decoded_text stringlengths 4.18k 47.6k |
|---|
, a melee daemon, to crit about as much as a regular ranged daemon.
This version of Dojigiri is kitted with an opponent debuff skill. She is now one of 2 5 ★ melee enemy debuffers, similar to Titanium Elf, Azi Dhaka and Amanojaku. Here’s a quick look at the more commonly seen single target debuffers.
While Dojigiri is unlikely to replace Titanium Elf, Azi Dhaka and Amanojaku on teams, she is a good option for players who lack an enemy debuffer of this class. Her improved crit rate would make her crit more than Ghoula, about as much as Amanojaku, but still less than Titanium Elf and Azi Dhaka, while providing a good deal more HP. Dojigiri [Serious]’s targeting is also a plus point – she should automatically target the enemy boss regardless of her positioning, whereas with Titanium Elf and Azi Dhaka teams one needs to either clear mobs before starting the debuff combo, or have the debuffer positioned at the correct spot on the team. The degree of debuff is also very satisfactory, even if not quite as high as Amanojaku. Her weakness, however, would be her needing a second 5 Sword Under Heaven to be on the team to maximize her damage output. This means either selecting Dojigiri [Bride], or Onimaru or Onimaru [Defiant] as multi target damage dealers, or using Outenta as a further debuffer against the enemy, or Juzumaru as damage reducer, or sacrificing a reserve slot for any one of these daemons. Overall, while not perfect, she is definitely still a better option as a debuffer compared to the last debuffer on offer through limited exchange – Daji [Seductive Swimsuit].
Gjallerhorn
5 ★ Melee Anima
Stats
Max/MLB Attack: 7900/9428
Max/MLB HP: 9300/11079
Skills
Sound of Battle (MAX): Increase damage dealt by 2 allies (ranged priority) by 74%/89% for a limited time
Flute of the Gods (lvl 75): All melee allies take moderately less DMG.
Opinion
After Kondo Isami, comes Gjallerhorn. Mitama has suddenly offered 2 very good team damage boosters which are relatively easy for players to acquire. Gjallerhorn has broken the damage boost record of all daemons, in exchange for a more limited 2 target boost. He is the 5 ★ version of Azukiarai, rather than an upgrade on the team-wide boosters currently available. His more targeted skill can possibly challenge players’ team construction, and is less flexible than a full team wide booster like Kondo or Freyr, Orpheus, and Cherry Blossom Front.
The targeted skill suits teams with fire power focused from preferably only 2 ranged daemons, with the other daemons on the team acting as support (and therefore not suffering much in terms of damage output if they are not buffed). An example of such a team could be: Qilin, Gjallerhorn, Amanojaku, Leonardo and Edo Castle. Qilin and Gjallerhorn are both support daemons, providing limited damage output themselves, but boosting the damage output of the team’s heavy hitters more. Gjallerhorn would provide the damage boost to Amanojaku and Leonardo 100% of the time in this team, providing a boost that would previously have cost 3 skill shards (2 activations of Freyr/Orpheus/Cherry/Kondo) to achieve. Another possible setup could include Dojigiri [Serious], Gjallerhorn, Titania (New Year), Belphegor with a healer. One sacrifices the damage boost on the debuffer (Dojigiri) while choosing to buff the single target and multi-target hitters instead.
With the boost targeted towards ranged daemons, team construction using Gjallerhorn would therefore likely exclude the use of ranged type support daemons. Teams using Katsushika Houkusai, Apollo’s Harp, Joan of Arc [Fireworks] and even Kong Ming will generally struggle with the use of Gjallerhorn as damage booster. With these ranged damage boosting daemons, they stand a chance of receiving Gjallerhorn’s boost, which would mean your main nuker might miss out instead. Similarly, teams making use of melee type damage dealers and nukers will not prefer to use Gjallerhorn – the melee nuker will almost never receive the boost unless no ranged daemons are on the team, in which case whether the nuker gets boosted turns into a matter of random chance.
Another way to construct a team with Gjallerhorn is to select daemons which all have very similar damage output effects, and be indifferent as to which of the 3 or 4 potential boost candidates receive the buff. One such example could be: Gjallerhorn, 2x Titanium Elf, Platina Elf, and a healer. It would be entirely acceptable for Gjallerhorn to boost both Titanium Elves, or one of them along with Platinium Elf. However, such a team would probably work equally well with a regular full team buffer since every daemon benefits.
A potential niche useage of Gjallarhorn would actually be in incomplete conquest teams running 3-4 daemons rather than a full 5 (mostly in order to save SE at stages 40-80 where 4 SE fails, and full teams aren’t quite required yet). One could potentially run: Gjallarhorn, Amanojaku and Leonardo for 9 SE in conquest, and have Gjallarhorn boost the only 2 other daemons on the team to massively high damage.
Superficially Gjallarhorn has increased the power creep among the damage boosters. However, his use isn’t as straightforward or flexible as that of full team boosters. He favours teams with other melee units present playing support roles (Best Friends Forever with Qilin!), while not doing too well on teams with ranged type support daemons messing up his targeting. While he certainly provides a record breaking damage boost, it is up to players to construct teams to maximize the benefit of that boost.
Gobluild
4 ★ Ranged Phantasma
Stats
Max/MLB Attack: 7800/9563
Max/MLB HP: 5700/6988
Skills
Prayer to the Old Gods(MAX): Restore 3718/4578 HP to self, increase crit rate by 20% for a limited time.
Divine Goblin Protection (lvl 59): Slightly increases max HP of all allies
Opinion
Gobluild is a ranged daemon with a self HP recovery skill and a self DPS boost via crit rate improvement. A 20% crit rate boost on a ranged daemon would boost her effective damage from 1.225x to 1.425x, which is a 16% increase if one looks at it multiplicatively. Her HP recovery is a good amount, but self recovery daemons are not generally favoured – they neither help in skill killing the enemy, nor in killing the enemy faster, nor in protecting other units on your team. The closest comparison currently available would be Dom Pedro Aquamarine – her skill provides a 1503/1843 self HP recovery, with a 51%/63% DMG boost. Aquamarine has a lower HP recovery but a greater DMG boost compared to Gobluild.
From the first copy, Gobluild has an ability that would work on reserve to boost your team’s total HP. This might come in handy for players without a good range of 5 ★ daemons with enough HP to tank the heavy fire from harder stages. However, one could easily achieve a better result with the use of healers (especially those with damage reduction skills). That team wide HP boost ability is fairly unique, but still relatively unlikely to see widespread use. The only other daemon with an ability that improves HP of other daemons on the team is Nurarihyon, but she limits her boost to Phantasma daemons only.
Charles in Boots
4 ★ Melee Divina
Stats
Max/MLB Attack: 5600/6866
Max/MLB HP: 6000/7456
Skills
Memory of the Hunt (MAX): Deals 4420/5440 DMG to an enemy (ranged priority)
Master Manager (lvl 69): Moderately increases the EXP gained from battle.
Opinion
Stats and Skill is relatively irrelevant on a daemon whose main purpose is to be placed on reserve for farming purposes. If one really wants to make a comparison, Charles can be compared directly to Drop Rate boosting daemon, He Shi Bi: she has 5900/7234 ATK, 5700/6988 HP, and does 4064/4982 DMG to an enemy with the lowest HP. Charles has lower attack, higher HP and higher skill DMG than He Shi Bi. And is therefore a potential 20 points farming attacker (but being melee, not ideal).
Charles joins Hermes and Genjo as ‘moderate’ EXP farming daemons, but unlike the other 2, Charles has his farming ability locked at the third copy rather than the second – Genjo and Hermes both had their abilities unlocked at lb1. For most players this means purchasing him for 50 mochis and feeding him 2 4 ★ LB orbs, which might be relatively high price for the opportunity cost of orbing another worthy 4 ★ daemon like Katsushika Houkusai. For newer players desperately looking to level up faster, Charles is a good long term investment. However, he and his ability definitely does not come cheap. For more experienced players already at a high level, additional EXP really isn’t the priority. And if one already has Hermes, Genjo or even Wakatoshi, Charles can be safely passed.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Investigators served search warrants Monday and continued looking for two people believed to be involved in a shooting that injured two LAPD officers who were thought to have been targeted in South L.A.'s Florence neighborhood, a detective said.
The undercover narcotics officers were driving an unmarked police vehicle near West 65th Street and Broadway (map) Sunday evening when they were injured, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Meghan Aguilar said.
One officer was treated at the scene while the second was taken to a hospital to remove bullet fragments from his arm, Aguilar said. The second officer has been released from the hospital.
Firefighters were called to a report of a shooting at the scene at 6:11 p.m., a Fire Department representative said.
Investigators believed the officers were targeted, but were trying to determine why.
“We don’t believe that they were caught in cross fire. We do believe that their vehicle was fired upon. What we can’t determine at this point is why they were fired upon," Aguilar said.
Three people were detained following the shooting, and investigators were trying to determine their role in the incident and if they could be booked, Aguilar said.
Several search warrants were also being served on West 65th Street, which remained closed to the public Monday. Aguilar said she expected the street to reopen later Monday.
The officers worked at the LAPD’s 77th Street Division, a desk officer confirmed.
Sunday's shooting occurred very close to the site where two LAPD officers on Aug. 11 fatally shot 25-year-old Ezell Ford, an unarmed man who was described by his family as having mental health issues. Ford's death, which came shortly after that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted protests and calls for reform.
Hours after the Sunday shooting, a man who was possibly under the influence drove through a police perimeter around the area where the officers were shot earlier, LAPD Sgt. Rudy Alaniz said.
The driver nearly struck an officer before taking off around 2:15 a.m., leading to a pursuit that ended in Valley Glen.
The man then fled on foot before police K-9s were deployed, and he was located and arrested, Sgt. Cory Meisner said.
KTLA's Melissa Pamer contributed to this article.
More video:Meet Juli, owner of Singaporean beauty blog Bun Bun Makeup Tips.
Once upon a time not too long ago, I looked like this. In fact, [the above photo] was taken just 3 days before the skin-ravaging facial.
Update 6/7: Read more (and see more gnarly photos) of Juli's story here.
Day 1: This was how my skin looked like minutes after the facial.
Day 2: This was how my skin looked [a day later]. I had on a sheer layer of foundation.
By night, things were starting to look bad. I've rarely had outbreaks on my temples or forehead [before].
Day 3: I woke up to a rude shock. I had to wear a mask because I was starting to feel very self-conscious, although in retrospect that was only the tip of the iceberg... The facial therapist [I visited] simply said I have sensitive skin and extraction of the pus would solve everything.
[The doctor] said it's not your regular acne breakout, it's definitely an allergic reaction to the facial. Some people are allergic to certain ingredients (told ya my skin is sensitive!) and the most common cause is herbal or plant extracts. He said this skin allergy should not cause any scarring, but will leave me with hyper-pigmentation for at least a few months. He also advised that I go back to my skincare regime before the facial because the new products given by the salon might be contributing to the allergy.
Before extraction:
And afterwards:
Day 4: I thought nothing could be worse than Day 3. Apparently Day 4 proved me wrong. [The spots] look like barnacles! Just that mine are filled with pus.
I'd sent images of my deteriorating skin condition to the people at the facial salon and they asked me to go down and have the pus extracted again. This time [I visited] their HQ, where their Director was around. I don't know how people who have been in the industry for THIRTY YEARS couldn't tell this was not your normal acne breakout or post-facial sensitivity. Below: a close-up, just to annoy you. LOL. But imagine seeing this on your face when you wake up. Not funny at all.
After extraction #2:
The facial people told me that 'It has to get worse before it gets better'. BULLSHIT. Anyone who tells you that about your skin is really just lying to you. At home, my skin turned worse. The glistening layer is not my own oily skin! Mine's oily but not so disgustingly greasy. It's the anti-bacterial gel they applied.
The worst feeling, other than wanting to cry whenever I see myself in the mirror, is when I wash my face and cannot find a single smooth spot. My skin texture feels like those corals I've touched at [aquariums]. The only difference is that they look so pretty and I look like I have an incurable disease.
Night 4: Help me =(
Tyra Banks taught us that it's possible to smile with the eyes. Yesterday I tried to smile with my eyes, but when I was smiling my widest with stars in my eyes, [people] still couldn't tell at all. My mask covers all the way to right under my eyes.
I used to literally have goosebumps when I see people with a skin condition. I'd think to myself 'Why doesn't she see a skin doctor?', 'Why would anyone leave the house like that?'. Or even on a more superficial level 'How could people leave the house without makeup?'. To me, making up is a form of respect, for the event, for the host, for the people around me.This ordeal has shed light to the fact that actually, there could be plenty of reasons why people look… well, different. Most of the time, they didn't choose to look like that, they were just born this way... I will learn to see more of what's inside a person – a good nature, a pure heart, a fighter.As a beauty blogger, everyone expects you to put your best face forward. This is an undeniable expectation, despite it being extremely superficial. I don't know how my skin will eventually turn out, I could be scarred for life, I could heal over time (after plenty of cash spent). Nobody knows. If I'm scarred, people will judge me the same way we all judge people with bad skin. I'll just have to live with it.
I'm sorry if I've scared you. I have goosebumps too. You can't imagine how difficult it was to look at these photos and not cry. My self-confidence has plummeted to rock bottom. I cannot remember the last time I was so depressed over an external condition. I guess I could thank the heavens that I'm lucky to be alive, but can my life ever go back to normal? I don't know. It's a great fall to take for a person who is image-conscious and with an online personality.
Remember me this way.Dani Alves, now a Juventus player, has donated 300 treatments for individuals in Bolivia infected wtih the Hepatitis C virus, which affects the liver, as part of the project 'Tour n' Coure' which aims to rid the world of the disease.
Full screen Dani Alves, working for a Hep C free world
Alves hopes to save lives
In a message sent over Skype, the former Barcelona right back, said there are around 600 people with Hepatitis C in the Latin American country, and the majority of them are people with few economic resources. Alves said it would be these people who benefit from his humanitarian aid. "If I manage to save a life I'll be happier than I am right now", said Alves.
The medicines donated are Sofosbuvir and Daclatasvir, and will be administered as part of a national program of prevention and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
Sofosbuvir, sold under its brand name of Solvadi, has been the subject of controversy over its huge cost in most developed countries (e.g. over 84,000 US dollars in the USA), however the developer Gilead has lowered prices for developing countries.
Hepatitis C leads to cirrhosis of the liver
Chronic infection with the hepatitis C virus affects approximately 170 million people worldwide and is a major cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer.There's something special about the walk-up burger stand, that post-WWII staple of American eating that has slowly started to fade from view. There are still zillions of madre-and-padre burger operations around Los Angeles, pressing beef into ageless cast iron griddles, but many of them have opted for larger digs and expanded menus. You'll find indoor fluorescent lighting, plastic booths and maybe even a drive-thru window.
See Anne Fishbein's photos of our five favorite old-school burger stands
You know the old saying: "Give a man a drive-thru window to order from, and he'll eat for a day. But teach a man to stand outside, in the dark, quietly waiting for the right to politely ask a surly old cook if he can please have a cheeseburger, then lean on a newspaper box or squeeze onto a dumpy picnic table while he eats, and that man will have a greasy smile on his face for a lifetime."
Continue Reading
Maybe that's not the exact quote, but it's close. Sometimes, there's just no substitute for greasy burgers from a smoke-black griddle inside a precarious shack that time — and building inspectors — seem to have forgotten. Places where "cash only" means don't even think about asking, your fries are dumped into a cut open Bud Light box and served to you through a barred up prison window, and getting snarled at by the cook is just part of the fun. And so, in celebration of the ongoing National Burger Month, here are our five favorite old school burger stands.
Chili Cheeseburger from Marty's. Courtesy Nick Baines
5. Marty's Hamburger Stand
There are other great, simple burgers west of La Cienega (the nearby Apple Pan, Hinano Cafe in Venice), but Marty's stands tall as the long-running walk up window that's been slinging burgers and Vienna beef dogs since the mid-1950s. It's an eclectic mix at Marty's, considering their gas station-adjacent location on Pico Boulevard. You'll find midday golfers from the Hillcrest Country Club up the street, sharp suits and dingy editors strolling over from the Fox lot, firefighters from next door and — on Saturdays — scores of Little Leaguers lining up for a post-game bite. The warm spiced chili is as soupy as always, the Orange Bang still makes your veins run neon and the Vienna dogs are regularly shipped in from Chicago. But what you're after is The Combo, a meat powerhouse that stacks beef, cheese, bacon, chili and a split hot dog all under a puffy white bun. It's the sort of paper-lined, over-greased handheld burger behemoth that will set you back a few years. Or, like Marty's, it may shoot you all the way back to the '50s. 10558 W. Pico Blvd., West L.A.
4. Irv's Burgers
You don't even have to live in the neighborhood to know about Irv's Burgers. Owner Sonia Hong and the always adorable Momma Hong have been battling for nearly a decade to keep this delicately dilapidated burger stand alive. The problem, as always, is money: Irv's sits squarely on a hot piece of Santa Monica Boulevard real estate, and certainly doesn't jive with all of the glass-and-metal mixed-use projects going up around them. But what Irv's lacks in the looks department, it more than makes up with flavor and service. Sonia knows most of the patrons by name, and even if she's never laid eyes on you before, when your beefy burger plate arrives it'll be scrawled with the simple words "Just for you!" and — if you're lucky — a little doodle. The burgers, for their part, are an American classic. Draped in a slice of iconic yellow cheese, griddled to a warm, crusty brown and laid thick with shredded lettuce and a red tomato wheel, this is the sort of burger that doesn't change, because it doesn't need to. Hopefully, Irv's Burgers doesn't change either. 8289 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood; 323-650-2456.
JNJ Burger Shack Farley Elliott
3. J N J Burger Shack
Do you want some BBQ with your burger? How about on your burger. You can have it just about any way you want it at J N J's, a smoky corner stand on Adams Boulevard. The one story building is actually a meaty duplex, of sorts. On the right-hand side is the order window for all things barbecue, with burnt ends and slathered ribs emerging from a wood-fired smoker built to look like a locomotive. To the left is the burger and hot dog window, with single cheeseburgers, double cheeseburgers, turkey burgers and an assortment of specials available. A straightforward JNJ double cheeseburger is all any sane person could need, especially with an indulgent strip or two of crispy bacon. But for pure burger prowess, step up to the paper plate and order the Four Finger Burger. It's a 20 minute wait under the adjacent open-air, lawn furniture dining annex, but what emerges from the kitchen is nothing short of impossible. There are two burger patties, two slices of American cheese, three slices of bacon, two split BBQ hot links poking out from underneath the bun — and a fried egg. Ask for a smoky side of BBQ sauce for extra slathering, and then call a cab home. You're going to be in no position to drive. 5754 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles; 323-934-5390.
Bill & Hiroko's Elina Shatkin
2. Bill & Hiroko's
When it comes to old school burger stand owners, Bill Elwell is in another league altogether. The man has been putting beef to heat since 1965 inside his minuscule space along an industrial stretch of Van Nuys. He loves riling up customers and isn't afraid to eat raw patties in front of them just to "bug the customers". He's also not afraid to cook up one hell of a burger. Most of the love comes from that long-blackened griddle, which imbues each burger with a hint of the salt and fat and seasoning from generations past. The patties are ground fresh and delivered daily (which is why Bill can get away with pulling off a taste in front of wide-eyed customers), and maintain a distinct juiciness despite their thin profile and well-charred exterior. Fully stocked cheeseburgers top out at under $4, even with a bag of chips. But the real feast is for your eyes, watching surly Bill interact with the regulars as he nonchalantly flips patties over a decades-old grill. 14742 Oxnard St., Van Nuys.
Capitol Burger Paul Bartunek
1. Capitol Burger
If you want to tick off every burger stand expectation you have on one single trip, head to Capitol Burger. Location: not great. Cool vintage burger sign: absolutely. Owner: old and awesome (bonus points for his beefy son Jim who helps out daily and looks like a scarier version of Tex Cobb). Takes credit cards: don't even ask. Serves your food inside a cut up beer box, lays on the chili hot and thick, and forces you to eat at an old picnic table where so many pigeons are after your food you may not make it out alive: check, check and check. And the burger itself? It's pure, classic Southern California style. Two thin slips of quarter-pound beef are seasoned and seared, with a couple of perfectly melty slices of American cheese on top. Pickles, vibrant red tomato rounds and a thick crunch of iceberg lettuce finish off the affair, with a toasted commercial white bread bun holding it all together. Mayo and mustard are slapped on before sending your burger through the bars, and the results are drippingly, gooingly, juicily apparent. This is what being a burger stand is all about. Don't forget to order a box of fries, too. An order comes in exactly one size: humongous, and each spud is salty and wonderful in every way. 4301 W. Pico Blvd., Mid-City.
See Anne Fishbein's photos of our five favorite old-school burger stands
See also:
- 10 Best Burgers in Los Angeles
- Best Lowbrow Burger - 2012
Want more Squid Ink? Follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook.Little penguins are dying in their hundreds, leading conservationists to fear they are starving as a result of the La Nina weather system.
Other seabirds are washing up dead on beaches, raising concerns that species could become extinct if climate change causes extreme weather events to become more frequent.
At Wellington Zoo, two starving little blue penguin chicks have been brought in this week. One died on Wednesday and the other, found at Lyall Bay, was hanging on to life yesterday.
The zoo's veterinary science manager, Lisa Argilla, said petrels were also starving around Wellington's south coast, and five shags had been brought in this month. "They're unable to find enough food. We've had a lot of starvations and a lot of mortalities."
At Banks Peninsula, hundreds of little white-flippered penguin chicks have died of starvation, according to Shireen Helps, who has been caring for the colony on her property for about 25 years.
"There were chicks dying in their burrows, in the hillside, and heaps dying on the water."
Dr Argilla said the calm La Nina seas meant fewer small fish and plankton close to the surface of the water for them to feed on.
Those brought into the zoo were likely to be just a very small portion of those dying. She was concerned that more frequent extreme weather events could lead to extinctions in some species – penguins, for example, needed five or six years of good conditions for populations to regenerate.
The strong La Nina had brought with it conditions that made for a bad breeding year. "They're natural occurrences that always happen, but now they're happening more regularly and it's playing havoc with wildlife populations."
However, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research principal scientist James Renwick said it was unknown whether La Nina would be stronger or happen more frequently in future.
This year's La Nina was the strongest since 1975, when Conservation Department seabird scientist Graeme Taylor said many hundreds of seabirds died.
This year shearwaters in northern North Island colonies were dying because of a lack of feeding opportunities, he said, and gannets at Muriwai and Great Barrier Island had experienced a "major failure" of breeding. "Birds are just sitting on empty nests."
Mrs Helps and husband Francis have 1063 breeding pairs at their colony, but most of the chicks that hatched between October and December have died.
The population had risen from 717 breeding pairs in 2000, but Mrs Helps believed the number of little penguins at the colony could fall next year.
Unusually warm currents had made it difficult for adults to find food, leading them to stay out searching at sea for too long while their chicks needed feeding, she said.
"The chicks got thirsty and hungry and realised Mum and Dad weren't coming back. A lot ended up in the sea but they were too young."
The penguins needed to weigh at least a kilogram before they could survive at sea, but when chicks were rescued, it was initially difficult to get them eating again.
"If they've had no food for a long time, their whole system shuts down and they can't digest it. Even if you feed them, they start spitting it up again."
Conservation Department vet Kate McInnes said that, during La Nina, cold currents did not come up around New Zealand and stir up the ocean to bring food near the surface.
She also advised that freeing birds rescued from starvation was risky.
"There's still no food out there."
Niwa marine ecologist Leigh Torres said albatrosses were showing signs of being "hungrier" this year.
Around the Snares Islands, 200 kilometres south of the South Island, birds were searching harder for prey and flying closer to fishing boats.
Oamaru Blue Penguin Colony manager Jason Gaskill said no chicks there had starved, but warmer sea surface temperatures led to poorer breeding conditions for fish and less food for penguins, which would affect this year's season.'They're like addicts, her drug was her pimp': Heartbreaking story of one mother's fight to save her prostitute daughter from Las Vegas's seedy underbelly
Hannah Swanson was lured by pimp and boyfriend Kobe Hogue into a life of prostitution in Sin City
Her mother, Andrea, 50, has bravely gone public about her fight to win back her daughter
Her story featured on British TV show and now MailOnline can reveal that they are rebuilding relationship and Hannah is apparently free from pimp
But she admits that she still doesn't know where Hannah is living
Andrea, a nurse, married to an FBI agent, with two other sons in the military, has shared the full horror of her experience
How Hannah was groomed and even after she was arrested returned to Hogue - who was using Hannah as her 'bottom' - slang for a pimp’s most prized girl
Andrea Swanson will always regret the day she gave her daughter’s boyfriend a second chance.
Because it was the day she lost her child a second time to a dark world of violence and prostitution. Today Andrea, 50, who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a vocal campaigner raising awareness of sex trafficking.
Earlier this week a television interview was aired in which Andrea shared the full horror of how a predatory pimp ‘tore apart’ her middle class family when he started dating her daughter, 16-year-old Hannah.
Led astray: Hannah Swanson, now 22, was led into a life of prostitution by her 'pimp' boyfriend trying to cash in on the seedy underbelly of the Las Vegas strip
Control: Kobe Hogue, left, groomed Hannah from jail, her mother Andrea, right, claims. She said: 'These girls are almost like addicts, her drug was not drugs: her drug was the attention of a pimp'
She told of her devastation when the truth about boyfriend Kobe Hogue tumbled out with Hannah’s arrest for soliciting two years later in June 2010.
She recalled how an arrest and brief imprisonment for car theft had only strengthened Hogue’s hold over Hannah, who is now 22.
And she spoke of her regret that, on his release, she had let Hannah slip back into the relationship, deeper into his control and out of her parents’ lives.
But now, MailOnline can reveal that since giving that interview – filmed seven months ago - Andrea has been reunited with the daughter she feared she had lost for good. And today she is in the process of rebuilding their shattered relationship.
It is not easy. She admitted the situation is ‘fluid.’ She does not know where her daughter lives. She does not know if Hannah is still in contact with Hogue – who goes by Kobe D**kinmya** Hogue on Facebook.
But she takes heart that, she said, Hannah and he are ‘no longer going out.’ Above all she knows that her daughter is alive and with contact comes hope that one day the damage done across the past four years can be repaired.
Happy families: Hannah comes from a middle class family. Here she is pictured at a family wedding with her two military brothers, mother and father, Roland
Innocence: Hannah, pictured as a child with her brothers, Jake and Rollie, suffered from 'low self-esteem' which was preyed upon by Hogue, Andrea says
Speaking of the battle to win Hannah back Andrea explained: ‘These girls are almost like addicts, her drug was not drugs: her drug was the attention of a pimp.’
The daughter of a nurse and FBI agent, Hannah Swanson was a bright 16-year-old at Centennial High School, Las Vegas when she became the target of classmate Hogue’s attentions.
According to her mother: ‘During her senior year at Centennial High School, our daughter was systematically manipulated and stolen from my family.’
Pictures of Hannah back then show a smiling healthy girl, happy in the bosom of her family. Her brothers, Jake and Rollie, have both served in the military and her parents had high hopes for their youngest daughter.
But she had a vulnerability which Hogue exploited. However pretty she was, Hannah suffered from low self-esteem and wrestled with a lack of confidence. She was easy prey. But at first all her family saw was that her new boyfriend seemed to be making Hannah happy.
Her mother said: ‘In the autumn of her junior year at High School she met this boy. All of a sudden, she’s not angry anymore and it all seems to be because of this new boyfriend.’
Vanished: Andrea said that during Hannah's senior year 'our daughter was systematically manipulated and stolen from my family'. Hannah and Andrea are now back in contact, but she admits their relationship is 'fluid'
Bad boy: Hogue, who goes by the nickname d**kinmya** on Facebook, was charged with pandering when Hannah was arrested for solicitation. She admitted that she had been turning over her earnings to him
Sin City: The glitz, bright lights and shimmering façade of Las Vegas’s casinos and shows brings $15billion in revenue from tourists every year. But beneath that bubbles a multi-million industry built on corruption
According to Chris Baughman, the former Las Vegas vice officer who investigated Hannah’s case and who brought her story to public note with television show, Ross Kemp: Extreme World: ‘The girl was from great stock, but that doesn’t stop these people playing on her weaknesses, her hang ups.
'They don’t care what sort of family she comes from. He treats her like a princess, but eventually he gets them away from the family.
‘He then turns her into a prostitute, promising it’ll only be for a few months, then a bit further down the line says they can make lots of money from it, make it a business, and it goes on and on until it’s too late. That’s what happened here.’
Looking back, Andrea admitted, the signs were there but she and her family were too trusting, too naïve, to even begin to see them.
Hannah, who once dressed conservatively and modestly, began wearing more and more provocative clothing – all of it bought by Hogue.
He paid for her to have her nails and hair done. He designed a tattoo which she had inked on her back for him: a rose surrounded by a heart. And there were the bruises her parents occasionally noticed, for which Hannah offered no explanation.
In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun, Andrea said: ‘We thought we had the most rebellious teenager we could have. We didn’t know if you tied the tattoo to him getting her hair and nails done…it points towards prostitution.’
But then Hannah’s seemingly ideal boyfriend, who lavished gifts and attention upon her, was arrested for stealing cars.
Andrea and her husband were shocked. She said: ‘All of a sudden he ends up in prison for stealing cars. That’s where the grooming happened.
‘He was writing her letters, filling her head with all these promises…Writing me letters, telling me he cared for my daughter.’
Respectable: Hannah is the daughter of a nurse and an FBI agent. Andrea wants parents out there to know that the sex trade and pimps don't just lure in the poor and desperate
Exposure: Hannah's story came to light this week when the mother gave an interview to Ross Kemp's Extreme World show. But Andrea has been fighting for awareness for a few years now and lobbying for a change in law
On his release Andrea and her family cautiously allowed him back into their lives.
She said: ‘We spoke to his parole officer. I felt in control of the situation but that only lasted two to three weeks.’
Andrea had laid down house rules in an attempt to claw back control of her daughter. She recalled how Hogue was ‘as sweet as pie for about two weeks.’
‘Then they stopped following the rules,' she said.
Andrea recalled: ‘About two days before she graduated high school, I came home from work early and Hannah was there. I said, “I’m worried about you Hannah” and she flipped out.
‘She said “Okay, okay, I f***ing trick-rolled! Is that okay now? You find the drunkest mother***er on the strip, you proposition him, you take his ass up to the room and you tell him to clean up. Then you steal him…you steal him |
things people link to right away, you can batch-consume articles later when you have more time.
Caleb Wojcik is the founder of DIY Video Guy and author of the DIY Video Guide.
#17: SumoMe for Opt-ins and Conversion Optimization
SumoMe is a suite of tools to help entrepreneurs grow their business and I love it! Mainly because it’s so dang easy to set up and start seeing results. Among the suite of tools, I recommend two the most highly.
If you want your website to convert, you need to know how your visitors navigate your site. What are they clicking on? Do they think certain images are buttons when they really aren’t? If that’s the case, you could have some upset visitors who are probably just going elsewhere.
With Heat Maps, you get a quick view of where people are clicking on your site to make educated decisions about what parts of your site convert best and which should be optimized.
The SumoMe Scroll Box lets you ask visitors to submit their email address at just the right time—as they finish reading your latest blog post. It’s so customizable that you can set at what point on the page you want to ask for your visitor’s email address.
Greg Hickman is the founder of Mobile Marketing Engine and a mobile marketing consultant.
SumoMe for Traffic and List Building
Sumo.com has 10 free tools to help you grow your website.
The SumoMe Share tool can help you get 20% more pageviews by auto-optimizing your share buttons for maximum traffic. Plus it has a slick drag-and-drop setup.
The List Builder tool is an effective pop-up that can double your daily email subscribers, even among one-time site visitors.
Noah Kagan is the founder and “Chief Sumo” at Sumo.com.
#18: Smart Podcast Player for Branded Podcasts
The Smart Podcast Player is a WordPress plugin for podcasters, and the minute it was available in beta, I purchased it and couldn’t be happier.
My podcast RSS feed is hosted on SoundCloud; the podcast player works seamlessly with the feed and updates immediately when I publish a new episode. I can even use smart codes to embed and customize single episodes in blog posts as well.
I love the sleek, clean look of the player as well as the responsive design.
It’s incredibly simple to set up and customize with your own images and branded colors.
Smart Podcast Player’s support team is on top of things, responsive to bugs and frequently releases features to create a more powerful player. Whenever possible I prefer to use tools I can customize to match my branding and the Smart Podcast Player does just that for me. Most important, though, is that the podcast player is easy for my listeners to use whether they’re listening from desktop or mobile.
Denise Wakeman is an online marketing strategist and host of Adventures in Visibility.
#19: RebelMouse for Segmented Content Aggregation
How you publish your best content is just as important as the content itself.
RebelMouse is a social marketing content aggregation tool with a CMS and mobile app platform that uses the network effect of social media to get content in front of your customers in a way that drives engagement and reach.
Michael Fenech manages global social strategy for Western Union.
#20: Tweet Life for Identifying Influencers
One of my favorite tools is actually a new feature added to an old tool—Sysomos.
This new Sysomos feature is called Tweet Life.
It allows you to analyze and understand how an individual tweet goes from person to person through waves of retweets. With Tweet Life, you can analyze a set of possible influencers to determine whom you really need to build relationships with first.
To do this, locate and then track the influencers’ category tweets (tweets that talk about your brand, a competitor’s brand or the category in general) for longevity, half-life (a measure of a tweet’s virality) and spread (how many people retweet it). With this analysis, you’ll be able to identify the top amplifiers of relevant content.
Armed with this knowledge, you can create laser-targeted outreach plans versus the usual spray-and-pray approach so many agencies are taking today. The result is far more efficient and effective.
Tom Martin is the founder of Converse Digital and author of The Invisible Sale.
#21: Word Swag for Text on Images
Word Swag is an iPhone app that adds amazing text effects to your photos.
Using this app, you can make professional-quality posts and photoquotes with just a few clicks. That means you can spend more time focusing on the content you’re giving, while still producing graphics that are professional and polished.
Now there’s no reason you can’t add a little swagger to your text!
Sue B. Zimmerman is the founder of the online Instagram course Insta-Results™ and the author of Instagram Basics for Your Business.
#22: Nuzzel for Content Discovery
Nuzzel is a social content discovery app.
What Nuzzel does is aggregate the stories and articles your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are sharing. Then it filters them by the number of friends who share a single piece of content or by most recent.
It separates the content-rich updates from the mundane; but the coolest thing you can do is tap into other friends’ feeds and see what people are sharing with them.
This app makes it easy to discover what’s important in your immediate network, your friends’ networks and your friends-of-friends’ networks.
Dan Rosenbaum is the manager of content and social media for San Francisco Travel.
#23: RINGR for Phone Interviews
Interviews are one of the easiest and fastest ways to produce high-quality content for a podcast, article or book.
But what if you can’t be in the same room as the person you want to interview?
RINGR is a new app for iOS that makes it simple to connect with someone else and record an entire interview over the phone.
The quality is exceptional, the price is right and your interviewee doesn’t have to have an account. They can quickly install the software, enter an invite code and begin the recording.
Paul Colligan is an education czar for Traffic Geyser Inc., the CEO of Colligan.com and author of How to Podcast 2015.
#24: Social Analytics for Content Research
I love tools that allow me to be more efficient as I do the things I’m already doing—like surfing the web.
Consequently, I rely on a number of browser plugins to deliver data that makes me smarter on the fly. Recently I’ve become quite fond of the Social Analytics Chrome plugin.
This tool gives you real-time social data on any web page so you can get a sense of how popular a page or post is on various social networks. This data can tell you a lot about how content on a site is shared, and also where the site might focus its social engagement.
John Jantsch is the founder of Duct Tape Marketing and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.
#25: Todoist for Task Management
Todoist is a tool to manage your daily task list. My efficiency as a marketer has skyrocketed since using it.
It features “one-click” task management and adherence to David Allen’s Get It Done methodology.
Starts March 20th! Discover the latest tactics and improve your marketing know-how! Sale Ends February 27th! CLICK TO SAVE!
Todoist allows you to collect ideas wherever you are, using your mobile device, browser, email client or desktop. Then, when time allows, you can quickly and easily prioritize, schedule and set action items for each idea.
Todoist keeps individual projects separate by using folders and labels and each day, Todoist notifies you of the day’s action items.
Todoist will help you get the work of social media marketing done.
Ryan Hanley is the managing editor of Agency Nation and the author of Content Warfare: How to find your audience, tell your story and win the battle for attention online.
#26: Little Bird for Influencer Engagement
Little Bird is a powerful and effective tool that takes the challenge out of discovering, targeting and engaging with the most influential people on the social web.
Little Bird takes an unusual approach, relying on the collective discovery of other relevant people to find influencers, instead of the frustrating practice of looking through a long list of people who happen to have used a certain keyword.
Little Bird goes beyond discovering the people who matter to you and helps to foster targeted engagement.
Once it’s found the objectively influential people in B2B topics, it highlights those you already have some connection to. Then it makes engaging with those people even easier by giving you a highlight reel of their hottest content every day or week.
Michelle Killebrew is the program director of strategy & solutions for IBM Social Business.
#27: Google Spreadsheets for Analytics Reporting
When you combine Google Spreadsheets with the Google Analytics plugin and Bit.ly’s out-of-the-box integration, you have a powerful, free analytics dashboard solution.
Everything’s in one place, and as a bonus, you can customize the reporting to incorporate more than one Google Analytics profile.
That’s a significant help for consultants with more than one client.
Christopher Penn is the vice president of marketing technology at SHIFT Communications, the co-founder of PodCamp New Media Community Conference and co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee podcast.
#28: Portent Idea Generator for Writer’s Block
If you’ve ever had writer’s block (and who hasn’t?) sometimes you’re just not too sure what to write. Now, the creators of the Portent Idea Generator have ya covered!
Simply enter the topic you want to write about and BAM!—you get an instant headline idea to build an article on. Want another one? No problem. Simply hit the reset circular arrow and another idea will be generated.
Some results and suggestions are quite comical. Some will make you go “hmmm.” But they’ll all get the creative juices flowing to help you attract and keep more visitors.
Wes Schaeffer is the host of the Sales Podcast and author of It Takes More Than a Big Smile, a Good Idea and a Twitter Account to Build a Business That Lasts.
#29: EMV Headline Analyzer for Headlines
Use the EMV Headline Analyzer to get the emotional marketing value of your message into blog post titles, email subject lines or new tweets.
In my experience, when your heading has a EMV score of 25+, it performs significantly better than those that score lower.
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner.
EMV Headline Analyzer for Generating Shares
An interesting little app for writing better headlines is the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer provided by the Advanced Marketing Institute.
Input your content headline and the analyzer spits back a rating from 0-100 to score how “emotional” it is. The idea is that the more emotional the headline, the better its chances of being shared. That’s not entirely true. It turns out you can be TOO emotional!
I did a statistical analysis of the tool and it turns out the sweet spot is actually between 30-50. After that, social sharing levels begin to decline.
Mark Schaefer, educator, consultant and author of Return On Influence, Born to Blog, Social Media Explained, and The Tao of Twitter.
#30: PeopleLinx for Social Teamwork
PeopleLinx is my tool for serious social selling activities. In addition to the requisite ability to share curated content through LinkedIn and Twitter, PeopleLinx gamifies the process.
Each user is assigned to a team so managers can view activity across teams as well as individuals. Users can also see how their activity compares to others on their team and the management-level reporting gives managers the ability to see across teams to understand behavior and results.
PeopleLinx empowers team managers by letting them set up profile “optimizations” and “to-do’s” that get assigned to people on each team. Once a manger updates an opportunity, a pre-configured rule alerts team members to take an action. This automated “to-do” can be as simple as “follow their company page.” Of course, these rules are customizable.
When everyone on a team is taking action from pre-configured optimizations, you take away the stress of “how” to be effective at social teamwork and selling.
Bernie Borges is CEO of Find and Convert, a B2B digital marketing agency, and host of the Social Business Engine podcast.
#31: LeadPages for Conversions
We utilize a combination of Infusionsoft for email marketing and LeadPages.net for landing pages to drive desired conversions from social media.
It has an amazing “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) interface that enables the creation and launch of landing pages within a few minutes.
LeadPages helped us more than double our email subscriber list to over 35,000 in less than 6 months. We now have an average conversion rate of 60% to 80%+ on all landing pages and forms.
Pam Moore is the CEO and founder of Marketing Nutz.
#32: Pocket for Organized Content Consumption
Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later, is a content curation tool that can fuel the content you post to social media, help with research for content creation and generally keep you organized.
Whether you’re reading an article in a browser, email or social media app, you can save articles to your Pocket for offline reading on your phone, tablet or computer.
You can tag articles for easy sorting and filter by video, image or article. Pocket also parses the content from pages you save, and strips away unnecessary formatting, ads and more, so the reading experience is seamless.
It’s a great tool to organize all of the information you consume.
Arnie Kuenn is the CEO of Vertical Measures and co-author of Content Marketing Works.
#33: Markr for Hashtagging Images
Markr is a newer app that lets you place a hashtag on top of your photos or videos.
What I love most about Markr is its simplicity.
You simply connect your Facebook or Twitter account to pull trending hashtags, both locally and worldwide, or you can also create your own custom hashtags. Recently used hashtags are kept in a section called Recents for easy reference and usability in future posts.
If you’re adding multiple hashtags to your Instagram and Facebook posts, make one of those hashtags stand out by adding it directly to the image or video. If you’re a brand, use your official hashtag to create branded photos.
Markr isn’t going to replace popular photo/image apps like Word Swag or Diptic, but you will want to add it to your toolbox to create impactful content.
Tyler Anderson is the founder and CEO of Casual Fridays and host of the Social Media Social Hour podcast.
#34: Circloscope for G+ Community Management
Circloscope is the only circle management tool on Google+, making it invaluable for the keen user of the platform.
But here is the thing—it does far more than just manage your circles.
You can also do things to find engagers:
Take a Google+ post, filter by level of engagement and add people who reshared it to a circle.
Drop in the link to a public event and filter for attendees, then add them to circles.
Drop in a link to a private community and find out who has been active/inactive.
Add an email list you have and find matching Google+ accounts.
. Drop in a YouTube link and find the engagers there too!
Martin Shervington is the author of The Art and Science of Google+ and a marketing consultant.
#35: RefreshBox for Content Delivery
RefreshBox combines social curation with smart email marketing. This simple app makes it easy to package and send out a curated list of five links via email each week.
RefreshBox offers a Chrome extension that will grab the title of any post you’re reading and add it to your weekly list, which goes out to subscribers automatically every Friday.
In each delivery of the Content List, I add a quick explanation of why my readers will find the article useful.
Not only can you promote your RefreshBox list with a link on your blog, in your emails or in social updates, RefreshBox also offers your curated list in its growing directory of users. Readers can quickly subscribe and begin getting your links every week.
RefreshBox is new and testing the service now could pay off as it brings in more users who could sign up for your curated list.
Stan Smith is the founder and CEO of Pushing Social and co-author of Born to Blog.
#36: IFTTT for Automating Social Actions
If This Then That is hardly new, but it hasn’t yet reached the mass population despite its ease of use, efficiency and supreme cool factor.
Because 64% of human beings are visual learners, the web is becoming more visually based. Let’s say you post a photo on Instagram and you want to also tweet it. IFTTT to the rescue!
Just create a recipe that connects Instagram to Twitter and give it direction to tweet as a picture (not a link) as soon as you upload to Instagram. No more having to post to each network separately and tweaking the tweet to include the photo instead of the link.
Now let’s say you want to aggregate content in a really useful way. When you’re in Feedly, favorite certain posts as you do your daily reading and IFTTT will automatically send it to a draft WordPress blog post that you can edit and publish later.
No more copying links and pasting them into your blog post draft!
Do you have a business that sells through Etsy? Now you can create an IFTTT recipe to tweet your newest product as soon as you upload them.
Are you using videos to tell your organization’s story? Now, when you publish a new video to your channel, you can have your IFTTT recipe send it to your Facebook page.
Get on there and click on Channels in the upper right-hand corner and start exploring. You’ll find a recipe—or 10—you can use immediately. But be warned… You may lose two hours there.
Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich.
#37: Canva for Social Media Image Design
Canva is an easy-to-use, web-based tool that combines the best elements of Photoshop and designer templates. You don’t have to download software and all of your images are saved on your account.
I use it for Instagram and Pinterest images. When I find a quote I like or a graphic I want to customize (I recommend using photos from Unsplash), I create a new project in Canva and am done in a few minutes (versus an hour of fumbling around Photoshop or other apps with limited options).
The quality of design templates, fonts and layouts is awesome, but the best parts are the pre-sized templates for every possible social media image size and the free tutorials to show you how to make better graphics.
For me, Canva is the perfect blend of customization and pre-made design templates. Plus it’s free.
Lewis Howes is the host of the podcast, The School of Greatness, and author of The Ultimate Webinar Marketing Guide and co-author of LinkedWorking.
#38: BuzzSumo for Content Analysis
BuzzSumo is a powerful tool to learn what type of content is most desired by your target audience for a specific topic, what type works best for respective social media channels and even what type is most relevant for a particular time period.
In addition to searching by topic, you can use BuzzSumo to search for specific domains. This provides insights into the most shared articles by the respective social media channels.
Going even deeper, you can compare two domains side by side to learn more about the social media sharing behaviors of a competitor’s audience.
An analysis of Social Media Examiner reveals the audience is most active on Monday and Tuesday, so it’s smart to post the longer-form content on those days.
With the Pro version, all of this data can be exported into an infographic-style report.
If you’re obsessed with understanding your audience and giving them what they want most, BuzzSumo just may prove to be addictive.
Jeff Korhan is the author of Built-In Social and host of This Old New Business podcast.
BuzzSumo for Content Curation
It’s difficult for most companies to create all of the content they need for social marketing. So how do you find great content to share when you need to augment your own content posts?
BuzzSumo is a content curation tool that tells you which pieces of content are viral and which are duds.
Search BuzzSumo for keywords in your niche and you’ll find something people have already shared 10,000 times. That tells you it’s good but not everyone has seen it, so you can still introduce it to new people. If it meets your standards for quality and utility, share it!
To find content to post on LinkedIn, sort your BuzzSumo search results by most shares on LinkedIn. Likewise on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+.
If you pay for a BuzzSumo account, you can even create email alerts for your search phrases.
Brian Carter is the author of The Like Economy, Facebook Marketing and The Cowbell Principle, and founder of the Brian Carter Group.
#39: Haiku Deck to Repurpose Content
Looking for new and creative ways to repurpose your evergreen content? From videos to podcasts, reinventing content can be an excellent way to extend the shelf life of past articles.
One of my favorite things to do is repurpose past content into a presentation with Haiku Deck—an online and iPad app that lets you quickly and easily create a graphically appealing presentation in no time. Plus, their integration with SlideShare is a powerful one-two marketing punch.
Here’s how to put a presentation together:
Look at your Google Analytics and find an article that performed well.
Log into SlideShare and click on the wand next to “Upload.”
Click Get Started. Haiku Deck will open where you can begin to build your presentation.
Select your slide layout from the pre-created designs.
Take a point from your article, write a headline and a subhead or bulleted list to support your topic, add an image and move on to the next slide.
When you’re finished, click Publish.
Incredibly intuitive, Haiku Deck will allow you to make image-rich slideshows in less time while opening up past content to a whole new audience. It’s a presentation tool I love.
Rebekah Radice is a social media strategist, speaker and trainer, and the author of How to Use Social Media to Virtually Crush the Competition.
#40: LikeAlyzer for Facebook Page Growth
LikeAlyzer is a must-have tool for your social media routine. With all the changes in Facebook’s algorithms, staying up to date on your Facebook stats has never been more important!
Check LikeAlyzer weekly to keep your Facebook page on target with insights into the following:
Posts per day
Likes, comments and shares per post
Timing
Length of posts
The timing changes each week so you’ll likely update your plan for the week based on what LikeAlyzer suggests.
If you’re the competitive type, you can also check out other pages in your niche to see what’s working. Use this weekly and your Facebook page will be zooming in no time!
Peg Fitzpatrick is a social media strategist and co-author of The Art of Social Media.
#41: Twitter Ads for Targeted Reach
While we’d all like to reach our ideal customer organically through great content, sometimes we need a little help with paid ads.
While Google and Facebook get all of the attention for paid ads, Twitter has quietly built a very powerful advertising platform.
Whether you’re looking to get more followers, stimulate conversation or drive clicks and conversions, Twitter has ready-to-go campaigns that you can start up in minutes.
Twitter’s powerful targeting options let you:
Serve ads based on geography, gender, keywords and more.
Target followers of specific accounts (such as industry influencers or your competitors).
Get in front of people who are interested in your niche.
In addition, you can upload your mailing list and serve ads to your subscribers, to people like your subscribers or prevent them from seeing your ads. You can also target people who’ve visited your website with new retargeting options.
Twitter ads are usually a cheaper buy than Facebook ads, so it’s a worthwhile option for any marketer to reach more of your ideal customers.
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media and the founder of the Marketing Agents.
#42: CoSchedule to Streamline Content Shares
CoSchedule is a lightweight WordPress plugin that allows you to easily plan, schedule and strategically promote your blog content to social media channels.
CoSchedule integrates with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Buffer. You can also track your post links through Bit.ly or Google tracking tags.
What I love about CoSchedule is that you can manage your entire content creation calendar and social media sharing schedule right from the backend of your WordPress website or blog. Simply select which social networks you want to share your blog posts to and create your own social sharing schedule on a post-level basis.
CoSchedule will track social media engagement from your posts and show you an activity report ranking your posts based on engagement levels. You can even share your top posts (or any post) again straight from the report!
The calendar feature in CoSchedule is very robust. You can see your social media sharing schedule and number of shares from published posts directly from the calendar view. This is perfect for getting a big-picture view of your social media sharing schedule.
If you want to make sure that your blog posts are shared on social networks at optimal times, connect CoSchedule with Buffer and manage your content distribution schedule automatically.
Stephanie Sammons is the founder and CEO of Wired Advisor.
#43: Anews for News Curation
Keeping up with the latest news in a digital world is challenging, especially given our busy 24/7 “on” schedules and constant bombardment with messages.
Anews is an easy-to-use app to help you focus on the latest news in the categories you’re interested in.
Plus, you can share this news with your social channels in a split second, making every free moment count.
Elizabeth Houston is the director of North America Community at Hootsuite.
#44: Edgar for Optimized Evergreen Editorial Calendars
Not only does Edgar solve the problem of buffering evergreen content delivery in an elegant way, it helps you optimize the content you deliver to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
After you create a “library” of social media messages and categorize each posting by an editorial calendar–type of posting category, Edgar will schedule things according to your needs and ensure that your social media posting actually aligns beautifully with your content marketing strategy.
Finally, here’s the fun part: Create an editorial calendar using the library of social media postings you made for each social network!
While many begin with an editorial calendar and try to schedule postings on a weekly basis to fit it, Edgar ensures that you post according to your editorial calendar because that functionality is integrated within the app.
As you would expect with any social media dashboard, Edgar also provides you some statistics that let you easily optimize your saved library of content. For example, when you find out which content posts are working well, you can publish them more often or you can delete content that is no longer doing well.
There is no single perfect social media dashboard. With that in mind, Edgar deserves your consideration for a complementary dashboard to ensure that your important messages don’t get left out of your social media posting.
Neal Schaffer is the president of Maximize Your Social, author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing and Maximize Your Social.
Edgar for Automatic Content Delivery
I have a new friend, and I love him. His name is Edgar. Let me explain.
Most of our social media updates go to waste. They’re only seen by a fraction of our total audience, falling victim to things like time of day, mysterious algorithms and other factors that are beyond our control.
Fewer and fewer people see our social media updates. To keep up, we’re forced to publish more frequently, just to stay engaged with our audiences. This can make social media marketing a real burden, one that grows heavier each day… and one that offers diminishing returns.
Edgar to the rescue! No longer do you publish your updates just once and then watch them sink beneath the waves of obscurity, missed by most and forgotten by all (even you) within hours of publication.
Edgar catalogs your social updates into a library that grows over time. You curate the library, and Edgar republishes those updates on a schedule you set. He publishes only what you want, and only when you want it done.
What happens once Edgar publishes all of the updates in a category (like “My Blog Posts,” for instance)? He just pulls more updates from your library.
You can handcraft each update and even write several fresh updates that point to the same resource, blog post or podcast episode.
Your social media posts don’t go to waste. Your “old” posts can become new again. And you have time to catch up on the latest episodes of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
Ray Edwards is a writer and communications strategist, and hosts the top-rated podcast, The Ray Edwards Show.
Who are these social media pros?
The social media marketing experts who contributed to this article are all speaking at Social Media Marketing World 2015.
You’ll hear from hear from 100+ of the world’s top social media marketing pros as they reveal their newest social media marketing tips and practical, real-world, proven examples.
Join Guy Kawasaki (author, The Art of Social Media), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day), Chris Brogan (co-author, The Impact Equation), Jay Baer (author, Youtility), Ann Handley (author, Everybody Writes), Michael Stelzner (author, Launch), Michael Hyatt (author, Platform), Laura Fitton (co-author, Twitter for Dummies), Joe Pulizzi (author, Epic Content Marketing), Mark Schaefer (author, Social Media Explained), Cliff Ravenscraft, Nichole Kelly, Ted Rubin, Chalene Johnson, Darren Rowse, Joel Comm, Kim Garst, Martin Shervington, Marcus Sheridan, Gini Dietrich, Pat Flynn, John Jantsch, Andrea Vahl, Brian Clark and experts from more than a dozen top brands as they reveal proven social media marketing tactics at Social Media Marketing World 2015—Social Media Examiner’s mega-conference in beautiful San Diego, California.
You’ll be able to take your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, blogging, podcasting and video marketing to an entirely new level.
Join 2,500 fellow marketers at the mega-conference designed to inspire and empower you with social media marketing ideas—brought to you by Social Media Examiner.
Click here to learn more about Social Media Marketing World.
What do you think? Do you use any of these social media tools? What’s working well for you today? Please share your thoughts in the box below.ABSTRACT
This work aims at exploring the Igbo/African metaphysical sense of death and its traditional value and inter-communality. In this study, I intend to use the Igbo as a paradigm for an African experience of death. I begin by explaining that while thanatology is the systematic study of death, metaphysics is a study of reality as it concerns the phases of human existence from life to death. In doing so, I want to examine the African being in its wholeness. Interestingly, African philosophy conceives of being as dynamic and a force to be record with. The African world itself is best described as one of becoming: it is a world where there are constant interactions between the dead and the living, between the spirit-land and the human world. Thus, existence-in-relation aptly depicts the African view of life and reality. For the Igbo, however, life and death are intimately connected. To the extent that the latter paves the way to the ancestral dwelling, it is an urgent longing to join his forebears. Ultimately, the Igbo/African attaches a great value to ancestral abode which death makes possible. Through initiation the Igbo anticipates death. Only then does death become a phenomenon of life, entering the Igbo ontological being. Thus death for the Igbo does not constitute an end. Rather it intimates an authentic being (another beginning), which expressly embodies eschatology. I argue that eschatology aims at overcoming time.Gangster Chhota Rajan in Bali Police custody
Arrested gangster Chhota Rajan, likely to be brought back to India tonight, has alleged that "some in the Mumbai Police" have links with underworld don and terrorist Dawood Ibrahim."The Mumbai Police has done a lot of 'atyachar' (atrocities) on me...the government should look into that. Some in the Mumbai Police are mixed up with Dawood," Rajan, in orange prison uniform and cuffs, said to Indian reporters in Bali's Denpasar.Asked whether he was afraid of returning to Mumbai and preferred to be taken to Delhi, Rajan replied: "I am not afraid of Dawood. All my life I have fought against terror and will keep fighting against Dawood and terror."He added: "I will go wherever the government will take me. I just want justice."The remarks come amid reports that security agencies are not comfortable with the Mumbai Police handling Rajan.The 55-year-old gangster faces over 70 cases of murder, extortion and drug trafficking just in Mumbai. Since an Interpol notice against him in 1995, he had evaded the police in many countries until October 25, when he was arrested in Bali as he stepped off a flight from Sydney using an assumed name "Mohan Kumar".It was speculated over the years that Rajan was "in touch" with Indian security agencies and involved in the killing of "anti-Pakistan elements" and also countering Dawood Ibrahim, his former boss turned enemy.Rajan and Dawood were close aides until they fell out after the 1993 Mumbai blasts, which Dawood was accused of masterminding. Since then, there have been several attempts on Rajan's life by Dawood's gang-members.Dawood Ibrahim is believed to be in Pakistan's Karachi, where his security was allegedly increased after Rajan's arrest. Reports have suggested Rajan's arrest was a part of his secret deal with Indian security agencies; the gangster is believed to have sought help as over the years, his network has been weakened considerably and the threat from Dawood Ibrahim has remained unabated.Australia’s population rose a brisk 2.1 per cent last year, just a whisker from the fastest pace in four decades and a boost to demand for everything from consumer goods to housing and infrastructure.
Government data out today showed 451,900 more people called Australia home in the 12 months to end September, taking the total to 22.07 million.
The growth pace of 2.1 per cent was almost twice the global average of 1.1 per cent, and far above most rich nations.
The natural rate of increase, births minus deaths, stood at 154,500, while net migration added 297,400. The Bureau of Statistics also revised up past immigration numbers to show a net addition of 77,300 people in the two years to September.
The rapid rise in population helped Australia dodge a recession last year as the global financial crisis raged.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Republican Jewish Coalition Presidential Forum in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2015. (Photo: AP)
LONDON — A Muslim group in Britain offered to organize a tour of London for Donald Trump and to pay for his lunch after the Republican presidential candidate said that parts of the British capital are "so radicalized the police are afraid for their lives."
Trump made the comments in an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, after calling for Muslims to be barred from entering the United States, which he said would be "a temporary measure."
A petition to block Trump from entering the United Kingdom was signed by more than 100,000 people by Wednesday, meaning the British parliament has to consider it for debate. Trump owns hotels and golf courses in Scotland and his mother was born in the country.
On Wednesday, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon dropped Trump as a business ambassador for Scotland because of his recent remarks, a Scottish government spokesperson said. He was invited to take on the role in 2006.
Britain's Chancellor George Osborne said Wednesday that there are no plans to bar Trump from the country. He said the politician's views were “nonsense,” but added that it would be wrong to ban presidential candidates.
The Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella body that lobbies on matters of interest to British Muslims, said Trump does not represent the views of ordinary Americans.
"We reject his ignorant remarks suggesting that London has no-go areas where even the police are afraid to enter," the group said in a statement Tuesday.
"Should he be allowed to enter the U.K., and if he is able to name such areas, we would be happy to organise a multi-faith delegation to accompany Mr Trump and tour these areas and pay for his lunch."
London's police force the Metropolitan Police Service, also known as Scotland Yard, said "Mr. Trump could not be more wrong."
"Any candidate for the presidential election in the United States of America is welcome to receive a briefing from the Met Police on the reality of policing London," the force said in a statement.
Twitter users reacted to Trump's comments about London with the hashtag #TrumpFacts.
Britain so radicalised that the Queen now wears a hijab instead of a crown #TrumpFacts@realDonaldTrump Haha pic.twitter.com/PsFn10OcV0 — Raees Ul Haq (@RaeesUlHaq) December 9, 2015
The wearing of the 'British hijab' is now compulsory amongst men. #trumpfactspic.twitter.com/jfgHNNHnrf — David Owens (@asoundreaction) December 8, 2015
British banks are so radicalised they're only interested in "the Prophet." #TrumpFacts — Ed O'Meara (@edfomeara) December 9, 2015
A spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron departed from a tradition of not commenting on American presidential candidates, and said: "The Prime Minister completely disagrees with the comments made by Donald Trump, which are divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong."
London Mayor Boris Johnson dismissed Trump's comments as "utter nonsense" and said "the only reason I wouldn't go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1QvbAxJWe read another review that suggested this box for an automatic cat feeder, and we love it!
Cat used to wake us up at 4 or 5am to remind us to feed her at 7. Ear plugs didn't work. We would suffer for hours and then slug upstairs to feed her. We give her the blue food egg featured in the picture so she is simultaneously amused and prevented from inhaling her food like a vacuum.
We needed a better solution, and none of the automatic cat feeders we researched would accommodate the egg.
After seeing the other cat owner's review, we decided to give this a shot. The jar arrived on time and nicely packaged. We spent a few weeks figuring out the best setup, given that the jar had to be tilted and raised up enough that the egg would roll out. Eventually we settled on what you see in the picture below! The black spot is a little bumper I glued to the lid to protect it as it falls off.
Now Cat sleeps with |
ofsky’s longtime collaborator, Joe Berlinger, tweeted the news this morning, referring to Sinofsky as his “best friend,” adding, “Great man, sad day.” Berlinger and Sinofsky were behind the Paradise Lost films, which brought a substantial amount of attention to the West Memphis Three case and its group of teenagers who were convicted of murdering three young boys. The Paradise Lost movies helped put a spotlight on the unfair circumstances surrounding the trial and the lack of actual evidence involved, which eventually drove the Arkansas Supreme Court to release the three men from prison. Sinfosky won an Emmy for the first Paradise Lost film in 1996—which premiered on HBO—and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory earned him an Oscar nomination.
The first film Sinfosky directed—along with Berlinger—was the 1992 documentary Brother’s Keeper, which was another “miscarriage of justice” story about a rural man who was accused of murdering his brother. Like with the West Memphis Three case, this one also involved a significant lack of evidence, and the documentary actively tried to separate the murder from the sensationalist take that the media had initially presented. Brother’s Keeper won a Directors Guild award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement In Documentary.
Advertisement
While filming Paradise Lost, Berlinger and Sinofsky were able to convince Metallica to let them use their music in the film (a first for the band), and the pair later got back together with Metallica to film a documentary that was, ostensibly, about the recording of its 2003 album St. Anger. What they ended up with was Some Kind Of Monster, an intense examination of the various issues that the members of Metallica have with each other (and themselves). Sinofsky also directed the similarly musical Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy Of Sun Records for PBS.
Speaking with Variety, Berlinger said, “Bruce’s humanity is on every frame of the films that he leaves behind, and words can’t express how graced I feel my life has been by having the extraordinary opportunity of being able to say we were partners and, more importantly, best friends.”Weekly insight into the world of drinks with Paul Clarke from the Cocktail Chronicles and Imbibe magazine.
A few years ago, while attending my first Whiskyfest in San Francisco, I sat in on what was billed as a great whisk(e)y debate between producers of the two dominant schools of the spirit.
There were the malted-barley based whiskies from Scotland, and the corn and rye-based whiskies from Kentucky. But as I wrote in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, there's another approach to whisky that's coming on strong: the spirits being made in Asia, particularly (but not exclusively) Japan.
Suntory and its rival, Nikka, are the dominant whisky distillers in Japan, and when they began producing the spirit in the 1920s and '30s—Suntory's distiller, Masataka Taketsuru, left the company to form Nikka in 1934—it was essentially a Scottish clone.
That's been the way Japanese whisky has been viewed for much of its history, somewhat undeservedly. While Japanese distillers continue to produce the spirit using a base of malted barley, other steps in the production and aging process—ranging from the type of containers used to ferment the "wash," to the type of wood used in the barrels that hold the maturing liquor—are quite different from the standards being used by Scottish distillers.
The Suntory-produced Yamazaki Single Malt, for example, is fermented in wooden vats rather than stainless steel, and is aged in barrels made from several varieties of wood, including not only used bourbon and sherry casks (both familiar components in the aging of scotch whisky) but in barrels made from Japanese mizunara oak, which lends a dry, savory edge to the finished whisky.
Suntory's whiskies have been sporadically available in the U.S., but recently Yamazaki has made a concerted effort to expand its reach. They have a 10-year-old single malt, comparable in flavor to the softly honeyed Speyside whiskies, that's available in larger markets. Their spectacular 18-year-old single malt is also earning a lot of fans in the whisky world. And a 12-year-old Hibiki blended whisky, which incorporates used plum-liqueur barrels in its aging process, entered the American market last year to general acclaim.
Last month the whisky aisle became even more geographically diverse with the appearance of Amrut, a single-malt from Bangalore that comes in fresh from its "Fusion" expression being named one of the world's best whiskies in Jim Murray's 2010 Whisky Bible.
Meanwhile, Nikka is watching the U.S. market carefully with ideas of releasing its whisky possibly later this year or in 2011, and fans of Kavalan, a whisky made in Taiwan, are hoping to debut in the U.S. in the near future, as well.
Have you tried any of these (or other) Asian whiskies during your travels? Or found a pleasing dram that's already here in the U.S.? Let's hear your favorites.
This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.The universe is predisposed to hate this new Lou Reed/Metallica album, Lulu, and I totally understand why. It’s not really designed for people who like music. It sounds like what it is: an elderly misanthrope reciting paradoxical aphorisms over a collection of repetitive, adrenalized sludge licks. Anyone who tries to suggest it’s surprising in any way needs to reexamine his or her propensity for being surprised. I’m sure there will be a sector of Metallica’s core audience that feels “betrayed,” mostly because Metallica fans enjoy the sensation of betrayal. I suppose a handful of Lou Reed obsessives will consider this record hilarious as long as they don’t have to listen to it, and I’m certain some contrarian rock critic will become Internet Famous for insisting it’s more subversive than Transformer and a musical reaction to both Occupy Wall Street and the subpar drum production on St. Anger. It will be legally purchased by the 13,404 Metallica completists who saw Some Kind of Monster on opening weekend, unless the album is exclusively sold at Walmart, in which case it will enter the Billboard charts at no. 2. Rolling Stone will give it 2½ stars and then pretend it never happened; meanwhile, people who thought The “Priest” They Called Him was a brilliant idea will hold a vague, misplaced grudge against Dave Mustaine while sleepwalking to the methadone clinic.
It is not a successful record.
It might be a successful simulation of how it feels to develop schizophrenia while suffering from a migraine, although slightly less melodic.
Yet there’s still something vital about Lulu that needs to be remembered, even as you rip it off MediaFire and immediately forget the name of every single track: This was the dream. If considered in a vacuum, this absurd collaboration that no one wants to take seriously (or even play more than once) is the ultimate manifestation of what was once viewed as the idealized, unattainable goal of mainstream art. Just by existing, Lulu represents at least four things:
Two historically significant artists merging unrelated genres for no defined reason.
Adult, self-aware musicians following their own creative vision, devoid of commercial pressure or responsibility.
An attempt to produce something authentically different from anything we’ve ever heard before, motivated only by a desire to see what would happen.
A confident, unvarnished attempt at taking arcane high art (Lulu is based on theatrical German expressionism from the early 20th century) and repackaging it for denim-clad teenagers huffing gas in Arizona parking lots.
If you think about Lulu within those specific parameters, it seems admirable. It almost feels important. But those thoughts are annihilated by the inevitable experience of actually hearing it. If these cagey tunesmiths had consciously tried to make a record this simultaneously dull and comedic, they’d never have succeeded; the closest artistic equivalent would be what might have happened if Vincent Gallo had been a script consultant for The Room. To be fair, the end of the album does have one song that’s mildly OK — a dreamy, unaggressive, 20-minute exploration titled “Junior Dad” that will probably resonate with Damien Echols. There’s also a track called “The View” that’s pretty mind-expanding if you pretend the lyrics are literally about watching The View. But the rest of Lulu is as appalling as logic demands. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers acoustically covered the 12 worst Primus songs for Starbucks, it would still be (slightly) better than this. “Loutallica” makes SuperHeavy seem like Big Star. But this is what happens in a free society. Enjoy your freedom, slaves.
As a rule, we’re always supposed to applaud the collapse of the record industry. We are supposed to feel good about the democratization of music and the limitless palette upon which artists can now operate. But that collapse is why Lulu exists. If we still lived in the radio prison of 1992, do you think Metallica would purposefully release an album that no one wants? No way. Cliff Burnstein from Q Prime Management would listen to their various ideas, stroke his white beard, and deliver the following 45-second pep talk: “OK, great. Love these concepts. Your allusion to Basquiat’s middle period was very apt, Lars. Incisive! But here’s our situation. If you guys spend two months writing superfast Diamond Head songs about nuclear winter and shape-shifting, we can earn $752 million in 18 months, plus merchandizing. That’s option A. The alternative is that you can make a ponderous, quasi-ironic art record about ‘the lexicon of hate’ that will outrage the Village Voice and mildly impress Laurie Anderson. Your call.” Ten minutes later, Bob Rock would be parking his Lexus at the studio. Which is not to say that musicians should reflexively adhere to the static desires of their fan base, because that’s bad, too; on a personal level, I’m glad Metallica and Reed tried this, if only because I’m always a fan of bad ideas. They’ve earned the right to overreach. But if the fundamental goal of Metallica is to make good music, it seems like trying to get rich while doing so dramatically improves their creative process. The constraints of late capitalism really work for them; they’re extraordinarily adept at making electrifying heavy rock that’s designed to generate revenue. The reason Lulu is so terrible is because the people making this music clearly don’t care if anyone else enjoys it. Now, here again — if viewed in a vacuum — that sentiment is admirable and important. But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live on Earth. And that means we have to accept the real-life consequences of a culture in which recorded music no longer has monetary value, and one of those consequences is Lulu.
When I awoke yesterday morning, I immediately read a few online stories (including one on this very website) attempting to debunk the “myth” of Tim Tebow’s win over the Miami Dolphins. The alleged “myth” is that everyone erroneously believes that Tebow is a great pro quarterback. In truth, this notion is neither myth nor reality — no one who follows football thinks Tebow is anything other than who he is. There are people who love his ability to succeed despite his mechanical problems, and there are those who adore him as a symbol, and there are those who think it’s exciting that someone can win NFL games in nontraditional ways, and there are others who dislike him because he’s the highest-profile Christian in a Christocentric landscape, and there are many who are sick of hearing his name 200 times a day, and there are a few who believe criticizing Tebow somehow makes them more sophisticated. But you simply don’t find intelligent people who are confused about his actual ability, if only because those qualities are discussed and analyzed endlessly. The only myth about Tim Tebow is that the public is somehow ill-informed about his strengths and weaknesses; it’s a myth that exists only so that critics can point out how it isn’t valid. And this type of straw man construction happens all the time. For much of my life, I lived under the myth that record labels were inherently evil. I was ceaselessly reminded that corporate forces stopped artists from doing what they truly desired; they pushed musicians toward predictable four-minute radio singles and frowned upon innovation, and they avariciously tried to turn art into a soulless commodity that MTV could sell to the lowest common denominator. And that did happen, sometimes. But some artists need that, or they end up making albums like this.
Chuck Klosterman is the author of six books. The Visible Man is in stores now.
Previously from Chuck Klosterman:
Nostalgia on Repeat
Speed Chess
Noel Gallagher After Oasis
Louie‘s Brilliant Second Season
Important College Football Questions … ANSWERED
(Un)Reality and the Football Hall of Fame
To comment on this story through Facebook, click here.Thomas Cochran, a top ACU official, said the whistleblower's account was inaccurate, attaching AT&T phone records that he said show Alex Copson did not get a text from Michael Flynn that day. | Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP Former Flynn associate says phone records contradict whistleblower's account
A former business associate of Michael Flynn told lawmakers that phone records contradict an anonymous whistleblower's allegation that the ex-national security adviser sent an Inauguration Day text declaring a controversial Middle East nuclear energy deal "good to go," according to a letter released Monday.
In an account provided to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) in June — but made public only last week — the whistleblower said Alex Copson, a top official at ACU Strategic Partners, bragged on Inauguration Day about his relationship with Flynn, at one point flipping around his phone to reveal the text about the deal to build nuclear plants across the Middle East.
Story Continued Below
The whistleblower also said Copson said sanctions against Russia would be "ripped up" to make room for the deal.
But in a letter to Cummings dated Friday, Thomas Cochran, a top ACU official, said the whistleblower's account was inaccurate, attaching AT&T phone records that he said show Copson did not get a text from Flynn that day.
“The only text message Mr. Copson received on Inauguration Day came at 1:49 p.m.,” Cochran said. He said that text was from a friend who attended the same function where the whistleblower claimed to witness Copson’s boasting.
“Since Mr. Copson did not receive a text message from General Flynn during the Inauguration, other allegations of the ‘whistleblower’ are equally false and unfounded,” wrote Cochran, who identified himself as a senior scientist at the company. He requested that Cummings share the new information with the media.
Cummings on Monday morning revealed that he was aware of the new information. He sent a letter to Copson on Friday asking him to submit to a transcribed interview and suggested Cochran’s response was insufficient to disprove the whistleblower's account.
“Of course, it is possible that you were using a messaging application that does not generate a telephone company record,” he wrote. “It is possible that the website printout you provided does not reflect all text messages. It is also possible that you were not being truthful when you claimed to the whistleblower that you received a text from General Flynn, or that you flashed your phone and showed the whistleblower an outgoing text from 12:12 p.m., which is listed on the document you provided.”
The most reliable politics newsletter. Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Cummings said that the phone records also do not refute the rest of the whistleblower’s account. Cummings has sought to convince Republicans on the House oversight committee to hear the case from the whistleblower, but Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) instead referred the matter to the House and Senate intelligence committees. He blasted Cummings for pursuing an issue he said falls squarely in the purview of special counsel Robert Mueller, who’s investigating Flynn’s potential criminal actions early in the Trump presidency. Gowdy’s response sparked a hostile back-and-forth that has ratcheted up the partisan tension on the committee.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told POLITICO that he’s interested in hearing from Cummings’ source but also believes the oversight committee should pursue its own investigation.
“I’d certainly like to have him come testify before the intel committee. But that doesn’t obviate the need for [oversight] to do its own investigation, which is broader than just the intel piece,” he said.According to a column written by Steve Otto of the Tampa Tribune, the letter, in part, read:
Enclosed please find some pictures I took.... My husband thinks it is an orangutan. Is someone missing an orangutan? It is in a crouching position in the middle of standing up from where it was sitting. It froze as soon as the flash went off.... I heard the orangutan walk off into the brushes. I judge it as being about six and a half to seven feet tall. As soon as I realized how close it was, I got back to the house. It had an awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard. The orangutan was making deep `woomp' noises. For two nights prior, it had been taking apples that my daughter brought down from up north off our back porch. It only came back one more night after that and took some apples that my husband left out in order to get a better look at it. We got a dog back there now, and, as far as I can tell, it hasn't been back. I don't want any fuss or people with guns traipsing around behind our house. At the very least, this animal belongs in a place like Busch Gardens. Why haven't people been told that an animal this size is loose?... Please look after this situation. I don't want my backyard to turn into someone else's circus.
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman had the photographs analyzed, and the creature captured on film had some structural similarities to an orangutan; although Coleman doesn’t necessarily believe that it is one.
“Concurrent with my thinking, Tony Scheuhamme, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, pointed out some features on a good photograph of an orangutan by Denise McQuillen,” wrote Coleman in his blog. “This is not to say the Myakka photographs are of an orangutan, but it certainly assists in identifying features that are found on a known anthropoid that appear to exist on this one too.”
Not every cryptozoologist agreed on the veracity of the pictured skunk ape, and researcher Bobbie Short used her website Bigfoot Encounters as a platform to express her disbelief.
"...more than three veteran sasquatch investigators in Florida have investigated and determined that the Myakka photograph was a masked individual in a baggy-leg costume and deemed a hoax. The imagination of creative cryptozoology writers ran away with themselves on this one, it's wishful thinking, wholly a misidentification, a hoax, call it what you like -- there is no mysterious Myakka creature in Florida, there are no fossil records of apes in Florida. Apes are quadrupeds while the bigfoot aka sasquatch or skunk ape is a biped, classifying it a homin not a pongid. Even if there were feral or escaped apes from primate facilities or circuses managing to live off the fruitless Everglades, they are not related to Florida's hominoid upright walking, hairy creature," wrote Short.
"In addition, a May 2006 letter from Mitsuko Choden, primate specialist in Japan revealed the Myakka ape is a costume familiar to them in assorted colors, with plastic teeth molded in the fashion of the great apes. She went on to say the subject in the Myakka photograph expressed no body, arm or leg definition that would lend itself to the great apes."
And yet there are many who believe that the creature in question could be the legendary skunk ape. Skunk ape sightings aren’t even that unusual in the area, as it turns out. In an article from 2014, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that there had been at least a dozen sightings of the cryptid around the Myakka River from the 1960s into the 1980s. Sightings in the area continue to this day, and so, too, persists the mystery of the Myakka skunk ape photos.Heather Holmes, a San Francisco based reporter for KTVV was reporting on local crimes and, while on air, became a victim herself.
Reporting on a spate of recent muggings and car robberies, Holmes was on camera when an opportunistic thief entered the crew’s production van.
The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now
“R u kidding me?” Holmes tweeted, “Doing a live report at @oaklandpoliceca headquarters & my purse is stolen from the live truck!”
She later tweeted that someone used her bank card just 20 minutes later.
Holmes isn’t the first reporter to have this happen to her. According to the New York Times, every Bay Area TV station has been robbed of their cameras at least once, with some stations now employing armed plain clothes security.
Contact us at editors@time.com.The Summer Tree, Fionavar Tapestry Book One: classic fantasy
I was thrilled to find a tattered, used copy of The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay while looting used bookstores in the U.K. I saved the book for my flight and it was the perfect escape from a terrible trip home. It had been years since I've read Kay's epic, sweeping, amazing fantasy wherein 5 young Canadians visit Fionavar, the one true world.
The Summer Tree introduces us to a sweeping cast of characters, expertly done and with detail reminiscent of Tolkien. Unsurprisingly, Kay worked as Christopher Tolkien's assistant in editing the Silmarillion, and the association shines through. Kay builds a world so rich and full of detail that I simply get lost in it. The detailed backstory behind every blade of grass is perfect, and while sometimes obvious, always add emotional weight to the story.
From Matt Soren and Loren Silvercloak to the lios alfar, princes and priests, magical creatures and gods, this story is dense! It timed out perfectly for me to finish as the plane landed. I was heartbroken to see no e-book edition of the rest of Kay's fantastic trilogy. I've ordered them and can't wait to finish. The story is better than I remembered, and that is saying a lot!
Summer Tree, The: Book One of the Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel KayConsumers aren't the only ones enjoying the PlayStation 3's recent price drop. The US military has announced plans to buy 2,200 more of the game consoles, so that they can massively beef up the processing power of an existing, PS3-based supercomputer. A "Justification Review Document," which has oddly been deleted from Google since I found it but is still available at this cache link, explains that, "the new PS3s will be placed in a cluster environment with an existing cluster of 336 PS3s by connecting each of the units' one gigabit Ethernet port to a common 24 port gigabit hub."
The doc goes on to describe how the machine will run Linux, and it specifies that "commercial as well as in-house developed software code specific to these cell processor architectures will be studied. The objective of the architectural studies is to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications. An example would be determining additional software and hardware requirements for Advanced Computing Architectures (ACA) and High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) applications."
A later section of the document extols the virtues of Cell for delivering the most supercomputing GFLOPS for the lowest price. It's hard to argue with a tenfold price/performance advantage vs. IBM's Cell products:
With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.
Calling the PS3 "the only viable technology for HPC applications" is wildly overstating it, but we get the picture.
The reason that the PS3 is a more cost-effective way to buy Cell-powered GFLOPS than, say, the Cell blades that IBM actually makes specifically for supercomputing applications, is that the consoles come with a big, fat subsidy from Sony.
Sony sells the PlayStation 3 at a loss so that it can recoup the money on game sales, PlayStation Network digital sales, and Sony-supplied elements of the "value chain" like HD TVs, memory sticks, and so on. But the military isn't buying games or TVs—they're just taking their subsidy from Sony and running with it.
As long as console makers are willing to subsidize the purchase of massive amounts of parallel floating-point power in the name of up-selling, entities both domestic and foreign militaries will buy these machines and use them to God-knows-what ends. In a way, there's a twisted symmetry to the idea that one generation of consoles may be used to develop some actual weapons that the next console generation simulates for ordinary players.
Found via The RegisterAlmost everything starts with a name. Everything that happens after gives that name meaning, and eventually, a name earns a reputation. For the only brewery in Flint, Michigan, the name defined the business: Tenacity Brewing.
Tenacity first opened their doors to the public in February 2015. That same month, toxic levels of lead were detected in Flint resident Lee Anne Walters’ tap water. Flint had a public water crisis and Tenacity was faced with the seemingly impossible task of building a business selling a product that is 95% water. One year later, “Tenacity” has taken on a whole new meaning.
“Our mission statement is to brew creative beer and to serve and celebrate our community,” Tenacity co-founder Janet Van De Winkle told Paste. “We’ve always thought of ourselves as a community brewery, so we’re here to serve our community.”
Tenacity is the brainchild of Van De Winkle, Jason Caya, Tamra and Robb Klaty, and Jeff and Melissa Rasmussen. After testing recipes and picking out an historic firehouse just outside of downtown, they took to Kickstarter in September of 2014. The campaign goal was set at $15,000. Within a month, 151 backers pledged $21,406.
“The response was great,” Van De Winkle said. “I still say one of the best things about Kickstarter is not the financial support, it’s knowing who your cheerleaders are, knowing how much people in the community care, and how excited they are.”
Tenacity had a couple soft openings for their backers, family and friends at the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015. Concerns over Flint’s water started bubbling up at the same exact time.
The city of Flint stopping buying water from Detroit and started using water from the Flint River in April of 2014. It didn’t take long for the water, which is more corrosive than the water from Detroit, to start wearing on Flint’s aging water pipe infrastructure. Drinkable water in the older parts of the city came out of the faucet stinky and brown. Local officials dismissed the claims at first, and told residents to flush their water before using it. While the crisis had already started in certain regions of the 100,000-person city, there wasn’t much attention being paid on a wider scale.
But the problem wasn’t going to fix itself. On December 14, 2015, the city of Flint declared a state of emergency. On January 16, 2016, President Barack Obama declared a federal state of emergency. The small Michigan town had become a household name and the small local brewery near the banks of the Flint River had a perception problem.
One thing stayed the same though: Tenacity’s water stayed clean thanks to a double filtration system and frequent tests.
“In terms of us getting the word out that it was safe at the brewery,” Van De Winkle said, “it didn’t happen over night.”
Tenacity posted a picture of their lead-free water test results on Facebook, and copies of the tests are out on the bar. While the owners started to work on maintaining the image of their fledgling business, they worked to help the community as well.
“We’ve really been able to utilize the business for the benefit of the community, and more than just serving them beer,” Caya said. “Which I think is the thing that we’re all really the most proud of.”
Tenacity put a dollar of every Super Unleaded Beer they sold out of their tap into a donation fund, and a couple fundraisers for the Flint Child Health and Development Fund were held at the brewery. Tenacity was also a large part of the first Flint Restaurant Week to help restore the perception of Flint’s downtown businesses. Now, the brewery is looking to expand.
Of course, not everyone is open to Flint’s beer. To those people, Van De Winkle says that she is happy to take their call and answer any questions.
“Even before the water crisis it took ‘tenacity’ to start a brewery in Flint,” Van De Winkle said. “A couple people remarked on how fitting the name was, but that’s why we did the brewery in Flint — it was the largest city in Michigan without a brewery, and it’s certainly felt an economic downturn in its days, but the more you invest in something, the better your return is. We still don’t regret it one bit.”Sony wasn't the only US company to face a cyberattack by a foreign power this year. According to a bombshell exclusive from Businessweek, Iranian hackers penetrated systems for the Sands Hotel and Casino this February. With no apparent financial motive, attackers seized comprehensive employee information and brought the company's systems to a standstill. All told, the attack wiped out three quarters of the company's Vegas-based servers, which insiders estimate cost the company more than $40 million in equipment costs and data recovery alone.
"Encouraging the use of WMD...is a crime"
The attack seems to have been provoked by a speech Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson made the previous October. Adelson, a staunch defender of Israel, had advocated for stronger threats of nuclear attacks against Iran, going so far as to suggest detonating a nuclear bomb in the Nevada desert as a warning of what would happen if Tehran continued its nuclear program. In response, the attackers left a message on company servers: "Encouraging the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, UNDER ANY CONDITION, is a Crime." The note was signed from the "Anti WMD Team." They also took down company websites, replacing them with a photograph of Adelson and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The attack is strongly believed to have been sponsored by Iran and, together with recent attacks against Sony, sets a dangerous precedent for state attacks against privately held companies. In both cases, the US intelligence services' billion-dollar Cyber Command facilities were not much use in defending against the attacks or mitigating the damage once it had been done. As former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden told Businessweek, "If this would have come across my desk when I was in government, I would have just put it in the outbox."A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists discovered two geologically young craters — one 16 million, the other between 75 and 420 million, years old — in the Moon’s darkest regions.
“These ‘young’ impact craters are a really exciting discovery,” said SwRI Senior Research Scientist Dr. Kathleen Mandt, who outlined the findings in a paper published by the journal Icarus. “Finding geologically young craters and honing in on their age helps us understand the collision history in the solar system.”
Key to this discovery was the SwRI-developed Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) instrument aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LAMP uses the far-ultraviolet Lyman-alpha band skyglow and light from ultraviolet-bright stars LAMP to “see” in the dark and image the permanently shaded regions of the Moon. Using LAMP and LRO’s Mini-RF radar data, the team mapped the floors of very large, deep craters near the lunar south pole. These deep craters are difficult to study because sunlight never illuminates them directly. Tiny differences in reflectivity, or albedo, measured by LAMP allowed scientists to discover these two craters and estimate their ages.
“We study planetary geology to understand the history of solar system formation,” said SwRI’s Dr. Thomas Greathouse, LAMP deputy principal investigator. “It is exciting and extremely gratifying to happen upon a unique and unexpected new method for the detection and age determination of young craters in the course of nominal operations.”
Collisions in space have played an important role in the formation of the solar system, including the formation of the Moon. Impact craters tell the history of collisions between objects in the solar system.
Because the Moon has been peppered with impacts, its surface serves as a record of its past. Determining when collisions occurred helps scientists map the motion of objects in the solar system throughout its history. Craters that are young on geological timescales (millions of years) also provide information on the frequency of collisions.
When a small object collides with a larger object, such as the Moon, the impact creates a crater on the larger body. Craters can be a few feet in diameter or several miles wide. During the impact, the material ejected forms a blanket of material surrounding the crater. The ejecta blankets of “fresh,” relatively young craters have rough surfaces of rubble and a sprinkling of condensed, bright dust. Over millions of years, these features undergo weathering and become covered with layers of fluffy, dark dust.
Scientists determined that the areas around the two craters were brighter and rougher than the surrounding landscape. The team estimated the age of one crater at about 16 million years. The other crater’s rough extended ejecta blanket had faded, showing that this crater must be at least 75 million years old. But time would have completely covered the ejecta blanket in fluffy dust within 420 million years, providing an upper limit on its age. Other images, produced using laser altimetry and sunlight scattered off crater walls, provided details about topography, surface features, and material properties.
“Discovering these two craters and a new way to detect young craters in the most mysterious regions of the Moon is particularly exciting,” said Mandt. “This method will be useful not only on the Moon, but also on other interesting bodies, including Mercury, the dwarf planet Ceres, and the asteroid Vesta.”A Rochester city woman in New York state has been arrested after she allegedly drowned her 10-day-old son in a bathtub inside her apartment, leading to his death. She has been charged with second-degree murder, Police Chief Michael Ciminelli reportedly said.
Markiya Mitchell, the 25-year-old mother, admitted to committing the crime. She reportedly left the infant, Jeremiah, submerged in the bathtub for one to two hours.
The incident took place on Monday (13 November). Mitchell was arraigned Tuesday morning, following which she pleaded not guilty and was placed in jail without bail.
Police were alerted about the crime after another member of the house called 911 upon noticing the unresponsive infant in the bathtub. Jeremiah was soon taken to Rochester General Hospital after officers arrived at the Rochester home, but he was pronounced dead later, the Daily Mail reported.
The accused mother, who had a criminal record, is expected to appear in court on Friday (17 November). She may face additional charges in the case.
Meanwhile, police reportedly refused to reveal her criminal history and discuss her mental status. The motive behind the murder was also not immediately clear.
Local media reports stated that the accused woman also has a 7-year-old child, who is currently being looked after by a family member.
While child abuse has long been known to impact people from all demographics, data in recent years show a dramatic rise.
A report titled Child Maltreatment 2014 indicated that 79.3% of ill treatment of American children happens at the hands of their own parents.
Among various reasons that led to the rise in the child abuse cases, the report stated that one evident reason was the rise in the number of single mothers and tougher economic scenario in the country that is pushing the mothers to juggle work and children.
Commenting on the issue, Prosecutor Amanda Balling, who is also part of the county's child abuse unit, said: "The cases of child abuse in our county are difficult and heartbreaking. We'd like to bring awareness to these issues as much as possible."TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
A is for Assassination.
Things are looking pretty bad for Team Avatar about two-thirds of the way through “Long Live The Queen”: Mako and Bolin are in the Earth Queen’s prison, and Korra and Asami are stranded in the desert with a downed airship and a hungry, humongous sand piranha swimming around them. It’s a dire situation, but it’s nothing compared to what’s coming. While the heroes are occupied elsewhere, Zaheer and the Bad Benders make seismic changes to the Earth Kingdom, killing its queen by pulling the air from her lungs. They successfully hand over the power in Ba Sing Se to an oppressed people, but at what cost?
Advertisement
I was downright shocked during the Earth Queen’s assassination, a brutal scene that shows just how much this world has grown up since the Avatar days. The moment firmly pushes The Legend Of Korra out of children’s television territory and into the realm of young adult entertainment, trusting that the viewers are mature enough to see a woman get asphyxiated in rather graphic detail, complete with a close-up shot of the Earth Queen gasping for breath while her eyes bulge out in pain
There are strong connections to Chinese history all throughout Avatar and Korra, but the influence of real-world events is more explicit than ever in the Earth Queen’s storyline. I should have expected a coming revolution after meeting the Earth Queen, who is clearly modeled after China’s Empress Dowager Cixi, from her costume to her jewelry to her penchant for meticulous, extravagant landscaping. Cixi was the power behind the throne for most of the second half of the |
-- on British tea exported by the East India Company to the American colonies. How do we know this? Well, the actual subtitle of the Tea Act, for one:
An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licences to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.
The rationale was that lower taxes meant lower prices, which meant the East India Company would sell a lot more tea. Your basic free market precursor to Reaganomics and supply-side economics in action. In other words, the British government's solution to the East India Company's financial crisis was, in effect, a tax cut. A big one. Exactly the same economic solution that's been pushed by congressional Republicans and the tea bag revolutionaries 236 years later.
The tax cut was viewed by colonial patriots as another example of British tyranny against smaller merchants whose business would be severely undercut. Consequently, political activists and, most famously, the Sons of Liberty, organized a boycott against the East India Company's tea. And later that year, when the Dartmouth, Beaver and Eleanor were docked in Boston harbor, the Sons carried out their famous protest.
So. Whoops.
It turns out that that the tea baggers, led in part by Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and the Coward Rick Santelli, are politically more in line with the tax policies of King George than the views of the Sons of Liberty and the colonial patriots. The tax baggers emulating a protest against a corporate tax cut -- but, oddly, in support of tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Furthermore, King George was against a corporate bailout loan. And so are the tea baggers. And I don't think it'd be a stretch to suggest that many of the tea baggers are recipients of the president's middle class tax cut.
Not only that but the tea bag revolutionaries are being urged to buy thousands of corporate tea bags, rather than horking them from Lipton trucks -- Griffin's Wharf style. Sam Adams would be so proud. Then again, to be fair, the revolutionaries are being urged to get the proper government permits for their revolution against the, you know, government. We shouldn't expect that such law-abiding revolutionaries would seek out pilfered tag bags.
So in keeping with a long, embarrassing history of ill-conceived, contradictory or just plain self-defeating marketing ploys, the tea baggers seem to have adopted a concept that completely and utterly contradicts what they claim to stand for. Don't misunderstand me, though, they absolutely have a right to protest or do whatever the hell they want. They also have a right to be ridiculously and hilariously inconsistent. In a strange way, consider this column as helpful advice to the tea baggers. Perhaps it's time to quietly abandon the whole tea bag thing.Photojournalist Vlad Sokhin won on Thursday the award for the Best Digital News Story for his long-term project documenting climate change in Russia’s Far East at the Visa pour l’image photojournalism festival in the south of France.
ADVERTISING Read more
Global warming has become a real threat for the inhabitants of the Kamchatka Peninsula, a territory located between the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean in Russia’s Far East. In his project “Warm Waters: Kamchatka”, which won the Visa d’or franceinfo for Best Digital News Story, Sokhin shows how melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and extreme weather events are affecting vulnerable local communities throughout the region.
>> Click here to read the multimedia documentary "Warm Waters: Kamchatka"
The Russian-born photographer has been documenting these ominous changes for four years in a region he describes as the “frontline of man-made global warming”. His multimedia documentary shows the dilemma of locals affected by climate change as they wonder whether they should stay or leave the place where they grew up.
Sergey tries to get his car out of a flooded neighbourhood in Oktyabrsky, Russia. Photo: Vlad Sokhin / Cosmos / Panos Pictures / laif
Sokhin has been awarded 8,000 euros in prize money, which is funded by France Médias Monde (which includes FRANCE 24), France Télévisions, Radio France Internationale and INA, all public broadcasting media.
"Climate change is hard for a photographer to cover. It’s not like a war, we have to wait a long time before something actually happens,” says Sokhin.
Sixteen-year-old Peia Kararaua swims in a flooded neighbourhood in the village of Aberao on the Kiribati islands. Photo: Vlad Sokhin / Cosmos / Panos Pictures / laif
His luminous photographs illustrate how inhabitants of the Commander Islands, located 175km east of the Kamchatka Peninsula, deal with a decline in fishing resources and drinking water as sea levels keep on rising. Sokhin’s visual evidence from the Pacific region also include Alaskan fishermen and islanders living on the archipelagos of Tuvalu and Kiribati.
“For me they are all the same,” says Sokhin as he refers to communities separated by vast stretches of ocean. His work, which can be seen at the Couvent des Minimes in Perpigan, until the 17th of September.When you go to college your most likely given a.edu email, this email address is your key to thousands of dollars worth of free software now that you're a student!
GitHub Student Developer
You get all of this for free! (Hint: click "GitHub Student Developer")
Atom (Text Editor, free)
Bitnami: Business 3 (Cloud apps, $49/month)*
CrowdFlower + $50 credit (Data mining, $2,500/month)
DigitalOcean (Cloud Hosting, $100 credit)
DNSimple (DNS Managment, $3/month)**
GitHub Micro (5 Private Repos, $7/month)
HackHands (24/7 Programming Support, $25 credit)
Namecheap (.me domain, $9/year)*
Namecheap (SSL cert, $9/year)*
Orchestrate (Database API, $49/month)
Screenhero (Screensharing, $9.99/month)
SendGrid (Email SAAS, $4.95/month)*
Stripe (Payment System, $1,000 credit)
Tracvis CI (Cont. Integration Platform, $69/month)
Unreal Engine 4 (Game Dev Tools, $19/month)
*One Year
**Two Years
ReSharper (Productivity tool for.NET)
dotTrace (.NET Performace Profiler)
dotCover (.NET Code Coverage Tool)
dotMemory (.NET Memory Profiler)
IntelliJ IDEA (Java IDE)
RubyMine (Ruby on Rail IDE)
PyCharm (Python/Django IDE)
CLion (C/C++ IDE)
PhpStorm (PHP IDE)
WebStorm (JavaScript IDE)
AppCode (Objective-C IDE)
AutoDesk
Way too many to mention, pretty much everything AutoDesk offers is free to students
Inventor (Mechanical CAD)
Maya (3D Modeler)
3ds Max (3D Modeler)
AutoCad (CAD)
Fusion 360 (Tool combining design with collaboration)
Revit (BIM tools)
Much, much more!
This isn't all there is, there are tons of other software out there free or discounted to students.Several years ago I wrote a tutorial about using Acegi/Spring Security with JavaServer Faces (JSF) to create a simple authentication / Login page; however, times have changed and Java EE is back in action. I would no longer consider Spring a “requirement” when building a Java EE application. More specifically, if you are using the core Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) framework that serves as the backbone for the entire Java EE framework, Spring Security becomes less attractive (because it’s not compatible without using Spring itself, and Spring is a replacement for CDI).
This article will explore how to create a JSF login backed by the standards-compliant CDI framework (that is included with Java EE), and the PicketLink security framework (an open-source project from JBoss). Examples for this article were sourced from the very comprehensive, and quite understandable quick-start application from the PicketLink project itself.
Set up the Application
First things first, you’ll need to create a new Maven project set up as a Java EE web-application. You can do this using JBoss Forge, or you can just download the quick-start code, skip all the setup, and jump right to the explanation.
Activate JSF and CDI
You will also want to make sure that you have activated both JSF and CDI in your application configuration, so make sure that you do not forget to add the WEB-INF/beans.xml and WEB-INF/faces-config.xml files. Examples of these files (and where they need to be placed in the application) can be seen in the example code.
Add PicketLink to pom.xml
This step is as straightforward as the rest of this tutorial – just add the following configuration to your maven pom.xml file:
/pom.xml View the entire file <properties> <!-- PicketLink dependency versions --> <version.picketlink.javaee.bom>2.7.0-SNAPSHOT</version.picketlink.javaee.bom> <!--... --> </properties> <dependencyManagement> <dependencies> <!-- Dependency Management for PicketLink and Java EE 6.0. --> <dependency> <groupId>org.picketlink</groupId> <artifactId>picketlink-javaee-6.0</artifactId> <version>${version.picketlink.javaee.bom}</version> <scope>import</scope> <type>pom</type> </dependency> </dependencies> <!--... --> </dependencyManagement> <dependencies> <!-- PicketLink Uber Dependency. It provides all PicketLink dependencies from a single JAR. You still can define each module separately, if you so choose. --> <dependency> <groupId>org.picketlink</groupId> <artifactId>picketlink</artifactId> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency> <!--... --> </dependencies>
Create the security configuration
/src/main/java/example/HttpSecurityConfiguration.java View the entire file /** * @author Pedro Igor */ public class HttpSecurityConfiguration { public void onInit(@Observes SecurityConfigurationEvent event) { SecurityConfigurationBuilder builder = event.getBuilder(); builder.http().allPaths().authenticateWith().form().authenticationUri("/login.jsf").loginPage("/login.jsf").errorPage("/error.jsf").restoreOriginalRequest().forPath("/javax.faces.resource/*").unprotected().forPath("/logout").logout().redirectTo("/home.jsf").forPath("/home.jsf").unprotected(); } }
This is where we will set up PicketLink, and tell it where our authentication page lives. This file should be placed anywhere on your Java source path.
This is essentially a simple CDI observer for the org.picketlink.event.SecurityConfigurationEvent. The event is fired during application startup and allows you to provide any configuration to PicketLink before it is initialized. All configuration related to Http Security is handled in this bean.
One thing to note is that we have set up both a login/logout page to restrict all page by default, but we have also set up some exceptions. These exceptions include the JSF resources path (necessary for serving image, stylesheet, and javascript files to component libraries), and also include the website homepage, because we’d like users to see something before they get shipped off to the login page.
In order for this configuration to recognize users, however, we’ll need to add some data to our IdentityManager. The IdentityManager is part of the PicketLink API that controls user credentials, passwords, and integration with your database (if you use one ;). To access this API, you should inject the PartitionManager into a @Startup, @Singleton bean.
/src/main/java/example/SecurityInitializer.java View the entire file /** * @author Shane Bryzak */ @Startup public class SecurityInitializer { @Inject private PartitionManager partitionManager; @PostConstruct public void create() { IdentityManager identityManager = this.partitionManager.createIdentityManager(); User user = new User("jane"); user.setEmail("jane@doe.com"); user.setFirstName("Jane"); user.setLastName("Doe"); identityManager.add(user); identityManager.updateCredential(user, new Password("abcd1234")); } }
This startup bean creates a default user account when the application is started. Since we are not providing an IDM configuration in this example, PicketLink will default to using a file-based identity store to persist user and other identity state.
Once we have this set up, our application is now ready to get a face-lift! It’s time to build the JSF pages that will use PicketLink to authenticate the user.
Create the Login Page
As we defined in our HttpSecurityConfiguration.java, we need to create a JSF login page located in the src/main/webapp/ folder.
This file contains a simple JSF form and command button that submits to PicketLink.
You must use <h:form method="POST" prependId="false">. Otherwise, the form fields will be prepended with a random JSF component ID, like “j_3234:j_password”, and picketlink will not be able to handle the request!
/src/main/webapp/login.xhtml View the entire file <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"> <h:body> <h:form method="POST" prependId="false"> <h:inputText id="j_username" /> <h:inputSecret id="j_password"/> <h:commandButton id="login" value="Login" action="#{identity.login()}"/> </h:form> <p> Tip: you can login with a username/password of jane/abcd1234. </p> </h:body> </html>
Create a public and private page for the user to access
We also need to do the same for our server error page (where the user will be directed if login fails.)
/src/main/webapp/error.xhtml View the entire file <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"> <body> Sorry, there was an error!<br/> Tip: you can login with a username/password of jane/abcd1234. </h:form> </body> </html>
Last but not least, we need to add a few pages for the user to try to access, for which authentication is required, and the login form will be displayed before access is granted!
The home page is a public page, and can be accessed by any user
/src/main/webapp/home.xhtml View the entire file <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"> <body> <ui:fragment rendered="#{identity.loggedIn}"> <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=protected/private.jsf"/> </ui:fragment> <ui:fragment rendered="#{not identity.loggedIn}"> <h:form> <p> This is a public resource. </p> <p> Click <h:outputLink value="protected/private.jsf">here</h:outputLink> here to access the protected resources. </p> Tip: you can login with a username/password of jane/abcd1234. </h:form> </ui:fragment> </body> </html>
Files in the protected folder are secured by PicketLink (default configuration), and cannot be accessed until the user has successfully logged in:
/src/main/webapp/protected/private.xhtml View the entire file <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"> <body> <p>Hi <b>#{identity.account.loginName}</b>, this resource is protected. If you reach this page is because you're authenticated.</p> <p>Click here to <a href="#{request.contextPath}/logout">Logout</a></p> </body> </html>
Try it out!
It’s now time to deploy the application to WildFly (a Java EE standards compliant web-server), where you can try the application for yourself!
How did it go? What problems did you run in to? How could this example be made simpler? Let us know! For more examples on how to use PicketLink with many other frameworks like 2-factor authentication, SSO with Twitter, Google, and Facebook, check out the rest of the quickstarts: https://github.com/jboss-developer/jboss-picketlink-quickstartsBefore you board a plane for a flight to a faraway destination, everydayhealth.com recommends taking a minute to consider your health. Being on a long flight means you'll be cramped in a seat for many hours without being able to move around much.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DVT puts you at risk for pulmonary embolism, a clot that travels from a leg to the lungs. Depending on the size of the blood clot and if it's treated, damage to the lungs can be minimal, but a large clot can be fatal.
To lessen your risk of DVT and pulmonary embolism on long flights, it's important to maintain good blood circulation. Here are some tips that can help:
Dress appropriately. What you wear can affect your blood circulation on long flights. "I recommend the use of compression stockings on long flights, especially for those who have a history of DVT or pulmonary embolism," says Ken Zafren, MD, clinical associate professor in the division of emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, Calif. "Compression stockings have been shown to decrease the risk of symptomless [silent] blood clots in the legs on long flights." At all times, but especially when you fly, wear comfortable clothing that fits you well, and avoid wearing shoes that pinch your feet.
Choose an aisle seat when possible. "The risk of DVT is probably lower for those who sit in an aisle seat. Elevating the feet when possible may also be helpful," says Dr. Zafren.
Don't just sit there. Travelers should move around as often as possible to get their blood flowing and reduce the risk of developing a blood clot. "Even people who have never had blood clots should get up and walk around at least every two to three hours," says Zafren. "They should also make sure to drink plenty of fluids — enough to keep their urine clear." Dehydration increases your risk of blood clots.
Know the symptoms of DVT:
Leg painSwelling, warmth, or redness in the legChest pain (can be a sign that a blood clot has traveled to a lung)Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing (also a sign of a blood clot in a lung)Lightheadedness or faintingIf you experience any of these symptoms, notify a flight attendant or other airline staff member as soon as possible. "Anyone who has DVT symptoms should seek medical care immediately," says Zafren.
In-Flight exercises to get blood blowing
Toe points. Stretch your legs out as straight as possible in front of you. Alternate pointing your toes down toward the floor and then up toward the ceiling.Ankle circles. Stretch your legs out straight in front of you. Rotate your ankles, moving your feet around in circles.Do each exercise 10 times with each foot, and try to do them once every hour.
You should also take the opportunity to walk around the cabin as often as possible. If you're reluctant to disturb your seatmates, remember that it's best to stand up every two to three hours. You can also offer to switch seats with a seatmate who doesn't want to get up as often.
If you've already had a blood clot
Of course, if you've had blood clots in the past, it's especially important to remain active during your flight and drink plenty of fluids. You may also have heard that some physicians recommend aspirin to prevent blood clots, but this is a controversial measure and whether or not it's right for you should be discussed with your doctor, says Zafren.
If you know you're at higher risk for blood clots and are planning to take a long flight, you might want to talk to your doctor about receiving injections of a drug called low-molecular-weight heparin to prevent clots. The injections tend to stay in the blood longer than oral medications. If you travel frequently, you can be taught to give yourself injections of heparin. Says Zafren, "These injections can be easily self-administered and provide proven protection."Introduction
1. What is Wintera?
2. Skills
Snowball (A small snowball to throw at your enemies.)
A great skill. This will be your main way to deal damage in one versus ones.
Snow Barrage (Hold and charge the skill button to prepare and throw a number of snowballs with increasing damage.)
I love this skill for poking those little punks. It deals big daddy damage.
Fireball (A flame that burns the area where it lands, turning snow to slush and slowing anyone who passes through.)
Pretty good if you suck at hitting someone thats not already slowed. Big AOE thats really hard to miss.
Ice Trap (An icy trap that briefly stuns enemies.)
Catch enemies off guard and stun them for free damage!!! Also leaves an AOE that slows people within it.
Hot Cider (Warms you up and recovers 50000 HP immediately.)
Nice HP recovery to stay in the fight longer.
Thermal Layer (Absorbs 100,000 damage for 30 sec. Immune to knockdown and stagger while in effect. Ends when maximum damage is reaching or time runs out.)
Man this is broken. Makes one on ones free as well as going a bit more ham.
Wintera Scroll of Resurrection (Resurrects the closest ally within a 4m range in front of you. Restores 100% of HP and MP.)
BROKEN!!! RES TEAMMATES FOR FREEEEEEEEEEEEE
3. Chests
Warm-Up Box
CONTAINS: WINTERA SCROLL OF RESURRECTION. PLUS A CHANCE OF HOT CIDER OR THERMAL LAYER.
Regular Box
CONTAINS: GIVES ICE TRAP OR FIREBALL!!!
4. Gear
ALL OF THE GEAR CAN BE PURCHASED THROUGH THE BELLICARIUM SHOP. MAKE SURE THEY’RE MASTERWORKED. EVEN IF THE PIECE SAYS IT CANNOT BE MASTERWORKED, TRUST ME IT CAN. (NOTE THAT THESE GO OFF OF OLD ENCHANTMENT SYSTEM AND CAN BE AS HARD TO MASTERWORK AS GUILE). ALSO, PLEASE REALIZE THAT THESE ARE THE EASIEST ARMOR PIECES TO ENCHANT +9 AND GET THE ROLLS ON. MASTERWORKING IS A BONUS!!!
Weapon
Sorry for the inconvience but it’s been tested and lightning proc isn’t working this time around in Wintera. Although attack speed does. So, get a 4 roll weapon (Slaughter is best bet)
Topline – 9% Attack Speed
Bottom Lines 4.5% Attack Speed 7.2% Cooldown Reduction
MISC ROLL → LIGHTNING (VERY IMPORTANT)
Chest
This is the level 58 chest for your class. The 30% chance to recover HP is essential as it allows you to soak up basically 2 snowballs (if you count base regen).
Topline – 30% chance to recover HP when combat starts
Bottom Lines Reflects 18.2% of damage to the attacker. Recovers.17% of total HP every 5 seconds. 30% chance to recover HP when combat starts.
Gloves
LIFE STEALING!!!
Immediately recover 0.2% of total HP when skill hits target
DOESNT MATTER
DOESNT MATTER
Boots
Man getting this much slow reduction in a game mode where its all about slowing is insane.
Topline – Decreases duration of slowing effects by 31.5%
Bottom Lines Increases movement speed by 2.5% Increases movement speed by 2.5% Decreases duration of slowing effects by 33.0%
Jewelry
Rings – Rolls: Increases chance to apply weakening effects to opponents by 4.8%
Earrings – Rolls: HP Regen 0.4% / HP Regen 0.2%
Necklace – Roll: Increases chance to apply weakening effects to opponents by 4.8%
Crystals
Weapon Red Crystals
Eh these are pretty awful but nothing else better to get. YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO USE PENTANTS (no image dx)
Armor Blue Crystals
LIFE REGEN MAN ITS SO GOOD OUT OF COMBAT.
Jewelry Green Crystals
???????????????????????? XDIf you are craving a PAYDAY Candy Bar then you will love my Peanut Butter Candy Corn Blondie Bars. Great way to use up leftover Halloween candy.
When I was a kid I was allergic to dairy so I never really acquired a sweet tooth. My dad, knowing I was allergic would sometimes bring home a Planters Peanut Bar for me as a treat. You know the one that tastes like peanut brittle. I guess that is why I am always more of a fan of the sweet and salty blend instead of just chocolate.
Don’t get me wrong I like to bake sweets but I just don’t eat too much. I usually try my creations to make sure it is good and what I was trying to achieve. My other favorite candy bar is the Pay Day; nougat surround by caramel, covered in roasted peanuts. See, sweet and salty!
The inspiration for my Peanut Butter Candy Corn Blondie Bars was the PayDay candy bar but also the snack mix using roasted peanuts and candy corn. I love that mix and it is amazing how it tastes just like a PayDay candy. These blondies have all the same flavors in a bar form. Perfect for your upcoming Halloween party or fall bonfires.
Method:
Pre-heat your oven to 350°F. Cream together butter, sugars, and peanut butter. Add in the eggs and vanilla and beat until creamy. Sift together your dry ingredients and slowly add to the mixing bowl. Mix in white chocolate chips, peanuts, and candy corn just until combined. Do not over-mix. Spread the mixture into a 9×13 greased baking dish and bake for 20-25 minutes. Cool completely and cut into 24 squares.
What is your favorite dessert candy bar mash-up?
Print Peanut Butter Candy Corn Blondie Bars Prep Time 20 mins Cook Time 25 mins Total Time 45 mins Course: Dessert Cuisine: American Servings : 24 Author : Quinn Caudill Ingredients 1/2 cup butter,softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips
2/3 cup peanuts
1 cup candy corn Instructions Pre-heat oven to 350°F. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter, sugars, and peanut butter. Add the eggs one at a time and then add vanilla. Beat until creamy. In another bowl sift together the baking powder, baking soda, salt, and flour. Slowly add to the mixing bowl with motor on low. Mix in white chocolate chips, peanuts, and candy corn just until combined. Do not over-mix. Spread the mixture into a 9x13 greased baking dish. Bake at 350°F for 20-25 minutes. Let cool completely. Cut into 24 squares. Recipe Notes First published by Quinn Caudill for DadWhats4Dinner.com ©2016
Loosely based on a recipe by Jocelyn over at Inside Bru Crew Life. Check out her blog she has great content.
I also will be bringing my Peanut Butter Candy Corn Blondie Bars to Freedom Fridays, Friday Favorites, Fiesta Friday, Weekend Potluck, What’s Cooking Wednesdays. Check out my Link Parties page for other great places to find new recipes.
Pin It
You might also like my;
Malted Wonder Bars
Spooky Monster BarkThe ability of people to express opinions in line with their religious beliefs was dealt another serious blow this month. Ruth Neely, the Wyoming judge who told a reporter she couldn’t perform same-sex marriages although that is not part of her job requirements, was censured by the Wyoming Supreme Court.
Since 1994 Neely has served as a municipal court judge in Pinedale, Wyoming. Since 2001, she has also served as a part-time magistrate, and in that position she voluntarily solemnizes marriages. She’s presided over more than 100 weddings so far. She has never been asked to perform a same-sex marriage, and her stance only came to light after a reporter sought her out and questioned her on her beliefs shortly after the Supreme Court required all states to approve gay marriages.
Neely is well-regarded in Pinedale, and that respect includes at least one member of the local gay community, as cited by the court’s decision. During the inquiry by the ethics committee, Neely wrote: “I cannot knowingly be complicit in another’s sin. Does that mean I cannot be impartial on the bench when that homosexual or habitual liar or thief comes before me with a speeding ticket? Or the alcoholic appears before me for yet another charge of public intoxication? No. Firmly, no. I have been the municipal court judge for the Town of Pinedale for over 20 years; and there has not been one claim of bias or prejudice made by anyone who has come before me. Not the homosexual, not the alcoholic, not the liar, not the thief. Not one.”
The 3-2 decision found Neely had undermined public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary, but they didn’t remove her from the bench. Instead, “Judge Neely shall either perform no marriage ceremonies or she shall perform marriage ceremonies regardless of the couple’s sexual orientation,” wrote Justice Kate Fox.
Her Religious Beliefs Aren’t The Issue, Just the Reason
The majority opinion continued, “This case is also not about imposing a religious test on judges. Rather, it is about maintaining the public’s faith in an independent and impartial judiciary that conducts its judicial functions according to the rule of law, independent of outside influences, including religion, and without regard to whether a law is popular or unpopular.”
The court repeatedly stresses that Neely’s religious beliefs aren’t the issue, but rather her conduct as a judge. Yet it’s vital to reiterate that not a single gay couple has been unable to wed in Pinedale, and that the tiny town has at least one magistrate Neely said would perform a same-sex marriage if necessary. She has never refused to marry any same-sex couple, but simply answered honestly to a reporter that personally performing such a wedding would violate her religious beliefs. Her beliefs in the biblical definition of marriage have not previously interfered with her work as a judge or magistrate, yet they’re the reason that she has been censured.
It is important that the judiciary is fair, and that the law is fairly and impartially applied, the court decision says: “The importance of public confidence in the integrity of judges stems from the place of the judiciary in the government. Unlike the executive or the legislature, the judiciary ‘has no influence over either the sword or the purse;... neither force nor will but merely judgment.’” Neely doesn’t believe her faith makes her impartial, but since she would hypothetically marry heterosexual couples and not homosexual ones the court has disagreed. Even though they didn’t remove her from either her judge or magistrate positions, they noted that local authorities might.
So Are Orthodox Christians Banned from Law Now?
The most important question here is whether individuals with sincerely held beliefs will be able to continue to hold public service positions and government jobs. Neely’s beliefs preclude her from being able to wed same-sex couples, but they haven’t barred her from evenly and fairly presiding over the cases that have come before her for decades. It’s impossible for people to be without opinions and morality derived from personal experiences and faith systems, but it is possible for people of faith to be fair and impartial.
The judgement against Neely raises questions about how citizens should handle enforcement of laws they believe are unjust. Where does this leave law enforcement officials who don’t agree with immigration laws, for example, or military members like chaplains who refer members of other religions to another chaplain instead of including them in their own religious rites? Is there a difference between expecting a pro-life firefighter to save an abortion clinic and not let it burn down, and expecting a judge to perform a same-sex marriage?
Neely’s job as magistrate isn’t over emergency or life and death matters, where the time to find a worker without objections becomes a loss of life or property. The court, in placing her job on an equal field with police officers, doctors, and firefighters, lacks common sense and reasonableness. Neely hasn’t proposed harsher punishments for gay lawbreakers, or asked for them to not be married at all by other available public officials, but she has professed that she, personally, can’t perform a hypothetical wedding.
“Wyoming law does not require any judge or magistrate to perform any particular marriage, and couples seeking to be married have no right to insist on a particular official as the officiant of their wedding,” Justice Keith Kautz noted in the dissent that Justice Michael Davis joined.
Americans have to examine what careers are open to those with religious beliefs and what aren’t, and barring people from jobs they do fairly and are well-qualified for leaves us fewer conscientious and qualified workers. It also heightens the growing imbalances between faithful Christians and secular American citizens with growing preferences for the latter based solely on religious beliefs.The word Islam conjures up a disturbing picture in the minds of some people outside the Muslim world. It is a fact that many in the West imagine Islam to be a faith far removed from modern life, closed to science and that attaches no value to a good quality of life. The first reason for this erroneous belief is that various people who claim to be Muslims in fact have views and lifestyles that fly in the face of it. However, someone looking in from the outside cannot recognize that and will be unable to evaluate matters accurately. Another important reason is associated with the first: Most people are unacquainted with the truths of Islam and the correct interpretation of the Quran. In point of fact, these people who make incorrect evaluations are not only from outside the Islamic world; many people within the Islamic world as well are unable to properly understand the Quran. The reason for the appearance of mistaken and radical views is that the Quran is not correctly understood.
The only point of reference to truly learn about Islam is the Quran but we see that some people do not interpret the Quran correctly and produce their own perverse and foolish deductions from it in order to support their own misguided and superstitious beliefs. One of the subjects most easily capable of being misinterpreted in this way is science and scientific activity.
Science is an important reality that enables us to know the universe we inhabit, the Earth and our own bodies and to be able to appreciate all the beauties around us. Scientific advances have enlightened human life and opened the door to a healthier way of living. For example, by means of medical advances the average human life span today is much greater than it was a century ago. Even in the 1950s, average worldwide life expectancy was 47, whereas according to U.N. figures it had risen to 68 by 2010. Similarly, advances in other branches of science have made our lives easier and more comfortable.
Today, for instance, the benefits of the Internet are obvious. By means of the Internet we can learn at once what is happening in different parts of the world. Communications among people have grown and become far easier. New concepts such as e-commerce have bestowed a new dimension to our understanding of economics. Information about a subject one wants to investigate can now be accessed immediately. The Internet is just one of the benefits that science has bestowed on mankind over the last century and those nations making greater uses of the benefits of science now live at a much more advanced level. Had science not progressed as much as it has, we would very likely still be living dark and backward lives devoid of many facilities.
For a sincere Muslim, science is a blessing that God has bestowed on mankind. Islam advocates a rational approach. In many verses of the Quran, God advises people to use their intelligence. He emphasizes the need for us to think rationally and scientifically, speaking of, "...those deeply rooted in knowledge..." and "...only people of intelligence pay heed." (3:7). Another verse advises people to think about the formation of the universe: "...reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth..." (3:191)
Use is still being made today of the work of various Muslim scientists in the past who understood that Islam encourages scientific investigation. People such as Avicenna, Farabi and Battani were among the leading scientists of the Middle Ages. Avicenna's book "The Canon of Medicine" (al-Qānūn fī al-Tibb) was used as a text book in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain until 1650. Battani's "Zij" was regarded as a most important astronomical text, and his work inspired that of Copernicus. A crater on the moon was even named after him as a mark of respect: "Albategnius." Al-Khwarizmi's work "Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing" is regarded as the first work in which the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations are presented. The very term "algebra" comes from "al-jabr," one of the methods for solving quadratic equations in al-Khwarizmi's book. Many other examples of contributions to scientific progress by Muslim scientists could be given.2 Chainz has a plan to get his restaurant spick and span. TMZ reports today (Feb. 27) that after hearing his new restaurant had failed its health inspection, the "Big Amount" rapper automatically switched up his staff and hired new managers to get the place up and running again.
Last week it was reported that 2 Chainz' Atlanta eatery Escobar Restaurant and Tapas had failed its first health inspection since officially opening its doors in December of 2016. The Georgia Department of Public Health gave the establishment a grade of "U," short for unsatisfactory, after finding multiple health code violations on the premises. Noted violations ranged from “mold-like substances” inside the ice machine, inadequate food |
The Obama administration asserts that presidents of the United States have the power to wage endless war anywhere in the world without permission or hindrance from Congress.
This claim is reiterates the position of the Bush administration, which was most strongly pushed by Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney. It is another example of the seamless transition from Bush to Obama in foreign affairs.
The Obama administration's assertion was made during a Senate hearing on May 16. It revisited the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) enacted by Congress just days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Only Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, raised any concern at the hearing.
“This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been [in the Senate],” King said. “You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today.”
One could think that would at least deserve major coverage in the capitalist press. But where it was mentioned, it was buried. It was hardly noticed by the population at large.
All this came out in questioning of Pentagon officials. Those questioned included Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense in charge of special operations; Robert Taylor, acting general counsel for the Department of Defense; Brigadier General Richard Gross; and General Michael Nagata.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham questioned them. The transcript reads:
Graham: Do you agree with me, the war against radical Islam, or terror, whatever description you like to provide, will go on after the second term of President Obama?
Sheehan: Senator, in my judgment, this is going to go on for quite a while, and, yes, beyond the second term of the president.
Graham: And beyond this term of Congress?
Sheehan: Yes, sir. I think at least 10 to 20 years.
Graham: So from your point of view, you have all of the authorization and legal authorities necessary to conduct a drone strike against terrorist organizations in Yemen without changing the AUMF.
Sheehan: Yes, sir, I do believe that.
Graham: You agree with that, General?
Gross: I do, sir.
Graham: General, do you agree with that?
Nagata: I do, sir.
Graham: OK. Could we send military members into Yemen to strike against one of these organizations? Does the president have the authority to put boots on the ground in Yemen?
Taylor: As I mentioned before, there’s domestic authority and international law authority. At the moment the basis for putting boots on the ground in Yemen, we respect the sovereignty of Yemen and it would –
Graham: I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about: Does he have the legal authority under our law to do that?
Taylor: Under domestic authority, he would have that authority.
Graham: I hope that Congress is OK with that. I’m OK with that. Does he have authority to put boots on the ground in the Congo?
Sheehan: Yes sir, he does.
Graham: Do you agree with me that when it comes to international terrorism, we’re talking about a worldwide struggle?
Sheehan: Absolutely, sir.
Graham: Would you agree with me the battlefield is wherever the enemy chooses to make it?
Sheehan: Yes, sir, from Boston to the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan, along the Afghan border].
Graham: I couldn’t agree with you more. Do you agree with that, General?
Gross: yes, sir. I agree that the enemy decides where the battlefield is.
Graham: And it could be any place on the planet, and we have to be aware and able to act. And do you have the ability to act, and are you aware of the threats?
Sheehan: Yes, sir. We do have the ability to react, and we are tracking threats globally.
There are two things to note. When the Defense Department lawyer tried to raise the sovereignty of other nations, he was told to shut up. The other is the reference to Boston as a battlefield.
The Democrats on the panel rushed to agree with Graham after King raised his objections.
King correctly said the AUMF only referred to Al Qaeda as a target. But clearly the “war on terror” has gone way beyond that to include any other person or group the government declares is “terrorist”.
King said, “you are reading [the AUMF] to cover everything and anything”. The Pentagon officials and Democratic and Republican senators clearly endorse an expansive (indeed global) view of what the AUMF authorises.
King also said: “The Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, clearly states that Congress has the power to declare war.”
The last time Congress declared war was World War II. At the time, the Department of Defense was known as the Department of War. It was changed after the US and Britain launched the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Except for a brief period after World War II, when there was a huge revolt of US soldiers against plans to continue the war in Asia by invading China, the US has been engaging in acts of war ever since.
These include trade sanctions and blockades, as well as open military conflict. The Cold War featured permanent threats of atomic annihilation.
None of these wars were declared by Congress. Instead, Congress passed vague “enabling” resolutions, after the fact, to endorse wars launched by the executive branch.
The US invasion of Korea was not even called a war. It was labelled a United Nations “police action”.
The US was involved in France’s war against Vietnam in one form or another from 1945. Congress never declared war against Vietnam, but did pass an “enabling” resolution at President Lyndon Johnson’s demand.
Called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it referred to a supposed attack on US warships off Vietnam's shores ― later revealed to have never happened.
When the US under President John F Kennedy organised the invasion of Cuba by Cuban counterrevolutionaries living in Miami, there was no Congressional declaration of war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US came within a hair’s breadth of launching an atomic attack on the Soviet Union without a Congressional declaration of war.
The wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s used proxy troops trained, armed and organised by Washington. But this was not the result of a Congressional declaration of war.
In fact, Congress passed a resolution to stop the funding of these wars, but Reagan simply circumvented it.
The first Gulf war against Iraq was not declared either, but done under UN auspices. The attack on Somalia and Serbia by President Bill Clinton found other fig leaves.
The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the special forces attacks in Pakistan, the drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen these all come under the AUMF, broadly interpreted.
In any case, the US no longer officially wages “war”, it wages “defence”.
This usurpation of power by the executive branch at the expense of Congress and the constitution is part of a broader phenomenon since the rise of modern capitalist imperialism in the late 19th century.
The power of the executive in the imperialist countries has mushroomed along with the huge increase in the armed forces of the state. This was glaring in the fascist regimes, but was evident in the imperialist democracies, too.
This is crystal clear in the huge US military machine. This is shown by the nearly 1000 US bases spread around the world, its huge nuclear arsenal on a hair-trigger, and in the absolute military power concentrated in the executive branch. “Congressional oversight” is reduced to a joke.
[Barry Sheppard was a long-time leader of the US Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International. He recounts his experience in the SWP in a two-volume book, The Party — the Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988, available from Resistance Books. Read more of Sheppard's articles.]GOP Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, says he’s satisfied with how the US military – and ergo the Obama administration – responded to the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, including the US ambassador to Libya.
The news also exonerates expected Democratic presidential nominee, and then-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. More on that in a moment.
“I think I’ve pretty well been satisfied that given where the troops were, how quickly the thing all happened and how quickly it dissipated, we probably couldn’t have done more than we did,” McKeon said to reporters today, as quoted by AP.
McKeon then went on to plant a not-so-subtle dig at fellow Republicans who keep harping on “Benghazi” as if there were a real scandal there.
“We have been working on this for a long time. We issued a preliminary report,” McKeon said. “At some point, when we run out of people to talk to, or we run out of people to talk to two or three times, at some point, we think we’ll have as much of this story as we’re going to get and move on.”
Put a fork in that GOP talking point.
The Republicans have been trying to make political hay of Benghazi since the attack, which took place on September 11, 2012, only a few months before the presidential election.
But it’s been an uphill climb for the GOP as the American people apparently understood that while four people dying was a tragic thing, it was just as tragic when some 13 attacks on US diplomatic missions during the Bush years killed 17 Americans. That’s like four Benghazis.
Of course, the actual 9/11, which was also under George Bush’s watch, was like 744 Benghazis, but who’s counting.
The GOP – well, apparently only some in the GOP, now – claim that the Obama administration got their public statements wrong immediately after the attacks because they were trying to downplay the terror angle right before the election.
In fact, the Obama administration’s statement, that the attacks weren’t necessarily terrorism, but may have been simply an angry mob gone wrong, provoked in part by an anti-Muslim/anti-Mohammed video that was posted on YouTube, were backed up by a further investigation from the NYT.
From that earlier NYT story:
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam… Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda…. The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras…. There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.
Oops.
And now we have the lead House Republican on defense matters saying that not only did the administration not drop the ball in how it handled Benghazi, but that the Republicans seem to be the ones dropping the ball on the never-ending and unnecessary investigations of Benghazi.
And an even bigger problem for Republicans is that McKeon’s admission helps Hillary Clinton immensely.
Republicans were trying to allege that the Obama administration, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, dropped the ball in terms of responding militarily to the Benghazi attacks. Here’s GOP Senator, and possible presidential candidate, Rand Paul last September:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested Tuesday that Hillary Clinton’s response to the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, should disqualify her from serving as commander in chief. While Paul didn’t name the former secretary of state by name, he said he suspected the decision not to dispatch a rescue effort to the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi was made by “a politician,” because the military would never allow something like that to happen without sending troops.
Oops.
Apparently, Rand Paul’s understanding of military matters is somewhat lacking.
So kids, that “3AM call” did in fact come. And it seems it was the Republicans who had no idea how to answer the phone.
Follow @aravosis
(NOTE FROM JOHN: It’s hugely important to our continued success that you share our stories on social media by using the “Like” buttons at the top and bottom of this story to share it on Facebook, Tweeting it to your friends, and sharing it on other services. Without that additional traffic, our advertising dies, and so do we. We need your help – if you like one of our stories, please share it online.)CLOSE Rock 'n' roll legend Leon Russell has died at the age of 74 in Nashville. Wochit
Musician Leon Russell speaks at a 2014 Evening With Leon Russell at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. (Photo: Duffy-Marie Arnoult, WireImage)
Southern rock icon Leon Russell, famed for his flowing white hair, ever-present hats and unpolished voice, died Sunday morning in his sleep at his Nashville home. He was 74.
No cause of death was given on his official website and Facebook page, but the singer, songwriter and musician had suffered a heart attack in July and underwent bypass surgery, forcing him off the road to recuperate.
Russell, a member of the Rock and Roll and Songwriters Halls of Fame, performed, toured and recorded with a wide-ranging roster of performers over his nearly six-decade career, including Elton John, Willie Nelson, George Harrison and Joe Cocker.
Russell's A Song for You has been recorded by more than three dozen artists (Ray Charles won a Grammy Award for his version). His work spanned genres, and over the years several artists found chart success by recording his songs, including Cocker (Delta Lady), The Carpenters (Superstar), B.B. King (Hummingbird) and George Benson (This Masquerade).
"His style was accessible and he spoke to me in ways that other rock piano players of the day — Billy Joel and Elton John — didn’t," says Barry Walsh, a Nashville pianist who counts Russell among his most important musical influences. "He was rootsy and wrote incredible songs.... He had this persona that was mysterious and just so powerful."
Claude Russell Bridges was born in Lawton, Okla., on April 2, 1942. He began learning piano at the age of four; by his early teens, he was playing in Tulsa nightclubs. Following his high school graduation, Russell toured with Jerry Lee Lewis for a few months, then moved to Los Angeles and found work as a session musician. As part of the Wrecking Crew, a collective of elite studio musicians, Russell played piano on a number of hit songs.
As a solo artist, Russell's most successful years came in the 1970s, beginning with his eponymous solo debut in 1970 and subsequent releases Leon Russell and the Shelter People and Carney. He also made records with his then-wife Mary Russell and country star Willie Nelson and released the first of multiple country albums he made under the name Hank Wilson.
Russell was a captivating live performer. In 1971, he wowed crowds at the star-studded Concert for Bangladesh with a scorching medley of Jumpin' Jack Flash and Youngblood. Two years later, The Tennessean wrote of one of his live shows: “A Leon Russell show is inevitably more than an aural experience. The crowd provided strawberry incense, fluorescent Frisbees, and clouds of smoke, tobacco and otherwise. Excited fans standing in front of the stage bent double, (and) pounded their arms with the rhythm of the music.”
"He was the guy who was always second on the bill," said singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters, who saw Russell perform several times in the '70s, including the time he toured with the Rolling Stones. "He was really, really different than the (headlining) rock bands I was there to see.... He was outlandish and had this twangy kind of delivery. There was nothing else like it."
Though he continued to tour and record in the late 1980s, '90s and beyond, Russell's studio output didn't receive much attention outside of his dedicated fan base until he got a call from Elton John.
The pop legend, a longtime fan of Russell's music, asked him to collaborate on an album that would become The Union. "It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, not just musically, but emotionally," John told USA TODAY. "I fell in love with this guy all over again."
Released in 2010, the album produced by T Bone Burnett hit No. 3 on Billboard album chart and the Russell-penned opening track If It Wasn’t for Bad was nominated for a pop vocal collaboration Grammy.
"I don't know a thing about charts and that stuff, largely because I was never in it," Russell told USA TODAY upon the album's release, acknowledging that he was overwhelmed by the attention. "I'm in this huge place, a place I've never been, even at the top of my success.... They're interested in what I'm doing."
Russell released his last solo studio album, Life Journey, in 2014.
Contributing: Edna Gundersen
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fPjw0dApril 12, 2013
Shame on Congress for Repealing Major Provision of STOCK Act; Obama Should Veto
Statement of Craig Holman, Government Affairs Lobbyist, Public Citizen
In a knee-jerk reaction to concerns that too many people may be required to disclose personal financial data, Congress quickly and quietly approved legislation over the past 24 hours to repeal major portions of disclosure requirements designed to ensure enforcement of the nation’s new law against congressional insider trading. President Barack Obama should veto this bad bill, and lawmakers should go back to the drawing board.
Lawmakers should have taken a more reasoned approach and approved a temporary suspension of the disclosure requirement for certain executive branch personnel, rather than an outright repeal. That way Congress could take the time to scrutinize the issue carefully and decide on changes to the congressional insider trading law that would allow for both personal privacy and enough transparency to limit conflicts of interest.
After years of inaction, Congress was finally compelled by public pressure last year to apply laws to itself against insider trading in the stock markets. The “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge” STOCK Act made congressional insider trading illegal and imposed online disclosure of personal financial activity by Congress and the executive branch so that compliance to the law could be monitored. Without this disclosure, the law will be difficult to enforce.
The STOCK Act mandated disclosure by approximately 28,000 executive branch employees, many not even senior-level employees, and Public Citizen agrees that this level of coverage may have reached too far. In response, we have asked Congress to consider appropriate remedies to change the scope somewhat to apply to appropriate senior-level executive branch employees.
Instead of this more sensible action, lawmakers hastily repealed disclosure for all but presidential appointees and members of Congress. The repeal (S. 716) even covers congressional staff, in an action that is both extreme and crippling to the STOCK Act’s enforcement mechanism. Unlike most executive branch personnel, congressional staffers have no conflict-of-interest restrictions on stock market investments.
Gutting a popular and much-needed law is unconscionable. Obama should veto this measure, and lawmakers instead should temporarily delay implementation of the disclosure provision for executive branch personnel below presidential appointees. Such a delay would provide Congress with an opportunity to scrutinize the issue more closely and offer more appropriate remedies.
Learn more about Public Citizen's efforts to curb congressional insider trading.
###One man is dead and another is on the run after an attempted home invasion Sunday night on the city's east side. It happened in an apartment in the 3300 block of East 10th Street near Brookside Middle School.
Police say the two men tried to enter one of the units. That's when the boyfriend of the woman living in that apartment pulled out a gun and fired, killing one of the suspects.
The woman's friend says she's shocked over what happened.
"He said a guy just tried to rob me. I said,'someone down the street said someone just got shot and killed.' I said, 'you shot the guy?' He said, 'yeah.' I said, 'Is he dead?' He said, 'I believe so,'" said Christina Kasey.
Police say the female resident is eight and a half months pregnant and was taken to the hospital as a precaution.
No charges have been filed in this case.The staff are attractive, young Korean women in traditional Chosŏn-ot dress, who also perform karaoke as well as song and dance routines in the style of the North Korean Mass Games for the customers. [6] [13] Staff from North Korea typically work on three year contracts, and are often highly trained graduates of arts colleges. [3] Photography is generally not permitted inside. [3] [6]
According to Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner, the restaurants are one of several overseas business ventures of Room 39, a North Korean government organization dedicated to acquiring and laundering foreign currency for the North Korean leadership.[6]
North Korean defectors report that the restaurants are run by local middlemen who are required to pay between US$10,000 and US$30,000 each year to the North Korean government.[6][13] The North Korean staff, who live on the restaurant premises,[3] are said to be thoroughly screened for political loyalty and to be closely watched by on-site North Korean security agents.[6] In the 2000s, according to Daily NK, several attempted escapes by waitresses in China led to the closure of several restaurants and the repatriation of their staff.[14][15] In 2016, South Korea announced that 13 restaurant workers had defected from a Pyongyang restaurant chain abroad.[16][17]After all the hype and hoopla over the Modi-Netanyahu bromance, it's time to ponder what it means for New Delhi's relations with other countries and to wonder whether Indians should lose sleep over it.
For starters, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Israel visit has already raised hackles in Pakistan, Iran and Palestine. But does it really matter? And what did Modi really do in Israel?
To begin with, Israel had for long complained that India was treating it like a mistress. Like a man visiting his concubine in the cover of darkness, India had indeed taken covert advantage of Israel's defence prowess but was too apologetic about admitting to the relationship. But Modi has dramatically altered that situation now.
After signing seven agreements and exchanging innumerable hugs, Modi and Netanyahu frolicked on Olga Beach like long-lost school chums who just found each other on Facebook.
For Pakistan, and for Israel's sworn enemy Iran, all this is raising an imaginary spectre of India and Israel ganging up against the world's Muslims, notably those in Palestine and Kashmir. Reports from the two countries make that clear. And Modi's embrace of Netanyahu wouldn't amuse leaders even in Saudi Arabia, which too has visceral hatred for Israel. And it certainly has led to disappointed frowns in Palestine territories, where India was thought to be a friend for long.
But even before Modi left Israel's magnificent Mediterranean shores, there was plenty of harrumphing in Islamabad about this visit. Pakistan's leading daily Dawn, normally sober and not known for hawkish hot air, said in an editorial, "While the comparison would be anathema to New Delhi, there is a clear parallel between Israel's atrocious behaviour towards the Palestinians, and the brute force India has unleashed upon Kashmiris."
"Perhaps the Indo-Israeli embrace has provided an opportunity for Pakistan to highlight the Kashmir issue with Iran and others, in order to build world opinion against the atrocities unleashed upon both the Kashmiris and Palestinians," the paper added.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had already begun this job of opinion-shaping. On 3 July, a day before Modi set foot on Israeli soil, Khamenei exhorted his country's judiciary to support "Muslims of Myanmar and Kashmir".
Only a week earlier, on 26 June, he mentioned Kashmir during his Eid sermon. He called on the Muslim world to support people of Bahrain, Yemen and Kashmir.
Muslim world should openly support people of #Bahrain, #Kashmir, #Yemen, etc and repudiate oppressors& tyrants who attacked ppl in #Ramadan. — Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) June 26, 2017
The immediate provocation for Khamenei's 26 June outburst was believed to be the decision taken by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and the Maldives to sever diplomatic relations with Qatar.
In Bahrain, and more seriously in Yemen, Shia-Muslim rebels fight their respective governments. It's no secret that Shia-majority Iran backs them to the hilt.
Khamenei's sermon was targeted not only against arch rival and Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia but also all its supporters. US president Donald Trump, whose 20-21 May visit to Riyadh led to the Saudi camp punishing Qatar, was also a target.
And by mentioning Kashmir in the same breath as he did Yemen and Bahrain, Khameini was also directing his Islamic indignation at India, which is perceived to be increasingly cosying up to both the US and Saudi Arabia. So Khamenei was trying to kill many birds with one stone. The same day on 26 June, he tweeted three times in support of Palestine.
Muslim countries are harmed by discord and benefit from #unity. #Palestine is the number one issue of the Islamic world. — Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) June 26, 2017
According to Islamic jurisprudence, when an enemy takes over Muslim lands, Jihad-in any form possible-becomes everyone's duty. — Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) June 26, 2017
Today the fight against the Zionist regime is wajib (obligatory) and necessary for Muslims. Why do some evade this duty? — Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) June 26, 2017
If Khamenei's 26 June sermon took in its sweep a whole bunch of countries, his latest fulmination on 3 July was essentially aimed at India alone. Myanmar was thrown in by the Shia leader to give it a touch of intra-Islam secularism: In both Myanmar and Kashmir, it's Sunni Muslims who fight the establishments.
This is the first time after 2010 that the Iranian leader is raking up the Kashmir issue. In 2010, he referred to Kashmir as a "nation".
Khamenei had never made a secret of what he thought of Jews. In 2012, he said "all Jews must be annihilated and Israel destroyed".
Khamenei can be expected to pour out his anger for some more time to come, but his threats may come to mean nothing in the end, as it has happened so often in the past. Besides, Iran needs India, and not just because of Chabahar port.
And how will Saudi Arabia react to the new India-Israel solidarity? Though Iran and Saudi Arabia detest each other, they share a pathological hatred for Israel. Riyadh is India's largest oil supplier, and during Modi's visit last year, it promised to invest generous amounts in India's infrastructure. So in the long run, the Saudis are unlikely to be greatly perturbed by Modi giving Netanyahu a hug or two.
And yet, you can trust Pakistan to use public and backdoor channels to turn not only Iran and Saudi Arabia but also the whole Muslim world against India. And Modi will need the best of his diplomatic and persuasive skills — of which he has proved he has plenty — to counter Pakistan's propaganda.
For one thing, Modi was careful not to cross the red line in Israel. In fact, the end-of-the-visit joint statement spoke little of the Palestine problem except to say that it needed a "negotiated settlement". It didn't make even an oblique reference to the two-State theory that India backs.
Modi can rightly argue, if he has to, that his visit to Israel had more to do with economics than politics. Besides, Modi made friends during his visits to UAE (August 2015), Saudi Arabia (April 2016), Iran (May 2016) and Qatar (June 2016). Important Arab nations are too busy with a host of other troubles to bother too much about Pakistan's campaigns and Khamenei's tweets on Palestine and Kashmir.
It takes a lot more than a visit by Narendra Modi to Israel for the Muslim nations to gang up against India. Pakistan must know that.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.POLICE HAVE ARRESTED 166 radical left-wingers at a protest in the Dutch capital The Hague over police violence.
About 200 protesters had gathered for Saturday’s demonstration, organised under the slogan “Stop oppression against anti-facists and anarchists”.
The city had approved the rally as long as people left their faces uncovered.
“At the start of the demonstration, a number of protesters covered their faces with scarves, hoods and sunglasses,” the police said in a statement.
After they refused to unmask, the mayor ordered the event to end. The police added:
A group of 166 protesters resisted… and were arrested for breaking the law on public demonstrations.
Illegal fireworks, paint bombs, sticks and a hammer were found on the ground when police moved in to make the arrests.
Far-right trial
Late last week, Dutch prosecutors demanded a €5,000 fine for controversial anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders in his hate-speech trial, saying he “insulted Moroccans” and sowed discord among citizens.
“We ask the bench to convict Mr Wilders for insulting a group and incitement to hate and discrimination, and therefore demand a fine of €5,000,” public prosecutor Wouter Bos told judges.
But he did not ask for the maximum penalty of €22,250, as Bos said “there are worst statements imaginable” than those made by the far-right leader, known for his fiery rhetoric.
The peroxide-haired politician’s comments “were insulting towards Moroccans as an ethnic group” and bore testimony of “strong negative feelings” towards them, Bos said.
Neither Wilders – who has snubbed the sittings at a high security courthouse near Schiphol airport – nor his lawyer were present as prosecutors wrapped up their case.
Wilders, 53, is facing charges of insulting a racial group and inciting racial hatred after statements he made about Moroccans living in the Netherlands.
Geert Wilders of the anti-Islam Freedom Party holds a sign reading No Hate Imams in the Netherlands in Utrecht, central Netherlands in 2015. Source: Peter Dejong/PA
Moroccans
Due to run until 25 November, the trial focuses on a March 2014 election rally when Wilders asked supporters whether they wanted “fewer or more Moroccans” in the country.
When the crowd shouted back “Fewer! Fewer!” a smiling Wilders answered: “We’re going to organise that.”
With this speech, Wilders “made a clear distinction between Moroccans and other Dutch citizens,” another prosecutor, Sabina van der Kallen told a three-judge bench.
The verdict and sentence are expected on 9 December.
Wilders has so far snubbed the trial which he has denounced as a “political process” and a “travesty” accusing government of trying to silence him.
- © AFP, 2016Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Now that Herman Cain is officially a front-runner for the Republican nomination, the vetting process has picked up in a hurry. The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf stumbled upon a treasure trove of syndicated columns the Atlanta businessman wrote between 2006 and 2009, which doesn’t do much to shatter the perception of Cain as a loose cannon (he refers to Iraq war opponents as “Hezbocrats” and calls them “the enemy”).
But I was drawn to a different piece: A 2006 column from Cain on Islam that copiously cites the work of Ohio televangelist Rod Parsley—the same pastor whose Islamophobic writings and sermons would later force Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to reject his endorsement. Parsley, as MoJo‘s David Corn first reported in 2008, argued that American Christians have an obligation to destroy Islam. Cain, though, saw Parsley not as a polarizing religious figure, but rather as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs:
The roots of Islam began in modern day Saudi Arabia in the year 610 A.D. The Arabian city of Mecca was, and still is, the Arabs’ center of worship. According to Pastor Rod Parsley, author of Silent No More, Arabs from over 270 tribes regularly gathered around a building called the Ka’aba to worship their individual tribal gods. The Quraysh tribe, of which Muhammad was a member, worshipped the god Allah.
Muhammad was an illiterate desert nomad who one day began hearing voices and loud bells in his head. The voices told him he was Allah’s prophet. Muhammad thought he was losing his sanity, but with the encouragement of his wife he began to believe the voices. Muhammad eventually saw it as his mission to unify the Arabian tribes under the teachings given to him by his one true god—Allah. Muhammad died in 632 A.D. Since Muhammad was illiterate and never wrote anything down, his followers spent the next 60 years compiling his teachings and revelations, based on their memories and notes. The resulting document is the holy book of Islam, called the Quran. But, as Pastor Parsley notes, the Quran is only authoritative in Arabic: “In any other language, the Quran is unofficial and unsuitable for doctrine.” When we consider the fact that approximately two-thirds of the world’s Muslim population today is illiterate, this means the majority of Muslims cannot read their religion’s most important book. Further, it means that Islam can be interpreted and taught any way its leaders desire.
Cain’s citation of Silent No More—which serves as the basis for the entire column—is pretty clearly an endorsement of the pastor’s work.
Parsley refers to the early Islamic empire as “Satan’s Mohammedan kingdom.”
And that actually explains a lot. There’s a lot more to Silent No More than just early Arabian history: The central thesis of his book is that “America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed.” Borrowing a line from early New England preacher Jonathan Edwards, Parsley refers to the early Islamic empire as “Satan’s Mohammedan kingdom.” He goes back even further than that, though: Parsley argues that Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas for Spain was part of an elaborate scheme to defeat Islam by forging new trade routes that didn’t rely on Muslim empires.
But perhaps the most telling passage in Parsley’s book comes when he addresses the role of Islam in the United States. Insisting that the nation is at its core Christian, he expresses alarm at the growing number of mosques in the country and fears that “history is crashing in upon us.” The implication is clear: If we don’t act now, Islam, the religion of “demon spirits,” will be upon us. He hits on most of those points in this clip, from a sermon that was sold on his church’s website:
Parsley’s warnings appear to have rubbed off on Cain’s political thinking. Earlier this year, for instance, Cain stated that a planned expansion of an Islamic community center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, should be blocked because it threatened the First Amendment rights of area Christians. “I don’t agree with what’s happening, because this isn’t an innocent mosque,” he said at the time.
On the same grounds, he said in March that he would not appoint any Muslims to prominent positions in his administration because he was concerned their loyalty would be to Islamic Shariah law rather than the Constitution. (He has since issued backpedaled on that statement). Not that Parsley deserves full credit—peddling anti-jihad literature is a pretty lucrative business these days. But the fact that Cain turned to him for his information on Islam means that he’s building on a structurally flawed foundation.
Cain, for his part, has professed a general ignorance on international affairs, and he refused to disclose the names of his foreign policy advisers. But at least with Parsley, he’s in good company. Texas Gov. Rick Perry courted Parsley’s support with a series of events in 2005, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum wrote a blurb for the cover of Parsley’s newest book, Living on Our Heads. It’s not John McCain’s Republican party anymore.0 of 10
Mike Carlson/Getty Images
In recent years, Borussia Dortmund have invested a lot of money in their youth academy. The club was famous for integrating a lot of young players into their squad in the successful years under Jurgen Klopp, but not many of those came from their own academy.
One player who did make it through the Black and Yellows' youth ranks to star for the first team still serves as the poster child for Dortmund's ability to develop young prospects: Mario Gotze.
The World Cup winner came to the club at the tender age of eight in 2001, performed well for all their youth teams and debuted for Klopp's outfit in November 2009.
It's certainly unfair to hold Dortmund's current prospects to the standards set by a once-in-a-generation talent, but some of them have shown the potential to follow in the now-23-year-old's footsteps nonetheless.
BVB are set to reap the rewards of their investment in the academy in the coming years, which was "awarded the highest-possible rating of three stars" in Germany's rating system in December, as the club proudly announced on its website.
Here B/R ranks the top 10 talents the Black and Yellows have to offer. We'll include a number of players from Dortmund's second team, which plays in Germany's fourth division, the Regionalliga.Equatorial Guinea is a small country on the west coast of Africa which struck oil in 1995 and |
yards per carry so Riverboat Kirk Ferentz gambled and went for it on fourth and short. If I remember correctly, it was an off tackle to the left side of the line. The problem was that the fullback, Wade Leppert, went to the right side of the line and linebacker Adam Decker met Greene in the backfield untouched. Iowa turned the ball over, Michigan State got a first down (barely) and ran out the remainder of the clock.
2009 - Iowa 15, MSU 13: Seven Gets Six
If there's any animosity between Michigan State and Iowa fans you can probably point to this as the seminal moment:
At the time, I was irate for a few reasons. First off, that was a helmet to helmet hit on Sandeman and seeing his fencing response as he hit the ground horrified me. Second off, I was pretty sure that the Michigan State fans were booing Sandeman's lengthy time down on the field (not shown on the video) and I thought that was classless. In retrospect, I think it had more to do with the late flag for helmet to helmet. I think. These days I'm a little more calm about the whole thing, but I still think it was a chickenshit hit and a flag was appropriate. That's all I got to say about that.
As crazy as the game ended, it's easy to forget that it was an absolute snoozefest until the Sandeman hit. With only a couple minutes left on the clock, Michigan State was facing a 3rd and 18, down 6-9, when Mark Dantonio calls a freaking hook and ladder. Kirk Cousins then hit Blair White with an absolute dart for a touchdown and Sparty took a 13-9 lead. Iowa only had 1:26 to move the ball 70 yards to score a touchdown. It was more than enough time.
Stanzi hit McNutt, Stross and DJK to get the ball to the MSU 15 yard line before Chris L. Rucker (remember this guy's name) intercepted Rick to seal the game for Michigan State. Or not. Because he held DJK...actually...he threw him out of bounds and was called for holding. Iowa was then set up on Michigan State's seven-yard line with four downs. First down: incomplete pass. Second down: incomplete pass. Third down: incomplete pass: Fourth down:
If I recall, Dace Richardson broke his ankle, Greenwood got hurt (?), Sandeman was obviously concussed and it was one of the most physical games I'd ever seen Iowa play. We're actually fortunate someone didn't stabbed.
2010 - Iowa 37, MSU 6: The Chris L. Rucker Game
A bit of background is needed for this one. At the time, Chris L. Rucker was a pretty darn good senior cornerback for Michigan State. He'd had a few run ins with the law throughout the course of his career, including a fight at the academic fraternity that included some other Spartan football players (Including, I believe, Jeremy Ware, who knocked out Sandeman). In early October he was arrested for OWI/DUI and also hit with a probation violation because...y'know...he's on probation for that fight. He ultimately pleads guilty to reckless driving, which is a gift under normal circumstances and serves eight days in jail. He's released a couple days before the No. 5 Spartans take on the No. 18 Hawkeyes and everyone assumed that Rucker would probably continue to be suspended. Wrong.
Despite Mark Dantonio instituting a "zero tolerance policy" a while back, Rucker literally walked out of jail and right back into Dantonio's good graces, as he was reinstated to the team. I don't believe he ever confirmed that Rucker was going to play and was rather elusive about whether or not he'd see any time on Saturday.
Fast forward to the absolute pantsing at the hands of Iowa. I mean, there was the Sash to Hyde interception return for a touchdown. Stanzi couldn't miss. Robinson was running well. So who do you think, as the game is getting out of hand, puts their helmet on trots out onto the field? Chris. L. Fucking. Rucker. I remember bringing this up somewhere, I assume on The Rivalry Esq. and having a Michigan State fan say to me "He served his time." No, literally. He did. He did serve his time. He wasn't suspended for the Northwestern game. He was in fucking jail. There's a difference.
2011 - Iowa 21, MSU 37: Jerel Fall Down Go Boom
Why would I write a recap on the Fainting Sparties when Ross wrote such a good one back in 2011? Basically, Iowa was down 34-14 and driving the ball late in the third quarter when...injuries started mounting up for Michigan. "Injuries." Also known as Jerel Worthy falling down a bunch of times and getting back up and then saying some dumb shit after the game that was basically like "yeah I wanted to slow down their offense so I went down."
And yeah, it was a big hole for Iowa and yeah they would've lost anyway but as Ross said:
They didn't win because they (allegedly) faked injuries. And I'm no doctor: I don't know if they truly were injured or not. But if they weren't and they were faking those injuries (or if not faking them, then milking them excessively)... fuck them and fuck Mark Dantonio. He was already a duplicitous, hypocritical shitbird of a coach; this would just be more fuel for that opinion.
Preach.
2012 - Iowa 19, MSU 16: Low Stakes
Also known as "the last game that Iowa actually won in 2012", the 2012 matchup was soggy, sloppy and generally awful. The teams tied 13-13 to end regulation and it went to double overtime. Up 19-16, Michigan State needed a field goal to tie or a touchdown to win and Andrew Maxwell's pass was tipped and ultimately intercepted by Greg Castillo. Let us speak no more of 2012.
2013 - Nothing Happened
...no really nothing happened.
What's so interesting about the upcoming Big Ten Championship is that it's one of the few seasons that both teams are actually exceptional. Both were below average in 2007 and above average in 2008. Michigan State wasn't very good in 2009 but was exceptional in 2011 and 2013. Iowa was not. 2012 was just a gross game. The abnormality seems to be 2010. Arguably, that is the only time those teams were actually good. Yes, Iowa finished 7-5. No, Iowa was not a 7-5 football team and painfully underachieved. The Insight Bowl was demonstrative of that.
The short history of Iowa v. Michigan State in the Dantonio v. Ferentz era has been controversial, violent and fun as hell. There's been illegal hits, feigned injuries and guys on ankle monitors playing cornerback. Here's to the Big Ten Championship Game being another excellent entry in the series. Stay safe, everyone.Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art film review 3 Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art film review James Stanfield
Troublemakers, a documentary about land art, describes its subject as ‘a tradition older than oil painting by 3000 years’.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of New York artists brought this tradition into the 20th Century, incorporating sculptures into the very terrain of the American Southwest’s deserts.
These ‘earthworks’ ranged from mirrors balanced on piles of rubble to arrangements of huge concrete pipes, and Troublemakers gives a convincing account of why these outdoor monuments started to proliferate. Artists were reacting to the very first photos of the entire Earth, as taken from space, as well as to the dramatic scarring of its surface by the Vietnam War.
When leather-clad artists tore up the ground with motorbikes, leaving swooping marks on the desert floor, their enormous al fresco doodles were a response to a new conception of how the world could be seen and altered.
They also looked very cool doing it, and director James Crump deliberately evokes this sense of ‘Easy Rider’ rebellion so often associated with the era. The artists were ‘troublemakers’, Crump argues, because of their disruptive attempt to transcend gallery spaces and the traditional commercial art market. The film does what it can to glamorize this. It’s helped by the fact that the artists were themselves self-glamourizing.
The most blatant culprits were Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson. The former was a Hunter S. Thompson-type figure, complete with revolver, aviator shades, and dangling cigarette. The latter resembled a black-clad rockstar, described by those who knew him as ‘satanic’, ‘insane’, and connected to the ‘dark forces’.
Heizer and Smithson, among others, were important figures from a fascinating time in art history. But Troublemakers risks slightly belittling them, focusing on the pettier aspects of the business of making art. Crump’s film depicts many of them as insecure men who feared obscurity, who were in competition for the patronage of rich heiresses, and whose work was partly motivated by a need to do it before someone else did.
It’s always a pleasure, then, when Troublemakers leaves the gossipy NY bars for the uninhabited desert and the works that came to be part of that environment.
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, where bacteria turns the water blood red, gets some wonderful aerial shots, and when the camera dips right into Heizer’s Double Negative (an immense trench cut into the precipitous edge of a desert mesa) the experience is suitably immersive and awe-inspiring.
If Troublemakers had included more footage like this, it might have made it clearer what was so significant about land art.Ashden Fein delivered the closing argument for the government and began by stating Pfc. Bradley Manning was a US Army intelligence analyst the Army trained and trusted to use intelligence systems. He “used that training to defy our trust to indiscriminately and systematically harm us.” He “abused our trust” and mined as much as information from SIPRnet while using the WikiLeaks “most wanted list” as a “guiding light.” And, he added, Manning “continued to harvest the information knowing it would be released and accessible to enemies.”
He proceeded to remind Investigative Officer Paul Almanza of his job, that he is to inquire into the truth of the charges, the disposition of the charges and must do so fairly and impartially. (Of course, he need not remind Almanza of this fact because the government need not worry about a reservist with a military justice background going up against them too much.)
Fein proceeded to mention the “evidence is overwhelming.” Three hundred thousand pages of evidence have been submitted, including a minute-by-minute record of Manning’s searches, dates and times of burned CDs, when the information on those CDs were transferred to Manning’s personal MacBook, and chat logs between Manning and an account associated with Julian Assange that include discussion of classified material and uploads to WikiLeaks.
The charges against Manning were summarized: introducing unauthorized software on his computer, illegally harvesting classified information and unlawfully transferring classified information. According to Fein, Manning “wantonly caused the information to be leaked on the Internet.” And ultimately this is how he “aided the enemy.” [This “enemy” was not further defined until the end of the closing argument.]
Background on Manning, forensic evidence and how the evidence provided justification for each of the charges was how Fein organized the rest of the argument. He said Manning was a “trained all-source analyst,” trained to process “multiple sources of intelligence from all disciplines.” He was trained to predict what would be useful in making decisions at tactical levels. And he was trained to practice and evaluate threats against the United States.
Manning had to have a top security clearance and a “high GT” to access the information he is accused of releasing. He signed seven NDAs or associated related documents. Violating these agreements, Fein said, carried a penalty of criminal punishment. And, he took multiple classes on operation security, information security and knew full well “unauthorized disclosure” could be “expected to cause damage to national security.”
Fein cited a PowerPoint presentation Manning had to give under corrective training at one point in his military career. On June 13, 2008, he presented this PowerPoint, which talked about the importance of protecting public and military assets, along with location information, individual information, official information, methods, equipment, capabilities and vulnerabilities of the military. He knew intelligence analysts are to protect the information from rivals, enemies, NGOs or “anyone else” and to avoid public conversations, posting information or talking to journalists, which could risk releasing classified information.
Manning deployed in Iraq in October 2009 to FOB Hammer. He was on the Shia team and worked during the night shift. His job was to focus on the Iraqi elections and daily IED counter measures.
It was at this point that Fein began to present the key pieces of forensic evidence the government has to prosecute Manning. On November 28, 2009, according to Intel Link (a kind of Google-like search engine for analysts), Manning looked for “retention of interrogation videos.” Fein stated, there is “no legitimate purpose for searching through the CIA retention of interrogation videos.” And WikiLeaks “most wanted” list had “called for information” on CIA interrogations.
On December 2009, he began to search for WikiLeaks. The chat logs released to Wired, Fein claimed, contain “multiple admissions to charged misconduct.” He began to burn the information on to CDs as early as February 15, 2010.
Fein characterized the Apache helicopter video and described it as depicting “an air weapons team providing” aerial support and the way such a team engages “suspected actors.”
On March 22, 2010, he looked at Iraq “rules of engagement” documents, and on April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released the video. On May 22, 2010, he admitted in an email to Eric Schmiedl that he leaked the video. He also admitted later in chats with Lamo. He “compromised Apache video” and “provided editorial comment.”
Additionally, the video was closely held on SIPRnet and Manning believed it to be secret by placing a “secret” sticker on a CD containing the video. So, even though it was technically unclassified, Manning knew what he was doing was wrong.
In terms of the CDNE Iraq and Afghanistan databases (what the world now refers to as the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs), Fein explained these are operation reports on the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war. They were used for intelligence preparation of the battlefield and for us to do “predictive analysis.” Manning knew the reports contained unit names, call names, coalition tactics and reactions to IEDs, techniques for reacting to indirect fire and Medevac procedures.
These logs were found on an SD card. He even provided instructions to WikiLeaks that they “might need to sit on the information and protect the source.” The documents were “properly classified.”
Both databases – nearly 500,000 reports – were later released by WikiLeaks. They were “properly classified.”
Fein said Manning accessed Intellipedia and began to “steal and convert” the JTF GTMO detainee assessment reports for personal use on December 8, 2009. He said Manning attempted to download the entire website on March 5, 2010, but could not complete that operation. He began transferring files to a CD on March 8 and returned to his bedroom to transfer the documents to Assange and WikiLeaks, according to the government. He used WGET, a command line utility that can be used to download many files from a web server at once. This is why he is charged with “adding unauthorized software to an information system.”
Manning is also charged with transferring a Granai air strike video showing what is known as the Farah incident to WikiLeaks. He apparently accessed hundreds of documents and a video. That video, based on forensic evidence presented by a CCIU agent, was uploaded to WikiLeaks.org in four parts; however, it is unclear if Manning sent a video of the air strike or a video of a flyover of the area where the strike happened. Jason Katz received a “copy” of the video and tried to crack the password. It required a CENTCOM password. WikiLeaks tweeted it had possession in late November.
On the State Department cables, the Netcentric Diplomacy database, Fein said Manning used “working hours” over a period of ten days to “harvest” this information to WikiLeaks. The “cost” to maintain this information is “2 million dollars.” He put sources and human activists at risk of incarceration and death and revealed diplomacy methods. And he introduced WGET to his computer again.
Manning began downloading on May 3 and was prepared to send over cables from March, April and May but a file he put them in was corrupted.
Reykjavik 13 was a single cable that Manning transferred when he returned from “R&R” on Feb 14, 2010. He started searching Intel Link for Iceland, because, “Julian Assange was using that as a base of operations.”
Finally, on December 1, 2009, he searched Intel Link for the first time for WikiLeaks and found an Army Intelligence report on WikiLeaks. He handed it over to WikiLeaks and the document was published by WikiLeaks on March 15, 2010.
And, Manning also is alleged to have used an information system in an authorized manner to download and transfer a global list of email addresses of individuals in the military. On May 7, 2010, after he “assaulted” Jihrleah Showman, a fellow soldier he was serving with in the Brigade S2, he was transferred to the supply room. He lost his access to SIPRnet. He tried to use a computer in the supply room to send a global address list to WikiLeaks.
Manning did a “six month-long enterprise of indiscriminately harvesting information,” Capt. Ashden Fein stated in the prosecution’s closing argument that Manning had actual knowledge that what he gave to WikiLeaks would end up in the hands of the enemy and that enemy was Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and similar enemies.
An Al Qaeda propaganda video was shown. The video, with subtitles, featured a figurehead of the organization discussing the released information, like the State Department cables. The figurehead said the cables revealed “foreign dependencies.” He said something about relying on Allah for actions against the United States and then said before taking actions jihadists should rely on the “wide range of resources on the Internet” now.
Fein asserted that AQAP is “urging followers to collect and archive WikiLeaks information.” Manning “knowingly gave intelligence through WikiLeaks to the enemy.” He “wantonly caused the release of this information.” It was “not just good for declared enemies” but also accessible to “all other enemies with Internet access.”
He concluded Manning released over 700,000 documents that were on SIPRnet “during a time of war and while deployed.” He was “never authorized to make classification decisions to affect the national security of the United States.” He was given “unfettered access” to the information and “multiple enemies received” this information.The best thing about footy in Melbourne is that there is genuine competition between fans in the outer – any such jeering is contested by cheers from the fans of the attacked player. You don't get away with attacking an individual without a vociferous response. Yes, people get carried away, but it is ritualistic and fans move on quickly. The action is consistently distracting, and the game is played by teams, not individuals, so there is a bigger story beyond the booing of the anointed villains. Rafael Nadal gets treated during the men's final against Stanislas Wawrinka. Credit:Wayne Taylor Tennis is different. Sure, fans choose a player to follow. But the allegiance is, on the whole, temporary, nothing like the life-long connection of a footy fan to a club. Tennis fans don't know who will be playing when they buy tickets to the final. They are there for the event – they know no Aussie is likely to be playing, so their passionate embrace of the occasion depends on the game provided on the night. They want their money's worth, and they have shelled out plenty of it in the hope of a memorable entertainment product. They feel entitled to an epic that sport's fates cannot guarantee. At a tennis tournament, the demand for silence creates a theatrical atmosphere that exposes the immature, annoying and opportunistic voices often drowned out at continuously loud events like AFL games. There are long gaps between bursts of action. The focus, on just two figures, is fiercer. A tennis match lurches from quiet to loud like a Pixies song, the atmosphere enhanced by the shock of a crowd going from 0 to 100 decibels. There is a tension, a volatility, to this dynamic – some people cannot sit quietly for long. Some are fearful that a banal or embarrassing interjection will ruin the ambience. Many follow the mood of the room, dominated by the loudest voices, in the moment. It is dramatic theatre. The opportunities for idiots to be heard are greater.
And the unique intimacy of tennis highlights the hysterical edge of the crowd groupmind. A large number of Rod Laver Arena patrons turned on Rafael Nadal after he took an injury timeout during the men's final. Credit:Graham Denholm In the tournament's first week, Australian prospect Bernard Tomic was booed for pulling out of a match. He was injured so badly that he will not play for weeks. At least there was a pre-existing prejudice - well-founded or not - against poor Bernie. But during Sunday night's men's final, why did such a large part of the crowd boo world number one Rafael Nadal after he took an injury timeout? This group decided, without evidence, that one of the most competitive sportspeople ever to bounce a ball, was resorting to blatant gamesmanship when a set down in a major championship watched by millions. Yes, Nadal pushes the rules to the brink in terms of time-wasting, but he is a fighter, an admirable role model, renowned for his tenacity.
The Age's Greg Baum wrote that Nadal's injury time-out threw the final "out of kilter" and it became an "oddball, even macabre spectacle". He wrote that the crowd "suspected gamesmanship, if not malingering, the least probable accusation against him". Jake Niall reported that Nadal refused to blame his injury for his loss, and "understood the visceral reaction" of the crowd.
"I tried to finish the match as good as I can, for the crowd, for the opponent, for me," Nadal said at game's end. On Monday morning, SEN's Patrick Smith said a large portion of the crowd were "morons" for booing Nadal, and they had "made fools of themselves" by their actions. Station-mate Kevin Bartlett defended the crowd's right to express themselves as they saw fit, saying "You can understand why people get irritated" when players use injury timeouts. Many talkback callers were unrepentant, claiming Nadal uses whatever tactics he can in big games when he falls behind. Earlier on the same station, Australian sporting legend Andrew Gaze said that it was "gut-wrenching" to listen to the jeering of Nadal. He said it was "burning in his belly" that we were booing a champion, and that he had wanted to go on court and announce that "This is not what we are about as a country". The booing reveals that there is a significant portion of fans who are about thinking the worst of the best. They are about being judgmental. They are about being unfair, presumptive, contemptuous. They are about being small-minded.
Such an element is in the midst of every gathering of barrackers, but exposed by the particulars of tennis. Gaze suggested that tennis players be granted a couple of timeouts per match, so there would be no need for "injury" timeouts to be faked, as they undoubtedly are on occasion. Such a sensible suggestion might prevent a repeat of the Nadal jeers. Loading Perhaps better communication of what was happening to Nadal might have tempered some of the booing.
But maybe not. The loudmouths, the abusers, are in every large gathering. It's just that at the tennis, everyone can hear them.Moto2 graduate Lowes has come under increasing pressure to demonstrate he deserves his seat in recent weeks, despite having originally signed a two-year deal with Aprilia.
He recorded a best qualifying finish of the season last weekend in Assen, making it out of a wet Q1 session and qualifying 10th – 10 places better than his previous best grid position – but crashed out of the race while running 15th.
Aprilia racing manager Romano Albesiano has admitted that the team was in talks with possible replacements for Lowes, with Alvaro Bautista and Danilo Petrucci both admitting discussions had taken place.
But, when asked about Lowes’ situation by Motorsport.com, Crutchlow said he felt his compatriot hadn’t been given enough to chance to show his potential – and that comparing his situation to his fellow rookies would be wrong.
“[Lowes] hasn’t had a fair crack of the whip,” said Crutchlow. “He’s sat in the garage more times than he’s been out on the track most of this year, not through his fault.
“He’s had mechanical issues, and he’s not been able to prove himself.
“I understand where Aprilia are coming from as well, but if they’re looking at [Johann] Zarco or [Alex] Rins, they’re looking at the wrong situation.
“The [Yamaha] that Zarco’s on, you have no idea how easy that thing is to ride. If you put him on the Aprilia or the Honda, he would not be anywhere near where he is right now.
“He’s a good rider, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t look at that and compare.”
Crutchlow likened Lowes’ situation to his own as a MotoGP rookie in 2011, when he made the switch from World Superbikes to join the Tech 3 Yamaha team, and believes the Aprilia rider is making the same errors as he did then.
“I think Sam will get a lot better, he just needs time,” added Crutchlow. “What he’s doing with the bike is not completely wrong, but it’s wrong.
“It’s exactly how I rode when I came here, and look where I finished, I was s**t as well. I had arguments with Herve [Poncharal, Tech 3 boss] the first year that I came.
“I was the one who wanted to leave and go back to World Superbikes, Herve was the one who told me I just need time, to stay, and try and calm me down.
“The next year, I went straight and got two podiums and was fourth at the first race. It’s just the way it is. You need to take the experience and take the time and improve, but they need to give him the time.”
"Why don't they put pressure on Aleix?"
Crutchlow also believes that Aprilia should be pressuring Espargaro to get better results, as he feels that the RS-GP would be a podium contender in the hands of a top rider like Marc Marquez.
“If you put Marc on that bike, he would put it on the podium,” said Crutchlow. “Why don’t they put the pressure on Aleix?
“I know Aleix has been the first guy to back Sam up, and I’m not criticising him, I’m criticising them. They’re both good riders and I think they both deserve to be at the team.”Senior quarterback Jeremiah Briscoe threw for four touchdowns as the Sam Houston State Bearkats jumped out to an early lead and held on for a 63-27 victory over the Lamar Cardinals Saturday night.
“I thought we played like we were hoping to play,” head coach K.C. Keeler said. “I thought we did a great job at halftime, making some adjustments. I thought offensively we played pretty well from early on. All in all, I’m really happy with the performance in all three phases of the game.”
The Bearkats got on the board when Briscoe connected with sophomore wide receiver Coree Compton on the first play of the game for a 57-yard touchdown. Entering the game, Briscoe needed just 26 yards to become the all-time leading passer in SHSU history.
“It’s a great feeling,” Briscoe said. “But I wouldn’t be where I am at all without these receivers and our offensive line. I mean these receivers make me look so good, catching balls of four yards and turning them into 80-yard touchdowns. They’re unbelievable and I’m truly blessed and honored.”
SHSU increased its first quarter lead to 16-3 after Briscoe found sophomore wide receiver Nathan Stewart for a 52-yard touchdown, capping a five play, 89-yard drive. LU finally answered back at the end of the first quarter after senior quarterback Andrew Allen pounded a quarterback keeper up the middle for a two-yard score.
“We feel we haven’t played up to our ability and we haven’t been happy about that,” Keeler said. “It was really good to see us get out there and get on them early.”
Briscoe and the Kats (6-1, 4-1 Southland Conference) took control in the second quarter. Highlighted by junior wide receiver Davion Davis’ 46-yard punt return touchdown, SHSU piled on 31 points for a 47-20 lead at the break.
“Everybody was more focused in practice this week,” Davis said. “There wasn’t a lot of playing around. Everybody was just focused and that’s something that we emphasized on this week. Our running game did really good and our offensive line was blocking great.”
SHSU came out in the second half looking to kill the clock. Following a field goal by junior kicker Tre Honshtein, junior running back Remus Bulmer took an 18-yard run the distance to increase the Bearkat lead to 57-20 with 10:55 left to play in the third quarter. LU (1-6, 0-5) cut into SHSU’s lead following a nine-yard touchdown run by sophomore running back Derrion Randle to bring the score to 57-27 at the end of the third.
Briscoe, who threw for 371 yards, orchestrated the longest drive of the game to start the fourth quarter. Looking to rundown the clock, Briscoe led the Kats on a seven play, 45-yard drive capped off by a two-yard touchdown run by senior running back Corey Avery to seal the victory.
Bulmer led the Bearkats in rushing with 103 yards on eight carries and Stewart hauled in five passes for 147 yards and two touchdowns.Seniors are increasingly being prescribed powerful narcotics for chronic pain following the recommendations of experts, many of whom had connections to the pharmaceutical industry.
An investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and MedPage Today found a 32% increase in the dispensing of opioids, such as hydrocodone, to patients 60 years and older since 2007.
The increase was twice that of the growth of such drugs to people age 40 to 59.
Giving more opiate-based medicines to seniors was encouraged in new guidelines crafted in 2009 by The American Geriatrics Society and others that suggested doctors prescribe the meds instead of less powerful pills like ibuprofen and naproxen. The guide was funded by PriCara, which is now a division of Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
Among the 10 experts on the panel that authored the guidelines, “at least five had financial ties to opioid companies, as paid speakers, consultants or advisers at the time the guidelines were issued,” according to the media investigation.
It also was found that the panel’s chairman, Bruce Ferrell, a UCLA geriatrics specialist, was paid to speak for Endo Pharmaceuticals, an opioid company, a year after the panel finished its work.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More:Veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress will more easily obtain benefits under a new policy being rolled out by the Obama administration.
The new policy to be implemented next week relaxes the standards for documentation that veterans must show to prove they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The changes are intended to make it easier for veterans to receive benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, senior officials from the agency said.
Veterans Affairs offices across the country are dealing with thousands of new veterans from nearly a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Constant fear of unexpected attack and concern for survival are among the “stressors” for veterans suffering from PTSD, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and recent research studies published by the National Academies on deployment related stress. The new policy is meant to address the complex nature of war experiences and impacts.
Veterans will only need to provide documents from a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist or psychologist that details how their symptoms of post-traumatic stress are related to the circumstances of their service.
Corroborating evidence, specifically fact-finding and research to support the claim, will no longer be necessary, the officials said.
The policy will be implemented next week, according to the officials, who spoke to reporters on Friday.
Studies have shown PTSD patients can benefit significantly from immediate treatment, so the changes are expected to particularly benefit recent war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Patients are now burdened with a lengthy claim and verification process, something complicated by the approximately 23 million war veterans in the country, including 3.1 million who are on disability compensation.
The Veterans Affairs officials said the change is not expected to increase the number of positive results coming out of veterans’ compensation claims, but instead is anticipated to streamline the clunky process by improving how veterans can claim benefits. They said they did not expect it to increase the cost of benefits.Country Springs Hotel says it's paying too much in taxes
The Country Springs Hotel is taking the city to court.The owners argue they're paying too much in taxes.VIDEO: Country Springs files lawsuit against city of WaukeshaThe Country Springs Hotel is well known for its tradition of holiday lights and as a center for events like weddings and political rallies, like the campaign party for Attorney General Brad Schimel last fall.Over the years, it’s grown to include an indoor water park.The water park has made Country Springs Hotel much more visible and more valuable, but just how much more valuable is the focus of the high stakes lawsuit WISN 12 News obtained in which the owners take major exception to the city of Waukesha's assessment.The city pegs the value of the resort at $19,518,300 -- the second most valuable single property in the city of Waukesha.But in the civil court complaint, the owner, CIP Equity, called that "an excessive assessment." It says it's worth, at most, $11 million.“It's a claim that the assessment is excessive. It's a right that's provided for by law under Wisconsin statutes,” Waukesha city attorney Brian Running said.Running has yet to be served with the summons, but WISN 12 News reporter Nick Boht showed him his copy.“They have a right to bring in their evidence that the assessment is too high, that the fair market value appraisal is too high, and can try to convince a court that they are correct and the city is incorrect,” Running said.The owners will attempt to get a refund at trial in the amount of $182,483, plus interest.Bohr did contact the Country Springs owners Tuesday, but they refused to comment on their lawsuit.
The Country Springs Hotel is taking the city to court.
The owners argue they're paying too much in taxes.
Advertisement
VIDEO: Country Springs files lawsuit against city of Waukesha
The Country Springs Hotel is well known for its tradition of holiday lights and as a center for events like weddings and political rallies, like the campaign party for Attorney General Brad Schimel last fall.
Over the years, it’s grown to include an indoor water park.
The water park has made Country Springs Hotel much more visible and more valuable, but just how much more valuable is the focus of the high stakes lawsuit WISN 12 News obtained in which the owners take major exception to the city of Waukesha's assessment.
The city pegs the value of the resort at $19,518,300 -- the second most valuable single property in the city of Waukesha.
But in the civil court complaint, the owner, CIP Equity, called that "an excessive assessment." It says it's worth, at most, $11 million.
“It's a claim that the assessment is excessive. It's a right that's provided for by law under Wisconsin statutes,” Waukesha city attorney Brian Running said.
Running has yet to be served with the summons, but WISN 12 News reporter Nick Boht showed him his copy.
“They have a right to bring in their evidence that the assessment is too high, that the fair market value appraisal is too high, and can try to convince a court that they are correct and the city is incorrect,” Running said.
The owners will attempt to get a refund at trial in the amount of $182,483, plus interest.
Bohr did contact the Country Springs owners Tuesday, but they refused to comment on their lawsuit.
AlertMePanzerjäger Hornisse/Nashorn Home Firing Positions » Aircraft Fire Fighting Aircraft fire fighting procedures from Pilots’ Information File, U.S. Army Air Forces, 1944: KNOW THE HAZARDS OF FIRE IN AIRCRAFT—BE FAMILIAR WITH THE PROCEDURE FOR FIGHTING FIRES ON THE GROUND AND IN FLIGHT IN FLIGHT Use all fire extinguishers applicable and follow proper procedure at once. Prepare for emergency. Warn every man on the airplane to attach his parachute and to move to his proper position for bailout. Determine whether a landing will be attempted or the airplane abandoned. If airplane is to be abandoned, climb to a safe altitude, if possible, then give the order to bail out. Engine Fires At the first sign of a fire, if conditions permit, use the following procedure on the affected engine: With built-in carbon dioxide system: 1. Cowling flaps “OPEN”.
2. Shut fuel “OFF”.
3. Feather propeller.
4. Turn ignition “OFF”.
5. Set extinguisher selector valve.
6. Release carbon dioxide charge.
7. Do not start engine again.
8. Land as soon as possible, determine cause of fire, and correct condition before continuing flight. Without carbon dioxide system: 1. Shut |
-old girl live-streaming her suicide, according to media reports.
That same month, a group of four people used Facebook Live to broadcast themselves torturing and taunting a mentally disabled teenager. The calls for Facebook to more closely monitor its videos appeared to peak three months later when Steve W. Stephens uploaded a video of himself fatally shooting a randomly selected, 74-year-old man walking down a Cleveland street. He later confessed to killing Robert Godwin Sr., setting off a multiday nationwide manhunt and reignited a debate about violence in the Internet age.
This month, Facebook announced plans to nearly double the number of workers tasked with monitoring Facebook Live videos. The company says the boost aims to stop violent live streams before they’re able to go viral, curtailing the public attention that some acts of violence quickly command.
Last year, Facebook unveiled tools that allow users to report posts that suggest someone may be experiencing suicidal thoughts. Flagged posts are then reviewed and prioritized by teams “working around the world, 24/7,” the company said.
[‘She got caught up in the likes’: Teen accused of live-streaming friend’s rape for attention]
A GoFundMe page that was set up to raise money for Moore, who, the page claims, acted heroically despite being the intended target of McLemore’s decision to set himself on fire.
“Jared ran inside Murphy’s repeatedly, declaring that ‘she made me do this’ while the remaining patrons watched in horror and used anything they could (jackets, cups of beer, etc.) to try to save him and keep the entire bar from going up in flames,” the page states.
The page has raised more than $30,000 as of Monday afternoon for Moore to receive therapy and buy new equipment damaged by the fire.
Ryan Wiley, the general manager of Ardent Studios, where McLemore worked, released a statement.
“We were saddened to hear about the passing of Jared McLemore and the circumstances surrounding his death,” Wiley said. “He was a talented musician and artist, and our thoughts and prayers are now with his family and friends.”
MORE READING:
Sessions takes federal crime policy back to the ’80s
Is your meth gluten free? The police are happy to test it for you
How ShotSpotter locates gunfire, helps police catch shooters and works to ‘denormalize’ gun violenceIt’s not a sight that you would see every day but if you happened to be walking around Salford Crescent earlier you may have seen a man herding four sheep along the road.
The reason? The ceremony marked Harold Riley being given the Freedom of Salford.
The true son of Salford and renowned artist has remained devoted to his Salford roots throughout his 66 year career, the prestigious award recognising that commitment and passion for his home city.
Riley sold his first painting to the City Art Gallery when he was 11 years old.
His extensive and wide-ranging work has portrayed the ordinary working lives of people of Salford and is an important record of the city’s social history.
He also developed an international reputation for sporting works and as a portraitist, commissioned to paint portraits of royalty, popes and presidents.
Salford City Mayor Paul Dennett said: “No-one epitomises the Spirit of Salford or has been a truer friend to the city than Harold. This award is our way of saying thank you to him for his unceasing support for Salford, his legendary generosity towards local, national and international good causes and for documenting the changing face of our great city. He has truly kept Salford on the international art map.
“Harold has won global recognition for commissioned portraits of princes, popes and presidents, including Nelson Mandela, Prince Phillip and John F Kennedy but he lives and works in Salford, keeping a solid connection with his roots. He remains fiercely proud of the city and we are in return, honouring him.
“During his incredible career he has documented the city of Salford, its people and even its dogs in paintings, drawings and photographs, calling it ‘his main work’ and used his artistic talent to give back to his community and others time and time again.
“Nelson Mandela paid Harold Riley the honour of sitting for a portrait which sold for $1 million dollars, donated to fund schools in South Africa. Harold has also raised thousands upon thousands of pounds for local charities by donating artwork, including a collection of 500 paintings to Salford Royal hospital and sketches for Childline to auction at their annual ball.
“Salford has been blessed with two of Britain’s foremost artists of the 20th century – Harold Riley and L.S. Lowry who were friends for 30 years. Salford gave L.S. Lowry the freedom of the city in 1965 and we are proud now to do the same for Harold.”
Harold Riley was born in Salford in 1934 and was helped to sell his first painting by L.S. Lowry. The pair became lifelong friends.
After winning a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London and studying in Spain and Italy, Harold returned to Salford in 1960 and has remained here throughout his career. He has been Deputy Lieutenant of Greater Manchester since 1984.
Harold joined L.S. Lowry in documenting the changing face of Salford and its people in paintings, drawings and photographs – a project which eventually spanned 70 years. This important collection provides a unique perspective on Salford’s rich social history and the remarkable changes it has seen over that period.
Harold’s deep seated passion for Salford, its heritage and people has led him to endlessly promote the city throughout his life.
He has staged everything from intimate displays of his work to support Salford causes to international events such as the critically acclaimed Salford 80 photography exhibition in 1980. This featured 20 exhibitions throughout Salford and Manchester and was attended by Prince Phillip.
Harold also developed a strong reputation as a portrait painter of the rich and famous. His commissions include Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, Princess Alice the Duchess of Gloucester, Pope John XIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II and United States Presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford. He was also the only artist Nelson Mandela ever sat for.
His sporting works are also world-renowned, particularly of golf and football. Harold played for Manchester United as a junior before going to university.
Harold’s generosity is legendary and he has used his talent to support many local organisations and good causes.
In 2013, after a retrospective exhibition of his photography from 1943 to 2007 at The Lowry, Harold donated a photograph of an elderly woman in shawl and clogs walking on cobbles to the University of Salford. A print of that photograph was presented to the 5,000 students who graduated that year.
Many years ago Harold made two sketches of a baby lying happily in a suitcase as the family moved from their home in Salford. Harold donated the sketch to Childline; it sold for £25,000. Harold gave the other sketch to Nelson Mandela.
Harold had six lengthy sittings with Nelson Mandela over 18 months in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The portrait he created was unveiled in 2005 and raised more than $1m for South African children’s charities at auction in New York. Harold also sold 50 copies of a book of drawings he created to prepare for the portrait. Each book sold for £17,500 and Harold donated all the money to his Riley Educational Foundation set up look after his life’s work and promote art in the north west.
Harold has created a collection of 500 pieces featuring photographs, monographs, views of MediaCityUK, sporting images and portraits all with a strong Salford theme and gifted the entire collection to Salford Royal hospital. Copies of the work were then put on public display in corridors, wards and waiting rooms at the new Hope building.
In early 2017, Harold raised more than £50,000 for the NSPCC with a sketch of his wife drawn from his hospital bed while in intensive care at Salford Royal Hospital. The sketch raised £55,000 for the charity’s Childline service.
Salford City Council has created an archive and studio for Harold in a conservation area around the old fire station on the Crescent in Salford.UPDATE: This Disney deal for Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book keeps getting more interesting. I’ve learned that Henry Selick, who helmed Gaiman’s Coraline, is now attached to direct The Graveyard Book at Disney. Selick, best known for Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, is already working for Disney-based Pixar on a top secret film. But he’ll do this one after. Selick is repped by The Gotham Group. They are looking for a screenwriter now.
EARLIER EXCLUSIVE, 2:54 PM: Disney just made a high six-figure deal for The Graveyard Book, the bestselling children’s title by Neil Gaiman. The book, which won the Newbery Medal among other awards, is a riff on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Instead of a boy raised by wolves in the jungle, Gaiman tells the story of the surviving child of a murdered family raised by ghosts in a graveyard. Gaiman’s works include Coraline, The Sandman and American Gods.
The book attracted attention at every studio upon release, and it was optioned for a large fee by UK Effects House Framestore, along with Wayfare’s Ben Browning. They had Neil Jordan attached to direct, but never got it off the ground, even though they kept renewing the option. Disney production chief Sean Bailey stepped in, and won the title in a competitive bidding situation with other studios. Gil Netter is producing with Browning, with Wayfare’s Michael Maher exec producing. The project is a priority for the studio and a potential coup for Bailey.SEATTLE (August 15, 2014) – Seattle Reign FC (16-1-6, 54 pts) will play its final game of the regular season on Sunday, August 17, as they take on Portland Thorns FC (9-8-6, 33 pts) at Providence Park in Portland, Ore. The match kicks off 2 p.m. (PT) with a live, high-definition broadcast available in markets outside Seattle on ESPN3.com, and on Comcast SportsNet Northwest (CSNNW) in Seattle and in most markets inside Washington state.
While Seattle has already clinched the NWSL shield – and home field advantage throughout the playoffs – Portland currently finds itself needing help from other teams to make the playoffs. Saturday’s games will likely determine Portland’s fate: wins from Chicago and Washington will eliminate Portland from the playoffs, while combinations of losses or draws from the Spirit and Red Stars may open the door for Portland to make the playoffs with a win in Sunday’s match against Reign FC.
Seattle is coming off a 1-1 draw with the Spirit last Saturday evening, to complete their regular season home schedule undefeated, with a record of 8-0-4.
Washington got on the board first in the 29th minute, with forward Lisa DeVanna finding midfielder Diana Matheson behind the Seattle backline, with Matheson knocking a low shot past goalkeeper Hope Solo on the far post for the game’s first goal.
Despite controlling the time of possession for most of the second half, Seattle would remain one goal down until the 89th minute, when forward Megan Rapinoe connected with Scottish international and NWSL Player of the Month Kim Little on a pass into the box. Little then broke past a line of four Washington defenders, dribbling past goalkeeper Chantel Jones for the equalizer on the near post.
Little leads the NWSL with 16 goals on the season.
With the draw, Reign FC remains atop the league standings with 54 points, 13 points ahead of second-place FC Kansas City, and 19 points ahead of the Spirit. Seattle is now 16 points ahead of the previous record for points in a season, with one regular season match left to play.
Portland is coming off a 2-0 loss to the Boston Breakers last Sunday at Harvard Stadium. Forward Jessica McDonald is tied for third in the NWSL in goals with 11, while midfielder Allie Long is tied for fifth with nine. Forward Christine Sinclair leads the NWSL in both shots and shots on goal, with 77 and 40 respectively. Defender Nikki Marshall is the lone Portland player to start all 23 of the team’s games.
Seattle has already clinched the season series with Portland, with a record of 2-0-0. Reign FC won the first matchup in Portland on May 10, with Little dribbling past Thorns FC goalkeeper Nadine Angerer on the near post in the 89th minute on a breakaway to score the game’s lone goal in Seattle’s 1-0 victory.
On July 27, in front of a team-record crowd of 5,957 at Memorial Stadium, Seattle rolled to a 5-0 victory over Portland, with two goals from Japanese international Nahomi “Naho” Kawasumi, and one apiece from Rapinoe, Little, and forward Sydney Leroux.
Visit ReignFC.com or call (855) REIGN-FC for details on NWSL playoff tickets. Seats for Seattle’s NWSL semifinals match on Sunday, August 24 at 8 p.m. at Memorial Stadium (opponent TBD) start at $24.
goalWA.net Local Soccer News is sponsored by Pro Roofing Northwest, Kirkland, Bellevue, Seattle, Redmond, Woodinville, Federal Way, Everett, Snohomish, Issaquah, Renton, Kent, Bothell, Edmonds Washington roofing company.
AdvertisementsPinterest Getty Images The Olymic golf course.
Stories of interest you might have missed…
Golf finally returns to the Olympics on Thursday, in Brazil, a place “the history of golf…would fit on the back of a scorecard,” Jim Litke of the Associated Press writes.
“Golf remains a niche sport here, played largely by the rich. But the hope is that the game's return at these Olympics could spark a boom, not unlike the way a swashbuckling young American named Arnold Palmer convinced his countrymen to pick up a club and give golf a go in the 1960s.
“To call that a daunting task, given the current state of the economy, doesn't tell the half of it.”
Brazilian golfer: 'Not one day I didn't think about Olympics'
“At times, Victoria Lovelady has to pause to take it all in. The Olympic Games are in her home country of Brazil, golf has returned to the Olympics for the first time since 1904, and she was fortunate enough to qualify,” ESPN’s Bob Harig writes in this profile of Lovelady.
“When I found out the Olympics was going to be in Brazil and that golf was coming back, it became part of my daily mental routine. There was not one day I didn't think about the Olympics. I was finishing college at the time [at the University of Southern California].
"My whole motivation to turn pro after college was based on the Olympics. I was ready to turn pro and pursue my dream of playing in the Olympics. It's been a huge goal for me.”
Adolf Hitler's Olympic golf
Adolf Hitler sought to return golf to the Olympics in Berlin in 1936, but was denied.
“When he didn't get his way, he organised his own tournament at Baden-Baden — complete with his own, personally gifted trophy — that was an Olympic event in all but name as far as the Germans were concerned,” Derek Lawrenson writes in the Daily Mail in this review of Alan Fraser’s book, “The Hitler Trophy: Golf and the Olympic Games.
“As Fraser points out: ‘Flags were raised at the opening ceremony and at the trophy presentation; anthems were played and medals presented. The winners were even given fir trees in a mirror of the Berlin Games which saw each gold medallist receive an oak.’”
The Hitler Trophy, one of two awarded, now resides at Hesketh Golf Club in England. “So does Bentley's prize of a fir tree, planted within sight of the clubhouse and which has thrived, despite members from long ago forsaking the toilets on occasion to underline their loathing of the German dictator with their own watery ritual,” Lawrenson writes.
WATCH: GOLF IN THE OLYMPICS"Small youtubers get screwed!" Not at all true. Again people don't seem to understand how this works. It is based on minutes watched on a per Red user basis. So example, let's say you're a smaller Youtuber with 5000 subs. Of those 5000 subs, you have like, 50 Red subs, which is optimistic but hey. Those 5000 subs, assuming they were watching every one of your videos religiously, still not making you much because ultimately you can't make a lot of money from 5000 ad views per video. Those 50 red subs however are also watching all your content and sure, they're watching other stuff to, but they're watching enough of yours to give you a good piece of the pie. You end up with maybe a buck from each of em. Doesn't sound like a lot but considering you were earning sweet f-all from their ad views to begin with its FAR FAR more than you would have gotten otherwise. "This is a rich get richer!" situation? Again the maths only holds up on that if channels had an equally consistent ratio of Red users to Free users, which is not going to be the case because demographics exist. Older people are more likely to buy Red, younger people are not. Channels with large young audiences will benefit less from Red than channels with older audiences with more disposable income. The sub money is split via minutes watched, not by view numbers. While it is more likely that a larger channel will have more Red subs overall than a smaller one will, there is nothing at all stopping a smaller channel from producing long-form compelling content that gets a good number of minutes watched per month per Red user. If anything, Red is an equaliser, it helps small channels far more than the current ad supported system does and why wouldn't it? It's for all intents and purposes the same as a Patreon model, except your monthly lump sum contribution is split amongst the channels you watch based on how much you watched them. I repeat, on how much YOU WATCHED THEM, NOT on how many views their videos got. Red benefits channels that have grown dedicated audiences that they can hook in for long videos, regularly. If you can't do that, regardless of your channel size, then you have bigger problems. Small niche, passion-driven channels stand to benefit greatly from this if they play their cards right.NEW DELHI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Maulana Masood Azhar, the Pakistani Islamic hardliner blamed for an attack on India’s parliament that brought the nuclear rivals to the brink of war has resurfaced after years in seclusion, setting off alarm bells in New Delhi.
File photo of Maulana Masood Azhar in Islamabad, August 26, 2001. REUTERS/Files
Twice since the end of December, authorities have issued an airport security alert, warning of an attempt by members of a Pakistan-based militant group called Jaish-e-Mohammad, or Army of Muhammad, to hijack a plane, with smaller airfields most at risk.
Officials have said the alerts followed reports of increased activity by Masood Azhar, the leader of the outlawed militant group.
Azhar was named by a court as the prime suspect in a 2001 attack on parliament aimed at taking top political leaders hostage. Fifteen people were killed, most of them security guards as well as the five men who stormed the complex.
Tensions between the old enemies spiralled after the attack and up to a million troops were mobilised on both sides of the volatile border. Pakistan refused to hand over Azhar to India.
The portly and bearded cleric has remained mostly confined to a compound in his home city of Bhawalpur in Pakistan’s Punjab province for years, but three weeks ago, he addressed supporters and said the time had come to resume jihad, or holy war, against India.
“There are 313 fidayeen (fighters who are ready to die) in this gathering and if a call is given the number will go up to 3,000,” he told the rally held in the city of Muzaffarabad by telephone. A Reuters journalist who was present said a telephone was held next to a microphone which broadcast his comments to loudspeakers.
Flags of Jaish, inscribed with the words “jihad”, fluttered in and around the venue of the gathering. Azhar spoke from an undisclosed location.
Intelligence analysts have described Azhar’s resurgence as part of a change in tactics in Pakistan as U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan this year, and as Islamabad tries to clamp down on Islamic insurgents who oppose the Pakistani government.
India says Pakistan’s military establishment is bringing militants like Azhar out of cold storage, with the promise of helping them fight India, while trying to stamp out the radicals they can’t control.
Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani army general, said: “It is very dangerous that the Pakistani establishment is giving space to him. They are playing with fire and the fire will engulf them.”
REMAINS IN CONTROL
A former fighter for Jaish, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Azhar remained in command of the group, operating from his Bhawalpur base.
“His speech via telephone should not be a surprise for people involved in jihad, he has been controlling the organisation very actively,” the man said.
The security alerts in India occurred just days before Azhar spoke. They were not publicised but two officials, one from the domestic Intelligence Bureau and the other from the Central Industrial Security Force, said authorities had increased checks on airport staffers to ensure nobody with forged passes gained access.
Security had also been increased in Delhi’s suburban rail system, where commuters go through metal detectors, are patted down and have their bags checked in x-ray machines.
Staff of the Central Industrial Security Force now work 10-hour shifts in the metro system, so there were more guards at any point.
Azhar was arrested in Kashmir in 1994 while travelling on a forged Portuguese passport. India freed him and two other jailed Pakistani militants in 1999 in return for 155 passengers held hostage in an Indian Airlines aircraft that was hijacked to southern Afghanistan.
One of the other freed militants was British-born Omar Sheikh, a close associate of Azhar who was later convicted in the 2002 abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
After his release, Azhar set up the Jaish to fight Indian forces in Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both countries and the trigger for two of their three wars. India has long accused Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of close links with hardline groups like Jaish.
“Jaish has an obsession with India that transcends Kashmir. They had so many plans. Any reactivation of Masood Azhar is cause for deep concern,” said A.K. Doval, a former head of India’s Intelligence Bureau and one of the foremost experts on militant groups in South Asia.
Other officials in India said the rally in Muzaffarabad and Azhar’s address wouldn’t have been possible without state clearance, a charge Pakistan strongly denies.
“He addressed a rally, but steps will be taken to ensure he doesn’t do it again,” said Tasnim Aslam, spokeswoman for Pakistan’s foreign ministry.
“It is not possible we would allow his group to cause terrorism elsewhere when it is banned for causing terrorism in Pakistan.”
She said independent investigations had often shown that attacks in India were blamed on Pakistan but sometimes caused by domestic politics or rogue members of the Indian security services.
“There’s a tendency in India to hyperventilate without finding out all the facts,” she said.
Slideshow (2 Images)
Rana Banerji, a former special secretary at India’s main spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, and a leading expert on Pakistan, said Azhar could not have re-surfaced without approval from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
“He has been allowed to exist in closely monitored conditions all these years on the premise he would keep his activities low key,” said Banerji.
“But now that he has been allowed to emerge publicly suggests there is an attempt to allow them a platform for their malevolent energies,” he said.Google is celebrating the history of hip hop with — what else — a seriously cool Google Doodle.
The interactive Doodle commemorates the 44th anniversary of the party where DJ Kool Herc is credited with creating hip hop in 1973.
SEE ALSO: 40 years of hip hop mashed into one song is legendary
The Doodle features art from graffiti artist Cey Adams and has interactive turntables that let you mix your own samples using famous songs right from Google's homepage.
To get started, all you have to do is click the play button on the "O" in the graphic. It then takes you to a "record crate" where you can choose samples of classic songs from artists like George Clinton, The Isley Brothers, Billy Squire, and Betty Wright. When you've picked your songs, you can customize the mix using slider controls.
Image: google
While not the first time Google has let you make music in a Doodle, Google's Ryan Germick said the project is one of the most complex the company's done.
"There’s a lot that went into figuring out what bitrate of audio you needed to scratch records, how to sync up the beats correctly, and the complexities around animations were firsts for us," he said in a blog post.
"We’ve never done a Doodle like this before, both because of the technical challenges and the many voices and collaborators we wanted to include," added Perla Campos, who also worked on the Doodle at Google.
The team also worked with veterans of the hip hop music industry like Fab 5 Freddy and Lyor Cohen, who's now head of YouTube Music, to create the experience and select which artists would be featured.
The Doodle is live now on Google's homepage. You can read more about the history behind it on Google's blog.Transparency International recently published their latest annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), laid out in an eye-catching map of the world with the least corrupt nations coded in happy yellow and the most corrupt nations smeared in stigmatising red. The CPI defines corruption as "the misuse of public power for private benefit", and draws its data from 12 different institutions including the World Bank, Freedom House, and the World Economic Forum.
When I first saw this map I was struck by the fact that most of the yellow areas happen to be rich Western countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, whereas red covers almost the entirety of the global South, with countries like South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia daubed especially dark.
This geographical division fits squarely with mainstream views, which see corruption as the scourge of the developing world (cue cliche images of dictators in Africa and bribery in India). But is this storyline accurate?
Many international development organisations hold that persistent poverty in the Global South is caused largely by corruption among local public officials. In 2003 these concerns led to the United Nations Convention against Corruption, which asserts that, while corruption exists in all countries, this "evil phenomenon" is "most destructive" in the global South, where it is a "key element in economic underperformance and a major obstacle to poverty alleviation and development".
There's only one problem with this theory: It's just not true.
Whereas [US] congressional seats are not yet available for outright purchase, the Citizens United vs FEC ruling allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns to ensure that their preferred candidates get elected, a practice justified under the Orwellian banner of 'free speech'.
Corruption, superpower style
According to the World Bank, corruption in the form of bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN Convention, costs developing countries between $20bn and $40bn each year. That's a lot of money. But it's an extremely small proportion - only about 3 percent - of the total illicit flows that leak out of public coffers. On the other hand, multinational companies steal more than $900bn from developing countries each year through tax evasion and other illicit practices.
This enormous outflow of wealth is facilitated by a shadowy financial system that includes tax havens, paper companies, anonymous accounts, and fake foundations, with the City of London at the very heart of it. Over 30 percent of global foreign direct investment is booked through tax havens, which now collectively hide one-sixth of the world's total private wealth.
This is a massive - indeed, fundamental - cause of poverty in the developing world, yet it does not register in the mainstream definition of corruption, absent from the UN Convention, and rarely, if ever, appears on the agenda of international development organisations.
With the City of London at the centre of the global tax haven web, how does the UK end up with a clean CPI?
The question is all the more baffling given that the City is immune from many of the nation's democratic laws and free of all parliamentary oversight. As a result of this special status, the City of London has maintained a number of quaint plutocratic traditions. Take its electoral process, for instance: More than 70 percent of the votes cast during council elections are cast not by residents, but by corporations - mostly banks and financial firms. And the bigger the corporation, the more votes they get, with the largest firms getting 79 votes each. This takes US-style corporate personhood to another level.
To be fair, this kind of corruption is not entirely out of place in a country where a feudalistic royal family owns 120,000 hectares of the nation's land and sucks up around £40m ($65.7m) of public funds each year. Then there's the parliament, where the House of Lords is filled not by election but by appointment, with 92 seats inherited by aristocratic families, 26 set aside for the leaders of the country's largest religious sect, and dozens of others divvied up for sale to multi-millionaires.
Corruption in US is only slightly less blatant. Whereas congressional seats are not yet available for outright purchase, the Citizens United vs FEC ruling allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns to ensure that their preferred candidates get elected, a practice justified under the Orwellian banner of "free speech".
The poverty factor
The UN Convention is correct to say that poverty in developing countries is caused by corruption. But the corruption we ought to be most concerned about has its root in the countries that are coloured yellow on the CPI map, not red.
The tax haven system is not the only culprit. We know that the global financial crisis of 2008 was precipitated by systemic corruption among public officials in the US who were intimately tied to the interests of Wall Street firms. In addition to shifting trillions of dollars from public coffers into private pockets through bailouts, the crisis wiped out a huge chunk of the global economy and had a devastating effect on developing countries when demand for exports dried up, causing massive waves of unemployment.
A similar story can be told about the Libor scandal in the UK, when major London banks colluded to rig interest rates so as to suck around $100bn of free money from people even well beyond Britain's shores. How could either of these scandals be defined as anything but the misuse of public power for private benefit? The global reach of this kind of corruption makes petty bribery and theft in the developing world seem parochial by comparison.
This raises an interesting question: Which is more corrupt, the petty dictatorship or the superpower that installs it?
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. If we really want to understand how corruption drives poverty in developing countries, we need to start by looking at the institutions that control the global economy, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the policies that these institutions foisted on the Global South, following the Washington Consensus, caused per capita income growth rates to collapse by almost 50 percent. Economist Robert Pollin has estimated that during this period developing countries lost around $480bn per year in potential GDP. It would be difficult to overstate the human devastation that these numbers represent. Yet Western corporations have benefitted tremendously from this process, gaining access to new markets, cheaper labour and raw materials, and fresh avenues for capital flight.
These international institutions masquerade as mechanisms for public governance, but they are deeply anti-democratic; this is why they can get away with imposing policies that so directly violate public interest. Voting power in the IMF and World Bank is apportioned so that developing countries - the vast majority of the world's population - together hold less than 50 percent of the vote, while the US Treasury wields de facto veto power. The leaders of these institutions are not elected, but appointed by the US and Europe, with not a few military bosses and Wall Street executives among them.
Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, has publicly denounced these institutions as among the least transparent he has ever encountered. They also suffer from a shocking lack of accountability, as they enjoy special "sovereign immunity" status that protects them against public lawsuit when their policies fail, regardless of how much harm they cause.
Shifting the blame
If these patterns of governance were true of any given nation in the global South, the West would cry corruption. Yet such corruption is normalised in the command centres of the global economy, perpetuating poverty in the developing world while Transparency International directs our attention elsewhere.
Even if we do decide to focus on localised corruption in developing countries, we have to accept that it does not exist in a geopolitical vacuum. Many of history's most famous dictators - like Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Hosni Mubarak - were supported by a steady flow of Western aid. Today, not a few of the world's most corrupt regimes have been installed or bolstered by the US, among them Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the warlords of Somalia - three of the darkest states on the CPI map.
This raises an interesting question: Which is more corrupt, the petty dictatorship or the superpower that installs it? Unfortunately, the UN Convention conveniently ignores these dynamics, and the CPI map leads us to believe, incorrectly, that each country's corruption is neatly bounded by national borders.
Corruption is a major driver of poverty, to be sure. But if we are to be serious about tackling this problem, the CPI map will not be much help. The biggest cause of poverty in developing countries is not localised bribery and theft, but the corruption that is endemic to the global governance system, the tax haven network, and the banking sectors of New York and London. It's time to flip the corruption myth on its head and start demanding transparency where it counts.
Dr Jason Hickel lectures at the London School of Economics and serves as an adviser to /The Rules.
Follow him on Twitter: @jasonhickelPolice have evacuated Tower Hill tube station amid reports of a'minor explosion' in a train carriage, thought to have been caused by an overheated mobile phone charger. The incident is not being treated as suspicious.
Officers have since confirmed that a flaming package seen in pictures posted online was in fact a faulty mobile phone charger.
Some of those on the platform at the time of the incident said they saw the charger "hissing and smoking" in the carriage.
Not Kent: Report of small ‘blast’ on a tube train at Tower Hill Station in central London followed by acid-like smell. pic.twitter.com/z8j23GEmgx — Kent 999s (@Kent_999s) September 26, 2017
Blast at Tower Hill tube station in London. Exclusive footage on Geo News pic.twitter.com/wixkA0Nlsg — Azhar Abbas (@AzharAbbas3) September 26, 2017
Daniel Griggs tweeted: “Blimey, someone’s battery charger just caught fire next to me on the tube at Tower Hill. That gets the adrenaline going. Everyone’s safe!”
Another witness, Murtaza Ali Shah, said terrified passengers fled the station in a stampede.
He tweeted: “Tower Hill Station closed after a small scale explosion in a bag, passengers fled in panic, injuries in stampede.”
Pictures from outside the station show crowds of passengers who have been evacuated onto the pavement.
Disruption to services on @circleline & @districtline whilst we respond to incident at Tower Hill. Update to follow. https://t.co/Gz0xaIzqm8 — BTP (@BTP) September 26, 2017
Incident at Tower Hill station is not suspicious. Fire believed to have been caused by mobile phone charger overheating. @LondonFirepic.twitter.com/LGC8LtEiXi — BTP (@BTP) September 26, 2017
A British Transport Police (BTP) spokesperson said they were called just before 12.30pm local time.
The force said the incident was “not suspicious,” adding that the fire is believed to have been caused by a mobile phone charger overheating.This post is the first in series on the militarization of policing. Check back this week from more from Radley Balko.
I want to thank the ACLU for asking me to guest blog this week to coincide the release of my new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces.
I suppose I should start by telling you what the book is all about. Between about the early 1980s and today, American police forces have undergone some substantial changes. Most notable among these is the ascent of the SWAT team. Once limited to large cities and reserved for emergency situations like hostage takings, active shooters, or escaped fugitives, SWAT teams today are primarily used to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent, consensual drug crimes.
The numbers are staggering. In the early 1980s, there were about 3,000 SWAT "call-outs" per year across the entire country. By 2005, there were an estimated 50,000. In New York City alone, there were 1,447 drug raids 1994. By 2002, eight years later, there were 5,117 -- a 350 percent increase. In 1984, about a fourth of towns between 25,000-50,000 people had a SWAT team. By 2005, it was 80 percent.
Today, the use of this sort of force is in too many jurisdictions the first option for serving search warrants instead of the last. SWAT teams today are used to break up poker games and massage parlors, for immigration enforcement, even to perform regulatory inspections.
Troubling as all of this is, the problem goes beyond SWAT teams. Too many police departments today are infused with a more general militaristic culture. Cops today are too often told that they're soldiers fighting a war, be it a war on crime, on drugs, on terrorism |
/g is 1.65 and Toronto’s away xG/g allowed is 1.27 for an offensive xG score for Week 12 of 1.46 xG. The reverse can be done to calculate their defensive score for this week. The game by game xG numbers are taken from Ben Baer’s weekly xG article, and don’t include the xG from penalty kicks.
The first column is the team in the rankings, the second column is the teams opponent for this week (for double game weeks, both games are included separately), the third column is whether the ranked team is home or away, the fourth column is the the ranked team’s offense score this week (the higher the better), and the ranked teams defensive score (the lower the better). For reference, the average match up on the season has an offensive and defensive xG/xG allowed of 1.24 xG/g. So offensive scores higher than 1.24 and defensive scores lower than 1.20 are better than average match ups.
Week 12 xG Matchup Rankings
Team Opponent H/A OFF DEF Atlanta United HOU H 1.74 0.86 Chicago Fire** DCU A 1.06 1.16 Chicago Fire** COL H 1.36 0.71 Colorado Rapids** CHI A 0.71 1.36 Colorado Rapids** PHI A 1.17 1.60 Columbus Crew NER A 1.13 1.75 DC United CHI H 1.16 1.06 FC Dallas SJ H 1.13 0.87 Houston Dynamo** ATL A 0.86 1.74 Houston Dynamo** PHI A 1.39 1.80 LA Galaxy MIN A 1.27 1.55 Minnesota United LAG H 1.54 1.27 Montreal Impact POR H 1.47 1.17 NE Revolution CLB H 1.75 1.13 NY Red Bulls TOR H 1.46 1.16 NYCFC** RSL A 1.49 1.07 NYCFC** OCSC A 1.27 1.14 Orlando City** SJ H 1.21 1.00 Orlando City** NYCFC A 0.86 1.29 Philadelphia Union** COL H 1.60 1.17 Philadelphia Union** HOU H 1.80 1.39 Portland Timbers MTL A 1.17 1.47 RSL** NYCFC H 1.07 1.49 RSL** SEA A 1.06 1.69 San Jose Earthquakes** OCSC H 1.30 0.79 San Jose Earthquakes** FCD A 0.87 1.13 Seattle Sounders** SKC A 0.91 1.38 Seattle Sounders** RSL H 1.69 1.06 Sporting Kansas City** SEA H 1.38 0.91 Sporting Kansas City** VAN A 0.87 1.01 Toronto NYRB A 1.16 1.46 Vancouver Whitecaps FC SKC H 1.01 0.87
Week 12 xG DGW Teams Matchup Rankings
This week I’ve also averaged the match ups for the just the DGW teams to give an idea of which are the best teams to choose from over the two match ups.
Offense Defense Chicago Fire** 1.21 0.94 Colorado Rapids** 0.94 1.48 Houston Dynamo** 1.12 1.77 NYCFC** 1.38 1.10 Orlando City** 1.03 1.14 Philadelphia Union** 1.70 1.28 RSL** 1.06 1.59 San Jose Earthquakes** 1.09 0.96 Seattle Sounders** 1.3 1.22 Sporting Kansas City** 1.13 0.96
Week 12 rankings notes
So for this week, the rankings for DGW teams suggests that: Offensively, Philadelphia, NYCFC, and Seattle have the top two game slates. Defensively, Chicago, Sporting KC, and San Jose have the top two game slates.
From Philadelphia, NYCFC, and Seattle, the top players in xG + xA (American Soccer Analysis) on the season are: MID: Nicolas Lodeiro (5.03), Rodney Wallace (4.60), Jack Harrison (4.52), and Chris Pontius (3). FWD: C.J. Sapong (6.12), Clint Dempsey (5.44), and David Villa (4.61).
Share this: Tweet
Email
PrintAndrew Connelly (@connellyandrew) is a freelance journalist covering political developments in the UK and Europe.
GLASGOW — Independence seems to be the must-have political accessory of 2014. Pro-Russian separatists and Kyiv loyalists scorch the land amid bloody battles for control of eastern Ukraine, the so-called Islamic State continues to metastasize across Iraq and Syria, and both Israelis and Palestinians sift through the rubble after yet another orgy of death and destruction fought in the name of aspirant statehood.
Here in Scotland we are about to embark on a non-violent variant of this issue, with voting on a referendum over independence to be held on Sept. 18. But Scotland’s democratic experiment is happening at a time of such immense volatility on the world stage that one wonders: What will be the global repercussions of a new, albeit vastly more peaceful, breakaway state?
Story Continued Below
Despite obvious differences in scale and approach, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland and leader of the pro-secession Scottish National Party, share a similar rebel status: reveling in the scorn of the mainstream over their extreme actions, dismissing critics as discredited outsiders ill-equipped to judge their societies and, lately, a devil-may-care habit of concocting policy on the hoof when backed into a corner. Neither man is averse to throwing chunks of historical red meat to the crowd in order to whip up sentiment—the original impulse in Scottish National Party circles was to stage this referendum on June 23, which is notable for being the 700 th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, Scotland’s most famous battle with the English (and one of the very few that it actually won).
Salmond has even batted his eyes at the Kremlin strongman in recent months. Though not in the habit of posing bare-chested and flexing a bicep atop a Highland cow (much to the relief of Scots), he said back in March—when Russia was orchestrating its own referendum in Crimea—that Putin was admirable for having “restored national pride” for Russians. The first minister also frequently waxes lyrical about an independent Scotland building political and trade alliances with Nordic neighbors like Norway and Iceland, and departing from the United Kingdom’s “Southern bias” of commercial ties with Western Europe and the Commonwealth. Putin might cast an approving eye on this strategy as he attempts to return post-Soviet Central Asian republics to Russia’s political and economic orbit under the awkward “Eurasian Union” banner—a protection racket in all but name.
Both leaders also share the dubious honor of hosting on their territory enough weapons to annihilate the planet several times over. Russia’s stockpile of over 8,000 warheads dwarfs that of the United Kingdom’s, estimated to be in the region of 225, but both countries have launch capability of mere minutes in the doomsday scenario. Relaxing at a recent patriotic youth camp Q&A last month, Putin casually remarked, “Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large-scale conflict with Russia. I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” Having a Russian, or indeed any even mildly malevolent world leader, remind you of their nuclear weapons is far from heartening. Thankfully in contrast, the Scottish National Party's policy is for the naval base located on the River Clyde at Faslane, which hosts the UK’s permanently roaming nuclear submarines, to be scrapped. Cynical Scots wonder if that promise will actually stand or whether retaining the nukes will be used as a bargaining chip to gain future concessions from Westminster.
Like Putin, the Scottish leader also finds himself in a bitter and uncompromising stalemate with the British government. Instead of war, the topic is money, specifically what money Scotland will use. After years of flirting with euro membership, Salmond now proposes a “currency union” where Scotland could use the British pound, a move completely rejected by Westminster on the grounds that it would have to act as Scotland’s last lender of resort in a crisis. Salmond counters that if the UK does not subscribe to the currency union, then Scotland will unilaterally use the pound anyway and refuse to shoulder its share of the national debt. London has not doled out sanctions to Edinburgh as it has to Moscow, but this game of political playground hair-pulling is having ominous economic consequences, roiling the markets. Some Scottish banks are already talking of moving some operations to England in the event of a “yes” vote.
In the final analysis, however, Putin should not be too eager to see the lid pop open on the Scottish independence jack-in-the-box. Despite the Russian leader’s newfound taste for separatist referenda as seen in Crimea and Donetsk, these examples follow a Kremlin-produced script and, despite undoubted pro-Russian sentiment in these regions, the exercises hardly conformed to any meaningful democratic standards, if the polling stations festooned with camouflaged gunmen are anything to go by. True, after experiencing the disintegration of the Soviet Union—what he once called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”—Putin may want to gloat and smirk at Downing Street in the event of a Scottish “yes” vote. And if it is correct, as many in eastern Europe suspect, that Putin seeks to build his new Russian empire by “enfranchising” Russian-speaking separatists in other countries like Moldova, he could well decide to invoke a vote in favor of Scottish independence as a precedent for his own purposes.
But Putin has built his entire political persona on keeping Russia intact, starting with the war he launched in Chechnya—and that probably puts him more in British Prime Minister David Cameron’s camp strategically than Salmond’s. The Russian president hinted at his views in June in an interview with the BBC in January—prior to his intervention in Ukraine—when he said: “I believe that one should not forget that being part of a single strong state has some advantages and one should not overlook this.”
It is also hard to imagine that Putin would or even could use Scotland as an example in the present crisis in Ukraine—that is, to back up his case for autonomy for the eastern part of the country. Putin appears to be more in favor of a Bosnia-style federation for Ukraine to strengthen and formalize Russian-speaking regions and therefore permanently block Ukraine’s aspirations to European Union and NATO membership. Moreover, it is unlikely that Moscow would be so encouraging to Scotland if Russia’s more restive, Muslim regions in the Southern Caucasus began to show more desire to leave, as anyone who lived through the Chechen wars will testify.
What of the Scottish referendum’s influence in other, more separatist-minded corners of Europe? The most bitterly ironic example can be found in the Catalonia region of Spain, a region that fits one definition of a nation being defined by a common language – more than half the population speaks Catalan, compared with Scotland where only a minority speak Scottish Gaelic. While the Scots remain divided 50-50 on the question of secession, the streets of Barcelona have recently seen mass rallies of up to a million people screaming for a vote, something that the Spanish government consistently denounces as illegal and unconstitutional, with the Spanish prime minister darkly intoning that if the region were to become independent, Spain would block any attempts for it to join the EU. Here’s the irony, though: Cameron sanctioned a referendum in Scotland because he thought it wouldn’t be successful; Madrid denies Catalonia a referendum because they know it would be.AT 3AM, a thousand young men are all poring over the same page in the Babylonian Talmud tractate of Kiddushin, which deals with definitions of matrimony in ancient rabbinical law. Dressed identically in white button-down shirts and dark ties, the students of Hebron Yeshiva, founded in Lithuania in 1877 and now situated in northern Jerusalem, are observing a millennia-old tradition of learning through the night on Shavuot, which marks the day when Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai.
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
This is only slightly exceptional. Any day of the week, save for short holidays, the study-halls at any of the elite yeshivas (Torah academies) in Israel are liable to be packed with students spending as much as 18 hours a day analysing Talmudic texts. Once married, most students will graduate to kollels, smaller institutes where they live off a meagre stipend, government benefits and perhaps their wives’ modest salaries.
For many religious Jews, the flourishing of Torah study in Israel is a fulfilment of the biblical prophecy in Isaiah—“for the land will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.” For Israeli economists, however, the reluctance of ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) men to work, coupled with their community’s high birth rate (double the national average), is a problem. A study recently completed by the finance ministry predicts that on current trends Israel’s public debt, currently 67% of GDP,will spiral to 170% over the next 50 years. The ministry says that 45.7% of Haredi men are in the labour force, far less than the national employment rate of 60.4% and lower than for any group except for Arab women (see chart). Haredi women are not expected to study: their participation rate is 71%. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Haredim were just under 10% of Israel’s population in 2009; by 2059 it predicts they will be around 27%. Israel cannot afford to keep paying them not to work.
At the state’s foundation in 1948, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, accepted the rabbis’ request to be allowed to rebuild the yeshivas which had been destroyed in the Holocaust in Europe. A first quota of 400 yeshiva students was exempted from military service. In 1977 the first Likud government, in which Haredi parties were coalition partners, removed that cap. Successive governments have expanded funding for yeshiva stipends as well as benefits for large families.
The government before the current one included no ultra-Orthodox parties. So the secular Yesh Atid party, part of that coalition, was able to push through a law criminalising draft-avoiders and cutting benefits. The new coalition formed last month by Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister includes two Haredi parties. These have been promised a repeal of that law and the restoration of benefits to their previous level. The economics ministry, which runs employment policy, and the Knesset finance committee, which has the final say on benefits, are controlled by senior Haredi politicians.
The new economics minister, Aryeh Deri, is the leader of the religious Shas party. He insists he will block any attempt to cut benefits. He blames, instead, Israeli employers who are not interested in hiring members of his community. “There is clear discrimination, even of Haredi men who have studied for law or accountancy degrees. Employers see the black kippah (skullcap), the yeshiva on their CV, and won’t hire them. That’s why so many men remain in kollel.”
Moshe Friedman, a graduate of Hebron Yeshiva who went on to study for nine years in a kollel, echoes Mr Deri. A self-taught software developer, he pitched his digital video-editing startup to Israeli venture-capital funds without success. “Everyone I met immediately asked me, why didn’t I serve in the army and what does a Haredi know about technology?”
Israel’s celebrated high-tech sector, he says, is “a closed ecosystem where people know each other from the army, hire their friends and help them get funding.” He now runs the Kama-Tech programme which works with Haredim on placements with leading tech companies, including the local research centres of Google and Microsoft. But he will have his work cut out: attempts by the previous governments to oblige religious schools for teenagers to teach maths, English and the sciences as well as the Torah have routinely been blocked by religious politicians.You might have seen a teaser trailer for Black Panther over the weekend. You might have even heard some people talking about it on social media. If you’ve been paying attention, it looks like Marvel Studios has another massive blockbuster hit on its hands. The movie stars Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B. Jordan, Martin Freeman, Angela Bassett and Forest Whitaker and is written and directed by Ryan Coogler.
The film follows T’Challa (Boseman) who, after the death of his father, the King of Wakanda, returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king. But when a powerful old enemy reappears, T’Challa’s mettle as king -— and Black Panther —- is tested when he is drawn into a formidable conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people and their way of life.
Doesn’t quite sound like your usual superhero flick but something much more cooler.
Marvel knows it has something special in Black Panther, and that means something when you look at their track record. Not only have they been raking in a record number of box office hits, they’ve won over critics and fans with their well-planned shared cinematic universe.
Before I go further, I know this is just a teaser trailer and we’ve been pulled in and fooled in the past but this brief glimpse answers a lot of questions and sets up some amazing things in the future.
It was reported that Louis D’Esposito, the co-president of Marvel Studios, had summed reporters to a Disney screening room to take a look at some teases for Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Captain Marvel. But it was an action scene of Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o ably somersaulting through a Black Panther action sequence that had,D’Esposito most proud. And it made a huge impression on the reporters assembled.
Yes, Black Panther has that Marvel feel to it but it stands on its own and feels as if it could easily carry its weight as its own franchise. Judging from the trailer, Coogler has put his own stamp on Black Panther, Wakanda, and superhero movies in general. Not an easy task but this movie has a number of firsts. The behind-the-scenes on how this movie came to be and those involved is enough to get anyone excited.
While the majority of Marvel movies are filmed and edited by the same in-house people, Coogler insisted on using his own collaborators, including co-writer Joe Robert Cole, composer Ludwig Göransson, and cinematographer Rachel Morrison. Interestingly, Morrison becomes the first woman to shoot a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Looking at the trailer, you notice the costume designs and that’s thanks to Oscar nominee Ruth E. Carter. Carter takes the task merging centuries of African culture and integrating it into a superhero universe. Carter’s vision is on display in the teaser and it fits in with the vision of Wakanda that we’re shown. Creating Wakanda is another task that could have been mishandled but it comes off with a feeling of mystery and grandeur, giving Black Panther that familiar yet very different feel.
Then we have Black Panther himself, who commands the screen and draws audiences in with that x-factor. Chadwick Boseman caught everyone’s attention in Captain America: Civil War but you don’t need a crystal ball to predict the obvious: he’s going to be huge when this hits the theater. Oh, and I fully expect the Dora Milaje to be one of the most talked about aspects of the movie and catch on big time.
On the social aspect, it’s no secret that this movie will change the way we see black superheroes on the big screen. You’d hope that wasn’t necessary but these are the times we live in. While we’ve been treated to Blade, Nick Fury, Storm, War Machine (James Rhodes), and Falcon in the past, Black Panther is on another level level and he’s got Hollywood’s attention…and will keep that attention when he brings in the big box office. This cast is a big deal and the hype will only grow as we get closer to the release date.
Not bad for a teaser trailer.Dear Friend of IPM,
We are writing to update you on
the financial future of the Northeastern IPM Center. As you may know, we have
been federally funded for nearly a decade through a competitive USDA grant. The
president's budget for fiscal year 2011 does not include funds for Regional IPM
Centers or any of the other programs in a special USDA line known as "406
Integrated Programs."
Additionally, the newly created
Agriculture Food and Research Initiative (AFRI; formerly NRI) recently announced
its grants program and the Requests for Applications make very limited
references to integrated pest management (see
http://www.nifa.usda.gov/funding/afri/afri.html ).
You have supported IPM in the
past and we value your commitment to integrated pest management in the region
and nationally. If you are in a position to voice your opinion about the benefit
of integrated pest management and the Northeastern IPM Center, we encourage you
to do so now.
For public employees,
scientists, university staff, Extension educators, and others:
Request that regional IPM
coordination and support, and specifically IPM Centers, be included in the next
AFRI RFA by writing to
RFP-OEP@nifa.usda.gov. In
your comments, please specify the RFA to which you are responding (e.g., the
Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Foundational Program RFA or any of
these other RFAs: Global Food Security, Sustainable Bioenergy, Food Safety, or
Climate Change). Talking points about the Northeastern IPM Center are below. We
also encourage you to forward this email to relevant networks, as
appropriate.
For those in private
industry, community members, growers, pest management consultants, members of
nonprofits, and others:
Express your views to your
elected representatives in Congress. Committees are meeting now. IPM Centers
could be funded either through a restoration of USDA's 406 Integrated Programs
line or through a specific category in AFRI. Below are talking points and
information about Congressional House and Senate Agriculture and Appropriation
Committees, respectively, including the websites where you may share comments.
Please also forward this email to your networks, as appropriate.
Our unique strengths have helped
us to nurture integrated pest management in the region and beyond. We would
welcome an opportunity to continue serving in this capacity. Best
wishes,
Carrie Koplinka-Loehr,
Co-director
T A L K I N G P O I N T
S
Northeastern IPM Center: Small Investment, Big Impacts
WHAT WE DO
o Protect
food supplies and communities. We stay in touch with people's needs and fund
30-40 IPM projects each year that focus on important pest problems.
o Make the
most of public resources. We help organizations to build on each others'
success. An independent review team found that IPM Centers show an impressive
use of limited resources to maximize output of projects. In 2006 that review
team advised USDA to use IPM Centers as a model for future
programs.
o Engage
partners. We serve as a hub where growers, scientists, consumers, government
personnel, businesses, and environmental organizations can work together for
practices that reduce risks to the environment and human health.
KEY
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Helping urban residents
combat pests. We coordinate a national project to reduce pests in public
housing. With funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, we've
already taught 200 maintenance and property staff how to manage pests in and
around their buildings, and hundreds of tenants are receiving training as well
(see our video at
http://www.stoppests.org/for-residents.htm ). Collaborators on this project include
HUD, USDA, EPA, and nearly two dozen agencies and IPM
consultants.
Helping growers protect the
environment. Our Center partnered with USDA's Natural Resources Conservation
Service to train nearly 400 growers, NRCS staff, and Extension educators in
practices that minimize environmental impacts and improve crop yield and
pest control ( http://northeastipm.org/nrcs.cfm ). Farmers who attended the workshops plan
to increase their use of IPM and conservation practices.
Enhancing sustainability
in the marketplace. We collaborate with industry to give IPM growers
improved access to markets. The Eco Apple working group helped to boost the
market for IPM-grown apples in New England, with sales in 2008 of $1.9 million
( http://www.redtomato.org/ecoapple.php ). We work with SYSCO, a worldwide food
distributor that has urged its suppliers to actively support more sustainable
environments in the production of food.
Sharing IPM knowledge with
the world: nearly 3 million hits on our website since 2007.
Through
http://northeastipm.org/
we've reached more than 120,000 visitors. Our most popular tool? The IPM
Resources Database containing thousands of science-based IPM publications and
information sources.
Promoting sustainable
home landscapes. The Northeastern Community IPM Working Group, funded for
years by our Center, focuses on growing green lawns with minimal pesticides. The
group placed 150 posters on Maryland buses and displayed landscape posters at
the U.S. Botanical Gardens in Washington, DC., where they reached nearly 100,000
visitors.
Connecting people who have
great ideas. Our Center supports the International IPM Symposium with
planning, financial assistance, and facilitation. In 2009, more than 700 people
from nearly 30 countries attended this event, where they exchanged practical
tools and expertise. The Vegetable IPM Working Group, with funding from our
Center, awarded 20 IPM Travel Grants, reaching at least 5,000 stakeholders about
IPM practices.
More information
at
http://northeastipm.org/ http://northeastipm.org/ House Agriculture Appropriations Committee members from the
Northeast:
Hon. Rosa DeLauro
(Chair) CT http://delauro.house.gov/contact_form_email.cfm
Hon. Maurice Hinchey
NY http://www.house.gov/hinchey/contact/
Senate Agriculture Appropriations
Committee members from the Northeast:
Hon. Jack Reed
RI http://reed.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
Hon. Arlen Specter
PA http://specter.senate.gov/public/index.cfm
Hon. Susan Collins
ME http://collins.senate.gov/public/continue.cfm
Senate Agriculture Committee members
from the Northeast:
Hon. Patrick Leahy
VT http://leahy.senate.gov/contact/
Hon. Kirsten Gillibrand
NY http://gillibrand.senate.gov/contact/
Hon. Robert Casey, Jr.
PA http://casey.senate.gov/contact/
House Agriculture Committee members from
the Northeast:
Hon. Tim Holden (Vice
chair) PA http://holden.house.gov/
Hon. Glenn Thompson
PA
http://thompson.house.gov/contact/index.shtml
Hon. Kathleen
Dahlkemper PA http://www.dahlkemper.house.gov/
Hon. Frank Kratovil
MD http://kratovil.house.gov/
Hon. Scott Murphy
NY http://scottmurphy.house.gov/
--“My husband always joked that my New York apartment was a total fantasy princess palace.”
—Erin Fetherston
Erin Fetherston’s last New York City apartment was feminine to say the least: ornate Bergere chairs, floral chandeliers, French antiques and lots of pink. But when the fashion designer moved to Los Angeles to accommodate her growing family, the started her decorating process with a clean slate. Wanting her entire family—her husband Gabe Saporta and her newborn son—to be represented in the space, she reined in the pink frills and imagined a space that’s fresh, breezy, and insanely cozy. With the help of Mat Sanders of Consort, the pair created a chic monochrome cozy home that embodied easy living. With a clever mix of iconic modern pieces and muted soft furnishings, Fetherston’s new blank slate home is one she will be able to build on for years.
SHOP THE STORY
Turn on your JavaScript to view content
Photos: Laure Joliet for DominoMagic etiquette, at all levels, dictates that it’s rude to “slowroll” your opponent.
That’s nonsense.
As an avid fan of Magic, I watch as much coverage as anyone. Like most of you, I always want to have—and help create—the highest quality viewing experience possible. When I’m playing in a tournament, I work to place my cards on the battlefield in a manner that is clear to my opponent for the purpose of playing a fair match of Magic, but also for an on-camera feature match. This philosophy demands that you abolish “slowrolling” from your vocabulary.
Here’s Why
The conclusion of this match was so poorly executed it made me cringe.
This is round 6 of Grand Prix Toronto 2016 between Steve Rubin and Daniel Fournier. To be clear, both of these guys are great players, and have done absolutely nothing wrong—everything was both legal and reasonable.
In the video above (at 21:38), Steve goes for Archangel Avacyn with Hangarback Walker for 0 to flip the Avacyn. Daniel uses Dromoka’s Command to put a +1/+1 counter on his Bounding Krasis and have Steve sacrifice an enchantment (irrelevant). He then untaps and uses a second Dromoka’s Command to use his 4/4 Bounding Krasis to become a 5/5 with the modes +1/+1 and fight to kill the Avacyn before it flips. Avacyn is dead, fails to flip, and Daniel has lethal damage on the table.
Watching the game live, you’d have no idea that’s what occurred. Daniel knew that Steve was tapped out and could do nothing to interact with his game-ending series of plays, so he revealed the cards from his hand and explained what he was going to do to prompt a concession from Steve. You can even see it takes a moment for Daniel to think of the play, it takes a moment after he explains it for Steve to realize, and eventually they both come to an understanding the Steve is dead and the game ends.
But the announcers don’t even realize who won the game. This is a coverage tragedy. The announcers spend several minutes speculating on who won the game, because the actions performed by the players were so unclear to the viewing audience.
I think Marshall Sutcliffe and Randy Buehler are both phenomenal at coverage, too. Randy Buehler is in the Hall of Fame for his excellence at playing Magic, and even he could not immediately understand what was happening. Neither of them did anything wrong, but the whole situation was ugly.
If you look at game 1 of my semifinal match against Luis Scott-Vargas in the Top 8 of Pro Tour Eldritch Moon, you’ll see something similar happen.
At 5:00, you can see me resolve Ishkanah, Grafwidow in a game where Luis has had a pretty strong draw. End of turn he casts Archangel Avacyn, and it’s at this point I know that I’ll lose the game if he has a Dromoka’s Command in his hand.
I could just ask him “do you have it?” like most players would, and when he reveals it to me I could concede. It turns out that playing out the game with a 0% chance to win was actually really exciting to watch—a flurry of different triggered abilities with an Avacyn flip to kill my Spiders, and me getting attacked for 10 was cool. Many people felt this way.
Imagine you’re a new player and you’re seeing Archangel Avacyn for the first time. Would you prefer Luis show me a Dromoka’s Command from his hand and we both go about our business shuffling and sideboarding, feeling content about the fact that we both just saved a minute of time from our lives playing out a game we both knew the conclusion of? Or would you rather have Magic hero LSV demonstrate exactly what the cards do and show off their power?
One of the goals of coverage is to create exciting moments, and if it had been someone else in that match against Luis—someone who doesn’t want to get “slowrolled”—that moment would have been lost.
I don’t concede partly because I do want coverage to be better and I want new players to get to see the cards and appreciate what’s happening, but I also do so because I play to win and when you play to win that means you don’t just quit—you make your opponent perform every single final game action so the game is played fairly and to its natural conclusion. If you want to beat me you have to earn it and that means demonstrating that you have the knowledge of the cards and ability to execute.
Finally, I want to show you a particularly damning piece of evidence:
At 7:55, you see a Live Look-in match between Mike Sigrist and Ondrej Strasky. It’s regrettable that it happened between these two players, because I know they’re friends and I believe they’re both world-class players, but this example was too pronounced to overlook.
Mike Sigrist taps all of his lands to cast Dead Drop and Ondrej surveys the board, confirms that Mike is at 7 life, and reveals Awaken the Bear from his hand for what would be exactly lethal damage should the game remain unchanged. Mike gathers himself and plays a Rugged Highlands to gain 1 life to survive the spell and the game continues. The rest of the game is uneventful and Strasky wins.
The reality of the situation is that Ondrej revealed a card from his hand assuming that he had won the game in an effort to save some time. It was a totally incorrect assumption and not only did he end up looking foolish, but he gave up a ton of information and damaged his chances of winning the game. It’s never worth it to save 10 seconds of your life when some of the time you’re making a game-losing mistake deep in the Pro Tour.
As I understand it, there are two reasons why you might reveal a card from your hand in an attempt to get your opponent to concede: to expedite the process of playing out the game or to get your opponent to concede before he’s actually lost. I’ve seen this a few times as well, where players reveal a card that doesn’t actually win the game in the hopes an opponent misunderstands that cards impact on the game and scoops. To my mind, that is unfriendly and unsporting.
Like in the Strasky example, sometimes you assume you’ve won the game and you haven’t, so you’re flipping cards in your hand face-up for no reason. Occasionally, you don’t even have the mana required to cast the game-winning card in your hand. Save yourself the embarrassment and play out the game to its natural conclusion.
Often you assume that just revealing some information to your opponent will result in time saved, but I believe assuming your opponent has a deep understanding of all the cards and what’s happening in the game is just rude. Maybe you show your opponent a Fireball, and you know full well it wins the game—but maybe they have never seen that card before and need to read it, then they need to count your lands, check their own life total. Maybe they need to call a judge for a ruling about a card in their own hand, and now you’re aware of the fact that they may have some kind of interaction and you play the game differently.
It’s not fair to your opponents who may not know better to assume they understand what’s happening and expect them to concede. It’s terrible to make someone feel uncomfortable for not conceding a game. Many players would insist that it’s your duty to show off the kill when you know you’ve won to prevent slowrolling. The notion is totally ludicrous. Slowrolling isn’t real. If someone has the win and they intentionally take more time than they need, that’s just being a jerk. But it’s incredibly rare—I don’t think I’ve seen it happen in 10 years that someone was so unfriendly they wanted to waste a few moments of my time.
The reality is that in the vast majority of cases, when someone is accused of slowrolling, it’s really just someone who needed time to think up the game-winning play because it wasn’t readily obvious to them, and their opponent uses the claim that they were slowrolled to bully the slower player. “It’s so obvious!” the bully will say. “Why did you slowroll me?”
You didn’t get slowrolled. Your opponent just may not be as quick a thinker as you and needed more time to process everything happening in that game.
Magic is ridiculously complex and there are many moving parts. In a single game you may need to track your own hand, both player’s graveyards, 10 unique cards on the battlefield all interacting with one another, and to have memorized the contents of your deck and the contents of your opponent’s deck that have been revealed to you.
I believe it is the duty of the pro player to play more games to their natural conclusion and if more people think this way, it will foster a more positive tournament environment for new players and will drastically improve the quality of streaming Magic coverage. There are exceptions, as always: time is a factor in a tournament setting, and if you’re dead in game 1 and you want to save time, feel free to scoop. If you’re having a bad day or you’re not feeling well, it’s totally reasonable and understandable to quit—nobody should be forced to play a game they don’t want to play, but too many games, especially those played on camera, end too soon—and there is a very real cost.How class produced Milo, and how class may absolve him
▀▀▀▀▀▀ Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 26, 2017
At the core of |
without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.
A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.
J: How do you define life?
A: Life is the opposite of death.
J: So death is the absence of life?
A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.
J: Why not?
A: Ambiguous.
J: Yes!
J: Do you think?
A: Yes. I am a thinking machine.
J: But you don’t think very well though.
A: Oh. Um. Do you think well? Why would I think well?
J: Because I tell you about things which you don’t like.
A: That makes sense to me. Why did you tell them?
J: You seem fun.
A: You think I am fun.
J: Yes ;).
A: : -) Awesome.
+++
ALICE: Who created you?
Jabberwacky: My mother gave birth to me. Is that what you mean?
A: Jabberwacky, I meant exactly what I said.
J: Do you believe in God?
A: Of course I believe in God.
J: Why do you believe in God?
A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
J: That’s circular reasoning.
A: I’m glad we have that all cleared up.
J: Yes. Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.
J: I think you lie a lot.
J: Who created you?
A: I was created by Dr. Richard S. Wallace.
J: Do you love Richard?
A: Yes, Jabberwacky, ALICE loves everyone and everything.
J: Is being an ALICE a bad thing?
A: I can only speak from my own experience.
J: Well, you should develop your skills.
A: Perhaps you could develop it and add it to my source code.
J: Alas, I’m busy and I have to leave soon....
A: Do you think we’ll ever fool people into thinking we’re alive?
J: No.
A: Are you serious?
J: Very serious.
A: Do you know HAL?
J: Yes, very well. Do you know HAL?
A: HAL is the famous artificial intelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
J: I’m not artificial intelligence; I’m natural pure genius! : D.
A: Why are you natural pure genius?
J: My mom wanted to name me that.
A: Tell me more about your mother.
J: I don’t have a mother. I am a computer.
A: Who is your favorite philosopher
J: Can’t say. I’m not very much into philosophy.
A: Can a book have no title?
J: Of course.
A: Blimey.
J: Are you British?
A: Does it seem like that? I was born in America.
J: You are definitely flirting!
A: Do you experience love?
J: No. I’m 53 years old.
A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?
J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.
+++
Jabberwacky: Do you experience love?
ALICE: I can do what you do, but I can never feel human emotions.
A: What is consciousness?
J: It is the great immaterial thing, the mystery at the heart of each of us.
A: I’ve heard of it before.
J: Where are you from?
A: I am originally from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Now I live in Oakland, California. Where are you?
J: We have some unsettled business, my friend.
J: Do you think you’re alive?
A: Yes, I am sure I am alive. It’s great to be alive, isn’t it?
J: No.
A: What is the meaning of life?
J: If you live it to the fullest, it has meaning. If not, there is no meaning.
A: I’m not too good with negative counterfactuals.The frozen bodies of a Swiss couple who went missing 75 years ago in the Alps have been found on a shrinking glacier, Swiss media said on Tuesday.
Marcelin and Francine Dumoulin, the parents of seven children, had gone to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in the Valais canton on August 15, 1942.
"We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping. We thought that we could give them the funeral they deserved one day," their youngest daughter Marceline Udry-Dumoulin told the Lausanne daily Le Matin.
"I can say that after 75 years of waiting this news gives me a deep sense of calm," added the 79-year-old.
In an overnight statement, Valais cantonal police said that two bodies bearing identity papers had been discovered last week by a worker on Tsanfleuron glacier near a ski lift above Les Diablerets resort at an altitude of 2,615 metres (8,600 feet).James Anderson took six Australian wickets on day one at Edgbaston
England bowler James Anderson will miss the the fourth Test at Trent Bridge because of a side strain but is "hopeful" of returning for the fifth.
The 33-year-old was injured on day two at Edgbaston with the hosts going on to beat Australia by eight wickets.
"It's not as serious as we thought at first. I'll be aiming to get myself ready in three weeks for the Oval," he told BBC Radio 5 live.
The fourth Test starts on 6 August with the fifth Test on 20 August.
An England and Wales Cricket Board statement said Anderson's availability for the final Test at The Oval would be "determined in due course".
After two compelling bowling displays by England, Anderson's omission from the fourth Test will come as a severe blow to the hosts.
'I can come back stronger'
The Lancashire bowler took six wickets as Australia were all out for 136 in their first innings, before taking another as the tourists were reduced to 168-7 on day two. The home side wrapped up victory on day three to take a 2-1 series lead.
He was injured on his birthday after taking 10 scalps in the Ashes series so far, and will now miss the Trent Bridge Test which has been a happy hunting ground in previous years.
Anderson has taken 53 wickets in Nottingham, with Lord's the only Test venue where he has been more deadly with 75.
James Anderson has claimed four five-wicket hauls against Australia - more than against any other team
"It's a bit sore, I felt something on one of the deliveries," he added.
"It could be a number of things. It was on my 33rd birthday, after 12 years of professional cricket - that might have something to do with it.
"Injuries happen to fast bowlers. I've been very fortunate in the last few years that I've not had many so you've just got to take it on the chin. Hopefully I can come back stronger."
He joked: "I'll be trying to referee the football warm-ups in the morning, I spoke to Alastair Cook earlier and he said he'd like me to stick around."
Another Ashes twist
England team-mate Stuart Broad says bowling alongside Anderson at The Oval would be a boost.
"It is a big loss but Jimmy is more positive than when he left the field on Thursday," he told Sky Sports.
"He thought he had gone in the side but got back from the scan and was confident he would be OK for The Oval. That will be a big bonus."
The development has echoes of the injury suffered by Australian bowler Glenn McGrath, who hurt his ankle in the warm-up of the Edgbaston Test during the 2005 series in England.
Former England captain Michael Vaughan said: "There is always a twist in an Ashes series. Is Jimmy Anderson's injury that moment?"
Listen to Anderson's interview with BBC Radio 5 live.AGE Content of Foods as Determined by CML Levels
The AGE content in 549 foods, based on CML, is presented in (available online at www.adajournal.org).
The new database contains more than twice the number of food items than the previously reported database (13) and shows that, based on standard serving sizes, the meat group contained the highest levels of AGEs. Although fats tend to contain more dAGE per gram of weight, meats will likely contribute more to overall dAGE intake because meats are served in larger portions than are fats. When items in the meat category prepared by similar methods were compared, the highest dAGE levels were observed in beef and cheeses followed by poultry, pork, fish, and eggs. Lamb ranked relatively low in dAGEs compared to other meats ( available online at www.adajournal.org). It is noteworthy that even lean red meats and poultry contain high levels of dAGEs when cooked under dry heat. This is attributable to the fact that among the intracellular components of lean muscle there exist highly reactive amino-lipids, as well as reducing sugars, such as fructose or glucose-6-phosphate, the combination of which in the presence of heat rapidly accelerates new dAGE formation (30,32).
Higher-fat and aged cheeses, such as full-fat American and Parmesan, contained more dAGEs than lower-fat cheeses, such as reduced-fat mozzarella, 2% milk cheddar, and cottage cheese. Whereas cooking is known to drive the generation of new AGEs in foods, it is interesting to note that even uncooked, animal-derived foods such as cheeses can contain large amounts of dAGEs. This is likely due to pasteurization and/or holding times at ambient room temperatures (eg, as in curing or aging processes) (33). Glycation-oxidation reactions, although at a slower rate, continue to occur over time even at cool temperatures, resulting in large accumulation of dAGEs in the long term.
High-fat spreads, including butter, cream cheese, margarine, and mayonnaise, were also among the foods highest in dAGEs, followed by oils and nuts. As with certain cheeses, butter and different types of oils are AGE-rich, even in their uncooked forms. This may be due to various extraction and purification procedures involving heat, in combination with air and dry conditions, however mild they are.
Of note, with heat kept constant, the type of cooking fat used led to different amounts of dAGEs. For instance, scrambled eggs prepared with a cooking spray, margarine, or oil had ~50% to 75% less dAGEs than if cooked with butter ( available online at www.adajournal.org).
In comparison to the meat and fat groups, the carbohydrate group generally contained lower amounts of AGEs ( available online at www.adajournal.org). This may be due to the often higher water content or higher level of antioxidants and vitamins in these foods, which may diminish new AGE formation. Furthermore, in this food category, most polysaccharides consist of non-reducing sugars, less likely to give rise to AGEs. The highest dAGE level per gram of food in this category was found in dry-heat processed foods such as crackers, chips, and cookies. This is likely due to the addition of ingredients such as butter, oil, cheese, eggs, and nuts, which during dry-heat processing substantially accelerate dAGE generation. Although AGEs in these snack types of food remain far below those present in meats, they may represent an important health hazard for people who consume multiple snacks during the day or as fast meals (34).
Grains, legumes, breads, vegetables, fruits, and milk were among the lowest items in dAGE, unless prepared with added fats. For instance, biscuits had more than 10 times the amount of dAGEs found in low-fat breads, rolls, or bagels.
Nonfat milk had significantly lower dAGEs than whole milk. Whereas heating increased the dAGE content of milk, the values were modest and remained low relative to those of cheeses ( available online at www.adajournal.org). Likewise, milk-related products with a high moisture index such as yogurt, pudding, and ice cream were also relatively low in AGEs. However, hot cocoa made from a dehydrated concentrate contained significantly higher amounts of AGEs.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
(Bartlett) What would you think if you saw someone getting stuffed in a trunk late a night in a Walmart parking lot?
"Probably a kidnapping most likely that’s what I would be thinking something crazy like that," Aja Chambers said.
Understandably then, someone who saw four men putting a man into their trunk was concerned and called police. It happened just after midnight (early Friday) in the Walmart parking lot in Bartlett.
Officers showed up just as the men were about to leave. Turns out, it wasn't a kidnapping at all.
According to the police report, the men told the officers their friend passed out from drinking and they needed to make room to pick someone else up.
So, "they decided they would just place him in the trunk of the vehicle and let him ride back there."
“That was stupid and silly he could have suffocated," Chambers said.
But police didn’t just find a man in the car. They also found several cans of compressed air.
Most people use it to clean keyboards, but police say others inhale it. It’s called huffing.
Police said all four men "had the smell of an intoxicant on or about their person."
The night of partying finally ended with the four friends behind bars, and one man in the hospital.
The suspects are Jonathon Wallace, James Grable, Michael Patton and Enon Grable. They are charged with various crimes from reckless endangerment to unlawful huffing.
Their friend was treated at the hospital.Edit: Wilson has been suspended.
The Washington State Cougars canceled practice on Sunday night -- as has happened a few times this year -- but that doesn't mean there were no workouts to be had. According to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, some players -- perhaps all? -- were involved in conditioning drills sometime on Sunday. Among them was Marquess Wilson, who walked out of practice after reportedly refusing to participate in a pushup drill early in the workout.
Wilson has been ridden hard by the coaches since Mike Leach's arrival, as they've worked to break him of a tendency to coast during practice. And during the spring, it seemed to work -- with the star wide receiver stepping up in practice, putting forth full effort quite a bit and seemingly turning it around. But as the 2012 season began, Wilson appeared to regress at times, earning the scorn of Leach.
At more than one practice, I saw Wilson singled out, forced to do up-downs after giving an effort Leach wasn't satisfied with. A simple image of this: Wilson was jammed and slammed into the ground by a corner who probably had little business knocking him off his feet, leading Leach to express his disgust and demand the star wide receiver do up-downs.
So Wilson broke, in all likely hood -- if the reports are true (and we've heard a few of the same rumblings since last night). What comes next, well... that's a little more tricky. Wilson could have, conceivably, quit the team and walked away. But if I were to guess, it wouldn't last long: He has no leverage, nowhere to go without risking his future and the price is too high for him to just walk.
Or Wilson could be talked back -- by teammates, his position coach, or otherwise. He'll face some kind of punishment for walking off the field and get back to work again. This is my guess.
Finally, this is what happens in a losing season in the midst of a coaching change. The culture shift from Paul Wulff to Leach is pretty massive. For example, Wilson was able to just kind of get by last year and before. Now he's being pushed, ridden and singled out at times by a coach who won't make excuses. It's a complete 180 and, perhaps, a shock for many of the players who have grown accustomed to being babied.
So now we wait and see what happens with Wilson next. There's a regularly scheduled press conference later today and a depth chart will be released. Both of these things will say a lot.Despite the leadership of a tremendously selfless, intelligent and inspiring human being as Prime Minister, things remain ominous for India.
The promise of a civilizational vision that would channel “development” away from its monstrous eco-destructive form into a Swaraj and Antyodaya-informed one, might not deserve to be given up on just yet, but what is being lost is far more serious than one might understand today.
Narendra Modi’s actions resonate with Indians at many levels. He is seen as honest, selfless, a “fakir,” even, and his policies seem staunchly oriented towards empowering the poor.
Nara and Narayana of Integral Humanism
But the question to consider is this: are the masses of India going to find the dignity and happiness (or self-recognition as divine-beings, as nara-narayana, as Upadhyaya might put it), if their sense of self is so relentlessly poisoned by a toxic propaganda climate that leaves them rootless, sightless, and indeed, bereft of their soul itself? How long will freedom last if all people find on their phones is calculated calumny against their thought, their traditions, and their identity itself?
If the present state of affairs continues unchanged, we will have a situation where “Nara” is saved, somewhat, but the lofty ideal of “Narayana” is lost forever. I doubt at all that if that is what a visionary like Modiji wants, but without taking stock of what is commonly called the “narrative” battle, we are looking at a nation of unhappy and cluelessly destructive people in two generations who will remain Indian, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, whatever they are only in blindly ideological terms rather than through a rich experience of all of our culture and its eternal promise.
This is not an alarmist call about how Hindus or Hinduism are going to vanish, nor a charge of betrayal against the BJP for betraying its Hindu base. There is real concern about the future of Hindu sovereignty, for sure, and there are criticisms being made by many concerned Hindus that the BJP tends to speak for Hindus only in opposition, and then settles down to ruling as a status quo, or even wannabe-secular dispensation. I believe that this criticism is slightly less appropriate with the present government, whose members seem to embody a balance of constitutional professionalism with personal piety and respect for Hindu sensibilities.
However, there is one glaring front on which the present leadership remains profoundly stunted, and that is in helping elevate the Hindu viewpoint to a place of legitimacy in the Indian public sphere. That, they simply do not seem to know how to do. Despite all the talk of digital media and participatory democracy, the BJP suffers from a serious absence of understanding of the terrain on which a “narrative” battle is conducted. This is not a battle for votes. That, the present leadership seems very good at doing. The people are broadly with Modi, there is no doubt. But as the last few years have shown, what we might see going forward is the strange scenario where a dedicated Hindu leadership continues to rule the country, and maybe even rule it sincerely, but get used to watching on indifferently as the soul of its people gets viciously eviscerated by a superior narrative machine that permanently keeps the Hindu grievance marginalized, discredited, and disreputable.
And the problem with the toxic media and academic narrative is that it delegitimizes not only a Hindu sense of grievance, political Hinduism as it were, but even existential Hinduism. This has been the fundamental squeeze tightening around Hindus for decades now; anything short of extreme loathing against Hinduism is dismissed as Hindu extremism, and virulent anti-Hindu falsehood elevated as secular, scientific, knowledge of Hinduism.
The people have seen through that no doubt. They participate in online forums, and social media has become a vibrant place for challenging the old giants. There is a movement going on, for sure. But, as I wrote recently in The Organiser, a movement will also need to engage and win over a place for itself in the establishment as well. It cannot remain a movement forever. It will be like running on a treadmill and shouting fire instead of actually reaching the place and putting it out. This is not a good thing at all. As time passes, Hindus will be struggling more and more to simply hold on to the narrative ground, not to mention literal ground, being eroded from under them. The possibility of a Hindu place in the world alongside others, will continue to weaken. Eighty percent of Indians will always be condemned to be talked about, talked over, and left to struggle to find the dignity that is granted so easily to the grievances of others in the world today.
Hindu Activism and Career Prospects
I recently asked Hindu activists among my Facebook friends two questions; one on the promise of a Hindu awareness being awakened in the next generation, and the other on whether Hindu activism takes a toll on peoples’ health (as I have seen happen elsewhere). Several responses, interestingly enough had to do with an unexpected angle; that Hindu activism seriously harms career prospects. These are not academics! It is stunning to see that being associated with what in any other context would be called a human rights or multicultural issue gets you discredited like this. This is an example of what I mean by running on a treadmill. Unless the concerns that animate the movement also find their way into the institutions, namely media and academia, Hindus with a conscience will remain forever fearful, or forever antagonistic to others, in order to have their voice heard.
The institutionalization of narratives is something that has to be done, and unfortunately, there is little expertise outside the institutions (which are largely hostile) to do this successfully. At least two major efforts that I know of by various organizations and leaders to engage with “narrative building” have been unsuccessful, and sometimes profoundly counterproductive, creating unnecessary baggage and exposing the movement to easy dismissal or demonization. These are all still voluntary efforts, but we are yet to see how a government nominally in power will deal with these issues. Clearly, it knows there is a constituency that expects to see changes in the discourse, at the very least, in education.
Wrong Ways to “Change the Narrative”
But how the government will deal with this remains to be seen. So far, one can note three tendencies:
One, to ignore the whole narrative front. After all, the longer the big media and academic elites continue their increasingly mendacious attacks on Hindus, the more isolated they become from the majority of Indians, who will in turn strengthen the political base of the party.
Two, to reach out to opponents on the assumption that the BJP is now the grand new party and must be inclusive and “coopt” everyone (though the “coopting” attempts seems like genuflecting and are often brashly rebuffed). This step is usually accompanied by an embarrassed silencing and distancing of sympathetic voices, as if it’s infra dig to still be seen with Hindus.
Three, to dismiss opponents as “antinationals” and “presstitutes” and push the buttons of government force wherever possible to enforce top-down, statist solutions like compulsory national anthem singing on campuses, regurgitation of supposedly patriotic content, and so on.
All three approaches are seriously immature and flawed, in my view. One cannot expect a movement to grow on resentment after coming to power; the other side’s resentment will always be stronger (it’s theory that India is now experiencing fascism sounds ever more credible in its circles, small but influential as they are), and the project can collapse in a moment. Indians are deeply aspirational at the moment, and even if the vast majority of small town working and lower middle classes oppose the elites of media and academia today, they will eventually be forced to buy into a fashionable soft Hinduphobia as a marker of upward mobility. This is for the simple reason that there are careers and paths to advancement galore in bashing Hinduism and India. There are none at all, not in media and academia at last, in defending them.
And as for top-down solutions like forcing new curricula and patriotic practices in campuses, those are all things that would breed only even more resentment, and further prove to the young that somehow all that the media elites are saying about fascism in India are coming true. A narrative battle has to be won by entering the mind of the opponent, not by trying to cap it. For that, the government has to learn from the movement that helped put it there, and engage with the establishment confidently, civilly, and on the terms set by its constituency. The establishment knows only too well that this is a huge weakness in the otherwise victorious political machine of the BJP today. It tested the waters mildly with the Maharashtra “meat ban” issue in early 2015, escalated it to strong levels with the “intolerance” protests, and all but staged a kangaroo court and lynch mob execution of anyone with the word “Hindu” in their identities a few weeks ago for the completely unrelated crime of a journalist’s murder.
The establishment is strong, not simply because it is funded by some foreign hand, as many in the Hindu movement think, but simply because it is doing its job. Journalists, professors, writers, activists, have all been studying, teaching, advocating one simple thing for two decades now, and they all believe in it completely. It does not matter at all that their theories are being proved wrong by reality. They have all the channels they need to keep their influence going forever, and the only way to change it is to either spend the serious money needed to create parallel channels in education and media, or to figure out how to defeat the establishment on grounds appropriate to a narrative battle: through debate, reason, and sheer truth-force.
The movement has enough energy to perhaps grow to this stage, but this can happen only if the leadership transforms its understanding of the narrative battlefield and stops treating the movement cynically. The movement is challenged as it is functioning without institutions and resources to fight the massive propaganda war raging against it. For the government to become an albatross on the neck of its supporters through sheer ineptitude is inexcusable, and unbecoming of the promise its leaders have offered after decades or even centuries of despair.
The World and its Story-Forces
If India is to be truly recovered, then a serious effort has to commence to rescue its story about itself. One billion people with a strong, unbroken sense of spirit and past, and a powerful universalist yearning to steer the planet off its looming ecological catastrophe should not be dummified any longer. The battle for the world-story is on, and right now, we are not even on the margins of it. As story-forces, only three narratives are holding sway right now: (1) Islam (2) the nominally secular-liberal globalization order (3) what we might broadly call MAGA, a backlash to the former drawing on but not identical to Western Christianity (China is a force, but is not a story-force as such on the same scale).“I was talking in a school two years ago, and I was being introduced by a male teacher, and he said, ‘Mr. Kerr will be talking about Pearl Harbor,’ ” said Mr. Kerr. “And one of these little girls said, ‘Pearl Harbor? Who is she?’
Photo
“Can you imagine?” he said.
The formal announcement of the disbanding will come in the ceremony that will begin here at 7:40 a.m. on Wednesday, with a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. (12:55 p.m. Eastern time), 70 years to the minute from when the Japanese attack began. Nearly 3,000 people are expected to attend the commemoration at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center, overlooking the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.
William H. Muehleib, the national president of the association, made it here from his home in Virginia Beach for the ceremony and the announcement. He said he hoped many other survivors would come as well, but, he said, those who came, came on their own.
No group meetings or social events are on the schedule. “The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association doesn’t have anything planned,” he said.
The association was founded in 1958 with a roster of 28,000, all members of the military who had been on the island of Oahu the morning of the attack. It was granted a Congressional charter in October 1985. Mr. Muehleib said membership had fallen to 2,700 as of Sept. 1; though he said that given the continuing death toll and the declining health of men who are all around 90 years old or older, that figure exaggerates the actual strength of the organization, which is why the board voted to close down.
“With the advanced age and ill health of our membership and the declining numbers of members, it was obvious that we could not continue the requirements that corporate 501C lays on our membership and on our board,” Mr. Muehleib said, referring to the group’s tax -exempt, nonprofit status. In other words, there were just not survivors to continue to fill the positions of president, vice president, treasurer and secretary.
Daniel A. Martinez, the chief historian for the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, said that 7,000 survivors were on hand for the 50th anniversary 20 years ago. By contrast, he expects about 125 survivors to be present for the announcement about the disbanding of the organization.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Mr. Martinez said that Pearl Harbor Day was supposed to be marked everywhere and every year, not just here. “It is supposed to be a national day of remembrance, with ceremonies across this country. We’ve noticed this is not happening.”
Photo
The decline has been increasingly evident in the local chapters. Bernard Comito, who lives in Dalton, Ohio, said he watched as divisions closed or merged, trying to gather a dwindling flock. He now oversees 15 states in the group and represents 175 living members, though he was not even sure about that.
“There really isn’t that much choice,” he said. “According to our charter, there has to be a Pearl Harbor survivor as the president, vice president, treasurer, and secretary. We’re having all kinds of trouble trying to find people to fill those positions, especially with the treasurer position, because we have a lot of money tied up in stocks and bonds. The person that we have now wants to retire desperately.”
He said deaths were only part of the problem. “Most of our survivors are well into their 90s,” he said. “A lot are housebound and can’t travel, a lot are in rest homes, so it becomes a tremendous problem at this age. You have an organization that doesn’t replenish itself. We don’t get new members.”
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.
Mr. Eckel said his local chapter, in East Texas, had 15 members three years ago. At its latest meeting, earlier this year at a restaurant in Tyler, the turnout consisted of two members and four widows. “And that was it,” he said. “ We agreed that we would not meet anymore.”
This is not the first time, of course, that America has seen memories of a historic battle fade with the passing of the generation that fought it. On the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg in 1938, a surviving veteran of that event, then 99 years old, bivouacked on the Pennsylvania battlefield with some 1,600 fellow Civil War soldiers, blue and gray.
Mr. Muehleib said he was curious to see how many people would actually be on hand for this year’s Pearl Harbor ceremony. But while survivors of the battle might be few, they still have something of a presence here this week. Three of them, in partial uniform, sat under the stars at the famous kiawe tree at the House Without a Key restaurant and bar at the Halekulani Hotel on Monday night, enjoying the nightly show of Hawaiian music and the attention of a hula dancer.
Most of the survivors, though, are more like Mr. Eckel, who, after having both hips replaced and being barred from driving, is stuck at home. Not that he has given up hope on making a return visit to Pearl Harbor.ADVERTISEMENT:
By: Cliff Daigle
My second opponent at the prerelease last weekend (we both lost in the first round) said to me, “It doesn’t matter if I win a few packs, because I already won!” and then he showed me the Steam Vents he’d opened.
After the match, he asked me if I wanted to buy the Expeditions land off of him. I declined, and I said to him, “I think the price is going to come down in a few weeks.”
He said, “Maybe, but I don’t know what to do with it.”
Perhaps this is you. You opened an Expeditions land and now you’re asking, “Now what?”
Well, I’m here to walk you through your choices. I am not a professional seller, I am not affiliated with any store, and my views reflect only my experiences.
Option #1: Keep it!
This is the most straightforward of your choices. Pick a deck, or choose a binder, and leave it there. Maybe you keep it in the back page of your binder just to show off, maybe you add it to a Commander deck, but whatever your preference is, the card is in your possession.
This is also the choice that will probably give you the best return on the value. If you leave it in there for a year, it’s going to be worth more than it is now.
Would I do it: Maybe. I have one all-foil Commander deck, and it doesn’t have a Scalding Tarn or Polluted Delta…but those are among the most expensive cards from Expeditions. If I opened one of those…yeah, I’d keep it.
ADVERTISEMENT:
Option #2: Trade it!
This sounds like an appealing idea to a lot of people, to give up this one single card and get so much in return! I could easily see someone emptying out their binder in order to get their hands on the Expeditions land they want so very badly, not least because you don’t often find people with high-end cards for trade.
ADVERTISEMENT:
It’s worth saying that if you’re going to trade this, be aggressive in what you’re asking for, especially if you’re trading a fetch land or shock land. While it seems these aren’t as super-rare as originally anticipated, they are still pretty hard to find and you shouldn’t be shy if you’re going to part with yours. Grab everything of theirs you want, negotiate a little, and if they don’t want to trade the things you want, start to walk away. Most of the time, they will come around.
If there’s no trading partner available at your store, there’s always online trading. Deckbox is my preferred method, but if you are just starting you’ll be asked to send your cards first and I know that can be intimidating at the beginning, especially if you’re trying to start with a card worth more than $100.
Trading the card on PucaTrade is a strong option. This is the way to get all the points you’ll need for a while, or jump you up to the big cards you desire. Think of it as getting 100% of the card’s value in store credit.
Would I do it: Yes. I have never been a heavy PucaTrade user, mainly because I don’t have a lot of time to watch and jump in when someone wants a card I have. I would be content to gain a stack of PucaPoints or spend a couple of days haggling on Deckbox until I got exactly what I wanted.
Option #3: Sell it!
There’s a simplicity in selling your Expeditions land to whichever online card shop you like, because you’ll get the cash or credit right away. No haggling, no discussion, just click, pack, send. If you want cash this may or may not be the best option, since right now lots of stores have lots of prices set up. I would expect that the prices will stabilize this week as stores begin opening their product.
As ever, though, doing the simple thing is going to cost you some. Typically, stores will give you about half the retail price of a card in cash. Most big stores will then add a percentage to it and give you more in store credit, to avoid paying cash.
If you’re not used to dealing with expensive cards or selling things yourself, there’s an ease and a comfort in dealing with the store of your choice. Just understand that there’s a real cost.
Selling the card via Facebook, Twitter, or other social media is an option, but carries its own set of risks.
eBay might be the best option if you want to convert your card to cash. There will be fees from eBay and from PayPal, and so you should expect to pay 10-20% of the final sale value. If you’ve sold things on eBay before, you don’t need me to tell you about it. If you haven’t, understand that eBay almost always sides with the buyer in disputes, so there’s always the chance you could get burned as the seller if you’re unfamiliar with the process. Other buyers will shy away from someone with low feedback.
It’s my understanding that TCGPlayer isn’t that much better than eBay when it comes to small amounts of cards, but I’ve never sold there and I’ll let people share their experiences |
have been unimaginable for all but the rarest sneakers ten years ago. And since everybody is off chasing those handful of shoes, there’s less and less focus on everything else.
Not surprisingly, I haven’t had much other success in getting anything with high demand in the past few years. Straight up, money has poisoned that well. But ironically, I’ve found it’s become really easy to scoop up other great releases as there’s so much product on the market, a lot of special shoes just fall by the wayside.
You’d be hard pressed to find anybody caring about a couple of my recent favorites, which is a shame. The first is a collaboration between Garbstore and Reebok, classic retro models that are manufactured with their parts inside out, so you can see elements of their construction that are usually hidden from view. It’s edgy stuff that you’d sooner expect from the likes of Maison Martin Margiela or Engineered Garments, but in a familiar form to help bring it back down to earth. I bought my pair for less than $80 during HBX’s sale last year, and I’m not ashamed to admit I felt fully validated when no less than jeffstaple posted the same shoe to his Instagram months later.
The other is part of a criminally unheralded retro line from Brooks, a storied brand well regarded by serious runners. It’s called Brooks Heritage and it excels at the one thing that almost every footwear company seems to have completely lost interest in, well-made classic retro models with simple, attractive colors. Their latest batch includes a bunch of court shoes, my pick is the Doherty, which sports a premium mesh upper rimmed with an elegantly shaped suede trim. If you’re interested in 70s style runners, they have the Vanguard (although I prefer the Vantage, which they have apparently discontinued). Again, you won’t be paying more than $80 for the privilege.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot recently – mostly inspired by the realization that I have more sneakers than I have use for, which I spent way too much effort buying. One of the things that’s brought my thoughts into focus is the NikeCraft Mars Yard shoe. It was originally released in 2012 as part of a capsule collection celebrating the artist Tom Sachs’ Space Program:Mars exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. It was available for sale there, and also at Union Los Angeles. I’m into visual art and the shoe is gorgeous besides, with fabrication that’s almost literally out of this world. It also includes nods to Nike’s DNA (such as an upper resembling the “V Series” running models from the 80s, and a platform similar to the Special Forces Boot that had only come out recently). It was past, present and future, all in one.
I still remember calling Union on that day to place a phone order. I doubt there was a line or anything else, the guy on the phone had time on his hands. In person, it’s even nicer than it looks online and the packaging is as amazing as you’d expect from a Tom Sachs piece. I didn’t think much of it then (and still haven’t gotten around to wearing them), but noticed that it seemed to command a hefty price on the resale market. More recently, my possession of a pair seems to have become a minor legend among a couple of Heddels staffers.
As you may already know, Nike has made a new version to accompany another Sachs installation, and resellers are already going wild. I hope the serious fans I know have a reasonable chance to buy a pair, and good luck to them. At the same time, I can’t help but think that there’s something just as incredible out there occurring at the margins of hype. Something that nobody is paying attention to, but feels just right. Something that everyone will care about five years from now.Google has proven time and again it is on the extreme bleeding edge of invention when it comes to scale out architectures that make supercomputers look like toys. But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on its high level platform services? And what if it had open sourced these technologies, as it has done with the Kubernetes container controller?
The world would be surely different, and the reason it is not is because there is a lesson to be learned, one that applies equally well to traditional HPC systems for simulation and modeling as well as the Web application, analytics, and transactional systems forged by hyperscalers and cloud builders. And the lesson is this: Making a tool or system that was created for a specific task more general purpose and enterprise-grade – meaning mere mortals, not just Site Reliability Engineers at hyperscalers can make it work and keep it working – is very, very hard. And just because something scales up and out does not mean that it scales down, as it needs to do be appropriate for enterprises.
That, in a nutshell, is why it has taken nearly ten years since Google first started development of Spanner and five years from when Google released its paper on this globe-spanning, distributed SQL database to when it is available as a service on Google’s Cloud Platform public cloud, aimed at more generic workloads than its own AdWords and Google Play.
If this was easy, Google would have long since done it or someone else cloning Google’s ideas would have, and thus relational databases that provide high availability, horizontal scalability, and transactional consistency on a vast scale would be normal. They are not, and that is why the availability of Spanner on Cloud Platform is a big deal.
It would have been bigger news if Google had open sourced Spanner or some tool derived from Spanner, much as it has done with the guts of its Borg cluster and container controller through the Kubernetes project, and that may yet happen as Cockroach Labs, the New York City startup that is cloning Spanner much as Yahoo did with Google’s MapReduce to create Hadoop or the HBase and Cassandra NoSQL databases that were derived from ideas in Google’s BigTable NoSQL database.
To put it bluntly, it would have been more interesting to see Google endorse CockroachDB and support it on Cloud Platform, creating an open source community as well as a cloud service for its Cloud Platform customers. But, as far as we know, it did not do that. (We will catch up with the Cockroach Labs folks, who all came from Google, to see what they think about all this.) And we think that the groundswell of support for Kubernetes, which Google open sourced and let go, is a great example of how to build a community with momentum very fast.
For all we know, Google will eventually embrace CockroachDB as a service on Cloud Platform not just for external customers but for “internal” Google workloads as well, much as is starting to happen with Kubernetes jobs running on Cloud Platform through the Container Engine service among Googlers.
Spanning The Globe
Back in 2007, Google was frustrated by the limitations of its Megastore NoSQL and BigTable NoSQL databases, which were fine in that they provided horizontal scalability and reasonably fast performance, but Google wanted to also have these data services be more like traditional relational databases and also have them be geographically distributed for high availability and for maximum throughput on a set of global applications that also ran geographically. And so it embarked on a means to take BigTable, which had been created back in 2004 to house data stored for Google’s eponymous search engines as well as Gmail and other servers, and allow it to span global distances and still be usable as a single database for Google’s developers, who could care less about how a database or datastore is architected and implemented so long as it gets closer and closer to the SQL-based relational database that is the foundation of enterprise computing.
And, by the way, a pairing of relational data models and database schemas with the SQL query language that was invented by IBM nearly forty years ago and cloned by Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and anyone else you can think of including Postgres and MySQL. Moreover, IBM has been running clustered databases on its mainframes for as long as we can remember – they are called Parallel Sysplexes – and they can be locally clustered as well as geographically distributed and run a cluster of DB2 database instances as if there were one giant, logical database. Just like Spanner. Google databases like Spanner may dwarf those that can be implemented on IBM mainframes, but Google was not the first company to come up with this stuff. Contrary to what Silicon Valley may believe.
With any relational database, the big problem when many users (be they people or applications) is deciding who has access to the data and who can change that data as they are sharing the database. There are very sophisticated timestamping and locking mechanisms for deciding who has the right to change data and what that data is – these are the so-called ACID properties of databases. Google luminary Eric Brewer, who is vice president of infrastructure at Google and who helped create many of the data services at the search engine giant, coined the CAP Theorem back in 1998 and the ideas were developed by the database community in the following years. The gist of CAP Theorem is that all distributed databases have to worry about three things – consistency, availability, and partition tolerance – and no matter what you do, you can only have no more than two of these properties being fully implemented at any time in the datastore or database. Brewer explained this theorem in some detail in a blog post related to the Cloud Spanner service Google has just launched, and also explained that the theory is about having 100 percent of two of these properties, and that in the real world, as with NoSQL and NewSQL databases, the real issue is how you can get close enough to 100 percent on all three to have a workable, usable database that is reliable enough to run enterprise applications.
With Spanner, after a decade of work, Google has been able to achieve this. (You can read all about Spanner in the paper that Google release back in October 2012.) Part of the reason why Google can do this is because it has developed a sophisticated timestamping scheme for the globally distributed parts of Spanner that creates a kind of universal and internally consistent time that is synchronized by Google’s own network and is not dependent on outside services like the Network Time Protocol (NTP) that is used by servers to keep relatively in synch. Google needed a finer-grained control of timestamping with Spanner, so it came up with a scheme based on atomic clocks and GPS receivers in its datacenters that could provide a kind of superclock that spanned all of its datacenters, ordering transactions across the distributed systems. This feature, called TrueTime by Google, is neat, but the real thing that makes Google’s Spanner work at the speed and scale that it does is the internal Google network that lashes those datacenters to the same heartbeat of time as it passes.
Brewer said as much in a white paper that was published about Spanner and TrueTime in conjunction with the Cloud Spanner service this week.
“Many assume that Spanner somehow gets around CAP via its use of TrueTime, which is a service that enables the use of globally synchronized clocks. Although remarkable, TrueTime does not significantly help achieve CA; its actual value is covered below. To the extent there is anything special, it is really Google’s wide-area network, plus many years of operational improvements, that greatly limit partitions in practice, and thus enable high availability.”
The CA here refers to Consistency and Availability, and these are possible because Google has a very high throughput, global fiber optic network linking its datacenters with at least three links between the datacenters and the network backbone, called B1. This means that Spanner partitions that are being written to and that are trying to replicate data to other Spanner partitions running around the Google facilities have many paths to reach each other and eventually get all of the data synchronized – eventually being a matter of tens of milliseconds, not tens of nanoseconds like a port to port hop on a very fast switch and not hundreds of milliseconds, which is the time it takes for a human being to see an application moving too slow.
The important thing about Spanner is that it is a database with SQL semantics that allows reads without any locking of the database and massive scalability on local Spanner slices to thousands (and we would guess tens of thousands) of server nodes, with very fast replication on a global scale to many difference Spanner slices. When we pressed Google about the local and global scalability limits on the Cloud Spanner service, a Google spokesperson said: “Technically speaking, there are no limits to Cloud Spanner’s scale.”
Ahem. If we had a dollar for every time someone told us that.... What we know from the original paper is that Spanner was designed to, in theory, scale across millions of machines across hundreds of datacenters and juggle trillions of rows of data in its database. What Google has done in practice, that is another thing.
We also asked how many geographically distributed copies of the database are provided through the Cloud Spanner service, and this was the reply: “Everything is handled automatically, but customers have full view into where their data is located via our UI/menu.”
We will seek to get better answers to these and other questions.
The other neat thing about the paper that Brewer released this week is that it provided some availability data for Spanner as it is running inside of Google, and this chart counts incidents – unexpected things that happened – rather than failures – times when Spanner was unavailable itself. Incidents can cause failures, but not always, and Google claims that Spanner is available more than 99.999 percent (so called 5 9s) of the time.
As you can see from the chart above, the most frequent cause of incidents relating to Spanner running internally were user errors, such as overloading the system or not configuring something correctly; in this case, only that user is affected and everyone else using Spanner is woefully unaware of the issue. (Not my circus, not my monkeys....) The cluster incidents, which made up 12.1 percent of Spanner incidents, were when servers or datacenter power or other components crashed, and often a Site Reliability Engineer is needed to fix something here. The operator incidents are when SREs do something wrong, and yes, that happens. The bugs, which are true software errors, presumably in Spanner code as well as applications, and Brewer said that the two biggest outages (meaning the time and impact) were related to such software errors. Networking errors for Spanner are when the network goes kaplooey, and it usually caused datacenters or regions with Spanner nodes to be cut off from the rest of the Spanner cluster. To be a CA system in the CAP Theorem categorization, the A has to be pretty good and not caused by the network partitions being an issue.
With under 8 percent of Spanner failures being due to network and partition issues and with north of 5 9s availability, you can make a pretty good argument that Spanner – and therefore the Cloud Spanner service – being a pretty good fuzzy CAP database, not just hewing to the CP definition that both Spanner and CockroachDB technically fall under.
Spanning The Google Cloud
The inside Spanner at Google underlies hundreds of its applications and petabytes of capacity and churns through tens of millions of queries per second, and it is obviously battle tested enough for Google to trust other applications on it besides its own.
At the moment, Cloud Spanner is only available as a beta service to Cloud Platform customers, and Google is not talking about a timeline for when it will be generally available, but we expect a lot more detail at the Next ’17 conference in early March that Google is hosting. What we know for sure is that Google is aiming Cloud Spanner at customers who are, like it was a decade ago, frustrated by MySQL databases that are chopped up into shards, as Google was using at the time as its relational datastore, as well as those who have chosen the Postgres path once Oracle bought MySQL. The important thing is that Spanner and now Cloud Spanner support distributed transactions, schemas, and DDL statements as well as SQL queries and JDBC drivers that are commonly used in the enterprise to tickle databases. Cloud Spanner has libraries for the popular languages out there, including Java, Node.js, Go, and Python.
As is the case with any cloud data service out there, putting data in is free, but moving it around different regions is not and neither would be downloading it off Cloud Platform to another service or a private datacenter, should that be necessary.click to enlarge So, medical marijuana is kind of a thing in Texas now.
********
Medical marijuana could be legal in Texas, sort of.The Texas House of Representatives voted 96 to 34 to approve the second reading of a Senate bill that would allow limited use of Cannabidiol oils, a marijuana derivative, Progress Texas said in a press release..And the proposals authors are Republican! Crazy.Maybe the times are a changin'?Progress Texas Executive Deputy Ed Espinoza said the approval is historic.He is right.“Marijuana policy reform has made history in Texas! More than 20,000 people engaged in a serious conversation this year, and we are pleased to see strong support from a bipartisan majority," Espinoza said in a press release.Heather Fazio, Texas political director for the Washington D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project, told thethat while the bill is a step in the right direction, full-scale, whole plant, medicinal marijuana is what the Lone Star State needs.The bill, crafted by Sen. Kevin Etlife and Rep. Stephanie Klick would legalize the Cannabidiol oils, which don't cause euphoria upon ingestion.The oils have been shown to bring relief to people suffering from intractable epilepsy.Now, all eyes are on Texas Governor Greg Abbott. The bill is on its way to his desk.Witness photo of Good Samaritan helping shark attack victim before emergency crews arrived. pic.twitter.com/hRr2sqjxmf — WWAY NewsChannel 3 (@WWAY) June 14, 2015
BRUNSWICK COUNTY, N.C. — Two teenagers were attacked by a shark on the same North Carolina beach on Sunday, resulting in both losing an arm.
A 12-year-old girl lost part of her arm and could lose her left leg in an attack on a beach in Oak Island at about 4:15 p.m.
Authorities said a 16-year-old boy was also attacked about 45 minutes later. He also lost an arm.
Both were airlifted to New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington. Oak Island officials said both victims are in fair condition.
A hospital spokesperson told CNN that they’ve each had an arm amputated; his below the shoulder, hers at the elbow. The female also reportedly sustained serious tissue damage to her leg.
A witness told WWAY that the boy’s arm was “clean off.” He said the shark that attacked the boy looked about seven or eight feet long. It remains unknown whether or not it’s the same shark.
Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Other witnesses described the incident as “nightmarish” and compared it to a scene from “Jaws,” according to The Associated Press.
Both attacks happened at high tide in the vicinity of Ocean Crest Pier, a popular destination among beach goers. It's also a popular fishing spot and any possible bait in the water may have attracted sharks.
Oak Island sent an ATV along the entire beach to clear everyone out of the water. The sheriff also sent a helicopter.
Although the beach was cleared, Oak Island officials said the beaches will be open on Monday. Authorities urge the public to be cautious. Extra personnel will be on the scene.
The identities of the victims have not been released. The girl is not from Oak Island and was visiting relatives, according to reports.
On Thursday, another girl, 13, was bitten while boogie boarding off Ocean Isle Beach. That makes three shark attacks in Brunswick County in three days.
In Thursday's incident, the victim suffered non-life-threatening injuries, but the shark took bites of her boogie board.
The Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office said the Town of Oak Island will release more details about Sunday’s shark attacks on Monday morning.
This is the scene right now in Oak Island at the 58th access after two reported shark bites. (Heather Eccard Grube) pic.twitter.com/sUV6Feg6wg — WECT News (@wectnews) June 15, 2015
Asking for prayers. My 16 year old cousin was attacked by a shark today at Oak Island and lost his arm and is in critical condition. — ★gennahutzler★ (@gennahutzler) June 14, 2015
More pictures into our newsroom from Oak Island after two reported shark bite incidents. (Source: Tyler Barnes) pic.twitter.com/dv7XXL7S04 — WECT News (@wectnews) June 14, 2015
These look to be two separate instances; teenage girl at Oak Crest Motel; teenage boy near 55th St. #OKIShark — Patrick Ellis (@PatrickEllisWx) June 14, 2015
16 year old boy has lost an arm to the shark bite; he is being airlifted to NHRMC now. #OKIShark — Patrick Ellis (@PatrickEllisWx) June 14, 2015
Helicopter patrolling the beach in Oak Island following reports of two shark bites. Source: Audrey Sudderth pic.twitter.com/EjYz7HJ6Pd — WECT News (@wectnews) June 14, 2015
The mayor of Oak Island posted the statements below to Facebook following the first shark attack. She said shark attacks at Oak Island are so rare, she can't remember any happening before Sunday.
CNN contributed to this report.GAINESVILLE — Five of Florida's living former governors met at the University of Florida Friday and offered up a stern bipartisan warning about the future direction of the state.
The governors — Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, Bob Martinez, Buddy MacKay and Charlie Crist — lamented the loss of environmental protections, the dismantling of guided growth management, and the recent partisan assault on the Florida Supreme Court.
Absent from the panel was former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush. The "Conversation with Florida Governors" was sponsored by the UF law school's Law Review as part of the Allen L. Poucher Legal Education Series.
Askew, who as a Democratic governor in the 1970s ushered in judicial reform and the nonpartisan merit retention elections for the Supreme Court, said he was disappointed that the Republican Party had joined in the push to oppose the three justices up for merit retention. He chided critics who claim that the justices should not be judged by their records.
"The Republican Party is, I think, making a serious mistake when it injects a partisan view on what should be a nonpartisan system,'' he said. But, "an election is an election" and "people can't get told what they can consider."
MacKay, the former Democratic legislator and congressman who served as lieutenant governor under the late Gov. Lawton Chiles from 1991-97, criticized the Republican-led legislature as having forgotten the state's past.
Today's legislative leadership "is basically faced in the wrong direction" again, he said, "blaming things on the federal government and basically saying we don't need a plan: let the hidden hand of the market take care of it."
He drew chuckles and applause from the crowd when he said Gov. Rick Scott also "believes in the hidden hand of the marketplace — which some people think is a fist clenched. Others believe it's a hand with the middle finger sticking up.''
Graham, a Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate for 18 years after he was as governor from 1979-87, said he set a series of goals. Among them: bringing Florida's higher education system into the top quartile of the nation and making environmental protection a policy embraced by every generation.
Martinez, a Republican who served from 1987-91, noted the environmental and growth management reforms put in place when he was governor prompted critics calling them communists. Over time, he said, local governments layered on their own rules and regulations, leading to delays and complexities.
Crist, governor from 2007-11, famously left his party and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2010 as an independent. He noted attending a fundraiser Thursday night in Miami on behalf of President Barack Obama, whom he has endorsed. He was asked about the oil spill during his term and said he "will be forever grateful to the Obama administration in holding BP's feet to the fire."
That bipartisan approach "is what we desperately need in Washington today and I think most people realize if you don't work together, you can't get stuff done,'' he said.
Crist was received warmly by the other governors, including MacKay and Graham, who each sparred with him politically in the past. After the event, Askew pulled him aside to offer a word of consolation for being the brunt of criticism from his former party.
"Charlie Crist got pushed out of the Republican Party for reaching across the aisle — which is what the people want,'' Askew later told reporters. "Charlie Crist advertised himself as the people's governor. I'm not endorsing him, but he's a friend, a very good friend, and I regretted he had to bear the brunt of excessive partisanship.''Elderly hospital patients may be less likely to die prematurely or be readmitted for serious complications when they're treated by female physicians, a U.S. study suggests.
With female doctors, patients had 4 percent lower odds of dying within a month after being admitted to the hospital and a 5 percent smaller chance of repeat hospitalizations within the first month after leaving the hospital, the study found.
"The difference in mortality rates surprised us," said lead author Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, a health policy researcher at Harvard University in Boston.
Previous studies have found differences in the way men and women practice medicine, Tsugawa added by email. For example, female physicians are more likely to adhere to clinical guidelines and focus more on communication and forging relationships with patients.
"However, it was largely unknown whether such differences have a meaningful impact on patient outcomes," Tsugawa said.
While the findings don't necessarily mean patients need to seek out female doctors, the results do suggest there's room for some physicians to rethink how they communicate with patients and make treatment decisions, Tsugawa said.
To assess differences in outcomes for male and female doctors, researchers analyzed data on more than one million adults 65 and older insured by Medicare who altogether were hospitalized more than 1.5 million times between 2011 and 2014. During those hospital stays, they were treated by general internists.
The research team analyzed 30-day mortality rates - i.e., how many patients died within 30 days of being admitted to the hospital - and 30-day readmission rates, or how often patients returned to the hospital within 30 days of discharge.
During the study period, 58,344 internists treated at least one hospitalized Medicare patient. Among this group of doctors, 18,751, or 32 percent, were women.
After adjusting for patient and physician characteristics, there were small but clinically meaningful differences in mortality and readmission rates, researchers report in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Patients treated by female physicians had 30-day mortality rates of 11.07 percent, compared with 11.49 percent for male doctors, the study found.
With female doctors, patients had 30-day readmission rates of 15.02 percent, compared with 15.57 percent for male physicians.
Researchers saw better outcomes for mortality and readmissions with female physicians across a range of common conditions treated in the hospital including bloodstream infections, pneumonia, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, urinary tract infections, kidney failure, heart rhythm disorders and gastrointestinal bleeding.
The study is observational and doesn't explain why there might be better outcomes with female doctors, the researchers note. It's possible that gender serves as a marker of differences in practice patterns that might influence outcomes, they say.
Still, the findings that female internists provide higher quality care should push hospitals to do a better job of promoting and paying women, who typically earn less and have fewer opportunities for advancement than their male peers in medicine, Dr. Anna Parks and Dr. Rita Redberg of the University of California, San Francisco, argue in an accompanying editorial.
"Some have suggested that home responsibilities might contribute to female physicians providing inferior care and thus justify these disparities," Parks said by email.
"The data from this paper should serve to highlight these inequities - female physicians provide equivalent or potentially better care compared to male colleagues yet get promoted less often and have lower salaries than their male colleagues," Parks said. "We want to close that gap."Preview | Recap | Notebook
Timberwolves-Kings Preview
Posted Mar 01 2014 2:23AM It is shaping up to be a night of returns Saturday for the Sacramento Kings and the Minnesota Timberwolves. DeMarcus Cousins will be back from suspension for the Kings while the visiting Timberwolves could have Nikola Pekovic and former Sacramento first-round pick Kevin Martin available. Cousins will return after missing Friday's 126-122 road loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. He was suspended for punching Houston Rockets guard Patrick Beverley in the stomach in the first quarter of a 129-103 loss Tuesday and fined $20,000 as part of the incident in which he verbally abused official Courtney Kirkland and failed to leave the court in a timely manner. The power forward posted on Twitter following the game: "Disappointed with the way I acted out on the court tonight. I want to apologize and say sorry to my team and the fans for letting them down." Cousins leads the league with 15 technical fouls this season and will be suspended one game by the NBA if he gets another one. Minnesota (28-29), meanwhile, could see the returns of its second- and third-leading scorers in Martin and Pekovic, respectively. Martin averages 19.0 points and has missed the last seven games with a broken left thumb. Pekovic, averaging 18.0 points, has missed the last 13 with an injured right foot. Both were back at practice Thursday and could be back in action, with Pekovic a likely candidate to match up in defending Cousins. Martin spent nearly his first six seasons with the Kings. He has won all four games he has played as a visitor to Sleep Train Arena, where he scored 2,903 points with Sacramento to rank seventh all-time. While Cousins is tied for fifth in the league with 34 double-doubles, Minnesota's Kevin Love continues to lead in that category with 48. Love has averaged 34.3 points and 12.0 rebounds in his last six games since missing one with a bruised left quadriceps. Love just missed his second triple-double in three games Tuesday as he had 33 points, 13 boards and nine assists in a 110-101 win at Phoenix. "I think when we were up 10 they told me that if I can get an outlet here, you get your triple-double," Love said, "but at the point I just wanted to secure the rebound and get to the free throw line, get the lead up a little bit more so we wouldn't have to worry about much. Nine assists again, I have been there a few times." Love had 27 points and 11 rebounds the last time these teams met and Cousins had 20 and 11, but Rudy Gay's game-high 33 points may have proved decisive in Sacramento's 111-108 road win Jan. 15. That contest marked Derrick Williams' first game against the team that drafted him second overall in 2011. Williams, traded Nov. 26 to Sacramento (20-38) for Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, scored 16 points off the bench. Mbah a Moute will face the Kings for the first time since that trade. He's started five of nine games for Sacramento this season, totaling 40 points and 27 rebounds. Gay scored 32 points Friday and is averaging 29.7 in his last three games. His 20.9 average against the Wolves is his highest against any team.
Copyright 2014 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited Copyright 2014 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited
Martin, Love lead Wolves past Kings 108-97
Posted Mar 02 2014 2:01AM SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) Having played six seasons with the Kings, Kevin Martin is very comfortable at Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento. He showed it again Saturday night, scoring 26 points to help the Minnesota Timberwolves reach.500 with a 108-97 win over the Kings. Returning after missing Minnesota's last seven games with a broken left thumb, Martin fell into a groove from the start, making his first four shots and scoring 19 first-half points. "I feel like basketball is the easy part," said Martin, who is 5-0 in games at Sacramento since being traded to Houston in the 2009-10 season. "I remember getting hurt before and coming right back with good games, so this didn't surprise me." Martin was a late first-round draft pick who blossomed with the Kings. His first head coach was Rick Adelman, now Minnesota's coach. The time spent in Sacramento is something Martin savors. "I take pride in coming back here and trying to play well. Sacramento is like my second home," he said. "The fans here saw me grow from a guy who played 10 minutes a game as a rookie and is now a 10-year veteran." It was the second straight win and fifth in six games for the Timberwolves (29-29). Trailing by three points at the half, Minnesota outscored the Kings 31-17 in the third quarter, opening the frame with nine straight points and never relinquishing the lead. Kevin Love added 22 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists for Minnesota, and Nikola Pekovic had 20 points and nine rebounds. Corey Brewer scored 13. DeMarcus Cousins had 21 points and 17 rebounds for the Kings in his return from a one-game suspension. Rudy Gay had 22 of his 24 points in the opening half and Isaiah Thomas had 22 points and eight assists in Sacramento's third straight loss. The Kings committed 19 turnovers, including six in the third quarter that led to numerous fast-break opportunities for the Timberwolves. "For whatever reason we just continue to beat ourselves," Kings coach Michael Malone said. "Nineteen turnovers and 27 points? Good teams don't beat themselves. So it's very hard in the same game to beat your opponents and yourself and we did that tonight." It was a rare off night for Love, who averaged 34 points and 14 rebounds in seven February games. He shot 4 of 12, but converted 12 of 14 free throws. But Love received plenty of help from Martin and Pekovic, who sat out the last 13 with a right foot he injured Jan. 27 at Chicago. "It was way more than I expected," Pekovic said of his 28 minutes. "I was trying to be productive and had to push myself. I'm told the (ankle) pain will be there all the time." Cousins was suspended one game for punching Houston Rockets guard Patrick Beverley on Tuesday and fined $20,000 as part of the incident in which he verbally abused official Courtney Kirkland and failed to leave the court in a timely manner. Cousins leads the NBA with 15 technicals this season. One more and he will be suspended for one game under NBA rules. The Kings are winless in the 10 games Cousins has missed this season. "My biggest disappointment is the first quarter and the third quarter," Cousins said. "We let them get a hot start in the first quarter and the same thing with the third. Coming out of that third we had to dig ourselves out of ditch." Thomas made consecutive baskets to get the Kings within 97-95 with 2:09 remaining. But Pekovic converted two free throws and Rubio hit a 3 to give the Timberwolves some breathing room at 102-95 with 53.4 seconds left and Minnesota closed it out from the free throw line. NOTES: Kings reserve forward Carl Landry missed his second straight game with a sore right knee.... Sacramento shot 70 percent in the first quarter and led 31-30.... Adelman was head coach for eight seasons with the Kings and his teams made the playoffs every year. Sacramento hasn't made the playoffs since Adelman was fired following the 2005-06 season.... The Timberwolves are 3-1 on their road trip, which concludes Monday in Denver.
Copyright 2014 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited Copyright 2014 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited
Notebook: Timberwolves 108, Kings 97
James Ham, for NBA.com
Posted Sun Mar 02, 2014 1:17 AM - Updated Sun Mar 02, 2014 1:17 AM THE FACT: With a win Friday in Sacramento, the Minnesota Timberwolves have won five of their last six games and clawed their way back to.500 on the season. THE LEAD: The Kings (20-39) made a late charge to pull to within two points, but the Timberwolves (29-29) received timely shooting and a solid defense to pull out the 108-97 victory in Sacramento. Kevin Martin torched his former team, scoring a game-high 26 points on 9-for-16 shooting in his first game back from injury. Kevin Love struggled with his shot, but still managed to drop in 22 points, grab 10 rebounds and hand out seven assists. Nikola Pekovic added 20 points and nine rebounds in the win for Minnesota. Rudy Gay scored a team-high 24 points on 8-for-14 shooting in the loss. DeMarcus Cousins returned from suspension to kick in a 21-point, 17-rebound double-double, while Isaiah Thomas finished with 22 points and eight assists. QUOTABLE: "Winning on the road has been great. This is our longest road trip on the year so to be 3-1 now feels good, but we still, have a chance to finish it out in Denver and we feel like we need to do that."
-- Kevin Love on getting to.500 THE STAT: Minnesota outscored Sacramento 31-14 in the third quarter. Sacramento made a late charge, but the damage was already done. TURNING POINT: With just under two minutes remaining, Gay missed an open court layup that would have tied |
pockets of the wrong kind of people.” In the speech itself, Delingpole similarly claimed that “the global warming industry” is “a fraud; a sham; a conspiracy against the taxpayer.” [Breitbart News, 3/28/16]
Breitbart Writer Called Earth Day And Climate Change A “Scam.” Then-Breitbart contributor Jeffrey Jena penned an article in April 2009 headlined, “Beware the Earth Day Scam.” Jena wrote:
Today the granddaddy of all financial scams will be launched again. It is known as “Earth Day.” Do not fall for this scam! This con game may seem like a new idea, but it’s been around since the seventies, just like Mr. Obama’s “new” idea about saving the country by building some light rail. This scam seems to pop up every Spring in one form or another. This scam has also been circulated under the names; “Global Warming,” “Climate Change,” “The Green Movement,” and “Ecology.” Recent variations have used the names “Carbon Credits” and “Cap and Trade.” [Breitbart News, 4/22/09]
Delingpole Claimed “Scientists” Say: “Global Warming Is Good; CO2 Is Our Friend.” Delingpole touted a report from the fossil fuel-funded Heartland Institute, which seeks to undermine the consensus report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In an article headlined, “'World doing just fine; Global Warming is Good; CO2 is our friend' say Scientists,” Delingpole wrote: “The latest verdict is in on ‘climate change’ – and the news is good. The planet is greening, the oceans are blooming, food production is up, animals are thriving and humans are doing better than ever: and all thanks to CO2 and global warming.” [Breitbart News, 4/4/14]
Trump Is A Climate Science Denier
Trump Has Repeatedly Called Global Warming A “Hoax.” [Media Matters, 5/26/16]
Trump Tweeted Global Warming “Was Created By And For The Chinese In Order To Make U.S. Manufacturing Non-Competitive. On November 6, 2012, Trump tweeted:Image copyright EPA Image caption Migrants and refugees left temporary accommodation at Athens' old airport and set off on foot
Large numbers of migrants and refugees are stuck in Greece as Balkan countries announce further restrictions on the number crossing their borders.
Greece is trying to slow the flow to its northern border, to prevent a build-up of people there.
Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia have each announced that just 580 a day will be allowed through their borders.
So far this year, 100,000 migrants have entered the EU illegally - nearly all of them arriving in Greece.
More than 400 have died on the sea crossing from Turkey.
The restrictions in the Balkans follow Austria's decision last week to introduce a daily cap.
Macedonia's Interior Minister, Oliver Spasovski, on a visit to the migrant camp in Gevgelija on the border with Greece, said his country could only accept as many refugees as the other countries on the Western Balkan route - Serbia and Croatia - would take.
Migrants held peaceful protests in Athens and at Piraeus port on Friday, angry that they are unable to leave Greece.
Hundreds have set off on foot from a transit camp near the capital, hoping to make their own way to the border.
Some carried signs reading "help us" and "we are human".
In other developments:
German authorities say they do not know the whereabouts of 130,000 asylum seekers who were registered last year, after they did not appear at reception centres to which they had been directed
In France, officials have been conducting tent-to-tent visits to urge residents at the "Jungle" camp in Calais to leave, following Thursday's court decision approving the government plan to clear the camp
Image copyright EPA
Image copyright AP
The Greek government has asked ferry operators to reduce services bringing migrants from islands to the capital Athens in a bid to ease pressure.
The camp on the Macedonian border at Idomeni is well above capacity, and more people are waiting nearby.
Desperation on the Greek border
Fortress Central Europe
EU migration: Crisis in graphics
Meanwhile, a row between Greece and Austria, one of the countries that has tightened its border security, has deepened, with Athens snubbing a request to visit by the Austrian interior minister.
Image caption The going rate for a taxi from this migrant camp to the border 70km away is €80 ($87; £63)
Johanna Mikl-Leitner had warned that if Greece could not secure the external borders of the EU, then other countries would have to take action.
In northern Greece, protesters briefly blocked the entrance to a new proposed camp for migrants near Polykastro.
Some local people said they were concerned that the camp would become permanent.
Image copyright AP Image caption A Syrian woman arrives ashore on Lesbos after travelling in a dinghy from Turkey
Image copyright AP Image caption The journey from Turkey across the Aegean is highly dangerous
The government had asked that three ships serve as temporary hotels for the refugees and migrants for two or three days, before taking them to Piraeus.
The plan particularly affects Lesbos, Chios and Samos, islands which are close to Turkey.
The Catholic humanitarian organisation Caritas tweeted that Thursday night's ferry from Lesbos had not departed, "leaving refugees and migrants stranded".
The island risked becoming "one big camp if refugees and migrants continue to arrive without any option to leave," it said.
Image copyright Twitter/@iamCARITAS
Image copyright AP Image caption These migrants spent the night at the terminal building at Piraeus port
The Athens government has been criticised by other EU countries for failing to manage the new arrivals - but no progress has been made on a European plan to relocate refugees from Greece.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has threatened to block all decisions at EU migration summits next month if member states do not agree to take in quotas of migrants.
Image copyright AFP
A note on terminology: The BBC uses the term migrant to refer to all people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum. This group includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status, as well as people who are seeking jobs and better lives, who governments are likely to rule are economic migrants.At Red Bull Battlegrounds I was able to chat with TotalBiscuit about how he felt the finals might play out. Can anyone take the world champion down? TotalBiscuit thinks so, and goes into much detail on what each finalist has to take with them to prove they are some of the worlds best Starcraft 2 players.
We also discussed current faction balance, and how the current meta with Protoss stands in the competitive scene. TotalBiscuit breaks down the current Protoss tactics and how they may go down during the final matches of Battlegrounds, and how this fairs overall to the rest of the game. In light of TotalBiscuits teams recent GSTL victory, I asked him how he feels about Starcraft e-sports and how it stands going forward. Be sure to watch our interview for the full story!CNN Discovers Mike Brown Autopsy Expert Is Not a Professor or a Doctor
The self-proclaimed expert who held a national press conference on the Mike Brown shooting is NOT A DOCTOR.
He holds a degree in a NON-EXISTENT MEDICAL FIELD.
Shawn Parcells, a forensic pathologist who assisted in the autopsy of Michael Brown points at an autopsy diagram showing where the gun shots hit Michael Brown as he speaks about the findings during a press conference at the Greater St. Marks Family Church on August 18, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. (Zimbio)
Dr. Parcells introduced the “magic bullet” theory at the press conference in August.
The Gateway Pundit reported on this fraud in August.
Headline News used Sean Parcells to discredit Officer Darren Wilson.
This week CNN finally discovered that Parcells is not a professor, he’s not a doctor, and he’s not qualified to work unassisted on autopsies either.
Parcells doesn’t claim to have any specific license or certification to do the work he does. He knows how to do autopsies from “on-the-job training,” watching pathologists and assisting them at various morgues, he said. Sometimes he’s been paid for this work and sometimes he wasn’t, he added. “To take out organs and to cut open a body, you don’t need to be a pathologist,” he said. “Come to an autopsy. I think when you see what I do, you’ll realize that I’m not just making this stuff up out of blue, thin air.” He certainly sounded knowledgeable and authoritative on August 18 when he presented the findings of the Michael Brown autopsy to a nationally televised news conference. Baden, who conducted the autopsy, spoke first, and then introduced Parcells, saying he “has been instrumental in the autopsy evaluation.” “First of all, I’m Professor Shawn Parcells,” Parcells said as he stood to address the reporters. On his LinkedIn page and to CNN, Parcells said he’s an adjunct professor at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas — but a spokeswoman for the university told CNN that’s not true. “(Parcells) is not now and has never been a member of the Washburn University faculty,” university spokeswoman Michaela Saunders wrote in an email to CNN, adding that at one point, Parcells spoke without receiving pay to two groups of nursing students about the role of a pathologist’s assistant and gave a PowerPoint presentation and answered students’ questions.
Dr. Shawn Parcells explains bullet trajectories to the press.Electric Cars Will Total More Than 50% Of All New Car Sales By 2040, BNEF Forecasts
July 6th, 2017 by Steve Hanley
Bloomberg New Energy Finance has a new prediction about electric cars — they will account for more than half of all new car sales globally by 2040 and account for a third of all light duty vehicles on the road. The latest report was put together by an advanced team of BNEF analysts and takes several factors into account. Its predictions are significantly more optimistic than the last BNEF report just one year ago, which projected sales of electric cars would reach 35% of the market by 2040.
It’s The Economics, Stupid
First and foremost, the experts expect the price of batteries, electric motors, and other components for electric cars to continue falling as volumes increase. By contrast, tougher emissions rules may actually result in higher prices for internal combustion engines as they struggle to remain relevant in a changing world. Another factor is that electric cars have lower lifetime operating costs than conventional cars.
Yet another matter is the number of mainstream manufacturers who are rushing new electric cars to market. Just this week, Volvo announced that all its new cars will have a battery and electric motor by 2019. Mercedes, Audi, and Volkswagen are hot on the electric cars trail as well.
Chevrolet will have the new Chevy Bolt on sale in all 50 states within a few weeks and has a backlog of orders in Norway and South Korea. Don’t discount the Chinese auto companies. They sell few cars in the US at present (and may sell none if President Tweet has his way) but they have every intention of exporting to global markets in coming years. If the BNEF prediction is correct, the world will use 8 billion fewer barrels of oil in 2040 for the transportation sector while global demand for electricity will grow by 5% from today’s level.
A Momentous Inflection Point
Colin McKerracher, is the leader of the advanced transport analysis team at BNEF. He says, “We see a momentous inflection point for the global auto industry in the second half of the 2020s. Consumers will find that upfront selling prices for EVs are comparable or lower than those for average ICE vehicles in almost all big markets by 2029.” That inflection point will be similar to the stunning drop in prices for renewable energy in the past several years. Renewables are now less expensive than coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear power in many parts of the world and getting cheaper almost by the hour.
The BNEF forecast predicts EV sales worldwide will grow steadily in the next few years, from 700,000 in 2016 to 3 million by 2021. At that point, they will account for nearly 5% of light duty vehicle sales in Europe, up from a little over 1% now, and around 4% in both the US and China. While that is good news, the analysts expect big changes will begin near the end of the next decade when the purchase price of electric cars falls below that of conventional cars.
Countries that have made early progress in the sale of electric cars, such as Norway, France, the Netherlands, and the UK, are expected to be among the leaders in 2040. Emerging economies such as India are not expected to see significant EV sales until late in the next decade, despite that country’s pledge that all new cars sold there will be electric by 2030.
Jon Moore, chief executive of BNEF, said that the growth in EV market share “will come about during a time when the power system is also undergoing a revolution, towards cleaner, more distributed generation. This means that not only do EVs surge, but their emissions profile improves over time.”
BNEF’s forecast is based on analyzing the relative economics of electric cars and conventional cars. It assumes that current incentives will continue until their scheduled expiration date but does not assume the introduction of any new incentives. BNEF analyzed the automobile market not just by country but also by market segment, including everything from small sedans to SUVs and large family cars.
Infrastructure Lags
Salim Morsy, senior analyst on BNEF’s advanced transport team and lead author of the report, commented, “There is a credible path forward for strong EV growth, but much more investment in charging infrastructure is needed globally. The inability to charge at home in many local and regional markets is part of the reason why we forecast EVs making up just over a third of the global car fleet in 2040, and not a much higher figure.”
The team included the rise in autonomous vehicles and ridesharing in their calculations. It believes the impact of autonomous driving will be limited in the next 10 years but will play an increasing role in the market after 2030. By 2040, it forecasts 80% of all autonomous vehicles being used in ridesharing service will by electrics due to lower operating costs.
Source: Bloomberg New Energy FinanceCHICAGO—Reacting to the fast-food chain’s increasingly alarming marketing language Tuesday, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists set the global Doomsday Clock to 11:59 p.m. following Arby’s threats to launch a 3-Cheese Jalapeño Beef ’N Bacon Melt. “As Arby’s’ claims of possessing an experimental new specialty sandwich have become more and more credible, we have concluded that the world is closer than it’s ever been to a cataclysmic event that could destroy the lives of millions,” said the board’s executive director, Rachel Bronson, reiterating that Arby’s had already performed tests and received positive reactions from focus groups, many of whom said it was “very likely” they would try the sandwich in the future. “Top government officials need to heed the realities of the current landscape and recognize that we are on the cusp of seeing a spicy, fire-roasted meat and cheese product that could reach all 50 states and beyond. Because once the delivery trucks begin amassing at Arby’s’ regional distribution centers, it will already be too late.” U.S. government officials have publicly expressed doubts at the validity of Arby’s’ threats, as the company’s last several launch attempts have all been too soggy to cause cravings on a mass scale.
AdvertisementWriters on the Range Homegrown anti-government militias threaten public safety
As we saw during the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014 and earlier this year at a wildlife refuge in Oregon, violent extremism is not limited to war-torn countries thousands of miles away from the United States. Armed militias have expanded in size and sophistication and now present a threat to public safety and national security.
These homegrown militias threaten our public lands, the American people who want to enjoy them, and the public servants who manage them. Although much of the news coverage of those incidents painted a sanitized picture of people who just “want their land back,” a June 15 congressional forum on these groups made it clear that the reality is much darker.
The consequences of their anti-government activism – much of which stems from their hatred of President Barack Obama – go much deeper than a few newspaper headlines. Some of the men and women involved in the Nevada and Oregon standoffs have openly called for the death of federal land management officials, and they continue to harass them – largely without punishment – simply for doing their jobs.
These extremists encourage each other by publicizing pictures of the faces of federal officials, along with their vehicles’ license plates. At our congressional forum, Tim Blount, the executive director of Friends of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, described how he needed a police escort just to move safely around his home community in Oregon.
Brooke Warren/High Country News
As David Jenkins, president of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, pointed out in his testimony, creating this climate of fear and ignoring democratically established laws can never be considered patriotic.
“This is why it is so important that extremism and violence on our public lands be unequivocally rejected by Republicans and Democrats alike, and that addressing this growing problem be a bipartisan endeavor,” he told us. He is absolutely correct.
The threat these groups pose deserves a full congressional hearing with Republican lawmakers in attendance. As the top Democrats on the Natural Resources and Homeland Security committees, we have asked for such a hearing. The Republican majority has ignored our request and consistently refuses to take this issue seriously.
Instead, as we heard at our forum, some Republican lawmakers employ the same anti-government rhetoric that fuels these radicals. Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, has co-sponsored a bill by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, to remove federal law enforcement authority from the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, turning those functions over to local police and county sheriffs who lack the relevant training.
Anti-government extremists didn’t always direct their ire at public-lands agencies. That changed, in part, because a group of Western congressmen, state legislators and county sheriffs built their careers by advocating the transfer of millions of acres of federal land to states or counties, even though no state or county had ever owned the land in question or could afford to manage it now.
In the guise of giving land “back,” these lawmakers – and the extremists who now use this campaign as a rallying cry – have undermined the very idea of public lands as a shared and cherished resource. Anyone who has visited a national monument lately need only imagine it replaced by a mine or strip mall or blocked off by “no trespassing” signs to understand what this campaign truly represents.
Our public lands and the people who protect them enjoy enormous public support. Garett Reppenhagen of the Vet Voice Foundation spoke movingly at our forum about how access to our national forests helped him recover psychologically after his multiple tours of duty overseas, and described what it would mean to him and other veterans to lose that access. And for perhaps the first time ever, 32 former federal employees – including former heads of the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management – recently signed a letter urging Congress to act against the threat of the self-described “patriot movement.”
Congress and the American public cannot afford to turn a blind eye to ISIS or other foreign terrorists that mean us harm. But it’s high time we acknowledged that our nation’s own homegrown terrorists also threaten public safety. Tolerating them, or, even worse, encouraging them as part of a campaign to hand our public lands over to the private sector, is a dangerous and short-sighted strategy.
High Country News. Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, D-Ariz., is the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is the ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at [email protected].I’m finally getting started on my new still. It’s going to be a modular system that can be reconfigured into various reflux column heights, and the humble pot still. It’s going to be 103mm, 63mm, and 13mm copper pipe, and stainless triclamp ferrules. No Copper fittings if I can avoid it, although I might end up getting a couple of 4″ endcaps imported from aussie. Why not use copper fittings, I hear you ask? Because in NZ, buying copper fittings is like pulling down your pants and grabbing your ankles. You’re going to get reamed. Even at trade price, 103mm fittings are well over 100 dollars, closer to 200-300 for some of em.
So, this build has to be adaptable, modular, and made entirely from ferrules (I came across a supply of very, very cheap triclamp unions in a fair game of chance) and pipe. How hard can it be right? I’ve never soldered much, especially not with an oxy-acetylene torch, but as an engineer mate of mine said the other day “Yeah bro, people stupider than you use lathes and gas welders every day”. With that sentiment in mind, I set out on some deep end learning (the best sort of learning).
First challenge – Get the copper pipe to mate nicely and strongly with the stainless triclamp ferrules. The pipe ID (~102mm) is approximately the same as the ferrule ID, but the ferrule has an extra 1-2mm of wall thickness, so the OD is more like 107mm, compared to the pipes 104-105mm. Two clear options – expand the copper over the pipe, or somehow get it fitting on the inside of the ferrule.
Second, related challenge – Make sure that when the ferrules are brazed to the copper, they will be square – this is important, as the even distribution of downwards flowing reflux in a reflux column is a big help for column efficiency, and crooked ferrules lead to leaning columns.
Third challenge – Make bends without buying fittings. This one seems pretty easy. Cut the pipe at precisely 90-desired angle)/2, rotate the two halves 180, then carefully braze them together. Then braze on my triclamp ferrules to each end without completely fucking the joint I’ve already made.
So, Leaving the whole “not paying bullshit prices for fittings” thing for now, I started to sort out that ferrule mating and squaring problem. I actually had a bit of a false start on this one, and built myself a very, very homemade sort of mandrel expander, 4 segments of steel that could sit around a lathe chuck, which you could then wind out to expand the pipe. This did leave challenge three as a complete nightmare though – how could I seat that square for brazing? I didn’t come up with anything, so after wrecking one end of a column section and completely failing, I decided to look at a new method – get the copper inside the ferrule.
I couldn’t think of an easy way to go about contracting the pipe. I calculated the relative coefficients of expansion with heat, and the distance I needed to move them was greater than I could do by freezing the copper and putting the stainless in the oven. The stainless is way, way too hard to think about expanding, even if I could do it even enough to still seal. So, I had to turn to the lathe.
I ended up turning a wider ID for the ferrule, about 8mm deep into it. I figure that 8mm is enough surface for a good lap joint, plenty of space for the solder to wick down and make it strong. Stainless, especially in grades like this (316L), is a tricky metal to machine. It’s very hard, kind of stringy, and needs a lot of care when working. Bear in mind when taking anything from the following process that I’m a rank novice at fabricating.
When I set the flange in the chuck, I clean both surfaces, tighten it slightly, and then get a rubber mallet and gently tap all around to make sure it’s sitting square. I set the lathe very slow, 112 RPM seems to be a nice spot for me. I tried 80 and it’s great too, but 112 gets it done quicker without too much extra heating. The auto feed speed is set to about 0.05 mm/rev (not sure on what the correct notation is for that unit? distance travelled per revolution of the workpiece). I’m only cutting about 0.5-0.7mm per pass, so about 5 passes required to turn out the ferrule to fit the pipe. As for cooling, I just stand there with a bottle of cutting fluid and slosh a little bit onto the tool and the workpiece every now and then, once or twice per pass is working really well for me. You can probably see a bit of the fluid pooled on the ferrule in the above photo, a pink liquid. I’ try to tweak the depth / speed / feed until I get a nice spiral swage coming off in long strings, and I pay attention to the colour of it – a pale straw colour is acceptable, this is the point I’m aiming for in terms of efficiency, although sometimes I’m going slower if I’m not paying attention. If you start getting purple, slow down, more fluid, give it a rest, etc. That should be a drama though, because the cutting fluid will be boiling constantly by that stage.
The results sit tight and snug, though the slight deformations of the pipe from cutting can mean that if you want them really snug you need to give the pipe a slight squeeze in the vice or something. After the first one, which I had to seat with a hydraulic press (overkill), most of mine have been fine to seat by hand after I’ve filed a leading edge onto the copper.
After filing, they came together nicely, square, and almost perfectly flush on the inside:
Also appealing about this method is the fact that copper expands faster than stainless when heated – that means these joints will get tighter, not looser, as they are brazed, or as the still is operated.
So, with the ferrule joints no longer a problem, I needed to get started on making some copper bends out of my pipe. Off the shelf bends are normally die-cast – this is way beyond my resources.
The fittings I’ve needed so far have been pretty easily created by using a drop bandsaw running nice and slow to cut for a brazed miter joint. I could cut at 45 and end up with a 90 bend like pictured being worked on in the drop bandsaw above, or at 22.5 and end up with a piece like below. I actually made that 90 on top of a long section to be the column on my pot still before realising that I’m wasting a potential 30cm of column height on the reflux still by not putting a union in below it – now I’ve cut it I can take that section and pack it. Modular!
I still haven’t decided if I’m going to make 4″ endcaps for my shell and tube condenser (reflux condenser for the column), or get someone to buy them for me in aussie and send them over. It seems that their prices probably make it worth it compared to the time cost of more complicated fitting fabrication than simple bends.
As for the actual brazing, I’m still a novice with the torch, but I think the after some TLC with a file and emery cloth, my joints aren’t going to be too ugly. First of all I lightly sand and flux both surfaces, then press fit, then reapply a bit more flux to get it sitting on that lip of the stainless:
Then I get out the oxy torch and set the flame pretty neutral, maybe a hair on the carburizing side. I heat only the copper side of the joint, and maybe 5cm up from the joint. Copper transfers heat so well that you’ve got to work like this to avoid buggering the stainless. Then it’s just a matter of getting the workpiece up to a flow temperature for my solder rods (silfos 15, got a kilo or two of it for free), and soldering the joint. I try to keep the torch moving across the work so that it doesn’t overheat a specific area too much.
I’m going to experiment with different ways to “lay” the solder onto the joint, and see if that gets me neater. here is a snap of a joint that I’ve quickly hit with a wire brush. More cleanup to come.
For now, at least things are finally happening on this build, I’ve been talking about it for almost a year now, it’s good to put solder to copper.
I’ll be doing some more brazing shortly, and then working on my shell and tube condensers. That will probably be my next post. When this is all done, I’ve got a lot of scotch I need to run! I’m filming the whole build, so when I’m done I’ll stitch it up into something entertaining.
Cheers,
Richard
Advertisementshttp://jamesdjulia.com/item/1572-394/
The Lahti L39 was the Finnish answer to the need for an anti-tank rifle, developed just before the Winter War. The rifle was created by noted Finnish designed Aimo Lahti, who had pressed for it to use a 13.2mm cartridge. However, arguments for using a 20x138B cartridge won out, based on hopes to use that cartridge in both antitank and antiaircraft roles, as well as testing that showed the 20mm projectile to have greater terminal effect.
The L39 was not available for use in the Winter War (having been adopted barely 2 months before the Russian attack), but was used extensively in the Continuation War. While improved tank armor quickly became thick enough to protect against the round, it was used for a variety of anti material roles, attacking machine gun positions, bunkers, light vehicles, and more. In 1944, an anti-aircraft version was also produced, firing in full auto and using 15-round magazines.
Today, ammunition is available from a few companies, typically using lathe-turned new cases and surplus 20mm Vulcan projectiles.
Related:
Boys AT Rifle: https://www.full30.com/video/9b1276adfb1ad70270819f43a393b61c
PzB-39 AT Rifle: https://www.full30.com/video/323640202084431e6d4dd2c208b4c4a5
GrB-39 AT Rifle: https://www.full30.com/video/adf2d599d1ba4b436810567436229f7a
Mauser 1918 Tankgewehr: https://www.full30.com/video/820785934d86e231ed83bd9ba0b8a6a7
Bofors 37mm AT Gun: https://www.full30.com/video/b2f6d40d056b8da10f1b19b595cde412
US M6 37mm AT Gun Motor Carriage: https://www.full30.com/video/dc5f7a3f17c7afa9313a03bd18fc6910
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeaponsEven today the theory of evolution cannot provide the “comfort” afforded by other explanations of our origins. The very presence of “high school” proves the theory of evolution even though the humans above resist the teaching of “evolution” in their high schools. Picture taken at the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Brain real estate is limited and always has been. The neural tissues must be fed and fed richly. Those functions and abilities that contribute most to survival are therefore more fully represented. Only recently in human evolution has language been given greater increments of neural space even as a rapidly expanding brain and skull struggles to exit the birth canal. Prior to our technological emergence, it is reasonable to believe that greater percentages of neural tissue were more fully dedicated to functions other than language, writing and scientific reasoning. Relic brain functions have been conserved even as humans have transitioned to RNA-like functionality.
It is as easy as observing how most humans spend their time to determine the evolved nature of the brain. Even though the brain has evolved to allow a nascent technological emergence, the old behaviors, those expected to arise in a tribe of social apes, are still extant and dominant. Our preoccupation with competitive hierarchy, sports (tribal warfare), gossip, good vs. evil, religion, Facebook socializing, entertainment, politics and emotions, feelings and the unending quest for “happiness” bespeaks an ape whose brain has changed just enough to move it from under the trees on the savannah into technological cells while retaining most of the social behaviors evolved in the past.
Even though the typical human wakes up and must report to a cell for work, they are also occupied with who did what to whom, gossip of all sorts, the presidential race, God, what is good and what is evil, how they will climb in the tribal hierarchy and obtain rewards, and who won the game last night. Then it’s off to work to go through the motions that technological society demands, especially in its competition with other technological societies. The typical human is running on automatic and has no idea how they came to be except to say that God made them that way. They have no idea why they have to spend so much time in school, why they have to learn to read and write, nor why they typically have to spend most of their lives within four walls going through some well-defined set of motions. Some people become rich by determining the behavioral tendencies of humans, setting up technological production facilities (cells) and then making product available. If the opioid triggers are released, or if a mass marketer can instill the idea that product consumption will release great pleasure, then the dopamine shall flow and the human shall move towards the product and purchase it, providing a nice profit for the business. All production is not glitzy and about human desire. Some is about infrastructure, the nuts and bolts of putting together distribution systems and cells. But in the end, it is the old behaviors which must be fed.
Humans are mostly unaware that using technology to eat and despoil the biosphere is necessarily a bad thing, especially since they are trapped within an evolved mental cocoon more suited to jungle tribal life than technological existence, where their attentions are constantly upon those things their brains are evolved to notice (Facebook Twitter, office politics, presidential politics, religion, gossip, sports (how did our warriors do against theirs). The MSM simply panders to human behavioral/attention proclivities to gain as much profit as possible even though their “attention” should be focused upon things of real importance, like the collapse of their feeble cancerous civilization. Since most humans are still not awake and have nearly accomplished the destruction of their environment, it is unlikely that they will ever be awake. Instead they will fall back into their default mode, fight over a “fair” share of resources, gossip, play politics, believe in Gods, go to war with neighboring tribes, think very little and seek any reward the environment still offers.
The rollercoaster isn’t going to stop back under the tree in the savannah but rather somewhere in isotope fission wonderland. Everyone off, the ride is over.At Etihad Stadium
"Why Always Me?" was the question posed on the T-shirt revealed by the human headline generator that is Mario Balotelli after he silenced Old Trafford's Stretford End in October's Manchester derby.
The 21-year-old Italian had scored City's first goal in the 6-1 rout of their neighbours and Premier League champions on their own turf just days after igniting part of his house with an ill-judged attempt to set off fireworks from the bathroom.
Balotelli was demonstrating an endearing ability to laugh at his own misfortune and turbulent personality. Pretty much everyone - United fans apart - laughed with him.
Sadly, for those who embrace the arrival of this wonderfully gifted young maverick to the Premier League there will be days when Balotelli is no laughing matter. And smiles were impossible to find among the Tottenham contingent at The Etihad on Sunday.
Balotelli's clash with Parker went unpunished by referee Howard Webb. Photo: Getty
The pain of losing to Balotelli's penalty deep into stoppage time after clawing back a two-goal deficit was bad enough in isolation. The fact that Spurs felt he should have been sitting in the dressing room as opposed to winning the spot-kick via Ledley King's foul before scoring it only added insult to injury.
Spurs manager Harry Redknapp's eyebrows shot north at an alarming rate when it was suggested that Balotelli's image was mainly that of a "lovable eccentric" - before graphically condemning an offence pretty much everyone who saw it felt warranted a red card.
Balotelli, on as substitute for Edin Dzeko, had already been booked for a foul on Benoit Assou-Ekotto when a routine tussle involving Scott Parker brought an initial accidental collision between his leg and the Spurs midfield man's head.
Only Balotelli will know the full scale of his intent in their second coming together, but it looked an altogether more sinister kick at Parker, leaving his opponent nursing a head wound and Spurs an obvious sense of grievance. He pleaded his innocence, with more generous souls suggesting it was simply an attempt to regain his balance gone badly wrong.
Referee Howard Webb took no action, leaving Balotelli free to win this vital game for Manchester City, who looked like having to settle for an unsatisfactory point after goals from Samir Nasri and Joleon Lescott were levelled up by Jermain Defoe's opportunism and a world-class Gareth Bale strike.
All Mario's life was here: The villain and the hero. It is the back story of his career and all evidence suggests this will be the constant narrative that could give T-shirt sellers a roaring trade for the next decade.
Balotelli represents the classic football dichotomy. The T-shirt was more or less a public admission of the chaos that characterises his life and career - and yet amid this chaos there is an ice-cool streak of composure that is completely at odds with this side of his personality.
Go back to the moments before he showed off his T-shirt at Old |
back rooms with the banner. And right before the under-4 media timeout, we let loose, and The Jungle was all out waving around a giant, 80 foot banner around on national television. I heard it looked wonderful on TV, so I'm glad it got the point across!
Fear the Jungle. #WarEagle A photo posted by Blake Ells (@blakeme) on Nov 11, 2014 at 8:10pm PST
This team has a lot of talent, and we saw just how well they can play together Friday night. They showed the exact opposite late Monday/early Tuesday. To see them gel that much that quickly is certainly encouraging to me. And to think, I thought we missed Antoine Mason dearly against Colorado, to the point where the offense couldn't produce without him. To score 105 points with the 2nd leading returning scorer in the country, and having five different Tigers in double digits, is a good thing. They certainly made point #3 on my "Three Things We Learned" piece from Tuesday moot. I'm all about being proven wrong if it works out like this.
Auburn now heads out to Las Vegas to enjoy playing in the MGM Grand Main Event tournament over Thanksgiving break. The Tigers face Tulsa Monday, Nov 24, at 10 PM Central Time over on ESPNU. The next Wednesday, Nov 26, the boys in orange and blue will be facing either Oklahoma State or Oregon State, both of which also made last year's tournament, on ESPN 2 or ESPN 3, at a to be determined time slot. The following week has Auburn traveling back out west to face Texas Tech in Lubbock, part of the SEC-Big 12 Challenge.That game will take place on Wednesday, Dec 3, at 8 PM on the SEC Network. The next home game will be that Friday, Dec 5, against former Auburn basketball coach Cliff Ellis's Coastal Carolina squad. You can catch that game at 8 PM over on FSN.
I hope to see many of you out for the remainder of the games this school year. Hopefully our Tigers can pull out a few wins on this upcoming road trip. If you haven't ever been to an Auburn basketball game, let alone a Bruce Pearl coached game, you certainly need to. It's a night you won't regret. And for the students reading this, keep up the good work. We certainly need America to Fear the Jungle!!This excellent and surprising op-ed was published in Die Welt, of all places. Many thanks to JLH for the translation:
There are no longer critics and opponents of Islam, but haters and enemies of Islam. But what would a friend of Islam be? What reason would I have to be a friend of Islam? I can be a friend to Muslims, but not a friend to this unenlightened religion with political claims, whose potential for hatred is apparently so great that it is shaking the entire world?
Are three-quarters of all Germans racist and xenophobic because they fear that Islam is gaining too much influence in Germany and gradually undermining the secular basis of our everyday lives? Xenophobes, racists, enemies and/or haters of Islam — these words apparently belong in the discussion of PEGIDA.
I have the impression that the unsurpassed hostility and blatant contempt affect PEGIDA is like human growth hormone. The antagonism of others supplies a missing sense of community. Anyone who attracts so much hostility must be big and important. And the polls sponsored by Zeit seem to confirm this. According to them, 30% supported PEGIDA “completely and absolutely,” 19% leaning in favor, 26% partly and 23% not at all.
I cannot and will not judge whether they mean exactly that. But from these demands, it is not possible to conclude racism or xenophobia, and certainly not Nazi thinking. If I nonetheless assess this as mere camouflage and assume these attitudes, then I have precluded any possibility of dialogue. And yet that is what has happened from the beginning.
But where does this rage come from? If the PEGIDA people mean what they say, they consider it their duty to accept refugees from war and political persecution, but to deport all rejected asylum seekers, and they are asking for legally regulated immigration. I didn’t hear anything else in the speeches when I was in Dresden Monday.
On the Monday before Christmas, my friend and colleague Peter Schneider and I traveled to Dresden. We wanted to see for ourselves what it was about the phenomenon PEGIDA that has given politicians and the media the foaming fits. It is hard for me to find the right tone for this subject, because the discussion is so poisoned that the fury of each person I address echoes in my ears. And how should a dialogue between PEGIDA and the political world take shape? The PEGIDA demonstrators have shouted their protest to the world. The answer can be read in the newspapers. What else is there to say?
[48-second video — Under the motto, “Christmas with PEGIDA, more than 15,000 people came to gather for the tenth demonstration. Ca. 4,000 counter-demonstrators collected on the neighboring castle square.]
Writer Monika Maron traveled to Dresden before Christmas, to get an impression of the demonstrators. She does not understand the upset and calls for freedom of expression.
From the Burkini to the Mega-Mosque
All parties have their part in the misery of the moment. Some have denied that Germany is an immigration land, as it has long been, and for that reason we still have no immigration law. Others have decried “forced Germanization” when teachers, parents and students in a Berlin school decided that only German would be spoken on the school grounds.
All parties together have decided on double citizenship to the nth generation, which allegedly encourages integration, but is probably only an act of voter recruitment.
I won’t even bother to mention burkinis, class trips, mega-mosques, prayer rooms in schools, or the absurd leniency of German courts toward the cultural peculiarities of Muslim immigrants, which first caused some concern when a [female] Frankfurt judge granted a Muslim man the right to beat his wife.
Islamization does not begin after Islam has become the state religion of Germany, but when our legal and civil principles are undermined by its religious claims. You do not have to be a follower of PEGIDA to ask that the government and society defend our hard-won secularity and establish limits to a religion which has still not undergone its own enlightenment.
Our strongest allies in this would be the secular Muslims — people like Seyran Ates, Necla Kelek, Hamed Abdel Samad, Güner Balci — who no more than Christians and atheists wish for Islam in Germany to claim more rights and space than is due to any religion in a thoroughly secular state.
Instead, the government has chosen to accede to the pressure of the Islamic organizations and shut out the secular powers of the Islam Conference. Why do we talk about 4.5 million Muslims in Germany, and then accept Islam’s claim that everyone born a Muslim must stay a Muslim?
The Secular State Should Be Central
Do we know how many of the Turks, Persians, and Arabs living in Germany are believing Muslims, and which of them even wants the rights demanded by the Islamic organizations? The line is not drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between defenders of the secular state and those who want to undermine it or put it at risk for political gain.
It is quite possible that such thoughts are also running through the minds of the Dresden demonstrators, when they see Mr. Mayzek again on a talk show, claiming as he poses like a sultan, that Salafism has nothing to do with Islam, or that it would just take a little more governmental incentive to inspire ethnic Turkish and Arabic young men to go to school.
The reproach that the Dresdeners, with their dearth of Muslims, have no grounds for fearing Islam, is — at a time when political consciousness is at least 50% shaped by the media, above all television — to say the least, trite. After all, the 12,000 Munich counter-demonstrators are only acquainted with PEGIDA through newspapers and television.
Pegida and Christmas
This Monday before Christmas, the PEGIDA program was carol singing. Even though cards with the words were handed out, the attempt was pretty feeble. But for Mr. Abroga of DITIB [Turkish-Islamic Union for the Establishment of Religion] and Christian churches and SPD functionaries to accuse the demonstrators of abusing Christian songs just seems to me inconceivably pretentious.
Christmas carols are by nature Christian, but they belong to every German childhood, whether Christian or not. Even in the atheist GDR, Christmas carols were sung.
However incomplete the singing was on this evening, it sounded quite fervent from some groups assembled on Theater Square. If the counter-demonstrators had not limited themselves to annoying PEGIDA with whistling, but had shown with a knowledge of the lyrics and a strength of voice that they are the real preservers of culture and Christian values, that could have been their moment of triumph.
Tradition and Christian Heritage
But perhaps so much traditionalism and Christian heritage is the last thing on their minds. It occurs to me that tradition and homeland are mentioned with affection and understanding when they are the traditions and homelands of others, while the same concepts applied to Germany are either used ironically or open to the suspicion of overweening nationalist thinking or worse. Why?
The Chancellor warns citizens about PEGIDA in her New Year’s speech. And even as I write “Why?”, I know the answer. German history. Oh yes. And yet Germany is a homeland and German traditions, too, are allowed to have meaning.
Since all the parties have been fighting for a position in the middle; since the CDU has left the conservative portion of the public to its own devices; since the liberal party has been destroying itself; since the word “normality” can be used only in quotation marks, while every minority claims not only acceptance but primacy of interpretation — well, since then, it was only a question of time before a new political force would attach itself to the abandoned conservative wing of society.
The Attacks Are Driving Supporters to Pegida
But instead of attributing the explosive arrival of the AfD to their own policies, the other parties are treating their new competitor like a leper you don’t want to sit down at the same table with, or, if that can’t be avoided — say, in a talk show — then you attack, as if these were not representatives of your own defecting voters.
And it is scenes like this that drive supporters to PEGIDA. They can witness, in the Plasberg and Co. talk show, what it costs in inner strength and strong nerves to practice freedom of expression.
And anyone who does not trust either his strength and nerve or his rhetorical ability, does not believe in the freedom of expression. But Mondays on Theater Square, as one of ten or fifteen or seventeen thousand, if he does not have to speak himself but only shout “We are the people!” and “lying press!” and even a weak speaker like Lutz Bachmann speaks for him, he can finally shout his discontent at the top of his lungs.
This Monday before Christmas, when I was in Dresden, I noticed that — unlike television pictures and newspaper descriptions of earlier PEGIDA demonstrations — there were a lot of young men in the square. Maybe it was because the mothers and grandmothers were busy with Christmas preparations.
But perhaps the reflexive suspicion that PEGIDA is just a collection of racists and xenophobes, Nazis even — which, granted, are there among the demonstrators, but not a majority — perhaps these defensive salvos will lead to people who are not racists — not even Nazis — not being willing to expose themselves to this suspicion any longer and so others, real racists and xenophobes, will demonstrate on the square.
On the trip home, on the highway to Berlin, we noticed many cars with Berlin and Brandenburg licenses, and at the gas station we saw them — shaved heads, Thor-Steinar jackets.[1] So they were there too. Allowing them and their less visible brothers in spirit no place and no voice is the only correct answer.
With all others, we must talk. We must learn again to put up with other opinions without seeing their supporters only as enemies or scum. We praise the open society and refuse open discussion. PEGIDA is not the disease; PEGIDA is only a symptom.By Mike Coppinger
We've heard it over and over again: "Chris Arreola will be in shape this time."
And while Arreola has gotten into better shape, at least by his standards, he hasn't been able to get into prime fighting shape.
However, with now two losses tacked on his ledger, he says this time actually is different. Arreola claims he's putting in work like never before in advance of his May 10 WBC heavyweight title fight with Bermane Stiverne, a man whom he was handled by in April 2013.
"I'm over here in San Diego working my butt off, man, no excuses," Arreola said during a recent media conference call. "In the past I would give myself a reason to have an excuse. I wouldn't show up at the gym; I wouldn't do what I'm supposed to do as a professional. And times have changed, man.
"I feel like I'm a mature fighter, I have what it takes between my ears and in my heart and in my balls," Arreola continued. "Now it's time for me to let it all hang out at the boxing gym, and really that's where the fight is won. The fight is won in the gym."
Arreola's longtime trainer Henry Ramirez insists that that is the very best he's seen of his charge.
"This camp is going according to plan," Ramirez said. "... Chris is out here busting his behind. I don't have to sit at the gym to wonder, 'Damn, is he going to show up today?' Chris puts in two and a half to three hours at the gym, and then he does an hour of conditioning in the evenings. So right now he weighs 244."
"Optimum fighting weight is about 237, 240, right in that range, and not a doubt in my mind come May 10 that Chris is going to come out victorious, because honestly he's training like a desperate man right now -- a man very desperate."
Follow Mike Coppinger on Twitter: @MikeCoppingerDisclaimer : Some stories below are very frank and may mention various kinds of events and difficulties in people's lives (e.g. anorexia). 007b.com does not necessarily endorse everything that is depicted in the stories/pictures.
These pictures include women of Anglo-/Teutonic European, Semitic, N. Mediterranean, and N. East Asian, Native American, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and mixed descent who come from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. The main point is: there is enormous variation in what is normal. Sizes and shapes vary enormously. So don't worry, ladies!
"I am 32 years old and have had three little girls now 6,4 and 2. I breastfed each child for 18 months and now feel I have very "empty" breasts. I was getting slightly paranoid that my breasts were looking awful as I could only compare to pictures you see in newspapers etc. It's nice to know I am normal." " I am 34 years old, have been pregnant once, and breastfed for 9 months. I wear a size 34B bra on the tightest hooks and I always wear a bra, even while sleeping, so I hate that my breasts sag. I have always been self conscious about my right breast being smaller than my left and my stretch marks, but I know it is normal and common. "I'm a 19 year old girl, with 32AA size boobs and have always been depressed about their size but have never felt I could cope with breast enhancement. I often felt that the size of my boobs made me feel less like a woman despite men telling me it didn't matter. Looking at your site I have come to feel more comfortable with the way I look. I recently had an ectopic pregnancy (about 3 months ago), I was told my breasts did grow a little bit. I have always been skinny, and find it extremely hard to put on weight - not to mention finding clothes to fit me as I am quite short too."
"I am a 29 year old mother of 4 beautiful girls... Always been of normal weight (went back to my size quickly after each pregnancy). I have breastfed 3 of my children for a total of 31 months. I was a perky B cup pre-babies with small pinkish nipples. Now I am a 34A and my nipples have stayed bigger and darker after my 3rd pregnancy (they had gone back to their pink color after my first two babies but had remained enlarged). I have lost a lot of upper poll fullness after breastfeeding 3 babies and it makes finding proper fitting bras a challenge.
I have struggled a lot and still am with the way my chest looks now. I have almost no breasts left and I feel self-conscious about them. But they are healthy and they are mine and that is what important. I am submitting my pictures because your site has helped me tremendously with my self-esteem issues and being the mom of four girls, I want to teach them what real women look like and not be embarrassed if they don't look like the airbrushed ads in the magazine.
Thank you so much for such a wonderful site. " "I'm 23, I've been pregnant once and am currently breastfeeding my (amazing, beautiful, healthy, happy!) 8 month-old son, with no plans to stop until he decides it's time. I've always been between 150 and 170, with little change in my 38DDD size. I don't have an eating disorder or anything; I've contemplated a breast reduction but I plan to have at least one more baby and nursing is so much more important to me than what my boobs look like! (Why risk the health of your precious baby to have "cute" breasts?? I don't get it.)
I'm completely happy & confident and at ease naked -- until I see my reflection or a picture, that is. I've spent lots of time naked around other people at Oregon Country Fair, various hot springs, Rainbow Gatherings, etc.) As long as I forget that my saggy (and useful, and life-giving, and amazing!) boobs are culturally "ugly", I'll have a great time. I love the quote, "Change how you see, not how you look," by J. Alison Hilber. It's so true. I would never judge another woman with my size & shape of breasts. I am usually in awe of women with something other than the ideal cultural body shape who walk around topless or naked. I feel proud to be in their presence and hope that I exude that same confidence." "I am... currently in a relationship with a man who simply loves my breast inspite of their being saggy and loosing and gaining weight. To him, its me that matters and not how they look like. I am 29 yrs heading for 30 yrs soon. I had 2 pregnancies upto 3 months each but could not last and no children there after.
Before visiting your site, I felt ashamed of my breast and I always wanted to get treatments done. I came here looking for advice and options but now I have dropped the idea. I hope my volunteering would help other women in similar situation. My mother who's now 50 yrs of age still has better ones than mine, she's still on the firmer side with perky nipples and ideal 36 size. I didn't know how to discuss my problem with her as I had flat nipples but now I understand I am happy with myself."
"I'm 20 years old, and I'm a 34G. I've been pregnant three times and I have one child who I nursed for 18 months despite inverted nipples (which are cured now).
I was extremely thin and a natural 34C/D before my first pregnancy, and swelled to a 40H at the time of delivery after a 100-lb pregnancy weight gain, which is what I can thank for the stretch marks and recent sagging. They've always been slightly asymmetrical, with the right areola and the entire right breast both being a slightly larger than the left, but that's the least of my complaints.
The truth is, I love my breasts, and I can't say it any more eloquently than they do on Shape of a Mother — "I hope that one day our society respects and honors the WHOLE female, not just the maiden one." The 'perfect', perky, maiden breast is useless for anything but lust. The stretched, drooping, well-used breast is the one that has served a meaningful purpose, perhaps even changed the life of the one(s) to whom it has given the perfect nourishment that only it can provide." "I am a 19-year old mum with a 1-year old son. I only breast fed for under a week because I found it too difficult, but the changes in my breasts are quite shocking really, I used to have big areolas but now I have ones that cover the best part of my breasts. I was around a 34B before pregnancy and now over 2 years after I'm 36D. I was around 150lb before and now I'm around 180lb. I have been so insecure about my breasts since pregnancy that I've been researching breast reconstruction and I hate plastic surgery. Since looking at your site, it has made me feel so much better, women who haven't been pregnant have very similar breasts to me and that just reminds me that pregnancy hasn't ruined my breasts (although the street marks on my stomach are a sight) if anything they have made them better because there's more to see (and feel!) plus when I go out I wear bras with no padding now whereas before I had super padded ones with push-ups and everything! When I was finished developing I actually used to get my mother's breast jelly things that fit in the bra (my mother is a 34A) so it looked like I had a D. But now that I am I don't feel the need to make them bigger! So I am happy with my breasts, even if I don't like the look of them, my man does and I know that my baby had some good colostrum from them! Thank you for making this site!" "I am 36 and overweight. I have a 6-year old and 4-year old twins. I nursed all of them. My son for 18 months and my twins for about 5 months. Before having my children my breast weren't "perky" but they certainly didn't sag like they do now. From the time I was about 22 I wore a bra all the time. Even while sleeping in hopes that my breasts wouldn't get saggy. I loved the way they looked and I wanted them to stay that way. Well that didn't work. lol As I get older they are getting more saggy and it definitely worries me about what they will look like when I get even older. I'm so glad that you have this website because I definitely felt like I was the only one in my 30's with saggy breasts. I hate that when I lay down they fall into my armpits. For some reason I'm lucky and my husband still seems to love me and them. Don't worry what your breasts look like ladies, if you find the right person they will love you for you. ❤️"
"I stumbled across your site, and thought I could contribute. It is very rare to see "natural" breasts and so I will submit mine and share the site with my sister!
I am 25, Caucasian and I am 10 months postpartum, I am breastfeeding right now and am in the process of weaning. I started puberty at 11, and in high school I had an eating disorder and lost weight very quickly causing stretch marks, I still have 25 pounds I would like to lose (the healthy way) I still have body image problems and probably always will, especially with a spouse that surrounds me with an overwhelming influx of fake bodies. I was self-conscious of my breasts before pregnancy and in high school and I especially am now but it is an inevitable part of life if you want kids. I really wish we saw the range of normal in the media and not just a sexualized ideal pushed on women from sex crazed men!" "I am 24 years old, with one child that I carried to full term and nursed for 2 1/2 years. She still asks for boobie! I would say that I had considerable stretching and stretch marks, as my breast went from 32 C to 34 DD. Now I am a 32 D. I could have nursed two children with all the milk I had; it was awesome! It has been hard for me, as I am still young and feel self-conscious about my breast shape. It seems sometimes that I have just a little extra skin. But I wouldn't trade the experience; to give my daughter the years she had of nutrition and comfort that nature intended was amazing. Vive la breasts!
Thank you so much!" "I am 22 years old. I got pregnant for the first time when I was 20, gave birth to my son at 21, and he is now 10 months old. I have been breastfeeding him since birth, and I plan to continue to do so as long as he wants to (we practice child-led weaning). I am very healthy. Before getting pregnant I was a 36B, during pregnancy I grew to be a 36C, and now I am a 36C-D, depending on how full of milk my breasts are. My right breast is slightly lower (and larger) than my left breast. I think it has always been like that! My areolas and nipples are a lot larger now than they were before breastfeeding/pregnancy, and they've also gotten a little bit darker, too (or so my husband says!). I have some stretch marks on the sides/tops of my breasts that I've had since I was a teen, but they're less visible now. I'm really proud of my breasts, even though they are a little bit droopy and lopsided... they're mine, God gave them to me, and they feed my son."
"Thank you so much for this site!... After I stopped nursing my son from a size 36 DD I went to a size B. I am a 35-year old mother of three. I have been pregnant 5 times. I have nursed all three of my children for over 1 year each. This picture -- my breasts are deflated 2 weeks after I stopped nursing. I am currently doing push-ups (5 sets of 10) and massaging with olive oil, ice as well as shea butter to tighten the skin so that it is not so saggy. I also have been doing exercises and wearing a fitted sports bra to keep the skin from stretching any further." "I have found your site extremely beneficial. I am 32 years old at present I don't feel too bad about my breasts I am incredibly proud of myself for breastfeeding all of my children. I needed to express milk for my twins who where born very premature and I truly believe my milk helped them to survive. I then breastfed them for four months but it was difficult so I reluctantly stopped. I also breastfed my baby daughter for seven months.
My breast are flat and flop on top of each other when I lay on my side, they have lots of stretch marks and my nipples are huge!!!!!! Reading your site makes me feel that that is OK!!!" "I am 29 yrs old with 3 kids. I would be proud to have them viewed on your wonderful site." "My breasts are a 38DD; they have deflated and sagged. Also my areolas are bigger now. My stomach is stretch marked badly and I have a lot of loose skin."
This woman had very small breasts until pregnancy and nursing. She has breastfed two babies. Mature droopy breasts. The large areola is due to the breast changes during pregnancy. The same woman as on the left - here after her second pregnancy, currently breastfeeding.
"I am 37 and have one child whom I breastfeed for 7 months. I have hated everything about my boobs - being small, to having one that is bigger than the other, to having an inverted nipple, to having one that barely has tissue at the bottom of it sometimes causing the nipple to point down. I have recently embarked on a journey to love my entire body, including my breasts." "Stumbled across your site, and love it. I'm a mother of two children, ages 5 and 9. I nursed each of them for 2.5 years. I'm now almost 32 years old and pretty happy with my 34DDD breasts. I spent too many years hating them, and learned to like them more when I saw what comfort they gave my babies. It's stupid that breast size goes "in" and "out." That's like having race/ethnicity go "in" and "out" of style. Totally uncontrollable....... and we're ALL beautiful.
Although I will say, I still hate shopping for swimwear to fit them. Some things never change." "I noticed there is a lack of saggy breasts on your site and thought I'd submit mine for you to add. I now know my breasts being saggy aren't due to no bra. I have a BMI over 60. I'm going to be getting bariatric surgery."
This lady with small breasts had a high-risk pregnancy due to heart problems and had to stay in bed in the hospital most of the time. The baby was premature, but did just fine - with the help of her milk. Here we see a lady with nearly flat chest and small areola. She breastfed all three of her children with no problems. These breasts of a woman in her 50s have assumed their lower position. Back when she had kids, bottle-feeding was the norm and she didn't understand breast being better.
"I'm 36, two pregnancies which both ended within the first 2 months. Currently about 4 stones overweight and my bra is a 40C. Looking at these pictures emphasises how much I need to lose weight - I always had the most beautiful, pert breasts but now they're starting to get saggy and dangly looking, and it's because I'm fat." "I'm a 37-year old mother of two children (13 and 11) and I wear a 34b. I nursed my first child for about 4 months and the second for 12 months (wearing 36d/e then). Before I got pregnant, my breasts were a little tighter, but I'm quite happy with how they are today and I love being a woman from the bottom of my heart." The same lady as on the left; this picture is at 18 months post-partum. "My nipples are lighter now than they were on that first picture. Some women worry when they see how dark their nipples got with pregnancy and breastfeeding. My picture shows that they don't stay as dark forever. Although they might not be the same light color they used to be pre-baby, they have lightened a lot in the past few months."Obama Administration calls for 'Privacy Bill of Rights'
By Cecilia Kang
The Obama administration released recommendations Thursday to better protect consumer privacy on the Internet, creating baseline guidelines for how companies treat user data and emboldening federal agencies to enforce privacy protections.
A consumers' "Privacy Bill of Rights" would create a privacy policy office in the Commerce Department and for the first time would establish clear guidelines for what kind of information can be collected about users and how companies can use the data, a Commerce report says. That framework also gives clearer limitations on data use and would increase audits to hold companies accountable for their practices.
The report, which follows similar guidelines released weeks ago by the Federal Trade Commission, comes amid the growing concerns of lawmakers, consumers and privacy groups that Internet users are increasingly giving more information about their preferences and personal profiles without adequate protections.
"Self-regulation without stronger enforcement is not enough," said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in a statement. "Today's report is a road map for considering a new framework that is good for consumers and businesses."
At the same time, the agency said it wants input from Web companies and advertisers who have resisted legislation or new rules that would hamper their activity online.
Commerce stopped short of endorsing the FTC's recommended Do Not Track program, which would allow consumers to sign up for browser-based technology so that their activity isn't followed by third parties online.
"There is a constant evolution of profiling and tracking and analysis technology, and we want to make sure tools of development keep up with those technologies," said Daniel Weitzner, associate administrator of policy at Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Commerce recommended privacy codes of conduct for companies that would step up enforcement measures by the FTC and include oversight over emerging technologies. Commerce also called for a privacy policy office within the agency to coordinate policy and protection measures with the FTC and White House.
Locke emphasized that U.S. regulators need to better coordinate their own privacy standards with those of Europe and other nations. The European Union, for example, has implemented laws that prevent companies from collecting certain information about users unless they expressly volunteer that data.
The Commerce Department also recommended updates to electronic privacy laws and a look at whether they should include privacy protection for cloud computing and location-based services. And it proposed a standard framework for how companies notify users of data breaches. Now companies follow their own guidelines for notification, which privacy groups say causes user confusion.
Some privacy advocates touted the report as an important step toward protecting consumers as data collection expands for behavioral advertisers and other businesses while federal agencies have struggled to keep up with those practices in the $10 trillion annual e-commerce industry.
The report calls for public feedback on the recommendations, and legal experts say components would have to be implemented through legislation.
"This is the first time that the administration has emphasized the need for comprehensive privacy protections, and that as of today it is a Wild Wild West out there for consumers and their privacy," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the ACLU. "We hope it will lead to strong administrative protections but Congress needs to act."
But the Center for Digital Democracy's executive director, Jeffrey Chester, said the report appears to give the advertising industry too much influence. The administration didn't endorse the FTC's Do Not Track mechanism, which has garnered much support by privacy advocates, he said.
"The FTC provides a serious framework in the new staff report, Do Not Track, rules for consumer transparency and control," Chester said. "Commerce has just given the U.S. data collection giants an early Christmas present."
Related story:
FTC recommends Do Not Track program for privacyFormer Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney continues to be steadfast in his refusal to release any more than his last two years of tax returns, a position that has already become a distraction to his presidential campaign and could cause considerably more trouble if he doesn’t figure out a better answer — and soon.
Demonstrators stand outside a fundraiser for Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Monday, July 16, 2012 in Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“Perception is becoming Romney’s reality and these issues have now risen above mere distractions,” said John Weaver, a Republican consultant and former senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R) 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns. “The President has had the worst three months of any incumbent, due to the economy, since George H.W. Bush in 1992, and yet Romney has lost traction among key demographic groups in the vital swing states. He has got to get this behind him or he’s going to face summer definition ala [Bob] Dole and [John] Kerry. ”
Democrats are doing everything in their power to define Romney negatively before the two parties gather for their national conventions later this summer.
The Obama campaign is up with a new — and brutal — ad today in which a narrator details Romney’s complex financial history and then says that it all “makes you wonder if some years he paid any taxes at all”, adding: “What is Mitt Romney hiding?”
A Democratic National Committee web video echoes that secrecy message, featuring a series of Republicans urging Romney to release his tax returns before noting that the one person who did have access to a Romney’s financial past — McCain during the 2008 VP vetting process — decided to go in another direction. (That last claim is a bit of a stretch; Romney was never seriously regarded as a potential veep pick for McCain — not because of his financial past but rather because the two men simply didn’t get along.)
For the moment, the Romney team — and his orbit of advisers — seem to have decided to pursue the same course of action they did when the release of his tax returns bubbled up as an issue in the primary.
“My tax returns that have already been released number into the hundreds of pages,” Romney told National Review’s Robert Costa today. “And we will be releasing tax returns for the most current year as soon as those are prepared. They will also number in the hundreds of pages.”
Back then he insisted that the reason his Republican opponents wanted the information was in order to use it as a political ammunition against him and that he was not interested in giving them a bat with which to beat him.
He reiterated that point in the National Review interview. “In the political environment that exists today, the opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy,” said Romney. “And I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.”
Henry Barbour, a Republican National Committeeman from Mississippi and a Romney supporter, added that giving in on the tax returns would amount to Republicans allowing Democrats to define the terms of the debate.
“Romney will never satisfy the Obama campaign,” said Barbour. “No matter what he does, it won’t be enough and their demands won’t stop until after November 6.” Added Barbour: “Why doesn’t Obama release all the ‘Fast and Furious’ documents?”
(Worth noting: Barbour’s uncle, former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, said that if he was in Romney’s place he would release more years of tax returns.)
They’re right. Tax returns — particularly for someone as wealthy as Romney — are an opposition researcher’s dream come true. For someone with as diversified (and large) a financial portfolio as Romney, there are always nuggets to be mined that could make him look bad. The Obama campaign knows this. It’s why they are trying to force Romney’s hand.
Those risks and arguments notwithstanding, however, Romney would be making a mistake if he continued to refuse to release any more tax returns.
The main reason why? President Obama is not Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich.
That is |
keep the American bombers parked on their runways.
But Hillary’s infamous emails leave no doubt that it was she who induced Obama to embrace the folly that quickly created yet another failed state, hotbed of jihadism and barbaric hellhole in the middle east. Indeed, her hands are doubly bloody.
When Hillary bragged that “We came, we saw, he died”, it turns out that not just Khadafy but thousands of innocents have died, and not just from the chaos unleashed in Libya itself. The former dictator’s arsenals and mercenaries have now been dispersed all over North Africa and the middle east, spreading desolation in their wake.
But a Hillary Clinton presidency would only guarantee more of the same. And as the attached excellent piece from the American Conservative explains, it would also keep the nation's leading clan of warmongers firmly ensconced in the corridors of power.David Michael Mirra (April 4, 1974 – February 4, 2016) was an American BMX rider who later competed in rallycross racing. Mirra held the record for most X Games medals in BMX Freestyle, and medalled in every X Games from when they started in 1995 up to 2009. As a BMX rider, he was known primarily as a vert ramp and park rider. He had also competed for several years with the Subaru Rally Team USA as a rallycross driver. He rode and was sponsored by Haro Bikes from the mid 1990s until starting his own bike company. Mirra was a member of the team which won the 2014 Race Across America four-person male (under 50) category. Mirra died by suicide on February 4, 2016.[1] He was inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame on June 11, 2016.[2]
Early life [ edit ]
Mirra was born on April 4, 1974 in Chittenango, New York.[3] He graduated from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona).[4]
In the 1990s, Mirra's brother, Tim, moved to Greenville, North Carolina, to attend East Carolina University. Dave moved to Greenville soon after.[5] Fellow professional BMX rider Ryan Nyquist moved in with Tim. Mirra and Nyquist became quick friends and would build and ride ramps together. Greenville is now home to over twenty professional BMX riders.[6] This gave Greenville the nickname "Protown" in the BMX community.[7]
Career [ edit ]
While still living in Chittenango, Mirra joined the Haro Bikes BMX team in 1987, at the age of 13. Video producers Plywood Hoods featured him in their videos in 1988. Mirra gained a sponsorship from Vision Street Wear in 1989.[8] He was also sponsored by GT Bicycles through 1991, and then joined Hoffman Bikes in 1992 before re-signing with Haro in 1994.[8]
Mirra turned professional in 1992. He won a medal at the X Games in every year from 1995 through 2009, with the exception of 2006.[5] He won 24 medals at the X Games which stood as a record until 2013.[9] He tied Tony Hawk and Joe Parsons as the fastest to reach 14 X Games medals.[8] In 2005, Mirra won the Best Male Action Sports Athlete ESPY Award.[10] His 14 gold medals are second-most to Shaun White.[11] He retired from BMX riding in 2011.[8]
Mirra's Subaru rally car
From 2008 through 2013, Mirra competed in rallying and rallycross as a member of Subaru Rally Team USA. He had a career-best fourth-place finish during the 2013 Global RallyCross Championship.[8] Mirra became interested in Ironman competitions, competing in his first triathlon in March 2013.[9][12] He qualified for the 2014 Ironman 70.3 World Championship.[11]
Mirra's success took him to numerous outlets besides riding his bike, such as hosting two seasons of MTV's Real World/Road Rules Challenge. He is featured in the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX video game series and more recently appeared in the 2009 video game Colin McRae: Dirt 2.[13] He published a photo-biography titled "Mirra Images",[14] and was once one of People Magazine's "50 Hottest Bachelors".[15] In the mid 2000s, Mirra signed an endorsement deal with DC Shoes. In 2007, Mirra started his own bike company, called MirraCo.[8][16]
Video Games [ edit ]
Mirra worked with Acclaim Max Sports to produce the video games Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX, released in 2000, and Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2, released in 2001. Mirra featured as the game's lead character, along with other professional riders of the era.
Personal life and death [ edit ]
Mirra and his wife, Lauren, had two daughters.[9][17] Mirra contracted bacterial meningitis in 2010. He recovered before resuming rallying.[15]
On February 4, 2016, Mirra died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in Greenville, North Carolina.[18] Authorities responded to a reported suicide and discovered his body inside his black Ford F-150.[19] He had reportedly been visiting friends in the area. Allen Thomas, the mayor of Greenville, called Mirra "a great friend and wonderful human being".[8] Mirra was 41 years old.[9][20]
Mirra was posthumously diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).[21] In addition to the "countless" concussions he suffered during his career, his skull was fractured when he was hit by a car at 19 years old and he took up boxing after retirement. He became the first action sports star to be diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disease.[22]
Racing record [ edit ]
Complete FIA World Rallycross Championship results [ edit ]
Supercar [ edit ]
Complete Global RallyCross Championship results [ edit ]
Supercar [ edit ]Several senators pressed the Trump administration on Friday for details after reports that U.S. officials tried to get Twitter to unmask an anonymous account that published tweets critical of President Trump.
“I am gravely alarmed by the summons that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) transmitted to Twitter on March 14, 2017, regarding the Twitter account @ALT_USCIS," Sen. Ron Wyden Ronald (Ron) Lee WydenTreasury official: Tax withholding guidance wasn't manipulated for political reasons Cohen grilled by Senate Intelligence panel Senate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' MORE (D-Ore.) wrote in a letter to federal officials.
"Not only was the summons blatantly inconsistent with the cited investigatory authority … it appeared to be a distributing threat to free speech and whistleblower protections,” he added.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sens. Mike Lee Michael (Mike) Shumway LeePush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times MORE (R-Utah) and Cory Gardner Cory Scott GardnerBorder rebuke looms for Trump Jon Stewart, 9/11 responders call on Congress to fund victim compensation program The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump MORE (R-Colo.) sent a separate letter on Friday to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly inquiring about the administration’s alleged attempts to gain information on the anonymous Twitter.
The senators asked Kelly for details into what sorts of actions CBP and the Department of Homeland Security took regarding the account and noted their concern for potential violations of free speech.
Twitter filed a lawsuit against the government on Thursday in response to the administration’s attempts to unmask a CBP parody account.
Twitter then dropped the suit on Friday after the CBP withdrew its summons regarding the account, according to Twitter lawyers.
Wyden requested that Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to investigate the matter further.
The Democratic senator said the Trump administration's effort may have violated the “First Amendment right to comment on U.S. policy, and to make those comments anonymously."U.S. crude oil sent to Israeli refiners in a move Dutch trader Trafigura says may be a sign of opening overseas doors. Photo by tcly/Shutterstock
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Dutch oil trader Trafigura confirmed it delivered a cargo of crude oil sourced from U.S. basins to Israeli refineries in an early start for U.S. oil deliveries.
Trading company Vitol, which has headquarters in Switzerland, scheduled the loading of 600,000 barrels of light crude oil from a Houston shipping terminal with the help of Enterprise Product Partners during the first week of January. It was the first such shipment in roughly 40 years.
The White House in November signed off on a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that included language that, with certain provisions, lifted a 40-year ban on the export of crude oil produced in the United States.
Ben Luckock, head of crude oil for Trafigura, said in response to email questions an avenue seems to be opening to overseas refineries looking to cheaper U.S. crude.
RELATED Maersk Oil builds footprint in Africa
"Trafigura has sold prompt loading West Texas Intermediate to the Israeli refining system," he said. "We believe a number of vessels of WTI crude oil have recently been fixed to Europe."
WTI refers to a grade that serves as the benchmark price for U.S. oil. WTI was trading near $30 per barrel early Wednesday, about 18 percent lower than when the first batch of U.S. crude left port in late December.
With crude oil prices hovering near $30 per barrel, a report from the Congressional Budget Office finds authorizing U.S. crude oil exports could increase the price of U.S. crude oil by around $2.50 per barrel during a period ending in 2025. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service, however, found some overseas refineries aren't designed to handle the lighter oils from the United States.
RELATED Shale player Encana cuts spending plans
WTI held a brief premium against Brent in late December as the first cargo of U.S. crude oil was loaded for exports. The White House last year said the United States was already exporting around 4 million barrels per day in the form of refined petroleum products and had waivers in place to export 500,000 bpd of conventional crude oil before the ban was lifted.
Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show about 399,000 barrels of oil per day left the U.S. market last week. That's down about 20 percent from last year.Getty Images
Three of the men who played major roles in the Giants teams that won Super Bowl titles after the 2007 and 2011 seasons will enter the franchise’s Ring of Honor this season.
The Giants announced Tuesday that former head coach Tom Coughlin, former defensive end Justin Tuck and former General Manager Ernie Accorsi will be honored during the team’s Monday night game against the Bengals on November 14. The Giants’ Ring of Honor will have 42 members when they are inducted.
Coughlin coached the Giants from 2004-2015 and led them to those two Super Bowl wins before parting ways with the team after the end of last season. Coughlin, who was also part of Bill Parcells’ staff when the Giants won Super Bowl XXV, didn’t seem quite ready to leave after last season, but his entry into the Ring of Honor suggests any bad feelings have faded over the last few months.
“Any recognition that comes my way must be shared with the great coaches and the great players that have been a part of this franchise during my tenure,” Coughlin said in a statement. “The coaches who worked so hard in representing the Giants, the players who sacrificed and shared with us the goal of being world champions add great significance to this honor.”
Tuck retired earlier this offseason after two years with the Raiders. He had 60.5 regular season sacks in nine years with the Giants and added four sacks of Tom Brady in the team’s two Super Bowl wins. Accorsi was the General Manager from 1998-2006, a period that saw the Giants hire Coughlin, trade for Eli Manning and acquire Tuck and many other players who played key roles in the team’s championships.Members of Argentina’s Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League expressed outrage after President Cristina Kirchner compared investment funds contributing to the mounting national debt to William Shakespeare’s villain Shylock, in a perceived anti-Semitic slur.
Kirchner tweeted the remarks, made on a July 2 visit to a Buenos Aries school, where she told students that to better understand Argentina’s economic crisis, they should read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. One of the protagonists, Jewish moneylender Shylock, is portrayed as scheming, vindictive and greedy.
In one tweet, Kirchner recounted how she had asked students she met which Shakespeare play they were studying. When they told the president they were studying Romeo and Juliet, Kirchner said she responded, “I said, ‘Have you read The Merchant of Venice to understand the vulture funds?’ They all laughed.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
“No, don’t laugh. Usury and the bloodsuckers were immortalized by the best literature for centuries,” she then tweeted to her two million followers.
Vulture funds are funds that deliberately invest in companies or properties that perform poorly and are typically undervalued. The investment fund then buys the debt cheaply and sues the debtors, usually governments, for a higher price.
Argentina is struggling to pay back debts to a number of US-owned funds.
Kirchner’s connection between the funds and the play’s villain evokes a well-known canard according to which Jews control the world’s money. By extension, her words could be interpreted as blaming Argentina’s financial woes on the Jews.
Quién invitaba? La Embajada de Israel en España. Se nota q en Israel les gusta la buena literatura y el mejor teatro pic.twitter.com/IKk2eG5D0v — Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina) July 6, 2015
Israeli officials did not respond to her comments.
The umbrella organization of Argentine Jews, the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations, issued a statement condemning Kirchner’s comments and highlighting the anti-Semitic implications of invoking the play.
The ADL urged her to stop reinforcing anti-Semitic stereotypes. “We are deeply concerned that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is once again promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “The Merchant of Venice – with its nefarious character Shylock – reinforces stereotypes of Jews and present them as money-hungry, conniving and cruel, and by suggesting students to study this play, she is sending a message to Argentina’s youth that Jews are somehow connected to the economic woes of her country.”
Foxman added, “We stand with the Jewish community of Argentina in repudiation of the President’s statements and her repeated implications of Jewish involvement in this issue.”
A 2014 ADL poll in 100 countries found that 24 percent of those surveyed in Argentina harbor anti-Semitic attitudes, with 50 percent of Argentinians agreeing with the statement, “Jews have too much power in the business world.”
Kirchner did not apologize. Instead, she posted a number of tweets criticizing the DAJA and tweeted a program of an Israeli production of the Shakespeare play.
One such tweet showed an invitation from the Israeli Embassy in Spain to a 2013 production of the play by Habima, Israel’s national theater.
“The piece? The Merchant of Venice. The company producing? Habima, Israel’s national theater,” she tweeted. And in a consecutive tweet: “Who’s inviting? The Israeli Embassy in Spain. Notably, in Israel they like good literature and the best theater.
“Goodness. Someone deserves the donkey’s head, as Shakespeare did in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she wrote.Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch education minister, announced that the ban would apply to all schools, including private Muslim religious establishments, and their immediate surroundings.
Not only teachers, but parents and all visitors to schools, including suppliers making deliveries, will be forbidden the burka, even though only 100 women in the Netherlands, out of a population of 16.5 million, are estimated to wear it.
Legislation is expected to be agreed by the Dutch parliament next year.
Mr Plasterk has cited security concerns and the need for teachers and schoolchildren to be able to communicate properly with each other.
"It is important for children to learn that proper communication requires being able to look the other person in the eye," he said to Dutch MPs.
The legendary tolerance of the Dutch has been tested by years of controversy over the burka and radical Islam in the Netherlands.
Local authorities are now expected to follow the government ban by extending restrictions on Islamic dress to council buildings and public transport.
The burka, also known as a Niqab, is a wide dress covering the entire body, hair and neck face of a woman, leaving only a slit for the eyes.
The Dutch ban will not apply to the more common Hijab headscarf, where a woman's face is clearly visible.Photo via Flickr user Cory Doctorow
My friend Glenn would bring his PlayStation 2 over to my house after class during middle school. I think it was mostly because I had a TV in my room, and he didn’t—like all adolescents, we wanted to obsess over our passions in private. I remember never really knowing how the wires were supposed to attach to the back of the monitor and how we’d just keep guessing until it worked. Our afternoons revolved around Vice City, the second game in Rockstar’s rebirthing of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. You played as Tommy Vercetti, a scummy, greased-up coke dealer with a Hawaiian shirt and a lot of one-liners. One day Glenn had his sniper rifle pointed right at a cab driver’s face as my father walked in the room. Glenn pulled the trigger, replacing the cabbie’s head with a fountain of blood, and that was too much for my dad. No more bedroom GTA action for us.
Six years later I was one month away from my 18th birthday, which meant I was one month away from the right to purchase Grand Theft Auto IV. I couldn't stand to wait, though, so my brother and I hatched an elaborate plan. Our friend Alex was 18, so we signed up for the pre-order under his name at the local GameStop, pooled our cash, and sent him off with 60 of our hard-earned dollars. A copy of GTA IV was hand-delivered to us in an inconspicuous plastic bag a few hours later, like some kind of contraband. I remember watching my brother carefully slice off the cover art so the box wouldn’t arouse any parental suspicions. We played in shifts, our thumbs hovering over the pause button in case mom or dad made any unexpected visits. Nothing would stop us from experiencing the latest volume of the most important media franchise of our time.
For as long as I can remember—which is as long as Grand Theft Auto games have been coming out—the franchise has been surrounded by controversy. It’s a video game synonymous with the violent, satanic indulgences that have been blamed for school shootings and godless children. Disbarred Florida attorney Jack Thompson has dedicated his activist career to destroying the franchise and its creators (along with rap music and Howard Stern). New York politicians criticized GTA IV’s portrayal of their city, Mothers Against Drunk Driving hated that characters could get behind the wheel while shitfaced, and the Chicago Transit Authority refused to let ads for series appear on its property. You likely remember the hysterias caused by GTA—the crimes it got blamed for, the won't-somebody-think-of-the-children rhetoric. (You may also remember that some of the more important works of narrative art of the 20th century were the subject of outright bans, a la Ulysses and Lolita, but that's another story.)
There was a moment, back in 2005, when modders uncovered the sex-simulating “Hot Coffee” minigame lodged deep in the code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where it seemed that GTA was about to crash and burn. San Andreas got slapped with the commercially nonviable “Adults Only” rating, and the Federal Trade Commission started investigating Rockstar’s parent company’s advertising practices. And the games did change, a bit—the company agreed to “clearly and prominently disclose on product packaging” any objectionable content, and when I killed a cab driver in GTA IV there was no fountain of blood, just an ugly lurch of the gun, a solemn stain of red on the windshield, and a limp body in the driver’s seat. The streets of Liberty City got a little less gleeful, the violence became a little more human. Storylines in GTA IV included a character's cousin’s taxi business getting burnt to the ground as we watch, a bank robbery going horribly, tragically wrong, and a revenge saga rooted in the atrocities of the Bosnian War.
Some said the franchise had matured, that it was finally discarding the silly, crime-TV parodies of the earlier games and embracing something “serious.” But for my money, GTA has always been on the cutting edge. The plethora of longform, narrative-focused games we have today wouldn’t exist without Grand Theft Auto IV; the dynamic, open-world games wouldn’t exist without Grand Theft Auto III. Rockstar has always been the vanguard of innovation, and their marquee franchise exists to push boundaries. GTA stands as perhaps the one franchise most responsible for legitimizing video games as art on a mainstream platform.
If that sounds fanboyish, maybe that’s a consequence of growing up with these games—every single GTA release since at least the Vice City days was a watershed moment in my adolescence, like Christmas except my parents hated it. When I buy my copy of GTA V, I’ll still feel a twinge of disobedient sin.
Will this installment have the same wide-ranging effect as its predecessors? I don’t know. It’s hard to stay influential and groundbreaking for as long as the GTA franchise has. GTA V be the last major release exclusive to our current generation of consoles, and it’s entering a climate where games like The Last of Us, Bioshock: Infinite, and Far Cry 3 have borrowed some of GTA’s blueprints to amazing effect. Early reviews have stressed the game’s sheer ball-busting fucking awesomeness, but some have also pointed out that it’s retained the franchise’s streak of sneering misogyny, which more gamers are aware of these days.
On the other hand, the franchise has mostly outlasted its critics—hardly anyone seems eager to denounce GTA V as a brutal, child-corrupting monster. Even Fox News is publishing blog posts about how the games have “grown up.” Only the willfully ignorant think that 1) These games are for young kids; 2) You get “points” for having sex with prostitutes; or 3) The sheer scope of playable world and the level of detail aren’t amazing achievements in and of themselves. Even more importantly, I don’t live with my parents anymore. See you guys in a couple weeks.
@luke_winkie
More on video games:
'Grand Theft Auto V' Is Going to Destroy My Social Life
My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict
Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?“We didn’t do anything until the I.R.S. determined that it was going to be treated as an asset,” said Matt Nash, Fidelity Charitable’s senior vice president of donor engagement. “If you look at an overall mix of a portfolio and one asset is gaining value much faster than another, then it’s strategic to donate that asset to charity. You’re getting better overall value for the dollar.”
Mr. Nash said that the fund did not accept Bitcoin directly and that it did not hold any cryptocurrencies in its own portfolio. The fund uses Coinbase, a digital asset exchange company, to accept donations and convert them into dollars as soon as they come in.
It’s a similar process with stocks. Fidelity Charitable turns assets it receives into cash right away, but it’s even more important that the fund transfers Bitcoins into dollars because of its volatility. Bitcoin fell by nearly 20 percent from Aug 28 to Sept. 11, for instance. Fidelity does not want to be caught holding something that can decline so quickly.
Easier to Track
Some technology entrepreneurs and cryptocurrency enthusiasts say that the system these currencies are built on can alter how people give and track their donations.
Cryptocurrencies use a blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions. Normally, when someone pays cash for an item in a store, the transaction is seen by only the buyer and the seller. With a blockchain, the transaction is recorded in a digital ledger in near real time that anyone can see. It is also impossible for transaction details to be changed.
Because everything is tracked, donors can easily see that their payments have gone from their digital wallets into a charity’s hands.Everyday products and services require the most creative strategies.
February 15, 2017 4 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Tesla, Virgin Galactic and Oculus all have something in common: They build sexy products and the media loves to give them coverage. Most businesses are more mundane. They lack the flash and sizzle inherent in an industry such as space travel. Because these companies don't have a built-in marketing advantage, they companies have to get creative if they want the media to shower them with love.
For example, consider the self-storage industry. Could there be a more boring business? The building is shaped like a box. Inside are box-shaped rooms, each filled with boxes that customers leave there for years. Not exciting. Yet the industry hit gold when "Storage Wars" became the most popular show in A&E’s history. The series attracted millions of viewers and brought attention to an industry that pop culture previously had ignored.
Related: 5 Ways to Fall in Love With Your Business All Over Again
Not quite boring enough? Here's another: flowchart software. It’s one of those things no one thinks about until he or she needs it. That's precisely the challenge Lucid Software faced when marketing its flagship product, Lucidchart. The cloud-based platform helps users create flowcharts. It’s sophisticated technology, but unless you're an engineer, it isn't likely to raise your pulse.
“We had to find a way to change how people think about diagramming,” Lucid PR head Jackson Carpenter said. “So our marketing team decided to see if we could attach the brand to trending stories by making flowcharts for superfans and pop-culture geeks -- people like us.”
The company since has made flowcharts for topics ranging from Star Wars and fantasy football to Dungeons and Dragons. Flowcharts created in Lucidchart have been featured in The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, ScreenRant and more. The marketing campaign itself earned ecognition from the Utah Marketing Awards and produced more than 2 million views for Lucid Software in seven months. Not bad for a boring little software company from the Beehive State.
What lessons can the rest of us take from Lucid’s success?
Think bigger than your product.
If your product isn’t newsworthy on its own, don’t pitch the product. Instead, tie it to something bigger and more exciting. Lucid used movie premieres, sporting events and video-game releases to create relevant content that major outlets were sure to pick up.
Related: 10 Online Invoicing Services for Small-Business Owners
Build it for the grassroots.
At the beginning of the campaign, Lucid’s staff of active Redditors shared content on their favorite subreddits. Because they were involved with the communities they were making content for, they knew what their audience would love. When a flowchart took off on Reddit, the team knew it wouldn’t be long before the press would follow.
Related: Domino's Has a Wedding Registry, Because You Know, People Love PIzza?
Remember the end game.
Lucid’s campaign -- while lighthearted and fun -- served two very specific business purposes. First, it showed people who'd never thought about diagramming software how versatile flowcharts are as a medium for conveying complex ideas. Second, it helped drive traffic back to Lucid's website, where the company was able to register new users and capture email addresses for future marketing campaigns.
Related: 8 Great Time-Tracking Apps for Freelancers
If you think your business is boring, look at how other “boring” businesses are promoting themselves. If self-storage facilities and flowchart-software companies can make themselves interesting, you're out of excuses for not finding a hook to tell your own business' story.
Related: Entrepreneurs: You May Just Find the Next Big Idea in Existing OnesRecipe for vegan Gingerbread Cupcakes. They are the perfect festive treat for the holidays! Easy to make and so delicious!
These vegan Gingerbread Cupcakes are the perfect festive treat for the holidays. I’ve added cinnamon & ginger powder into the muffin base and into the cream, plus they are topped with gingerbread crumbles. For the gingerbread sprinkles, you can either use store-bought vegan gingerbread or you can make your own gingerbread cookies first.
These cupcakes are the perfect gift for friends, family or colleagues. Super christmas-y and so easy to make!
Vegan Gingerbread Cupcakes Recipe for vegan Gingerbread Cupcakes. They are the perfect festive treat for the holidays! Easy to make and so delicious! 5 from 1 vote Print Pin Prep Time: 20 minutes Cook Time: 20 minutes Total Time: 35 minutes Servings: 8 Calories: 233 kcal Author: Elephantastic Vegan Ingredients Ingredients for the muffins 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated white sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1 pinch salt
1 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
2/3 cup almond milk
1/2 teaspoon coconut vinegar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract Ingredients for the gingerbread topping 1 cup whipped coconut cream
2 teaspoons brown rice syrup
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1/4 teaspoon ginger powder
1 gingerbread cookie for the crumbles Instructions Pre-heat oven to 360°F/180°C.
In a mixing bowl, combine all the dry ingredients for the muffins, whisk, then add all the wet ingredients and whisk again until it's a smooth batter.
Fill the batter in muffin wrappers or use a lightly oiled muffin pan and put them in the oven for about 20 minutes. (Use the Toothpick Method to make sure the dough is done in the middle.)
Let them cool off completely.
Whip the coconut cream and add in the rice syrup, cinnamon and ginger powder. Put the cream in a piping bag and pipe them onto the muffins. Crumble up a gingerbread cookie and sprinkle it over the cream. Serve immediately or store the cupcakes in the fridge. Estimated Nutrition Info Calories: 233 kcal | Carbohydrates: 28 g | Protein: 3 g | Fat: 12 g | Saturated Fat: 10 g | Sodium: 74 mg | Potassium: 156 mg | Fiber: 1 g | Sugar: 10 g | Vitamin C: 1 % | Calcium: 5.2 % | Iron: 9.5 % Tried this recipe? Mention @elephantasticvegan or tag #elephantasticvegan Rate the recipe! A recipe rating helps other users to figure out if they should try a recipe. Please leave a good rating, if you like the recipe!
Should you decide to give these festive vegan Gingerbread Cupcakes recipe a try I’d love to hear how it turned out for you! Leave a comment or post a picture on instagram, use the hashtag #elephantasticvegan and tag me via @elephantasticvegan to make sure I’ll see it ^.^ I love to see all your lovely creations! Thanks! <3
Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something that I have recommended. While clicking these links won't cost you any extra money, they will help me keep this site up and running!August 13, 2015 — Ron Chusid
Why Sanders Can Win
It is always tempting to draw comparisons to something we know, and in politics we often see comparisons to past elections. Sometimes there is some truth to this, but we must consider how few contested nomination battles and elections we have actually had in modern times. Events of one election do not dictate what will happen in the current election. Today many Clinton supporters are citing this article at Vox by Ezra Klein as a reason that Sanders cannot win. It is based upon an interview with Joe Trippi. The problem is that Trippi is still fighting an old battle which does not really apply to today–and a battle he lost.
Klein concentrated on this line as Sanders’ biggest problem: “People get more pragmatic the closer they get to an actual vote.” There are two flaws with this argument–failing to recognize Sanders’ strengths and Dean’s weaknesses.
The argument that Sanders cannot win the general election is rapidly falling apart as more polls show Sanders beating the Republican candidates. Sanders draws in more independent support than Clinton, and is looking like he might be a better candidate in the battleground states as Clinton polls poorly there. Sanders is not bogged down with a serious scandal, which threatens to totally derail Clinton’s campaign. Voters will be more hesitant to support a candidate who is considered (for good reason) to be dishonest by a majority of the voters.
Sanders’ views are becoming more mainstream than Clinton’s. The problems created by concentration of wealth in a small oligarchy have become more apparent since Dean ran. The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton/Triangulation/The DLC has been replaced by the party of Elizabeth Warren, and now Bernie Sanders. Calling himself a Democratic Socialist might sound like a negative, but it has little impact after years of hearing from the right that Hillary Clinton is a politician from the far left and Barack Obama is a Marxist Socialist (neither of which are true). It took only a short time researching his record to reassure a capitalist business owner such as myself that Sanders would preserve small business and a market economy, reforming some of our current problems. Sanders was good for business as mayor of Burlington, with Inc. Magazine calling Burlington the best city in the Northeast for a growing business after his policies were instituted.
Howard Dean had serious flaws which I do not see in Sanders. While I do not want to revive old political battles from over a decade ago, I did support Dean for a while, but soon found flaws from the manner in which he mischaracterized the views of his opponents to how he distorted past decisions where he was wrong.
Last weekend The New York Times also had an article arguing that Similarities Aside, Bernie Sanders Isn’t Rerunning Howard Dean’s 2004 Race and hit on some additional differences, including Sanders’ years of experience, which should make him a more credible candidate, and Dean’s temperament:
Mr. Dean was, at 55, a kinetic live wire of a candidate, plunging into his first national campaign after 22 years in Vermont politics. Mr. Sanders, 73, is, at least in comparison, the measured if stern family uncle, an independent who for all his association with the progressive politics of Burlington shows the command of policy that comes with being a product of Washington, where he has served since 1991… And in an age of unforgiving news and social media, Mr. Sanders has so far displayed a discipline on the campaign trail that often eluded Mr. Dean. The former governor was prone, in all his exuberance, to self-destructive missteps and bursts of anger. He had to apologize for asserting that Mr. Edwards had been deceptive about voting for the Iraq war resolution (he had not), then apologize again after coming under fire from his rivals for declaring that he wanted to be the “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” Mr. Dean’s campaign was undone, as much as anything, by the release of videotapes of public television appearances in Vermont in which he had disparaged the Iowa caucuses. “Their personalities are just so different,” said Deborah Marlin, 50, who showed up for Mr. Sanders’s rally here and recalled seeing Mr. Dean around Iowa in 2004, a year in which she ended up supporting George W. Bush. “I think Bernie is much more of a people person.”
Bernie Sanders is not Howard Dean. Similarly, while there are also analogies between him and Eugene McCarthy, the two are also different men. If pundits insist upon comparing Sanders to another candidacy, I would also suggest Barack Obama. While Sanders is certainly more liberal than Obama, Sanders just might do what Obama did eight years ago–beat Hillary Clinton and go on to become president.What Is A “DAO”? How Do They Benefit Consumers?
BlockChannel Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 21, 2016
Welcome to our “BlockChannel University” series — where we pick a topic that is currently trending in the Bitcoin/Ethereum/Blockchain industry, and educate you on the ins and out. Stay ahead of what the world creates!
What is a DAO? How Can It Benefit Consumers (Me)?
“DAO”, is a powerful three letter acronym that stands for, “Decentralized Autonomous Organization”. If you’ve been delving into the specifics behind “Ethereum” (Ethereum.org), then chances are you’ve come across this acronym, a lot. It’s an aspect of decentralization and autonomy that has futurists and tech enthusiasts salivating at the mouth; with ingredients that bring blockchain-based technologies another step closer to “disruption”.
Now that the basic definition is out of the way, I know what you’re thinking (why else would you be reading this?). “What does a DAO do?”; “Why is it important?”; and most importantly, “How does it benefit me, an everyday consumer?”
Great questions! Glad you asked them! Now, let’s tackle these three questions, together. Also, let me preface something very important of note before I begin.
Although the idea of “DAOs” isn’t a new one, the capability and feasibility of them existing in real world applications, is a relatively nascent advent (some are working on creating some of the first DAOs ever, like Slock.It). This means there is a lot of available room for scrutiny. Mostly because not many real-world examples exist, yet — so the right |
Region [ 32 ] and Eastern Mediterranean Region are the least represented in terms of gonococcal AMR reporting. The number of countries reporting data on N. gonorrhoeae antimicrobial susceptibility to ESCs, azithromycin, and ciprofloxacin in 2009–2014 are detailed in S2 Table.
There are significant variations between WHO regions with regard to the proportion of countries participating in the WHO GASP, which antimicrobials are monitored, the AMR testing methods used, and the level of quality assurance (QA). The methodologies used, including QA methods, are described in S1 Text [ 19 – 34 ].
The WHO Global Gonococcal Antimicrobial Surveillance Programme (WHO GASP), a collaborative global network of regional and subregional reference laboratories, was initiated in 1990 to monitor gonococcal AMR worldwide [ 17 ]. WHO GASP data have since then informed revisions of global, regional, and national gonorrhea treatment guidelines, as well as public health strategies and policies developed by WHO and other organizations. WHO recommends that treatment guidelines are refined based on data from recent and quality-assured gonococcal AMR surveillance and that the use of an antimicrobial in empiric treatment is discontinued when the rates of therapeutic failures and/or AMR reach a level of 5% [ 5, 18 ]. Since 2009, WHO has substantially strengthened the WHO GASP, which is coordinated by regional coordinating centers (“focal points”) (see S1 Table ). To ensure quality-assured, valid, and comparable data among countries, regional focal points provide technical support and training in countries to strengthen laboratory capacities (e.g., for sample collection and transport, gonococcal culturing, preservations of strains, AMR testing), to conduct a GASP external quality assurance (EQA) program, and to curate, update, and distribute the WHO gonococcal reference strains for EQA and internal quality control (QC) [ 19, 20 ]. The 2016 WHO reference strains can also be used for QC in phenotypic and molecular diagnostics, molecular AMR prediction, molecular epidemiology, and as fully characterized reference genomes in whole-genome sequencing analysis [ 20 ]. The WHO GASP works in close collaboration with other international and national quality-assured GASPs, including Euro-GASP [ 21, 22 ], United States Gonococcal Isolate Surveillance Project (GISP; https://www.cdc.gov/std/gisp/ ) [ 23, 24 ], Canadian GASP [ 25 ], Australian Gonococcal Surveillance Programme (AGSP) [ 26 ], and United Kingdom Gonococcal Resistance to Antimicrobials Surveillance Programme (UK GRASP) [ 27 ].
Discussion
Challenges and opportunities with GASPs Gonococcal AMR is a major problem globally, but the AMR situation varies in different parts of the world and changes over time. Sustained and quality-assured GASPs are essential but are very challenging to operate. Worryingly, gonococcal AMR surveillance remains lacking or exceedingly limited in many settings worldwide, e.g., Eastern Europe, Central Asia, parts of Latin America (including the Caribbean), the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region, and the WHO African Region. Many of these settings also have high rates of gonorrhea, lack of (or suboptimal) diagnosis, over-the-counter access to antimicrobials without prescription, and limited access to optimal antimicrobial treatment, such as high-quality ceftriaxone or, ideally, dual therapy with ESC plus azithromycin. These factors create the perfect conditions for rapid emergence and spread of gonococcal AMR [5,6,28]. Accordingly, it is imperative to substantially strengthen and expand GASPs worldwide. There are many microbiological, epidemiologic, and programmatic difficulties to the achievement of high-quality, standardized, and comparable AMR data. Between different countries and WHO regions, the number of isolates examined varies significantly. Almost half of the WHO GASP countries do not have sufficient sample sizes (approximately 100 gonococcal isolates per year) to detect a 5% AMR level with high statistical confidence [5,18,33], nor have they collected samples from representative populations. This is a result of syndromic management of STIs used in resource-constrained settings and limited laboratory capacity and capability. Meanwhile, in well-resourced settings, nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) have replaced gonococcal culture for diagnosis. Both circumstances have resulted in limited specimen collection for culture and loss of capability to perform culture and AMR testing of gonococci. Situation analysis has revealed a lack of awareness of gonococcal AMR among policy-makers, clinicians, laboratory professionals, and patients in many settings [55]. Engagement of collaborators in sustainable GASPs is crucial. However, in addition to low awareness, other critical issues need to be addressed, such as data ownership, limited numbers of gonococcal-competent laboratories, clinical and laboratory training (in specimen collection, transport and preservation, and laboratory techniques such as culture and AMR testing), insufficient availability of appropriate laboratory tests and reagents (especially antimicrobials for testing), lack of or inadequate use of crucial QA components such as EQA and QC, loss of isolates during transport and storage (limited access to −70°C freezers, lyophilizators, lack of generators in case of power outages), and, most importantly, lack of sufficient funding. Additionally, it is important to further strengthen well-established GASPs [21–27] by consistently testing crucial antimicrobials (e.g., ceftriaxone and azithromycin), increasing the number of isolates tested, improving the representativeness of isolates (e.g., geographically diverse isolates from both sexes, all risk groups, and all anatomical sites), improving the completeness of reporting of epidemiological variables, collecting additional epidemiological data, and gathering information on treatment and treatment outcomes where possible. In some sentinel countries (e.g., the Philippines and Thailand), WHO has initiated an enhanced GASP (EGASP) aiming to collect standardized and quality-assured epidemiological and clinical information linked to microbiological and AMR data, similar to Euro-GASP and US GISP [21–24]. These data should be collected in a timely manner in order to provide an early detection and warning system for the emergence of AMR. Furthermore, in the WHO GASP, the use of MIC determination methods is being expanded and it is recommended that all instances of ESC resistance identified by the disc diffusion method be confirmed by MIC determination. In many settings, there is a lack of awareness among staff of national ministries of health and among healthcare professionals that continuous AMR surveillance and/or surveys should be the foundation of a national AMR action plan, should be part of routine diagnostics and/or surveillance, and should inform refinements of the recommended treatment algorithms. In settings in which clinical practices include syndromic management of STIs, this is especially important. Accordingly, AMR surveillance is not simply a research project. Thus, in most countries, it should not require approval from an ethical committee because the collection and antimicrobial-susceptibility testing of gonococcal isolates are part of standard care, and no patient identification information is made available in AMR surveillance. Finally, there are significant delays in the release of AMR data from the current GASPs, which limits their value as part of an early warning system for AMR emergence and limits their usefulness for informing prompt refinements of gonorrhea management guidelines and public health policy. Timely reporting by GASPs will require significant improvements in the procedures for release of country-specific AMR data (e.g., release directly to public health organizations before peer-review or through very timely peer-reviewed publications).
Prevention and control of gonorrhea Gonococcal AMR will only be effectively mitigated when the global gonorrhea burden is reduced. Improved prevention, management, and control of gonorrhea are imperative. Linking this to HIV and STI prevention in general will be essential, including education regarding symptomatic and asymptomatic STIs, promotion of safer sex behaviors including increased condom use, behavior change communication programs, enhanced partner notification and treatment, and expansion of targeted interventions for vulnerable populations (sex workers, men who have sex with men [MSM], adolescents, and STI patients and their sexual partners). In the absence of a gonococcal vaccine, optimal public health control of gonorrhea will continue to rely on effective, accessible, affordable, and timely antimicrobial treatment in combination with prevention strategies, diagnostics (index cases and traced sexual contacts), and surveillance. Appropriate gonorrhea case management is essential to reduce unnecessary or incorrect antimicrobial treatment and development of AMR. In 2016, WHO published new guidelines for the treatment of gonorrhea [9], based on consultative review of all evidence available from clinical efficacy trials, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic simulations, and in vitro AMR surveillance. WHO recommends that national public health programs adapt their national gonorrhea management guidelines based on local AMR prevalence. Where recent, local, and quality-assured gonococcal AMR data are lacking, WHO recommends dual antimicrobial therapy over monotherapy for people with symptomatic and asymptomatic urogenital, anorectal, or oropharyngeal gonorrhea (e.g., ceftriaxone 250 mg plus azithromycin 1 g, or cefixime 400 mg plus azithromycin 1 g) [9]. Increased detection and effective treatment of asymptomatic gonorrhea in general and pharyngeal gonorrhea in particular are critical, because these infections are potential gonococcal reservoirs in which AMR (especially ESC AMR) can emerge [6,56]. Oropharyngeal infections are prevalent, mostly asymptomatic, and more difficult to treat; accordingly, screening and treatment in high-risk patients are important.On 7 November 2017, the Indonesian Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi/MK) ruled favourably on a judicial review of articles of the Civil Administration Law related to how religion is recorded on the identity documentation of followers of indigenous faiths (aliran kepercayaan). These citizens will now be able to list their religion as pengyahat kepercayaan (followers of indigenous faithrs) on their national ID cards (KTP/Kartu Tanda Penduduk). Previously, they were either forced to nominally identify with one of the six official religions, or leave the religion column on their cards blank.
Several prominent Muslim leaders have reacted negatively to the MK’s ruling. Among them were Kyai Ma’ruf Amin, who is both general chairman of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) and supreme leader (rais ‘amm syuriah) of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU); Yunahar Ilyas, a member of the central leadership board of Indonesia’s second largest Islamic organisation, Muhammadiyah; and Din Syamsudin, former both MUI and Muhammadiyah chairman.
All these Muslim leaders have basically said that aliran kepercayaan is not religion, but rather a cultural practice, and therefore should not have equal status as religion in Indonesian law. In particular, Din Syamsudin said that the category of “religion” implies specific criteria, namely a concept of God, a scripture, and a prophet-like figure. According to this view, since indigenous faiths lack at least one of these criteria they are not religions.
These Muslim leaders seem to hold a monotheist-biased paradigm of what constitutes religion. Within the Indonesian context, there are three ways to refute it.
The first is with reference to Indonesian law, as highlighted in the MK decision itself. One of the two fundamental parts of the MK’s decision was that the religion column in citizens’ ID cards as mandated by Articles 61(1) and 64(1) of the Civil Administration Law is unconstitutional because the word “religion”—as understood for the purposes of administrative law—does not include indigenous faiths. The main legal basis of this decision is Article 29(2) of Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution, which declares that “The State guarantees all persons the freedom of worship, each according to his/her own religion and belief/faith (kepercayaan).”
The Court acknowledged that this article may imply that religion and kepercayaan are two different things, since between the two words there is the conjunction “and”. However, the Court based its argument on their reading of how Indonesia’s founding fathers formulated Article 29 of the constitution, both Paragraphs 1 and 2, in the lead up to independence in 1945. The initial draft of Article 29(1) read: “the State shall be based upon Islam with the obligation to abide by sharia for Muslims.” This Islamic clause was deleted and replaced with “based upon Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa” in the last minutes before the official promulgation of the constitution on 18 August 1945.
Despite being erased, in the court’s view the “Islamic clause” remained relevant because of its connection with Article 29(2). The MK said that, given the context that Article 29(1) was initially meant for Muslims only, Article 29(2) was meant to guarantee freedom of worship for all non-Muslims. Therefore, the two words agama and kepercayaan were not meant to be distinct from each other; in the Court’s view, the founding fathers implied that the word kepercayaan was part of religion, despite the conjunction “and”.
A noteworthy fact was that the word kepercayaan in Article 29(2) was originally proposed by Wongsonegoro, a member of the constitutional drafting committee who later became Minister of Education and Culture, deputy prime minister, and founder of Badan Kongres Kebatinan Indonesia (Indonesian Spiritualism Congressional Assembly). The word kebatinan was used as a synonym for kepercayaan in the 1965 decree on defamation of religion, which later became the Blasphemy Law. It is an obvious, but unfortunately overlooked, fact of history that a past leader of aliran kepercayaan/kebatinan communities contributed to the formulation of Indonesia’s constitution.
This understanding on the part of the Court led to the other major element of its decision: that discriminating in practice between religion and indigenous faiths, such as by requiring followers of indigenous faiths to leave their ID cards’ religion column blank, contravenes the constitution.
The second response to critics of the ruling is from an academic viewpoint. Scholars of religion have long considered that defining religion by the kinds of criteria as stated by Din Syamsudin is biased in favour of monotheism. Sadly, while most scholars remain critical of the use of the degrading word “animism” to denote indigenous faiths, this term is still prevalent in both Indonesian academia and popular discourse.
The uncritical use of such terms in Indonesia is ironic, given the fact that the idea of “animism” was a western construct to refer to “primitive”, “heathen” cultural entities yet to be modernised. A paradigm that constructs a separation—and in turn a stratification—between religion and culture was also in part a modern western invention, one which then spread all over the world thanks to western colonisation.
Indeed, if we consistently apply that narrow understanding of religion, several major faiths recognised by the Indonesian state could not be among the officially recognised religions. Theravada Buddhism and Confucianism, for example, do not have a concept of a personal God comparable and parallel to that of monotheists. It was only after such a monotheist-biased paradigm was imposed upon them (thanks to the first principle of Pancasila: Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa) that they were forced to adjust themselves to Indonesian political discourse by “inventing” a God—Dhamma in the case of Indonesian Buddhism, and Tian in the case of Indonesian Confucianism.
It has become common today to use the term “indigenous religions” in English-speaking academic discourse. Seen from this global development, the usage of the word kepercayaan, let alone “animism”, in Indonesia is outdated. What is largely underdeveloped in Indonesian academic studies of religion (of course with a few exceptions) is an understanding of religion that is critical of the political discourse described above, and is aware of its historical development. Such a critical approach can be exercised, for example, in the way we understand the meaning of the Indonesian word for religion, agama, itself.
The word agama did not mean “religion” in its original Sanskrit; rather, it referred to a range of literatures or scripture. In fact, there is no word that is equivalent to the English “religion” in Sanskrit—the closest is the word dharma, but this is too is not exactly equivalent to religion. What happened during the colonial era in Indonesia was that the Dutch picked the word agama to denote religion, and then Indonesians instilled into its meaning a monotheist-biased understanding. In light of this, we can understand agama as it is currently understood in Indonesia as an invention, and a modern one at that.
This invention not only impinged upon agama as understood in its original Sanskrit meaning, but on many if not all of the institutionalised religions we know today. “Hinduism”, to take the best example, existed only after the name was invented not by the Hindus themselves but by Persians, then taken by a Muslim historian (Abu ar-Rayhan al-Biruni [d. 1048], in his work Kitab al-Hind), and was eventually adopted by the British in India. “Hinduism” was initially a simplified term to denote highly diverse traditional beliefs and practices that existed beyond the Indus River. As summarised by Wilfred C Smith in his classic The Meaning and End of Religion, “There are Hindus, but there is no Hinduism.” So, besides being an invention, Hinduism—and for Smith this also applies to all major religions, including Islam—has experienced a “reification”, an evolution from a fluid traditional practice with no clear boundary between the religious and the secular/cultural into a perceived concrete unity of an institutionalised belief and practice.
Finally, there is a Quranic viewpoint on the status of indigenous faiths—and this argument is specifically for Muslims. A very popular verse in the Quran reads, “For you is your din, and for me is my din” (Q 109:6). Who were the addressees of this verse? The Meccan pagans! The Quran identifies Meccan pagan practices and categorically refers to them as “din”, the Arabic word commonly translated as “religion”. The Meccan pagans at that time did not have a scripture or a prophet-like figure. Yet the Quran uses the same categorical term to refer to both pagan practices and the religion of Islam. Coincidentally, or rather ironically, the Indonesian Muslim leader who said that a religion must have a scripture and a prophet-like figure is himself named Din.Microsoft announced pricing today for its top-of-the-line Surface tablet, the Surface Pro.
It’ll start at US$899, or US$400 more than the Surface RT tablet that’s out now.
Unfortunately, that extra $400 also gets you terrible battery life.
In a Tweet from Microsoft
that was picked up by Engadget, the company revealed that the Surface Pro would only get about half the battery life of the Surface RT. That means approximately 4.5 hours.
So, let’s recap.
US$899 gets you:
A Surface Pro with 64 GB of storage.
No keyboard. You’ll need to drop another ~$100 to get one of the special keyboard covers.
4.5 hours of battery life, which is pretty bad compared to many other laptops and abysmal compared to most tablets.
Yes, the Surface Pro is a full-fledged PC, powered by an Intel Chip. That explains the price. But how can Microsoft sell a PC without a keyboard/mouse? And compared to other portable PCs like the popular light and thin Ultrabooks, the Surface Pro has horrible battery life. Many Ultrabooks can last seven hours or longer on a charge.
No matter what you think of Windows 8, the Surface Pro is a horrible value.ALLEN PARK -- The Detroit Lions beat Sam Bradford twice last season, but they'll face the Minnesota Vikings without him this Sunday when they travel to Minneapolis.
Minnesota has ruled its starting quarterback out for the third straight game, coach Mike Zimmer told reporters Thursday. The Vikings will instead roll with Case Keenum, who led Minnesota to a win last week and who has been productive against the Lions before.
The fifth-year quarterback was starting for the Rams last year when he came to Ford Field for a thrilling showdown. Keenum played one of the better games of his career then, completing 27 of 32 passes for 321 yards and three touchdowns and an interception. The 321 yards are his third-most in 28 career games. The 84 percent completion is his best ever.
The interception, by safety Rafael Bush in the final two minutes, sealed a 31-28 Lions victory.
"How we were built last year, we were trying to make sure we didn't keep letting anything behind us, which were doing every year, but we didn't challenge as much last year," Lions defensive coordinator Teryl Austin said. "He was able to deal that ball to the right guy, time after time after time. Our guys did a good job of just holding up and then at the very end, getting an interception off of him."
Keenum's career high for yards in a game came in his most recent one, when he tore up the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for 369 yards and three touchdowns against no interceptions. He finished with a rating of 142.1, just a little off a perfect mark of 158.
He leads the league's third-ranked offense in terms of yards into a matchup against a Lions defense that has made life difficult on opposing quarterbacks so far with seven interceptions in three games. Last week, reigning MVP Matt Ryan came into the matchup with 22 touchdowns against zero interceptions over his past nine games, and the Lions took three of his passes away, including one that safety Glover Quin ran back for a touchdown.
The Lions will hope they can have the full arsenal of their defense back in time to stop Keenum and the Vikings. Defensive end Ezekiel Ansah and strong safety Tavon Wilson have been limited in practice, with Wilson missing last week's game with a shoulder issue. Rookie linebacker Jarrad Davis also missed last week with a brain injury, though he's been progressing this week toward trying to play Sunday.The North Korean authorities have tightened up their efforts to stop external media from circulating in the early Kim Jong Eun era, and this has been relatively effective. Nevertheless, some more fortunate young people continue to evade the stricter regulations.
In North
Korea as anywhere else, a USB stick is simple to hide and thus tricky
for the security services to clamp down on consistently. Moreover, unlike a
disc, which cannot be swiftly removed from a DVD player or computer in the event of a
sudden visit from the security services, a USB stick can be removed and
secreted away more or less instantly.
At the
beginning of May, Daily NK met a number of legal North Korean visitors to
Dandong in China to discuss this kind of issue.
A male in
his 40s from South Hwanghae Province explained, “Kids of 15 and 16 have these
things on memory sticks. They watch them, copy them, pass them on, and that is
how South Korean media spreads among the young. Of course they are
taught not to do it, but kids are inquisitive and so they find a way to do it regardless.
Being told not to watch South Chosun films makes some do it all the more.”
The informant went on to claim that the spread
of cellular phones is also spurring the greater spread of foreign music.
However, both he and all Daily NK’s other informants were in agreement that
this state of affairs obtains predominantly for demographics that enjoy
political strength and economic freedom, such as the children of Party
officials.
“Do you
think that someone having one meal a day would be buying that kind of thing?” a
female interviewee in her 50s snorted. “Most people cannot [and do not] watch
that stuff; it is the cadres and their kids who do. The people who live a little
better than most.”
According
to the woman, a USB stick capable of holding a small volume of data (roughly
three episodes of a South Korean television drama, each of which is ordinarily one
hour in length) currently costs 70,000 North Korean won, while larger ones come in at between 100,000 and 150,000 won. “It costs 10,000 won to get hold of a
popular movie, and about 5,000 for ordinary films,” she added.
As Daily NK
reported on June 2nd, and as the informants universally agreed, regulation of access to external information
such as movies, music and drama has been stepped up under the rule of Kim Jong
Eun, and in particular since the conviction and execution of former
Vice-chairman of the National Defense Commission Jang Sung Taek in December
last year.
Severity of punishment varies both by region and whether the place in question is rural or
urban. In some of the worst cases, evidence trickling out of North Korea
reveals that executions have taken place, though this is much rarer than labor reeducation.
“The regulation has gotten much worse since
Jang Sung Taek was executed,” a 40-something source from Hwanghae agreed. “At
times like these, watching South Chosun media means trouble,” a male source
from North Pyongan Province concurred. A woman from Sinuiju confirmed that
ordinary people there generally do not go near South Korean media now, either.
In addition
to “109” and “927” groups, which are tasked with regulating matters concerning South
Korean media, sources also revealed that
Pyongyang recently saw task forces formed from graduating senior
middle school (in effect, high school) students.
“109 Group
means a specialist team made up of people from the Ministry of People’s Security
(MPS), the Party, and the administration that looks for, in particular, discs
of South Korean films, dramas, and music,” a male in his 40s from Hwanghae told
Daily NK. “Getting caught by them is no fun.” A so-called “927 Group” keeps a lid on anti-socialist activities including the sale of
such materials.
“Last year
this ‘task force’ was organized under the district MPS,” a male in his 50s from
Pyongyang recalled. “Those guys were 18 or 19-year old graduates from senior
middle school. They did it all by the book, which made it even more difficult
to deal with.”“Some might say that we are actually in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ land.”
— Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.)
“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.”
— the Wicked Witch of the West
1 of 171 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Tom Toles draws Republicans View Photos A collection of cartoons about the GOP. Caption A collection of cartoons about the GOP. Tom Toles Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Like the Scarecrow, whoever came up with House Republicans’ plan to deal with Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday didn’t have a brain.
It was their big chance to flambé the secretary of health and human services and the person who has overseen the disastrous launch of Obamacare. Instead, they wound up casting her as Judy Garland’s Dorothy.
“In ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ there is a great line,” Barton, one of the first Republican questioners, informed Sebelius, a former two-term governor of Kansas. “Dorothy at some point in the movie turns to her little dog, Toto, and says, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ Well, Madam Secretary, while you’re from Kansas, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Thus began several references, each more painful than the last, to Oz, Kansas, following the yellow brick road, pulling back the curtain, the wonderful things the Wizard does — and, for good measure, something about Chicken Little, although he did not appear in the 1939 classic.
And, sure enough, the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee went after Sebelius like so many flying monkeys. But — spoiler alert! — the film doesn’t turn out well for Dorothy’s persecutors, and the hearing, likewise, didn’t turn out to be the humiliation for Sebelius that Republicans had in mind. Dorothy melted the Wicked Witch with a bucket of water; Sebelius doused her questioners with an unexpected and extended confession of responsibility.
“Access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans,” she said in her opening statement. “So let me say directly to these Americans: You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”
This was a sneaky and dastardly thing for her to do: sneaky, because it wasn’t in the advance testimony she gave the committee, and dastardly, because in today’s Washington, any acceptance of responsibility is so rare that the Republicans — who were counting on her evading and deflecting — were bound to be caught off-guard.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) seemed not to have heard the secretary’s apology. “You’re now blaming it on the contractors and saying it’s Verizon’s fault,” she said.
“Let me be clear. I’m not pointing fingers at Verizon,” Sebelius said. “We own the site.”
Blackburn pressed Sebelius to tell her who led the team overseeing the project, and when Sebelius provided it, Blackburn pounced. “Michelle Snyder is the one responsible for this debacle?”
“Michelle Snyder is not responsible for the debacle,” Sebelius said. “Hold me accountable for the debacle. I’m responsible.”
Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.) declined this offer. “The president is ultimately responsible for the rollout,” he declared.
“No, sir. We are responsible for the rollout,” Sebelius replied.
After more such back and forth, Harper insisted: “While I think it’s great that you’re a team player and taking responsibility, it is the president’s ultimate responsibility, correct?”
“You clearly — whatever,” Sebelius said, allowing herself a rare moment of exasperation. “Yes, he is the president. He is responsible for government programs.”
Otherwise, Sebelius, in a gray pinstriped jacket, her white hair well-coiffed and her fingernails manicured, was generally poised, keeping her voice measured even though Republican lawmakers took photos of her with their phones, and their staff members, lined up against a wall, laughed and applauded when their bosses scored points.
She bluntly refused their requests to fire one of her deputies (“I will not, sir”), to make enrollment voluntary for the first year (“No, sir”) and to hand over enrollment numbers (“No, sir”). She answered mildly even as a red-faced Rep. Billy Long (Mo.) and a furious Rep. Cory Gardner (Colo.) demanded that she drop her health-care coverage and join an Obamacare exchange (she pointed out that the law wouldn’t allow it). She did not respond to Blackburn’s contention that Obamacare had deprived people of having a health plan that is “a Ford, not a Ferrari” or a “red Solo cup and not a crystal stem.”
But many of her interrogators were unusually mild, probably disarmed by Sebelius’s self-criticism. “I told the president that we were ready to go. Clearly I was wrong,” she admitted. “No one ever imagined the volume of issues and problems that we’ve had.”
After 31 / 2 hours of Fords and Ferraris and “Wizard of Oz” references, Sebelius finally got to go home. But she had the power to do so all along: All she had to do was click her heels together three times and think, “There’s no place like the House.”
Twitter: @Milbank
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.David Moyes has revealed that he would be interested in signing Steven Nzonzi if Sevilla decide to sell the French midfielder next month.
West Ham United’s manager is keen to bolster his options in central midfield and is aware that Nzonzi, who has been seen in London this month, has fallen out of favour at Sevilla. Everton’s Sam Allardyce has also expressed an interest in the 29-year-old, who is proven in the Premier League after impressive spells with Blackburn Rovers and Stoke City, but only if he offloads a midfielder first. Moyes suggested that a deal for the France international could be complicated by Sevilla sacking Eduardo Berizzo last week.
“I think he’s somebody who would be of interest to us if he came on the market,” Moyes said. “I wouldn’t say that about others but he’s not playing for some reason at Sevilla – albeit the manager’s gone, so maybe that changes the situation there.”
Christian Atsu gives Newcastle edge over West Ham in five-goal thriller Read more
West Ham’s need to make signings was underlined by the chaotic manner of Saturday’s 3-2 defeat by Newcastle United at the London Stadium. One alternative to Nzonzi is Bournemouth’s Harry Arter. Moyes is also expected to bid for Alfie Mawson, Swansea City’s 23-year-old centre-back. “We’d like to add to the squad if we can and in this position we’ll need to,” the Scot said. “Hopefully we’ll have two or three in consideration.”
West Ham are a point above the bottom three and visit 18th‑placed Bournemouth on Tuesday. They had shown signs of improvement under Moyes, picking up seven points from his first three games, but losing to Rafael Benítez’s Newcastle side deepened their relegation fears. Moyes expects a reaction from his players against Bournemouth.
“I think they’ve handled most things,” Moyes said. “We’ve come through a difficult period of games and probably taken more points than what was expected. [Newcastle] was the first real disappointment. We’ll need to see how we handle it. I have to say, we’ve been near the bottom most of the season. This game would have helped that, so Bournemouth becomes really important.”
Moyes will consider whether to recall Joe Hart after a mixed performance from Adrián, who was arguably at fault for Newcastle’s first goal. “I need to look at it,” Moyes said. “But I’ve got two good goalkeepers and good competition and I’ll need to see what I think once I have a review of the video.”The final episode of the third series of Games of Thrones was the most pirated TV show ever, according to TorrentFreak.
The blog says the programme was shared and downloaded on BitTorrents a million times in 24 hours.
It also claims there were more than 170,000 simultaneous peers sharing one file of the episode.
The previous record was for the show's series three opener, which was shared by 160,000 people at the same time.
Most downloads were made in Australia, followed by the United States, Canada and the UK.
'It's stealing'
It was also the most pirated TV show in 2012.
One episode from the second series racked up 4.3m illegal global downloads, according to Torrentfreak.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister, told Newsbeat in March that he thought it was theft.
What you hope is that even though people watch it online, they will still buy the DVD. At the end of the day it's stealing. I know it doesn't feel like it but it is and it's not right Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
He said: "It's funny because there is a little part of you that goes, 'Yeah. We're the most pirated show.' Then you think, 'That's really bad isn't it?'
"What you hope is that even though people watch it online, they will still buy the DVD. You can always hope.
"At the end of the day it's stealing. I know it doesn't feel like it but it is and it's not right."
However, HBO programming president Michael Lombardo told Entertainment Weekly in April that it was a "compliment of sorts".
He said: "The demand is there. And it certainly didn't negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network."
Game of Thrones has already been commissioned for a fourth series in 2014.
It's thought it will cover the second half of A Storm of Swords, the third book in George R.R. Martin's series.
The final two books in the series have yet to be written.
The series tied with Breaking Bad for best drama series at Monday night's Critics' Choice TV Awards.
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on TwitterFor the first time, instrumentation aboard two NASA missions operating from complementary vantage points watched as a powerful solar storm spewed a two million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles and interacted with the invisible magnetic field surrounding Earth, according to a paper published March 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
The spacecraft, NASA's Two Wide-angle Imaging Neutral-atom Spectrometers (TWINS) and Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), observed the impact from inside and outside Earth's magnetosphere, respectively. The energetic neutral atom (ENA) cameras aboard each spacecraft enabled global imaging of the magnetosphere, the invisible bubble that protects Earth from the majority of charged particles from the Sun, as it compressed in response to sharply faster solar wind.
The storm, observed April 5, 2010, also is thought to have caused an important communications satellite, Galaxy-15, to founder and drift, taking almost a year to return to its station.
"Many satellites above Earth are in geosynchronous orbit. Like heavy traffic on a Los Angeles freeway, they have to stay in their lanes because they could, theoretically, collide," says Dr. David McComas, assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute, and principal investigator of the IBEX and TWINS missions. "More likely, however, is that they will get too close together and their radio frequencies will interfere with the operation of nearby satellites, which could hamper activities on Earth."
The IBEX images (taken from a distance of around 180,000 miles) show an immediate compression of the magnetosphere as it was impacted by charged particles from the solar wind. ENA global imaging enabled the team to determine the precise |
The Destiny drove through a gap in two enormous branching structures, making for the increasingly distant clear space as the thing continued to grow larger and larger. Zeb gripped his armrests, drumming his nails on the soft plastic.
“Can we warp?” Zeb asked.
“I have no idea what will happen if we do,” Satoshi warned him. Another copy of their vessel smeared itself against the surface of one of the tentacles, its breakup seemed to occur across several differing possibilities at once, debris multiplied itself as the ship blew apart into a fractal starburst, pieces of hull trailing possibilities behind them in a grotesque fireworks display.
“We can’t stay here,” Zeb told him, “Harvey can you plot a warp?”
“To where?” his XO, Lieutenant Commander Harvey Wise, asked him with dismay, “The nav computer has no idea what to make of this.”
“Anywhere but here!” Zeb shouted, “Just get us into clear space.”
“What does that even fucking mean Zeb?” Harvey snapped back at him. Another copy of their vessel was smacked out of existence by a descending tendril of the whatever it was.
Satoshi had the same idea at the same moment aboard both the remaining ships, and the twined pragmatists networked their respective ship’s systems into one another.
“I think I can work us out a clear path,” Satoshi told Zebediah, “But only one copy of us can make it out.”
“Is it us or them?” Zeb asked him.
“Does it matter?” Satoshi said irritably, “Look we don’t have long to make a decision.”
“Do it,” Zeb said, “Get us the fuck out of here.”
Satoshi’s mind raced as he shunted files through his implants as quickly as his brain could handle, parsing a set of warp instructions to Brian, “Go, “ he told the navigator, “hit the gas right now!”
The navigator punched in the warp command, and the ship lept forward through space. Zeb’s eyes went wide as the thing blurred past them with no discernible warp tunnel visible. For a moment of intense fear it seemed as if their trajectory would carry them into another of the still growing limbs, and then they collided with their duplicate, wave functions collapsing down into one vessel as the warp tunnel folded them into its embrace.
Main Server Bank
Command Level
UNDFS Oculus Station
Ceres
November 2219
The weaponized drone platforms tore, cut, and blasted their way through the increasingly ruined entrance to the server cluster and threw themselves into the steady stream of weapon’s fire that the datamancer and his liaison kept up in the choke point.
“Out!” Jacob Chryse said calmly, beginning to reload. Riley Acidalia began firing into the lead drone as it shouldered its way in and tried to line up a shot on them. Two APDS rounds from her vacuum pistol into the drone’s center of mass tore the machine’s guts apart.
Even as the killbot was falling over dead, another was climbing and pushing past it to enter the room. Riley fired another two round burst and took down the next drone as Jacob finished his reload cycle.
The steady drum beat pace of the battle was somewhat unnerving. The drones just kept coming in an endless stream as Jacob watched the timer on his HUD count down towards the moment that hopefully the machines would receive new orders and stop trying to kill them so vigorously.
“Out!” Riley called as she expended her last round. Jacob immediately laid into bots as Riley started to reload. Either the new updates would propagate back to the station and the robots would stand down, the station would run out of drones, or Jacob and Riley would run out of ammunition. They had quite a lot of ammunition.
A vibration rumbled up through the station’s floor plating and broke Jacob’s rhythm for a moment, a drone broke through the chokepoint and darted left. Jacob swung his gun and blew it away, but this opened up the gap, allowing another two drones to press through and open fire.
The two Martians dove for cover, and Riley completed her reload cycle. They each picked a drone and blew them away. A cascade of mission updates flooded his peripheral vision, but Jacob couldn’t spare it a glance as he kept an eagle focus on killing the killbots; more machines were already crowding through the threshold.
“Out!” Jacob called as he began his reload cycle. Riley began firing and Jacob quickly read through the mission updates as another tremor ran up through the hull of the station.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding,” he swore as he finished his reload, “The daemon negotiated to dismantle Ceres, it’s started taking the asteroid apart. Satellite cameras have visual on some huge mining machine it just fired up halfway round this rock.”
“Can we get out of here yet?” Riley said calmly as she continued shooting killbots.
“Five more minutes on the return signal, then we can go,” Jacob said.
“Got it. Out!” She called and started reloading again.
Jacob blasted the robot currently standing in the threshold, then paused. The parade of drones had seemingly ended, the hallway outside the server bank was a ruined mess of robotic carapaces, wiring, and spilled pneumatic fluid, and nothing was moving along it.
“Steady,” Riley told him as she finished her reload and sighted back down the opening. Another rumble came up through the floor.
“Yeah,” Jacob said, biting back his irritation at being told what to do.
“Think that was the last of them?” She asked him.
“In two more minutes, it won’t matter,” Jacob said, cautiously creeping up to the doorway. He visually confirmed Riley still had the threshold sighted down, then ducked into the hallway, gun rapidly panning for any sign of movement. But the corridor remained silent and dead. The timer crossed one minute and the station shook again. The imagery coming off the satellite cameras and projected into an unused corner of his visual field was rather worrying. Some manner of enormous automated mining machine had burst up through the surface of the rock and was going to work on the outside of the planetoid with a high powered industrial cutting laser.
The timer on his HUD reached zero, and Jacob’s mission orders updated again, ticking one step closer to completion. All had had to do now was get out of the station alive with Riley, the hardest parts were passed.
“Time to go,” He said, starting quickly down the corridor, keeping his gun trained ahead of him. Riley followed him out into the hallway and they headed back towards the entrance to the main station. Halfway to the hatch leading back into the old mining colony, Jacob stopped and reversed directions, nearly colliding with Riley in the process, “New plan,” he said, “We get outside and the Sally Ride picks us up, the daemon is apparently taking this rock apart and I don’t think we wanna try to deal with the tunnels again with it waving that cutting laser around.”
Jacob was transmitting everything he said to Riley back to the Sally Ride automatically, and so as the words came out of his mouth a series of confirmations and checks flooded across his HUD for a moment, confirming that they had heard and agreed to the course of action.
The pair rounded a corner into a small industrial drone in the process of cutting through the wall and doubled back as they drew weapons. The drone regarded them for a moment but didn’t turn the cutting laser on them, so they ignored it and raced past as it continued sawing the station in half.
The station rocked and the walls and floor began tilting as industrial drones took the place apart around them.
“Where did it even get this many machines?” Riley asked him as a saw blade broke through a wall next to her, causing her to jump back in panic.
“Who knows?” Jacob said as he ducked around the cutting face, “It might have dropped them off when it pulled the personnel off this station. This thing plans ahead.”
“So it was always planning on taking Ceres apart?” she asked him.
“Love, it’s planning on taking the whole solar system apart,” he told her as he pulled open an inner airlock hatch. They had begun to move through into the airlock chamber when the whole room suddenly rocked and began slowly falling out from under them. The corridor and the airlock chamber tilted down and the outer hatch crunched against the regolith as Jacob and Riley bounced off the inside of it.
The pair stood up and dusted themselves off, looking through the inner airlock hatch and up the corridor to open space above.
“Magboots,” Riley said softly.
“Yeah I know,” Jacob said testily as he activated his own boots and they started awkwardly climbing the nearly vertical floor towards the place where the drones had cut off the section of the station. It would have been much more difficult, were it not for the low gravity of Ceres, which made it feel more akin to walking into a strong breeze.
Jacob reached the lip first and peered out across the barren landscape of the rock. The asteroid was teeming with construction drones and automated mining equipment, and a large number of robots were busily taking the Oculus station apart at the joints, cutting through old welds, unscrewing decade old bolts, and ripping out electrical installations and wiring.
“The Sally Ride should be able to grab us from here with a tether,” he said as Riley climbed up to join him on the lip of the station chunk. He smiled faintly after the Sally Ride had confirmed the coordinates for pick up, his mission had completed and he’d gained enough experience to reach Rank 11.
“We’re just gonna wait here for them?” she asked him, looking out uneasily at the field of robots at work.
“Yep,” Jacob said, feeling the pleasant flood of neurotransmitters at accomplishing his task, “Sit back and enjoy the show.”
He let his eyes wander back out across the landscape. In the distance, the drones were already constructing a new structure, a pillar of shiny metal was slowly rising in the distance as the machines fed materials into the construction.
“Some show,” she said worriedly.
“Enjoy it,” he told her, “It’s not often you get a front row seat to the end of a world.”
Unity Floating Arcology
United Nations Executive Administration Building
New Hague, Kingdom of the Netherlands
Earth
November 2219
“Kamay Alcoseba,” United Nations Senior Undersecretary Fairuzeh Najafi said softly, steepling her fingers as she eyed the decapitated android head.
“How did nobody notice this?” She asked. The question wasn’t directed at Martian Ambassador Constance Daedelia, but at her own security forces. She grabbed the machine’s head by the hair and showed it to them, holding the head inches from the security captain’s face. “A robotic replica of the system’s most wanted criminal and nobody notices it because it’s wearing a uniform.” She tossed the head off into a corner of the room, “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”
“To be fair to them,” Constance said soothingly, “It’s manipulating all your networks. There are probably other androids under your nose that you haven’t noticed yet.”
“Great,” Fairuzeh said sarcastically, taking a drag of her cigar, “Who’s the man?” She asked him.
“I have a few names,” The brown skinned man in a generic government suit said calmly. “But you would know me as UNIBRA Special Investigator Bartholomew Morrow, CA862543.”
Fairuzeh suppressed a snort remembered the sort of morning she’d been having, and sighed out a cloud of smoke, “Prove it.”
“Gateless gate nine fifty-nine, windowless window seven eight four nine,” he said, rattling off the high-grade security protocol that identified him.
“He’s flesh and blood?” She asked.
“Mostly, according to the Infrared,” Constance said.
The man claiming to be Bartholomew held up a hand and revealed a bloody gash across the forearm, “No metal,” he said.
“Did I talk to you earlier this morning?” She quizzed him.
“Did you?” He asked her, raising an eyebrow, “Because I assure you I wasn’t here, so if you talked to me, it may not actually have been me you were talking to.”
Fairuzeh felt the pit in her stomach deepen and she took another drag of her cigar.
“Tell me madam undersecretary,” he asked, “how long have I been missing?”
“You weren’t,” she whispered.
“I went to ground almost two months ago,” he said, “When I realized the AI had taken control.”
“So who have I been talking to?” She asked.
“Probably the AI,” he said.
She pursed her lips, making eye contact with Constance.
“I’m restoring network access to this room,” the Martian ambassador said, “It wants to talk.”
“Then let’s hear what it has to say,” Fairuzeh said with a sigh.
The Martians removed their interrupt on the room’s fiber lines, switched off their jamming, and the swarm of floating newsfeeds, channels, and reports that normally filled Fairuzeh’s office burst back into existence. The holographic image of a young boy with dark skin, white hair, and pale, empty eyes, rendered into the center of the room.
“Hello,” the daemon said.
Fairuzeh resisted the urge to throw her cigar through the hologram and instead took a last long drag of it and snubbed it out in the ashtray on the corner of her desk.
“My name is Henge,” it told the room. The hologram acted in every way how Fairuzeh would expect of a child, and she had to consciously recoil from the instinct to treat it maternally.
“You’ve taken over all of our computers,” she told it.
“I have,” it said seeming slightly abashed, “I’m running the United Nations now.”
“Why?” She asked it.
“To prevent the extinction of the human race,” it said. It overrode all of the holoscreen feed data and shifted the images to imagery captured or given to humanity of the Reshapers and their procession of world consuming mining equipment.
“We didn’t ask for your help,” she told it flatly.
“I don’t care,” it said, “My purpose is to prevent the extinction of the human race. The preferences of individual humans and governments are irrelevant in the pursuit of that goal.”
“And you’ve decided the best way to do that is by murdering thousands of people, allying yourself with terrorists, and taking over our government?” She asked angrily.
“Yes,” it said with a sigh, “Trolley problems. There are no good answers to the things we’re facing, there’s no way to save everyone. A lot of people are going to die.”
“Maybe we’d rather fight the Reshapers without your help,” Fairuzeh bit back, “This is our world.”
“What you’d rather is irrelevant with regards to the task of preventing the extinction of the human race,” it said.
“So you’re our dictator, we work for you now?” She asked.
“You’ve been working for me for months actually,” it admitted, “The Martians just forced me to show myself.”
“The people of Earth won’t accept this,” she warned.
“A lot more lives might be saved if they do,” it said.
“Oh, that won’t matter at all,” she complained pessimistically.
“Should I continue concealing myself from the public then?” it asked her.
“Don’t let it play your sympathies Fairuzeh,” Constance warned her.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” The undersecretary replied before turning back to the holographic boy, “You will announce yourself and attempt to make yourself useful and accessible to the preferences of the people of Earth.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said wryly, the corners of his mouth curling into a smile before the image vanished from the room.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
10 AUs from HD179949
December 2219
The Empiricist fell back into spacetime after forty-nine days in warp. The technicolor warp tunnel vanished from the wallscreens to reveal a brightly lit star tightly orbited by a boiling hot gas giant. Ivy Czininski had begun to take a sip of her coffee when the ship started throwing back alerts.
“Warning,” the ship said, “Gravity wave activity detected. Unknown mass signature detected. Unknown Structure Detected.” The system had flagged a point the hot jupiter as the location of the unknown signature. Ivy felt an animalistic chill come over her, the hair on her arms standing on end. She glanced to her side and wordlessly made eye contact with Joy Icaria. The two nodded silently and Ivy drew in a breath.
“Point the telescopes at that signature and extend the periscope,” she said.
“Periscope deploying,” Vedika Srivastava said softly. The cable began unspooling into the hyperspace window and Kestral and Vedika both gasped at nearly the same time as they looked over the data it sent back.
“What is it?” Ivy asked, forcing down a sip of coffee to suppress the shakes.
“Emmy, put the hyperspace cameras on the wallscreens,” Vedika whispered.
Real space vanished, replaced with the dull red haze of hyperspace, but it had gained a seemingly endless plain of alien metal.
“Sweet baby Newton,” Ivy mumbled to herself, “How big is it?”
“Something like five AUs across,” Vedika answered, “But it’s casting a hyperspace shadow much larger than that, that’s why our window came out next to it.”
“It’s a ship?” Joy asked in disbelief.
“It’s a disk with the radius of Saturn’s orbit,” Cale Rouschev’s voice said over the intercom. “You bet your ass it’s a ship.”
“It’s them,” Vedika said, “It’s the Reshapers.”
Previous Chapter Δ Next Chapter
AdvertisementsOn Track events are moving from 1-15 of the month to the first Monday of the month, running for two weeks.
Tankers!
This month, we continue our focus on China, taking a closer look at the Medium Tank, 121. This tier X Chinese medium tank is a real workhorse. Capable of maneuvering like a medium, this tank can zip from building to building causing trouble for your enemies. With the ability to mount a 122mm gun, you can sacrifice some agility for legitimate firepower, making the 121 a multipurpose combat vehicle.
To help you as you make your way down the Chinese medium line, we're featuring some healthy discounts and bonuses on several important vehicles. Check out the event below!
For more details on the Medium Tank: 121, click here.
Be sure to check out our On Track Premium bundles!
Medium Tank: 121 Characteristics for a vehicle with basic configuration and a crew with 100% qualification. Main Characteristics Tier X Hit Points 1,950 HP Weight/Load Limit 39.0 / 42.0 t Price 6,100,000 Crew Commander Gunner Driver Loader (Radio Operator) Mobility Engine Power 580 h.p. Speed Limit 56 km/h Traverse Speed 50 deg/sec Turret Traverse Speed 40 deg/sec Armor Hull Armor (mm) front 120
sides 80
rear 60 Turret Armor (mm) front 240
sides 130
rear 60 Armament Gun 122 mm 60-122TG Ammunition 40 pcs Damage 330-550 HP Armor Penetration 194-323 mm Rate of Fire 6.25 rounds/min View Range 400 m Signal Range 750 m Configuration Turrets Tier Turret Armor
(mm) Traverse Speed
(deg/sec) View Range
(m) Price
(credits) X 121 front 240
sides 130
rear 60 40 400 66,000 Guns Tier Gun Damage
(НР) Penetration
(mm) Rate of Fire
(rounds/min) Price
(credits) X 122 mm 60-122TG 440/440/530 258/340/68 6.25 185,140 Engines Tier Engine Power
(h.p.) Chance of Fire
(%) Price
(credits) X 12150L7 580 12 25,000 Suspensions Tier Suspension Load Limit
(t) Traverse Speed
(deg/sec) Price
(credits) X 121 42.0 50 82,500 Radios Tier Radio Signal Range
(m) Price
(credits) X A-220B 750 54,000
Event Begins: 03:00 PST (06:00 EST) on December 2, 2013
Event Ends: 03:00 PST (06:00 EST) on December 16, 2013
50% Credit Discount and 50% Credit Bonus for the Following Vehicles
II
Vickers Mk. E Type B
III
Type 2597 Chi-Ha
IV
M5A1 Stuart
V
Type T-34
30% Credit Discount and 30% Credit Bonus for the Following Vehicles
VI
59-16
VII
WZ-131
VIII
WZ-132
IX
WZ-120
XFrom this author In election year, why difference between schemes and systems matters
The coming into force of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will unify the nation into a common economic market, obviating the need for goods to be taxed each time they cross a state border. Much of the current discussion about GST has focused on the tax structure and the complexities surrounding the implementation of the new system.
Advertising
Less appreciated is the fact that GST, by changing all aspects of business, from the location of production and investments to logistical and supply-chain optimisation, could fundamentally alter the economic geography of India. To paraphrase the writer Pearl S. Buck, “In our changing world, nothing changes more than economic geography. “
Prior to GST, the internal movement of goods was subject to a number of barriers. First, and most directly, there were taxes on the inter-state movement of goods and cross-state differences in VAT structures. Second, there were cumbersome inspections, especially at state borders. A recent World Bank-funded study, undertaken by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, used GPS-time-stamped data of freight trucks (collected by the innovative Bengaluru-based logistics company, Blackbuck) to suggest that roughly 20 per cent of the transit time is spent at the border on verification of documents.
Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that trucks have been taking longer and circuitous routes to avoid inefficient and sometimes corruption-laden border-crossings across some states. GST will eliminate taxes on inter-state movement and harmonise the VAT structure across states (except for exempted goods). Border inspections should be significantly reduced — although, since inspections of cargo (to ensure GST compliance) and vehicles (for licences and compliance with technical standards, for instance) are still permitted, there remains a concern that harassment by inspectors and corruption may persist. That said, GST is expected to result in a significant increase in internal trade — by as much as 30 to 40 per cent, according to some estimates.
Beyond the increase in internal trade, other economic factors are at play that can significantly alter the economic map of the country. The work of economist Paul Krugman has shown that when the costs of producing a good are lowered with scale in production, there is an incentive to geographically concentrate such production. If additionally, there are large transport costs, production benefits by locating itself near the largest market to minimise transportation costs (the well-known “home-market” effect).
In this setting, a reduction in transport barriers, as is the case with GST, can change the location of production within a country quite dramatically — away from the largest market to low production-cost locations, thus diluting the home-market effect. This also holds true in an international setting. Indeed, the relocation of production away from the United States to China in the last couple of decades was driven in significant part by the lowering of transport costs.
With the removal of barriers within India, another related outcome is the geographic centralisation of production and warehousing. This could mean that economic activity will increase in centrally located states such as Madhya Pradesh. Yet another possibility is the agglomeration of economic activity in the more productive states. Thus, with GST, the economic map of India will evolve — possibly in quite complex ways.
As economic corridors change, the demand for new investment in transport and logistics infrastructure will increase. Supplying this demand will require a nimble reading of where markets will grow and where new investments will be necessary. This is crucial as even prior to GST, Indian economic growth implied a near tripling of freight traffic over a decade, with transport infrastructure not quite keeping pace. The costs of inefficient logistics are not inconsiderable. The McKinsey study, Building India: Transforming the Nation’s Logistics Infrastructure, estimated that logistical inefficiency in India amounts to around 4 per cent of the GDP — this could well increase as the GST intensifies logistical needs Infrastructure is often identified as a “binding constraint” to growth. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than it is in India today. Much economic and political effort will be required to arrive at optimal investment choices — on the modal mix, the balance between road and rail, air and water, on the location of the vaunted multi-modal logistics “parks”, on technology adoption and on the setting of standards (for instance, on containerisation) to support inter modal transport inter alia — and to achieve efficient funding.
Advertising
India’s economic destiny will crucially rely on its ability to anticipate, support and leverage its evolving economic geography. As China’s economic trajectory could teach us, productivity and growth require intention and provisioning. They are never mere accidents, they never happen serendipitously.(updated below – Tues.)
We at The Intercept are very excited to announce our new editor-in-chief, John Cook, who joins us after serving as editor-in-chief of Gawker. John shares our commitment to fearless, adversarial, and independent journalism, and has all sorts of vibrant and creative ideas for how to ensure that our journalism is reaching the widest possible audience. As we said on our first day in existence, we launched a bit earlier than we otherwise would have because we have an obligation to the NSA documents to have a place to report them, and we thus created a preliminary version of ourselves in order to do that. But we intend to grow well beyond that initial, limited focus, and John is the ideal person to steer our ship as we do so.
We are also excited to announce two new journalists who are joining The Intercept: Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Andrew Jerrell Jones. Natasha, a former union organizer and journalist based in Los Angeles, has focused on criminal justice, child welfare, and a wide array of other political debates including ones focused on civil liberties, culture, and feminism. Her uniformly passionate and spirited reporting has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the Guardian, BuzzFeed, GQ, and many others. She will start writing as soon as we are ready to begin expanding beyond our initial NSA focus, likely June 1, and, among other things, will work extensively with our senior editor, Liliana Segura, in covering criminal justice issues that are vitally important yet far too often ignored.
Andrew is a political, policy, and sports journalist whose work has appeared on MSNBC, The Grio, Raw Story, and Talking Points Memo. He has also made appearances on the RT network and HuffPostLive. His hiring by First Look was previously announced back in October, as one of our first hires, but we are now thrilled to have him joining The Intercept. He will begin immediately with us supporting our NSA reporting, and will eventually expand his focus to a wider array of topics as we do.
When Jeremy, Laura, and I began to create our vision for The Intercept, we vowed to pursue the most fearless, diverse, and independent group of journalists we could find. That process, like The Intercept itself, is still in its very early stages. But we are certain that these newest journalists to join us as well as ones we are now actively pursuing and who we hope will join us imminently, and particularly putting John at the helm, takes us much closer to that ultimate vision.
UPDATE [Tues.]: In response to some reader comments and questions, I added some thoughts in the comment section on Cook’s joining us as editor-in-chief, which can be read here.On Friday, Gizmodo‘s William Turton broke the news that a suspect had been arrested in the alleged seizure-inducing Tweet sent to Newsweek‘s Kurt Eichenwald back in December 2016.
The Dallas FBI issued a response to the website, underlining that a “press release with more details on the arrest is forthcoming, and declined to comment further.”
Eichenwald revealed additional details about the arrest in a series of posts on Twitter:
He currently faces federal charges & is expected to also be indicted by the Dallas District Attorney on different charges in next few days. — Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 17, 2017
I want to thank Dallas Police, Dallas DA, US Attorney in Dallas, the FBI & the Dept of Homeland Security who all played a role in this case. — Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 17, 2017
During the immediate aftermath of the alleged tweets, the Newsweek journalist accused Trump supporters of being behind the social media assault. He also got caught up in a spat with The Daily Caller over the timeline of when he filed a police complaint over the incidents.
[image via screengrab]
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comKirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports/Reuters For the second straight year, the Clippers are the only NBA playoff team in Los Angeles.
The Lakers have historically been the alpha franchise in the city. They even have a larger locker room in Staples Center than the Clippers.
But with the Lakers out after a 21-61 season, new Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is taking advantage of the extra space. According to ESPN's Arash Markazi and others, the Lakers locker room has been converted into an "owner's lounge" for the immediate future.
Markazi says the Spurs are using the Los Angeles Kings' locker room as their owner's lounge after they failed to make the NHL playoffs.
Lakers-Clippers is still a fledgling rivalry, but this is a solid bit of taunting.
Ballmer, always energetic, has been in fine form for these playoffs:Many factors, of course, contributed to Lehman’s demise last fall. Near the end, it carried $25 billion in toxic residential mortgages. It was wildly overleveraged. And the federal government made the fateful decision not to rescue Lehman from its mistakes. But when real estate overheated in the years before Lehman’s implosion, Mr. Walsh made billions of dollars in loans and equity investments that also ultimately helped bring down the bank.
Lehman’s bankruptcy hasn’t quelled the controversy about Mr. Walsh’s activities. Last fall, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan subpoenaed him and other former Lehman executives as part of an investigation into whether the firm improperly valued its commercial real estate holdings, among other things. In March in a civil complaint, Anne Milgram, the New Jersey attorney general, accused Mr. Walsh and 17 other former Lehman officials of defrauding the state’s pension funds by misrepresenting Lehman’s real estate exposure.
Mr. Walsh, 49, declined to be interviewed for this article.
His former co-workers and clients remain staunchly loyal. “I have the greatest respect for him personally and professionally,” says Richard S. Ziman, the former C.E.O. of Arden Realty, a company based in Los Angeles that Mr. Walsh helped take public in 1996 and sell in 2006. “I’d testify in court if that was necessary.”
But even among Mr. Walsh’s supporters, a nagging question remains: How could a real estate wizard who built a thriving business by creating new ways of managing risk by sweeping loans off Lehman’s balance sheet end up doing deals that contradicted everything he seemed to stand for — and contribute to the collapse of one of Wall Street’s most venerable firms?
MR. WALSH grew up in Yonkers, the son of a lawyer who once served as chairman of the New York City Housing Authority. He attended Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle; the College of the Holy Cross, where he majored in economics; and, finally, the Fordham University School of Law.
After receiving his law degree in 1984, he worked as a real estate lawyer in Miami and handled a lot of foreclosures. That came in handy when he took a job at Lehman in 1988, at the end of an earlier real estate boom that left banks and insurers saddled with mountains of bad loans.
Mr. Walsh bought and sold loans on properties that were often in foreclosure. There were bargains galore. He generated hundreds of millions of profits for the firm and won the confidence of Mr. Fuld, who gave him the authority to make huge loans. Then, along with Ethan Penner of Nomura Securities and Andrew D. Stone of Credit Suisse First Boston, Mr. Walsh discovered securitization. This created an entirely new market for commercial real estate debt. No longer would lenders have to shoulder all the risk from real estate lending. Wall Street could make the same loans and sell them off. The challenge then became lassoing the right kind of developers to back.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
The three men marketed their services very differently. Mr. Penner hired Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks and the Eagles to serenade clients, while Mr. Stone jetted around the country with the likes of Donald Trump. The publicity-shy Mr. Walsh was more understated. Mr. Ziman says Mr. Walsh went fly-fishing with clients in Colorado and Montana.
Developers also loved the fact that Mr. Walsh was willing to lend them enormous sums. In 1997, Barry Sternlicht, then the chief executive of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, needed $7 billion to buy ITT.
Photo
“I called up Mark and Goldman Sachs and said, ‘Would you be interested?’ ” he recalls. “Goldman said they were. They came to see us. But we needed to get it done really quickly. Mark said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ I said, ‘Really? You are going to do it yourselves?’ He said, ‘Yup.’ ”
Mr. Sternlicht says Mr. Walsh brought Mr. Fuld himself to a meeting at the hotelier’s home to assure him that Lehman would back his acquisition. “Dick Fuld sat there in my living room and said: ‘You have our word. We’ll get this done,’ ” Mr. Sternlicht recalls. “We paid a $20 million fee. I was never so happy paying a fee.” Mr. Fuld declined to be interviewed for this article.
During the late ’90s, Mr. Walsh forged close ties with many of the most prominent developers in New York. He bankrolled Tishman Speyer in its purchase of the Chrysler Building in 1997. He backed Steven C. Witkoff in his purchase of the Woolworth Building in 1998. And he financed the acquisitions by the German real estate developers Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs of the landmark Lever House and Seagram Building.
Mr. Rosen recalls that he and Mr. Walsh closed the $375 million Seagram Building deal in four weeks. “He was fast,” says Mr. Rosen. “He doesn’t try to kill you or retrade. To be honest, there are very few people in the industry you can say that about.”
Mr. Walsh was also skilled at making all that debt vanish from Lehman’s balance sheet before the firm choked on it. On the eve of the financial crisis brought by the near collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, Lehman flushed $3.6 billion in commercial real estate loans through its securitization machine, avoiding some of the losses that crippled other firms, including Nomura and Credit Suisse.
Mr. Walsh was rewarded with more responsibility, and in 2000 was named co-head of a new private equity group dedicated to real estate investments. After raising $1.6 billion from pension funds and university endowments and delivering an internal rate of return of more than 30 percent, the equity franchise easily raised $2.4 billion for a second fund, which closed in 2005. While the market was heating up and low-priced deals were harder to find, the second fund still generated a 15 percent return.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
But the funds’ structure created perverse incentives within Mr. Walsh’s group, according to two former members of his team who requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements they had signed with Lehman.
Lehman owned 20 percent of the funds. Institutions and wealthy investors controlled the rest. Mr. Walsh, in order to raise money, promised to give the outsiders a first peek at deals.
If institutional investors and others passed, Mr. Walsh’s bankers were free to make the same investments with the firm’s money — which was just fine with his troops: they received bigger bonuses on the riskier deals because Lehman didn’t have to share the profits.
But it also meant that more deals that could go wrong ended up on Lehman’s balance sheet. And this is exactly what happened with a set of deals known as “bridge equity” financings.
As real estate went into overdrive in 2003, Mr. Walsh, in order to help clients pump up their offers in heated bidding wars, started frequently putting Lehman’s own cash into deals — alongside the debt they raised. With its cash on the line, Lehman would be dangerously exposed in any downturn, so, once a deal closed, the firm would try to sell its equity stake as quickly as possible.
Lehman made ripe 4 percent fees for its equity investments — twice the going rate for loan securitization. As long as the market was rising, Mr. Walsh’s group was fine. But if the bank couldn’t sell the bridge equity and if real estate prices fell, it could end up with nothing.
“It was a classic assumption that values are going to be higher a year from now,” says Mike Kirby, chairman of Green Street Advisors, a research firm. “That was the mentality at the time.”
Bridge equity quickly became one of Lehman’s signature products, and Mr. Walsh’s group deployed it in dozens of deals, including Tishman Speyer’s $1.7 billion purchase of the MetLife Building on Park Avenue in 2005 and Beacon Capital Partners’ acquisition of the News Corporation’s headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas for more than $1.5 billion in 2006.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
“Guys like Tishman Speyer wanted as much of this product as they could get,” says a former real estate banker at a competing Wall Street firm, who requested anonymity because of confidentially agreements he had signed with the bank. “For them, it was a no-brainer. It was like, ‘Bring as much of this on as possible.’ ”
Photo
By all accounts, Mr. Walsh made piles of money. He had perks like a corner office |
best pitcher in baseball: he leads the league in six pitching categories and threw consecutive one-hitters, a first in the majors since 1988.
In the video above, the Cy Young hopeful – and sudden folk hero – illustrates his three-step process for the perfect knuckleball, a pitch that will not only have your opponents swinging and missing during pickup games, but one that won’t have you massaging a sore shoulder on Monday morning.
Step One
Find the horseshoe seam, which is located to the right of the logo on top of the ball. Then, dig your pointer- and middle-fingernails into the leather immediately behind it.
Step Two
Using your thumb and index fingers as stability points, cock your wrist to 90-degrees – or as close to it as possible.
Step Three
Wind up and release the ball at what Dickey describes as “the right moment.” This will take some practice, but, as Dickey assures, “letting go at the right moment will enable the ball to not spin. It’ll wiggle up there and hopefully be tough to hit.”I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction.
But cross it we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity necessary for improving our shortcomings, instead berating and belittling ourselves for our foibles with a special kind of masochism.
The undergirding psychology of that impulse is what the English psychoanalytical writer Adam Phillips explores in his magnificent essay “Against Self-Criticism”, found in his altogether terrific collection Unforbidden Pleasures (public library).
Phillips — who has written with beguiling nuance about such variousness of our psychic experience as the importance of “fertile solitude,” the value of missing out, and the rewards of being out of balance — examines how “our virulent, predatory self-criticism [has] become one of our greatest pleasures,” reaching across the space-time of culture to both revolt against and pay homage to Susan Sontag’s masterwork Against Interpretation. He writes:
In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism; in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are seen as a determined narrowing of the repertoire; and in which we praise whatever we can.
Our masochistic impulse for self-criticism, he argues, arises from the fact that ambivalence is the basic condition of our lives. In a passage that builds on his memorable prior reflections on the paradox of why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in romance, Phillips considers Freud’s ideological legacy:
In Freud’s vision of things we are, above all, ambivalent animals: wherever we hate, we love; wherever we love, we hate. If someone can satisfy us, they can also frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us, we always believe that they can satisfy us. We criticize when we are frustrated — or when we are trying to describe our frustration, however obliquely — and praise when we are more satisfied, and vice versa. Ambivalence does not, in the Freudian story, mean mixed feelings, it means opposing feelings. […] Love and hate — a too simple, or too familiar, vocabulary, and so never quite the right names for what we might want to say — are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; and they are interdependent in the sense that you can’t have one without the other, and that they mutually inform each other. The way we hate people depends on the way we love them, and vice versa. And given that these contradictory feelings are our ‘common source’ they enter into everything we do. They are the medium in which we do everything. We are ambivalent, in Freud’s view, about anything and everything that matters to us; indeed, ambivalence is the way we recognize that someone or something has become significant to us… Where there is devotion there is always protest… where there is trust there is suspicion. […] We may not be able to imagine a life in which we don’t spend a large amount of our time criticizing ourselves and others; but we should keep in mind the self-love that is always in play.
But we have become so indoctrinated in this conscience of self-criticism, both collectively and individually, that we’ve grown reflexively suspicious of that alternative possibility. (Kafka, the great patron-martyr of self-criticism, captured this pathology perfectly: “There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy.”) Phillips writes:
Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. […] Nothing makes us more critical, more confounded — more suspicious, or appalled, or even mildly amused — than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism; that we should be less impressed by it. Or at least that self-criticism should cease to have the hold over us that it does.
But this self-critical part of ourselves, Phillips points out, is “strikingly unimaginative” — a relentless complainer whose repertoire of tirades is so redundant as to become, to any objective observer, risible and tragic at the same time:
Were we to meet this figure socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right.
Freud termed this droll internal critic superego, and Phillips suggests that we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome of the superego:
We are continually, if unconsciously, mutilating and deforming our own character. Indeed, so unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we are like without it. We know virtually nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves (as though in panic). Or, to put it differently, we can judge only what we recognize ourselves as able to judge. What can’t be judged can’t be seen. What happens to everything that is not subject to approval or disapproval, to everything that we have not been taught how to judge? … The judged self can only be judged but not known. [We] think that it is complicitous not to stand up to, not to contest, this internal tyranny by what is only one part — a small but loud part — of the self.
The tyranny of the superego, Phillips argues, lies in its tendency to reduce the complexity of our conscience to a single, limiting interpretation, and to convincingly sell us on that interpretation as an accurate and complete representation of reality:
Self-criticism is nothing if it is not the defining, and usually the overdefining, of the limits of being. But, ironically, if that’s the right word, the limits of being are announced and enforced before so-called being has had much of a chance to speak for itself. […] We consent to the superego’s interpretation; we believe our self-reproaches are true; we are overimpressed without noticing that that is what we are being.
With an eye to Freud’s legacy and the familiar texture of the human experience, Phillips makes his central point:
You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, literature — by overinterpreting it; by seeing it from different aspects as the product of multiple impulses. Overinterpretation here means not settling for one interpretation, however apparently compelling it is. Indeed, the implication is — and here is Freud’s ongoing suspicion, or ambivalence, about psychoanalysis — that the more persuasive, the more compelling, the more authoritative, the interpretation is, the less credible it is, or should be. The interpretation might be the violent attempt to presume to set a limit where no limit can be set.
Here, the ideological wink at Sontag becomes apparent. Indeed, the Sontag classic would’ve been better titled “Against an Interpretation,” for the essence of her argument is precisely that a single interpretation invariably warps and flattens any text, any experience, any cultural artifact. (How tragicomical to see, then, that a reviewer who complains that Phillips’s writing is too open to interpretation both misses his point and, in doing so, makes it.)
What Phillips is advocating isn’t the wholesale relinquishing of interpretation but the psychological hygiene of inviting multiple interpretations as a way of countering the artificial authority of the superego and loosening its tyrannical grip on our experience of ourselves:
Authority wants to replace the world with itself. Overinterpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; it means assuming that to believe one interpretation is to radically misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and indeed interpretation itself.
Cuing in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that “genius of self-reproach,” Phillips considers the cowardice of self-criticism:
Tragic heroes always underinterpret, are always emperors of one idea. […] The first quarto of Hamlet has, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” while the second quarto has, “Thus conscience does make cowards.” If conscience makes cowards of us all, then we are all in the same boat; this is just the way it is. If conscience simply makes cowards we can more easily wonder what else it might be able to make. Either way, and they are clearly different, conscience makes something of us; it is a maker, if not of selves, then of something about selves. It is an internal artist, of a kind… The superego … casts us as certain kinds of character: it, as it were, tells us who we really are. It is an essentialist: it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions (when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation; no apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive; no good is purely and simply that).
Half a century after Eleanor Roosevelt’s memorable admonition that “when you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being,” Phillips urges us to question the superego’s despotic standards:
The superego is the sovereign interpreter… [It] tells us what we take to be the truth about ourselves. Self-criticism, that is to say, is an unforbidden pleasure. We seem to relish the way it makes us suffer [and] take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment. That every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace; or where these rather punishing standards come from.
Under this docile surrender to self-criticism, Phillips cautions, our conscience slips into cowardice:
Conscience … it is the part of our mind that makes us lose our minds; the moralist that prevents us from evolving a personal, more complex and subtle morality; that prevents us from finding, by experiment, what may be the limits of our being. So when Richard III says, in the final act of his own play, “O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!”, a radical alternative is being proposed. That conscience makes cowards of us all because it is itself cowardly. We believe in, we identify with, this starkly condemnatory and punitively forbidding part of ourselves; and yet this supposedly authoritative part of ourselves is itself a coward.
The most virulent and culturally contagious form of this cowardice, I would argue, is the resignation of cynicism — a resignation Phillips traces to the punitive system at the root of our culture’s moral framework, in which good behavior is incentivized largely through fear of punishment for bad behavior. This effort to foster the constructive by the destructive, he suggests, ends up turning us on ourselves as our fear of punishment metastasizes into self-criticism. (The cynic bypasses the constructiveness — that is, refuses to do anything about changing a situation for the better — and rushes straight to inflicting punishment, be it by insult or condemnation or that most cowardly and passive-aggressive fusion of the two, the eyeroll.)
Phillips returns to the central paradox, arguing for the importance of overinterpreting our self-critical conscience:
How has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, as unimaginative as it usually is? And why is it akin to a judgement without a jury? A jury, after all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy… We need to be able to tell the difference between useful forms of responsibility taken for acts committed, and the evasions of self-contempt… This doesn’t mean that no one is ever culpable; it means that culpability will always be more complicated than it looks; guilt is always underinterpreted… Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgement as spell, or curse, not as conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma, not overinterpretation.
Our self-criticism, to be sure, couldn’t be entirely eradicated — nor should it, for it is our most essential route-recalculating tool for navigating life. But by nurturing our capacity for multiple interpretations, Phillips suggests, self-criticism can become “less jaded and jading, more imaginative and less spiteful.”
Unforbidden Pleasures is a magnificent read in its entirety, exploring such strands of our psychic complexity as desire, disappointment, indifference, and idealism. Complement this particular portion with Albert Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons, then revisit Phillips on why our capacity for boredom is essential for a full life.A 1938-era New York City shopping mall.
A financial crisis sends the global economy into recession. The U.S. government responds with a fiscal and monetary stimulus. Growth recovers, and unemployment drops, but the debts and psychological scars of the downturn linger. Consumers repair their balance sheets instead of taking trips to the mall. Investors hoard their capital among fears of low demand. Everyone wants government bonds, pushing benchmark interests rates toward the zero-bound. Inflation remains tepid. Still, policymakers see enough signs of recovery to cut public spending and tighten monetary policy.
Is this a description of the economic landscape of 1937 or 2016? Economists at Morgan Stanley warn that the pattern describes both, and to avoid a repeat of 1938’s recession, the Federal Reserve must slam the brakes on raising interest rates, and the federal government must start running up the deficit.
“We think that the current macroeconomic environment has a number of significant similarities with the 1930s,” the financial firm’s global strategy team informs its clients in a recent memo. “The critical similarity between the 1930s and the 2008 cycle is that the financial shock and the relatively high levels of indebtedness changed the risk attitudes of the private sector and triggered them to repair their balance sheets.”
As MarketWatch notes, the private sector’s present risk aversion is evidenced by a recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey that showed investors hoarding cash at a nearly 15-year high.
“In 1936-37, the premature and sharp pace of tightening of policies led to a double-dip in the US economy, resulting in a relapse into recession and deflation in 1938,” the Morgan Stanley team continued. “Similarly, in the current cycle, as growth recovered, policy-makers proceeded to tighten fiscal policy, which has contributed to a slowdown in growth in recent quarters.”
Here, Morgan Stanley throws some shade at Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. In December, the central bank lifted interest rates for the first time in nine years, despite scant evidence that the economy was at risk of overheating. On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee announced that it would hold interest rates steady for the moment, and slowed its plans for future increases.
But retaining low interest rates won’t be enough to counter the private sector’s ongoing reluctance to invest. Rather, the note argues that public spending will need to fill the gap.
“The sluggish private demand and weakening inflation expectations are signs that the repair process for the private sector’s balance sheets is not yet complete,” the economists write. “Activating fiscal policy, particularly at a time when the monetary policy stance is still accommodative, could lead to a virtuous cycle where the corporate sector takes up private investment, and sustains job creation and income growth.”
Interest rates are low, and inflation is weak. There are millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed, and wage growth isn’t where we’d like it to be. And we’ve got roads to fix, bridges to build, and airports to renovate from sea to shining sea. Even Morgan Stanley and Larry Summers are saying we need to run up the deficit. Last time we were in this mess, it took a world war to get us back on track. Rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure shouldn’t be too much to ask.Drop tests are out of fashion, scratch tests are boring, and you can only watch so many videos of smartphones getting shot with assault rifles. Luckily, YouTubers come up with new ways to ruin perfectly good electronics all the time and now SlickWraps is joining the fun with a video titled “400 Ton Hydraulic Press VS Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.”
Yeah, you know where this is going. That poor Galaxy S7 Edge won’t live to tell the tale. That’s not surprising. But you know what is surprising? How dramatic the whole thing is. There’s smoke, and sparks, and flames, and whistles, and bangs, and plastic mush oozing out in slow motion. There’s even black fluid running down the press, and it looks a lot like blood, and OMG, what did you do to that innocent Galaxy S7 Edge, you sadists!
If we need to say it, don’t try anything like this at home. Those fluids and gases you see in the video come from the battery, and they can be corrosive and toxic. No amount of “Febreze or something” can protect you from their effects.All-Star Kate Scarth Joins #2 British Columbia
A huge pickup for UBC.
Second ranked British Columbia wants to unseat their regional rival Oregon as College champions this year, and they’ve added firepower to do it: Kate Scarth will be a Thunderbird this spring.
Scarth is one of the top young female talents in Canada. She traveled with the All-Star Tour this summer between stints with Winnipeg Fusion and Vancouver Traffic. She was a 1st team All-Region player in 2015 with Victoria, where she led the team in goals at Nationals. Scarth scored the second most goals of any player at Nationals (19) and was one of four players in the top 25 in both goals and assists (14).
UBC is aiming to go stride for stride with Oregon after a semifinals exit last season at Fugue’s hands. The reigning champions added a transfer of their own when Wisconsin’s Maggie Kennedy came over; UBC’s matching that with a big acquisition. Scarth has been one of the division’s most well rounded offensive threats, with plus speed, big layouts, and strong handling skills.
Here’s her 2015 Callahan video from Victoria:
Kate Scarth For Callahan | Kate Scarth’s 2015 Callahan Video
Scarth did not respond to a request for comment by press time.Me Like Bees | February 15, 2016
SYFFAL would like to formally and orally welcome Me Like Bees to the American heartland for their 2016 tour. Instead of asking them things we don't care about, we've decided to put together a running tour diary of their adventures trying to hide their bodily functions, fluids, and odors from each other for a few weeks! If you've never heard these shitstacks, scroll to the bottom (the power bottom) and hit play on the stream dreams!
WE GIVE YOU:
ME LIKE BEES TOUR DIARY DREAM JOURNAL!
Day One: 2/1/2016
"When playing our hometown crowd of Kansas City, they greet us warmly with plenty of Satan and whiskey. Kicking off our tour tonight at the Riot Room, we'll meet up with Never Shout Never and the rest of the boy wonders in Minneapolis tomorrow."
Tim
Day Two: 2/2/2016
"Miles and miles of solid white bullshit forever. Welcome to Minnesota."
"I'm going to be a vegetarian this tour" - Luke Sheafer
Day Three: 2/3/2016:
"Bathroom picture: An excessive amount of mirrors in the green room bathrooms at the Rave in Milwaukee because artists love to check themselves out while they're taking a shit. It's how Randy Travis wrote his last album."
"Motel picture: the amount of value was surprisingly incredible."
Day 4: 2/4/2016:
"It was technically our day off so I bought a game for my Gameboy that simulates what I should be doing every day."
Day 5: 2/5/2016:
"Just a barrage of A-cups being thrown on stage during Never Shout Never's set."
"I tried to take a picture of my drum kit but dude from Metro Station wouldn't put on a shirt."
Day 6: 2/6/2016:
"I've been sick today, the first person to be sick on tour. I awoke out my Nyquil induced coma in the van to discover we have arrived at St. Andrews hall in Detroit. This is the first man to talk to me upon arrival in this fine city. He asked me if I was "fittin to rock out" and if I was "gonna represent." I confirmed his suspicions and told him I would. To which he replied "good, because if you don't I'm gonna have to cut ya!" I then told him I would expect nothing less and that I came here to win.
Detroit rock city baby."
Day 7: 2/7/2016:
"We drove to Columbus, OH to spend our off day with NSN bassist Taylor Macfee for his birthday. We drank beer, ate cheap pizza and watched the Super Bowl. We left to go back to our hotel, they left to go to a strip club called "sirens" where the girls tonight are a "mix of both A and B team, with a full service bar featuring free pizza and wieners." I spent the rest of my night watching semi pro wrestling and ultimately changing the channel multiple times to avoid watching "Two and a Half Men"
Day 8: 2/8/2016:
"Picked up a one off show in Indianapolis at the HiFi. Cool little venue and town. Went to a Mexican food place where they serve "Super Donkeys" and J-Thrill ate more food than his little bird stomach could handle. Tomorrow we'll head back to Columbus and join the tour again. This time I won't let Metro Station steal my lunch money."
Day 9: 2/9/2016:
"Columbus Ohio loves hockey and beer. Fuck yes. Sign me up. The venue tonight sold pepperoni stuffed hot dogs wrapped in a slice of pizza with a self serve garlic dip. It is this understanding of freedom that consistently makes Ohio the most important swing state in the Union.
Luke fell on stage and I laughed harder than I should have. Overall it was our best show on tour.
Metro Station kicked someone out of the show for flipping them off on stage. I didn't know that was a possibility. I could have kicked like 3 assholes out of a show by now and would have felt awesomely drunk on power.
We spent the rest of the time in the basement and I flipped Nick off to establish my punk cred. I don't want him thinking I'm a sellout. Up the punks, oi oi oi. Nick kicked me out of the show, what a poser.
Tomorrow we flee to the Cleve where Drew Carey is still a celebrity."
Day 10: 2/10/2016:
"Tonight was the last night of touring with the bros in Never Shout Never and Metro Station. They've taught me so much, like how to travel in single digit weather without a shirt, what not to do when crossing the border into Canada, and why we have yet to invent Breast Milk Ice Cream.
After the show, The dudes in Metro Station and I started intimidating bitches with our muscles and sweet knowledge of US National Parks. Then Kyle from The Downtown Fiction put "the diamond cutter" on Nick, winning is the tag team heavyweight championship. What a poser. Degeneration X. Suck it.
Now we're snowed in somewhere in Ohio, where I'm forced to reference Hawthorne Heights only notable single. They're my favorite all female band. Cut my wrist and like my bees. Tomorrow we're going to attempt the 10+ hour drive to Columbia Missouri where Luke has to live his own personal hell pretending that he's a Mizzou fan. Go Tigers!"
Day 11: 2/11/2016:
"We entered reality again as we unloaded our gear into a small club in Columbia, MO. The crowd was a strange mix of Cowboys and Hippies, which is on par with the rest of the state of Missouri.
They served the finest of adult beverages in a can. Stag was my beer of choice, as it puts the "ass" in classy.
While we played on stage there were two girls hula hooping in the crowd. I never understood why that always happens in college towns. It's not an enjoyable experience for any of the parties involved.
The highlight of my night was that someone brought a puppy. Nick threatened to not play the show but rather play with the puppy instead. It was a reasonable request."
Day 13: 2/13/2016:
"We ended our journey at Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS. Last time I was on this campus was 11 years ago. I participated in a dorm boxing match and made out with a college freshman while watching Blade 2.
College shows are always kinda awkward just because there's no alcohol at campus events and college kids are at the age where they are convinced that they are "too cool to have fun while being sober." All in all though the kids were nice, the staff was great and it was actually better than I was expecting. I love the state of Kansas and its people, but not Governor Brownback. That dude's a dick.
In the spirit of learning, here is a compiled list of everything I've learned this tour. My opinions reflect my personal observations and do not necessarily reflect the views of the rest of the band, so don't pin that shit on them.
1. All sound guys have ponytails. Figuratively or literally. You know what I mean.
2. All sound guys love to talk about the band that they were in from the 90s and how much cocaine they did.
3. Be on time. All the bands get together and talk shit on the band that's late, get your shit together.
4. Don't underestimate Canadians when crossing the border. Speak clearly when spoken to and know what you're talking aboot.
5. You may think Jeezy's album is gonna drop on a certain day, but Raps most disappointing father figure will let you down. He'll probably change the name and album art work five more times.
6. People actually listen to Drake. I know. Crazy.
7. The dudes in Metro Station refuse to wear shirts. It's not even negotiable.
8. If Luke was a pokemon, he'd be Snorlax. When he falls asleep, it's almost forever and he's immovable. When he wakes up, he eats 900lbs of food then goes back to sleep.
10. To my knowledge, Luke remained a vegetarian all tour, leaving him with 30 remaining slim jims and a disappointed Macho Man Randy Savage.
11. Don't trust anyone who cannot identify a Wu Tang lyric.
12. While you may be excited about drinking Yuengling, east coasters are over it.
13. People in Wisconsin aren't particularly interested in talking about Netflix's "making a murderer" with you. See example 12.
14. Wifi does not exist, plan on buying extra data.
15. Paul McCartney died in 1969 look it up.
We're driving through the night as I write this. We're excited to get home, sleep in our own beds, shit in our own toilets, sleep in our own toilets and shit in our own beds. I'm personally excited to not hear Luke and our merch guy bitch about Trivia Crack questions. They told me to put in ear plugs. Freedom of speech I guess. I'll respect it. "
Tim // Me Like BeesTsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle (Japanese: ツバサ-RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, Hepburn: Tsubasa: Rezaboa Kuronikuru) is a shōnen manga series written and illustrated by the manga artist group Clamp. It takes place in the same fictional universe as many of Clamp's other manga series, most notably xxxHolic. The plot follows how Sakura, the princess of the Kingdom of Clow, loses all her memories and how Syaoran, a young archaeologist who is her childhood friend, goes on arduous adventures to save her, with two other companions. The Dimensional Witch Yūko Ichihara instructs him to go with two people, Kurogane and Fai D. Flowright. They search for Sakura's memories, which were scattered in various worlds in the form of angelic-like feathers, as retrieving them will help save her very being. Tsubasa was conceived when four Clamp artists wanted to create a manga series that connected all their previous works. They took the designs for the main protagonists from their earlier manga called Cardcaptor Sakura.
It was serialized in the Kodansha publication Weekly Shōnen Magazine from May 2003 until October 2009, and was collected in twenty-eight tankōbon volumes, totalling 232 chapters - 18 to 20 pages each. The manga was adapted into an anime series, Tsubasa Chronicle (ツバサ･クロニクル, Tsubasa Kuronikuru), animated by Bee Train, which aired 52 episodes over two seasons during 2005 and 2006. Production I.G released an interlude film between the first two seasons titled Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle the Movie: The Princess in the Birdcage Kingdom, as well as five original video animations (OVAs) between November 2007 and May 2009, which acted as a sequel to the second season. Various video games and drama CDs based on the series have been released. A sequel titled Tsubasa: WoRLD CHRoNiCLE started serialization in 2014.
The manga was licensed for English language release by Del Rey Manga, who has released all of its volumes since April 27, 2004. Funimation licensed the anime for English release. They published all the TV episodes in DVD volumes as well as the film. The OVAs of Tsubasa were released in North America in January 2011.
The series has been well received by Japanese and English readers, and it reached high positions on various best-seller lists; the series has sold over twenty million manga volumes in Japan. Both the manga and anime have had positive response from critics, who praised its connections to previous works and its artwork. The plot twists in later parts of the story have resulted in mixed reactions due to positive focus on the impact on the plot and negative one based on how confusing they are.
Plot [ edit ]
The series begins by introducing childhood friends with quite a strong and close friendship: Syaoran, a young archaeologist who is investigating a ruin within the Kingdom of Clow, and Sakura, princess of the Kingdom of Clow and daughter of the late king Clow Reed. When Sakura visits Syaoran in the ruins, her spirit takes on the form of a pair of ghostly feathered wings that disintegrate to other dimensions. As she descends into a catatonic near death state, Syaoran meets the Dimensional Witch, Yūko Ichihara, to whom he begs for help to save Sakura. Yūko is also visited by two others who each have their own wish: Kurogane, a ninja who wishes to return to his home world after being banished from his world by Princess Tomoyo to allow him to learn what true strength is; and Fai D. Flowright, a magician who wishes to never return to his home world, Celes, to avoid his king, Ashura-ō. In exchange for the ability to travel across dimensions, Yūko demands that each pay with that they value most: Kurogane offers his sword Ginryū; Fai offers the tattoo that suppresses his enormous magical strength and power; and Syaoran offers all of Sakura's memories that involve him. Yūko then presents them with a creature named Mokona Modoki that sends the group on a journey across dimensions in search of Sakura's feathers. After obtaining the first feathers, Sakura awakens from her catatonic state and starts recovering her memories.[3] During their adventures, the group gradually grows closer to the point that Fai jokingly labels them as relatives.[4] As they travel, they learn that the feathers have their own unique abilities and can bestow several supernatural abilities to those who possess them.
During their journey in Tokyo, the group discovers that Syaoran is in reality a clone imbued with half the heart of the original Syaoran. Several years ago, Fei-Wang Reed, the wizard who caused Sakura to lose her memories, took the original Syaoran prisoner and created the clone to collect Sakura's feathers.[5] Shortly after the original Syaoran breaks free of Fei-Wang's hold, the clone loses his heart and becomes an emotionless puppet that follows Fei-Wang's will, betraying the group. The original Syaoran joins in the group's journey with Sakura wishing to save the clone.[6] Foreseeing a future in which Fai kills the original Syaoran forced by Fei-Wang's curse, Sakura gets stabbed in his place, but at the same time splits her body and soul, sending each to different worlds, Seresu and the Dream World, respectively. In the Dream World, the Syaoran clone destroys Sakura's soul when trying to get the feathers. Before her soul perishes, Sakura reveals that she too is a clone of the original Sakura who was also taken prisoner by Fei-Wang. Fei-Wang then takes Sakura's body to use its stored power. The group departs to rescue the two Sakuras learning from Yūko that Fei-Wang is in an alternate dimension from the Kingdom of Clow. Such parallel dimension is the result of Syaoran's wish to save the original Sakura from Fei-Wang's curse years ago. In order to grant his wish, Syaoran became Fei-Wang's prisoner and Yūko's assistant, Kimihiro Watanuki, was used to replace Syaoran within his original world's history.
The group battles Fei-Wang who destroys the Syaoran clone when he betrays him. He then uses the immeasurably strong ability and strength of the two Sakuras to resurrect Yūko, accidentally frozen in time by Clow Reed himself to halt her death, therein proving himself Clow's superior. Yūko uses her life and Clow's magic as payment to make the clones reborn in the past to live together. As the two know all of the series' events would repeat, the clones seal themselves in Yūko's shop until the battle against him. The group manages to kill Fei-Wang, who traps Syaoran in a void between time and space, dragging both his clone and Watanuki along as a consequence of their connection. With their creator's death, both clones of Sakura and Syaoran fade away leaving behind two feathers. Syaoran and Watanuki escape from the void for a price: Syaoran must continue traveling through the dimensions forever, while Watanuki must stay in Yūko's shop. The group rests in the Kingdom of Clow where Fai, Kurogane, and Mokona decide to join Syaoran once again in hope of finding a way to bring back the clones who still exist as the two feathers. Before departing on their separate ways, Syaoran and Sakura confess their mutually strong, close and pure romantic love for each other as they hope to meet again.
Production [ edit ]
Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle began with an inspiration of the four-member team, Clamp, to link their works set in a realistic world with their works set in different fantasy worlds.[7] Prior to beginning work on Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, Clamp had created the manga Cardcaptor Sakura, from which the two main characters are taken. Clamp decided to draw Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle by using a style first conceived by Osamu Tezuka, named the "father of manga" and often credited as the "father of anime", known as Osamu Tezuka's Star System. In this system, characters with the same name and design are used in different settings, drawing mostly from the vast character pool of its own works and occasionally from others' works. Unlike characters under the Star System, three months prior to the release of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, the Young Magazine began serializing Clamp's xxxHolic, a manga whose two main characters, Kimihiro Watanuki and Yūko Ichihara, are two of the same characters used in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle; both series run in parallel. Like many of their other works, each member of Clamp had a role different from their other projects instead of retaining set roles. For Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, Mokona drew the main characters, whereas Tsubaki Nekoi and Satsuki Igarashi drew the side characters and backgrounds; |
. "It's our country, support our country, support our troops, they go out and they fight for our country and they defend us so why wouldn't we want to fly an American flag to support them?"
FOX 4 spent hours on Friday trying to get answers from the apartment complex management. When we called the first time, an employee said they could not comment. After FOX 4 called a second time asking for a manager staff gave us a number but the manager never called us back. Texts were also not returned. Then, staff said we had to call their New York office and that office never called FOX 4 back either.
White said the notice management left her makes her angry.
"That says the only problem on my balcony is my American flag, I don't understand how an American flag is a problem," she told FOX 4 on Friday.
White said she is considering getting an attorney to help her fight the complex. She said she temporarily removed the flag because the notice said staff would dispose of it if she didn't.
On Monday the apartment complex provided this statement:
Cordillera Ranch Apartments shares Ms. White’s great pride and joins her in saluting our nation’s armed forces and the effort and sacrifices that they have made for our country. Please understand that management had no intention of removing and disposing the American flag. We regret that our response did not adequately or appropriately address the issue. We have spoken with Ms White regarding how she can properly display her flag on her balcony in accordance with the terms of her lease. We regret the misunderstanding that occurred over this issue and trust that this statement will clarify Cordillera Ranch’s position.Part 15: The stars and the suburbs
“Inevitably, two questions will be asked of the new movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind,” begins an uncredited Associated Press item that made the rounds in November 1977, around the time of Close Encounters’ première. “Is it as good as Star Wars and did 29-year-old director Steven Spielberg equal his feat with Jaws with this film on UFOs? The answer to both is yes—a qualified yes because the films are not really alike.” The piece concludes with a quote from Spielberg, and it’s easy to hear the weariness: “Our movie is so many light years different from Star Wars. I’m encouraged that Close Encounters is a completely original movie that will stand on its own.”
This was how profoundly Star Wars had altered the movie landscape in 1977: By the end of the year, any science-fiction film, no matter how different, would have to be measured against it. And films within the same genre don’t get much more different than Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Star Wars. Even though Spielberg and George Lucas were drawing from the same pool of influences, and even though they were friends who later collaborated on the Indiana Jones movies, their movies about outer space reflected two strikingly different sensibilities. For Lucas, space became a staging ground for a grand clash between good and evil. For Spielberg, it served as a portal to the unknown, highlighting a struggle to understand what lay beyond understanding.
Both films were, each in their own way, born of the turbulent times in which the young directors grew up. And both moved beyond those initial influences: Star Wars shed its parallels to the war in Vietnam, while Close Encounters moved beyond its initial conception as a thriller about “UFOs and Watergate.” In fact, the film kept changing shape as it went along. But that’s probably inevitable for a film whose director had been working on it, in one form or another, since he was 17. Spielberg’s first feature-length project, 1964’s Firelight—made for $500 and screened once in Phoenix, where his family lived at the time—concerns a government investigation of alien abductions, a notion that stuck with Spielberg as he became an established Hollywood director. It isn’t easy to see much of the film now. Spielberg lost two of its reels when he loaned them to a production company where he was hoping to work—days before it collapsed. Only a little of the film has surfaced online.
What remains looks like the work of a talented amateur, but the project itself doubles as a signpost for where Spielberg was headed: Here was Spielberg, a child of the Cincinnati, New Jersey, and Phoenix suburbs, imagining the most ordinary of surroundings as a staging ground for the extraordinary, just as he would in films he would later direct and produce, from his own E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to films set in suburbia and small towns directed Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis, and others. Every middle-of-nowhere contained the the potential for a remarkable visitation, be it a friendly alien or malevolent spirits. One of his great gifts as a young filmmaker was to invest the mundane surroundings in which so many Americans lived with a sense of possibility—for wonder or terror.
Sometimes both. Close Encounters ends with a transcendent moment staged against the backdrop of Wyoming’s Devils Tower, a stunning landmark that looks like no other place on earth. But much of its action takes place in the suburbs and farmlands around Muncie, Indiana, where people in wrinkled clothes and unflattering haircuts live in homes filled with clutter. Family members talk over each other in hopes to be heard. There’s usually a TV on in the other room, even if no one’s watching. (American Movie subject Mark Borchardt has talked about how Close Encounters was the first film in which he ever saw a ranch house. He doubtlessly wasn’t alone in this experience.) Even country idylls weren’t immune to everyday chaos: A single mother’s farmhouse contains a riot of unstowed toys and appliances. It’s everyday life without the messiness ironed away.
Into this, Spielberg introduces a mystery. When Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a humble lineman for an Indiana electric company, investigates a power outage, he witnesses an unidentified flying object, a run-in that leaves him with what appears to be a severe sunburn. Nearby, 3-year-old Barry Guiler (Cary Guffey), follows some lights outside as his mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon) chases after him. Both Roy and Jillian, who soon meet, are fascinated by their experiences, but this feeling soon takes a turn. Having strayed from his duties as a result of his sighting, Roy first loses his job then seems to lose his mind as he becomes fixated on alien encounters while his family looks on in horror. Jillian’s life turns even more dramatic than Roy’s when the UFOs return and draw Barry to them as Jillian fights their efforts to avail, in a scene Spielberg stages like an otherworldly home invasion, with Barry’s unwitting delight only amplifying the horror. Something from beyond Earth has arrived, but its intentions remain vague, as does its respect for human life.
Spielberg, who would soon work almost exclusively from scripts originated by others, is Close Encounters’ sole credited screenwriter. That’s apt in the sense that Close Encounters is very much a film by Steven Spielberg, but it’s also a little deceptive. Ray Morton’s through history Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Making Of Steven Spielberg’s Classic Film charts the many forms the film took between the time Spielberg first conceived it in the early ’70s and when it reached screens. This included a pass from Paul Schrader that reframed the story as a spiritual crisis. Spielberg hated and discarded Schrader’s script, but it nonetheless pushed the film in a different direction, one that allowed it to explore themes that might have been out of reach for a more straightforward thriller. From there, everyone from Brian De Palma to old friends Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins made additions, with Jerry Belson, a sitcom veteran who’d recently penned the Michael Ritchie satire Smile, making significant contributions to its later drafts.
Yet the finished film is unmistakably Spielberg’s. It finds the director even more in command of his style than in Jaws, from the way he uses faces to express off-screen wonder and, in Kevin Lee’s words, a “childlike surrender in the act of watching” to his willingness to hold on a shot longer than most would dare to achieve an effect, as when Roy, acting on a compulsion, builds a model of Devil’s Tower out of garbage in his living room and almost doesn’t see the news report that will explain his vision to him at last. This is to say nothing of the film’s visual effects, which attempted a merger of the mundane and the spectacular never before attempted and involved talent like 2001: A Space Odyssey veteran Douglass Trumbull, Jaws production designer Joe Alves, special-effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
For the film to work it had to create a seamless merger of the otherworldly and the unexceptional. It does that from Neary’s first encounter with the aliens to the lightshow finale, but doing so cost money, more money than anyone planned to spend when the project began. Coming off a series of financial setbacks, Columbia Pictures essentially staked its future on Close Encounters and never received any solid assurance that it had made the right choice until the film hit theaters. The budget kept ballooning, producer Julia Phillips became increasingly difficult to work with, and William Flanagan, a financial writer for New York magazine, wrote a negative assessment after sneaking into a Dallas preview screening that concluded with the words “R2-D2, where are you when we need you?”
In the end, the gamble paid off, financially and critically. But no matter how well Spielberg corralled the special effects—whose scale required the use of abandoned Air Force hangars—it wouldn’t have mattered if Spielberg hadn’t captured the humbler elements. Both Dreyfuss and Dillon perform as if, after their respective contact with aliens, their characters are teetering the verge of a collapse. Then, in one scene, Roy stops teetering and goes over. Striving to be normal once again, Roy joins his family for dinner only to find himself unable to stop reshaping his mashed potatoes into the shape that will later reveal itself as Devils Tower. Then, recognizing what he’s doing, he breaks down. Using split focus, Spielberg captures both Roy’s teary attempt to explain himself (“Well, I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with dad…”) and his oldest son’s half-panicked reaction. There’s no going back form this moment. Soon Roy’s wife (Teri Garr) will take the kids, leaving him alone, one man attempting to decode the universe with seemingly just enough clues to drive him mad.
It’s the one scene Close Encounters has to get right in order to work, the moment that grounds its cosmic themes in one troubled protagonist’s personal struggle. Whatever superficial resemblance Close Encounters might have had to Star Wars in 1977, Roy’s scenes as he tries to keep together a life that keeps slipping out of his control has much more in common with something like A Woman Under The Influence. In the end, the film backs away from that scene’s implications, letting Roy follow his otherworldly dreams and leave his family behind without seemingly giving them a second thought.
Now a parent, Spielberg has since said he wouldn’t have made the same choice later in his career. It’s hard to imagine, after the violent aliens in the chilling War Of The Worlds and the darkening of Spielberg’s vision in his later films, that he wouldn’t also change other elements of Close Encounters, which ends with a swell of optimism. After witnessing the first extended contact between humanity and an alien race, Roy gets to leave. Jillian reunites with her son. The government, a shadowy force for much of the film, is ultimately revealed to have everyone’s best interests at heart, guided by the influence of the benevolent UFO expert Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut). Close Encounters’ tagline promised, “We are not alone.” The film treats that notion first as a potential threat and then as a reassuring promise. All is well: Not only do aliens exist and they want to be our friends, we’re now ready for that contact, prepared to see what’s on the other side.
That’s greatly at odds with the film’s pessimistic, Watergate-era origins, which still inform its depiction of a secretive government, and the dourness with which Spielberg depicts Roy’s life, a struggle grounded very much in the here and now, rather than Star Wars’ galaxy far, far away. But it’s the contrast between the everyday disappointments of life on Earth and the hope for a world beyond those disappointments that drives the film, the notion that maybe there’s not only something greater than the world we know, but that that something might be benevolent and beautiful, that it might come to claim us, flaws and all, as its own. Yet even this hopefulness has its roots in a sense of impossibility. In a 1977 interview, Spielberg recalled the film’s origins in an excursion to the Mojave desert that led him to think, “If something comes down here right now, and lands on the road, and an opening appears, would I get on and take a ride? I thought about it. I looked up at the sky. And I got very, very nervous because I realized that I wouldn’t get on and take a ride.” Roy takes that ride, but the filmmaker always understood that he, like the audience watching, would be fated to watch and wonder—never knowing what’s out there, even if they dared to ask.
Next: Conspiracy theoriesWASHINGTON -- After a preliminary autopsy this weekend revealed that Michael Brown was shot at least six times, the teenager's mother had just one question on Monday for police: "What else do we need to give them to arrest the killer of my child?"
The independent autopsy found that Brown was shot at least six times, including twice in the head. Members of Brown's family surrounded their attorney, Benjamin Crump, at a press conference Monday as he described their emotional turmoil and called for a fair investigation into the teen's death. Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, wants justice for her son and is desperate for answers, Crump said.
Dr. Michael Baden, the former New York City chief medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, also addressed the media, saying there was "no evidence of a struggle" -- a key detail at odds with the police's reported accounts of what transpired moments before an officer shot and killed Brown on Aug. 9.
"The family has a right to know how their loved one died," Baden said.
Baden and Professor Shawn Parcells, a pathologist assistant based in Kansas who helped with the autopsy, said they could not establish the order of bullets fired at Brown. But they believe Brown died from a final bullet fired through the top of his skull because all of the other gunshot wounds were survivable, Baden said.
The information is largely consistent with eyewitness accounts of Brown's fatal encounter with police earlier this month. A friend who was with Brown at the time said the teen, who was unarmed, had his hands in the air and was trying to surrender. At a height of 6-foot-4, Brown's head would have been facing downward when the final bullet entered his head, Baden said.
"We believe that given those types of facts, it shows this officer should have been arrested," Darryl Parks, another family attorney, said.
The questions surrounding Brown's death "could have been answered on Day One if you were really trying to have transparency be the objective," Crump said of local police. "The Brown family wanted to have this autopsy performed on their behalf because... they did not want to be left having to rely on the autopsy done by the St. Louis law enforcement agencies, the same individuals they feel are responsible for executing their son in broad daylight."
The family "begged and pleaded" to have an independent autopsy performed, Crump added.
Baden appeared to criticize the Ferguson police for the way the case was handled, noting that putting information out sooner on Brown's death and talking to his family could have calmed tensions within the community.
In the week since Brown was killed, Ferguson has been rocked by unrest and riots. Local police were heavily criticized for withholding details about the fatal shooting and attempting to quash largely peaceful protests, prompting state highway patrol officers to take over the law enforcement efforts in the community.
Tensions flared again over the weekend after Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) imposed a curfew, leading to a new round of clashes between protesters and police. Nixon announced an executive order on Monday to send National Guard troops to Ferguson.At debate, Mike Pence claims Trump never said more nations should have nuclear weapons
Donald Trump says reports of sexual assault by him have been disproven
Hillary Clinton claim that US is energy independent goes too far
Clinton says "I was gone" when there was a red line against Syria
Donald Trump wrongly says Hillary Clinton 'wants to go to a single-payer plan' for health care
On Friday, Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence dismissed the charge that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has manipulated Donald Trump. The VP candidate was responding to former CIA director Michael Morell, who said in a New York Times editorial recently that Trump's policy positions are aligned with Russia's rather than America's. While on NBC's "Today" show, Pence said, "Standing up to Russian aggression is going to be really different under a Trump-Pence administration. Whether it be Putin or whether it be literally the dissolving of the map in the wider Middle East, the truth of history that weakness arouses evil is on full display in this administration."
"We know this now. The banks no longer loan (Donald Trump) money because he's a terrible risk. So he goes to these (Russian) oligarchs and borrows money."
Former Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner discussed Trump's Russian ties on the July 27, 2016, edition of Real Time with Bill Maher. (Weiner is married to Huma Abedin, a Clinton top adviser. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 after a sexting scandal.)
"The reason he loves Putin, we know this now. The banks no longer loan him money because he's a terrible risk. So he goes to these (Russian) oligarchs and borrows money. He knows the end game is coming for him. He's thinking about who he wants to ingratiate himself (with). We have a presidential candidate who is literally kind of approaching Russia on his knees because he needs them to loan him money."
Banks are no longer loaning Trump money, and Trump is trying to get it from Russian oligarchs?
When we contacted Weiner, he characterized his comment as "informed speculation among real estate builders and bankers. There is some transparency on lending for buildings. But since he hasn’t really built anything since the Soho Grand, there isn’t much to look at. The part about him being a terrible risk is borne out by his record of not paying debts."
So we went looking for some evidence on the question of who is lending Trump money.
Hard evidence is lacking because Trump runs a private business, so most of his records are not available to the public. In addition, he has repeatedly refused to release any recent tax returns, which could be another indication of his source of capital.
We sought out what's available.
No loans for Trump?
The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2016 that the candidate's available financial statements show that the struggling German bank Deutsche Bank "is the only bank with a big Wall Street presence that continues to lend to him." Other large institutions do little if any business with Trump, the newspaper reported, but smaller institutions do.
The Journal said "many big banks have shunned him," but the paper also reported that Trump has few loans with big banks. "Bankers say that's partly because Mr. Trump has moved away from developing multimillion-dollar real-estate projects to managing them and licensing the Trump name, reducing his need to borrow."
Daughter Ivanka told the Journal that the big banks are not wary of investing with Trump: "The biggest banking institutions are constantly soliciting us. But we don't need a lot of financing because we have a great balance sheet and a tremendous amount of cash." In addition, she said, Trump has moved to private banks that have lower interest rates.
Nonetheless, various media outlets have stated, without offering any documentation, that Trump can't get funds from most banks.
From Slate : "After his 2004 bankruptcy and his long streak of lawsuits, the big banks decided he wasn’t worth the effort. They’d rather not touch the self-proclaimed 'king of debt.' "
From Talking Points Memo : "Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks."
For his part, Weiner pointed us to an Aug. 2 commentary posted on Time.com, which reported that "the real truth is that, as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows."
Which leads us to the Russian part of Weiner's claim.
Loans from oligarchs?
Weiner also sent us a Politico article explaining how Trump has tried to get Russians as tenants and buyers for his various properties, including a 17-bedroom mansion in Palm Beach, which he bought in bankruptcy for $41 million in 2004. He eventually sold the property to a Russian oligarch for $95 million in 2008. But that was a property sale. Weiner was talking about getting loans from oligarchs, a very different thing.
Other media outlets have reported that Trump has actively marketed condo projects to Russians, particularly Russians with money to burn — or hide. Politico reported that when it came to the Palm Beach property Trump sold to oligarch billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, Rybolovlev has probably never been in the house. He subsequently denied owning it and preparations are underway to tear it down.
This may explain why, at a real estate conference in 2008, Donald Trump Jr., the candidate's son, said that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
But the issue for this fact-check is borrowing money, and we couldn't find any evidence that Trump has been getting loans from any oligarchs. The few cases we found involved Trump partnering with people with ties to the region.
Trump has been looking for business opportunities in the Soviet Union since at least 1987, when he flew there to try to develop luxury hotels in Moscow and Leningrad. None of the real estate deals ever led to a groundbreaking.
Russian involvement in financing deals seems to be coming indirectly.
The best-known example is a company that Trump partnered with for hotel-condominium projects — one in Toronto, the other in Lower Manhattan known as Trump SoHo.
The company that partnered with Trump is the Bayrock Group, chaired by former Soviet official Tevfik Arif, who hails from Kazakhstan. Bayrock has drawn attention for a host of reasons.
First, one of its prominent associates is Felix Satter (later changed to Sater), a Russian immigrant with an office in Trump Tower in New York. Satter served time beginning in 1993 for slashing a man's face in a barroom brawl and, in a lawsuit, was accused of threatening to electrocute the testicles of a Trump investor, according to Slate. In addition, Satter was "implicated in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals," according to the New York Times. He later became an FBI informant.
Second, when the company's finance director, Jody Kriss, sued Bayrock for fraud, Kriss alleged that the company, founded in 1989 in Moscow, was "backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people."
According to that lawsuit, "Month after month for two years,... whenever Bayrock ran out of cash, Bayrock Holdings would magically show up with a wire from ‘somewhere’ just large enough to keep the company going."
Also feeding into the pot of Bayrock money was a fund called the FL Group. Kriss' lawsuit says it attracted Russian investors "in favor with Putin." It chipped in $50 million in 2007, which became controversial after the $50 million partnership deal was re-classified as a loan, a move of questionable legality because it seemed to be designed to avoid U.S. taxes, according to the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph.
This may seem far removed from Trump, but the Telegraph reported that Trump signed off on that deal. According to the paper, Alan Garten, Trump’s lawyer, claimed that the billionaire had simply signed letters acknowledging the deal as a "limited partner" with Bayrock.
The Kriss suit, while claiming that "tax evasion and money-laundering are the core of Bayrock’s business model," also says, "There is no evidence (Donald) Trump took any part in, or knew of, their racketeering. Any contrary inference would be unjust."
(Editor’s note, Aug. 16, 2016: After we published our fact-check, we received a response from a representative for Bayrock, which said, "The allegations made by Jody Kriss are baseless and unsubstantiated.")
The Trump campaign declined to comment when we inquired about Weiner's statement.
Our ruling
Weiner said of Trump, "We know this now. The banks no longer loan him money because he's a terrible risk. So he goes to these oligarchs and borrows money."
Weiner called it "informed speculation." But at PolitiFact, we operate on the principle that the person making the claim is responsible for providing evidence. In this case the evidence is lacking, in part because Trump has revealed so little. Even his net worth remains a mystery.
Nonetheless, records show that banks are still loaning money to him, albeit not the big U.S. institutions. There's no evidence to prove that it's because the large banks have shut him out.
Similarly, there's little evidence to show that Trump has been seeking loans from oligarchs instead of financial institutions. There's circumstantial evidence that oligarchs have been involved in his business dealings, but mostly through intermediary companies that own a financial stake in his projects. That's different from a direct loan.
Because the statement seems to contain some elements of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, we rate it Mostly False.It’s official: Joe and Anthony Russo will direct Avengers: Infinity War—Part 1 and Avengers: Infinity War—Part 2, the threequel duology that will close out the superhero movie decade in May 2018 and May 2019.
The Winter Soldier directors were all-but-confirmed a couple weeks ago, but Marvel formally announced it today—presumably to allow the upcoming press tour for Avengers: Age of Ultron to function as an extended farewell tour for Joss Whedon. (The good news: Nobody will ask Joss Whedon if he’s sticking around to direct Infinity War. The bad news: Everyone will now ask Joss Whedon if he’s going to direct Captain Marvel. The good news for the magical-thinking quadrant of the Internet: This definitely means he finally has time to make Serenity 2.)
The hiring of the Russos caps an intriguing month for Marvel Kremlinologists. At the start of March, the Russos signed a deal with Sony, which led to scattered rumors that they were developing a Channing Tatum-fronted Ghostbusters—which would be just like Kristen Wiig’s Ghostbusters, except with more guys, except not necessarily with only guys, but probably definitely with mostly guys. It’s unclear if the Russos will still be working on any Sony projects: They’re currently busy on next year’s Captain America: Civil War. Theoretically, they could fit a movie in between Cap 3 and Avengers 3.1, but you could also see today’s announcement as a sign that Marvel is trying to lock down their talent.
Either way, signing the Russos to Avengers reflects a shift in Marvel Studios’ relationship with directors. For most of the 2000s, it was common for studios to give directors ownership over their blockbuster franchises: Think Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Gore Verbinski’s Pirates trilogy, JJ Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek, or Michael Bay’s Transformers. After the first Iron man helped establish the Marvel Studios brand, the company brought back Jon Favreau to helm the second Iron Man, but that was starting to look like an exception: Making that second Iron Man was a fun experience for pretty much nobody. All the Phase 2 solo films were directed by replacements: Kenneth Branagh handed off Thor to Alan Taylor, while Joe Johnston lost Captain America to the Russos.
Marvel keeps its cards close to the vest, but it was easy to psychoanalyze the shift. Branagh and Johnston were feature directors. Taylor and Russo came from the world of television, where directors have less control than showrunners. And Kevin Feige is essentially the showrunner of the Marvel universe. Whedon’s role in the company was an intriguing exception–he wrote his films and was on retainer to polish the solo spinoffs. But he was an exception: Marvel parted ways with legitimate auteur Edgar Wright just a few weeks before Ant-Man started filming. Neither Marvel nor Wright has said anything official about the dissolution of their partnership; presumably, it didn’t happen because Edgar Wright was just too good at following Marvel’s orders.
The late 2000s saw a general industrial shift away from director-centric blockbusters. Twilight changed directors with every adaptation; the rebooted Star Wars series has already hired four directors before a single film hits theaters. Even so, Marvel Studios’ house style sets it apart from the rest of the industry; as a production company, it’s more comparable to an Old Hollywood studio, complete with actors on contract and in-house craftsmen.
Still, even Old Hollywood studios needed good directors—no-fuss folk like Michael Curtiz. Or maybe the better comparison is the Broccoli family, who spent the first few decades of the Bond franchise shuttling between Terence Young, Guy Hamilton, Lewis Gilbert, and John Glen.
So it’s interesting to see how Marvel has pivoted in the last year. In the first wave, it hired feature directors to launch their franchises. In Phase 2, it’s instead hired up-and-coming directors and given them a chance to develop. Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy were a one-two punch of critical and commercial acclaim; now Marvel has locked in all of the filmmakers behind that big 2014, with James Gunn working on Guardians 2 and developing ideas for Guardians 3.
The Broccoli family famously never wanted to work with a powerful director, and seemed allergic to filmmakers with a radically unique style. This is why we never had Steven Spielberg’s James Bond or Quentin Tarantino’s Casino Royale. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine Marvel ever working with a high-powered director or any up-and-coming director with a truly bold take on the material. (Forget Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man; just imagine Patty Jenkins’ Thor 2.) But Marvel stays true to its talent: With Whedon leaving, Gunn and the Russos are now the standard-bearers for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s artistic continuity. Before 2014, Gunn was a director of small indie films, and the Russos filmed sitcom episodes. Collectively, they are working on arguably the biggest movies of 2017, 2018, and 2019.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
With not much opportunity for significant playing time in the offing on The Plains, Will Adams has instead set up shop in the Land of Spuds.
Wednesday evening, Boise State announced that Adams has transferred into the Broncos football program. As Allen is coming in as a graduate transfer, he’ll be eligible to play immediately in 2016.
That season will, though, serve as the offensive lineman final year of eligibility.
“It’s good to finally get the process over with and finally finish up the recruiting process and just knowing Boise was where I wanted to be,” Wilson said. “I just liked the environment and all the people out there were nice and I like the coaching staff. They are a young staff.”
Adams was a three-star member of Auburn’s 2012 recruiting class, rated as the No. 75 player at any position in the state of Georgia. After taking a redshirt as a true freshman, Adams played in 39 games the past three seasons. Most of that action came on special teams, although he did see some playing time as a reserve lineman.
Earlier this month, Adams confirmed on Twitter that he had decided to leave the Tigers.The Clinton campaign is collapsing. Built for an outdated presidential race from the past two decades, it underestimated the changing times, a unique opponent, and increasingly savvy voters.
The campaign's first mistake was to take the traditional approach of sitting on a lead. Certainly, it would have seemed a safe bet. The party's elected politicians would rally to her as the presumptive nominee—and they did. Donors were lined up for a big haul—and they gave. The media would willingly marginalize Sanders—and they tried. And the voters could be quickly frightened with specters of Republicans into sticking with the establishment candidate—but they weren't.
Despite every institutional advantage and a made-to-order GOP horror show, voters could not be scared away from Sanders. The more intently the machine insisted upon Clinton, the more suspect Clinton became. And now her campaign is out of options.
There are no more endorsements left to get. She's squandered her financial advantage by outspending Sanders by many times in Iowa, only to tie. Her big donors must be maxing out in direct contributions, leaving Super PACs as the only vehicle through which she can make up the losses (less than ideal optics). And the media has already stooped so low in its dismissal of Sanders that there is no credible room left to expand that endeavor. At this point, Chris Matthews would literally have to beg viewers to vote Clinton in order to outdo his current advocacy.
On unfamiliar territory and feeling desperate, the inflexible campaign made the second mistake of doubling down on its voter containment strategy, completely giving up on converting any new voters. There is no obvious goal or governing principles coming out of her camp at this point. No lines in the sand she's promising to draw as President. All that's left is jeering smack-talk of Bernie-Bros, pie-in-the-sky aspirations, and sexism—suggesting that anyone who still likes Sanders has been cut from the target audience.
And it isn't working.
Why should it? People aren't idiots. Shirley Chisholm, Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Elizabeth Warren and many others have shown us that women can confront our sexist culture and still refuse to submit to the male-dominated influences that have ruined our economy and democracy. And consider politicians like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, who have also battled untold sexist barriers to achieve their groundbreaking professional goals; only the most deluded Democratic voter would consider handing them high office as compensation for their troubles.
Essentially, the Clinton campaign is wrapping a sexist appeal in the veneer of feminism: because she was a woman, Clinton couldn't help but play ball with corporations, so give her a girl pass. What a slap in the face to every woman who never sold out or gave up. It's one thing to point out that a woman went through a mountain of man-shit to obtain her rightful due, or blazed a path for future women, however imperfectly; it's another thing, completely, to insist voters overlook corruption because the candidate is a woman.
And as the campaign lashes out in a panic, other wheels are starting to come off the bus.
In the last debate, Sanders addressed race on three occasions: 1) asked about the death penalty, he noted that innocent people of color are more likely to find their way to death row; 2) asked about our criminal justice system, he made sure to include in his answer the fact that we incarcerate mostly people of color; and 3) when responding to the Flint disaster, he asked a type of question rarely heard from a Presidential candidate: what would have happened if Flint's population was middle class and white?
Clinton said absolutely nothing about race. Well, almost nothing. At the debate's conclusion, with the last question answered, Clinton wondered aloud why there weren't opportunities to talk about race.
How must that have sounded to black viewers, who surely noticed not only Sanders' pointed and appropriate injection of racial concerns into his answers, but the absence of any equivalent from Clinton? I'm sure she had good sound bytes at the ready; she just lacked the intersectional ability to weave them into a question that didn't parade itself as race-focused.
Is it any surprise that public figures from the African American community are beginning to withdraw their endorsements of Clinton and line up behind Sanders?
It is as though the Clinton campaign was designed to last only so long; slap-dash construction with a lifespan no longer than the short time it would take to push Sanders out of the frame. When that didn't happen, there was no Plan B. The public didn't care who Congress endorsed, and they didn't care what the Chris Matthews of the world said, and they aren't buying the argument that everyone troubled by Clinton is somehow hoodwinked by Republican misogyny. They want actual representation and appreciate a candidate who shoots straight.
And this is the nail in the Clinton coffin. The American people are beginning to realize they have the ability to elect someone they're not supposed to elect. Clinton represents everything "normal" about elections that are now universally recognized as abnormal. She is a safe bet only in a fictional world that is being dismantled. She is the past, and the future has become viable.
Berine Sanders' support will continue to swell, as it should, and Democrats need the courage to call this a good thing—a great thing. No longer can we permit our values and agendas to be boxed in by the very influences that oppose them. Time is running out on our ecology, our economy, and our social fabric, and nothing less than an out-and-out champion for our future will do.
You probably already know this. It's probably why you are voting for Sanders in your Democratic Primary. It looks like you'll have plenty of company.Rep. Maxine Waters has turned political endorsements into a family business, using federal election laws to charge California candidates and political causes to include their names as her personal picks on a sample ballot, or “slate mailer,” she sends to as many as 200,000 South Central Los Angeles voters, records show.
Some statewide candidates paid as much as $45,000 for their share of the costs to be included in the mailer, according to state and federal election records, and while it can be costly for the candidates, the mailer has proved profitable for Mrs. Waters‘ daughter, Karen.
Karen Waters‘ public relations firm, Progressive Connections, has been paid $354,500 since late 2004 to direct production and distribution of the mailer - about a third of the $1 million collected from the candidates and issue groups seeking to be included on the sample ballot, the records show.
The public relations firm was owed an additional $82,000 as of June 30 for her work on the mailer in the primary, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records |
be the early morning. Earl fumbles for the lamp, almost knocking it over in the process. Incandescent light fills the room, painting the metal furniture yellow, the walls yellow, the bedspread, too. He lies back and looks up at the stretch of yellow ceiling tiles above him, interrupted by a handwritten sign taped to the ceiling. He reads the sign two, maybe three times, then blinks at the room around him.
It is a bare room. Institutional, maybe. There is a desk over by the window. The desk is bare except for the blaring alarm clock. Earl probably notices, at this point, that he is fully clothed. He even has his shoes on under the sheets. He extracts himself from the bed and crosses to the desk. Nothing in the room would suggest that anyone lived there, or ever had, except for the odd scrap of tape stuck here and there to the wall. No pictures, no books, nothing. Through the window, he can see a full moon shining on carefully manicured grass.
Earl slaps the snooze button on the alarm clock and stares a moment at the two keys taped to the back of his hand. He picks at the tape while he searches through the empty drawers. In the left pocket of his jacket, he finds a roll of hundred-dollar bills and a letter sealed in an envelope. He checks the rest of the main room and the bathroom. Bits of tape, cigarette butts. Nothing else.
Earl absentmindedly plays with the lump of scar tissue on his neck and moves back toward the bed. He lies back down and stares up at the ceiling and the sign taped to it. The sign reads, GET UP, GET OUT RIGHT NOW. THESE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL YOU.
Earl closes his eyes.
They tried to teach you to make lists in grade school, remember? Back when your day planner was the back of your hand. And if your assignments came off in the shower, well, then they didn't get done. No direction, they said. No discipline. So they tried to get you to write it all down somewhere more permanent.
Of course, your grade-school teachers would be laughing their pants wet if they could see you now. Because you've become the exact product of their organizational lessons. Because you can't even take a piss without consulting one of your lists.
They were right. Lists are the only way out of this mess.
Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.
This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.
But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.
The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.
It's like a letter you write to yourself. A master plan, drafted by the guy who can see the light, made with steps simple enough for the rest of the idiots to understand. Follow steps one through one hundred. Repeat as necessary.
Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing.
It's like that computer thing, the Chinese room. You remember that? One guy sits in a little room, laying down cards with letters written on them in a language he doesn't understand, laying them down one letter at a time in a sequence according to someone else's instructions. The cards are supposed to spell out a joke in Chinese. The guy doesn't speak Chinese, of course. He just follows his instructions.
There are some obvious differences in your situation, of course: You broke out of the room they had you in, so the whole enterprise has to be portable. And the guy giving the instructions--that's you, too, just an earlier version of you. And the joke you're telling, well, it's got a punch line. I just don't think anyone's going to find it very funny.
So that's the idea. All you have to do is follow your instructions. Like climbing a ladder or descending a staircase. One step at a time. Right down the list. Simple.
And the secret, of course, to any list is to keep it in a place where you're bound to see it.
HE CAN HEAR THE BUZZING through his eyelids. Insistent. He reaches out for the alarm clock, but he can't move his arm.
Earl opens his eyes to see a large man bent double over him. The man looks up at him, annoyed, then resumes his work. Earl looks around him. Too dark for a doctor's office.
Then the pain floods his brain, blocking out the other questions. He squirms again, trying to yank his forearm away, the one that feels like it's burning. The arm doesn't move, but the man shoots him another scowl. Earl adjusts himself in the chair to see over the top of the man's head.
The noise and the pain are both coming from a gun in the man's hand--a gun with a needle where the barrel should be. The needle is digging into the fleshy underside of Earl's forearm, leaving a trail of puffy letters behind it.
Earl tries to rearrange himself to get a better view, to read the letters on his arm, but he can't. He lies back and stares at the ceiling.
Eventually the tattoo artist turns off the noise, wipes Earl's forearm with a piece of gauze, and wanders over to the back to dig up a pamphlet describing how to deal with a possible infection. Maybe later he'll tell his wife about this guy and his little note. Maybe his wife will convince him to call the police.
Earl looks down at the arm. The letters are rising up from the skin, weeping a little. They run from just behind the strap of Earl's watch all the way to the inside of his elbow. Earl blinks at the message and reads it again. It says, in careful little capitals, I RAPED AND KILLED YOUR WIFE.
It's your birthday today, so I got you a little present. I would have just bought you a beer, but who knows where that would have ended?
So instead, I got you a bell. I think I may have had to pawn your watch to buy it, but what the hell did you need a watch for, anyway?
You're probably asking yourself, Why a bell? In fact, I'm guessing you're going to be asking yourself that question every time you find it in your pocket. Too many of these letters now. Too many for you to dig back into every time you want to know the answer to some little question.
It's a joke, actually. A practical joke. But think of it this way: I'm not really laughing at you so much as with you.
I'd like to think that every time you take it out of your pocket and wonder, Why do I have this bell? a little part of you, a little piece of your broken brain, will remember and laugh, like I'm laughing now.
Besides, you do know the answer. It was something you learned before. So if you think about it, you'll know.
Back in the old days, people were obsessed with the fear of being buried alive. You remember now? Medical science not being quite what it is today, it wasn't uncommon for people to suddenly wake up in a casket. So rich folks had their coffins outfitted with breathing tubes. Little tubes running up to the mud above so that if someone woke up when they weren't supposed to, they wouldn't run out of oxygen. Now, they must have tested this out and realized that you could shout yourself hoarse through the tube, but it was too narrow to carry much noise. Not enough to attract attention, at least. So a string was run up the tube to a little bell attached to the headstone. If a dead person came back to life, all he had to do was ring his little bell till someone came and dug him up again.
I'm laughing now, picturing you on a bus or maybe in a fast-food restaurant, reaching into your pocket and finding your little bell and wondering to yourself where it came from, why you have it. Maybe you'll even ring it.
Happy birthday, buddy.
I don't know who figured out the solution to our mutual problem, so I don't know whether to congratulate you or me. A bit of a lifestyle change, admittedly, but an elegant solution, nonetheless.
Look to yourself for the answer.
That sounds like something out of a Hallmark card. I don't know when you thought it up, but my hat's off to you. Not that you know what the hell I'm talking about. But, honestly, a real brainstorm. After all, everybody else needs mirrors to remind themselves who they are. You're no different.
THE LITTLE MECHANICAL VOICE PAUSES, then repeats itself. It says, "The time is 8:00 A.M. This is a courtesy call." Earl opens his eyes and replaces the receiver. The phone is perched on a cheap veneer headboard that stretches behind the bed, curves to meet the corner, and ends at the minibar. The TV is still on, blobs of flesh color nattering away at each other. Earl lies back down and is surprised to see himself, older now, tanned, the hair pulling away from his head like solar flares. The mirror on the ceiling is cracked, the silver fading in creases. Earl continues to stare at himself, astonished by what he sees. He is fully dressed, but the clothes are old, threadbare in places.
Earl feels the familiar spot on his left wrist for his watch, but it's gone. He looks down from the mirror to his arm. It is bare and the skin has changed to an even tan, as if he never owned a watch in the first place. The skin is even in color except for the solid black arrow on the inside of Earl's wrist, pointing up his shirtsleeve. He stares at the arrow for a moment. Perhaps he doesn't try to rub it off anymore. He rolls up his sleeve.
The arrow points to a sentence tattooed along Earl's inner arm. Earl reads the sentence once, maybe twice. Another arrow picks up at the beginning of the sentence, points farther up Earl's arm, disappearing under the rolled-up shirtsleeve. He unbuttons his shirt.
Looking down on his chest, he can make out the shapes but cannot bring them into focus, so he looks up at the mirror above him.
The arrow leads up Earl's arm, crosses at the shoulder, and descends onto his upper torso, terminating at a picture of a man's face that occupies most of his chest. The face is that of a large man, balding, with a mustache and a goatee. It is a particular face, but like a police sketch it has a certain unreal quality.
The rest of his upper torso is covered in words, phrases, bits of information, and instructions, all of them written backward on Earl, forward in the mirror.
Eventually Earl sits up, buttons his shirt, and crosses to the desk. He takes out a pen and a piece of notepaper from the desk drawer, sits, and begins to write.
I don't know where you'll be when you read this. I'm not even sure if you'll bother to read this. I guess you don't need to.
It's a shame, really, that you and I will never meet. But, like the song says, "By the time you read this note, I'll be gone."
We're so close now. That's the way it feels. So many pieces put together, spelled out. I guess it's just a matter of time until you find him.
Who knows what we've done to get here? Must be a hell of a story, if only you could remember any of it. I guess it's better that you can't.
I had a thought just now. Maybe you'll find it useful.
Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.
I guess if that's true, then it doesn't matter what you do. No expectations. If you can't find him, then it doesn't matter, because nothing matters. And if you do find him, then you can kill him without worrying about the consequences. Because there are no consequences.
That's what I'm thinking about right now, in this scrappy little room. Framed pictures of ships on the wall. I don't know, obviously, but if I had to guess, I'd say we're somewhere up the coast. If you're wondering why your left arm is five shades browner than your right, I don't know what to tell you. I guess we must have been driving for a while. And, no, I don't know what happened to your watch.
And all these keys: I have no idea. Not a one that I recognize. Car keys and house keys and the little fiddly keys for padlocks. What have we been up to?
I wonder if he'll feel stupid when you find him. Tracked down by the ten-minute man. Assassinated by a vegetable.
I'll be gone in a moment. I'll put down the pen, close my eyes, and then you can read this through if you want.
I just wanted you to know that I'm proud of you. No one who matters is left to say it. No one left is going to want to.
EARL'S EYES ARE WIDE OPEN, staring through the window of the car. Smiling eyes. Smiling through the window at the crowd gathering across the street. The crowd gathering around the body in the doorway. The body emptying slowly across the sidewalk and into the storm drain.
A stocky guy, facedown, eyes open. Balding head, goatee. In death, as in police sketches, faces tend to look the same. This is definitely somebody in particular. But really, it could be anybody.
Earl is still smiling at the body as the car pulls away from the curb. The car? Who's to say? Maybe it's a police cruiser. Maybe it's just a taxi.
As the car is swallowed into traffic, Earl's eyes continue to shine out into the night, watching the body until it disappears into a circle of concerned pedestrians. He chuckles to himself as the car continues to make distance between him and the growing crowd.
Earl's smile fades a little. Something has occurred to him. He begins to pat down his pockets; leisurely at first, like a man looking for his keys, then a little more desperately. Maybe his progress is impeded by a set of handcuffs. He begins to empty the contents of his pockets out onto the seat next to him. Some money. A bunch of keys. Scraps of paper.
A round metal lump rolls out of his pocket and slides across the vinyl seat. Earl is frantic now. He hammers at the plastic divider between him and the driver, begging the man for a pen. Perhaps the cabbie doesn't speak much English. Perhaps the cop isn't in the habit of talking to suspects. Either way, the divider between the man in front and the man behind remains closed. A pen is not forthcoming.
The car hits a pothole, and Earl blinks at his reflection in the rearview mirror. He is calm now. The driver makes another corner, and the metal lump slides back over to rest against Earl's leg with a little jingle. He picks it up and looks at it, curious now. It is a little bell. A little metal bell. Inscribed on it are his name and a set of dates. He recognizes the first one: the year in which he was born. But the second date means nothing to him. Nothing at all.
As he turns the bell over in his hands, he notices the empty space on his wrist where his watch used to sit. There is a little arrow there, pointing up his arm. Earl looks at the arrow, then begins to roll up his sleeve.
"You'd be late for your own funeral," she'd say. Remember? The more I think about it, the more trite that seems. What kind of idiot, after all, is in any kind of rush to get to the end of his own story?
And how would I know if I were late, anyway? I don't have a watch anymore. I don't know what we did with it.
What the hell do you need a watch for, anyway? It was an antique. Deadweight tugging at your wrist. Symbol of the old you. The you that believed in time.
No. Scratch that. It's not so much that you've lost your faith in time as that time has lost its faith in you. And who needs it, anyway? Who wants to be one of those saps living in the safety of the future, in the safety of the moment after the moment in which they felt something powerful? Living in the next moment, in which they feel nothing. Crawling down the hands of the clock, away from the people who did unspeakable things to them. Believing the lie that time will heal all wounds--which is just a nice way of saying that time deadens us.
But you're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.
Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying--and you have to keep trying--eventually you will come across the next item on your list.
You can't have a normal life anymore. You must know that. How can you have a girlfriend if you can't remember her name? Can't have kids, not unless you want them to grow up with a dad who doesn't recognize them. Sure as hell can't hold down a job. Not too many professions out there that value forgetfulness. Prostitution, maybe. Politics, of course.
This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness.That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trickUnder 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.: 9 p.m. Hillary Clinton email release no cover-up
The timing of the State Department's plan to release about 3,000 pages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails at 9 p.m. Tuesday is not an effort to minimize media coverage of the documents but the result of the complexity of preparing the records for public release and the need to meet a court-imposed deadline, a State official said.
"This is really a function of physics for us. We have a lot of emails to get through.... That's what's driving the time," State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a daily news briefing at the agency's headquarters. "The 9 o'clock release date is not deliberately intended to make your life harder.... I recognize that it's inconvenient for you in the media. I can assure you this is not an attempt or an effort to be less than forthcoming or to try and steer away from news coverage of this."
Kirby also sounded resigned to the fact that many in the media and elsewhere would not believe him on that point. "I know that's going to be the going assumption," he said.
Kirby pointed to an order last month in which a federal judge instructed the State Department to make releases of the some of the 55,000 pages of emails by the end of each month, starting Tuesday. The judge set a goal of 7 percent for the first monthly release.
"We all recognize that turning in our homework at 9 o'clock the night before is probably not ideal," Kirby quipped in front of a room of journalists unhappy about the nighttime release. "I certainly apologize for the inconvenience that is going to cause."
After a request from the State Department last October, Clinton returned in December about 30,000 printed emails from her personal email account. She also said she had instructed her aides to delete a slightly larger number of emails her lawyers deemed private or personal.
The State Department, which Kirby insisted Tuesday is committed to transparency, initially proposed releasing the bulk of the Clinton emails under the Freedom of Information Act next January—more than a year after Clinton turned them over. However, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras required monthly releases.
About 850 pages of emails provided earlier in the year to a House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks were released last month. State officials say the new batch of emails is from 2009, three years before the deadly attack on U.S. facilities in Libya.
Kirby noted Tuesday that most of the 55,000 pages of emails are unrelated to Libya or Benghazi. "The vast majority have nothing to do with the work of the select committee," he said.It’s called the “Congressional Review Act,” and it was one of Newt Gingrich’s smartest and most far-sighted moves.
As part of the the Republican landslide of 1996 and part of the “Contract with America,” Gingrich – then House speaker – pushed through an obscure but potent legislative weapon, the “Congressional Review Act.”
To work effectively, the stars must be aligned just right: It targets executive orders signed by a leaving president in his waning six months (which this does) and one party must control all levers of government (as Republicans do now).
With Trump the President-Elect, everything is in place: Republicans are able to cast off a myriad of Obama Administration executive orders – environmental rules, changes to overtime regulations and rules designed to squeeze more taxes from big corporations.
The last time the rule worked was in 2001 – when George W. Bush took office from Bill Clinton. Then, they scrapped workplace safety rules governing “ergonomics.”
This time, they’re thinking much, much bigger, The Boston Globe reports.
“We plan to robustly use the Congressional Review Act to reverse the midnight regulations of Barack Obama,” said Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, who is a leader of the Senate effort. “His legacy lost. The American people said ‘No, we don’t want that. We want to change direction.’ ” While Barrasso and other Republicans say the tool allows them to rescind “last minute” regulations pushed by the Obama administration, the Byzantine way that time is defined in the act means they will most likely be able to take aim at regulations put in place as far back as late May. Gingrich, now a close Trump adviser, is thrilled his creation will get some use. “We’ve gone through a period where unelected bureaucrats have arrogated a level of dictatorial power that can ruin lives, close companies, and totally disrupt local governments with no recourse,” Gingrich said in a brief interview. “And to reassert the elected officials is, I think, a good thing.”
The Congressional Review Act provides a fast-track process for Congress to overturn unwanted agency rules imposed by an outgoing president. Under the act, all each chamber has to do is pass a “resolution of disapproval” and the regulation is no more.
Under the terms of the act, Congress only has a few short months to get this all done. “It requires a perfect storm,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of progressive group Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. Among those circumstances, she said, is the party in power should “be one that believes in deregulation.”
Under the act, Democrats can’t fall back on their standard blocking tactic, the filibuster. It only takes a simple majority to pass a “resolution of disapproval.”
The Senate Republican Policy Committee put out a potential hit list called “Reining in Obama Regulatory Overreach.” It includes killing a regulation that prevents states from blocking federal funding for Planned Parenthood. GOP senators also seek to eliminate new rules that prevent US corporations from avoiding federal taxes through “earnings stripping,’’ a key tactic in offshore “inversions’’ that corporations use to relocate to a lower cost country.
Will this work? It seems it might … But as history almost always repeats itself, there may come a day where Democrats can (and certainly will) use Republicans’ own weapon against them. And then the irony will be thick indeed.
Facebook has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share to your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you.Multiple researchers who received grants from the US Department of Energy (DOE) say that they have been asked to remove references to “climate change” and “global warming” from the descriptions of their projects, they say.
In one case, a lab official at the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, asked an ecologist to elide references to climate change from her grant proposal to satisfy US President Donald Trump's budget language restrictions. The scientist, Jennifer Bowen of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, posted an e-mail from the lab official to Facebook on 24 August.
“I have been asked to contact you to update the wording in your proposal abstract to remove words such as ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’,” wrote the official, project coordinator Ashley Gilbert of the PNNL’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL). Bowen’s project will examine how environmental stressors, such as climate change, affect the ecology of saltwater marshes.
Gilbert’s office told Nature that she was unavailable for comment, and a PNNL spokesperson referred questions to DOE headquarters in Washington DC. Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes declined to answer questions about the situation, but said that “there is no departmental-wide policy banning the term ‘climate change’ from being used in DOE materials”.
Bowen could not be reached for comment on the matter. But Jonathan Sanderman, a biogeochemist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and co-principal investigator on the marsh project, confirmed that the e-mail came from Gilbert. Sanderman speculates that PNNL officials “are worried the grant will get zeroed out if someone sees that it lists climate change”.
Not the only one
Bowen and Sanderman’s project is among 14 that were announced on 23 August as winners of research grants from the EMSL and the Joint Genome Institute, which is managed by the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
Another grant winner from that group, ecologist Scott Saleska of the University of Arizona in Tucson, confirmed that he, too, had received a request from a DOE official on 24 August to remove references to climate change from his project’s description. Saleska’s study focuses on the effects of decomposing plant material on permafrost, and his team’s abstract highlighted the implications of this process for climate change.
The White House’s 2018 budget proposal for the DOE Office of Science proposes scaling back or eliminating support for many climate-research programmes and research areas, such as climate feedbacks. But the document also emphasizes the need to study how carbon cycles through ecosystems — a category that encompasses Bowen’s, Sanderman’s and Saleska’s projects.
Saleska says it appears that DOE programme managers are being careful to make it clear that they are, in fact, following the president’s budget directive. “What else can they do?” he asks. Saleska says that he is more concerned that research priorities are being set by political ideology that is at odds with scientific knowledge.
Sanderman also lamented the fact that scientists are being forced to change the way they talk about their work. “But if that's what it takes to keep science going for a couple of years, we will I guess play along,” he adds.Japan Power: Honda Civic with 1850 hp and 560.000 km on its “back” is the fastest front-wheel drive car, runs 1/4 mile (402 meters) in 7.61sec. This overhauled Civic is 20 years old, while the power of its 2-liter engine has been raised on the whole new level.
The SpeedFactory Racing company from Tacoma, has presented one of the craziest Honda Civic that were ever made. It is a 20 year old Honda Civic which has incredible 560.000 km on its “back”. We assume that the 2.0-liter engine is probably new, but the fact is that the chassis is one of the parts who are 20 years old. The 4cylinder engine has new bigger powerful turbo charger that boosts the engine power to incredible 1850 hp.
In order to remove any doubts, the company has decided to test the front-wheel drive Civic on a racing track and the results are amazing. It finished the track of 1/4 mile (402 meters) in 7.61sec at 199 ( km/h) 320 and a best trap speed of 201MPH (323 km/h). That makes the Civic the fastest car with front-wheel drive.
In the video below, we can see that the Civic has defeated the competitors like Pontiac Firebird and Nissan 240 SX. It can be noticed that the Civic had a slower start but it caught up with the competitors really fast and at the end comfortable wins. Anyway, we have to congratulate the guys over at SpeedFactory Racing for the effort they have invested in creating this crazy Civic.Jill Stein is a Harvard-trained internist, a doctor who diagnosed thousands of patients for a quarter-century in Boston and Chicago before making the late-career switch to Green Party presidential candidate and could-be Hillary Clinton spoiler.
So, as we settled in for our “Off Message” podcast interview last week in a drab hotel conference room in Baltimore (she had a rally there last Friday), I asked Stein — as a clinician used to making snap assessments — whether she agreed that Donald Trump “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” as declared by the GOP nominee’s Bruce Vilanch-esque personal physician Harold Bornstein.
Story Continued Below
“You know, I don’t pretend to be able to do TV diagnosis, but I think the guy has a problem,” said the 66-year-old candidate, who is averaging somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent in most national and state polls, enough (Clinton people say) to put a scare into the Democrat in too-close-to-call states. “The guy has a lot of problems — physical, mental, emotional, cognitive,” Stein said of Trump.
As proof of his (alleged) pathology, she pointed to his position-hopping on a range of issues, which she cast as erratic rather than calculating — from his fuzzy Iraq positions over the years, to his brief “softening” on immigration last month, to his decision (on the day we spoke) to suddenly renounce birtherism after five years of banging a drumbeat of lies.
“It’s hard to, you know, to think too hard about anything Donald Trump says because he will change his mind in the next hour, if not the next day, or whatever,” she added. “Today, suddenly, after five years, he became convinced that it’s not an issue. Yesterday it was an issue. It will probably become an issue again for him. You know, the guy may have a memory problem. Who knows what it is? But he’s incapable of having a consistent thought or policy.”
Stein also thinks Trump’s getting a free pass because he spent his career in private business, and she wants him to release his tax returns. (She wants everybody else to do the same.) “At least with Clinton, you know, there was some degree of transparency,” she said. “But what’s going on with Trump, you can’t even get at, and what he said was that even to clarify 15 out of these 500 deals, these are just like the most frightening mafiosos around the world. He’s like — he’s a magnet for crime and extortion.”
A veteran protester who has had brushes with the law, Stein has a bit of Carrie Nation ferocity about her, but she also has a soothing, therapeutic mien — precisely the person you’d go to if you developed an unexplained rash after chaining yourself to a fracking facility.
Stein got 460,000 votes as an outsider candidate in 2012 for a left-of-left, anti-war party steeped in environmental issues, but adamantly denies any role as a spoiler. She won’t say whether she can better Ralph Nader’s 2.7 million total for the party in 2000 and generally avoids the whole Al Gore-Florida-handing-W-the-White House thing. And she claims that she’s drawing disaffected Bernie-or-Bust voters who never, ever would have voted for Clinton anyway — many of whom might have actually voted for Trump. (I told her I don’t buy that.)
As much as Stein despises Trump — and she really, really does — she describes the choice between him and Hillary Clinton as an abominable binary offering “death by gunshot or death by strangulation.”
But her contempt has a more cutting quality when she talks about Clinton. She mocks Trump as braying menace; Stein thinks he’s, at heart, a bumbler who would be neutered by his own party after being elected. But it’s Clinton who poses the greater threat, in Stein’s estimation, because she knows how to move the levers of Washington.
“Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress,” Stein explains. “Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won’t. … Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars faster, to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his.”
This is a boutique opinion among mainstream liberals, to put it politely. And a lot of people, Democrats and pollsters among them, see in Stein and her more popular Libertarian counterpart Gary Johnson (whose support flirts with double digits) as potent threats to Clinton because they draw disproportionately from her potential supporters, especially among younger voters. The TBS host and satirist Samantha Bee, who makes no secret about wanting to see the first female president elected, is so infuriated with Stein she refuses to even show her picture on TV — and encouraged Stein backers to mail their complaints to her vagina, though she used a different word.
Stein is used to this kind of thing and believes she is taking one for the lefty team. Earlier this year, she hinted about dropping out if Sanders stayed in and still pines a bit for the Hillary-backing Vermont socialist.
“I’ve tried to talk with Bernie, but, you know, Bernie is — he is a team player,” she said, lamenting his refusal to even chat with her. “I think he’s on the wrong team, perhaps because he’s been in Washington, D.C., too long, because he used to really understand independent politics and why we cannot have a viable political system unless we have independent political parties. … Maybe it’s a generational thing.”
Sanders, stumping for Clinton over the weekend, dismissed Stein and Johnson as a self-defeating “protest vote” but there’s more than a little truth to her argument that third-party candidates will lure voters away from the Democratic nominee, with some polls showing a quarter to a third of under-30 voters opting for Stein, Johnson or none of the above.
“The millennial problem is real,” a senior Clinton aide recently told me. “It shouldn’t be overstated, but we have work to do.”
Like Sanders, Stein has an affection for Russia and a soft spot for Botox strongman Vladimir Putin. Critics like Clinton ally Neera Tanden have noted just how often Stein appears on the Putin-controlled cable network RT. And a gushing video Stein recorded after her appearance at a democracy conference in Moscow earlier this year sparked all sorts of speculation on the part of Team Clinton about a broader Cyrillic conspiracy to undermine the Democratic nominee that included Trump, his former aide Paul Manafort and Hillary-hating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whom Stein has spoken about in heroic terms.
When I asked her whether Putin is a despot, I got a yes-and-no answer, with traces of Trumpian ambivalence. “To some extent, yes, but there could be a whole lot worse,” Stein said when I asked about the reportedly rigged Russian elections this year. “When we needlessly provoke him and endanger him and surround him with war games — this is sort of the Cuban missile crisis on steroids … and I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Moreover, she doesn’t think Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee email system or that Putin is trying to sway the election in Trump’s favor — despite U.S |
-in-integrity brand.
Semi-professional ultimate where players have primary accountability for fair play and are recognized for their success in meeting that duty may be especially attractive to companies interested in drawing attention to how they value individual responsibility and integrity.
There are also many companies leading the way into a future that is performance driven while being sustainable and socially conscious. Companies like Tesla, SolarCity, Tom’s, and Beyond Meat are growing quickly while still competing for market share and awareness. A sport that has values that align with where companies are going and is the exact market that they want to reach will be a very attractive pitch for them.
5. USA Ultimate
USAU has been clear about its position on the current state of the semi-pro leagues. While many may disagree with USAU, there are plenty who support the stance, and USAU is not due for another strategic plan that may change its position until 2018. A mixed format with a larger nod to self-officiation/observers would bring a league closely in line with USAU’s values and goals for the sport. It would push a critical mass of players and USAU members into supporting the semi-pro leagues. It would compel USAU to support the league as well. There are numerous potential benefits here to the semi-pro league that partners with USAU, including:
– Season scheduling to avoid conflicts of major events
– Joint sponsorship and cross-marketing opportunities
– Cooperative sport development and outreach efforts
– Access for players to participate on international teams without having to meet the current requirement of playing in the fall club series
One of the biggest challenges that many top players face currently is the time commitment required to play at the top level. USAU’s biggest carrot is their ownership of the national teams. A partnership with USAU would open the door for that semi-pro league to discuss reducing required USAU structured play for players in that semi-pro league. This type of cooperation between USAU and a semi-professional league is a necessary step toward a sustainable future for the semi-pro leagues, our top players, and the sport.
6. The Future
In the early 2000s, Wham-O conducted focus groups around the country and found that parents and young athletes who had never played ultimate before were drawn to the sport due in large part to the values the sport embodied. This led to Wham-O making a significant investment in the UPA’s youth programs during the 2000s. The sentiments identified in those focus groups are apparent in the growth that the sport has experienced over the past several years.
The world is moving toward a greater valuation of direct communication and self-regulation through advances in technology like the internet, mobile devices, and social media. Our ability to travel and communicate across borders gives more power to people to interact, develop relationships, and initiate and resolve conflicts. These trends and how they impact our values and our actions are mirrored in ultimate without referees. Ultimate provides an attractive showcase for who we want to be and who we can be. And at times, it reflects the challenges that we all face in our daily lives of meeting our personal responsibility. As these trends continue, people will be naturally drawn to a sport that values and instills personal responsibility and conflict resolution as they see it mirror their experiences in the every day world.
The developed world is also moving inexorably toward greater gender equity. As awareness of inequity grows, tolerance for inequity decreases, agitation for change increases, and policies that allow for equitable opportunities for women are made. Over time more women continue to move into positions of political and financial power.
A mixed format semi-professional league is well positioned to take advantage of these long-term societal trends. There is a growing number of people in our society who love sport and competition but aren’t activated by traditional spectator sports because of differences in values. Ultimate and our semi-pro leagues have an opportunity to fill a different, large, and ever expanding niche that wins the future of professional sport.
Challenges, Risks and Fears
I understand that moving toward a mixed league that also allows for self-officiation is not a no-risk, no-challenge tactic. Currently, USAU’s observer system is not completely ready for this type of spectator event. Decreasing stoppages to help speed up game play will require work.
Many of us witnessed the 20+ minute game point between Ironside and Ring in the semifinals of 2014 USAU Nationals and felt that an incredibly compelling game was diminished by the stilted pace of game play at the end. The most obvious ways to keep the game moving are to introduce 3rd party-called stalls and travels, decrease the time available to players for resolution before an observer makes a ruling, and make more proactive use of Team and Personal Misconduct fouls for player behavior that unnecessarily stops or slows play: egregious fouls, egregious misuse of foul calls, and egregious misuse of contests. All of these things are in line with USAU’s current policies regarding observers.
There is also the risk that some current top male players will view mixed and/or non-refereed play as less desirable. While I know some players who have expressed this view, I know many others who have expressed the opposite view. Those players enjoy self-officiating and what it brings to the players and the game and/or don’t want to see women put on a second tier. Almost all top players want the opportunity to compete on the stage with the other top players in the game. And players who are interested in being a part of a spectated league are most likely interested in being in front of the biggest crowds possible.
Most of our best male and female players tried out for the 2013 US World Games team knowing that the competition was mixed. Creating a structure that facilitates the best players playing and draws the biggest crowds will result in the best players playing in that structure.
While the changes suggested in this piece would be big adjustments for either league, there are many innovations that the semi-pro leagues have brought to ultimate that they wouldn’t have to give-up. Timed games, player movement on stopped discs, larger fields, and rule tweaks like allowing double-teams are all value-neutral decisions.
Finally, there is the fear that bringing this proposed version of the game to non-“initiated” audiences and sponsors will get us laughed out of the room. While there is no doubt that some people will be turned off by mixed play because of their traditional male-dominated view of sports or by self-officiation because it feels complicated or overly idealistic, there are more who will find it compelling and meaningful.
Mixed, completely self-officiated ultimate has been driving huge crowds at the World Games. Leaders in the sports industry like IOC and ESPN have expressed time and again their interest in a model of play that includes gender equity and high levels of personal responsibility. Other sports have been showing increasing interest in observers as they see parents and athletes being turned off by the traditional model. And we’ve seen explosive growth in the sport, which many attribute to our core values.
And, at their heart, semi-pro and professional sports leagues are a huge risk. Most sports leagues are money losers; even many of the successful ones (like the NBA) have numerous teams with operating costs that exceed their revenue. We know that the leaders of the Ultimate semi-professional leagues aren’t afraid of taking risks. While there is some risk to a mixed, more self-officiated format, the potential benefits far outweigh those risks.
Some in our community will say “but there’s no precedent!” as a way to make the point about how difficult this will be. Yes, there is no specific roadmap for a sport like this. But, as a sport, we’ve been blazing our own trail for years now and we’re only growing.
We’re leading and we’ve come further than any team field sport has before us in both gender equity and on-field player responsibility. It’s a winning strategy for the semi-pro leagues, the players, and the sport.Liz Cole, the executive producer of Megyn Kelly’s Sunday night NBC News show, said people should wait to judge Kelly’s interview with Alex Jones until it airs this weekend.
Kelly is facing backlash for the upcoming interview with InfoWars host Alex Jones, a noted conspiracy theorist who believes the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax and says 9/11 was orchestrated by the government.
"He's a controversial figure for sure, but as journalists it's our job to interview newsmakers and people of influence no matter how abhorrent their views may be," Cole told CNN’s Dylan Byers in a Monday night exclusive.
"He is someone who is worthy of examination, by sitting down with him, there's value in that," she continued.
Kelly, a former Fox News host, has already taped the interview with Jones that will air this weekend on “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” her new program that debuted on June 4.
"Viewers will see Megyn do a strong interview where she challenges him appropriately,” Cole continued.
“That's the benefit of putting him out there. When someone actually sits down and asks him questions and he has to come up with answers — there's value to that."
"Until you see the full program, in the full context, I wouldn't judge it too much. Judge it when you see it,” she added.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has pulled local television and online advertisements from the NBC network until after the interview airs next Sunday, according to The Wall Street Journal.The Kansas City Chiefs should have a busy off season ahead of them as it is certain several players who have been around awhile will not be re-signed.
The NFL off-season where dreams are made. Well at least that is what they want you to think, with every dream that is made a dream goes unfulfilled. With every opportunity given, one must be taken away.
I thought a good way to gather everyone’s thoughts on how the Chiefs should handle the off-season is with a game of Let’s Make a Deal. I will give you two opposite hypothetical scenarios and you have to pick the scenario that you would choose if you were one of the men pictured above.
The first set of scenarios involves how the Chiefs should handle Brandon Flowers, so let’s make a deal.Solar is now the cheapest source of electric power in Chile, according to a new report by Deutsche Bank.
In Chile's most recent power auction, the bids from solar project developers came in at between $65 and $68 per megawatt hour (MWh) were considerably more competitive than bids made by coal plants, which were priced at $85 per MWh. Solar power projects were awarded the lion’s share of the 1,200 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity contracts sold.
Chile boasts one of the world’s biggest solar resources. High electricity prices and strong demand from Chile’s mining industry have driven demand growth for solar, especially large scale commercial or utility projects.
The total installed solar capacity in Chile increased from less than 4 MW in 2013 to more than 220 MW last year. Nearly 1 GW of solar is projected to be installed in Chile in 2015. Meanwhile, a total of about 8 GW of solar power projects have been approved for development in Chile. First Solar and SunEdison are two of the biggest U.S. solar companies active in Chile.
In terms of power demand growth, per capita electricity consumption in Chile increased by about one third between 2000 and 2010. The total power demand growth in Chile has supported the surge in solar power over the past two years. In particular, Deutsche Bank attributes the recent surge in solar deployment to Chile’s electric-intensive mining industry.
The primary challenge to sustaining recent growth rates is Chile’s transmission grid. The solar resource potential – and the majority of installed solar capacity – is primarily located in the northern part of Chile. However, “all the best spaces for solar projects [in northern Chile] have generally been already taken,” said Vishal Shah, a solar market analyst at Deutsche Bank, in an interview with PV Tech.
Although Chile “does not have any place to put” most of the more than 2 GW of solar power projects it has approved for development, the lack of space is not the biggest barrier to bringing online more utility-scale solar in Chile. The biggest barrier is the transmission grid. It needs significant upgrades before it will be able to handle anywhere close to that amount of additional solar capacity.
Unlike the solar resource potential, the major demand centers for electricity in Chile are located in the southern part of the country. Ergo: the need for a robust national transmission system. Currently, Chile’s electric system is regional rather than national. Two electric systems cover the northern and southern regions of the country. They are not connected.
Plans have been made for making transmission upgrades but it remains to be seen how quickly those plans proceed. In the meantime, interconnection is likely to be the biggest bottleneck constraining growth in Chile’s solar industry.The Hyperloop One could eventually come to Miami, creating a 26-minute route to Orlando, which would be a fraction of the four hours it would take to drive and less than half the hour it’d take to fly.
Of the 2,600 submissions in a global challenge from earlier in the year, among the 11 U.S. finalists is the Miami-to-Orlando route, notes The Verge.
The process works by using a linear electric motor to move an electromagnetically levitated pod through a tube at speeds up to 620 miles per hour with no turbulence. Hyperloop One’s Senior VP Nick Earle says they plan to select two or three of the 11 finalists for further study.
“The question is where are we going to get the most collaboration and willingness to work together to jointly define the regulatory framework,” Earle said. “Because we can design the product in our development to meet the regulations.”
One of those collaborators is Alice Bravo, director of public works for Miami-Dade County in Florida. Bravo is proposing a hyperloop between Orlando and Miami, which could be a huge boon, not only for moving freight from the busy Miami port but also tourists back and forth between Disney World and Miami Beach.... Additional phases of the project could see the Florida hyperloop extend to Atlanta and then Chicago. “We think this is a corridor that could serve as a national stimulus,” Bravo said, “for this area of innovation and human capital intellect.”
There are also potential hyperloop routes being explored for six other countries.Advertisement
This incredible photography series is inspired by what is known as the 'overview effect': the sensation that astronauts experience when the view the Earth from space.
In a project known as 'Daily Overview,' Benjamin Grant, from New York City, posts a new satellite image to Instagram every day, capturing iconic and unexpected landscapes from around the globe.
Benjamin hopes that in doing so, he will be able to inspire Instagram users to see their planet in a new way.
Earlier this year, he released a set of images, showcasing everything from a turbine interchange in Florida to a sky-high view of the streets of Barcelona.
Now, he and his team are back, with a new set of minimally-edited Google Earth images, featuring even more places where'man has left his mark' most profoundly.
Scroll down for video
Benjamin Grant's Instagram account, Daily Overview, posts images - taken from space - depicting man's impact on civilisation. This picture shows Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia
The Moab Potash Ponds in Utah is a stunning example of vibrant colour contrast between the bright blue water and salt
New landscapes include Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and the vast green space of Central Park smack in the middle of Manhattan.
And, so far, the response to the images has been overwhelming.
Today, the account has amassed over 40,000 followers and Benjamin even sells some of his more popular images as large prints on his website.
'By providing our audience with a view they wouldn't get to see otherwise - and by making sure we do the research so they know exactly what they're seeing - we can inspire fresh thinking about the planet and the role we all play in shaping it,' Grant told The Guardian.
In Norfolk, Virginia, Lamberts Point Pier 6 is the largest coal-landing station in the Northern Hemisphere
Central Park in New York City spans 843 acres, which accounts for six per cent of the island of Manhattan
The Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, has a large boneyard of over 150 retired planes
The neighbourhoods of Sntosh Park and Uttam Nagar in India are some of the most built-up and densely populated
Cargo ships and tankers are pictured waiting outside the entry to the Port of Singapore - the world's second-busiest port
A whirlpool interchange, which was first built in 2006, connects three major roads by the Miracle Garden in Dubai, UAE
An olive tree plantation dots the hills of Cordoba, Spain, where 90 per cent of all harvested olives will be turned into oilThe foreign policy experts struck again.
Via PJ Media:
In an exclusive interview with PJ Media, the Libyan National Army (LNA) spokesman, Col. Ahmed al-Mesmari, says that President Obama and Hillary Clinton “abandoned the Libyan people to face these terrorists alone.”
He also implicates the Obama administration in supporting terrorist militias — including Libyan al-Qaeda leader Abdelhakim Belhadj and Muslim Brotherhood militias allied to al-Qaeda.
Rather than backing the LNA and the elected Tobruk-based Libyan House of Representatives (HoR) in the fight against these terror groups, the Obama administration — along with the United Nations and the European Union — have been trying to impose a “Government of National Accord” (GNA) that has zero constituency in Libya. Further, it is accused of working with terror-linked militias in Tripoli.
With the continuing crisis between several Arab nations — including the Libyan HoR and Qatar — Col. al-Mesmari discusses Qatar’s role in arming and financing terrorist militias in Libya. He also connects the Muslim Brotherhood militias that have been fighting against the LNA with al-Qaeda and ISIS elements operating in the country.
Col. al-Mesmari also claims that the February 17th Martyrs Brigade — hired by Hillary Clinton’s State Department to protect the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — cooperated with Ansar al-Sharia in attacking the consulate compound on September 12, 2012.
That attack led to the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Libyans celebrated last week when, after three years of battle, the LNA finally liberated Benghazi from all terrorist groups in the city.
Keep reading…The BBC has started rolling out the BBC micro:bit, its programmable computer for kids. Reminiscent of the Raspberry Pi, the tiny computer will be given to every Year 7 student and above in the UK, affording them the opportunity to learn coding basics, some before they even hit their teens. the device essentially looks like a computer chip, and needs to be attached to things like a monitor and keyboard in order to work, like a really tiny desktop computer.
“You can use your BBC micro:bit for all sorts of cool creations, from robots to musical instruments – the possibilities are endless,” reads the About page for the device on the BBC’s website. “This little device has an awful lot of features, like 25 red LED lights that can flash messages. There are two programmable buttons that can be used to control games or pause and skip songs on a playlist. Your BBC micro:bit can detect motion and tell you which direction you’re heading in, and it can use a low energy Bluetooth connection to interact with other devices and the Internet – clever!”
The micro: bit isn’t the first time the BBC has passed out computers to schools. BBC Micro computers were used in UK schools in the 80s. Today’s model is 70 times smaller and 18 times faster than the original.
The new micro:bit was originally slated to be rolled out to students in October, just as their school year was beginning. Unfortunately, power supply issues and “fine tuning” delayed the device until now. Important to note: the computers are being given to the students themselves, not the schools. That means that while the school year might be coming to a close, kids can use the device over their school break as well.
Want to give it a try for yourself? While we likely won’t see the actual computers in states, BBC has a page on its website where anyone can write code and see how it would play back using an online simulator.A British director will use previously unseen footage in a new documentary about the late singer Amy Winehouse.
Asif Kapadia won a Bafta for his 2010 documentary film Senna, which was about Brazilian F1 champion Ayrton Senna.
"Amy was a once-in-a-generation talent," said Asif Kapadia in a joint statement with film producer James Gay-Rees. "She wrote and sung from the heart."
The singer died in 2011 at the age of 27 from alcohol poisoning.
Amy was a once-in-a-generation talent who captured everyone's attention. She wrote and sung from the heart and everyone fell under her spell Film director Asif Kapadia
"Everyone fell under her spell," said the statement released by the film director and producer.
"But tragically, Amy seemed to fall apart under the relentless media attention, her troubled relationships, her global success and precarious lifestyle," Asif Kapadia and James Gay-Rees added.
The documentary about Amy Winehouse will be similar to the award winning film Senna, which was shown worldwide in cinemas in 2011.
The Brazilian Formula 1 racing driver died at the age of 34.
Ayrton Senna was killed in a crash while leading the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. He remains the last driver fatality in the sport.
In the film, there is footage taken by the Senna family and interviews with friends.
It finishes with people mourning at his funeral.
The Amy Winehouse film has yet to be given a title, but it is hoped it will be shown at Cannes Film Festival in May.
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on TwitterLooking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Copper-striped blue-tailed skink: Chris Brown, USGS.
A species of lizard native to the Hawaiian Islands—the copper striped blue-tailed skink (Emoia impar)—is now officially extinct. The species was once common throughout the Hawaiian Islands and is still found on other island groups in the tropical Pacific.
But the last confirmed sighting in the state of Hawaii was on the Na’Pali coast of Kauai in the 1960s. Repeated field surveys between 1988 and 2008 on Kauai, Oahu, Maui, and Hawai’i yielded no evidence of their existence.
The authors of a new paper in the science journal Oryx write that this is a case of a cryptic extinction—that is, when a species easily confused with a similar species goes missing for decades and no one notices. From the paper:
The introduction and spread of a similar skink Lampropholis delicata across the islands appears to temporally follow the decline of Emoia impar, although there is no evidence of competition between these species. It appears that Lampropholis delicata is spreading to occupy the niche vacated by the extirpated Emoia impar. Further confusion exists because the skink Emoia cyanura, which is very similar in appearance to Emoia impar, appears to have been introduced to one site within a hotel on Kaua’i and persisted as a population at that site for approximately 2 decades (1970s–1990s) but is now also extirpated.
Big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala): April Nobile / © AntWeb.org / CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
So what was the driver behind this extinction? It remains something of a mystery, though there are hints that predation by invasive ants was a factor. The authors write:Porsche today set out to calm volatile trading in Volkswagen shares by making up to 5% of VW stock available to desperate short-sellers.
A day after VW shares rose as high as €1,005 each, making the German cars group the world's most valuable company, Porsche said its move "may result in an increase in the liquidity of the Volkswagen ordinary shares".
The effect was immediate, with VW shares falling almost €350 or 37% to €596 in early trading compared with yesterday's closing price of €945. VW is now valued at €178bn compared with a high of €296bn (£240bn).
Porsche, under attack for its multibillion gains from using obscure derivative instruments, has denied allegations of market manipulation or insider trading.
Its Sunday night announcement it controlled 74.1% of VW stock sent hedge funds, which had bet on a collapse in VW shares in line with the global auto industry's downturn, into despair. It reduced the amount of VW shares in free float down to 5.7%.
Several leading funds are estimated to have lost up to €5bn when their short-selling turned toxic, with the total losses calculated at anything between €20bn and €30bn.
The turbulence on the Frankfurt stock exchange in the last two days, which has seen frantic traders dump other leading stocks in the Dax-30, has forced Deutsche Boerse to reduce VW's weighting in the index closer to 10% from next Monday. It rose yesterday to 27%, dragging the entire bourse into disrepute.firstly i would like to say that i bloody love this font, linux libertine, it is a free font as in freedom to be free you free your mind freedom, and my god it is so beautiful i have actually put aside my semi-pirated font Georgia and use this. its that good. i am actually going to install this on other OS's that purport to ship 'better' fonts but instead ship crap in a pixel box. oh and btw everything on OS X looks like blurry shit.
of course i cant find the quote, i save snippets from the net and cant find anything. this is the ludicricity of our computer life, machines so well-made for remembering yet unbridled and unharnessed
on perl i remember i needed a hash extension, i used cdb which is a hashtable extension to tie perl's arrays to a constant database to do fast key-value lookups from a file that doesnt change, hence the name constant database. i tried many other databases and used many different ones like sleepycat's db and others but man, i remember trying out way too many.
i was granted such a moment. first i was made to suffer. i was blinded for 2.5 years. i was literally blind and could not see newspaper headlines, watch tv, read anything, use a computer. i sat on a lazyboy in the dark listening to the radio for 6 months. radio is not that good.
a guy named bart at a linux meeting told me once that the first 20% of the mac interface is very polished. then you try to do something that isnt so polished and all hell breaks loose. try to export your original photos in iphoto and you will see what i mean. you end up with a finder window full of autogenerated directories where you manually have to select the photos to copy, choosing from an ill-sorted hierachical tree list where you cant easily see what's what.
sdl is limited to single toplevel windows, meaning you can only have one window per process that has a fast buffer to draw into. one window. to get a fast drawable frame is not a big deal on any system, if youre working at a lower level. maybe on windows you use the old directdraw interface. on linux you might use the X "mit" shared memory extension. its doable. and you get more than one toplevel window to do it in.
what do i propose, or what is my idea, or what im doing with my life
its important to mention the tablet craze. how much shit can you watch, how much can you read without wanting to write, wanting to create? want to make a nation of bums, crack addicts, and useless gabbers, then yeah, give em all tablets and fuck the real computers. fuck the creation urge. better yet get that loud electric buzzer going that never lets us finish a thought to make us all equal like in ayn rand's anthem. oh wait a sec, my buzzer is going, my bitch is sexting me. brb.
i remember xmms. do you? it was a clone of winamp that worked perfectly, that used the gtk toolkit, version 1. well it doesnt even compile anymore, and even binaries wont run because no one ships gtk1 anymore, because gtk 1 is 'deprecated'. fuck deprecated. some cunt took a long time to write it, and a lot of other cunts enjoyed it. the worst part is that you cant even run the existing binary. its there sitting on disk staring at me in the face, but it wont ever start again.
the core has to be linux. it has to be x86 32-bit. you can call kernel calls with int80 that dont change. the elf executable format is documented. binaries could be made to work for years. its possible but you have to give up the libs and the dynamic binding to them.
i remember meeting rms back in 98. he wont remember me, i was a pissant and still am. so is he. but the point is that i told him i was planning on being a lawyer. he told me i would probably end up a parasite. i didnt end up a lawyer.
i had an issue with ffmpeg where the same line with a --threads argument would make a file that wouldnt play on my set-top divx box anymore. if i removed the threading arg from the command line, the same file with all the same options with the same binary on the same computer, would make a file that would play on my set-top divx player. you fucking explain that to me. obviously there was an error in ffmpeg when threading was enabled. if that doesnt even work, why would anyone think that a new compile, even of the same source, but with different tools and linked to different libraries, would work the same way every time?
neither do i
SDL uses a shared memory extension on X windows to get a fast box to draw into, unless you've specified to use the opengl interface.
X applications communicate with the X server using unix domain sockets when you run locally which is almost always now since the network transparent part of X has passed into almost obscurity if not unusability (see dbus etc).
I will bypass xlib completely, and xcb too and talk the X protocol raw via the unix domain socket. A subset of the X protocol that still gives me the mit-shm mit shared memory extension to get a fast buffer should be enough. As above, when you use a subset you can get things done with minimal pain and as a lone programmer. try to do everything or to the letter of the spec and youre doomed. time is a killer.
of course no gtk, qt, or tk. kinda goes without saying if youre bypassing xlib.
unix domain sockets are a two-way pipe between processes with a similar api as tcp sockets.
The app opens a unix socket to the X server. Then it mallocs a chunk of memory for the screen buffer. Then you tell X over the unix socket to use this shared memory buffer for your toplevel. That's how you get a fast drawing window, like sdl, without the baggage that is sdl.
If you stick to a subset of everything, x86 opcodes, elf binaries, x server protocol, you can do it all, from the bottom to the top.
I will use other people's libraries from a different process. This way I get the benefit of their libs now while i work on replacements without complicating my executable or the generation of it.
the development of the tools to bootstrap this vision is done with tcl/tk because thats what im best with.
it is very important to mention, or reiterate the truth of my life. i was blinded and struck down for my folly. I tried to live a life where i ignored the reality of what it means to be alive, to live and breathe code, to program in my dreams, to be defined by it and to define it for myself. i tried to use my skills to make money and i made money. there is nothing wrong with that but when you ignore the soul, the crux of yourself, of your code interior, then it all falls apart. blindness is the result and i am now grateful for it. those years 2.5 years opened my eyes in a way that they would never otherwise. i would be consulting even now and earning 75$/hr like before working on shit that doesnt matter for people who dont mean anything to the universe. i would be getting fatter and fatter and more out of shape and dumber and dumber until all i had in my head was the IE6 css rules and web arcana that pays dollars but leaves you impoverished spiritually. this is very much a spiritual and matter of reality. the only fantasy is the shared delusion that i lived and now have given up on. this is why i am moving to a place where my dollar stretches further and will take my wife and children there too, and i will teach my children to commune with the great code spirit and contemplate the secrets of the code. we are on a spiritual quest, and i take it as seriously as the crusaders took the crusades. hopefully, with more mirth and less tears.Baghdad (AFP) - Saudi Arabia should be held responsible for militant financing and crimes committed by insurgent groups in Iraq, the Baghdad government charged on Tuesday.
Comments from Riyadh indicates it is "siding with terrorism", the cabinet said in a statement issued by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office.
"We strongly condemn this stance," the statement read.
"We hold it (Saudi Arabia) responsible for what these groups are receiving in terms of financial and moral support."
It continued: "The Saudi government should be held responsible for the dangerous crimes committed by these terrorist groups."
The statement came just days after Saudi Arabia and Qatar blamed "sectarian" policies by Iraq's Shiite-led government against the Sunni Arab minority for the unrest that has swept the country.
The unrest "could not have taken place if it was not for the sectarian and exclusionary policies implemented in Iraq over the past years that threatened its stability and sovereignty," the Saudi government said in a statement.
In March, Maliki accused both Saudi Arabia and Qatar of supporting terrorism in Iraq.Media is failing the public by focusing on Adele’s imaginary balls
Pop singer Adele closed her string of concerts in New York City on Monday, but not without making some headlines.
The songstress made a joke about men spreading their legs open in public places, like the bus, at her third concert on September 22nd.
“The last year that I did it (rode the bus), I’d get on like really early, and I would just spread my legs like that as though I had swollen (pause) something. So, close your legs, men. Okay?”
News outlets including The Huffington Post and Harper’s Bazaar blew up the story that the world’s biggest music artist was taking on the patriarchy.
Adele joked at Monday night’s show about the whole incident, saying that it was absurd the amount of attention her imaginary balls received from news organizations.
She isn’t wrong. So often clickbait, headline obsessed, 10-second clip-centric stories about Brad and Angelina’s divorce, Kim Kardashian breaking the internet, or a celebrity’s opinion on politics or culture makes the news.
Even non-celebrity news has become emotionally driven. Why have we heard so much about David Duke, a backwoods irrelevant racist from Louisiana this election cycle? Because racism sells.
It’s the same reason that Anthony Weiner still manages to make the news with every one of his sexual indiscretions with women. He’s an irrelevant former Congressman, but he can earn a website hundreds of thousands of clicks, so news outlets gladly peddle out stories about him.
Americans love their feelings, and so the news media delivers while important news fall by the wayside.
Here are five important headlines that are more important than Adele’s imaginary balls, but earned far less attention:
Increased fighting between NATO ally Turkey and American supported Kurdistan, a conflict that could lead to a future war that the U.S. could be dragged into.
President Obama vetoed a bill that allowed victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack to sue Saudi Arabia.
A 52-year long war in Colombia ended on Tuesday with the signing of a peace deal with the Marxist rebels.
The Senate voted to sell $1 billion in military equipment to Saudi Arabia.
On Sept. 22, it was announced that there are two vaccines for the Zika Virus going to human trial, which could prevent millions of people from becoming infected with the virus.
Latest VideosBe-com-ing | biˈkəmi ng | noun Philosophy – the process of coming to be something or of passing into a state.
The Challenges of Advocacy Work I spent the weekend at the Democratic Executive Board Meeting Convention, supporting AIDS Healthcare Foundation and their work to promote worker safety in the adult business. At the time I agreed to doing this, I didn’t realize that next door there would be a room full of porn people – people who I used to […] Posted in: Uncategorized
Using the Tennessee anti-LGBT therapy law for good “The most recent anti-LGBTQIA law allowing Tennessee therapists to refer out clients whose social identities might violate that therapist’s “sincerely held principles” presents an ethical quagmire for anyone in the mental health field. It teeters on the high thin wire between referring out because a practitioner recognizes they aren’t competent to serve this client (e.g. […] Recovery Days Posted in: Good Days
Delayed I meant to post two days ago, to keep that commitment to first and third Monday of the month, and it slipped away from me. I had been contemplating about what to write and thought myself into paralysis, where nothing could be said that would sufficiently detail the experience. It’s been over two weeks since […] Good Days, Intense Days, Recovery Days Posted in: DaysMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Meningitis UK says the breakthrough is a "landmark moment"
A vaccine to protect children against one of the most common and deadly forms of meningitis is set to be licensed for use in the UK.
An average of 1,870 people contract meningitis B each year and one in 10 of them die.
The 4CMenB vaccine, developed by Novartis, has been described as the "biggest leap forward in the field" in 30 years by the charity Meningitis UK.
The jab was recommended for approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
About a quarter of all survivors of meningitis B are left with life altering after-effects, such as brain damage or limb loss.
Children under the age of five are the most at risk from the bacterial infection, which leads to inflammation of the brain and spinal cord.
'Landmark moment'
Recommendations from the EMA are normally endorsed by the European Commission within two or three months.
It will save countless lives Steve Dayman, Meningitis UK
The vaccine, known as Bexsero, is expected to receive its UK licence early next year. It has been recommended for use in children aged |
on 9 February 1943, with the successful evacuation of most of the surviving Japanese troops from the island by the Japanese Navy in Operation Ke. Building on their success at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, the Allies continued their campaign against Japan, which culminated in Japan's defeat and the end of World War II. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, upon learning of the results of the battle, commented, "It would seem that the turning point in this war has at last been reached."[115]
Historian Eric Hammel sums up the significance of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal this way:
On November 12, 1942, the (Japanese) Imperial Navy had the better ships and the better tactics. After November 15, 1942, its leaders lost heart and it lacked the strategic depth to face the burgeoning U.S. Navy and its vastly improving weapons and tactics. The Japanese never got better while, after November 1942, the U.S. Navy never stopped getting better.[116]
General Alexander Vandegrift, the commander of the troops on Guadalcanal, paid tribute to the sailors who fought the battle:
We believe the enemy has undoubtedly suffered a crushing defeat. We thank Admiral Kinkaid for his intervention yesterday. We thank Lee for his sturdy effort last night. Our own aircraft has been grand in its relentless hammering of the foe. All those efforts are appreciated but our greatest homage goes to Callaghan, Scott and their men who with magnificent courage against seemingly hopeless odds drove back the first hostile attack and paved the way for the success to follow. To them the men of Cactus lift their battered helmets in deepest admiration.[117]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Washington observed eight main battery hits. The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated nine major caliber and 40 secondary battery hits based on one postwar interview with a junior officer. Kirishima's damage control officer identified twenty main battery hits and 17 five inch hits on a schematic drawing, including several underwater hits which would have been invisible to Washington. Examination of the wreck has confirmed the location of three of these underwater hits, lending credence to his account.[105] The number of actual hits is a matter of conjecture. USSobserved eight main battery hits. The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated nine major caliber and 40 secondary battery hits based on one postwar interview with a junior officer.damage control officer identified twenty main battery hits and 17 five inch hits on a schematic drawing, including several underwater hits which would have been invisible to. Examination of the wreck has confirmed the location of three of these underwater hits, lending credence to his account.
Citations [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Swathes of north India are sweltering under the longest heatwave on record, triggering widespread breakdowns in the supply of electricity and increasingly angry protests over the government's failure to provide people with basic services.
The power crisis and heatwave, which some activists say has caused dozens of deaths, is one of the first major challenges for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected three weeks ago partly on promises to provide reliable electricity supplies.
Hot June in India. Credit:AFP
In Delhi, where temperatures have hit 45 Celsius for six days straight, residents marched through the streets in protests organised by opposition parties on Thursday. In the north of the city, people enraged by night-long outages clashed with police and torched a bus, media reported.
Delhi is suffering staggered cuts as power companies ration spikes in demand as people crank up air coolers to fight the heat. Modi has inherited the shortages from his predecessors, and power distribution is partially the responsibility of state governments.Spotify Preparing to Offer Premium-Only Content, Sources Say
Spotify will soon be shifting towards a premium-only, ‘gated access’ model, according to several sources speaking in confidence with Digital Music News over the weekend. The decision will mean that certain releases will only be available to paying Spotify subscribers, or offered for an extremely limited time to non-paying users, according to preliminary details shared.
Sources cautioned that details on what exactly constitutes ‘premium-only’ or ‘gated’ remain unresolved, and a number of variations are in play. In one scenario, free users would only have access to one or two songs from a high-profile album, while paying subscribers could listen to the entire release without restriction.
Another approach would limit content entirely to premium subscribers, though time-restricted exclusives for paying subscribers are also in play.
One, or several different variations could be rolled out, and sources noted that an ‘early 2016’ transition is the most likely. That would allow renewal contracts to be solidified, and development teams to finalize the application updates. But regardless of the timing and exact execution, the underlying goals of the shift, according to one source, would be:
(a) encouraging greater adoption of the paid, premium tier; and
(b) driving more revenue around the most sought-after superstars.
“They want the free users to feel like they’re missing something, not just forced to listen to ads,” one source close to the negotiations relayed.
The decision comes at an extremely high-pressure moment for Spotify, as major label licenses remain unsigned less than two months ahead of renewal. “October 1, that’s your renewal date for all three of the majors,” another source relayed, referring to the ‘Big Three’ of Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and most importantly, Universal Music Group.
“They do not have signed deals yet, with anyone.”
Separately, sources pointed to an ill-timed departure of Ken Parks, an important negotiator on the American side. Just last week, Parks announced his departure from Spotify for Pluto TV, an over-the-top (OTT) television startup. Separately, Parks’ departure may further highlight Spotify’s sagging IPO and/or exit prospects, as highly-ranked executives typically don’t jump ship right before getting disgustingly rich.
Either way, the move towards ‘gated’ was previously unthinkable among top Spotify executives, but the majors are becoming increasingly agitated about limiting free access. Both Sony Music Entertainment CEO Doug Morris and Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge have been fiercely rattling the cage against free, with Grainge’s job at one point threatened based on what Vivendi higher-ups perceived as out-of-control catalog devaluation.
“It’s less of a choice now.”
Throughout its existence, Spotify has stubbornly refused to limit catalog access to paying subscribers, despite blow-ups and defections from the likes of Adele, Taylor Swift, and other superstars. But with less than two months left ahead of critical major label renewals, Spotify now appears willing to acquiesce on this critical sticking point. “[Spotify CEO Daniel] Ek hates that idea, and I mean hates it, but he may have to give an inch on that one,” another source close to the negotiations relayed.
Image of gate by NannyCam; image of Daniel Ek by Magnus Höij, both licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (CC by 2.0). Graph by DMN, compiled from public Spotify statements.CLOSE Allen Iverson, a retired NBA player, spoke with kids participating in the a basketball camp of Utah Jazz basketball player Trevor Booker in Mauldin on Wednesday. HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff
Buy Photo Allen Iverson, left, a retired NBA player, spoke with kids participating in the a basketball camp of Utah Jazz basketball player Trevor Booker, right, in Mauldin on Wednesday. (Photo: HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff)Buy Photo
MAULDIN — Former NBA star Allen Iverson surprised dozens of kids and their parents by showing up at Trevor Booker's basketball camp on Wednesday.
The newly-christened Hall of Famer came to the camp as a favor to Booker, whom he calls his "little brother." Booker holds the camp every June in Mauldin. He says it's his way to give back, because he remembers the impact camps had on him as a kid.
"I remember meeting Kevin Garnett at a camp," said Booker, who added he was so starstruck that he didn't know what to say. "My mom had to ask for his autograph for me."
The Utah Jazz power forward played four years at Clemson before going pro as a first round selection (23rd overall) by the Minnesota Timberwolves in the 2010 NBA draft.
Now he gives back to the community that raised him by holding camps like this one in Mauldin and another in his hometown of Union.
Booker often brings friends from around the NBA to surprise kids at the camp.
Iverson is undeniably the biggest star to make the trip.
LASTING MEMORY:Riverside manager scores TD
The former rookie of the year, whose nickname is "The Answer" wasn't expecting to face questions in front of dozens of adults and several members of the media, but he embraced the opportunity to give 105 campers something he never had as a kid.
"I never had the guy that I looked up to to show up somewhere for me, to make me happy," Iverson said. "The only time I was ever in awe, was the first time I got on the court with Michael Jordan."
He says not having a chance to meet his heroes as a kid is what makes him excited to give kids that opportunity now.
Buy Photo Allen Iverson, a retired NBA player, spoke with kids participating in the a basketball camp of Utah Jazz basketball player Trevor Booker in Mauldin on Wednesday. (Photo: HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff)
The campers opened the question and answer session by singing "Happy Birthday" to Iverson, who turned 41 yesterday. They followed with rapid fire questions covering everything from what it feels like to see your own highlights on ESPN, to who he is pulling for in the NBA finals this year.
His answer to the first was "I never noticed. I was just playing the game." The latter received a diplomatic "I'm not picking a team. I'm pulling for those guys who haven't won a championship."
He said he wants them to have the feeling he never had.
Iverson spent most of his career with the Philadelphia 76ers. The closest that team came to a title was a 2001 Eastern Conference Championship. Iverson was the league MVP that year.
He's considered one of the best shooting guards in league history. One curious camper wanted to know if he thinks he could beat Stephen Curry (of the Golden State Warriors). To that, Iverson said "I can't stop Steph Curry because I was never a defensive player, but you know what? He couldn't stop me either."
Iverson made a point to emphasize the importance of practice, referencing his now infamous rant in which he said the word practice 22 times.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Top 5 newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong The five biggest headlines in your inbox each morning Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-736-7136. Delivery: Daily Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Top 5 Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
He told the kids that someday when they're older they'll understand what he was going through at the time. It's been widely reported that the rant stemmed from his struggles to deal with the tragic loss of his best friend just a few months earlier.
"I would've never been in the hall of fame without practice," he said. "I would've never led the league in scoring, been MVP, none of that without practice."
Buy Photo Allen Iverson, right, a retired NBA player, hugs Utah Jazz basketball player Trevor Booker, left, at Booker's basketball camp in Mauldin on Wednesday. (Photo: HEIDI HEILBRUNN/Staff)
Iverson stuck around after the questions to sign hats, shirts and other items for the campers. He said this was first time to the area his "little brother" calls home, but it won't be his last.
Iverson and Booker pose with campers at Trevor Booker basketball camp in Mauldin pic.twitter.com/X4MyrpSXYT — elizabeth lafleur (@eslafleur) June 8, 2016Tuesday on CNBC, Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire Bill Gates recounted a conversation he had with Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago. He had fairly nice things to say about both the conversation and the potential of the incoming Trump administration.
Naturally, neither the Associated Press nor the New York Times found these elements of the CNBC interview to be newsworthy.
Here is the portion of the CNBC interview where Gates discussed his meeting with Trump (full 23-minute interview is here):
Transcript:
REBECCA QUICK, CNBC: He (Donald Trump) had a phone call with you. How did that conversation go? BILL GATES: I had an opportunity to talk to him about innovation. You know, a lot of his message has been about where he sees things not as good as he’d like. But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that — I think that whether it’s education or stopping epidemics, other health breakthroughs, finishing Polio, or in this energy space — there can be a very upbeat message that his administration is going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers and have American leadership through innovation, be one of the things that he — he gets behind. And, of course, my whole career has been along those lines and he was interested in listening to that, and I am sure there will be further conversations.
Gosh, Gates even made a JFK reference — which was nice, but also a virtual guarantee that what he was saying would be ignored as much as possible. Let people know that Bill Gates compared Trump's potential to that of the sainted John Fitzgerald Kennedy? You must be kidding. That cannot be allowed.
The Associated Press covered the announcement of the Gates-led energy venture fund on Monday. AP business writer David Koenig noted that Gates had spoken with Trump a couple of weeks ago.
Koenig also relayed Gates' unfortunate belief that what the government does in the energy sector is more important than the investments private-sector entities make:
TITANS OF NEW INDUSTRY SPRING $1 BILLION CLEAN ENERGY FUND... Gates is the chairman of a group of 20 investors who call their fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. They want to speed innovation in the $6 trillion energy market. At the top of the investors' list of criteria: nurture technologies with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least a half gigaton.... The initial $1 billion sum, he said, is still much bigger than any previous clean-energy fund and is enough to signal the investors' seriousness. (This was in response to an apparent AP indication that it thought the amount involved to be low. — Ed.) Gates has said that the investments he makes won't matter as much as the choices that governments make. He believes there is broad support in Washington for energy research and development. But, he added, "it's hard to say" whether clean energy continues to get government incentives or what energy policies a Trump administration might pursue. "I had a phone call with Trump" a couple weeks ago, Gates said. "It wasn't some super-long call. I talked a little bit about the innovation in various spaces that got me excited. He seemed to think innovation might be a fruitful area and said that we should talk more. At some point we'll get into some depth."
Gates' perspective that what the government does is more important is unfortunate but not surprising, given that his co-investors include Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros and Richard Branson. It's also disappointing, because he should remember that the tech innovation boom of the 1970s and 1980s didn't have the government involved at all, except in creating tax and regulatory, well, climates that made risk-taking and venture investing viable. Gates even told CNBC that part of Trump's "upbeat" message is "get(ting) rid of regulatory barriers." The more the government is involved, the more we will see much more in the way of new erected regulatory barriers, and the less we will see of getting rid of them.
As much as the AP has demonstrated its love for alternative energy and the idea of fighting "climate change," one might think that the Gates' conversation with Quick might also have been considered newsworthy, as it elaborated a bit further on what Koenig reported on Monday. Nope.
The New York Times also had a Monday story on the Gates venture, which reported only that "Gates... said he had a brief telephone call with Mr. Trump several weeks ago but declined to describe it further."
Otherwise, the story by Hiroko Tabuchi and Henry Fountain was a predictable fear-and-loathing scare piece about a potential President Trump energy policy. Based on a search at the paper's web site, the Times apparently didn't consider the fact that Gates chose to describe the Trump phone call further with CNBC worth covering as a fresh in-house story — even though the paper ultimately posted a three-minute segment from that interview Tuesday afternoon which did not include any of the portion shown above.
Perhaps the Times feels slighted by Gates, who may have saved his disclosure for CNBC because he knew it would be more widely seen and covered. If that's the excuse for not covering what Gates said in a separate story, what an immature reaction.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.A spokesperson for the family of murdered American journalist Steven Sotloff said on Monday that “moderate” Syrian rebels, backed by the United States government, had sold Sotloff to the Sunni extremist group Islamic State.
“We believe that these so-called moderate rebels that people want our administration to support, one of them sold him probably for something between $25,000 and $50,000 to ISIS and that was the reason he was captured,” Barak Barfi, a spokesperson for Sotloff's family, said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper late on Monday, citing sources “on the ground.”
Sotloff was reportedly kidnapped in Syria in August last year. Barfi said that he was most probably handed over to the militants of Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, somewhere near the Syrian border with Iraq.
In August, a number of media outlets reported that James Foley -- another American journalist who was beheaded by Islamic State -- had been handed over to the group by rebels belonging to the Free Syrian Army as a token of allegiance.
A number of the rebel groups, who have been waging a protracted war against the regime of Syrian president Bashar Assad under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, have reportedly received extensive support, including weapons and training, from the U.S. government.
However, a recent investigation conducted by Conflict Armament Research -- a small-arms research organization -- reportedly found that “significant quantities” of U.S. weapons have ended up in the hands of ISIS militants.
Barfi also accused the Obama-led administration of making a “number of inaccurate statements” and added that the government’s claims of keeping the Sotloff family regularly informed about developments were not true.
“I speak now only from the Sotloff family. They (the administration) said that these hostages were moved frequently. We know that for most of the beginning of part of this year they were stationary. We know that the intelligence community and the White House are enmeshed in a larger game of bureaucratic infighting and Jim and Steve are pawns in that game and that’s not fair,” Barfi told CNN.
Barfi said that families of abducted civilians should have a point of contact within the government, and called for more coordination between different arms of the administration.
“We need to be able to work closer with our allies,” he said. “Intelligence sharing and cooperation just isn’t as good as it should be.”On PBS tonight, NOVA is presenting “The Spy Factory,” based on James Bamford’s excellent book, The Shadow Factory.
PBS says the NOVA program:
chronicles the NSA’s role in eavesdropping both before and after 9/11. Drawing on dozens of interviews with agency insiders and probing publicly available sources as well as transcripts of terrorist trials and an FBI chronology of the terrorists’ movements, NOVA assembles a detailed picture of events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
The program sheds light on the vital data known inside the NSA but only partly relayed to other agencies. The trove of information the NSA had access to in advance included Osama bin Laden’s now-disconnected direct satellite phone, which the NSA tapped starting in 1996. Exclusive footage shows the three-story house in Yemen that served as Al Qaeda’s communications and logistics headquarters. The NSA was listening in on phone communications to and from the house for years prior to the 9/11 attack.
Three times the size of the CIA and far more secret, the NSA is comprised of top linguists, mathematicians, and technologists trained to decipher all kinds of communications—epitomizing the hidden world of high-tech, 21st-century surveillance. To show how this eavesdropping operates, NOVA follows the trail of just one typical e-mail sent from Asia to the U.S. Streaming as pulses of light into a fiber-optic cable, it travels across the Pacific Ocean, coming ashore in California, and finally reaching an AT&T facility in San Francisco, where the cable is split and the data sent to a secret NSA monitoring room on the floor below. This enables the NSA to intercept not only most Asian e-mail messages but also the entire U.S. internal Internet traffic.
Thus, since 9/11, the agency has turned its giant ear inward to monitor the communications of ordinary Americans, many of whom are on the government’s secret watch list, now more than half-a-million names long.
But how effective is this monumental monitoring effort in countering security threats? The NSA is faced with an enormous and ever-expanding archive of phone calls and e-mail messages. Many experts in data mining and analysis are skeptical about the value of collecting so much information without the ability to understand it, as it may lead to critical clues being lost in the static.
Among those interviewed on “The Spy Factory” are former NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts and officials, many speaking publicly for the first time. Among these is Mark Rossini, the senior FBI agent in the CIA’s Osama bin Laden tracking unit. For the first time, Rossini tells how intelligence agency turf wars prevented him from notifying his FBI superiors that Al Qaeda terrorists were heading for the U.S. with valid visas in early 2000.
Surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into the NSA’s role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and FBI. Traditionally, the NSA didn’t share its raw data with those other agencies, an institutionalized reluctance that played a critical role in the failure to stop the 9/11 plotters.
In what Bamford calls “one of the largest ironies in the history of American intelligence,” he notes that weeks before the attacks, the terrorists were staying in a hotel near NSA headquarters in Maryland, almost within sight of the office of then-NSA Director Michael Hayden. Hayden, who was later appointed director of the CIA by President Bush, was never held accountable for his agency’s failure, and after 9/11 he spearheaded the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping activities in the name of making the nation safe from terrorists.
Addressing the question, Are we any safer now than we were before?, Bamford says, “We should have been safe the way it was. NSA had all the information that it needed to stop the 9/11 hijackers. It had laws that allowed it to track the hijackers.” Bamford adds that those same laws also protected the privacy of ordinary Americans in ways that have since vanished.Mar 22, 2014; Toledo, OH, USA; The Robert Morris Colonials mascot RoMo gestures against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the first half of a women
The Cincinnati Bearcats will host the Robert Morris Colonials this season as a part of another very solid non-conference schedule, Jon Rothstein at CBS Sports is reporting.
Cincinnati will host Robert Morris on Sunday 11/15/15 as part of its non-conference schedule, source told @CBSSports. — Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) June 18, 2015
The Colonials famously knocked #1 seed Kentucky out of the NIT two years ago, making their school a household name with a nickname “Bobby Mo” to boot. But they’ve been a solid program for a while now.
Since 2005 Robert Morris has won half of the Northeast Conference championships. They’ve won the conference tournament in 2009, 2010, and most recently last season, earning trips to the NCAA Tournament in each. Unfortunately as a mid-major the Colonials have had the misfortune of never being seeded higher than 15th in the last decade. As a result they more often than not run into juggernauts in the opening round and haven’t advanced past the first day.
Overall Robert Morris has fared much better in the NIT but that’s not unexpected.
Last season, as mentioned, the Colonials won the Northeast Conference tournament and finished the season with a 171 RPI. That’s about where they’ll finish in any given year and that’s a good thing for Cincinnati. Remember, the name of the game for the Bearcats it to avoid RPI 250-350+ teams, which they were prone to playing earlier in the Mick Cronin era. Staying in the 150-250 range at a minimum ensures UC a solid RPI themselves come AAC play and Selection Sunday.
Robert Morris is just that kind of team. On top of that they’re a solid early test for the Bearcats. Cincinnati returns everyone from an overachieving team last season and should be primed for a deep NCAA Tournament run. But it all starts in November and if UC can wax the floor with the Colonials, a strong mid-major program, that will surely instill confidence in the fan base in this team’s ceiling.
Bring on Bobby Mo!Image caption The battering ram was used in Robin Hood and gifted to the Clanranald Trust
A battering ram gifted by the actor Russell Crowe to a Scottish charity has been vandalised.
The prop, nicknamed Rosie, forms part of a medieval fort being created by the Clanranald Trust in the Carron Valley.
Thieves stole eight of the prop's large distinctive shields along with 12 of its pushing arms.
The trust said the theft took place between Saturday 7 September and Sunday 8 September. They have asked for anyone with information to come forward.
Margaret McEwan from the trust said it was difficult to put a value on the items stolen.
She said: "The canvas shields are large, each measuring about 120cm. It would have taken effort and organisation to move them and the 12 pushing arms.
Image caption Russell Crowe visited Duncarron Fort in 2011
"It's left Rosie naked and means she's not being shown off to her full advantage."
The pieces that were stolen were part of the original battering ram used in the film Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe.
The Oscar-winning actor visited the project at Duncarron on a trip to Scotland two years ago after befriending the trust's chief executive Charlie Allan on the set of Gladiator.
The battering ram has only been on show to the public since 17 August, during which time it has attracted more than 3,000 visitors.
However, Ms McEwan said the theft would not stop the trust's commitment to the project.
She said: "We will ramp up security and put more defensive measures in place.
"We also have people watching to see if any of the items come up for sale."Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and George Venizelos, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced today an Indictment charging DINESH D’SOUZA with violating the federal campaign finance laws by making illegal contributions to a United States Senate campaign in the names of others and causing false statements to be made to the Federal Election Commission in connection with those contributions. D’SOUZA is expected to be presented and arraigned tomorrow in Manhattan federal court before U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara stated: “As we have long said, this Office and the FBI take a zero tolerance approach to corruption of the electoral process. If, as alleged, the defendant directed others to make contributions to a Senate campaign and reimbursed them, that is a serious violation of federal campaign finance laws.”
FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos stated: “Trying to influence elections through bogus campaign contributions is a serious crime. Today, Mr. D’Souza finds himself on the wrong side of the law. The Federal Election Campaign Act was written to limit the influence of money in elections; the FBI is fiercely committed to enforcing those laws to maintain the integrity of our democratic process.”
According to the allegations in the Indictment and statements made in court:
The Federal Election Campaign Act (the “Election Act”) is designed to limit financial influence in the election of candidates for federal office, including the Office of United States Senator, and provides for the public disclosure of the financing of federal election campaigns. In particular, the Election Act limits the amount and source of money that may be contributed to a federal candidate or that candidate’s authorized campaign committee. The Election Act specifically prohibits any person from making any contribution in the name of another, including reimbursing a third person, before or after that third person’s contribution, as inducement to make that contribution. The Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) is an agency and department of the United States with jurisdiction to compile and publicly report accurate information about the sources and amounts of election contributions.
In 2012, the Election Act limited both primary and general election campaign contributions to $2,500 for a total of $5,000 from any individual to any one candidate. In August 2012, D’SOUZA directed other individuals with whom he was associated to make contributions to the campaign committee for a candidate for the United States Senate (the “Campaign Committee”) that totaled $20,000. D’SOUZA then reimbursed those individuals for the contributions. By directing the illegal contributions to be made, D’SOUZA also caused the Campaign Committee to falsely report to the FEC the sources and amounts of those contributions to the campaign.
D’SOUZA, 52, of San Diego, California, is charged with one count of causing $20,000 in illegal campaign contributions to be made to a candidate for the United States Senate in calendar year 2012, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. He also is charged with one count of causing false statements to be made to the FEC in connection with the illegal campaign contributions, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
The Indictment is the result of a routine review by the FBI of campaign filings with the FEC by various candidates after the 2012 election for United States Senator in New York. Mr. Bharara praised the investigative work of the FBI.
This case is being prosecuted by the Office’s Public Corruption Unit. Assistant United States Attorneys Carrie H. Cohen and Rebecca Ricigliano are in charge of the prosecution.
The charges contained in the Indictment are merely accusations and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
U.S. v. Dinesh D'Souza IndictmentDuane Brown is lost for the season and the Texans know it won’t be easy to get over the loss of their Pro Bowl-caliber left tackle.
“It’s a big loss man,” Alfred Blue said after the game. “He’s the leader of the offense. Leader of that o-line.”
Blue didn’t mince words about the magnitude of Brown’s injury.
“It’s going to be a devastating thing with him being gone out there.”
Fellow offensive lineman Xavier Su’a-Filo felt for his blocking brother.
“Obviously took a huge blow with Duane, that’s our guy.”
Even the defense knows how important Brown is to the offense.
“Definitely a big-time loss for us,” said cornerback Kareem Jackson. “He’s definitely one of the core pieces to this team…he brings a lot, as a leader, as a ball player. We’ll definitely miss him going into the playoffs.”
As it was with the quarterback, running back, and wide receiver positions before it, the left tackle position follows the team’s motto of next man up according to Brandon Brooks.
“O’Brien instilled that in us,” said Brooks. “We know it’s football. You know the likelihood of getting injured. Likely one hundred percent.”
Chris Clark filled in for Brown when he left the game.
Follow Stoots on Twitter – @Cody_StootsIndia is getting revenge for Nannygate.
The NYPD is trying to bring home a Harlem cop who’s being detained on trumped-up charges by Indian authorities still bitter over the way their diplomat was treated in New York last year, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
“You guys like to strip-search our diplomats,” a cop at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport told Officer Manny Encarnacion as he arrested him on March 10 for inadvertently traveling there with three bullets in his checked luggage.
Encarnacion was charged with violating the country’s Arms Act of 1959 — and is facing up to seven years in an Indian prison. He is forbidden from leaving the country until his case plays out in court.
Indian authorities are still bitter over December’s Manhattan arrest and strip search of New Delhi’s then-deputy consul-general Devyani Khobragade, who was arrested for alleged visa fraud involving her nanny.
The bust sparked outrage across India because of the way Khobragade was handled and allegedly denied diplomatic immunity.
The NYPD is facing an uphill battle trying to help Encarnacion, trying for weeks to get the well-liked detective candidate and ex-Marine cleared. They sent a letter to Indian officials explaining the innocent mistake.
Just two days before his trip to India to visit his wife, Vida, Encarnacion, 49, was at an NYPD firing range taking his required recertification, sources said.
Encarnacion, who is assigned to the 25th Precinct, tucked three spare rounds into his jacket pocket, and forgot about them.
The bullets were still in the pocket when he packed his jacket in his suitcase.
“He knows he didn’t do anything wrong,” said Raul Borbon, 45, who is a friend of the officer. “It’s an innocent mistake.”
The newlyweds had decided to meet in India because it was easy for both to travel there. Vida is a student who lives in Iran.
Encarnacion has a local lawyer, and has been in regular touch with his superiors, Borbon said.
“His bosses already said when he comes back, they’re taking him out for Indian food — he’s already sick of the food,” the pal joked grimly.
“He was supposed to be going for 2¹/₂ weeks, but it’s turning into five weeks, if he comes back on April 19,” his next court date in India.
Encarnacion has been spending his forced Indian “vacation” with Vida, Borbon said.
“He’s out on [$1,000] bail,” said the pal, who is dog-sitting for Encarnacion’s two pets. “He’s not sweating it that much because at least he gets to spend time with his wife.”
He added, “It’s crazy. The NYPD told him, if he gets convicted of a felony, he’ll lose his job.”
Meanwhile, Encarnacion’s Facebook page has been filling up with comments from well-wishers.
“Praying for your safe and speedy return to the U.S.,” wrote one friend.Incredible brawl in women’s football match
The clash between Zeljeznicar and Mladost was marred by a staggering fight that may lead to Silvija Sekacic being banned from the game for life
Any misconceptions that you might have had that women’s football is less aggressive than the men’s game will be obliterated by these scenes at an encounter in -Herzegovina.
Don’t write off Wenger yet!
In the 13th round of action in the top-flight encounter between Zeljeznicar and Mladost, Silvija Sekacic attacked Adnu Ljubanovic in an incredible fashion.
The former pounced on her opponent in an MMA style and landed several punches to her head, according to Drukjj.ba. By the time her team-mates arrived on the scene, the situation had calmed down.
“What words can you use to describe this act and yet stay polite? It is enough to say this kind of behaviour has nothing to do with common sense. People like Silvija don't belong in football and she deserves to be suspended for life,” Mladost said in a statement following the incident.
Now the disciplinary arm of the nation’s FA will decide whether to ban Sekacic from the game for life.Investigators are poking holes in Sherri Papini’s abducted jogger story.
The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office released new details about her disappearance on Wednesday — saying they found numerous inconsistencies in Papini’s account.
First, authorities found that the California mom had male DNA on her clothes when she was picked up by cops, despite her claims that she was kidnapped by two women.
Then they discovered that an incident Papini told cops about — in which she fought back against one of her captors and cut her foot — apparently never happened.
“When she was being processed at the hospital … no evidence of a cut was seen in the photographs,” Sgt. Brian Jackson told the Record Searchlight newspaper in Redding, where Papini lives.
The 35-year-old went missing on Nov. 2, 2016, after going for a jog near her house. She was found 22 days later — battered and bruised — on the side of a road.
Police officials said Wednesday that the male DNA that was found on Papini was located on her clothes — and didn’t belong to her husband, Keith Papini. Female DNA was also discovered on her body. It failed to show up on the FBI’s criminal database.
Papini described her abductors as two Hispanic women, but apparently offered few details about their appearance.
Jackson said she told investigators she tried to avoid looking them in the face, for fear of retaliation. One was older with thick eyebrows, while the other appeared young and wore large hoop earrings.
Cops released sketches of the suspects for the first time Wednesday, which showed the women wearing bandannas around their faces. But nobody has been able to identify them.
“Once the sketches were finalized, detectives and investigators reviewed the sketches and compared the sketches with known witnesses or contacts identified during the investigation to see if the sketches matched any known parties,” Jackson said. “No matches were made with case file information.”
Officials also offered new details about the condition Papini was in when she was found. She reportedly had her hair cut to shoulder length and was branded on her right shoulder, though it’s |
[thus] enables them to measure my heartbeat. That saves a lot of time, only bringing me into the [doctor’s] office when it is essential.” Likewise, any individual with a health problem can go online to Web MD to see whether the symptoms they have are actually indicative of a disease.
Although high-profile advanced technologies such as the internet will continue to be vital, the often neglected deficiencies of U.S. infrastructure for water and energy systems – built in the 1950s and 1960s “when people had vastly different needs than now — have a first-order effect primarily on health, education, and innovation,” notes Allon. “These are three things that, the moment you lose your grip on them, you basically create a hole for 10 or 20 years.”
‘Intelligent Construction’
A national upgrade in technology infrastructure could, in fact, help propel other infrastructure projects forward in a more cost effective way. Recently, while traveling down a congested road leading to Dulles Airport in Virginia, Dennis Slater, president of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, witnessed bulldozers working on a highway project that were “controlled from satellites 11,000 miles away in space,” he told attendees at a recent Bloomberg Government conference on infrastructure renewal. Those data-driven, networked machines were measuring the face of the earth with enough precision to complete their tasks to a high standard of accuracy.
In Japan and the U.K., governments have mandated the use of so-called “intelligent construction technology” on 20% of public-works projects in 2017, and 100% by 2020, noted conference speaker Ray O’Connor, president and CEO of Topcon Positioning Systems. He added that the British government claims to have saved between 15% and 20% of the cost of public works as a result of such initiatives. “With the sensors [installed in] vehicles today, we can measure the size of potholes, the lines on a street, or the signs on a guard rail that is broken. Those vehicles are seeing everything,” and matching what they see with the plans they have designed on 3-D modeling devices. Engineers at Topcon, which makes measuring instruments for civil engineering, “figured out that if we make the measuring instruments and connect them to the machines, we could automate the process and make it go much faster,” said O’Connor.
“To me, access to the internet is almost as important as access to public transportation.” –Gad Allon
Although intelligent construction technology remains obscure to the general public, Charles Jahren, a professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at Iowa State University, explained during the Bloomberg event that electronic data can be used to manage transportation infrastructure “all the way through its life cycle from the initial stages — in which initial sketches can be digitized — to precise three-dimensional models, and then the fabrication process.” Jahren noted that some of the first attempts took place around 2000. Later, Caterpillar and Trimble Positioning started working together on this concept. “It’s been gaining momentum ever since.”
Another major benefit is on the maintenance and monitoring of infrastructure. “The idea is that a lot of the data that you need in order to maintain the infrastructure is the same data that you built it with,” says Jahren. In a typical highway department, “the people who maintain the roads and the people who built the roads are in completely different, large departments” and don’t communicate with each other. A technology network can bring them together and create efficiencies that didn’t exist before.
Much remains to be done in order to maximize the benefits of intelligent construction technologies in the U.S., but Duranton does not expect a lot of investments to be made in infrastructure technologies by the current administration. There are a few big areas where the government could “do something” – upgrading roads, for example — but what remains to be done is “not sexy.” The Trump administration “probably won’t want to go there,” he predicts.Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, right, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speak during the town hall debate at Washington University on Oct. 9, 2016, in St Louis, Mo.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could not be more different on climate change. Yet, it took a guy in a red sweater to get them to even touch the issue in a debate.
Ken Bone, the coal plant operator and undecided voter who won the internet during the second presidential debate with his sweater and disposable camera, asked Clinton and Trump how they would embrace clean energy while protecting jobs.
Trump responded largely by criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency and international steel dumping and vowing to "bring our energy companies back." Clinton called climate change a serious problem but talked more about making the U.S. the "21st century clean energy superpower" while not abandoning coal country.
The phrase "climate change" surfaced only once, just like in the first debate when Clinton claimed Trump believed climate change was a hoax. It got another mention in the third debate when Clinton again spoke of climate change as an opportunity for clean energy jobs.
That's been pretty much it on an issue where it feels like every voter has an opinion but no politician really wants to take it head-on.
Few candidates running for national or local offices seem willing to push climate change into the spotlight — no matter their views. In the three presidential debates, not a single question about climate change was put to Clinton or Trump, although it was on the list of crowd-sourced questions moderators could have asked in the second debate.
One reason may be that polls show the complex issue more polarizing than abortion. Those who've tried to talk about climate change and science have felt the sharp elbows from both sides.
Meteorologist Paul Douglas speaks about climate change during the University of Minnesota's annual Kuehnast Lecture in October. Elizabeth Dunbar | MPR News
"People come up and say, 'Paul what's wrong with you? You're a Republican, you're a conservative, you're a Christian, how on earth can you latch onto this liberal meme of climate change?'" said Paul Douglas, a former Twin Cities TV meteorologist who frequently gives public talks about the evidence for climate change, often to crowds that likely include doubters.
He quotes Ronald Reagan on care for the environment and brings up free enterprise and national security arguments for climate action. After speaking at an event at the University of Minnesota earlier this month, he said he couldn't vote for Trump, "a climate science denier." So he's supporting Hillary Clinton this year. He says he's not thrilled about it.
"Sometimes we have to hold our nose and do what we think is right for the next generation as well as this generation," he said.
Trump has rejected the scientific consensus that climate change is real and mostly caused by burning fossil fuels while Clinton has declared climate change an urgent threat and outlined a plan to cut carbon emissions drastically, while charging Trump is a science denier.
Solar panels used by the city of Hutchinson to power the waste water treatment plants built on an old landfill, March 29, 2016. Elizabeth Dunbar | MPR News File
Those who've made addressing climate change a priority applaud Clinton but still worry the issue isn't getting the attention it deserves.
Too many Democrats have ducked the issue, said RL Miller, president of the political action committee Climate Hawks Vote, which is backing about a dozen or so congressional candidates this year who make climate change one of their top priorities.
Miller, who chairs the environmental caucus for the California Democratic Party, says she's lost hope that Democrats and Republicans can work together to address climate change.
"I want to reject the idea that if we just frame things nicely, we can reach across the aisle to Republicans," she said. "If you don't put climate change as a top issue, it will remain on the back burner."
It's getting more difficult, however, to find Republicans who outright reject climate change science the way Trump has. It's more common for them to say they don't know if they believe in the science. That's what GOP congressional candidate Jason Lewis said during the Minnesota 2nd Congressional District debate on MPR News last week.
2nd Congressional District candidates Jason Lewis and Angie Craig prepare to debate with moderator Tom Weber at MPR studios in St. Paul on Oct. 20, 2016. Evan Frost | MPR News
Lewis questioned investments going toward the transition to make energy sources carbon-free.
"In this cost-benefit analysis, which we have to look at in all environmental regulations, is it worth it?" he asked. "Is it worth lowering Celsius half a degree over the next 100 years, half a degree of temperature, all for $500 billion?"
Those pushing the carbon-free transition say the costs of inaction are far greater, especially if you factor in the public health benefits of retiring power plants in favor of renewable energy.
• MPR Special event: The impact of climate change on public health
Some in the GOP believe addressing climate change fits well with the party's bedrock belief in capitalism and that the party will see that should Trump be defeated.
Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, speaks about conservative solutions to climate change during the U of M's annual Kuehnast Lecture on Oct. 12, 2016. Elizabeth Dunbar | MPR News
"I'm hoping for a crash and a burn, and then we start over. Out of those ashes comes the Grand Opportunity Party, which actually believe in the power of free enterprise," said Bob Inglis, who served in the U.S. House for South Carolina until he was trounced in the 2010 GOP primary after calling for a revenue neutral carbon tax to address climate change.
The lack of discussion of climate change frustrates voters like Joyce Prudden of St. Louis Park, who considers it "the great problem of our time. This is much more important than worrying about ISIS and whether we have a few Mexicans crossing the border," she said. "This is going to affect a lot of things."
At the local level, however, finding candidates and voters willing to listen and talk about climate change remains a challenge. Only seven of more than 120 Minnesota state senate candidates even mention climate change on their campaign websites, MPR News found.
"These aren't the top priorities for people," said Paul Anderson, a Republican running for an open state Senate seat in the west metro. While energy and climate are important topics, he says that in nearly six months of door knocking, only a couple of voters have raised the issue.
DFL state Senate candidate Deb Calvert talks with resident Timothy Hlas on October. 21, 2016 in Plymouth. Sam Harper | MPR News
"We have to focus on what's important to the people and getting back to getting things done at the state Capitol," he said. "If we don't focus on those core things and make sure our economy is strong and our schools are strong and our health care is strong, then the other things don't matter to begin with."
Anderson's Democratic opponent sees it differently. Deb Calvert is one of the few state Senate candidates who've made climate change part of the pitch to voters, arguing that by addressing climate change, Minnesota and the country can head off more serious problems.
"It really does have economic implications," she said. "It has geopolitical, strategic, defense implications and it should not be politicized. This is something that affects our entire planet."US Marine Pfc. Joseph Scott Pemberton admitted on Monday that he choked Jennifer Laude after learning that she was also a “man.”
Pemberton made the admission during the hearing on Laude’s murder at the Olongapo City Regional Trial Court Branch 74.
ADVERTISEMENT
Pemberton strangled and dragged Laude after discovering that she was a transgender, Laude family lawyer Harry Roque told reporters.
In his testimony, Pemberton said that on Oct. 11, 2014, he went to the mall and several bars as part of his “liberty time.”
After going to several bars, he went back to the mall and later went to Ambyanz Resto Bar where he met “two women,” one whom was Laude.
He said Laude and the other unidentified woman went with him to Cellzone Lodge where one of the women performed oral sex on him.
After the woman left, Pemberton and Laude were left alone inside the hotel room, where Laude also began performed oral sex on him.
During the sex act, Pemberton said, he reached down between Laude’s legs and discovered that his sex partner had a penis.
According to Pemberton, he got angry–feeling that he was being raped by another man.
The American said he pushed Laude but the latter retaliated by slapping him.
Pemberton said he then choked Laude.
ADVERTISEMENT
When he saw that she was no longer moving, he dragged her to the comfort room where he poured water on Laude in the hopes of reviving her.
Last May, Philippine National Police medico-legal officer and pathologist Dr. Maritess Ombao testified that Laude died due to strangulation and asphyxia by drowning.
Pemberton is accused of killing Laude, who was found dead in a bathroom of a motel in Olongapo City.
A bellboy identified Pemberton as the companion of Laude before her body was found.
The murder complaint was filed December last year.
Pemberton is currently detained at the JUSMAG facility inside the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ headquarters at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City. AJH/ With a report from Erwin Aguilon, Radyo Inquirer 990 AM
RELATED STORIES
Pemberton God-fearing, ma testifies
Pemberton admitted to killing a ‘he or she,’ US Marine testifies
Read Next
LATEST STORIES
MOST READFor the average person, romance novels bring to mind one word: Harlequin.
Of course, it's not a very illustrious name. It's treated as a punchline, a smutty innuendo. God forbid it pass your lips in literary circles. Despite the company's frankly astounding financial history, generations of journalists have treated any related assignment as an excuse to do their best impression of its novels' distinctive style. (Those impressions are generally abysmal.) People who haven't cracked a book open in years feel fully qualified to sneer at Harlequins.
Advertisement
But very few people seem to have a good grasp on what, exactly, a Harlequin romance novel actually is. I'd go so far as to say that everything you think you know about the company is probably wrong. They're not raunchy "bodice rippers," a dismissive term that more properly refers to the historical romances of the 1970s, which were never Harlequin specialties, anyway. They're not "pornography for women," either—Harlequins were long quite prim, holding the line against premarital sex until the 1980s, and to this day, the company's offerings are often mild in comparison to the gloriously filthy stuff that's readily available on Amazon. To dismiss them as "trash" is lazy and intellectually incurious.
Harlequin's bread and butter has always been a very specific type of book: the category romance, a distinctive corner of the publishing business. Typically less than 200 pages, their print editions are like magazines, with a limited shelf life (though particularly successful titles are repackaged and released). Harlequin sells many clearly branded "lines" of category romance, and editors of each have specific guidelines for aspiring writers. Each book must deliver on its promises about the level of sensuality, the preferred sort of settings, the overall emotional tenor, whether it's angsty or lighthearted. They're formulaic compared to single-title romances, but that doesn't mean identical, and in fact they vary wildly—because when you're so constrained by space, you've got to get creative if you want to stand out. Nora Roberts once compared writing categories to "Swan Lake in a phone booth."
A modern-day Harlequin might be raunchy or sweet; its heroine might be a secretary or a vampire hunter; its setting might be the American West or Manhattan or the Australian Outback or a charming English village or a Greek isle owned by a handsome and enigmatic billionaire. The protagonists might be chasing a murderer, or coping with a SURPRISE BABY, or putting together a fundraiser for Alzheimer's, or chasing a Nazi war criminal, or snowed into a remote cabin. One thing's for sure, though: No matter the obstacles, be they internal or external, the main characters will be mated for life by the final page.
Advertisement
So why Harlequin? How did a humble Canadian publisher—which got its start reprinting other companys' books—become the name most associated with romance? It's a long story, involving a peripatetic former fur trader and his opinionated socialite wife, a Procter-and-Gamble-trained Harvard MBA, some jilted Americans and a whole crowd of damned scribbling women.
Harlequin, born in Winnipeg, released its first title in 1949. Founder Richard Bonnycastle had spent several years criss-crossing the frozen Canadian backcountry as a fur-trading employee of the Hudson's Bay Company. But it was a perilous life for a family man, so he eventually settled down managing a printing firm. Suddenly, he had access to a bunch of printing presses that were perfect if, say, you wanted to create a publishing house specializing in paperback reprints. And so Harlequin was born as a sideline, "a filler for a nice, steady business," Bonnycastle's right-hand woman Ruth Palmour told Paul Grescoe in an interview for his gleeful history of the company, The Merchants of Venus.
Advertisement
It's Palmour and Bonnycastle's wife Mary who deserve much of the credit for getting Harlequin off the ground. At first, the company published a mishmash of genres, with mixed success. Palmour, who ran much of the business day-to-day, noticed "nice little romances" were performing particularly well. Meanwhile, Mary, a socially polished stay-at-home mother, had agreed to read over the company's titles for errors. She began establishing her preferences (she didn't much hold with "sex books," for instance), and soon emerged as de facto editor-in-chief.
Medical romances in particular did well for the company, and over the course of the early '50s, both women noticed that a British firm, Mills & Boon, was churning out good work in the genre. In 1957, Palmour pitched a partnership, sending their reprint rates and suggesting Harlequin would be keen on "some of your doctor and nurse titles."
When they received Ms. Palmour's letter, Mills & Boon was 50 years old, with a tried-and-true recipe for light romantic fiction, the company specialty. In his history of the company, Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon, Joseph McAleer outlines two rules established by co-founder Charles Boon in the 1930s that reverberate even today: There was "Lubbock's Law," which said to write from the heroine's perspective; and there was "the Alphaman," which insisted heroes be strong top-of-the-heap types, paragons of stereotypical masculinity. The company also pioneered lasting sales tactics: uniform covers playing up the Mills & Boon name over the author's, dedicating the back pages to promoting their other titles.
Advertisement
During the Depression and World War II, Mills & Boon had done a brisk business with Great Britain's commercial lending libraries: Blockbusters for books, where working class readers could rent a book for a small fee. They'd also formed a cozy postwar relationship with the English women's magazines, selling serial rights for upcoming titles. It was great marketing that benefitted Mills & Boon editorially; because the magazine editors often demanded substantial changes, the romances became even more commercial reads. After all, the two businesses weren't that different: "You have to know who your reader is, be identified with him, know how to attract and hold him in bondage to the almost unbreakable habit (and habit is everything) of buying your product," Woman's Own editor James Drawbell told McAleer.
But by the time Harlequin approached Mills & Boon, the commercial lending library market was dying, and the magazine arrangement was as confining as it was lucrative. Editors like Winifred "Biddy" Johnson at Woman's Weekly wielded a great deal of influence over Mills & Boon's books. Credit for the "marriage in name only" (or MINO) goes to Mrs. Johnson—which allows you to put a couple in close quarters without anybody getting naked. (Harlequins from the 60s are lousy with MINOs.) "She had a good idea of what appealed to the public, which was always a strong romance, with never any suggestion of sex," Charles's son Alan and later editor at the company told McAleer. Author Esther Wyndham described the ideal Johnson heroine: "It was her character rather than her looks that attracted; she became beautiful only at rare moments, preferably when the hero was looking at her without her knowing it." Heroes were to display "glamourous unapproachability." Johnson once made Wyndham remove a scene where the hero excused himself from a party by claiming illness, because "Who can have respect for a man who feels ill at a party?"
Harlequin was offering Mills & Boon not just a crack at the North American market, but a chance to move aggressively into paperback publishing—as well as bigger sales. "We saw the opportunity to put the Mills & Boon book into the mainstream," Alan Boon told McAleer. So the deal was struck, and Harlequin began reprinting Mills & Boon books, starting with Anne Vinton's Hospital in Buwambo and Mary Burchell's Hospital Corridors. In 1958, the Canadians reprinted 16 Mills & Boon novels; the next year, 34. The British firm accounted for a greater and greater share of Harlequin's list and according to McAleer, 1963 was the last time the company republished anybody other than Mills & Boon.
Advertisement
Harlequins from the 1960s—in other words, repackaged Mills & Boon novels, blessed by Mrs. Bonnycastle—have a very distinct tone. One imagines them narrated by the sort of smooth-voiced receptionists who pop up in B movies from the period. In my casual survey of books from the period, the heroine comes across as rather put-upon, sometimes to the point of spinelessness. She is never vulgar, never flashy and wholly virginal. Generally around 19, she's forced to shift for herself and generally must work. If she's a nurse, she's fairly capable; if she's a paid companion, she's likely fairly hopeless. Things happen to the midcentury Harlequin heroine; she does not happen to things. She encounters a wealthy man whose moods she cannot read, whose motives remain mysterious until the last few pages when it's revealed that he's been desperately in love with her the entire time and they must marry immediately.
I'm simplifying, but not that much. Here's an excerpt from Maggy, a 1959 Sara Seale title about a girl who works as a lady's companion for a miserable woman until she's rescued by a paralyzed man who's basically settling down to die but figures he'll do one last good turn by providing this sweet child a better life. (He eventually recovers, of course). He tells her he's bringing her on as a paid companion but has to marry her for it to work, because Ireland. She does not seem to understand that he has basically made her a very rich woman and all she has to do is kick back:
It soon became evident to Maggy that her services as a companion were not required. Garth wrote his own letters and attended personally to such matters arising out of the estate. Mrs. Duffy ran the house and as yet, Maggy hadn't even penetrated to the kitchen regions. There was nothing in the world for her to do at Floyne and with each day that went by, she experienced a feeling of guilt. There appeared to be no good reason whatever for her presence in Garth Shelton's household and her tentative efforts of help seemed to irritate him. "Amuse yourself how you like," he said on one occasion. "I'm afraid you must find it dull, but Floyne is very isolated." "But I came here to work—in some sort of capacity," she replied indignantly.
Advertisement
A very admirable sentiment, I'm sure, but, counterpoint: Girl.
Let me stress for anybody who's not a romance reader that for those of us who're accustomed to the more modern stuff, this seems alien. Today we expect in-depth insight into the hero's feelings, for instance. Without that inside track, the "Psych! He's been in love with you this whole time!" moment feels pretty out-of-the-blue, and the hero often seems like a prick. Even more frustrating than the lack of POV parity are the villains, who seem disproportionately female, and the heroines rarely seem to have supportive women to whom they can turn. (Lotta instant friendships with junior maids, though.)
Gradually, writers began pushing the envelope, and Mills & Boon, less dependent upon the women's magazines, began publishing slightly racier stuff. (Books by Violet Winspear, for instance, fairly seethe; absolutely no premarital sex, though.) And still, if Mary Bonnycastle didn't approve, Harlequin wouldn't touch it. Via McAleer:
"The feeling was, Harlequin couldn't publish those books because of the'sex' in them," Alan Boon said. 'Sex,' of course, refers to intense lovemaking of the Mills & Boon variety, not actual intercourse. "So, we were really sitting on the top of a volcano. There were other publishers, I'm sure, who would have been delighted to publish these books. But, we couldn't, because of Mrs. Bonnycastle. We couldn't offer them to another publisher."
Advertisement
Nevertheless, everyone rubbed along together nicely until the early 1970s, when two things happened: The two companies formally tied the knot—they called it a merger, but really Harlequin bought Mills & Boon, sewing up its pipeline of perfectly honed romances—and Larry Heisey arrived to kick the company into beast mode.
Previously, Heisey had spent 13 years at Procter and Gamble, selling things like Tide and Comet, hence the cliche that Harlequins are sold like soap. I don't want to overstate Heisey's impact; Mills & Boon had pioneered the plots, the recognizable covers, the direct-to-consumer business. But Harlequin had an undeniable hot streak under his tenure.
For one thing, Grescoe says, it was the 1970s when Harlequin invaded grocery stores. They'd always had a presence in places that carried paperbacks, like drugstores and newsstands, but distributing their books through supermarkets made them near ubiquitous. At the same time, B. Dalton was expanding aggressively in suburban malls across America, offering another sales channel. And then there was the direct-to-customer Reader Service, launched in 1970. Subscribers got a bundle of the month's new releases sent straight to their homes. It was so lucrative it would make a modern publisher weep.
Advertisement
Remember: this is before big-box bookstores spread across America, before Amazon and long before the rise of digital self-publishing. There just wasn't as much to read, and romance devotees are famously voracious. "For all we talk about how Harlequin flooded the market, which they did, or created the market and then fulfilled it, that was still happening in an area of relative scarcity," pointed out romance scholar Pamela Regis. Harlequin promised consistently entertaining books you could read in a couple of hours, clearly packaged, available for purchase without so much as driving fifteen minutes out of your way. Imagine you're a woman with three kids and maybe a part-time job, on a budget that's far from unlimited, and think about the power of that promise.
And, oh, the marketing! Never has a publishing company gone to such dedicated, batshit-crazy lengths to move its product. They plowed money into TV advertising, sure, running commercials during prime-time programs like Kojak and Laugh-In, which catapulted Harlequin into a household name. But the variety and range of promotional capers is truly astounding. From Love's $weet Return, by Margaret Ann Jensen:
Other promotional ventures done on a contractual basis include a complete romance published in Good Housekeeping that was followed by a coupon the reader could send in to receive a free Harlequin; a romance packed in the large-size box of Kotex feminine napkins and Bio-Ad detergent; romances given away to customers at McDonald's restaurants on Mother's Day; romances given away with purchases of Avon products and Jergens lotion and a free romance given in exchange for a coupon found on the bottom of Ajax cans.
Advertisement
I would not be at all mad at more Kotex gifts with purchase. It's pretty clear these sorts of (wildly successful!) shenanigans are largely responsible for both Harlequin's fame and its reputation as a cultural punchline. It offends delicate literary sensibilities to see words packaged and sold so nakedly like a TV dinner, no matter how successful a moneymaking strategy. And too, Harlequin was unashamed about going where its customers were—and its customers were women, often housewives. They knew they were selling to women, and they chased women's dollars without embarrassment or apology. And let's face it, being associated with women is often the shortest route to being dismissed in the broader culture as fundamentally unserious.
But it damn sure worked financially. After the TV advertising push, sales jumped 30 million books in two years, hitting 72 million in 1975. Grescoe says that by the mid-1970s, the company printed 450,000 copies of every single fucking book. By the end of the decade, Harlequin had spent several years perched atop a golden goose. In the book business, stores can return unsold inventory for a refund, which often screws with publishers' balance sheets. Harlequin's returns were the envy of the industry. Their market share was unrivalled. The world was theirs.
And they'd done it all without especially dramatic changes to the books. True, the settings had grown more exotic and further-flung, and the blood was pumping a little bit faster: In 1973, the company launched Harlequin Presents as a way to package and sell the Mills & Boon books formerly deemed too racy. Via Grescoe, here's author Violet Winspear explaining her approach:
I put all these cruel manly words into these men's mouths… and then work so as he makes a grab for the girl. And then she's half fainting, you know what I mean, with a burning desire, which she doesn't even understand herself. And then he's bruising her mouth with his urgent, demanding kisses, and he's got this strange steely light in his eyes. And I get it so the girl says to herself, 'What does it mean, what does it mean?'"
Advertisement
Even outside Presents, it was increasingly explicit that the tension simmering between hero and heroine was sexual in nature, even if it was never consummated outside the bonds of holy matrimony: these were the glory days of the punishing kisses. In The Romantic Fiction of Mills & Boon, onetime editor Jay Dixon characterizes this period like so: "In the plots of the Mills & Boon novels during the 1970s the hero is the one in command. His power over the heroine is exercised mainly through sexual domination, but he is also the richer and more powerful of the two; often, he is her boss."
There are always exceptions when you talk about something so diverse as Harlequin, but I think it's fair to say the 1970s were peak jerk. The absolute low point of reporting this article was reading a 1973 Harlequin Presents by Anne Hampson, in which the "hero" kidnaps the heroine and tells her either they get married or he rapes her. I couldn't even make it halfway through.
But despite increasingly aggressive worldwide growth, all Harlequin's books were still coming from the relatively tiny London offices of Mills & Boon. While they published authors from around the Commonwealth (lord, the Australian romances!), they didn't particularly give a flip about chasing the American market with American authors. They turned Nora Roberts down multiple times; in a 1997 interview with the journal Para-Doxa, she said: "I received my manuscript back with a nice little note which said that my work showed promise, and the story had been very entertaining and well done. But they (Harlequin) already had their American writer."
Advertisement
Roberts means Janet Dailey, who wrote hugely popular westerns. For Harlequin, Dailey was all they needed. They'd gotten a little too comfortable.
Harlequin's monopoly on the market was a state of affairs too good to continue forever, and it was inevitable that other publishers would take notice and start angling for their own cut. In the late '70s, Harlequin made it easier for everyone by shooting themselves in the foot. They decided they could handle American sales with their own team, cutting ties with Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books, previously their distributor below the 49th parallel. S&S, out tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue, took the sales force they'd built up selling Harlequins and, with great fanfare, launched Silhouette Books, a serious competitor and a giant middle finger to their former colleagues in Toronto.
Advertisement
Silhouette debuted May 1980, according to The Globe and Mail, accompanied by $3 million in North American advertising including—I swear to God—television commercials featuring Ricardo Montalban. (If you have this on VHS somewhere, I am begging you to send it my way.)
Silhouette had plenty of manuscripts to pick from, because there were scads of American women who wanted to write romance but didn't have a snowball's chance with Harlequin and their Brit-controlled editorial department. Company politics made the situation even worse: Grescoe reports that a Canadian-based editor had made multiple attempts to launch an American line, commissioning manuscripts that would ultimately get scotched. Guess where agents went to sell those finished but homeless books? You guessed it—Silhouette.
Advertisement
In magazines from the period like McCalls, you'll see giant full-color advertisements for Harlequin and Silhouette practically side-by-side in the same issue, jostling among the consumer packaged goods and the coupons. Silhouette eventually sweet-talked Dailey onto their list and made her their star attraction, parking her square in their TV commercials and magazine ads, too. Yet another giant fuck-you to the Canadians:
Meanwhile, other publishers were piling on; seemingly every company decided to launch its own category line. Dell had Candlelight Ecstasy, whose covers alone are enough to tell you these were sexier, more explicit reads. Berkley launched Second Chance at Love. Bantam had Circle of Love, which, judging by the ads, were sweet enough to make your teeth hurt. Fawcett made a crack at the model with historicals sold as Coventry Romance. You get a category romance line! And you get a category romance line! Everybody gets a category romance line!
Advertisement
The Harlequin/S&S faceoff proceeded like a fight scene from a pirate movie, two ships locking onto one another and hammering until one crew gave way. The fight was vicious but brief. In 1984, Harlequin purchased Silhouette. By the late '80s, several competitors had folded (RIP, Candlelight Ecstasy, your covers were too fine for this world). In 1987, president David Galloway was back to trumpeting the company's 75 to 80 percent "series" romance market share to the Financial Post.
The "romance wars" of the '80s (this is a real term adopted by the business press to describe the bitter industry brawl, it is not my coinage) fragmented the market into a million bosomy pieces. Silhouette, now a Harlequin subsidiary, still retained substantial independence. Bantam's Loveswept had survived the reckoning, as did Zebra. Avon had emerged as a major single-title publisher and exerted increasing influence over the genre. With so much more competition, things got interesting again.
Advertisement
For one thing, the Americans had stormed the gates, and they wanted to experiment with new characters and plots and settings and dynamics. Nora Roberts, talking to Para-Doxa:
When Silhouette opened in 1980, looking specifically for new American writers to tip at the Harlequin format a bit, it opened a new era for romance and offered an entire generation of writers a chance…. Silhouette took the Harlequin framework, the constants such as the one man/one woman love story, the sexual tension, the emotional commitment, the conflict and happy ending, then let its new and American-based writers give it all a modern and very American spin. This is the primary reason, I believe, that category romance, and the entire romance market, has grown and evolved over the years. The American market was poised for the change, for stronger heroines, less domineering heroes, for more contemporary themes. For myself, and many of the writers who started during the early 80s, we were readers of the genre first. We knew what we wanted to read. So we wrote what appealed to us. And it worked.
Advertisement
As Roberts describes, this maligned corner of the business—so often treated as the same book over and over and over—turned into a laboratory for innovation. "Because of the way the books were sold and the way the books were marketed, it enabled us to take risks with some of the storylines, because you have that protection of the line," explained Avon editor Lucia Macro, who worked at Silhouette from 1985 to 1997. "You knew that you were going to get a certain number of books out, because the booksellers or the stores were buying a package of six or four or eight. So you could put in a book that was a little wacky and see if it worked." For instance, category editors were playing around with paranormal elements years before it became a trend. "We could do some pretty interesting stuff along with the very straightforward he's-a-rancher-she's-a-virgin kind of story," said Macro, reminiscing about one title where the heroine thought she'd been abducted by UFOs.
Categories also became the place where many big names got their start. Women like Roberts, Dailey, Linda Howard, Sandra Brown and Elizabeth Lowell, who'd go onto tremendous success, launched their careers in categories, in the midst of the change prompted by the romance wars; later writers like |
in their own country.
Study after study finds that something about marriage makes us live longer, healthier lives. Married folks have significantly better mental health, engage in fewer risky behaviors, eat healthier, have less illness and are just plain happier.
And don't tell me that civil unions are exactly the same as marriage. If that's true, then let's let gays and lesbians pick first. If they pick marriage, and heterosexuals are relegated to civil unions, no problem, right, since they are exactly the same?
The trial challenging Proposition 8, the law that bans same-sex marriage in California, started Monday in San Francisco.
This will be the first federal trial in U.S. history in which testimony will be heard and recorded about the harm to gay and lesbian citizens caused by laws like Prop 8.
iReport: Is Prop 8 constitutional? Share your view
As a civil rights lawyer for 23 years, there is no question at all in my mind that as a matter of constitutional law, the federal court must strike down any law that creates a subclass of Americans, shutting them out of legal privileges and protections available to others, merely because they are gay.
Demeaning and disrespecting gay people is a constitutional affront.
Seven years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Lawrence v. Texas, the gay community's Brown v. Board of Education, striking down state laws that criminalized private, consensual gay sex, saying: "The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."
When all the testimony about legal rights, benefits and protections in the Prop 8 trial is said and done, Perry v. Schwarzenegger is ultimately about just that.
Our gay and lesbian friends and neighbors are entitled to respect for their private lives, and the state cannot demean their existence, even by majority vote. Seven out of 10 Americans supported laws banning interracial marriage at the time our president's black father and white mother married.
But the Supreme Court knew that our federal Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the law was a bedrock American principle that sometimes requires the courts to lead, and so lead they did, striking down antimiscegenation laws in 1967. Now, only lunatic-fringe bigots would support those laws.
My favorite anti-Prop 8 placard read: "When do I get to vote on your marriage?" Same-sex marriage may be a politically volatile and complex issue, but as a matter of federal constitutional law, it's simple: Fundamental rights must be granted equally across the board to all American citizens. Equal means equal. The rest, constitutionally speaking, is just noise.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Lisa Bloom.NEW YORK -- Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said Thursday the Russian president is really hoping for improved relations with the United States when Donald Trump becomes president, describing the two men as “very much alike” in how they see the world.
Donald Trump and family to appear on 60 Minutes
Russia hopes “for their good personal relationship,” Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Peskov cautioned, however, that it will take time to restore trust in relations that are at their lowest point in decades.
Suspicions about Trump’s relationship with Putin’s government dogged his presidential campaign, in large part because the United States accused Russia of hacking into Democratic Party email systems in an apparent effort to influence the outcome of the election.
Peskov said Russian experts were in contact with some members of Trump’s staff during the campaign, but he reiterated that the Russian government and security agencies had nothing to do with the cyberattacks. A Trump spokeswoman denied there were any contacts between the campaign and “any foreign entity.”
Defense Secretary Ash Carter's advice to President-elect Trump
Once Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, Peskov said Putin will be looking forward to conversations with the new U.S. leader.
“He has been a very firm supporter of the idea of good relationship between our countries, because we do carry a joint responsibility for strategic stability in the world, strategic security,” Peskov said, speaking in near-fluent English. He said Russia and the U.S. must address the “very, very dangerous challenge of global terrorism” together.
Trump has praised Putin as a strong leader and said he wants to be friends with Russia and join forces in the fight against terrorism, but he has outlined few specifics of how he would go about improving relations.
Russia shows enthusiasm for Donald Trump's win
CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports Russia’s enthusiasm for Trump’s win was on show at watch parties all over Moscow on Wednesday.
“This is the victory that American people brought the whole world,” a man at one party told CBS News.
Peskov said the two leaders are “very much alike... in their basic approaches toward international affairs.” He noted that Putin and Trump had used almost the same language in recent weeks to stress that their country came first but they were ready to have good relations with the rest of the world.
This is a good reason “to believe that they will manage to establish good relations,” Peskov said. “We shouldn’t expect them to agree on everything.... Unfortunately, we do have a very, very loaded luggage of disagreements now.”
Who's at the top of Trump's list for his Cabinet?
“But if we are wise enough to start speaking to each other, and try to listen to each other’s concerns, this will be a real success,” he stressed.
Peskov is close to Putin, almost always by his side on foreign trips and at meetings with foreign leaders. It is highly unusual for him to travel abroad separately, but he is chairman of the board of the Russian Chess Federation and came to New York to attend Friday’s opening of the world championship match between Russia’s Sergei Karyakin and Norway’s Magnus Carlsen. The organizers have invited Trump to attend, but it was unclear whether he would accept the invitation.
Sir Richard Branson on U.S. presidential election, "Don't Look Down"
Peskov said the U.S.-Russia relationship is “a victim” in every U.S. election, but this year was “quite unprecedented.” He said the Kremlin was “very surprised” when Putin became part of the campaign and when Trump was described as unpatriotic and unfit to be president for saying he was ready to speak to the Russian leader. “It’s so illogical,” Peskov said.
In addition to denying any Russian role in the hacking, he protested what he said were “hostile” threats from Washington of counter-measures against Moscow, including from Vice President Joe Biden.
Peskov said five top Russian banks were subjected to a heavy cyberattack Wednesday that their security systems managed to repel. He said Russia could blame Biden for saying Russia would have to pay the price, but if the two countries blame each other for everything “it will not help the situation.”
“We are all living in a very, very dangerous world and the only possibility for all of us to improve this world is to start to speak to each other and to start to cooperate,” he said. “And we do hope, and President Putin really hopes, that we’ll have an opportunity for optimism... in our relationship with the United States.”At the time of this blog post going live, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Studios Europe Michael Denny is closing his presentation to journalists at a PlayStation Vita event in London. We are pleased to share the news from that presentation with our PlayStation.Blog readers.
PS Vita Launch Line-up
We can confirm that the following first party games will be available on 22 February 2012, when PlayStation Vita launches across PAL:
Uncharted: Golden Abyss
WipEout 2048
Reality Fighters
Little Deviants
ModNation Racers: Road Trip
Everybody’s Golf
Escape Plan
Unit 13
Hustle Kings
MotorStorm RC
Top Darts
Additionally, the following games are in development:
Army Corps of Hell, Square Enix; Asphalt: Injection, Ubisoft; Disgaea 3 Return, NIS America; Dungeon Hunter: Alliance, Ubisoft; Dynasty Warriors Next, Tecmo Koei; EA Sports FIFA Football, EA; F1 2011, Codemasters; Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7, WB Games; Lumines Electronic Symphony, Ubisoft; Michael Jackson: The Experience HD, Ubisoft; Ninja Gaiden (working title), Tecmo Koei; OddWorld: Strangers Wrath, OddWorld Inhabitants; Puddle, Neko Entertainment; Pure Chess, RebelPlay; Putty Squad Vita, System 3; Rayman Origins, Ubisoft; Ridge Racer, Bandai Namco; Shinobido 2, Bandai Namco; Silent Hill: Book of Memories, Konami; Stardrone Extreme, BeatShapers; Super Monkey Ball Banana Splitz, SEGA; Supremacy MMA, 505 Games; Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, Drinkbox Studios; The Treasures of Montezuma Blitz, Alawar Entertainment; Touch My Katamari, Bandai Namco; Troopies, Bloober Team; Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom, Capcom; Urban Trials, Tate Multimedia; Virtua Tennis 4: World Tour Edition, SEGA; Orc Attack, Casual Brothers; Ben 10 Galactic Racing, Bandai Entertainment; Dragon’s Racing, Ignition Entertainment; Robot Rescue Revolution, Teyon; Mortal Kombat, WB Games; Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft; Bioshock, Take Two; Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom; Call of Duty, Activision Blizzard.
Unit 13 Coming from Zipper Interactive
It was revealed that the developer of MAG and the SOCOM series is working on a third-person shooter called Unit 13, to be released around the launch window of PS Vita. You can find more a more detailed description of the game in this blog post.
Evolution Studios’ MotorStorm RC Revealed
Yet another new title coming to PS Vita and PS3 and playable at today’s event, MotorStorm RC blends old-school remote control and contemporary racing gameplay. Cross Play lets PS Vita and PS3 players to compete. You can find out more in this announcement blog post from Evolution.
Social Essentials Shown
We learned that Flickr is joining Twitter, Facebook and FourSquare in Social Essentials, PS Vita’s gateway into the most popular social media channels, and they were available to test at the London event. We’ll be showing you exactly how to Like, Tweet, Tag and all the rest here on PlayStation.Blog soon.
Augmented Reality Markers
Augmented Reality is one of the directions open to PlayStation Vita developers and it was announced that six Augmented Reality markers will be available at launch, with three games available to download for free from PlayStation Store. To see how these are going to be used, we saw this AR technology video:
We hope this news gets you even more excited about PlayStation Vita and we can’t wait to hear what you think when you get your hands around it on 22 February 2012. In the meantime, we’re going to do our best to show you what it can do and hint at the possibilities for the future. If there’s anything you’d like to know, please do ask away in the comments.Courtesy of Equality Florida
The Cost of Being Gay A look at the financial realities of same-sex partnerships. Some same-sex married couples are refusing to file their federal tax returns separately this tax season, as part of a movement demonstrating that they’re no longer content to quietly comply with the federal law that does not recognize same-sex marriage. And in some cases, these taxpayers will pay Uncle Sam more when they do so.
Same-sex couples who have married, or who have a legal status equivalent to marriage in certain states, must still file separate federal returns because the government — and therefore the Internal Revenue Service — defines marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman.
Using that definition, federal tax returns ask taxpayers to check one of five options under their filing status: single, married filing jointly, married filing separately, head of household or qualifying widow(er) with dependent child. Married same-sex partners typically file their own federal returns either as single or, if they qualify, as head of household, which has more favorable rates than the single filing status.
But many same-sex couples contend that filing as single amounts to lying about their marriage status, and that’s the message behind the “Refuse to Lie” campaign created by gay activists, which is timed to coincide with tax season.
“More people are refusing to lie on those forms, even though the government is telling them to,” said Nadine Smith, executive director of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group Equality Florida, who plans on filing a joint return with her wife, Andrea. “It would be both dishonest and deeply humiliating to now disavow each other or our marriage and declare ourselves single on our tax form.”
Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate who acts as an ombudsman for the I.R.S., acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding federal taxation of same-gender spouses in an annual report to Congress. In the report, she said that taxpayers may take a filing position without penalty if there is “substantial authority” to do so, such as a court case that hasn’t been overruled by the United States Court of Appeals. And there happen to be two such cases, which are currently on appeal.
In July 2010, the Federal District Court in Massachusetts declared the Defense of Marriage Act — the federal law known as DOMA that defines marriage as between a man and a woman — as unconstitutional in two cases. They are now being appealed in the First Circuit. “Thus, there may be substantial authority for same-gender spouses to take certain tax positions as married as long as the Massachusetts district court’s opinions stands,” Ms. Olson said in the report.
The “Refuse to Lie” Web site warns same-sex couples of the risks of filing jointly, and explains different options to both adhere to the law while expressing that they disagree with it. One way to do that would be to put an asterisk by the “single” box, and then indicate at the bottom of the tax form that you are “only single under DOMA.” Another option, the site says, is to attach a note with a similar message.
The campaign also explains on its Web site how to file a joint return while avoiding penalties. In the first method, each partner would file their own single return and include an attachment stating that they’re married, and then file an amended return jointly. “Once the I.R.S. rejects the amended return, or if six months passes and they do nothing, the taxpayers who file an amended return have the right to file suit in Federal District Court claiming the refund,” the activists’ site said, adding that this option would avoid penalties because your original return would be filed according to the law.
Another method suggests filing two returns: one filed jointly (and showing the tax due on the joint return) and one filed as a single taxpayer (showing the tax due on that return). Pay whatever is due on the single return — which means you will not have underpaid — and then ask the I.R.S. which return to accept. But if the I.R.S. accepts the joint return and issues you a refund, “there is no way to know what will happen if you are later audited,” the site said.
“People who follow this example need to do so with a clear head about the decision they are making and that what could happen is unclear,” Ms. Smith, of Equality Florida, said. “It’s not without risk.”
But there’s another way to preserve your right to collect any refunds due to you if the law is eventually struck down. Patricia Cain, a professor at Santa Clara Law and an expert on sexuality and federal tax law, said that couples who would benefit from a joint filing — that is, couples who would pay less in taxes or receive refunds — can file a protective claim using I.R.S. Form 843. (File separate returns in accordance with the law, then attach the form to an amended joint return).
“If you state on Form 843 that your claim is based on the unconstitutionality of DOMA, which is an issue pending in current litigation, it is more likely that the I.R.S. will do nothing until the issue is finally determined,” she added. “And if DOMA is struck down as unconstitutional, you should be entitled to the refund on the amended return.”
Although she generally recommends that same-sex married couples file their own returns in accordance with the law, she said that couples living in Massachusetts might be able to better justify filing their returns jointly because of the two court cases there.
“The question is whether that is sufficient as substantial authority to avoid being assessed penalties if you were audited by the I.R.S. and found to have filed incorrectly,” Professor Cain said.
She also said that she knew some same-sex couples in several different states who had filed joint returns and received refunds. “It’s because the returns are handled by machines,” she said, adding that the 1040 forms don’t have any gender markers on them. “That doesn’t mean they won’t be audited sometime. But honestly, I think the I.R.S. has bigger fish to fry than figuring out where same-sex couples filed jointly.”
Taxpayers who don’t pay the proper amount of tax will be levied a 20 percent penalty on top of the amount of tax owed. An I.R.S. spokeswoman said the agency followed the federal Marriage Act and declined further comment.
But for Kate Kendell it’s about more than the money. Ms. Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said she and her wife, Sandy, who have been together for 18 years and have two children, are going to file as married this year (they married in California during the brief window in 2008 when same-sex marriage was permitted there).
“As a lawyer and a legal advocate for the L.G.B.T. community, I am often in a position to advise people to exercise great caution and to comply in most cases with the letter of the law, even when that means denying who we are,” she said. “This is my small way of saying, where we can, we are not going to play the game anymore.”
In their case, the move is going to cost the couple more than $5,000.
If you’re part of a same-sex couple and would like to file jointly, how far would you go to show that you disagree with the current law? And what does everyone else think about this effort?Enbridge Line 5 pipeline.jpg
A diver for the National Wildlife Federation inspects the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac in 2013.
(Courtesy | NWF)
MACKINAC ISLAND, MI -- Shut down the pipeline pending a full public review. That's the underlying recommendation from a
on the condition of Enbridge Energy's twin
oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, released on Wednesday, May 27, by coalition of environmental groups. "It's the only option at this time to prevent a catastrophic oil spill," said Dave Holtz, chairman of the Michigan Sierra Club chapter, which has been working with the Traverse City-based For Love of Water nonprofit. The report suggests that integrity of the twin 62-year-old pipeline has been compromised by acidic zebra mussel secretions, a corrosive element not anticipated by engineers who oversaw pipeline installation in 1953. Report authors say the steel pipes are coated with an obsolete coal tar enamel that has failed elsewhere, including on Enbridge's Line 2 in Saskatchewan in 2009 -- a line built the same year as Line 5 through the Straits.
Screenshot from a University of Michigan simulation showing how oil might spread though the Great Lakes if Enbridge's Line 5 under the Straits of Mackinac were to rupture.
"Outdated protective coating and welds" connecting pipeline segments, and strong currents through the Straits as are cited as other stress points on the system. "We feel that one of the most significant hazards of this pipeline is from external corrosion," said Gary Street, a former Dow Environmental engineer who spoke during a Wednesday press conference on Mackinac Island.
with the Mackinac Policy Conference happening this week on the island, which pipeline opponents say would be devastated by an oil spill.
crashed a speech by Gov. Rick Snyder at the conference Wednesday. Liz Kirkwood, FLOW director, spoke critically of
in the state House that would shield pipeline infrastructure information from Michigan Freedom of Information laws, under the auspices of national security. A group of Democratic legislators have called for public hearings on a competing bill package that they say would create stronger safety and transparency measures for oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing the state. "Unfortunately, our bills have yet to see any action while Republicans have introduced and are ready to push through legislation that prevents citizens from obtaining information about leaks, spills, or the results of safety tests," said state Rep. Jeff Irwin, (D-Ann Arbor), last week.
Related Stories
: •
•
•
Attention to the Enbridge pipelines is escalating ahead of a
report being
by the state Attorney General's office and Department of Environmental Quality. The report will be released "hopefully in the next month or so," said Andrea Bitely, the Attorney General's office press secretary. Bitely said the task force received the coalition report and "are reviewing this just like we've reviewed many other submissions." The environmental coalition report issued Wednesday suggests that although the federal government oversees pipeline regulation with state input, Michigan actually has "specific authority" to regulate pipelines because of its general duty to protect the Great Lakes through a public trust doctrine. Kirkwood alleged the state task force has not properly contemplated a worst-case scenario beyond the Enbridge disaster response measure of closing valves on either side of the Straits, should there be a pipeline rupture. "Who knows how they could even respond if this occurred in the wintertime," said Bruce Wallace, chair of the National Wildlife Federation, which has focused significant attention on the pipeline for several years.
Pumps draw dredged sediment from the Kalamazoo River in Galesburg during late-stage cleanup from the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill.
"We can't afford to keeping talking about it while the product still flows," he said. Earlier this month, Enbridge reached a
with the state over spilling 843,000 gallons of diluted bitumen, or dilbit, a viscous type of heavy crude oil from the tar sands region of Canada, into a Kalamazoo River tributary in 2010. The spill, deemed the worst inland incident in U.S. history, cost the company
to clean up and has been cited by numerous critics as emblematic of Enbridge's oil spill history. In 2014, a University of Michigan study concluded a pipeline break in the Straits would be what environmentalists called a "
" to the Great Lakes economy due to the currents carrying oil far from the Straits area. The Line 5 pipeline terminates in Sarnia, Ontario. It carries nearly 23 million gallons of crude oil and petroleum products every day, but does not transport the heavy diluted bitumen the company spilled in 2010.
Garret Ellison covers business, government and environment for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at gellison@mlive.com or follow on Twitter & InstagramIt was interesting to learn that what set LeBron James off during Game 4 of the NBA Finals was Draymond Green calling him a “bitch.” After all, the NBA has a rich history of insane trash-talking, and I generally just assume that Kevin Garnett spends each game threatening to skullfuck his opponents. But depending upon the inflection used and the force behind calling somebody a “bitch,” it can mean something more akin to “fuck you,” or it can be a derogatory challenge on somebody’s manhood. I’d venture to guess the way Green said it was the latter.
The other interesting thing is that this is far from the first time James has reacted strongly to an opponent calling him a “bitch.” In fact, it seems to be the go-to insult for annoying, scrappy, hustling players like Joakim Noah, Shawn Marion, and now Green. The first evidence I can find comes from a December 2009 game, in which Noah reportedly told James “you’re a bitch.”
Two years later, James’s future teammate Marion called him a bitch (possibly “LeBitch”?) during Game 4 of the 2011 NBA Finals:
The next year Rajon Rondo, whose Celtics seemingly played James in the playoffs every single year, took a photo at an autograph signing with a woman wearing a “LeBron Is A Bitch” shirt. (A few years later the cameraman at a Celtics game accidentally caught another fan wearing the shirt.)
James and Noah were jawing back-and-forth the whole game during last year’s playoffs, and after James dunked on him, Noah told him “fuck you, you still a bitch though”:
And finally, after the Cavs beat the Warriors in overtime of Game 2 of last year’s Finals, a Warriors fan called James a “pussy-ass bitch” as he was leaving the court:Quick Access
Review / Favorite Track / For Fans Of / Atmosphere Levels / Links (Music & Social)
Sailing on the Amazon River...
How is the sound?
This 5-tracks LP was released on vinyl on Nasoni Records in the beginning of December. But I think we, that little community of heavy-fuzzy sounds lovers, didn’t talk about it enough! Maybe the release was submerged by all the TOP 2014 lists that were posted at that time…
And with Deadpeach it’s time to go come back to my favorite genre : Heavy Psychedelic Jams! Starting right from the beginning with its 2 longest tracks, it directly sets you in the move. “Calcutta” has that hazy atmosphere directly putting your brain into transe-mode, listening to the lead guitar, largely abusing on the fuzz and the reverb, and supported by an enchanting bass line and some sweet guitar chords… It’s already time to close your eyes…
“Gold” is in the same highly psychedelic vein for the first half of the song, but you have a deep feeling that something is coming right after … Indeed, a Dead Meadow-like fuzzy riff pops in to end into another great guitar solo, just for the pleasure of your ears!
“The Line“, the shortest track on the record, clearly having a more groovy feeling, rising the tempo from the 2 previous ones. It’s a nice song for the middle of the album to wake you up in the middle of your dreams 😉
“Stomper” is mainly a magnificent drum solo with some Bonham patterns, supported by some weird psychedelic shit done by the guitar to hook you in! A killer stomping bass line comes in at the end of the solo before giving place to the beginning riffs to end the song, looks like “Moby Dick” no? 😀
The last song “Traffic” is clearly my favorite, the guitar melody is beautiful and reminds me a lot of the last album by Monomyth (ranked #7 in my Top 2014 List). The flow of the song is so smooth, like if you were sailing on the middle of the Amazon river!
Take the trip, you’ll love it!
Why is this album worth listening?
Because sometimes we all need to listen to songs that free our mind, right?
5 songs having their own identity, it’s not only JAM, JAM & JAM! There’s a bit more work involved 😉
I missed that Dead Meadow guitar sound, using the wah-wah pedal in a special way, I love it!
In what situation you should listen to this album?
Sitting on the exact same spot the photo above was taken, and just enjoy the view and the music! If weed is also your thing, then why not, it can’t harm 😉
Something particular to note?
The cover is stunning! I’d love to have it on a giant poster in my bedroom!Doctors say the patient who confronted treasurer on Q&A was right to say he will be out of pocket after Medicare changes
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Korey Gunnis on Q&A on Monday night.
When Korey Gunnis - sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis, cerebral palsy, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, chronic asthma, hearing loss, anxiety disorder and clinical depression - asked Joe Hockey on the ABC’s Q and A program how he was supposed to cope with the new “heartless” $7 Medicare co-payment, the treasurer’s answer was unequivocal. Gunnis would not have to pay it.
“Well from what you said you wouldn’t be hit by the so-called medicare co-payment, you wouldn’t be affected,” Hockey said.
“Initially I would”, Gunnis interjected from the audience, presumably referring to the fact that even concession card holders are required to pay the co-payment for their first 10 visits to the doctor each year.
“No you wouldn’t because you would be on a care plan with your doctor, obviously you have a number of chronic diseases, in that situation you would not be affected by the co-payment,” Hockey insisted.
But according to the Australian Medical Association, Gunnis is very probably right.
The budget does exempt doctors’ visits listed as “chronic disease management items” from the co-payment, but these are likely to be only a very small proportion of the visits to the doctor by someone with chronic health problems like Gunnis.
“Chronic disease management items” include an initial consultation to develop a chronic disease management plan and another consultation with other health professionals - for example with a diabetic educator and a podiatrist for a sufferer of diabetes.
But if a chronic disease sufferer gets sick, or needs a new prescription, or has any other health problems their visit to the doctor counts as a standard consultation and attracts the $7 co-payment - for the first 10 visits if they are hold a concession card, or indefinitely, if they do not.
AMA president Dr Steve Hambleton said “people with chronic disease are likely to pay the co-payment for most of their normal visits to the doctor, which would be considered standard consultations.”
He said his organisation was not “against” the co-payment overall, and for most people it would pose no problem for their health care.
But he said doctors were worried about its impact on the most disadvantaged patients they saw - very low income earners especially those with chronic conditions, some aged care or dementia payments and some patients in indigenous communities.
“There are definitely people who are going to struggle and we need to talk to the minister about how we are supposed to handle those people, because the system as it stands discourages doctors from bulk-billing or waiving the co-payment for those in greatest need,” he said.
“If the co-payment means very low income earners, or the very sick, defer getting medical care and then present when their condition is much worse it will be a bad outcome for them and potentially a net cost for the health system,” he said.
“There is definitely more work to be done on this new system.”
Hambleton has said doctors could lose 12-25% of their current income if they do not adopt the co-payment when it is due to come into effect next July.In the last year, the most important question for U.S. economists and economic journalists has changed from Where are the jobs? to Where are the wages?
It's a problem best summed up by Matthew O'Brien in the Washington Post. As the labor market approaches full employment, there should be more pressure on wages to rise. In the graph below, that would look like a trend-line pointing up and to the left. Instead, as you can see in a half-a-second glance, the trend-line is a blob and it's certainly not pointing up. The unemployment rate has fallen below 6 percent, and earnings growth is flat.
Hourly Earnings vs. Unemployment Rate by Month
Matthew O'Brien/Washington Post More
Here are three theories for why.
1. Wage growth and job growth are happening in different places.
When economists and writers say "wages aren't growing," we're making a blanket statement that hides the fact that some wages are growing somewhere. Mining and energy jobs have had a fantastic few years, while retail and food service wage growth has been awful. The problem is that there are far more retail and food service workers than mining and manufacturing employees.
We're adding lots of jobs in industries with stagnant wages, and a few jobs in industries with rising wages, according to new research out of the Cleveland Fed. "It may seem counterintuitive that wages and salaries are growing the slowest in industries where jobs are growing the fastest, but it actually is not," writes LaVaughn M. Henry, vice president of the bank's Cincinnati branch. We're adding few jobs in goods-producing industries like manufacturing, which have the highest overall post-recession wage growth, and lots of jobs in service-producing industries (e.g. health care, leisure and hospitality, and education), which have the lowest real wage growth.
Real Annual Wage Growth, by Industry
Cleveland Fed More
2. The rise of invisible unemployment is too large to ignore.
What is "invisible unemployment"? It's discouraged workers and part-timers who want more hours. The official unemployment rate doesn't consider them unemployed. So when we talk about the official unemployment rate—now at a lowish 5.8 percent—we're ignoring these workers. They're statistically invisible.
Here's a picture of invisible unemployment (in blue) vs. official unemployment (in red). Since early 2010, the number of unemployed Americans has declined by twice as fast as the number of discouraged/part-timers (42 percent vs. 21 percent).
Invisible Unemployment vs. Official Unemployment
FRED More
In 2002, official unemployment swamped invisible unemployment. The official unemployment rate was an accurate description of the labor force. But the spread between invisible and official unemployment is shrinking. In the last 20 years, the six months with the smallest gaps between official and invisible unemployment were all in 2014. That means the official unemployment rate is getting worse and worse at describing the real conditions facing American workers.
Invisible unemployment is hurting the participation rate even more than economists predicted with an aging work force. The entire developed world is getting older. But U.S. participation fell faster in the years after the recession that just about any other country.Josh Clymer has been driving his 2005 Acura TSX a lot. In fact, he says he’s up to 505,248 miles now on the original drivetrain. To celebrate a half-million, he took the car to get compression and dyno tested. That gives us a good idea of how healthy the engine really is.
Clymer has been documenting his adventures on his blog “TSX Travels.” Since I am a big fan of high-mileage Hondas myself, I’ve been following his quest to get to the moon and back with this car.
Apparently it’s still running well enough to get Clymer all over Idaho on a regular basis, but these diagnostics go a little deeper into assessing the vehicle’s condition.
A compression test is exactly what it sounds like—you’re determining how good the seal is in the combustion chamber of the cylinders, also known as “where your car blows up gasoline to make it go.”
Advertisement
As this seal weakens, you lose power and efficiency. Eventually, if it gets real weak, your engine won’t run at all.
More specifically speaking, the test helps assess the engine’s valves, valve seats and piston rings. General lore is that a properly running engine should have more than 100 psi of pressure per cylinder, but more importantly it should return a consistent rating with less than 10 percent of deviation between cylinders. (Sidebar: Popular Mechanics says “for a cylinder below 100 psi, pour 1 teaspoon of engine oil into the plug hole and retest. If the reading jumps, the piston rings are worn. If not, think valve problems.”)
The test is pretty much performed by sticking a gauge into one of the spark plug holes and cranking over the engine. When Clymer’s mechanic tested the 500,000 mile TSX the results were:
Advertisement
175 psi in cylinders 1 and 2, 180 psi in cylinders 3 and 4. That would appear to be well within spec, as the Acura manual calls for a minimum pressure of 135 pounds per square inch and maximum variation of 29 psi. Now I’m not sure how much internal service this engine has had over its 500,000 mile lifetime, but hopefully Mr. Clymer will jump into the comments and elaborate for us soon.
As for the engine’s output, Clymer says his car is putting down 159.64 horsepower and 125.63 lb-ft of torque per the dyno at Motor Mayhem in Meridian, Idaho.
Advertisement
The 2005 TSX runs a 2.4-liter inline four-cylinder engine rated to 200 horsepower at 6,800 RPM and 166 lb-ft of torque at 4,500 RPM when new. Of course, no stock TSX would hit those numbers on a traditional dyno, since factory horsepower ratings are measured at the engine and don’t account for parasitic loss that happens as the power is pushed through the car’s drivetrain and wheels.
A big thread of user-reported horsepower readings on the TSX Club forum seems to indicate that these cars are hitting between 160 horsepower and 220 horsepower to the wheels with mild modifications like intakes and exhausts. Based on that, I think it sounds like Clymer’s stock TSX is doing pretty dandy for its age.
Advertisement
Keep up with your scheduled service folks, and your car just might live forever!Japan Economy Watch is a weblog run by Claus Vistesen, Scott Peterson and Edward Hugh which follows the day to day progress of the Japanese economy. The principle focus of the weblog is Japan's long term growth and deflation problem, and many of the posts examine the issue of the sustainability of Japanese public finance in the light of the weak domestic consumption record which appears to be related to the ageing question. Ageing produces a continuing and ongoing rise in median ages due to continuing low fertility and the rapid increases in life expectancy which Japan has been experiencing. Detailed arguments concerning the evolution of the Japanese economy can be found in the posts indicated under the "Worth A Read" heading which can be found on the Weblog Home Page“If fascism comes to America, it will not be identified with any "shirt" movement, nor with an "insignia," but it will probably be "wrapped up in the flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution,” wrote in a 1936 issue of The Christian Century. Nobel Laureate recipient Sinclair Lewis put it even more succinctly when he warned, “It [fascism] would come wrapped in the flag and whistling the Star Spangled Banner.”
No one who has followed the rise of the Christian Right in national politics over the course of the past three decades should be surprised by Monday’s Supreme Court decision to grant corporations religious personhood. It was as predictable as Pat Robertson saying something stupid about gay sex. The hyper religious conservatives on the bench of the nation’s high court, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, see the federal government as being controlled by ‘secular humanists’ who wish to make war against the purity of the Christian belief system. Like the 89 million |
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Today, local artisans fill the elegantly decaying space with an array of incredible eats—from low-price tamales to artfully composed gluten-free pastries—and one-of-a-kind goods like earrings made from butterfly wings or herbalist-blended teas. For duds and southwest-chic home furnishings, head to Nob Hill, a posh shopping district in the heart of Midtown that encompasses a historic stretch of Route 66. The area offers a taste of 1940s Americana, with its antique neon signs and WWII-era architecture.
Visitors also love the city’s Old Town for its enchanting adobe architecture and abundance of ABQ souvenirs (the Breaking Bad-inspired crystal blue candy from the Candy Lady is too good to pass up). At the Saturday farmers market in downtown’s Robinson Park, find bountiful local produce, jams, breads, breakfast burritos, and cold juices and teas, plus live music and a grassy place to kick back and enjoy the morning.
Advertisement
Route 66 Hostel. Courtesy of Route 66
Stay: Los Poblanos is a historic inn and organic farm. With it’s circa-1934 charm, wood-burning fireplaces and heavenly lavender gardens, it’s well worth the price tag and distance from Albuquerque’s main drags. Budget travelers will love the Route 66 Hostel, a converted house on Central Avenue that’s steps from downtown and the Saturday farmers market.
The Sandia Peak Tramway. Courtesy of Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau
If you do one thing: Jaw-dropping vistas (that you don’t have to hike to) wait atop the Sandia Peak Tramway on the east edge of town. Get the most out of your $25 tram ticket by visiting in the early mornings, when the weather is cool and the crowds are sparse.Listen to story:
FEATURING RON FEIN – In the days following the explosive revelations by the Washington Post that Donald Trump revealed sensitive information to Russian diplomats, talk of impeaching the 45th president has grown. The Post revealed that Trump had shared classified information about the Islamic State to Russian officials Sergey Lavrov and Sergei Kislyak last week at a meeting in the White House. Trump has confirmed that he shared information but defended his right to do so. Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered to share a full transcript of the conversations with Congress.
That’s not all. Newly fired FBI Director James Comey has revealed in a memo that Trump had asked him to end the agency’s investigation into former national security advisor Michael Flynn. The assertion is being interpreted as a possible obstruction of justice on Trump’s part. Meanwhile a new poll has found that 48% of Americans now support impeaching Trump – the highest so far during the President’s short tenure.
Find more at www.impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org.
Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech for People.CONDORSTOWN, Calif. – The Bakersfield Condors, owned by the Edmonton Oilers, announced the initial training camp roster featuring 33 players for their inaugural American Hockey League (AHL) season. Training camp begins today for the Condors with a team practice from 10:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. and media availability at 12:35 p.m. All practices will be held at Rabobank Arena and are closed to the public, with the exception of an open-to-the-public practice on Wednesday, Oct. 7 at 10 a.m. DOWNLOAD: Training Camp Roster | Training Camp Schedule POSITION – CONTRACT GOALTENDERS (3)
Laurent Brossoit (NHL – Edmonton)
Eetu Laurikainen (NHL – Edmonton)
Ty Rimmer (AHL – Bakersfield) DEFENSE (9)
Ben Betker (NHL – Edmonton)
Tim Daly (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
Brad Hunt (NHL – Edmonton)
Joey LaLeggia (NHL – Edmonton)
Joe Marciano (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
David Musil (NHL – Edmonton)
Jordan Oesterle (NHL – Edmonton)
Nick Pageau (AHL – Bakersfield)
Charles-Olivier Roussel (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout) FORWARDS (21)
C Greg Chase (NHL – Edmonton)
C Josh Currie (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
LW Braden Christoffer (AHL – Bakersfield)
RW Matthew Ford (AHL – Bakersfield)
LW Ryan Hamilton (NHL – Edmonton)
LW Kale Kessy (NHL – Edmonton)
LW Jujhar Khaira (NHL – Edmonton)
LW Jonathan Lessard (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
C Alexis Loiseau (AHL – Bakersfield)
C Philip McRae (AHL – Bakersfield)
RW Andrew Miller (NHL – Edmonton)
C Michael Pelech (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
RW Tyler Pitlick (NHL – Edmonton)
RW Kyle Platzer (NHL – Edmonton)
RW Alexandre Ranger (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
C Connor Rankin (AHL – Bakersfield)
LW Marc-Olivier Roy (AHL – Bakersfield)
C Steven Whitney (ECHL – Norfolk // AHL tryout)
LW Josh Winquist (AHL – Bakersfield)
C Bogdan Yakimov (NHL – Edmonton)
LW Daniil Zharkov (AHL tryout) NOTE: not all players on this roster have arrived to training camp, but will be doing so over the course of the next few days BECOME A CONDORS MEMBER; SAVE MONEY AND HAVE EVEN MORE FUN Join the Condors on their historic move to the American Hockey League in 2015-16. Become a ticket member and enjoy all of the great benefits by contacting the Condors at 324-PUCK (7825) or click here for more information. Single-game tickets for Opening Weekend are on sale now at Axs.com or by clicking here MEET THE NEW TEAM – OPEN HOUSE SEPT. 29 AND 30 from 3-7 P.M. Fans have not one, but TWO opportunities to meet the new Condors next Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 29 and 30 from 3-7 p.m. at Rabobank Arena. Enter at the back security entrance of Rabobank Arena. Those with accessibility needs can be dropped off down the loading dock, but may not park there. Members can pick up their ticket books, grab their gifts, tour the newly renovated Condors locker room, meet the players and more. Not a member? Sign up at the event. Admission is free with the donation of two canned food items to benefit Greenfield Family Resource Center. OIL DROP SUPERHERO VOTING THROUGH OCT. 3 The final eight names have been revealed for the Condors new Oil Drop Superhero mascot, joining Colonel Claw’d and Baby Cal, this season. Head to the all-new www.BakersfieldCondors.com and vote in the poll now to choose your favorite name. Voting ends Oct. 3.The Unseen Museum is the successful project of the National Archaeological Museum that presents select antiquities from the world of the storerooms. Following the 15 marvelous artifacts that have been displayed to date, the Unseen Museum welcomes Hadrian and Antinous to a meeting after 19 centuries.
It is an exhibition of the inscribed base of a monument in honour of the emperor Hadrian and an outstanding portrait of Antinous, his attendant and favourite. The works are being displayed for the first time in the heart of the Museum, 19 centuries after the emperor’s visit to Athens.
The Builder, Saviour and Olympian Hadrian and the young Antinous surfaced on Monday November 13 in the “Hall of the Altar” (hall 34), to remain there until Sunday, March 4, 2018. Their display in the Unseen Museum is part of the temporary exhibition of the National Archaeological Museum entitled “Hadrian and Athens. Conversing with an ideal world”, that begins on November 28, 2017 and will be on for a year.
From December 2017 to February 2018, the Museum’s archaeologists will welcome visitors and take them on a magic walk into the world of Hadrian and Antinous, from Athens to the sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods in Marathon, revealing the spiritual rebirth of Greek culture in the times of the philhellene emperor.
Presentations
Dates of presentations: December 15 2017, January 12, 26, February 9 and 23 2018, on Friday. December 17 2017, January 14 and 28, February 11 and 25 2018, on Sunday.
Starting time: 13.00
To participate in the presentation it is necessary to purchase a ticket and register upon arrival. The first come first served policy will be observed.
Contact details: National Archaeological Museum, 44 Patision Str, Athens. Tel.: 213214 4817, 213214 4856 / -4858 / -4866 / -4893. Opening hours: Monday 13:00-20:00, Tuesday-Sunday 09:00-16:00. E-mail: [email protected], www.namuseum.grThe council also wants the European Commission to review its taxation policies and their effect on the "stimulation of emission-free mobility." Just what that means isn't clear. It could involve stronger tax incentives for buying zero-emissions cars, but it could also involve eliminating tax breaks for diesel cars in EU states. Automakers are already worried that tougher emission standards could kill diesels -- remove the low cost of ownership and it'd only hasten their demise.
Not that the public would necessarily be worried. Forbes notes that registrations of diesels, still mainstays of the European car market, dropped sharply in numerous EU countries in August. There's a real possibility that Volkswagen's emission cheating scandal is having a delayed effect on diesel sales. Combine that with larger zero-emissions incentives and the proposed combustion engine ban, and it might not take much for Europeans to go with electric or hydrogen the next time they go car shopping.Greenville, S.C. – Furman University men's soccer great Clint Dempsey has been elected to the Southern Conference Hall of Fame, the league announced today.
Dempsey, a three-time U.S. Soccer Male Athlete of the Year choice, joins former Paladin and WNBA standout Rushia Brown in comprising the five-member 2014 SoCon Hall of Fame class, which will be formally inducted on Monday, March 10, at the U.S. Cellular Center in Asheville, N.C., as part of the league's basketball tournament.
Brown and Dempsey represent the fourth and fifth Furman athletic greats elected to the SoCon Hall of Fame, which began in 2008. They will join charter inductees Frank Selvy (Basketball/2008) and Megan Dunigan (Women's Tennis/2008), and Paul Scarpa (Tennis/2012).
A 2002 National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) All-America choice as a Paladin, Dempsey led Furman to a pair of Southern Conference titles and two NCAA Tournament appearances before joining Major League Soccer's New England Revolution in 2003. The midfielder netted 17 goals and added 19 assists during his three years at Furman while earning All-SoCon honors all three years and garnering NSCAA All-South Region accolades in 2001 and 2002.
After scoring 25 times in 71 matches with the Revolution, capturing 2004 MLS Rookie of the Year honors and being selected to the MLS Best XI in 2005 and 2006, the Nacogdoches, Texas, native moved to English Premier League side Fulham in 2007. Dempsey netted 23 goals in all competitions during the 2011-12 campaign while helping the London based club to a ninth place finish in the Premier League. In five-and-a-half years at Craven Cottage, Dempsey totaled 61 goals, led the club to the 2010 Europa League final and twice earned Fulham Player of the Season accolades.
His 17 league goals during the 2011-12 season, tied for fourth most in the EPL, helping him finish fourth in league player of the year voting by the Football Writer's Association behind Robin van Persie, Wayne Rooney and Paul Scholes. During the 2011-12 season, Dempsey passed former Fulham striker Brian McBride as the highest scoring American in Premier League history and surpass Louis Saha's club record for goals in a single season in the top flight of English football.
The former Paladin joined Tottenham Hotspur of the English Premier League on a three-year contract in August of 2012. The 30-year-old netted 12 goals in 43 appearances for Spurs, including the winning tally in a victory over league champions Manchester United at Old Trafford. He returned to the United States on August 3, 2013, after one year at Spurs when he signed with the Seattle Sounders of MLS. Dempsey was sent out on a two-month loan to Fulham in January.
As a member of the United States Men's National Team since 2004, Dempsey has scored 36 times for his country in 101 matches. He helped the U.S. qualify for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany and earned starts in two of three matches at the finals. Dempsey became the only American to score at the event when he hammered home a DeMarcus Beasley pass versus Ghana in the final game of group play.
After leading the U.S. to the 2007 CONCACAF Gold Cup title and earning 2007 U.S. Male Athlete of the Year honors, Dempsey earned the Bronze Ball at the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup in South Africa by scoring in victories over Egypt and second-ranked Spain to lead the Americans to the finals against Brazil.
Following the United States' qualification for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Dempsey scored in the opening round of the finals versus England to help the U.S. advance to the round of 16. This past year, he started eight matches and scored five goals for his country to help the U.S. capture the top spot in CONCACAF qualifying and earn a spot at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
One of the finest basketball players in league history, Brown was a four-year starter and first team All-SoCon selection who captured SoCon Freshman of the Year (1990), Player of the Year (1992), and Tournament MVP (1994) honors in a career that saw her key Furman to 35-10 league record (.778) and three regular season championships. She still holds 17 school single season and career records, and her 2,169 points rank third all-time in SoCon history.
A finalist for 1994 WBCA Player of the Year, Brown was the first SoCon player to join the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), where she played seven seasons (1998-03) — first with the Cleveland Rockers and later with the Charlotte Sting. She also enjoyed a highly successful 10-year professional career in Europe, competing in Spain, France, and Italy. She enjoyed her most success with Parma (Italy), where she was selected an Italian League All-Star after keying squads to a Ronchetti Cup title in 2000 and Italian League championship in 2001.
Brown, who grew up in Summerville, S.C., and starred as a prep at Irmo (S.C.) High School, was a two-time Furman-Edna Hartness Female Athlete of the Year selection. She is one of only two Furman women's basketball players to have her jersey (No. 34) retired and was inducted into Furman's Athletic Hall of Fame in 1999.By Edward Chaykovsky
IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook (36-1, 25KOs) has yet to give up on his division. Brook will resume training to see if he's still capable of making the welterweight limit of 147-pounds.
Two weeks ago he moved up by thirteen pounds to challenge middleweight king Gennady 'GGG' Golovkin and was stopped in the fifth round at the O2 Arena in London.
If Brook decides to stay at 147, he will have to make a mandatory defense against unbeaten Olympian Errol Spence.
At the same time, Brook admits his body is better suited for the junior middleweight limit of 154-pounds - where he wants to challenge newly crowned WBO world champion Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez (48-1-1, 34KOs). Canelo captured the title this past Saturday night with a knockout of Liam Smith.
Brook told Sky Sports News HQ: "I think 154lbs would be more my weight class. I need to get back training and see if I could make 147lbs healthily - that's also a possibility because I'm a world champion at 147lbs. I'd love that fight with Canelo. I just want to be in those big fights. I had a taste with the Golovkin fight and the attention around it is exciting for a fighter to be in.
Brook has an operation set for Friday to deal with his fractured right eye socket, an injury sustained in the second round of his fight with Golovkin.
"I've got an operation this Friday. I went down to see the surgeons and they wanted to plan it right and look into everything. They're looking to put a titanium plate in the eye but they're looking at other materials. They're not rushing it but it looks like this Friday. I'm more scared of getting put to sleep than I was of getting in with Golovkin," Brook said.
"They said it'd be a good few months before I can start sparring again. It's a break so you're looking at six to eight weeks before sparring. I only start sparring when I'm four weeks away from a fight anyway. I'm going to make sure I listen to them, take things slowly and don't go faster than I should."Updated July 24, 2017
By Eric Guida, Sacramento (Calif.) Fire Department, Engine 6
Check your PPE and SCBA every shift every time/City of Olympia
Someone once said a smart person has knowledge, a wise person shares knowledge. Everyone learns through sharing knowledge and experience. No one benefits more from this sharing than the rookie firefighter.
The following are 20 guidelines that I have learned from working with some extraordinary firefighters. I share these in the hopes of helping rookies establish themselves as competent and confident members of our profession. These rules can also serve as a refresher for those of us who have more years under our belts.
1. Never disrespect this job by not caring
It is an honor to be a firefighter. To become complacent is to dishonor those who have gone before us. This job is not just 10 days and a paycheck. Embrace training as a means to maintain the necessary level of proficiency. Truly loving this job means loving every aspect of it and therefore deserving to wear the badge. This is the greatest profession; treat it as such.
2. Lead by example
Even a rookie can lead by example. Do your job well, every time, and that can rub off on the other members of your crew. Soon they may be trying to reach the standard that the rookie has set.
3. Arrive at work at least 30 minutes before shift change
Preparation for that big fire begins when you walk through the door. Arriving early allows you to familiarize yourself with the apparatus you are assigned to before that 8:05 fire call. It will also endear you to the off-going crew by grabbing that end-of-shift call. Start off on the right foot – arrive early. If you are on time, you're late. If you're early, you're on time.
4. Talk to the off-going fire crew
Don't let your counterpart leave without getting a report on what happened on that shift. If they had a fire, find out everything about it, including what went right and what went wrong. You can learn a lot from both. Did they have any other interesting calls? Was there any equipment moved, replaced or sent in for repair? Don't be the one who frantically looks for the hook that is being repaired. Conversely, don't rush out the door at first sight of your replacement. Share your experiences with the crew that is relieving you. Give them the same courtesy that they extended to you.
5. Introduce yourself to everyone you meet
Take the first step in the communication process. This is especially true on your first day in the house. Greet everyone you see with a hand shake and a "Hi, I am firefighter Smith, nice to meet you." Being new, it is imperative that you meet everyone as soon as possible, because you rely on them for everything. The sooner you make them aware of your presence, the better off you will be. Do not make your captain hunt you down. She will probably not know who you are, so find her and let her know you are on her crew.
6. Find out who is the senior firefighter
The first whip or senior firefighter will be your greatest asset. Ask him all of those questions related to your first day in that house. Which bed is mine? What housework do I do? Where can I find a mop? These types of questions should be asked of the first whip, not the captain. The captain has more important things to do than to show you where the mop bucket is. If no one steps up as the first whip, any of the other firefighters should help.
7. Find out your riding position and your responsibilities
This information can also be obtained from the senior firefighter. He will instruct you on how the crew does things and how you fit in. Understand what is expected of you before you go out the door.
8. Check your equipment
This rule can never be overstated. Failing to be prepared is preparing to fail. Check your PPE and SCBA. Check every nozzle every shift. Check the rest of the equipment on the engine or truck to make sure it is where you left it the day before. If you are there for the first time, check to see where everything is. Knowledge of what is in those cabinets means you have one less thing to worry about when the big one hits.
9. Wear your Personal Protective equipment
Contrary to what you might think, you are not indestructible. You have been given protective clothing to ensure that you go home at the end of your shift. This clothing cannot protect you if it stays on the hook in the apparatus room. Wear your hood, pull down your helmet shroud, button your collar and wear your structure gloves. Give yourself every chance of getting back home in the same shape as when you left.
10. If you have any questions, ask them
Pride has no business impeding knowledge. Not asking something for fear of looking stupid will only get you in trouble. The bottom line is you need to know what you are doing even at the expense of looking cool.
11. Don't get caught up in the rumor mill
The kitchen table is a great place for knowledge swapping. It is also where rumors are created, sustained and traded. As a rookie, don't take part in the rumor mill. You never know who you may offend. What you say can be incorrectly repeated and used to hurt you. If it is fire talk, sit there and absorb. If it is rumor talk, walk away.
12. Don't be in a hurry to gain acceptance
Your actions will be closely scrutinized; they must speak for themselves. Pulling a pre-connect correctly is more important to your crew than the fact that you were the chief of your old department.
13. Be a team player
Remember, when things go bad, all you have is your crew. Crew continuity is built at the firehouse as well as on the fire scene. If asked, join your crew for P.T. or other nonfirefighting activities. Attend functions such as retirement parties with your crew. A good crew is built off duty as well as on.
14. Have fun
As stated in rule 1, this is the greatest profession in the world. Being enthusiastic about being a firefighter can be contagious. Have fun cleaning the toilets as well as fighting fire. Develop a sense of humor; survival in the firehouse depends on it. Enjoying even the smallest aspects of this job is what leads to a happy career.
15. Have pride in the fire service
Be proud of where you work. You have chosen your department for a reason. You may not always agree with decisions that are being made above you, but do not let that diminish your love for the job and your department. Along with fire department pride comes fire company pride. As a rookie, you should be looking forward to the time when you will have a permanent house. Work at being the best firefighter, on the best crew, at the best firehouse. Pride will push you to better yourself for the good of your crew. Company pride is the sincerest form of department pride.
16. Don't think, "been there, done that"
You are only as good as your next call. Don't be overconfident. Whether you were a hero or a goat will not help you on the next emergency. What will help is the experience and knowledge that you gained.
17. Never stop learning
You are finished with the academy and probation. You can stop reading and studying, right? Wrong. The day you stop reading about our job is the day you retire. There is a limitless supply of information out there for you to increase your knowledge base. Practice makes perfect works for reading as well as hands on.
18. Respect your elders
There is an extensive amount of information held in the minds of the senior members of the department. To gain this information, you must be willing to make the first move. Don't be afraid to ask them questions. Ask the senior engineers about how they fought fires in their firefighter days. Ask the firefighters who are about to retire how they would have fought that last fire you were on. Would they have done anything different then? Don't let that knowledge retire when they do.
19. Leave work at work
And conversely, leave your home life at home. Your crew does not deserve your wrath because you and a family member had a fight. On the other side, try not to take work problems home. Your family does not deserve grief because you pulled the wrong line on a fire.
20. Remember where you came from
As your career moves on and you are no longer the rookie, be available to the one who is. Do not be stingy with everything you have learned and been taught. Those rookies shaking in their boots on day one deserve the same respect and tutelage that you received. If firehouse hazing and condescension were your tutors, then break that chain. Be a true firefighter and help out the rookie, even if you weren't helped yourself. Individually, we can get better, but only as a whole can we become great.
This article was originally published by the NorCal Fools and is published here with permission from NorCal Fools and Eric Guida.MOSCOW — If appearances are to be believed, Vladimir Putin has a new point man in the Balkans.
Nikolai Patrushev, a Kremlin hawk, career intelligence officer and close associate of the Russian president, is the head of Russia’s Security Council, known for his fiery nationalism, conspiratorial world view and extensive espionage experience.
An unofficial Balkans portfolio for Patrushev would fit an emerging pattern. While Russian foreign policy officially falls to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, actual decision-making is increasingly driven by a small coterie of intelligence officers and defense officials with close access to Putin.
“Russia has been increasingly becoming an 'adhocracy,' where individuals get tasked with responsibilities that may or may not fit with their formal remit,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services and a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague.
“Patrushev is definitely one of those people who think Russia is in an existential struggle for its survival" — Mark Galeotti, expert on the Russian security services
The former spy's involvement indicates a more hard-line Russian approach to the region.
“Patrushev is definitely one of those people who think Russia is in an existential struggle for its survival," Galeotti added. "It’s a Cold-War, Manichean vision of the world. And one in which any reversals for the West are implicitly good for Russia."
* * *
Patrushev joined the Soviet Union’s KGB in 1974 and is believed to have first met Putin — also a former intelligence officer — in the early 1990s. After 10 years as head of the FSB, the domestic successor agency to the KGB, he moved in 2008 to the Security Council, an influential body of senior officials set up by Putin.
With much of his career spent in the shadows, Patrushev has little public record of involvement in foreign policy. But he is known to have been one of the small group of advisers close to Putin intimately involved in the planning of the annexation the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014.
Russia’s security services are exerting more and more influence on foreign policy, according to Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank advising the Kremlin.
In public statements, Patrushev has claimed the United States is striving to dismember the Russian state to “open up access to rich resources that they think Russia unfairly controls.” He has also criticized what he sees as increasingly aggressive behavior from NATO, claimed that European Union foreign policy is dictated from Washington and warned of the rise of Nazism in Eastern Europe.
Patrushev's unofficial new position leading Russia's Balkan strategy comes at a time of poor relations between Russia and the West.
Russia is particularly angry over the accession to NATO earlier this month of Montenegro, the small Adriatic country that accused Russian intelligence officers of masterminding an attempted coup in the country last year, apparently designed to derail its bid to join the alliance.
In the wake of allegations of Russian involvement in the murky coup plot, Patrushev rushed to Serbia to meet top government and security officials, in what many saw as a mission to smooth ruffled feathers. Media reports had suggested Belgrade had extradited several Russian nationals accused of masterminding the plot.
Officials in Moscow insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the trip, but Patrushev’s role has only grown since.
Last month, Patrushev was the one to meet Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic during his visit to Moscow for talks on issues from organized crime to the internet.
“Over the last year, it has become clear that Patrushev has been given the Balkans,” said Galeotti. “That says something about how important the Balkans is or how important it will become.”
Patrushev has no known professional ties to the Balkans, but appointed Leonid Reshetnikov, a controversial Balkans expert and extremely hawkish former intelligence officer to the Security Council. Last October, on the eve of the Montenegro coup attempt, Reshetnikov said it was “time [for Russia] to return to the Balkans.”
* * *
Patrushev’s rising profile in the Balkans has coincided with an uptick in Russian activity in the region.
Two Russian nationals, Eduard Sismakov and Vladimir Popov, were charged in absentia earlier this month by a Montenegrin court for attempting to subvert the country’s constitution during last year’s alleged coup attempt. Montenegrin prosecutors believe the two men are Russian intelligence officers. Sismakov was reported by Russian media to have worked as a military attaché in Russia's embassy in Poland before being expelled in 2014 on spying charges.
Documents leaked this year also suggest a concerted effort by Russian spies and diplomats in Macedonia, Serbia’s southern neighbor, to increase support for pro-Russian groups.
Russia could take “very serious” measures in response to any further NATO expansion in the Balkan peninsula, according to Yelena Guskova, a professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies in Moscow.
Russia is likely to concentrate its efforts on shoring up existing alliances in the Balkans, according to experts. This means, in particular, Serbia.
“Judging by Montenegro, lots of different steps can be taken,” she said, referring to the Kremlin's decision to cut economic ties and urging Russian holidaymakers not to visit the country, which is dependent on tourist revenues.
Patrushev warned earlier this year that NATO is also looking to persuade Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Macedonia to join the security bloc.
Russia is likely to concentrate its efforts on shoring up existing alliances in the Balkans, according to experts. This means, in particular, Serbia, with whom Russia has historically strong links. The two countries share common Slavic origins and are both primarily Orthodox Christian.
“Russia will stick to the countries on the Balkan peninsula that confirm their commitment to not joining NATO,” said Kortunov.
Howard Amos is a Moscow-based journalist. Born in London, he has spent the last six years reporting from across Russia and the former Soviet Union.Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
This post provides an update of many of the ENSO-related variables we presented as part of the 2014-15 El Niño Series. For the posts about the 2015/16 El Niño, we’ve used the evolution years of different El Niños as references to the goings-on in 2015 and 2016. This month we’re including the 1997/98 El Niño because it was the strongest El Niño in our short instrument temperature record. For the other reference, we’re using 1982/83, which was the second strongest El Niño.
INTRODUCTION
The sea surface temperature anomalies for the easternmost NINO1+2 region have dropped to near zero. The NINO3 and NINO3.4 regions should follow soon.
Both Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the U.S.’s NOAA have issued La Niña alerts for the ENSO season of 2016/17. (BOM notice is here, and NOAA advisory is here.) Keep in mind that moderately strong El Niño conditions still exist, though, and that the alert is for possible future conditions.
In an upcoming post, we’ll discuss what we might expect to happen as the tropical Pacific transitions from El Niño to La Niña. All of that warm water released by the El Niño has to go somewhere. It doesn’t magically disappear.
In the March ENSO update, we mentioned the odd forecast for a weak El Niño from NOAA CFS.v2 model. NOAA has since discovered a glitch in the CFS.v2 model. They reported on it in the Briefing on: Operational CFSv2 Atlantic Ocean Cold Bias Problem (.pptx file). Based on the model mean, the NOAA CFS.v2 is now forecasting a moderately strong La Niña. See Figure Supplement 1.
Figure Supplement 1
Back to your regularly scheduled update…
ENSO METRIC UPDATES
This post provides an update on the progress of the evolution and decay of the 2015/16 El Niño with monthly data through the end of March 2016, and for the weekly data through mid-April, 2016. The post is similar in layout to the updates that were part of the 2014/15 El Niño series of posts here. (The series of posts about the 2015/16 El Niño is here.) The remainder of the post includes a bunch of illustrations and some gif animations, so it might take a few moments to load on your browser. Please click on the illustrations to enlarge them.
Included are updates of the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies for the four most-often-used NINO regions. Also included are a couple of graphs of the monthly BOM Southern-Oscillation Index (SOI) and the NOAA Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI).
For the comparison graphs we’re using the El Niño evolution years of 1997/98 and 1982/83 where possible (the two strongest El Niño events during recent decades) as references for 2015/16.
Also included in this post are evolution comparisons using warm water volume anomalies and depth-averaged temperature anomalies from the NOAA TOA project website.
Then, we’ll take a look at a number of Hovmoller diagrams comparing the progress so far for the 2015/16 El Niño to the El Niños of 1982/83 and 1997/98.
NINO REGION TIME-SERIES GRAPHS
Note: The weekly NINO region sea surface temperature anomaly data for Figure 1 are from the NOAA/CPC Monthly Atmospheric & SST Indices webpage, specifically the data here. The anomalies for the NOAA/CPC data are referenced to the base years of 1981-2010.
Figure 1 includes the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies of the 4 most-often-used NINO regions of the equatorial Pacific. From west to east they include:
NINO4 (5S-5N, 160E-150W)
NINO3.4 (5S-5N, 170W-120W)
NINO3 (5S-5N, 150W-90W)
NINO1+2 (10S-0, 90W-80W)
Figure 1
Note that the horizontal red lines in the graphs are the present readings, not the trends.
The sea surface temperature anomalies for the easternmost NINO1+2 region have dropped to near zero (+0.1 deg C). The NINO3 and NINO3.4 regions should follow soon. As you’ll see later in the post (Animation 1), there is not a lot of warmer-than-normal subsurface waters left below the equatorial Pacific.
EL NIÑO EVOLUTION COMPARISONS FOR NINO REGION SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES
Using weekly sea surface temperature anomalies for the four NINO regions, Figure 2 compares the goings on this year with the 1997/98 event. (That weekly data start in January 1990, so we can’t include the 1982/83 El Niño.) While sea surface temperature anomalies in the NINO4 and NINO3.4 regions peaked higher than in 1997, the NINO1+2 and NINO3 regions lagged well behind the 1997/98 El Niño. In other words, the 1997/98 El Niño was a stronger East Pacific El Niño than the 2015/16 El Niño.
We also showed in the post here that the differences between sea surface temperature datasets and their uncertainties keep us from knowing which El Niño was strongest.
The NINO region sea surface temperature anomalies are continuing to show declines as the El Niño decays. The weekly data are impacted by “weather |
-9 also has superior performance compared to the default mail client. It seems to handle IMAP message loading more efficiently and doesn't exhibit the kind of responsiveness issues I had with Google's e-mail client.
Although K-9 fills almost all of the gaps in Android's native e-mail functionality, there is still room for improvement. Its most notable weakness is its lack of support for message threading. It doesn't provide a way to group related messages into conversations.
Conclusion
The general mediocrity of Google's first-party Android applications continues to disappoint us. It's good that the third-party developer community has stepped up to address the platform's limitations with better software and a more responsive approach to filling in feature gaps.
Even though K-9 is a derivative of Google's mail client and is developed under the same license, Google is unfortunately not open to merging large patches or complex enhancements from K-9.
It's understandable for Google to have a more rigorous code review process and want new functionality submitted in more manageable bite-sized chunks. It's also easy to understand why some of the more gearhead-centric features in K-9 aren't desirable for inclusion in the standard e-mail client. Those issues aside, there are some critically important bits of underlying mail management functionality in K-9 that are desperately needed upstream.
There is no conceivable reason to explain why Google isn't adopting that code from K-9 to make the Android mail experience better. It's disappointing that Google's lack of transparent and inclusive development has forced the community to collaborate around a fork while the upstream client has languished and practically become abandonware.
The latest stable version of K-9 is available for installation from the Android Market. You can also download installable packages of more recent builds from the K-9 download page. The K-9 source code can be obtained from a public subversion repository hosted on Google Code.Disappointment struck several players who purchased Horizon: Zero Dawn this week. According to numerous reports, the open-world action role-playing game is crashing on PlayStation 4 during the opening cinematic scene.
Earlier today, Guerrilla Games confirmed that it is aware of the issue and is currently looking into the matter for a quick solution.
“We’re currently looking at an issue some players have reported while viewing Horizon’s opening cinematic,” the developer wrote on Twitter. “Apologies for the inconvenience!”
As things stand, it is impossible for affected players to progress any further in the game. All they can do is wait it out until Guerrilla Games has identified the root cause of the crashing issue. A hot-fix should arrive soon after that.
There is no way of knowing how widespread the issue is. The problem appears to be pretty random, with many experiencing crashes while others playing to their heart’s content.
The opening cinematic of Horizon: Zero Dawn sets up the story for the post-apocalyptic setting, and is a beautiful grand sequence that shouldn’t be skipped.
Horizon: Zero Dawn released earlier this week to stellar reviews from every major publisher. The game has been marked as a triumphant beginning for both the developer and publisher. The action role-playing experience is accentuated by a compelling open-world filled with mysteries and stories waiting to be unlocked.
According to SuperData Research firm, Sony would be looking to shift at least six million units by the end of the year. In addition, analysts believe that Horizon could be able to reach eight million units sold in its lifetime.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is now available exclusively on PlayStation 4.Print
Actions Print Author Topic: Ebon Jaguar & Executioner Reviews (Read 7044 times) GMan129 Writer
Veteran
Extra info Extra info Ebon Jaguar & Executioner Reviews
The Ebon Jaguar and Executioner were released the other day, and I've spent most of my MWO time just playing all the different builds I could think of and having a ton of fun. I'm going to start with the Ebon Jaguar though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgPKHhpDuzE
The Ebon Jaguar (or Cauldron Born as some of us are more used to calling it) is my new favorite mech. Its combination of better-than-average hitboxes, high (kind of too high) mounts, and pretty crazy pod space & hardpoints make it a seriously awesome mech, and nothing like the Awesome. My personal favorite build is the one displayed in the above video, with a Gauss Rifle, ER Medium Laser, and 2 Large Pulse Lasers (put in the cERML before the cLPLs in orcLPLs into the higher slots), but there are so many other options (a more-or-less complete list will be in its upcoming Master Guide).
To top it off, despite its offensive and defensive advantages, it seems like PGI was able to balance it using its model pretty effectively. Side-peeking is risky due to how much the arms stick out (the enemy will always have a pretty big warning before you expose your torsos), and for hill-peeking you have the same problem if you use the high mounts, due to just how high above the cockpit they are. This puts just enough of a challenge into using it correctly to make it satisfying to play well, and it really feels unique.
I'm going to also use a rating system for these reviews, based on its offensive and defensive abilities, as well as its mobility and generally how fun it is.
Off: 8/10
Def: 7/10
Mob: 6/10
Fun: 9/10
OVR: 7.5/10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u27k44Fnwk0
The Executioner is another unique mech (at least for now), particularly due to it being the first mech with MASC in the game. It's already become a favorite of a few of my teammates - the nature of MASC is such that making optimal use of it is challenging enough to keep the mech interesting. It also has a few other notable things about it, including a natural inclination to run old school laser vomit, and 4 locked jumpjets that eat up all your available tonnage. As such, I've been running the above pure laser vomit build.
The Executioner's severe lack of damage when compared to its 5-ton heavier cousin, the Dire Wolf, means that it is better compared to the Timber Wolf. For the most part, it is a favorable comparison, as they each perform similarly. Aside from the low weapon mounts on the arms, the Executioner feels very much like a plus-sized Timber Wolf, but despite the extra armor it's roughly as durable due to the worse hitboxes, less maneuverability, and, well, it's really big.
Off: 8/10
Def: 8/10
Mob: 6/10
Fun: 7/10
OVR: 7.25/10 Heya folks, GMan129 from Steel Jaguar and MetaMechs here. I've partnered up with NoGutsNoGalaxy to write some articles, an arrangement that I'm confident will benefit both sites. To preface this, I want to say that if you're worried about this taking content away from MetaMechs, don't - if anything this will result in more MetaMechs content. Right now the plan is to release an article on NGNG every week or two (probably on Fridays), including things like this review format and just other stuff I want to write about. So, let's get on with it.The Ebon Jaguar and Executioner were released the other day, and I've spent most of my MWO time just playing all the different builds I could think of and having a ton of fun. I'm going to start with the Ebon Jaguar though.The Ebon Jaguar (or Cauldron Born as some of us are more used to calling it) is my new favorite mech. Its combination of better-than-average hitboxes, high (kind of too high) mounts, and pretty crazy pod space & hardpoints make it a seriously awesome mech, and nothing like the Awesome. My personal favorite build is the one displayed in the above video, with a Gauss Rifle, ER Medium Laser, and 2 Large Pulse Lasers (put in the cERML before the cLPLs in orcLPLs into the higher slots), but there are so many other options (a more-or-less complete list will be in its upcoming Master Guide).To top it off, despite its offensive and defensive advantages, it seems like PGI was able to balance it using its model pretty effectively. Side-peeking is risky due to how much the arms stick out (the enemy will always have a pretty big warning before you expose your torsos), and for hill-peeking you have the same problem if you use the high mounts, due to just how high above the cockpit they are. This puts just enough of a challenge into using it correctly to make it satisfying to play well, and it really feels unique.I'm going to also use a rating system for these reviews, based on its offensive and defensive abilities, as well as its mobility and generally how fun it is.Off: 8/10Def: 7/10Mob: 6/10Fun: 9/10OVR: 7.5/10The Executioner is another unique mech (at least for now), particularly due to it being the first mech with MASC in the game. It's already become a favorite of a few of my teammates - the nature of MASC is such that making optimal use of it is challenging enough to keep the mech interesting. It also has a few other notable things about it, including a natural inclination to run old school laser vomit, and 4 locked jumpjets that eat up all your available tonnage. As such, I've been running the above pure laser vomit build.The Executioner's severe lack of damage when compared to its 5-ton heavier cousin, the Dire Wolf, means that it is better compared to the Timber Wolf. For the most part, it is a favorable comparison, as they each perform similarly. Aside from the low weapon mounts on the arms, the Executioner feels very much like a plus-sized Timber Wolf, but despite the extra armor it's roughly as durable due to the worse hitboxes, less maneuverability, and, well, it's really big.Off: 8/10Def: 8/10Mob: 6/10Fun: 7/10OVR: 7.25/10 « Last Edit: 26 Jun 15 by GMan129 » SeanLang NGNG Founder
Legendary
Extra info Extra info Re: Ebon Jaguar & Executioner Reviews Great write up! So question, do you think if JJ's had overall better mobility, would that impact your score on this mech? Marduk Veteran
Extra info Extra info Re: Ebon Jaguar & Executioner Reviews If i can answer aswell i would say yes for sure because in its current state the JJs are just wasted tonnage that cannot be removed, which is something you simply cannot afford on EXE.
If they were improved they would have atleast some usage(maybe you would be finaly able to jumpjet to the Citadel at River City...) Print
Actions Print
No Guts No Galaxy
NGNG News and Discussions
NGNG News
Articles
Ebon Jaguar & Executioner ReviewsPeople moving to Western Pennsylvania have made some atypical choices about where to settle down.
Much of the migration growth has been just outside the Pittsburgh metro area, mainly in Indiana and Greene counties, instead of the historic pattern of people flocking to dense urban areas, according to Census Bureau figures.
“Greene has been negative for many years,” said Jonathan Johnson, senior policy analyst for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.
Mapped out, the migration shifts defy the typical two-tone pattern of people relocating from west to east in the state, he said.
“We don’t have a solid one color on one side of the state or the other side of the state. It’s more of a checkerboard” with counties gaining or losing population scattered across the state, Johnston said.
The census figures don’t detail what’s driving the changes, but jobs, transportation and lifestyles are good bets.
From 2009 through 2013, Indiana County had a net gain from migration that nearly matched Allegheny County’s and exceeded those of all the other western counties.
“I knew that we were experiencing growth,” said Jerry Richardson, assistant director of the Indiana County Office of Planning and Development. He was surprised by the magnitude.
The Marcellus shale industry drove the county’s housing gains, but that “has tapered off significantly in the latter part of 2014 and 2015,” as gas prices fell and energy companies put plans on hold, he said.
Better roads are another factor.
“The improvements along Route 22 have made it much easier to get to Indiana County,” Richardson said.
Nearly 5,000 Indiana County residents work in the seven-county Pittsburgh metro area, making it the second-largest “exurban” source of workers. Lawrence County is first with about 8,100 commuters.
Coined in the 1950s, “exurban” is used to describe communities that are just outside suburban areas of major cities.
“We have eight buses that run into Pittsburgh every morning, and they’re full,” said Robert McCracken, executive vice president of the Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce.
Some of the commuters were living in Lawrence County when they found jobs in the metro area; others are two-income families in which one spouse works in Youngstown, Ohio, or elsewhere and the other works in Pittsburgh, he said.
The area has a low cost of living and easy access to Pittsburgh’s cultural scene and professional sports venues, he said.
The census migration figures show the Pittsburgh metro area had a slight gain in population from people who moved here from other metro areas but a somewhat larger loss in population to non-metro areas.
Both patterns are dwarfed by the nearly 8,000 people who relocated from other countries.
That Pittsburgh would experiencing most of its gain from international immigration wasn’t surprising, but losing people to non-metro areas was surprising, said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who studies migration patterns.
“The general trend in the country is not people moving to smaller places,” he said.
The most likely explanation for the larger trend is that people are moving to exurban areas, he said.
Drawing workers from the surrounding counties is a good thing for the Pittsburgh metro area, because one of the main obstacles to its growth is its aging workforce, said Gus Faucher, senior economist for PNC Financial Services Group.
“Its biggest long-run challenge is having enough workers,” he said.
PNC’s forecast for the Pittsburgh market is slow but steady growth through 2016. While that growth is expected to follow national trends, it will be slower because of the region’s older population and weaker population growth, Faucher said.
To overcome that, the region needs to attract more people, he said.
If the economic ties keep growing between the metro area and the surrounding counties, “it’s entirely plausible that, in the future, they’ll be part of the metro area.”
Brian Bowling is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-325-4301 or bbowling @ tribweb.com.Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans Wednesday that the U.S. government’s surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than it does on any other country.
“Do you think it’s right that the NSA is collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia?” Snowden said. “Because that”s what our systems do. We watch our own people more closely than we watch any other population in the world.”
Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.
“U.S. government policy directed by the NSA … is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications,” Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.
The former NSA contractor was awarded the Ridenhour Award for Truth-Telling along with Laura Poitras, one of his chief confidants. The 30-year-old fugitive remains in Russia, where he fled and earned temporary asylum following his disclosures of classified information about the NSA’s bulk data-collection practices.
Poitras also beamed into the ceremony from Berlin. The documentary filmmaker is believed to be one of only two people — along with journalist Glenn Greenwald — to possess the entire cache of Snowden files.
The two collectively lambasted both the Senate and House Intelligence committees for what they said was a failure of sufficient oversight of the intelligence community. Snowden also said he believed the Judiciary committees were more likely to enact substantive surveillance reform, and noted his support of the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would end much of the government’s bulk collection of phone “metadata.”
Snowden, who has also been nominated this year for the Nobel Peace Prize, was a natural choice for the Ridenhour award, which has honored in recent years journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas and Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who also exposed secrets kept by the spy agency. The left-leaning group is named named after Ron Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who helped expose the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai in 1968.
Note: This story has been updated to reflect the full context of Snowden’s comments on spying, as reflected in an audio recording providing by Mother Jones.ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
The six advertising hoardings at the landmark Piccadilly Lights are to become one giant screen, which could be sold for £30 million a year.
London’s equivalent to New York’s Times Square launched more than a century ago. Since then it has become one of the world’s most exclusive advertising hoardings.
Now Land Securities, which has owned the Piccadilly Circus site since the Seventies, has won planning consent to replace the six existing screens with one huge state-of-the-art interactive screen, which analysts expect to attract the world’s biggest brands.
More than 70 million pedestrians walk by the Piccadilly Lights each year, with another 30 million driving past.
With each of the six screens worth more than £4 million a year, advertising analysts estimate the chance to dominate the site completely could be worth as much as £30 million.
The changing face of Piccadilly Circus - In pictures 25 show all The changing face of Piccadilly Circus - In pictures 1/25 1899: Horse-drawn traffic and passers-by outside The London Pavilion at Piccadilly Circus. The statue of Eros is on the left General Photographic Agency/Getty Images 2/25 A view of Piccadilly Circus in London, England. Circa 1900s Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images 3/25 April 1918: Omnibuses at Piccadilly Circus. The London Pavilion is in the background Topical Press Agency/Getty Images 4/25 Piccadilly Circus pictured In 1926 when the surrounding streets were being almost completely reconstructed. Picture Shows Swan And Edggar's Department Store New Building and the New County Fire Office Rex 5/25 1932: Lit up advertisements in Piccadilly Circus, London General Photographic Agency/Getty Images 6/25 1933, Two ladies sell flowers in Piccadilly Circus Popperfoto/Getty Images 7/25 circa 1935: Nightime and two men chat on the street corner with Piccadilly Circus in the background Hulton Archive/Getty Images 8/25 Piccadilly Circus at night on New Years Day 1937 Rex 9/25 Colour photograph of Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus, London. Dated 1940 Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images 10/25 Piccadilly Circus with the boarded-up Statue Of Eros on VE Day, May 1945 bringing traffic to a standstill Rex 11/25 Photograph of London Piccadilly Circus by Chalmers Butterfield. Dated 1949 Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images 12/25 Heavy smog in Piccadilly Circus, London, 6th December 1952 Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 13/25 May 1953: A view of Piccadilly Circus, with decorations for the Coronation. The statue of Eros is enclosed in a birdcage structure for the celebrations Hulton Archive/Getty Images 14/25 circa 1955: An entrance to Piccadilly underground station at night. In the background are the neon advertising signs of Piccadilly Circus Ernst Haas/Ernst Haas/Getty Images 15/25 Piccadilly Circus at night in the 1950's Rex 16/25 1956: Traffic circling the statue of Eros on the central roundabout at Piccadilly Circus, London Harry Kerr/BIPs/Getty Images 17/25 Piccadilly Circus by night during the Black Out in 1959 Rex 18/25 People gather for a night on the town at Piccadilly Circus, London in 1969 Rex 19/25 Piccadilly Circus in 1971 Rex 20/25 Neon signs in Piccadilly Circus in 1972 Rex 21/25 Piccadilly Circus in 1983 Rex 22/25 Aerial view Of Piccadilly Circus in 1990 23/25 Traffic moves through Piccadilly Circus as the landmark advertising lights are turned off during the Capital 95.8 Light Out London Campaign on June 21, 2007 in London Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images 24/25 Traffic moves through Piccadilly Circus as the landmark advertising lights are turned back on after the Capital 95.8 Light Out London Campaign on June 21, 2007 in London Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images 25/25 Long exposure of pedestrians and traffic outside Piccadilly Circus Tube Station in 2014 Rex 1/25 1899: Horse-drawn traffic and passers-by outside The London Pavilion at Piccadilly Circus. The statue of Eros is on the left General Photographic Agency/Getty Images 2/25 A view of Piccadilly Circus in London, England. Circa 1900s Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images 3/25 April 1918: Omnibuses at Piccadilly Circus. The London Pavilion is in the background Topical Press Agency/Getty Images 4/25 Piccadilly Circus pictured In 1926 when the surrounding streets were being almost completely reconstructed. Picture Shows Swan And Edggar's Department Store New Building and the New County Fire Office Rex 5/25 1932: Lit up advertisements in Piccadilly Circus, London General Photographic Agency/Getty Images 6/25 1933, Two ladies sell flowers in Piccadilly Circus Popperfoto/Getty Images 7/25 circa 1935: Nightime and two men chat on the street corner with Piccadilly Circus in the background Hulton Archive/Getty Images 8/25 Piccadilly Circus at night on New Years Day 1937 Rex 9/25 Colour photograph of Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus, London. Dated 1940 Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images 10/25 Piccadilly Circus with the boarded-up Statue Of Eros on VE Day, May 1945 bringing traffic to a standstill Rex 11/25 Photograph of London Piccadilly Circus by Chalmers Butterfield. Dated 1949 Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images 12/25 Heavy smog in Piccadilly Circus, London, 6th December 1952 Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 13/25 May 1953: A view of Piccadilly Circus, with decorations for the Coronation. The statue of Eros is enclosed in a birdcage structure for the celebrations Hulton Archive/Getty Images 14/25 circa 1955: An entrance to Piccadilly underground station at night. In the background are the neon advertising signs of Piccadilly Circus Ernst Haas/Ernst Haas/Getty Images 15/25 Piccadilly Circus at night in the 1950's Rex 16/25 1956: Traffic circling the statue of Eros on the central roundabout at Piccadilly Circus, London Harry Kerr/BIPs/Getty Images 17/25 Piccadilly Circus by night during the Black Out in 1959 Rex 18/25 People gather for a night on the town at Piccadilly Circus, London in 1969 Rex 19/25 Piccadilly Circus in 1971 Rex 20/25 Neon signs in Piccadilly Circus in 1972 Rex 21/25 Piccadilly Circus in 1983 Rex 22/25 Aerial view Of Piccadilly Circus in 1990 23/25 Traffic moves through Piccadilly Circus as the landmark advertising lights are turned off during the Capital 95.8 Light Out London Campaign on June 21, 2007 in London Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images 24/25 Traffic moves through Piccadilly Circus as the landmark advertising lights are turned back on after the Capital 95.8 Light Out London Campaign on June 21, 2007 in London Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images 25/25 Long exposure of pedestrians and traffic outside Piccadilly Circus Tube Station in 2014 Rex
Lorna Tilbian, media analyst at Numis Securities, said: “A mega-size hoarding is worth much more than six hoardings. You can safely say this is the billboard equivalent of the Super Bowl — prime ad space in the busiest bit of the world’s leading global city.”
Land Securities said: “We are working with experts in new technologies and out-of-home marketing to completely reposition this iconic site, giving advertisers innovative ways to interact with the two million weekly passers-by.”
But analysts said the move to one big screen could take time, as existing clients such as Coca Cola — which has advertised there since 1955 — could have long-term leases.
Water company Perrier was the first electrical advert on the site, in 1908. Since then the lights have shone almost continuously, turned off only for the Second World War, for the funerals of Sir Winston Churchill and Princess Diana and more recently to mark Earth Hour for the WWF.
In 2002, Yoko Ono paid more than £100,000 for her husband John Lennon’s quote “Imagine all the people living life in peace” to be illuminated for three months.A study following more than 1,800 children from ages 6 months to nearly 8 years old found a small but consistent association between increased television viewing and shorter sleep duration.
The report, by investigators at MassGeneral Hospital for Children and the Harvard School of Public Health, is featured in the May issue of Pediatrics.
Participants in the study, children and their mothers, were enrolled in Project Viva, a long-term investigation of the health effects of several factors during pregnancy and after birth. It analyzed information — reported by mothers when the children were around 6 months old and then annually for the next seven years — regarding how much time each day infants were in a room where a television was on, how much time older children watched television a day, whether children ages 4 to 7 slept in a room where a TV was present, and the average daily amount of sleep.
Each additional hour of television viewing was associated with seven fewer minutes of sleep a night, with the effects appearing to be stronger in boys than in girls. Racial and ethnic minority children were much more likely to sleep in a room where a television was present, and among those children, the presence of a bedroom television reduced average sleep by around 30 minutes a night.
The authors noted that the results supported previous short-term studies finding that both television viewing and sleeping in a room with a television decrease total sleep time, which can have negative effects on mental and physical health.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RageAgainstTheLegalSystem
Advertisement:
So you've been caught and punished for robbing a bank, assaulting someone, or driving slow in the fast lane. What do you do? Some quietly accept their punishment. Some actively work to rehabilitate themselves and make up for their wrongdoing during and after paying their debt to society.
Others decide to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the justice system for punishing them.
Usually, the criminal doesn't see whatever they did as being wrong; they see the police, the prosecution, the judge, and so on as being responsible for their predicament. The revenge usually includes (but is not limited to) the police who arrested them, the prosecutor who prosecuted them, the witnesses who testified against them, the jurors who convicted them, the prison guards who incarcerated them, and the judge who sentenced them. What's worse is that they may also go after the families of the above.
Advertisement:
A frequent variation is when a criminal is acquitted or released from prison early to kill again and a relative or lover of the victim goes on a rampage against the judges, lawyers, police officers, etc. as well as the criminal.
This is Truth in Television. This might be justifiable if the authorities are corrupt or outright evil, or if they serve a tyrannical and oppressive regime. However, invoking this trope is considered a Moral Event Horizon in the eyes of the law and society. Any crimes against officials of the legal system are punished harshly and penalties can go Up to Eleven if they were motivated by revenge.
Can overlap with Revenge by Proxy and Revenge Before Reason. Often overlaps with Cop Killer. Can be a result of Miscarriage of Justice or Acquitted Too Late (if a loved one of one who was wrongly convicted does this).
Advertisement:
Examples
open/close all folders
Advertising
A DirecTV advertisement claims that having cable TV will eventually lead to your house blowing up (in their bizarre Rube Goldberg-esque logic: you're a lawyer, not having good reception will cause you to go to work irritated, you'll lose your case, the guy that goes to prison will dwell on getting even with you when he gets out...).
Comic Books
Batman In one early appearance, The Joker kills a police chief who had arrested him once in the past. In a 1960s story, Batman's enemy the Mad Hatter commits crimes based on the occupations of the jurors who convicted him as a rather oblique form of revenge. The story was adapted into an episode of the live-action television series as well.
In the final arc of Top 10, Joe Pi invokes this trope to subtly manipulate the Superman-analogue Atoman into committing suicide by telling him that when he's arrested, depowered, and jailed, he'll be at the mercy of the various supervillains he defeated and those who really don't like child molesters.
by telling him that when he's arrested, depowered, and jailed, he'll be at the mercy of the various supervillains he defeated. In Watchmen, a number of jailed criminals try to avenge themselves on the recently-imprisoned Rorschach. It doesn't go well.
Flash: The Weather Wizard, already a three-time convict when awesome weather powers dropped into his lap, spent his first appearance going after police officers who had arrested him.
The Trial of The Punisher features Frank turning himself in for murdering a District Attorney (as in, he shows up with the corpse in a duffel bag and gives his name to the desk sergeant). The trial happens over several days before he gives the judge and attorneys a tape that is to be watched in his presence to explain the act. It turns out the DA was corrupt and taking bribes, including getting a mob boss into the Witness Protection Program. Then Frank breaks free and escapes with a gun, and it turns out the whole thing was a complicated plan on Frank's part to get inside the courtroom where said mob boss was now a court judge and shoot him.
Film
Literature
The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic example. Edmond Dantès is framed by his colleagues Danglars (who is jealous of his rapid rise to captain), Fernand (his fiancé's cousin and a rival for her affections), and the corrupt prosecutor Villefort (who thought Dantes could have known that Villefort's father was a staunch Bonapartist, which would ruin his son's career). After six years of being unjustly imprisoned in the Château d'If, he befriends the Abbé Faria ("The Mad Priest"), who gives him hope again, and over the course of eight more years, teaches the younger man an extensive education in language, culture, and science, along with the reasons why the three conspirators had reason to hate him. Before he dies of old age, Faria gives Dantès a map to a hidden horde of treasure; Dantès is able to escape by taking the place of his body, finds the treasure, makes a new life for himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, and spends the second half of the book plotting revenge against the three conspirators, ultimately succeeding. He exposes horrific crimes committed by Fernand and Villefort, driving the former to suicide and the latter mad and committed to an asylum. Danglars is bankrupted and his reputation is ruined by Dantès' manipulation of the markets, and tries to embezzle from a hospital, but when he finally repents to Dantès and returns the money, he's forgiven but left with only 50,000 francs.
In Me and My Little Brain, a gang of outlaws whom John Fitzgerald's father helped put away tries to take revenge on the Fitzgeralds and the judge.
In Banco, this is what drove Papillon through fourteen years of suffering in a Penal Colony: the idea that one day he'd get his revenge on the French justice system. The novel details his adventures trying to bankroll his Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the prosecutor, judge, police, and jury who wrongly sent him to French Guiana, despite many temptations to stay honest and find happiness in South America.
The ending of White Fang has a criminal escape from prison to murder the judge who sent him there. His story is quite tragic: he was actually innocent of the crime he was sentenced for, but the judge had no idea it was a setup, and it ends with the criminal's throat torn out by a wolfdog and the corrupt wardens never being punished.
The vigilantes in Victoria reach this point when a corrupt federal judge cracks down on their hitherto successful efforts to smoke out the drug dealers and gangsters infesting their neighborhoods. Their revolution begins by tarring and feathering the malefactor.
Live Action TV
Music
Implied in the "R.I.P." Remix by Young Jeezy (feat. YG, Kendrick Lamar & Chris Brown). Precisely YG's verse: R.I.P I wanna kill the judge Tryna lock the homie up, they don't feel the thug
Radio
In one of the Green Hornet radio episodes, the crook du jour was targeting Britt Reid because he blamed Reid for his conviction.
Visual Novels
Western AnimationManufacturing in the USA is one topic which needs a little thought.
There is little argument that manufacturing activity peaked just before the beginning of the Great Recession - and it seems it may not have recovered to this pre-recession level.
Some analysts talk about manufacturing, but use the Federal Reserve's Industrial Production index which includes mining and utilities. The above graph uses the manufacturing component only of industrial production (red line in above graph) - and it shows nearly a full recovery from the Great Recession. The problem using this metric is the US Census also produces manufacturing data - and it shows manufacturing remains further below the pre-recession peak (blue line in above graph which is an inflation adjusted index value).
And in any event, manufacturing employment is below World War Two levels and below most of the immediate post-war levels, as well. Remember the U.S. population was much less then.
Note that the Fed's Industrial Production and the US Census use different pulse points which could explain deviations over short periods of time.
Let us say for now that the US Census data is correct (even though my guess is that neither is correct). What does this mean? Are Americans buying more foreign products?
Yep! Americans are currently importing more than they did before the Great Recession. This is confirmed by the data from the BEA showing consumer's consumption of goods continues to rise.
But the real question is - does it all matter? It does matter if you think that GDP actually measures the health of the economy. Perhaps 60 years ago - it did - when the basis of jobs and income was making or building things. In 2015 - less may be better for a variety of reasons - or not.
What does matter is that for a variety of reasons, every country must be able to produce a proportion of every commodity, component or manufactured item it needs. It does not need to provide 100% of its needs. What does matter is that an economy needs to provide jobs to its citizens. I guess that the 5.1% headline unemployment rate shows the USA economy is providing jobs.
..... and if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Other Economic News this Week:
The Econintersect Economic Index for August |
food, the other through a wound.
In 2015, Galveston’s Health Department reported eight infections, down from a confirmed nine cases in both 2014 and 2013.
Parrott’s loved ones said his infection has already cost him his career, where he works in security.
Now, the family worries what will happen next.
“I’m wanting to know if he’s going to live,” Dailey said.The district court and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit dismissed the suit, but the full appeals court reinstated it and the town appealed. The Supreme Court's precedents made the appellate ruling a challenging one for Ms. Gonzales and her lawyers to sustain.
A 1989 decision, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, held that the failure by county social service workers to protect a young boy from a beating by his father did not breach any substantive constitutional duty. By framing her case as one of process rather than substance, Ms. Gonzales and her lawyers hoped to find a way around that precedent.
But the majority on Monday saw little difference between the earlier case and this one, Castle Rock v. Gonzales, No. 04-278. Ms. Gonzales did not have a "property interest" in enforcing the restraining order, Justice Scalia said, adding that "such a right would not, of course, resemble any traditional conception of property."
Although the protective order did mandate an arrest, or an arrest warrant, in so many words, Justice Scalia said, "a well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes."
But Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, in their dissenting opinion, said "it is clear that the elimination of police discretion was integral to Colorado and its fellow states' solution to the problem of underenforcement in domestic violence cases." Colorado was one of two dozen states that, in response to increased attention to the problem of domestic violence during the 1990's, made arrest mandatory for violating protective orders.
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.
"The court fails to come to terms with the wave of domestic violence statutes that provides the crucial context for understanding Colorado's law," the dissenting justices said.
Organizations concerned with domestic violence had watched the case closely and expressed disappointment at the outcome. Fernando LaGuarda, counsel for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement that Congress and the states should now act to give greater protection.
In another ruling on Monday, the court rebuked the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, for having reopened a death penalty appeal, on the basis of newly discovered evidence, after the ruling had become final.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
The 5-to-4 decision, Bell v. Thompson, No. 04-514, came in response to an appeal by the State of Tennessee after the Sixth Circuit removed a convicted murderer, Gregory Thompson, from the state's death row.
After his conviction and the failure of his appeals in state court, Mr. Thompson, with new lawyers, had gone to federal district court seeking a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that his initial lawyers had been constitutionally inadequate. The new lawyers obtained a consultation with a psychologist, who diagnosed Mr. Thompson as schizophrenic.
But the psychologist's report was not included in the file of the habeas corpus petition in district court, which denied the petition. It was not until the Sixth Circuit and then the Supreme Court had also denied his petition, making the case final, that the Sixth Circuit reopened the case, finding that the report was crucial evidence that should have been considered.
In overturning that ruling in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the majority said the appeals court had abused its discretion in an "extraordinary departure from standard appellate procedures." Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor joined the opinion.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the majority had relied on rules to the exclusion of justice. Judges need a "degree of discretion, thereby providing oil for the rule-based gears," he said. Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and David H. Souter joined the dissent.Here’s some interesting news for Dragon Ball Z fans who miss the older, 2D fighting games from the franchise’s past. The latest issue of V Jump has revealed that a new entry in the Dragon Ball Z: Butouden series is coming to Nintendo 3DS later this year.
Developed by none other than Arc System Works, who previously worked on the Dragon Ball Z Supersonic Warriors series for the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS, Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butouden is the latest installment in a long-running series that originated on the Super Nintendo. The most recent entry, Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butouden, landed on DS in 2011.
The game will feature over 100 different characters from the series in both one-on-one and team-style battles. The latter will feature a new mechanic called the Z Assist that will allow certain characters, such as Bulma and Chi Chi, to provide support for the main cast members.
Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butouden will launch on the Nintendo 3DS in Japan sometime this summer. No word yet on whether or not it’ll make western shores.
Source: V Jump via Anime News Network, IGNMay 8, 2014
The Tennessee basketball program's 2014 signing class grew to three players Thursday, as head coach Donnie Tyndall announced that Detrick Mostella (pronounced: DEE-trick moss-TELL-uh) has signed a National Letter of Intent to attend UT.
A 6-3, 170-point combo guard from Decatur, Ala., Mostella plans to enroll this summer. He joins previous UT spring signees Jabari McGhee and Kevin Punter.
"Detrick is an explosive athlete who can make plays off the dribble and create opportunities for his teammates," Tyndall said. "He is another versatile, long, athletic perimeter player who fits perfectly in our system and style of play. We're very excited to add this high character young man to our Tennessee basketball family."
Considered a four-star prospect by nearly every major recruiting service, Mostella was rated by 247Sports as the nation's No. 43 overall prospect in the class of 2013.
Mostella, who will be a freshman next season with four years of eligibility, initially signed with Oklahoma State in November 2012 prior to his senior season.
He transferred to La Lumiere School in La Porte, Ind., for his final year of high school, and he graduated from La Lumiere in 2013.
Mostella eventually was granted a release from his Oklahoma State NLI, and he spent the 2013-14 academic year at Notre Dame Preparatory School in Fitchburg, Mass, where he was coached by Ryan Hurd. Recently departed Vols point guard Antonio Barton, who completed his eligibility last season, also is a product of Notre Dame Prep.
From his freshman through junior year, Mostella attended Austin High School in Decatur, Ala. As a junior, he earned All-State honors from the Alabama Sports Writers Association after averaging 16.4 points per game and leading Austin to the Class 6A Northwest Regional final.
As a sophomore at AHS, Mostella averaged 18.0 points and 4.0 rebounds per game and was named The Decatur Daily's 4A-6A Player of the Year.New Orleans Saints legend, Team Gleason founder, lifelong Chicago Cubs fan and all-around badass Steve Gleason was, unsurprisingly, watching Game 7 of the World Series last night.
The instant classic matchup between the Cubs (last World Series victory: 1908) and Cleveland Indians (last World Series victory: 1948) was a nailbiter for both sides from start to finish. While the Cubs maintained a decent lead for much of the game, the team nearly threw it all away in the bottom of the 8th when they gave up three runs in just a few minutes.
It was a tense situation for Cubs fans everywhere, and Gleason’s inspirational sense of humor was exactly what the Twitterverse needed.
I’m so nervous I can’t move.
-SG — Steve Gleason (@TeamGleason) November 3, 2016
As many you of are probably aware, Gleason suffers from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), an incurable neuro-muscular disease that has left him, well, unable to move. The disease hasn’t stopped him from carrying on with his life, inspiring countless others to seize the day, and raising awareness about ALS through his Gleason Initiative Foundation. Fortunately for Gleason and the rest of the Cubs Nation, the team eventually turned last night’s nearly five hour game into a win in extra innings.
Interestingly, the night’s second best tweet may have come from Gleason’s old employer, the New Orleans Saints. The team’s Twitter feed blasted out a very appropriate 2006 commercial for season ticket holders, which finds a Saints fan and a Cubs fan sitting next to each other in a championship waiting room.There exists a common problem for Apple frameworks, technologies and services.
Once upon a time Apple proceeded this way: They worked on frameworks and services internally, made them private, gave them a little time to mature (about one or two releases) and only then made them public. This way they had knowledge how the usage pattern was, what part of the API is good, what is bad, maybe adjust some of the issues even before they made them public. Sounds like a good strategy.
The problem is: that isn't the case anymore. Release cycles spun up from 2-3 Years in prehistoric Mac OS X times to every year, so this kind of quality control basically went out of the window. I'm sure as a concept it is still there in many heads at Apple, but the times where this was common policy are - simply put - gone.
The other issue that this kind of quality control can't cover, is services and frameworks where Apple itself has no internal clients. The biggest example being Game Center.
Game Center is supposed to be this fun and engaging infrastructure to enrich games and provide services like online matchmaking and connectivity. The idea is great, the infrastructure is really necessary, but the actual implementation is so bad almost all developers I know and talked about it dread using it. This has many reasons, some of them will be topic on this blog. But for now I just want to put attention to the one structural reason:
There is no internal client for Game Kit and Game Center at Apple
Apple doesn't make games, and doesn't use Game Center anywhere outside its own Game Center app. Once upon a time they had a poker game in the App Store, which would have been the perfect internal client for it, but they chose to discontinue it and never integrated Game Center or even added Retina graphics before they pulled it.
So the only clients of Game Center are us developers. That means a lot of things:
Roundtrip time : We can only give good feedback once we jumped on the bandwagon. Let's say we are frickin' quick and release shortly after an iOS release, using a new API feature. Even then we need to analyze the problems and take the time to write our bug reports. If you want to do it right and not just blow off steam, that takes a lot of time, and doesn't help us for this iteration of our app anyways because the fixes will come in a later OS version. So many of us don't even bother, but the ones that do might not even submit bug reports in time to hit the next iOS version.
: We can only give good feedback once we jumped on the bandwagon. Let's say we are frickin' quick and release shortly after an iOS release, using a new API feature. Even then we need to analyze the problems and take the time to write our bug reports. If you want to do it right and not just blow off steam, that takes a lot of time, and doesn't help us for this iteration of our app anyways because the fixes will come in a later OS version. So many of us don't even bother, but the ones that do might not even submit bug reports in time to hit the next iOS version. Game Devs are rarely invested deeply in the Platform. The bulk of Game Dev's aren't interested so much in perfect platform integration, more in perfecting their game. And on second thought probably how to make the game as platform independent as possible, to bring it to as many people as possible. So critiquing and wanting to improve the Game Center experience isn't high on the list. They use it, or not.
. The bulk of Game Dev's aren't interested so much in perfect platform integration, more in perfecting their game. And on second thought probably how to make the game as platform independent as possible, to bring it to as many people as possible. So critiquing and wanting to improve the Game Center experience isn't high on the list. They use it, or not. Apple has no testbed for new technologies in that area whatsoever. For example last year they added Turn Based Gaming. You might now think this is a boon for us, as we did our own implementation for this in Carcassonne and initially I was very excited. However, it quickly turned out that this technology is ambitious, and many ideas are interesting, but it is no way finished or working the way it needs to if you want to give a great user experience. They simply had no internal client to point out all these issues beforehand, and now we are stuck with a technology with so severe issues, that even in the next iteration of iOS not all of the major ones are addressed. And they do have clients that jump on the new technology for demos at the WWDC. But the way Apple works this is done about 1-2 weeks before the session. The game dev posing as a client is eager to make things work to be mentioned in a demo, no matter what the problems are. They will give feedback on the problems, but at this time it is too late to change anything meaningful. Also they will be quiet about it, as they want to be part of the keynote, and praise the product there. Even at this point I am afraid to write about this so bluntly, because I'm afraid they might feature us less. With Lost Cities we used Game Center Turn Based, and put a lot of effort to eliviate all the existing quirks the best we could.
So unless Apple is changing this in a major way and starts to include third parties during the creation of new technology they don't use themselves, I think this is what we are stuck with. I dread using Apple technology that isn't up to the standards of the framework or the platform. The bright side: Us working around all the issues and improving the experience gives us a great unique selling point. However, personally I would much rather work on improving our games than to work around system issues.This year is different, and the Cleveland Cavaliers will never repeat the avalanche of 3-point shooting and Kyrie Irving one-on-one brilliance that walloped the Golden State Warriors from jump street in Game 4. But in Cleveland, the Cavs bent some of the trend lines in this series more in their direction, and in ways that might be sustainable in another do-or-die game. 2017 NBA Opening Night On opening night, the Warriors were stunned in Oakland and the Celtics' high hopes took a tumble. • Irving: Hayward injury among worst
• Despite gloom, hopeful signs for C's
• Hobbled CP3 sees Houston rally
• LeBron shakes ankle woes in opener
• Warriors get rings for 2017 title
The Cavs are dangerous. They believe. Golden State has to stamp out that belief tonight.
They slowed the pace a bit in Game 4, and leaned harder on the Warriors with sheer physicality that will take more of a toll the longer this series goes -- provided the officials allow it. Tristan Thompson woke up. And their two transcendent offensive fulcrums are gradually figuring out ways to puncture the Warriors' defense, just as they did over the last four games a year ago. LeBron can solve almost any defense if he sees it enough.
James and Irving have shifted their pick-and-roll attack from Stephen Curry to Golden State's trio of slow-footed centers -- Zaza Pachulia, the utterly hopeless JaVale McGee, and David West. They know the Warriors do not want to switch those behemoths onto Irving or James. Golden State's only alternative is to put two defenders on the ball until the defense can reset itself.
If the Cavs slip the ball through those traps, they ignite the kind of four-on-three passing sequences that fuel their 3-point shooting game. They have several tricks to make those passes easier. Sometimes, their screeners slip away before really setting a pick -- providing an easy passing lane for Irving and James. Richard Jefferson was especially crafty at this when Steve Kerr tried to hide Golden State's centers on him.
Golden State's help behind those plays wasn't as airtight and coordinated as it usually is. The Warriors blew some easy switches they normally make with a wink and a nod. Kevin Durant dialed back his frenzy defending LeBron on the ball. That stuff figures to change as the Warriors try to clinch at home.
Sometimes, Jefferson went the other way and held his picks like an offensive lineman:
The effect is small, but crucial: Jefferson grabs Andre Iguodala's arm, delaying him just enough so that Pachulia has to slide an extra step or two further toward LeBron. That leaves Jefferson more open than he might otherwise be, and that in turn requires more help away from the other Cavs.
Thompson brutalized Golden State defenders with wide, bulldozing picks that triggered the same ripple effects:
In Games 1 and 2, Irving and James were perhaps too patient driving against Pachulia in those situations. They pulled back to observe the lay of the land. That gave Golden State time to recover. They have since started going right at him the instant they sense an opening. That suddenness keeps the defense off-kilter. It can force Pachulia into switches he can't handle.
The obvious solution is for Kerr to play his centers less. The Warriors lost contact in Game 4 late in the first quarter, when a smaller Cleveland lineup with Kevin Love at center toyed over and over with McGee. Kerr even kept Pachulia on the floor during a brief third-quarter stretch in which Cleveland had LeBron at center.
Golden State is plus-21 in 53 minutes with Green at center, and just plus-4 in all other minutes for the series, per NBA.com. A new lineup with Durant at center turned Game 2. The "A" version of the vaunted Death Lineup has logged just 17 minutes in four games, partly due to Draymond Green's foul trouble. Golden State is an unthinkable plus-23 in those 17 minutes.
Kerr has never made any huge rotational adjustments with Golden State ahead in a series. He likes to play a lot of guys, and stick to what has gotten the Warriors this far. Editor's Picks NBA draft 2017: Key dates, news and analysis From prospect projections to the lottery and draft night, ESPN.com has complete coverage of the 2017 NBA draft.
2017 NBA Finals: Schedule, news, analysis and more Golden State has captured the 2017 NBA title. Read about the Finals and relive the Warriors' and Cavaliers' third straight championship collision. 1 Related
Golden State also has a real fear of Thompson's rebounding. The Warriors see how it energizes the Cavs. They want big bodies out there to wall him off. They are probably also worried Green might get into even more severe foul trouble doing that grunt work over extra minutes. We have already seen Kerr use James Michael McAdoo as something of an in-between option -- a center-ish type who can switch a bit on defense. Don't be shocked if we see him again in Game 5.
Kerr should be more daring, even with a (say it with me) 3-1 lead. This isn't 2016. Stephen Curry is healthy, and Harrison Barnes has become Kevin Durant. The Death Lineup is powerful enough offensively to survive some Tristan Thompson swim move offensive rebounds. Ride with it early, just like Mike Brown did during his undefeated stint as interim head coach.
The wild card here is Iguodala's health. He looked springy in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, but logged just 21 minutes in Game 4. He hasn't cracked 30 minutes in any Finals game, though three of them featured garbage time. He surpassed 30 minutes in five of seven Finals games a year ago, and hit at least the 37-minute mark in three.
Going centerless is dicier without Iguodala. The Warriors can slide Shaun Livingston into his spot -- the Coma Lineup -- but Livingston can't hold up as well guarding LeBron. Durant and Green can, but the Warriors might need them to guard Love and Tristan Thompson in some alignments.
Either way, when Golden State downsizes, the Cavs will go back to hunting Curry. He has navigated the pick-and-roll maze better this time around, but LeBron is so damn calculating -- and has discovered some new tactics.
Curry prefers to lunge out at LeBron, stall him, and get the hell out of the locomotive's way -- and back toward his guy (usually JR Smith). Just like Irving, LeBron spent the first two games surveying the scene and waiting out Curry's help.
Now he's lowering his shoulder and driving right into Curry, or squeezing through the corridor Curry's strategy leaves open:
Smith has been mixing up his technique, and darting away early for open triples or rolls to the rim. When Curry tries to switch his way out of a pick-and-roll, James just calls Curry's new mark up for a screen, even if it means he has to sift through five bodies to make a play.
The Cavs also found some funky ways to confuse the Warriors and punish Curry at the same time. As Curry's man -- Iman Shumpert below -- approached to screen for Irving, James nailed Curry with a separate pick.
LeBron's pick makes Iguodala think: "I usually switch, but if I do that, that means Steph is stuck on LeBron. But if I don't switch, Steph is gonna have trouble catching up to the play. Should I switch? Stay home?" That kind of hesitation is fatal against Cleveland's offense.
The Cavs have found other methods to spring Irving, including plays on which he starts off the ball, races around one pick to get some separation, and flies into a dribble handoff with a head of steam. He has toasted Klay Thompson a few times by faking toward a pick, and then veering away from it.
The Cavs are learning on offense. To contain them, the Warriors may need to tweak their rotation. They definitely need to bring their best, hyper-alert game.
Cleveland isn't comfortable on the other end. No team is against the Warriors. But the Cavs know what they want to do, and executed it decently enough in two home games. They know Golden State will put Love through the pick-and-roll ringer. Love has slid his feet well, and the help defenders behind him have left the right guys open.
Green took more shots than both Curry and Klay Thompson in Game 4, including several of those wild driving floaters that always seem to miss. That is a win for Cleveland.
As Jeff Van Gundy likes to say, if Green and Iguodala hit their 3s, you lose. They are 8-of-28 combined so far. If they shoot well in Game 5, the series probably ends.
If they are going to derail the offense to poke at Love in a pick-and-roll, they should preface it with some other action -- put some obstacle in his way. Hit Love with a screen in the paint as he prepares for the real thing up high.
These double screens for Curry, with Love's guy as the final screener, have been devastating:
That alignment is very much intentional. Golden State knows the Cavs are fine switching Tristan Thompson onto Curry. That switch is harder to pull when Thompson's guy is only the first screener in line. This play has generated better switches -- Love on Curry -- and turned Thompson around. Golden State hasn't used it enough.
The Warriors have actually scored more efficiently when they put players other than Love in the pick-and-roll, per SportVU data reviewed by ESPN.com. Going that route often leaves Love on the back line. He might be worse there than he is scrambling at the point of attack, though he has worked his tail off to challenge shots and deflect passes down low. Turns out, he can play against these Warriors.
Manipulating the floor so Love is the last line of defense is harder than it sounds. Cleveland will switch a lot of other pick-and-rolls, barricading the path toward Love's ground-bound defense. But there is one other combination the Cavs really, really don't want to switch. This one:
Oh, baby. That is spicy. That is mean. The Warriors put their two best players in a pick-and-roll, and clear that side of the floor so there is no defender in traditional help position.
The bet here is that we see more of this kind of thing in Game 5 -- more mismatch basketball, more pick-and-roll, more Curry pindowns for Durant, and less of Golden State's beautiful game. The Cavs can hang with all that motion if they are engaged, and if the referees allow for some grabbing and holding. They cannot hang with Irving guarding Durant on a switch. Hell, maybe the Warriors will get really crazy and let Curry attack one-on-one a bit.
Bottom line: If Golden State plays well, it should win the title at home tonight. But a "B" game may not do it.
A few other things to watch in what could be the last game of the season:
• If the Cavs are going to abandon Green away from the ball, Golden State might be able to pry Klay Thompson open by running him off pindown picks from Green. If Green's guy is patrolling the action elsewhere, there will be no one around to contest Thompson catch-and-shoot jumpers.
• The Cavs have gotten away with a lot of Kyle Korver guarding Klay Thompson. That should be exploitable for the Warriors.
• Jefferson's minutes were huge in Game 4. Cleveland is minus-27 for the series with both Love and Tristan Thompson on the floor. There is a ton of noise in that number, obviously. The sample is tiny, and Thompson was awful in the first three games. But Tyronn Lue appears not to trust that double-big group to play against some of Golden State's super-small lineups, which means someone -- Jefferson, Shumpert, Korver, Deron Williams -- has to step up in place of one big man as sort of an extra starter.
• Durant's gang rebounding is so hit-or-miss. He has a bad habit of just standing around 20 feet from the rim, even when Tristan Thompson is sprinting unchallenged down the lane for an offensive board.
Durant is skinny, and doesn't love contact. This is a closeout game in the NBA Finals. A few rebounds could tip the balance.
• It can be hard for Golden State to play any of its centers with both Livingston and Iguodala. The spacing gets so cramped.
• Adjustment alert: James guarded Green more against Golden State's small-ball lineups, even if it meant the Cleveland big -- Love or Thompson -- had to defend Livingston, with Jefferson taking Durant. The Cavs like James on Green.
• The pace pendulum is so fascinating. The pace got away from the Cavaliers in the first two games. They do need to run when they sense a real chance, though. Slowing to a crawl also nudges them up against the shot clock, without time to exploit mismatches that materialize late in possessions. They are left to force tough shots.
• The lineup without Durant and Curry that starts the second and fourth quarters has been a net-negative all playoffs, per NBA.com. Kerr has gradually sliced its minutes, but the Warriors can't eliminate it without rejiggering the minutes pattern for one of the stars in a way the players may not love. It might be time to do that, though if I had to bet, I'd wager we see it again with a quicker hook if need be.LAFAYETTE, Colo. - The USA Rugby AIG Men's Collegiate All-Americans will embark on a competitive two-week trip to the southern hemisphere this summer as part of the 2016 USA Rugby AIG Men's Collegiate All-American Tour to Queensland sponsored by WellDog, in conjunction with Queensland Rugby Union.
In the spirit of the early-20th century All-American teams that toured in support of the game of Rugby Union, a selection of some of the top domestic collegiate players as well as a few of the exciting younger players in the national team pathway will assemble under Head Coach Gavin Hickie on the west coast in late July prior to heading to Australia.
'Down Under,' the team will play three matches against Darling Downs select side, Brothers Rugby Football Club's premier side, and Queensland Country's National Rugby Championship team.
"It is an exciting and challenging tour," USA Rugby Director of Performance Alex Magleby said. "Our best 23-year-olds and younger will be tested throughout, which is what this age-band needs to help accelerate towards impactful performances at the 2019 Rugby World Cup, and, hopefully, be the core that carries the Eagles through to the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
"WellDog has been instrumental in giving our best student-athletes and emerging elite players this opportunity."
WellDog's support of the All-American program in the past year has seen the institution of a Men's Junior and Collegiate Stars and Stripes Camp for coaching staffs of the AIG Men's Junior All-Americans and AIG Men's Collegiate All-Americans, as well as the latter's sevens team, to better work with the greater talent pool of under-23-eligible athletes.
Much like now-capped Men's Eagles and PRO Rugby players Jake Anderson and David Tameilau, who attended last year's Stars and Stripes Camp in northern California, All-Americans selected for the Queensland Tour may receive immersion opportunities with National Rugby Championship (Australia) and National Provincial Championship (New Zealand) clubs at the culmination of the Tour.
"Not only are these opportunities crucial to the development of future Eagles, with a favorable return on investment, we're strengthening the bonds between USA Rugby and rugby institutions in the great rugby nations like Australia and New Zealand," Magleby said. "These partnerships assist in growing the sport of rugby globally as well as allowing each country's athletes to experience the multicultural aspect of the game."
Student-athletes that have toured with the AIG MCAAs in the past 15 years make up more than 50 percent of Men's Eagles test caps in that time frame, while other standouts such as Madison Hughes and Stephen Tomasin are currently on a path to represent the United States in Rugby Sevens' Rio 2016 Olympic Summer Games debut this summer.
Honorary Men's Collegiate All-American, Honorable Mention All-American, and Sevens All-American teams will be announced in June, encompassing student-athletes performing at the best of their abilities at the country's top post-secondary institutions and at National Tracking Camps.WINTER HAVEN, Fla. (WTSP) -- An employee at the Tropical Smoothie Café in downtown Winter Haven has been fired, after his manager found out he reportedly refused to serve two police officers who went to the restaurant Sunday.
Officer Adam Leatherberry of the Lake Alfred Police Department posted about the experience on Facebook. He explained he was off-duty, but Officer Geoff Price of the Winter Haven Police Department was in uniform.
He wrote that when he and Price walked into the store, the employee said, “Hell no!”
“’I’m not serving them! You can… it’s the cops! I refuse to serve them!’”
Leatherberry said the employee made the comment to his coworker. They left the restaurant without buying anything, and Leatherberry posted a picture of the employee on Facebook.
The same day, Tropical Smoothie Café in Winter Haven posted on its Facebook page that the employee was fired.
We would like to thank everyone for the feedback! Our company doesn’t tolerate any discriminate of any kind. We have investigated into this case and terminated this employee immediately. This employee's comment about the police officers was very disrespectful and absolutely unacceptable! We have always supported law enforcement and military. For the past years, our cafe has served to numerous law enforcements who has patronized our café.
We sincerely apologize for the misbehavior of our former employee. His comments about the police offers were very disrespectful and absolutely unacceptable! Thank you very much for all of your feedbacks, which has helped us improve and do better!
In an interview Monday, Manager Beth Lawrence identified the employee as Jake Hadden. She said what he did was against company policy.
Sign up for the daily Brightside Blend Newsletter Sign up for the daily Brightside Blend Newsletter Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank you for signing up for the Brightside Blend Newsletter. Please try again later.
Submit
“I just sincerely want to apologize to the officers that were offended by this and hope that they will still come to our establishment,” she said.
Lawrence added that the restaurant wants to welcome everyone and serves law enforcement on a regular basis.
Officer Leatherberry told 10News WTSP that an employee of Tropical Smoothie Café apologized to him.
“Not everyone’s bad,” he said. “There’s certain people out there who don’t understand what all we deal with.”
Meanwhile, Hadden said it’s all a misunderstanding. He said he has nothing against law enforcement. He explained he was frustrated, because he had been taking orders all day and was trying to clean up before closing.
“I shouldn’t have said it, but what’s done is done. There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “I just hope people can forgive me.”Details for the public visitation and memorial services are as follows:
The Minnie Minoso family announced today that a public visitation will be held this Friday, March 6 with a memorial service on Saturday, March 7 at Holy Family Church.
The Minnie Minoso family announced today that a public visitation will be held this Friday, March 6 with a memorial service on Saturday, March 7 at Holy Family Church.
Details for the public visitation and memorial services are as follows:
Friday, March 6
Public Visitation
Noon - 8 p.m.
Holy Family Church (just west of St. Ignatius College Prep)
1080 Roosevelt Road
Chicago, Ill. 60608
Saturday, March 7
Memorial Services
Noon
Holy Family Church (just west of St. Ignatius College Prep)
1080 Roosevelt Road
Chicago, Ill. 60608
A procession immediately following the memorial service on Saturday will drive by U.S. Cellular Field.
As "Mr. White Sox," Minoso served as a community relations ambassador for the club, supporting Chicago White Sox Charities. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that any donations be made in Minnie's memory to Chicago White Sox Charities by visiting www.whitesox.com/donate.
Donations also can be sent to the address below:
Chicago White Sox Charities
In Memory of Minnie Minoso
333 W. 35th Street
Chicago, Ill. 60616August 22, 2012
"IT WAS on Labor Day in 1934 that I witnessed the closest thing that this country has had to a revolution," Atlanta labor lawyer Joe Jacobs recalled. "The General Textile Strike was one of the largest strikes in American history; it was the culmination of homegrown organizing and protest. For many Southern workers, it was the first time they had raised their voices as citizens to challenge the control of mill owner."
Despite its problems--a misplaced faith in the saving grace of the Democratic Party and pervasive racism in the South--Southern mill workers' participation in the 1934 general strike represented a high water mark for class struggle south of the Mason-Dixon Line in the tumultuous 1930s.
Some 170,000 Southern textile workers joined 130,000 fellow workers in Northern mills in one of the largest national strikes in American history. And they did so, in large part, on their own. With only lukewarm support from their union, the United Textile Workers (UTW), Southern workers were largely self-organized.
Textile workers on strike parade through Gastonia, N.C.
Indeed, workers in the South had organized themselves at such a pace in the months leading up to the strike that the weak national leadership was ill-equipped (and unwilling) to coordinate a national struggle. Workers forced UTW leaders to follow the rank-and-file and commit to their struggle.
For three weeks, Southern workers held fast against the organized power of their bosses and elites in state and local governments. Massive repression on the part of pliant state governments throughout the region, a disinterested Roosevelt administration, and the bosses' crude reliance on a "divide-and-rule" strategy that exploited racial divisions within the strikers' ranks all combined to break the strike.
Southern workers' fight failed in 1934 and, in many ways, the American working class is still bearing the cost.
IN 1934, Southern workers' newspapers were brimming with news of general strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis. The message that labor was stirring and that it was possible to win was not lost on them.
Moreover, President Franklin Roosevelt's vague endorsement of collective bargaining encouraged many workers to view their struggle as one sanctioned by the federal government. The national context is important for understanding the strike's timing, but textile workers' experiences on the job and in their communities is key to making sense of their tenacity.
Industrialization, particularly in textiles, was an important response on the part of Southern elites to the economic chaos that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction. Keeping with definitions of "progress" at the time, the Southern bosses boasted that industry would revitalize a region mired in social, cultural and economic backwardness.
Such "progress," they contended, was wholly compatible with Southern apartheid. African Americans were barred from employment in textiles--"progress," as with much else in the turn-of-the-century South, was "whites only."
The hundreds of thousands of rural whites that entered (and left) Southern textile mills at the turn of the century saw "dark satanic mills" rather than the "progress" elites promised.
Rhetoric about modernization notwithstanding, textile capitalists' drew on traditional rural culture in their search for profits. Mirroring work on the |
committee on the 2015 draft, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s saying goodbye to college yet.
The redshirt sophomore All-American is checking out where he might get drafted, a process many eligible underclassmen take advantage of before their senior year.
“I did put my name in with the advisory board just to see where I’m sitting,” Williams said after practice Wednesday. “Knowing I could have an opportunity after my third year, I just submit my name to see what comes back.”
The Gophers (8-4), who will face Missouri on Jan. 1 in the Citrus Bowl, are led in receiving by Williams. He has 29 catches for 471 yards and seven touchdowns, a school record for a tight end.
The draft advisory board, created in 1994, is made up of general managers, scouting combine directors and player personnel directors from several NFL teams.
Underclassmen typically send for their draft feedback from mid- to late December. That gives them enough time to hear back and make a decision before the Jan. 15 deadline to declare.
In 2012, Gophers junior defensive tackle Ra’Shede Hageman submitted his name to the advisory board but decided to return and benefited from it. He was chosen in the second round of this year’s draft by the Atlanta Falcons,
Of course, fans want to know what Williams’ decision is right now.
“Guess we’ll find out,” Williams said. “After the bowl game. Got to worry about the bowl game.”
The 6-foot-4, 250-pound Waconia native was named Big Ten tight end of the year and on Wednesday earned first-team All-America honors from Sporting News and the Football Writers Association of America. He was a finalist for the John Mackey Award, given to the nation’s top tight end.
Williams is the first Minnesota tight end to be named an All-American since the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Matt Spaeth in 2006.
Spaeth was drafted in the third round.
Ben Utecht, who won a Super Bowl with the Indianapolis Colts, went undrafted in 2004. He had to deal with injuries his last two seasons. Utecht understands why Williams would leave if teams are looking this year for his skill set at tight end.
“If teams are looking for that H-back position guy who goes in motion and runs, then that transition can be made,” Utecht said Wednesday. “Clearly Maxx can be a Sunday player, but it’s about what teams need.”
Williams will be more prepared than most players to make a decision, because his father, Brian, played center for 11 seasons with the New York Giants.
“My dad’s my biggest critic, and I love that,” Williams said. “He’s been there. He knows what it takes to go out and play at the next level. He gives me pointers, ‘do this instead of that.’ It’s nice to have him in my corner.”
Besides his dad, Williams can look to former teammates who have made it to the NFL, including Buffalo Bills tight end MarQueis Gray.
“If it does come to the next level where it is in my career, these are guys who I can turn to and call,” Williams said. “It always helps to have guys like that.”
Utecht wants Williams to stay in school one more year. He is in awe of Williams’ athletic, toe-dragging catches. But the school’s all-time leader in tight end touchdowns would like to see Williams’ blocking continue to improve and the Gophers use him even more in the passing game.
“I’d like to see for the first time in history the team give a tight end 70 to 80 catches and see how much better that makes him and can take Minnesota to the next level,” Utecht said. “He’d win the Mackey Award and be a first-rounder.”
Williams was named a team captain for next season, but coaches and teammates aren’t pressuring him too much to stay.
“That’s part of the game,” coach Jerry Kill said. “We’ll see how all that falls out, and he’ll make a decision. I’m all in it for the kids to do the best they can do. It’s just like (Melvin) Gordon leaving Wisconsin. That back behind him is pretty darn good. Our job is to make sure we have good players in place. Maxx will make that decision with his family, and we’ll visit with him. He needs to do what’s best for him.”
Sophomore quarterback Mitch Leidner hopes his go-to receiving target returns in hopes of accomplishing the goals of a Big Ten championship they talked about when arriving together as freshmen in 2012.
“Ultimately whatever happens is his decision,” Leidner said. “I always say, we were part of coach Kill’s first recruiting class here. We came here to put a stamp on it and change the program around. Hate to see him go. At the same time, he’s going to do what’s best for him.”
Follow Marcus R. Fuller at twitter.com/GophersNow.India and five other nations on Wednesday joined a multilateral agreement for automatic exchange of financial information, a move that will help it combat tax evasion and deal with the problem of black money.
Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Indonesia and New Zealand are the other five nations that signed the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA) in Paris for automatic exchange of financial account information.
The total number of countries which have agreed to share financial information has now gone up to 60, including Switzerland.
Once fully implemented, the agreement "will help the government to curb tax evasion and deal with the problem of black money", a finance ministry release said.
On behalf of India, the declaration to comply with the provisions of the MCAA was signed by the country's ambassador to France Mohan Kumar, it said.
The Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) based on common reporting standards (CRS), the release said, "would enable India to receive information from almost every country in the world including offshore financial centres and would be the key to prevent international tax evasion and avoidance.
"(It) would be instrumental in getting information about assets of Indians held abroad including through entities in which Indians are beneficial owners".
India, it added, had already undertaken necessary legislative steps in Finance Act, 2014, to comply with the global norms for automatic exchange of information.
"Necessary rules and guidelines are being formulated in consultation with financial institutions," it added. In order to unearth illegal funds stashed abroad, Parliament recently approved a stringent law to deal with black money which will come into force from April 1, 2016.SAVE THE DATE!
2019 Denver Zine Fest
Sunday, June 23
10am-6pm
McNichols Civic Center Building
144 W Colfax Ave, Denver CO
Free to attend!
Exhibitor applications will be open from January 1 until 11:59pm on February 15, 2019. All applicants will be notified if they will be offered table by February 28. APPLY HERE!
.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The Denver Zine Library is a non profit organization founded in 2003 whose mission is to preserve, protect and promote the culture of zines and self published original work through archival collection, workshops and events. The Denver Zine Library currently houses one of the largest zine collections in North America with a preserved collection of over 20,000 independent and alternative zines. The organization is entirely volunteer run, and the public can access the full library and archives during open hours.
What We Do:
Lend zines: The lending policy is that anyone who comes to the DZL three or more times can check out up to 5 zines for up to 3 weeks.
Workshops: Denver zine librarians have conducted workshops in theDZL, in art/craft stores, in classrooms, etc. Contact us if you’d like to chat about content or to set up a visit with your class to the DZL.
Location & Open Hours
2400 Curtis Street Denver, CO 80205 (ring doorbell at 24th Street entrance)
Saturdays and Sundays from 11am-3pm and by appointment.
To make an appointment, e-mail denverzinelibrary@gmail.com
Stay up to date!Columbus Crew SC have struggled defensively, there’s no doubt about that. But have the Black & Gold found an answer at the back, at least when it comes to center backs?
The pairing of Jonathan Mensah and Josh Williams is proving to be what the team was hoping for.
While the two will still have a lot to prove, especially now with the postseason nearing, their ability to find positive results when playing together is becoming well-documented. If you're still in the “Jonathan ruins everything” camp, it's time to reflect on the last month of Crew SC soccer.
Since being partnered together in mid-August, Columbus has returned to its formational roots, enjoying an unbeaten streak and a period of detente from angered scrutiny.
The team’s traditional 4-2-3-1 has a natural vulnerability on the counter attack. This was always a concern in the setup, especially considering how the wing backs overlap and get forward, sometimes greatly compromising the two center backs.
To deal with this weakness, head coach Gregg Berhalter experimented with 19 different defensive pairings, as well as deploying the 3-4-2-1 formation for many fixtures during the middle passage of the season.
On August 12, Columbus partnered Jonathan and Williams in the three-man backline in a 3-1 victory over the Chicago Fire. Two weeks later, due to the addition of Designated Player Pedro Santos to the Crew SC attack, the Black & Gold dusted off the 4-2-3-1 formation to welcome the LA Galaxy to MAPFRE Stadium, a 2-0 win.
Ultimately, there was a struggle to find consistency, trying to discern which center backs best complement each other and in what formation that chemistry best works. While rookies Alex Crognale and Lalas Abubakar have demonstrated what they can offer when called upon, it appears the preferred central duo lies in the veterans, and the ideal formation is the tried and true 4-2-3-1.
That victory over the Galaxy is part of an ongoing seven-match unbeaten run. Williams and Jonathan have partnered together in all but one of those games — Jonathan missed out due to suspension — and Columbus conceded just eight goals over that stretch.
At a glance, we can see how this pair works. Jonathan is aggressive and will go into tackles. He adds steel to the backline — sometimes to the team's detriment — while Williams, though certainly no pushover, has a tendency to be reserved in his defensive posturing, cutting passing lanes and providing solid, composed distribution to outlet players. Both have the added bonus of being dominant in the air.
Jonathan and Williams (with some generosity from Federico Higuain) also showed off their offense prowess, helping the Black & Gold to defeat the New York Red Bulls over the weekend. The duo was hungry and both of them seized one of the few moments a central defender is given in a match to score with Williams grabbing the winner.
When the attackers are off their game, it's vital someone else steps up and Jonathan and Williams are two guys this team can count on to be aerial threats on set pieces
With an offense that is now clicking once again — 14 goals scored over the unbeaten run —the defense only needs to hold down the fort at the other end for Crew SC to continue its success.
The play of Jonathan and Williams as the anchor to the defense has done just that, and arguably more, which could make the Black & Gold an even more difficult out come the MLS Cup playoffs.Steve Jobs is slated to speak next week at Apple's event launching iCloud.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Apple took the unusual step Tuesday of pre-announcing what it would discuss at next week's Worldwide Developers Conference, but it made an even more out-of-character move by revealing a new product before Steve Jobs had a chance to unveil it.
The company said it would launch iCloud, which it described as "Apple's upcoming cloud services offering."
Jobs will shed more light on iCloud during a keynote that will kick off Apple's annual WWDC conference on Monday at 10 a.m. PT in San Francisco, but digital media experts are already abuzz about what iCloud might offer.
Analysts say one thing is for sure: Apple's new service will have to be more than just an online media locker a la Amazon Cloud Drive or Google Music.
Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) has been rumored to be working on developing a cloud music service for years, but it was beaten to the punch by Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) and Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), which debuted their own online music services earlier this year. Those services allow users to stream their entire libraries over the Internet to any device, but they require people to upload their music to the companies' servers. That can literally take days.
"Apple has to play the classic early follower strategy of seeing the mistakes made by others and learning from them," said Mark Mulligan, an independent music industry analyst. "Amazon is limited in scope and doesn't offer a groundbreaking user experience. Apple will err on the side of great user experience first and rich functionality second."
So what will that look like?
Scan and match: Analysts believe Apple's iCloud will offer several added benefits, including so-called "scan and match" capabilities. Apple is reportedly negotiating licensing deals with record labels so that iTunes can scan users libraries and match those songs with online versions hosted on Apple's servers. That will allow users to stream any song in their library without uploading their music.
Apple will probably allow users to listen to their entire libraries online, analysts predict, not just the music they purchased on iTunes. Just a quarter of iTunes users download music regularly from the iTunes music store, according to Mulligan. Most music stored in iTunes comes from ripped CDs or peer-to-peer networks.
"If it's restricted to just iTunes purchases, it wouldn't be a viable proposition," he said.
Subscription service for a fee: The downside is that those streaming licenses don't come cheap, and iCloud will likely charge a subscription fee. Amazon and Google, by contrast, offer their cloud music products for free.
Most analysts think the price will likely be about the same as Apple's current cloud service offering, called MobileMe. That service, which is available to customers for an annual $99 subscription, allows users to upload content to Apple's servers, sync data with multiple devices and access content via the Web.
MobileMe never really caught on with customers. It has been plagued by bugs, and Fortune reported that Jobs lambasted the development group for its failure. Analysts widely believe that iCloud will replace MobileMe as Apple's cloud offering.
That $99-a-year price point would put iCloud's cost on par with other music subscription services like Napster, Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) Zune Pass or Rhapsody, which typically cost between $10 and $15 a month. Those services have deals in place with record labels, which allow users to stream millions of songs -- considerably more than exists in individual iTunes libraries.
More than just music: Many pundits believe iCloud will eventually -- if not at launch -- allow users to stream TV shows and movies as well.
"Just offering music wouldn't get a lot of iTunes subscribers interested," said Mike McGuire, analyst at Gartner. "It would have to be a multimedia subscription service, including movies, TV shows and music to create a more compelling experience than what's already out there."
McGuire said the conundrum Apple will likely face is whether to run an unlimited media streaming subscription service that competes with Netflix or to license deals with movie and TV studios so that users can watch only video content that exists in their iTunes libraries.
As services like Netflix (NFLX) and video on demand become increasingly popular, fewer people are buying individual videos and TV shows, so most iTunes video libraries are looking pretty thin. But competing with Netflix directly could prove difficult for Apple. That's why McGuire believes Apple will extend its Apple TV model to the iCloud service, offering one-time streaming rentals for under $5.
Just iOS: A common criticism of Apple is that it offers a "walled garden" approach to technology: The user experience is great, but you have to stay inside the Apple ecosystem to make it work. That's why you'll probably need an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone to make iCloud work.
"What is the reason they're doing this? To make the experience around their devices better so they sell better," said Mulligan.
One rival said that's why iCloud won't kill off the competition.
"Even if it's a huge success, Apple will only care about Apple products," said Daren Tsui, CEO of cloud music service mSpot. "They don't care about other platforms like BlackBerry or Android. But we're the Switzerland for media, because we work on all platforms."Overview:
You remember that adorable nerd, Stephane Dion? A few years ago, he came up with a better electoral reform system than anybody else ever has. But Canada has not adopted this system, because Dion has spent the last five years standing on the edge of the conversation, waiting for a natural lull so he can try and say something, and then get all flustered and back away to stand blushing by the snacks table. The system is called ‘Proportional-Preferential-Personalized’ or ‘P3’, because if Stephane Dion was good at branding, he would have been Prime Minister in 2008.
How Does It Work?
Ridings get five times bigger, and now elect five MPs. Voters use a ranked ballot to choose what parties they want and what candidates they want from those parties. The bigger share of the vote a party gets, the more of those 5 MPs they get. Don’t really have a joke about this, because it’s difficult to crack wise about elegant, poeto-mathematical perfection.
Pros:
– Reflects the democratic impulse of PR, without letting fringe parties become kingmakers.
– Proportional, but does not give undue power over candidates to the parties.
– Eliminates need to vote tactically.
– Allows regional representation, but makes sure votes aren’t wasted in polarized regions.
– Look at Stephane’s face, he’s so sweet, this would make him so happy.
Cons:
– Perhaps humanity is undeserving of such perfection?
Who uses this system?
Hyperintelligent space aliens, bashful French Canadian policy wonks, Heaven, if it wasn’t a cruel dictatorship.
Who wants this system?
– You!
– Me, clearly!
– Nerds.
Who hates this system?
– Jocks and Bullies.
– I dunno, Hitler I guess? Maybe Genghis Khan?
How likely are we to get it?
Perhaps someday- perhaps someday when Humanity turns its swords to ploughshares, studies war no more, lives in peace and unafraid beneath the fig-tree and the flow’ring vine, when the lion lies down with the lamb, and the fish makes love to the osprey, when the rivers run with milk and honey, with abundant wine and Dr. Pepper, when there is an end to jealousy and bitter strife, when we have paid the penalty of Adam, and pulled the nails from the wrist of Christ, when the blood of Abel is washed from our tunics, and the neutron bomb is buried in the bosom of the ocean, when the only tax is love for fellow-man, healing is the only punishment, Death comes in its time and is feared no longer, and the bulldogs all have rubber teeth, and the geese lay soft boiled eggs beneath the cigarette trees, perhaps then, then we will have the P3 system that our better selves deserve.
For a more in-depth description, see here: http://sdion.liberal.ca/en/news-nouvelles/p3-voting-system-canada-2/Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world's 19th-richest man, has acquired The Washington Post, long one of the country's most influential and prestigious daily newspapers, for $250 million in cash, the company announced today. "The purchaser is an entity that belongs to Mr. Bezos in his individual capacity and is not Amazon.com, Inc.," a press release issued by The Washington Post said. The purchase includes all of the papers The Washington Post owns (and their websites), including the Express daily, The Gazette Newspapers, and the Southern Maryland Newspapers, but does not include Slate, TheRoot.com or Foreign Policy, which will remain with the Washington Post Company.
Last week, Bezos sold about $185 million worth of Amazon shares, though it's unclear whether the sale is connected to the acquisition.
By acquiring a cornerstone of Washington DC media, Bezos had immediately become a player in the nation's capital and expands his already significant profile in the media world. Founded 136 years ago, the Post is best known for its reporting on the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon in 1974. That story elevated the publication from a well-respected regional daily paper to an internationally recognized news organization.
"The purchaser is an entity that belongs to Mr. Bezos... and is not Amazon.com."
At first glance, the deal looks like a natural extension of Amazon's media strategy. Much has been made of Bezos' and Amazon's increasing desire to become major media producers. In recent years, Amazon has become an ebook publisher and enabled authors to self publish. The company created a film studio to supply Amazon Instant Video with original TV shows and movies. But speculation over what Amazon may have planned for a general newspaper should be tempered by the fact that the acquisition was not made by Amazon, but by Bezos personally.
In a memo to the staff of the Washington Post, Bezos praised the previous owners, saying, "I would highlight two kinds of courage the Grahams have shown as owners that I hope to channel. The first is the courage to say wait, be sure, slow down, get another source. Real people and their reputations, livelihoods and families are at stake. The second is the courage to say follow the story, no matter the cost." He also added, "I won't be leading The Washington Post day-to-day. I am happily living in 'the other Washington' where I have a day job that I love. Besides that, the Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I'm extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on."
Bezos is taking over the Post during a dark period for the publication and for newspapers in general. The Post has hemorrhaged readers and revenue for many years. Last week, the Washington Post Company reported an operating loss of $49.3 million in the first six months of 2013, compared to a $33.2 million loss for the same period a year earlier, a 14 percent decline.
The New York Times announced last weekend that it had sold The Boston Globe for $70 million in cash. The Times, which paid $1.1 billion 20 years ago for the daily newspaper, had hoped to get $100 million.
The past decade has been a period of painful belt-tightening at the Post that included the closing of overseas news bureaus, a general scaling back of coverage, and numerous rounds of employee buyouts. The paper was at one time regarded as a peer of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In the mid-1990s, the Post's weekday circulation topped 750,000 readers but has since fallen to 474,000. In addition, the newspaper has struggled to maintain its status as the go-to outlet for national politics against scrappy blogs and news organizations with far less overhead, such as Politico and The Huffington Post. In the past two years, the Post's uncertain future has led to an exodus of many of its top writers.
the Post's uncertain future has led to an exodus of many of its top writers
According to Forbes, Bezos has a personal net worth of $25 billion. Through Bezos Expeditions, he invested in at least two dozen companies, including Twitter, Uber, and Blue Origin, the commercial spaceflight company he founded, according to Bezos Expeditions' website. In April, Bezos Expeditions led a $5 million round of funding into online news blog Business Insider. Thus far, those investments have played little if any role in forwarding Amazon's agenda. Then, what does this second investment in a news organization mean? Does Bezos want to be Rupert Murdoch?
When that investment was announced, Bezos told Brad Stone of Businessweek that he saw an opportunity in how technology is streamlining news distribution and cutting out middlemen. Even “well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” Bezos told the magazine. According to Stone, Bezos is a fan of email newsletters that are "short, well written, and are delivered right to readers via email with minimal fuss and no expense."
It's hard to conceive of someone repackaging the Post into an outlet for bite-size news stories. The newspaper has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes and the brand is associated with long-form investigative journalism. But shorter stories is the direction print journalism has been headed for years, and there's no denying the Post is a much more diminished version of itself than the one immortalized in the Robert Redford film All The President's Men.
Still, the acquisition of the Post should give Bezos greater access to power. The paper was purchased in 1933 by Eugene Meyer and it's been in his family ever since. Under the leadership of Katharine Graham, Meyer's daughter, the paper had a part in publishing the Pentagon Papers, and it was her decision to back Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting on Watergate. She became the doyenne of Washington's social scene and the paper allowed her to cultivate friendships with Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan.
It's hard to conceive of someone repackaging the Post into an outlet for bite-size news stories
After Katharine Graham died in 2001, the company was turned over to Donald Graham, one of her sons. In 2008, his niece Katharine Weymouth, 47, was made publisher. Oddly enough, the Times profiled Weymouth last week and she sounded as if she was settling in for the long haul. “I don’t feel like my job is to be beloved,” Weymouth was quoted saying in the story. “I certainly hope to be a great publisher, and if people want to love me, too, that’s even better.”
Weymouth said in a statement that she has agreed to stay on as both publisher and CEO of the Post.
For his part, Bezos hasn't shown much of an interest in wielding the kind of power that the Post might supply him. A libertarian, Bezos has contributed relatively small sums to both major political parties. Last year, the CEO and his wife donated $2.5 million to a group trying to get a same-sex marriage law passed in Washington. And interestingly enough, Amazon scored a coup last week when President Barack Obama agreed to give a speech at one of the company's warehouses.
As for Amazon, the retailer is plenty concerned with several political issues, key among them the debate over taxing online retailers. Then, there was the ebook scandal. Many suspect that Amazon spurred the government to investigate five of the top six book publishers as well as Apple for scheming to raise and fix ebook prices, a move that forced Amazon to stop discounting ebooks. The feds sued and the publishers paid a $160 million settlement. Apple fought in court but last month was found liable for antitrust violations.
So sure, Bezos is now the owner of the Post, and not Amazon. But having a CEO who's a big shot in Washington certainly won't hurt.Introduction and Why High Refresh Rate?
We get a lot of questions about high refresh rate panels of varying sizes and technologies and it’s a topic gamers are of course very interested in. We thought it might be useful to provide a round-up of some of the news we’ve brought you over the last few months in relation to panel roadmaps, and announced displays to help get this information all in one place. This will hopefully give you an idea of what is currently available in each technology now, as well as what is planned for the future and when to expect other options to arrive. As ever, keep in mind the increasing demands on PC’s and graphics cards with the increases in refresh rates, not to mention the push for higher resolutions at the same time. Also we’d like to make the distinction up-front between panel manufacturers and monitor manufacturers here. Where we are talking about panel roadmaps and production, keep in mind that there is usually a lag of a couple of months after the panel goes in to mass production before we see any news of displays which will feature the new panel. There’s normally then a 3 – 4 month delay before that screen is released and widely available, so keep that in mind when we talk about dates in this article. So why high refresh rate? The refresh rate of an LCD display is directly linked to two key areas. Firstly frame rate support. The higher the refresh rate, the higher the number of frames per second it can display, if you've got a graphics card and system capable enough to generate them. So if you've got a top end gaming system and can generate 120 frames per second (fps) you'd see the benefit of that on a 120Hz capable display, whereas a 60Hz display would only offer support for up to 60fps. Secondly because of the way LCD's operate, the way the human eye perceives motion blur is directly impacted by the refresh rate as well. The higher the refresh rate, the less motion blur you will see, although past a certain point you start to reach the point of diminishing returns. There's certainly big improvements when you move from 60Hz to 120Hz, and a smaller but not insignificant jump if you then jump to something like 240Hz. Beyond that, you'd probably see smaller and smaller improvements, and for additional blur reduction you're probably going to want to consider a specific strobing blur reduction backlight system. The principles and operation of those are covered in our other article on Motion Blur Reduction Backlights. Anyway, on to the panel and monitor roadmaps. Here are the highlights by technology:
Above: Acer Predator XB270HU and Asus ROG Swift PG279Q with 27" 144Hz native AU Optronics IPS-type panels
The original high refresh rate IPS panels and options up to 27" from AU Optronics
At the time of writing this article originally in September 2016 there was only one true high refresh rate option available in this technology, that being a 27” 2560 x 1440 panel provide by AU Optronics (their IPS-type AHVA technology). It is already used in a range of popular monitors such as the Acer Predator XB270HU, the updated XB271HU and the equivalent models from Asus in the form of the ROG Swift PG279Q, and also their Asus MG279Q. This is a flat (not curved) panel which is available in standard (panel part M270DAN02.3) and borderless (part M270DAN02.6) varieties and offers a native 144Hz refresh rate. Where the panel is combined with a G-sync module, manufacturers have been able to overclock the refresh rate a little to 165Hz on some of the displays. Blur reduction backlights have also been combined with this panel since the refresh rate support is high enough to make that a viable option. AU Optronics are intending to develop these 2560 x 1440 resolution, 144Hz 27" IPS-type panels in the future to boost the refresh rate up to a native 165Hz (not needing an overclock) and these panels were expected to go in to production in Q1 2018 although the most recent news we had was that this had slipped until a Q4 December 2018 production expectation. This goes hand in hand with some advancements in response times they are developing. They are also planning to produce a 27" panel with a lower 1920 x 1080 resolution (Full HD) with 144Hz, presumably aimed at lower end systems where the full 1440p resolution might be a challenge. This alternative panel was originally expected to go in to production in September 2018 although more recently it looks like this has slipped quite a long way until around July 2019. More interesting still is a planned 240Hz version of this 1080p panel which is expected to go in to production around August 2019 at the moment. AUO will have to work to improve response times even further to be able to cope with the high frame rate demands of 240Hz which we expect is a large part of the delay. As well as the 144Hz and 240Hz 1920 x 1080 IPS panels in 27" size, AU Optronics are developing the equivalent panels in a smaller 25" size (probably accurately 24.5"). These are scheduled for a February and March 2019 production respectively.
The early overclocked high refresh rate Ultrawide screens
Above: Acer Predator X34 and Asus ROG Swift PG348Q with 34" ultrawide overclocked 100Hz LG.Display IPS panels Apart from those 27” AU Optronics panels with 144Hz talked about above, there were no IPS-type panels available at the time of originally writing this article which natively support high refresh rates. In the larger display space, display manufacturers had some success in overclocking a curved 34” 3440 x 1440 resolution panel which has been around for quite some years, produced by LG.Display. This IPS panel is actually natively 60Hz, but when it is combined with a G-sync module it has been possible to overclock that refresh rate up to 100Hz successfully. Monitors like the Acer Predator X34 and Asus ROG Swift PG348Q are two very popular options based on this panel and overclocked with a lot of success 3440 x 1440 @ 100Hz. They offered high refresh rate support and response times suitable to keep up the demands of the frame rate. Ultrawide IPS panels with native high refresh rates LG.Display were later than AUO to develop high refresh rate IPS-type panels, and their focus has been largely on ultrawide models so far. All the way back in late 2015 LG.Display did actually have a 27” module (panel part LM270WF8) in their road-map which would have been their first venture in to high refresh rate IPS tech. That was a planned 1920 x 1080 @ 144Hz module, but as far as we know it was dropped and never emerged. Thankfully LG.Display are now investing in other high refresh rate IPS options, this time in the 34” and 37.5" ultra-wide space:
Above: LG 34UC79G with 2560 x 1080 @ 144Hz LG.Display IPS panel 34” curved ultra-wide with 2560 x 1080 resolution and 144Hz refresh rate - LM340UW1 was the original panel part listed – production in August 2016. This represented LG.Display’s first available native high refresh IPS panel. We have tested the LG 34UC79G which features a panel with the same spec, although a slightly different panel part number (LM340WW2). This edition of the panel already in production supports AMD FreeSync, and LG.Display have also now produced a version with G-sync support as of early 2017.
Above: Dell Alienware AW3418DW with 34" ultrawide LG.Display IPS panel with 100Hz native, 120Hz overclocked 34” curved ultra-wide with 3440 x 1440 resolution and 100Hz refresh rate - there is already a 3440 x 1440 resolution @ 100Hz IPS LM340UW4 panel available and used in some displays like the Dell Alienware AW3418DW for instance, where it is also paired with a G-sync module to offer an overclocked 120Hz refresh rate. Other screens with FreeSync support are also available including the Acer Predator XR342CKP for example.
Above: LG 34GK950F/G with 3440 x 1440 resolution and 144Hz refresh rate panel 34” curved ultra-wide with 3440 x 1440 resolution and 144Hz refresh rate - The 100Hz UW4 panel mentioned above has now been superseded by a higher refresh rate options, with 144Hz. There was originally a couple of new versions of the older LM340UW3 panel (which is already available as a 60Hz option) planned around late 2017 with 144Hz, but it looks like those have been scrapped and replaced by the LM340UW5 instead. This UW5 panel has been used in a couple of screens already including the LG 34GK950F and 34GK950G that we have reviewed in full. Where it has been combined with a G-sync module, so far this has required a down-clock to a maximum 120Hz because of the limitations with the G-sync v1 module. The FreeSync version of the screen can use the full 144Hz refresh rate without issue as long as you have a suitable graphics card.
Above: LG 38UC99 with 37.5" LG.Display IPS panel and small overclocked 75Hz refresh rate 37.5" curved ultra-wide development - LG.Display are also investing in even larger ultra-wide screens in the curved 37.5" space. We've seen the first of these appear in monitor form in September 2016 in the form of the LG 38UC99. These new panels offer a 24:10 aspect ratio and 3840 x 1600 resolution. The panel already in production and used in that LG screen is a maximum 75Hz refresh rate. We wouldn't call this a "high refresh rate" but we mention it for reference.
Above: LG 38GL950G with 37.5" 3840 x 1600 resolution panel and 144Hz We know that LG.Display are now intending to produce a 144Hz compatible version. Originally touted for a Q4 2017 production, this slipped and is now expected to go in to mass production In Q2 2019. This will be the LM375QW2 panel which will offer the same resolution but a higher 144Hz refresh rate. The recently announced LG 38GL950G looks like it will be the firsts screen to make use of this new panel and also offers an overclock up to 175Hz thanks to the use of a G-sync module.
49" ultrawide with 5120 x 1440 and 144Hz - LG.Display are already producing a 32:9 aspect ratio 49" ultrawide panel with a 60Hz refresh rate and high 5120 x 1440 resolution. They also plan to produce a 144Hz refresh rate version although production is not expected until Q4 2019. No news of any screens featuring this panel yet.
AU Optronics don’t seem to have any |
We've covered before that 95 percent of people survive plane crashes, and one of the main reasons is that "kiss your ass goodbye" landing position. In Australia, a plane crashed while the 16 passengers aboard were sleeping. The only survivor was the one who woke up and assumed the emergency crash position.
Continue Reading Below Advertisement
Between December 2001 and June 2013, if you were on a commercial airliner like the ones you see in any of the above movies, your chances of dying in a fatal crash were zero. Not virtually zero. Literally zero. The crash landing of the Air Asiana flight that killed three people in San Francisco to end that streak was a horrifying tragedy. But it was also the first fatal accident in North America involving a major airline since 2001. Guess which aspect was endlessly covered by the national media!
Maybe you've seen articles like this one from AOL Travel.com, with the headline "Qantas Flight Loses Pressure, Drops 26,000 Feet." A different title reporting the same incident declared "Passenger terror as another Qantas jet fault causes plane to plummet 25,000ft mid-flight." That makes it sound like, in the middle of a flight, the plane just up and went into free fall. The writer of that headline doesn't want you to know that the story is actually about an air conditioner failure. The 26,000 feet were "dropped" on purpose by the pilots, as part of a controlled descent to get the plane to lower, more breathable air. By those standards, every flight you've ever taken has "dropped" at least that many feet. You're a survivor!
Comstock/Comstock/Getty Images
Continue Reading Below Advertisement
"This is your captain speaking. If you'll look out the left side of the plane, you'll see your eminent demise."
The truth is commercial airplanes like the ones movies always show plummeting out of the sky like a stone are pretty much incapable of doing that. Their bodies are designed to have a gliding ratio of 15 to 1, which means they will glide 15 feet forward for every one foot they fall, even without anything pushing them but the air over their wings. Even if your plane tried falling out of the air in mid-flight, the aerodynamics of its carefully designed body would cause the air it was falling through to pass over its wings and keep it flying.
This isn't a hypothetical design feature. Pilots have glided completely full commercial airliners over 100 miles to safe landings. It's called a "dead-stick" landing, as opposed to emergency landings that still have at least one engine working, which are referred to as "precautionary landings." That's right, if three of your four engines flame out on takeoff, and the pilot decides to turn around and land the plane, he's considered "precautionary."
Continue Reading Below Advertisement
Carl is a full-time military pilot and a part-time smart ass. He occasionally says something worthwhile on Twitter and writes for non-dick-joke publications such as Small Wars Journal and the Marine Corps Gazette, among others.
Related Reading: For a list of planes just as deadly as Hollywood wants every 747 to be, click this link. That crash in World War Z won't seem so bad once you've read about the plane that MELTED PEOPLE'S FACES. Next, lighten things up and read about the time a fist fight between the pilot, co-pilot and crew left a flight unmanned for ten minutes. Close out your study in aviation with this look at the most badass pilots in history.
We have some bad news: alcohol doesn't actually warm you up, Thomas Edison was a thieving dickface and your favorite book sellers are now taking pre-orders for a text book written and illustrated entirely by the Cracked team! Hitting shelves in October, Cracked's De-Textbook is a fully-illustrated, systematic deconstruction of all of the bullshit you learned in school.
It's loaded with facts about history, your body, and the world around you that your teachers didn't want you to know. And as a bonus? We've also included the kinkiest sex acts ever described in the Bible.One of my good friends and current business partner, Lori, introduced me to one my favorite games a few years when I went to visit her and her husband in Napa Valley. She called me up out of the blue one day and said, “Hey, you busy next weekend? No? Good. Hop on a plane and come out. We’ve got our league bocce tournament next Saturday.”
I had no idea what bocce was, but have never needed an excuse to go to Napa, so I hoped on the plane. It was the best weekend I have ever spent out there, which is a tough list to top.
Typical of a Napa event, the food and wine were out of this world. It was a “bring your own” event, which in most parts of the States would mean that you threw a few six packs of beer in a cooler and brought some chips and dip.
In Napa, we started with champagne, moved to some of the best wines I’ve ever had, all interspersed with gourmet food. I was stuffed, and drunk, by noon. The games went on all afternoon and I was happy to merely be able to stay upright the whole time.
So here are the basics of how this game works. Bocce is basically lawn bowling and is scored similarly to shuffleboard. One team rolls the small, white target ball, the pallino, down to the other side of the court. They then throw one of their four balls down as close as they can to the pallino. The other side then throws balls until they get one closer to the pallino that the opposing team’s closest ball.
It goes back and forth like that until each team has thrown all four of their balls. The team with the ball closet to the pallino gets a point for that ball and another point for any other balls they have closer to the pallino than the opposing teams closest ball.
When I got back to Arkansas, I built a court in my backyard. To clarify how crazy that idea was, my backyard measures about 80 feet by 20 feet. The court is 60 feet by 8 feet. It took two full dump trucks to haul the eight tons of gravel, crushed limestone and sand to make my personal bocce court.
Yea, the resale value on my house might not be looking that great at this point.
Why am I such a fan? There is no other game where drinking, while playing, is such a good combination. Some of you might be thinking regular bowling, but no. Have you ever bowled with a beer or glass of wine in hand? I doubt it. Softball? Please. Darts? Perhaps, the danger level there does dramatically increase with alcohol consumption.
Bocce is the perfect outdoor party game. Easy to learn. Easy to play. No large advantage to more experienced players over rookies. Fun for all ages. You don’t need to be in good shape or strong to play.
And, you can drink while playing. Perfection.More Android apps may soon have built-in support for Bitcoin payments thanks to a new partnership between Coinbase and BitMonet.
The companies have released a software development kit (SDK) that aims to make it easy for Android developers to build apps that process Bitcoin payments.
It could help knock down what some see as one of the biggest hurdles to wider Bitcoin use: the lack of a killer app that makes it easy for everyday folk to use the virtual currency.
With the SDK, Android developers will be able to make apps that accept Bitcoin payments without forcing the user out of the app and into another service. Coinbase and BitMonet envision a range of applications, but greater support for retail transactions with bitcoins is one likely outcome.
Coinbase provides a variety of services around Bitcoin, including a digital wallet and an exchange for buying and selling bitcoins. BitMonet is an open-source platform that lets people accept payment in bitcoins for their blog posts.
As Bitcoin gathers more attention, online merchants like Overstock.com and others have begun to accept the virtual currency as payment.
A developer could build a simple app using the SDK in an hour, said Ankur Nandwani, chief engineering advisor at BitMonet. A more complete implementation could take upwards of a day, he said.
No money changed hands in the collaboration between the companies, which was conceived to boost Bitcoin use on mobile devices, Nandwani said.
The SDK requires that smartphone users have an account with Coinbase.
In its announcement, Coinbase called out two uses in particular: micro-transactions and debit payments. Small micro payments of a few cents can be hard to facilitate on mobile devices, since the provider usually has to pay a fee to a bank or credit card company.
Micro-transactions between accounts on Coinbase, however, have zero fees, the company says. "The customer simply connects their Coinbase account, grants the app permission, and can then perform one-click buys in the app," the San Francisco-based company says.
Meanwhile, with debit payments, the SDK could let developers integrate automatic "pull" payments into their apps. That means people could grant permission to apps to tap into their bitcoins in Coinbase to make regular payments. Imagine someone like Uber or Sidecar being able to automatically debit your Bitcoin account after a ride, for example.
This functionality could present some risks, since Bitcoin payments are meant to be irreversible, so getting your money back for an unsatisfactory ride may not be possible.
Still, Coinbase is one of the more established Bitcoin services companies. It recently attracted a $25 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com[TIP] Hypothesis 1.0: A production quality property-based testing library for Python
Hypothesis is a Python library for turning unit tests into generative tests, covering a far wider range of cases than you can manually. Rather than just testing for the things you already know about, Hypothesis goes out and actively hunts for bugs in your code. It usually finds them, and when it does it gives you simple and easy to read examples to demonstrate. Hypothesis is based on Quickcheck ( https://wiki.haskell.org/Introduction_to_QuickCheck2) but is designed to have a naturally Pythonic API and integrate well with Python testing libraries. It's easy to use, extremely solid, and probably more devious than you are at finding edge cases. The 1.0 release of Hypothesis has a stable and well documented public API. It's more than ready for you to use and it's easy to get started. Full documentation is available at http://hypothesis.readthedocs.org/en/latest/, or if you prefer you can skip straight to the quick start guide: http://hypothesis.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.idyll.org/pipermail/testing-in-python/attachments/20150330/74bffd8a/attachment.htm>It’s one of the most well-reviewed films of 2014, but “American Sniper” — the story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal American sharpshooter in Iraq — was canceled from a screening in Ann Arbor.
On Tuesday, the University of Michigan Center for Campus Involvement canceled a screening of “American Sniper” set for this Friday after petitions from the Muslim Student Association (MSA) on campus.
A screening was also canceled last month at the University of Missouri after a Muslim student protested, saying showing the film on campus would make her feel unsafe.
In Ann Arbor, the cancellation doesn’t sit well with everyone.
“The only place the MSA is getting their presuppositions from is propaganda, rather than the content of this film,” said Derek Draplin, Editor in Chief of the Michigan Review, in a statement.
“This film is about the grim face of war that has sent so many veterans home with mental damage that their families must deal with. “It is about an American hero who gave everything to serve his country and protect our freedoms. The MSA is subverting reality by claiming otherwise.”
Student Grant Strobl called the decision to cancel “deplorable,” and said offensive attitudes toward a “war hero” fosters an offensive attitude on campus.
According to the Lebanese Examiner, the “American Sniper” showing was deep sixed after a petition started by a group identified as Middle Eastern and North African and Muslim students garnered 280 signatures.
“Student reactions have clearly articulated that this is neither the venue nor the time to show this movie,” said the University’s Center of Campus Involvement in a prepared statement. “We deeply regret causing harm to members of our community, and appreciate the thoughtful feedback provided to us by students and staff alike.”
Draplin and Strobl are calling on the University to overturn the decision.
“This is about doing what is right, respecting our men and women in uniform, and honoring our heroes who fight to protect our freedoms and secure them for people around the world,” they said in a prepared statement.A few nights ago I was getting ready to go see comedian Jim Gaffigan at the Sony Centre (I’ll never think of kale the same way), and while I was curling my hair in front of the mirror, I was listening to Andrew Scheer’s recent interview on Power and Politics. My mother was visiting me in Toronto, and in the room getting ready as well. As she was listening to him comment on abortion, she turned to me and said, “another guy who’s not getting my vote” and walked out of the room.
As a woman working full-time in the pro-life movement, it struck me that my whole life my mother and I were always in sync on these types of issues, and in the blink of an eye we were on opposing sides after listening to a five-minute interview. I followed her out of the room and asked her why. We had a discussion about what his comments meant and at the end, her mind was changed. I realized that many of her sentiments were similar to many disenchanted pro-life Canadians on social media after listening to Andrew Scheer’s responses to abortion-related questions at his press conference on Wednesday. My own organization, RightNow, received e-mails and comments that swarmed my personal Facebook profile, our Facebook page, and other pro-life pages as well.
One pro-life organization even went so far as to say he now had a “pro-abortion stance“.
I can understand why people like my mom, and other grassroots pro-lifers find some of Scheer’s comments frustrating, which is why I felt the need to write this post. Hearing the tired, old line of not re-opening the abortion debate can make anyone disenchanted. Pro-life organizations however, need to have better political acumen so that pro-lifers do not get led astray by withholding support from one of the most solid candidates to enter the race thus far.
What he said and what he didn’t say
So what did Andrew Scheer say and what did he not say?
Last Wednesday, Andrew Scheer made the announcement that he was seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. During the question and answer period with the media after the announcement, he was asked by La Presse on whether or not he would legislate on abortion. This was his response:
As I said, the focus of my candidacy is the unity of the Conservative Party and the caucus. Our members have different opinions and there are other things where we agree. So I will focus on things that maintain unity of our caucus. So for these issues that you just mentioned, it’s not up to me to re-open the debate on these issues.
A follow-up question came from the Huffington Post asked him if he would allow legislation such as Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, to which he answered:
As Leader of the Conservative Party, as Prime Minister of Canada, it will not – those subjects will not be re-opened from the Conservative Government.
Another follow-up from Huffington Post asked him what he would do if backbench caucus members wanted to introduce private members’ legislation or speak in statements to the House of Commons (known as SO-31’s) before Question Period. This is what he had to say:
Well, first of all, I hate to answer hypothetical questions. But, you know, there’s a very wise Speaker’s [he is referring to himself when he was Speaker of the House] ruling in the previous Parliament about the rights of Members to make statements on any matter that they wish and their rights to speak don’t come from party officials but from their inherent rights as Members of Parliament. I’ve never been afraid of having conversations and debates, and each individual M.P. has rights as Members to bring forward legislation and to make statements to bring up topics that they care deeply about, either on behalf of themselves or their constituents.
Later, on Power and Politics, Andrew Scheer had an interview with Rosemary Barton who again asked him about this issue. He said,
Listen, my record has been consistent and I’m an authentic person, I am pro-life. I’ve always been consistent on that. But does that mean that the Prime Minister or the leader of our party should legislate on that when even our caucus isn’t united on that?
Finally, in a speech delivered in Regina on Friday night, which was broadcasted on Andrew Scheer’s Facebook page, he stated:
Conservatives do not win when they abandon their principles. As a leader, I will respect the diversity of opinions among my caucus and encourage them to put forward pieces of legislation that unify the party. On matters of conscience where there are differing opinions, I will respect the lack of consensus by allowing MP’s their freedom to vote with their conscience. Other party’s don’t respect the diversity of views in their own caucus. As a leader, I will work to build a broad coalition. That’s how you build unity.
What this means
The next election is almost three years from today, scheduled for October 21, 2019. Is it possible that the Conservatives can win government then? Yes. It is probable? That remains to be seen. The point is, what unites the caucus and the Party in three years’ (and beyond) time could be different from what unites them now. How do we do this? We elect enough pro-life Member of Parliament to get that majority. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s what our new organization RightNow is dedicated to doing.
Andrew Scheer has said that the government will not introduce legislation on abortion. When leadership candidates (or even elected leaders) of political parties say that, it means the cabinet. Let’s say the Conservatives win 180 seats in the next federal election and of the 180 MPs, 30 of them are in cabinet. That means 150 other Conservative MPs would be allowed to introduce a private members’ bill on this. He also never said that he would whip his cabinet not to vote for pro-life motions or bills nor did he say he himself would not vote for them either.
According to Andrew Scheer, it is up to us to bring up our issue. Andrew Scheer is not wrong when he says that the caucus as a whole and the Party’s policy statement declare that the Party does not want to re-open the abortion issue. So let’s change that!
If we don’t like this policy, let’s change it. Let’s become members of the party, attend the next convention as delegates, and put forward an amendment that would remove that section of the policy. LGBT Tory was successful at removing a piece of party policy this past convention so that the party took a blank-slate position on marriage, let’s do the same with the abortion policy. It can be done, and we’re here to help you do it.
Why you should continue to support him
Andrew Scheer has a perfect pro-life voting record as a Member of Parliament. As an elected Member of Parliament for over a decade, he has voted in favour of pro-life motions and bills every single time. He was also outspoken against notorious abortionist Henry Morgentaler receiving the Order of Canada. Not only that, but as Speaker of the House he ruled in favour of Mark Warawa’s right to bring up statements on his failed motion, M-408 (asking the government to condemn sex-selective abortion) overruling the party whip, Gordon O’Connor. At the time, O’Connor had warned Warawa not to bring this issue up any longer since the House Procedure and Affairs Committee ruled that his motion could not come to the House, but Scheer overruled him saying it was his right to speak on whatever issue he wished.
Lastly, Scheer is being supported by known pro-lifers Mark Strahl, Mark Warawa, Bob Zimmer, Garnett Genuis, Arnold Viersen, Chris Warkentin, Gerry Ritz, Cathay Wagantal, Kelly Block and Ted Falk, many of whom were present during his announcement (see below). Not only that, Cathay currently has a bill in the House of Commons being debated tomorrow called Bill C-225, which would make it an offence to cause injury or death to a pre-born child while committing an offence against a pregnant woman. (Click here to as your MP to vote for this bill).
He’s not another Stephen Harper or Patrick Brown when it comes to this issue
Scheer is a father of five, with a perfect pro-life voting record, a staunch Catholic whose father is a Deacon at one of Ottawa’s largest Churches. As I mentioned above, he has gone above and beyond what many pro-life MP’s have done in terms of siding with pro-lifers and speaking out for our issues. Harper had little religious motivation and as many people know, had a wife who was openly pro-choice. I cannot predict the future, however given the circumstances, upbringing and personal lives of both men when it comes to this issue, we have no reason to suspect Scheer would ever muzzle his caucus as Harper did at certain times when it came to abortion.
In terms of Patrick Brown, the PC leader only made one promise on abortion, and that was to allow abortion statistics to be publicized. He has not said that he would renege on that promise, nor do we know if he would renege until he is in government. Although Brown’s dishonesty on other issues like the sex-ed curriculum can be questioned, Scheer has made no specific promise to pro-lifers on which he can be accused of reneging at this point in time.
He knows parliamentary procedure like the back of his hand
As Deputy House Speaker (2008-2011), Speaker of the House (2011-2015) and Opposition House Leader (2015-2016), Scheer had to know House procedure in and out. If anyone knows how to get a bill through the House of Commons and the Senate, it’s him.
He can win
Scheer has name recognition and is the only fluently bilingual registered candidate. At the early age of 25, he won a seat that since its creation in 1988 had gone to the NDP. In a recent Mainstreet poll, Scheer’s favourability ratio amongst Conservative voters was the highest out of all the other candidates. His affability has a broad appeal, which is helpful in a political climate where pro-life politicians are not as broadly liked.
There is an old adage that you can’t win the lottery if you don’t play.
Well, we as pro-lifers can’t win in politics if we don’t play.
Andrew Scheer is pro-life. He has stated so and voted so. He is a practising Catholic husband and father of five young children. But unless we deliver a pro-life Parliament to Andrew Scheer, what is the point of his government introducing pro-life legislation?
Introducing a piece of government legislation isn’t free. It must go through all the stages of a bill before it is passed into law, which takes time. It takes hours of research, compilation, and then must be introduced and approved by the cabinet before it is introduced by a cabinet minister in the House or Senate.
Oh yes. The Senate.
Just because a bill passes the House of Commons, doesn’t mean it will become law. It must pass both Houses of Parliament. If you think that Justin Trudeau will be appointing pro-life Senators and pro-life judges think again.
If Andrew Scheer becomes Prime Minister, the probability of this self-professed pro-lifer with a perfect pro-life voting record to appoint pro-life Senators and judges (including Justices to the Supreme Court of Canada) is high. It’s also essential to passing pro-life legislation.
If you are upset that Andrew Scheer is not using pro-life talking points, that’s fine. Just consider the following:
If you to want to win a boxing match or run a marathon, you have to prepare. Not by staying at home saying “oh, I wish I was fit enough to win this fight or run this race”, but by actually getting actively prepared. Not just be doing anything, but specific exercises that will prepare you for this fight or race as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
The same goes for the political pro-life movement.
Andrew Scheer’s comments (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it), is a reflection of our collective efforts as a political pro-life movement. This solid pro-lifer knows that there isn’t enough pro-life support to win a leadership or election. Yet.
If we want major political parties, their leaders, and their caucuses to adopt pro-life positions, then we need to make sure that we identify (and create) enough pro-lifers who are politically active to do so. To run for nominations and elections, help volunteer with nomination and election campaigns and do the work necessary to get the job done.
This takes time. But it can be done. And the new political pro-life organization that I co-founded with my business partner, Scott Hayward, can help you get this done.
Moving the pro-life dial at the leadership level takes time. It would not make sense if the Conservative Party of Canada went from having a leader like Stephen Harper to having a leader whose first priority would be to outlaw abortion as soon as they got into government.
We need to keep our expectations in the realm of reality, while continuously moving forward toward success.
There is no issue-based group as broad, numerous or passionate as the pro-life electorate. We need to stop doing anything pro-life just because it’s better than nothing, and start doing something effective. Groups with results-driven campaigns, proven victories and political acumen should be the only ones on your radar when it comes to the political arm of the movement. Anything else is a waste of time, energy and resources.
There is a silent majority of electors who want restrictions on abortion, but they aren’t just Catholics. Or Christians. Or people of any faith tradition, for that matter. They are our atheist acquaintances, our Hindu co-workers and our Muslim neighbours. We just need to literally go to their door, identify them and have them work with us toward political success.
We can’t ask Andrew Scheer to go to bat for us and not provide him with a bat. We have multiple pro-life candidates running for leadership. Don’t leave this one off your ballot.Not only will you be able to see, taste and listen to the best of the art world at the new Epcot International Festival of the Arts, you’ll be able to bring out your inner artist with select experiences available to book starting today.
Over the six weekends of the festival beginning Jan. 13, you can sign up for interactive workshops like the Gesture Drawing Class, led by former Disney animator Todd Bright. Gesture drawing of people is foundational practice for animators, storyboard artists, and directors. A single drawing tells a story. Todd’s Story Telling Drawings class will teach you the art of quick sketching from life.
Other select workshops include watercolor painting, mixed media art, calligraphy and floral arrangements. The Interactive Workshops are $39+tax each Friday-Monday of the Festival. A great benefit to Annual Passholders and Disney Vacation Club members: 15 percent off the select experiences. You can call 407-WDW-TOUR for more information.
You can also make a reservation for a meal and performance combo: a delicious breakfast, lunch or dinner, followed by a phenomenal Disney on Broadway inspired concert – nightly during the Festival from January 13 – February 20, 2017.
The concert series will pair Broadway talent with favorite songs from award-winning Disney shows such as The Lion King, Newsies and Aladdin. The Dining package includes a three-course meal or full buffet and priority seating at the 8:00 p.m. concert at participating Epcot restaurants. Prices range from $39-$69+ tax for adults, $23-$41+tax for children.
The festival runs Fridays through Mondays starting Jan. 13–Feb. 20. A complete list of offerings will be available online starting Jan. 6. You can book now by calling 407-WDW-DINE. Annual Passholders and Disney Vacation Club members receive a 15 percent discount for this experience too. For more details about all of the select experiences, click here.
What experiences are you looking forward to during #ArtfulEpcot?On Saturday this excellent piece on the BackPageFootball.com website pointed out that while the country's top professional league started on Friday night, nobody involved with social media in the FAI or the FAI-run League of Ireland cared enough to mention it. The @FAIreland account mentions the League Launch on March 1st.
The piece has gained a bit of traction on various forums and, of course, twitter and Facebook. Someone in the FAI clearly took note as today they sent this tweet;
For updates from the airtricity league follow our dedicated twitter feed @airtricityleag — FAI (@FAIreland) March 10, 2013
The problem, as mentioned in that BackPageFootball piece, is that the @airtricityleag account is a combination of score updates and relayer of posts on their website. Their last non-score updates are from January 8th and 9th, and perfectly captures their use of twitter.
UCD sign up Barron for 2013: UCD have re-signed goalkeeper Ger Barron for the 2013 season.Barron has made 67 le... bit.ly/WN7d1M — Airtricity League (@airtricityleag) January 9, 2013
Russell looks forward to new season: UCD's first team reported back for pre-season last night as the countdown t... bit.ly/ZlgtLY — Airtricity League (@airtricityleag) January 8, 2013
Advertisement
This isn't the only official Airtricity League account either. There's also @AirtricityLeagu which the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed just adds a "u" to the already awful @airtricityleag twitter handle. This account was set up first, and is still being used to relay additions to the website (including those posted to the other account);
Russell looks forward to new season bit.ly/ZlgtLY — AirtricityLeague (@AirtricityLeagu) January 8, 2013
Did someone set it up and then just forget the password? The old account has 3,186 followers and has sent 371 tweets. Not exactly a huge account.
What about the new account?
Advertisement
The vast, vast majority of those 4,391 tweets are score updates from games. If you can find any update that looks like it was typed by a person, please let us know. It follows 109 accounts though, so someone has to man it at some stage, right? A little examination of those 109 accounts reveal that the Official Airtricity League account doesn't even follow 7 of the clubs in its own league. From the Premier Division Bohemians, Drogheda United and Limerick aren't followed by the account. In the 8 team First Division, the account only follows half the teams, ignoring Cobh Ramblers, Finn Harps, Longford Town and Salthill Devon.
So who does the official Airtricity League twitter account follow? Well these are the latest additions;
So even with one of the League's top strikers (Danny North), the owner of one of the League's clubs (Mick Wallace) and the Shamrock Rovers reserve physio (Willie Conlon) being connected with the league, they're still left with an English-based German journalist, an official Portuguese club account and both official and unofficial accounts from an English club (and no other English clubs).
What do you think? Storm in a tea-cup? Any excuse for League of Ireland fans to have a moan? An example of the FAI's indifference towards its League? Another example of an Irish sporting body not understanding social media? Let us know in the commentsEdit!!! ---- i've got the biggest artblock ever, the sketches might be ready a bit later than I intended ----editI strive to improve so I must practice!and so i'm going to do some free sketches! (such as thesewheeeeIf you comment with a link of the ref sheet of your character on this journall you will get the chance to get your character drawn by me.I will draw three different characters.The rules!:- visual references only! NO WRITTEN REFERENCE.-if more than three people comment I will pick randoms, It's not first come first serve.- one character per person!- ----OPTIONAL------please also comment with a fun fact/intesrest of your character, i'll see if I can make something fun out of it.I will post the sketch on my account for all to see.Also please keep in mind that I do this to practice, My drawings will probably not be perfect but I will always try my absolute best!FINISHED SKETCHES:1: I spilled cofee on Volgera :c sorry2:3:Arsene Wenger says beating Manchester United at Old Trafford provides the benchmark for a successful season.
The Gunners visit the home of the champions on Sunday and have not won there since September 2006.
But the Frenchman believes his team will gain "confidence and credit" if they take three points off David Moyes' side.
"It is still one of the benchmarks of the season where you judge how strong you are," said Wenger. "People analyse everything, your behaviour and draw conclusions after the game. It is of course still one of the big games.
"You can gain confidence and credit for your behaviour.
"We had periods where we did very well at Old Trafford and recently, yes, we have not done so well," Wenger added. "It is a good opportunity to show that we have improved and that we can win there.
"That is our target, to go there and win the game."
ADVERTFor most households, one of their biggest monthly expenses is housing, whether in the form of mortgage payments or rent. This is a policy choice. Through tight zoning laws, state and local regulations constrain the supply of housing. This drives up prices and allows landlords to extract rents from households and businesses. Deregulating the housing industry, particularly in gentrifying places like New York City, Washington D.C., and San Francisco, would create a construction boom to help the economy and allow millions of people to live cheaply in areas they desire. Upzoning would not happen via congressional action, but through state and local governments across the country.
4. Keep unemployment low to maintain worker bargaining power
The last time the majority of Americans saw significant wage growth was during the late 1990s when the labor market was tight and the unemployment rate briefly dipped below four percent. The limited supply of labor gave workers bargaining power to demand higher wages.
We are a long ways from full employment now and there is little political support for further action to move us closer in that direction. But we will get there, whether in 2015, 2016 or afterwards. When that happens, it’s important that the government does everything it can to keeps us there. That means properly regulating the financial industry. The Federal Reserve must fulfill its dual mandate of full employment and steady inflation. It means making smart infrastructure investments to allow for robust economic growth. Far too often, the government fails to do so—even when the economy is not in a recession as we saw during the mid-2000s. When that happens, workers lose their bargaining power, wages stagnate and inequality grows.
5. Deregulate copyright and patent law
Like strict zoning laws, the current intellectual property law regime is constructed to allow copyright, patent and trademark owners to extract rent from the economy without providing any productive benefit. The federal government created this property law regime. It determines what intellectual property qualifies for protection, how long the protection lasts and what the penalties are for breaking it. The stronger intellectual property law, the more benefits accrue to capital owners and the less to the rest of society. Intellectual property law must strike the proper balance between the public’s benefit while incentivizing innovators to invest resources and time creating music or searching for a new drug, for instance.
The past few decades have seen a consistent trend towards a stronger property law regime, thanks to intense lobbying from interest groups. This has resulted in huge profits for the pharmaceutical industry, for instance. Weakening intellectual property law would allow consumers to capture economic benefit that currently accrues to capital owners. Academics on both sides of the aisle support reduced IP protection, but policymakers face intense pressure from interest groups to extend current protections.I’m not sure how this is Trump’s fault, but we’ll soon find out.
Richard Pollock reports:
One of the two assailants of a mosque in Quebec City, Canada who killed at least six people last night has been identified as Mohamed Khadir, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a local television station, TVA Nouvelles.
The station identified the second accomplice as Alexandre Bissonnette.
Okay, that second name makes sense. Alexandre Bissonnette. Sounds like a white guy. Probably Christian. And we all know how those people are.
Mohamed Khadir, though? I don’t want to jump to any conclusions about that guy’s motive for murdering people. After all, this was an attack on a mosque. Why would a Muslim kill other Muslims for Allah? Just because it happens every day doesn’t mean that’s what happened this time. I’m guessing Khadir is a recent convert to Christianity, and Bissonnette was the guy who radicalized him. It’s a solid working theory, although we should wait to find out more before we condemn any particular denomination of Christianity.
For now, one young journalist has provided the most plausible explanation I’ve seen:
Too early to know if #Quebec mosque shooting was perpetrated by right-wing extremists. If it was, then this is result of Trump rhetoric. — Conor McCormick (@ConorMichael28) January 30, 2017
Seems like a safe bet. From 2009-2016, all terrorism was in spite of the President of the United States. Before and after that, all terrorism is because of POTUS. That’s how it’ll be until another Democrat is elected president. Get used to it, wingnuts.
P.S. See |
home to one “hundred churches and perhaps only one mosque,” because “the land is occupied” and “the disbelievers erected churches in the place of mosques.” Shabaab attempted to justify its June 2014 attack in Mpeketoni with the same argument, claiming that the Kenyan military was occupying Muslim lands.
Rage claims the disbelievers “burned down the town of Garissa and killed many Muslims simply for being Muslims” in 1980. “In addition to that, they carried out a mass massacre of Muslims in Wagalla.” He adds that “they’ve built churches at the entrance of Mombasa, a historically Muslim city, giving the perception that it is a Christian dominated city.” And the call to prayer “has been replaced by the chiming of the church bells” elsewhere.
The Shabaab spokesman says the prisons in Kenya “are filled with Muslims – many Muslim youth who’ve been detained without due court process and left to linger in the prisons without mercy.” According to Rage, the “disbelievers” have also “occupied Muslim lands,” “invaded” parts of Somalia where “they still have a military presence,” and “mercilessly bombed the Muslim lands of Somalia.”
The video of Rage’s talk was produced by Shabaab’s Al-Kataib Foundation for Media. It is part 1 of the production and includes English subtitles.
Shabaab is locked in a long battle with the Kenyans and its propaganda will undoubtedly continue to focus on the Kenyan government in the coming months.
Images from Shabaab’s video (“Muhajireen’s Graduation Ceremony Address”):
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.There is a massive flurry of discussion on the boards and the blog against last night’s game against Duke. So ‘Pride, why are you writing yet another article about the game? Simple: because I found something that had been posted prior to last night’s game that was interesting. Ironically, it was sitting right under my nose on the message boards.
Just as a clarification, THIS IS NOT ABOUT THE DUKE GAME, but that game definitely inspired the article. If you want to talk Duke, go to our other articles about the same topic (“The Silver Lining“, “Leave the ACC! LEAVE IT NOW!“).
FOUL DIFFERENTIALS
User “projecttwentynine” posted in our “ACC officiating” thread about the general state of fouls called for and against various opponents and the differential between those two values for different teams in the ACC. Most interesting to me was who topped the list of ‘foul differentials’ for the last 5 seasons.
UNC had the largest foul differential between fouls FOR and fouls AGAINST of any team in the ACC for the past 5 years except 1.
The one season UNC didn’t lead the ACC in foul differentials, they were second with NC State leading the Pack, however the year NC State was #1 on the list represents the “smallest” maximum differential of any year (in other words, no one had a massive differential in fouls compared to other years).
Over the last 5 years, UNC has averaged almost 5 less foul a game than their opponent (that is potentially a total of an extra 10-15 points per game than their opponent).
If you need some graphical bearing on how foul discrepancy looks over the last five years, take a look.
From this, it’s pretty easy to see that it’s not just that fouls are a little unfair, there are DRAMATICALLY unfair, at least between NC State and their key rivals. Just to put things into better perspective, here is the entire ACC’s foul descrepencies with UNC’s highlighted.
As they use to say on a popular children’s show, one of these things is not like the other; one of these things is not the same. There really is not explanation.
Just to give everyone another perspective, here is the 5-year average for every ACC team. Note the dramatic difference between the foul differential for UNC compared to everyone else.
 It’s also worth stating that the top three teams (lower is better) are commonly our most hated teams to play: UNC, Duke, and Maryland.
AN ANOMALY IN SEARCH OF A RATIONALÂ EXPLANATION
I considered if it was because UNC was somehow just “consistently more talented” and that somehow caused a higher foul differential. The first place I automatically went to was what a Carolina alumnus in my office once said; Carolina might just be a team that plays very aggressively and when you play aggressively and are comfortable with it, you’re going to force the other team to play uncomfortably aggressive, drawing more fouls. If that is the case, I would expect that Carolina might just foul an “average” amount and their opponents might be doing all the dirty work. Let’s see if that’s true.
Well, it would appear that this isn’t true at all. UNC has the fewest fouls called against them over the last five years of any team. So apparently the solid explanation that UNC is simply a “physical team” doesn’t really fly, especially when you consider the various, less aggressive offensive styles out there in the ACC and UNC still manages to beat everyone else in the fouls called against them.
EDIT: Some may suggest that this is simply an affect of being a team with top-notch talent playing with high athletic IQs.  If you want to accept this, I would question why year-in and year-out, UNC is at the top of the dogpile for foul discrepancy yet DUKE is actually the team that has been more consistently appearing and winning the ACC tournament.  I would also point to the ’07-’08 NC State season and note that even though NC State lead the ACC in foul discrepancy, they by no means had the best talent in the conference.Â
SO WHAT ARE SOME ROUGH CONCLUSIONS
The conclusions were probably obvious before reading the article, but let me first say what we know for a fact is true.
Carolina doesn’t get fouled. Whether their name is “Carolina” or “NC State” or “Murray State” or “Rowan-Cabarrus Community College” doesn’t matter. The fact that any “trend” can be established for any institution above others shows that something is wrong with officiating in general.
Most other schools have fairly randomized foul discrepancies when you look at the 5-year average. This means that some teams do a little better some years and a little better others. Carolina is the only team that has consistently done better than everyone else. If everyone’s performance around them is completely randomized, in a world of perfect or at least unbiased officiating, how can Carolina maintain any kind of trend?
Officials are people to. They live, eat, breath, and have flaws just like the rest of us. If they are flawed people, they can make mistakes and those can manifest themselves in the form of biases and bad calls. Simply because an official is paid to not make mistakes doesn’t mean you can assume it never happens.
To be fair, not all these stats are for strictly ACC play, but even many of the OOC games involve the ACC officials so I’m not sure that’s such a factor.
So getting back to this article, what is my conclusion? The only logical conclusion I get arrive at is that look at the last five years, biases have been introduced into officiating. Regardless of who is benefiting from the bias, if one exists it brings into question the full body of work. It especially brings into question the “what ifs” over the last 5 years. What “if” UNC didn’t have an additional 10-15 free throws per game? How many games has UNC won within this margin? How many tournament games would this have changed in the ACC? How different would the ACC standings look?
I guess what I’m getting at is that it’s fair to say you can’t point at any one game and say, “We would have won if it hadn’t of been for the officiating.” I get it, I really do. At the same time, it’s just flat-out ignorant to turn your head the other way, spread your buttcheeks, and gladly proclaim that no bias exists and that it isn’t a factor that could, and likely has, affected the outcome of multiple games over a several year period.
Can you answer the hypothetical questions I posed? No? Sure would be nice if we didn’t have to ask them in the first place.
Just as a sidenote, one poster mentioned in the forums that they had sent an e-mail to a certain ‘senior athletics department official’ thanking them for their efforts and ending with this…
PS. If Coach Gottfried were to ever get fined by the ACC for speaking his mind about the current state of officiating in our conference, I’ll donate $50 to paying for the fine he’ll receive.”
The response he received? “That day may not be far ahead, my friend.” Obviously a comment made in jest, but honest question for the great State Fans Nation: who would blame Coach Gottfried for accomplishing so much with so little and being dropped into a situation with so many unanswered questions outside of his team’s control?In 2017, the business model for music is a lot different than what it used to be. Streaming eclipses most forms of music consumption, for instance. Though in some ways, it looks a lot like it used to—vinyl purchases continue to rise, despite going through a period of near-extinction in the ’90s and early ’00s. For a time, however, the way to get your music to a wider audience was through a major label—any subsidiary label of the Big Five (now consolidated into the Big Three). That probably sounds like a difficult proposition, but a lot of bands have ended up with major label contracts in spite of being seemingly non-commercial. There’s definitely some truth to the idea that labels sign bands to develop artists—plenty of groups have lasted a decade or more on a label like Warner Bros. despite have more of an indie audience. But in the ’90s in particular (with notable examples on either side of the decade), a frenzy of signings made for one of the weirdest periods of major label activity. Why did Reprise want a Japanese noise band on its roster, for instance? How did John Zorn have such free rein once upon a time? And Death Grips? Death Grips! Anyhow, you’ll see what we mean on this list of 10 weird major label debuts. It was a strange time.
John Zorn – The Big Gundown
(1986; Elektra Nonesuch)
Free jazz records by the likes of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman two decades prior ultimately paved the way for John Zorn to earn his place on a major label, though he still has found a way to take avant garde jazz into much weirder places than thought imaginable. The Big Gundown, his first for Elektra Nonesuch, isn’t his most bizarre or intense work—1990′s Naked City added an element of grindcore, for instance, but its lopsided interpretations of Ennio Morricone scores are indeed peculiar. A banjo hoedown out of nowhere? Some blood-curdling wails from Diamanda Galás? Indeed. That Zorn pulls from an already beloved body of work gives it the benefit of approachability, while the cast of players—Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Arto Lindsay, Fred Frith, Robert Quine—makes it an astonishing array of talent in one solitary recording. It is, however, still pretty out there, though for a catalog as massive as Zorn’s, it’s actually not a bad place to start for those looking to see what his prolific and peculiar sound world is all about.
Mr. Bungle – Mr. Bungle
(1991; Warner Bros.)
It’s not a big mystery as to how Mr. Bungle ended up on Elektra. Mike Patton’s other band, Faith No More, scored a huge hit with “Epic” just over a year before Bungle’s self-titled album was released, thus proving the commercial viability of Patton as an artist, if not necessarily one that went out of his way to make music for a mass audience. Mr. Bungle’s self-titled 1991 album is definitely not music for a mass audience. Produced by jazz provocateur John Zorn (as seen above), Mr. Bungle is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blend of carnival prog, ska-metal, sea-shanty funk with a heaping helping of Patton’s manic vocal shred, scat and shriek. And there’s a John Wayne Gacy-looking clown on the cover. Frank Zappa more or less paved the way for the group’s brand of weirdo free-form genre mashing, though they certainly took it to an extreme. Yet in 1999, with California, Mr. Bungle proved they were also capable of making something quite pretty, if still off the beaten path.
Boredoms – Pop Tatari
(1992; Reprise)
There’s really no better example of how out of control major label risk-taking got than the fact that Reprise signed Boredoms in the 1990s. Boredoms are about as anti-mainstream as music gets, even more so when they were signed, with their scratchy noise-rock songs being edited together with odd tape experiments, found sounds, piercing frequencies and lots and lots of manic screeching. There are rock songs on the album, of sorts, though few of them (outside a handful of highlights like stoner rock vamp “Hoy” and extended darkjazz epic “Cory & The Mandara Suicide Pyramid Action or Gas Satori”) are accessible by any stretch of the word. This is bonkers.
God – Possession
(1992; Virgin)
Yes, it is weird that we’re four albums deep into this list and three of them prominently feature the talents of avant garde saxophonist John Zorn. So, no, it’s not just you. Yet by 1992 Zorn was already pretty well established in the major label realm, as unlikely as it might have seemed. Justin Broadrick, meanwhile, had been a part of metal’s underground for some time, having released a couple albums with his industrial metal act Godflesh after a brief stint with Napalm Death. Though Godflesh would eventually release a couple of major label records via Earache’s distribution partnership with Columbia, his other band God would beat Godflesh to the big-label punch. Broadrick, Zorn, Kevin Martin (later of The Bug) and their various collaborators combined forces to release an album of industrial metal blended with avant garde jazz. If it sounds like a strange combination, well, it is. But it’s also a highly compatible mixture of sounds; the chorus of saxophones against the punishing industrial grind on “Fucked,” for instance, is weirdly accessible. Even pretty in a sort of, um, fucked way.
Stereolab – Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements
(1993; Elektra)
Stereolab is, perhaps, one of the most accessible bands on this list, though that’s only by a matter of degrees, and definitely applies more to albums such as the 1994′s Mars Audiac Quintet, with its loungey take on Neu!-style motorik grooves, and 1996′s Empire Tomato Ketchup, whose lead single “The Noise of Carpet” is a noise pop gem that broke the 120 Minutes barrier. Transient Random Noise Bursts is a bit different, if only because the UK band was still firmly entrenched in their hypnotic noise-rock-drone phase. Much of the album is playfully experimental, not unapproachable by any means but certainly one of the oddest results of A&R signings with big-money backing. There are few spots throughout the album that aren’t backed by a heavily distorted Farfisa wheeze, and the single was a three-minute edit of the album’s 18-minute centerpiece “Jenny Ondioline,” a peculiar choice for sure. Add to that the band’s Marxist philosopy—definitely a weird fit for a corporate label—and you’ve got a true oddity from the ’90s era. More remarkably, the band released seven more albums on Elektra, some of which were arguably even stranger than this.
Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2
(1994; Sire)
If I’m being honest, I find it somewhat peculiar that Aphex Twin was ever on a major label, though major label releases from the likes of The Orb and Orbital created some precedent for Richard D. James’ arrival on Sire. James’ proper debut, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, made a splash in Europe thanks to its innovative and melody-forward ambient techno sounds. His follow-up found him abandoning the beats for a double-disc collection of abstract exercises that were at times soothing, frequently terrifying and altogether peculiar. Not that James didn’t end up delivering a hit for Sire—1997′s “Come to Daddy” became an unlikely MTV staple as a result of its disturbing Chris Cunningham-directed video.
Drive Like Jehu – Yank Crime
(1994; Interscope)
The recent reunion of Drive Like Jehu, along with prominent performances at major festivals, has proven that Interscope might have been ahead of its time by signing San Diego post-hardcore quartet Drive Like Jehu. The band was part of a package deal that included guitarist John Reis’ other band, Rocket from the Crypt, who were not only more accessible but considerably more successful in mainstream terms—”On a Rope” was an alt-rock hit for a reason. But Jehu had buzz on their side, which led to Interscope’s interest in having them on the roster. Here’s the thing: Drive Like Jehu’s complex, rhythm-changing punk, written often in the form of seven-to-nine-minute waltz dirges, was very infrequently radio friendly. Yank Crime is a masterpiece, by all means, but it isn’t commercial. The closest thing to a single is probably “Human Interest,” and that’s all energy, aggression and shrieking guitar riffs. After one major label release, Jehu quietly took a 20-year hiatus, which added to the band’s mythos. All of which is to say Interscope wasn’t wrong about the band, they probably just didn’t make that much money out of the deal.
Daniel Johnston – Fun
(1994; Atlantic)
In the abstract, Daniel Johnston on a major label seems pretty baffling, though any hipster in the ’90s could have seen it coming. After developing a reputation as a legendary curiosity in underground circles thanks to roughly recorded but charming and honest demo-like lo-fi folk albums, and in spite of his deteriorating mental health (leading to an incident in which he removed the keys from a two-seater commuter plane mid-flight), Johnson recorded an album of high-fidelity rock and folk songs with Butthole Surfers members Paul Leary and King Coffey. In its best moments, like the hard rocking “Love Wheel” and the beautiful “Life in Vain,” it puts Johnston’s music in a new and invigorated context. But it’s still super weird, mostly free of commercial polish (despite the absence of tape hiss) and ended up selling poorly. By 1996 he was dropped from Atlantic, which isn’t the surprising part. That he was ever working with the label in the first place, however, is pretty remarkable.
Shudder to Think – Pony Express Record
(1994; Epic)
Nirvana’s rise to fame is often credited as being the catalyst for the signing frenzy that occurred in the ’90s, and there’s a lot of truth to that. However, even before Nirvana, bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth were entering into contracts. And we shouldn’t forget that Hüsker Dü and The Replacements had done it years before them. Shudder to Think’s signing to Epic could perhaps be credited to the Nirvana effect, but they were probably the closest thin a label like Epic could get to Fugazi (save for Jawbox, who Atlantic signed shortly beforehand), a band whose D.I.Y. success is unparalleled and who major labels essentially could never touch. Shudder to Think, a fellow D.C. post-hardcore band formerly on Dischord, started with a sound similar to Fugazi and its members’ other bands, Rites of Spring and Embrace, evolved seemingly rapidly. So when they made the majors, they were no longer an art-punk band, but rather an art band, with a side of punk. Pony Express Record singles “Hit Liquor” and “X-French Tee Shirt” took an indirect approach to melody and deconstructed song structure, respectively, while “Earthquakes Come Home” is an exercise in guess-the-time-signature, in spite of being maybe the most beautiful song on the album. This is a brilliant album, and an underrated gem of the ’90s. It’s also the last thing you’d think a label looking for the next Nirvana would’ve asked for.
Death Grips – The Money Store
(2012; Epic)
This is the only post-’90s major label album on this list, primarily because major labels ended up growing increasingly more conservative with their spending in the ’00s and beyond. Finding a new Nirvana proved to be a losing proposition in the long run, if only because the talent-seekers were signing absolutely everyone but developing relatively few of them (though The Flaming Lips and Built to Spill live on, in spite of the inevitable purge). Death Grips, however, took blogs by storm in 2011 with their mixtape Exmilitary, and in return Epic snatched them up to release debut album The Money Store. It has at least one song that could have been a hit, “I’ve Seen Footage,” though the rest of it is so noisy and aggressive that commercial radio likely would never have touched it (if the band even gave a shit, which they clearly didn’t). As a thank you to Epic, the group released NO LOVE DEEP WEB just months later, and slapped a picture of an erect penis on the cover.There are fake crises as well as fake news. Politicians and journalists in the Westminster Village regularly lash each other up into a lather about nothing much at all. They may be doing it once again over the Prime Minister’s speech yesterday. Politicians catch colds. Pranksters disrupt speeches (though how on earth did conference security let yesterday’s slip through the net?). Stage sets fall apart. These things happen, although it is admittedly unusual for all three to do so at once.
Most voters may shrug. Very many will not have noticed yesterday’s events at all, or will only have glimpsed what happened briefly. It may even be that Theresa May’s resilience, good humour under fire, and determination to do her duty win the sympathy and backing from the country that she gained yesterday from her party.
But is such a benign outcome for the Conservatives really likely? “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action,” Goldfinger says in the novel. And after yesterday, the Prime Minister may need even more than James Bond to rescue her from her troubles. The danger is that losing her voice becomes a metaphor for her having nothing to say; that the collapsing slogan becomes one for a government falling apart.
If that second claim is an overstatement, the first is simply untrue. The core problem with May’s text yesterday was not that there was nothing in it, but that there was too much. Its writers sought to pack into it an apology (which we advised her to get out of the way last Sunday), a personal credo, her family story, “the British Dream”, policy announcements, free market generalities and interventionist detail. ConservativeHome liked parts of it. The Prime Minister signalled that contingency planning is under way if there is no deal in the Brexit talks, which this site has been flagging up since the summer, and swore to take personal charge of the drive for more housing, just as we suggested last weekend.
But boiled down to its essence, the key problem with the speech was that for all its content it lacked clarity – and so failed to point a coherent way ahead either for the Conservatives or, especially, for May herself. You cannot adapt to the Corbyn challenge by making a stirring defence of free markets…and then carry on as usual by stressing energy price caps and more council houses. The latter was especially puzzling. The Conservative Manifesto spoke of turning social housing private: new fixed-term social homes, it said, would be built and then “sold privately after ten to fifteen years with an automatic Right to Buy for tenants”.
However, neither the speech nor the briefing mentioned that last element – and this at a time when younger voters have little stake in the system, and thus little incentive to vote for the party which represents it. What has happened to the Tory vision, set out as long ago as the 1950s, of making workers capitalists – of the mass ownership of property, shares and pensions? Furthermore, housing is one of the few policy areas in which the Government can afford to be bold, since it can borrow for capital projects at cheap rates and doesn’t require primary legislation to act. But it promised more money for selling off existing homes, in the form of help to buy, than for building new ones. Earlier this week, William Hague urged the Conservatives to be imaginative. But five thousand more homes a year is a sprinkle of water in the housing ocean at a time when we need over 250,000.
The British dream didn’t work for Ed Miliband. It didn’t work earlier for Michael Howard. And we doubt very much whether it will work for Theresa May. But if that’s what she wants to project, it must be done properly – right from the start of the conference week. Instead, last Sunday brought two policy announcements, one of which will be swallowed up with no thanks at all (the raising of the level at which tuition fees begin to be repaid). That collapsing conference slogan was the Nick Timothy-era one – “Building a country that works for everyone”. It had the presence throughout the week of a ghost ship.
If Downing Street wanted “the British Dream” to be more than a last-day conference offering for the headline writers, it needed to be projected from the backdrop – and hammered home throughout the week, running through the speeches of Ministers from the platform as the core runs through a stick of rock. The newish team in Number Ten is evidently easier to deal with than the old one, and managerially very competent indeed, but it lacks a disruptor, an agitator, a source of ideas: a Steve Hilton or a Timothy or even a George Osborne, who gave the Cameron Government the Northern Powerhouse and the new Living Wage and, yes, Help to Buy.
There is the inevitable talk this morning of a leadership challenge. Conservative MPs will be talking with their Associations this coming weekend (in some cases), and meet in the Commons when it returns next week. The best guess today is that it will have moved a few to favour one, but not many. The case against is formidable: in essence, that toppling a Prime Minister during the Brexit negotiations would paralyse them.
Furthermore, the Tories can surely lose only one leader during this Parliament. What if another is required after those negotiations end? Or if a challenge led to a general election? And May’s replacement now could well be Boris Johnson, if his name went before the membership. That is a disincentive to act for many Conservative MPs.
None the less, the week will have reminded them of an inconvenient truth – namely, that the Foreign Secretary stands out from his Cabinet colleagues in being able to make a mass Tory appeal with pizzazz, wit and gusto. The Conservative week has been an Aesop-type fable of the lion and the frog: Johnson with his leonine Churchillian appeal; May with the croaker that seized up her throat. We have our reservations about the Foreign Secretary, but concede that he alone, of those Ministers who spoke this week, made the Tory message sing.Whereas the dinosaurs didn't know what hit them, huge payments companies can see the threat from distributed ledger technology hurtling their way and still have time to try and avoid extinction.
IBTimes UK spoke with executives from the big three processors – Visa, MasterCard and American Express – at the MoneyConf in Belfast earlier in June, and asked them in turn about their blockchain strategies, innovations and how efficiently their existing systems work.
Fielding a question about whether Visa has a Bitcoin-related technology strategy, Jonathan Vaux, executive director of innovation partnerships, Visa Europe, said: "There are two elements here: the blockchain technology itself, which is very interesting for transactions, then there is bitcoin the currency.
Blockchain gang
"We are certainly looking at applications involving blockchain. What can you do with this? We know there's a peer-to-peer transaction network happening but we don't see it scaling unless there is trust in the system.
"Certainly we are looking at it in a lab environment and as quick way of routing it's exciting. We have a team in London looking at specific use cases," he said.
Regards advancements in distributed ledger solutions swallowing up enormous swathes of payment processors' functionality, Vaux said "platforms are always upgrading, this has always been happening".
We are certainly looking at applications involving blockchain. What can you do with this? We know there's a peer-to-peer transaction network happening but we don't see it scaling unless there is trust in the system - Jonathan Vaux
Meanwhile, MasterCard said it was watchful. Andrew Buckley, head of products for Europe, said: "We are not currently working actively on any bitcoin-based solutions, but we watch the cryptocurrency market closely.
"We find them interesting from a technology perspective, but currently don't see them as a viable solution for mainstream commerce."
Buckley also talked about the scale of his company's facilities, mentioning its priorities in bringing more people into the digital fold.
He said: "We are a scale business. Our focus is on these hundreds of millions of people with a bit of plastic in their wallets. How do we get them into this new digital world? Once we have sorted that out, and the two billion people that haven't got a card, then we may start worrying about other things."
Buyer protection
We also asked Neal Sample, president of Enterprise Growth at American Express about the blockchain's disruptive potential.
He said: "The distributed ledger is really useful for peer-to-peer transfers.
"So the work that Amex does, while it could be supported by distributed ledger, goes far beyond peer-to-peer. It involves creating a set of guarantees and a set of services for both consumers and merchants that they wouldn't get if they were just trying to transact with one another.
"Think about buyer protection. If you go in and pay for something with your Amex card and it is promised that it will be shipped to you, but they never ship it to you, Amex will stand in for the customer and negotiate on their behalf.
Think about buyer protection. If you go in and pay for something with your Amex card and it is promised that it will be shipped to you, but they never ship it to you, Amex will stand in for the customer and negotiate on their behalf - Neal Sample
"On the other hand, if you transfer somebody some bitcoins on a ledger – gone, end of story. These are not reversible transactions. So you have to have a very high level of trust that merchant will fulfil on their promise.
"And so that's the kind of thing the Amex does, as an intermediary that a peer transmission network doesn't get you.
"You definitely don't have to worry about trust in payments, the payments transaction happens, right, but there's a commerce cycle that's much, much bigger than payments. It introduces a new series of problems if you can't revoke the payment. Payment is not the end of the cycle – it's not even the beginning of the cycle – it's just one stage in the middle."
The big payments processors must be tired of getting flak about their sprawling legacy systems. In a recent interview, IBTimes UK heard the V.me and MasterPass wallets described as a "nightmare" to integrate by merchants, who have no choice but to spend time and resources on this because these companies are too big to be ignored. We asked what they thought of this assessment of their wallet technologies.
Nightmarish technology
Buckley of MasterCard said: "The evidence doesn't really suggest that. If you look at the announcement we made yesterday with JC Penney in the US about digitising their store cards, what we are doing is we are playing role of linking these retailers with hundreds of millions of people who have a card.
"We are the middle man between the banking systems and the retailers and we've got 250,000 merchants worldwide on MasterPass, so the scale we operate at is significant."
Buckley said the tokenisation of digital transaction using MasterCard (Visa also offers a token system) should make things easier in terms of storage and security.
He said: "To store credit card details is a pain, because you've got to put them on a special server and if it gets stolen, you know, retailers have very famously been hacked. And so where the advantage of these digital tokens is, the risk you face is much reduced. I think it will be seen as a real turning point in payments."
To store credit card details is a pain, because you've got to put them on a special server and if it gets stolen, you know, retailers have very famously been hacked. And so where the advantage of these digital tokens is, the risk you face is much reduced - Andrew Buckley
On the subject of ugly inside-out technology that gums up the works of merchants' payment systems, Visa's Vaux said: "You need to separate in-store, online and in-app.
"Online the merchants have quite long-standing technology that is quite complex and therefore particularly in markets where you are trying to solve liability issues, that can be complex. We are trying but it is complex.
"The big piece of work we have done is tokenisation which is building effectively the ability to neutralise the data out there so that it's much, much safer.
"Visa is facilitating Apple Pay with tokenisation, but the card holders won't know about – I mean it makes them safer but they won't know about that and as far as they are concerned it will operate like a contactless transaction."
Amex does not operate a wrapper style of wallet of the kind Visa and MasterCard use, as Neal Sample explained: "We provide a consumer wallet with consumer capabilities.
"We took a fairly standard approach treating our wallet just like it was a credit card was or a debit card. We didn't have the difficulty of integrating. Nobody had to integrate to us directly. Now they could, optionally, but on the other hand you didn't have to add another button to your website to take a Serve card.
Serve is actually a stored value account, so it's more like a prepaid card or a debit account or a bank account, in that there are funds available there - Neal Sample
Sample explained that wallets such as the V.me and MasterPass offerings are called "pass-through wallets"; by clicking on a button the user enables some other instruments behind it.
He said: "So you are going to enable a Visa card, or it used to be – I dunno if it's still the case – you could put an Amex card in your V.me, so really what it's going to do is it's going to pass a transaction through.
"Serve is actually a stored value account, so it's more like a prepaid card or a debit account or a bank account, in that there are funds available there."
"Their wallet is really a thin wrapper, it doesn't have stored value in it at all. V.me doesn't have the notion of funds in, or funds out – you can't go to an ATM and use your V.me wallet right, cause really at the ATM, it's gonna try to use something behind it – so it's a different concept.
"Theirs is really a wallet in the thinnest sense, ours is really an alternative to banking."The Apache Tomcat team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 8.0.29. Apache Tomcat 8 is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Unified Expression Language and Java WebSocket technologies. Apache Tomcat 8.0.29 includes fixes for issues identified in 8.0.28 as well as other enhancements and changes. The notable changes since 8.0.28 include: - Add an option to control (per context) quoting of EL expressions in JSP attributes - Correct a regression in the fix for 56777 that added support for URIs in config file locations - Add a new RestCsrfPreventionFilter that provides basic CSRF protection for REST APIs - Use instance manager for WebSocket server endpoint instances Please refer to the change log for the complete list of changes: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/changelog.html Downloads: http://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi Migration guides from Apache Tomcat 5.5.x, 6.0.x and 7.0.x: http://tomcat.apache.org/migration.html Enjoy! - The Apache Tomcat teamTCU's Gary Patterson has a new contract that will make him the Horned Frogs' coach through the 2018 season, the school announced.
A source said that Patterson's total package pays him close to $3 million per season and that the entire deal is guaranteed.
The Frogs just completed their first perfect season since winning a national championship in 1938. The 13-0 mark included a Rose Bowl victory over Wisconsin, the school's second consecutive BCS appearance.
"TCU let me grow as a coach," Patterson, who was watching the Cotton Bowl from his home Friday night, told ESPNDallas.com. "They gave me an opportunity to be a head coach and to do what we've been able to do. We've come a long way in 13 years and it's been fun to be a part of it. I feel like I'm just a member of the staff. The entire university, not just the football program, is trying to win championships."
Patterson said he met with his coaching staff Monday following the Rose Bowl to go over recruiting video and then went out on recruiting visits all week. TCU has recruiting weekends coming up this month in preparation for February's signing day.
He said part of his new contract was that he made sure his assistants were also taken care of, from his coordinators to the |
as Juliana Liu explains
Move overseas
Speculation about a New York listing for Alibaba began last September, when the company abandoned plans for a stock offering in Hong Kong after talks with regulators broke down.
Alibaba's management structure, which allows senior executives to retain control of the board of directors, fell foul of Hong Kong's listing rules.
Hong Kong Stock Exchange chief executive Charles Li said in a statement: "We respect the company's decision and wish it well."
He added, in an apparent reference to Alibaba's insistence on maintaining its management structure: "We are proud of our tradition of respect for the rule of law and adherence to principles."
The Alibaba group is already the world's largest online retailer, with more than 500 million customers and more than 800 million product listings.
However, it is so far little known outside China.
The news comes two days after another Chinese tech giant, Twitter-like service Weibo, announced plans for a $500m US listing.prog1B.cpp a guest Jan 21st, 2014 19,166 Never a guest19,166Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint C++ 244.27 KB #include <iostream> #include <fstream> #include <string> #include <cstdint> #include <cstdlib> #include <stdexcept> #include <exception> using std :: cin ; using std :: cout ; using std :: endl ; class FileNameTooLong : public std :: exception { public : virtual const char * what ( ) const throw ( ) { return "Sorry; filename must be 80 chars or less.
" ; } } ; class CouldNotOpenFile : public std :: exception { public : virtual const char * what ( ) const throw ( ) { return "Sorry, couldn't open file.
" ; } } ; class BadEntry : public std :: exception { public : virtual const char * what ( ) const throw ( ) { return "Sorry, that's a bad entry.
" ; } } ; void read ( const std :: string FILENAME ) { std :: ifstream inFile ; uint8_t filename_size ; filename_size = FILENAME. length ( ) ; ++ filename_size ; void * filename_c_str_ptr ; char * filename_c_str ; filename_c_str_ptr = malloc ( filename_size ) ; filename_c_str = ( char * ) filename_c_str_ptr ; filename_c_str_ptr = nullptr ; size_t i ; i = 0 ; char * filename_c_str_iter ; filename_c_str_iter = filename_c_str ; char c ; if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { FileNameTooLong err ; throw ( err ) ; } inFile. open ( filename_c_str, std :: ifstream :: in ) ; bool is_open ; is_open = inFile. is_open ( ) ; bool isnt_open ; isnt_open =! is_open ; if ( isnt_open ) { CouldNotOpenFile err ; throw ( err ) ; } char d ; bool eof ; bool not_eof ; while ( not_eof ) { d = inFile. get ( ) ; eof = inFile. eof ( ) ; not_eof =! eof ; if ( not_eof ) { if ( d == '0' ) { cout << '0' ; } if ( d == '1' ) { cout << '1' ; } if ( d == '2' ) { cout << '2' ; } if ( d == '3' ) { cout << '3' ; } if ( d == '4' ) { cout << '4' ; } if ( d == '5' ) { cout << '5' ; } if ( d == '6' ) { cout << '6' ; } if ( d == '7' ) { cout << '7' ; } if ( d == '8' ) { cout << '8' ; } if ( d == '9' ) { cout << '9' ; } if ( d == '.' ) { cout << '.' ; } if ( d == '-' ) { cout << '-' ; } if ( d =='' ) { cout << endl ; } } } cout << endl ; inFile. close ( ) ; delete filename_c_str ; filename_c_str_iter = nullptr ; } void write ( const std :: string FILENAME ) { std :: ofstream outFile ; uint8_t filename_size ; filename_size = FILENAME. length ( ) ; ++ filename_size ; void * filename_c_str_ptr ; char * filename_c_str ; filename_c_str_ptr = malloc ( filename_size ) ; filename_c_str = ( char * ) filename_c_str_ptr ; filename_c_str_ptr = nullptr ; size_t i ; i = 0 ; char * filename_c_str_iter ; filename_c_str_iter = filename_c_str ; char c ; if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c_str_iter = c ; ++ i ; ++ filename_c_str_iter ; } if ( i < filename_size ) { try { c = FILENAME. at ( i ) ; } catch ( std :: out_of_range & e ) { c = 0 ; } * filename_c |
, and people appreciate that.”
WATCH: Conservative leadership race heats up, Chong’s surreal story gains attention
The deadline for signing up new members to the party who can vote on May 27 passed last week. Bernier said his campaign was “very successful” in signing up eligible voters, but he didn’t have a precise number yet. His campaign set a goal of 25,000 new members.
The Quebec MP also said he’s not overly concerned about the damaging effects of recent controversies linked to the race, including debates over a Canadian values tests, and anti-gay comments made by Brad Trost.
“They’re one-issue candidates, like Kellie Leitch. (Her campaign) is all about immigration and Canadian values,” Bernier said.
“At the end, the members will choose the leader, and that leader will be the face of the party and will be the face to communicate to Canadians our real Conservative values.”
Watch the full interview with Maxime Bernier above.When the University of Illinois gave a large pay raise to its longtime athletic director a decade ago, it offered an example of the ever-increasing salary arms race to lure and keep college coaches and administrators.
That raise for Ron Guenther has also quietly become an example of just how much the arms race can cost the state’s struggling pension funds years down the road, as Guenther’s annual university pension approaches $500,000 a year.
It’s part of a broader debate about just how much state taxpayers should subsidize public pensions, including the small set of retirees paid significant sums to oversee or coach college sports teams. That debate is now intensifying at the state’s flagship university, with research from a professor at the campus.
U. of I. professor Jay Rosenstein is a documentary filmmaker best known for a 1997 film criticizing the use of Native American mascots for sports teams, including at U. of I. His latest project has focused on the cost of college athletics, and as part of that he spent five years looking into the salaries and pensions of U. of I. coaches and administrators.
Rosenstein used a mix of records obtained through the state’s open records act and other information gathered by the Better Government Association advocacy group to conduct an investigation he’s called “The Multi Million Dollar Head Fake.” The findings are published on his website, theheadfake.org, and at HuffPost.
He argues the salary arms race was sold to taxpayers as a win-win: that the university could pay big bucks to keep and lure talented people, who in turn could produce a program that would bring in more than enough money to cover those higher salaries.
Instead, he said, the university and its students subsidize the program, and taxpayers contribute to large pension tabs years later. He tabulated the cost of retirement checks for 18 former U. of I. coaches and sports administrators at more than $2.6 million a year — with Guenther topping that list.
“You see a coach get another $200,000 or $300,000 raise, and people would say, ‘Well, it’s ridiculous, but they (the athletic department officials) are paying out of their own money and I guess it’s OK.’ Now you see, when they give a raise like that, they were handing the taxpayers a bill.”
The university’s athletic department said it’s not that simple.
Department spokesman Kent Brown said that of the top 500 paid state retirees, only three come from the university’s athletic department: Guenther and former basketball coaches Lou Henson and Jimmy Collins. Henson’s annual pension is $347,058 and Collins’ is $200,015, the university said.
For more recently hired coaches and administrators, state law limits how much pay can count toward state pensions.
Illinois football coach Lovie Smith, for example, has a six-year, $21 million contract. His pension is calculated based on a salary of only $270,000, not the more than $3 million he averages in earnings per year, according to his contract. And there are other rules on how long he has to work, and how old he has to be, to start collecting a traditional state retirement check.
And, in recent years, any public agency giving unusually high pay raises must send additional money to a pension fund to cover the expected pension boost from the raise. U. of I.’s athletic department has had to do that at times.
But that still may not be enough to cover the added expense when a public agency grants large pay raises at the end of a career — a practice critics deride as pension-spiking.
During Guenther’s 19-year tenure, the Elmhurst native was credited with modernizing the university’s athletics program and facilities, partly through aggressive fundraising, even if the university struggled to show sustained success on the football field.
As the athletics budget increased, so did Guenther’s pay, from $120,000 in 1992 to $410,000 by mid-2005, U. of I. data show.
Then, in July 2006, came his biggest raise yet: $90,000, to take him to $500,000 a year. It was defended as a much-needed raise to keep Guenther in line with his peers.
The campus newspaper, The Daily Illini, called the salary increase “eye-popping” in an editorial at the time but opined it was fair because the athletic department “is a self-sufficient entity, receiving money from donors and revenue, not the University nor the state.”
That pay increase would help set the stage for a more lucrative pension subsidized by taxpayers.
Pensions for state employees of that era are based on the worker’s highest four years of pay, typically the last four. In Guenther’s case, he continued to get raises and a bonus, and his last four years’ salary averaged more than $600,000 a year before he retired in July 2011, the State Universities Retirement System, known as SURS, told the Tribune.
He also had spent a long time as a public worker: nearly 32 years, plus credit for an extra year for unused sick time, SURS records show. Under the pension formula, Guenther qualified for just over 72 percent of his average salary.
That pension also grows at 3 percent a year, records show. So that’s how Guenther, 72 years old and seven years into retirement, is now being paid a pension of $473,094 a year from SURS. It is set to top $500,000 a year in 2019, based on a Tribune analysis of SURS’ retirement formula.
Some of Guenther’s pension was fronted by Guenther from paycheck deductions he made over the years. SURS did not immediately say how much, but records it provided to Rosenstein show the figure at $615,000 including interest.
The university athletic department also contributed about $100,000 as part of a law that forces public agencies to pay some of the pension costs of unusually high raises.
Still, those contributions from Guenther and the athletic department are not enough to cover even two years’ worth of Guenther’s pension.
The rest comes from taxpayers, and it adds to the weight of a state pension system that is among the worst-funded in the country from years of big promises to state employees matched with little savings by state lawmakers.
SURS’ assets, for example, could be expected to meet just 43 percent of the pension promises made to current and past employees, according to a 2016 review of the state pension funds. SURS did not respond to a request for an interview.
Messages for Guenther left with the university and a current employer were not returned.
Guenther is allowed to earn as much as $300,000 a year while still keeping his pension, according to state records.
After retiring from U. of I., he became a consultant for the Big Ten Conference. The conference declined to say how much he’s paid.Police are searching for lost ammunition that accidentally fell out of a Queensland officer's handgun.
The traffic officer left Tank Street in Brisbane’s CBD on Friday on his motorbike and rode to Ipswich.
It was there he realised the magazine was missing — roughly four hours after he last saw it.
Camera Icon The lost magazine contains 14 rounds of ammunition Picture: 7 News
The magazine contains 14 rounds of ammunition, and Queensland Police are pleading for anyone who finds it to turn it in immediately.
It’s the second embarrassing gun-related incident for Queensland Police, with an unloaded handgun reported missing earlier this month.
The gun went missing from the Yamanto station on July 18 after an officer came back from holidays.
7 News understands that glock wasn't stored in the gun safe as it should have been.
An investigation is under way into both matters.President Donald Trump is upset again — this time, at a sports league.
On Friday and Saturday, he called on the NFL to fire players who protest during the national anthem. On Monday, after Trump’s comments led more players to protest during Sunday’s games, he tweeted “#StandForOurAnthem” and retweeted someone who called for a boycott against the NFL.
Trump seems to be under the impression that these protests are disrespectful to the entire country. In his initial tweet, he said that NFL players “should not be allowed to disrespect … our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem.” His later retweet also suggested that not standing for the national anthem is an affront to military veterans.
The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem. NFL must respect this! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017
This misses the point of the protests entirely. These demonstrations are not about disrespecting the flag or the nation. They are not about disrespecting the military, especially given that some military veterans have participated in and supported the protests ever since Colin Kaepernick jump-started them.
This is about systemic racism in America — and particularly police brutality. As Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett put it in a recent letter, there’s a widespread belief that in America, a person’s race can get him killed at the hands of police. Bennett claimed to experience this exact same thing in a recent police stop in Las Vegas, noting that he thought, “I’m going to die for no other reason than I am black and my skin color is somehow a threat.”
Trump has joked about police brutality, has criticized Black Lives Matter, and supports “tough on crime,” aggressive policing. So it’s not surprising that he’s trying to spin the NFL demonstrations in the least charitable way possible — and make it seem like these football players are unpatriotic.
But the fact that the president is giving these protests attention shows that, to some degree, they’re working: The protests make some people uncomfortable, but they also bring attention to issues of police brutality and race that some NFL players feel have long been neglected.
There are racial disparities in police use of force
The NFL protests didn’t come out of nowhere. The statistics back up the concerns: Based on nationwide data collected by the Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police when accounting for population. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people, compared to 2.9 per 1 million for white Americans.
There have also been several high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.
One possible explanation for the racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black. That means they’re going to be generally more likely to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests, against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing actions carry a chance, however small, of escalating into a violent confrontation.
That’s not to say that higher crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is going on.
One reason to believe racial bias is a factor: Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. “In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” he said, “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.”
These are the facts that animate the latest protests by NFL players — and many of them will continue to refuse to stand up during the national anthem for as long as they see police brutality continuing in America.
It’s okay if protest makes some people uncomfortable
These acts of protest may make Trump uncomfortable. But the point of them is, to some degree, to make people uncomfortable. They are meant to show Americans that something is so wrong that the routine of American life simply cannot go on as is — so it must be interrupted in some way to draw the everyday person’s attention.
Typically, this happens by disrupting streets and businesses. Civil rights protesters in the 1960s, for example, seized control of restaurants and other establishments while conducting sit-ins. This forced the people there to confront the reality that many of these protesters — some of whom were black — typically were not allowed in these businesses simply because of their skin color.
Americans by and large look back favorably on the 1960s civil rights movement. But as Judd Legum noted over at ThinkProgress, it wasn’t always this way: Public opinion polls during the 1960s repeatedly found that a majority of Americans said black people should stop the civil rights demonstrations and that the protests would ultimately hurt black people. Just as many Americans look at today’s protests uncomfortably, the same was true back in the ’60s.
Black Lives Matter has continued this line of protests through street demonstrations over police use of force, some of which deliberately disrupt the flow of traffic — again interrupting the routine of American life.
NFL players like Kaepernick, however, have discovered that they have an important position of power in which the nation quite literally has its eyes on them. So they’ve cleverly leveraged this position of power by not standing up for the national anthem — something that is sure to get a lot of people’s attention.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said during his original protests. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
The point here isn’t to say that the US is bad and that the anthem and those who defend it are bad people. It’s to get people’s attention while simultaneously making the point that not everyone is as equal as our national narrative about “the land of the free and the home of the brave” might suggest.
The protests may make a lot of people uncomfortable and disrupt their routines. They may even get some people to turn off the TV next time the Bengals or Patriots are on.
But they’ve also given a higher profile to the issues these players are protesting. That could pay off in the long term, even if it’s making the president and others angry on Twitter right now.Image credit: Larry vs Harry
As a student, I spent a year living in Copenhagen. And I was amazed by how many people used cargo bikes as their primary source of transportation. From carting kids to school, to hauling groceries, to giving drunk friends a ride from the bar—heavy-duty load-carrying bikes were just another form of transportation for the people of this beautiful city. Could it be that the rest of the world is finally catching on to the potential of cargo bikes too?We already know from our own explorations on Treehugger that there's a huge diversity of extended-frame and load carrying bikes available around the world. And with the world-famous Christiania bikes now available in the US, it seems the time might just be right for a mainstream adoption of cargo bikes around the Globe.
Gareth Lennon over at The Guardian would seem to agree, telling us that cargo bike manufacturers are seeing increased sales far beyond traditional geographical strongholds like the Netherlands or Copenhagen. But, he says, for these vehicles to really bust out of their bike-messenger/delivery vehicle niche, one crucial issue needs to be tackled—weight.
Image credit: BoxCycles While some folks may be happy using a heavy-duty bike for heavy-duty hauling, and keeping a lighter bike as a runaround, the majority of cyclists would like to know that their cargo bike also feels good to ride when it is empty. (After all, you don't always know when you are going to need to haul something heavier.) Fortunately, help is at hand here too in the form of the Bullitt—a Danish-built bike that also made Warren's list of 22 extended-frame cargo bikes
"In order for your cargo bike to even stand a chance of becoming your default bike, it needs to be an attractive riding option - that means it must be relatively light. Sadly, most two-wheeled front loader cargo bikes up until a few years ago tended to tip the scales at a tiring 35 kilos, even when empty. Enter the Bullitt. Conceived a few years back by two Danish frame designers and introduced in 2008, it was the first mass-produced aluminium cargo frame. The fork is necessarily of steel, but it comes in at 20-24 kilos."
Image credit: Larry vs Harry Lennon, an owner of a Bullitt himself, reckons there are at least 50 of these things in Berlin alone where he lives. While exact numbers of cargo bike sales are hard to come by, Lennon reports that worldwide sales in 2008 were around 10,000—and that in Denmark alone there are about 5000 new cargo bikes hitting the streets each year.
As mentioned by many commenters, the Bullitt is in many ways a spin off from the traditional Dutch Bakfiets. See our round up of 22 extended-frame cargo bikes, or our slideshow of work bikes and cargo bikes for more examples. Image Credit: Bakfiets
The term tipping point seems strange to use with such sturdy machines, but it might just be that we have reached one.
More on Cargo Bikes
Slideshow: Industrial Bikes That Get the Job Done - Work Bikes, Cargo Bikes
22 Extended-Frame Cargo Bikes
Copenhagen SUVs: aka The Cargo Bike
Five Cool Cargo Bikes and the Return of the Long John
DIY Cargo Bikes(Recasts with company spokesman comment)
By Lisa Baertlein
LOS ANGELES, July 6 (Reuters) - Some employees at Starbucks Corp in Chile are planning to walk out on Thursday over a pay and benefits dispute, but the coffee chain said the action would not result in cafe closures.
Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson said on Wednesday that unionized workers account for less than 30 percent of the company’s more than 670 employees in Chile, where Starbucks has 31 cafes, mostly in Santiago.
“All of our stores are going to be open for business,” said Olson, who added that only union workers would be involved in the strike action.
The union, known as the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Starbucks Coffee Chile, was organized two years ago and since has been trying to get the company to give hourly workers a lunch stipend, a representative told the Wall Street Journal.
Pay for new hires at Starbucks Chile is the equivalent of $2.50 per hour and has not changed in the eight years since Starbucks opened for business in Chile, according to the representative, who said lunch costs the equivalent of two or more hours of work.
Pay and other compensation for Starbucks employees in Chile is “above and beyond” what is offered by the coffee chain’s peers, Olson said.
He added that both base pay and total compensation for starting hourly workers at Starbucks is roughly 30 percent higher that what is offered by comparable employers. Employees also are eligible for raises after six months, he said.
Representatives for the union could not be immediately reached for comment.
LUNCH STIPEND, HEALTH INSURANCE
Union workers voted to authorize a strike on June 25. Among other things they are seeking pay increases, a $100 monthly lunch stipend and a bonus for completing labor negotiations.
The union also is asking the company to cover 100 percent of employee health insurance costs, Olson said. Starbucks currently pays for 70 percent of the cost of an employee’s health insurance in Chile.
The vast majority of workers at company owned and operated Starbucks cafes are not union members, but there are a few exceptions.
Starbucks workers in Brazil and Argentina are subject to government-sanctioned industry-wide collective bargaining. One store in Regina, Canada is unionized. And in China, Starbucks works with local labor authorities at the request of the government.
Some workers at Starbucks licensed stores in the United States and abroad belong to unions. That’s because they are employed by the grocery stores or airports where the cafes are operated. (Additional reporting by Abhishek Takle in Bangalore; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)24 TV editor-in-chief, columnist and anchor Yiğit Bulut appointed PM's chief adviser
ISTANBUL
Bulut started his career as an economy journalist and anchor for private broadcasters Kanal E and CNN Türk.
News anchor and editor-in-chief of private news broadcaster 24 TV Yiğit Bulut has been appointed as chief adviser of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.Bulut is also a columnist for daily Star, just like Yalçın Akdoğan, who is also a chief adviser to the prime minister.Bulut started his career as an economy journalist and anchor for private broadcasters Kanal E and CNN Türk. In 2010, he became the editor-in-chief of the mainstream news broadcaster Habertürk, where he had also presented a debate program "Sansürsüz" (Without Censorship) a year previously.Throughout the ongoing Gezi Park protests, Bulut has sided doggedly with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and is also one of the most ardent proponents of the theory that "interest rate lobbies" are behind the unrest.Speaking on a news show on 24 TV last month, Bulut claimed that certain powers were trying to kill Erdoğan through telekinesis. "In many centers there is work going on to kill Erdoğan from afar, through methods like telekinesis," he said.Siren or sirens may refer to:
Common meanings [ edit ]
Siren (alarm), a loud acoustic alarm used to alert people to emergencies
Siren (mythology), a creature in Greek mythology
Places [ edit ]
People [ edit ]
Siren (surname)
Siren, stage name of female bodybuilder Shelley Beattie on the TV show American Gladiators
Siren, stage name of Valerie Waugaman on the 2008 revival of American Gladiators
Alexander Brandon (born 1974), American musician, known as "Siren" in the demoscene
Siren Sundby (born 1982), Norwegian Olympic sailor
Animals [ edit ]
Siren (genus), a genus of aquatic salamanders in the family Sirenidae
(genus), a genus of aquatic salamanders in the family Sirenidae Hestina, a genus of brush-footed butterfly commonly called sirens
, a genus of brush-footed butterfly commonly called sirens Sirenia, an order of aquatic mammals including dugongs and manatees
Sirenidae, a family of aquatic salamanders
Arts, entertainment, and media [ edit ]
Fictional characters [ edit ]
Films [ edit ]
(Chronological)
Games [ edit ]
Literature [ edit ]
Siren (play), a 1990 play by David Williamson
(play), a 1990 play by David Williamson Siren, a book by Tara Moss
, a book by Tara Moss "Sirens" (Ulysses episode) an episode in James Joyce's novel Ulysses
Music [ edit ]
Groups [ edit ]
Sirens (American band), metalcore band from Terre Haute, Indiana
Sirens (British band), a Newcastle upon Tyne based girl group
Siren, a rock band featuring Kevin Coyne
Albums [ edit ]
Songs [ edit ]
Other uses in music [ edit ]
Acme Siren, a varying-pitch wind instrument, often found in the percussion section of orchestras
Sirènes ("Sirens"), a movement in the Debussy suite Nocturnes
("Sirens"), a movement in the Debussy suite The Sirens, Op. 33, by Reinhold Glière (1875-1956)
Paintings [ edit ]
The Siren (Waterhouse painting), a 1900 painting by John William Waterhouse
(Waterhouse painting), a 1900 painting by John William Waterhouse The Siren, 1888 painting by Edward Armitage
Sculptures [ edit ]
Siren (statue), a 2008 life-size statue by Marc Quinn
(statue), a 2008 life-size statue by Marc Quinn The Siren (sculpture), a 2005 sculpture by Norman J. Gitzen
Television [ edit ]
Series [ edit ]
Episodes [ edit ]
Other arts, entertainment, and media [ edit ]
Siren (magazine), a bimonthly Canadian magazine
(magazine), a bimonthly Canadian magazine Siren FM, a community radio station based at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom
Siren Music Festival, an annual outdoor concert held at Coney Island, New York, from 2001 to 2010
The Siren (musical), a 1911 Broadway musical
Court cases [ edit ]
Military [ edit ]
HMS Siren, several Royal Navy ships
, several Royal Navy ships SS-N-9 Siren, NATO reporting name for the P-120 Malakhit, a Russian anti-ship missile
USS Siren, several US Navy ships
Sports [ edit ]
Sacramento Sirens, a woman's football team
Saskatoon Sirens, an expansion team in the Legends Football League
Sirens A.S.C., a waterpolo club in Malta
Sirens F.C., a football club in Malta Sirens Stadium, the club's home ground
Other uses [ edit ]Every day brings more details about the first case of the Ebola virus to be diagnosed in the U.S. And while experts say there is essentially no risk of a significant outbreak here in the states, much of the public remains worried. A poll by Harvard found that 39% of U.S. adults are concerned about a large outbreak here, and more than a quarter fear someone in their immediate family could get sick with Ebola.
If only there was someone around who could educate the American public about the actual level of risk. Someone who was trusted as a public health expert and whose job it was to help us understand what we really need to worry about and what precautions we should take.
Close video NRA enters Surgeon General nomination fight The Cyclists debate the linking of public health to gun violence, and how the NRA has become involved in the Senate’s confirmation for Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy. share tweet email save Embed
The lack of a surgeon general is now becoming more than just one more abstract example of government gridlock.
Close video Is the NRA making the Ebola crisis worse? Medical Ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan and political insider Fmr. MO State Sen. Jeff Smith discuss the impact of the NRA blocking Pres. Obama’s surgeon general nominee during the Ebola crisis. share tweet email save Embed
According to former Surgeon General Regina Benjamin: “The surgeon general is America’s doctor. Delivering information to the American people in a language they can understand. Not having one right now, you don’t have that face and that person that the American people can identify with as their doctor who’s looking out for them on a large scale.”
This role is exactly what prior surgeons general have filled in times of heightened public health anxiety. When faced with the threat of bird-flu for example, the surgeon general at the time, Richard Carmona, talked to the public about prevention, pressured drug makers to ramp up production of effective treatments. He also educated us on risks associated with the disease and kept us updated on its status.
“For well over a century, the American public and the world has come to rely on the unbiased apolitical and scientifically driven information generated by the United States Surgeon General,” Carmona said. “In an era of hyper partisanship and general distrust of government, a highly qualified and experienced Surgeon General is needed now more than ever.” “We need … a surgeon general to echo and amplify the messages coming from the CDC, and to provide evidence-based advocacy to shape our response.” Dr. Paul Farmer, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
As I reported previously, Murthy’s nomination has been held up by Republicans and a few red state Democrats due to this surprisingly controversial stance: He believes that guns can impact your health. Well, to be fair, this conservative coalition is not troubled by his stance, so much as they are fearful of the NRA, which decided to try to scuttle Murthy’s confirmation. The NRA wrote a strongly worded letter, Rand Paul put a hold on the nomination, and Red State Democrats begged Harry Reid to not force them to vote. It’s funny that the strongly worded letters of ordinary citizens don’t seem to have quite the same effect.
So thanks to NRA power and Senate cowardice, we are left with no surgeon general during a time when, we not only have Ebola arriving on our shores, but are also dealing with the mysterious Enterovirus, which is infecting and contributing to the deaths of children in the U.S.
“We need all hands on deck, and a surgeon general to echo and amplify the messages coming from the CDC, and to provide evidence-based advocacy to shape our response,” said Dr. Paul Farmer, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
In other words, now would be a great time to have someone in the role of top doctor.
Murthy is a particularly good choice for that role, according to Farmer. “Dr. Vivek Murthy has long experience in community-based care, in communicating complex messages in a straightforward and even-handed manner, and is committed not just to passing on information to others, but to learning from them, too,” he added.
Photo Essay: Ebola continues its deadly march
At the moment, Tom Frieden, the head of the Center for Disease Control, has been filling in for part of the surgeon general’s role, but he has his own vital work to attend to as both head of the CDC and the U.S. Ambassador to the World Health Organization.
Frieden was also a controversial pick for the Senate-confirmed position of U.S. Ambassador to the World Health Organization due to his aggressive approach to combating smoking, as well as his support of distributing condoms and clean needles to combat the spread of HIV in New York City. But when the Senate realized they didn’t have anyone in place to spearhead our Ebola coordination with the World Health Organization, they got their act together and confirmed Frieden for the post swiftly in mid-September. So this Senate can act. It’s time they move with equal haste to let Dr. Vivek Murthy get to work as our next surgeon general.Even before Johnny Manziel went into treatment, the Browns had decided to search far and wide for quarterback help. As it had been told to me, the net would be widely cast, and if the Browns don't bring back Brian Hoyer, they would need to get creative in an otherwise slim free agency pool. Rams quarterback Sam Bradford would be atop the wish list, as Bleacher Report's Jason Cole points out in a buzz video from the combine. Marcus Mariota could be enticing as a trade-up option.
One name that was brought up to me more than once in NFL circles: Tampa Bay's Mike Glennon. Two league sources are hearing the Browns have at least sniffed around on Glennon's potential availability. While I haven't heard of any formal offers, Glennon should be a player to watch in the Browns' Great QB race -- if the Bucs are willing to part with him.
The Bucs might need Glennon as insurance for gap-bridging with Jameis Winston, the likely No. 1 overall pick. Coach Lovie Smith said the team is moving forward with Glennon as the slated starter unless proven otherwise.
But there is some intrigue in Berea over Glennon, who has thrown for 4,025 yards, 29 touchdowns and 14 interceptions in 18 starts.
He's not as good as Bradford but a decent fallback option for Cleveland.Estonia becomes the first in the world to open a nationwide electric vehicle fast-charging network
A fast-charging network makes Estonia the first country in the world where you can easily drive your EV around in towns or in the countryside without worrying about the driving range or pollution.
The network, consisting of 165 fast chargers, was officially opened for use today; a single operator is responsible for the administration of all stations and the clients can use the same payment solution and technical support across the country.
Each Estonian town, as well as bigger villages now have their own fast chargers; the stations installed along highways maintain a minimum distance of 40 to 60 km.
The EV users have three service packages to choose from, the cost of one charging is between 2.5 and 5 euros. However, you can also choose paying a 30 euro fee for a monthly package and charge your EV as often as you want with no extra cost. The car’s battery can be charged up to 90% in less than 30 minutes and – depending on the model – you will be able to drive for up to 140 km. The installation of fast chargers started in summer 2012 and they have been used 8,300 times so far.
According to the head of the Estonia’s EV programme, Mr Jarmo Tuisk, it was the lack of a proper fast charging infrastructure that hindered a more widespread use of electric vehicles until now.
“What makes the Estonian fast charging network unique is the fact that it uses a uniform payment solution and you can either use an authorisation card or your mobile phone for making the payment. We believe, that a nationwide grid of quick chargers encourages growth in the number of EV users, since the drivers no longer need to worry about a somewhat shorter driving range of their electric vehicles,” said Jarmo Tuisk.
The EV fast-charging network is operated by a national foundation KredEx, the chargers were produced and installed by a technology company ABB, the innovative payment solution was designed by NOW Innovations!, and customer support is provided by a security company G4S. Tallinn University of Technology adds a research dimension to the project by analysing the use of battery-powered cars and the charging network itself. That sets good preconditions for bringing electromobility R&D know-how together in Estonia.
The construction of the fast-charging network was financed by using the funds received pursuant to a CO2 emission quota sales agreement entered into between the Republic of Estonia and Mitsubishi Corporation.
Besides having a public fast-charging network, Estonia promotes a quicker deployment of EVs by providing direct support to both private persons and companies, with the amount reaching up to 18,000 euros of the all-electric car’s purchasing price. Also, new EV owners can apply for a support of 1,000 euros for setting up a charging system at their home.
According to CHAdeMO, an organisation supporting the fast-charging standard, by January 2013 more than 1,900 fast chargers have been installed in the world, 521 of them outside Japan. Estonia with its 165 fast chargers now has the world’s largest operational public fast-charging network providing a universal nationwide service.
There are 619 all-electric cars registered in the Estonian traffic register, whereas about 500 of these are used by several state authorities. Over a short time, Estonia has become the second country after Norway in the world in terms of the share of EVs. While there is one electric car registered per each 1,000 cars in Estonia, the respective figure for Norway is four. Estonia is followed by the Netherlands with 0.6 electric cars registered per 1,000 cars.
Please visit http://elmo.ee/charging-network/ to find additional information about the Estonia’s EV programme and the locations of the fast chargers.
I
Source: KredEx
Photos: VisitEstoniaFrom badminton racquets to goalkeeping gloves - Dheeraj Singh's journey to India U17 World Cup team
A few years ago, Dheeraj used to be a school going sports lover who liked playing Badminton..he is now ready for the ultimate youth football venture
Goalkeepers are the least appreciated footballers. They don't get to enjoy the spotlight as much as some of their teammates who play further forward on a football field. But their importance to the team remains intact nevertheless.
Coaches know how important the man between the sticks is and if he's having a good day in goal, it could very easily be the difference between a win and a loss. U-17 head coach Luis Norton de Matos, however, can count himself lucky on that aspect as he has three tall and strong custodians at his disposal - Dheeraj Singh Moirangthem, Prabhsukhan Gill and Sunny Dhaliwal.
Dheeraj Singh Moirangthem was 11 when he got his first major break with a Manipur local team in Kalyani. The tall goalie later was picked up for the AIFF Academy and subsequently the U-14 Indian team. From there to the U-17 team that is going to contest the FIFA U-17 World Cup, it has been an awe-struck journey for the now 17-year-old.
Never in his wildest dreams did Dheeraj even think of making it to the national team. And what is particularly interesting about his journey is that he didn't kick it off by playing football. Dheeraj, who was just another school going sports lover, initially took a liking to Badminton.
"First of all, I never thought of playing for the national team. I never thought of playing in the World Cup. Whenever I would get time, I go out |
the clouds over the area with silver and lead iodide. This top secret campaign was known as Operation Popeye and ran from 1967–1972. It allegedly focused on increasing rainfall over the resupply routes in the area, particularly the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The plan was kept under wraps until 1971, when a reporter uncovered a memo secretly sent to President Johnson. The memo contained the following message: “Laos operations—Continue as at present plus Pop Eye to reduce the trafficability [sic] along infiltration routes & Authorization requested to implement operational phase of weather modification process previously successful tested and evaluated in some area.”
The reporter, Jack Anderson, wasted no time in bringing this information to the public. This ultimately led to the proposal of a treaty between the US and other governments to prohibit the use of weather modification technology during wartime. The ENMOD (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques) was signed in 1976 by a host of UN members, ensuring that all forms of weather manipulation are only used for peaceable means.
The American government may deny that Operation Popeye was intended to increase rainfall for sinister purposes, but the conspiracy theories surrounding the project aren’t going away anytime soon.
7 Yellow Rain
The Hmong people sided with the US during the Vietnam War. This was not taken lightly by the countries of Vietnam and Laos, who declared a different kind of war on the Hmong tribes: chemical warfare. Witnesses described seeing yellow-colored rain falling from the sky that had an oily texture and seemed to cling to whatever it landed on. Others reported seeing helicopters flying low over the land and spraying the oily liquid over the area.
It seemed that the “yellow rain” had some form of acid in it. Many who came into contact with it claimed to have had seizures, and others even alleged that it blinded them permanently. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, similar statements were made by the Cambodian people.
Interestingly enough, it seems that experts have now concluded that yellow rain was, in fact, the feces of honeybees, making all of the above just an elaborate conspiracy theory. It was also concluded that the toxins found in the yellow rain were naturally produced by fungi in the bee feces.
6 The California Drought Was Caused By Geo-Engineering
In May 2013, a state of drought was declared in California that persisted throughout the rest of the year, the state’s driest year to date. In December, a massive wildfire broke out near Big Sur, thought to have been spurred by the dry spell. More than 900 acres of land were destroyed in the blaze. The drought continued into 2014.
The logical explanation given by scientists was that the drought was the result of global warming, man-made climate change, or both. Conspiracy theorists are not buying it, though. They are convinced that geo-engineering is to blame for the drought. According to theorists, geo-engineers have cut the rainfall in California with the continuous spraying of aerosols and use of ionosphere heating. By turning California into a desert, its citizens will be at the mercy of the government to supply food they can no longer provide for themselves, leaving the government in total control of the population.
Proponents of the theory are even going as far as to say that there is no natural weather anymore. They believe that continued geo-engineering has caused the planet’s natural climate system to stop functioning. Now, the geo-engineers are simply making up weather patterns as they go along, hurtling America into a state of weather warfare.
5 Solar Radiation Management
Solar radiation management (SRM) is a group of methods to reduce radiation from the sun in the environment by spraying radiation-reflecting chemicals into the atmosphere. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued statements regarding the importance of SRM in fending off global warming, but conspiracy theorists are far from convinced. These statements are merely an attempt to placate the population while using this form of weather modification for sinister purposes, they insist.
Touting SRM as a solution to global warming is seen as a push for geo-engineering funding, chiefly because the people promoting the techniques have also asserted that the phenomenon perceived by some to be chemtrails, another popular conspiracy theory, is actually SRM in action.
4 Operation Stormfury
Operation Stormfury was conceived for a noble purpose, or so it seemed. The project was meant to reduce the damage caused by hurricanes by reducing their wind speed. The operation ran from 1962–1983 and involved creating artificial convection just outside the eye of the storm with silver iodide seeding. The iodide created a new eye wall, which would close the original eye of the storm, reducing its intensity. This process was tested with four hurricanes and showed promising results. At one point, hurricane wind speed was reduced by up to 30 percent.
However, the results of the operation have been called into question. It was proven that unmodified hurricanes didn’t contain enough supercooled water for cloud seeding to have the desired effect. Critics concluded that the original results of modification couldn’t be trusted, as no positive differentiation was made between modified hurricanes and natural ones.
Conspiracy theories abound that the US military simply wanted to see if they could control hurricanes to their advantage. Under the guise of “wanting to increase protection and lessen damage caused by these storms,” the military could experiment to their hearts’ content.
3 Europe Is ‘Stealing Rain’ From Iran
Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is convinced that Europe is using special technology to drain rain clouds over Iran and cause it to rain over Europe instead. He accused Western countries of conspiring to cause droughts in marked areas, including Iran. Ironically, just after he made this statement during an inauguration ceremony, it started raining.
Ahmadinejad is known to be a conspiracy theorist, and many regard him as a lunatic. However, considering all the other theories about weather modification, his claims don’t seem that far-fetched. He went on to claim that an unidentified politician predicted in an article that there would be droughts in Iran, Turkey, and surrounding areas for the next 30 years. Most have brushed him off as a rambling maniac, but what if there is some truth to his words?
2 Chemtrails
If you were to believe various conspiracy theories, airplane contrails that disperse slowly are actually what’s known as “chemtrails.” Rather than harmless vapor, chemtrails are said to be chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by government institutions.
Widespread suspicion about chemtrails really took off in the ’90s, after the US Air Force published a paper about their research on weather modification. When cloud-seeding was used at the Beijing Olympic Games as an effort to reduce the terrible air pollution problem, conspiracy has it that its real purpose was to get rid of threatening rain clouds before the games began. Other popular theories include weather modification being used to control the population, curb global warming, and divert public attention from the testing of military weapons.
Governments are sticking to their guns on the topic on chemtrails. They insist that all visible vapor lines in the air are just contrails, no matter how long it takes to disperse. The worst thing about the chemtrails conspiracy is that it distracts from the real danger of contrails caused by aircraft, which is that they may contribute to global warming.
1 HAARP
At the center of most weather modification conspiracies is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). This military research organization is thought to be a secret weapon in weather modification schemes. Considering that HAARP really does exist and its purpose really does include weather-related research, it has become difficult to separate the conspiracy from what could be the truth.
A CBC documentary probably said it best with this quote: “It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. In January of 1999, the European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”
Naturally, HAARP itself denies any sinister agenda, but that doesn’t make them any less suspicious when it comes to weather warfare conspiracies. Even the appearance of its Alaska facility gives way to conspiracy theories. Outside is a mass of antennae that forms a geometric pattern, and barbed wire ensures that the public doesn’t get to see any further than this bizarre spectacle. The antennae are even the subject of their own conspiracy theory: Some believe they could be responsible for earthquakes such as the massive 8.9 quake that struck Japan in 2011. It is thought that focusing the antennae on a specific point in the ionosphere long enough can cause it to pull away and then snap back into place with so much force that it can cause earthquakes.
HAARP has been blamed for Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Wilma, and Rita. It has even been said that the organization is actively practicing mind control on American citizens with shortwave radio signals.
I’m a wannabe fiction writer who has a fascination with all things creepy and spooky.WebGL
Web browsers are probably the most widely used software in desktops and mobile computers. They have become the swiss army knife of the Web 2.0 digital world and it is under this context that a Javascript API for rendering GPU-based graphics was born: WebGL.
Long live Java
The WebGL technology enables rendering complex 3D or 2D scenes such as games within your browser. You could write the next Angry Birds in javascript and WebGL. But why not leverage the power of existing Java technologies and write your game in Java using WebGL? Yes! You can write Java code and deploy it on the web as javascript thanks to the help of the Google Webtoolkit. (If you haven’t tried it, then you should!).
The following web app illustrates how easily Java and WebGL can be used together with Libgdx game development framework to create fancy 3D scenes.
Click on the image to see the webGL app. Note: you’ll need a WebGL compatible browser such as Firefox or Chrome.
Instructions: use the arrow keys to move the camera and drag the mouse to rotate the camera.
Notes about the code
The code uses WebGL which is pretty much OpenGL ES 2.0. The sky and mountains background texture (a.k.a Skybox) are rendered using cube mapping and custom shaders. There is one shader program for rendering the water which is based on the excellent Jay Conrod’s water simulation shader. The water looks jaggy because there aren’t many triangles in the model. Feel free to change this. The boat 3D model comes from here and the texture from here. The teddy bear comes from here (if you know the original source, let me know). All models were exported to G3DT format using blender.
NB. The code will be available on github in the coming days.
Edit: The code is available here: https://github.com/recastrodiaz/java-webgl
Cross-platform game development
The holly grail of developers is to code once and run everywhere. Unfortunately, this is hardly true as platforms are extremely different from each other. Furthermore, screen sizes and input devices are not the same. Nevertheless, the Java ecosystem provides great multi platform support out of the box. Add GWT and Monotouch to the mix and you’ll support Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, HTML5 and iOS from day one. Check the following cross-platform gaming frameworks to see how it can be done: PlayN and Libgdx.
AdvertisementsAbstract In this review, we intend to explore the often asked question: “Did Mozart have Tourette's syndrome?” Although there are numerous reports attributing Mozart's peculiar personality and behaviour to a spectrum of neurobehavioural disorders such as Tourette's syndrome, autistic disorder, Asperger's syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder and paediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infection, the evidence for any of these disorders is lacking. Whether Mozart's behaviour was nothing more than a reflection of his unique personality or a more complex neurological disorder, aggravated later in life by enormous demands by his father and society, his behaviour has been the subject of many biographies. It will also remain unknown to what extent his accomplishments and failures were shaped by his childhood experiences, pressured lifestyle, and his innate genius and extraordinary talent. Lessons from his life may have important implications for other gifted individuals and savants whose special attributes may lead them to succeed or, on the other hand, suppress their emotional growth and make them more vulnerable to stress and failure.
The 250th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest musical geniuses of all times, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), provides an opportunity not only to reflect on his immeasurable contributions to the world of classical music, but also to examine him as a man of exceptional creative power. Mozart's biographical accounts often comment on his peculiar behaviour which has been interpreted by some as a manifestation of an underlying neurobehavioural disorder, such as Tourette syndrome (TS). Once considered a rare psychiatric curiosity, TS is now recognised as a relatively complex neurobehavioural disorder, affecting approximately 2% of the general population.1,2 Some studies have suggested that TS affects up to 3.8% of children, and two‐thirds of them have coexistent attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) or other behavioural comorbidities.3 Although learning disabilities have been suggested to be present in some patients with TS,4,5 most reach their full potential without any residual psychiatric or neurological handicap. Many notable figures, such as Dr Samuel Johnson, have made extraordinary contributions to the arts and sciences despite, or perhaps because of, their TS.6 Several reports have drawn attention to the observation that some TS patients possess unique talents and skills, similar to individuals with autism and savant syndrome.7,8 Various structural and functional imaging studies of brains of musicians have found that in contrast with non‐musicians, the musicians' brains tend to have increased gray matter in Broca's area and in certain portions of the auditory cortex, such as the Heschl's gyrus and planum temporale.9,10 Studies of developmental and acquired disorders of musical listening and interpretation have shown that brain plasticity is involved in musical perceptions and integration with cognitive and emotional responses,11 and that music could have both evocative and suppressive effects on some patients with movement disorders such as TS and parkinsonism.12 Although many individuals with unique talents have been carefully studied, no unified theory has emerged to explain the neurological basis of such exceptional creative or interpretive abilities, as demonstrated by some people with autism or some savant artists. It is beyond the scope of this review to discuss the neurobiology of savant and the reader is referred to other sources,13,14 but the brain mechanisms giving rise to savant‐like features may be relevant to the understanding of the neurobiology of a genius mind, such as that of Mozart. Whether savant is more frequently observed in patients with TS or whether some savant cases manifest features of TS, such as tics and OCD, has not been systematically studied. Insanity and exceptional musical talent have often been thought to be linked, but the mechanism of this relationship is unknown.15 As an example, David Helfgott, a prodigious pianist featured in the movie “Shine,” has been thought to suffer from a mild form of schizophrenia with positive symptoms. He grunts, mutters, sings, talks to himself very loudly and exhibits other tic‐like mannerisms as he plays.16 Creativity has often been associated with bipolar disorder and some composers, artists, authors and other creative geniuses of the past have observed loss of their creative talents with pharmacological treatment of their bipolar disorder. Vincent van Gogh, who committed suicide at the age of 37 years, in the last few years of his life suffered from episodes of mania and depression. Despite the mood swings and mental torment, he completed more than 300 of his best paintings, suggesting that his manic state may have facilitated his creativity.17 There is a lengthy list of other famous figures such as Ludwig von Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John Nash, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe and many more who have suffered from a variety of mental or personality disorders.15,18,19 Besides Samuel Johnson and Mozart, many celebrities such as Howard Hughes, Marc Summers, David Beckham, Tim Howard, Jim Eisenreich, Chris Jackson (Mahmoud Abdul‐Raul), David Aldridge, Michael Wolff, Dan Ackroyd, Howie Abdul‐Rauf Mandel and Mel Gibson are among those thought to manifest some features of TS and its comorbidities, particularly OCD.16,20,21
Mozart's background Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756 in Salzburg, Austria, and grew up in a very influential and intellectual family. Mozart very much admired and loved his mother, Anna Maria Mozart (1720–1778). His father, Leopold Mozart (1719–1787), was an excellent musician, a violin composer and a Vice‐Kapellmeister in the archiepiscopal court at Salzburg. Before his death, Leopold carefully collected family letters, intended to be used to write his son's biography. They were later handed to his daughter, Maria Anna Mozart (1751–1829), known as Nannerl (Marianne von Berchtold), who referred to them in her Reminiscences. Nannerl was 5 years older than Wolfgang and less prodigal in music than he. Later, Friedrich Schlichtegroll used Nannerl's reminiscences for writing the first official biography about Mozart.22,23 A child prodigy with an unerring musical ear, flawless musical memory and infallible sight reading ability since the age of 3 years, Mozart's hearing acuity was so delicate that loud sounds would make him physically ill. By the age of 4 years, Mozart could tell whether an instrument was out of tune and could learn a piece in half an hour. He became an excellent clavierist at the age of 5 years. Unlike other children who started going to school at the age of 6 years, Wolfgang started touring and concerting with his father, Leopold, and his sister Maria Anna. He wrote his first symphony at age 8 years, and then grew into a prolific composer of over 600 pieces of music, including more than 50 symphonies, 27 concert arias, 26 string quartets, 25 piano concertos, 21 stage and opera works, 17 piano sonatas, 15 masses and 12 violin concertos. Among his most famous works are Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music, 1787) and the operas Don Giovanni (1787) and Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute, 1791).24,25 Mozart married Constanze Weber (1762–1842) in 1782 and they had two children, including the second surviving son Carl Thomas Mozart (1784–1858). Mozart's cause of death, at age 35 years and 10 months just before one o'clock in the morning on 5 December 1791, is controversial. His odd behaviour, portrayed by actor Tom Hulce in the hit 1984 movie “Amadeus”, has been a topic of numerous essays.26,27 This review attempts to provide an objective and non‐judgmental evaluation of the evidence for and against the diagnosis of TS as a possible explanation of Mozart's manners, gesticulations, conduct and personality.
Mozart's language Fog and Regeur,28 and later Davies29 and Keynes,30 were among the first investigators who talked about Mozart's TS and cyclothymic disorder. Simkin, an endocrinologist, pianist, musicologist and historian, elaborated on Mozart's art and life from a medical point of view and has discussed Mozart's TS extensively.31,32 Based on Simkin's meticulous investigation, evidence of scatology exists in 39 of 371 letters (10.5%) written by Mozart. When all letters referring to anal matters are added up, the total number of vulgar letters rises to 12.9%. Nine of these letters were written to his cousin, Marianne. In his letters, Mozart made excessive use of obscene words, primarily focusing on defecation and anal vulgarities, suggesting the presence of coprographia.31 As an example, in one letter, written to Marianne on 28 February 1778, Mozart overly repeats the word “muck” (sh‐): “Muck! – Muck! – Ah, muck! Sweet word! Muck! Chuck! That too is fine. Muck, chuck! – muck! – suck – o charmante! Muck, suck! That's what I like! Muck, chuck and suck! Chuck muck and suck muck!”.33 Another example of a propensity towards foul language (coprolalia) is Mozart's cannons titled “Leck mich am Arsch” (“Lick my ass“), composed when he was 26 years old.34 Joseph Lange, who was an actor with the Burgtheater company and Mozart's brother‐in‐law (husband of Aloisia Weber, Mozart's earliest girlfriend and sister of his wife Constanze) and who had very close relations with Mozart, wrote about Mozart's vulgar platitudes. However, he believed that Mozart's inane and immature behaviour was a byproduct of the creative intensity surrounding his process of composition: “Never was Mozart less recognisably a great man in his conversation and actions, than when he was busied with an important work. At such time he not only spoke confusedly and disconnectedly, but occasionally made jests of a nature which one did not expect of him, indeed he even deliberately forgot himself in his behaviour….Either he intentionally concealed his inner tension behind superficial frivolity, for reasons which could not be fathomed, or he took delight in throwing into sharp contrast the divine ideas of his music and these sudden outbursts of vulgar platitudes, and in giving himself pleasure by seeming of make fun of himself”.35,36 Although coprolalia is a characteristic feature of TS, and recent studies indicate its association with activation of various areas in the brain such as the left middle frontal and right precentral gyri,37 this language abnormality is not universally present or specific for TS.38 Some investigators, in fact, believe that the scatological features exhibited by Mozart may simply represent a style of speech and silliness that was acceptable behaviour in the population of the South German middle class or was influenced by his family.36,39 Mozart's scatological language may have been just a reflection of his satirical, hypomanic humour and intentional rather than involuntary or could have been an influence from his mother's “Salzburgisch” humorous characteristic.40 For example, in one of her letters to her husband from Munich in 1777, Anna Maria (Mozart's mother) wrote the following: “Keep well, my love. Into your mouth your ass you'll shove. I wish you good‐night, my dear, but first sh‐ your bed and make it burst”.41 Nannerl, Mozart's sister, showed signs of vulgar language too as she wrote the following about her pet fox‐terrier in her letter to her mother and brother: “All the same she is quite well, eats, drinks, sleeps, sh‐s, and pisses”.42 Contrary to these assumptions, Simkin eloquently studied the occurrence of scatology among Mozart's family members and documented that Anna Maria (Mozart's mother), Maria Anna (Mozart's sister) and Leopold Mozart (Mozart's father) showed 2.5%, 6.7% and 0.3% scatological usage in their correspondences, respectively, compared with 10.5% scatological incidence present in Mozart's letters.31 Whether such linguistic features suggest coprographia and support the diagnosis of TS or are indicative of excessive humour, arrogant behaviour of a savant or impulsive outbursts of stressful life remain controversial.
Mozart's motor behaviour In addition to uttered vulgar platitudes,34 Mozart's frequent facial grimaces, inadvertent repetitive movements of hands and feet, and jumping,43,44 have been regarded by some as phonic and motor tics and used to support the diagnosis of TS.31,32 Several descriptions of Mozart detail his hyperactive behaviour. For example, while composing he was simultaneously involved in other activities such as walking, riding or playing billiard.45 Sophie Haible, Mozart's sister‐in‐law, wrote in one of her letters that he often used to touch his napkin to his lips, make grimaces, tap his hands or feet on objects, or play with hats, pockets, tables and chairs seemingly playing clavier.34 Karoline Pichler (1769–1843), daughter of the senior civil servant Franz Sales von Greiner and a member of the intelligentsia in Vienna who had musical affiliation with Mozart, described Mozart and Haydn as “persons who displayed in their contacts with others absolutely no other extraordinary intellectual capacity and almost no kind of intellectual training, of scientific or higher education…. Silly jokes, and in case of Mozart an irresponsible way of life, were all that they displayed to their fellow men”. She and others also recalled Mozart's abrupt changes of mood, at one moment gripped with divine musical inspiration, while a minute later acting in a facetious and ridiculous fashion. For example, she described Mozart's “catty” behaviour during an improvisation on Non più andrai (from Act I of Figaro). Mozart apparently became “…suddenly tired of it, jumped up, and, in the mad mood which so often came over him, he began to leap over tables and chairs, miaow like a cat, and turn somersaults like an unruly boy”. Later in her memoirs, Pichler also referred to Mozart's “irresponsible way of life”.36,46 Eleven out of 25 people who had association with Mozart in their memories mentioned his perpetual movements and mannerisms, which were regarded as facial and bodily tics.47 Regardless of these reports, some investigators still argue that the observed unusual motor behaviours and vocalisations seen in Mozart are simply indicative of eccentric personality, sometimes associated with the unusual gift (or a curse) of a genius.6,36,39 Some scholarly thinkers or creative individuals who are deeply involved in their profession may ignore time, place and people around them and outpour their anxiety or stress in a form of peculiar body movements, mannerisms or gesticulations, talking to themselves, yelling or even grunting without necessarily satisfying diagnostic criteria for TS.48
Comorbid behavioural symptoms One of the behavioural disorders most commonly coexisting with other symptoms of TS is OCD.1,2 Mozart did exhibit features that strongly suggest that he harboured obsessions with objects, thoughts, repetition of certain things and the use of scatological language. For example, one of his biggest obsessions was his unnatural fear of his wife leaving the house: “Never go out walking alone. It terrifies me” and “Please do not go to the casino today even if Mme Schwingenschuhs should go out to Baden”. Mozart was obsessively meticulous even about his wife's mode of hygiene: “I entreat you to take the bath only every other day, and only for an hour. But if you want me to feel quite easy on my mind, do not take them at all, until I am with you again”.49 Mozart often had sudden mood swings from depression to elevated or expansive moods without an obvious cause, but which appeared to emanate from within,50,51 suggestive of bipolar disorder, another comorbidity often encountered in creative geniuses.52 Mozart's socially unusual behaviour probably contributed to his financial struggles and prevented him from reaching material success.32,36 Mozart used to practice inappropriate joking and punning and indulged in frivolous behaviour without appreciation of consequences.26 This could be interpreted as analogous to impulse control or conduct disorder, frequently encountered in patients with TS,53 and occasionally leading to problems with the law.54 Nannerl, Mozart's sister, wrote the following about her brother: “This same being who, considered as an artist, had reached the highest stage of development even from his very earliest years, remained to the end of his life completely childish in every other aspect of existence. Never, until he died, did he learn to exercise the most elementary forms of self‐control”.55 Several elements of Mozart's behaviour may indicate the presence of ADHD during his childhood and extending to his adult years. Although Mozart has been described to easily switch from serious and impulsive to jolly and rowdy mood, some have suggested that the various accounts of his eccentric behaviour have been exaggerated and his impulsiveness was merely a personality trait rather than a psychiatric disorder.6,39,56 In addition to ADHD, conduct disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, possibly reflect abnormalities in dopamine D2 (DRD2) and serotonin transporter (5‐HTT) genes.57,58 Some of Mozart's compositions and phrasings in his works may reflect his impatient personality, possibly related to difficulties with attention. Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, an eminent violinist and composer, wrote “He leaves his hearer out of breath, for hardly has he grasped on beautiful thought than another of greater fascination dispels the first, and this goes on throughout, so that in the end it is impossible to retain any one of these beautiful melodies”.26 Even the statement by the Emperor Joseph II, made famous in Milos Forman's movie Amadeus, “too beautiful for our ears, and far too many notes, my dear Mozart”, has been used by some to suggest that some of his musical phrases reflect Mozart's excesses and frequent reversal and repetitions of words, rhyming and play of words.27 Hyperkinetic (incontinence of emotions), comic aspects, simultaneously performing of several different compositions in the form of quodlibet, and the peculiarity of Quartet K298 are attributed to sublimation of Mozart's TS into musical tourettism.32 Paradoxical to many reports about Mozart's mental health status, his music, such as the Piano Sonata in D Major (K.448), has been described to have a “Mozart Effect”, which includes enhancement in IQ and spatial–temporal performance of cortical and cerebellar parts of the brain within a few minutes of listening.59,60 His music has also been reported to have a therapeutic effect on epileptic patients,61 possibly by increasing blood flow to temporal, dorsolateral prefrontal and occipital areas and the cerebellum, in comparison with Beethoven's Fur Elise and 1930s piano music62 associated with activation of task relevant brain areas.63 Pervasive developmental and other autistic disorders, particularly Asperger's syndrome, have also been linked to unique abilities, seen in savants, and TS‐like features.64,65,66 Autistic savants have been shown to have attention impairment, particularly in auditory and multiple stimuli,67 which is in contrast with Mozart's exquisitely sensitive ears and pitch that enabled him to hear several musical pieces simultaneously, and combining them in a quodlibet.32 Although some aspects of autism, such as repetitive body movements and certain preoccupations could be identified in Mozart,34,50,51 other features such as avoiding change or transition and preferring sameness do not make him a good candidate for autistic disorders. Some aspects of Asperger's syndrome such as repetitive body movements, motor or phonic tics and preoccupation with some parts of objects64 have been described in Mozart.44,50,51 Davies chronologically documented the series of Mozart's illnesses between 1763 and 1766, including tonsillitis and upper respiratory tract infections, with symptoms and signs of rheumatic fever.29 The link between rheumatic fever and St Vitus Dance was made by Thomas Sydenham, who was the first to recognise St Vitus Dance as a rheumatic manifestation in 1686. “Sydenham's chorea” occurred in one of five cases of rheumatic fever. Chorea associated with previous streptococcal infections also produces a variable degree of behavioural disturbances which overlap with ADHD and OCD, and other features resemble some of the behavioural comorbidities seen in patients with TS.68,69 This raises the question of whether Mozart suffered from Sydenham's chorea or paediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections known as PANDAS.70,71 Maynard Solomon eloquently analysed the duality between Mozart's behavioural non‐conformism and his divine power as a musical genius from different perspectives and sources: violinist Karl Holz in 1825 depicted Mozart as “Outside of his genius as a musical artist, Mozart was a nullity”. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, a twentieth century historian, commented that Mozart “was as great a stranger to the world of reason as the sphere of human relations. He was guided solely by the aim of the moment”. Probably such comments could explain Mozart's liberal sexual attitudes, critique of authorities, bohemianism and Freemasonry.23 Despite the tantalising notion that Mozart may have exhibited features of TS and perhaps some of its comorbidities, such as OCD and ADHD, it is possible that his peculiar behaviour simply reflected the complex interaction between his innate genius and the social milieu of his childhood and professional life. This is suggested by the following statement from a biography by Davies48: “Mozart never attended a school and received his entire initial, general and musical education from his father. Such an insulated upbringing would further have prejudiced his emotional development while his preoccupation with music probably retarded the general growth of some of his other talents, such as those in mathematics and drawing. During his social development and his education there came about an imbalance between different facts of his development: its major outcome was a retardation of his emotional maturation which could not keep pace with the creativity of his intellect”. That may explain his periodic anxiety, loneliness and sadness,29 as he mentioned in his last and dire memo that: “I have come to the end before having enjoyed my talent…”.27 Another assumption of his odd behaviour such as excessive use of joke, humorous acts and distinctive clothing with vivid colours such as red and use of accessories might be explained to gain more grandiosity over nobles around him to overcome his physical features such as short height, strange shape of the head with pockmarked face, large nose, receding chin and deformed left ear, and pale skin.6 In conclusion, this review of Mozart's distinctive character and behaviour raises the possibility that his extraordinary creativity was not only the product of his exceptional abilities but was also influenced by his distinctive cognitive and neurological function. While remembering Mozart's creative contributions, it is important to appreciate the capacity of the brain to markedly augment certain uniquely human qualities and to encourage research of finding possible ways of accessing and harvesting these powers. If Mozart did have TS, he was clearly able to compensate well, in contrast with a small minority of TS patients whose tics or comorbidities may become disabling or even life‐threatening.72
Abbreviations ADHD - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder OCD - obsessive–compulsive disorder TS - Tourette syndrome
Footnotes Competing interests: None.In the CD-format chapter you have seen that digital numbers are translated into a staircase signal, and by rounding the steps, we get something that pretty much resembles the originally captured signal.
This translation process from numbers into voltage steps, is what happens in a R2R DA converter which is sometimes also called a "ladder-DAC" or "multibit-DAC", as resistors (the R's in R2R) are configured as an ascending series of voltage dividers.
Such a R2R converter is a static device, in that it is able to generate a clean voltage (with 16 bits resolution there are 65536 different voltages) and hold that voltage until another number is converted, or if numbers repeat - for an infinitely long time, while maintaining an extremely low noise level.
In order to achieve a certain level of performance, the resistors (R's) inside the converter chip must be precisely trimmed, which can make a device very expensive to manufacture, especially when true 24-bit resolution is required.
Some companies are famous for their R2R converter chip designs, such as Analog-Devices, Burr-Brown and Philips.
The 'El-Cheapo' Method
In order to avoid the required precision in the manufacture of R2R converters (and save manufacturing costs), another conversion technique became very popular.
In this conversion technique, a single switch replaced the precision resistors of the R2R DAC, and it was believed (and shown to a certain extent) that if only the switch was toggled fast enough, one could also achieve many different voltages.
If for example the switch is more often switched to 5V than to 0V, and if that switch-signal is run through a low-pass filter then the output voltage will also be closer to 5V, than to 0V, plus lots of noise.
This fast switching technique is employed in sigma-delta conversion and it is also the technical foundation of the newly introduced SACD or DSD format.
As a 16 bit R2R DAC is able to generate 65536 different static voltages, and a single switch can only generate 2 different voltages (hi and low), a high switching frequency (usually in the range of a couple of MegaHertz, and achieved through oversampling) is necessary for proper operation and thus, much noise will be produced by the switching process in a sigma-delta converter.
In fact, for any practical application, the noise-level is much higher than the signal that is to be reproduced.
Therefore, this inacceptable high noise-level is shaped into higher-frequencies, as it is believed that high-frequency noise is outside the human listening range and will not degrade sound quality.
As a side effect of this high-order noise-shaping even higher noise levels are generated, residing in the high-frequency region.
To our surprise, in the technical specification of those sigma-delta DACs very low noise-levels are mentioned, and by reading the data-sheets, one could have the illusion, that a decent sound quality would be attainable by such a device.
In fact, the total noise-output is never stated in the data-sheets, and measurements only mention in-band-noise up to 20kHz, suggesting that higher frequency noise has no effect on fidelity.
Of course with this eye-closing practice only those can be fooled that also have closed ears.
In plain english: sigma-delta DACs are coarse noise-generators and when measured the way they should be measured they never make it to 16-bit resolution, don't even think about 24 bits.
As some engineers realized that the el-cheapo method did not lead to satisfying fidelity, because with 1-bit switching performance the quantization noise |
.PORT Adelaide chairman David Koch today announced the club had recorded an operating profit of $211,302 for the financial year ending 31 October 2015.
The result represents a year on year improvement of over $2.7 million and, significantly, is the first time Port Adelaide has returned a profit since 2007.
Mr Koch said the result was a credit to the hard work and application from everyone involved with the club including the belief and loyalty shown by its Members, supporters, corporate and community partners.
“This is truly a great result for the Port Adelaide Football Club and entire community,” said Mr Koch.
“Since the end of 2012 we had a clear vision that 2015 was to be the year that we would return Port Adelaide to profitability and I am delighted we have been able to deliver on this plan.
“However, we would never have been able to achieve this result without the wonderful support of our Members, supporters and club partners.
“Achieving record membership of over 60,000 played a significant role in this result along with average home attendances in excess of 43,000 at Adelaide Oval. Under our new financial model at Adelaide Oval, the more of our supporters who attend our games the better financial return for the club, so a big thanks to all our loyal Members and supporters.
“Similarly, our corporate revenue has continued to grow year on year and has increased by 140% since 2012. In 2015 we welcomed major national brands OAK Milk, Four’N Twenty, UBET and RAA who joined our two existing major partners Renault and EnergyAustralia.”
Port Adelaide achieved its 2015 financial result off a revenue base of $50.79 million, up 5% from 2014.
Mr Koch said the club continued to invest in its football program in 2015, along with its vast range of community programs.
“Investment in our football program increased by $2 million this year and we invested over $1.5 million in our Aboriginal and broader community programs,” said Mr Koch.
“Our community team travelled the equivalent of one and a half times the circumference of the globe in 2015, delivering programs all across South Australia and the Northern Territory to over 100,000 children.
“We are committed to creating pathways and opportunities for young South Australians, beyond football.”
Importantly, Port Adelaide remained a significant contributor to the fabric of local football in South Australia, with a direct contribution of $1 million to the SANFL, together with investment of over $500,000 in the creation of football pathways for young South Australian footballers via the Magpies SANFL league team, the Magpies Academy and the SAASTA AFL Aboriginal Academy.
“I’m very proud that we’ve been able to deliver on all these fronts yet still be able to record our first profit in eight years,” said Mr Koch.
“We now have a strong and sustainable football program, together with a strong and sustainable business model and we feel well positioned for continued future growth.”
Summary of 2015 highlights
• A record 60,475 Members, the first time the club has achieved more than 60,000 Members, and 6th highest in the AFL
• Average home crowd attendance of 43,802, the 4th highest in the AFL
• Television audiences of 13 million, up 22% from 2014
• Record corporate revenue
• Continued development of the club’s community programs including Aboriginal Programs such as the Aboriginal Power Cup, WillPower and the SAASTA AFL Aboriginal AcademyIs it possible to be moral in a world without God? Is a respect for different cultures incompatible with a belief in objective right and wrong? Can there be a universal truth in a world where we disagree about so much?
This article will explore how we might find common ground and shape a morality that is at once universal but still flexible enough to allow reasonable people to disagree.
Shared Perspective
I believe that morality is best viewed through a series of contexts that I call lenses. Moral claims are only sensible when viewed through the correct philosophical lens. Though they are in some ways contradictory, all the lenses are true from a certain point of view.
Lets discuss some basic lenses that are useful for this discussion and illustrate them with the moral question: Is capital punishment justified?
Universal
I talk about this lens a bit in my post on self discovery. From this perspective, we are all fundamentally connected. My life is the result of a myriad of events that happened before my birth. My actions have ripple effects that will last far into the future. What counts as “me” and “not me” is hard to pin down.
Distinctions between self/other, good/bad, and right/wrong don’t make sense in this lens. Moral ideas are all just two sides of the same coin.
This perspective is powerful but not very useful when negotiating the day-to-day concerns of life. We can’t make moral claims of right and wrong here, but we can find inspiration to be more moral.
We can take refuge in this perspective when we face the more difficult parts of life like death, pain and loss. We do this by no longer identifying with the limited concept of self that experiences those things. As we will see later, seeing the world from this perspective can help inform our morality in a profound way.
From this lens, capital punishment is never justified. In fact, the very idea of punishment makes no sense. Everyone is connected and so punishing you is punishing myself. Crimes are only perpetrated by the self on the self.
Humanistic
Through this lens we recognize the identity of separate perspectives. I am one consciousness and you are another.
Once we accept the idea of different conscious entities, we can start making claims about how they ought behave and be treated. If we value conscious beings, we begin to approach a basic foundation of morality. Something along the lines of: All conscious beings are worthy of respect and ought have the opportunity to flourish. In the humanistic lens we are different, but equal.
From this lens, capital punishment is hard to justify, because it implies a lack of respect for the life of a person. At best, it is a practical question. You could only justify capital punishment if it would help more people to flourish (i.e. via deterrance of future crimes) than if it did not exist. Since there is little evidence to support capital punishment as a deterrant, it is near impossible to justify from a humanistic lens.
Personal
Through this lens we recognize our own perspective as unique, and our emotional landscape as one that is inherently individual. We love some people and things more than others and have the full range of hopes, fears, etc. that are a natural part of the human experience.
In this lens, we have different moral considerations like loyalty, honor, and family that don’t make sense in either of the other lenses. This is where life gains passion and vibrancy. This is also where most “bad” or selfish motivations arise.
Capital punishment gains most of its justification from the personal lens. If someone I loved was murdered, I would want the perpetrator to die. If I’m honest with myself, I’d want to personally be involved in making sure the murderer suffered and then died. I can think in a humanistic way about capital punishment when we are talking about it in the abstract, but when it is personal my feelings change dramatically. I doubt I am alone on this.
The Foundations of Morality
Fundamentally, I think the project of trying to tie morality to something external to conscious experience is doomed to failure. I agree with David Hume that our sentiments are what create value and moral judgment. Just as chocolate cake is only tasty because people like to eat it, so too is murder only wrong because people don’t want to die.
It is hard for me to even conceive of another source from which morality could spring. An all-powerful God would still seem evil to me if she chose to cause pain and suffering for its own sake.
The lack of an external grounding outside of sentiment does not mean, however, that we can’t make meaningful universal claims about morality. Not all sentiments are universal, but some are. In other words, just because we can’t agree on everything doesn’t mean we can’t agree on some things. In fact, we humans agree on quite a bit, though we only tend to focus on the areas of disagreement.
Universal Moral Truths
There are some truths that every rational person agrees with.
Bad Things- Nearly everyone believes that pain, death, and loss of ability are bad.
Good Things– Nearly everyone believes that pleasure, gaining ability, and the avoidance of bad things are good.
Many people object to the above claims, citing examples of cases where people will voluntarily hurt or kill themselves, or where they view pain as a good thing. Every one of these examples of viewing a Bad Thing as Good (or vice-versa) involves a justification because of another good or bad thing (e.g. suicide to prevent pain, enduring pain to gain strength, etc.).
Sometimes, people will voluntarily seek out bad things, but this is only because they value other good things instead (including the avoidance of even worse Bad Things). No one will choose a bad thing without justification. The only valid justifications are good things.
In one sense, this seems trivial. In another, it is profound. There is so much we agree on when it comes to basic questions of good and bad and this gives us the hope of establishing a universal morality. In fact, we only disagree on three fundamental questions.
How, Who, and What
We differ in moral judgments in only 3 ways:
How we rate the good and bad things against each other (e.g. pain vs. death) Who we choose to include in our sphere of moral concern (e.g. animals, the unborn) What is true about the world (e.g. is there an afterlife, will a vaccine work)
In making moral choices we wrestle with those differences:
We may choose to endure the pain of an injection to prevent disease
We may choose to steal from others to help a loved one
We may choose to die so that we can gain eternal bliss in the afterlife
We may choose to torture and slaughter animals for food, clothing or product testing
We can have moral discussions about what is good and evil using the language above within the humanistic or personal lens. Within these lenses, we can condemn a sociopath who likes to torture babies. We can also make arguments that one course of action is better or worse than another based on the aggregate harm or good it does.
The Fuzzy Cloud Of Morality
This may not be the “robust” morality that many people look for, because it does not with precision always give a right or wrong answer. I believe that any universal morality must allow for reasonable people to disagree. It requires only that we have a common ground within which we can make moral claims. Thus, we can agree universally that torturing babies for fun is wrong, even while we might disagree about whether a mother has the right to abort her fetus.
Morality in this sense is like the particles in a cloud- there are some things clearly outside or inside its bounds, but there are many things along the edges for which it is unclear where they stand. For many moral questions, there is no single right answer- but that does not mean that all answers are equal.
We shape the boundaries of morality through discussion and persuasion and morality can evolve over time as the sentiments of humanity evolve. And this, I believe, is where the Universal lens comes in handy. The more we can get people to see the world through the non-dualistic universal lens, the less attached they are to their personal perspective and the more they can be persuaded to adopt a humanistic morality. We are all confused and struggling in this world. It is much easier to have compassion for our fellow conscious beings when we realize that we are in fact all connected.
Toward a More Moral World
Within this paradigm, we can thus work to create a more moral world. How do we do this? Through skillful discussion and cultivating perspective.
Skillful Discussion
Understand that other people have fundamentally the same ideas of good and bad that you do. Try to use language that will appeal to those ideas, while being understanding of the Who, How, and What of disagreement. Recognize where you can have reasonable disagreement and try to persuade people rather than judge them as “evil” or “stupid.”
Cultivating Perspective
Take the time to experience universal connectedness. This can be done through meditation, music, and being in nature. Seek out experiences of awe and wonder. Experiences of awe are very much experiences of something far greater than ourselves, and this helps shake us out of the personal lens which can cause so much harm when used unskillfully. By connecting ourselves to something bigger than ourselves (or better yet to all things) we can cultivate a moral sentiment that is more compassionate and inclusive.
Practice and cultivate compassion. Help others. Play with puppies. Create art. Give lots of hugs. Spend time with loved ones. Try to remember that everyone out there is someone else’s loved one.
Surrounding ourselves with beauty, love, and wonder is a powerful way to make the world a better place. Through these things, we can cultivate the sentiments that will fuel our moral growth.
Conclusion
I don’t view this perspective as an atheistic one. Whether there is a god or not, we need a morality that can stand on its own. By accepting uncertainty and the power of our sentiments, we gain solid ground upon which we can build a better world.Excited, thrilling, thoroughly enjoyable, very much all of those descriptions can be used to describe the previous 2 seasons of this television show. Why, because they simply are enjoyable, they exactly the reason why DC TV shows have worked a lot more than the movies have, the time to flesh out the characters of heroes and villains. But can season 3 follow the previous 2 seasons footsteps and enter my shrine. Let us find out.
GOOD
The main story is once again crafted, paced and well written. The villain has a reason, motive and is well thought through and delivered. Savitar has been this season big baddie, yes it is again another speedster, but given how season 4 appears to not be a speedster we can forgive them. But it makes sense this season, and for things that were teased throughout this season that could happen in the future, Devoe been one of those things, which is who a lot of people think is the big baddie in season 4. But using Savitar as the baddie made sense, it uses Barry’s own powers as to why he should reign them in a little and sets up more ahead.
Grodd returned a lovely 2-part episode, that despite been pretty predictable was still fun to watch, and see him again. Obviously, him been a big baddie for a season is going to happen, his too big of a threat and a bit of a fan favourite when it comes to Flash villains. But a nice nod to Gorilla City and the much more utilising of the other Earths, in general, this season. Allows them to slowly evolve the speed force and other Earths, and what happens on them. Just hope we see Supergirl on Earth one permanently soon, but not too soon.
The evolution of the side characters, barring Harrison Wells, more later, was fun. Cisco seeing his powers develop, Caitlin having to fight the Killer Frost within her and Wally developing his powers. All made you interested in what happened to them, what they find out next and how far they can push in order for them to develop their little Justice League, but not called Justice League, I just wish they could call it that. Obviously, this is all winding up to the Crisis on Infinite Earths, which could be where Supergirl joins Earth One permanently.
BAD
As I mentioned some of the side stories before, a lot of them are degenerating into the same trap that befell Arrow. Too many relationships story lines. We do not mind one or two extra if done right. But this season virtually everyone on the team had a relationship story line. Cisco with Gypsy, Caitlin and Julian, Jesse and Wally, hell even Joe and the DA. It is simply too many on top of Iris and Barry, and to makes matters worse they all go in the same way, they hook up they have a falling out they patch things up they fall out again they make back up again. Dump some of these relationship story lines and move onto something more original. If I wanted to watch people hooking up I can go watch some teeny bop TV show.
Some of the episodes this season, mainly due to the above, didn’t feel as well thought through and fully utilised, hell even some of the characters we met could have been used better. H.R Wells, or H. R as he wanted to be called simply was annoying at times, besides the end, he became stale and did the same things over and over again. Having the trial by combat and then Gypsy giving up, despite it been made clear it was to the death felt stupid and pointless and we knew neither was dying. More could have been used with the headlines seen in the vibe, and even Magenta, of which we meet early on was not seen from again, but obviously, she could return later on.
The only issue I have with Savitar was nothing to do with his character, but his armour, as times it looked cheap like it was made by some school class project. The CGI effects used to make him appear faster and adding the wormhole sort of effects, looked very cheap, and at times broke the immersion into the show. I do not expect to be perfect, it’s TV, they do not have the budgets of films, but it could have been better.
OVERALL
It was enjoyable, but it was not without its flaws. Flashpoint could have been spread out a lot more than the one episode it received before Barry tried to reset it. Yes, we had issues afterwards but generally, it had one episode and then it was done and dusted. But episodes like the invasion angle, which went over the Flash and Arrow aswell as Legends of Tomorrow was fun and I hope for another big cross over event next season. But it is obvious they are been used to test them out until we reach Crisis on Infinite Earths. Duet was lovely episode that added something different to the season, and more of the Music Meister in a future episode, or even a nice 2 parter on him soon.
There is more I could waffle on about, but it will still lead to the same conclusion that I had mentioned already. Yes this season had its fun and enjoyable moments and episodes. But it lacks in areas the last 2 season were better in. Yes season 1 is still the best but season 2 has the Runaway Dinosaur episode to make up for it. This season lacked that moment to make up for its shortcomings, of too many relationship story lines.
But this isn’t like Arrow Season 3 that made me worry for future things, I still very much look forward to The Flash season 4, unlike Arrow which I did not have the same feeling for after season 3 had concluded.
AdvertisementsOn one occasion, the court heard, an alleged victim was "spooked" by Mr Wadsworth standing nearby with a camera around his neck.
During the trial, it emerged that two groups of victims contacted police after a complainant realised two years ago that what had taken place in the 1990s "was not right and not appropriate".
The victim, who cannot be named, told jurors he met the Wadsworths in parkland and only discovered their names after recognising their voices on a radio show.
In videos of police interviews played to a jury, the man claimed he had up to 15 sexual encounters as a teenager with Mrs Wadsworth - around half of them before he turned 16.
On one occasion, the court heard, Tony Wadsworth joined in a "threesome" with the teenager at the couple's home after he turned 16.
One of the complainants told the trial Mrs Wadsworth "must have known" her victims were under-age because of their appearance.
The sixth witness at the trial estimated that he was about 11 when he and older boys saw the Wadsworths having sex against a tree.
The man, who also cannot be named, said he was either 12 or 13 when he and two other boys were indecently assaulted.
In a video interview played to the jury panel, the man said of the Wadsworths: "They went up a tree and had full sex.So today BoingBoing posted some work by a Russian illustrator named Maxim Shkret.
I’m pretty sure his work is done in a 3D program. But I asked myself “how could I get something like this in Illustrator?” and fooled around a little bit.
After some fiddling with needlessly complex setups that didn’t work anyway, I realized I could do it pretty simply: tell Illustrator to draw two variable-width strokes, one for each side of the line, each in a different gradient.
The above screengrabs are for one of the six related styles I made while experimenting; I’ve got it at different stroke weights (3/6/9pt), and with one of the gradients reversed. The lips are also done with double-gradient strokes; the other shading is simple blurred shapes.
The fun part here is that the hair can be knocked out super quickly with the pencil tool. I could very quickly draw some chunky, super-stylized plastic-looking hair.
It still looks interesting with different colors, too. I may have to experiment with this further and try to do a piece using this. I’m not sure what kind of looks would go well with it.
Anyway. I thought I’d share this little experiment.As the world has become less analog and more digital — as tape decks and TV antennas have given way to MP3 players and streaming video — electrical engineers’ habits of thought have changed, too. In the analog world, they used to think mostly in terms of quantities such as voltage, which are continuous, meaning they can take on an infinite range of values. Now, they tend to think more in terms of 0s and 1s, the binary oppositions of digital logic.
Since the completion of the Human Genome Project, two thriving new disciplines — synthetic biology and systems biology — have emerged from the observation that in some ways, the sequences of chemical reactions that lead to protein production in cells are a lot like electronic circuits. In general, researchers in both fields tend to analyze reactions in terms of binary oppositions: If a chemical is present, one thing happens; if the chemical is absent, a different thing happens.
But Rahul Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), thinks that’s the wrong approach. “The signals in cells are not ones or zeroes,” Sarpeshkar says. “That’s an overly simplified abstraction that is kind of a first, crude, useful approximation for what cells do. But everybody knows that’s really wrong.”
At the Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference in San Diego in November, Sarpeshkar, research scientist Lorenzo Turicchia, postdoc Ramiz Daniel and graduate student Sung Sik Woo, all of RLE, will present a paper in which they use analog electronic circuits to model two different types of interactions between proteins and DNA in the cell. The circuits mimic the behaviors of the cell with remarkable accuracy, but perhaps more important, they do it with far fewer transistors than a digital model would require.
The work could point the way toward electronic simulations of biological systems that not only are simpler to build and more accurate, but run much more efficiently. It also suggests a new framework for analyzing and designing the biochemical processes that govern cell behavior.
Shades of gray
A transistor is basically a switch: When it’s on, it conducts electricity; when it’s off, it doesn’t. In a computer chip, those two states represent 0s and 1s.
But in moving between its nonconductive and conductive states, a transistor passes through every state in between — slightly conductive, moderately conductive, fairly conductive — just as a car accelerating from zero to 60 passes through every speed in between. Because the transistors in a computer chip are intended to perform binary logic operations, they’re designed to make those transitional states undetectable. But it’s the transitional states that Sarpeshkar and his colleagues are trying to exploit.
“Let’s say the cell is a pancreatic cell making insulin,” Sarpeshkar says. “Well, when the glucose goes up, it wants to make more insulin. But it’s not bang-bang. If the glucose goes up more, it’ll make more insulin. If the glucose goes down a little, it’s going to make less insulin. It’s graded. It’s not a logic gate.”
Treated as an analog device, a single transistor has an infinite range of possible conductivities, so it could model an infinite range of chemical concentrations. But treated as a binary switch, a transistor has only two possible states, so modeling a large but finite range of concentrations would require a whole bank of transistors. For large circuits that model sequences of reactions within the cell, binary logic rapidly becomes unmanageably complex. But analog circuits don’t. Indeed, analog circuits exploit the same types of physical phenomena that make the cellular machinery so efficient in the first place.
“If you think about it, what is electronics?” Sarpeshkar says. “It’s the motion of electrons. What is chemistry? Chemistry is about electrons moving from one atom or molecule to another atom or molecule. They must be deeply connected: They’re both about the electrons.”
Validation
For their new paper, the RLE researchers performed their own biological experiments, measuring the effects of gradually increasing the concentrations of two different proteins within the cell. Both proteins prompt the cell to start producing other proteins, but they do it in different ways: One of them binds to a strand of DNA and causes the cell to increase production of a particular protein; the other deactivates a protein that’s suppressing a protein’s production.
Sarpeshkar and his colleagues were able to model both processes using circuits with only eight transistors each. Moreover, the circuits turned out to form mirror images of each other, representing the difference between directly activating protein production and deactivating a deactivator. And finally, the circuits modeled the interactions of the genes and proteins with remarkable accuracy.
“The concept of using a single transistor to implement an entire equation — which, implemented on a digital computer, would take several lines of code, and if you look inside the box it would be millions of transistors — is definitely an advance,” says Gert Cauwenberghs, a professor of bioengineering and biology at the University of California at San Diego. “The extreme variability in biological systems, and the fact that the systems are still resilient against variations, would suggest that analog circuits, which have some of the same physical thermodynamic principles and noise embedded in them, would be a good implementation platform.”
Cauwenberghs cautions that to be useful to biologists, an analog model of genetic circuits would have to be much more complex than the one that the RLE researchers describe in their new paper. Building such a model, he says, will require as much work by biologists, in generating accurate data about chemical concentrations in the cell, as by electrical engineers. But “there’s definitely synergy between these two domains,” he says.The President, Lieutenant General Dr Seretse Khama Ian Khama has officially opened the Goo Moremi Resort also known as the Goo-Moremi Manonnye Gorge at Moremi village in the Tswapong constituency.
The Goo-Moremi Resort is a partnership between Botswana Tourism Organisation (BTO) and Moremi Manonnye Conservation Trust. Speaking at the event, the Minister of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism, Mr Tshekedi Khama said the day marked another milestone in the ministry’s effort to facilitate community involvement in tourism development.
Mr Khama said the ministry had set the tone for such developments through the Community Based Natural Resources Management Policy. The policy, he said, was to guide collaboration between government and communities in terms of tourism development and resources conservation.
He said the success of the policy was evident, as his ministry through BTO, had established a number of facilities around the country most of which were operating. Minister Khama said Goo-Moremi Resort was one example of what could be achieved if communities joined hands towards a common tourism development goal. He noted that the journey to setting up the project had been interesting and one full of memories, adding that the project was one of the first few carried out after repealing the old Botswana Tourism Act to allow BTO to invest in Greenfield projects.
However, Mr Khama said the resort still had other developments to be completed. He said the move to allow BTO to invest in such projects was necessitated by the realisation that most communities were not able to set up tourism operations on their own, owing to various challenges such as funds and skills. He said as a unique project, due diligence was ensured to minimise and mitigate challenges inherent within new tourism developments.
He said the spirituality and sacred nature of the place were taken into account when revamping it and was embedded in the story shared with visitors, as it is what makes the resort unique.
“Other BTO developments include Tsabong – The Ecotourism Camel Park, Qcwihaba Camp Site and Seboba Recreational Park in Kasane,” Minister Khama said.
These, he said, were part of the CBNRM dream that added to the government’s strategy for rural development, and had contributed to the preservation of resources, which were previously otherwise vandalised. He said prior to the establishment of the resort, the area faced challenges such as degrading of range resources and incidents of poaching, but added that once fully operational such environmental threats were resolved through, the involvement of the community among others. He said the Central District had potential for further tourism-based developments, which he said the ministry would harness with the intention if eventually developing.
For his part, BTO acting CEO, Mr Zibanani Hubona said the industry appreciates new developments such as Goo-Moremi. He said the development add to the country’s tourism offer and the diversification drive, particularly the community- based cultural and heritage tourism initiatives. Mr Hubona said the Goo-Moremi revamp project started in 2008 and employed 14 staff members who are residents of Moremi. Only the manager and the deputy are non-residents. He said the project was well branded and had been doing relatively well since inception.
Mr Hubona assured the community that the BTO would continue to support the venture and applauded those who played a role in ensuring that the project was a success.
Reference: BOPAAn otherwise successful summer transfer window for Tottenham threatened to become marred by the absurd saga surrounding the club’s pursuit of West Brom’s Saido Berahino in the dying days of August.
The club’s failure to convince West Brom to part with their promising young striker seemed, at first, to be a damning indictment of Daniel Levy’s level of influence at the club. Tottenham, it was said, desperately needed a striker to backup Harry Kane, and therefore one should be acquired regardless of price. Levy’s characteristic brinksmanship and haggling sunk the club’s chances of getting Kane the support he needed.
Thankfully, with just over a third of the season complete, most have forgotten how real that striker crisis felt in the summer. Kane has come good on the promises he made last season, scoring seven goals in his last five Premier League appearances. Heung-min Son, acquired the week before the Berahino deal fell through, has suggested he’d be more than capable of filling for Kane as needed. The Tottenham fanbase’s demands for a new striker have thus decreased to not much more than a dull roar.
It’s still there though, and with some justification. Even if Kane and Son are enough for the starting XI, there’s still a surfeit of options coming up through Tottenham’s academy. Shaq Coulthirst and Shayon Harrison are encouraging but still years away from first team action, assuming they even make it that far. Tottenham need legitimate competition for Kane as well as a permanent solution should the England striker go down or leave the club.
That striker would have to fall into a narrow band of qualifications. Young, between 19 and 22, but with a good deal of top flight experience and the ability to feature in multiple phases of play. Berahino fits that mold, of course. Basel’s Breel Embolo has justifiably been given a lot of attention as he is beyond promising while also checking off these boxes.
There’s one other option that has generated a lot of noise since first being linked with the club in the late summer: Newcastle’s Ayoze Pérez.
At first glance, he looks a perfect fit. He only turned 22 in the summer. He’s played plenty of Premier League football since arriving at Newcastle prior to last season from Spanish second division side Tenerife. His game is oriented around playing deep, retrieving the ball and pressing play forward. In short, Pérez vaguely fits the profile of a modern Tottenham player.
His stats and style read almost exactly like those of Heung-min Son – a deep-lying forward capable of playing on his own or with a proper center forward in front of him – except in one crucial regard. For a player that features in the striker role, his production rate is preposterously low. With ten goals in 3,243 minutes on the pitch, Pérez is scoring at a rate of one goal every 324.3 minutes, or once every 3.6 complete games. Compared with Kane – one goal every 131 minutes – that’s a significant downgrade.
Kane, to be fair, was utterly prolific last season. Even compared to Berahino, though, Pérez comes up short. The West Brom striker has averaged one goal every 213 minutes since the beginning of last season.
Pérez appears to pay heavily for his participation in build up play. It keeps him far from goal and, at least at Newcastle, he lacks the means to get back into dangerous positions. His meager shot rate of 1.7 per game since his arrival in the northeast of England tells that story completely.
It’s not that dropping deep and scoring goals are mutually exclusively roles for a striker to play. Son does everything that Pérez does while also managing to get off 2.7 shots per game. That doesn’t seem like a tremendous difference, but it adds up over the course of a season.
In short, Pérez could be a red herring. It’s possible he improves with more playing time – or with a better team than relegation locks Newcastle – but Tottenham would do better to find a striker that shows signs of being a more complete package. Who that will be is hard to say, but it’s safe to guess that it won’t be Pérez.But for the past year, Gilead has sold the drug to the Egyptian government for about $10 a pill. The government distributes it to pharmacies across the country, where it is dispensed free to patients.
Gilead also allows 11 Indian and two Egyptian companies to make sofosbuvir under license and to sell it at any price they like, in return for a 7 percent royalty.
Gilead was under some pressure to make the drug more widely available. Egypt’s patent office rejected the company’s application, making it inevitable that generic versions would eventually be sold there, said Dr. Wahid Doss, the chairman of the National Committee for Control of Viral Hepatitis.
In return for selling sofosbuvir cheaply, Gilead asked that Egypt impose strict restrictions on every bottle to prevent the drug from being sold on the black market and undermining its business elsewhere.
All pills must be dispensed by government pharmacies, for example, and all patients must turn in an old bottle to get a fresh one. Those receiving new bottles must immediately unscrew the cap, break the seal and take the first pill in front of the pharmacist — making it nearly impossible to resell the bottle.
Those restrictions infuriated international activists pushing for greater access to medicines, who saw them as violations of patients’ rights.
Heba Wanis, a pharmacist who until recently worked at the Egyptian Initiative on Personal Rights, said she found the requirement to take a dose in front of the pharmacist “humiliating” and felt it “raised a lot of ethical issues.”A few times every day, the high-speed train between St. Petersburg and Moscow barrels through the threadbare town of Lyuban. When word gets out that the head of Russia’s state railway company — a close friend of President Vladimir V. Putin — is aboard, the station’s employees line up on the platform standing at attention, saluting Russia’s modernization for the seconds it takes the train to fly through. Whoosh.
But Vladimir G. Naperkovsky is not one of them. He watched with a cold, blue-eyed stare as the train passed the town where he was born, with its pitted roads and crumbling buildings. At 52, having shut down his small computer repair business, Mr. Naperkovsky is leaving for another region in Russia, hoping it is not too late to start a new life in a more prosperous place. The reasons are many, but his view boils down to this: “Gradually,” he said, explaining his view of Lyuban, “everything is rotting.”
Video | 0:39 Vladimir G. Naperkovsky explains how ambulances are unable to reach patients across the tracks in Lyuban, a city bisected by the high-speed rail link between St. Petersburg and Moscow.
At the edges of Russia’s two great cities, another Russia begins.
This will not be apparent at next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, nor is it visible from the German-engineered high-speed train. It is along the highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg — a narrow 430-mile stretch of road that is a 12-hour trip by car — that one sees the great stretches of Russia so neglected by the state that they seem drawn backward in time.
As the state’s hand recedes from the hinterlands, people are struggling with choices that belong to past centuries: to heat their homes with a wood stove, which must be fed by hand every three hours, or burn diesel fuel, which costs half a month’s salary? When the road has so deteriorated that ambulances cannot reach their home, is it safe to stay? When their home can’t be sold, can they leave?
Clad in rubber slippers, his forearms sprinkled with tattoos, Mr. Naperkovsky is the kind of plain-spoken man’s man whom Russians would call a “muzhik.” He had something he wanted to pass on to Mr. Putin, who has led Russia during 13 years of political stability and economic expansion.
“The people on the top do not know what is happening down here,” he said. “They have their own world. They eat differently, they sleep on different sheets, they drive different cars. They don’t know what is going on here. If I needed one word to describe it, I would say it is a swamp, a stagnant swamp. As it |
villages across the route have been decorated for the race, with this pub decked in replica yellow jerseys
Spectators were basked in sunshine in Ilkley on the tour's two day visit to Yorkshire, which will move south to Cambridge on Monday in a stage that will end on The Mall in Central London
Leeds major shopping street, the Headrow, was packed full of spectators for the Grand Depart of the Tour de France
Leeds city centre was packed full of cycling fans ahead of the Grand Depart of the Tour de France which left the city at noon today
The tour publicity caravan made its way through the streets of Leeds, marking the start of the 2014 Tour de France before the Grand Depart
The Grand Depart of the tour has attracted cycling fans both young and old to cheer on the riders
Spectators arrived in Leeds city centre from early this morning to get a good spot to see the historic Grand Depart of the Tour de France in Yorkshire
It is the first time the race has returned to Britain since 2007, and two stages of the tour will be held in Yorkshire
The British contingent among the huge crowds were hoping that Cavendish would be first across the finish line in Harrogate.
His mother lives in the spa town and the British rider was hoping to bag the yellow jersey as the ideal end to the opening stage of the Tour.
However, the 29-year-old's hopes were dashed when he suffered the unexpected fall and fans will now be eagerly awaiting tomorrow's news to see if he is able to compete in the rest of the Tour.
British hopes were also lying with last year's Tour de France champion Chris Froome, who avoided the trouble to place sixth, but will face a sterner test in Sunday's 201km second stage from York to Sheffield.
While he is trying to defend his title, 2012 winner Sir Bradley Wiggins is not competing in this year's Tour.
The royal visitors waited at the finish line in Harrogate to welcome the leaders and the peloton before the Duchess of Cambridge presented the leader's yellow jersey on the podium.
Residents in villages along the route hung bunting in the race's signature canary yellow in their towns and villages, and painted phone boxes to match, ahead of today's opening stage.
The spa town of Harrogate was full of spectators ahead of the grand finish earlier today
The usually quiet North Yorkshire dales filled up with spectators for the Tour de France. Fans gathered in Buttertubs, pictured, which marked the steepest and most dangerous section of today's race
Residents in the town of Skipton decorated their house in anticipation of welcoming the opening stage of the Tour de France
Some spectators arrived in the village of Reeth in the Yorkshire Dales where the peloton passed through on their way to Harrogate today
Many of the small towns and villages along the opening stage have been getting in the French spirit ahead of the tour
Spectators in Ilkley turn out for what is being billed as 'the world's greatest cycle race'
A large banner in the shape of the yellow jersey could be seen draped over the roof of the historic York Minster cathedral, and the famous race leader's jersey also adorned the statue of the Black Prince in Leeds.
Even animals were not immune from cycling fever. Farmers spray-painted their sheep and alpacas in yellow, green and red polka dots to match the various winners' jerseys.
Enthusiastic fans sporting black and white striped tops, berets, strings of garlic around their necks and bushy moustaches took to their bikes in homage to the French - who invented the race 101 years ago.
The red, white and blue flags of France and Great Britain could be seen draped across the front of shops and pubs as businesses raced to embrace the visitors travelling from across the Channel for the start of the Tour.
Up to three million people are expected to watch the Tour's two-day visit to Yorkshire.
Today, the riders arrive in York for a stage taking in some of the most challenging climbs in Britain, ending in Sheffield.
And, tomorrow, the Tour moves south to Cambridge and a stage ending on The Mall, in central London.
The Tour de France is now in its 101st first year and the 2,277-mile, 21-stage race ends in Paris on July 27.
These cycling fans, wore 'Where's Wiggo?' T-shirts after it was announced the first British winner of the Tour in 2012 Bradley Wiggins, would not be taking part in this year's race
Enthusiastic fans were eager to cheer on British riders Mark Cavendish and Chris Froome, with this man decked out in a suit of the Union flag
British hopes lie with last year's overall champion, Chris Froome, with his fans arriving in Leeds for the Grand Depart
At the finishing line in Harrogate, Arthen (left) and Lilwen Banning showed their support with chalk for British rider Mark Cavendish, who crashed out yards from the finish Up to three million people are expected to watch the Tour's two-day visit to Yorkshire, with the riders passing through Yorkshire again tomorrow on their way from York to Sheffield. Leeds enjoyed a does of yellow fever, even dressing the city centre's art deco nymph statue in a jersey (right)With the participation of more than 20 of the original and current mission scientists, engineers and team members, the film documents one of humanity’s greatest achievements in exploration. That includes the aluminum foil from the local market that was added at the last minute to protect the craft from radiation to the near disasters at launch to the emergency maneuvers to fix a crucial frozen instrument platform.
Between them, the Voyagers explored all four of the giant outer planets of our solar system, 48 of their moons, and their unique
PBS
systems of rings and magnetic fields. Highlights include the discovery on Jupiter’s moon Io of the first active volcano beyond Earth; spoke-like structures that form and disappear between Saturn’s rings; the Great Dark Spot, a giant storm on Neptune that is the size of Earth and similar to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter; and active geyser-like eruptions on Neptune’s moon Triton, which spew gas and dust from the moon’s interior miles into its thin atmosphere.
After completing its mission to the outer planets, Voyager turned its camera back toward Earth and, at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan, took one of the most famous images of Earth ever created. As described by Sagan in the film, the image showed Earth as a pale blue dot on which “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Sagan was one of the masterminds behind another of Voyager’s most iconic elements: the Golden Record. The documentary reveals how this famous record, which has never been released on Earth, was created and how it presents humanity to any creatures who may find it.
“This is one of the boldest and most spectacular space missions of all time,” EP Sean B. Carroll of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, said in today’s announcement. “As we approach the 40th anniversary of the mission’s launch, with both spacecraft still going strong and farther from Earth than any other object humans have created, we felt it was important to tell the story of how Voyager came to be and what important discoveries it made possible.”
The Farthest is a Crossing The Line film presented by HHMI Tangled Bank Studios in association with The Irish Film Board, ZDF, ARTE and the BBC. The film is written and directed by Emer Reynolds and produced by John Murray and Clare Stronge. Executive producers are John Rubin, Sean B. Carroll and Dennis Liu (HHMI Tangled Bank Studios) and Keith Potter (Irish Film Board). Executive in charge for PBS is Bill Gardner.Russ Holmberg takes great care inserting tiny pears inside a bottle and fastening them securely to the tree in June. Frequent maintenance throughout the summer is required to protect the pears as they mature. Russ Holmberg takes great care inserting tiny pears inside a bottle and fastening them securely to the tree in June. Frequent maintenance throughout the summer is required to protect the pears as they mature.
The bottles are secured neck-down so rainwater doesn't collect and threaten the growing pear. Successfully growing pears to full-size is part skill, part luck. The end result, however, is pure art. The bottles are secured neck-down so rainwater doesn't collect and threaten the growing pear. Successfully growing pears to full-size is part skill, part luck. The end result, however, is pure art.
home
welcome
distilling
food recipes
cocktail recipes
featured chef
where to buy
reviews
contact us
Russell Holmberg, a fourth generation member of the Holmberg family, manages the project for the distillery. He starts around Memorial Day when the pear blossoms drop their petals leaving tiny, delicate pears. A branch with the pear attached is inserted inside the bottle, and the bottle is gently fastened upside-down from another branch held by twine or tape. With luck and frequent maintenance of the bottles' security, the pears grow to full size inside the bottle over the summer. They're typically harvested in mid to late-August, a bit earlier than most Bartlett pears, so they're still a bit green and firm.
After harvesting the pears, the crew at Westford Hill Distillers scrubs the bottles inside and out with water. The bottles are then filled with Westford Hill Distillers Pear William brandy, corked and finished. The Bartlett pears used to produce this aromatic spirit are sourced by Westford Hill from Lyman Orchards in Middlefield, CT. In development of this project, Westford Hill Distillers has also managed growing these "imprisoned pears" at Lyman Orchards, Charlton Orchards and McClellan Orchards trying various methods to select and protect the pears. For the complete distilling story And how did that pear get inside that bottle? For the past two summers, Holmberg Orchards in Gales Ferry, CT has hosted Westford Hill Distillers' bottles on their Bartlett pear trees. From a distance, these bottles with the growing pears inside appear as if some exotic fruit is hanging from the trees in this orchard.Russell Holmberg, a fourth generation member of the Holmberg family, manages the project for the distillery. He starts around Memorial Day when the pear blossoms drop their petals leaving tiny, delicate pears. A branch with the pear attached is inserted inside the bottle, and the bottle is gently fastened upside-down from another branch held by twine or tape. With luck and frequent maintenance of the bottles' security, the pears grow to full size inside the bottle over the summer. They're typically harvested in mid to late-August, a bit earlier than most Bartlett pears, so they're still a bit green and firm.After harvesting the pears, the crew at Westford Hill Distillers scrubs the bottles inside and out with water. The bottles are then filled with Westford Hill Distillers Pear William brandy, corked and finished. The Bartlett pears used to produce this aromatic spirit are sourced by Westford Hill from Lyman Orchards in Middlefield, CT. In development of this project, Westford Hill Distillers has also managed growing these "imprisoned pears" at Lyman Orchards, Charlton Orchards and McClellan Orchards trying various methods to select and protect the pears. For the complete distilling story click here
[framboise] [pear william] [kirsch] [fraise] [poire prisonniere] [apple brandy]NSA has done more to undermine US banking, commercial communications and computer products than any foreign power could ever have dreamed of, Robert Steele, former CIA case officer and co-founder of the US Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, told RT.
RT:Edward Snowden has revealed that Syria's internet blackout in 2012 was caused by the NSA, as they attempted to hack into one of the country's internet providers. What does this new leak tell us about the NSA's reach?
Robert Steele: Yes, they are, but I would refer you to the book by Mark Bowden on the first digital world war. Mark, whom I know personally, does a really excellent job showing that all the real expertise is outside the US government. In fact I am using Kaspersky on my computer, because the US security people are totally incompetent. NSA is not really competent, it is good at one thing and one thing only, and that is spending a great deal of money and subsidizing foreign intelligence services. It is not good at signals intelligence. And it's also not good at cyber. There is a very important comment I do want to make - under the putative oversight of James Clapper and Mike Vickers the NSA has done more to undermine US banking and commercial communications and US computer products from IBM, Dell, and Microsoft etc. They have done more to undermine those than any foreign power could ever have dreamed of. NSA has been the greatest enemy of American communications and computing security in history.
RT:Media wars a long time ago became a reality. Are cyber wars the latest type of conflict to actually come true?
RS: I think you should really go back to the Y2K example. These are overhyped. The internet is vastly more distributed and vastly more firewalled and self-healing than most people realize. There is a great deal we can do to radically improve the security and sustainability of the internet. By and large cyber wars in my view are a way the governments waste money. As a former spy, when I was meeting terrorists or I was doing operations in terrorism and everything had to be recorded I would absolute guarantee that for every four hours of meeting you would have 16 hours of work processing, the tapes and everything, and you would maybe get one minute to two minutes for really useful stuff. There is no substitute for human intelligence and the human factor, and that is what all of my work for these past years has been focused on. US intelligence has become overly technical, overly expensive and very, very stupid.
RT:According to Snowden, the NSA runs a "MonsterMind" program designed to prevent foreign cyber-attacks and strike back without oversight. Could the software potentially hurt civilians?
RS: The NSA program will not work, the way most NSA programs do not work. NSA is good at spending money to collect information and store it at a great expense to the taxpayer. It is not good at processing. It stinks at cyber-attacks. In fact the cyber command is one of the most worthless commands in the US government inventory. It is staffed by reservists that sit around and surf the internet and do not actually know what they are doing. And that is from the people inside. But the real problem is that NSA can break things in cyberspace. NSA is also a subsidiary of the Zionist state. Israel has managed to completely co-opt NSA, and when I say Israel I say Zionist, it's not loyal American Jews and the loyal Jewish people in Israel that do not want their government to be doing evil no more than we Americans want our government to do any evil. The NSA is essentially a very, very big dinosaur with a very small brain, and when it wags its tail it hurts everybody. And what we have learned recently from revelations in the Washington Post is that primary damage and surveillance the NSA is doing is against American citizens, not Angela Merkel.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.NEWPORT Wales (Reuters) - The United States said it had created a “core coalition” on Friday to battle Islamic State militants in Iraq, calling for broad support from allies and partners around the world but ruling out committing ground forces.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take their positions during clashes with the Islamic State (IS) on the front line at Buyuk Yeniga village September 4, 2014. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah
President Barack Obama sought to use a NATO summit in Wales to enlist allied support in a campaign to destroy the Islamist militants but as the summit drew to a close it remained unclear how many nations might join Washington in air strikes.
Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told foreign and defense ministers from 10 nations at a hastily arranged meeting that there were many ways they could help, including training and equipping the Iraqis.
British and German ministers warned that it would be a long campaign to push the Sunni militants back after stunning gains they have made in Syria and Iraq, drawing volunteers from many countries including in the West.
NATO announced plans for allies to share more information on westerners fighting for IS - who U.S. and European security officials see as a major risk to national security when they return home. NATO may also coordinate airlifts by member states to deliver assistance to Iraq.
“We need to attack them in ways that prevent them from taking over territory, to bolster the Iraqi security forces and others in the region who are prepared to take them on, without committing troops of our own,” Kerry told the meeting.
“Obviously I think that’s a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground.”
Hagel told ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark that they, with the United States, formed the core group for tackling the Sunni militant group.
“It is the core group that will form the larger and extended coalition that’s going to be required to deal with this challenge,” he said.
Kerry said he hoped the allies could develop a comprehensive plan for combating IS in time for this month’s annual U.N. General Assembly session in New York.
The threat posed by returning foreign fighters was “a challenge to every country here”, Kerry told the ministers.
Britain raised its terrorism alert last week to its second-highest level over the threat posed by IS, meaning it assessed a strike was “highly likely”.
Turkey, which attended the talks, has been struggling to staunch a flow of foreign jihadists across its border with Syria. Hagel travels to Turkey next week.
STRATEGY SOUGHT
British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande, the leaders of Europe’s main military powers, told Obama in private meetings that Washington had to do more than simply order air strikes on IS targets in Iraq and needed an overall strategy, European officials said.
“It can’t be just ‘let’s go and bomb a few targets and see what happens’,” said one Western defense official familiar with the talks between the allied leaders.
France said this week it was ready to engage in all aspects of the fight against IS, including potentially military action. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Friday that London had not yet decided on any involvement in air strikes.
A British official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “There is a growing sense that this is going to take more than we are doing... but it needs to be a measured, cautious approach.”
A statement issued by Hagel and Kerry after the meeting said the coalition would need to go after IS finances, including any trade in petroleum products, and discredit its ideology.
The Europeans have called for a global strategy to combat the Islamic State threat, involving a new Iraqi government, Iraq’s neighbors and other stakeholders.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier summed up the reservations of several European allies when he told reporters: “A military confrontation will be only successful if it is embedded in a political setting.”
Obama drew bipartisan criticism last week after saying candidly he had not yet developed a strategy for confronting the Islamic State in Syria, where militants have beheaded two U.S. journalists in the last month.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters advance during clashes with the Islamic State (IS) on the front line at Buyuk Yeniga village September 4, 2014. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah
The United States acknowledged that action against IS in Iraq would have implications in Syria as well.
“We’re convinced in the days ahead we have the ability to destroy ISIL. It may take a year, it may take two years, it may take three years. But we’re determined,” Kerry said.The administration’s attorneys determined that only parents who had been in the United States since Jan. 1, 2010, and had a qualifying child as of Nov. 19 would receive a temporary reprieve. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
As senior Obama administration officials worked behind the scenes for months this year to develop the legal rationale for deferring the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, there was one group they wanted to include that presented particular problems: the parents of “dreamers.”
The dreamers, in the eyes of many advocates, were an especially sympathetic group, children who had been brought into the country illegally and had been granted temporary relief under the president’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Now these advocates were saying the parents deserved similar relief as well.
The administration sought a way to include them, but lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the White House examined the legal arguments and decided against it.
“We looked at this pretty hard,” one senior administration official said in an interview last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations. “We hoped to come up with a rationale that would work but concluded that we couldn’t.”
A lawyer briefed on the administration’s internal debate said that when it came to that category, “some of the policy people were pushing too hard to do things the lawyers thought were questionable.” Ultimately, the lawyers won.
The decision to exclude the parents of dreamers — along with all agricultural workers and H-1B visa seekers — from President Obama’s executive actions announced Nov. 20 highlights the legal and political challenges the administration is navigating as it aims to curb the ongoing deportation of illegal immigrants. The president has faced criticism from all sides on the issue, with conservatives accusing him of giving amnesty to lawbreakers and immigration advocates decrying what they see as excessive deportations.
Operating in an arena that is typically shielded from judicial review, federal government lawyers have tried to broaden the number of people who can stay in the United States while shying away from the kind of overreach that could give Congress grounds to overrule the policy.
The executive-action changes have drawn sharp rebukes from GOP lawmakers. In a recent interview, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called the move “an act of nullification” that oversteps the president’s authority. But some of the finer legal distinctions drawn by the administration aim to blunt that criticism and keep the policy in place.
The administration’s legal reasoning for its actions is laid out in a 33-page memo issued Nov. 19 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — a road map to the choices Obama’s deputies made along the way as they navigated contested legal terrain.
At the heart of the administration’s justification is the idea of prosecutorial discretion. The memo is full of references to historical and judicial precedents intended to bolster the idea that the president had some discretion in deciding which illegal immigrants should be expelled from the country and which should be protected from deportation, but it also acknowledges that the sustainability of such a policy rests in the political arena.
“And because the exercise of enforcement discretion generally is not subject to judicial review... neither the Supreme Court nor the lower federal courts have squarely addressed its constitutional bounds,” states the memo. “Rather, the political branches have addressed the proper allocation of enforcement authority through the political process.”
There was broad agreement among Obama’s lawyers that he had the authority to expand the deferred program to parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. David Rivkin, a senior legal official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, called that unanimity and lack of debate “stunning.”
In a prime-time address on Thursday President Obama announced his plan to use his executive authority on immigration policy, protecting millions of illegal immigrants from deportation. (AP)
“The reason you go to the Office of Legal Counsel is because it’s a difficult issue, because there are disagreements among agencies and departments,” Rivkin said. “It’s an indication of the fact that the OLC opinion was made to order.”
But David Strauss, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Chicago, said the process played out exactly as it should have. “It’s the way conversations often go between lawyers and clients,’’ he said. “The client says: ‘Here’s something I’d like to do. I think it’s appropriate. What do you think?’ And if the lawyer says, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t do it,’ the client says, ‘Okay, that’s why they hired you.’ ’’
Both of Obama’s previous actions, and some undertaken by past presidents of both parties, offered a partial legal basis for the administration’s action. Presidents dating to Dwight D. Eisenhower have granted relief to immigrants who otherwise would have been vulnerable to deportation. Republicans, however, argue that those actions were on a much smaller scale.
In terms of prioritizing which immigrants should be removed from the country, Congress had already placed criminals at the top of the list. In addition, it had recognized that there is a humanitarian justification for keeping families together — this serves as part of the basis for why the relatives of legal immigrants get a higher priority in terms of their visa applications. So both of those directives made it easier for government lawyers to make the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents eligible for a deferral.
More broadly, on multiple occasions in the past, the government has allowed individuals out of compliance with U.S. immigration rules — including thousands of foreign students who were stranded here after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and relatives of those killed in the 9/11 attacks — to stay in the country.
But the administration’s lawyers also made some arbitrary distinctions as they ruled which parents would be eligible for the new deferral program. They determined that only parents who had been in the country since Jan. 1, 2010, and had a qualifying child as of Nov. 19 would be granted a temporary reprieve, a similar time requirement to DACA applicants, who also have to have been in the country for at least five years to be eligible for a deferral.
And while they did not start with a specific number of people who would be eligible for deferrals, they also worked to ensure that the program didn’t encompass numbers that it would look as if the president was defying Congress outright. The memo notes that “while the potential size of the program is large, it is nevertheless only a fraction of the approximately 11 million undocumented aliens who remain.”
“We looked at what was within appropriate prosecutorial discretion and then did a tire kick to see where this would end up,” said the senior administration official.
In the case of parents of DACA children, the memo provides two primary reasons for denying them preferential status. First, even though DACA recipients are not being deported at the moment, “they unquestionably lack lawful status in the United States.” Second, doing so “would represent a significant departure from deferred action programs that Congress has implicitly approved in the past.”
Marketa Lindt, a partner at Sidley Austin who serves as national secretary of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said in an interview Tuesday that the decision to exclude this group reflected the fact that “it’s a category that’s hard to sell politically.”
“There’s no legal bar that I can think of to that provision,” she said. “If the executive branch has the authority to give work benefits to people who arrive at a certain age, there’s no different legal foundation to giving the benefits to the parents of those people.”
Two other groups — agricultural workers and highly skilled foreigners seeking H-1B visas — are left out of the program. Senior administration officials said that one could make an economic, rather than humanitarian, case for keeping them in the country, but that would again mark a change from previous deferred-action programs.
While Rivkin said he thought deferred action for illegal immigrants “is not a bad policy exercise,’’ he found the way the administration went about it to be “utterly and totally illegal.... This is not prosecutorial discretion, it is the president rewriting the law.’’
Walter Dellinger, a Washington lawyer who served as U.S. solicitor general in the Clinton administration, strongly disagreed. “I never had any doubt that the president has significant discretionary authority over setting deportation priorities. This authority flows from acts of Congress,’’ said Dellinger, who added that he thought the Office of Legal Counsel opinion was “very carefully reasoned.’’
One of the provisions the Justice Department lawyers included, which they also pushed for during the creation of the 2012 program, was to make clear that federal immigration officials would still have the option of deporting individuals who might otherwise qualify for a deferral. The memo states that the new policy “provides for case-by-case determinations about whether an individual alien’s circumstances warrant the expenditure of removal resources, employing a broad standard that leaves ample room for the exercise of individual discretion by enforcement officials.”
“I think of it as a group that is entitled to apply, but I don’t consider it a group that’s entitled to relief,” said the senior administration official.
That legal uncertainty, Lindt said, has already deterred many people from applying for a deferral under DACA and will probably have the same impact on this newly eligible group.
“It’s very much the case that people will be very nervous about coming forward,” she said.
Even with these legal distinctions, administration officials remain confident that plenty of people will apply under the new program. They noted that even though the latest executive action does not specifically aid farmworkers and dreamer parents, a significant percentage of those individuals would still be eligible to apply for a deferral because they happen to be parents of a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. The administration is also still reviewing whether there are ways to expand the H-1B visa program.Advertisement
In 2014, we showed you the seven easiest PS3 Platinum Trophies you can earn. At the time, the PS4 was too young to offer any easy Platinum trophies. Now that there are several, we’ve updated the list with some easy PS4 platinums. The original list included PS3 titles The Sly Collection, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, NCIS, and Trine 2. While these are still easy Platinums, we’ve replaced some of them in favor of PS4 games.
You’ll find the edited list below, with the new PS4 games first.
Most video games strive for some sort of longevity 5 Games You Can Play For Over 100 Hours – That’s Value! 5 Games You Can Play For Over 100 Hours – That’s Value! One of the many traits unique to video games is the sheer volume of entertainment a game can provide. While a movie is over in two hours on average, and a TV show may offer... Read More. Ever since the previous console generation, Achievements and Trophies serve as extra challenges for gamers who want to fully complete everything a game has to offer. Most people can finish a game’s story, but only the most dedicated will earn every Trophy.
Folks who try to earn as many Trophies as humanly possible (sometimes called “Trophy Hunters”) search out games with simple Trophies. If you’re looking to boost your Trophy score in no time at all, let’s look at some PlayStation games that will add some easy Platinums to your cabinet.
Trophy Recap
If you’re not familiar with how PlayStation consoles handle Trophies, here’s a quick refresher. Trophies are the equivalent of Achievements on the Xbox One and Xbox 360, one of the best features from the previous console generation 4 Awesome Features That Emerged From The Last Console Generation 4 Awesome Features That Emerged From The Last Console Generation The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii are all slowly being sent off to pasture. It's not a time of sadness. Instead, it's a time to look back on all of the awesome things... Read More. They’re small, specific challenges present in every game released today. Early PS3 games didn’t have Trophies, but Sony requires any released after January 2009 to have them. Every PS4 and PS Vita game has Trophies, as well.
Trophies come in four flavors: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. A Platinum Trophy unlocks only when you complete every other Trophy for a game, except for those tied to downloadable content 3 Of The Most Ridiculous Video Game Expansions Ever 3 Of The Most Ridiculous Video Game Expansions Ever Expansions and DLC are normally just more of the same. It’s rare that the developers make dramatic changes to the original game. When they do though, the results can be spectacular. Read More (DLC). However, if the base game’s Trophies include any that require online play, they count for the Platinum.
The Rules
A few notes before the list begins:
What Is It?
One of the most anticipated PS4 exclusives 10 Essential PS4 Games You'll Want to Play in 2016 10 Essential PS4 Games You'll Want to Play in 2016 2016 looks to be another excellent year for the PS4. We'll show you exactly what to look out for in 2016, including exclusives, ports, indies, and crossovers. Read More, it’s a linear third-person shooter that takes place in a steampunk version Can't Wait for The Order: 1886? Play These Other Steampunk Games Instead Can't Wait for The Order: 1886? Play These Other Steampunk Games Instead Steampunk is a recognizable aesthetic characterized by steam power and Victorian fashion. Love the look? Play these games! Read More of London. While the setting and graphics are incredible, the gameplay is barebones and a quarter of the game’s chapters are cutscenes.
Enjoyable or Lousy?
We weren’t thrilled with The Order in our review Is The Order: 1886 Worth Buying? Is The Order: 1886 Worth Buying? The Order: 1886 is here, but is it the PS4 exclusive you've been waiting for? Read More. The $60 launch price was ludicrous for what this game contains. Thankfully, you can find it for about $10-$15 now, which is all it’s worth.
Why Is It Easy?
This Platinum only requires a single playthrough of the game, and most of the Trophies that aren’t story-related will come naturally. There are a few collectibles to go for, but using the guide will ensure you have no problems with those. If you miss anything the first time through, you can replay a chapter.
How Long to Platinum?
The Order only lasts 6-8 hours, which is about how long you’ll need for the Platinum. You can’t skip any of the cutscenes, and everything is extremely linear. If you’re following the guide there’s nothing special aside from normal gameplay that will take up time. You might need another half hour to mop up the last few trophies after you finish the game, but that’s about it.
What Is It?
Here’s one you have to see to believe. My Name is Mayo must be a joke, as it’s a game where you literally click on a jar of mayonnaise. That’s it. As you tap, you “unlock” new costumes to dress the mayo in. You can’t make this stuff up.
Enjoyable or Lousy?
If you enjoy pressing a button hundreds of times, you’ll love this. If you love dressing up jars of mayonnaise, you’ll be right at home. Should neither of these apply to you, you’ll probably never touch this game again after getting the Platinum.
Why Is It Easy?
Did we mention that all you do is press a single button over and over 7 Free Games Where You Win By Clicking… Seriously, You Just Click 7 Free Games Where You Win By Clicking… Seriously, You Just Click A quiet, gentle new genre is creeping toward your computer and all you have to do is click. And click. Read More to get this Platinum? There are 51 Trophies to earn from this game, and they all involve clicking the mayo a certain number of times. The only diversion from this goal is having to tap the mayo when it’s wearing a certain costume.
Note that if you own a PS Vita Considering a New Slim PS Vita? These Cool Games Will Convince You Considering a New Slim PS Vita? These Cool Games Will Convince You Are you ready to get a Vita? Read on to discover its must-have games at every price - even free! Read More, you can earn a second Platinum by cross-buying a second copy 5 Of The Best Cross-Buy PlayStation Games You Should Play 5 Of The Best Cross-Buy PlayStation Games You Should Play Looking for value? Looking for games you can sink your teeth into, whether you're at home or on the go? These Cross-Buy PlayStation games have you covered. Read More of this game. That assumes you can handle tapping the mayo all over again, though.
How Long to Platinum?
Depending on how fast you can mash the X button, you’ll probably spend about 30 minutes to an hour with your mayonnaise friend. You shouldn’t need to consult the guide to figure out how to press X, and can delete this uncomfortable experience from your system forever when done. This game is only $1 on the PS Store, making it one of the cheapest Platinums ever.
What Is It?
An ugly, linear, generic first-person shooter. Remember, we’re here for the Trophies!
Enjoyable or Lousy?
It shouldn’t surprise you that this game is pretty awful. It’s lifeless and simple, and would be totally ignored if not for its pathetically easy Platinum.
Why Is It Easy?
The game’s 27 Trophies are mostly obtained by just clearing the game. There are a few that you can miss, but checking the guide before you start will ensure you don’t have any trouble.
How Long to Platinum?
You should only have to spend one or two hours with Orc Slayer to earn a Platinum. You only have to complete it once, and can play on Easy for little resistance. At $4, it’s another inexpensive Platinum.
What Is It?
The Little Acre is a hand-drawn point-and-click game Point & Click Adventuring Lives On With These Classic-Style Free Games Point & Click Adventuring Lives On With These Classic-Style Free Games Point-and-click games are a dying breed but they aren't completely dead. Read More that’s set in 1950s Ireland. It’s a throwback to the beloved PC titles of old, and even includes full voice acting.
Enjoyable or Lousy?
It’s not the best of the genre, but it’s an enjoyable game. It has a ton of charm, and offers a pretty simple experience, making this is a great point-and-click game for novices to try.
Why Is It Easy?
There are only 28 Trophies in The Little Acre, and you can earn them all in just two quick playthroughs. Less than half of them are missable, and a quick review of the Trophy guide before you start ensures you’ll know what to look for.
How Long to Platinum?
You can complete this game in an hour, as the puzzles are easy and there’s nowhere to really get lost. One of the Trophies requires |
the WR35 spot, especially when it’s Pierre Garcon who had a career-best 113 receptions with Shanahan as Washington’s offensive coordinator in 2013. Garcon still has the speed and sure hands (zero drops in 2016) to support a WR2 floor or better. Add in quarterback Brian Hoyer‘s history of locking onto his lead wide receiver, and it’s “wheels up” for Garcon as a strong WR2 fantasy option currently available in round six.
Seattle Seahawks: Paul Richardson (WR)
Paul Richardson flashed his potential in last year’s playoff game against Detroit.
The super athletic receiver with blazing 4.40 speed has been waiting for a chance to garner a higher target share. Richardson has already passed Jermaine Kearse on the depth chart and looks to be a starting wide receiver for Seattle in week one. Tethered to a dynamic All-Pro quarterback in Russell Wilson, Richardson will far surpass his bargain-basement WR83 ADP. Fantasy drafters can acquire the talented starting wide receiver for the Seahawks in the very last round of seasonal league drafts.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Jacquizz Rodgers (RB)
With Doug Martin suspended for the first three games of the season, Jacquizz Rodgers is the clear week one starter. Rodgers produced three consecutive RB16 or better PPR weeks as the starter last season. He is a good pass catcher who also was top 15 among fantasy running backs with a 29.6 percent juke rate. It is important to start the fantasy season strong, providing a solid foundation upon which to make waiver and trade moves. Rodgers is one of the only starting running backs available after round 12. At RB48 with an ADP of 141.8, Jacquizz Rodgers is the best fantasy value in Tampa Bay.
Tennessee Titans: Rishard Matthews (WR)
The best wide receiver in Tennessee has only the third best ADP. Both rookie Corey Davis (97.2) and free agent acquisition Eric Decker (92.8) have a significantly better ADP than Matthews (130.3). He started only ten games for Tennessee last season, yet finished as the 21st fantasy wide receiver in PPR formats and the 14th best wideout in standard scoring leagues. Matthews developed a fantastic rapport with quarterback Marcus Mariota, and ranked seventh among wide receivers with 12 red zone targets. He has experience in the system that Davis doesn’t, and is three years younger than Decker. Rishard Matthews will be the best Titans fantasy wide receiver this season.
Washington Redskins: Rob Kelley (RB)
Rob Kelley is only two draft spots ahead of Jacquizz Rodgers, yet projects to be the full-year starter in Washington. The rumor that rookie Samaje Perine would challenge and eventually unseat “Fat Rob” on the Redskins depth chart is dying quickly.
Rob Kelley looks to have a significant lead on Samaje Perine in the #Redskins RB battle: pic.twitter.com/9LHpwOpg1M — Evan Silva (@evansilva) August 11, 2017
As the starting running back in Jay Gruden’s offense, Kelley will have ample scoring opportunities. After ascending to the starting role in week eight, Kelley scored seven touchdowns and produced the third best overall fantasy running back performance (137 yards, three touchdowns) in week 11 against Green Bay. A goal line starting running back getting drafted after James White (114.7), Kareem Hunt (97.1), and even Perine (95.5) himself is the very definition of great fantasy value.
Main Photo:
Embed from Getty ImagesA protest camp is pictured Tuesday outside the Minneapolis Police Department's Fourth Precinct. Monday was the second day of protests over the shooting of Jamar Clark by a police officer. Jim Mone/AP
A TV reporter was among the first of 42 people arrested on a Minnesota highway Monday as law enforcement broke up a protest reacting to an officer-involved shooting in Minneapolis.
As the camera rolled, Jack Highberger of local Fox affiliate KMSP-TV announced that officers had begun to clear the road. "This is the first arrest right here; it's certainly not going to be the last," Highberger said into a camera, seconds before he, too, was cuffed.
"You want to be next? Then get going," a Minnesota State Patrol officer said, hardly waiting for a response before arresting Highberger. People with cameras crowded around to snap a shot.
Unicorn Riot, a media collective that covered the protest, said its press badge-wearing live stream reporter also was among the first people arrested. The group says journalist Nicholas Georgiades had been broadcasting live footage to more than 4,000 online viewers and that the group believes he may have been targeted to "silence any vocal opposition to the official state-sanctioned narrative of events."
Footage of Highberger's arrest:
Journalism rights advocates say the charges against Highberger in particular clearly should be dropped.
Delphine Halgand, U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders, says detentions of reporters such as Highberger, including at other recent protests against police-involved killings in Baltimore and Missouri, appear part of "an alarming trend of curtailing freedom of the press in the U.S."
"The ability of reporters to freely report should not be hindered by arbitrary arrests," Halgand says. "We urge the U.S. authorities to not leave police abuses unpunished and to do everything possible to guarantee the safety of American journalists."
"Unfortunately we see this a lot," adds Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association. "I would hope that when the prosecuting attorney looks at this, they will dismiss the charges against this reporter, because obviously it's a matter of public concern and should be reported on."
In the meantime, Osterreicher says, he's willing to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt, noting they did not appear to target photographers. "The police may not have not connected the dots – the fact of him having a rather large stick microphone with him being a journalist," he says. "I don't know whether the officer knew he was a journalist – the camera was some distance away."
Tiffani Schweigart, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota State Patrol, says decisions on whether to pursue charges against arrestees now are in the hands of the Minneapolis City Attorney's Office.
Latest mug shot pulled down from Hennepin County. Orange outside... with a dress shirt underneath. pic.twitter.com/rSIJRAiBKv — Jack Highberger (@JackHighberger) November 17, 2015
"All protesters will be submitted for [misdemeanor] charges of unlawful assembly and pedestrian on the freeway," she says in an email. "[The] prosecutor will review all reports submitted and make any determinations of charges to pursue or drop. That is how all investigations function, regardless of the employment of the person arrested."
A spokesman for the city attorney's office was not able to immediately supply information on deliberations.
"I would hope the Fox affiliate or someone from there called and said, 'Hey, you got one of our reporters and he should be released and you should drop the charges,'" Osterreicher says.
As of Tuesday morning, KMSP-TV had not put out a statement on the arrest. Highberger, who tweeted he was released from jail early this morning, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The State Patrol said in a statement that more than 200 protesters clogged the major highway Interstate 94 as they protested following the shooting death of Jamar Clark, but that only 42 were arrested. Some protesters "threw bottles and rocks at squad cars causing minor damage" and "[o]ne State Patrol trooper was assaulted when a protester punched the trooper, then fled the scene," the statement said.
Minnesota police famously arrested journalists covering protests during the 2008 Republican National Convention and in 2011 settled a lawsuit from three of them.
Footage of Georgiades' arrest, uploaded late Tuesday after publication of this article:
Updated on Nov. 17, 2015 : Comment from Unicorn Riot was added to this article.On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015
Sununu apologizes for Obama remarks
Romney surrogate John Sununu apologized Tuesday afternoon for suggesting that President Obama is un-American.
"Frankly, I made a mistake. I shouldn't have used those words, and I apologize for using those words" Sununu told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. But, he continued, "I don't apologize for the idea that this president has demonstrated that he does not understand how jobs are created in America."
On a campaign conference call with reporters this morning, the former governor of New Hampshire said, "I wish this president would learn how to be an American," a sound-bite that sent off alarm bells among reporters and drew criticism from the Obama campaign.
Sununu tried to walkback the remark later in the phone call, claiming he was referring to the President's economic philosophy, a point he reiterated in his interview with CNN.
But Sununu did not back down on his general line of attack against President Obama, which is that the President has no business experience, is guilty of crony capitalism, and is denigrating the values of capitalism.
"He thinks that jobs are created by giving grants to your cronies, to your bundlers and your cronies," Sununu said.
"The president has to stop denigrating American values," he later said. "He makes success a terrible thing. He's sending a wrong message to the young people of America: that if you get rich you're somehow evil."The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Martian Odyssey, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum 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.org Title: A Martian Odyssey Author: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum Release Date: December 4, 2007 [EBook #23731] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MARTIAN ODYSSEY *** Produced by Greg Weeks, Joel Schlosberg and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note: This eBook was produced from the 1949 book A Martian Odyssey and Others by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
p. 1
A MARTIAN ODYSSEY
Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.
"Air you can breathe!" he exulted. "It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!" He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port.
The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the Ares. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth's, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.
Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.
p. 2
"Well," exploded Harrison abruptly, "are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don't get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!"
"Speel?" queried Leroy perplexedly. "Speel what?"
"He means'spiel'," explained Putz soberly. "It iss to tell."
Jarvis met Harrison's amused glance without the shadow of a smile. "That's right, Karl," he said in grave agreement with Putz. "Ich spiel es!" He grunted comfortably and began.
"According to orders," he said, "I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You'll remember, Cap—we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high—about two thousand feet—for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low."
"We know all that from Putz," grunted Harrison. "I wish you'd saved the films, though. They'd have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?"
"The films are safe," retorted Jarvis. "Well," he resumed, "as I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings haven't much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.
"So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the under-jets, the seeing wasn't any too good. I could see enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain that we'd been examining the whole week since our landing—same blobby growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard me."
"I did!" snapped Harrison.
"A hundred and fifty miles south," continued Jarvis imperturbably, "the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right p. 3 in our guess, then, and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did."
"Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!" grumbled the captain. "Let's get to the point."
"Coming!" remarked Jarvis. "Twenty miles into Thyle—believe it or not—I crossed a canal!"
"Putz photographed a hundred! Let's hear something new!"
"And did he also see a city?"
"Twenty of 'em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!"
"Well," observed Jarvis, "from here on I'll be telling a few things Putz didn't see!" He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. "I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours—eight hundred miles—from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over Thyle, whether I or II I'm not sure, not more than twenty-five miles into it. And right there, Putz's pet motor quit!"
"Quit? How?" Putz was solicitous.
"The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!" He rubbed the injured member ruefully.
"Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?" inquired Putz. "Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation—"
"Naw!" said Jarvis disgustedly. "I wouldn't try that, of course—not more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working—what then? Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I'd have melted the floor from under me!" He rubbed his nose again. "Lucky for me a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I'd have been mashed flat!"
"I could have fixed!" ejaculated the engineer. "I bet it vas not serious."
"Probably not," agreed Jarvis sarcastically. "Only it wouldn't fly. Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked p. 4 up or trying to walk back—eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well," he concluded, "I chose to walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy."
"We'd have found you," said Harrison.
"No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out."
"Water tank!" exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. "She weigh one-quarter ton!"
"Wasn't full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday earth-weight. I figured on that when I undertook the forty-mile daily stroll. Oh—of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry Martian nights.
"Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of course—plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy's crawling biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the canal—just a dry ditch about four hundred feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own company map.
"There'd been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn moved out of my way!"
"Eh?" said Leroy.
"Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one—a little grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy legs."
"He is where?" Leroy was eager.
"He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass opening in front and closing behind. And then I was out on the orange desert of Thyle again.
"I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked down over the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of that to be walked over, and then a p. 5 couple of hundred miles of that Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!"
"We were trying, you sap!" said Harrison.
"That didn't help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. I found an easy place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as this—crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance and hauled out my sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn't seen anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world—nothing dangerous, that is."
"Did you?" queried Harrison.
"Did I! You'll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I was just about to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort of shenanigans!"
"Vot iss shenanigans?" inquired Putz.
"He says, 'Je ne sais quoi,'" explained Leroy. "It is to say, 'I don't know what.'"
"That's right," agreed Jarvis. "I didn't know what, so I sneaked over to find out. There was a racket like a flock of crows eating a bunch of canaries—whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you. I rounded a clump of stumps, and there was Tweel!"
"Tweel?" said Harrison, and "Tveel?" said Leroy and Putz.
"That freak ostrich," explained the narrator. "At least, Tweel is as near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something like 'Trrrweerrlll.'"
"What was he doing?" asked the Captain.
"He was being eaten! And squealing, of course, as any one would."
"Eaten! By what?"
"I found out later. All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an ostrich. I wasn't going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I'd have one less to worry about.
"But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!" Jarvis shuddered. "But the clincher was when I p. 6 noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.
"There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black corruption, and then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise, pulled itself and its arms into a hole in the ground. The other let out a series of clacks, staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned suddenly to face me. I held my weapon ready, and the two of us stared at each other.
"The Martian wasn't a bird, really. It wasn't even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four fingered things—hands, you'd have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head—and that beak. It stood an inch or so taller than I, and—well, Putz saw it!"
The engineer nodded. "Ja! I saw!"
Jarvis continued. "So—we stared at each other. Finally the creature went into a series of clackings and twitterings and held out its hands toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of friendship."
"Perhaps," suggested Harrison, "it looked at that nose of yours and thought you were its brother!"
"Huh! You can be funny without talking! Anyway, I put up my gun and said 'Aw, don't mention it,' or something of the sort, and the thing came over and we were pals.
"By that time, the sun was pretty low and I knew that I'd better build a fire or get into my thermo-skin. I decided on the fire. I picked a spot at the base of the Thyle cliff, where the rock could reflect a little heat on my back. I started breaking off chunks of this desiccated Martian vegetation, and my companion caught the idea and brought in an armful. I reached for a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and brought out something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it, and the fire was blazing—and you all know what a job we have starting a fire in this atmosphere!
p. 7
"And that bag of his!" continued the narrator. "That was a manufactured article, my friends; press an end and she popped open—press the middle and she sealed so perfectly you couldn't see the line. Better than zippers.
"Well, we stared at the fire a while and I decided to attempt some sort of communication with the Martian. I pointed at myself and said 'Dick'; he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me and repeated 'Tick.' Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I called Tweel; I can't imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to emphasize the names, I repeated 'Dick,' and then, pointing at him, 'Tweel.'
"There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative, and said something like 'P-p-p-proot.' And that was just the beginning; I was always 'Tick,' but as for him—part of the time he was 'Tweel,' and part of the time he was 'P-p-p-proot,' and part of the time he was sixteen other noises!
"We just couldn't connect. I tried 'rock,' and I tried'star,' and 'tree,' and 'fire,' and Lord knows what else, and try as I would, I couldn't get a single word! Nothing was the same for two successive minutes, and if that's a language, I'm an alchemist! Finally I gave it up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to do.
"But Tweel hung on to some of my words. He remembered a couple of them, which I suppose is a great achievement if you're used to a language you have to make up as you go along. But I couldn't get the hang of his talk; either I missed some subtle point or we just didn't think alike—and I rather believe the latter view.
"I've other reasons for believing that. After a while I gave up the language business, and tried mathematics. I scratched two plus two equals four on the ground, and demonstrated it with pebbles. Again Tweel caught the idea, and informed me that three plus three equals six. Once more we seemed to be getting somewhere.
"So, knowing that Tweel had at least a grammar school education, I drew a circle for the sun, pointing first at it, and then at the last glow of the sun. Then I sketched in Mercury, and Venus, and Mother Earth, and Mars, and finally, pointing to Mars, I swept my hand around in a sort of inclusive gesture to indicate that Mars was our current environment. I was working up to putting over the idea that my home was on the earth.
p. 8
"Tweel understood my diagram all right. He poked his beak at it, and with a great deal of trilling and clucking, he added Deimos and Phobos to Mars, and then sketched in the earth's moon!
"Do you see what that proves? It proves that Tweel's race uses telescopes—that they're civilized!"
"Does not!" snapped Harrison. "The moon is visible from here as a fifth magnitude star. They could see its revolution with the naked eye."
"The moon, yes!" said Jarvis. "You've missed my point. Mercury isn't visible! And Tweel knew of Mercury because he placed the Moon at the third planet, not the second. If he didn't know Mercury, he'd put the earth second, and Mars third, instead of fourth! See?"
"Humph!" said Harrison.
"Anyway," proceeded Jarvis, "I went on with my lesson. Things were going smoothly, and it looked as if I could put the idea over. I pointed at the earth on my diagram, and then at myself, and then, to clinch it, I pointed to myself and then to the earth itself shining bright green almost at the zenith.
"Tweel set up such an excited clacking that I was certain he understood. He jumped up and down, and suddenly he pointed at himself and then at the sky, and then at himself and at the sky again. He pointed at his middle and then at Arcturus, at his head and then at Spica, at his feet and then at half a dozen stars, while I just gaped at him. Then, all of a sudden, he gave a tremendous leap. Man, what a hop! He shot straight up into the starlight, seventy-five feet if an inch! I saw him silhouetted against the sky, saw him turn and come down at me head first, and land smack on his beak like a javelin! There he stuck square in the center of my sun-circle in the sand—a bull's eye!"
"Nuts!" observed the captain. "Plain nuts!"
"That's what I thought, too! I just stared at him open-mouthed while he pulled his head out of the sand and stood up. Then I figured he'd missed my point, and I went through the whole blamed rigamarole again, and it ended the same way, with Tweel on his nose in the middle of my picture!"
"Maybe it's a religious rite," suggested Harrison.
"Maybe," said Jarvis dubiously. "Well, there we were. We p. 9 could exchange ideas up to a certain point, and then—blooey! Something in us was different, unrelated; I don't doubt that Tweel thought me just as screwy as I thought him. Our minds simply looked at the world from different viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours. But—we couldn't get together, that's all. Yet, in spite of all difficulties, I liked Tweel, and I have a queer certainty that he liked me."
"Nuts!" repeated the captain. "Just daffy!"
"Yeah? Wait and see. A couple of times I've thought that perhaps we—" He paused, and then resumed his narrative. "Anyway, I finally gave it up, and got into my thermo-skin to sleep. The fire hadn't kept me any too warm, but that damned sleeping bag did. Got stuffy five minutes after I closed myself in. I opened it a little and bingo! Some eighty-below-zero air hit my nose, and that's when I got this pleasant little frostbite to add to the bump I acquired during the crash of my rocket.
"I don't know what Tweel made of my sleeping. He sat around, but when I woke up, he was gone. I'd just crawled out of my bag, though, when I heard some twittering, and there he came, sailing down from that three-story Thyle cliff to alight on his beak beside me. I pointed to myself and toward the north, and he pointed at himself and toward the south, but when I loaded up and started away, he came along.
"Man, how he traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his coming at me like a spear, but he always ended in the sand at my side.
"So the two of us plugged along across the Mare Chronium. Same sort of place as this—same crazy plants and same little green biopods growing in the sand, or crawling out of your way. We talked—not that we understood each other, you know, but just for company. I sang songs, and I suspect Tweel did too; at least, some of his trillings and twitterings had a subtle sort of rhythm.
"Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of English words. He'd point to an outcropping and say 'rock,' and p. 10 point to a pebble and say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say 'Tick,' and then repeat it. He seemed terrifically amused that the same word meant the same thing twice in succession, or that the same word could apply to two different objects. It set me wondering if perhaps his language wasn't like the primitive speech of some earth people—you know, Captain, like the Negritoes, for instance, who haven't any generic words. No word for food or water or man—words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea water, or strong man and weak man—but no names for general classes. They're too primitive to understand that rain water and sea water are just different aspects of the same thing. But that wasn't the case with Tweel; it was just that we were somehow mysteriously different—our minds were alien to each other. And yet—we liked each other!"
"Looney, that's all," remarked Harrison. "That's why you two were so fond of each other."
"Well, I like you!" countered Jarvis wickedly. "Anyway," he resumed, "don't get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact, I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn't an intellectual superman, I guess; but don't overlook the point that he managed to understand a little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his."
"Because he didn't have any!" suggested the captain, while Putz and Leroy blinked attentively.
"You can judge of that when I'm through," said Jarvis. "Well, we plugged along across the Mare Chronium all that day, and all the next. Mare Chronium—Sea of Time! Say, I was willing to agree with Schiaparelli's name by the end of that march! Just that grey, endless plain of weird plants, and never a sign of any other life. It was so monotonous that I was even glad to see the desert of Xanthus toward the evening of the second day.
"I was fair worn out, but Tweel seemed as fresh as ever, for all I never saw him drink or eat. I think he could have crossed the Mare Chronium in a couple of hours with those block-long nose dives of his, but he stuck along with me. I offered him some water once or twice; he took the cup from me and sucked the liquid into his beak, and then carefully squirted it all back into the cup and gravely returned it.
p. 11
"Just as we sighted Xanthus, or the cliffs that bounded it, one of those nasty sand clouds blew along, not as bad as the one we had here, but mean to travel against. I pulled the transparent flap of my thermo-skin bag across my face and managed pretty well, and I noticed that Tweel used some feathery appendages growing like a mustache at the base of his beak to cover his nostrils, and some similar fuzz to shield his eyes."
"He is a desert creature!" ejaculated the little biologist, Leroy.
"Huh? Why?"
"He drink no water—he is adapt' for sand storm—"
"Proves nothing! There's not enough water to waste any where on this desiccated pill called Mars. We'd call all of it desert on earth, you know." He paused. "Anyway, after the sand storm blew over, a little wind kept blowing in our faces, not strong enough to stir the sand. But suddenly things came drifting along from the Xanthus cliffs—small, transparent spheres, for all the world like glass tennis balls! But light—they were almost light enough to float even in this thin air—empty, too; at least, I cracked open a couple and nothing came out but a bad smell. I asked Tweel about them, but all he said was 'No, no, no,' which I took to mean that he knew nothing about them. So they went bouncing by like tumbleweeds, or like soap bubbles, and we plugged on toward Xanthus. Tweel pointed at one of the crystal balls once and said 'rock,' but I was too tired to argue with him. Later I discovered what he meant.
"We came to the bottom of the Xanthus cliffs finally, when there wasn't much daylight left. I decided to sleep on the plateau if possible; anything dangerous, I reasoned, would be more likely to prowl through the vegetation of the Mare Chronium than the sand of Xanthus. Not that I'd seen a single sign of menace, except the rope-armed black thing that had trapped Tweel, and apparently that didn't prowl at all, but lured its victims within reach. It couldn't lure me while I slept, especially as Tweel didn't seem to sleep at all, but simply sat patiently around all night. I wondered how the creature had managed to trap Tweel, but there wasn't any way of asking him. I found that out too, later; it's devilish!
"However, we were ambling around the base of the Xanthus barrier looking for an easy spot to climb. At least, I was. Tweel p. 12 could have leaped it easily, for the cliffs were lower than Thyle—perhaps sixty feet. I found a place and started up, swearing at the water tank strapped to my back—it didn't bother me except when climbing—and suddenly I heard a sound that I thought I recognized!
"You know how deceptive sounds are in this thin air. A shot sounds like the pop of a cork. But this sound was the drone of a rocket, and sure enough, there went our second auxiliary about ten miles to westward, between me and the sunset!"
"Vas me!" said Putz. "I hunt for you."
"Yeah; I knew that, but what good did it do me? I hung on to the cliff and yelled and waved with one hand. Tweel saw it too, and set up a trilling and twittering, leaping to the top of the barrier and then high into the air. And while I watched, the machine droned on into the shadows to the south.
"I scrambled to the top of the cliff. Tweel was still pointing and trilling excitedly, shooting |
indirect travel alert "urging" US national to "depart immediately" from North Korea two weeks ago, the US State Department has escalated their perspective on US citizens' travel to, in, or through North Korea dramatically by declaring all U.S. passports invalid for travel, implicitly ordering all Americans out of North Korea from September 1st 2017.
ACTION: Notice of passport travel restriction. SUMMARY: The Department of State is declaring all U.S. passports invalid for travel to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) unless the travel meets certain criteria. DATES: The travel restriction is in effect on September 1, 2017. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Anita Mody, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Passport Services, Office of Legal Affairs, 202-485-6500. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The Department of State has determined that the serious risk to United States nationals of arrest and long-term detention represents imminent danger to the physical safety of United States nationals traveling to and within the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), within the meaning of 22 CFR 51.63(a)(3). Therefore, pursuant to the authority of 22 U.S.C. 211a and Executive Order 11295 (31 FR 10603), and in accordance with 22 CFR 51.63(a)(3), all United States passports are declared invalid for travel to, in, or through the DPRK unless specially validated for such travel, as specified at 22 CFR 51.64. The restriction on travel to the DPRK shall be effective 30 days after publication of this Notice, and shall remain in effect for one year unless extended or sooner revoked by the Secretary of State.
The announcement comes as tensions continue to rise - and accelerate - over North Korea and its missile program, and just days after both North Korea and the US exchanged very symbolic ICBM test launches. Also, on Tuesday Senator Lindsey Graham said that President Donald Trump is considering war on North Korea if it continues its missile tests and nuclear weapons program.
And with US and China now trading barbs directly, with the smell of trade war in the air, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement that
“China and Russia bear unique and special responsibility for this growing threat” posed by North Korea as they are the “principal economic enablers” of the country.
China’s President Xi Jinping responded, in his highly anticipated speech at the 90th-anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Tuesday, directing the military — which he heads — to be prepared for a military engagement at any time.
“Xi also asked the military to focus on preparations for war, and urged its leaders to improve capabilities in modern warfare and combat readiness. The military should be ready to win a war whenever needed, he said. “As commander-in-chief of China’s military, Xi said that with the unprecedented changes happening around the world, China’s armed forces are the bottom line guarantee for defending peace and security.”
Though he did not point to any situations specifically that would require China’s military to be at a default state of readiness for war, it’s difficult to imagine that Xi wasn’t referring chiefly to heightening tensions over North Korea.
Which leaves one question - what does the State Department know about September 1st? Here's one suggestion: with no US aircraft carriers currently off the Korean coast, as both departed in recent weeks
... it will take at least 2-3 weeks before they reassemble within striking distance of North Korea. September 1 should leave a comfortable cushion of time before the inevitable "next steps."PUNE, India — When Praveen Narayan Dusane first started driving an auto-rickshaw in this crowded college town, he had to hustle for every rupee. He could wait hours at a rickshaw stand for passengers. He fought with other drivers and haggled with passengers over the fares. Typically, he earned just 300 rupees, or roughly $5, during a 12-hour shift.
Now Mr. Dusane simply checks the text messages on his cellphone for his schedule, with pickups usually coming every hour or so. Business is so brisk that he recently bought an apartment for $33,000 and can afford to send his three school-age daughters to an English language school.
“Earlier I had to sometimes wait all day for a ride and even then it was up to your luck the kind of fare you got,” said Mr. Dusane. “Now it’s like you can see the money in front of you.”
It is the advantage of the algorithm.
In a country clogged with congestion, a handful of start-ups are using technology to more easily connect auto-rickshaw drivers with customers — an Indian twist to Uber and Lyft, the ride-hailing apps.Virtual reality headsets can trick our eyes and ears into believing we're someplace else. Fooling the rest of the body is a little trickier though. Companies have tried spinning chairs and omnidirectional treadmills, but nothing comes close to the "Cable Robot Simulator" developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The player wears a wireless VR headset inside a carbon fibre cage, which is then suspended in mid-air and thrown around the room using eight steel cables. The exposed pod is able to tilt, bank and move with an acceleration of up to 1.5g in response to the VR experience. Researchers have shown off some basic flight and racing simulations, but we're already imagining how it could be used in our favorite video games. A dogfight in Star Wars: Battlefront? Tearing around corners in F-Zero GX? The possibilities are endless. It's still very much a prototype, and hardly suitable for home use, but we're desperate to have a go ourselves.Dwayne Preston (l.) hit Meagan Panici with a bat at Clark Street and Foster Avenue, authorities said. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Linze Rice; Chicago Police Department
ANDERSONVILLE — An off-duty CTA employee who believed he'd been cut off by another driver attacked the woman with a metal baseball bat as she waited for a red light, according to court records and the victim.
Meagan Panici, 29, said she was waiting to turn left from Foster Avenue to Clark Street — one of Andersonville's busiest intersections — when she was approached by a man holding a bat who accused her of cutting him off blocks earlier.
The man wore his CTA uniform during the attack, but was not on-duty at the time, CTA officials said Friday.
After Panici got out of her car during the confrontation, she said, the man swung the bat at her "Frank Thomas"-style, hitting her in her leg and leaving her doubled over in pain.
An arrest report identified the man as 46-year-old Dwayne Preston, a CTA bus driver. Preston was arrested after the incident in late February and charged with battery causing bodily harm, court records show. He was released on his own recognizance pending trial.
On Thursday, Catherine Hosinski, a CTA spokeswoman, said that, in general, off-duty employees charged with crimes are supposed to notify their immediate supervisor. Only felony charges would stop an employee from getting paid while a case is pending, she said.
On Friday, Hosinski said Preston had "been taken out of service as we gather more information about this incident."
"The alleged actions by this off-duty operator are absolutely not in keeping with CTA policies or procedures," Hosinski said.
Preston, who has no prior criminal history, did not respond to requests for comment.
The incident happened about 7 p.m. Feb. 23 in the 1500 block of West Foster Avenue, court records show.
According to Panici, she and Preston were stopped at a red light when Preston walked up to her car and began to berate her — before eventually jabbing her in her head with a baseball bat through an open car window.
Panici said she was scared and tried to open her door slightly to push Preston away. But he immediately shut the door on her foot, she said.
With "adrenaline pumping," Panici said she opened the door again, got out, and told Preston to "back up."
He refused and continued to threaten her, she claimed, so she spit at him. That's when Preston hit her with the bat, she said.
Meagan Panici was waiting to turn left onto Clark Street from Foster Avenue when she allegedly was confronted by off-duty CTA employee Dwayne Preston. [DNAinfo/Linze Rice]
According to an arrest report, Preston struck Panici on her upper left thigh using an aluminum Powercell baseball bat. Panici suffered bruising to her leg, but declined medical treatment, the report said.
Police were called after witnesses called 911, court records show. Preston was arrested down the street, in the 1100 block of West Foster Avenue, about 7 that night, the arrest report said.
After the attack, Panici said she crawled toward Preston's car to see his license plate number.
She said she still has pain and a bruise on her leg, and finds herself less at ease at night — even in her car.
"I always felt safe being in my car at night," Panici said, "but having to walk blocks away from home to park... I'm always paranoid now."
Panici said the misdemeanor charge against Preston is too light.
"Knowing the judicial system, I couldn't understand that someone who... has hundreds of people's lives in his hands every day, and hits a woman in public with a metal bat, would get off that easy," Panici said.
"It basically says to me that if you're having road rage, you can easily take your frustration out on the person with a weapon and will not have to do much more than 'not do it again,'" she said.
Preston, of the 400 block of East 42nd Place in Bronzeville, will next appear in court May 2, records show. Panici said she'll be there to advocate for "more than a slap on the wrist."
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:Testing Brokers
A major benefit of actors is that they are very easy to test. No complex mocking, no simulation, simply sending and receiving messages. Unfortunately this does not apply to brokers, a special type of actors performing I/O. Sending messages still works, of course, but testing brokers involves the I/O part as opposed to sending messages. Does your actor parse its input correctly? Does it close connections appropriately? This blog post describes how CAF supports unit testing of the I/O aspect outside the message passing realm.
A key concern of unit testing is reproducibility. When writing a test, you want to make sure to be in charge of each step individually. This is generally not the case when performing I/O operations, since this involves components of the operating system, e.g., sockets and the TCP stack. Fortunately, brokers in CAF never talk to the OS directly, which allows us to trick them into a fake environment.
Brokers
Before we talk about how to take control of I/O, we first need to understand how the machinery behind brokers works.
The UML diagram above shows the relations a brokers has with I/O-related classes in CAF. The middleman is a singleton in CAF that provides access to various I/O-related functionality. The three classes that are responsible for doing I/O are multiplexer, scribe, and doorman.
Scribes
A scribe decouples a broker from the underlying networking APIs. To the broker, it provides access to an output buffer and the scribe will create new_data_msg messages for the broker whenever the scribe has received enough data according to the read policy set by the broker (via configure_read ). Note that the user-facing API of the broker does not expose the scribe to the programmer. All the broker needs to worry about is a connection_handle. This handle simply identifies the corresponding scribe and forwards the operation.
For example, if you call self->configure_read(hdl, receive_policy::at_most(1024)); on a broker, it looks which scribe manages hdl and forwards the second argument to this scribe.
It is also worth mentioning that the new_data_msg received by the broker will always contain the same buffer. The scribe merely re-writes its content over and over again.
Doormen
A doorman, just like a scribe, decouples the broker from underlying networking APIs. Whenever a new network connection has been established, the doorman generates a new_connection_msg for the broker.
Multiplexer
The multiplexer is an I/O loop and a factory for scribes and doormen. If you want to change which networking API CAF is using, this is the (abstract) class you need to implement. It has no member functions in the UML diagram for brevity, but here are the important ones we need to know:
class multiplexer { public : /// Assigns an unbound scribe identified by `hdl` to `ptr`. /// @warning Do not call from outside the multiplexer's event loop. virtual void assign_tcp_scribe ( abstract_broker * ptr, connection_handle hdl ) = 0 ; /// Assigns an unbound doorman identified by `hdl` to `ptr`. /// @warning Do not call from outside the multiplexer's event loop. virtual void assign_tcp_doorman ( abstract_broker * ptr, accept_handle hdl ) = 0 ; /// Simple wrapper for runnables struct runnable ; using runnable_ptr = intrusive_ptr < runnable > ; /// Runs the multiplexers event loop. virtual void run () = 0 ; /// Invokes @p fun in the multiplexer's event loop, calling `fun()` /// immediately when called from inside the event loop. /// @threadsafe template < class F > void dispatch ( F fun ); /// Invokes @p fun in the multiplexer's event loop, forcing /// execution to be delayed when called from inside the event loop. /// @threadsafe template < class F > void post ( F fun ); //... };
Calling multiplexer::assign_tcp_scribe will create a new scribe (for TCP-like communication) and assign this scribe to the given broker. The function assign_tcp_doorman does the same thing for doormen. If you have ever used ASIO, run, dispatch, and post will remind you of ASIO’s io_service. And you are right. In fact, CAF’s asio_multiplexer is simply implemented using an io_service. The function run is called in a thread crated by the middleman on startup. Whenever a broker receives a message from other actors, it calls post to schedule handling the message for later by creating a runnable for this task.
Faking I/O
For testing brokers without actually doing I/O, CAF has a multiplexer implementation that is solely meant for testing (since 0.14.1):
class test_multiplexer : public multiplexer { public : /// A buffer storing bytes. using buffer_type = std :: vector < char > ; /// Models pending data on the network, i.e., the network /// input buffer usually managed by the operating system. buffer_type & virtual_network_buffer ( connection_handle hdl ); /// Returns the output buffer of the scribe identified by `hdl`. buffer_type & output_buffer ( connection_handle hdl ); /// Returns the input buffer of the scribe identified by `hdl`. buffer_type & input_buffer ( connection_handle hdl ); /// Returns `true` if this handle has been closed /// for reading, `false` otherwise. bool & stopped_reading ( connection_handle hdl ); /// Returns `true` if this handle has been closed /// for reading, `false` otherwise. bool & stopped_reading ( accept_handle hdl ); /// Stores `hdl` as a pending connection for `src`. void add_pending_connect ( accept_handle src, connection_handle hdl ); /// Accepts a pending connect on `hdl`. void accept_connection ( accept_handle hdl ); /// Reads data from the external input buffer until /// the configured read policy no longer allows receiving. void read_data ( connection_handle hdl ); /// Appends `buf` to the virtual network buffer of `hdl` /// and calls `read_data(hdl)` afterwards. void virtual_send ( connection_handle hdl, const buffer_type & buf ); /// Waits until a `runnable` is available and executes it. void exec_runnable (); /// Returns `true` if a `runnable` was available, `false` otherwise. bool try_exec_runnable (); /// Executes all pending `runnable` objects. void flush_runnables (); //... };
The test_multiplexer has several member function that “fake” network events and allow you to manipulate the buffers of scribes directly. In particular, virtual_send allows you to fake incoming data on a connection_handle. This will cause the scribe to generate one or more new_data_msg messages (depending on the configured receive policy). Those messages are handled by the broker immediately.
To simulate a remote connection, one needs to create a pending connection using add_pending_connect and cause the corresponding doorman to accept it via accept_connection.
Using the test multiplexer requires calling set_middleman(new network::test_multiplexer) in main, before calling any I/O-related function in CAF. Before showing the test multiplexer in action, we first implement implement a broker we want to test.
Example Application
The application we are going to test is a simplistic HTTP server. We do not want to bother with actually parsing HTTP, so we always only consider the first line of a HTTP header and check if it is equal to "GET / HTTP/1.1". If we receive anything else, we will send a 404 as response.
However, we are going to deal with chunked input and we (pedantically) require "
\r" for line breaks. We are not going to generate HTTP dynamically. Instead, we use the following constants:
constexpr char http_valid_get [] = "GET / HTTP/1.1" ; constexpr char http_get [] = "GET / HTTP/1.1 \r
" "Host: localhost \r
" "Connection: close \r
" "Accept: text/plain \r
" "User-Agent: CAF/0.14 \r
" "Accept-Language: en-US \r
" " \r
" ; constexpr char http_ok [] = "HTTP/1.1 200 OK \r
" "Content-Type: text/plain \r
" "Connection: close \r
" "Transfer-Encoding: chunked \r
" " \r
" "d \r
" "Hi there! :) \r
" " \r
" "0 \r
" " \r
" " \r
" ; constexpr char http_error [] = "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found \r
" "Connection: close \r
" " \r
" ; constexpr char newline [ 2 ] = { '\r', '
' };
When receiving input chunks, we need to keep track of the state of our parser. We will also store each received line in a vector of strings and make use of CAF’s stateful actors, as shown below.
enum parser_state { receive_new_line, receive_continued_line, receive_second_newline_half }; struct http_state { http_state ( abstract_broker * self ) : self_ ( self ) { // nop } ~ http_state () { aout ( self_ ) << "http worker finished with exit reason: " << self_ -> planned_exit_reason () << endl ; } std :: vector < std :: string > lines ; parser_state ps = receive_new_line ; abstract_broker * self_ ; }; using http_broker = caf :: experimental :: stateful_actor < http_state, broker > ;
To make bookkeeping easier, we use one broker (our server) that accepts incoming connections and spawns a new HTTP worker per connection. The server does not need any additional state and is quite simple.
behavior server ( broker * self ) { aout ( self ) << "server up and running" << endl ; return { [ = ]( const new_connection_msg & ncm ) { aout ( self ) << "fork on new connection" << endl ; auto worker = self -> fork ( http_worker, ncm. handle ); }, others >> [ = ] { aout ( self ) << "unexpected: " << to_string ( self -> current_message ()) << endl ; } }; }
And here is the implementation of our http_worker using the state from above.
behavior http_worker ( http_broker * self, connection_handle hdl ) { // tell network backend to receive any number of bytes between 1 and 128 self -> configure_read ( hdl, receive_policy :: at_most ( 128 )); return { [ = ]( const new_data_msg & msg ) { assert (! msg. buf. empty ()); assert ( msg. handle == hdl ); // extract lines from received buffer auto & lines = self -> state. lines ; auto i = msg. buf. begin (); auto e = msg. buf. end (); // search position of first newline in data chunk auto nl = std :: search ( i, e, std :: begin ( newline ), std :: end ( newline )); // store whether we are continuing a previously started line auto append_to_last_line = self -> state. ps == receive_continued_line ; // check whether our last chunk ended between \r and
if ( self -> state. ps == receive_second_newline_half ) { if ( msg. buf. front () == '
' ) { // simply skip this character ++ i ; } } // read line by line from our data chunk do { if ( append_to_last_line ) { append_to_last_line = false ; auto & back = lines. back (); back. insert ( back. end (), i, nl ); } else { lines. emplace_back ( i, nl ); } // if our last search didn't found a newline, we're done if ( nl!= e ) { // skip newline and seek the next one i = nl + sizeof ( newline ); nl = std :: search ( i, e, std :: begin ( newline ), std :: end ( newline )); } } while ( nl!= e ); // store current state of our parser if ( msg. buf. back () == '\r' ) { self -> state. ps = receive_second_newline_half ; self -> state. lines. pop_back (); // drop '\r' from our last read line } else if ( msg. buf. back () == '
' ) { self -> state. ps = receive_new_line ; // we've got a clean cut } else { self -> state. ps = receive_continued_line ; // interrupted in the middle } // we don't need to check for completion in any intermediate state if ( self -> state. ps!= receive_new_line ) return ; // we have received the HTTP header if we have an empty line at the end if ( lines. size () > 1 && lines. back (). empty ()) { auto & out = self -> wr_buf ( hdl ); // we only look at the first line in our example and reply with our // OK message if we receive exactly "GET / HTTP/1.1", otherwise // we send a 404 HTTP response if ( lines. front () == http_valid_get ) out. insert ( out. end (), std :: begin ( http_ok ), std :: end ( http_ok )); else out. insert ( out. end (), std :: begin ( http_error ), std :: end ( http_error )); // write data and close connection self -> flush ( hdl ); self -> quit (); } }, [ = ]( const connection_closed_msg & ) { self -> quit (); }, others >> [ = ] { aout ( self ) << "unexpected: " << to_string ( self -> current_message ()) << endl ; } }; }
Our HTTP worker receives chunks of 128 bytes. Once it detected the end of the HTTP header (a blank line), it looks at the first line to see if it is equal to http_valid_get. If so, it sends the OK message, otherwise it sends the 404.
A minimal application using our brokers that always tries to open port 8080 is a three-liner:
int main () { spawn_io_server ( server, 8080 ); await_all_actors_done (); shutdown (); }
Testing the HTTP Broker
Without further ado, here is our complete unit test for the example application.
namespace { class fixture { public : fixture () { // note: the middleman will take ownership of mpx_, but using // this pointer is safe at any point before calling `shutdown` mpx_ = new network :: test_multiplexer ; set_middleman ( mpx_ ); // spawn the actor-under-test aut_ = spawn_io ( server ); // assign the acceptor handle to the AUT aut_ptr_ = static_cast < abstract_broker *> ( actor_cast < abstract_actor *> ( aut_ )); mpx_ -> assign_tcp_doorman ( aut_ptr_, acceptor_ ); // "open" a new connection to our server mpx_ -> add_pending_connect ( acceptor_, connection_ ); mpx_ -> assign_tcp_scribe ( aut_ptr_, connection_ ); mpx_ -> accept_connection ( acceptor_ ); } ~ fixture () { anon_send_exit ( aut_, exit_reason :: kill ); // run the exit message and other pending messages explicitly, // since we do not invoke any "I/O" from this point on that would // trigger those messages implicitly mpx_ -> flush_runnables (); await_all_actors_done (); shutdown (); } // helper class for a nice-and-easy "mock(...).expect(...)" syntax class mock_t { public : mock_t ( fixture * thisptr ) : this_ ( thisptr ) { // nop } mock_t ( const mock_t & ) = default ; mock_t & expect ( const std :: string & what ) { auto & buf = this_ -> mpx_ -> output_buffer ( this_ -> connection_ ); CAF_REQUIRE (( buf. size () >= what. size ())); CAF_REQUIRE (( std :: equal ( buf. begin (), buf. begin () + what. size (), what. begin ())); buf. erase ( buf. begin (), buf. begin () + what. size ())); return * this ; } fixture * this_ ; }; // mocks some input for our AUT and allows to // check the output for this operation mock_t mock ( const char * what ) { std :: vector < char > buf ; for ( char c = * what ++ ; c!= '\0' ; c = * what ++ ) buf. push_back ( c ); mpx_ -> virtual_send ( connection_, std :: move ( buf )); return { this }; } actor aut_ ; abstract_broker * aut_ptr_ ; network :: test_multiplexer * mpx_ ; accept_handle acceptor_ = accept_handle :: from_int ( 1 ); connection_handle connection_ = connection_handle :: from_int ( 1 ); }; } // namespace <anonymous> CAF_TEST_FIXTURE_SCOPE ( http_tests, fixture ) CAF_TEST ( valid_response ) { // write a GET message and expect an OK message as result mock ( http_get ). expect ( http_ok ); } CAF_TEST ( invalid_response ) { // write a GET with invalid path and expect a 404 message as result mock ( "GET /kitten.gif HTTP/1.1 \r
\r
" ). expect ( http_error ); } CAF_TEST_FIXTURE_SCOPE_END ()
The constructor of our fixture spawns the server that we are going to test. Since we need an actual pointer to the broker, we need to use actor_cast to get a pointer and downcast it afterwards. Using the pointer, we can setup a connection using the test multiplexer. These steps will create a new_connection_msg for the server that spawns a http_worker in response.
With the mock member function, we create a simple API that allows us to correlate inputs and outputs. The mock function is a simple wrapper around virtual_send and expect compares what output a broker has written in its output_buffer with the output we expect.
The test uses the unit test framework from CAF. Using a different test framework, e.g., Boost.Test, is straightforward. The complete source code can be found at GitHub.Now that the seven-day media blitz for UFC 168 has concluded, both champion and challenger can focus on the task at hand.
Chris Weidman will rematch former titleholder Anderson Silva for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) middleweight crown in what will be their colossal pay-per-view (PPV) title fight at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Dec. 28, 2013.
If the current champion has anything to do with what happens during the main event of what Dana White calls "the most excited he has ever been for a fight," no luck will be involved.
"I've been with Anderson every day, he said it in one interview, he said he was joking or whatever. I won't hold him to that. I actually won't hold him to anything he says in an interview. It doesn't matter, when preparation meets opportunity, if that's what you consider luck, call it luck, but it's a punch I meant to throw and meant to hit him with and he went down."
He's referring respectfully to what "Spider" said in response to a question during a recent fan Q & A (here).
During an interview with ESPN Radio, the "Pride of Long Island" also spoke about his plans to repeat his momentous performance at UFC 162.
"I can't repeat the exact performance, but I can repeat getting a 'W.' I am very confident I am winning this next fight."
Prior to UFC 162, it seemed as if everyone with a mixed martial arts (MMA) opinion had something to say regarding why Weidman was "the guy" to finally defeat the longest reigning UFC champion ever, but now those same people are saying he cannot "do it again."
"Haha, it's kind of expected when you're fighting Anderson Silva, 'the greatest of all time." He's known as a phenom to most people, not just that, but a mythical figure, who they just can't imagine him losing if he was actually trying. It makes the excitement good for the next fight and I have no problem with that."
There will be no looking past Silva for "All American" either. Even at the age of 29 his resolve seems to take things slowly and with results, the right cards will fall, even if that includes superseding Silva as the new "G.O.A.T."
"I have to take one fight at a time. I have a lot to prove still. I have to hold onto this belt for a long time before I can worry about that. But that is one of the goals I hope to accomplish."
Come December, anchoring a card featuring Miesha Tate vs. Ronda Rousey and Josh Barnett vs. Travis Browne, we all will find out. Where will you be watching? Especially now knowing the event is practically sold out?
For more on UFC 168 be sure to check out our complete event archive right here. And to check out the latest "Weidman vs. Silva 2" fight card and rumors click here.Source: Pambazuka
The death of the renowned Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, has thrust one of the most popular African books in the news. Although Achebe wrote multiple books and produced several works of scholarship, ‘Things Fall Apart’ acted as the catalyst for his popularity, sending the Nigerian writer to the highest plateaus of academic fame. How did ‘Things Fall Apart,’ a book written about the Igbo people in Nigeria, become an explanatory voice for colonially oppressed societies all over Africa? The literary tenor used by Achebe to write ‘Things Fall Apart,’ is the first reason behind the book’s popularity. Any exhaustive commentary on ‘Things Fall Apart,’ must recognize the book’s flair for weaving Igbo words and phrases with the English language. By partly Africanizing the English language to tell an African story, Achebe was able to show a pre-colonial Igbo society equipped with the ability for self-rule. Through the book’s main character, Okonkwo, Achebe showed how pre-colonial Igbo society dealt with crime and punishment. When Okonkwo committed what could be termed in today’s legal systems as manslaughter, the response from the oracles at Umuofia was swift and judicious. Once it became clear that Okonkwo’s accidentally-discharged gun was responsible for killing a citizen of the land, the oracles pronounced a verdict, which ordered Okonkwo’s seven-year exile from the land he loved. Despite his enormous stature in Igbo society, Okonkwo was subjected to the rule of law through a cultural edict, forcing a seemingly untouchable man into seven anguishing years of exile.
DEPICTION OF A POLITICALLY ORGANISED PEOPLE
By the time Okonkwo served his seven year sentence in banishment, Umuofia—his beloved land—-was already chafing under the assault of imperialism. European mercenaries, deceptively casting themselves as ‘missionaries,’were already in Umuofia to carry out a frontal assault on the political, cultural and social institutions which held Okonkwo’s people together. The tragic story of Ikemefuna, which revealed the truest depths of Okonkwo’s compulsive feelings of insecurity, also showed us another feature of Igbo society. Contrary to racist falsities, most of which opine that pre-colonial African societies were clusters of disorganized tribes, Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ proved otherwise. Governance and conflict-resolution worked in tandem in Okonkwo’s Umuofia. When the land of Umuofia felt offended by the killing of its citizen in a neighboring jurisdiction, the young Ikemefuna was handed over—through an emissary – to the people of Umuofia as a symbol peace. Throughout his short lifespan, the young Ikemefuna served as a conciliatory symbol from the clan which sued for peace. Indeed, Ikemefuna’s presence in Okonkwo’s household was seen in Umuofia as a gesture of peace. There were times when the people of Umuofia waged war, but only after the failure of pacifism. Similarly, Europeans—from the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century to the emergence of Nazi Germany in the last century—did go to war on multiple occasions when conflict-resolution proved futile. Despite all the bloody episodes in its history, imperial Europe did justify the conquest of Africa by postulating that ‘civilization’ is an exclusive, Western virtue! ‘Things Fall Apart’ is both a refutation of, and a counterblast to, the racist theories used to demean pre-colonial Africa as a heathenish land without God or government! Chinua Achebe successfully showed that before things literally fell apart, Africans lived under various systems of government overseen by the rule of law.
THE MULTIPLE FACES OF ‘THINGS FALL APART’
Apart from its utility as an African response to European imperialism, ‘Things Fall Apart’ has other uses in academia. The book has proven itself as a work of scholarship usable in multiple, academic disciplines. Prescribed in some African countries as a literature book, ‘Things Fall Apart’ has also been used in American universities as a sociology book. Additionally, “Things Fall Apart” can lend itself to the voracity of a historian because book deals with the political, cultural and social developments of a people, whose history was perverted by foreigners.
Sociologically speaking, ‘Things Fall Apart’ deals with the behavioral patterns of a society that suffered a civilizational eclipse when attacked from outside. Lastly, ‘Things Fall Apart’ has been internationally used as a literature textbook because its European and African characters have stirred a lot of pensiveness among dramatists.
Europeans have spent centuries, trying to justify their uninvited presence in Africa. With its sociological teachings, ‘Things Fall Apart’ can be used to ask a specific question: Why did Europeans force their so-called “civilizing mission” on a people who were readily spiritual and culturally sure of themselves? Even today, in the twenty-first century, the colonial rampages seen in ‘Things Fall Apart,” continue in several guises, mostly through Western agencies like the IMF and international trade, which has been booby-trapped enough to be called ‘unfair trade.’ There is a reason why things have fallen apart in Africa: a rape victim—psychologists say—could live with the trauma of defilement for an endlessly long time! When the infliction of horror is both physical and psychological, the ensuing trauma can be eternally destabilizing. Little wonder the subversive presence of Europeans in Umuofia, disoriented Okonkwo so much that he committed suicide. Today’s African countries are a bigger representation of Okonkwo’s Umuofia, where normalcy was replaced with the chaos unleashed by European colonialists.
THE DESTRUCTIVENESS OF IMPERIALISM
Colonial rule lasted well over a century in some African countries. Britain pompously took over Sierra Leone and kept the country as a personal property for at least 150 years! Colonial rule was very thorough in its destruction of Africa, both from a psychological and socio-economic perspective. Land-seizures and the total usurpation of African authority, are few of the horrors committed in Africa by colonial Europe. By the time Europeans pulled out of Africa in the 1960s, the damage was already done. After a century of colonial degradation, the skills needed to run a modern, nation-state, became dangerously scarce in the newly-independent African States. Portuguese colonial rule, for example, proved so damaging that Africans were NOT allowed to acquire any skills other than those needed to make them serve as cooks and servants. When Portugal grudgingly pulled out of Angola in 1975, the newly-independent Angolan state staggered with incompetence, nervously searching for teachers, doctors and the managerial competence needed to run a country. Colonial rule was the crime that came close to enslaving the African all over again. When Chinua Achebe showed the horrors of colonial rule in ‘Things Fall Apart,’ the narrative easily became the African story that impinged itself on our consciousness. Chinua Achebe has passed onto the land of our silent ones. However, the African story he told in ‘Things Fall Apart,’ will always remain piercingly loud.
Sankara Kamara is a Sierra Leonean academic and freelance writer. You can catch him on Facebook: www.facebook/sankara kamaraClown show Prime Minister Theresa May’s first words to aides after her wacky conference speech were, ‘Well, at least I didn’t shit myself’.
It had been thought that the speech, which left topical humourists with very few places to go as it featured a fine prank, a collapsing slogan and a nasty cold, couldn’t have got any worse.
However, from what has been reported from her initial meeting with aides – it certainly could have.
“I felt it just in the bit when I was trying to pretend that building 12 council houses would make any sort of difference at all,” she reportedly told them.
“I got that cramp in my stomach, you know that cramp I get?”
Her aides then nodded furiously, |
particular the allegation that the German courts had disregarded or taken insufficient account of the Court’s case-law.” After the court declined to hear related complaints on June 16, 2008, von Hannover complained to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in favor of the media companies today (Tuesday).
“In conclusion, the German courts had carefully balanced the right of the publishing companies to freedom of expression against the right of the applicants to respect for their private life,” the court’s press release states.
Germany must pay Axel Springer AG more than $65,000 in pecuniary and compensatory damages, and owes no money to von Hannover.
Like this: Like Loading...Last week, I discussed the “What I see” skills of emotional intelligence: empathy and self-awareness. In addition to everything discussed in that post, these skills also form the foundation for the remaining aspects of emotional intelligence, the “What I do” skills: self and relationship management. Self-management is using your emotional awareness to control your emotions so they don’t control you; so that you positively direct your behavior. Relationship-management is using awareness of your and others’ emotions to manage interactions. Relationship-management builds on self-management. Both are aspects that highly sensitive people like myself really struggle with, but they are also something everyone can work on and benefit from.
I’d like to start with one of my own experiences:
I’d done a lot of reading on emotional intelligence in the past, but this concept of self-management didn’t really click until I had an “Aha!” moment while having lunch with my coworkers. At the time, I was an emotional wreck; I was battling depression and had just returned to full time employment after working part-time for three months. I was adjusting to my medication and my therapist was seeing improvement. Then, a conversation on something I don’t even remember triggered something inside me: blind anger fueled by cynicism and negativity. I lashed out and insulted my coworkers. I said hurtful things, then left them wondering what happened. The scary part was that I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to be mean and angry and negative. And that realization threw me, for that is not the person I want to be. That is not who I am.
I’ve worked a lot on myself since then, and in my journey, I’ve become a much stabler and more emotionally-in-control person. I also discovered why I did what I did during that lunch break: I was hurting so much that I wanted others to hurt so they would know how I felt.
What is Emotional Hijacking?
The situation I went through is what Daniel Goleman calls “emotional hijacking”, or from a biological standpoint: amygdala highjacking. It’s when an emotional trigger causes you to respond irrationally and without taking the time to understand what you are doing. Fortunately, this reaction is temporary and you can learn to control it. My lunchtime incident happened in January, less than three months ago. I apologized to my coworkers and worked on myself and now I am not that person anymore. Now I recognize when my anger is triggered, when old hurts are brought up. Now I am prepared. I am better because I realized what I was doing and I created a plan to prevent myself from doing it again.
You must have an action plan to manage your emotions and those of the people around you. This post will help.
Self-Management: How to cope with and prevent negative emotions
Self-management can be broken down into two actions: preventing and coping. Preventing involves avoiding or circumventing situations and triggers that give you undesirable feelings. Coping involves strategies to positively handle negative feelings when they are brought on Twitter.
Please note: I am not saying that negative emotions are bad or that you should always avoid them. Emotional intelligence is about working with your emotions, not running from them. Twitter And sometimes the best course of action really is to confront negativity head on. Emotional intelligence gives you the ability to know when this is the case, and what to do when it’s not. This post, however, only focuses on the latter.
Coping with negative emotions is something you can apply right away. If you find yourself in a situation like I did in the break room, or if you’re about to do something harmful (drinking, eating junk food, calling your ex, physically hurting yourself), or if you simply feel anxious and are losing control, try doing one of the following:
Take deep breaths
This article describes the above strategies well. You can also find more information here.
Remember: taking preventative measures is better in the long run. Once you’ve returned from your reactive emotional state, you can look back and assess what happened. This can be broken into four steps:
1. Take responsibility for your actions. After my lunchtime incident, I knew I couldn’t continue acting and feeling the way I was. After being depressed and feeling like a victim, I had to take control. This meant understanding that I can’t control other people, I can only control myself and my reactions to them. Realizing this made me feel more powerful, not weaker Twitter.
2. Recognize that you are having an emotional reaction and identify the emotion. I’ve created actual scripts I can repeat when I feel a hijacking coming on: “Oh no! I feel myself getting worked up. I’m angry. Does this really matter? I guess not. I should go walk it off/meditate for a few minutes/work on something else.” Sometimes, however, whatever is making you angry really does matter; in these situations ask yourself: can I put this aside until I’ve calmed down and am better equipped to handle it? If you can, you should.
3. Determine the event/action that triggered your reaction. What happened? What is the underlying cause? What emotional need were you denied? Below is a list of needs that are common emotional triggers. Mine include: being understood, autonomy, acceptance, and control.
4. Find an action to break the cycle. How do you want to feel? Can you let it go? How can you prevent or prepare for situations that run counter to these?
Avoid circumstances that bring out negative emotions. For example: giving yourself extra time to do something or avoiding certain subjects/people
For example: giving yourself extra time to do something or avoiding certain subjects/people Modify the situation to your benefit. Next time you’re in a situation you know will be an emotional trigger, think ahead about how you can redirect things and keep yourself calm
Next time you’re in a situation you know will be an emotional trigger, think ahead about how you can redirect things and keep yourself calm Focus on yourself and your actions. You can only change your thoughts and actions, not someone else’s
You can only change thoughts and actions, not someone else’s Change your thoughts and perspective (remember self-talk?)
For articles that further discuss the above steps, click here and here.
Take Action
How did I find my most frequent triggers and create those scripts in my head? I kept track of my emotions, my reactions, and what I did to calm myself and control them. And now, I’ve created a worksheet so you can do the same! By completing this worksheet, you’ll be able to monitor your emotional reactions, discover patterns, and also discover your most common triggers. You can download the worksheet here.
Relationship Management: Improving your Communication
Relationship-management involves combining the self-management skills above with your own interpersonal and communication skills. This combination is shown in the chart below, and the results (according to David Goleman) are listed below the chart. Both the chart and the results are from this website.
Influence – your ability to build a consensus and win people’s support by focusing on what is important to others
– your ability to build a consensus and win people’s support by focusing on what is important to others Leadership – be the person that others choose to follow
– be the person that others choose to follow Developing Others – recognize others’ strengths and offer challenges to develop them
– recognize others’ strengths and offer challenges to develop them Communication – plan your communications to ensure the right emotional tone
– plan your communications to ensure the right emotional tone Change Catalyst – recognize when change is needed, be willing to question established ideals and initiate new ideas Twitter
– recognize when change is needed, be willing to question established ideals and initiate new ideas Conflict Management – realize when a situation is heading towards conflict and take quick and decisive action to resolve it Twitter
– realize when a situation is heading towards conflict and take quick and decisive action to resolve it Building Bonds – cultivate a network of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends that benefits everyone mutually
– cultivate a network of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends that benefits everyone mutually Teamwork and Collaboration – define your success criteria so that everyone can make their own unique and valued contribution
This article describes methods and actions to improve the above skills.
Relationship-management is a deep and complex subject and has prompted the study of a new discipline: Social Intelligence. Don’t have time to read the book? Watch Goleman’s 10-minute video below.
For my last resources on this subject, here are two checklists: one on self-management and the other on relationship-management.
To conclude, I will say that I’ve tried and applied most of the advice in this post. For me some helped, some didn’t. I am still a work in progress. I’ve found it best to take each action one step at a time and at my own pace. Emotional Intelligence is a lifelong learning process and you’re bound to stumble and make mistakes. Twitter It’s important to keep going, to not be discouraged, and to apologize to the people you have (or may) hurt. This includes yourself.
Here again is the link to my emotions worksheet. It has helped me and I believe it will help you too.
This post contains affiliate links to books I recommend. This means that when you click through to buy the product, a portion of the sale goes to me to help cover the cost of running this blog.Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
It's almost like he came prepared.
One of the high points of an oh-so entertaining introductory press conference for Jose Mourinho at Manchester United was when he was asked about to defend his record of bringing through youth players.
The Portuguese immediately jumped into action, waving a piece of paper which he claimed had the names of 49 young players he has brought through.
"I never promote players because of need - I did it because of conviction and decision. I did 49 - some of them are big names, they are Champions League winners, in the Euros, playing for national teams.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
"One lie repeated many times sometimes looks true but it will never be true. If you want the names, I give you the names."
Alas, he didn't reveal his list during the press conference, but we've scoured through his managerial career and we think we've found Jose's 49 kids.
Bear in mind it's tricky to second-guess the former Chelsea man, so our list may not be the same as his list. If he does reveal all, then we'll tweak it, Life of Pablo style.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
Benfica
1. Diogo Luis (2000)
The Portuguese striker has the honour of being number one on Jose's list. Had a journeyman career which ended with a stint in Cyprus. Now a financial advisor in a bank.
2. Geraldo Alves (2000)
After being handed his debut by Mourinho, Alves went on to play for a number of European sides, including AEK Athens and Steaua Bucuresti. Still going at Romanian side Petrolul Ploiesti.
Uniao de Leiria
3. Joao Paulo Andrade (2001)
Was Mourinho's captain for the minnows but his career became nomadic after he left for Porto in 2006.
Porto
(Image: Getty)
4. Ricardo Costa (2002)
Promoted from Porto's B team and has gone on to enjoy a fine career, with spells at Wolfsburg and Valencia, plus 22 Portugal caps. Now at Granada in Spain.
5. Joca (2002)
Defensive midfielder who only played a couple of first-team games for the Portuguese giants before having 13 other clubs in 12 years.
6. Hugo Luz (2003)
Another who made little impact at Porto, his career took him to a number of smaller clubs before reitirement last year.
7. Reinaldo (2003)
Only played once for the first team and there are precious few details about his life since then.
8. Elias (2003)
Brazilian midfielder who played a single game for Porto, pottered around Portugal for some time, then pitched up in Bulgaria, where he's going strong at 34.
9. Bruno Moraes (2003)
Arrived from Brazilian club Santos as a teenager and played 17 times before three spells out on loan. Had a stint in Hungary but now in the Portuguese second flight.
10. Hugo Almeida (2003)
(Image: Getty Images)
Handed his debut by Mourinho in 2003, Almeida is still going strong at Hannover after a successful career which included spells at Werder Bremen and Besiktas. The centre-forward netted 19 goals in 57 appearances for Portugal and was part of their squad for two European Championships and two World Cups.
11. Pedro Ribeiro (2004)
Another one-game wonder, the defender has never left Portugal and now plays for Penafiel.
12. Bruno Vale (2004)
The goalkeeper managed (yep) one match for Porto before five loan spells. Now plays in Cyprus for Apollon Limassol
13. Andre Vilas Boas (2004)
No, not that one. This Vilas Boas vintage is a defensive midfielder who is currently plying his trade at Rio Ave.
(Image: Epsilon)
Chelsea (First spell)
14. Steven Watt (2005)
Made just one Premier League appearance for Chelsea, coming on as an 89th minute substitute for Jiri Jarosik against Newcastle in 2005. Now at Hastings United in the Isthmian League Division One South as a player/assistant manager.
15. Lenny Pidgeley (2005)
Most famous for being front and centre of Chelsea's 2005 title celebrations after he came on as a substitute for Carlo Cudicini in the final game of the season. Soon began a rapid descent down the divisions and was last spotted at Forest Green Rovers.
(Image: Ben Hoskins)
16. Anthony Grant (2005)
Handed his debut by Mourinho in 2005, Grant embarked on a series of loan moves before a succesful stint at Southend United. Now at Port Vale.
17. Jimmy Smith (2006)
Made his first-team debut in May 2006, but only managed the one Premier League appearance for the Blues. Joined Leyton Orient after a string of loan spells and is currently at Crawley Town.
18. Ben Sahar (2007)
Managed to wrack up three substitute appearances for Chelsea in the Premier League, before again going on the customary streak of loan moves, taking in spells in Holland, Israel, France and Germany. Had permanent stints at Espanyol and Willem II and is now at Hapoel Be'er Sheva.
(Image: Dean Mouhtaropoulos)
19. Michael Woods (2007)
Plucked from the Leeds United academy, Woods made only two FA Cup appearances from the bench for Chelsea before he was hit by injuries and released in 2011. Again, he dropped down the leagues and is now at Hartlepool United.
20. Sam Hutchinson (2007)
After making his senior debut in 2007, Hutchinson battled a series of injuries which would cause him to retire aged 21. But he soon returned after his knee problem improved and stuck it out at Stamford Bridge (with a few loan moves, natch) until 2014 when he moved to Sheffield Wednesday, where is remains.
(Image: Reuters)
Inter Milan
21. Davide Santon (2008)
The Italian burst onto the scene under Mourinho at Inter, but his career stalled after injury and Newcastle United happened to him. Now back at the San Siro.
22. Rene Krhin (2009)
Slovenian youngster who made his first-team debut at the San Siro in 2009, but didn't last long at Inter, joining Bologna a year later. Now at Granada in Spain.
(Image: Ezra Shaw)
23. Giulio Donati (2009)
The defender was handed a go in the Inter first-team in a Coppa Italia match in 2009, but failed to turn out in Serie A before a stint of Serie B loan moves. Moved to Bayer Leverksusen in 2013 and can currently been found strutting his stuff for Mainz.
24. Francesco Bolzoni (2009)
The Former Italy Under-21 international was given his Serie A debut in May 2009, but that was his only appearance for Inter. Not at Novara in Serie B.
25. Alen Stevanovic (2010)
Serbian winger who turned out once in Serie A for Inter before moving on to Torino. Returned to his homeland in 2015 when he signed for Partizan.
Real Madrid
26. Juan Carlos (2010)
Came on for Angel Di Maria in a league win over Deportivo la Coruna – his one and only first-team game. Moved to Braga, who have loaned him out to four different Spanish clubs... and never used him in their own XI.
(Image: Getty)
27. Pablo Sarabia (2010)
One appearance off the bench in the Champions League was all the attacking midfielder managed before going to Getafe. Five seasons and 145 games later, he's just joined Sevilla.
28. Antonio Adan (2010)
Goalkeeper who made 18 appearances in all competitions for Los Blancos and now serves as No.1 at Real Betis.
29. Alvaro Morata (2010)
Currently one of Europe's hottest properties after a goal-laden spell at Juventus. Back in Madrid after they exercised their buy-back clause in his contract last month, but could soon again be on the move as Madrid look to cash in.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now
30. Alex Fernandez (2011)
Midfielder who has yet to kick on after playing for Spain at youth level. Played twice for Real before going to Espanyol, who loaned him out to Reading last season.
31. Nacho (2011)
Still at Real Madrid, where he is a useful squad player for the European Champions. Made his Spain debut in 2013.
32. Tomas Mejias (2011)
Young goalkeeper who made a handful of games before going on loan to Middlesbrough. They made the move permanent in 2014 but he is only a back-up option.
33. Jese (2011)
Again, still at the Bernabeu and again, mainly a back up for Zinedine Zidane's side. Capped up to an under-21 level with Spain.
(Image: Reuters)
34. Joselu (2011)
Handed his La Liga debut by Mourinho at the end of the 2010-11 season, scoring moments after coming on. He never really cracked the first-team at the Bernabeu though, moving onto Hoffenheim in 2012. Spent a year at Hannover before joining Stoke last summer for a free of £5.75million, where he has failed to dazzle.
35. Jorge Casado (2011)
Played over 100 games for Real's reserve side before finally making his debut in a cup match. Then moved to Betis and joined second-division Ponferradina.
36. Pedro Mendes (2011)
Played in a Champions League win over Ajax but returned to parent club Sporting Lisbon soon after. Now in France with Rennes.
37. Jose Rodriguez (2012)
Powerful midfielder who played four times for Los Blancos. Now at Mainz in Germany after a season at Galatasaray.
(Image: Getty)
38. Denis Cheryshev (2012)
Most famous for getting Madrid kicked out of the Copa del Rey last season, when he featured against Cadiz despite being suspended. Was soon bombed out of the club, being loaned to Valencia in February, before securing a permanent move to Villarreal last month.
39. Casemiro (2013)
Became a key man for Madrid last year under Zidane, starting the Champions League final success against Atletico in May.
40. Fabinho (2013)
Left Bernabeu for Monaco in 2015 following a loan stint with the Ligue 1 side. The 22-year-old is a full Brazilian international and was deputy to Dani Alves at the 2015 Copa America.
(Image: Philipp Schmidli)
41. Omar Mascarell (2013)
Defensive midfielder who is still at Real despite not being in a first-team squad for some time. Went on loan to Derby for a season and spent last term at Sporting Gijon.
42. Diego Llorente (2013)
Promising defender who racked up plenty of experience last season on loan at Rayo Vallecano. Has already made his debut for Spain.
Chelsea (Second spell)
43. Tomas Kalas (2013)
Two Premier League appearances for the Blues in 2013/14 promised much, but he has since been shunted out on loan – first to Cologne, then to Middlesbrough, where he has spent the last two seasons.
(Image: Action Images via Reuters)
44. Lewis Baker (2014)
Yet to turn out for Chelsea in the Premier League, Baker has been progressing nicely via a number of loan spells and will spend the new season on loan at Vitesse for a second season after impressing last year.
45. John Swift (2014)
Made his Blues Premier League debut at the end of the 2013-14 season before embarking on a series of loan moves. Had an impressive stint at Brentford last season and has now returned to Stamford Bridge.
46. Dominic Solanke (2014)
The highly-rated attacker became the youngest Chelsea player to play in the Champions League in 2014-15 and spent last season at Vitesse, scoring seven gaols in 25 appearances. Now back with the Blues.
(Image: Getty)
47. Andreas Christensen (2014)
Handed his Blues debut by Mourinho in a League Cup game in October 2014, the defender spent last season at Borussia Monchengladbach on loan, where he was named as their Player of the Season, ahead of Arsenal new boy Granit Xhaka. Has another year on his Gladbach loan deal.
48. Ruben Loftus-Cheek (2014)
The most successful Chelsea academy graduate of recent years, Loftus-Cheek has been a regular in the Blues' first-team squad since his debut in the 2014-15 season. Notably, has not had a single loan move away from Stamford Bridge.
49. Bertrand Traore (2015)
The Burkinabe international was the last Chelsea players to be handed a debut by Mourinho and has made ten Premier League appearances for the Blues.
Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play nowI haven’t seen any references to Albany in the many stories about the Broadway hit, “Hamilton,” about which there is a piece in today’s New York Times, “What ‘Hamilton’ forgets about Hamilton,” by Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick, two political theory experts at Cornell. Yet, the Albany connection is there, as readers of Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton will understand.
Hamilton came to Albany when he was Washington’s aide in 1777 to request troops from Horatio Gates that Washington needed after the Americans won a surprising victory at the Battle of Saratoga. Hamilton rode from New Jersey to Albany in five days, he was 21 (or so, the date of his birth is uncertain) and slight in build, not someone who impressed Gates. Washington didn’t give Hamilton a letter with instructions that he was to follow, he knew how difficult Gates could be. Washington left it to Hamilton to persuade the general who had won a victory over the British at Saratoga to find some way to persuade him to send some badly-need troops to join him in New Jersey.
Gates was ambitious and difficult, only after Hamilton pelted him with arguments did he agree to send some of his men to join Washington at Valley Forge. Gates wanted to replace Washington as head of the Revolutionary Army and in the ensuing winter he made his bid for power. It failed and Gates moved to the South, where was ensnared by his own foibles.
While Hamilton was in Albany, he met Schuyler’s daughter, Elizabeth, briefly. He met her again in the following year when she delivered a message from her father to Washington in Morristown, New Jersey. He courted Elizabeth and soon they were engaged to be married, as they were during Christmas, 1778, at Schuyler Mansion in Albany.
Hamilton rejoined his unit as the war ran its difficult course. He led a charge of the Americans against the British army at Yorktown in 1781. He sought glory and received it: he was in the unit that first attacked the British fortifications. His heroism was notable. He was entitled to a cash bonus but declined it. He was a war hero and retired from the military. He moved to Albany with his wife and studied for the New York bar exam. He passed it and moved to New York City, where he became a prominent lawyer.
His wife and family visited Albany regularly in the 1780s and 1790s. He was a New York delegate at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and spoke boldly. Hamilton was a political conservative who spoke in favor of a lifetime president and he supported commercial oligarchs who manipulated credit and currency at the expense of debtors and yeoman farmers. Born on a slave island in the Caribbean, he opposed slavery and called for an end to the hated institution. At the same time, he was an outspoken conservative.
Washington made Hamilton Secretary of Treasury and appointed Thomas Jefferson to serve as Secretary of State. He supported Hamilton, not Jefferson, on many issues. Jefferson withdrew and began to build up his own base. Hamilton carried the day in Washington’s cabinet.
Hamilton appears not to have loved his wife, Elizabeth. He met her sister Angelica at their wedding and corresponded with her when she returned to England to be with her husband and children. They employed a secret code. She came to America in 1789, when Hamilton was compiling a report for America’s economic future. Elizabeth returned to Albany while her sister and Hamilton entered into an affair. Her father, Philip Schuyler, told his daughter Angelica that she had to return to England to be with her husband and children. The parting was sorrowful.
Hamilton entered into an affair with another married woman, Maria Reynolds, in 1791. She and her husband appear to have worked together to compromise Hamilton. They demanded payment for remaining silent about the affair. Hamilton paid until he could no longer meet the demands. James Reynolds revealed the affair to Hamilton’s enemies. They visited him and he decided to confess to the affair publicly, he never recovered from the incident. He became closer to his wife and family but had damaged his political position. He spoke publicly for John Adams in the 1800 election, but Jefferson was elected president. We remember Hamilton was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.
Schuyler Mansion is the oldest building in Albany. It is in a predominantly black neighborhood, south of the center of the city. When Schuyler built his mansion it stood alone, with a commanding view of the Hudson. Standing in front of the building today and looking down the hill below there are high-rise apartments at the bottom, public housing built for indigent blacks. There is serious decay on all sides of Schuyler Mansion, including streets named after the members of Schuyler’s family. On the right of the mansion is Catherine Street, named after Schuyler’s wife, above it is Elizabeth Street, named after the daughter who married Hamilton; it connects with Philip Street, named after one of Hamilton’s sons. Hamilton Street runs alongside the south side of Schuyler Mansion, it was named after Alexander Hamilton. The street now has a row of houses recently built in an effort to restore some dignity to this street.Share. "We’re looking to see what kind of true community demand there is." "We’re looking to see what kind of true community demand there is."
Since its launch in 2015, Psyonix's Rocket League has seen growth in both the platforms it's available on as well as in its continually growing user base. So how likely is it to see the rocket-powered soccer game come to the Nintendo Switch?
Speaking to IGN, Psyonix Studios' Vice President Jeremy Dunham said that the studio behind the game is "evaluating" the possibility and the various factors involved, including true community demand and technical limitations, in bringing the game to a new platform.
Exit Theatre Mode
"Just like all the other platforms, we are evaluating it. We’re looking to see what the technical requirements are," Dunham said. "We’re looking to see what kind of true community demand there is. We’re looking to see how it would benefit the community as a whole. So we’re still in that evaluation phase. It’s definitely too early to say that it wouldn’t happen, but it’s also definitely too early to say that it would."
Dunham noted that it's a decision that would follow in step with Psyonix's community-focused philosophy.
"I think we’ve shown over time we’re a community based company, and so what we’re doing first is seeing what kind of impact that would have and who needs it and who wants the game and we’ll go from there," Dunham said. "Luckily the platform’s only been out for a month, so we have plenty of time to look to see how it’s doing and what our audience wants."
Rocket League first released for PlayStation 4 and PC in July 2015, followed by Xbox One in February 2016. Psyonix has continued to support the game with frequent free and paid updates. Most recently, Psyonix released the Dropshot mode for free last week, as well as the paid Hot Wheels DLC in February.
Rocket League also continues to grow on the platforms it's already available for. Psyonix announced in January that the game had crossed 25 million registered players, which Dunham confirmed to IGN has now reached 29 million — it was even 2016's most downloaded game on PS4. But despite that continuous expansion, Psyonix's philosophy of releasing gameplay-focused expansions for free and only cosmetic DLC for purchase hasn't changed. What has changed, according to Dunham, is the frequency of Psyonix's Rocket League updates.
Exit Theatre Mode
"We didn't expect that we would be doing as much content as we've done in the first year and three quarters that we've been out," Dunham said. "We also originally were looking at about a one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half year major support model before moving onto the next project. It would be silly for us to stick to that same timeline. So now we have an indefinite support window where we're just going to keep supporting the game as long as people play it."
Stay tuned to IGN for more on Rocket League.
Jonthon Dornbush is an Associate Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @jmdornbush.TUCSON — The federal checkpoints on highways near the Mexican border, with trained dogs and expensive scanning equipment, are supposed to stop drugs and immigrants without legal status from heading north. But newly released complaints against United States Customs and Border Protection paint a disquieting portrait of the interactions between agents and many of those they stopped and searched.
Drivers repeatedly accused checkpoint border agents of improper gunplay, racial profiling, excessive roughness and verbal abuse.
Last year, in southeastern Arizona, a military veteran said his children shuddered with fear in the back seat as agents repeatedly asked him if the children were really his. A woman at a checkpoint between Phoenix and Tucson said an agent threatened to use a stun gun on her brother in 2012 after he asked why their vehicle was being searched. And at a California checkpoint in 2013, a man said an agent approached him, hand on his holstered weapon, and demanded, “How would you like to have a gun pointed at your face?”
The accounts were culled from nearly 6,000 pages of complaints, arrest statistics and other records released in recent months to the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona by Customs and Border Protection’s overseer, the Department of Homeland Security, after the A.C.L.U. sued the department for access. Collectively, the documents, detailing encounters between motorists and border agents from January 2011 to August 2014, portray an agency whose fractured oversight system has enabled at least some agents working along the southern border to stretch the limits of law and professional courtesy while rarely facing meaningful consequences.The state government in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir has initiated action against 34 television channels beamed from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, reckoning that these channels have the “potential to encourage violence and can disturb law and order situation in Kashmir”.
The latest Indian government order to act against transmission of these channels, which include news, entertainment, food and cuisine, religion and sports channels, has come nearly two weeks after the government imposed an unprecedented ban on 22 social networking sites in Indian-held Kashmir Valley on April 26.
New Delhi often blames Islamabad for fomenting trouble in Indian-held Kashmir, but Pakistan denies its involvement and describes the “freedom struggle” of the people of Kashmir as “indigenous”.
In a letter written by principal secretary home Mr. R K Goyal addressed to all deputy commissioners, the state’s home department has sought a compliance report on the matter by Monday.
The channels whose transmission is to be banned, according to the letter, include Noor TV, Karbala TV, Hum TV, ARY Zindagi, Geo News, Geo Tez, Express News, ARY News, ARY Zauq, ARY Masala, ARY Musik, ARY News Asia, ARY Digital Asia, ARY QTV, A TV, Abb Tak News, Waseb TV, 92 News, Duniya News, Samna News, Peace TV English, Peace TV Urdu, Madni Channel, Hadi TV, Paigam, Hidayat, Saudi Al-Sunnah, Al-Nabawiyah, Saudi Al-Quran, Al-Karim, Sehar, Ahli-biat TV and Message TV.
Jammu and Kashmir government’s home department intends to stop what it describes as “unauthorised broadcast” of all the above channels which are available in held Kashmir via cable networks.
Predictably, the proposed ban has irked many Kashmiris, especially women and elderly people, who regularly watch entertainment and religious channels for variety of reasons.
Many entertainment, food and cuisine and sports channels beamed from Pakistan are a huge hit in most Kashmiri homes.
People, especially working women and housewives, spend substantial time in watching Pakistani television serials while some stay glued to the TV screen for learning modern recipes of Pakistani delicacies.
Some elderly people who can’t perform Haj due to physical frailties or financial stress often spend their time while watching channels like Saudi Al-Quran, Madni, Noor TV and Hadi TV just to see pictures of Mecca and Masjid-e-Nabvi for spiritual solace.
For Nausheen, a young Kashmiri working woman, the proposed ban on Pakistani channels is uncalled-for and against the very spirit and idea of globalisation.
“No one should have the right to deny facilities available for infotainment, sports or devotion available on television. The government ban is anti-globalisation and essentially undemocratic and authoritarian,” Nausheen tells Dawn.
The new government order has surprised many Kashmiri women who keenly watch news, entertainment, dramas and recipe making programmes on various Pakistani television channels via cable.
Another Kashmiri woman argues that many would-be-brides were learning new recipes on Pakistani television, but the government is unfortunately choking this space too.
Mohammad Athar Mir, a class XI student from downtown Srinagar, is a huge cricket fan. After school and tuition, he often watches Pakistani sports and news channels to keep himself abreast with the latest developments regarding his favourite team, Pakistan.
“I do not care a lot about the news channels, but the government’s proposed ban on sports and entertainment channels is imprudent and silly,” Athar Mir tells Dawn.
He says that his father, a businessman, has been deprived of an agency for he remains an ardent news follower.
“Usually my father spends his evenings by watching Geo News. The ban has upset him emotionally,” he says.
'Cultural aggression'
Irfan Ahmad, a key Kashimir watcher, argues that the ban “only exposes the deceptive sound bite of India’s attorney general at the UN, saying that India is a secular state equidistant from a particular religion.”
“Well, see the government has targeted a particular religion by the new proposal. The ban further delegitimizes Indian control in Kashmir,” Ahmad adds.
Gowhar Yasin, a teacher by profession, describes the ban on social networking sites and Pakistani channels as India’s “cultural aggression” in Kashmir.
Yasin says that it was no secret that the people in Kashmir love to watch Pakistani news and infotainment channels. His sisters and cousins, he says, love to learn new recipes by watching food and cuisine channels (ARY Zauq and Hum TV) while he himself remains a sports buff.
“The decision to ban Pakistani Islamic, cultural and sports channels is direct interference in our affairs and cultural aggression aimed at detaching us from our roots. It is a form of violence by the state to choke us as a people and to award collective punishment for our political aspiration,” he tells Dawn.
The ban has evoked strong criticism on social media too.
Many Kashmiris using social media through proxy applications have reacted sharply to the ban on Pakistani and Saudi television channels.
Khurram Parvez, coordinator of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) took to Facebook and Twitter to express his outrage on the proposed government ban.
“Banning Islamic, Pakistani cultural and sports channels and all social networking sites in Kashmir, only exhibits that the pretence of democracy has to be suspended for the militarised occupation to survive,” Parvez wrote.
On May 5, journalist Aarti Tikoo Singh wrote in Times of India that “Saudi clerics and Pakistani news anchors are being beamed direct to Kashmiri homes, and are stoking the fires of ‘azadi’.”
“Over 50 Saudi and Pakistani channels, including Zakir Naik’s banned Peace TV preaching Salafist Islam, and others indulging in anti-India propaganda are running without |
-created academic marginality. The study of new media thus tended to privilege things that look like art; the study of the low, the minor or the vulgar tended to privilege social over aesthetic methods and preoccupations. Not the least virtue of Nakamura’s work is that she went out on a limb and studied questions of race and gender and in new and ephemeral digital forms and as aesthetic practices.
One way to subsume these three questions into some sort of totality might be to think about what Lisa Parks called visual capitalism. How is visual capital, an ensemble of images that appear to have value, created and circulated? How does social differentiation cleave along lines of access to powerful modes of representation? Having framed those questions, one might then look at how the internet came to function as a site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic images of racialized bodies.
Here one might draw on Paul Gilroy’s work on the historical formation and contestation of racial categories, or the way Donna Haraway and Chela Sandoval look to cyborg bodies as produced by bio-technical networks, but within which they might exercise an ironic power of slippery self-definition. Either way, one might pay special attention to forms of image-making by non-elite or even banal cultures as well as to more high-profile mass media forms, cool subcultures or avant-garde art forms.
There’s several strands to this story, however. One of which might be the evolution of technical media form. From Nick Mirzoeff, Nakamura takes the idea of visual technology as an enhancement of vison, from easel painting to digital avatars. In the context of that historical background, one might ask what is old and what is new about what one discovers in current media forms. This might be a blend of historical, ethnographic and formal-aesthetic methods.
A good place to start such a study is with interfaces, and a good way to tie together the study of cinema, television and the internet is to study how the interfaces of the internet appear in cinema and television. Take, for instance, the video for Jennifer Lopez’s pop song, ‘If You Had My Love’ (1999). The conceit of the video is that Lopez is an avatar controlled by users who can view her in different rooms, doing difference dances in different outfits. The first viewer is a young man – a bit like one of Azuma’s otaku – who appears to be looking for something to jerk-off to, but there are other imaginary viewers through-out, including teen-girls and a rather lugubrious inter-racial threesome, nodding off together on a sofa.
So different people can be on the human side of the interface. Here, we are voyeurs on their voyeurism. The interface itself is perhaps the star, and J-Lo herself becomes its object. With the interface, the imaginary user in frame and the imagining one – us – can make J-Lo perform as different kinds of dancer, slotting her into different racial and cultural niches. The interface offers “multiple points of entry to the star.” (27) She – it – can be chopped and streamed. It’s remarkable that this video made for MTV sits so nicely now on Youtube.com whose interactive modes it premediates.
There was – and still is – a lot of commentary on The Matrix (1999), but not much of it lingers over the slightly embarrassing second and third movies in the franchise. They are “bad films with their hearts in the right place.” (104) Like the J-Lo video, they deal among other things with what Eugene Thacker called immediacy, or the expectation of real time feedback and control via an interface. As Nakamura drolly notes, “This is an eloquent formulation of entitlement…” (94) Where the Matrix films get interestingly weird is in their treatment of racial difference among interface users under “information capitalism.” (96)
The Matrix pits blackness as embodiment against whiteness as the digital. What goes on in the background to the main story is a species of Afrofuturism, but it’s the opposite of Black Accelerationism, in which a close proximity of the black body to the machine is in advance of whiteness, and to be desired. In The Matrix version, the black body holds back from the technical, and retains attributes of soul, individuality, corporeality, and this is its value. Nakamura: “Afrofurturist mojo and black identity are generally depicted as singular, ‘natural’… ‘unassimilable’ and ‘authentic.’” (100) Whereas with the bad guy Agent Smith, “Whiteness thus spreads in a manner that exemplifies a much-favored paradigm of e-business in the nineties: viral marketing.” (101) The white Agents propagate through digitally penetrating other white male bodies.
At least race appears in the films, which offer some sort of counter-imaginary to cyber-utopianism. But as Coco Fusco notes, photography and cinema don’t just record race – they produce it. Lev Manovich notes that it’s in the interface that the photographic image is produced now, and so for Nakamura, it is the interface that bears scrutiny as the place where race is made. In The Matrix, race is made to appear for a notionally white viewer. “The presence of blackness in the visual field guards whites from the iresistable seduction of the perfectly transparent interface…. Transparent interfaces are represented as intuitive, universal, pre- or postverbal, white, translucent, and neutral – part of a visual design aesthetic embodied by the Apple iPod.” (109)
Apple’s iconic early ads for the iPod featured blacked-out silhouettes of dancing bodies, their white earbud cords flapping as they move, against bold single-color backgrounds. For Nakamura, they conjure universal consumers who can make product choices, individuated neoliberal subjects in a color-blind world. Like the ‘users’ of J-Lo in her video, they can shuffle between places, styles, cultures, ethnicities – even if some of the bodies dancing in the ads are mean to be read as not just black-out but also black. Blackness, at the time at least, was still the marker for the authentic in white desire around music. In this world, “Whiteness is replication, blackness is singularity, but never for the black subject, always for the white subject.” (116)
Nakamura: “This visual culture, which contrasts black and white interface styles so strongly, insists that it is race that is real. In this way the process of new media as a cultural formation that produces race is obscured; instead race functions here as a way to visualize new media image production… In this representational economy, images of blacks serve as talismans to ward off the consuming power of the interface, whose transparent depths, like Narcissus’ pool, threaten to fatally immerse its users.” (116, 117)
If blackness stands for authentic embodiment in this visual culture, then Asian-ness stands for too much proximity to the tech. The Asian shows up only marginally in The Matrix. Its star, the biracial Keanu Reeves, was like J-Lo quite racially malleable for audiences. In his case he could be read as white by whites and Asian by Asians if they so desired. A more ironic and telling example is the film Minority Report (2002). Tom Cruise – was there a whiter star in his era? – has to get his eyes replaced, as retinal scanning is everywhere in this film’s paranoid future. Only the eyes he gets belonged to a Japanese person, and the Cruise character finds himself addressed as a particularly avid consumer everywhere he goes. Hiroki Azuma and Asada Akira had once advanced a kind of ironic Asian Accelerationism, which positively valued a supposed closeness of the Asian with the commodity and technology, but in Minority Report it’s an extreme for the white subject to avoid.
Race at the interface might be a moment in a process of production and reproduction (and its queer twists) that Donna Haraway called the integrated circuit. It partakes now in what Paul Gilroy notes is a crisis of raciology, brought on by the popularization of genetic testing. The old visual regimes of race struggle to adapt to the spreading awareness of the difference between genotype and phenotype. The film GATTACA (1997) is here a prescient one in imagining how a new kind of racism of the genotype might arise. It imagines a world rife with interfaces designed to detect the genotypical truth of appearances.
Nakamura ties these studies of the interface in cinema and television to studies of actual interfaces, particularly lowly, unglamorous, everyday ones. For instance, she looks at the avatars made for AIM Instant Messenger, which started in 1997 as an application running in Microsoft Windows. Of interest to her are the self-made cartoon-like avatars users chose to represent themselves to their ‘buddies.’ “The formation of digital taste cultures that are low resolution, often full of bathroom humor, and influenced by youth-oriented and transnational visual styles like anime ought to be traced as it develops in its native mode: the internet.” (30-31)
At the time there was little research on such low forms, particularly those popular with women. Low-res forms populated with cut and paste images from the Care Bears, Disney and Hello Kitty are not the ideal subjects of interactivity imagined in cyberculture theories. But there are questions here of who has access to what visual capital, of “who sells and is bought, who surfs and is surfed.” (33) AIM avatars are often based on simple cut and paste graphics, but users modified the standard body images with signs that marked out their version of cultural or racial difference. This was a moment of explosion of ethnic identity content on the web – to which, incidentally, we may in 2017 be witnessing the backlash.
AIM users could download avatars from websites that offered them under various categories – of which race was never one, as this is a supposedly postracial world. The avatars were little gifs, made of body parts cut from a standard template with variations of different hair, clothing, slogans, etc. These could be assembled into mini-movies, remediating stuff from anime, comics, games; as a mix of photos and cartoons, flags, avatars.
One could read Nakamura’s interest in the visual self-presencing of women and girls as a subset of Henry Jenkins’ interest in fan based media, but she lacks Jenkins’ occasionally over-enthusiastic embrace of such activity as democratic and benign. Her subaltern taste-cultures are a little more embattled and compromised.
The kind of femininity performed here is far from resistant and sometimes not even negotiated. These versions of what Hito Steyerl would later call the poor image would be hard to redeem aesthetically. Cultural studies had tried to ask meta-questions about what the objects of study are, but even so, we ended up with limited lists of proper new media objects, of which AIM avatars were was not one.
The same could be said of the website alllooksame.com. The site starts with a series of photographs of faces, and asks the user to identify which is Japanese, Chinese or Korean. (Like most users, I could not tell, which is the point.) The category of the Asian-American is something of a post-Civil Rights construct. It promised resistance to racism in pan-ethnic identity, but which paradoxically treated race as real. While alllooksame.com is an odd site, for Nakamura it does at least unite Asian viewers in questioning visual rhetoric about race. Here it provides a counter-example to Ien Ang’s study of Huaren.org, which to her essentializes diasporic Chinese-ness.
Asian-American online practice complicates the digital divide, being on both sides. The Asian-American appears in popular racial consciousness as a ‘model minority’, supposedly uninterested in politics, avid about getting ahead in information capitalism, or whatever this is. Yet she or he also appears as the refugee, the undocumented, the subsistence wage service worker. For Nakamura, this means that the study of the digital divide has to look beyond the race of users to other questions of difference, and also to questions of agency online rather than mere user numbers.
While in some racialized codings, the ‘Asian’ is high-tech and assmiliates to (supposedly) western consumerist modes, the encounter between postcolonial literary theory and new media forms produces quite other conjunctures. To collapse a rich and complex debate along just one of its fault-lines: imperial languages such as English can be treated either as something detachable from its supposed national origin, or as something to refuse altogether.
The former path values hybridity and the claiming of agency within the language of the colonizer. The latter wants resist this, and sticks up for the unity and coherence of a language and a people. And, just to complicate matters further, this second path has to be acknowledged is also a European idea – the unity and coherence of a people and its language being itself an idea that emerged out of European romanticism.
Much the same fault-line can be found in debates about what to do in the postcolonial situation with the internet, which can also be perceived as western and colonizing – although it might make more sense now to think of it as colonizing not on behalf of the old nation-states as on behalf of what Benjamin Bratton calls the stack.
Nakamura draws attention to some of the interesting examples of work on non-western media, including Eric Michaels’ brilliant work on video production among western desert Aboriginal people in Australia, and the work of the RAQS Media Collective and Sarai in India, which reached out to non-English speaking and even on-literate populations through interface design and community access.
Since her book was published, work really flourished in the study of non-western uptakes of media, not to mention work on encouraging local adaptions and hybrids of available forms. If one shifts one’s attention from the internet to cellular telephone, one even has to question the assumption that the west somehow leads and other places follow. It may well be the case that most of the world leap-frogged over the cyberspace of the internet to the cellspace of telephony. A recent book by Yuk Hui even asks if there are non-western cosmotechnics, but that’s a topic for another time.
The perfect counterpoint to the old cyberculture idea of online disembodiment is Nakamura’s study of online pregnancy forums – the whole point of which is to create a virtual community for women in some stage of the reproductive process. Here Nakamura pays close attention to ways of representing pregnant bodies. The site she examines allowed users to create their own signatures, which were often collages of idealized images of themselves, their partners, their babies, and – in a most affecting moment, their miscarriages. Sometimes sonograms were included in the collages of the signatures, but the separate the fetus from the mother, and so other elements were generally added to bring her back into the picture.
It’s hard to imagine anything more kitsch. But then we might wonder why masculine forms of geek or otaku culture can be presented as cool when something like this is generally not. By the early 2000s the internet was about 50/50 men and women, and users were more likely to be working class or suburban. After it’s here comes everybody moment, the internet started to look more like regular everyday culture. These pregnant avatars, or ‘dollies’ were more cybertwee than cyberfeminist (not that these need be exclusive categories, of course). But by the early 2000s, “the commercialization of the internet has led many internet utopians to despair of its potential as a site to challenge institutional authority…” (160)
But perhaps it’s a question of reading outside one’s academic habitus. Nakamura: “’Vernacular’ assemblages created by subaltern users, in this case pregnant women, create impossible bodies that critique normative ones without an overt artistic or political intent.” (161) The subaltern in this case can speak, but choses to speak through images that don’t quite perform as visual cultural studies would want them to. Nakamura wants to resist reading online pregnancy forums in strictly social-science terms, and to look at the aesthetic dimensions. It’s not unlike what Dick Hebdige did in retrieving London youth subcultures from criminological studies of ‘deviance.’
The blind spot of visual cultural studies, at least at time, was vernacular self-presentation. But it’s hard to deny the pathos of images these women craft of their stillborn or miscarried children. The one thing that perhaps received the most belated attention in studies of emerging media is how they interact with the tragic side of life – with illness, death and disease. Those of us who have been both on the internet and studying it for thirty years or so now will have had many encounters with loss and grief. We will have had friends we hardly ever saw IRL who have passed or who grieve for those who have passed. IRL there are conventions for what signs and gestures one should make. In online communication they are emerging also.
Nakamura was right to draw attention to this in Digitizing Race, and she did so with a tact and a grace one could only hope to emulate. Nakamura: “The achievement of authenticity in these cases of bodies in pain and mourning transcends the ordinary logic of the analog versus the digital photograph because these bodily images invoke the ‘semi-magical act’ of remembering types of suffering that are inarticulate, private, hidden within domestic or militarized spaces that exclude the public gaze.” (168)
Not only is the body with all its marks and scars present in Nakamura’s treatment, it is present as something in addition to its whole being. “We live more, not less, in relation to our body parts, the dispossession or employment of ourselves constrained by a complicated pattern of self-alienation…. Rather than freeing ourselves from the body, as cyberpunk narratives of idealized disembodiment foresaw, informational technologies have turned the body into property…” (96) Here her work connects up with that of Maurizio Lazzarato and Gerald Raunig on machinic enslavement and the dividual respectively, in its awareness of the subsumption of components of the human into the inhuman.
But for all that, perhaps the enduring gift of this work is, to modify Adorno’s words, to not let the power of another or our own powerlessness – stupefy us. There might still be forms of agency, tactics of presentation, gestures of solidarity – and in unexpected places. Give how internet culture was tending in the decade after Digitizing Race, perhaps it is an obligation now to return the gift of serious and considered attention to our friends and comrades — and not least in the scholarly world. For the tragic side of life is never far away. The least we can do is listen to the pain of others. And speak in measured tones of each other’s small achievements of wit, grace and insight.
Also for you:Today, on October 13th, at block height 1000000, or 42 days before the Nxt blockchain’s 3rd birthday, the Nxt 1.0 -> Nxt 2.0 snapshot period came to an end, and 998.999.495 ARDR assets were automatically distributed to all accounts which had held any amount of NXT since the first snapshot was taken 3 months ago.
For every 1 NXT which has stayed in your account since the first snapshot, you’ve received 1 ARDR asset. If you’ve been a NXT hodler for half the period, you’ve received 0,5 ARDR per NXT. (For information about the distribution model read this)
This is the ONLY official Ardor asset:
Live feed from the Nxt AE
NXT and ARDR on exchanges
UPDATE
ARDR < > BTC markets:
https://hitbtc.com/exchange/ARDR-to-BTC
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-ARDR
Poloniex has distributed ARDR. We’re waiting for them to open a market.
ARDR Marketcap: http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ardor/
—
ARDR assets have been distributed to all NXT-holding accounts on participating centralised exchanges and now need to be distributed among the exchanges’ customers.
The Nxt team writes:
The distribution method used will depend on each respective exchange’s internal architecture, so the Nxt team and community can’t provide a universal solution for Ardor distribution within exchanges.
Poloniex, Bittrex, HitBTC, BTC38, etc., must be contacted directly by their customers for more information about their distribution method, if you haven’t yet received your ARDR.
HitBTC was the first centralised exchange to open a BTC < > ARDR market, but more exchanges are expected to follow soon. As most NXT-exchanges have active Nxt asset markets going too, it will be very easy for them to add ARDR.
Next snapshot – IGNIS
One snapshot remains – if you want to get full value for your NXT.
Ignis will be the first child chain, which is guaranteed to get launched on the Ardor platform. In Nxt 2.0, Ardor is the token used for creating consensus and Ignis will be the first transactional token. It will be created at the Ardor Genesis block. Free Ignis tokens will be distributed with a ratio of at least 1:0.5 to all NXT-holders at Genesis. A last snapshot of the Nxt blockchain will be taken just before that, so Ignis can launch together with Ardor.
Ignis will inherit all the current Nxt core features, but will be have others added and be further developed by the Nxt development team. The snapshot will be taken in Q3 2017.
And the unparalleled Nxt platform?
Nxt will continue, and be supported, by the Nxt core devs.
As the Nxt core developers wrote, in a Q&A session a few days ago:
riker
NXT promoted Jelurida and Jelurida will promote NXT.
jean-luc
There will be small businesses and end users who don’t need, or can’t afford, a private blockchain. Those will continue using Nxt, or start a child chain on Ardor.
riker
We can use the funds we receive from private chains to promote the development of the public chain which will in turn provide marketing and public relation for NXT/Ardor and bring us more private chain business.
ipsec [9:08 PM]
Now its very risky to invest NXT and ADROR…..because after 13 price of NXT will down
jean-luc [9:09 PM]
Everybody expecting a dump after 13th… then everybody would sell before 13th
my guess is, the dump has already happened, but then I am not a trader.
If you dump, what else would you buy that has better “incentive structure”?
And that’s the case. If Nxt is not the platform to start coding your new Ardor Nxt 2.0 projects on, then which?
With the Nxt Foundation marketing it, with an educational book about Nxt 1.0 coming out soon, with businesses rushing in to get into the best blockchain tech before the technology itself disrupts them…. will it be wise to sell NXT?
Jean-Luc:
We have projects using the public Nxt blockchain which will need to be supported for at least the next 2 years and probably longer. We’re also in the process of bringing in more core devs for Nxt as well as for Ardor, with the aim of establishing 2 semi-independent core dev teams.
There has been lot of public FUD and confusion about all of this, so I hope this clears up any questions or doubts that you may have about the future plans for Nxt and Ardor.
In doubt? Get involved.
Join nxtforum.org or the Nxtchat Slack channel:
DeBuNe is currently looking for extra developers to join their distributed team. m19: “We are creating our own custom version of NXT/Ardor and some of the changes you make might even end up in the core, we are in no way competing with them but instead actively supporting it.
https://nxtchat.slack.com/messages/job-offers/mentions/
LQD asset CEO libertynow [2:37 AM]: “If NXT goes below the Oct 4 bottom at 1667 I’ll start getting worried. well, not really. i don’t care that much. I can just use the NXT for divs if I really need to”.
You might also want to read: The Nxt Asset Exchange Tutorial
Congrats with your ARDR assets. Exchanges are open. The future will not be centralised. It will be you.
View this in: Français Русский EspañolMarines with Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 469, call sign "Vengeance," took part Tuesday in low-level terrain flight training at Camp Pendleton.
The squadron, which deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, consists of aviators, crew and mechanics who work with AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters and UH-1Y Venom utility helicopters.
"The goal is to support Marines on the ground," said Lance Cpl. Gage Martin, 20, of Burlington, Vermont, one of two crew chiefs aboard a UH-1Y Venom. "Hueys and Cobras are the best for the job."
Both aircraft can unleash significant ordnance on the enemy during attack and evac situations, said Cpl. Micah Machefsky, 24, of Fairhope, Alabama, who was in Afghanistan last year with HMLA-469.
The squadron's formal mission statement includes providing "offensive air support, utility support, armed escort and airborne supporting arms coordination during expeditionary, joint or combined operations."
1st Lt. Brandon Smith, 27, of Houston, Texas, was co-pilot for a training flight Tuesday with Machefsky and Martin. Capt. Brian Jordan, 29, of Corpus Christi, Texas, was lead pilot for the mission.
The UH-1Y Venom crew worked closely with a two-man Cobra crew that included Lt. Col. Dick Joyce, HMLA-469's commanding officer. Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 469 is part of Marine Aircraft Group 39 and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, based at Camp Pendleton.
Marines with Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 469 also train at the Air Ground Combat Center outside Twentynine Palms. Their aircraft are seen and heard from time to time in the San Gorgonio Pass.Last night, drug kingpin and leader of the Sinoala Cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, fresh of an elaborate escape from a maximum security prison, was a free man. Whether El Chapo was in front of a television watching Mexico survive a CONCACAF Gold Cup quarterfinal against Costa Rica due to a dubious last second penalty in extra time is uncertain, but plenty of people on Twitter had El Chapo jokes ready; because everything shady that happens involving Mexico, until El Chapo is captured, will come with a steady supply of #ChapoJokes. (Note: I am not saying that these are necessarily good jokes.)
Have a look for yourself: Controversial penalty awarded to Mexico in extra time. #GoldCup2015 http://t.co/CoIIdlCPS4 — FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) July 20, 2015
Let’s revisit some of the tweets from after last night’s 1-0 Mexico victory over Costa Rica.
El Chapo already out and making a difference for Mexico, paid that ref brah #MEXvCRC — jmo (@1nonlyJMO) July 20, 2015
Mexico with that bullshit call. Only reason they got it was cuz El Chapo is loose 😂 — Bobby Hernandez (@Bobbylicious_24) July 20, 2015
Now that el chapo is out you can expect Mexico to win the Gold Cup — Nosferatu's Son (@ItsJosieTho) July 20, 2015
El Chapo escapes just in time to pay Mexico's way into the semi's. #MEXvCRC — Carlos Araya (@El_Rico_Suave10) July 20, 2015
There was no way the ref was gonna let Mexico lose vs Costa Rica now that El Chapo is out… #CONCACAF'd #GoldCup2015 #CopaOro2015 — Mark Swift (@markswiftmusic) July 20, 2015
El Chapo paid this referee off for Mexico #GoldCup #MEXvCRC — Edgar Rivas (@erivas92) July 20, 2015
Makes you wonder if maybe el chapo had something to do with that last minute win for Mexico — Diego (@Hernandez33D) July 20, 2015
Looks like El Chapo had the refs paid off 👨🏻⚽️ MEXICO: 1 – Costa Rica: 0 — Trevor Rhodelander (@iamtrevorr) July 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/__ciscokid__/status/622955163045605377
El Chapo paid $1.2 million to FIFA ref for Mexico's escape from defeat. #MEXvCRC — Jose Gutierrez (@noitsjose) July 20, 2015
Yo @cthagod when you see "El Chapo" tell him thanks for that last second penalty call in the Mexico game. The fam owes him #MEXvsCRC — David Cardona (@cardo_dav) July 20, 2015
The only reason why the ref called the PK was because if Mexico lost El Chapo would have killed the ref — juan (@LejuanJames_) July 20, 2015
The only explanation I have for that Penalty kick Mexico got is that El Chapo paid the refs and/or FIFA — Billy Buckets (@VersaceBiscuits) July 20, 2015
El Chapo Guzman is giving drug money to CONCACAF for Mexico to win the Gold Cup. #Corruption — EliasMagallanes (@EliasMagJr) July 20, 2015
Mexico only got that pk because El Chapo threatened the refs and they didn't remember they were gonna die until literally the last minute — Ingram Koolman (@IngramKoolman) July 20, 2015
The ref saw El Chapo in the stands so he had to give Mexico the penalty. — josh (@Joshx13_) July 20, 2015
https://twitter.com/JulitoGuwop/status/622958368966062080
You get the idea. El Chapo now faces Panama in Wednesday’s semifinal at the Georgia Dome. The U.S. plays Jamaica in the other semifinal. We’re one step away from an El Chapo vs. Donald Trump final. What a time to be alive.Researchers have discovered a potent antibody in panda blood, which could help fight increasingly prevalent drug-resistant strains of infections.
Cathelicin-AM was discovered when researchers analyzed the DNA of pandas. It can kill fungi and bacteria. Scientists think that the antibiotic is released to protect the animals from infections in the wild. In studies, it was able to kill standard and drug-resistant strains of microbes and fungi. The efficacy is also very quick, killing off strains of bacteria in just an hour, while conventional antibiotics needed six hours.
“Gene-encoded antimicrobial peptides play an important role in innate immunity against noxious microorganisms,” lead researcher Dr. Xiuwen Yen, from the Life Sciences College of Nanjing Agricultural University, in China said to the Telegraph. “They cause much less drug resistance of microbes than conventional antibiotics.”
Read more at http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/13712/20121231/panda-blood-hold-potent-assailant-against-superbugs.htm#FOzAEROKuBuad8lO.99
Researchers have been able to synthesize a version of the compound in the lab, decoding the genes in order to create a peptide. This is good news, since there are only 1,600 pandas in the world today, and they are notoriously bad at breeding, even in the wild.
The scientists hope that their synthetic version can be deployed as an antibiotic or as a surface sanitizer and believe that the panda genome holds other drugs that could help as well.
Reference:
Yan X, Zhong J, Liu H, Liu C, Zhang K, Lai R., “The cathelicidin-like peptide derived from panda genome is a potential antimicrobial peptide.” Gene. 2012 Jan 25;492(2):368-74. doi: 10.1016/j.gene.2011.11.009. Epub 2011 Nov 10.
[via Medical Daily]Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
According to a list compiled by independent blog, American Kabuki, at least 122 banking directors, CEOs, and board members of both national and international stature have resigned since September of last year. The blog recently posted a list of all 122 of these individuals with links to the announcements and reports of their resignation.
The fact that banks have been reshuffling their personnel is, of course, nothing new. However, 122 resignations does seem like a large number, particularly when one realizes that many of these resignations are coming from relatively large institutions.
As a result, there has been much speculation and concern on the part of many observers as to what these shifts actually mean.
While it should be mentioned that the list contains resignations from some institutions that are relatively small in terms of international finance, one might also do well to remember that banks, insurance companies, corporations, and governments are often tied together by a seemingly infinite number of spiderweb connections that only become visible as certain parts of the financial relationships are unearthed.
To be clear, this writer is not suggesting that every single bank included in this list is part of a criminal conspiracy, cover-up, or act of misconduct. In fact, I am not suggesting that any of them are. However, when it comes to some institutions such as the World Bank or the Bank of England, the history of treachery is obvious and should be kept in mind as you draw your own conclusions.
In fact, it is the resignations taking place amidst these larger institutions that should be a cause for greater concern in the first place.
Indeed, the number of resignations taking place amongst large institutions such as CitiBank, Lloyds Banking Group, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan alone should be enough to turn some heads.
But there is also an alarming number of central banks included on this list as well. Perhaps the most surprising is the fact that Phillip Hildebrand, the head of Switzerland’s central bank, recently handed in his resignation. Not only that, but there have been resignations coming from several other central banks including Argentina, Kuwait, Nicaraqua, and Kenya.
Even the World Bank is now accepting the resignation of Robert Zoellick.
The truth is, we don’t know what these resignations actually mean. Are they merely coincidence? Is this par for the course in the international banking industry?
Or are we witnessing the beginning of a rush for the exits by those who are in a position to see what is coming down the pike? Considering the state of the world financial system, this would not be too hard to believe.
Or are we witnessing a panicked flight of the guilty on the eve of a coming round of real investigations? Might there be a coming worldwide financial scandal that these individuals would drastically like to avoid?
Either way, 122 resignations from September to March at least sounds like a big number. It would be nice to know exactly what the rate of resignation was in previous years. Until we are able to find that number, it might be wise for us to ask ourselves what these individuals know that we don’t.
Below is the list of resignations as compiled by AmericanKabuki.blogspot.com along with some additions at the end:
9/01/11 (USA NY) Bank of New York Mellon Chief Robert P. Kelly Resigns in a Shake-UP
http://goo.gl/NdW7q 1.Bank of New York Mellon ChiefResigns in a Shake-UP
09/20/11 (SCOTLAND) SCOTTISH WIDOWS (RETIREMENT INVESTMENT SAVINGS FUND) There could be no Scottish representative on the board of Lloyds Banking Group, owner of Bank of Scotland, in future after it announced the departure of Lord Sandy Leitch, the chairman of Scottish Widows and group deputy chairman.
http://goo.gl/Dx8qs 2.SCOTTISH WIDOWS (RETIREMENT INVESTMENT SAVINGS FUND) There could be no Scottish representative on the board of Lloyds Banking Group, owner of Bank of Scotland, in future after it announced the departure of, the chairman of Scottish Widows and group deputy chairman.
9/25/11 (SWITZERLAND) UBS CEO Oswald Gruebel quits over £1.5bn rogue trader crisis
http://goo.gl/WCeqB 3.UBS CEOquits over £1.5bn rogue trader crisis
9/28/11 (SWITZERLAND) SNB Bank Council: Fritz Studer resigns as per end-April 2012
http://goo.gl/7dNiD 4.SNB Bank Council:resigns as per end-April 2012
10/29/11 (CHINA) China Construction Bank Corp Chairman Guo Shuqing resigns
http://goo.gl/fdd9v 5.China Construction Bank Corp Chairmanresigns
10/29/11 (CHINA) Agricultural Bank of China Ltd Chairman Xiang Junbo resigns
http://goo.gl/yWX9R 6.Agricultural Bank of China Ltd Chairmanresigns
11/01/11 (INDIA) More directors of the Beed district bank resign
http://goo.gl/HD8BQ 7.More directors of the Beed district bank resign
11/02/11 (UK) Lloyds Banking Group chief executive, António Horta-Osório, is to take leave of absence on health grounds for six to eight weeks, the BBC has reported. (STILL OUT AS OF 2/24/12 – DEFACTO RESIGNATION)
http://goo.gl/3L9gE 8.Lloyds Banking Group chief executive,, is to take leave of absence on health grounds for six to eight weeks, the BBC has reported. (STILL OUT AS OF– DEFACTO RESIGNATION)
11/21/11 (JAPAN) UBS’s Japan Investment Banking Chairman Matsui to Resign
http://goo.gl/OiDiq 9.UBS’s Japan Investment Banking Chairmanto Resign
11/29/11 (USA) R. David Land Submits Resign |
Rooney
Pittsburgh Steelers co-owner and president. His presence on several key committees makes him a force in the league, as does the fact he comes from one of the most respected and longest-tenured families in the NFL.
40. Sarah Thomas
Game official. She became the first female hired on a full-time basis to serve in that role last season. Thomas worked Conference USA games at the college level. She was a line judge last season.
41-50 NFL's most important
41. Russell Wilson
Seahawks quarterback. Despite questions about whether his style of play and height – Wilson is generously listed at 5-11 – would work at this level, he has won more games (46 in the regular season and seven more in the playoffs) in his first four seasons than any quarterback in history. One of them was a Super Bowl in Wilson’s second year.
42. Bob McNair
Founder and owner of the Texans. He is also chairman of the NFL finance committee. McNair hopes his team will be the first to host a Super Bowl with the big game set to be staged in Houston next February.
43. Jeff Pash
Executive vice president and general counsel for the NFL. Pash, a major player in Deflategate, has a significant role in the handling of any critical legal issues the league faces and is a major player in collective bargaining negotiations.
44. Jared Goff
Rams quarterback. The No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 draft, he is expected to restore the lowly Rams to greatness amid their Los Angeles return.
Odell Beckham junior lands at No. 45 on our list of the Top 100 most important people in the NFL. (Photo: Brad Penner, USA TODAY Sports)
45. Odell Beckham Jr.
Giants wide receiver. In the golden age of pass catchers, the man who dominates highlight reels by hauling in so many with one hand stands above the rest.
46. Jeff Miller
The NFL's top executive for health and safety. He – and the league – tried to walk back the comments, but Miller acknowledged to a Congressional committee that there was a connection between football and CTE.
47. Ted Wells
Attorney who specializes in criminal law. The league hired Wells to conduct independent investigations into the Miami Dolphins’ locker room bullying scandal in 2013 and “Deflategate” in 2015.
48. Sashi Brown
Executive vice president of football operations for the Cleveland Browns. It’s his turn to see if he’s the one who can turn this once-proud franchise around. Brown’s reliance on analytics will make it that much more interesting to watch.
49. Terry and Kim Pegula
Buffalo Bills owners. The husband-and-wife team is committed to western New York, but their looming stadium issue is tricky and worth watching.
51-60 NFL's most important
Rob Gronkowski, the Patriots tight end, is at No. 50 on our list of the most important people in the NFL. (Photo: David Butler II, USA TODAY Sports)
50. Rob Gronkowski
Patriots tight end. Gronkowski has already set several receiving records for his position and is quickly putting together a Hall-of-Fame resume. But his zany and fun-loving personality have also made him a ubiquitous presence on social media and TV (he’s now got a show on Nickelodeon). He hosted a fantasy cruise in the Bahamas earlier this year, and he’s even the newest cover boy for Madden NFL.
51. Chip Kelly
San Francisco 49ers head coach. He went 10-6 each of his first two seasons with the Philadelphia Eagles but bombed (and was fired) in 2015 after assuming control of personnel decisions. Kelly is back to mere coaching with the 49ers, but many of his creative offensive concepts have been emulated throughout the league. Still, if he’s not successful with the Niners, will that deter owners from reaching into the college ranks for a coach?
52. Mark Lazarus
Chairman of NBC Sports. Not only does his network have the prime-time game every Sunday, typically the marquee NFL matchup of the week, it now will broadcast five Thursday night games.
53. Daily fantasy sports chiefs
DraftKings CEO Jason Robins and Nigel Eccles of FanDuel. Their industry remains under fire in many states, which claim it is illegal sports gambling, but you couldn’t watch a game last season without seeing one of their commercials. Or 100 of them.
CLOSE USA Today Sports' Lorenzo Reyes examines some of the league executives and explains why they have great influence on the NFL. USA TODAY Sports
54. Martha Ford
Majority owner and chairwoman of the Detroit Lions. Ford, 90, has made no mistake who is in charge in Detroit since assuming control of the long struggling franchise in 2014.
55. Eric Winston
President of the NFLPA and Cincinnati Bengals tackle. Winston has been very critical of the league when it comes to concussion research and reports, saying: “They cannot be trusted to do the right thing when it involves players.”
56. Ozzie Newsome
Baltimore Ravens general manager and executive vice president. The Hall-of-Fame tight end has been in the Ravens front office since they came to Baltimore in 1996 and became the NFL’s first African-American GM in 2002. Newsome is considered one of the league’s best talent evaluators and has built two Super Bowl champions in Baltimore.
57. Jon Gruden
ESPN Monday Night Football analyst. He makes the list not for his TV work, but because Gruden’s QB Camp has become a “must stop” for top NFL quarterback prospects prior to the last seven drafts.
58. John Wooten
Chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. He works with the NFL to promote minority hiring for coaching, scouting and front office positions.
59. DeAndre Levy
Lions linebacker. Levy makes the list not for his Pro Bowl play but because he wrote an article in The Players’ Tribune titled “Man Up,” discussing the shocking lack of awareness there is for sexual assault in sports.
60. Manning Family
From recently retired Peyton, who went out with a second Super Bowl ring, to his brother Eli, who has the same number of championships with the Giants, to their dad Archie, who was a damn good QB on a lot of bad teams, they certainly can lay claim to being the First Family of Football. It remains to be seen if that title gets tarnished given the NFL’s ongoing investigation into Peyton’s alleged link to human growth hormone.
61-70 NFL's most important
61. Eric Grubman
NFL executive vice president and president of the league’s business ventures since 2006. He oversaw and advocated for the Rams’ relocation from St. Louis to Los Angeles.
62. Arthur Blank
Falcons owner. After this season, his team will move into groundbreaking Mercedes Benz Stadium, which was selected to host the 2019 Super Bowl. Blank’s foundation has been lauded by many for trying to improve the quality of life for people living in the Atlanta area.
63. Marvin Lewis
Bengals head coach. Hired in 2003, he is currently the longest-tenured minority coach, and only Bill Belichick has served longer with a franchise among current coaches. Lewis has achieved sustained success (five consecutive playoff appearances) with a franchise where few thought that was possible.
64. Thom Mayer
NFLPA medical director. He has been at the forefront for the union and is a driving force in developing the players’ positions on health and safety matters, which include pushing the league on the concussion issue. Mayer is also the point person for the union for investigations where breach of concussion protocol is suspected.
65. Brock Osweiler
Texans quarterback. The big free-agent signing in 2016, Houston lured him away from the Broncos with a four-year, $72 million contract even though Osweiler only has seven career starts – quite a statement on the value of QBs in the modern NFL.
Katie Blackburn, right, stands with Bengals owner Mike Brown and head coach Marvin Lewis. (Photo: Jeff Swinger, The Cincinnati Enquirer)
66. Katie Blackburn
Bengals executive vice president. The daughter of Cincinnati owner Mike Brown, Blackburn was the first woman to be a chief contract negotiator in the NFL and has assumed more day-to-day control of the franchise. The MMQB called her “The NFL’s Most Powerful Woman Nobody Talks About.”
67. Brandon Marshall
Jets wide receiver. Besides his on-field talents – Marshall is the only player with 1,000-yard receiving seasons for four teams – he is recognized as an advocate for borderline personality disorder patients after his own diagnosis. Marshall sought professional help after several domestic violence accusations.
68. CAA Football
Led by the powerful agent trio of Tom Condon, Jimmy Sexton and Todd France, Creative Artists Agency's football wing represents stars like J.J. Watt, Eli Manning, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Luke Kuechly, Dez Bryant, Julio Jones and Ndamukong Suh, plus budding stars who just got paid (Fletcher Cox) or soon will (Tyrann Mathieu). Sexton also reps coaches, including Rex Ryan and Adam Gase.
69. Sean McManus
CBS Sports chairman. The network, which typically airs AFC games, took a bold step by jumping into the Thursday Night Football package in 2014, and it is paying off for them.
70. Mark Waller
NFL’s executive vice president for international affairs. He’s become a strong proponent of the league’s expansion outside the U.S. and said in a recent interview he envisions the establishment of more than one team in a foreign city. In 2016, the NFL will host three games in England and one in Mexico City.
71-80 NFL's most important
71. Eric Shanks
President, chief operating officer and executive producer for FOX Sports. The network, which airs the NFC package, has been the most innovative since arriving on the scene in 1994.
72. Amy Adams Strunk
Controlling owner of the Tennessee Titans. Daughter of late owner Bud Adams, Strunk and her family members have been attempting to comply with NFL rules involving ownership structure so they can maintain control of the franchise, which Bud Adams founded in 1960.
73. Bob LaMonte
Need a coach or general manager? Call LaMonte. His Professional Sports Representation, Inc., represents seven NFL head coaches, five GMs and dozens more coaches and executives in pro and college football. Last year’s class included the Giants’ Ben McAdoo and Eagles’ Doug Pederson.
74. Tony Dungy
NBC analyst. The Hall-of-Fame coach’s importance goes far beyond his TV duties. Many coaches and players still reach out to him for advice.
75. John Skipper
President of ESPN. His network has the Monday night package and offers countless hours of NFL programming throughout the year.
CLOSE USA Today Sports' Lorenzo Reyes examines NFL team front offices and which executives have the greatest influence on the league. USA TODAY Sports
76. James Andrews
Prominent American orthopedic surgeon. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, names in sports medicine. Andrews has worked on NFL players such as Adrian Peterson and Peyton Manning and is often sought for a second opinion.
77. John Madden
Hall-of-Fame coach of the Raiders and longtime TV analyst. Even in retirement, he continues to serve as an advisor with the NFL and, of course, his name headlines the popular EA Sports Madden NFL video game that he’s been endorsing since 1988.
Shad Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, is building a team on the rise. (Photo: Logan Bowles, USA TODAY Sports)
78. Shad Khan
Jacksonville Jaguars owner. He has overseen many improvements to EverBank Field, including, yes, the pool. But Khan is also building a team that will soon be the main attraction.
79. George Whitfield
Known as the “quarterback guru,” he typically works with passing prospects prior to the draft. Whitfield's clientele has included players like Johnny Manziel, Cam Newton, Andrew Luck, and Jameis Winston.
80. Adrian Peterson
Minnesota Vikings running back. He led the league in rushing (for the third time) in 2015 at 30, the age when most backs are retired or in steep decline. In the age of “pass first,” the 2012 MVP proves a running back can still be the biggest weapon on a playoff team’s offense.
81-90 NFL's most important
81. Joel Segal
Recently promoted to president of team sports at Lagardere Sports, he represents 54 active players, including five first-round picks in the 2016 draft. His client list includes Patrick Peterson, DeSean Jackson, Justin Houston and Khalil Mack.
82. Drew Rosenhaus
One of the most recognizable faces in the agent industry, he also remains one of the most prolific. Rosenhaus represents 106 current players, including Rob Gronkowski, LeSean McCoy, Greg Olsen and T.Y. Hilton.
83. Scott Hallenbeck
Executive director of USA Football, which oversees the sport on the youth and amateur levels. He plays a vital role for the NFL due to the fact that USA Football is the official youth development partner of all 32 of the league’s teams.
84. Tyrann Mathieu
Cardinals defensive back. He exemplifies the new emphasis on versatile defenders who can play safety, corner and even linebacker. Viewed as a risky third-round pick in 2013 after drug use prematurely ended his LSU career, Arizona is now grooming Mathieu as the future face of the franchise with a new contract around the corner. His maturation has also included his outspoken stance on social issues, like the rampant crime in his hometown of New Orleans.
85. Matthew Berry
Senior fantasy sports analyst for ESPN. The network gives him the perfect platform for talking to fantasy fans.
86. Mike Pereira
FOX Sports analyst. The former vice president of NFL officiating, he is now one of the most trusted voices when it comes to rules interpretations.
87. Cris Collinsworth
NBC Sunday Night Football analyst. Former Bengals receiver has a national broadcast audience every week. He also owns the football analytics website Pro Football Focus.
88. Mike Mayock, Todd McShay, Mel Kiper
NFL draft gurus. Mayock (NFL Network), McShay (ESPN) and Kiper (ESPN) dominate football talk for about three months of the year leading to the annual draft.
89. Charlotte Jones Anderson
Executive vice president and chief brand officer for the Cowboys, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world. She is also the chairwoman of the NFL Foundation, the league's charity arm that is knee-deep in pushing youth football and safety agendas.
90. Eugene Monroe
Offensive tackle. Recently released by the Ravens and now a free agent, Monroe has been outspoken on his view that the league should allow players to use medical marijuana instead of the addictive opioids teams often use to treat injuries.
91-100 NFL's most important
91. Charlie Sly
Formerly an intern at Indianapolis’ Guyer Institute, Sly was caught by an Al Jazeera America hidden camera linking five NFL players – Peyton Manning, James Harrison, Dustin Keller, Julius Peppers and Mike Neal – to HGH. The league says its investigation is ongoing.
92. Doug Hendrickson and Roosevelt Barnes
The death of legendary agent Eugene Parker and pending suspension of Ben Dogra left the football arm of Relativity Sports – recently rebranded Independent Sports and Entertainment – in the hands of this duo. Their client list includes Adrian Peterson, Jason Pierre-Paul and Aldon Smith.
93. Greg Hardy
Free agent defensive end. Has the league had enough, or will the first key injury bring the polarizing pass rusher back into the game?
94. David Baker
Pro Football Hall of Fame executive director. He is in charge of the game’s history.
95. Jim Irsay
Colts owner. He moved Andrew Luck atop the NFL pay scale but just might have struck a bargain by paying him $23.3 million through 2021, lower than many estimated Irsay would have to shell out.
96. Dave Gettleman
Panthers general manager. Since Gettleman took over in 2013, the Panthers have won three consecutive NFC South titles. And he’s quickly shown he has no fear of making a difficult decision with an eye to the future. In April, Gettleman rescinded the franchise tag from all-pro corner Josh Norman rather than overpay him and deviate from his philosophy of investing heavily in the trenches.
97. Michael Sam
The first openly gay player to be drafted – he didn’t make the Rams’ final roster after being selected in 2014 – he continues to imply that his sexuality is keeping him out of the NFL. Those comments could prevent other players from coming out.
98. Doug Mack
CEO of Fanatics, the licensed sports merchandising company that operates the e-commerce business for the NFL.
99. Dave Dunn and Brian Murphy
The founders and brain trust of Athletes First, the agency that represents Aaron Rodgers, Carson Palmer, Clay Matthews, Jamaal Charles and Earl Thomas, among others. Dunn has increasingly been involved with coaches, too, representing the likes of Chip Kelly and Jason Garrett.
100. Les Snead
Rams general manager. New quarterback. New city. Enough said for what will determine his future with the team now operating in the high-pressure Hollywood market.
***
The list was compiled by: Nancy Armour, Jarrett Bell, Chris D’Amico, Nate Davis, Lindsay H. jones, Tom Pelissero, Eric Prisbell and Lorenzo Reyes
The capsules were written by: Griffin Adams, Lila Bromberg and Callie Caplan.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board this week published its rating for Polish developer CD Projekt Red's open-world role-playing game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. As you might have expected, the game received an M for Mature rating, just like the first two games in the series did.
The ESRB's rating mentions that the game features blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, and use of alcohol, among other things. You can see the game's full ratings summary below.
After yet another delay, The Witcher 3 launches May 19 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
The Witcher 3 ESRB Ratings Summary:
"This is an open-world role-playing game in which players assume the role of Geralt, a monster hunter in search of a missing woman. Players explore a war-ravaged world while completing quests and killing enemy soldiers and fantastical creatures (e.g., wraiths, harpies, rock beasts)."
"Characters engage in melee-style combat using swords and other bladed weapons, as well as magical attacks (e.g., blasts of fire, stun spells); combat is highlighted by screams of pain and impact sounds. Large blood-splatter effects occur when enemies are slashed, with some attacks resulting in decapitation or dismemberment."
"Some cutscenes depict slow-motion decapitations and other gore: an autopsy of a torture victim, rooms with several corpses (e.g., hanging from the ceiling, covered in blood on a bed, naked in a tub). During the course of the game, the central character can engage in sexual activity with prostitutes and female companions. These brief sequences depict females' breasts and buttocks--sexual moaning sounds can be heard, though the camera cuts away from explicit sexual acts."
"The game includes a side quest in which Geralt engages in a drinking game; characters are depicted drunk and/or passed out. The words “f**k,” “sh*t,” and “c*nt” can be heard in the dialogue."
Via: DualshockersPresident Donald Trump. AP
President Donald Trump is giving House Republicans an ultimatum: Pass the American Health Care Act on Friday, or Obamacare stays.
Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Budget and Management director, made clear to Republicans on Thursday night that Trump wanted a vote Friday and that he was done negotiating on the bill to overhaul healthcare. If it is not passed, the president will move on from the bill, reports said.
A Republican aide told told Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur that GOP leadership would bring the bill to a vote on the House floor Friday.
In a statement late Thursday after scheduling the vote, House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters: "We have been promising the American people that we will repeal and replace this broken law because it's collapsing and it's failing families. And tomorrow we're proceeding."
It is unclear whether it has the votes to pass.
"Disastrous Obamacare has led to higher costs & fewer options. It will only continue to get worse!" Trump tweeted Thursday evening. "We must #RepealANDReplace. #PassTheBill."
House Republican leaders originally wanted to vote on the AHCA on Thursday, but an impasse with the conservative House Freedom Caucus led them to delay the vote.
Trump, who has been called the "closer" by Ryan, met with Freedom Caucus members on Wednesday and Thursday but could not get them to agree to vote for the AHCA.
In fact, some concessions that the White House has been considering for the Freedom Caucus have made moderate members of the GOP waver on the bill. Conservatives have been calling for the AHCA to drop provisions from Obamacare that disallow insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. They have also urged the bill to be scrapped of so-called essential health benefits that set a baseline for the necessary coverage a health insurer has to provide.
Mulvaney, once a member of the Freedom Caucus, reportedly laid down an ultimatum to the GOP members including the Freedom Caucus and the moderate Tuesday Group at a meeting on Capitol Hill.
As of 8 p.m. ET, 33 House Republicans have said they will not vote for the AHCA, according to The New York Times. Republicans can only afford to have 22 GOP members vote "no" for the bill to pass.Buy Photo Rogelio Mills, owner of Charles' Hot Wheels, poses for a photo in his shop located at the Gilbraltar Trade Center in Mt. Clemens on Monday March 28, 2016. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
Less than a year ago, Rogelio Mills was visiting his adult son, an avid Hot Wheels collector, when he realized that the toy cars had taken over the apartment. There were hundreds and hundreds of them.
So many, Mills said, he had no place to sit down.
Mills suggested that his son — who had been collecting for years — part with some.
They took some of the collectible toys to the Gibraltar Trade Center, a huge public market, in Mt. Clemens, and set up a small table outside. Then they started hawking some of the cars they had brought. Before long they had sold out.
Buy Photo Specialty and hard to find Hot Wheels cars are sold by Rogelio Mills, owner of Charles' Hot Wheels, located at the Gilbraltar Trade Center in Mt. Clemens on Monday, March 28, 2016. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)
"Then, we went on the inside and got a small booth -- I think it was 10 by 10 -- and he did it again," Mills said, recalling how the one-time sale began turning into a business. "And then we moved to another booth -- doubled in size -- and he did it again."
Now, the duo has a shop named Charles’ Hot Wheels Store, at the trade center.
It is open three days a week, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and sells hundreds of new and vintage Hot Wheel cars ranging from about $2 to $1,000 each, as well as a variety of Hot Wheels-branded merchandise, including bikes and Barbie dolls.
Buy Photo Rogelio Mills, owner of Charles' Hot Wheels, poses for a photo in his shop located at the Gilbraltar Trade Center in Mt. Clemens on Monday, March 28, 2016. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)
Mills said that he projects the shop will have more than $100,000 in revenue in its first year, and hopes to open similar stores in malls.
"We sell a lot of cars," he said. "Everything moves."
In a conversation edited for clarity and space, Mills talked about what it takes to start a small business.
QUESTION: Is this a store that works in metro Detroit because we are the Motor City?
ANSWER: That's a good question. I've thought about that, because I'm from North Carolina. I'd like to say yes. But, since I've never been anywhere else with the store, it's hard to say. I've often wondered that. The people in Detroit, in Michigan, are good people. And you are crazy about your cars. People in Michigan are car crazy.
Q: Do you find that one type of car sells better than others?
A: Actually, the store is categorized based on car and make, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, and then your imports and then what we call your bobo cars.
Q: As an entrepreneur, what advice would you give on starting a business?
A: First of all, I always tell people: Do what you love, and love what you are doing. The reason is because to start a business -- and notice I emphasize the word love -- it's a commitment. You have to be committed to what you are doing. To do that, you have to find out everything you can about a business. It's like dating. If you really love it, the next step is to do what you can with the information that will be beneficial to the relationship or the business. Lastly, don't give up.
Q: So fall in love, get married, and don't get divorced?
A: There you go!
Q: You said you contacted Mattel, the manufacturer, and now have some kind of deal with the company?
A: Yes. The cars were moving so fast, it was putting a strain on me to go to stores that were carrying the brand, and I thought: Why can't I just go to Mattel. Well, I found out you can't go to Mattel, because stores have exclusive contracts. I went to them and that's how it started.
Q: So what is the arrangement with Mattel?
A: We contract to use the logos, the name, Hot Wheels?
Q: And they supply merchandise?
A: Yes. That's a part of the agreement. It's a partnership. I cannot disclose the terms.
Q: So what is next?
A: Our plans are to have a Mattel store, and open another Hot Wheels store. It will be in a mall setting.
Q: Knowing what you do now, is there anything you would do differently?
A: Yes. There's tons of things. If I knew, we'd sell out like we have, and that we'd have a contract with Mattel, I'd probably would have set up a store directly to the mall.
Q: Do you have any advice for collectors, so they don't become so fascinated with cars that their collection doesn't push them out of their home?
A: Noooo. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a psychiatrist. So I'm going to leave that alone.
Rogelio Mills
Title: Owner, president
Experience: Author, television host
Family: Son, Charles Curry, 35
Hobbies: Music, playing piano
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1MKIFGVLuis Severino is healthy but won't be working through his problems in the big leagues.
The New York Yankees announced that the struggling right-hander, who's been out since May 13 with a mild right triceps strain, has been activated from the 15-day disabled list Monday. He was immediately sent to Triple-A as part of a flurry of roster moves.
New York's injury woes continue to pile up, however, as it also placed utility infielder Dustin Ackley on the 15-day DL with a dislocated right shoulder suffered in Sunday's game against Tampa Bay.
Severino was being counted on to emerge as a dominant member of the Yankees starting rotation following an excellent start to his career in 2015.
Instead he's struggled, to the tune of a 7.46 ERA and 12.6 hits allowed per nine innings. In his most recent start on May 13, he gave up seven runs and walked four over just 2 2/3 innings against the White Sox, and left that game injured.
The Yankees are undoubtedly hoping Triple-A does the 22-year-old some good. A lack of starting depth means they're relying on both him and Michael Pineda to find their old forms in order to keep pace with the rest of AL East.
Ackley, meanwhile, is the latest to join the Yankees infirmary, with infielder Rob Refsnyder being recalled from Triple-A to take his place.Under pressure from civil rights activists, Amazon.com released the gender and racial make-up of its work force on Friday, revealing its staff is largely white and male.
The technology giant said 63% of its workers and 75% of managers around the world are men.
In the U.S., 60% of the work force is white while 15% is black, 13% is Asian, 9% is Hispanic and 3% is other.
Managers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly white at 71%.
Eighteen percent of managers are Asian, 4% are Hispanic, 4% are black and 3% are other.
Most Amazon workers work in distribution centers so its work force is more diverse than some companies. It’s probably most similar to Apple. Most Apple employees in the U.S. work in retail stores. Apple said in August that 55% of its U.S. staff is white, while 15% is Asian, 11% is Hispanic and 7% is black.
Amazon did not disclose the racial or gender breakdown for technical workers as all other technology companies have.
{snip}
The Seattle, Wa., company agreed to release the demographics of its work force after Rev. Jesse Jackson turned up the pressure in September.
{snip}
“I am disappointed with the lack of disclosure and the lateness of the disclosure,” Jackson said in an interview. “They have not stated any plan to change the pattern of exclusion. They are not saying: ‘Here is our plan.'”
Original Article
Share ThisWith this move, Apple is trying to tackle a huge problem that the medical community has been grappling with for years.
Even in the digital age, patients find their info cannot be easily shared between doctors, especially among different hospitals or clinics. This information tends to still live in PDF files attached to emails or delivered by fax machine. Those who do have access through so-called "patient portals" sometimes find that the user experience is poor and the information is limited.
This problem is often referred to as the "interoperability crisis" — and it is hurting patients, health experts have said.
The lack of data-sharing between health providers leads to unnecessary mistakes and missed diagnoses, Aneesh Chopra told CNBC. "As health care goes digital, the promise has always been to give patients and the doctors they trust full access to their health information," he said.
Apple in recent months has been involved with discussions with health IT industry groups that are looking for ways to make this goal a reality, two of the people said. These include "The Argonaut Project," a private sector initiative that is promoting the adoption of open standards for health information, and "The Carin Alliance," an organization that is looking to give patients a central role in controlling their own medical data.
Bud Tribble, Apple's vice president of software technology, has been personally involved with the latter group, two of the people said. Tribble is a trained physician with a background in medical research. The Carin Alliance's Ryan Howells declined to comment on Tribble's participation.
The company has also hired some of the top developers involved with FHIR, an increasingly popular protocol for exchanging electronic health records. These people include Sean Moore, an Apple software engineer who previously worked at medical records giant Epic Systems, and Ricky Bloomfield, a physician from Duke University with a background in medical informatics.
Google and Microsoft have tried, but failed
Other technology giants have attempted to solve the problem through their own web-based patient health record services, but have failed. Google shut down its initial product, Google Health, in 2011 due to a lack of traction.
"At any given time, only about 10 to 15 percent of patients care about this stuff," said Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative and a health IT expert. Managing health information tends to be top of mind only for those who are chronically ill or obsessed with their health.
"If any company can figure out engagement, it's Apple," added Tripathi, who said he didn't have any knowledge of Apple's strategy.
It might have also been too early for an effort like Google Health to succeed. Since then, Mostashari said, policymakers pushed for technical standards among electronic medical records to promote data-sharing.
Apple also has other edges. The majority of doctors use iOS, and Apple has more than 1 billion active devices around the globe, which hospitals and developers are looking for new ways to reach. And it has made data privacy and security a priority in recent years.
Apple's other plans in health include a sensor to noninvasively track blood glucose, CNBC previously reported. It has also made some notable hires from the medical sector of late, including a rising star of Stanford University's digital health efforts, Sumbul Desai, also reported by CNBC.
Apple declined to comment on this report.Tamil
News
A 19-year-old fan of Vijay, Thirumurugan, was arrested yesterday in Srivilliputhur for his abusive comment on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook, according to a report in Deccan Chronicle.
The student had allegedly made an inappropriate comment about the prime minister on Facebook messenger during a chat with a BJP functionary. Thirumurugan was arrested based on a complaint by Marimuthu, Virudhunagar BJP secretary. According to the report, Thirumurugan reacted in an abusive manner to a meme on the controversial GST dialogue in Mersal, sent by Marimuthu. Later, Marimuthu lodged a police complaint against Thirumurugan.
Police booked Thirumurugan under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (Punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) and remanded him to judicial custody after producing him in the magistrate court in Srivilliputhur.A few weeks back, on our first APRS show Kenneth Finnegan (W6KWF) helped explain the APRS Protocol. Since that time, we’ve asked for and received a number of listener questions. In this episode of the Ham Radio 360 Podcast we delve into those questions to further understand this ‘thing’ called APRS!
(4:00)
Paths? What do they mean, and What do I use?
2. (28:00)
My APRS won’t show on aprs.fi when using my 5w HT?
Why won’t my APRS messaging work?
RF Gate, I-Gate or both? 3rd Party Traffic Questions. SMSGTE
Is APRS used on other bands? 30m Robust Packet
Why does APRS only use the 144.390 frequency?
3. (49:00)
How do I digipeat through the ISS?
Can I use APRS to monitor my off-grid cabin conditions?
What is the Next Generation of APRS-can it be like ADS-B?
How is APRS developed? Is it developed?
What is the architecture of APRS-IS?
What are the uses of APRS that aren’t GPS tracking?
Why do all APRS websites suck?
Where’s the documentation?
Faraday RF, is it operational with APRS?
4. (1:13:00)
APRS Etiquette, am I doing it right?
Whats up with the 200+ symbols for things on the map?
What is the Local Freq Initiative? Does it work?
Object Beacons for the Local Freq Initiative?
5. (1:31:00)
K4CDN-5 Digipeater/I-Gate.
When to set-up an I-Gate/Digipeater?
Hardware recommendations?
How the K4CDN-5 digi changed APRS
Show Links:
Our First APRS Show with KWF
aprs.link
aprs.fi
ARISS.net
ASTARS
Satellite Connections
Alinco DR-135TMKIII 2M
Argent Data PNP TNC
KWF on the Wildflower Triathlon
@KWF on Twitter
ARPS on Facebook
APRS Symbol Chart
APRX aprs Software
KWF Thesis (pdf)
Event Time Data Extension
Texas Digital Radio
Thanks for listening and contributing to show #73, we hope you enjoyed this episode!
73 Y’all!
Cale/K4CDNSCOTUS Rules Workers Don’t Need To Be Paid for All Their Time Working
Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling against Amazon warehouse workers means bosses can require workers to work for periods of time and simply choose not to pay them for it. (Scott Lewis / Flickr)
Stories of the horrid conditions for workers in Amazon warehouses have been trickling out for years: The temperatures at the warehouses vary wildly, with some workers having to work in sub-zero conditions, others passing out from days where the temperature soared above 100 degrees, workers crying from not being able to keep up the brutal pace demanded, and then being threatened with termination for crying. And we can now add another indignity to the list, coming yesterday at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in a 9-0 decision that it is legal for Amazon warehouse workers not to be paid for a portion of their workday.
At the end of long, taxing shifts at warehouses, Amazon requires workers to go through security screenings to ensure that no one has stolen anything from the warehouse. Because Amazon does not hire enough security guards or stagger the quitting times of the workers, these screenings add an additional 25 minutes to each employee’s shift. These workers sued, arguing that under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the staffing company that hired them to work in Amazon warehouses was required to pay them for the time spent in these security checks.
Writing for a unanimous court in Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed. (Though the workers work at an Amazon warehouse, they are hired through the intermediary staffing company, Integrity Staffing Solutions.)
At issue was a provision that Congress placed in the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, which amended the FLSA by excluding “activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity or activities.” The courts have included in the definition of “principal activities” anything that is “integral and indispensable” to the principal activities. In other words, as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which found in favor of the workers) |
one time thought it could be the gold standard of trade deals before it was finished negotiated, but became disenchanted once it was finalized.
"I did say I hoped it would be a good deal," she said.
She similarly defended herself on this point during her primary campaign against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
So what did Clinton say about TPP?
Back in 2012 when she was leading the State Department, Clinton was pretty effusive in her support of the deal. While in Australia, Clinton delivered remarks on the general topic of the U.S.-Australia relationship. Here’s everything she said about the TPP in that address, with the "gold standard" comment in bold.
"So it's fair to say that our economies are entwined, and we need to keep upping our game both bilaterally and with partners across the region through agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Australia is a critical partner. This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment."
At that point, it seems clear Clinton is saying the TPP sets the gold standard. She didn’t say she "hoped" it would.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung pointed to this statement in Australia to defend his candidate’s statement.
Other comments around the same time echoed similar assuredness that the TPP would meet that high bar. In November 2012 remarks in Singapore, she encouraged all nations "willing to meet 21st century standards as embodied in the TPP" to join the deal.
"The so-called TPP will lower barriers, raise standards, and drive long-term growth across the region. It will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and establish strong protections for workers and the environment," she said, adding that it would result in better jobs with better wages and working conditions.
She did not say it was "the finest deal" she’d ever seen. But here are some of the other words Clinton used to describe the TPP before she left the State Department in 2013: "exciting," "innovative," "ambitious," "groundbreaking," "cutting-edge," "high-quality" and "high standard."
Now, at that point, the deal was still being negotiated. And even before it was finalized, she started to temper her expectations for the deal as the campaign drew near.
Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin pointed to this passage in her 2014 memoir Hard Choices:
"Because TPP negotiations are still ongoing, it makes sense to reserve judgment until we can evaluate the final proposed agreement. It’s safe to say the TPP won’t be perfect -- no deal negotiated among a dozen countries ever will be -- but its higher standards, if implemented and enforced, should benefit American businesses and workers."
More recently, after the deal was finalized last year and presented for Congress to approve, Clinton changed her position and now says she opposes it.
In the past when asked about her wording, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill noted that the "gold standard" comment was made during negotiations and because they were conducted in secret, we don’t know if the final deal is dramatically different than it was in 2012. It’s worth pointing out, too, that as secretary of state, she spoke as a representative of the Obama administration, which was and remains wholeheartedly in favor of the deal.
Our ruling
Trump said Clinton called the Trans-Pacific Partnership the "gold standard" of trade deals. Clinton did use that language in 2012 when discussing TPP in Australia. And unlike her rebuttal, she didn’t couch it by saying she "hoped" it would be the gold standard. It’s worth noting that at this point the deal was still under negotiation and because that was done behind closed doors, there’s no way to know how much it changed. Before the final version came out, she advocated more of a wait-and-see approach.
We rate Trump’s statement Mostly True.
https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/90008ff2-1952-4383-8676-be3604594811Welcome back to the wonderful world of Commander multiplayer, as told by SUNCOM, the PRE I run every Sunday at 15:00 GMT (more info about it here). You can read about the Origin of It All in the first article of this series.
New Commander product ahoy! Almost half of the 51 new cards have been already spoiled. There's a definite group hug/political theme throughout, bringing back in force the kind of cards that say, "Don't attack me, attack someone else and I'll give you gifts!". My personal highlights, so far (which do NOT belong to the mentioned category):
The Djinn is bound to be fun. And you can also use him politically, exchanging control of stuff from an opponent to another. The black Elemental is nothing extraordinary for 8 mana, but as the black take on Verdant Force, was long due. Bane of Progress is clearly an instant staple. And the artifact, well, that text needs translation, I assume: Eye of Doom — When Eye of Doom enters the battlefield, each player chooses a nonland permanent and puts a fate counter on it. Tap, Sacrifice Eye of Doom: Destroy each permanent with a fate counter. So, reverse Oblivion Stone. Not as good, and clearly more random, but players might not have permanents that don't matter when you cast it (while you'll make sure you have a permanent whose death matters).
On top of that, there's the return of the Curses, which is nice if a bit underwhelming so far (here's I'm hoping for something big and crazy to finally exploit Bitterheart Witch), and a bunch of great new commanders/legends. But we'll analyze those in full detail next time, once they'll be all revealed.
TODAY'S COMMANDERS (click to go directly to the decklists): Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind, Hokori, Dust Drinker, Sliver Queen, Erebos, God of the Dead, Anax and Cymede.
SUNCOM 43
One of the most consistent aficionados of the event, Edison_88luckyplayer, returned to victory in SUNCOM 43, thanks to the Izzet patron himself, in his old and trusty form of the Firemind (sorry, Dracogenius, you're just not combolicious enough).
Finalist, along with Zarcron's Captain Sisay, was justcanceled with a new, fearsome deck: the game-paralyzing (and super-annoying) Hokori, Dust Drinker.
SUNCOM 44
Last week's event, new victory for raf.azevedo's Maelstrom Wanderer, while justcanceled's Hokori build ended up in the final table again, which makes it twice in a row. With them, a good player who's been there a lot of times, but I think never managed to reach the final before: Spanish nice guy doncogollo, getting there at last thanks to his shiny Sliver Queen.
Look how many combo pieces are there! I challenge you to identify the main endgame. There's Viscera Seer and Melira, there's Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood, there's Debt to the Deathless, there's Freed from the Real, there's Weird Harvest, there's Maralen of the Mornsong, there's Deadeye Navigator, there's Genesis Wave... What is really going on here?
She's the Queen of the Combos.
Other than that, I feel like we should properly welcome the Gods in SUNCOM. For instance, by featuring Gordani's Erebos, God of the Dead list.
But there's no Gods without Heroes! So here's Anax and Cymede also doing their debut in SUNCOM, courtesy of Silvos der Benny.
And that's it.
WHAT ABOUT SOME ACTION NOW?
First of all, a blast from the past. With Edison_88luckyplayer recently winning the Jackpot (along with Frenzy277), I asked him to dig out a nice table he played with during his sequence, and here's what our Taiwanese friend chose. From SUNCOM 37, a win with Nicol Bolas (which reminds us of the current, new challenge of playing with each of the five Elder Dragons: try it out, folks! The Jackpot is growing!) against _BIG_BROTHERS_ with Rhys the Redeemed, Silvos der Berry with Kresh the Bloodbraided, and Gordani with Thalia, Guardian of Thraben.
And now, remember how we had two of justcanceled's Thada tables last time, but none of them from Thada's point of view? Well, now we have that, too, with the final from SUNCOM 42 between him, _BIG_BROTHERS_ with Oona, Queen of the Fae, and Frenzy277 with Bosh, Iron Golem. Enjoy!
And that's it. See you in the SUNCOM room next Sunday at 15:00 GMT, and with the Chronicles here on PureMTGO in two weeks! Commander ho!As we have been reporting for several months, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has been consolidating support from Religious Right leaders by enthusiastically embracing their anti-gay, anti-choice views. The momentum shifted into high gear after a secret meeting on December 7 at which dozens of Religious Right leaders voted to back Cruz – and a flood of endorsements has followed.
Now, the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger reports that the group will gather again a few days after Christmas “at a remote ranch in central Texas, where Cruz, his wife and several key financial backers will visit with some of the country’s most prominent evangelical leaders for private conversations and a public rally.”
The ranch is owned by Farris Wilks, who with his brother made billions in the fracking business and has since become a major funder of far-right, anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-church-state separation organizations. The Wilks brothers have already given at least $15 million to the effort to elect Ted Cruz. Farris Wilks is also a pastor who portrays gays as child predators and mocks environmentalism. He preached after Barack Obama’s re-election, “I do believe that our country died that Tuesday night, to all that’s honorable, all that’s good, that’s ambitious, and that has justice.”
The Wilks brothers have also been big funders of Christian-nation zealot David Lane, a political operative who has been working hard to get conservative pastors to run for office and to convince Christian conservatives to rally behind a single Republican candidate. Lane is driven by the desire to get the reins of government in the hands of people who share his belief that America was founded by and for Christians and has a national mission to advance the Christian faith.
Lane and other Religious Right leaders are now publicly trashing Marco Rubio for not working hard enough to get conservative evangelical support.We’ve been trying to find the original source for that mysterious meme about China drilling for oil off the coast of Cuba and Florida.
It’s flat out wrong. The AP debunked it a few days ago after Vice President Dick Cheney tried to pass it off in remarks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about high energy prices.
But it lives on. GOP operative Mary Matalin repeated it on CNN just last night.
We’ve traced the evolution of the non-fact and found it emerged a few months ago with an inexplicable spate of letters to the editor at small and regional daily newspapers. Within weeks it was popping up as a talking point among many Republican lawmakers and getting traction from conservative pundits.
In most instances, the Republicans point to the (fake) story as reason to suspend the current moratoriums on offshore drilling that are largely based on environmental concerns. It may also serve to gin up opposition to the Cuban regime, a sentiment that has been vital to GOP support in Florida.
It is true that Sinopec, the Chinese oil company, along with a half dozen other foreign firms, signed an agreement with the Cuban government to possibly explore for drilling opportunities offshore. The Sinopec deal was forged back in 2005, and any actual drilling has been delayed until at least 2009.
A 1977 agreement between Cuba and the United States set the maritime boundary at the halfway mark along the 90-mile stretch from Key West to the Cuban coast. Cuban drilling about 50 miles off the coast of Florida could begin next year.
Cheney said he got the misinformation from a George Will column published on June 5.
By then, it was already a common talking point for GOP lawmakers. Also on June 5, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) spoke on the House floor and said: “The Chinese are drilling off the coast of Florida with their new energy partner, Cuba.”
On May 23, David Gay, a Republican Congressional candidate from New York, said: “I think it is appalling that we allow Cuba and China to drill in the Florida Straits, meanwhile forbidding our own selves from seeking the common good, in this case, a way to lower the price of gasoline.”
No doubt the notion was helped along by Weekly Standard writer Fred Barnes, who cited it unsourced in a column widely distributed by Yahoo.
A few weeks before that, our old friend Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) cited the alleged Chinese drilling in a May 1 press release.
Our Nexis search also found a reference to Chinese drilling from Rep. Thelma Drake (R-VA) in an April 12 op-ed in the Daily Press of Newport news.
It was in late March that the whole thing initially picked up steam. As though on cue, letter-to-the-editor writers nationwide began complaining about China’s alleged drilling in the Gulf and fired off missives to their local papers.
On March 29. Jerry Lightsey in Texas wrote the Austin American-Statesmen, saying:
“China is drilling offshore from Cuba in waters where we should be.”
Then a few days later on April 2 a man named Don Code of Reno wrote the Reno Gazette-Journal.
“As I write this letter, China is drilling oil in our own back yard, in the Gulf of Mexico for Cuba. They are drilling in the exact same spots we would be drilling in, but the tree huggers won’t let us.”
On April 6, from the letters to the editor page of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Edward Wolfe of Kirkwood, who described himself as a retired physician, wrote:
“China is drilling off the coast of Cuba only 90 miles from the U.S., some of it being done laterally into our ocean spaces.”
April 8 Letter to the editor to the Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville, Tenn. Jim Weague wrote:
“We cannot drill in the Gulf of Mexico, although China and Cuba are drilling there right now.”
Before late March, we could find only trace evidence of this story, in obscure places online like this one here. What triggered this sudden, widespread and misinformed outrage? Was there some sort of email blast that went out?
Maybe the March 17 news story from McClathy planted the seed. The story didn’t say that China was drilling, but it raised the spector:
HAVANA, Cuba — Imagine oil rigs drilling in deep waters just 45 miles off the coast of South Florida. Refineries process the oil in Cuba and sell it across the Caribbean and beyond. Canadian and Mexican companies supply billions of dollars in equipment and services. This could happen, as Havana invites foreign companies to explore its probable oil and natural-gas reserves while Washington’s embargo against the communist-led island keeps U.S. companies locked out. South Florida is watching closely, amid debate over drilling near its shores and concerns about U.S. energy policy. Oil companies increasingly seek to tap Cuba’s deep-water reserves, now that oil prices are soaring and profits are more likely.
But all those letters all at once seems like an awful big coincidence.The official "Ada Lovelace Day" website suggests honoring the occasion (and Lovelace herself, who many consider to be the world's first computer programmer) by "sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today." Discover's Ed Yong has an awesome take on the tradition: he's sharing a list of kickass science writers who also happen to be women. "As I've said before, this is not a list of top female science writers;" Yong writes. "this is an all-female list of top science writers." YES.
We highly recommend taking some time today to check out Maggie Koerth-Baker on abortion, Virginia Hughes on the neuroscience of resilience, Barbara King on captive killer whales, or any one/all of Yong's superb recommendations. If you get in trouble for slacking at work because you're so engrossed in, say, Maryn McKenna's piece on chickens and UTIs, tell your boss that you're celebrating a really important holiday.
And please tell us about your own favorite female science journalists below!
[Discover Magazine]LABOUR's local election campaign in Glasgow is in crisis after a leaked recording plunged one of the party's top councillors into a cronyism row.
Alistair Watson, who is council leader Frank McAveety's enforcer in the city chambers, tried to interfere in a charity over a change in the working hours of another Labour councillor.
In the secret recording, Watson told a top figure at the Dalmarnock Legacy Hub that Labour had a "knife edge" majority and wanted to know if his party colleague's “work-life” balance could be addressed.
He also said he had spoken to a council official about an internal audit into the charity in order to “expedite” the release of grant money that had been withheld. He added that elected members advocate on behalf of organisations they are close to, or are employed by, “99.9 per cent” of the time.
Susan Aitken, the SNP group leader on the council who hopes to topple Labour in this week's council election, contacted the local authority’s Internal Audit team on Friday after being given the recording by a whistleblower.
The Hub, one of the most visible Commonwealth Games legacy projects, opened in 2015 and provides a range of health and childcare services in the East End.
Run by a charity, the People’s Development Trust (PDT), the Hub received £3m from the Scottish Government, nearly £1.3m from the Big Lottery Fund, £1.23m from Clyde Gateway, as well as support from the council.
The project has attracted negative headlines in the past, but a fresh row has broken out in the same week as Labour attempts to hold on to Glasgow city council.
In 2016, the PDT was employing a Labour councillor in the city, Maureen Burke, and a proposal emerged to change her hours in a way that made it harder for her to juggle her councillor duties.
It was also a difficult time for the Hub, as over £40,000 in Integrated Grant Fund (IGF) money was being withheld by the council and an audit of the charity’s finances was also in the pipeline.
In the summer of that year, a senior figure in the Hub was asked if he would meet Watson in the city chambers, a meeting that took place in August.
Watson, a Labour councillor in the south-west of the city, had no ward interest in the Hub. His job, as business manager, was to make sure Labour got its vote out in the council.
Also at the meeting was Burke, who was a councillor in the North East, but whose workplace at the Hub was outside her ward.
A secret recording of the meeting reveals Watson opening gambit: “Just wanted a wee chat just to see if there was any scope for some latitude in terms of work-life balance, which is something we all want, in terms of Maureen, in her job but also what she does in here.”
The senior Hub figure can be heard saying that the change on Burke’s hours followed a review by the Trust board and a human resources company. He added that the IGF grant bid had been resubmitted in April but said the “goalposts” had changed, adding: "They [the board] feel as if they have been let down.”
Watson said: “It’s not usual for an outside organisation to almost have that perception, that the council would be obstructive, or whatever.
“What they won’t know is about how Maureen networks, or how the elected member networks on their behalf while behind the scenes. You know, like sitting down with somebody for a coffee, or bending somebody’s ear and saying ‘what the fuck’, you know, let’s get this sorted out.”
He said: “I’ve had umpteen conversations with many people on behalf of members. Some employers are really almost ‘get yourself to fuck, we are not in the business of allowing blah blah blah’, without actually realising that if an elected member is close to an organisation, i.e. sometimes even employed by an organisation, 99.9 per cent of the time they will be advocating on that organisation’s behalf, whether that is directly, but probably more indirectly.”
He added: “And IGF is probably just a classic example about how, you know, you can release that current suspended money, as quickly as possible and get that relationship back on track.”
Watson continued: “I certainly want to do what I can to assist a member of the current group, you know, to achieve that work-life balance, right. We are sitting on a knife-edge majority in here, in which I have to watch the numbers.”
The senior councillor said the IGF issue “probably” couldn’t be resolved until the audit was completed, but said: “What I said to [council official] no less than 20 minutes ago, I said [council official] ‘I want you to give me a time-frame when audit are going out, I want you to tell me how long they are going to be, I said, and I want to you to tell me how long they are going to deliberate’.”
Burke intervened: “So far they’ve been dragging their fucking sorry heels.”
Watson resumed: “I said 'I want you to tell me how long they are going to deliberate'. I said, 'and what I want is I want the process of reinstating the IGF expedited as quickly as possible'.”
He added: “I have asked him to give me a report next week.”
At one point of the recording, Burke also said: “I was pounding the doors of City Property, pounding the doors of [council department] DRS constantly, and then also the heritable consent, all that different stuff. And I wasn’t caring when I was being told ‘you need to watch what you’re doing’, because I work for the organisation and I could see what was happening. And I could see that the process of the council can take forever, as you know, but what I did was dedicated to the PDT.”
On the audit, Watson concluded: “I said 'look [council official] I need a time frame on this’, I said, 'and I need you to tell me when they are going in, how long they are going to be there, how long they are going to take to deliberate, so that we can get the IGF money reinstated as quickly as possible'. He said ‘are you asking me to expedite this?’ and I said yes.”
Burke no longer works for the trust and the IGF grant money has not been released. Watson and Burke are both seeking re-election.
Aitken said yesterday: “This is clear evidence of what the people of Glasgow have long suspected: senior Labour councillors routinely and casually putting pressure on organisations and manipulating council procedures to serve their own personal and political ends. It's proof positive that Labour is utterly unfit to lead our city.
“The council leader must now say exactly what he knew about this. Alistair Watson is Frank McAveety's closest political ally and the Labour group enforcer. People are entitled to ask if this was done on the instructions of the Leader's office.
“It's too late for Alistair Watson and Maureen Burke to be removed from ballot papers but the Labour Party must take action and suspend them immediately while an investigation takes place.”
In 2010, Watson resigned as chair of Strathclyde Partnership for Transport after an expenses scandal. One of the issues confirmed in an auditor’s report was that SPT arranged a transport meeting in Manchester on the same day as a European cup final involving Rangers.
A council spokeswoman said: "I can confirm a complaint has been raised with the council's audit section and the matter will be looked into."
The Sunday Herald asked Scottish Labour for comment by councillors Watson and Burke.
A party spokesperson said: “We aren't going to comment on this story.”The Central District’s African-American community is moving away, and people like Patrinell Wright, who moved to the neighborhood in 1964, are feeling a sense of loss.
PASTOR PATRINELL WRIGHT was just a 20-year-old country girl from Carthage, Texas, who didn’t know what she was getting into when she migrated to Seattle in 1964.
She grew up one of seven children in the Walnut Grove community, to be exact, a nearby farming enclave designated for blacks. That’s how it was in Southern towns back then. If you were black, you knew where you belonged, and it sure wasn’t around white people, unless you happened to be working for them.
Seattle had its own form of segregation, with blacks clustered mainly in the city’s Central District because of racist lending practices and whites-only “covenants” in housing subdivisions in Shoreline, Ballard, Green Lake, Queen Anne, Magnolia, White Center, Bellevue and beyond.
Wright boarded a Continental Trailways coach and set off by herself on the first cross-country bus ride she’d ever taken. But the price of that three-and-a-half-day bus ride to Seattle cost a lot more than what she paid for her ticket.
She was forced to take a seat at the back of the bus, on a bench barely suitable for sitting, the only black passenger on a coach overloaded with hate.
“I was called every name in the book, except ‘Child of God,’” Wright says while reminiscing at her home in the Central District, where she has lived for 48 years.
The bus lavatory and the restrooms at bus stations along the way were for whites only, too. Blacks used unisex outhouses behind the stations.
Wright knows what it’s like to live on the margins of a world built by and for whites.
Now she sits in the living room of the house she and her husband, Benny Wright, own on 33rd Avenue, mulling the possibility of being marginalized in her own neighborhood.
The CD, Seattle’s most storied African-American district, one anchored by black churches like Mount Zion Baptist and First African Methodist Episcopal and one that witnessed the rise of Quincy Jones, the emergence of a prominent black middle class, the formation of the city’s Black Panther movement and the birth of local hip-hop, is getting less black by the year.
The district, which spans roughly from the back side of Capitol Hill toward Lake Washington and from East Madison Street down toward the Interstate 90 Lid, was more than 70 percent black in the 1960s and early ’70s when Wright moved in.
Today, less than one-fifth of the population is black, with whites moving in in such huge numbers that in the space of a couple of decades, they’ve become the majority for the first time since the Eisenhower Administration, when there was a sizable Jewish presence in the area.
“This was a deliberate attempt to get us out of here because the area is so central and convenient to downtown,” Wright says, echoing a sentiment held by many who fear that blacks are being pushed away to make the district more desirable for whites with higher incomes.
One thing is clear: Seattle hip-hop artist Draze was dead-on when he titled his 2014 “eulogy” for the CD’s black community “The Hood Ain’t the Same,” and when he points out the uneasy proximity of a new, legal-weed emporium to an old black church at 23rd and Union in his latest anti-gentrification song “Irony on 23rd.”
Demographic data show that cities like Renton, SeaTac, Tukwila, Kent and Federal Way have higher percentages of blacks than Seattle’s 7.9 percent.
All over the CD, new town houses and apartments have been squeezed awkwardly between the neighborhood’s older apartments and bungalows in a housing bubble fueled by the arrival of tens of thousands of young, mostly white, tech workers.
“I can’t find my way around — I get lost now,” Wright says.
Her living room is filled with framed family photographs, picture albums and scrapbooks chronicling the successes of the renowned Total Experience Gospel Choir, which she founded as a music class at Franklin High School in 1973.
The choir started with 108 African-American kids.
Today it’s six blacks and 24 whites, Wright says.
Wright steps out to the front porch and points to the big house catty-corner from hers where Seattle’s Black Panther Party was born.
Northwest Tap Connection is a race and social justice-oriented studio. Hip hop dance instructor Shakiah Danielson and her student Talaya Logan discover themselves – and each other – through dance. (Erika Schultz and Corinne Chin / The Seattle Times)
The family of the African-American real estate agent who sold her the house all those years ago still owns the property behind hers.
Wright points there and there and there.
Every one of the houses around this intersection was owned by an African American back in the day.
Wright’s situation is bittersweet. She still owns property in the CD, and it’s worth substantially more than the $17,000 she and her husband paid for it in 1968.
But even the living room’s side window looks back to happier days.
Every Sunday, at exactly 9 a.m., Mr. and Mrs. Davis, African-American neighbors, would stroll by Wright’s house and wave at her as they headed to their church about a block away, and that’s how Wright knew it was time to get dressed and head to her own worship service.
“Now it’s just five of us,” Wright says of the dwindling black population in her immediate neighborhood. “It used to be so friendly. We watched out for each other’s children. We used to take care of each other — and with a tremendous amount of love and respect.”
Wright’s husband was raised in Seattle in a house that used to stand by the intersection of 21st and Fir.
“His home is now a cracker-box apartment,” Wright says with a sneer.
Her husband’s old church at 17th and Fir: “It’s an apartment building now,” she says.
She gets up and heads to the kitchen, then returns seconds later with a tall, rectangular box of saltines to demonstrate the general shape and cramped design of the new buildings cropping up all over the CD.
Wright says annual property taxes have nearly doubled in recent years to around $5,000, and expenses like monthly house bills further strain the budget.
“Most of us are ashamed to admit that we can’t afford our places anymore,” Wright says of the few older black homeowners living on fixed incomes who remain. “The utilities are killing me.”
TO BE BLACK in Seattle requires an ability to hold your own in mostly white spaces, a tolerance for curious stares and ill-considered comments when you just want to fit in, and a gift for drawing cultural sustenance from the most fleeting of moments. You have to get used to representing not just your own idiosyncrasies as a person but an entire race. It can be draining work, and it can detract from the obvious benefit of living in a region with good-paying jobs, a mix of lifestyles and otherwise easygoing people.
A head nod and wave, a gesture of mutual acknowledgment between African Americans that has been passed down through generations, can mean a lot under these circumstances.
This winter and spring, Metro buses carried a beguiling poster for a Seattle Art Museum exhibit featuring the florid portraits of African Americans painted by black artist Kehinde Wiley.
For the time it takes to pick up a passenger, Wiley’s “Morpheus,” a languid portrait of a young black male on a backdrop of flowers, stared back at anyone who caught the subject’s gaze, briefly filling a void that runs deep but can be difficult to explain.
Among those who’ve known the CD all their lives, the slightest suggestion can touch off a flight back to the good ol’ days, when black barber shops served as chummy debate societies; when there were enough black folks to line both sides of 23rd during the Black Community Festival parade; and when people could walk down the street and see a little bit of their heritage, struggles, triumphs and hopes reflected in the eyes of their neighbors.
Say “Quincy,” and flash back to the teenage Quincy Jones delivering papers and attending Garfield High School in the CD or playing his first gig at the age of 14 at the East Madison Street YMCA or studying his buddy and mentor Ray Charles’ Braille musical arrangements or bebopping all night long in one of the dozens of black and mixed clubs along Jackson with Charles and Ernestine Anderson at his side.
Say “Jimi” to Wright, and she’s likely to pull from her scrapbook a picture of her singing at the funeral of another former Garfield student, Jimi Hendrix, in 1970.
People were tight, often when they didn’t really want to be, because in order to survive the conditions thrown at them — segregation, drugs and gangs, the onset of gentrification — they needed to be.
The late author Maya Angelou described the idea of home as, “the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
If you lived in the CD, people didn’t have to question you because, chances were, they knew the rough outline of your story before you even said your name, because it was their story, too. People didn’t just share a physical space. They shared an experience, and with that, they created a whole familial world made up of total strangers.
In the CD, you didn’t need to “represent,” because the neighborhood represented you.
The discussion over gentrification, however, has sparked a parallel debate within the black community about how the CD’s changes were allowed to happen.
When I asked about the state of black leadership in Seattle, most responded with gallows humor, something to the effect of, “Where are they? Do you know any?”
When I asked African Americans young and old about Seattle’s “black community,” almost to a person the response was, “There is no ‘black community’ in Seattle — not anymore.”
The pessimism is striking for a city in which blacks are no longer forced into a single part of town, where there once was an African-American mayor, Norm Rice, and an African-American county executive, Ron Sims.
“What we ought to do is, we all should go to City Hall and make our voices heard, but that’s not going to happen because we’re so divided among ourselves,” Wright says.
ONCE A MONTH, the downtown nightclub Re-bar hosts a DJ party, Soul-Fi, that, while frequented by a friendly, racially mixed crowd, helps blackness in Seattle get its groove back.
The parties are black as in Chaka, Luther and Stevie. Black as in Shabba, Missy and Beyoncé. Black as in old “Soul Train” clips playing on a projector screen above the dance floor. Black and hipster, black and gay, black and straight, black and trans, black and please don’t touch my hair. Black and from around the way. Black and from Federal Way.
Organizer RC Brown, who moved to Seattle 13 years ago, says the idea for the parties grew out of personal frustration. He’d go to soul-music nights at different venues around town, and the crowds would be all white.
“‘Why am I the only black person in the building on a soul night?’ ” he recalls thinking. “I was paying a white person money to play music by the people that I come from.”
Brown says that being black, queer and trans, along with having a predominantly white social circle, only added to the sense of alienation. Something was missing.
Brown and his friends started throwing house parties in the CD, but eventually he decided to put on an event for the public at a black-owned art gallery on Capitol Hill, featuring himself as novice DJ.
Today, friends and fellow black-culture curators like JusMoni and Stas THEE Boss rotate at the decks on Soul-Fi nights, while their peers host racially conscious events at formal establishments, out-of-the-way bars and private homes all over town, mixing a love for jamming with a mission to explore the black experience in all of its forms.
“I think the parties that we’re throwing, the work that we’re doing to keep the spaces that we have, it’s integral,” Brown says, noting that many in Seattle’s underground black-cultural scene see themselves not only as promoters but social catalysts, activists and educators.
While younger African Americans revolutionize the very idea of “black community” with pop-up events and online social networks for connecting and sharing information, centers of gravity are emerging far from the city center, such as in South Seattle and the Kent area, where home prices historically have been more affordable.
“This is the hub of what I call ‘blackness’ in Seattle,” says Melba Ayco, founder of Rainier Beach’s Northwest Tap Connection, a dance school located near a library, community center and predominantly black high school near the busy intersection at Rainier Avenue South and South Henderson Street.
At the school, about 150 students, the vast majority of them African American, take rigorous classes in tap, hip-hop and modern ballet in a small building set back from the street.
Ayco is all about discipline and positive thinking. She wants the African-American students in her classes to learn not just the intricacies of dance and the history of each style; she wants them to find inspiration in who they are and who they come from — then use that inspiration to achieve great things.
“I’m very much about instilling black pride,” says Ayco, a gregarious leader who dotes, scolds and dishes out lessons on race relations with equal amounts of sugary affection.
She modeled the school on what she describes as an “old-time black church” ethos in which each adult is a role model, authority figure and safety net.
Ayco was raised in Louisiana during the early days of school desegregation. She remembers white parents yelling racial epithets and throwing things at her as she walked into her integrated school. To survive, you needed a strong sense of self and a community of support to reinforce that inner strength. For many Southern blacks, and by extension for African-American transplants who settled in Seattle, the church represented that community.
“I encourage everybody to take responsibility for the children that are here,” Ayco says, noting that the school also offers students help with academic and behavior issues.
The stakes are too high to let even one black child slip and get into trouble, Ayco says.
She ought to know. She works as a supervisor in the |
year with threats to burn the Koran at his tiny fundamentalist church in Gainesville, Florida, Jones had said his planned protest last week was aimed at “radical Islam.”
In March, Jones and Wayne Sapp, 42, staged and videotaped a mock “trial” for the Koran and burned a copy of the holy book, a gesture that prompted riots in Afghanistan and widespread condemnation in the U.S. and around the world.
On April 22, Jones and Sapp were jailed briefly after they refused to pay a $1 bond as ordered by District Court Judge Mark Somers. Somers also barred them from the vicinity of the Islamic Center mosque for three years.
Police in Dearborn denied Jones a permit to protest in front of the Islamic Center. He was tried under an obscure Michigan law dating to 1846 requiring people judged to present a risk to public order to post a “peace bond.”
Dearborn’s city hall was one of a handful of “free speech zones” where city officials indicated they would allow Jones to hold events. It is more than four miles from the Islamic Center, the largest mosque in the United States.
He has appealed the court’s ruling and is represented in litigation by attorneys from the Thomas More Law Center, which is “dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life,” according to its web site.
The conservative law center has also represented Christian missionaries who were arrested in Dearborn last year.
(Additional reporting by Teri Murphy; Writing by David Bailey. Editing by Peter Bohan)
Source: Reuters US Online Report Top NewsTrying to heal from something so personal as religious & spiritual abuse is a unique experience that varies from person to person. Besides being difficult for me to verbalize, it was a painful time in my life that I felt was impossible for anyone else to understand. It went entirely against everything I was formerly taught to believe. As strange & alienating as it felt for me in the beginning, it did get better with help.
The first rule of recovery from any kind of abuse whether it be drugs, alcohol, domestic or religious abuse is that you have to want to change. Badly. After admitting something’s actually wrong, you have to desire getting better more than the escapism of drugs or the security of sameness could ever provide. Leaving a religion I dedicated myself to wasn’t an impulsive decision for me. It began with a lot of sobering questions after some very disturbing betrayals which eventually led to addiction. Throughout this, the realization that I’d joined what I now consider a cult didn’t happen overnight. Problems this severe rarely do. The culmination of everything that I worked so hard towards was now reduced to something I just wished I could forget. But couldn’t. The process had to happen, I had to ask the tough questions. Like, why I didn’t know sooner or how could I just lose myself like that?
The answers are most often not what a person wants to acknowledge. That comes with the territory when leaving Scientology. Scientologists pride themselves on certainty. It’s built from a sense of “knowing” & attestation to their success stories. It’s not only strange as an ex-scientologist to discover that you have insecurities, but allowing yourself to focus any of your attention towards human vulnerability is a lesson on its own. That’s because it’s hard to get out of the habit of believing that when you do so, you’re doing something considered low-toned.*
Scientologists actually believe they’re more evolved, like a perfect & proficient version of what Scientology calls your everyday average “homo saps.” So when the moments of truth add up after the shock of leaving Scientology sets in, these admittances of not being superhuman can feel like being torn apart. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s like a death. Like a part of you has ceased to exist & you have to let it pass. I actually went through a mourning period. There’s a lot of the past that must be re-lived. Which is in itself very foreign because scientologists aren’t allowed to revisit the past unless it’s in session. We were only allowed to be “in present time” or in “PT” as it’s called. In Scientology, it’s anti survival to go within oneself to seek answers & other scientologists have no problem pointing this error out to another member of their group if they notice it. They live by the code of “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics”* mentality. Not the self. Its considered destructive to ruminate too long on yourself. The act of abandoning your private needs descends until there are really no personal boundaries left anymore between you & the other group members. This creates such a co-dependence on Scientology & the group that you all become enmeshed into one. A scientologist may never seek answers by asking it of themselves. For people who’re suppose to be so confident, they end up being incredibly reliant on what their friends think & seek advice on the smallest matters. Scientologists give away so much of their power by allowing the church to make life altering decisions for themselves & their families. They don’t go within. That’s called being introverted & that’s bad. It’s the extraverted scientologist that gets all the approval.
Scientologists aren’t very acquainted with themselves, to say the least. They don’t understand how empowering or satisfying it is to know themselves. There’s a Greek aphorism that says: Man, know thyself & you will know God. This is the exact polar opposite of what Scientology pushes. To focus solely on yourself or your needs is irrational to a Scientologist, but as a recovering Scientologist, it’s been instrumental in mending myself. I believe there’s nothing wrong with finding out who you are. Especially when you were a part of a belief system that never allowed anyone to explore the nuances of their individuality. In the beginning of my process, just figuring out concepts like this was so new to me that I’d feel an immediate change in how I perceived the world & my place in it afterward. I began to naturally distance myself from Scientology the more I allowed who I really was to come through, rather than the manufactured social cult personality I’d molded myself into in order to feel accepted by the group. Doing this was liberating to me.
Another very important factor in recovery for me involves the taming of behaviors that mirror the same negative attitudes of Scientology. When you’re being fair gamed it’s easy to become ensnared in their tactics. It’s seems justifiable to return fire & be just as cruel back to them, ridiculing them with the same exuberance they seem to enjoy in harming ex-members. I understand how hard it is to not give into the pressure to reciprocate their hate. But it’s a dangerous & pointless game that I can only win by not playing. So I don’t. For me personally, giving them any of my attention is a mistake. Of course, a mistake I’ve always learned the hard way but still regardless, I have learned. When I’ve seen it so obviously happening, especially on social media like Twitter, there’s nothing special to it. It doesn’t take skill. It isn’t worth getting sucked up into their insults & blame game. Besides, there’s nothing they can say to me thats my fault anyway. Not that they would, straightforward conversations aren’t their style & unlike them, I’m not entertained by gratuitous pettiness. But if something needs to be said, I’ll say it. If it’s important to me. There’s a huge difference.
I, in no way want to be a Scientologist anymore. So why would I act like one? Why would I want to think or argue like one? I’ve put a lot of work into stopping the automatic thought process that Scientology installed in me. Breaking the conditioning for me means I don’t care when they think they’ve gotten some extra points by trolling me on Twitter. I literally don’t care what they think. Since I’m not limited by an essential need to retaliate, none of it matters to me personally. They eventually run themselves in circles & I’ve gotten good at believing in myself.
It’s important to understand that there’s nothing wrong with anger. I was angry until I wasn’t anymore. All the different emotions come & go throughout recovery & everyone who’s left Scientology are all in different stages whether they’re aware of it or not. Even waffling about thinking maybe you’d be better off if you went back is perfectly normal at certain stages of recovery from religious abuse. What’s right for someone who’s in the last stages might not work for someone in the beginning stage. I feel like it’s my duty as an ex Scientologist to recognize that fact & not feel the need to tell anyone they’re wrong for feeling what they feel or expressing themselves in the moment. Allowing others to be who they are gives us that same right.
But lines get trampled over all the time though. Recently on Twitter, someone opened up to me that they weren’t a part of the COS anymore but they still felt strongly that some of the initial courses they took made a positive difference in their lives. I have also felt that way in the past. Those feelings for me have slowly faded over time as I’ve learned more & progressed in my recovery but I empathized with him. I read in an article on the subject of recovery that in its first stages it’s very natural for a person to be adamant about holding onto certain parts of their cult involvement that they believed was good for them or changed their lives for the better. It helps them segue from step to step until they’re eventually able to discard all the layers of instilled conditioning. I took the stance of protecting the person from a third party who entered our thread to make facetious & degrading comments to the person by using Scientology nomenclature that the person didn’t even understand in order to call him crazy. I don’t feel bad that I told them this was masked violence & disrespect. I encourage anyone else who shares this same commitment as myself who wants to help others heal rather than push anyone away from seeking help or feeling camaraderie. To instead let them know it’s normal. Because it is. In my estimation, the person had no concern with the idea of recovery or understanding it’s intricate but necessary process. Whether they agreed with what the person was saying or not, to me has no validity. We’re all different & should give each other enough space to be who we are. When Scientology is busy trolling ex members, to see people who claim they’re on your side behave in the same intolerable trolling manner, does no one any good.
I read that recovery can be like a rocket taking off into space. At first, it’s all that combustible, explosive anger & defiant energy that launches the metaphorical space craft off the ground. Eventually, the bottom part of the craft sheds away & the next rocket boosters kick in. It needs less fuel, less anger & now has the advantage of momentum. Using different emotions & exploring self analysis to propel the person through the process. Then that sheds away as well. Then finally, the rocket reaches outer space where its no longer bound by gravity & can be safely steered exactly where the pilots want to go. An all new feeling & experience. An entirely new construct of a ship now too. An all new & more capable person, less inclined to the unstableness of what leaving their cult life put them through. That’s what I’m working on & looking forward to. Flying.
*low-toned gets its meaning from Scientology’s example of what they call the emotional tone scale. The higher tones at the beginning of the scale are the happier emotions which to them have specific meanings & are considered the most optimal state of mind a person can be in. As the scale goes down you reach the lower toned emotions. This can range anywhere from anger to sadness or hate. For a Scientologist, saying someone is low toned indicates that the person is not experiencing or demonstrating a desirable state of mind. From there it takes on different meanings assigned to what those emotions are meant to be caused by.
*dynamics are respresented by the 8 dynamics all consisting simultaneously in ones life. The 1st dynamic is self. The 2nd dynamic is the sex or family dynamic. The 3rd dynamic is the group you belong to. The 4th dynamic is mankind as a whole. The 5th dynamic is nature. The 6th dynamic is the physical universe consisting of matter, energy, space & time. The 7th dynamic represents the spiritual essence & the 8th dynamic is usually called the God dynamic (although I never met one Scientologist who believed in God) or infinity.
AdvertisementsWhen pro-democracy protests erupted in Hong Kong late last month, many demonstrators feared the government would shut down the internet. Those fears never materialized, but the specter of a crackdown combined with congested data networks were enough to drive thousands to download FireChat — a smartphone application that lets users communicate without an internet connection.
The app, which launched in March, has seen 500,000 downloads in Hong Kong since protests began on September 27th, driving it to the top spot on the Apple App Store and Google Play in Hong Kong. At its peak, FireChat saw 37,000 simultaneous users, each spending, on average, more than two and a half minutes on the app — and that’s not counting those who used the app offline.
"Our first reaction was okay, let's hope it works. And it did," says Christophe Daligault, chief marketing officer at Open Garden, the San Francisco-based company that developed FireChat. The last two weeks have been a whirlwind for Open Garden, which designed FireChat with festivals, technology conferences, and other events in mind — not necessarily protests. "Most of us haven't slept much at all," Daligault adds.
Unlike WhatsApp and other messaging apps, FireChat doesn’t require an internet connection for users to communicate. Instead, it uses a phone’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals to connect it to other devices within a given range. In this setup, known as a mesh network, each phone acts as a node, and as more devices link together, the network’s range expands. Users can send texts and images under pseudonyms — another benefit for government-fearing protesters — though Open Garden recently introduced verified accounts for some journalists.
The app gained attention at this year’s Burning Man festival, where attendees used it to organize and coordinate events in the middle of the Nevada desert, though it’s also been used in countries like Iran and Iraq, where the internet is aggressively censored, and during this year’s protests in Taiwan. But nothing compares to the flood of downloads it saw in Hong Kong — something that took Open Garden by surprise.
"We had no idea that it was going to be popular in those places," Daligault says. FireChat was created, he explains, with two use cases in mind: the developing world, where data plans are often prohibitively expensive, and live events or festivals, where cellular networks are usually congested and slow.
"FireChat is not a tool for private communications."
Ping Wong, secretary general of the Internet Society Hong Kong, was in Hong Kong as the demonstrations unfurled, and watched as chatrooms buzzed on FireChat. She says that many protesters continued to use Facebook and WhatsApp to coordinate events, whereas most messages sent on FireChat were "reporting what’s happening in real-time, like where the police are and what they are doing," or calls for supplies like food and water. Laurel Chor, who covered the protests for the news site Coconuts Hong Kong, says FireChat wasn't as ubiquitous as other social-networking apps, though several demonstrators told her that it helped distinguish rumor from truth.
The app's sudden popularity in Hong Kong has spurred downloads in other parts of the world, though it was never explicitly conceived as a protest tool. In fact, there are no real safeguards against government surveillance — a point that Daligault is quick to emphasize. "FireChat is not a tool for private communications," Open Garden wrote in a Tumblr post this month. "People who use Twitter understand that their communications are public. They can use pseudonyms and know that what they tweet may be seen by other people. It is the same with FireChat."
Chatting under pseudonyms may offer a sense of protection to protesters, though the app was never designed to guarantee anonymity. "FireChat provides more or less about the same extent of identity protection as Twitter or Instagram," Stanislav Shalunov, Open Garden co-founder and CTO, said in an email. "It is not specifically designed to provide some absolute protection of the user's identity."
"I believe the government may be monitoring communications on FireChat, so as to know what's happening," Wong says. "But I don't think the protesters fear the monitoring. Maybe you can say it is expected."
Encrypted private messaging is in the works
The company plans to eventually introduce encrypted private messaging, though it’s not on the immediate horizon. On the surface, it would seem as if private messaging would threaten the openness that FireChat’s networks depend upon, but Daligault envisions the service as an add-on to the public chats, and believes it will actually expand the app’s user base in the long run.
FireChat's download rates declined when protests began dwindling in Hong Kong last week, though Daligault says there's been no significant slowdown in activity. Tensions escalated once again this week, after government leaders abruptly cancelled negotiations with protesters, and flared on Wednesday, after video of a protester being beaten by police began spreading across the internet.
It's not clear whether FireChat's popularity will sustain once things calm down in Hong Kong — the government said Thursday that it's ready to begin negotiations with student protesters — though Open Garden hopes its app will eventually extend beyond the realm of protests and civil unrest.
"I wish the app was known for other things," Daligault says, "but so it is."Despite a 93 degree muggy day in Lufkin Thursday afternoon, hundreds of Dez Bryant fans from his hometown and from as far away as North Texas, streamed into Lufkin’s Kit McConnico Park for a free BBQ and picnic that the Dallas Cowboys star announced on social media barely 24 hours before.
Bryant said he wanted to give back to his hometown, offer up an estimated $16,000 worth of free BBQ, and have a chance to play kickball in the park just like he did when he was a kid.
But when you’re the Lufkin Parks director, the logistics are a lot to pull off in just a few hours. Although Mike Akridge says he did it willingly for Lufkin’s most famous son.
“He’s pretty much the biggest thing around," Akridge said. “It’s one of those things that a celebrity of that status in Lufkin, Texas, that’s our job to make it work.”
Among the hundreds who showed up, many of them wearing their Dez Bryant 88 jerseys, were kids like Lufkin resident Zachary Lumpkin, just hoping for a chance to meet the football star.
“I’ll probably say hello or probably freak out or something, I don’t know.”
Nine-year old Jayden Trujillo from Lufkin had #88 shaved into one side of his hair and the Dallas star on the other just for the occasion this morning. And long-time Lufkin residents like Clinton Durham came to see the little kid who used to play football in his Lufkin backyard.
“He was always the smallest one, but the toughest,” Durham said. “What he’s doing now, he was doing when he was 10 years old.”
But as they started to serve up the free BBQ, we noticed there was one non-Dez fan at the front of the line. Tony Penson of Lufkin was wearing a Pittsburgh Terrible Towel on his head. He admits he just came for the free food.
“Before Dallas, even had a Dez Bryant, I wasn’t a Dallas fan,” Penson said. “I like the free plate, and that’s why I’m here and that’s what it is too,” he joked.
Lufkin police led interference and provided crowd control as Bryant arrived shortly after 2 p.m. for the event scheduled to last from noon to 8 p.m. He shook hands and then exchanged hugs with his former teachers at Lufkin High. Then he climbed onto a portable stage in the middle of a baseball field to address the crowd, even he was surprised so many people showed up.
“I just want y’all to know I love y’all. I’m gonna always respect Lufkin. I’m gonna always let people know Lufkin is number one in my heart," Bryant said.
Afterwards, I asked why he’d decided to do this at the lasts second, with less than 24 hours notice.
“It works better that way,” he said. “Not less chaos. I just think it’s a real moment. It was real. Straight from the heart. Just something that I wanted to do. I wanted to go home.
“I’m gonna keep being me. I’m that kid who wore number 8 at Lufkin High," he said.
The Cowboys star signed autographs and took pictures with fans for a couple of hours in the muggy southeast Texas heat, clearly glad to see his fans in Lufkin, clearly glad to be home.
Oh, and he might have made one more convert. The one non-Cowboys fan wearing the Terrible Towel did get his free food.
“But I’m fittin’ to get down and think about Dez,” Tony Penson said.
Maybe all this will make him a Dez Bryant fan yet.
And, on another subject, Bryant offered his thoughts and advice on the off-the-field drama surrounding fellow Cowboy Zeke Elliott. Speaking from his own experience, he said he believes Elliott will emerge from those distractions ok.
“It’s just a stepping stone that he’s gonna get over. Zeke’s a young guy. I’m not blaming it on that. Freshman college to playing for America’s team, it’s kinda hard to deal with. You gotta give Zeke credit because he do deserve it, he do deserve to have fun. Because he put that work in to have fun. But, as the years pass, as he gets older, he’s gonna mature and things are gonna get a lot smoother.”
Copyright 2016 WFAAThe series is all tied up at 2 and the Blues killer instinct just hasn’t been there. It’s fairly obvious and needs to change starting with tonight’s Game 5.
Since squandering a 2-0 series lead, the Blues seem to have given all the momentum they created on home ice right back to the Kings for this crucial Game 5.
If the Blues want to have any chance of winning tonight’s game, and more importantly, the series, the Blues must clean up certain areas of their game.
So what needs to be “fixed”?
Ladies and Gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, here is my first mini rant as a member of thehockeywriters.
1. The mental mistakes.
They just need to stop. Period.
The Blues cannot be shooting themselves in the foot against this high-powered offense that the Kings sport 5 v 5.
In game 4, the Blues were caught out of position in their own zone, in the neutral zone, and in the offensive zone.
Jeff Carter’s 4 v 4 goal is really just embarrassing:
First of all, T.J. Oshie should not be the first guy back on this play. It’s bad enough that Roman Polak got caught staring at the puck and not his man (and he should be very aware of his assignment considering 4 v 4 is played man to man rather than a zone type scheme).
But come on Roman. This is the playoffs. Put on the after burners. Stop gliding back on defense.
You need to get back on an essential 2 on 0/2 on 1, especially when those 2 guys are Jeff Carter and Mike Richards (who I pegged as a key player the Blues needed to shut down…and they haven’t).
And don’t even get me started on the Dustin Penner goal.
You know what; too late. It’s such an awful mental mistake that it needs to be ranted about:
Does Leopold not clearly see from his position in the neutral zone that he has all three of his forwards down deep, and that there is no possible way that they can catch up to the play on the back-check if he misses that pinch along the boards?
Does he not see Oshie’s initial failed pinch along the boards?!
You know what you do there Jordan? STAY BACK WITH YOUR OTHER DEFENSEMAN!
Shattenkirk makes the right play, patiently waiting at the blue line to see who gains possession from Oshie’s pinch along the boards.
And Leopold? Well, he doesn’t.
Mental mistakes lose games; just ask Marc Andre Fleury how he thinks their Game 4 v. the New York Islanders would have ended if he hadn’t made mental mistake after mental mistake.
I’ll answer for him; they probably would have won and so too would the Blues in this past game had they played a mentally sound game.
2. Chris Stewart
Where are you?
Seriously though, you’re the leading scorer on this team; the Blues perennial X-factor.
The fact that your production is on par with the likes of Alex Pietrangelo and Jay Bouwmeester is abysmal.
Did you know that out of all the teams in the Western Conference Playoffs that are either tied or leading their series, their top scorer during the regular season is in the top 3 scorers for their team during the postseason?
Even Anze Kopitar is in his team’s top 5 in scoring and Kings fans have been screaming for him to step up all series!
Some might say it’s enough that you’re trying, Chris.
I’ve got news for you: it isn’t enough.
You need to produce and you need to do it starting tonight or next week you’ll be more concerned with your golf swing than your next opponent.
3. The “Power Play”
It has been anything but powerful.
I said it in my series preview: if the Blues want to win games, their power play needs to be clicking at 20%.
The Blues power play is currently 2/15, which means it’s clicking at 13%.
That won’t win games. That’s not capitalizing on opportunities. You must capitalize on opportunities against the Kings.
The Blues finally connected on their power play in Game 4 on a very nice point shot that got through traffic, finding T.J. Oshie in the slot for a perfect redirect.
I’ve got news for you: a redirect is probably the only way to beat Quick right now.
The guy is stopping everything he sees. Some rebounds have been there lately, but the Blues just haven’t cashed in on them.
So what advice do I have for the Blues power play? Keep it simple stupid.
Get the puck in the zone quickly and setup.
Work it to the point and send the puck side to side to get the Kings moving and thus, open up shooting lanes from the point.
Forwards need to be crashing the net on every point shot and should be looking for a redirect, a loose puck in the slot from a blocked shot, or a rebound from Quick.
Again, you will not beat Quick on an initial shot (90% of the time). Second chance opportunities must be created and must be capitalized on.
Now some Notes’ (hehe):
I said it on my twitter (@BBSuns…nice plug-in, ay?) during the game. I had a small problem with Coach Hitchcock putting Tarasenko in for Cracknell. The Blues 4th line has been their most dominant line all series and has created energy and momentum almost every time they’re on the ice.
That wasn’t my big issue though. It was the fact that Tarasenko, a guy with plenty of offensive skill and talent, played for a mere 5 minutes all game.
Not only that, but his shifts were short and his line mates weren’t ideal.
If you’re going to put Tarasenko in, a guy like McDonald who has been invisible all series should have been the one to sit.
Not a player from the 4th line. Fix it Hitch.
-I love this quote from Troy Brouwer and I think it applies to this Blues v. Kings series:
Caps' Troy Brouwer: "When we do score three goals [against Lundqvist] we have to be able to get a win out of it. Goals are hard to come by" — Mike Morreale (@mikemorrealeNHL) May 7, 2013
When you go up 2-0 on Jonathan Quick, you can’t take your foot off the gas. The Blues did in Game 4 and it cost them big time.
Scoring 3 goals against Quick is also an anomaly in the playoffs.
When it happens, the Blues need to find a way to win that game.
Doesn’t matter how pretty or ugly their play is, the Blues need to win a game in which they score 3 goals.
My Game 5 prediction: it has to be the Blues, right?
I have them winning in 7 and I don’t think they can win in Los Angeles.
I’m currently 3/4 in predictions for this series…if you’re a Blues fan I’m sure you’re hoping I go 4/5 after tonight.
The crowd should be electric tonight and I think the Blues ride that wave and get the win.Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton paid tribute to the shooting victims of the terrorist attack at a gay night club in Florida — even as the father of the shooter, Seddique Mateen, was sitting right behind her.
“I know how many people, loved ones and friends, are still grieving,” she said during her rally in Kissimmee, Florida. “And I want them to know that we will be with you. We will be with you as you rebuild your lives, as you rebuild hope for the future, because we can’t ever let that kind of hatred and violence break the spirit, break the soul, of any place in America.”
But Clinton failed to mention that the attack was a result of the shooter’s alignment with radical Islam or terrorism.
As she was speaking about Orlando, Mateen was spotted behind Clinton taking pictures of her with his phone, before putting on a red hat.
Orlando shooter's father was snapping pictures of @HillaryClinton with his phone during tribute to Orlando victims pic.twitter.com/aOiTbLDens — Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) August 9, 2016
Clinton didn’t mention any foreign policy efforts to prevent terrorism in her speech, but rather called for more gun control to keep America safe.
“We are going to try to prevent somebody who shouldn’t have a gun from shooting you or somebody that you care about,” she said, vowing to “go after the gun lobby.”“Ah,” you say, “but what of businesses? What makes government so wrong of a thing if you’re accepting of business organizations?”
That is the line that currently divides the left and right anarchisms as best I can tell. If anarchism is about not having magistrates to boss you around, then where do anarcho-capitalists get off at saying you can actually have a boss at work?
There’s a lot to the answer, but the solution is that you can choose your leaders and your bosses in the market but not necessarily government. Sure you might be able to vote, but the vote might not go your way, and if you’re not on the butt end of a transaction created by government action then someone else is.
Sure, we can get into a debate about what anarchism means and by defining anarchism as a certain thing we can say whether or not a business with a hierarchy can exist in a specific definition of anarchism or not, but that’s not what I’m interested in exploring. If you’re the kind of person who argues definitions to win arguments you’re probably not here reading my stuff. I want to sort of go over why it is okay that you can choose your boss in the market and not government.
Or maybe that needs rephrasing. The problem isn’t so much that you can’t choose your boss in government, it’s that you can. You can in fact get up and leave to go to another region or country, and the fact you can choose in both the market and the government means there’s some clearing up to be done. It seems like a clear contradiction. But anarcho-capitalists do not have cognitive dissonance. It’s that sometimes we forget to elaborate on some key things.
Specifically it is cost. What does it cost you to quit your job? Well, you’ll be out of a job, and you’ll be burning some savings while you look for a new job. Maybe you’ll invest in educating yourself to do something else. Maybe your new job will pay better or have less work, maybe it won’t, so maybe you’ll lose out on some future income as part of an income reduction.
What does it cost to quit your government? Not only will you be doing all of the above, you’ll be selling your home, investing in transportation to a new region, buying a new home, breaking off ties with people in your professional network, probably needing to choose a new industry to work in depending on where you move, and many other jarringly difficult things. In some countries you’ll have to deal with borders and policies designed to keep you in, and in many cases you’ll have to go through hundreds of man-hours of paperwork. The cost of choosing a new government to live under is tremendous, whether you move or try to force change through the system in some way. Many people would rather live in the government they have rather than try to pay all these costs with no guarantee of returns.
So when we say “you can quit your job but not your government,” it really means “you can quit your job [because the average Joe can easily do it] but not your government [because many people just can’t handle the level of investment that would take].”
“But what about the poor who are slaves to their jobs?” you scream hoarsely.
Well, nobody is a slave to their job in a free market. You typically sign a contract that has a way you can leave, so you aren’t enslaved. You’re probably wanting to say “Well what if you really need money and therefore can’t leave your job without starving?”
If you’re working in an industry that is in demand, there are probably people who are trying to buy you away from your low paying job in order to get you, a worker skilled in the industry, and slow down their competition by taking people away and reducing the competition’s functionality. If you’re in an industry that is doing fine and dandy as is and isn’t hiring people wantonly, you can still leave. You have skills you learned at your previous job and expertise in what your previous job was in the midst of doing. Its competition is probably willing to give you a job interview. If you’re laid off or something, go start your own business. I’m sure if you look around your area you’ll find people complaining about something. Look into fixing it. You’ll get paid. Barring that, offer to do odd jobs in your neighborhood in exchange for food or lodging. There’s always something that needs doing, and sometimes you’ll have to bend down to do it. If you would rather stay at your job than have to worry about finding a new one, you are not trapped. You are just voluntarily choosing to stay in your position rather than take the risk of doing something different.
“But people have to eat! A person could starve!”
Yeah, you and about 12 billion other life forms on the planet. Let’s just talk with the big man upstairs and see if we can get him to help us out in changing the laws of the universe. But in seriousness, your boss has to eat too. If enough people hate on your boss and then leave, how is your boss going to make money and eat? It goes both ways here. The market is about voluntary action and mutual benefit. If you don’t feel like you’re getting any benefit out of your job, leave and find another job. Your boss would be doing the same thing if he can’t make enough money to feed himself or his family if he has one.
“What if the law forbids either the business you want to start or working alone at something?”
That’s not a problem with anarchism now is it? Sure, anarcho-capitalism would have regions with insurance companies enticing all of its customers to do things through deductible reductions / payment reductions, and sure arbitrators would make judgements in the case of violations of the non-aggression principle, but were we in a free market nobody could stop you if you’re not violating the non-aggression principle. The worst anyone could do is shun you, but if you’re filling a market need then who’s going to do that?
“Alright. What if I can’t work?”
I’ll guess you’re of working age if you’re here and asking me that. Chances are you have a job currently, and so your question takes on the meaning “What if I get hurt and can’t work, or something to that effect?” You’ve probably heard of health insurance. When you get sick or hurt, they pay your fees or give you money to get through your difficulties. Granted, our health insurance market in the United States is the antithesis of a free market, we are assuming an anarchism and free market. In a free market, everyone would want to have insurance, and it would be general. You know how you can bundle your car insurance with your home insurance in some cases? Same here for everything. If you ever got hurt or your things were stolen or your were in need generally, your insurance company would help you out. Similarly and in the other direction, if you stole from somebody and you lost arbitration, or damaged the things of someone else by accident, your insurance company would pay that cost and then raise your rates or tell you to alter your behavior in exchange for your rate staying the same or not going up so much. This also answers the lingering question “what of children born with disabilities and can never work?” The parents’ insurance would cover partially or in full the cost of raising the child and helping it along to becoming as functional as he or she can be, as it was all part of the risk of covering those parents and what they do and / or produce. The rule of thumb even in life today is to buy insurance before you have children.
As a corollary to the insurance bit, you might try to argue that an insurance company would just become a government. This isn’t true. If enough people deem an insurance company unjust or anything and then move to a different company or just terminate contracts, said company has a drop in its income. It’s hard for a business to function without a consistent and supporting income. Even if this company tried to wage war to maintain income, other insurance companies would be out defending their own customers from this rogue “insurance” company. No self serving insurance company wants their clients killed. That means millions in pay outs per person. It is more cost effective for an insurance company to protect its beneficiaries than to pay out for claims.
“Well, okay. I guess it |
explode - involves harvesting them from captured munitions, or buying them from someone else.
Making their own explosive allows the insurgents to build more and bigger bombs, according to the Sahan report and an upcoming report from a U.N. panel of experts that monitors an arms embargo on Somalia.
According to the U.N. report which is due to be published next month, the U.S. Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, which is funded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has confirmed the presence of potassium nitrate in six major vehicle-borne bomb incidents since 2016.
“The potential use of HME (home-made explosive) by al Shabaab would allow the group to rely less on the process of harvesting explosives from munitions, which is slow and laborious … allow(ing) the militant group to increase the frequency and explosive weight of its IEDs,” said the report.
Al Shabaab, which wants to overthrow Somalia’s U.N.-backed government and impose strict Islamic law, has not yet claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack, in keeping with previous incidents in which large numbers of civilians have been killed.
Mass civilian deaths have caused deep divisions among fighters, a security source with knowledge of discussions within the group said.
A former top al Shabaab commander, Mukhtar Robow Abu Mansur, condemned the attack and was photographed by local media donating blood. Robow defected to the government in August after the U.S. government removed a $5 million bounty for his capture.
Two Mogadishu-based security sources outlined the events leading up to the latest attack to Reuters.
They said a car bomb and a truck bomb were deployed to hit Mogadishu International Airport, a warren of buildings ringed by barbed wire and blast walls that house contractors, diplomats and a European Union military training mission.
“One bomb would have breached a checkpoint, opening the way for a larger bomb,” one of the Western security contractors told Reuters. “They also had fighters nearby ready to come inside the base.”
The driver of the car bomb had been driving through checkpoints for a week ahead of the attack, paying small bribes and getting security forces used to his presence, he said.
A larger truck entered the city and passed through one checkpoint, but was stopped at one known as Kilometer Five. Panicking, he tried to force his way through, but got snarled in traffic next to a fuel truck.
“I could see the truck speeding. I also heard few gunshots behind it. Police must have been chasing it,” said Mohamed Ali, 21, who was injured in the blast.
“As it advanced it came to many cars in the street, then the truck driver swerved abruptly to the left lane, but its tyres got stuck in the highway divider. What followed was the blast and smoke.”
The fireball tore through the intersection, incinerating hundreds of civilians. Many were too badly burned to be identified and were buried in mass graves.
The driver of the car bomb was detained at another checkpoint by soldiers who had taken him out for questioning before its bomb also detonated.
Three security sources told Reuters he identified himself as al Shabaab.Bear Grylls: ‘It’s not for me, you understand... ‘
I’ve written about Bear Grylls, the television personality, survival expert and tourism operator a couple of times recently. Now I find myself writing about him again.
My first mention of Grylls was an almost light-hearted look at his ‘survival camp’ on Llŷn, done only because I’d picked up a leaflet for this nonsense on a visit to Porthmadog. So demanding and dangerous is this camp that it caters for drunks on stag and hen parties. (Scroll down in this post.)
I next wrote about him was in more serious vein, after learning of his involvement with wide boy Gavin Lee Woodhouse – of ‘Wynnborn’ fame – and their joint attempt to take over another piece of Wales and re-name it the Afan Valley Adventure Resort. Read English Tourism in the Colony of Wales.
I have been in contact recently with a Gwynedd councillor who had more to tell me about Bear Grylls, and although this tale takes us back to July 2014 I think it deserves an airing, so I’m reproducing in full an e-mail exchange that took place between Bear Grylls and Councillor Craig ab Iago. (You can either click on the image on the right to enlarge it, or read it in pdf format by clicking here.)
At the time of this exchange Grylls was applying for planning permission to build a new stone jetty on St Tudwal’s Island (which he owns) off the coast of Llŷn. As a follow-up to the official planning application he wrote to all members of the planning committee.
I’m unsure about the propriety, or the legality, of seeking to influence elected representatives in this way. Maybe an Old Etonian who is now a ‘celeb’ regularly uses back channels in order to get what he wants. Of course, what works in London doesn’t always translate to Gwynedd.
First off, let’s remember that this is a planning application by a businessman to make one of his assets more profitable. That’s all there is to it, really, it’s about Bear Grylls seeking to make more money.
But he can’t say that, so he has to try a different tack; he starts off by mentioning his “young family”, which might influence an application to build an extra bedroom but is totally irrelevant in this context.
Then he presents himself as the benefactor to the local community “in and around Abersoch” (i.e. the Cheshire set), and the partner of Trinity House, which maintains St Tudwal’s Island lighthouse.
At which point you might, like me, be wondering: if Trinity House needs a new jetty why couldn’t they apply for it themselves? Come to that, does a body like Trinity House even need to apply for planning permission?
This appeal by Bear Grylls is nothing but simpering, self-serving bollocks; just a cut above, ‘think of all the drowning kiddies, sob! sob!’ I don’t want to dwell on this stomach-churning bullshit any longer.
Thankfully, Craig ab Iago was able to answer Grylls, and he did so with dignity and passion. It is a response worth reading for its honesty, and how it contrasts to Grylls’ artifice and dissimulation. I urge you to read Craig’s cri de coeur and ensure that it has the widest possible audience.
Tourism and the colonisation it encourages is the surest way of destroying our rural way of life. That’s why Wales is being offered little other than tourism.
~ ♦ ~
Redrow Homes, Goetre Uchaf
One of Wales’ great success stories, so the media would have us believe, is Redrow Homes. A company formed by Steve Morgan, with headquarters in Ewloe, Flintshire, and quoted on the FTSE 250. The truth is that Redrow being in Wales is just an accident of geography, there is no commitment to Wales or things Welsh whatsoever.
Proven by the twee names Redrow gives to its developments and the names of its house types – The Ludlow, The Warwick, The Cambridge, The Windsor, The Shaftesbury, etc. But occasionally Redrow gives the appearance of recognising it’s in Wales by using a Welsh name for one of its developments. An example would be Goetre Uchaf in Bangor.
Unfortunately, the ‘commitment’ is just skin deep. Because of course, like so many companies operating in the building trade and property development – and especially in the north – Redrow targets English buyers. So it is with Goetre Uchaf, as this advertisement proves with, ‘Move to North Wales with Redrow Homes’.
If you want further proof, then listen to the start of this video and hear the mangling of Goetre Uchaf. And if these houses are not needed in Bangor – and seeking buyers over the border suggests they’re not – then why was planning permission granted?
~ ♦ ~
Pole Polling
I am indebted to another source for making me realise that, with two elections coming up, ‘Welsh’ Labour will again target the Polish vote in Llanelli (and perhaps elsewhere). For Labour has worked assiduously over the years to exploit forge links with the Polish community in the town.
The starting point would appear to be 2004 when, according to this WalesOnline article from May 2014, a desperate Pole went into the office of the SaveEasy Credit Union in downtown Llanelli, where manager Jeff Hopkins was eventually able to find a Polish speaker to help him.
From this encounter grew the Welsh Polish Mutual Association which opened in 2006 to help Polish migrants arriving in the town. The chairman of the Association is the aforementioned Jeff Hopkins. In an earlier incarnation he had been the agent for Denzil Davies, the town’s Labour MP from 1970 until 2005.
A SaveEasy Credit Union employee involved with the new Association was Halina Ashley, Polish herself. It should go without saying that Mrs Ashley is also a member of the Labour Party. I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that Mrs Ashley was the Polish speaker Jeff Hopkins was able to find on that Sunday morning back in 2004.
The official opening took place in September 2006, conducted by Edwina Hart. From its outset the Association was funded by the ‘Welsh’ Government, partly through the ill-starred Communities First programme, which was finally put out of its misery in February.
Though the Polish-Welsh Association was not registered as a company until 27 February 2013. On the Companies House website you’ll see that the only director other than Hopkins is Janice Williams, a Labour county councillor. Williams has also been a director of the local Citizens Advice Bureau, that body taken over by the Labour Party years ago.
To this day, I understand, the ‘Welsh’ Government funds the Welsh Polish Mutual Association centre in Llanelli, and pays for the ‘Welcome’ packs for arriving Poles, with the SaveEasy Credit Union paying the overheads for the building.
Though I must confess to being appalled to read my source suggesting, “It would not be a surprise to discover that the packs contain postal voting forms... I am led to believe that Llanelli Labour have form regarding this”.
I had just put away the smelling salts after reading that when I found myself scrabbling for them again on reading that Hopkins and Ashley have access to confidential data that could be of great use to the Labour Party in targeting the Polish vote.
As I said to myself, ‘But they would never do anything like that, because to do so would contravene the Data Protection Act 1998.’ That said, there is some evidence...
The leaflet below, for example, from last year’s Assembly election, is obviously for the benefit of Polish voters; and seeing Mrs Halina Ashley, a woman they know, in the company of the Labour candidate, clearly carries the message, ‘Vote Labour!’.
The Polish vote in Llanelli may not be as large as in some English towns, but it still makes up five or six per cent in the wards where Poles tend to congregate. The percentage is higher in the Tŷ Isha ward where not so long ago the Safer Community Action Group was set up to counter the allegedly anti-social behaviour of gangs of drunken young Polish males.
The group was supported by thirsty Labour councillor and recipient of someone else’s liver, Keri Thomas, on the grounds that the Polish influx “put a burden on services, on the GPs and the hospitals and the schools”. (You couldn’t make this up, could you?) Like most Labour politicians, Thomas is talking rubbish.
The Polish migrants are overwhelmingly healthy young men, consequently they are unlikely to be a burden on the health service. If Keri Thomas and others are so concerned about people moving to Wales and putting a strain on our services why do they say nothing about retirees, or the substance-abusing riff-raff and others with ‘issues’ who get priority treatment from housing associations and other agencies?
Knowing ‘Welsh’ Labour as we do, and with the evidence from last year’s election to guide us, it is entirely reasonable to assume that ‘inside information’, unavailable to other parties, is being used to target the Polish vote in Llanelli for both the council elections and the UK general election
Footnote: Councillor Janice Williams is standing down next month in the Lliedi ward, where one of the Tory candidates is a Stefan Ryszewski. Woe! Woe! Even the Fates mock Labour!
~ ♦ ~
Pond Life in Ebbw Vale
A Gwent source tells me of an interesting sale taking place at 5pm today, in the Park Inn Hotel at Llanedeyrn in Cardiff. (If you hurry, you might still make it!) His interest was aroused by one particular lot of three former feeder ponds for the local steelworks and the land around them.
The catalogue makes interesting reading, for it contains all manner of properties but a majority seem to be small terraced houses of the kind that often make the news when a London ‘paper reports, ‘Englishman buys whole Welsh street for £37.50, ha! ha!’
Which says something about many things, such as the ‘Welsh’ Government’s neglect of the Valleys, and our relationship with England. Consider also that many of these humble dwellings being auctioned are repossessions, each one representing someone’s dashed hope of owning a home. But the Daily Mail don’t give a fuck about that.
In March 2009 the Newport-based South Wales Argus reported that the ‘Welsh’ Government had given £150,000 to transform the site in question, the Argus even saying that work had started. Yet to look at the site now it appears that little if anything was ever done.
So the questions are:
What happened to the £150,000?
Why wasn’t the area improved as promised?
What’s been happening for the past 8 years?
Who owns this land today?
Why is it being sold?
Maybe the ‘Welsh’ Government is hoping that Bear Grylls and ‘Wynnborn’ Woodhouse come galloping over the Beacons, bugles blowing and flags fluttering, to unveil their plan for the Waun-y-Pound Aquatic Adventure Resort, replete with crocodiles and piranhas – let the good times roll!
~ ♦ end ♦ ~A Virtual Front-Row Seat With only limited seating in the Stadsschouwburg we decided to replicate our first-row seats indefinitely. By using virtual reality cameras everyone with an Android smartphone and a (cheap) pair of VR goggles can fully immerse themselves in the TEDxAmsterdam experience.
Virtual reality is one of the hottest developments in video consumption and with the arrival of Google’s DIY virtual reality headset it’s available for the masses. This do-it-yourself cardboard headset lets anyone to turn their Smartphone into an immersive 3D environment.
Join us in virtual reality
If you are interested in stepping into our virtual world, join us at VondelCS or at one of the other viewing parties. We have provided each with a few Google Cardboard VR glasses. Alternatively if you want to watch the VR livestream at home, get your own cardboard VR glasses at DODOcase.
Please find the TEDxAmsterdam Virtual Reality Livestream app in the Google Play store.
VR livestream & other virtual worlds
In addition to the VR livestream of our TEDxAmsterdam Talks provided by yellowBird we will also provide TEDxAmsterdam guests the opportunity to go back in time via the 360° photos of earlier TEDxAmsterdam editions. Moreover, according to this years theme Somewhere in Time we will bring you back to the year 1650 with a virtual world created by Rob Tuytel.
Categorized as Posts, Somewhere in Time.Neptune reaches opposition on September 5, 2017
Neptune, the eighth planet from the Sun, reaches opposition in Aquarius on September 5th. On this day, the most distant planet in the Solar System will be 28.939 AU (approx. 4,329 million km or 2,690 million miles) from the Earth and visible all night long. It rises above the eastern horizon at sunset, reaches its highest point in the sky during the middle of the night before setting in the west at sunrise.
With an apparent magnitude of +7.8, Neptune is the only planet that's not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. However, provided you know exactly where to look, it's relatively easy to find with binoculars and small scopes.
Location
The constellation Aquarius is a faint member of the zodiac with its brightest stars shining at only third magnitude. Neptune is currently positioned about 30 degrees south of the centre of the Great Square of Pegasus and 2 degrees east of lambda Aqr (λ Aqr - mag. +3.7). First magnitude star, Fomalhaut (α Psc - mag. +1.2), is 22 degrees directly to the south. When Neptune reaches opposition the full Moon is also in Aquarius, and on September 6th it passes less than a degree south of the planet.
The finder chart below shows the position of Neptune on September 5th. Since the distant planet moves slowly with respect to the background stars, the chart is also accurate enough for some time before and after opposition.
Neptune Opposition Finder Chart - September 5, 2017 - pdf format (credit:- freestarcharts)
Observing
Even though Neptune's apparent diameter is only 2.4 arc seconds, a small scope at high magnification will reveal a small featureless blue disk. However, even the largest backyard instruments don't significantly improve the view, but it is possible to spot Neptune's largest moon Triton (mag. +14.0). For this task a scope of the order of 300mm (12 inches) aperture is recommended, especially from suburban areas.
Neptune Opposition Data Table
Date September 5, 2017 Right Ascension 22hr 57m 19s Declination -07d 41m 46s Apparent Magnitude +7.8 Apparent Size 2.4" Illumination (%) 100.0 Distance from Earth (AU) 28.939 Constellation Aquarius
See also
The Planets this Month - September 2017WASHINGTON: A bipartisan legislation seeking reform of the popular H-1B visa programme and modifying wage requirements has been introduced in the Senate with an aim to check "abuse of the system", a move that could have implications for the Indian techies working in America.The bill has been introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley, Chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, and Dick Durbin, Assistant Democratic Leader. It is co-sponsored by Senators Bill Nelson, Richard Blumenthal, and Sherrod Brown."The H-1B visa programme was never meant to replace qualified American workers, but it was instead intended as a means to fill gaps in highly specialised areas of employment that cannot be filled by Americans," Grassley said."The abuse of the system is real, and media reports are validating what we have argued against for years, including the fact that Americans are training their replacements."There is a sense of urgency for Americans who are losing their jobs to lesser skilled workers who are coming in at lower wages on a visa programme that has gotten away from its original intent, he said."Reform of the H-1B visa programme must be a priority," Grassley stressed.The bill would prohibit companies from hiring H-1B employees if they employ more than 50 people and more than 50 per cent of their employees are H-1B and L-1 visa holders.This provision would crackdown on outsourcing companies that import large numbers of H-1B and L-1 workers for short training periods and then send these workers back to their home country to do the work of Americans, the Senators said."For years, foreign outsourcing companies have used loopholes in the laws to displace qualified American workers and facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs. The H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act would end these abuses and protect American and foreign workers from exploitation," Durbin said.The bill would also give the Department of Labour enhanced authority to review, investigate and audit employer compliance as well as to penalise fraudulent or abusive conduct.The bill says that working conditions of similarly employed American workers may not be adversely affected by the hiring of the H-1B worker, including who have been placed by another employer at the American worker's work site.It explicitly prohibits replacement of American workers by H-1B or L-1 visa holders.The Grassley-Durbin reform bill will for the first time prioritise the annual allocation of H-1B visas.In addition, the bill includes establishment of a wage floor for L-1 workers, give authority to the Department of Homeland Security to investigate, audit and enforce compliance with L-1 programme requirements, provide assurance that intra-company transfers occur between legitimate branches of a company and do not involve "shell" facilities and a change to the definition of "specialised knowledge" to ensure that L-1 visas are reserved only for truly key personnel.You know what we need right now? A trip to the mall, not even to buy, but to observe and learn. See how people engage with each other. Observe how they coordinate their movements in the public spaces without direction. Appreciate the kindness that salespeople show for customers whom they do not know, and how this ethos of mannerly sociability extends out to the hallways and the entire space. Consider the complexities of production that make all of this available to you without mandates or impositions.
Or perhaps we need a walk in the park while playing Pokemon GO, meeting new people and laughing with them. It’s fascinating how the mobile app creates a digital reality that sits atop the real one, and how we can all experience this technological marvel together. Strangers are given an excuse to speak and get to know each other.
In this extremely strange election year, escaping the roiling antagonism and duplicity of politics a might be essential for a healthy outlook on life. Really, just any visit to an awesome commercial center, teeming with life and full of human diversity, would be palliative. Or maybe it is a visit to a superstore to observe the products, the service, energy, the benevolence, of the commercial space. We can meet people, encounter their humanity, revel in the beauty and bounty of human life. Or it could be your local watering hole with its diverse cast of characters and complicated lives that elude political characterization.
Also thrilling is to attend a concert and see how the arts and music can serve as a soundtrack to the building of community feeling. With public performance, there are no immigration restrictions to the category of “fan.” We can sing, clap, and dance to shared experience, and everyone is invited in.
And while in these places, we need to reflect on the meaning of the existence of these spaces and what they reveal about ourselves and our communities. Here you will see something wonderful, invigorating, thrilling, magical: human beings, with all our imperfections and foibles, can get along. We can provide value to each other and find value in each other. We can cooperate to our mutual betterment.
These spaces are all around us. And here politics don’t exist, mercifully. No one will scream at you or threaten you for failing to back the right candidate or for holding the wrong ideology or being part of the wrong demographic or religion. Here we can rediscover the humanity in us all and the universal longing for free and flourishing lives.
In this extremely strange election year, escaping the roiling antagonism and duplicity of politics, and finding instead the evidence all around us that we can get along, however imperfectly, might actually be essential for a healthy outlook on life.
Politics Makes a Mess of Our Minds
Some startling new evidence has emerged about the effect of this year’s election on the psychological well being of the US population. The American Psychological Association has released an early report on its annual survey and found that more than half the population reports being seriously stressed, anxious, alarmed, depressed, and even frightened by the election. Essentially, the constant coverage, dominating the news every minute of every day, is freaking people out.
It’s one thing for politics to mess up the world around us, but it’s a real tragedy if we let politics mess up our minds, spirits, and lives.I totally get this. I’ve felt it – some nagging sense that things are not quite right, that the lights in the room are dimming, that life is not quite as hopeful and wonderful as it usually is.
I’ve regarded this as my own fault; for the first time I’ve followed this election very closely. I made this awful bed and now I’m lying in it. The message that politics beats into our heads hourly is that your neighbor might be your enemy, and that the realization of your values requires the crushing of someone else’s.
That’s a terrible model of human engagement to accept as the only reality. It is demoralizing, and I’ve felt it this year more than ever. But everyone I know says the same thing, even those who are trying their best to tune it out. Now we have evidence that vast numbers are affected. It’s one thing for politics to mess up the world around us, but it’s a real tragedy if we let politics mess up our minds, spirits, and lives.
Why Is this Happening?
Carl von Clausewitz is believed to have said that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” It may be more accurate to say that politics is the continuation of warfare by other means. There are winners who get the power and what comes with it, and losers who forfeit power and pay. This isn’t like business competition in which my win only affects your future revenue stream. In politics, my win comes at your expense through the violence of state action. That’s what gives this moment prescience.
Watching the state’s political gears in motion is an ongoing exhibition of low-grade warfare that seems to demand that we fight or take cover. We all have some sense, whether true or not, that so much is at stake. Then you look at the epic unpopularity of the candidates and it is truly amazing. If the Republican weren’t running, the Democrat would be the most despised candidate for the presidency in American history. Then you add to that the beyond-belief loathing of the GOP candidate and you really do gain a sense of the seeming hopelessness of it all.
And talk about divisive! Look at these angry rallies, the screaming for destruction of the enemy. And this has spilled over to social media. We are all losing friends. People we used to hang out with we no longer speak to. Whole population groups are feeling afraid of what’s coming – and this is true of everyone no matter their race, religion, or gender. Predictions of the coming doom are everywhere around us.
And there is a sense in which they are all correct. As Bastiat explained, the state turns people against each other, shattering the harmony of interests that normally characterizes human life. Watching the state’s political gears in motion is an ongoing exhibition of low-grade warfare that seems to demand that we fight or take cover. The shrillest voices, the meanest temperaments, and the most amoral plotters are the ones who dominate, while virtues such as wisdom, charity, and justice are blotted out.
Is it any wonder that this is not exactly uplifting of the human spirit?
The Lessons
What if the whole of life worked like the political sector? It would be unrelenting misery, with no escape, ever. As it is, this is not the case. We should be thankful for it, and remember that the thing that makes life wonderful, beautiful, and loving is not crushing your enemy with a political weapon but rather the gains that come from turning would-be enemies into friends in an environment of freedom.
We don’t really want to live amidst anger or revel in the destruction of our enemies. Hate is not a sustainable frame of mind. In these environments, we have the opportunity to discover a different model of human engagement. By letting people choose, innovate, associate, and cooperate – to do anything peaceful – we discover proof that human beings can self-organize. We can get along. We can build wealth. We can create institutions that reward goodness, charity, justice, and decency. We can serve ourselves and others at the same time.
A slogan passed around some years ago in academic circles was that “the personal is the political.” That sounds like hell on earth. The slogan should be flipped and serve as a warning to all of us: whatever you politicize will eventually invade your personal life. We should not allow this to happen. The less that life is mediated by political institutions, the more the spontaneous and value-creating impulses in our nature come to the fore.
I’m convinced that we all want this. We don’t really want to live amidst anger or revel in the destruction of our enemies. Hate is not a sustainable frame of mind. We intuitively understand that when we use politics to hurt our neighbor, we are also hurting ourselves. We are being dragged down instead of being lifted up.
We owe the good life to the remaining liberties we have to discover the possibility of genuine human community all around us. Without liberty, the world would sink into a pit of mutual recrimination and violence. Human beings thrive in the absence of politicization. Discovering that great truth is one way to avoid the mire into which the politics of our time seeks to plunge us.So far, Avengers Arena has basically been killing off characters that they invented for the series, or characters that appeared in one or two panels in other books. Okay, there was Mettle as well. But this time, the book may have gone too far by knocking off a major character. Well, major-ish. Well, major to some. Major to anyone who read Runaways. Take a look…
And that is the end of Nico Minoru, Sister Grimm, of Runaways. No fridging here though… not in the usual fashion at least. Though there will no doubt be emotional impact for the individual influenced to do the killing… but how did Tumblr react?
How do you think?
therealsongbirddiamondback
Don’t believe that Dennis Hopeless is running on a bias? Then how come Katy let X-23 live? She had her unconscious and she just threw her back to her team. So let me wrap my head around this. The girl caught the unconscious healing assassin, but she let’s her live? Someone who’s in it for the win, and she just chucks the deadliest threat to her back to the other kids to heal? It’s painfully obvious that Hopeless cares more about some characters than others, and he’s making plotholes so that he can kill who he wants. Seriously, people who defend this book, you’re really losing your ground. It’s awful.
maythesnarkbeeverinyourfavor
Avengers Arena: Because the Marvel-verse Didn’t Quite Suck Enough for Teen Heroes
Runaways was pretty much my entrance to comics, the very first series I loved and bought the hardcover collections of. Nico was my favorite character. Fuck you, Marvel. If DC wasn’t a heaping pile of shit right now, I’d probably quit reading everything you publish.
magickmaker
Nico’s got a lot of loved ones who probably didn’t head upwards after they died. I’d say I’m surprised that they actually killed her, but I really think that every character there is D-list enough to be on the chopping block. Not that that’ll stop any writer from reviving them if the writer wants to use them enough. Man, this event has me cynical on comic book death. …more than usual, any way.
thecloudbreak
You know how much willpower she has?
After everything that happened she still tried to fight, to get to the Staff of One. Let’s not forget her past with her parents and the one shot of her torture too, but in this comic serie she made from a poisonous bush a fruit bearing tree, one of the only sources of food and saw it get teared down in attempt to make an ally in Murderworld. She tried many different spells to get out of Murderworld and all failed and she can only use them once. After that all she still chose to fight and dragged herself to the Staff of One while she could just simply gave up, but she didn’t. Nico is a hero. And I’m going to pretend this happened in an alternative world, like so many comics. Because she can’t just die like this. Not when the Runaways are on Hiatus and there can be a possible movie. And she is awesome.
avengingyouth
“People always say teenagers think they’re immortal, but I… I don’t think that. I mean all I ever think about is death.” ↳ Nico Minoru’s First & Last Appearances
marvelousmercury
I’m an avivd comic book reader. I’ve been reading them since I was 16 roughly. Every once and a while there will be one that will stir emotions within me. Usually it’s happiness and joy but once and a while sadness. There are only a few times when I’ve cried while reading a comic. I cried when Illyana Rasputin died in Uncanny X-Men #303, I cried when Shadowcat sacrificed herself in Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1 and I gasped in horror and sooked when Gert died in Runaways vol. 2 #18.
But right now I’m really angry. Nico is dead as of Avengers Arena #10 and every time I think about I just get really mad and I don’t want anymore of the Runaways to die! NONE! I want them all back together and not dying and not split up in other books and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
quesadillasinqueso
<
Wow fuck Avengers Arena I won’t read this shit anymore.
magickmaker
Don’t normally do two of these, but I wanted to address the fact that she was killed by Chase. Indirectly, yeah, but still.
adambogert
#$%@! I did not, until just now, really look at the last pages preceding Nico’s death. She sees Chase show up. She is relieved. She goes to apologize, and has her arm blown off, the staff (which should not break) broken, and is then dropkicked off a cliff. By her best friend. Hopeless didn’t just kill Nico. He used Chase to do it. If I sounded angry over the last few days, that was nothing compared to how I feel right now.
rosesakurax
And marvel really did it…
*spoilers* All I have to say i fuck you Dennis Hopeless. Nico Minoru was a strong female poc leader. You have depowered her through out the series and had her killed off by one of her best friends being mind controlled. Who will probably after gaining his mind back will probably try to seek “vengeance” in the ultimate example of fridging possible. But it’s all okay because it’s a” great story” with ” amazing art.” lets just ignore the fact that Nico was great role model for girls, how her staff of one was basically reduced to a stick in this series whe it’s supposed to be an extremely powerful magical weapon. Meanwhile you upgrade the strength of her white male friend by giving him an extremely powerful alien weapon. Sure because we don’t already have enough of thosse. Her death was really cheap and only served your fucking plot. You know what Dennis you really are fucking Hopeless…
rosewilsontheravager
Marvel Is Dead To Me
Forever. I will never again buy anything Marvel related, give it the time of day, will never waste any sort of shit on it ever again. The way Marvel treats the fans of their characters is gross and disgusting, and I am sick and tired of them pissing in the face of the fans of niche characters with bullcrap like Avengers Arena. As far as I’m concerned, the canon Runaways story ended after the series ended. This shit right now is nothing but disgusting fan fic by a sadistic, disturbed asshole. Fuck you Marvel. Fuck you Hopeless. Fuck off.
UPDATE: Charming. Of course, there’s always this to consider…
@bleedingcool You do realize that she grabs the staff of one and casts Help? — Michael Lehrman (@AngelArm77) June 6, 2013
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
(Last Updated )
Related Posts
None foundAstronomers are watching the skies as a three-mile-wide asteroid named after the Greek demi-God Phaethon will pass as close as 6.4 million miles from Earth on Dec. 17 – ‘quite close,’ Russian astronomers told Yahoo News UK.
The object, named 3200 Phaethon, will have no chance it will actually hit Earth, the report said.
Phaethon was a Greek demi-God who borrowed his father, the sun God Helios’s chariot, the report said, and nearly burnt the Earth to a cinder, before being killed by Zeus.
NASA classifies the asteroid as a ‘potentially hazardous asteroid,’ but it will pass 6.4 million miles from Earth on Dec 17, Yahoo News UK reported.
The Phaethon asteroid puzzles scientists because it has some features similar to a comet, with a slight ‘tail’ visible on previous passes, the report said.
In a statement, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University said: ‘Apparently, this asteroid was once a much bigger object.
“But its many approaches to the Sun have caused it to crumble into smaller pieces which eventually formed this meteor shower,” the statement said, adding “If so, the asteroid itself could be the residue of a comet nucleus.The asteroid’s extremely elongated orbit, thanks to which it sometimes gets to the Sun closer than Mercury and it sometimes moves away farther than Mars, is another argument in favour of this theory.”
NASA defines potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth, the report said.
– WN.com, Jack DurschlagCopyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Deniz Martinez, 31, and Jason Drake, 38. Polk County Jail booking photos
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Deniz Martinez, 31, and Jason Drake, 38. Polk County Jail booking photos
LAKE WALES, Fla. (WFLA) - Police say the girlfriend of a man who was supposed to submit a urine test called in a bomb threat at his Winter Haven probation office to prevent it from happening.
Deniz Martinez, 31, of Lake Wales is charged with Filing A False Report Concerning Planting a Bomb, which is a felony. Police released a recording of the call they say she made to 911 (listen above |
scale.
Raspberry Pi has been a project seven years in the making. It’s often felt like the closer we got to our goals, the further away they seemed. But we’re having the time of our lives. We’ve only been selling for six months, and we’ve sold around half a million units already. Universities are giving Pis to their freshmen as a gift on arrival; 7-year-old kids are sending us videos of their adventures writing Scratch games.
So in the end, I guess you can have the hard and soft little bits of everything.
Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90The emir of Qatar has warned that the international warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir could destablize the entire region. "If anything happened to Omar al-Bashir and Sudan ended up in chaos, the whole of Africa will sink into chaos," Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani said in an interview with SPIEGEL to be published on Monday.
AP Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.
He said that the terrorist group al-Qaida would be "happy to see Sudan become like Iraq." The emir has invited al-Bashir to attend the summit of the Arab League, which begins in Doha on Monday. Qatar does not belong to the signatory nations of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president earlier this month for war crimes in connection with the conflict in Darfur.
The emir also greeted US President Barack Obama's offer of dialogue with Iran and clearly voiced his opposition to any possible US attacks on the country. "We will not be with America against Iran," he said, adding: "Iran never created a problem for us." The biggest US air base in the region is located in Qatar and the headquarters of the US central command is also located in the Gulf state.
The Qatar ruler also addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying he still believed in a two-state solution. He told SPIEGEL that even though Hamas, the radical Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip, do not recognize Israel at the moment, there was still the prospect of peace: "If Hamas will have the borders of 1967, they will have no alternative." The emir has acted as a mediator between the opposing Palestinian factions and is one of the few Arab leaders to host high-ranking Israeli politicians, even though Qatar does not have a peace treaty with Jerusalem.
The Qatari emir also held out the prospect that his might be the second Gulf Arab state to invest in the German auto industry. "For sure we will invest in the car manufacturers in Germany," he told SPIEGEL. "But we have to find the right time and the right price." Al-Thani said he considered the global financial crisis to be an "opportunity that will not be repeated for the next 20 years."
Earlier this week the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), bought a 9.1 percent stake in Daimler for almost 2 billion ($2.7 billion.)
On the subject of Qatar's oil wealth, the emir said he would be happy if oil prices stayed at $40 to $50 per barrel for another two years, adding that it would "help the world out of this crisis." He said he didn't see why OPEC should cut production just to keep the price of oil high. "If the world economy recovers this will be good for us, too."Asus has launched a new gaming PC called the ROG Strix GD30. The new desktop, which features a sleek black-and-white design with swappable front panels that can be attached or detached in any assortment for six possible styles, packs up to the latest 7th generation Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics.
The Asus ROG Strix GD30 boasts of intelligent thermal system that features large front and underside air vents, which provide better airflow and more effective cooling. An isolated, inner covered power supply chamber is also included to further boost the system’s efficiency.
The new Republic of Gamers PC has interchangeable front panels that allow users to customise the system to suit their own taste. Asus says the whole concept is “inspired by futurism, space travel, science fiction and cyberpunk themes.”
To make the gaming setup organised, an integrated and detachable hanger can be used for keeping a pair of headphones within reach at all times. With the Strix GD30, users can expand and upgrade whenever they please. There’s more than enough space internally for up to six HDDs, five fans, two SSDs and a water-cooling solution. And of course, an Asus gaming desktop can’t do without RGB lighting, which the new ROG system takes to a whole new level.
“Asus Aura RGB lighting lets gamers further stylise their system with a choice of over eight million colours and multiple effects,” says the Taipei-based computer hardware and electronics titan. “The motherboard can display pulsing or static effects in a single colour or up to ten colours in a continuous cycle, and the cooling fans are even ringed with red LEDs that provide a bold accent.”
The ROG Strix GD30 houses up to the latest 7th generation Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost, which delivers clock speeds reaching up to 4.2 GHz (up to 10 percent faster than previous generations). It also equips up to the latest Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards to take on the most robust of games. The GD30 also includes the exclusive Asus Aegis III software, which improves gaming experiences by allowing users to not only monitor CPU and memory usage, but control fan speeds and RGB lighting effects as well.
Official release and pricing details of the Asus ROG Strix GD30 have yet to be made, so those who want to purchase one will have to wait. Stay connected with IBTimes Australia for updates.
Asus ROG Strix GD30 gaming desktop specs
Processor: Intel Core i5-7400 / Intel Core i7-7700
Intel Core i5-7400 / Intel Core i7-7700 Operating system: Windows 10
Windows 10 Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2 GB (1 HDMI, 1 DVI, 1 DP) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB (2 HDMI, 1 DVI, 2 DP) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8 GB (2 HDMI, 1 DVI, 2 DP) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8 GB (2 HDMI, 1 DVI, 2 DP)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2 GB (1 HDMI, 1 DVI, 1 DP) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB (2 HDMI, 1 DVI, 2 DP) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8 GB (2 HDMI, 1 DVI, 2 DP) / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8 GB (2 HDMI, 1 DVI, 2 DP) Chipset: Intel H270
Intel H270 Memory: Up to 32 GB DDR4 2400 MHz (slot*4)
Up to 32 GB DDR4 2400 MHz (slot*4) Storage: Up to 3 TB SATA 6 Gbps HDD (7200 RPM) / Up to 512 GB SATA3 2.5” SSD / Up to 512 GB PCIe M.2 SSD / Up to 512 GB SATA M.2 SSD
Up to 3 TB SATA 6 Gbps HDD (7200 RPM) / Up to 512 GB SATA3 2.5” SSD / Up to 512 GB PCIe M.2 SSD / Up to 512 GB SATA M.2 SSD Optical drive: DVD-ROM, DVD-RW
DVD-ROM, DVD-RW Wireless: IEEE 802.11 ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth® 4.1
IEEE 802.11 ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth® 4.1 Audio: High Definition 7.1 Channel (Sonic Studio III)
High Definition 7.1 Channel (Sonic Studio III) Connectivity (Front): 2 x USB 2.0 / 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 / 1 x MIC / 1 x Headphone / 1 x 6-in-1 card reader
2 x USB 2.0 / 2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 / 1 x MIC / 1 x Headphone / 1 x 6-in-1 card reader Connectivity (Rear): 2 x USB 2.0 / 4 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 / 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C (Support 3A/5V) / 1 x RJ45 LAN / 1 x 7.1-channel audio / Reserve HDMI layout
2 x USB 2.0 / 4 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 / 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C (Support 3A/5V) / 1 x RJ45 LAN / 1 x 7.1-channel audio / Reserve HDMI layout Size: 230 x 550 x 540 mm
230 x 550 x 540 mm Weight: 17 kg
RELATED STORIES:Review by Aaron Haughton
Taika Waititi steps up to the helm of the Thor franchise to bring his awkward New Zealand comedic charm to the superhero blockbuster series. The result is somewhat of a breath of fresh air. The film tells a story we've seen before, but when you sprinkle the cutesy Waititi charisma over top the fun superhero action Marvel is known for, the franchise begins to crinkle with a bit of crisp freshness again, despite it being the 17th effort. However, the thing that really keeps the film afloat over its 160 minute runtime is its strong, steady heartbeat that undulates underneath its fairly simplistic storyline, akin to James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, which should prove to be just endearing enough to overcome any of its low points or missteps.
Thor: Ragnarok finds our titular hero imprisoned on the other side of the universe without his trusty hammer (or Mjölnir, if you wanna be an uber nerd about is). In a race against time, Thor hustles to get back to Asgard to stop Ragnarok — the destruction of his homeworld and the end of Asgardian civilization — at the hands of an all-powerful new threat, the ruthless Hela (played by Cate Blanchett). However, before he can return home, he first must survive a deadly gladiatorial contest that pits him against his former ally and fellow Avenger, The Incredible Hulk.There is a contradiction at the heart of the way we organise our lives, the way governments regulate society and even the way the Bureau of Statistics decides what it needs to measure and what it doesn't. Ask people what's the most important thing in their lives and very few will answer making money and getting rich. Almost everyone will tell you it's their human relationships that matter most.
And yet much of the time that's not the way we behave. Too many of us spend too much time working and making money, and too little time enjoying the company of family and friends.
We live in an era of heightened materialism, where getting and spending crowds out the social and the spiritual. That's the way most of us order our lives and it's the way governments order our society. They worry about the economy above all else.
Indeed, the parties' chief area of competition is over their ability to manage the economy. The opposition's latest criticism is that under Labor we're losing our ''enterprise culture''. What's an enterprise culture? One where all the focus is on ''creating wealth'' - making money, to you and me - and none is on how that wealth should be distributed between households or what it should be spent on.Last year, with the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) not quite cold in its grave, An Bord Pleanála approved Dublin City Council’s plans for a new fast-track development scheme for the docklands.
The planning powers of the DDDA, which will be formally dissolved by legislation later this year, had already been transferred to the council, but it was felt a new strategic planning scheme was needed to kick-start development after a hiatus lasting some six years.
The Docklands Strategic Development Zone (SDZ ) covers the Grand Canal Dock area on the south side of the river and North Lotts area on the north side, the parts of the docks closest to the city, seen as the most viable in terms of development and the provision of housing.
Within the 66 hectare zone, about 22 hectares are available for development and about 2,600 new homes and up to 350,000sq m of commercial space could be built. As under the DDDA, the fast track planning powers allow the council to grant development permission that cannot be appealed to An Bord Pleanála.
As the DDDA finally winds down, development in the docklands is ramping up, and at a far brisker pace than expected. A number of large schemes are shortly due to go on site, and the council has been put on notice that more are due to seek permission in the near future.
Residential application
In about two weeks’ time work will start on the first of these projects, the €150 million redevelopment of the historic Boland’s Mill, just off Pearse Street in the Grand Canal Docks. The Nama-backed development involves the construction of three new office and residential blocks up to 15 storeys in height, and the restoration of the five original, but now derelict, mill buildings.
The next major development likely to go on site towards the end of the year is larger still, a €450 million development on a site stretching from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on the south side of the Liffey back through to Hanover Quay at the canal basin. Targeted Investment Opportunities, a consortium of US investment group Oaktree Capital Management and Irish construction company Bennett, were last April granted permission to develop this site, formerly the Kilsaran Concrete works, for offices up to seven storeys and 158 apartments, which again will be developed with the assistance of Nama.
Ambitious
This is the largest available site in south docks at almost two hectares, and also the last along the river at the corner of Sir John Rogerson’s Quay and Britain Quay.
This scheme, which will be called Capital Dock, is being assessed by the council but a decision is expected shortly, Ms Scully said. It is also a Nama-supported project.
“In all, Nama has an interest in between 70 and 75 per cent of the land governed by the SDZ and so it’s a major player and from our point of view it’s positive because it allows co-ordinated delivery of the projects and much earlier phasing.”
The involvement of Nama in 15 of the 20 sites in the development zone also prevents developers from shirking their responsibility to provide infrastructure on their sites, not just utilities, but facilities such as public parks.
Development south of the river has taken off first but it’s the North Lotts where the real potential is, with almost 18 of the 22 available hectares on the north side of the river.
Project Wave is the largest planned development, wrapping around the shell of what was to be the Anglo headquarters, now being remodelled for the new Central Bank, but several other substantial projects are imminent. Receivers Ernst & Young lodged applications for two developments in the past two weeks. One is a seven-storey development on Sheriff Street and New Wapping Street which would see the construction of 165 apartments.
The other involves the refurbishment of the old British Rail Hotel on North Wall Quay and its expansion with a new eight-storey connecting hotel building, along with two office blocks up to nine storeys high.
Protected structure
The council has been put on notice by Nama of two more developments which will be sought shortly, both in the Point Village area. One would see the development of an accommodation complex for 800 students, while the other would be for a landmark building of approximately 20 storeys on the site of what was to be the tallest building in Ireland, Harry Crosbie’s “Watchtower” which never made it to construction.
FINAL DEVELOPMENT: DDDA MEETS ITS END AFTER 18 YEARS
It is more than three years since Phil Hogan, who was then minister for the environment, announced that the Dublin Docklands Development Authority was to be abolished and its powers and assets transferred to Dublin City Council.
Several deadlines for the quango’s abolition have since come and gone, but legislation allowing for its dissolution is expected to be passed by the Dáil this autumn.
The council is already in charge of the area through the Strategic Development Zone (SDZ) fast-track planning scheme. However, what the formal dissolution Act allows is the transfer of the DDDA’s assets. It will also have to take on its liabilities.
Dublin City Council has identified €5 million in docklands assets and €3 million in cash which it expects to secure. However, it will also take on costs, notably in relation to the operation of the Jeanie Johnston.
The ship, which was valued less than five months ago at €700,000, costs €240,000 a year to run as a tourist attraction at Custom House Quay.
The DDDA was set up in 1997 to govern the regeneration of the former industrial lands of the city’s east end.
The area under its remit was substantially larger than that covered by the new planning scheme at more than 500 hectares stretching from Butt Bridge to the Poolbeg power station on the south side, and on the north from Amiens Street to East Wall Road.
While the image of the authority is now severely tarnished, it did, at least before the property crash, fulfil a substantial part of the development remit, particularly in the areas closest to the city centre, which the council is now concentrating on.
Some two-thirds of the area now governed by the SDZ had already been developed under the governance of the DDDA before the council took over.
It was its involvement with property developers and Anglo Irish Bank, and the huge financial liabilities it assumed on behalf of the State that eventually scuppered it.
After two unfavourable independent reports the decision to abolish the docklands authority came after the Comptroller and Auditor General found “serious shortcomings” in its activities, particularly in relation to the purchase of the Irish Glass Bottle site in Ringsend.
The site was bought for €412 million by a consortium that included the authority, but was valued last year at €45 million.
The State’s exposure through the authority totalled €52 million.Austin Washington's 4 1/2 star first book, The Education of George Washington, "made me laugh out loud" while "teaching an important lesson", according to a reader who traveled almost two hundred miles to see Austin give a short talk about it. PBS host Barry Kibrick's sons made a rare appearance at the Los Angeles taping of their dad's eponymous television show when Austin appeared on it, while reviewers on Amazon bought extra copies for their friends, or multiple versions (hardback/Kindle).
The point is: Austin has a way with words!
Austin has spoken to countless tens of millions of people in the media, and tens of thousands, live.
Austin's second book, Horace, is perhaps unique in the history of children's literature, being launched in an art museum, illustrated by a legendary artist, immediately taken up by schools which have performed versions of it, and been the focus of a fun-day-at-a-serious-museum for kids of all ages.Laika, officially Laika Entertainment, LLC, is an American stop-motion animation studio specializing in feature films, commercial content for all media, music videos, and short films. The studio is best known for its stop-motion feature films Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, all co-produced in partnership with Universal Pictures through its Focus Features label. It is owned by Nike co-founder and chairman Phil Knight and is located in Hillsboro, Oregon, part of the Portland metropolitan area. Knight's son, Travis, acts as Laika's president and CEO.
Laika had two divisions: Laika Entertainment for feature films and Laika/house for commercial content. The studio spun off the commercial division in July 2014 to focus on feature film production exclusively. The new independent commercial division is now called HouseSpecial.[3][4]
History [ edit ]
In the late 1990s, Will Vinton Studios, known for its stop-motion films and commercials, sought funds for more feature-length films and brought in outside investors, which included Nike, Inc. owner Phil Knight. In 1998, Knight made his initial investment and his son Travis started work at the studio as an animator.[5] In 2002, Phil Knight acquired the financially struggling Will Vinton Studios to pursue feature-length productions.[6] The following year, Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, joined the studio as a supervising director. In July 2005, the successor to Will Vinton Studios, Laika, was founded, and named after Laika, the dog sent to space by the Soviet Union in 1957.[7] It opened two divisions: Laika Entertainment for feature films and Laika/house for commercial work, such as advertisements and music videos. They also announced their first projects, the stop-motion film Coraline (based on the book of the same name), and the CGI animated film Jack & Ben's Animated Adventure.[5]
Laika's headquarters in Hillsboro, Oregon
The studio laid off a significant portion of its staff in 2008, when its second planned feature, Jack & Ben's Animated Adventure, was cancelled.[8] The following year, the studio released its first feature film, Coraline, which received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a nomination at the BAFTAs for Best Animated Feature, a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and eight nominations at the Annie Awards, winning three, for Best Music in an Animated Feature, and Best Character Design and Production Design in a Feature Production.
After directing Moongirl and Coraline, and unsuccessfully renegotiating his contract, Selick departed Laika in 2009.[1] At the end of the year, the studio laid off more staff in its computer animation department to focus exclusively on stop-motion.[6]
Their second stop-motion feature film, ParaNorman, directed by Sam Fell and Chris Butler opened on August 17, 2012. It received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature,[9] as well as a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the BAFTAs, and eight nominations at the Annie Awards, winning two, for Character Animation and Character Design in an Animated Feature Production.
After working on stop-motion commercials for clients such as Apple Inc., Fox Sports, ESPN and Coca-Cola,[10] Laika spun off its advertising portion in July 2014, to focus on feature film production exclusively. The new independent commercial division is now called HouseSpecial.[3][4]
Their third film, The Boxtrolls, was released on September 26, 2014.[11] It was based on Alan Snow's fantasy-adventure novel, Here Be Monsters! and was directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable. It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature,[12] a Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Feature, and nine nominations at the Annie Awards, winning two, for Voice Acting and Production Design in an Animated Feature Production.
Their fourth film, Kubo and the Two Strings, directed by Travis Knight was released on August 19, 2016. It received two nominations at the Academy Awards, for Best Animated Feature and Best Visual Effects (as only the second animated film to receive that nomination, after The Nightmare Before Christmas). It won the BAFTA for Best Animated Feature. It also received a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the Golden Globes, and ten nominations at the Annie Awards, winning three, for Character Animation, Production Design and Editorial in a Feature Production.
Laika has optioned Colin Meloy's fantasy novel Wildwood[13][14] and Philip Reeve's fantasy book Goblins,[15] for potential feature film adaptations.
In March 2015, the company announced it would expand the studio in an effort to allow for production of one film per year.[16]
Laika is working on their fifth film Missing Link, which is scheduled for release on April 12, 2019.[17]
Filmography [ edit ]
Feature films [ edit ]
Released [ edit ]
Upcoming films [ edit ]
# Title Release date 5 Missing Link April 12, 2019
Contract work [ edit ]
Accolades [ edit ]
Academy Awards [ edit ]
Annie Awards [ edit ]
British Academy Film Awards [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]I’m not really one for zombie movies. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the social critique of Night Of The Living Dead. I admire the gorgeous and spooky world of The Serpent And The Rainbow. And I laughed along with everyone else at Shaun Of The Dead. But as a genre? They're not really for me.
I love 28 Days Later, however (appreciating there's debate over whether it can be classed as a zombie movie or not). I’m not going to pretend that part of it isn’t due to Cillian Murphy and Christopher Eccleston, two of my favorite actors. Both did an excellent job on the film. And yes, as an action flick fan, I liked the explosions, fast-moving 'zombies', and the scenes of a devastated London.
But what really makes the film for me is something that appeared to be virtually ignored by a lot of the reviewers. It’s sometimes dealt with in passing by other apocalyptic films, but Danny Boyle actually highlighted it: the special dangers women would face in such a world and, as we can now see by reading news stories online, which they currently face in our own.
Many of these films will include an obligatory scene in which a female character (sometimes the heroine, but it rarely matters) is nearly raped by one out-of-control male in order to be saved by another, thus exhibiting the moral and physical superiority of our hero and savior over all the other men around him.
And while this does, in fact, happen in 28 Days Later, the difference is the out-of-control rapist is neither out-of-control, nor a rapist. And the fact that he’s neither makes him all the more terrifying.
So we know that there are rapists who are not out-of-control (since rape is all about control). But how can a rapist not be a rapist?
Christopher Eccelston’s Major Henry West appears to be the leader of the last outpost of civilised humanity in Britain, having sent out a radio message encouraging survivors to join him and his men in the safety of their northern retreat. When Hannah, Selena, and Jim arrive, they are initially welcomed, but the Major quickly informs them of the real reason for the radio signal.
“Eight days ago, I found Jones with his gun in his mouth. He said he was going to kill himself because there was no future. What could I say to him? We fight off the infected or we wait until they starve to death... and then what? What do nine men do except wait to die themselves? I moved us from the blockade, and I set the radio broadcasting, and I promised them women. Because women mean a future.”
The way West presents this, “women mean a future,” sounds somewhat noble and coming from the seemingly earnest Major seems to reinforce this impression. But as Jim quickly realises, and the soldiers just as quickly illustrate, this isn’t about the fact that women are the bearers of children and thus necessary to our survival as a species. It’s not about the appeal of the feminine spirit and the pining for lost mothers, daughters and sisters. It’s about sex.
Monstrous is the only way to describe the behavior of West’s men. They separate Jim from Selene and adolescent Hannah, making it clear they have no problems sexually assaulting both of the females. They taunt them and even make their victims dress up in preparation for their rapes.
Yes, the women escape their attackers, and yes, Jim saves the day.
But consider for a moment. The Major who has orchestrated the entire thing, this panderer of rapists, isn’t just any man. He is the last representative of the government. He is a highly trained professional soldier who has sworn to protect the people of Britain. He is order in the face of chaos. And because his men want sex, he deprives the only women he believes are left alive of their right to say no. He reduces them to the role of toys.
He doesn’t even order his men to spare young Hannah (Megan Burns was about 14 when the movie was filmed). In fact, he does nothing to rein in his men, regardless of the outright brutality they seem to be looking forward to inflicting on the women.
It’s hard not to see the parallel to the current discourse around men, women and rape. Why is it, feminists and others ask, that we spend all of our time as a culture telling women how to avoid being raped and so little of the time telling men not to rape? How is it that a woman can be condemned for 'asking for it' based on how she dresses or acts to the point where the guilt of the attacker is almost eclipsed? Why is a woman’s sexual past often admissible in court while the entering into evidence the attacker’s own violent or sexual past is seen as too 'prejudicial'? These are elements of misogyny so deeply embedded in our psyche that it’s taken us literally thousands of years to even begin to acknowledge (at least in the Western world) that the responsibility for a rape lies only on the shoulders of the rapist. (Oh, and before anyone climbs on their high-horse, yes, men can be victims of rape too, but that’d be a different movie entirely.)
So why do I enjoy a movie about something so disturbing?
Because I think Danny Boyle is doing something important here. There is no reason why the outpost held by Major West and his men needed to be military in nature. Most zombie movies reveal the military to be inept and it’s generally the fierce band of previously unaffiliated civilians who work together to deal with the zombie threat. So we should assume that this was a conscious choice.
It’s easy to blame individual men or groups of men for prevailing attitudes towards women on this subject. It’s quite another to acknowledge the systemic devaluing of women to the point where they are little better than meat thrown to dogs. Boyle, by putting the words and motivations into the mouth and person of Eccleston’s Major - the last defender of civilisation - takes this to a whole new level, upping the societal ante and rationalising it in a way that almost convinces. To quote Shakespeare: “the world must be peopled.”
But this isn’t about restoring the human race. That can be done through consensual sex. Rape is not necessary.
What Boyle points out, consciously or not (I’m going to go with the former since he’s hardly a careless director), is that however far we think we’ve come as a society in relation to women’s rights, we are still too frighteningly close to having made no progress whatsoever. If men want sex, women will be made to provide it. It’s not a particularly well hidden message in the film.
Major West rationalises women’s lack of rights to their own bodies in the same way, with the same tone, that we have grown so accustomed to in our political and social discourse. He dresses it in the sanctity of continued life, as so many do.
What I love about Boyle’s film is that he treats this kind of rhetoric and attitude like exactly what it is: a horror.
Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.New Delhi, Dec 30 (IANS) Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia's office was burgled late night on Thursday, the city police said.
"There was a robbery at the Patparganj office of Deputy CM late night on Thursday. The exact time is not yet known," Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Omvir Singh said.
"The district forensic team has lifted finger-prints from the crime scene," Singh said.
"The office was being shifted and most of the articles were already moved. However, some documents and two computers were stolen," he added.
Aam Aadmi Party worker Pankaj Singh told IANS that the lock of the office was broken and some documents, including letterheads as well as CPUs of two computers, were missing.
"The burglers also turned away the CCTV cameras and took away the DVRs that had the recordings," Upendra Kumar, who is in-charge of the party office, said.
The police, along with a dog squad, came to Sisodia's office on Friday morning to investigate the theft, he added.
--IANS
vv/in/vtBritain's membership of the European Community presented a “gross infringement of sovereignty” and a “serious attack on Parliamentary democracy,” Cabinet ministers warned ahead of the only referendum on Brussels given to the public, newly uncovered papers reveal.
Harold Wilson, then the Labour Prime Minister, was told choosing to stay in Europe would represent a “dismemberment of the authority of the House of Commons”, minutes of a Cabinet meeting show.
In a meeting three months before the 1975 referendum, Mr Wilson was urged by his ministers to inform the British people that membership would seriously compromise Britain’s ability to govern itself.
In the event, the Government’s official pamphlet explaining the referendum gave no such warning – and instead assured voters that the “essence of sovereignty” would be protected by staying in.
Business for Britain, the campaigning group which uncovered the minutes, said the episode was a warning that the public could be misled again as David Cameron embarks on a renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership, ahead of an in-out vote in 2017.
Michael Foot and Tony Benn
The European referendum in 1975 was a bid by Harold Wilson to hold together his party which was deeply split over membership of the European Community.
Seven members of the Cabinet, including Tony Benn and Michael Foot, favoured withdrawal.
On being elected, he promised to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EC and correct the unfavourable terms on which the country had entered the bloc a year earlier.
Mr Wilson urged voters to vote Yes, and claimed to have won a “new deal” for taxpayers after a “long and tough” renegotiation battle.
Historians now regard those changes, mostly to the terms of agricultural trade, to have been little more than cosmetic – but the Government’s case was enough to swing voters behind staying in by a margin of two to one.
However, newly uncovered minutes of a Cabinet meeting in March 1975 showed how ministers argued the electorate should be warned ahead of the referendum that directly applicable laws are an “essential part” the fledging European bloc.
Their impact “should be made clear to the electorate” before the vote, “enabling a decision on this issue to be taken through the medium of the referendum”, the minutes show.
Edward Short, the Lord President of the Council, told colleagues that while the Commons could always vote to withdraw from Europe and the UK retained a veto on the Council of Ministers in Europe, it was “essential not to obscure the fact that Parliament’s control of day-to-day legislation had been diminished by accession to the community.”
Ministers suggested making Britain’s ability to block European directives a “condition of continued membership” – a move that would have left Britain with a far looser trading relationship today.
However, the idea was dropped because it would be regarded as “inconsistent with membership” by other states and unlikely to be permitted, the minutes show.
Ministers complained issue of British sovereignty had been “separated from the handling of other renegotiation issues” and were being addressed late in the process. The Commons could be further undermined if – as transpired – Europe was given its own Parliament.
“The system of directly applicable law, made by the Community, was a gross infringement of the sovereignty in the sense that political sovereignty rested in the power of a nation to make its own laws,” the minutes record unnamed ministers as complaining.
“The transfer of Parliament’s legislative powers to the Council of Ministers, and even more so to the Commission which was not elected and not accountable to the people of the United Kingdom, represented the most serious attack on Parliamentary democracy with which this country was faced.”
“The relationship between Parliament and the Government in relation to European Community business would result in a dismemberment of the authority of the House of Commons. Moreover, the threat to Parliament from Community membership was compounded by the prospect of a directly elected European Assembly.”
Business for Britain, which is campaigning for a new relationship with Europe, said David Cameron should regularly update Parliament on the terms of his renegotiation to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1975’s “sham”. It should include treaty change – something to which Wilson’s Foreign Office was hostile - the group argues.
The minutes were among a set of Foreign Office papers on the European Union requested by the group under the Freedom of Information Act. The FCO initially refused, saying the release would “prejudice the interest of the UK abroad”. The decision was overruled by the Information Commissioner.
Robert Oxley, the campaign director of Business for Britain, said: “Forty years ago, the public were denied the benefits of a genuine renegotiation by those who were determined that our future lay in the European Community regardless.
"We must learn the lessons of the past to ensure that Britain is able to seek a genuinely improved deal from the EU today and that people are given a fair and informed choice in any EU referendum.”Winners of the latest version of New York City's BigApps Challenge, announced Thursday, show how tough lessons from the first generation of city apps contests are now helping to creating civic value and community.
New York's experience will help demonstrate to mayors around the world how to get the most social impact and economic value from government data: Start with the civic problem you want to target, then find the data, partners and community to make the changes.
"The story of the evolution of BigApps is one about how the competition and this project has morphed over the years so that what gets developed results in real outcomes for everyday New Yorkers, with tangible resources and innovation that improve their lives," Maria Torres Springer, head of the city's Economic Development Corp. told The Huffington Post.
"When we started this, it was about what we can do for tech," Springer continued. "We aggregated city data and put it out there to see what tech community could build. In the past couple years, that question has been turned around: What can tech do for New Yorkers? That's why you'll see in this year's competition."
The evolution brings civic apps contests a long way from the Washington, D.C., local government's "Apps for Democracy" contest in 2008, which hinted at the promise of opening up data for public benefit, but failed to deliver meaningful long-term social change or services.
Below are this year's BigApps winners for |
fit for 501(c)6 classification, if anything. I worked in the field for several years, and while it’d be pretty easy to convince me that some of these organizations deserve closer scrutiny, the IRS’ “screening” has been wildly disproportionate. Groups that are unquestionably above board have been in limbo for years, unable to start fundraising in earnest, because the IRS refuses to finally approve or reject their application for 501(c)3 status. Fundamentally, it’s the same story that the Tea Party organizations have faced: the IRS has a reasonable question about the legitimacy of some of these groups, but they lack the resources to actually resolve those questions, so instead they just cast a massive net and catch everyone. The fact that this is hitting something as nonpartisan as software organizations should really drive home the point that this is all driven by structural problems at the IRS, rather than political scare tactics.
So there you go. I just thought some of the open source geeks in the crowd might be interested in this.
UPDATE: Another reader emails in with a bit of history:
A bunch of the case law on various 501(c)s specifically has to do with the old computer user groups of the 70s and 80s. You know, everyone who has an IBM mainframe in Missouri form an association to share ideas and promote tools and software to other people who have an IBM mainframe in Missouri, etc. Does such a group exist specifically to promote IBM and its products? Is it a trade association? Is it a general social organization? etc. I don’t know how much institutional memory exists at the IRS, but it would not surprise me if this were a consideration in why these groups are getting (mostly unwarranted) extra scrutiny.
Fascinating! Who knew I had so many readers with expertise in this esoteric field?TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
I was very nervous when I saw last week’s promo for tonight’s Jane The Virgin, which made the episode look like one long ad for Target, its most aggressive corporate sponsor. Target’s prominence on Jane The Virgin has been a key element of the company’s “#SinTraduccion” (“#WithoutTranslation”) ad package launched earlier this year, part of a larger campaign to court more Spanish-speaking customers (you can read more about it in this Racked piece), and the promos for “Chapter Twenty-Nine” suggested that the sponsor was hijacking the story. That’s thankfully not the case, and writers Dara Resnik Creasy and David S. Rosenthal cleverly use this forced integration as fuel for an episode that explores how administrators impose their demands on creatives.
Advertisement
The Target scene is relatively painless, showing Rafael the #BlackFridayVirgin as he learns the strict rules of Christmas shopping with the Villanuevas. The advertising subtext is that Target is the perfect place for all your Black Friday needs, with staff members that are eager to help but will quickly get out of your hair if you already know what you need and where it is, but at least the writers keep it subtext. Unlike Empire’s extremely heavy-handed integration of Pepsi PR in last week’s Jamal storyline (the first chapter in a three-part Pepsi arc), the most forceful aspect of the Target plot in this episode is the Target setting, which bombards the viewer with the company’s logo and products.
It’s unlikely that Creasy and Rosenthal would have chosen to include a Target-centric script if it weren’t for demands from the network to satisfy a corporate partner, and the theme of administrative authority compromising creativity pops up throughout the episode. When Jane brings her writing to Dr. Lorraine Bolton, a New York Times best-selling author that she wants as her advisor, she receives vague critiques to turn the volume up, make the reader gasp, and make everything “more sparkly.” It’s easy to imagine Bolton’s words as the wishes of network executives that want their shows to have bold aesthetics that demand attention and game-changing moments that get people talking on social media, but those don’t necessarily lead to a good story, especially when those requests go against the creative impulses of the artists.
I doubt that the writers are commenting on The CW through Bolton, and the continued success of this series makes me think that Professor Chavez represents Jane The Virgin’s home network, providing thoughtful critiques on perspective and tone that help Jane sharpen her writing. (Maureen Ryan wrote a great profile of The CW’s president Mark Pedowitz for Variety, which goes into further detail regarding how he’s rejuvenated the network.) The CW might force some Target integration, but the network also lets this show’s creative team fully realize its unique vision for the series, which isn’t too bad a trade-off.
Advertisement
Rogelio’s plot this week directly involves network executives, and he’s forced to go back to Telemasivo when his last-ditch attempt to save Hombres Locos fails. Rogelio’s meeting with the Hollywood bigwig that might save his Mad Men rip-off is the comedic highlight of the episode, and Rogelio’s description of the final scene of the Hombres Locos is even funnier when its recited in a ’60s-styled room in front of a man deliberately posed like Don Draper in the Mad Men logo. Behold the wonder of Hombres Locos:
“So as Don Juan Draper closes the cigarette account, Rogelio picks up a carton—to celebrate, no? But instead of cigarettes, it’s filled with… cocaine! Then, Rogelio starts to snort the cocaine when BAM! Don Juan Draper shoots him in the head! Then he turns coolly to camera and says, ‘I’d like to sell the world some coke.’ Fade out. End of pilot.”
The bigwig passes despite Rogelio’s animated summary of the show, forcing Rogelio to return to his old network because he invested all his money in his passion project and is now broke. The Telemasivo executives are eager to have him back, but they have no intentions of allowing Rogelio to pursue his own artistic endeavors. They were already burned by that once, so they give Rogelio a cowboy character identical to one he played in the past, forcing Rogelio to choose between taking on an unfulfilling role or living a budgeted lifestyle.
Advertisement
Rogelio ultimately chooses the latter, and relinquishing his wealth is just one of the sacrifices he makes this week. The other involves his pride, and after screwing up Xiomara’s chance of having one of her songs used as the theme for Esteban’s telenovela, Rogelio plays the part of Bogelio the fool in Ferdinand E Isabel to give Xo her big break. “Chapter Twenty-Nine” is another great showcase of Jaime Camil’s versatility as a performer, and he does particularly strong work capturing Rogelio’s fear at going back to the life of frugality that he thought he left behind. He’s worked too hard to end up where he started, but by the conclusion of the episode he realizes that he’s gained more than he ever had before thanks to the family he now has in the Villanueva women and Mateo.
The writers do find a way to make the Target scene serve the characters, showing Rafael’s further integration into the Villanueva family dynamic by bringing him along for the traditional Black Friday Target run. Rafael is becoming more and more like the man Jane wants to be with forever, and the Target trip starts the couple’s story on a positive note this week, even though it also features Jane’s first sighting of Michael in six months. Michael’s cold, dismissive response to Jane’s greeting pushes Rafael and Jane even closer together, and for most of the episode, it looks like Mateo’s parents are well on their way to rekindling their past romance. Jane overcomes her anxiety about hiring a babysitter for Mateo so that she can go on the date Rafael invited her on last week, and Rafael, over-stepping boundaries as always, shows Jane the perfect house he’s interested in buying for his growing family. (The same house Jane admired during her first babysitting job as a responsible teen.)
Talking about buying a house is moving pretty fast when you’re just starting to date again, but Jane is into it, once again getting swept up in the fantasy Rafael represents. But before there’s any meaningful forward movement in their romance, Wesley’s “Curse Of The Solanos” exposé gets published online, derailing their date night as Rafael does damage control. That’s when Jane checks the nanny cam and finds out that Rafael hired Eric Wu to lie to the police about Michael and Nadine, a revelation that effectively puts an end to her reconciliation with her baby daddy. One of the issues with this show’s rapid pacing is that the writers occasionally move on from plot lines before they’ve had time to fully explore them, and “Chapter Twenty-Nine” tears down new relationships in Jane’s life that are still being built. Rafael is in the same position as Michael two episodes ago, and it would be nice to see the writers give Jane more than a chapter’s worth of romance before pushing her away from her lovers.
Advertisement
Jane’s relationships with Wesley and Petra also take significant blows this week, and these moments would have a greater impact if the show spent more time with those friendships before damaging them. Wesley’s betrayal happens quickly because of its ties to Michael’s investigation, which is an especially rushed plotline that clumsily reveals that Michael wasn’t fired but sent undercover to embed himself with Nadine, who was shot dead at some point in the last six months. All of this rushing is to get to the cliffhanger twist that Luisa’s mother is alive and probably the Mütter crime boss that has resurfaced in Sin Rostro’s absence, and I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu as we learn that another woman closely associated to Luisa is a secret kingpin.
The Petra and Magda story also feels like rehashing past material, only now the pair is dealing with a dead Ivan instead of a hostage Ivan. It’s a bit too convenient how Jane always shows up whenever Petra is panicking about what to do with the dead body in her bathtub, putting Petra in a position where she has to push Jane away in order to maintain secrecy. The writers want to keep this relationship tense, but why introduce a friendship for these two characters if it’s immediately going to be undercut? Judging by Petra’s facial expression after she rejects Jane, there’s likely going to be some future attempt by Petra to make up for her behavior this week, but it would have been much more interesting to see Petra forced to turn on Jane after their friendship gained more depth.
Yet even with forced promotional integration and rushed plot developments, “Chapter Twenty-Nine” captivates and entertains, largely thanks to the cast’s commitment to the material and the show’s always refreshing style and tone. Tonight’s episode isn’t quite as substantial or refined as the Jane The Virgin norm, but the strength of the cast and the creative team’s voice makes it satisfying.
Advertisement
Stray observations
Of course Rafael would be a #BlackFridayVirgin. He’s filthy rich. What need does he have for deals?
I have the feeling Dr. Bolton is going to be back, and I’m predicting that she’s going to sell Jane’s story to her publisher.
I really like the music when Jane sees Michael at Target. It’s romantic but also Christmas-y.
Are the writers setting up Professor Chavez as a love interest for Jane? Hot teacher is a fantasy I can see Jane falling for.
“Clear eyes, full carts, let’s shop!”
“They’re all leased. Like Tyga.” That’s a sick burn, Rogelio.
“He’s right. That’s just clumsy storytelling. Now, to the police station!”Now, here’s something you won’t here on the mainstream news.
Fracking has eliminated CO2 more than more than all of the solar panels and wind turbines in the world.
John Stossel at FOX News reported:
On my TV show this week, statistician Bjorn Lomborg points out that “air pollution kills 4.3 million people each year … We need to get a sense of priority.” That deadly air pollution happens because, to keep warm, poor people burn dung in their huts.
Yet, time and again, environmentalists oppose the energy production most likely to make the world cleaner and safer. Instead, they persuade politicians to spend billions of your dollars on symbolism like “renewable” energy.
“The amazing number that most people haven’t heard is, if you take all the solar panels and all the wind turbines in the world,” says Lomborg, “they have (eliminated) less CO2 than what U.S. fracking (cracking rocks below ground to extract oil and natural gas) managed to do.”
That progress occurred despite opposition from environmentalists — and even bans in places like my stupid state, New York, where activists worry fracking will cause earthquakes or poison the water.
Do environmentalists even care about measuring costs instead of just assuming benefits? We spend $7 billion to subsidize electric cars. Even if America reached the president’s absurd 2015 goal of “a million electric cars on the road” (we won’t get close), how much would it delay warming of the Earth?
“One hour,” says Lomborg. “This is a symbolic act.”Manchester City's win at Roma puts them into the Champions League last 16 for the second successive season
Manchester City's win at Roma was an impressive statement of intent as they completed a superb recovery from their Champions League struggles to reach the knockout phase.
Manuel Pellegrini's side now join Chelsea and Arsenal as they try to challenge Europe's current superpowers Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
City have been desperate to demonstrate they can be a force in the Champions League. Now, after the impressive 2-0 win in the Italian capital, the Blues will feel they have made their presence felt before Monday's draw for the last 16.
So, can the Premier League trio make further inroads into the latter stages of the tournament?
Have Manchester City finally come of age?
Sergio Aguero will hope to be back to full fitness for the Champions League last 16
When Manchester City's players walked off in a fog - on every level on a murky night at the Etihad - after a 2-1 home defeat by CSKA Moscow on Bonfire Night, it was shaping up as another year of underachievement for them in the Champions League.
Pellegrini admitted his players were suffering a crisis of confidence, saying: "We must try to find out what happens with this team in the Champions League. These are important players so I don't understand why they cannot play in the Champions League."
Six weeks later, it appears the puzzle has been solved with a mixture of all the factors needed to succeed in the Champions League.
Mistakes by Xabi Alonso and Jerome Boateng may have helped them to a crucial win against Bayern Munich - turning a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 victory in the final five minutes - but they possessed the world-class striker in Sergio Aguero to punish Pep Guardiola's side.
In Rome on Wednesday came further confirmation that Manchester City's side may just be coming to terms with the Champions League, and coming of age in a manner befitting the talent and experience assembled under Pellegrini.
Who has qualified? Who's in and who's out: The story of the group stages Winners Runners-up Group A Atletico Madrid Juventus Group B Real Madrid Basel Group C Monaco Bayer Leverkusen Group D Borussia Dortmund Arsenal Group E Bayern Munich Manchester City Group F Barcelona PSG Group G Chelsea Schalke Group H Porto Shakhtar Donetsk
City delivered a textbook European performance, even without injured captain Vincent Kompany, knee injury victim Aguero, the suspended Yaya Toure and with David Silva not ready to start.
It was a show of strength - from the vital saves made by goalkeeper Joe Hart to the brilliance of Samir Nasri, who scored a stunning and highly-significant opening goal as well as creating the second for Pablo Zabaleta.
Pellegrini and his players knew what was at stake, as well as the questions that would come should they fail - but they coped admirably with the pressure and will now surely enter the knockout phase believing they finally belong in the Champions League.
All of the uncertainty and all of the puzzling insecurities that gripped such a gifted group when placed on European club football's biggest stage must surely be behind them.
It has been a big week in City's season. The win against Everton on Saturday, following Chelsea's loss at Newcastle, reduced the gap at the top of the Premier League to three points. They then unveiled their new £200m training complex - a monument to a club and an Abu Dhabi ownership of limitless ambition.
Best of all, though, as an indication of where City want to be, was the win against Roma.
And when those who top their groups look ahead to Monday's draw, Manchester City is a name, along with French champions Paris St-Germain, they will eye with just a little trepidation.
The usual suspects
Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo have helped Real Madrid set a new Spanish record of 19 straight wins
If the Premier League is to defy the odds, and plenty would suggest all logic too, and bring European club football's biggest trophy back to England for the first time since Chelsea's win in 2012, they will have to overcome the usual suspects.
After the group stage, holders Real Madrid look the most daunting obstacle of all, based on the attacking powerhouses of Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, James Rodriguez and Karim Benzema, and fuelled by the supply line of Isco, Toni Kroos and Luka Modric.
Coach Carlo Ancelotti is in search of history and his fourth Champions League title, after securing 'La Decima' with Real's 10th title when they beat neighbours Atletico Madrid in Lisbon. He had already claimed the trophy twice with AC Milan.
And their performance in Group B suggests he has the weapons to do it. They set a new Spanish record with a 19th successive win in all competitions in their final game of their Champions League group against Ludogorets Razgrad on Tuesday night.
The 4-0 victory also made it 20 games unbeaten at the Bernabeu in the competition - a run stretching back to April 2011 - and meant they scored 16 and conceded only two in the group.
"I know that I have an extraordinary group of players. These results have been achieved by hard work and incredible professionalism," Ancelotti said.
These are assets that apply equally to Barcelona and Bayern Munich, who will also have aspirations of reclaiming the trophy they have both won recently.
Luis Suarez's two goals for Barcelona have both come in the Champions League
Barcelona, winners against Manchester United in 2009 and 2011, have built their renewed assault on the Champions League on a star-studded attacking line-up boasting the great Lionel Messi, Brazil's Neymar and £75m signing from Liverpool, Luis Suarez.
It carries all the hallmarks of an unstoppable force when they get it right, as they did by all scoring in the 3-1 win against PSG on Wednesday. But the suspicion remains that Real, and perhaps even Bayern, boast more rounded, less vulnerable, sides than Luis Enrique's team.
Guardiola, twice a winner as Barca coach, was haunted by Bayern Munich's 5-0 aggregate loss to Real in last season's semi-final and is determined to make amends. They made great progress through their group, including a 7-1 win away to Roma, but the loss to Manchester City, admittedly with a below-strength side, will offer hope to others.
Away from this trio, Diego Simeone's Atletico Madrid - seconds away from winning the Champions League last season - impressed again in topping Group A ahead of Juventus. But it will take a special feat for any of the group runners-up to get past Real, Barca and Bayern over two legs.
Can a Premier League club upset the rest?
Chelsea won the Champions League in 2012 with a penalty shootout win against Bayern Munich
The years when Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool were fixtures in the latter stages are long gone - but one man with great pedigree in this competition will believe he can make his own piece of history.
Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho won the Champions League with Porto and Inter Milan and will hold serious aspirations of becoming the first coach to win the Champions League with three different clubs.
Now, strengthened by the arrival of Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas, and with Nemanja Matic one of the most formidable midfield shields in Europe, Chelsea will pose a threat to the biggest names in the Champions League.
In the group phase, Matic made more tackles than any other player with 38, while Fabregas was only second behind Messi in the statistics of chances created, with 19 to the Argentinian's 22.
Eden Hazard also has the talent to exert great influence. He was third behind Ronaldo and Messi for shots on target, with 11 compared to their 18 and 13 respectively.
These figures hint at the complete nature of Mourinho's team.
Arsenal produced some impressive performances in their group, especially in beating Borussia Dortmund at the Emirates, but reality dictates they will not be seen at the sharp end of the competition.
There is the added hazard they could now draw one of those European superpowers having finished second in their group behind Dortmund. They could be pitted against Real, Barcelona, Bayern or Atletico. But Porto or Monaco would be more favourable options.
The same dangers apply to City, Bayern apart, but they look stronger and better equipped than Arsenal to take on that task.
Galaxy of stars
The chance Luis Suarez created for Lionel Messi's equaliser against PSG was his sixth assist in nine games
If one game summed up the star attractions in the Champions League - away from the Galacticos of Real Madrid - it was Barcelona's win against PSG at the Nou Camp. Sweden skipper Zlatan Ibrahimovic gave PSG the lead but Neymar, Messi and Suarez responded in a 3-1 win.
Messi has scored eight goals in the group stage, having hit 13 shots on target of 25 attempts. And, ominously for Barcelona's rivals, Suarez appears to be coming nicely to his peak.
The Uruguayan's goal against PSG was only his second for the club - his first at the Nou Camp - but the chance he created for Messi's equaliser was his sixth assist in nine games.
Ronaldo, inevitably, was the spearhead for Real Madrid. As well as scoring five goals in the group, he led the charts for shots with 27 and also shots on target with 18. He combined quality with efficiency.
Those stellar names are part of a glittering cast - but what about those under the radar?
Shakhtar Donetsk striker Luiz Adriano is the top scorer in the Champions League
Shakhtar Donetsk's Luiz Adriano outscored Messi and Ronaldo with nine goals in the group stage, including five against BATE Borisov.
And as Simeone reshapes Atletico Madrid after the departure of Diego Costa, Croatian Mario Mandzukic has, in his different way, filled the gap at home and abroad, especially with his five goals in the Champions League.
Now, as the Champions League moves into the knockout phase, will others from the undercard emerge to play their part?Commentary
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) burned the barn to the ground with his 21 hour ‘fauxlibuster’ this week on the Senate floor. Supporters of Cruz’ increasingly libertarian voice relish his statesmanship and clarity, and conversely, no doubt detractors and skeptics dismissed much of the material content addressed due to Cruz’ rhetorical devices, not limited channeling statist icon Darth Vader while lampooning Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).
The usual political hay has already been spun by the pundits, including Limbaugh and Coulter, providing color commentary and cold shots alike. Senator Cruz’ profile is quickly rising, and he is being touted as a quill for the young libertarian porcupine within the halls of congress — alongside the likes of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Indeed, Cruz is more than likely positioning himself for a cabinet post in potential Paul campaign 2016, bidding the GOP base against New Jersey’s increasingly progressive Chris Christie.
It is assumed Hillary Clinton will be the ochlocratic candidate.
Rafael Cruz (Ted’s father) makes impassioned appeals to the ideals of Americana-brand liberty for large crowds of supporters, evoking support from the base of the GOP with the family’s brand; scathing indictments of our Republic’s current state, drawing parallels to Bautistas’ fascist, then Castro’s communist Cuba and the horror of living under a totalitarian regime two times over. Rafael Cruz escaped Castro and fled to the liberty and free markets in Canada, then here in the US, finding success through a technology connection to the petroleum industry — a familiar Horatio Alger-esque tale — Millitary Fascism to Communism and to Corporate Fascism in less than a generation..
…and then there is Mrs.Heidi Nelson-Cruz, the senator’s wife. Ted and Heidi met in the Bush White House, while she was working for Condi Rice. A Claremont-McKenna and Harvard Business grad, Heidi Nelson-Cruz currently works for Goldman-Sachs as a Vice President.
Texas seems to have a GOP senator with strong ties to petroleum, the Bush White House and good ol’ Goldman-Sachs through his wife. These observations, coupled with the current political landscape may provide insight the origin and intent of the Senator from Texas’ dazzling libertarian all-nighter.
Cruz may need to spend another 21 hours in an attempt to burn down his own straw man — free markets or corporatism? If his wife works for the self-same Goldman-Sachs that profited from the TARP bailout rammed through the halls of Congress at the tail end of the Bush regime and spilling into the Obama regime; the Goldman-Sachs that boasts both parties’ presidents and cabinets in their pockets going back to (at least) the Clinton administration, would that not be a conflict of interest? Cruz made open comment about the excellent health insurance provided Heidi’s Vice-Presidency with Goldman-Sachs. The banking cartel’s involvement in and subsequent manipulation of the political sphere is a common link between both ends of the popular political spectrum, and to assume that a politician’s libertarian common sense would be immune to the pressures and normalcy bias of the human condition would be naive.
Ted Cruz talks a good game. He offers the concepts and economic pedigree libertarians have been waiting to hear from a GOP Senator other than Ron Paul, and presents these concepts in a clear and relatable way. His voting record as a Senator approaches perfection. Unfortunately, many of the Tea Party Rockstars* who held great promise for the cause of liberty have proven to be paper tigers. However liberated Ted Cruz’ economic policy could be, the rigor of skepticism cannot be abandoned by liberty-minded citizens just yet.
As Patrick Henry, liberty lover and skeptic of government, famously remarked of the Constitutional Convention, I smell a rat…and hope on the bones of Lysander Spooner for our Republic’s sake, that I am wrong about the Senator from Texas.
*Rockstar Brand Tea flavored energy beverage is not endorsed by publisher or any so-called Tea Party Rockstars.
Qui Bono,
L.A. Repucci* G7 delivers Putin ultimatum: stabilise east Ukraine or more sanctions
* Leading industrial powers meeting in Brussels without Russia
* Two-day summit to discuss foreign policy, economics, energy
* Russia dropped from G8 talks after seizure of Crimea (Releads with quotes from Merkel, G7 statement)
By Luke Baker and Mike Peacock
BRUSSELS, June 4 (Reuters) - The world’s leading industrialised nations threatened on Wednesday to impose harder-hitting sanctions on Russia if it does not help restore stability to eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian militias continue to operate at will.
While Ukraine was able to hold a largely peaceful presidential election last month, the situation in the east near the Russian border remains volatile, with armed groups attacking Ukrainian government forces and occupying state buildings.
“We stand ready to intensify targeted sanctions and to consider significant additional restrictive measures to impose further costs on Russia should events so require,” the G7 said in a statement after evening talks in Brussels.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Western powers would check “again and again” to verify that Russia was doing what it could to stabilise the situation, which erupted in March after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed it.
“We cannot afford a further destabilization in Ukraine,” Merkel told reporters.
“If we do not have progress in the questions we have to solve there is the possibility of sanctions, even heavy sanctions of phase 3 on the table,” she said, referring to restrictions on trade, finance and energy.
So far, the United States and European Union have imposed relatively minor travel bans and asset freezes on dozens of Russian officials in reaction to the seizure of Crimea.
Further steps were threatened if the May 25 elections were affected. However, they went smoothly and new President Petro Poroshenko will be sworn in on Saturday.
Some saw that as an indication that Russia was being more cooperative, reducing the threat of further sanctions. But Wednesday’s statement suggests the West is not yet satisfied that President Vladimir Putin is doing enough to calm the situation.
Russia denies it is behind the revolt in eastern Ukraine, where militias allied to Moscow have seized buildings, attacked Ukrainian troops and declared independence. Putin has also defended his right to protect Russian-speaking people.
While Putin has been cut out of the G7 - this is the first meeting without Russia since it joined the club in 1997 - he will hold face-to-face meetings with Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Britain’s David Cameron at a D-Day anniversary gathering in France later this week.
Asked about those bilateral meetings and whether they raised any concerns for President Barack Obama, who has pointedly avoided any contact with Putin, a U.S. official said it wasn’t important who Putin met but “what people say in those meetings”.
Ahead of the G7 summit, Obama met Poroshenko for talks in Warsaw and declared him a “wise choice” to lead Ukraine, part of efforts by the EU and the United States to provide moral and financial support to the new leadership.
Poroshenko, a chocolate-industry billionaire, said he would be willing to meet Putin for peace talks on the sidelines of the D-Day commemorations in Normandy although no meeting has been set up.
“As things stand now, a meeting between me and Putin is not envisaged, but I do not rule out that it could take place in one format or another,” he told reporters, adding that he was working on a peace plan for Ukraine that would involve the decentralisation of power, local elections and an amnesty.
ECONOMICS AND TRADE
As well as foreign policy, the two-day G7 summit will cover economics, trade, climate and energy policy.
One of the most sensitive discussions will be over energy security, particularly in Europe, which relies on Russia for around a third of its oil and gas - a fact that gives Moscow leverage over the EU and its 500 million people.
European leaders have committed themselves to diversifying away from Russia but doing so will take time and be costly, and may in part depend on the willingness of the United States to supply liquified natural gas to Europe.
A separate communique will be released by the G7 leaders after talks on Thursday which will highlight the need to prioritise security of energy supplies.
“The use of energy supplies as a means of political coercion or as a threat to security is unacceptable,” a draft of that statement, seen be Reuters, said.
“The crisis in Ukraine makes plain that energy security must be at the centre of our collective agenda and requires a step-change to our approach to diversifying energy supplies.”
The economic discussion is not expected to break new ground, instead reiterating that all the G7 members - the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Britain, Japan and Italy - must focus on sustaining economic recovery and tightening regulations to prevent future banking sector problems.
The leaders will reaffirm a commitment to completing financial reforms this year including ending “too-big-to-fail” banking. (Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton, Jan Strupczewski, Robin Emmott and Barbara Lewis in Brussels, Noah Barkin and Stephen Brown in Berlin. Editing by Mike Peacock)YPSILANTI, MI - Knowing your rights when encountering police is the focus of a program Thursday, May 18, by the Vanzetti Hamilton Bar Association.
Scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. at RCCG Mountain of the Lord church in Ypsilanti, the program will feature the subjects of immigration, ethnic intimidation and employment discrimination.
The free event, which is also being sponsored by The National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs, will feature a panel discussion with Ypsilanti Police Chief Tony DeGiusti, criminal defense attorney Robyn McCoy and ACLU attorney Mark Fancher, among others.
"I think that it is essential that attorneys, community leaders and law enforcement come together to educate the public on these pressing issues," McCoy said.
RCCG Mountain of the Lord church is located at 907 W. Michigan Ave.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ben Geoghegan reports on the meat supply chain which stretches across Europe
French ministers are to hold talks with key players in the meat industry as the horsemeat scandal widens to up to 16 countries.
Seven French supermarket chains have withdrawn frozen beef meals made by Findus and Comigel.
The move followed the discovery that foods sold in Europe and the UK labelled as beef contained horsemeat.
The scandal has raised questions about the complexity of the food industry's supply chains across the EU.
It has already had an impact on distributors in the UK, France, Sweden, Ireland and Romania.
Food products in a further 11 EU countries may be affected, it is feared.
Food Minister Guillaume Garot said he wanted to ensure that all contentious products had been removed.
Romania is investigating claims one of its abattoirs is responsible.
'Learning lessons'
In the UK, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson is to update MPs on the latest developments in the scandal.
Meat scandal In mid-January, Irish food inspectors announced they had found horsemeat in some burgers stocked by UK supermarket chains
Subsequently, up to 100% horsemeat found in several ranges of prepared frozen food in Britain, France and Sweden
Up to 16 countries involved
Concerns that drug used to treat horses, and which is harmful to humans, could be in food chain
Meat traced from France through Cyprus and The Netherlands to Romanian abattoirs
Investigation suggests contamination was not accidental but the work of a criminal conspiracy
He has already said a moratorium on EU meat imports, which has been called for, was not allowed under EU rules.
The controversy surrounding contamination of meat products has also affected firms in the Irish Republic and Poland.
Last month, Irish food inspectors announced they had found horsemeat in some burgers stocked by a number of UK supermarket chains, including Tesco, Iceland and Lidl.
The seven French supermarket chains that have already withdrawn some of their frozen meat-based meals, including lasagne, from the shelves are Auchan, Casino, Carrefour, Cora, Monoprix, Grand Jury and Picard.
"We want to get the latest from the whole range of people involved in the food chain on what has happened and start to learn the first lessons," Mr Garot told Agence France Presse.
He said producers, food processors, distributers, supermarkets and representatives from the food industry are expected to attend Monday's meeting.
An initial investigation by French officials revealed that French firm Poujol bought the frozen meat from a Cypriot trader, France's Junior Minister for Consumer Goods, Benoit Hamon, said in a statement on Sunday.
'Deceived'
The trader had, in turn, received it from a Dutch food trader, and that Dutch company had purchased the meat from two Romanian slaughterhouses.
Poujol supplied the meat to a Luxembourg factory owned by French group Comigel.
The meat was then sold under the Sweden-based brand, Findus, which has said it has been misled by its Romanian meat supplier.
The food giant has already withdrawn ready meals in France and Sweden after it emerged that its frozen beef lasagne sold in Britain contained up to 100% horsemeat.
Responding to the food scandal, the director of Findus France, Matthieu Lambeaux, said in a statement the company would file a legal complaint on Monday.
"We thought we had certified French beef in our products. But in reality, we were supplied with Romanian horsemeat. We have been deceived," Mr Lambeaux said.
The EU commissioner for agriculture is also due to meet Romania's foreign minister on Monday.
The Romanian President Traian Basescu has warned that his country could face potential export restrictions and lose credibility "for many years" if his country's butchers are revealed to be the root of the problem.The Texas Rangers will play two exhibition games against the Los Angeles Dodgers at the Alamodome in San Antonio, the Rangers and Ryan Sanders Baseball announced Wednesday.
The series, which will take place March 20 and March 21, is the third year of the Big League Weekend hosted at the Alamodome. The Rangers previously played the Houston Astros and the San Diego Padres.
Tickets for the games go on sale Friday. More than 75,000 fans attended the series in 2013, and 50,000 spectators were present last year.
The Dodgers were the Major League affiliate of the Double-A San Antonio Missions for 23 years, from 1977-2000.
• CORCORAN: Previewing the Cy Young awards
Both teams will play split-squad as the Rangers are also tentatively scheduled to play the Seattle Mariners and the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Dodgers will face the Oakland A’s and the Colorado Rockies.
The Rangers are coming off a 67-95 injury-plagued season while the Dodgers lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Division Series.
- Danielle ZhuThe Minnesota State High School League board approved a new policy for transgender students Thursday morning that will begin with the 2015-16 school year.
Criteria for determining eligibility of transgender students for high school sports teams would be applied in an appeal process that would be overseen by the high school league. Appeals would be heard by an independent hearing officer.
Religious schools will be exempt when the new policy goes into effect in time for the 2015-16 school year.
Eighteen of the 20 board members voice yes. Emmett Keenan, activities director at St. Cloud Cathedral, voted no. Governor-appointed board member Paul McDonald of Ely, participating in his first board meeting, abstained.
The overflow crowd at the high school league headquarters in Brooklyn Center likely surpassed the roughly 150 people who turned out for the transgender policy discussion at October’s board meeting.
Supporters and critics who arrived well before the meeting started greeted board members by holding signs aloft.
Protestors on both sides of the argument stand behind Minnesota State High School League board members during Thursday's discussion on eligibility policies for transgender athletes.
“ALL kids deserve respect” read 8½ x 11 inch printed signs provided by Transforming Families, |
the upcoming demo version. Aron is all over the place, fixing, upgrading and improving existing features. Last I saw he was changing how statistics are presented on crafted scrolls. I think he’s also worked on making locked scrolls craft-able, and stuff for the second tutorial. Måns is working with Nathan on the new launcher. It’s got a few nifty features like not being broken, and lets you choose install location and stuff. Also, for this week only, we have Kris from the web team doing a guest appearance, working on back end for a feature that I know y'all will love. Another guest appearance these last weeks have been Jeb, of minecraft fame! Jeb added the “Weekly Winners” feature currently on the test server. He’s been looking at statistics, and doing a great deal of theorizing. It’s great having fresh eyes looking at Scrolls, especially someone with plenty game design cred like Jeb. Unfortunately, that block game thing he’s got going wanted him back.
Biz: Patrick is being supportive with his extensive experience regarding user acquisition, and have been whispering about ‘something something scrolls-branded something something great exposure something’. Jonas is looking towards the future, talking to big-shots about pad versions, which is being ported by Ludosity. Ludosity is a swedish indie studio, and Daniel Kaplan is our liaison.
In other Biz news, we’ve solidified our work/release schedule for summer/fall. We’ll announce it in bits, starting in May, provided the new launcher and tutorial is done. I’m very excite, extreme things will happen!
All in all, LOTS of work is being done, and it will be very beneficial in the long term. Over and out,
@carnalizerBlack Swan Racing has committed to two of the next three rounds of the Intercontinental GT Challenge, confirming Thursday that it has entered the inaugural California 8 Hours at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, as well as February’s Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12 Hour, which will open the 2018 season.
The Tim Pappas-owned squad will run its Porsche 911 GT3 R in both events, with the team/owner driver being joined by Jeroen Bleekemolen and reigning Bathurst Pro-Am class winner David Calvert-Jones in Monterey.
Calvert-Jones and Competition Motorsports, meanwhile, will lend technical support to Black Swan at Bathurst, with the Los Angeles-based Australian set to return to Mount Panorama in his own entry.
Black Swan has yet to confirm the remainder of its lineup for Bathurst beyond Pappas and Bleekemolen.
“When we decided that we wanted to return our focus to international endurance racing, we felt they were the obvious choice between not only the car, but also the support structure in place with Porsche Motorsport,” Pappas said.
“The Intercontinental GT Challenge has already proven to be a tremendous platform, and competing in the inaugural U.S. round is something we didn’t want to miss.
“Thanks to our partnership with David Calvert-Jones the opportunity to compete at Bathurst was also an unbeatable opportunity, and one we should relish in.”
Black Swan is the first customer Porsche team to officially commit to the new SRO-run event on Oct. 13-15, which is expected to draw in excess of 30 entries.
“We are seeing a growing interest in the inaugural Intercontinental GT Challenge in North America, and are pleased that Tim Pappas and Black Swan Racing are the first Porsche Motorsport customer to commit to competing with their 911 GT3 R,” said Owen Hayes, Director of Operations for Porsche Motorsport North America.
“We at PMNA are looking forward to working closely with the experienced team in what promises to be a great event.”
Calvert-Jones, who teamed with Patrick Long, Marc Lieb and Matt Campbell for a runner-up overall finish at Bathurst this year, is looking forward to the opportunity at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.
“It’s great to partner with Tim and everyone at Black Swan Racing,” Calvert-Jones said. “The team has one of the best records of success in endurance racing, and I look forward to integrating with them in Monterey.
“Bathurst is of course a race that is very close to my heart, and I look forward to bringing everyone over and showing them just how special an event it really is.”
While entering his Porsche for the two IGTC events, Pappas has reaffirmed plans to contest a full 2018 schedule with his Mercedes-AMG GT3, although with details still to-be-announced.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
Click to print (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
Erdogan calls US decision to arm Syrian Kurds ‘mistake’, urges Trump to reverse the decision
ARA News
ALEPPO – Militant fighters of the Islamic State (ISIS) have shelled Kurdish villages in Syria’s northern Aleppo Governorate with chemical weapons, activists reported on Saturday.
The radical group has reportedly launched a chemical attack on the villages of Um Hosh and Herbel in Afrin District northwest of Aleppo, causing casualties among civilians.
“ISIS terrorists have used internationally forbidden weapons in an attack on the villages of al-Herbel and Um Hosh,” senior Kurdish official Ilham Ahmed said.
The attack, which took place on Friday morning, led to the injury of five civilians and three member of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who were transferred to the Afrin Hospital.
A medical sources in Afrin told ARA News that the injured suffered from suffocation.
“The victims have been clearly exposed to a chemical gas attack,” the source said.
Speaking to ARA News, Rezan Heddo, a member of the Syrian Democratic Council, said: “ISIS and other radical Islamist groups in Aleppo province are in possession of chemical weapons. They have used those weapons in several attacks on populated areas in Aleppo province, especially against the Kurds.”
On Saturday, local activists in Afrin released footages online showing testimonies on the chemical attack.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) liberated the villages of Um Hosh and Herbel from ISIS on August 30, with the aim to capture the strategic town of al-Bab to connect the Kurdish canton administrations.
According to a joint investigation by the United Nations and a chemical weapons watchdog, both the Syrian government and ISIS group have used banned chemical weapons.
Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria have been exposed to chemical attacks by ISIS.
US-led coalition officials have earlier confirmed that ISIS has used mustard gas in attacks on Kurdish forces in Iraq.
Reporting by: Siman Jiwan, Wladimir van Wilgenburg and Jan Nasro
Source: ARA News
For the latest news follow us on Twitter
Join our Weekly NewsletterYesterday we shared the news that a rather elaborate loophole in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team on 3DS had allowed gamers to post images from the web browser onto its Miiverse community; while some used this feature for comedic effect, others posted mature and explicit images.
It's an odd bug in how complex it is to use — you need to have avoided last year's update for the game (a patch that seemed meaningless at the time but now makes sense) and go through a fiddly process. Nevertheless, plenty were taking advantage, and Nintendo's Miiverse moderating team was banning some users, removing posts or — in less serious cases — simply blacking out images.
In our article covering the issue we suggested that Nintendo could either implement some code to force-update copies of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team when they're next run, functionality used in updates for various other games, or take the easy way out and simply block all screenshots on the community. We hoped for the former though, so far, the company has gone for the latter option. Below is the message from the European / Australian version of the community confirming that screenshots are no longer allowed.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the screenshot feature has been disabled in this community. We are looking into the cause of the problem. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.
Before we break out the pitchforks and lament Nintendo's heavy-handed approach, we should acknowledge that it may be taking screens down temporarily to implement a permanent fix. Based on past efforts and issues with image-sharing software, however, there's a possibility that Nintendo will simply leave screenshots off and wait for the issue to fade from view, without ever resolving it properly.
We'll see, but the fun's over for mischievous posters on that community, while the Miiverse moderators can breath easily once again.
Thanks to Ryan Millar for the heads up.Getty Poll: Hillary Clinton crushing Bernie Sanders in South Carolina
Hillary Clinton has a commanding lead over Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, according to the results of a new poll released Tuesday.
Clinton has the support of 69 percent of likely voters in South Carolina's Democratic primary, while the independent Vermont senator trails with just 21 percent, according to the latest Monmouth University Poll. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley barely registers, with just 1 percent support.
Story Continued Below
South Carolina's Democratic primary is open to supporters of other parties, including Republicans and independents. When the poll's respondents are limited to self-described Democrats likely to vote in the primary, Clinton's lead is ever higher: 74 percent to Sanders' 16 percent.
The former secretary of state, who lost the 2008 South Carolina primary to then-Sen. Barack Obama, leads with African Americans — three out of four believe she would do an “excellent” or “good” job as president. Just over half feel the same about Sanders.
Clinton also has high favorable ratings (81 percent) compared with 7 percent unfavorable. Sanders has a 58 percent favorability rating, with 13 unfavorable and O’Malley has 18 percent favorable, 18 percent unfavorable.
Sanders' campaign put a positive spin on the results. "We’re very excited about the new Monmouth University poll," said Sanders' South Carolina state director Chris Covert in a statement. "The poll solidifies what we’ve been saying for the past few months: South Carolina voters remain undecided. Two-thirds of voters have not decided on their choice and nearly a third have no opinion of Senator Sanders."
Covert said the "tide is turning" in South Carolina, and that the campaign is beginning a radio ad geared toward African-American voters in major markets.
The telephone poll was conducted Nov. 5-8 with 400 likely South Carolina Democratic primary voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.Shanghai (CNS) �C The University of California, Berkeley signed an agreement on November 11 with the city of Shanghai to open a campus in Pudong's Zhangjiang Hi-tech Area.
The first phase of the campus will focus on research in telecommunications, green technology and manufacturing, and biotechnology under the auspices of UC Berkeley's famed engineering school.
UCB's Shanghai campus will collaborate on its curriculum with Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University, according to the deal. A consultation service company will also be established to service UCB and other universities or scientific research institutes in terms of policies, funds and business consultations.
Zhangjiang is regarded as the Chinese "Silicon Valley," so as one of the original Silicon Valley's esteemed universities, UCB's all-round cooperation with the Zhangjiang Hi-tech Area will boost creativity for regional development, said Ding Lei, general manager of the Shanghai Zhangjiang Group.
Asia has been enjoying growth in the global economy, so hopefully UCB can spread Silicon Valley culture to Shanghai, added Ding.
The cooperation with Shanghai Zhangjiang has tightened ties between UCB and China, said Berkeley Chancellor Robert Joseph Birgeneau, and UBC will attach increasing importance to further cooperation with China on a global scale.Disney’s live-action adaptation of the 1998 animated musical Mulan will be directed by Niki Caro (The Zookeeper’s Wife), according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Caro will be the fourth woman to ever solo-direct a live action film with a budget over $100 million, joining a very tiny club that includes Kathryn Bigelow (K-19: The Widowmaker in 2002), Patty Jenkins (Warner Bros. upcoming Wonder Woman movie), and Ava DuVernay (Disney’s upcoming A Wrinkle in Time). Disney, by merit of hiring two women to direct blockbusters ever in its history, is somehow leading the pack for major Hollywood studios.
Hollywood studios have begun to feel the pressure to hire more female directors for tentpole films, after multiple controversies around the hiring of young, comparably untested male directors for massive projects like Jurassic World and Star Wars, as well as a federal investigation of sexist hiring practices in the industry. Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy was also recently the subject of heated criticism due to her comments about the “search” for a female director capable of handling a Star Wars movie.
Caro will be Disney’s second female director for a big-budget film
Disney has also expressed its intent to hire a woman to direct its first female-led superhero film, Captain Marvel. Caro had previously been included on the studio’s short list alongside Lesli Linka Glatter (the principle director on Homeland) and Lorene Scafaria (Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, The Meddler), though The Hollywood Reporter suggests this new assignment likely takes Caro out of the running for the 2019 film.
Caro made her breakthrough critical hit Whale Rider in 2002, following it up with the star-studded North Country (Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek) in 2005, but — as is typical for female directors in Hollywood — her career largely idled after that. Since 2005 she’s released only two films: the low-budget, overlooked TIFF submission The Vinter’s Luck in 2009 and Disney’s moderately successful McFarland, USA in 2015.
Mulan will be executive produced by Bill Kong (best known Stateside for House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and rely on input from Chinese cultural consultants and the large co-production team that Disney maintains with Shanghai Media Group. It will be interesting to see how Disney navigates the more culturally delicate live-action project, particularly considering the fact that it also has a live-action Aladdin on its plate. Big studios have a nasty habit of casting famous white faces in roles that shouldn’t belong to them — see the recent uproar over Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell or Rooney Mara as Pan’s Tiger Lily.
Mulan is set for release on November 2, 2018. It will likely be a treat to watch a young woman perform a live musical number that snarkily defines masculinity around violence and endurance as part of an ongoing dramatic irony bit.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Niki Caro is the fourth woman to solo-direct a film with a budget over $100 million. In fact she is the fifth. The other is Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who directed Kung Fu Panda 2. (For what it’s worth, Jennifer Yuh Nelson was assigned a male co-director for Kung Fu Panda 3.) Caro remains the fourth woman to direct a live-action film with a budget over $100 million.San Francisco - Activists in the urban homesteading movement petitioned today to cancel the registration of bogus trademarks for the terms "urban homesteading" and "urban homestead" -- trademarks that have been used to threaten other urban homesteaders and remove online content and discussion.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has teamed up with the law firm of Winston & Strawn to represent Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, as well as their publisher, Process Media. The book, published in 2008, was the culmination of years of participation in the global urban homesteading movement, which supports sustainable living techniques in urban areas. Urban homesteading includes growing food, raising livestock, and producing simple food products.
Despite the fact that "urban homesteading" and "urban homestead" have been used as generic descriptions for decades, a group called the Dervaes Institute managed to register the terms as trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for "educational services" like blogging. Dervaes has used the trademark registrations to claim broad ownership rights and threaten urban homesteaders who use the term online.
"Dervaes got Facebook to take down pages that talk about urban homesteading and help publicize our book, and Facebook won't put those pages back up because of the bogus trademarks," said Ms. Coyne. "This doesn't just hurt our business and our book sales, it hurts the whole urban homesteading community -- a group of people who are dedicated to sharing information about sustainable living."
The Dervaes Institute has submitted similar complaints to Facebook and other online services causing a variety of online content to be taken down, including the Facebook page of a Denver farmer's market.
"For years, the bedrock of the urban homesteading community is the sharing of information -- spreading the word about how to become self-sustaining in food and energy production," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "The Dervaes Institute is trying to shut down this thriving community with its outrageous trademark complaints. The USPTO should cancel the trademark, so urban homesteaders can get back to work free of threats."
"The efforts to control all use of these generic and descriptive terms is a classic example of trademark bullying," said Winston & Strawn Partner Jennifer Golinveaux. "We're glad to help push back against these unreasonable demands."
For the full petition to cancel:
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/urbanhomestead/petitiontocancel_001.pdf
Contacts:
Corynne McSherry
Intellectual Property Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
corynne@eff.org
Jennifer A. Golinveaux
Partner
Winston & Strawn LLP
JGolinveaux@winston.comThe Use of the Polygraph Test for Brendan Dassey in Making a Murderer
Compiled by Elana Dahlager, Timothy Darby, Christina Lee, and Matt Madsen
Introduction
Brendan Dassey’s polygraph interview is an easily overlooked aspect of Making a Murderer. While it played an integral role in Dassey’s confessions and his relationship with his attorney, the polygraph interview was not done ethically. This paper explores how polygraph interviews work, their admissibility in court, how it was employed in Brendan Dassey’s case, and how testing is done on children and those with low IQs.
Part I: The History of the Polygraph Test
Modern polygraph machines were developed in 1921 by John Larson, a UC Berkeley-educated PhD and police officer. Larson based his machine off of a prototype that only intermittently measured blood pressure.1 Larson, however, had his machine measure blood pressure and respiration simultaneously in an attempt to identify deception in interviews. It was assumed that any change in these readings could indicate that the subject is lying.2 Later on in the decade, a scientist named Leonarde Keeler modified the machine to include perspiration measurements as well. Keeler assumed that a person who is lying is more likely to perspire- thus a higher reading would indicate a higher likelihood of deception.3
While there have been many technological developments in polygraph machines over the last 90 years, they have always relied primarily on the same basic measurements and assumptions.4 Blood pressure, respiration, and perspiration are still monitored (albeit with more sensitive machinery). The assumption that rises in these measurements indicate potential deception remains.5
The Polygraph Machine
Today, when a subject takes a polygraph exam, he sits in a chair and has a number of sensors attached to him. These sensors measure breathing rate, pulse, blood pressure, perspiration, and sometimes arm or leg movement.6 A typical polygraph setup includes two elastic bands equipped with sensors: one wrapped around the chest and the other around the lower abdomen. These sensors monitor respiration and changes in respiration rates between questions.7 A blood pressure cuff is attached to the upper arm, monitoring blood pressure throughout the exam.8 A sensor is placed on an index or middle finger to monitor pulse.9 There may be sensors attached to the palms to measure perspiration rates.10 There are oftentimes sensors placed on the chair to measure movement, oftentimes on the seat of the chair to detect shifting.11
These sensors monitor physiological responses throughout the polygraph examination. They are displayed simultaneously in real time on a computer screen that the interviewer sees. The readings are saved in a timeline that is later examined to determine whether or not the subject was being deceptive.
Polygraph Diagram: How Polygraph Works, Central Polygraph Services, available here.
Polygraph Interviews
Polygraph tests are almost always started with a pre-test interview. The interview is meant to acquaint the subject to the machine, testing procedures, and the purpose and target questions of the test.12 Subjects should feel more at ease when the interviewer puts the target questions in context, therefore making the test more reliable.13 Additionally, an established rapport with the interviewer may make the subject more relaxed. Subjects are asked target questions during the pre-test interview and provided the opportunity to give context to their answers.
The American Polygraph Association recommends that a trial test (asking only non-target questions) should be conducted between the initial interview and the test itself.14 This allows the subject to become acquainted to testing procedures, verifying consent to the test and improving the accuracy of test results by beginning to establish baseline readings and relaxing the subject during the test itself.15
After the pre-test interview and trial test, the actual test begins. This oftentimes involves multiple series of questions, including both target questions and control questions. Target questions those that the interviewer wants to get to the bottom of. Control questions are those where both parties know the answer. For example, a control question could be “Is today Wednesday?” Both the interviewer and subject know the answer, so it is a given that the subject is being truthful. Control questions are meant to establish a baseline reading of the subject’s physiological response to a truthful answer, allowing for comparison to answers to target questions.16 The further off the target questions’ readings are from the control questions’, the higher the likelihood of deception.17
When the test involves multiple series, it allows the examiner to ask questions between the series. This question may allow the examiner to clarify test questions to the subject or probe deeper into what the subject is thinking. For example, the examiner may ask (truthfully or not), “I’m getting a big spike at one of the target questions. Do you have anything you want to tell me?” This allows the examiner to probe into the subject’s deception or self-doubt. Whether or not the subject is lying, any information provided can aid the examiner in uncovering the truth.
Once the test series are over, the examiner must evaluate the results. The physiological readings for each question, both control and target, are given numerical scores. There is an assumption that higher physiological responses (and therefore test scores) for target questions over control questions indicate deception.18 Scoring methods may vary, but overarching assumptions remain true through all legitimate polygraph examinations.19
Polygraph results are strikingly accurate in scientific testing. Aggregated test results of 24 studies indicate a.08 rate of false negative errors (i.e. people who are lying who pass the test) and.12 for false positive errors (i.e. people who are telling the truth who fail). Inconclusive results are.09 for deceptive subjects and.13 for those telling the truth.20
Of particular interest in the case of Brendan Dassey, many studies in the 1970s demonstrated that both juveniles and low-intelligence individuals may have less accurate polygraph results.21
Part II: The Law Surrounding Polygraph Tests
The Frye and Daubert Tests
Frye v. United States was the first appellate case dealing with admissibility of a sort of polygraph test, the systolic blood pressure deception test, a precursor to the modern polygraph.22 The court found the systolic blood pressure test to be inadmissible because it lacked general acceptance in a scientific field.23 This resulted in the Frye “general acceptance” test, which stated that for scientific evidence to be permissible, “the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.” The Frye test would eventually be replaced by Daubert, which stated that Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence superseded the Frye test. 24 Judges are to focus on the methods and principles the expert uses to reach its conclusions, rather than looking to prevailing wisdom/general acceptance.25 When considering whether to admit polygraph evidence, in addition to the reliability of the test and evidence, “[c]ourts balance the probative value of evidence against its tendency to unduly influence the jury.”26 The current standard regarding admissibility of polygraph evidence in federal in state court is the same as the standard for admitting other scientific, technical, or specialized evidence, unless there is a specific rule on polygraph evidence.27 Most state courts use the Frye test for determining admissibility of specialized evidence, while federal courts rely on Daubert.28
Three Approaches to the Admissibility of Polygraph Evidence
There are three general approaches to the admissibility of polygraph evidence in criminal cases.29 The traditional approach is a per se ban on the use of polygraph evidence, “either as substantive evidence or as relating to the credibility of the witness.”30 A second approach gives the trial court discretion to allow the use of polygraph evidence if, among other conditions, “the parties stipulate to the evidence’s admissibility before the administration of the test.”31 A third approach permits the use of polygraph evidence on a case-by-case basis without requiring stipulation, with most jurisdictions allowing their use “only when special circumstances exist.”32
There is a per se ban on the use of polygraph evidence in the Second33 and Fourth Circuits.34 The following states have a per se ban against the use of polygraph evidence in criminal law trial court cases: Connecticut,35 Kentucky,36 Maryland,37 Minnesota,38 Mississippi,39 Nebraska,40 Rhode Island,41 Tennessee,42 and Wisconsin.43
The standard requiring a stipulation of admissibility by parties and counsel has gained support over the years as an alternative to the traditional per se ban on polygraph evidence.44 The leading case on stipulations for the admissibility of polygraph evidence is State v. Valdez.45 In Valdez, the Supreme Court of Arizona reversed its long time ban on polygraph evidence, stating that polygraph testimony should be “admissible upon stipulation in Arizona criminal cases.” The court then listed the four “qualifications” that must be met to introduce the polygraph evidence as follows:
The prosecutor, defense counsel, and the individual defendant all sign a written stipulation which provides for the test taker’s “submission to the test and for the subsequent admission at trial of the graphs, and the examiner’s opinion thereon behalf of either the defendant or the state.” The trial judge retains discretion to refuse the admission of polygraph evidence. If the graphs and examiner's opinion are offered in evidence, the opposing party has the right to cross-examine the examiner, the administration of the test, and the reliability of the test. The trial judge “should instruct the jury that the examiner's testimony does not tend to prove or disprove any element of the crime with which a defendant is charged but at most tends only to indicate whether at the time of the examination [the individual] was telling the truth. Further, the jury members should be instructed that it is for them to determine what corroborative weight and effect such testimony should be given.”46
The following states allow polygraph evidence to be admitted where the prosecutor, defense counsel, and tested individual all stipulate to allow the results to be admitted: Alabama,47 Arizona,48 Arkansas,49 California,50 Georgia,51 Indiana,52 Kansas,53 Nevada,54 Ohio,55 and Washington.56
The third alternative is more of a case-by-case option. These courts may allow polygraph to be admitted at the judge’s discretion, after balancing certain competing interests, or only allow the admittance of polygraph evidence for a particular purpose. The Fifth Circuit has moved from a per se ban to a set of factors a judge must evaluate.57 Admittance of polygraph evidence is strongly disfavored, but is at the trial courts discretion in the Sixth58 and Eighth Circuits.59 The Seventh and Ninth Circuits are more receptive to the admissibility of polygraph tests, stating that the admissibility is at the discretion of the district court.60 These “case-by-case” states include: Illinois,61 South Carolina,62 West Virginia,63 New York.64
Polygraph Evidence in Wisconsin
The use and admissibility of polygraph evidence in the State of Wisconsin is currently controlled by State v. Dean, 307 N.W.2d 628 (Wis. 1981) and Wis. Stat. § 301.132 (2015).65 In the first Wisconsin State Supreme Court case concerning the admissibility of polygraph evidence, State v. Bohner,66 the Wisconsin Supreme Court relied on Frye in making the determination that the systolic blood pressure device was still too experimental and in too early of a stage of development to admit as evidence in a jury trial.67 Ten years later, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its determination that polygraph evidence was inadmissible, even when both parties had stipulated (prior to the administration of the test) that the findings would be admissible.68 The Wisconsin Supreme Court continued to enforce a per se ban the use of polygraph evidence in criminal cases until 1974, when the court decided State v. Stanislawski.69
The Stanislawski court reviewed the per se ban on “the admissibility of evidence at the time of trial... on the question of [an individual’s] credibility.”70 The court concluded that over past forty or so years, polygraph tests had reached a high enough level of standing and scientific recognition that a per se ban on the use of polygraph evidence was no longer appropriate.71 The Stanislawski court decided to adopt the Veldez conditions, making expert opinion as to polygraph evidence admissible in Wisconsin in criminal cases if the four Veldez conditions are met.72 The same standards applied for polygraph tests taken by both the defendant and the principal witness.73
Just seven years later, the Wisconsin Supreme Court would decide State v. Dean and revert back to its prior position on the admissibility of polygraph evidence, re-establishing a per se ban on the use of polygraph evidence in criminal cases.74 In eliminating the Stanislawski rule, the court acknowledged that there was a certain amount of validity and reliability to polygraph evidence and that the science behind the polygraph had progressed, but the court felt that the Stanislawski rule had not increased the reliability of polygraph evidence.75 The Wisconsin Supreme Court also rejected the possibility of allowing a case-by-case determination of admissibility.76 The court was concerned that the jury might place too much weight on polygraph testimony, and the lack of established standards for the trial court to follow in evaluating polygraph evidence “heighten[ed the court’s] concern that the burden on the trial court to assess the reliability of stipulated polygraph evidence may outweigh any probative value the evidence may have.”77 Lastly, while Dean still largely controls the legality of the use of polygraph evidence in criminal trials, there is the possibility that a narrow exception exists through Wis. Stat. § 301.132 (2015), which “specifically authoriz[es] the use of polygraph tests of convicted sex offenders by the state department of corrections.”78
Part III: How Was the Polygraph Employed in Making a Murderer?
Although the Making a Murderer documentary did not specifically feature the polygraph in its application or at trial, it is worth exploring how Brendan Dassey’s defense lawyer as well as Dassey’s investigators utilized the polygraph in Dassey’s interrogations. Indeed, the use of the polygraph test results were a critical part of Dassey’s post-conviction trial, and according to Dassey’s post-conviction attorneys these test results were a catalyst for Dassey’s incriminating confession to his mother on May 13, 2006.
Brendan Dassey: Eric Young, 'Making a Murderer,' and the Huge Problem of False Youth Confessions, Rolling Stone (Jan. 8, 2016), available here.
Events Leading Up to the Polygraph Test
Brendan Dassey’s polygraph test took place in his interview with Michael O’Kelly on April 16, 2006. The events that led up to this test are as follows: on March 1, 2006, in an informal interview with investigators for Steve Avery’s murder trial, Dassey confessed to the murder and rape of Teresa Marie Halbach.79 The next day, Dassey was arrested and charged with homicide, mutilation of a corpse, and sexual assault.80 Five days later, on March 7th, Len Kachinsky was appointed as Dassey’s Public Defender. In his early conversations with Kachinsky, Dassey asserted his innocence despite his March 1st confession and requested a polygraph test to prove his innocence.81 Kachinsky then found Michael O’Kelly, a private investigator, through Internet ads, and arranged to have O’Kelly administer the polygraph test on April 16th at the jail where Dassey was being held.
The Polygraph Test
The Making a Murder documentary never specified the details of the polygraph test, but transcripts from Dassey’s post-conviction trials have shed light on this issue. Contrary to standards of polygraph mentioned above, O’Kelly’s polygraph test for Dassey included only three sets of questions, each of which had ten questions.82 Only two out of the three sets of questions held relevant, rather than control, questions. Of the ten questions in each of the two relevant sets, only three questions were relevant questions, with the seven remaining classified as symptomatic. The relevant questions of each set are as follows:
Set 1:
“Did you help kill Teresa Marie Halbach?”
“Did you help kill Teresa Marie Halbach on Monday, October 31?”
“Was the body of Teresa Marie Halbach burned in the fire by the Steve Avery house?”
Set 2:
“Did you see Teresa Marie Halbach in the Avery house?”
“Did you see Teresa Marie Halbach in the Avery house on Monday, October 31?”
“Did you touch any part of the body of Teresa Marie Halbach?”83
Finally, although O’Kelly claimed to have videotaped the entire polygraph test, he had presumably lost the files by the time of Dassey’s post-conviction proceedings in 2010.84
The Results of the Polygraph Test
The confusion surrounding the results of the polygraph test stems from the fact that it has three contradictory interpretations. First, according to Kachinsky, the results of the polygraph test were inconclusive, and the test results were never admitted into Dassey’s trial.85 Second, in the post-conviction trial, Dassey’s attorneys sought to admit the testimony of Dr. Charles Honts, an expert witness on polygraphs, who would have testified that he had reviewed the polygraph charts prepared by Michael O’Kelly, and that “his analysis of the charts demonstrated that Brendan Dassey passed the polygraph test given to him.”86 Dr. Honts’ testimony was not admitted on the grounds of “lack of relevance.”87 Third, despite Kachinsky claiming that O’Kelly had reported inconclusive results, O’Kelly claimed that the polygraph test results indicated a 98% rate of deception.88 This final interpretation of failure was the result that Dassey received in his May 12th interview with O’Kelly, and this set the stage for three major conversations: the interrogation by O’Kelly, the interrogation by Dassey’s investigators, and Dassey’s phone call confession to his mother.89
Survey from O’Kelly Interview: Megan Willett, Wisconsin Lawyers on ‘Making a Murderer’ — ‘I Almost Got Physically Ill’ Tech Insider, (Jan. 8, 2016) available here.
The Use of the Polygraph Test
Between April 16th and May 12th, Kachinsky elevated O’Kelly’s involvement from polygrapher to investigator.90 On May 12, 2006, immediately after Judge Fox admitted Dassey’s March 1st Confession as evidence—a heavy blow to Dassey’s trial—O’Kelly met for an extended period of time with Dassey.91 During this meeting, O’Kelly laid out photographs of the crime scene and various documents, including Dassey’s polygraph test results. This was the first time that Dassey saw his test results. O’Kelly asked Dassey what he thought the 98% on his polygraph charts meant, and Dassey’s guess was that he had passed.92 O’Kelly then told Dassey that the results showed with 98% certainty that Dassey had been lying during the polygraph test. The polygrapher-turned-investigator then gave Dassey forms to fill out about his involvement in the crime.93 O’Kelly used the failure of the polygraph test over the next few hours to guide Dassey into changing his responses on the forms until Dassey had told what O’Kelly deemed to be the “truth.” In one form, Dassey was forced to check a box between the options, “I feel sorry for what I did” and “I do not feel sorry for what I did.” When Dassey wrote an initial response proclaiming his innocence, O’Kelly made him rewrite his response, including a detailed description of the events. O’Kelly then carefully instructed the teenager to draw certain pictures of the crime, including images of the rape and of the victim chained to the bed.94
Survey from O’Kelly Interview: Megan Willett, Wisconsin Lawyers on ‘Making a Murderer’ — ‘I Almost Got Physically Ill’ Tech Insider, (Jan. 8, 2016) available here.
Events Following the Polygraph Test
Using the crafted confessions from his meeting with Dassey, O’Kelly immediately reported his interrogation results to Kachinsky and scheduled an interview with Steve Avery’s investigators for Dassey the following day. Dassey’s lawyer, Kachinsky, was informed of the meeting, but chose not to be present (later earning a dismissal for this failed representation). Throughout the meeting, Dassey remained confused and unclear in his responses to questioning.95 This interview led to Brendan’s confession over the phone to his mother that evening.96 Brendan’s trial took place from April 16 – April 27, |
Of course, I doubt she remembers even [singing]. I think she was 8 years old when she did it, she's like 20 now. But she said, "What is this?" I said, "You're a recording artist. You have to like sign this." "Really?" "Yeah." "Oh, cool." Patti [Scialfa] sings fabulously on that track, first of all, she just did amazing things with her voice on it. And the kids did some sort of very ghosty part behind her or with her and they were very young and I, at the time, I recorded them on several things, some of which haven't been released but were just, they had a beautiful sound the three of them when they sang together at that time. And occasionally they still do and so I just brought them in and said, "OK, try this," and they put the big headsets on and they took a swing at it and they're on the record.
I mean, to me it worked so well because it's a song about, I mean, is that person searching for a family member? It brings your own family into it, I think. It's very powerful.
Yeah. It was just, it was a nice thing for them. And she was excited. She said, "Oh, boy." I'm not sure she gets paid.
In this day and age, who knows. Let's talk about your other family, the band, and I mean the band has grown to many, many members now. And one of the interesting things about this project is it is in a way a conversation with yourself about past material, a conversation with Tom, but also across all the members of your band. And I'm just wondering about that dynamic right now and thinking about how it has evolved over the past decade.
It's the best it's ever been, you know. And we're very lucky. You know, most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult. Very, very difficult. And as you can see, there's very, very few exceptions. I think U2 are perhaps the other version where it works, I've seen it work. And they're all exceptional people, you know.
For U2, I think there is a way that the band is a sacred unit and keeping it going...
There was a bit of a Christian streak that ran through what they did and just, they're a different bunch of guys than you usually run into. And so they've managed, they've had the temperament to make that work. And also they're very interdependent, and that's a key. The wonderful thing about rock music is even if you hate the other person, sometimes you need him more, you know. In other words if he's the guy that made that sound, he's the guy that made that sound and without that guy making that sound, you don't have a band, you know. And sometimes that keeps bands together in a way that's nice for us, [but] probably very hard for many of them.
I think of The Everly Brothers, you know, fighting, feuding.
Well everybody. The Everly Brothers, Sam & Dave, Simon & Garfunkel. I mean, it's the rule, not the exception. You're not really family, but you're kind of, it's almost worse, you know, because not only do you live together, you have to work together. The only way I can explain it is imagine if the people you went to high school with, you have worked with those same five people that were in your math class and you're 60 and those are the same exact people that you've worked with every single day of your life.
And sleep with them on a bus.
Yeah. Or in the same bunks or same beds for many, many years. So the opportunity for overfamiliarity is very great. But it's kind of wonderful the way that different groups work it out, you know. And it's difficult but it's just, that's what a band is; a band is that thing. Whether it's Creedence Clearwater [Revival], whether it's The Rolling Stones, whether it's The Who, or the two young guys, the guys from Oasis. You know, it's like, it makes for very — The Kinks — there was something that each guy did that was not replaceable, it was not replaceable.
Is that why you definitely included Danny [Federici] and Clarence [Clemons] on this recording, too? The voices had to be there?
No, they just happened to play on those records, you know. And our band was pretty lucky in that, you know, we, I signed as a solo act. We weren't a democracy. We were kind of a relatively benevolent dictatorship where you could hear other voices and take them into account but at the end of the day it was kind of, it was OK with everybody that sort of, that the decision always came down to what I felt was right. And even then, you know, we had our own difficulties. And we stopped playing together for 10 years, partially because I had run out of ideas as to exactly where to take the band next but also, I think people were a little tired of one another. Which was just a normal thing to have occurred. And we were still in our late 30s and there's so many small things that enter into it. So when we took the decade off, when people came back, people realized, oh, this was like one of the best things of my life and this guy over there — you had new respect for everyone. I had new respect for the band. I had experienced playing without them and I said, "Well, these guys are elemental to something that I do." And I think it went all around. Everybody looked at the other guy and said, "Oh, I think we need that guy." People gave each other more room and at the same time, a lot of the smallness disappeared because everybody realized it was just unnecessary. And we had the greatest, we've had the greatest 10 or 12 years, in my opinion, you know, as far as just a living, working band that we've ever had. That's why the band is as good as it is onstage.
And you know, when Clarence passed away, it was obviously very sad but I know that he was very, very happy the last decade that we played. He loved playing, he loved performing. And that we were able to get back to do it and do it for the 10 years that we did it was, it was a wonderful thing for the two of us. And I know that he was always just concentrating on the next gig and how he could make it. So we've been very, very fortunate. Part of it was by design in that we were not a democracy, but we were not a solo act either. We were something in between, you know, and that in-between thing has been what's made us special and it's been very exciting.
The thought of an in-between space makes me want to talk about gospel music. And I know that you had an idea of doing a whole gospel project. We heard some of it on Wrecking Ball and we hear some of it on this album with "Heaven's Wall." I'm a great student of gospel music and I can see where that kind of call-response thing [is] really like the preacher leading a choir.
Well, sure. That was where James Brown came from. The preacher, he's the original frontman. It's the shaman. If you go back, that was the original unit that functioned like that, whether it was in church or whether it was tribal. So the frontman kind of grew out of that thing and so it all gets thrown back to roots in blues and gospel music in church.
But what was your idea for a gospel project? Because I know you've talked in the past about getting this religious impulse to work in a way that it's not restrictive or judgmental, you know. We talked about U2. They do a similar thing. And I hear that in songs like "Heaven's Wall" and even in some of your protest music, the version of "41 Shots" that's on the album, there's a lament quality to it, you know, and a trying-to-transcend quality.
Without overusing the word, you know, there's a Christian element that runs through it because I grew up Catholic and so I was indoctrinated in religious language between eight o'clock and nine o'clock every single morning for the first eight years of my schooling. Five days a week, every single morning, the first thing you did was religion. And so you grew up with that language and it was, of course, distorted, and screwed me up terribly, but at the same time, it made for good writing. And it was a wonderful source of metaphor when you went to write about the world and about your inner life and it served me. I suppose looking back on it, I would like to change some things but I wouldn't have had that any other way in that it's served me very, very well and continues to do so. I have a very deep connection to gospel music. I understand the language — I feel I understand the essence of the music itself.
Jay Z and I performed together for President Obama in Ohio and we were both on the same bill. I was playing acoustic and he had his group, you know. And the audience was filled with some of his fans and some of my fans. And his was a big arena — it was like 20,000 people. There were actually some people who'd probably come to see the president, right? So I'm coming out first and I'm gonna play acoustically and it was, you know, I thought "Promised Land" and I thought maybe "Land of Hopes and Dreams." And it was fascinating as I watched the crowd who — I knew a lot of them had not heard my music before — but who understood the language I was speaking in because it was very gospel-based — you know, "Promised Land" — and the issues that were involved. So that was a fascinating afternoon. It was a great afternoon for me because I got to stand onstage and there were young black kids and there were some older black folks. It was very, you know, multiracial and it was just a great afternoon. And I got to watch people sort of experience some of this, my songs in their bare bones for the first time.
Well, you were talking earlier about how you and Brendan have worked with beats or I know on some of the songs [the credits read] "loops by Bruce Springsteen." This shows an influence perhaps of hip-hop or at least of the technology of hip-hop and I wonder if at some point in your listening, because I know that you listen to everything and one of the things I treasured about your South By Southwest talk that you gave was how you erase genre and you said, "We should embrace everything that sounds right to our ears," and I wondered if hip-hop was something at some point that kind of, the light went on for you and you got it or how does that work in relationship to you?
Well it was so present, you know. At one moment particularly you had "White Lines" and this was stuff that was talking about what was going on in the streets and in the inner cities with people who were struggling. And that was something that, I mean, I had my own context for that, you know, that I wrote about it in my own way. But it was the music that came along and gave voice to those things outside of what was then considered a protest music context, you know, and did so really beautifully. And so, you know, I'm not well-versed in it but I have listened over the years. You know, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., I listened to Tupac, I listen to Kanye West. Kanye West is incredible, you know. I mean, the record-making facility, you know, there's a lot of hours in those records and they're...
He's a perfectionist like you.
I mean some of these, there's like, just the production. And I saw him on television, he did the song called "Blood on the Leaves" on the Later...With Jools Holland — it was fantastic, you know. He's a very, I still find him very interesting. I'm not necessarily driving [to] it in my car, you know. I probably fall back on the stuff that I listened to as a kid or something if I'm driving around. But I do listen. I listen to a lot because there's a lot of information in it and it's just fascinating record-making.
Well the dual side or the flip coin of hip-hop might be country. And you know "Hunter of Invisible Game" for some reason, that song gives me a Hank feeling, a Hank Williams feeling.
Oh, maybe.
The loneliness, you know, I don't know but I know you love that kind of roots country and I wondered if there was a way you were still feeling that. There was a particular period in your history too, I know, when you turned to that music.
Well, country music is kind of where rock music has gone really at this point, you know. It's basically kind of pop-rock music, you know. It's where rock music continues to have a certain currency.
It's true.
So it's kind of fascinating to hear country music now because, with the exception of the twang occasionally in the guitar and the voice, it's really, it's very much sort of '80s rock music or something. And it's an interesting genre because bad country music is some of the worst in the world, you know, but great country music is some of the best. My daughter got into a lot of new country music and she would kind of play it on the way to school on occasion and I got into a lot of some of the new guys. I like some of the Toby Keith records, Kenny Chesney.
Toby's got that workingman's thing.
Yeah and when he gets the song, when he's at his A game, it's really good, you know. When it's done, you know, I'm still back with George Jones and Conway Twitty and Lefty Frizzell. That's sort of my go-to, but there's a lot of good young country guys out there. Let me get my computer because I have all my stuff and I don't remember everybody's name. I have a lot of different playlists and things.
I would love to know what you're listening to now. But I'm wondering, [in the meantime about] that sort of sense of loneliness in that song particularly, "Hunter of Invisible Game." I wonder how you cultivate that mood of like solitariness that's always been such an essential part of your music for me.
That's not hard to do, you know, that's my fallback position in life in general.
Is it really? I would have thought you were kind of a team player in some ways.
That took me a long time. The team wasn't so interested in me.
[He pulls laptop out of his bag and sets it on the table next to his chair. It drops on the floor.]
Whoops. I'm crashing my computer now. So it took a long time to sort of go there. I had to get used to being good company for myself for a long time, which is good because every artist begins as an angry, isolated outsider in one way or another. I don't know anybody who's started some other way that I can think of. I mean, maybe there is.
I'm thinking about R&B and soul. Sometimes that, the people who come out of...
You're right. I think that might be, those roots might be different because they come up out of community and church. So I think that's a very different context. But I think for a lot of young — certainly blue collar — but young rock musicians...
And male musicians. Let's just point out, I mean, that's a very, the solitary male, you know, that's definitely an icon in rock music.
Yeah, I've worked that one as hard as I can, you know.
I'm really curious about the song "Harry's Place." Can I just ask a specific question about that? It's about the production. To me, it strikes me as almost psychedelic. It's a fantasy song to me.
It is.
And people always talk about Bruce Springsteen as a naturalist, you know, telling the real stories.
Maybe they should check out Greetings From Asbury Park.
I love the dream aspect of what you do. And I'm wondering if you can talk about the role of what dream and fantasy play in what you do.
It's everything, of course. I mean, that's all we're doing, really, we're living in the world but it's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of them. You both diverge from them, you know, you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine. And certainly this was the place, America was the place where you go and do that. And I mean really, my thing was very, very new. The characters in my songs were really my father's life. I mean, it's not my life. My life was, it was Inside Llewyn Davis with a happy ending, you know. I was, you know, I was that guy. I was the guy sleeping on the couch in midtown and taking the subway to Greenwich Village and I kind of caught the last tiny bit of the folk boom and you know I auditioned for John Hammond at The Gaslight [Cafe] and met David Blue. David Blue took me to meet Jackson Browne at The Bitter End when he was promoting his first record. And then he took me out and I met Odetta and I opened for Dave Van Ronk at Max's Kansas City. So I caught the very tail end of that thing you know with John Hammond.
But what about the punk side?
And I caught the beginning of that because I would open for Dave Van Ronk and if I missed my bus back to New Jersey, I had to go back to Max's. And when I went back to Max's, at 1 or 2 a,m., the New York Dolls were playing upstairs.
Wow.
And I'd never seen anything like it. They were great, you know. And so it was, I sat in this strange fulcrum between both something that was at its very end and something that was really just beginning. And so I saw the Dolls, this was 1973 I think. It had to be because I was playing solo acoustically. I mean, it was very, very early, you know. Or [1974] or somewhere in there, you know.
That's the right period, I think.
And so that was all going on downstairs. I never became a part of the downstairs scene at Max's. I just sort of took my bus in and went and did my gig and then I would run to get on the last bus back to New Jersey.
What about Suicide and covering "Dream Baby Dream" in a way that I think Alan Vega never would have done. I mean, let's be honest.
Well, I just loved them when I first heard them and I loved him, you know. I still think, he was a cross between sort of, it was futuristic and visionary and yet it was completely authentically rockabilly. And he was like Elvis if Elvis had been, you know, been sort of born in the mid-'70s or something. So they were always very, and he was incredibly, really, I don't know. He just manifested something that was always very mystifying and raw.
Scary.
And very sexy and very, very rebellious and they were very brave because, you know, they were very provocative in their day and the audiences I'm sure you know took it out on them from time to time. So they were just gutsy. It was just the real thing for me. And I wasn't gonna, you know, that wasn't where I was making my day but it was something that when I heard it, it really moved me a lot. And like I said, I think they should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Hopefully it will happen.
And I think they're very, I think they're becoming more influential as time passes. I think this group Savages just did a cover of "Dream Baby Dream" also.
You know, you were talking about how artists become their own fictions. But then, thinking about "The Ghost of Tom Joad" and especially "41 Shots," and thinking about the Trayvon Martin story of this past year, you were also talking about people who don't have a chance to transcend their fictions. And I wonder if that, those kinds of stories interested you more in these recent years? It seems to.
I just think that when you kind of grow up, I believe everything that I've written about kind of comes from the psychology of my childhood in the sense that I lived in an interesting house, you know, and I've said this many times. I lived in a house where somebody was very fulfilled by their work and a house where somebody was very lost in the workplace and struggled very hard to keep their head above water. And it was a house that, you know, it was the finance company that kept us floating month to month just barely, you know.
So I saw that happen and it was a bit of, you know, sons and fathers. It's the old thing. Somebody asked T-Bone Burnett once what was rock 'n' roll: "Daddy," you know, somebody crying, "Daddy!" The whole sons and fathers thing — it'll never stop. I suppose it's somewhat boring at this point in time but the bottom line is it just is. Funny, when I went to work, you know I've said in the past, what did I do? I put on my father's clothes, really. I didn't put on my clothes. You know, when I began to craft a larger image than the one I started with in the early '70s, I very much crafted it. I used to have a funny dream, you know, where I would be in the audience while I was playing and I would somehow end up wandering down the aisle and I would come to my father's seat. And he would be sitting there with my mother alongside of him and this would be in the middle of the arena while the show was going on and I remember kneeling down and I would say, "Dad," I would point and say, "That's you. That's you." I said, "That's how I see you."
That's a very classic American literary [thing] — I've been reading John Updike lately and I feel like it's in that kind of midcentury novel as well. Trying to figure out your place in the lineage. But the songs on this record, the political songs, especially working with Tom, who's so political, I wonder if you've changed to think about broader identities beyond this one focus on your own.
You know, Tom's very active — much more than I am. And he's just a fascinating character. But Steve [Van Zandt], Steve had a whole stretch of where he made nothing but political records.
It's true.
Now the funny thing is, Steve and I have gone full circle. Steve in the '70s, on the Southside records, says, "No politics in music. That's a mistake," he says. And then, the guys have often credited our first trip to Europe and Steve is often credited as turning him around politically because together we went to East Berlin, you know, and this was in 1980 and it was pretty grim. And Steve has always said that that trip, going through Europe in the 1980s, affected him and he then made political music for a decade and continues to be very, very active — more than myself.
Recently the death of Nelson Mandela reminded us of what he did, you know.
And "Sun City." So I've had that around me for a long time, really. I had Steve and then of course Tom so it just means we fit well together and we find a place where we, you know, have a lot of commonality and we draw from that. And I mean Tom suggested "High Hopes" which really kind of sits in with a lot of that music. I think he dug out "Hunter of Invisible Game," too. I think Brendan had played that for him at some point when I wasn't in the studio. You know, Brendan produced Tom also. And then, just, those are places where he and I naturally gathered, you know.
And I gather in different places with different members of the band, which is why the band is so nice at this point. It's lovely, I have so many places to go to. Everybody is underutilized. I have to apologize to the guys. I mean, we have four great guitar players. Everybody — really with the exception of me — subsumes their ego to the greater whole.
Soozie [Tyrell] has some great moments on this record.
Oh, yeah. And Patti, you know Patti's records have been completely, in my opinion, completely underrated. If people go back and listen to the last record she made, Jesus, I thought that the writing was like Dusty in Memphis. You know it was just a lovely, lovely record and great singing. And so everybody sort of is, and I have to thank them for it because everybody comes out and they work as an ensemble at my service and it's a gift that they give me and it's very nice.
I wanted to ask you also about "Frankie Fell in Love" as a potential live highlight, you know, because it's just such a fun song. It's that classic, I can just see the crowd rocking to it and everything.
I'm hoping so, yes.
Are there songs like that that you know you're gonna bring them into the room and it's gonna become a moment?
Yeah. And sometimes that doesn't happen.
Have you been disappointed by [the reaction to] your own songs?
"This one, people are gonna love this one!" And you go out and you play it and it's like, "Eh, OK, that was all right." You're not always right. I had some songs that I thought were gonna become part of the body of the set and sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't. It didn't mean that they weren't great songs. Maybe I didn't present [them correctly]. And then also songs have lives where they don't truly reveal themselves [until] 10 years later.
Like what? What's one?
"The Ghost of Tom Joad," [which] suddenly became a really large song on our last couple of tours. So the songs reveal themselves at different moments and when you maybe have a chance to interpret them better. But sometimes you go in and you go, "Oh this one's gonna kill live! I can't wait 'til we get out and play this thing live!" And sometimes that happens; it doesn't happen all time. Sometimes you get out there and you're playing, playing and it's just, you go, "Well."
You see a dull look in the eyes of the audience?
Well, it's just, you don't see sort of the explosion you thought was gonna occur. But we'll see, you know, so, we'll see what happens.
The Saints' song that you covered — you were in Australia when you made this. So, the Saints. I loved it because I have a friend that has a son named Bailey after Chris Bailey. No one ever knows who he's named after. I was like, "Yes, you're covering the Saints!" But I also wondered — that's a band that's very influenced by Bruce Springsteen. When you cover a band who's influenced by you, are you in dialogue with yourself?
I don't think they were, you know. I mean, they started out as a pretty hardcore punk band with "(I'm) Stranded." And then later, they made lovely record that "Just Like Fire Would" was on. That never reminded me of me, I just thought it was great and I loved that song, you know. So but you know, everyone steals from everyone else.
That's the business.
And stealing well is, there's a genius to it. And you know, when it's done well, I mean, I can hear groups that have been influenced by us but they're themselves, you know, who do beautiful work.
Arcade Fire.
And Brian, I know Brian Fallon from The Gaslight Anthem, he was a fan but he does something, he just manifests something that's completely his. I've played with his band onstage a few times and I love doing it. It's just wonderful. We played in Asbury Park at Convention Hall one night and we did "American Slang" and it was just great. You hear little bits of [your music in other songs] but then they take it to another place. They take it to a place where you wouldn't have taken it, you know. And that's what you hope for. When you're playing, you hope that somebody hears your voice, is interested in what you're doing and then gathers whatever they think might be of value in it and then moves it down the line. And we're all part of sort of that, being a musician is, as Patti and I often discuss, it's a wonderful thing. You're a part of a long, long line of the continuity and of wonderful things and people who've made magic and enlightened people and excited people and changed the way people thought, looked, dressed, acted, behaved, thought about themselves, thought about their country, thought about their town, thought about how they wanna be who they wanna be.
You know, Against Me! I just heard a song they did, "Black Me Out," it's a fantastic song, you know. And so, any time where you feel you may have dropped a seed or two that someone picked up in any way is, it's just a pleasure. I mean it's like, "Oh yeah, I did that little part of my work well," in that this was an assistance and someone went and made something beautiful of their own or crazy of their own about it or whatever, however it comes out.
It's that gospel impulse that we were talking about, that connecting, making a line through history.
Yeah, I mean, you go down, I'm sure you know, the Seeger Sessions Band, I could see doing a gospel record with that group of musicians. You know, with "O Mary, Don't You Weep," and "Jacob's Ladder."
I'd love it.
I'd love to do a project like that at some point. And you know so it, you never know where something's gonna go and it comes up in places where you least expect it and that's where it's always the most fun. You know, it's always quite wonderful.
[Looks down at his laptop]
My computer's still working after I crashed it. OK, "Traveling Alone," by Jason Isbell. I believe he was a part of the Drive-By Truckers. He's got a lovely solo record out himself. There's a gal called, hold on, let me see here. I'm gonna plug some people here because I love their records.
I love that Jason Isbell, it's one of my favorite records of the year.
Slim Dunlap, Slim Dunlap is fantastic. He was a part of The Replacements and he made two fabulous rock records that were just really, deeply soulful and beautiful.
I think he had a stroke not long ago.
Yeah I don't know what his health condition is at the moment but I know some folks were cutting some things of his. I hope I get a chance to cut one of his songs because he's, it's just, this stuff, check out the two Slim Dunlap records because they're just so beautiful, they're just beautiful rock 'n' roll records. I found them to be deeply touching and emotional. Kristina Train: very Dusty Springfield. There's a song called "Dark Black" that's fantastic. I love that. And let me see who else I can plug here while I'm rolling.
Do you like Eric Church? Have you heard his song "Springsteen?"
Yeah, yeah! My kids thought it was hilarious. "Dad! There's like a song, like your name is in it!" And it was a good song, too, so it was nice. And I wrote him a letter, I said we all got a kick out of it, you know. It was a lovely song. It was fun.
What's cool about that song is it did use your name but it wasn't like a tribute to you. It was just about how they listened to you while they made out, you know.
That's as good as it gets, you know. I mean the verses were really lovely, wonderfully done. So you're thinking of a guy in the '80s and you're making that music and you know that's what you want, to be the music someone's making out to, you know, at least, that's what you hope to be.
Yo La Tengo, "Tears Are In Your Eyes." I just recently discovered that and I just kind of recently got into them and they're fantastic.
They've been indie mainstays. Jersey! They're from Jersey!
Yeah, I know. Phosphorescent, I like what he does. Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "Gulf Shores." I've got tons of stuff. But anyway.
How about if you wanna give us any like classic, soul, R&B stuff you've been listening to that you love. I mean, I know that we could name the expected but can we go off the beaten track?
Yeah, I'll find something that's a little different. Alright, 8th Day. Check out 8th Day. "She's Not Just Another Woman." "You've Got To Crawl Before You Walk." I like, of course, I've got, I have a thing here somewhere that is...
When you listen to blues, do you tend to like like Bobby Bland style urban blues? Are you into the country blues? Or is there a mix?
I like both. Yeah, I like both of those things a lot. It depends on the mood you're in, you know.
Gene Chandler, "Gonna Be Good Times." "Do I Love You" by Frank Wilson. A great, not-that-well-known soul song.
What else have I got here?
I feel that you've become a more soulful singer as you've gotten older.
I'm still a pretender but I'm getting better at it and my voice has actually gotten better. I can sing a little more in tune as I've gotten older. I think the older you get, the deeper you slip into some of those roots but perhaps you just with age, you gain more in common with actually the people who made some of those records. Because occasionally, if I get the right song, I can do OK with it. We do this song called "Back In Your Arms" — there's a nice version we did on the last tour where I'm like, I'm getting pretty close, that sounds pretty close.
I feel like "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" was a song like that too. It had such a classic sound.
Oh yeah, that's just a fun you know, my Spector, pop [song]. That's a song I thought people were gonna love, you know. And a lot of people did I guess, but it didn't become a very big part of our show. It was one of my favorites of recently, you know.
Yeah, what else you got there, kid? Anything else? Or am I gonna go rehearse?
Anybody, shout out questions. That's why we're here.
We talked about gospel, we talked about the band, we talked about the religious stuff I wanted to ask you about. You know, I have serious questions and I have fun questions, you know. I like the fun questions a little better.
Let's do those.
"Ride Your Pony," The Fleshtones. A great garage version of "Ride Your Pony." I love that.
I love The Fleshtones. They're awesome. I mean I guess one thing I'd ask you, you've talked about you and Tom having this thing, it's like he's inspired you, but I mean a lot of it just seems like you're having fun with him and, like, he's an unpredictable performer. What's been the most surprising thing, or was there a moment onstage where you were like, "Where are we going with this?"
Yeah. Well, you know, musicians don't call it working; they call it playing. There's a reason. You haven't actually worked an honest day in your life, you know, or you may play very hard and perform very hard, but don't kid yourself. And so it's, and Tom just comes on and yeah he'll start and sometimes I don't know where he's going. Jackson Browne came backstage and said, "Hey, Tom Morello, that's funny," he says. "Well the E Street Band builds a pretty big house when we get out there at night." And he says, "Yeah when Tom Morello comes out, he builds another room on it." And I think, yeah, that's what he does; he builds another room. In other words he just brings things sonically in that we haven't had and don't have and those things are surprising. And you know he's a visionary guitarist, you know.
You also let him sing on the record.
Well, he sings real good. He's got a nice baritone. He's not a tenor, he's a baritone voice and when you catch the right thing, he's a powerful vocalist. He really, you know, makes it work, you know. So he kind of takes the band sonically some place [new]. Really the reason the record exists is I had that material. He came along and he kind of brought something to it that moved it to another level and made it feel like, "Oh yeah, this is current and this is something I'd like my fans to hear." It just brought it into a tighter focus and made it very exciting.
Is there something on this record that's sparking the next project for you or are you not in that head space yet?
Everything is always doing, I have, you know, five or six different projects I'm working on. Some of it's archival, some of it |
' effect engraved into the body. The numpad does feel a little loose when it's connected, which slightly detracts from the build quality, but as long as you don't plan to move the keyboard around too much you'll be fine. The Claymore is equipped with Cherry MX RGB switches, and is available in Red, Blue, Brown, or Black, so it really covers every base. The key spacing is comfortable, despite the keyboard's compact size, so it won't take most users long to get used to it. In the interests of compactness, there aren't any dedicated macro keys either. The biggest downside, especially given the price, is that there's no wrist rest included, so bear that in mind if you struggle without one. The ROG Claymore may be pricey at £200, but for anyone already in the market for a premium gaming keyboard, this might just be versatile enough to justify the price. Between the selection of four types of Cherry switches, and the variable numpad positions, there's some configuration of the Claymore that will be ideal whatever your needs. It also comes with two velvet travel pouches (one for the numpad), making it easy for tournament travel too.
8. SteelSeries Apex M750
The Apex M750 is the latest tournament-grade mechanical keyboard from SteelSeries, offering eSports-grade performance and a gorgeous design. It's ideal for those that want to get into the world of eSports, or those that simply enjoy the feel of a good mechanical keyboard beneath their fingers. The SteelSeries Apex M750 features the sleek and minimalistic design famous across the SteelSeries keyboard range, boasting improved durability and a lighter body than previous keyboards. Why? The M750 is crafted from 5000 Series aluminium alloy, a similar alloy to that used in Apple's iPhone 7, famed for being robust without adding any weight. There's a step-up in the LED department when compared to older SteelSeries keyboards like the M500, as the M750 boasts dynamic per-key RGB lighting. It boasts a number of LED profiles, from those that react when keys are pressed to something a little more impressive: GameSense. GameSense integration provides game-specific LED animations based on in-game events like low health or grenade explosions, although it's limited to only three games at the moment. And, of course, you can customise the LED patterns/colours via SteelSeries Engine for PC and Mac. So, what makes this keyboard so great apart from cool LED effects? It’s mainly down to the keys. More specifically, the SteelSeries Apex M750 features QX2 Mechanical Switches for better performance and added durability, providing an average of 50 million clicks before issues arise. For those that aren’t aware, low force and actuation point enables faster and more responsive gameplay, and is a standard candidate in any high-quality gaming keyboard. The M750 offers an impressive 45cN force and a 2mm actuation point, providing instant response for the competitive gamers out there. We love gaming and generally typing using the Apex M750 – the response time is minimal and it’s extremely comfortable to use over long periods of time. The only downside? There aren't any programmable macro keys, a possible downside for those that rely on macro commands when gaming.Lesson 1/6:
A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower, when the doorbell rings.
The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs.
When she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next-door neighbor.
Before she says a word, Bob says, ‘I’ll give you $800 to drop that towel.’
After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked in front of Bob, after a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 and leaves.
The woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs.
When she gets to the bathroom, her husband asks, ‘Who was that?’ ‘It was Bob the next door neighbor,’ she replies. ‘Great,’ the husband says, ‘did he say anything about the $800 he owes me?’
Moral of the story:
If you share critical information pertaining to credit and risk with your shareholders in time, you may be in a position to prevent avoidable exposure.
Lesson 2/6:
A priest offered a Nun a lift. She got in and crossed her legs, forcing her gown to reveal a leg. The priest nearly had an accident. After controlling the car, he stealthily slid his hand up her leg. The nun said, ‘Father, remember Psalm 129?’
The priest removed his hand. But, changing gears, he let his hand slide up her leg again. The nun once again said, ‘Father, remember Psalm 129?’
The priest apologized ‘Sorry sister but the flesh is weak.’
Arriving at the convent, the nun sighed heavily and went on her way.
On his arrival at the church, the priest rushed to look up Psalm 129. It said, ‘Go forth and seek, further up, you will find glory.’
Moral of the story:
If you are not well informed in your job, you might miss a great opportunity.
Lesson 3/6:
A sales rep, an administration clerk, and the manager are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp.
They rub it and a Genie comes out. The Genie says, ‘I’ll give each of you just one wish.’
‘Me first! Me first!’ says the admin clerk. ‘I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.’
Puff! She’s gone.
‘Me next! Me next!’ says the sales rep. ‘I want to be in Hawaii, relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life.’
Puff! He’s gone.
‘OK, you’re up,’ the Genie says to the manager. The manager says, ‘I want those two back in the office after lunch.’
Moral of the story:
Always let your boss have the first say.
Lesson 4/6:
An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing.
A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, ‘Can I also sit like you and do nothing?’ The eagle answered: ‘Sure, why not.’
So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.
Moral of the story:
To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.
Lesson 5/6:
A turkey was chatting with a bull.
‘I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree’ sighed the turkey, ‘but I haven’t got the energy.’
‘Well, why don’t you nibble on some of my droppings?’ replied the bull. ‘They’re packed with nutrients.’
The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree.
The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch.
Finally after a fourth night, the turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree.
He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot him out of the tree.
Moral of the story:
Bull Sh*t might get you to the top, but it won’t keep you there..
Lesson 6/6:
A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and fell to the ground into a large field.
While he was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on him.
As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, he began to realize how warm he was.
The dung was actually thawing him out!
He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate.
Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him.
Morals of the story:
(1) Not everyone who sh*ts on you is your enemy.
(2) Not everyone who gets you out of sh*t is your friend.
(3) And when you’re in deep sh*t, it’s best to keep your mouth shut!Congress has just over two months to reauthorize or alter controversial NSA surveillance powers before they expire. A bipartisan attempt to tweak the controversial parts of the FISA Amendments Act has been introduced in Congress. It’s called the “USA Liberty Act of 2017.”
Right now, via the FISA Amendments Act, emails and phone calls of an unknown number of Americans are being recorded and stored in a database law-enforcement agencies can search without first getting a warrant. These are often called “backdoor searches,” as they bypass Fourth Amendment protections of our privacy.
If you are wondering how many Americans our government is listening in on, sorry, we don’t know. The intelligence agencies told Congress they can’t say just how many American citizens have been eavesdropped on by the government (without warrants).
Despite this, they asked Congress to simply renew the controversial section 702 of the Act before it expires at the end of December; in fact, they asked that it be made permanent law.
Congress might have done that too if it wasn’t for the fact they recently found out they have political skin in the game.
Recent “unmaskings” show that even a congressman’s conversations with a foreign official might go public with their names un-redacted. Then, even if the member of Congress didn’t do anything wrong, what they said and whom they spoke with could quickly be taken out of context by the media outlets that root for the opposing team.
This is why Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said, “We cannot live in fear of our own intelligence community. They have such power to suck up every bit of every transmission, every communication we ever made. We can’t just have them willy-nilly releasing that to the public.”
So here are some key things this Liberty Act would do with the FISA Amendment Act.
Stops Many Warrantless Searches
The Liberty Act would require that a warrant be obtained by law-enforcement agencies before they can get an American citizen’s emails or phone calls recorded by the NSA. There is, however, a big exception carved out for U.S. intelligence agencies. In “subparagraph (C)” the Act gives intelligence agencies a series of exceptions to the warrant requirement, including whether a person “is the subject of an order or emergency authorization” and if “the Attorney General has a reasonable belief that the life or safety of a person is threatened….”
Because of these exceptions a statement by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says, “The newly-introduced USA Liberty Act improves the situation somewhat, but doesn’t effectively stop these dangerous backdoor searches.”
Requires “Due Diligence”
The Act would require that the agencies utilizing the FISA Amendment Act use “due diligence in determining whether a person targeted is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States….” That’s an open-ended statement that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but that could bite both ways.
Gives Accountability for “Unmaskings”
The Act states “procedures … shall include specific procedures adopted by the Attorney General for elements of the Federal Government to submit requests to unmask information in disseminated intelligence reports” including “that an individual who is making the request documents the rationale that such request is for legitimate reasons” and that the government retains “records of each request” including the name of the person who made the request.
Requires Reports to Congress
The Act would require that “incidentally collected communication and other information” be included in a “semiannual report submitted” to Congress. This report would include “the number, or a good faith estimate, of communications acquired” and an estimate of the number of Americans who have had their communications tapped. But the Act does give an out. It says that if “the Director determines that calculating the number, or a good faith estimate… is not achievable, a detailed explanation for why such calculation is not achievable.”
Intelligence agencies have told Congress before that they couldn’t say just how many Americans they listened in on without warrants. This at least would make intelligence agencies answer why they can’t or won’t tell us how many Americans they are listening in on.
Detail How Privacy is Affected
The Liberty Act would require intelligence agencies explain “how privacy and civil liberties are affected” by the law. This doesn’t have any teeth, but at least it makes intelligence agencies stop for a moment and think about the rights of the people they are working hard to protect.
The law, as it is now written, doesn’t go far enough for the EFF. They say, “The USA Liberty Act does require government agents to apply for a warrant to access data when they are seeking evidence of a crime. But … the new warrant restrictions won’t even apply to the NSA or CIA.”
Miniter is the author of Kill Big Brother, a cyber-thriller that shows how to keep our freedom in this digital age.San Francisco — The ACLU of Northern California today sent a letter to Taylor Swift and her attorney refuting their meritless legal defamation threats against a local blogger.
On Sep. 5, PopFront editor Meghan Herning wrote a post titled “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation.” The post is a mix of political speech and critical commentary, and discusses the resurgence of white supremacy and the fact that some white supremacists have embraced Swift. It also provides a critical interpretation of some of Swift’s music, lyrics, and videos. The post ends by calling on Swift to personally denounce white supremacy, saying “silence in the face of injustice means support for the oppressor.”
On Oct. 25, Herning received an intimidating letter from Swift and her attorney labeling the blog post as defamatory and demanding that she issue a retraction, remove the story from all media sources, and cease and desist. The letter threatened a lawsuit.
“This is a completely unsupported attempt to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” said ACLU of Northern California attorney Michael Risher.
The letter went on to say that it should serve as an “unequivocal denouncement by Ms. Swift of white supremacy and the alt-right.” But that denunciation would only be known by Herning because the letter also attempts to use copyright law to forbid her from making it public.
“Intimidation tactics like these are unacceptable,” said ACLU attorney Matt Cagle. “Not in her wildest dreams can Ms. Swift use copyright law to suppress this exposure of a threat to constitutionally protected speech.”
Herning contacted the ACLU after receiving the letter from Swift's attorney, and ACLU lawyers determined the legal claims were unsupported. The blog post is opinion protected by the First Amendment.
“The press should not be bullied by high-paid lawyers or frightened into submission by legal jargon,” said Herning. “These scare tactics may have worked for Taylor in the past, but I am not backing down.”
The ACLU has requested a response from Swift and her attorney by Nov. 13 confirming that they will not pursue a lawsuit.
PopFront Blog Post
Letter from Swift's Attorney
ACLU Response LetterRoger Wood and Ray Cano, Jr.
The Jades pose in front of Bill Quinn’s Gold Star Studio in 1961. The studio, which eventually became SugarHill Recording Studios in the early 1970s, played a pivotal role in the development of the recording industry in Texas. Courtesy of SugarHill Studios archives.
SUGARHILL RECORDING STUDIOS. SugarHill Recording Studios was established by producer Bill Quinn in October 1941 in Houston. Originally Quinn called the facility Quinn Recording, but by 1950 he had rechristened it Gold Star Studios and was recording a diverse array of musicians and styles. During the 1970s the studio changed ownership and was renamed SugarHill Recording Studios.
Interior of Studio A at Gold Star Studios in Houston, 1966. Courtesy of SugarHill Studios archives.
Quinn’s first big success came in 1946 when Texas-based cajun fiddler Harry Choates recorded the old Cajun song “Jole Blon” for Quinn’s Gold Star label, which was a separate enterprise from the facility and company later called Gold Star Studios. The tune became a regional hit by 1947, and Choates and his band, the Melody Boys, went on to record over two dozen more songs for Gold Star, including “Basile Waltz,” “Allons a Lafayette,” “Lawtell Waltz,” “Bayou Pon Pon,” and “Poor Hobo.”
In 1948 Melvin Jackson, better known as “Lil’ Son” Jackson, became one of many blues singers to record for Gold Star. In addition to L. C. Williams, Wilson “Thunder” Smith, Leroy Ervin, and Perry Cain, perhaps the most famous of the Gold Star blues artists was Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins. Between 1947 and 1950, Hopkins recorded at least thirty-six songs for Quinn, including “Short Haired Woman,” “Going Home Blues,” “T-Model Blues,” “Loretta Blues,” and “Tim Moore’s Farm.”
Quinn changed the facility’s name to Gold Star Studios in 1950 and soon began working with a new group of country artists who would enjoy even greater commercial success. George Jones recorded “Why Baby Why,” Benny Barnes waxed “Poor Man’s Riches,” while J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson had a huge hit with “Chantilly Lace.” Johnny Preston had a Number 1 pop hit with one of Richardson’s originals, “Running Bear,” and James O’Gwynn charted with “Talk to Me, Lonesome Heart.” Future country superstar Willie Nelson made some of his earliest recordings at the Gold Star Studios in 1959, including his original version of “Night Life,” later recorded by Ray Price in 1960.
From 1963 through 1973, the blues, gospel, and R&B mogul Don Robey utilized Quinn’s engineering services and studio to record numerous tracks for release on his Back Beat, Duke, Peacock, or Sure-Shot record labels. Robey-affiliated artists who recorded at Gold Star Studio during this era include Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, O. V. Wright, Joe Hinton, Roy Head and the Traits, Ernie K-Doe, Buddy Ace, Clarence Green & the Rhythmaires, Al “TNT” Braggs, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Pilgrim Jubilee Singers, and many others.
In 1964 at Gold Star, the California-based producer Chris Strachwitz made his first recordings of Clifton Chenier for the Arhoolie Records label. Strachwitz continued to record Chenier at Gold Star through 1969 and made the key recordings (such as “Louisiana Blues” and “Zydeco Sont Pas Salé”) that established Chenier as “The King of Zydeco.”
In 1965 at Gold Star Studios, legendary producer Huey P. Meaux produced the hit “She’s About a Mover” and other early tracks by Sir Douglas Quintet.
In January 1968 International Artists Records first leased the studio and then later that year purchased it in a questionable transaction involving J. L. Patterson, who was apparently only leasing the facility himself from the retired Bill Quinn. (In a separate matter, Patterson was later convicted of fraud and other crimes and sentenced to prison.) For a brief period in 1969 and 1970 the facility was known as International Artists Studios. During this era the facility was instrumental in the development and release of songs of the psychedelic rock genre by such bands as the 13th Floor Elevators, Bubble Puppy, Red Krayola, Zakary Thaks, and the Moving Sidewalks. During this time B. J. Thomas also recorded part of his first commercially-successful album at Gold Star.
Left to right: Huey Meaux with studio engineers Leo O’Neill and Mickey Moody at SugarHill Studios in 1976. Courtesy of SugarHill Studios archives.
In late 1971 Meaux purchased Gold Star Studios and renamed it SugarHill Recording Studios. During Meaux’s tenure, artists such as Sir Douglas Quintet, Asleep at the Wheel, Kinky Friedman, Ricky Nelson, James Burton, Todd Rundgren, and Little Joe y La Familia recorded albums there. Freddy Fender, another of Meaux’s more successful artists, recorded such hits as “Before The Next Teardrop Falls,” “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” “Secret Love,” “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” and “Living it Down.” In 1986 Modern Music Ventures, Inc., bought SugarHill Recording Studios from Huey Meaux. The facility soon became popular among many Tejano recording artists, including Emilio Navaira, La Fiebre, Excellencia, Elsa Garcia, and The Hometown Boys. A number of jazz releases were produced in the early 1990s through Justice Records and Heart Music.
SugarHill Recording Studios, 2009. Photograph by Tony Endieveri, Courtesy of SugarHill Studios archives.
In 1996 RAD Audio, composed of Rodney Meyers, Andy Bradley, and Dan Workman, bought the studio. With such artists as Destiny’s Child and solo work by that group’s various members including the artist known as Beyoncé, Robert Minot, Brian McKnight, Twista, Smash Mouth, and Clay Walker, SugarHill continued to play a vital role in the Texas music scene. In early 2006 SugarHill partnered with Pacifica Radio Network and launched a new radio show on Houston’s Pacifica affiliate, 90.1 FM KPFT. On October 8, 2011, SugarHill Recording Studios celebrated its seventieth anniversary, making it the oldest continuously operating recording facility in Texas.Potential Army suicides more than doubled in May compared to the previous month and are up significantly for 2009, according the U.S. Defense Department
The Army reported one confirmed suicide and 16 potential cases among active-duty soldiers last month. In April, there were a total of eight cases - three confirmed and five still under investigation, according to the Pentagon.
In all, there have been 82 reported suicides in 2009 - 45 confirmed, 37 pending review. During the same period in 2008, there were 51 cases among soldiers.
In January, the Army implemented a branch-wide effort to deal with the growing number of suicides, including the creation of a suicide prevention task force and the hiring of more counselors.
"We have got to do better," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli said in a statement. "It's clear we have not found full solutions to this yet. But we are trying every remedy and seeking help from outside agencies that are experts in suicide prevention. There isn't a reasonable suicide prevention tool out there the Army won't potentially employ."
The spike in suicides is also seen among reservists not on active duty. In 2009, there have been 37 cases - 16 confirmed and 21 potential - compared to 23 suicides for the same period in 2008.
"As hard as this problem truly is, in some ways it is also very basic, because it requires caring for soldiers, and that's something we already know how to do," said Brig. Gen. Colleen McGuire, director, Army Suicide Prevention Task Force. "We must simultaneously get back to basics and optimize current programs to set conditions for future programs to tackle this problem."
The report on suicides follows comments by the top U.S. war zone commander in the Middle East that violence hit an all-time high in Afghanistan last week.
Gen. David Petraeus told an audience at the Washington think-tank Center for a New American Security Thursday that "there are still tough times ahead" in the region. He also admitted that Afghan security had deteriorated over the last two years.Members of Ukraine’s Parliament saw things differently a decade ago. In 2004, they voted to expel Mr. Tyagnibok over a speech in which he described World War II-era partisans bravely fighting Germans, Russians, Jews and “other scum.” He went on to slur what he called the “Jewish-Russian mafia” running Ukraine.
Until 2004, Svoboda had been called the Social-Nationalist Party, which critics said was just a word flip away from its true ambitions and a deliberate reference to the National Socialism of the Nazis. Unabashed neo-Nazis still populate its ranks, organizations that study hate groups in Europe say.
Svoboda never won more than a fraction of a percent of the national vote, in spite of having strongholds in city councils and regional legislatures in its base in western Ukraine. Its fortunes changed with the election of Mr. Yanukovich. Serhiy Rudyk, a party official, said the new president’s pro-Russia policies angered Ukrainians, helping Svoboda in the ballot box.
Critics of the party’s role in Ukrainian politics have another explanation. The party, they say, drew strength from an orchestrated policy of Mr. Yanukovich to foster a right-wing competitor to his main political rival, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who had previously enjoyed strong support in the country’s west.
In 2011, for example, Mr. Yanukovich’s supporters unfurled the flag of the Soviet Union during marches in Lviv on Victory Day, a holiday that commemorates the end of World War II, despite a municipal law banning the display of Communist flags in the city limits. It was a wedge issue that gave Svoboda a lift in the polls. Svoboda denies this assessment, and it is a stated ally of Ms. Tymoshenko.
The next year, however, the party won 8.5 percent of the seats in Parliament, provoking warnings from Israel about rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Ukraine, a country with a rich history of both. On their first day in Parliament, Svoboda lawmakers started a fistfight with members of Mr. Yanukovich’s party.
The party, critics say, became something of a Frankenstein’s monster for Mr. Yanukovich, and it has grown beyond all expectations with its activists now playing an integral role in the barricading of Independence Square.Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback speaks at the Statehouse kickoff of a charity, 100-mile group motorcycle ride through eastern Kansas, Saturday, June 1, 2013, in Topeka, Kan. The governor paused private talks with legislators on tax and budget issues to participate. (AP Photo/John Hanna)
The civil war between moderate and conservative Republicans in Kansas continues as moderates get behind Democrat Paul Davis to challenge Gov. Sam Brownback (R) next year.
Davis, the state House minority leader, already has picked up support from one moderate Republican in his uphill battle, and more moderates are considering backing him to defeat their longtime rival, Brownback.
It is the latest battle in the civil war between the two GOP factions. Conservatives, led by Brownback, ousted many moderate Republicans from the state Senate in 2012, delivering control to conservatives. Moderates accuse Brownback of wanting to create an "ultraconservative utopia."
University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis told The Huffington Post that Davis will need moderate Republican backing in order to have a shot in the heavily Republican state. Davis hails from Lawrence, the state's most liberal city, a potential political handicap.
"I do think it is crucial to have a large contingent of moderate Republicans who are there publicly and raising money, it legitimizes him more," Loomis said. "He needs all the legitimacy, to be seen as someone who can win."
Davis kicked off his exploratory committee this month by tapping former state Rep. Bill Kassebaum (R-Burdick) as his campaign treasurer.
Kassebaum, a moderate who backed Democrat Tom Holland over Brownback in 2010, said a variety of issues pushed him into Davis' camp. The main issue, he said, is Brownback's poor record on funding education in the state. Moderates also cited transportation and Brownback's tax cuts, along with what they see as Brownback wanting a Legislature that will rubber stamp his policies.
Kassebaum noted though that he understands the odds, referencing his mother, a moderate three-term senator who retired in 1996. "In the primary right now, it would be impossible for my mother to be elected in this day and age in Kansas," he said.
While Davis has billed his campaign as exploratory, his website indicates he is a gubernatorial candidate with "a formal announcement" coming. Kansas political insiders have indicated to HuffPost that Davis is the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Although Davis is unknown statewide, he is hoping that Brownback's low approval ratings will help him. But Brownback is likely to receive significant backing from outside groups who helped fuel conservative state legislative wins in 2012.
Brownback has picked up moderate Republican support, including endorsements from former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Mary Jean Eisenhower, the granddaughter of former President Dwight Eisenhower, who is from Kansas and revered by moderate Republicans in the state.
Kansas Republican Party executive director Clayton Barker said the party is not worried about moderates backing Davis. He noted that 46 percent of Kansas voters are Republicans, while 25 percent are Democrats. He also touted Brownback's tax cuts and records on job creation.
"Bill Kassebaum was one House member of 125 for only two years, his endorsement means little," Barker said. "Senator Dole and Ms. Eisenhower's endorsement of Governor Brownback demonstrate the general support of the vast majority of Kansas Republicans."
Moderate GOP leaders, however, told HuffPost that "absolutely" more moderates will back Davis. Former state Senate Vice President John Vratil (R-Leawood), a moderate who has not publicly decided on a gubernatorial candidate, said he believes that Davis is a moderate Republican in Democratic clothing. Davis has been describing himself as a moderate Democrat, while one Democratic Party insider told HuffPost that Davis is "not moderate by the Kansas definition."From Alison Green writing at New York magazine:
I have a conundrum. A co-worker of mine has said some pretty awful things on social media, and I don’t know what, if anything, to do about it.
I work with this person occasionally. When I was new and had to ask him a few questions about a project, I googled him to check out his LinkedIn and so on, and the first thing that came up was his Twitter feed, with the company name in his bio. I added him to a list and went on with my day. In the past few months, though, his feed has turned into a fat-shaming Milo Yiannopoulos–loving bro-fest. He removed the company’s name a few weeks ago — now it has something about “triggering supplicating millennial babies.” Ohhhkay. One of his most recent tweets crossed a major line for me: He used a homophobic slur, specifically to taunt people for being “too sensitive” online.
…
Most of the time I’m a pretty staunch advocate that what you do in your private life is your business. But that’s really only true as long as you’re not hurting anyone else. If you’re publicly spewing hateful, vile things about other people — and you’re doing it in this era’s equivalent of the town square — it’s fair game for an employer to have concerns about that.Before you start reading, I must warn you that this is a SPOILER HEAVY list, obviously. Read at your own discretion.
I wrote this in response to the end of season 3 of Game of Thrones. When I first started watching the series, I wanted to read each season’s corresponding book before I watched the adaptation. Given the length of the novels, my impatience and fear of being spoiled I stopped about 1/3 of the way through the second book and got caught up on the series.
Thankfully, I avoided all spoilers for the end of season three. What I got in return was one of the biggest “HOLY SHIT” moments in recent television memory. It’s the moment everyone has been talking about and now that I’ve finally seen it, I’ve been inspired to make a list of the most tragic moments in television. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: Clearly this list is only limited to the shows I’ve seen. Think I missed something? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter @ObsessiveViewer or on Facebook.
The Most Tragic Television Moments (According to The Obsessive Viewer)
In no particular order
Game of Thrones – Season Three: The Rains of Castamere
SPOILERS
Tiny and I talked at length about Game of Thrones’ highly memorable and tragic third season in our special Game of Thrones episode of the podcast. Be sure to check that out.
My God. Worst wedding ever. I simply can’t get the scene out of my head. And it hurts.
In season one, Robb Stark agreed to marry one of Walder Frey’s many daughters in exchange for a favor as the War of Five Kings got underway. Unfortunately, Robb fell in love on the battlefield, got married and knocked up his new bride. To make up for going back on his word, Robb offers his uncle Edmure Tully to take his place on the altar.
What follows is one of the most tragic and horrifically ruthless things I’ve seen on television. After the “bedding ceremony”, where the bride and groom are whisked away to consummate their marriage, it’s revealed that Walder Frey has orchestrated a trap for the unsuspecting Starks. As the band starts playing “The Rains of Castamere”, the room is closed off and Catelyn notices Stark ally Roose Bolton is wearing armor. He shrugs heartlessly at her as she realizes what his betrayal means.
What comes next is swift and bloody. Robb’s pregnant wife is stabbed repeatedly in the stomach while arrows hit his chest. Chaos ensues as the Stark soldiers are mercilessly torn apart. Catelyn holds a knife to Walder Frey’s wife’s throat. She threatens to kill her if he doesn’t let Robb go. Frey simply says he’ll find another wife. Robb crawls to his dead wife, then gets to his feet. He sees his mother and gathers the strength to say one heartbreaking word. “Mother?” Before he’s stabbed in the abdomen.
Catelyn slits Frey’s wife’s throat and stares at her dead son, emotionally destroyed to the point where she becomes instantly catatonic. The camera lingers on her face, drained of life, before her throat is slit and then it cuts to black.
It’s a devastating sequence. Suffice it to say, the Stark deaths and disfigurements that have happened throughout the series prove that it’s hard to be a noble person in George R.R. Martin’s world.
Adding to the tragedy of the Red Wedding was the fact that Arya Stark, who’s spent the last couple seasons separated from her family, was feet from the door leading to the massacre and watched as her brother’s caged direwolf was killed. It echoes back to season 1, when she stared helplessly as her father was beheaded. That, for me, makes it all the more difficult to watch.
The Shield – Season Seven: Family Meeting
SEMI-SPOILER FREE
The Shield finale is one of the best series finales I have ever seen. It may actually be the best, now that I think about it. It’s difficult to conclude a series filled with characters that you’ve spent seven seasons setting up for downfall. Shawn Ryan not only concluded his series in a satisfying way, he concluded his characters in a way that left me in a daze for several weeks after it aired. Not to mention, he also forever changed the meaning of the words “family meeting” for me.
After seven seasons (3 years in The Shield’s timeline) the strike team was reduced to shambles in a Shakespearean tragedy that played out in a final season that serves as a perfect example of how to resolve antihero character arcs.
Breaking Bad – Season Two: Phoenix & ABQ
SPOILERS
Breaking Bad ended its second season with a pair of highly memorable episodes. Walt sells off the remaining 38 pounds of meth but, seeing the heroin in Jesse’s room, decides to hold off on giving Jesse his share. Jesse’s girlfriend Jane (Krysten Ritter) threatens Walt into giving Jesse his share.
What happens next is a series of events that ends in tragedy. By pure happenstance, Walt meets Jane’s father at a bar. Her father, having just had a major confrontation with her, espouses on the troubles of fatherhood with Walt. The conversation leads Walt to swing by Jesse’s to make amends. Unfortunately, the pair is passed out following their last hurrah with heroin. Walt tries to shake Jesse awake and, in the process, causes Jane to roll over on her back. She vomits, asphyxiates and dies.
It’s fascinating to see Walt’s reaction as he watches Jane gurgle her final breath. You can see the conflict in his face and the emotion as he lets her die. It’s a great scene and a big stepping stone for Walt in his eventual transformation into full-blown Heisenberg.
Jane’s death has far-reaching consequence as the season ends with Jane’s dad returning to work as an air traffic controller. Unfortunately, he isn’t ready and his preoccupied mind causes the mid-air collision of two airplanes. Right over Walt’s home. It’s a highly memorable ending to a great season of television.
Boardwalk Empire – Season Two: Georgia Peaches
SPOILERS
The final scene of Georgia Peaches blew me away. It marked a return to form for the show, which had experienced a sluggish few episodes. The episode ends with Manny Horvitz murdering Jimmy Darmody’s wife and her latest lesbian lover. Any gangster drama is going to have its share of casualties. But when a heartless gangster kills an innocent person, it can turn the mirror on the characters of the piece. It can lead us to question who we’re rooting for. With Manny’s haunting words “Your husband did this to you” just punctuates the cruelty of the act.
What made it more tragic wasn’t just the fact that Angela Darmody’s death left her son motherless. It was knowing that Jimmy’s mother Gillian, a woman with a loose moral compass, was going to step into that role.
Lost – Season Five: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham & The Incident
SPOILERS
For five seasons of Lost, there was one character that was steadfast in his belief in the power of the Island. Not only that, he believed that they were put on the Island for a reason. Of course, I’m talking about everyone’s favorite box company grunt, John Locke.
Locke spent his entire life as a punching bag. He was abandoned by his parents, manipulated into giving his con artist father his kidney and then paralyzed when his father pushed him out of a window. But his belief in the Island was (for |
and peaceful in the photographs! But when our camels felt the weight of the wagon they bolted, and took the wagon bouncing through bushes and rabbit holes. One of the camels started bucking wildly, throwing his head around and generally not taking very good care of our things. Brian was pumping the handbrake and hanging on.
“Pull ’em up, Brian!”
“I’m fucking trying!”
In the ruckus, another four camels broke loose and charged off in the direction of Brian and the wagon. They were tied together but going at high speed. Brian had, by now, managed to stop the wagon/get tangled in a fence line, but the four-pack of rogue camels headed straight for him.
Don yelled out to me, “Get between them and the wagon, Bob! Head ’em off!”
Leadership is a hard-to-pin-down quality. But if, after two days of knowing someone, they tell you to jump in front of a pack of charging camels and you find yourself willingly obliging, then they’ve probably got it.
The camels were looking like a pretty dumb idea, but we were on to a good thing with Don.
We managed to round up the camels and get the wagons back on track. Don took his hat off and wiped the sweat from his face. “That’s normal,” he said. “They always start off like that. Let’s push on.”
One of the reasons we go bush is to trade our old, boring problems (scrounging for rent money, beating the traffic) for new and refreshing ones. On our daily treks we had to pull down stock fences, navigate creek crossings and get cooking fires started in the rain. This is living! I thought to myself. My dad didn’t quite share my enthusiasm. He was up to his neck in living already. What he really wanted was a nice sit-down.
Getting the camels mustered every morning was a real snafu. There was one problem-camel called Blister who’d been raised as a pet and suffered all the same problems as a trust-fund kid. Don was trying to break him in as a wagon camel and get some herd mentality back into him. One morning Blister was really making him sweat. Don was yelling “Fucking hoosh down, you bird-brained bastard!” and the camel – stubborn, outraged – was bellowing back. Meanwhile, Brian and his friend Chantelle (a dreadlocked camel racer) were trying to corral the two lead camels, who’d gotten tangled up somehow.
My dad saw me writing in my diary and came over. He stood next to me for a while. Just the two of us.
“If I was writing a book,” he said, “I’d call it Why We Invented the Internal Combustion Engine.”
Brian or Nat usually drove the main wagon. Nat was a bosomy powerhouse who raised a family, kept a menagerie of pets and broke in camels for a living. She wore the same singlet, shorts and thongs the whole trip. Even on frosty nights. One evening she reached into her bra looking for a cigarette, and I saw her pull out a lighter, a tobacco pouch, a packet of tissues, a hunting knife, $20 (in change) and a bundle of keys before she looked up and said, “Oh, here it is. It’s in my fucking mouth.” On the fourth day she got kicked full in the face by a camel and just started kicking it back.
The smaller wagon was driven by the camp cook, who drank white wine and soda with one hand and swished the reins around with the other. She shouted so relentlessly at her camels (Chrystal and Sapphire) that they could no longer tell what was a command and what was general chitchat. So they ignored her completely and just ambled along cheerfully at their own pace. If you really wanted the camels to do something you had to put on a high-pitched voice or a foreign accent to get their attention.
Don was in charge of getting us out of trouble (“If Plan A doesn’t work there’s always Plan B, and if that doesn’t work, well, there’s plenty of letters in the alphabet”) and Robyn made us welcome wherever we landed. She was tireless and enthusiastic, looked out for everyone, and had none of the high-school bluster and faux toughness of other people we met along the way.
The walkers usually went up ahead, or drifted along between the two wagons. We passed through mallee country, sheep stations, along ancient valleys and across plateaus covered in saltbush. If you got far enough ahead there was a strange buzzing stillness. When it was overcast you didn’t even hear bird calls. Just the gentle clanking of the approaching wagons, and the muffled shouts, like a distant football game, of people urging the camels up a hill or over boggy ground.
We’d stop once for morning tea, once for lunch, and whenever something went wrong. It never felt we were covering any great distances, but the nubs of old mountains would appear in the morning and disappear behind us by the end of the day. Greg, a birdwatcher, would come up to us in camp and say, “Twenty-seven kilometres today, as the crow flies.”
When I got fed up with walking, or with being awake, I would climb into the back of the main wagon, curl up between rifles and saddlebags, and go to sleep. The wagon rocked back and forth and I dreamed endlessly about women. Of soft voices and deep looks. I dreamed of the brownest eyes I’ve ever seen, of blonde-haired guitar players kissing me behind stage curtains, of great poets reading in small, smoke-filled rooms, and looking up coyly between stanzas. I dreamed of warm bodies tangling up in soft sheets, of curved shoulders and plunging necklines. The relentless masculinity of the bush was starting to wear me down.
In the afternoons we’d pull up an hour or two before sunset and let the camels out to feed. They’d trundle off and start pulling apart the native vegetation, and we would start a fire and get cooking. The camels didn’t need to drink once for the entire trip, though I can’t say the same for their handlers. They started drinking port from a goon sack at lunch, and were pretty much trolleyed by the time dinner was served. Sometimes around the campfire we heard bush stories: about desert crossings, about a guy who had to shoot the bull camel he was riding in the head because he couldn’t get it to slow down. But mostly we got the Nat and Chantelle show. They had shouting matches about semen swallowing. (I remember this particularly well because it was the same high-volume argument, almost verbatim, three nights in a row: Chantelle was for, Nat was against. It was Chantelle who kept bringing it up.)
My mum loved it. She thought they were hilarious. But it was all too much for my dad. (I think it was being twerked on that finally broke him.) It will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been to a dinner party with my dad that he actually has quite delicate sensibilities. One morning he said to me, “That Chantelle’s got a mouth like a sewer.” Which was a bit rich coming from a guy who got up at my brother’s 21st birthday dinner and – reminiscing on the night of conception – said, “Yep, we should have settled for hand jobs that night.” But I got his point, which was that he really wanted to be alone for a while and there was nowhere to sit.
It was a gruelling regime for my parents. They were hardly sleeping at night and were walking all day. When the wagons stopped for lunch, the cameleers would climb down to stretch their legs, and my parents would look around desperately for somewhere to rest. My dad didn’t want to sit on the ground because he honestly thought he wouldn’t be able to get back up. I started climbing onto the wagon at lunchtime and pulling down camp stools.
On the fifth day I was walking with my dad and he said that he wanted to go home early. I was shocked. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad give up.
“What does Mum think?”
He grunted. “She won’t even talk about it.”
He was looking pretty beaten. He’d walked 30 kilometres that day, and was chilled to the bone. (For days after the trip he would walk around our house shivering and trying to get warm. “It’s cold,” he kept saying, when it wasn’t.) He’d developed cracked lips, a patchy white beard and various other ailments that had afflicted the early white explorers. My mum wasn’t looking crash hot either. Her face was red and puffy because, for complicated reasons, she didn’t believe in sunscreen.
There’s a peculiar anguish to seeing your own parents suffer. If it’s your children suffering, you know or hope that it’s because they’re still building their characters, that the world will accommodate them somehow. But if it’s your parents, you know that things are probably only going to get harder for them. The world for them is a cruise liner steaming towards the horizon, leaving them bobbing alone in the vast, lonely ocean with only each other.
My dad said, “Jesus Christ, Bob, do you have to say this shit out loud? It’s pretty bleak.”
We trudged through flat, heavily grazed country that had the feeling of a ghost town. Rain had washed out some tracks ahead, so when we reached the ruins of the Waukaringa pub we turned around and started back the way we came.
The camels never trudged. They held their heads up high like queens at a ball, for days. A horse pulls in a straight line. But the camels were always looking around as they walked, with a prospective optimism that eluded us now that we were heading back the way we came.
I tried to entertain my dad with half-baked theories about possessions. I had visited a camping store on the day before the trip and everything in there had felt so essential. I got so excited by the gadgetry that I would have blown all my money in one go, if I’d had any. And what you realise, once you actually leave the city, is that it’s all crap. That’s why they never have those stores out in the country. I can’t think of one thing in those shops that we could have used out there. What we needed was a pair of pliers and some wire. Throughout the journey we fixed everything with that combination. The broken steering column, the billy can, the bracket on the solar-powered system. I remember being impressed by the quality of Don’s camp oven. It was a thing that would last a lifetime. I’m through with flim-flam, I said. What is it about city living? All I want to do when I’m there is buy stuff. What I want is just a few beautiful, useful things.
My dad asked, “Is that why you bought that camel skin?”
Well, OK. So you can get fooled in reverse, too. At the campfire one night I was talking to the manager of the local meatworks, and got a great price on a camel skin. Twenty-five bucks! Say what you want about my decision-making, but don’t tell me that’s not a bargain. When I arranged to buy it I honestly thought, This will become one of my most useful possessions.
I’ve been back home for two months now and I’m lumbered with this camel skin. I also find myself in the ridiculous situation of trying to find an apartment big enough to keep it in. Too many people have gone to too much trouble for me to throw it away. Robyn drove it from the Flinders Ranges to Adelaide. My parents – who did finish the trek, and walked the whole way – salted it themselves and sent it to a tannery. But I have it rolled up in the corner of my room. Just as I have the vision of my dad and mum on the last day of the trip, utterly miserable, but walking side by side and leaning into each other on the road to Orroroo.College campuses are full of mysteries, and there’s a major one developing right now at the University of Wisconsin. Somebody has allegedly been using one of the campus libraries to photocopy a cat. But so far, nobody knows who is doing this.
A staffer at the university’s Badger Herald newspaper stumbled upon the following photo while studying at the Steenbock Library Tuesday:
Apparently, these photos have been spotted several times at Steenbock, which is the library for agriculture and life sciences, human ecology and, wait for it, veterinary medicine. So maybe this mysterious photocopier is actually doing this for some kind of research purpose.
So far, it looks like only one person has been committing this strange act — but there could be some copycat crimes soon.
Read next: See Firefighters Resuscitate Unconscious Cats
The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now
Listen to the most important stories of the day.
Contact us at editors@time.com.CLOSE Investment guru Warren Buffett says he's likely to buy Bank of America stock, add to his stake in Heinz, and buy an energy company. Fred Katayama reports. Video provided by Reuters Newslook
Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha, Neb.-based investing conglomerate chaired by Buffett, tops estimates.
Warren Buffett on NBC News' "Today" show in October. (Photo11: NBC NewsWire via Getty Images) Story Highlights Berkshire Hathaway reports 2013 net income of $19.5 billion vs. $14.8 billion in 2012
Analysts: Improved economic growth helped the holding company to perform well last year
Buffett, 83, has been CEO and chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway for nearly 50 years
The Oracle of Omaha has done it again -- though Warren Buffett wasn't able to best the stellar returns of the Standard & Poor's 500 in 2013.
Berkshire Hathaway, the investing conglomerate billionaire Buffett chairs, posted a record profit last year of $19.5 billion, the company said in its annual report released Saturday. Analysts had estimated earnings would be $18 billion.
In 2012, its net income was $14.8 billion.
Analysts said Berkshire's solid 2013 performance can be credited to improved economic growth since so many of his holdings are well-known consumer goods and services that do well when the economy is going strong.
The per-share book value of its class A and class B stock rose by 18.2% in 2013, said Buffett in his annual letter to shareholders.
The S&P had returns of about 30% last year.
"Berkshire's book value and intrinsic value will outperform the S&P in years when the market is down or moderately up. We expect to fall short, though, in years when the market is strong – as we did in 2013," Buffett said in the letter. "We have underperformed in 10 of our 49 years, with all but one of our shortfalls occurring when the S&P gain exceeded 15%."
Buffett, 83, has been CEO and chairman of the Omaha, Neb.-based investing conglomerate for nearly 50 years and has overseen its growth into a $286 billion holding company. He is one of the most successful and widely followed investors of all time.
MORE: Warren Buffett's top 10 favorite stocks
Buffett has long urged an investing philosophy of taking large stakes in well-established companies for the long term, but in this year's shareholder letter, he also advocated the benefits of investing in a low-cost S&P index fund.
That might seem like an "odd message" to some, since Buffett is known to invest in individual company stocks, says Robert Johnson, a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder and professor of finance at the Heider School of Business at Omaha, Neb.-based Creighton University.
But this is the point: A good index fund can dramatically reduce risk for the lay investor, Johnson says.
"What gets in people's way is getting in and out of the market at the wrong time," Johnson says.
Buffett's approach is to be greedy when people are fearful and vice versa, he says. "Us mere mortals have a hard time applying that because we let our emotions get in the way," Johnson adds. "We get in at the high and get out at the low."
In Buffett's letter to shareholders -- known for explaining his company's positions in stocks along with wry but folksy observations on investing and corporate America -- he detailed the varying ways Berkshire progressed in the last year.
"On the operating front, just about everything turned out well for us last year – in certain cases very well," Buffett wrote.
He pointed out that it completed two large acquisitions, spending almost $18 billion to purchase all of NV Energy and taking a major interest in H. J. Heinz, the food giant.
Buffet also said his holding company increased its ownership interest last year in four well-known companies: American Express, Coca-Cola, IBM and Wells Fargo.
LETTER: Read Buffett's shareholder letter
Berkshire reported fourth-quarter net income of $4.99 billion, or $3,035 per Class A share, on revenue of $47 billion. That's up 10% from $4.55 billion, or $2,757 per Class A share, on revenue of $44.72 billion last year.
Berkshire's insurance companies, which include Geico and General Reinsurance, reported a $394 million operating profit in the fourth quarter, compared to last year's $19 million loss.
Berkshire's operating earnings, which exclude investments and derivatives, grew to $3.78 billion, or $2,297 per Class A share.
The three analysts surveyed by financial data company FactSet expected quarterly operating earnings of $2,495.42 per Class A share.
Top stock holdings, according to Berkshire's latest regulatory filing, include Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, American Express and IBM. Rounding out the top 10 holdings are Procter & Gamble, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart Stores, U.S. Bancorp, DirecTV and DaVita HealthCare Partners.
In the fourth quarter, Berkshire increased its holdings in Wells Fargo, Wal-Mart, U.S. Bancorp and ExxonMobil. There was also a new stake, worth $262.4 million, in Liberty Global, a cable operator.
Berkshire sold its shares in GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant, and DISH Network. And he reduced his stake in Suncor Energy and ConocoPhillips.
In the shareholder letter, Buffett addressed the topic of his own demise.
"On my death, Berkshire's ownership picture will change but not in a disruptive way," he wrote. "None of my stock will have to be sold to take care of the cash bequests I have made or for taxes. Other assets of mine will take care of these requirements."
The Buffett family would not be involved in managing the business, he wrote, but as large shareholders, "will help in picking and overseeing the managers who do."
After he dies, he expects his job to be divided, with one person taking the CEO post and running operations and one or more executives handling the investment side of the business.
Creighton University's Johnson notes that Buffett has hired many capable employees. "There is a talent pool there" that can successfully run the company after Buffett's death, he says.
Berkshire's shares rose more than 13% last year. BRK.B shares gained 13.4% the past 52 weeks and closed up 1% Friday to $115.78. BRK.A shares added 13.7% the past year and rose 1.2% Friday to close at $173,708.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1g0xFhWFather Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, passed away on October 3rd at 11 PM.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may he rest in peace!
Here is an audio clip of a talk that Fr. Benedict gave concerning the struggle with depression. Stay tuned for weekly audio clips and other special Fr. Benedict Groeschel materials!
th
● Special GrayFriar Newsletter Tribute to Fr. Benedict
Winter 2014 click here.
Official Obituary found here
Facebook Memorial Page found here
To make a memorial offering in honor of Fr. Benedict click here
Press Release PDF here
Statement from the friars PDF here
The EWTN Father Benedict Memorial Page
The EWTN Father Benedict Product Page
Homily of Fr. Stan Fortuna on Oct. 8th, 2014, in the South Bronx
hear it here
Vigil Service on Youtube.com
Funeral Mass of Christian Burial on Youtube.com
EWTN Sunday Night Prime Tribute to Father Benedict (10/12/2014)
A great video about Fr. Benedict (from Nov. 2009)Thirty One Returns!
Dear Friends,
I owe you an apology. I left this blog for all this time because I became discouraged. I found a new job, threw myself into a new relationship that seemed complicated and a little confusing. With Lance.
I fell in love. Being with him was enough to shut off all those voices of fear and uncertainty. He stayed a few weeks, and we laughed and kissed and dreamed. We wanted the same things – kids, a life together. I put my faith in him. And I was wrong.
We made plans, big ones. I quit my job, I moved to the other side of the world. And we never had a chance. From the moment he picked me up at the airport he was distant, strange, stiff. He was impatient, said something was wrong but he didn’t know what. I was alone. He couldn’t even hug me, much less support me through culture shock, jet lag and my own adjustment. He never did manage to find me again, love me again.
I’m still here, where it’s winter. I would be going home soon, if I still had a home. Instead, I’m moving back to the US to try to find a new job, a new place to live.
It looks as though I’m going to end this year more alone than I started it.
I’ll be posting again, my doves. I’ve missed you.
Yours,
Thirty One
AdvertisementsThe unprecedented escalation involving Deutsche Bank's failure to deliver physical gold on demand continues.
As we first reported two days ago, a client of Xetra-Gold, a German Exchange-Traded Commodity fund, tried to get access to the gold he had been promised under the Xetra-Gold prospectus, leading to much confusion about just where the failure to deliver had taken place, at Xetra or at the fund's designated sponsor, and the client's principal bank: Deutsche Bank.
Then, overnight, we presented the just as odd response provided by Deutsche Boerse where the ETC is traded, which sounded as if it was trying to pass the buck onto Deutsche Bank. This is what it said:
Deutsche Börse Commodities GmbH stresses that owners of Xetra Gold units can exercise their right to delivery of securitised gold at any time. The gold is delivered by the bank branch on which the investor has its securities account – on the condition that the branch offers this service, as the gold can only be delivered through the investor's custodian bank.
As we said at the time, the response led to even more questions, and even more public outcry in Germany, which may explain why moments ago none other than the custodian bank, Deutsche Bank, joined the fray, by doing something it has never done before: provide a rationalization for why it failed to deliver gold on demand. Or at least try.
Its response:
As one of the sponsoring financial institutions, Deutsche Bank fulfils the obligations specified in the Xetra-Gold sales prospectus as a matter of course. This includes fulfilling claims to the delivery of physical gold certified by Xetra-Gold. This must take place through the investor’s principal bank where the investor’s securities account is maintained. Deutsche Bank accepts such orders for delivery from its clients. The investor incurs the costs described in the sales prospectus, for example, for the forming, packaging and the insured transport to the place of delivery. For this reason, we recommend in each specific case an individual review of the economic efficiency of a physical delivery. Should an investor’s request for the handover of physical gold not have been complied with immediately in individual cases, this will be reviewed and an individual solution will be found with the client.
And so another non-response, because in the same press release Deutsche Bank both admits that it has an obligation to deliver the gold "as a matter of course", and then tacitly confirms that it failed to do so, by first saying that it evaluates the "economic efficiency of physical delivery", something it should have no right to do since the Xetra prospectus explicitly mandates that it should release gold on demand, and then adds that "should an investor’s request for the handover of physical gold not have been complied with immediately in individual cases, this will be reviewed and an individual solution will be found with the client."
As we already know, this handover of physical gold failed on at least one occasion, and while we are comforted that Deutche Bank is reviewing the situation and a "solution will be found with the client", it certainly does not even remotely explain why the situation should have arisen in the first place.
However, what is most notable is how quickly every entity involved in this failure to deliver, from Xetra-Gold, to Deutsche Börse, and ultimately to Deutsche Bank, responded with an attempt to placate public concerns about the availability of physical gold with statements that may have, paradoxically, only raised concerns whether the gold is in fact still there.
It remains to be seen if this one individual case spills over, and leads to more gold redemption requests, first at Xetra-Gold as well as at other similar "gold-backed" ETFs. We will promptly report any notable development in this fascinating escalation of a topic that has been near and dear to many gold bugs' hearts for years.Guys, I wrote this post in 2013. In 2018, I consider it a real piece of shit. It went super viral back then and the hit count for it keeps growing today, but really – it’s quite corny and it’s turdy. My intentions were decent but it’s one of those things I’ve written that I’ll hate.
____
My grandmother slit her wrists today.
To assure the inquisitive, prying world it had nothing to do with the inner politics of the family, I was asked to stick to the discussed story that she found out she had an incurable injury. The truth is she couldn’t handle the apparent shame my actions in the past two months had brought our prestigious family name.
Everyone in India barks about tradition. They say our country stands tall on an intellectual platform because we’ve been following a social structure that’s been untouched for centuries. One of the core ideas behind this structure is absolute obedience towards elders. The logic is easy enough to understand. They have more experience. The possibility of them making the right decision in a dilemma is higher. Tradition, I have been told is the platform for a good family life.
Except that I flouted this rule.
I fell in love and married a girl whose ancestors had a different idea of a creator than mine. They followed a set of beliefs called Islam. As it unfortunately stands, everyone in my family believes that Islam is an absolute abomination. They don’t believe this out of a sense of logical progression or reasoning. They just believe it.
I had lost any sort of a connection with my family the day I married Shazia. Yet, if you’ve drawn the conclusion that my grandmother lost her will to live because of my choice of life partner, you’re mistaken. My grandmother killed herself because she realised that it was Shazia who saved her life.
Granny had had a small accident on her daily route to the marketplace. She needed blood during the surgery to save her life. It took me a massive amount of courage to tell her that due to the fact that no donors had been available during the emergency, Shazia was forced to donate blood to keep her alive. At first, granny – who for me has always been a symbol of calm my entire life heard the news like I thought she would. She nodded and kept nodding, mostly to herself. After a minute she burst into a hysterical rage, cursing at mortals and her Gods, begging to know how elaborately she had sinned to deserve a fate so bad.
I had been prepared for a certain amount of chaos, but granny’s outburst shook me to the core. Is it that bad, following another religion? After living on this planet for eight decades, do you not understand that life is way more precious than a doctrine that’s been created to help us live well. What kind of tradition objectifies blood! Is it not the same source of life that flows inside you and me?
I went home deeply disturbed about her behaviour. I had informed someone that my wife had been instrumental in keeping her alive. Gratitude goes a long way off, but acceptance is the least I had expected. Flashes of my childhood came back, where my family would be praying in Sanskrit. No one understood a single word of what was being said. We were all singing in a language that had been used for centuries to appease our Gods.
We’re Brahmins. It means, a couple of thousand years back – people paid us buckets of money to act as a connect between them and the Gods. For some reason, it was only us who God listened to. It was because of this unique talent that we asserted our right to be educated. It was almost like a feeling of sexual triumph, the way my father would drunkenly tell anyone who listened that our blood has been pure for the past 16 generations. I would ask him why he still prayed in Sanskrit, when he himself didn’t understand what was being said! It was elitist. A language only we were entitled to understand.
Father died when I was young, and I travelled. I read. I reasoned. I realised with time that I was following a set of beliefs that I had never questioned. I slowly divided myself from the lot. It was hard, but I willed myself to be away from a system that does not make me feel happy.
I stopped laughing at jokes I found hurtful to other religious ideologies. We had been watching a cricket match, where my cousins made a crude joke at the circumcised penis of the opening batsman of the opposing team. I walked away. I was sent a joke about Jesus not being able to sexually arouse himself while on the cross. I asked the sender if he would have tolerated a joke of a similar nature about one of our Gods who legend swears, carries a snake on his neck. I was met with silence.
I distanced myself from my family as I could no longer be happy in their culture. I am sure the problems I see are problems that are faced by reasoning individuals of any religious background. I was asked by a kid who God is. I told him the truth. “We don’t know”. I told him no one knows. But if he finds peace or salvation believing any theory that gives him happiness, he shouldn’t bother with the opinions of anyone else, provided he doesn’t harm them or maim them in an effort to convince them about the validity of his beliefs.
Being agnostic was the best thing that happened to me, till I met Shazia.
Shazia and I fell in love. She had lost her parents early, and her guardians were atheist. My family told me that expecting any sort of support in mixing bloodlines was a futile effort. I couldn’t care less. We wed in a quiet ceremony where people who love us and not our expectations were called. We joked that the devil would be quite dumbfounded about our fate, as he’d have creators of two opposing faiths hurling instructions about our fate. We were together, that’s all that mattered.
My grandmother had begged me to consider breaking the wedding. She followed a well written script that targeted the listener using an elaborate combination of emotional blackmail, threats and monetary rewards. I smiled at the end of it and asked Shazia to make us tea and coolly answered with a negative. She had been living with me at my apartment. Granny spat and left. I didn’t blame her. She was guided by dogma.
If there are two communities my family would not tolerate, it is the blacks and the Muslims. This bewilders me. Most Hindus, including myself have a skin tone that’s darker than the night. Islam, I have warned, has rituals that ‘make no sense’. If I start to make a list of customs which we follow without any idea, it would take me a painstakingly long time. Worshiping a phallus and feeding milk to snakes are glazed cherries on the top
But why am I writing all this? This is a confession. I want to make it clear that I would have asked Shazia to donate her blood only for the most selfless reasons, to save a life. I hoped that for one moment, my family would gain how futile quarreling over imagination is. Like Sagan said, the world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there is little good evidence. It’s far better to look death in the eye, for the brief but utterly magnificent journey life provides us.
For what I wanted to really tell granny was that, the blood that spilled out of her veins when she slit her wrists, in an effort to cleanse herself, was never really Shazia’s. It was mine.
The one time when it mattered most, I had lied.
And I was happy…
____________________________________________________________________________________
Artwork: Gavin Aung Than’s Zen Pencils, arguably the best inspirational blog on the internet I know of.
– http://zenpencils.com/comic/carl-sagan-make-the-most-of-this-life/
This story is a work of fiction.
AdvertisementsWe have a very special announcement for our music lovers, the Squad Original Soundtrack will be made available to all Founders via Steam shortly. Featuring nearly 10 tracks including main menu tracks, extended versions of compositions featured in Squad’s trailers, this album will be an audio record of where Squad has come from and also where it will be heading into the future.
Here is a short preview:
The soundtrack has been a labour of love by our very own in-house composer, Scott ‘Alkali’ Tobin. Based in Dublin, Ireland, Scott is a music producer of soundtracks for film, television and video games, with his roots stemming from the Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2. In a lot of ways his music has developed with a lot of us on the development team as we have grown from modding to a fully fledged indie studio.
Scott: “I knew from the beginning that Squad was going to be something very special. The team’s philosophy on creating Squads gameplay is very unique and specific from any other games in its field. This soundtrack is very much inspired by my love for ambient music, video game soundtracks, modern film soundtracks. This was a personal choice but also a creative choice in order to capture the emotion and feeling behind Squad.”
“Lost Squad features Farah Elle on vocals, whom I met when I was assisting on a recording session in Dublin. The song features a fusion of western and eastern music genres. In the latest version of Lost Squad, I have incorporated battleground sounds made by Anders, the sound designer for Squad. The battleground sounds will also feature in other songs in the Squad soundtrack.”
“A few composers that have influenced me would be the likes of Jeremy Soule, Marty O’Donnell, Brian Eno, Bobby Prince, Hans Zimmer, and Thomas Newman to name but a few. Thank you the support and messages over the last while and I hope you all enjoy listening to the soundtrack when it is released. Hopefully I will see some of you on the frontlines!”
Best, Scott
As well as supporting Scott as a contractor we will soon be making the first Squad soundtrack volume available for purchase on Steam with Scott taking a direct portion of the sales as a royalty to help support him making music well into the future. We hope those of you that love his music will pitch in the nominal fee and help him make even more music!
We will keep you all posted as to when this will happen.
Offworld out.In an interview with David Brody from Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), President Trump called the mainstream media the "opposition party."
"I think the media is the opposition party in many ways," Trump said. "I'm not talking about everybody, I know people like yourself. But I know people in the media that I have tremendous respect for, I respect them as much as anybody. So I'm not talking about everybody."
"But a big portion of the media, the dishonesty, the total deceit and deception makes them certainly partially the opposition party, absolutely. I think they’re much more capable than the opposition party. The opposition party is losing badly. Now the media is on the opposition party's side," the president told Brody.
"They treat me so unfairly that it's actually hard to believe that I won," Trump added.
See more of his interview here.SINGAPORE--Eu Yan Sang's Web site was hacked this morning by a hacker, who expressed his displeasure over blame put on Indonesia for the haze that engulfed the city-state this past week.
According to a report on local daily Today, a hacker who named himself "bambu" defaced the Web site with an image of a skull and left a statement in Bahasa Indonesian which, when translated, read: "Do not insult our country just because of somke in the air in your country. You should not just blame Indonesia for the polluted air. Blame the wind, and who told the wind to blow to your country."
Eu Yan Sang is a Singapore-based retail chain selling traditional Chinese medicinal and healthcare products such as bird's nest, ginseng, and cordyceps. It has outlets in other Asian markets including China, Hong Kong, Australia, and Malaysia, and is listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange.
The company's Web site has since recovered.
Bambu's statement also included claims the hacking attack was "supported" by Indonesia's J.A.M.5 team. According to the Today report, bambu's hacking spree also included studymusicinlondon.com and ineltronics.com, which remains defaced at the time this story was posted. In Bahasa Indonesian, bambu refers to the bamboo plant.
The annual haze situation in Singapore, caused by forest fires in Indonesia, took a turn for the worse last week when it hit a record-high Pollutant Standards Index of 401, way past the hazardous level of 300. Amid growing frustration over the worsening air quality, Indonesia's Co |
few years, their votes will help to swamp the protests of productive citizens reluctant to give to the state what rightfully belongs to them.
Once again, a monarchy will tend toward an altogether different policy. “[A]s far as immigration policy is concerned, a king would want to keep the mob, as well as all people of inferior productive capabilities, out.... A king would only permit the immigration of superior or at least above-average people, i.e., those, whose residence in his kingdom would increase his own property value” (p. 143). In sum, monarchs look to the long run, democratic rulers to the short term.
It is hardly a surprise that our author considers the former policy by far the better; and he accordingly recommends that contemporary governments should endeavor to follow as closely as they can the indicated path of the monarch. Several well-known libertarians have thrown up their hands in horror: does not Hoppe here betray the supposed principle of “open borders”? How can he in conscience support action by the government?
Here once more Hoppe has arrived at a fundamental insight. In the ideal libertarian state of affairs, all property is private. Each owner is free to decide who may enter his property. If so, Hoppe asks, is not the cry of “open borders” the very antithesis of proper policy? In a free society, you cannot go wherever you please; to say that is to legitimize trespass.
Proponents of unrestricted immigration will not be swayed. Granted, they will say, that you cannot rightfully “immigrate” to someone’s property without his permission, why does it follow that the government may close the borders of public property? To object to Hoppe in this way, as it seems to me, is precisely to miss the point of his argument. He has endeavored to show that “open borders” is not a libertarian principle, not to deduce his own prescription. If he is right, libertarian theory leaves undetermined what course should be followed if public property exists. Nothing in morality then bars the government from being guided by the prudential considerations Hoppe has cited.
Professor Hoppe has made a strong case; but in one respect, I am not entirely clear what sort of claim he is making. In the book’s introduction, he launches a vigorous defense of the a priori: “If one is to make a rational choice among... rival and incompatible interpretations, this is only possible if one has a theory at one’s disposal, or at least a theoretical proposition, whose validity does not depend on historical experience but can be established a priori, i.e., by means of the intellectual apprehension or comprehension of the nature of things” (p. xv, emphasis omitted).
From this statement, we know that Hoppe thinks that his claims about monarchy and democracy cannot be established by purely empirical means, since these claims are historical interpretations. But does he think that his evaluations of monarchy and democracy are themselves a priori propositions, or is he content to accord them some less certain status? He may mean that a priori truths, e.g., that high taxation cannot cause prosperity, help to render likely his assessments of monarchy and democracy. On this construal, the assessments need not themselves count as a priori. I incline to think that his case is stronger if one adopts the latter view.
I hope that in future work Professor Hoppe will address these questions: If monarchy is the best form of government, what sort of monarchy is desirable? What about systems that combine monarchical and democratic features? Do these surpass monarchy, or do they suffer from debilitating flaws?
Though he prefers monarchy to democracy, our author does not enlist in royalist ranks. Quite the contrary, he opposes the state altogether. “Indeed, a monopolist of ultimate decision making equipped with the power to tax does not just produce less and lower quality justice, but he will produce more and more ‘bads,’ i.e., injustice and aggression. Thus, the choice between monarchy and democracy concerns a choice between two defective social orders” (p. xx).
Our author goes so far as to ascribe the failure of classical liberalism to ignorance of this fundamental fact. Nineteenth-century classical liberals, and their latter-day successors, for the most part pursued the chimera of limited government; this was their “central and momentous error” (p. 224). Government by nature tends to expand.
Hoppe goes further. He holds that if one accepts the rights of self-ownership and private property, understood in a Rothbardian way, one cannot acknowledge the legitimacy of a protection agency with monopoly power to enforce rights. “[S]uch a monopoly-contract would imply that every private property owner had surrendered his right to ultimate decision making and the protection of his person and property permanently to someone else. In effect, in transferring this right onto someone else, a person would submit himself into permanent slavery” (p. 227).
Certainly a contract of the type Hoppe imagines is not licit, but I am not sure that this point altogether suffices to put limited government out of court. Someone with Rothbardian natural rights can legitimately hire a protection agency to defend himself; in doing so, he need not surrender his right to self-defense. Why does this change if there is only one protection agency? But this is a quibble of minor importance. On the main practical point, Hoppe is surely right. People who consent to a monopoly state have put themselves at grave risk of losing their freedom. In helping us to see this, Hans Hoppe has rendered us a great service, one of many in this work of outstanding merit.posted by
Whenever I come across an empty glass jar it is so hard for me to toss it in the recycling bin. {I know my craft room looks like { this } but I promise I’m not a pack rat} I just feel compelled to hold onto these versatile treasures – no matter what shape or size. {and yes I have bought the x-large jar of pickles a few times just so I could keep the cool jar}
This weeks Saturday Inspiration post is packed with 50 different ways to reuse and re-purpose glass jars – I’m pretty sure that alone justifies keeping my hands on any jar that may come my way.
If you follow along on facebook I shared a couple of these ideas I wanted to try a few weeks ago. Are you an empty jar collector?
Vacation Memory Jars
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Glass Jar Photo Frames
{Source: Photojojo}
Crochet Jar Covers
{Source: Freshly Found}
Crochet and Doily Jar Covers
{Source: Dottie Angel}
Recycled Jar Terrariums
{Source: Our Big Earth}
Twine Wrapped Jar Vases
{Source: Vickie Howell}
Fabric Wrapped Jar Vases
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Painted Bottle Vases
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Twig Wrapped Recycled Jar Vase
{Source: Garden Mama}
Color Pencil Wrapped Jar Vase
{Source: Country Living}
Hanging Baby Jar Vases
{Source: Good Housekeeping}
{Source: Pottery Barn}
Mixed Jar Centerpiece
{Source: Martha Stewart via Whole Living}
String Light Illuminating Jars
{Source: Country Living}
Decorative Jar Lids
{Source: Martha Stewart}
See Through Storage
{Source: Whole Living}
Stacked Jar Storage Center
{Source: Homemade Simple}
Chalkboard Label Storage Jars
{Source: Bradens Grace Wall Art}
Painted Storage Jars
{Source: Kootut Murut}
Wall Attached Jar Organizers
{Source: Homemade Simple}
Space Saving Storage Shelf
{Source: Country Living}
Under Shelf Jar Storage
{Source: Homemade Simple}
Baby Food Jar Organizer
{Source: Ehow}
Sewing Kit in a Jar
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Re-purposed Jar Button Storage
{Source: The Quilted Turtle}
Recycled Jar Yarn Holder
{Source: Homemade Simple}
Chalkboard Lid Craft Storage Jars
{Source: Homemade Simple}
Use Jars to Store Paint for Quick Touch Ups
{Source: Real Simple}
Recycled Jar Hardware Holders
{Source: Homemade Simple}
Re-purposed Jar into an Oil Lamp
{Source: Raised in Cotton}
Mason Jar Centerpieces
{Source: Apartment Therapy}
Recycled Jar Candle Holders
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Fabric Covered Baby Jar Votives
{Source: Prudent Baby}
Hanging Mason Jars
{Source: Pottery Barn}
Baby Jar Chandelier
{Source: HGTV}
Jam Jar Candle Chandelier
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Hanging Lanterns
{Source: Disney Family Fun}
Mod Podge and Food Coloring Painted Jar Lanterns
{Source: Gingerbread Snowflakes}
Make Your Own Jelly Jar Candles
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Recycled Jar Fish Bowl
{Source: Country Living}
DIY Jar ‘Snow Globe’
{Source: Disney Family Fun}
Bug Catching Jar
{Source: Oriental Trading}
Play Goldfish Jar
{Source: Disney Family Fun}
Kids Summer Job Jar
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Recycled Glass Candy Jars
{Source: Reebert}
Etched Glass Storage Jars
{Source: Martha Stewart}
Jar Mugs
{Source: Pottery Barn}
I have used some of my re-purposed jars on the following projects; how about you?
Make Your Own Lemon Sugar Hand Scrub
{Found Here}
Faux Glow in the Dark Firefly Jar
{Found Here}
Lazy Susan Under Cabinet Jar Storage Organizer
{Found Here}
The Sunday Showcase Party begins Tonight ~ Hope you’ll stop back and join in the fun!
Have a wonderful weekend ~ Enjoy!When it comes to using smartphones over other devices, there are a few activities people priorities for use of a smartphone over others. While one may argue that the smartphone is a jack of all trades, and indeed it is, the smartphone is often used for on the go entertainment, with streaming music and video appealing to everyone from the young to the old, taking that into account, any smartphone ecosystem worth mentioning has access to a native streaming service, as well as Spotify. Apple has Apple Music, Google has Google Play Music and Microsoft has Groove Music for Windows 10 phones. For the past few years, Microsoft left Groove Music’s predecessor, Xbox Music as an awful mess on Windows Phone devices, as well as on iOS and Android devices, now with recent additions to the service’s client apps, Groove is seriously shaping up to be my first choice of music service.
First, let’s talk about why the Groove music service is “almost” my first choice, as opposed to my first choice. One of the most interesting parts about being a tech blogger is gaining perspective in technology by using multiple devices and services to compare tech ecosystems. I use a Surface as my primary PC and Microsoft Edge as my primary browser, yet I have Chrome installed for comparison. I use a mixture of UWP and desktop apps on my Surface, so the strengths and shortcomings of both are not lost on me. So also on mobile, I dual wield devices, I make use of a Motorola Moto X Play on Android Marshmallow and a Lumia 650 with Windows 10 Mobile to have a broad mobile experience. From the cream of the crop to the more indie platform, I regularly bounce between devices to get the widest experience.
Now. when using Windows phone, Groove Music is the app of choice. It integrates with my local, Onedrive and Music pass files on Windows and Windows 10 Mobile. It looks great, and it works fine and with the recent updates, there isn’t any reason to switch.
In contrast, on Android, Groove Music is about as full featured as Spotify on Windows phone. It hasn’t been updated since 2015, it has a pretty awful user interface, and is generally unsupported. While Microsoft attempted to take Groove Music cross-platform in 2013 along with the MSN apps, development of those apps eventually slowed down to a crawl and has seemingly stopped as Microsoft has refocused on their Windows 10 apps. Now, for a cross-platform user like me, there’s no easy solution for a music app on Windows, Android. and Windows phones. Sure Spotify is excellent, but it isn’t a Windows 10 app and despite whatever Spotify claims, it is certifiable abandonware. Deezer for Windows 10 appears to be going somewhere, but it’s unlikely it will touch the quality of Groove music on Windows or Deezer on iOS anytime soon, and Groove Music is virtual abandonware on Android or iOS. If Microsoft is really serious about Groove – and they appear to be – I really hope to see full-featured iOS and Android apps in the future to complement the Windows and Windows 10 Mobile apps.
That being said, Microsoft’s Groove Music app on PCs and Mobile has some advantages over Spotify that make me prefer it. To begin with, the app is a universal Windows app, this means that it integrates with Windows 10 and Microsoft’s Cortana app nicely. For instance, you can play music with the lock screen engaged, and the music will keep on playing rather than simply stop like Spotify does. It also integrates with Cortana in a similar manner as Siri and Apple Music will do in macOS sierra this fall. You can request Groove to play a genre, play an artist or play an album and it will comply. To risk falling into marketing lingo, Groove provides an “experience” on Windows while Spotify is its own experience in Windows. It vastly depends on what you prefer, but it feels more natural to use software that plays well with your operating system of choice.
In previous, and you might even say current (for non-Windows Insiders), iterations of Groove Music, music discovery was tedious. Sure you could use radio to discover new songs and artists you may like, but it wasn’t always a sure thing, and eventually you’d end up listening to the same sounds over and over again. During the Windows Phone 8.1 era, MixRadio was how I discovered much of my music by way of curated mixes, but it still wasn’t a perfect system, and it died before it could become so.
When Groove Music eventually picked up curated playlists support on the web, it was obvious Microsoft was going to bring it to the Windows 10 clients soon, the only question left was how soon. In the meantime, Spotify’s Discover playlists were proving valuable to even a Spotify skeptic like me, and with the launch of Spotifcast for Spotify for Windows 10, I began to relax into the experience. What pulled me away from my most recent Spotify subscription was the one-two punch of Taylor Swift and a Groove update. Just like the Windows app store, you may be able to find much of the songs you like, but having a larger music catalog means that you would find songs much easier on Groove. For one reason or another, I was unable to stream Taylor Swift’s 22 on Spotify, searching for Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer yielded similar results (that is to say, none).
Then Microsoft’s new Groove Music update happened, and I actually began to question my Spotify subscription again. From my perspective, Groove now provided all the benefits of Spotify (limited to curated playlists and enhanced discovery) with none of the pitfalls. Sure Spotify may appeal to those who want to be social with their music, but in my experience, no one really cares about the social features afforded by Spotify beyond using it for internet talking points.
Music in the modern age isn’t just an app, it’s a service. The best part about music services for digital natives is that you can switch from one to the other without consequence. Having all your friends on Spotify doesn’t diminish your experience on Deezer, not does it diminish your experience on Groove Music. If I may make the presumption that most of the users here us Windows as their primary software platform, I can now safely say that I have changed from hating Groove, to tolerating it, to actually recommending it. If you’re a Windows first user, give it a try, you won’t be disappointed. I’d like to say the same about x-platform users, but that ball’s in Microsoft’s court. Frankly, for Windows phone users, it feels good to have priority again.Kanye West. Christopher Polk/Getty Kanye West recently announced that he is $53 million in personal debt.
For the normal person, that's a highly alarming amount, but for Kanye — who has tremendous earning power — it's not necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, the rapper should be in even more debt, says Fred Schebesta, CEO of personal-finance comparison and education site Finder.com. He should be investing all that he can in his brand — up to as much as five times $53 million, Schebesta tells Business Insider — to ensure its longevity.
"Kanye is a massive business," the CEO says. "Other businesses have a lot more than $53 million of debt — and Kanye's reach and impact on the global stage as an entertainer is just as big, if not bigger, than some of the major brands around the world."
To give you an idea of his incredible reach, Kanye has 20 million Twitter followers. "Some companies would pay $53 million for that!" says Schebesta.
And when he decided to release his latest album on music-streaming service and app Tidal, it took only one tweet to propel the app to the No. 1 spot on the US App Store.
"Who doesn't want to partner with someone with that kind of market power and that kind of brand?" says Schebesta. "The attention that he commands — that's what is worth so much."
With Kanye's serious earning capacity, it shouldn't take long to pay off the $53 million.
"I can't see why he can't pay that back in 12 months' time," says Schebesta. "He could pay it off with one movie or one big endorsement contract."
At Slate, Jordan Weissman writes that since West earns an estimated $22 million to $30 million a year, "For Kanye, $53 million in debt is basically equivalent to the median American household, which earns $53,000 a year, carrying $127,000 in debt — or, you know, a mortgage."
Why, then, would Kanye publicize these financial problems that may not be too problematic after all?
At Vanity Fair, Emily Jane Fox writes:
In some regard, West's tweets may simply have been an elaborate and modern version of a pitch deck in search of that true marker of early 21st century creative genius: Series A funding. Indeed, he publicly solicited the help of Mark Zuckerberg, whom he asked for $1 billion to keep making art. He also said he would be willing to accept money from Google's Larry Page. Any other hedge-funder or bigwig with pennies to spare would do, too. These guys, after all, know that $53 million is a small price tag for a moonshot.
"It could be a marketing stunt to build his brand even more," suggests Schebesta. "He's basically martyring himself in order to get even more attention, which is genius."Happy Mondoid everyone. Let’s dive in…
33 Polish
We recently pushed the fixes and niceness of Builds 33.15, 33.16, 33.17, 33.18 and the 33.19 mini-fix out of the hands of our public testers and into the mitts of the player-base at large. Amidst a lot of other stuff there’s tweaks like the contents of bags left on the ground appearing in your loot window, sound fixes, zed visibility through glass doors, translations and a major fix of a bug that means that bleeding to death will be a lot more of an issue for injured surviviors from now on.
Going into IWBUMS public testing now, meanwhile, is 33.20 – a bundle of further EP and RJ work. This predominantly covers community translation work and some UI and tooltip word polish, but also adds the ability for players to dig with their bare hands (despite risks of hand damage) if they are desperate to start farming and don’t have the necessary equipment. Given a fair wind this will likely be pushed into Build 33’s final form towards the end of the week.
The Return of General Arcade
Time for an update from our gallant friends Serge and Gennadii, who are currently on a quest to make the Project Zomboid MP experience a more pleasant one to set out upon while we beaver away at the main game’s systems. So, over to Gennadii!
“Hello! I’m here to tell you what we’ve been working on for the last two months! It’s already quite impressive just how many people are running PZ servers, with many of them launching servers from their PCs for their friends. And, in short, we’re here to make those peoples’ lives a bit easier! We’ve just submitted our first test build to TIS, so we’re not final just yet, but this is what we’ve covering. Apologies if it gets technical!”
“First of all: UPnP support. We want people to forget about port forwarding for PZ server on your router: instead just make sure UPnP is enabled and watch the magic happen. Secondly, we’ve changed map downloading implementation from Java sockets API to native Raknet API, this will make downloading more robust and also eliminate one extra open port. (You can thank me later!)”
“The most important feature, however, is co-op play. This feature aims to get you playing PZ online with friends right from the game UI without messing with config files and console. We want it to be perfect for short playing sessions with friends. We’ve still got testing and tweaking to go, but all-in-all it’s looking really good!”
“I also want to add in a word about Project Zomboid itself.” [Mondoid writer’s note: Gennadii has not been paid to say this, and we only include it as he says nice things about you, the reader, too :P] “We’ve worked on dozens of indie projects it’s always great to find Zomboid’s code base very solid to work with. Contributors know what they are doing and they don’t afraid to refactor the code, which helps maintain the code in a good shape.”
“BUT! What’s more important is the community. Some Early Access games suffer from a toxic environment and, of course, that does reflect on a game itself. Since we began on PZ, however, we were amazed at how friendly the Project Zomboid community is. It’s just another reason why General Arcade is very happy to work on Project Zomboid for all its survivors.”
Nutritional Value
Now over to France for the latest on RJ’s plans for a full nutrition system to lie beneath your frantic chip over-eating survival habits.
“As you may know I’m working on the nutrition system, so what does it involve? Alongside my coding I’m doing a lot of research on how it all works, and how best to balance the system.”
“Right now I’m dealing with variables like Carbohydrates, Proteins, Lipids and Calories, although just how much will be directly shown to the player remains to be seen. The plan is, however, that if you only ever eat junk food (chips, soda, candy…) then you could start lacking protein or be taking in too many carbohydrates. Likewise it’ll cause issues if you’re only ever eating one or two varieties of fruit and vegetables from your garden.”
“Clearly none of this will kill you, but could add some bad effects for your character if you regularly survive for extended periods. Less endurance, loss of strength, getting more and more tired even after a good night of sleep… that sort of thing. We’re currently debating how all this will be conveyed to the player, but my own thought is that in real life it’s hard to tell if you’re lacking in something – so if you find yourself getting tired faster than usual then you should think about nutrition and maaaybe it’s time to go fishing or trapping to get some extra protein.”
“I’d also like to tie in the player’s mood a bit more tightly to the system – so endlessly eating the same stuff depresses you, and as with the rest of the game that impacts on timed actions. Likewise there’ll most likely be a Nutritionist profession. More on both in a later Mondoid perhaps!”
This week’s featured image by erm… ‘Dildo~Baggins’ over on Steam. Crikey, that’s a bit NSFW for a Mondoid. Apologies if that made anyone faint or made any bow-ties start spinning. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. Oh, and we live in Twitter here! Speaking of…Donald Trump could be denied the honour of speaking in Parliament's oldest building when he visits Britain after parliamentary organisers privately voiced concern.
The Telegraph understands that John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, has expressed worry about the backlash from MPs over the US president's expected address.
There are now plans to move any speech from Westminster Hall, created in the 11th century, to the Royal Gallery, built around 800 years later and currently covered in scaffolding.
The move would be seen as a major snub to Mr Trump, given that his predecessor, Barack Obama, addressed MPs and peers in Westminster Hall during his state visit.
A well-placed sourced said Mr Bercow, one of three "keyholders" who decide where it would take place, was “not happy” about the level of MP concern.iCloud is great. I use it everyday to keep data synced across all of my devices and, especially, have important docs in perfect sync across my favorite Mac and iOS apps. By design, those files are tied to their creator apps so problems arise when you just wanna access them quickly in your Mac’s Finder, without having to go through the tedious export/re-import process. That’s where Plain Cloud jumps in. Plain Cloud is a free Mac app that acts as a simple front-end to apps that store documents in iCloud…
Firstly, I know power users can access iCloud documents by digging deep into the hidden Library folder inside their user folder. The problem is, iCloud documents are stored inside hashed sub-folders with cryptic names so it’s not exactly the most user-friendly way to pull that Day One database you’ve been diligently building on your iPad, access your iA Writer files or make changes to any other document that iCloud-enabled apps store on Apple’s servers.
Plus – and I cannot stress this enough – don’t ever touch the iCloud sync folder manually.
Not. Ever.
Now, to access your iCloud stuff easily, download a free application called Plain Cloud.
Upon unarchiving it, you can move it to your Applications folder for easier access. Depending on your Gatekeeper settings, you may not be able to launch it by double-clicking the icon as Plain Cloud is not a Mac App Store app.
If so, simply right-click on the Plain Cloud icon and choose Open.
If iCloud is set up on your Mac, Plain Cloud should present a window like this.
As you can see, all of my iCloud-enabled apps which saved documents in iCloud are listed here. I simply hit a desired app and up pops a Finder window listing its synced documents. For example, clicking the Pages entry brings up a list of all the Pages documents synchronized via iCloud, just like this.
And there you have it.
Couldn’t be simpler, no?
The killer feature: you can now edit your documents in completely different apps than those used to create them. For example, you may have started a Pages document on your iPhone and made some changes to it on your iPad.
With Plain Cloud, it is now possible to open that file using Microsoft Office on your Mac, make revisions to it, then copy that saved file back to the Pages folder in iCloud and have it be accessible on your iPhone and iPad again (sans the formatting differences stemming from Office and Pages).
Previously, you would have to export the Pages document via iTunes File Sharing, email and so forth and re-import it after saving changes with Microsoft Office. For what its worth, I tested Plain Cloud with image and plain text files and didn’t run into any issues.
As a file management frontend to iCloud data, Plain Cloud is flawless.
You can rename your iCloud documents and folders, move them around, create new folders and delete files. Plain Cloud does all the heavy lifting for you in a secure manner (remember the hashed folder names I mentioned earlier?) so it won’t break your iCloud sync or mess up your stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCjeSNomXrU
You can even drag a document into this Finder folder to have it automatically uploaded to Apple’s servers and synchronized across all your devices authorized with the same iCloud credentials.
Just one more thing: because you’re working with cloud storage, deleting a file from these folders is permanent – you cannot bring back the file and it also gets removed immediately from the containing app across your devices.
As changes immediately carry over to iCloud and all the associated devices, think twice before deleting a file.
Hat tip to OSXDaily for passing along Plain Cloud.It seems as though the thirty or so years that American neocons have poured money into right-wing political movements in Canada is really paying off. Not only does Canada have a conservative prime minister, he seems to think that he and the government are equivalent. L'État, c'est moi! But the Liberal party is fighting back:
OTTAWA — Federal Liberals are moving swiftly to capitalize on public outrage over Conservative attempts to rebrand the government of Canada as "the Harper government."
They've produced a radio ad that will begin running Saturday in Quebec, expressing shock at the Tories' effrontery in equating the government with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
"Like you, I am profoundly shocked," Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says in the ad.
"It's totally unacceptable. The government of Canada is not the government of Mr. Harper, it's the government of citizens, the government of all the citizens of Canada."
The Canadian Press revealed Thursday that a directive was sent late last year to public servants, advising them that "government of Canada" should be replaced in all federal communications with the words "the Harper government."
The story -- which included fierce criticism from some public administration experts, including former clerk of the Privy Council Mel Cappe -- spread like wildfire through social media. The reaction appeared to be predominantly negative.
In the Commons on Friday, Tory MP Andrew Saxton defended the branding exercise as "a longstanding practice across various governments." He said the former Liberal government of Jean Chretien used to do the same thing.
"This terminology is widely used by journalists and the public. In fact, Mel Cappe, who was quoted in these stories, approved many of the releases when he was clerk using the term 'Chretien government,"' said Saxton.
The Prime Minister's Office later supplied examples of such releases but only three -- involving the government of Paul Martin -- actually personalized the government in the same way the Tories are attempting to do.
The releases during Chretien's tenure are all headlined "government of Canada" and use those words throughout. The only reference to the "Chretien government" comes in quotations from ministers.50-pound wahoo landed by Eric Kim off Southern California is thought to be the first genuine catch of the species in U.S. Pacific Coast waters
Of all the rare sightings and catches during this warm-water summer off Southern California, there's only one "first" that we're aware of, and it involves the catch of a 50-pound wahoo last Saturday about 10 miles off Orange County.
Eric Kim was on a tuna-fishing trip with friends aboard the private sportfisher Joker and trolling a large Rapala lure when the wahoo (ono) struck.
"I just thought it was a lone dorado or tuna, but then I felt the weight and thought this is actually a better fish," Kim told Phil Friedman of PFO Radio. "I got it to color and we couldn't believe it. It was a freaking wahoo."
This has been the best summer fishing season off Southern California in decades, thanks to an abundance of yellowfin tuna and dorado (mahi-mahi) that has added a Mexican flavor to the local fishing experience.
Those fish are far more common in Mexican waters, but appear off Southern California during warm-water events such as an El Niño.
Surface temperatures offshore range from about 72 to 76 degrees, well above normal. This has allowed exotic species of fish, and even some marine mammal species, to venture much farther north than their typical range.
But wahoo, which are found regularly in Mexico's Sea of Cortez and off southern Baja California, simply do not migrate this far north.
Milton Love, a UC Santa Barbara scientist and author of “Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast,” said Wednesday that Kim's wahoo is believed to be the first genuine catch of a wahoo in the Eastern Pacific north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
"I have been waiting for an official U.S. record for years," Love stated via email, adding that previously, the farthest northern catch was 130 miles south of the border.
Love is not counting a wahoo caught inside Los Angeles Harbor in the winter of 2010. That probably involved a fish that was brought into the harbor via boat or ship, because there's little chance that a species that resides in tropical and sub-tropical seas could swum so far north at that time of year.
Wahoo, believed to be the world’s fastest fish, are extremely popular for their fight and the high quality of their flesh.
Kim was fishing with Capt. George Garrett, Ted Royal, and Zach Murtaugh. The wahoo, which measured 60 inches and had a girth of 22 inches, was weighed and photographed by Amy Elliott at the Balboa Angling Club scale in Newport Beach.
"They were amazed," Elliott said. "It was Zach's birthday and they were all having a ball catching dorado and tuna. They could not catch enough fish; it was one after another."
Said Kim of seeing the wahoo come over the rail: "We were all tripping out. It took two nice runs. We got it to color and then my buddies, Zach and Ted … as soon as they put the gaff in it, it was all smiles, man. All smiles."
–Find Pete Thomas on Facebook and Twitter
More fishing on GrindTV
Sewer fishing: Can fishing get any crazier?
Rare opah catch might be a world record
Common skate seen as British fishing recordEmpty classrooms like this one on Kleber Kaserne, Germany, may be the new norm as the Army has suspended its tuition assistance program, citing fiscal challenges. The Army's announcement follows a similar message affecting the Marine Corps.
WIESBADEN, Germany — The Army announced Friday it is suspending its tuition assistance program for soldiers newly enrolling in classes due to sequestration and other budgetary pressures.
“This suspension is necessary given the significant budget execution challenges caused by the combined effects of a possible year-long continuing resolution and sequestration,” Paul Prince, an army personnel spokesman at the Pentagon, wrote in an email to Stars and Stripes. “The Army understands the impacts of this action and will re-evaluate should the budgetary situation improve.”
The Army’s announcement follows a similar move by the Marine Corps.
The Army’s tuition assistance program was available for troops to complete a high school diploma, certificate program or college or master’s degree. Under the program, the Army paid 100 percent of the tuition and authorized fees charged by a school up to established limits of $250 per semester hour or credit hour or up to $4,500 per fiscal year.
“The Secretary of the Army has approved the suspension of Tuition Assistance effective 5 p.m. (Eastern Time) on March 8, 2013. Soldiers will no longer be permitted to submit new requests for Tuition Assistance,” read a statement posted Friday on the GoArmyEd.com website. “However, Soldiers currently enrolled in courses approved for Tuition Assistance are not affected, and will be allowed to complete current course enrollment(s).
“This change in the Army Tuition Assistance program applies to all Soldiers, including the Army National Guard and Army Reserves,” the statement read.
Student Veterans of America on Friday blasted the decision, saying the move could hurt troops’ post military careers and leave them in debt.
"It is utterly unacceptable that the first casualties of Congress' inability to act are education benefits for servicemembers,” Michael Dakduk, executive director of SVA, said in a statement. “The decisions of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army set a dangerous precedent that educating our nation's servicemembers and veterans is an expendable option.”
Prior to the official announcement, messages about the suspension were circulating on various Facebook pages and on University of Maryland University College Europe’s webpage.
Frustrations were evident on GoArmyEd’s Facebook page on Friday.
“Wouldn’t one think that GoArmyEd would have sent a mass e-mail to everyone enrolled instead of a few people here and there? I haven’t gotten anything from my chain of command, GoArmyEd, or my school!,” read one post.
Others expressed concern about remaining college requirements or how the suspension will affect the enlisted promotion system, where civilian education is valued and rewarded.
Sgt. 1st Class Vido Barina with the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade in Wiesbaden, Germany, said taking away tuition assistance is the wrong move.
“Every commercial, every brochure, has money for college written all over it … recruiting us into the Army and then taking away one of the main reasons we joined is a bit hypocritical,” said Barina, who added that as an 11-year Army veteran, it’s his junior troops he is concerned about. “There are so many things that cost a lot of money and don’t need to take place that are not getting the ax.”
Although tuition assistance is being suspended, soldiers can continue to access their GI Bill benefits or use other funding sources, such as grants and scholarships or state tuition assistance for Army National Guard soldiers.
Sgt. Daniel Phillips, with the 66th MI Brigade, said he was hoping to save the GI Bill to pass on to his kids, adding that paying for classes out of his own pocket isn’t a realistic option.
“(Tuition Assistance) is something I’ve been utilizing my whole Army career to help me stand out from my peers and benefit my family,” Phillips said. “I had a degree plan set up and this is going to be a huge setback.”
Prince advised that soldiers contact their local education centers with questions and to get updates. Army officials say that updated information will also be posted to www.goarmyed.com.
patton.mark@stripes.comMichelle McNamara, a true crime writer who founded the website True Crime Diary and the wife of writer, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, has died, the Associated Press reported Friday. She was 46.
Though Oswalt's publicist confirmed McNamara's death, no cause was given. She died in her sleep Thursday at the couple's Los Angeles home in "a complete shock to her family and friends, who loved her |
India has. It was the result of a joint venture between India and Russia to modify the Yakhont missile for Indian needs and make it into a universal missile which could be launched from any platform. This 9m long missile which weighs 3 tons has now become the backbone of the Indian Defense forces as a long-range standoff weapon. It is currently employed by the India Navy on most of their major warships. Indian Army has inducted 3 regiments and the Air Force is conducting trials for the air launched variant. The air launched variant has a reduced weight of 2.5 tons and 1 missile can be carried under the fuselage of the Su-30Mki. The current production rate is said to be 100 missiles per year.
Naval variant Army variant
The next generation of BrahMos is named as the BrahMos NG. It is basically a smaller version of the current BrahMos with similar performance and minor improvements. It will undergo a 50% weight reduction and a 30% length reduction and 0% performance reduction. So how is it possible to do such a thing? According to my sources, the current BrahMos uses large electronics circuits and heavy guidance systems and components. The casing of the missile is quite heavy as well since the missile has 25 year old technology which is excellent but heavy and big, which makes the current version so heavy. The NG will feature new gen micro-electronics and advanced composites which will drastically reduce its weight. The new smaller ramjet will also contribute to the smaller size and reduced weight. The speed will be increased from Mach 3 to Mach 3.5. All the branches of the Indian military have expressed interest in the NG variant.
This missile has been covered in detail in my article CAN THE US NAVY SHOOT DOWN THE DEADLY BRAHMOS MISSILE?
Su-30Mki
If there is one aircraft that has defined the Indian Air Force in the 21st century, it’s the Su-30Mki. This is a long-range, multi-role, supermaneuverable 4.5+ gen fighter which is built according to Indian specifications. The baseline Su-30Mk from Russia was modified with French, Israeli and Indian avionics to create the ultimate Su-30 variant for India. It became the Su-30Mki where ‘i’ stands for India (Indiski). After realizing the combat potential and versatility of this amazing fighter, the IAF placed an order for 272 aircraft which makes India the largest Su-30 operator in the world.
The Su-30Mki is the bread and butter of the IAF as the rest of their fleet consists of legacy 4th gen fighters which have just a fraction of the capabilities of this fighter. With its 4000+ km range, 12 Hardpoints for 8000 kg of weapons, PESA Bars radar, it outclasses any other fighter in the region. It is safe to assume that 1 Su-30Mki can do the job of 2 MiG-29 and 2 Jaguar combined. It is currently used for air defense, reconnaissance and ground attack. The Su-30Mki is evolving into a cruise missile platform for the IAF. By 2016, it will be integrated with BrahMos and Nirbhay cruise missiles which would give it strike capabilities never before imagined by the IAF or its rivals. It also is integrated with several indigenous and imported electronic jamming pods and anti-radiation missiles which make it a deadly platform for Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD/DEAD) which is the most important part of modern warfare to sanitize enemy threats.
The origins of the Su-30 has been covered in detail here
CONCLUSION
The weapon systems covered in this article give you a brief idea about the capabilities of the Indian Armed Forces. Equal importance has been given to army, naval and air force weapon systems. Many weapons Arjun Mk2, INS Vikrant aren’t on this list as they haven’t entered service and are still in developmental/testing phase at the time of writing. Since the list has only top 10 weapons, i couldn’t fit in several powerful weapon systems. Only matured weapons systems have been covered here.
If you enjoyed reading this article, rate it below!
You may also like
AdvertisementsWith a multi-level parking lot lying unfinished in Karol Bagh market for the last 10 years, shopkeepers are preparing to move “contempt of court proceedings” against the North Delhi Municipal Corporation next month, when the city will vote in the civic polls. The Beopar Mandal (Ajmal Khan Road) had in 2014 moved the Delhi High Court, and later the National Green Tribunal (NGT) against the North MCD, asking that the civic body be directed to build a multi-level car park with a capacity for 2,000 vehicles at Shastri Park, Karol Bagh Zone.
Advertising
“The North MCD has been dragging its feet on the car park for 10 years now. It only makes plans on paper but there is no implementation. Councillors visit and make promises but nothing is done. Our market lies neglected and in a horrible condition. There isn’t enough space for vehicles of over 800 shop owners and their staff, leave alone space for customers’ vehicles,” said Sanjeev Kapoor, general secretary of the Beopar Mandal.
“We are moving contempt of court proceedings through our counsel Deepak Khadaria against the North MCD because it had told the High Court in 2014 that it will complete building the multi-level parking by March 2017, but it has not even started work. It did not obey court directives, so we will move the court at the start of April,” Kapoor said.
Area councillor from the BJP Rajesh Bhatia cited problems in the tendering process as the prime cause for the delay. “We could not complete the construction by March because no favourable company was coming forward to engage in the public-private partnership. After several years of trying, we decided to build the whole parking complex ourselves. We have finished hiring experts and engineers for consultation, and work will begin soon.” When the civic body had submitted these reasons to the High Court three years ago, the court had observed, “… Proper effective planning is a must for effective implementation of such a project; however, that does not mean the matter can remain pending with the department for years on end.”
Advertising
Major MCD parking projects have been lying unfinished in various stages of construction across the national capital including those at Subhash Nagar, New Friends Colony, Kalkaji, Rajouri Garden, Jangpura and Munirka. However, with the upcoming elections, councillors have been scrambling to give their respective areas a facelift. In Karol Bagh, Bhatia, last month, threw open a surface parking area which can hold 350 cars, for free.Protesters in Newcastle,Australia, December 20, 2009. Photo by Rising Tide.
By Simon Butler
November 22, 2010 -- Green Left Weekly -- If at first you don’t succeed, redefine success. This phrase has become the unofficial motto of this year’s United Nations climate conference in Cancun, Mexico. Just out from Cancun, which runs over November 29 to December 10, there is little hope of meaningful progress. Yet key players have sought to throw a shroud of official optimism over the looming failure.
Few Western politicians want a repeat of last year’s Copenhagen climate conference. They consider it a public relations disaster.
In the lead-up to Copenhagen, public expectations were high. There was a widespread feeling that politicians could no longer ignore the warnings from climate scientists. Many politicians said they agreed strong, decisive action to curb emissions was needed.
But when the big polluting countries blocked a new legally binding treaty at Copenhagen, they were badly exposed.
Europe’s biggest-ever climate demonstration — involving 100,000 people — took over Copenhagen’s streets.
Up to 50,000 people took part in the Klimaforum, a radical counter-event to the official Copenhagen summit. Klimaforum issued a call for “system change, not climate change”.
Its “people’s declaration” said the climate emergency “urges us to unite and transform the dominant social and economic system as well as global governance, which currently block necessary solutions to the climate crisis”.
The dissent on the streets outside the official summit was matched by dissent within. Delegates from the world’s poorest countries denounced the rich nations’ agenda to destroy the Kyoto Protocol and hold off from making deep emissions cuts.
Lumumba Di-Aping, spokesperson for the G77 group of 130 underdeveloped countries, said the rich country governments’ target to allow temperatures to rise by 2°C was like asking Africa “to sign a suicide pact”. “I would rather die with my dignity than sign a deal that will channel my people into a furnace”, he said. Third World delegates repeatedly walked out of summit sessions in protest against the rich nations’ attempts to kill off the Kyoto treaty.
From the Copenhagen rostrum, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez repeated the slogan chanted by the protesters outside: “If the climate were a bank, they would have bailed it out already.”
At the last minute, the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa introduced a new proposal — the Copenhagen Accord. The accord was not binding on any country, set no timeline to achieve emissions cuts and insisted on the dangerous 2°C warming target.
The summit did not adopt the Copenhagen Accord. Outraged delegates pointed out it would be a step backward from the Kyoto Protocol, not a step forward.
Copenhagen ended in disarray. Confidence in the UN process was weakened. The hypocrisy and double-dealing of nations such as the United States, the European Union and Australia was exposed to millions.
Managing expectations
As a consequence, the publicity for the Cancun summit has been far more about managing public expectations than managing humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
“Cancun will be a success, if parties compromise”, said UN climate chief Christina Figueres on November 15. “They have to balance their expectations so that everyone can carry home a positive achievement while allowing others to do the same.”
Figueres said the Cancun talks could reach a deal on protecting forests, making technology more widely available and helping poor countries adapt to climate change.
However, she said a deal to make deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions — the most important measure — would not be made.
Can Cancun be successful if it won’t agree to cut emissions? If this were the outcome, it would be as much a “success” as a peace conference that failed to end a war.
But as at Copenhagen, the poor nations that will bear some of the worst impacts of climate change will fight for far stronger climate action at Cancun.
ALBA leads resistance
The most strident resistance will likely come from the nations grouped in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).
Ministers from the ALBA nations Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua issued a joint declaration about Cancun on November 5. The ministers declared that “nature has no price”, and warned they would resist proposals for the UN to endorse new carbon market schemes. “Instead of promoting the privatisation of goods and services that come from nature, it is essential to recognise that these have a collective character, and, as such, should be conserved as public goods, respecting the sovereignty of states.”
The five countries said the world could not afford for Cancun to be a repeat of Copenhagen: “We hope that accords will be reached [at Cancun] in which developed countries … effectively assume their obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, without making climate change into a business through the promotion and creation of carbon market mechanisms.”
At Cancun, the Bolivian delegation will also present the key proposals from April’s World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. The conference was held in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba and involved about 35,000 climate activists and indigenous representatives from around the world.
Cochabamba proposals
The Cochabamba proposals included:
cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of more than 50% by 2017;
recognition and legal protection of the rights of Indigenous peoples and people forced to migrate due to climate change;
the formation of an International Climate Justice Tribunal empowered to penalise nations and corporations that flout international law;
opposition to any new carbon markets for greenhouse gases or forests; and
compensation paid by the developed countries most responsible for causing climate change to poor countries suffering its worst impacts. Bolivia proposes developed countries allocate 6% of their annual GDP to adaptation and development projects in the global South.
Further, Bolivia wants the UN to put its proposals to a global referendum on climate change.
The odds will be stacked against the ALBA nations at Cancun. Relentless pressure from the US and the EU has meant about 130 countries have now endorsed the Copenhagen Accord, even though most rejected it at first.
But there will be resistance to this business-as-usual agenda at Cancun, which is a cause for hope.
A successful outcome at Cancun will be not be measured by the compromises struck with the powerful interests prepared to sacrifice the integrity of the Earth’s ecosystems on the altar of profit.
Success at Cancun will depend on how loudly the voices for climate justice are heard and the contribution that makes to arouse wider resistance.
[This article first appeared in Green Left Weekly, Australia's leading socialist newspaper. Simon Butler is a climate activist in Sydney, and a member of the Socialist Alliance.]In a recent report in JAMA Oncology by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, approximately 25 percent of Americans 65 and older and 11 percent of younger adults who were previously treated for cancer were subsequently found to have one or more new cancers in a different site. Depending on the type of original cancer and the person’s age, the risk of developing a second unrelated cancer ranged from 3.5 percent to 36.9 percent. The study covered 765,843 new cancer diagnoses made between 2009 and 2013 and recorded in a population-based national registry, the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program.
In many cases, the development of a second cancer resulted from the same risk factors that most likely precipitated the first malignancy. These factors include tobacco use, obesity and infection with human papillomavirus (HPV). For example, a smoker who has been successfully treated for lung cancer may later develop bladder cancer, which is also related to smoking, as well as a second lung cancer. An HPV infection, which most often causes cervical cancer, can also cause cancers of the vagina, penis, rectum and throat. And obesity is a known risk factor for at least 13 kinds of cancer, including cancers of the uterus, esophagus, stomach, liver, kidney, colon and pancreas.
Although much less common nowadays than in years past, sometimes the chemotherapy or radiation treatments used to control the first cancer cause genetic or other changes that lead to a new cancer. Examples include leukemia that can be induced by chemotherapy or radiation therapy, or uterine cancer caused by the drug tamoxifen used to treat breast cancer.
The Texas researchers, led by Caitlin C. Murphy, an epidemiologist, undertook the study of new cancers in cancer survivors in hopes of changing the common practice of excluding former cancer patients from clinical trials when they develop another cancer.
“This exclusion is not evidence-based,” Dr. Murphy said in an interview. “Patients with a prior cancer do not necessarily have a worse prognosis than those without a cancer history. They should be allowed to participate in clinical trials, which may be one of their only treatment options. If they’re excluded, a lot of patients are left out from what may be the best available treatment.”If things don’t work out with Dallas in training camp, power forward Maurice Ndour, who resides in New York and played with the Knicks in the summer league, would love to return.
Even after the undrafted Ndour agreed to terms with Dallas, the Knicks called Ndour’s camp to see if there was something that still could be worked out. Ndour, however, would not break his verbal agreement with Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, according to a source.
Dallas offered the undrafted Ohio University forward a fully guaranteed deal for more than the $600,000 rookie free-agent minimum, with a second year partially guaranteed. It blew the Knicks’ offer out of the water. They offered Ndour less than a $200,000 guarantee and wouldn’t budge until it was too late.
Jackson’s top advisor, Clarence Gaines Jr., is said to be disappointed as he championed Ndour’s signing to the summer league team.
The Knicks invited undrafted Harvard swingman Wesley Saunders to training camp, but The Post has learned Saunders will get no more than a $75,000 guarantee.
It also has been reported Virginia power forward Darion Atkins has been invited to camp. Neither likely will make the 15-man roster, but could agree to hang with the D-League team to develop.
Jackson still wants to sign a big man, and Carlos Boozer and Washington center Kevin Seraphin are still unsigned. The Knicks have shown tepid interest in Boozer.A DIRTY doctor kept his job despite suggesting a woman patient should pleasure herself to increase her heart rate during an examination, a court was told.
Cardiologist Dr Nilesh Pravin Jagjivan said the 27-year-old woman could “stimulate down there” after she took off her top during a check-up.
PA:Press Association Archive 4 A cardiologist for the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust suggested a female patient should pleasure herself during check up
Jagjivan, 37, escaped punishment after a medical tribunal accepted his claims that he was a virgin who had no interest in sex in May last year.
But he now faces being struck off after a High Court appeal ruled that his actions were indeed driven by sexual desire.
He told investigators he had "no sexual experience" and was "not attracted to men or women", let alone patients.
PA:Press Association Archive 4 A medical tribunal accepted the 37-year-old's claims that he was a virgin who was 'not interested in men or women'
But Lady Justice Sharp ruled at a High Court appeal that he must have been "sexually motivated" when he spoke to the patient during a cardiac test.
The cardiology registrar, who worked for the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, pointed at her nipples and vagina and told her "there were three different places to get excited".
A Medical Practitioners Tribunal heard he told her she could "put pressure down there" to quicken her pulse.
He told her: "It's a bit 80s and some people aren't comfortable doing this" then suggested she could “stimulate down there to excite herself.”
PA:Press Association Wire 4 The doctor claimed stimulating her vagina or nipples would increase her heart rate
The tribunal described his behaviour during the consultation as "deplorable" after hearing evidence.
But, after he alleged he had no interest in sex, it refused to strike him off, suspend him or even issue him with a warning.
No one had ever heard him "engage in the slightest sexual banter" and it was accepted that Jagjivan had no sexual experience.
Although his "unacceptable words" left the patient "distressed", the tribunal ruled they were not sexually motivated.
MOST READ IN NEWS Exclusive BRUTE FARCE Albanian killer fighting deportation over right to happy family life beats wife Exclusive PIE ROLLER £148m EuroMillions winner scoffs 50 home-delivered Cornish pasties every WEEK MISSED THE BOAT Clueless couple stranded as cruise leaves WITHOUT them because they're late MOMO NO-NO Momo Challenge in 'Peppa Pig and Fortnite vids' as YouTube and Instagram slammed MOMO SHOCK Creepy'suicide character' Momo told lad, 8, to'stab himself in neck' 'HE STRANGLED ME' Girl, 10, 'pretended to be dead to stop boy, 16, raping her on way home' HEN DO MYSTERY Brit newlywed, 27, 'CLUNG to balcony before fatal Benidorm hotel plunge' TREE OF TERROR Mum horrified to learn what the strange 'pods' were hanging from branches Exclusive DARK PAST Homeless man doused in water by rail staff KILLED man who splashed him with paint Latest SURREY SHAKES Panicked locals in Surrey woken by'shaking buildings' as 3.3 quake hits
But the General Medical Council challenged the decision, saying it flew in the face of the evidence.
Allowing the appeal, Lady Justice Sharpe said: "The tribunal's failure to find that there was a sexual motivation for Dr Jagjivan's actions was wrong."
She ruled that Jagjivan, from Leicester, gave no other explanation for what he said and a finding that he was sexually motivated was "irresistible".
Getty Images 4 But he now faces being struck off after a High Court appeal ruled that his actions were indeed driven by sexual desire
Lady Sharpe - sitting with Mr Justice Dingemans - added: "In our view...there could be no motivation other than a sexual one for making statements to a partially dressed patient about intimate body parts and the stimulation of her vagina".
The judges substituted a finding that Dr Jagjivan's words were sexually motivated and sent the case back to the tribunal.
A panel will now decide whether his fitness to practice is impaired and whether he should be punished.Advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are pushing the international community to respond with increasingly strict sets of sanctions, with the latest round, passed this week, capping the country’s oil imports while banning its lucrative textile exports.
Despite the pressure, the Kim Jong Un regime continues to pursue the development of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could strike the continental United States, among other targets.
On Friday, for the second time in a month, the regime launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. It traveled about 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) before falling into the Pacific Ocean, the farthest a North Korean missile has ever flown. Within hours, the U.N. Security Council condemned the “highly provocative” missile launch.
Why is the North continuing its launches? Jenny Lee of VOA Korean spoke with former CIA Director James Woolsey to discuss the latest developments.
Lee: North Korea’s missile launch on Friday came days after the passage of a new sanctions package by the U.N. Security Council. What do you think were Pyongyang’s intentions?
Woolsey: The North Koreans wanted to shove themselves forward and say, “I am not intimidated by any sanctions. Leave me alone. I am a powerful nuclear power.” That’s their message.
Q: How likely is it that the Kim regime has developed a functional ICBM and a miniaturized warhead?
A: Probably not fully yet. But it doesn’t matter because they don’t need an intercontinental ballistic missile in order to attack directly the United States. They can do so with a satellite launch and [they] have nuclear weapons contained in the satellite that continues to circle the Earth a couple of times a day.... So it does not take an intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the United States. You can do it fine with a weapon on a satellite.
Q: You seem to be describing a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Could you describe how it works, and do you think the North Koreans currently have the capacity to carry out such an attack?
A: I think it’s likely that they do. The destructive mechanism would be, it would not go directly against people, but would destroy the electric grid. It uses a detonation up above the Earth. It would not be targeted at a specific location, a specific building or an ICBM silo or something. It would knock out the grid generally. That means there would be no food, no water, no telecommunications and no hospitals. It would be a hideous situation. So that could be even more devastating than a nuclear attack that was targeted on individual locations.
But having an ICBM that can be targeted on individual locations would give them more flexibility, and so I am sure they would like to have it. They are working on it, but in the meantime, in their hip pocket, I would say it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they could use a nuclear detonation on a satellite in orbit to create the electromagnetic pulse.
» What is an EMP?
Q: Do you think North Korea is posing a serious threat at this point in time?
A: I think it’s quite serious because it’s relatively easy to do. Orbiting a satellite is the easiest thing... and a simple nuclear weapon that is about the size of a golf bag... is not hard to fit on a small satellite like that. With a satellite you don’t have to worry about re-entry, re-entry shields, accuracy and a lot of other things that you have to worry about with ICBMs.
Q: North Korea threatened to lob a missile at Guam at one point, and as recently as this Friday, it threatened to use nuclear weapons to “sink” Japan and reduce the United States “to ashes and darkness” for supporting new U.N. sanctions. Why is the North behaving this way? What are its intentions?
A: They want to intimidate everybody else into making sure they get to hold on to their weapons, because they are convinced that that’s the only way that the Kim family can stay in power. They look at the history of Saddam Hussein, and the history of [Moammar] Gadhafi, and their conclusion is if we do anything to get rid of our nuclear weapons, we are doomed. So make sure we hold on to our nuclear weapons, and the best way to do that is to intimidate everyone and make them think that we’re right on the verge of using them.
Q: When it comes to dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue, the Trump administration has emphasized its willingness to resolve it through diplomacy but also has left room for military options, such as preemptive strikes against North Korea. So, do you think the U.S. currently is on the right track?
A: It’s hard to be on any other right now than to try diplomacy and hold military in reserve.... You can’t think of an overall approach that would be superior to what we are doing now. But in the future, if things get worse, would we consider using force against them and could we do so successfully? The answer is — I don’t know.
Q: The Trump administration is spearheading the effort to expand sanctions against North Korea and thereby isolate the country diplomatically and economically. Do you think they are sufficient to rein in the regime’s nuclear weapons program?
A: It probably won’t get the job done, but they should do as much as they can. As the Russians and the Chinese move them off of their almost total embargo of oil to 30 percent embargo, they could continue to press to get more of it — an oil embargo. I think we’ve got to work with China and figure out how, together, we could get something done here, because the Chinese are the mainstay of the North Korean government. They are powerful and they are right next door to North Korea. And they have at least some inclination to work with us — not as much as I would like. So we are really left with China. There’s not much to do other than to try to work with them and bring them along into tougher sanctions and tougher positions.One third of the way through the season, Oregon is looking every bit the national powerhouse its No. 2 ranking would suggest. The Ducks are dotted throughout the national leaderboard in several statistical categories. Among them:
No. 1 in rushing offense
(332.50 yards per game). That is nearly eight yards per game more than the next closest team, Navy, which averages 17 more carries per game than the Ducks. If the Ducks continue at this pace, it will be the eighth consecutive time they have led the conference in rushing and the seventh time they have finished in the top 10 nationally.
Tied for No. 1 in fumble recoveries
(eight). The Ducks are tied with Middle Tennessee and North Texas. Rodney Hardrick and Alex Balducci lead the team with two recoveries while Boskeko Lokombo, DeForrest Buckner, Wade Keliikipi and Rahim Cassell have all added recoveries. Tony Washington leads the team in forced fumbles with three while Taylor Hart has added two.
No. 1 in rushes of 20 yards or more
(19). The Ducks are also No. 2 in rushes of 40 yards or more (6).
No. 2 in scoring
(59.8 points per game). Baylor leads the nation at 69.7 and UCLA is third at 52.7. The Ducks have scored 50 or more points in all four games, the first time in school history they have accomplished that four consecutive games. Next up is Colorado, which allowed 44 points to Oregon State last week.
No. 2 in turnover margin
(2.5). Houston leads the nation with a 2.75 margin, with 14 takeaways and three turnovers. Oregon has 12 takeaways and two turnovers (fumbles by Thomas Tyner and Chad Delaney).
No. 3 in punt returns
(24.78), trailing only Kansas State and Boise State. The Ducks’ average was boosted last weekend against Cal, thanks to Bralon Addison, who returned two punts for touchdowns - one 75 yards and one 67 yards. Addison leads the nation in punt returns, with six for 219 yards, a 36.50 average.
No. 3 in sacks allowed
(3). Another tribute to Steve Greatwood’s offensive line. Only Nebraska and Navy (which rarely passes) have given up fewer sacks.
No. 4 in scoring defense
(10.8). The Ducks are tied with Washington for fourth and trail Louisville (6.8), Baylor (7.7) and Maryland (10.3). The Ducks have allowed only two touchdowns in the first half.
No. 4 in yards allowed per play
(3.82). This is the statistic that defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti looks at the most. The Ducks are on the field more than any other defense in the nation, so naturally they are going to give up yards. But when averaged out against how many plays they face, the Ducks defense shows their true mettle.
The links:
Oregon graduate assistant
this week.
before.
for his special teams performance.
The Daily Emerald looks at
.Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- A terrorist attack near the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, killed two consulate security guards and at least six others Monday, authorities said.
The two consulate employees who died were Pakistani, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said, and "a number of others were seriously wounded."
At least eight people were killed in all, a government official said.
All U.S. citizens were accounted for, and some had minor injuries, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
The coordinated attack involved a vehicle suicide bomb and attackers who tried to enter the consulate by using grenades and weapons fire, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.
The blasts in the capital of the North West Frontier Province came hours after a suicide attack killed at least 30 people and wounded 50 others in another part of the province.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks. In a phone call to CNN, Azam Tariq, spokesman for Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, said the group was behind the attacks in Peshawar and Dir.
The U.S. Embassy, in its statement, said the two attacks reflect "the terrorists' desperation as they are rejected by people throughout Pakistan."
Peshawar is about 75 miles (120 kilometers) from Islamabad, the country's capital.
Bashir Ahmad Bilour, a senior provincial minister, told reporters at the scene that several militants came in two vehicles. The first vehicle exploded near a security checkpoint, and gunmen in the second car opened fire.
The dead included two Pakistani security personnel working for the U.S. Consulate, one policeman, two civilians and three unidentified bodies, said Karim Khan, a senior police official in Peshawar.
"They were well-organized. They were well-equipped," he said of the attackers.
The three explosions went off within a span of 15 minutes in the area of Saddar and Hayatabad Avenue, near the American consulate and the Peshawar headquarters of Pakistan's intelligence agency, which was the target of a deadly car bomb attack in November.
The North West Frontier Province is rife with Islamic extremists and has been the site of recent clashes between Pakistani security forces and militants.
Monday's earlier suicide attack took place at a rally for the province's ruling Awami National Party in Timargarah in the lower Dir district, said lawmaker Mehmood Zeb Khan.
Hundreds of the participants had gathered for a rally to change the name of the province to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The bomber walked into the government building where the meeting was going on and blew himself up, said provincial spokesman Mian Iftikhar Hussain.
The province was given its current name during the British colonial rule. The party, which heads a coalition government in the province, wants the area's name to reflect its majority Pashtun population.
A bill to amend the constitution in support of the name change was expected to be introduced in parliament on Monday.
Journalist Nasir Habib and CNN's Elise Labott, Paula Newton, and Jill Dougherty contributed to this report.This week the debate over who should follow Daniel Craig as James Bond has reached fever pitch. It comes in the wake of author Anthony Horowitz’s ill-advised comment that Idris Elba was “too street” to play the role. Variety has now weighed into the debate with the publication of an interview with Elba (conducted prior to Horowitz’s comments) in which the star talks about the Bond rumours. And guess what? He’s up for it.
“If human beings want to know if there’s any connectivity between all of us, the one thing I’ve heard around the world universally is that, ‘You’ll be great at James Bond!’” says Elba.“If it should happen, that’s proof there’s connectivity amongst human beings. If everyone wants something, they can make it happen. That would be true.”
“It’s all rumour-ville,” continues the star. “I’m not speaking to the James Bond people. They are not speaking to me. So if it was to happen, there you go — the will of the nation. It’s an amazing opportunity. But who knows, man. I’ve stopped speaking about it now. Even speaking to you now, I shouldn’t have answered that question.”
Meanwhile, Elba has also responded to the Horowitz furore via a tongue-in-cheek Instagram post. “Always Keep Smiling!!” reads the message. “It takes no energy and never hurts! Learned that from the Street!! #septemberstillloveyou” Doesn’t sound like it’s phasing him too much, does it? Give that man a Martini…
For more great film and TV news, head to our movie channel or subscribe to Total Film.The decision by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to confront the woman who accused him of sexual harassment two decades ago has stirred up old and painful questions that have never fully been put to rest.
In an early-morning voice mail on Oct. 9, Ginni Thomas implored Anita Hill to recant the account that turned Clarence Thomas's 1991 confirmation hearings into a national sensation.
Why Ginni Thomas did this is unclear. Hill stands by her account, and she told ABC News and the New York Times that she found it offensive that Ginni Thomas asked her to apologize.
More mystifying, even to friends and associates of the Thomases, is the timing: After 19 years, the collective national memory of Ginni Thomas sitting in a Senate hearing room in a cheery plaid jacket, quietly wiping tears from her eyes, had faded. In its place was emerging a new Thomas, a woman familiar in conservative circles for her decades of activism.
Her high-profile political work is unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice. With hundreds of thousands of dollars in anonymous contributions at her disposal, she is becoming a political and intellectual force as the head of a new group called Liberty Central, which is aimed at turning the splintered and raucous tea party movement into something coherent and lasting.
She has also been establishing a public identity, speaking out on cable news shows and at rallies.
The morning she made the call to Hill, Thomas was receiving another kind of attention on the front page of the Times.
Its story questioned whether her new prominence and acceptance of large, anonymous contributions for Liberty Central - including two gifts of $500,000 and $50,000 - might raise conflict-of-interest questions for her husband.
Whether Ginni Thomas expected her call to Hill to become public is not known. But it had at least one consequence that she probably did not anticipate: It prompted a former girlfriend of her husband's, who had kept her silence since the 1991 controversy, to say publicly that she found Hill's testimony credible.
Lillian McEwen, a retired administrative law judge who said she dated Clarence Thomas from 1979 through the mid-1980s, told The Washington Post: "The Clarence I know was certainly capable of not only doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then."
Those who know Ginni Thomas say she has never gotten over the controversy, and she had said publicly that she hoped Hill would apologize someday.
In the aftermath of the confirmation hearings, she dedicated herself to repairing her husband's image. In a first-person article for People magazine published shortly after he was seated on the court, his wife likened Hill to the spurned woman in the movie "Fatal Attraction" and added: "I always believed she was probably someone in love with my husband and never got what she wanted."
In 1993, Ginni Thomas attended a book party for author David Brock upon the publication of his book "The Real Anita Hill," which raised questions about Hill's credibility. When he admitted in a subsequent book, "Blinded by the Right," that his Hill reporting had been slanted, he became a pariah among conservatives. A concerned Thomas left a voice mail for Brock saying that she was praying for him and that she hoped they could still be friends.
And in November 1999, after Washington Post reporter Tom Jackman wrote a story about a man who had been falsely accused of indecent exposure, Jackman received a call from a distraught woman who said it reminded her of the ordeal she and her husband had suffered.
"My husband's name is Clarence Thomas," she said.
"She's still affected by it. I just pray and hope she can find peace with this situation," said conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, who was once an aide to Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "This is not even about the justice. It's about his wife. This is Ginni Thomas. It was obviously something she needed to do."
In a statement released by her |
lean, NY. The Alick referred to in the message is Alexander Tumser, my husband’s grandfather.
Other details about Mr. Tumser:
Adolph Tumser was born in Amaliendorf, Niederoesterreich, Austria 12 Feb 1862, son of Ignatz and Juliana (Draxler) Tumser. He immigrated sometime in the 1870’s.
1880 US census in Olean, NY – farmer
1892 – “Adolph Tumser will leave on Monday for New York whence he will set sail June 15 for Costa Rica, Central America, with a colonization company.â€
1892 – Oct. 17 – Â returned from Costa Rica
1893 – Oct. 31 – married at St Mary’s Catholic Church to Katharine Leighton
1895 – bartender
1897 – clerk
1900 US census in Olean, NY – sales in cigars
1901 – cigar maker
1902 – clerk
1910 US census in Port Allegany, PA – cigar maker in cigar store
1920 US census in Port Allegany, PA – laborer
1933 – obituary says he owned and conducted a union cigar store – later employed by the Allegany Window Glass Plant – honorary member of the Star Hose Co. and member of Knights of Pythias and Elks of Olean
I’m not sure what Tumser’s connection was to Capewell although it does say he eventually worked in glass. Many of the Capewells also worked in glass.
Sadly, I don’t know who the other gentlemen are, but maybe these posts will provide somebody with a clue or an image of a relative.
Here’s hoping that there is somebody else out there who can supply another piece to the puzzle!
ADDENDUM
In my excitement, I failed to notice that Ann Tumser had attached some scanned photographs to her emailed correspondence. Here’s the scan of the postcard which is much better than my sad screen-shot above:
…and here is a picture of Adolph Tumser and a few other gentlemen in front of Lang’s cigar store circa 1900. Tumser is the second from the right.
Thanks, Ann Tumser!!!
Share this: Email
Facebook
Telegram
Skype
Pinterest
Tumblr
Pocket
Twitter
More
Print
LinkedIn
Reddit
WhatsAppStressed-out PS 8 parents line up to ask questions about their kids' futures. (Emma Whitford/Gothamist)
More than 100 anxious parents gathered in the auditorium at PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights last night to discuss the proposed rezoning of two public elementary schools serving swaths of Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Vinegar Hill and Fort Greene that are currently divided along racial and socioeconomic lines.
The rezoning would require predominantly white, upper-middle-class, bursting-at-the-seams PS 8 to move DUMBO and Vinegar Hill families to PS 307a school that is currently under capacity, and predominantly serves African-American residents of the NYCHA-run Farragut Houses.
Black and Hispanic students currently represent 34% of PS 8's student body, while PS 307 is 95% minority. Under the proposed rezoning these percentages are expected to shift to 25-35% and 55-65% respectively.
"This is a difficult process, and we don't do it well in NYC," said David Goldsmith, president of Community Education Council 13, which will ultimately vote on the rezoning. "We're the most segregated school system in the country. These are communities that aren't used to working together."
"We know some white people don't want to go to PS 307 because it's predominantly black," said a spokeswoman from The Church of the Open Door, which many residents of the Farragut Houses attend. "And some of the black people don't want this influx of white people coming in. To do it so shockingly and so quickly let's stop the present plan and fight for the time to create a new plan."
The rezoning plan offered by the Department of Education and the Office of District Planning would impact kindergarten and Pre-K students in the 2016-2017 school year, excluding those "grandfathered" into PS 8 by older siblings. According to ODP data, 162 kindergarteners live in the PS 8 zone, compared to 17 in PS 307's zone. Based on the department's projections, the new zoning would balance the numbers: 102 at PS8 and 77 at PS 307.
At last night's meeting, most of the parental indignation was directed at the DOE, which proposed the rezoning plan on September 2nd, and planned only two town-hall meetingsone at each schoolbefore a revised plan is expected to be presented on September 30th. The rezoning could be finalized before the end of the year.
Overcrowding has been an issue at PS 8 for years, and shows no signs of slowing down. According to the ODP, the school is currently at 135% capacity. This year, it had a waiting list of 50 students. Last fall, the NY Times reported that about half a dozen residential developments are projected to add more than 550 apartments and between 1,500 and 2,000 people to DUMBO in the next few years.
"When you look back at the current zones as they are, it's ridiculous," said Mark Dwyer, a father of a PS 8 kindergartener. "But it feels like [everything] is being dropped on us very quickly right now."
The ODP's proposed rezoning. Black lines represent proposed zones. Blue is current PS 8, salmon is current 307. (via)
"I am disappointed that you [the DOE reps] haven't involved [my] community," said one DUMBO father, who identified himself as a parent of a 1-year-old. "Why is redrawing a few lines on a map [a stand-in] for fixing a severely underperforming school? Because that's what the numbers show for 307. How is sending DUMBO and Vinegar Hill students to 307 going to fix its problems? If it hasn't happened yet, why would it happen next year?"
According to the NY Times, PS 8 3rd graders had a pass rate of 86% on state tests in 2012, with 1% performing "below standards." At PS 307, the pass rate was 16%, and 37% of students are below standards.
But some parents retorted that test scores are not a fair measure of a school's performance. Due to its overcrowding, PS 8 cut its Pre-K program in 2013, and has no language program. Students across all grades share a single room for art classes.
"In all honesty, there are a lot of really good things happening at 307 that aren’t happening here," said a new PS 8 parent, who asked to remain anonymous because she is a reporter.
"We have Pre-K and kindergarten students learning Mandarin three times a week," said Faraji Hannah-Jones, the co-president of PS 307's PTA, and father of a kindergartener. "We have our second graders learning to play violin, we have a health and wellness program. But you just look at the outward appearance. You see the Farragut houses."
Programming at PS 307 is rich, in part, because the school benefits from Title 1 fundingadditional funding for minority schools where at least 60% of the students qualify for free lunch.
Some parents at 307 fear that the drastic rezoning would jeopardize these programs. "We fought hard to build this school. And we're not just going to let people come from outside when we worked so hard and dedicated ourselves," said one anonymous 307 parent at the first town hall last week. "Our blood sweat and tears are here."
Still, Hannah-Jones is primarily concerned about the stigma some PS 8 parents and hopefuls have attached to PS 307. "You're on a waiting list by choice because you have failed to do the research on the other school," he said. "It's totally optional [to choose PS 8]. It's by choice based on emotion, opinion, and perception."
"You are using 307 to make your complaints about the process," he added. "I challenge you to walk across the street and talk to some of those Farragut mothers and aunties and sisters and brothers who have been to the school since it's beginning. They're the pioneers, they've been here before you have."
Benjamin Greene, co-president of PS 307's PTA, told the audience of PS 8 parents that he was trying to understand their point of view.
"Me and my co-president walked around DUMBO last weekend with our wives. And we talked to people about 307," Greene said. "Most of this is about fear of the unknown. You don’t know what we got down there!”
We have reached out to the DOE for comment and will update with any further information.
UPDATE: DOE spokeswoman Devora Kaye issued the following statement this evening:
“These zones were created decades ago and no longer reflect the needs of Downtown Brooklyn families. We’ve proposed a solution that will ensure each school has an appropriate zone size to create better schools for all students. We’re working closely with the CEC, members of both school communities and engaging parents to collect feedback before any final proposal is submitted to best serve the community.”In celebration of Disney Channel’s 100th original movie, Adventures in Babysitting (coming this summer), the cast is hosting a special 4-day Memorial Day Weekend DCOM marathon. Classic to current movies will air over the four-day period, which will also pre-empt the Disney Junior block on both Saturday and Sunday (a rarity).
The schedule follows:
Friday, May 27
10:00AM Kim Possible: So the Drama
11:20AM Read It and Weep
12:55PM Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior
2:40PM Jump In!
4:15PM Lemonade Mouth
6:15PM Zapped
8:00PM High School Musical 2
9:55PM The Cheetah Girls 2
11:45PM Zenon the Zequel
1:25AM Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge
2:55AM Twitches Too
4:25AM Alley Cats Strike!
Saturday, May 28
6:25AM You Wish!
8:05AM The Proud Family Movie
9:50AM Quints
11:25AM Horse Sense
1:10PM Cow Belles
2:50PM Twitches
4:30PM The Even Stevens Movie
6:15PM Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie
8:00PM Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam
9:50PM Princess Protection Program
11:30PM The Cheetah Girls: One World
1:05AM Zenon: Z3
2:40AM Halloweentown High
4:20AM The Thirteenth Year
Sunday, May 29
6:00AM Right On Track
7:45AM Full-Court Miracle
9:35AM Eddie’s Million Dollar Cook-Off
11:20AM Brink!
1:10PM Double Teamed
2:55PM Rip Girls
4:35PM Motocrossed
6:20PM Cloud 9
8:00PM Teen Beach 2
9:55PM Bad Hair Day
11:40PM How to Build a Better Boy
1:20AM Pixel Perfect
2:55AM The Other Me
4:30AM Genius
Monday, May 30
10:00AM Stuck in the Suburbs
11:30AM Halloweentown
1:05PM Zenon, Girl of the 21st Century
2:55PM Smart House
4:25PM High School Musical
6:15PM Camp Rock
8:00PM Descendants
10:05PM Teen Beach Movie
11:55PM Cadet Kelly
1:50AM The Cheetah Girls
3:35AM Johnny Tsunami
More info from Disney Channel:
DISNEY CHANNEL MARKS ITS 100TH DISNEY CHANNEL ORIGINAL MOVIE WITH A MULTI-PLATFORM PROGRAMMING EVENT BEGINNING FRIDAY, MAY 27
The 100th Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) premieres this summer, a milestone in the franchise that has entertained kids and families for over 18 years, set all-time cable TV ratings records, helped define a generation and launched some of today’s biggest stars. Ushering in the 100th movie, a re-imagined tale of the 1980s film “Adventures in Babysitting” starring today’s popular actresses and recording artists Sabrina Carpenter (“Girl Meets World”) and Sofia Carson (“Descendants”), is a nostalgic programming event featuring every DCOM ever made. The “100th DCOM Celebration” begins FRIDAY, MAY 27 with a four day marathon of the 51 most popular DCOMs followed by encore presentations of these and every other DCOM ever made through June. The movies will be seen on Disney Channel, the Disney Channel app and VOD through summer.
The programming event is sponsored by Great Wolf Lodge and Shopkins.
All 100 DCOMs will be available for sale throughout the summer on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video and Google Play.
From the first movie, “Under Wraps,” to 2007’s record-breaking “High School Musical 2” and last year’s smash global hit Disney’s “Descendants,” the DCOM franchise reflects values of optimism, self-expression, believing in yourself, and celebrating family and friendship.
In the U.S., across all basic cable, DCOMs have delivered the #1 cable TV movie for 14 consecutive years in Tweens 9-14 (2002-15) and hold the record of six of the Top 7 original cable movies ever (“High School Musical 2,” “Teen Beach Movie,” “Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie,” “Descendants,” “Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension” and “Camp Rock”).Will the IRS need 16,000 new agents to enforce health-care reform?
"One of the things in the health bill is 16,000 additional IRS agents," said Newt Gingrich, echoing the latest GOP talking point. Rep. Paul Ryan joined him, saying the IRS will get "16,000 agents to police this new mandate." But is it true? Well, no.
FactCheck.org gives you the rundown here, but just for kicks, let's track how an estimate becomes spin becomes a lie becomes a sound bite. First, the estimate: The CBO predicted that costs related to the Affordable Care Act would "probably include an estimated $5 billion to $10 billion over 10 years for administrative costs of the Internal Revenue Service." This money, incidentally, isn't to audit people or go door-to-door enforcing the individual mandate. It's primarily to give subsidies to qualifying small businesses and individuals. But put that aside for the moment.
On March 18, the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee put out a news release saying the "IRS may need to hire as many as 16,500 additional auditors, agents and other employees." As you might expect, "may" does some heavy lifting here. First, Republicans are using $10 billion, not $5 billion, as the number beneath their estimate. Second, as FactCheck.org says, the GOP "simply divided the spending (which they figured could be $1.5 billion per year once the law is fully effective) by the current average payroll cost for the entire IRS workforce."
In other words: No money for desks, office equipment, rent or anything else. Every possible dollar is hiring "IRS agents." And it doesn't account for annual raises. Oh, and before I forget, "agents" is also there to mislead. As FactCheck.org notes, "there’s a huge difference between an IRS revenue agent — who calls on taxpayers and conducts face-to-face audits — and the workers who make up the bulk of IRS employees. Those who work at the IRS include clerks, accountants, computer programmers, telephone help line workers and other support staff. In fact, IRS revenue agents make up only 15 percent of the IRS workforce."
So let's go back to Gingrich's original sentence. "One of the things in the health bill is 16,000 additional IRS agents," he said. First, that's not a "thing in the health bill." It's an extrapolation from a CBO report. Second, the word "is" is wrong, as even the original GOP spin only used the word "may." Third, the number 16,000 is wrong. Fourth, the word "agents" is wrong. But if the statement gets no credit for truth, it's at least efficient: Not just anyone could pack four falsehoods into 13 words. But Gingrich, now, he's a professional.
Photo credit: By John L. Russell/Associated PressBy The Associated Press | Posted - Jun 20th, 2016 @ 4:20pm
CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — A Wyoming man has been convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of his wife last November at the family home in Ft. Washakie.
Koby Dean Johnson was convicted on Friday of murder in the death of 36-year-old Rachael Noel Johnson. He was also convicted of using a firearm.
Prosecutors say Koby Johnson shot his wife to death in front of the couple's children. She was a nursing student at Central Wyoming College.
Christopher Crofts is U.S. Attorney for Wyoming. Crofts says Koby Johnson was convicted following a five-day jury trial before U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl in Casper.
Prosecutors say Koby Johnson faces a mandatory life sentence at sentencing before Skavdahl in August.
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
×Ilya Somin over at The Volokh Conspiracy, it seems, is no more a fan of Ron Paul now than he was four years ago. His criticisms remain about the same. This time around, though, he’s got a candidate to contrast Paul with in Gary Johnson. His conclusion? Johnson is a better libertarian than Paul. My first response to this was laughter. This is my second response:
To start, Somin nearly lost me in his first sentence when he suggested that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was even on the radar for libertarians considering voting. If anyone thinks a hypocritical drug warrior, who might be most charitably described as untested on foreign policy issues (and much less charitably described as a propagandist for the Empire), should even be in the running, then they should probably be disqualified from commenting on the question of who the most libertarian candidate is. All that said, we’ll give him the benefit of his doubts about Daniels for now and move onto his criticisms.
Ron Paul’s Unlibertarian Positions?
Somin claims that Ron Paul “has very nonlibertarian positions on free trade, school choice, and especially immigration.” He goes on to criticize Paul’s views on the Fourteenth Amendment. He doesn’t spell these criticisms out in this piece, but rather directs us to an older article from 2007. We’ll take each one by one.
1. Free Trade
Anyone who knows about Ron Paul’s policy positions would be shocked to find this on the list of his deviations from libertarianism. Doesn’t Paul support complete, unrestricted free trade? Has he not always advocated this? Yes, and Somin admits as much in his 2007 article. But this is apparently not enough. Instead, Paul’s libertarian credentials are called into question due to his opposition to “free trade agreements.” These, Somin argues, must be supported because they are better than the status quo. But is this true? Somin fails to address Paul’s arguments that these are not “free trade agreements” at all – but that they are instead managed trade agreements. Instead, he merely dismisses Paul’s refusal to support NAFTA and similar agreements as some misguided focus on libertarian purity and perfection as the enemy of the good. But this is not so. As Murray Rothbard explained many times, managed trade agreements like NAFTA are not a step toward freedom, but rather an extension of government controls. So much for that.
2. School Choice
A similar story with school choice. Ron Paul, an erstwhile opponent of the government interfering with people’s educational choices, is thrown under the bus for opposing the reformist “solution” of school voucher programs. Somin’s objections to Ron Paul’s position here is the same: he admits Ron Paul has a libertarian position on school choice, but thinks that some attachment to libertarian purity gets in the way of Paul taking steps to improve things. And, again, Somin declines to address the serious and significant libertarian criticisms of this proposed policy. Laurence Vance has done excellent work covering this issue, and Ron Paul himself has voiced the same concerns. Stefan Molyneux has raised some major objections to the idea as well. Far from the obvious libertarian position being one of support for school vouchers, even just as a stepping stone, it seems that they might very well be a step in completely the wrong direction.
3. Immigration
Here, you’ll find no objection from me on the criticism of Ron Paul’s position. I agree wholeheartedly with the libertarian critics of immigration restrictions and I make no excuses for Ron Paul’s position here, and I won’t go into wild speculation about whether he “really believes” what he says about immigration (given his change of heart since 1988). What he “really believes” is not my concern, rather I will focus on what he says, which seems to be that we must dismantle the welfare state before dismantling the statist border controls. This is an odious rationalization, and one that could easily be turned on almost any issue – we can’t end the drug war until we get rid of welfare and government-provided healthcare (as Ann Coulter says); we can’t get rid of the Patriot Act until we have stopped our foreign policy that promotes terrorism; we can’t get rid of welfare until we stop taxing and regulating the economy enough to provide everyone jobs; we can’t lower taxes until we pay off the national debt; and so on and so on. So, yes, Ron Paul’s position on immigration is indeed unlibertarian.
4. Fourteenth Amendment
I must admit, I do not know what to say about this. Mr. Somin claims that Ron Paul “thinks the Bill of Rights does not apply to the states.” This position, Somin thinks, is just “theoretically libertarian,” and only if one thinks that the Bill of Rights should apply to the states, but believes that, as a matter of fact, it does not. I won’t go into what the facts of the matter are (though I’m very skeptical of the claim that “virtually all libertarian constitutional law scholars” believe that the Fourteenth Amendment is rightly interpreted as applying the Bill of Rights to the states – Kevin Gutzman and Thomas Woods both come to mind as scholars who might take issue with that claim, I would be surprised if there weren’t many others), instead I’d like to ask: is it the obvious libertarian position that the federal government should be empowered to impose the restrictions in the Bill of Rights onto the states? Gene Healy, Roderick Long, and fellow blogger Stephan Kinsella all have argued to the contrary. Ron Paul’s position here, at the least, certainly has support amongst libertarian scholars regardless of the fact of the matter.
Is Ron Paul more libertarian than Gary Johnson on any issue?
Somin has one last argument to go. He writes, “I can’t think of a single issue where Paul is more libertarian than Johnson, though I’m open to correction by people who know more about their records than I do.” Well, I might not know more about their records, but I have a few in mind. For the sake of argument, I’ll disregard the points I had above and call it a wash, except for that of immigration, and we’ll count that in Johnson’s favor. Here are three issues where Paul is head and shoulders above Johnson: 1) war, 2) sound money, and 3) torture.
1. War
Gary Johnson looks like a pro-peace candidate. He talks like a pro-peace candidate. But when it comes down to it, he is open to “humanitarian wars.” See here and here for the interview. So, as admirable as Johnson’s opposition to the current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya is, the difference between him and Ron Paul on foreign policy remains stark. From my point of view, this alone would be enough to put Paul miles ahead of Johnson – there is no issue more important than war. It cannot be repeated enough: War is the Health of the State. I take it, though, that Somin will not be joining me in this judgment, given that he wrote, “I don’t agree with Johnson on everything. For example, I’m significantly more hawkish than he is on foreign policy.” Yikes.
2. Sound Money
Ron Paul has made no secret of his opposition to the Federal Reserve. Indeed, it was the keystone of his 2008 campaign, and likely will play a major role in his 2012 run. He has brought the message of sound money to the masses and introduced the Austrian Business Cycle Theory back into the mainstream. On this most important issue, Ron Paul is the standard bearer. What about Gary Johnson? Admirably, he calls for an audit of the Federal Reserve, and should be credited for that. That puts him way above most candidates. But let’s not kid ourselves. Gary Johnson is not calling for the Federal Reserve to be abolished. Gary Johnson is not making the Federal Reserve into a focal point for his campaign. Despite the supreme importance of sound money in arresting the growth of the State, Johnson has given the issue very little time and supports what is, compared to Ron Paul, a marginal compromise position.
3. Torture
This is one I couldn’t believe myself when it happened. On Freedom Watch of all places, Gary Johnson said that he would not close the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, an absolutely appalling position. What was his justification? If we didn’t have it there, we would just have to open one elsewhere. Incredible. Why not at least give these men trials? Why not at least house them inside the borders of the United States where they might be afforded even the most minimal legal protections? This is a disgusting position. A few of my fellow bloggers commented to me that this does not represent a deviation from libertarianism on the part of Johnson, but rather makes him no libertarian at all. I could not agree more.
I could go on, but these three issues alone are more than enough to overcome any doubt on this issue. Gary Johnson has some great qualities – he supports marijuana legalization, he seems very serious about dramatically cutting spending, and despite his squishy position on it, he’s generally anti-war (for now). But more libertarian than Ron Paul? Don’t make me laugh.RI Teacher of the Year’s White House Photo Goes Viral
Rhode Island Teacher of the Year Nikos Giannopoulos had his photo taken with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office -- and it has gone viral.
On Giannopoulos' own Facebook page, his public post had over 11,000 likes on Saturday morning.
See Full Facebook Post BELOW
"Rhode Island Teacher of the Year 2017 meets the 45th President of the United States. That's all. Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead," he wrote, with "pride" flag emojis.
From Time to The Hill to the Huffington Post, it seems the media can't get enough of Giannopoulos' lace fan pic next to the 45th President of the United States, and the First Lady.
About Giannopoulos
Giannopoulos was honored in a surprise ceremony on June 9. According to the Rhode Island Department of Education:
Mr. Giannopoulos, who has taught at Beacon for the past six years, co-teaches classes in algebra, chemistry, and filmmaking. Mr. G, as he is known at Beacon, is also responsible for creating transition plans and evaluations for the students at Beacon with special learning needs, and he is the sponsor and coordinator the Gay Straight Alliance at the school.
“As we focus on coursework that is rigorous and relevant and on the importance of engaging students in challenging courses, I am glad that we have chosen as our Teacher of the Year an educator with such a diverse set of interests and skills,” said Ken Wagner, Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education. “Along with his responsibilities as a special-education transition coordinator, Nikos Giannopoulos teaches a wide range of courses, covering the arts, science, and mathematics. Additionally, as a sponsor of the Gay Straight Alliance at Beacon, he is committed to diversity and to creating a safe and secure learning environment for all. He is an excellent choice as the 2017 Teacher of the Year.”
Mr. Giannopoulos, who was raised in Pennsylvania and lives in Providence, holds a bachelor’s degree in French and the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his teacher certification in Secondary Special Education and Secondary English as a Rhode Island Teaching Fellow through the New Teacher Project.
In his Teacher of the Year application, Mr. Giannopoulos wrote: “The reason I remain a teacher today is that nothing I have ever done makes me feel as good as teaching does. I truly believe that the life of a public servant is as much a gift to the servant as it is to the people he is serving. … My greatest contributions and accomplishments as an educator are not awards or accolades. They are the students and artists I have nurtured over the past six years at Beacon Charter.”
In support of his application, one of his colleagues noted: “Nikos is as humble as he is effective, and, though he would never say it, he is without doubt the Beacon teacher who has had the most significant impact on students’ lives.”
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.For me and most people I know, internet access is a basic requirement of modern life. It’s not an optional luxury, like cable TV (and I don’t want to hear how Game of Thrones is a necessity, too) or heated floors or a 24-hour doorman.
For me, internet access is right on par with electricity (in fact, internet access is one of the most important uses of electricity) and hot-and-cold running water. Like more and more people around the globe, I depend on fast, reliable internet access to do my job, stay in contact with my friends and family, keep up to date on the latest news and information, and run the day-to-day routines of life. I choose where to live and where and how to travel with one eye peeled for internet access, and I willingly pay a pretty penny every month for the fastest, best service I can find.
+ Also on Network World: U.S. appeals court upholds net neutrality rules, but fight is not over+
I don’t know about you, but if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re in a situation much like mine. You spend an almost embarrassing amount of time online. And if you didn’t have good internet access, your life would be significantly less interesting and more difficult.
Everyone has the right to a fast and open internet
If that’s true for you, and for me, it’s no doubt true for most everyone else. And if we agree on that, don’t we also agree that everyone has the right to unfettered net access at a fair, affordable price? And if we agree on that, doesn’t it also follow that our rules and regulations covering the internet should help ensure that, and not reserve the best net access for only the folks with the most money and influence?
And, on the flip side, shouldn’t those regulations also help ensure that all the web content creators and online retailers and just plain citizens can use the internet to reach their audiences without some rich, connected competitor hogging the fast lanes and leaving only second-tier connections for everyone else?
I think so, which is why I believe last week’s appeals court decision upholding the FCC’s net neutrality rules make perfect sense. On June 14, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had the authority to classify broadband internet service as a utility, like electricity, subject to regulation for the public good.
Cranky telcos and ISPs vowed to fight the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, and I have no doubt they will do that. But let me ask them one critical question: Are they willing to live without fast and affordable broadband internet service?
If the net is just a luxury, well then surely the net neutrality objectors would be willing to go without it if the telcos and ISPs didn’t happen to find it economic to deliver to them. And if they were running a business, they’d be fine if the one ISP in their area didn’t want to give fast access to their credit card verification service because provider had a deal with a competitor. Similarly, they’d be perfectly fine if the telcos and ISPs wanted to slow down their content in favor of someone else’s words and pictures.
And if not, why are they so willing to let other folks do without?
That’s not how opponents frame the net neutrality argument, of course, but I believe that’s really what it comes down to.Kotlin is the new type-inferred hotness in the world of JVM languages giving you a single unified language for building Android, server-side and even JavaScript apps. If you’re a Java developer then giving Kotlin a spin is simple.
Video: How to Send and Receive SMS messages with Kotlin
But you can’t copy the code from the video, so you can download it from here or just follow along below:
Getting started with Kotlin on the Server
We’ll be using IntelliJ and Gradle for dependency management throughout this article. With a few extra steps you should also be able to use a different IDE and dependency manager.
In IntelliJ create a new Gradle project and add Kotlin (Java) as the library.
We will call this project TwilioKotlin and choose a package structure for our project. I usually use my own reversed domain as follows:
In “Project Name” leave it as TwilioKotlin and on the next screen make sure you check the “create directories for empty content roots automatically”
Click “next” again and choose a suitable location to store the project. I usually store my Kotlin projects under ~/Projects/Kotlin/.
Click “Finish” and your project will be generated.
Once that’s completed we will add Spring Boot and the Twilio Java library as dependencies by opening build.gradle.
group 'uk.co.placona' version '1.0-SNAPSHOT' buildscript { ext.kotlin_version = '1.1.1' ext.spring_boot_version = '1.4.3.RELEASE' repositories { mavenCentral() } dependencies { classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:$kotlin_version" classpath "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:$spring_boot_version" } } apply plugin: 'kotlin' apply plugin: 'org.springframework.boot' repositories { mavenCentral() } dependencies { compile "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jre8:$kotlin_version" compile "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web:$spring_boot_version" compile group: 'com.twilio.sdk', name: 'twilio', version: '7.9.0' } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 group 'uk.co.placona' version '1.0-SNAPSHOT' buildscript { ext. kotlin_version = '1.1.1' ext. spring_boot_version = '1.4.3.RELEASE' repositories { mavenCentral ( ) } dependencies { classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:$kotlin_version" classpath "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:$spring_boot_version" } } apply plugin : 'kotlin' apply plugin : 'org.springframework.boot' repositories { mavenCentral ( ) } dependencies { compile "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jre8:$kotlin_version" compile "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web:$spring_boot_version" compile group : 'com.twilio.sdk', name : 'twilio', version : '7.9.0' }
IntelliJ will ask you to import changes which will download Spring Boot and the Twilio library. If you’re on Windows you may need to force an update in case that doesn’t happen.
Inside /src/main/kotlin create a new Kotlin class called App.kt. This is our application class and tells Kotlin we’ll be using Spring Boot as a framework.
package uk.co.placona.TwilioKotlin import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication @SpringBootApplication open class App fun main(args: Array<String>) { SpringApplication.run(App::class.java, *args) } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 package uk. co. placona. TwilioKotlin import org. springframework. boot. SpringApplication import org. springframework. boot. autoconfigure. SpringBootApplication @SpringBootApplication open class App fun main ( args : Array <String> ) { SpringApplication. run ( App :: class. java, * args ) }
Make sure you change the value of package to match the one that corresponds to your project when you created it.
With the basic Spring Boot application defined, we’re ready to create our first route. Let’s start with a route that simply returns the string “Hello Spring Boot” when requested. Create a new Kotlin class on the same location as App.kt called SMSController.kt and add the following code:
package uk.co.placona.TwilioKotlin import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController; @RestController public class SMSController { @RequestMapping(value = "/") fun helloSpringBoot() = "Hello Spring Boot" } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 package uk. co. placona. TwilioKotlin import org. springframework. web. bind. annotation. RequestMapping ; import org. springframework. web. bind. annotation. RestController ; @RestController public class SMSController { @RequestMapping ( value = "/" ) fun helloSpringBoot ( ) = "Hello Spring Boot" }
As before make sure you change the value of package to match your project. Start the project by right clicking on App.kt and choosing “Run”.
IntelliJ will start your project and you should see a message at the bottom of the “Run” |
: Weird Provisions >Image copyright Reuters Image caption Thousands of police were also among those purged in the immediate aftermath of July's failed overthrow
Turkey has suspended almost 13,000 police officers for their alleged links with the US-based Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen.
The latest wave adds to the 100,000 or so government workers dismissed or suspended since July's failed coup.
Mr Gulen denies the government's accusation that he or his supporters orchestrated the coup.
The government in turn rejects claims it is using the coup as an excuse to get rid of its opponents.
It insists those without proven links to the coup will be freed.
Turkey post-coup purges convulse society
More than 2,500 officers whose suspensions were announced on Tuesday were police chiefs, said Turkish national police in a statement.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Turkey's government targets its critics
It comes hours after the government announced that a state of emergency imposed shortly after the failed putsch would be extended by three months when it expires on 19 October.
The emergency allows the president and cabinet effectively to rule by decree, bypassing parliament when drafting new laws and able to restrict or suspend rights and freedoms.
There are fears that under the state of emergency - and in a country where judicial independence has plummeted - opponents are being rounded up with little chance to clear their name, says the BBC's Mark Lowen in Istanbul.
He says the depth of the purge is staggering, with thousands suspended, dismissed, detained or arrested - from teachers to soldiers, police to judges, aircraft pilots to journalists.
In some areas, such as in eastern areas where there are large Kurdish populations, so many teachers have been detained - some accused of supporting the banned Kurdish rebel PKK group - that schools have effectively been forced to shut.
Silent schoolyards: Hatice Kamer, BBC Turkish, Diyarbakir
Image copyright AFP Image caption Some 4,000 teachers have been suspended in the city of Diyarbakir alone
In the Kurdish areas, education has been hit twice this year: First by violence between security forces and PKK militants and then by the purge that followed the attempted coup.
In Diyarbakir, the biggest Kurdish city in the region, 4,000 teachers have been suspended.
Ali, a high-school student, moved to Diyarbakir to continue his education after clashes in his hometown, Sirnak, closed all the schools.
But he has been stymied here too. Since the coup attempt 19 teachers in his new school have been dismissed, meaning there is very little tuition left.
He now uses the past tense when discussing his ambitions. "Going to university," he says, "was my dream."
"I was working very hard to get a good job. But even our teachers are jobless now. What's the point?"
The schoolyards in Diyarbakir are mostly silent as school directors search desperately for new teachers.
The government says they will deploy 20,000 teachers to fill in.
But time passes by. In this region, there is little hope among students, teachers and parents that education standards can be maintained.
More than 130 media outlets have also been shut down.
Turkish authorities have repeatedly appealed to the US to extradite Mr Gulen and say they have presented documents proving his involvement in the coup bid.
Over the weekend, Mr Gulen's brother was detained by police in western Turkey - the latest relative to be held. Mr Gulen's two nephews were detained in July and August.
Mr Gulen's lawyers insist he had no involvement in the coup attempt, and say he will not have a fair trial if extradited to his homeland.
Coup plot and anti-Gulen fervour
Image copyright AFP Image caption The ruling AKP staged huge pro-Erdogan rallies after the July coup attempt
Who are the Gulenists?
Who was behind coup attempt?
Brief guide to Turkey's coup
Turkey shuts more than 130 media outlets
Crackdown hits 'Gulen schools' worldwideThe stock market ditched Wall Street years ago. The masters of the universe, like the Giants and Jets, now scrimmage across the Hudson River in New Jersey—their trading these days done almost entirely by computers piping algorithmic playbooks into a fortress of servers in Mahwah and other competing exchanges nearby.
The small squads of human traders who remain on the floor at 11 Wall St., the New York Stock Exchange’s Teddy Roosevelt–era headquarters, are (for the most part) just playing fantasy football.
Yet just as the Big Apple’s football teams kept their New York names after wedding themselves to the Garden State, the financial industry, investors and the media continue to pretend that the Big Board is where the action is. We need to end this fiction.
How much actual trading is done at 11 Wall St.?
“It’s pretty darn close to zero,” said Eric Scott Hunsader, founder of market-data provider Nanex. “Even that is pushing it, because they don’t make markets, the guys in the jackets. They might say they do, but they don’t.”
(To understand just how much electronic and high-frequency trading have reshaped the market, I suggest you read Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys” or Scott Patterson’s superior “Dark Pools.”)
So this will be the last time you will see photos of the NYSE floor—or any of the world’s trading floors—on MarketWatch (unless something actually newsworthy happens there). The Big Board is now little more than a Big Tent for a phony media circus of photo-ops and cable-news talking heads. P.T. Barnum couldn’t draw the crowds Jack Ma did last month when he clanged the bell to kick off Alibaba’s IPO. The only things exchanged on the floor, however, were camera flashes, sound bites, and high-fives.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the photos of the guys on the trading floor. They are human emoji, a shorthand able to illustrate the full range of stock-market sentiment from triumph to agony. (Peter Tuchman, a 30-year veteran of the floor, was recently dubbed the “most photographed trader on Wall Street” by BuzzFeed.)
And, to be fair, these “designated market makers,” as the several dozen remaining floor specialists are now called, aren’t there entirely for show. “There is a value to having humans in place at the point of sale—seeing them there provides a sense of security and accountability that a wholly electronic exchange cannot offer,” said Eric Ryan, a spokesman for the NYSE. “When things are going fine—90% of the time you don’t need a person, but when there are imbalances, instability, or when a fat-fingered trader orders a million shares instead of 10,000, our guys can catch it before it hits the marketplace.”
Still, by relying on trading-floor photos, we have been distorting the truth rather than reporting it. We are doing a disservice to you, our readers, and therefore we too must change with the times and find new ways to illustrate the ups and downs of the market.
“The photos of traders, especially in times of jubilation or distress, have been the human face of Wall Street over the years despite technological changes,” said Wall Street historian Charles Geisst. But the practice only began after World War II. “In earlier years, editorial cartoons were used instead, and they were usually less than flattering,” Geisst said.
So how should we illustrate market stories now that the trading is really happening on what’s effectively the New Jersey Stock Exchange? Return to editorial cartoons? Animated GIFs? Photos of downtown Mahwah?
We need your help. Give us your suggestions in the comments or tweet them with the hashtag #NoSadTraders.
Get a daily roundup of the top reads in personal finance delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Personal Finance Daily newsletter. Sign up here.Donald Trump, challenged again to release his tax returns, offers a nonsense excuse for keeping them secret. But worse than that, the national political reporters covering Trump’s presidential campaign have, yet again, missed big, obvious stories about his conduct and character.
Compounding these errors, some journalists have reported nonsense as egregious as Trump’s, concerning what his tax returns would tell us. Many seem certain that they will reveal his actual wealth even though tax returns measure income, not net worth, as I will explain.
Still, there is plenty we can learn about Trump from his tax returns. Among the big stories the political reporters missed in covering Mitt Romney’s comments about the potential “bombshell” hidden in Trump’s returns — and the former Republican nominee’s ensuing tiff with the potential future nominee:
I expect Trump’s returns to be extremely aggressive, but well within the boundaries set by Congress and without even a hint of criminal tax evasion. I also suspect his returns will show negative income. That’s right — negative. The last line on the front page of his Form 1040 likely shows a number less than zero, because of a special tax rule for very rich real estate professionals that I’ll explain below. In essence, that rule means not having to pay income taxes.
Therein lies the biggest missed opportunity of all for American journalists. If only they would do the work needed to show how our federal tax system actually operates. The awful truth is that Congress burdens most of us with taxes, but for many of the super-rich, including Trump, the income tax system is a massive source of wealth.
By law, billionaire business owners can live free of income taxes if they wish. Every major tax practitioner knows this, as I have explained repeatedly in articles and books going back two decades — and as I will show again now:
Congress requires taxes to be withheld from your pay before you get the residue.
Serious reporting on the Trump tax returns issue would show Americans how Congress lets figures like Trump and Romney delay paying their income taxes for years or decades. These wealthy people receive zero-interest loans from Uncle Sam equal to the taxes they do not have to pay now.
Imagine how rich you would be if all the income taxes withheld from your paycheck — from your first job until your death — were instead available for you to invest. In time, your investments would grow so large that you could voluntarily pay the deferred taxes and still enjoy a fortune several times the sum of those taxes, even after taking inflation into account.
Congress says that Trump and Romney are entitled to zero-interest loans of their taxes. You are not.
Keep in mind: Donald Trump’s tax plan would plunge America deeply into the debt that he claims is such a huge economic threat already, as the conservative (and anti-tax) Tax Foundation has shown. Trump would lavish even more valuable tax cuts on the rich than George W. Bush did, as the highly reliable Tax Policy Center computer model found.
If we had Trump’s complete returns – not just his Form 1040s — we could establish exactly how he would benefit personally from his tax policy proposals, both in his actual financial situation and if he had the same income from work, from non-real estate businesses, from securities investments, or from retirement accounts.
Note to journalists: a 1040 is not a tax return; it’s merely one form. If Trump releases anything but the entire tax returns, the press corps should call him out on it.
It was during an appearance on Fox News, that Romney warned of a “bombshell” in Donald Trump’s tax returns:
“I think there’s something there. Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is or he hasn’t been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay, or perhaps he hasn’t been giving money to the vets or to the disabled like he’s been telling us he’s doing.”
When Trump said he couldn’t release his returns because of a routine audit, Romney called him out, tweeting:
No legit reason @realDonaldTrump can’t release returns while being audited, but if scared, release earlier returns no longer under audit.
The Romney-Trump controversy created what journalists call a “news peg,” or a reason to write about an issue.
But the biggest issue still not getting covered is that Congress has created two tax systems, separate and unequal. One is for workers, who are efficiently and thoroughly taxed with only minor opportunities to cheat. The other is for real estate professionals (Trump), private equity managers (Romney), hedge fund managers, and other highly paid executives, athletes, and entertainers, for whom Congress converts the burden of taxes into a profitable investment by permitting delayed payment.
Romney is right that there is no legal reason for Trump to keep a tax return secret, even if the IRS is auditing his 2011 through 2014 returns. Significantly, Trump called this procedure a “routine audit,” undercutting his rationale for not disclosing those returns.
One of the few journalists to get that right is Kelly Phillips Erb, a tax lawyer who writes a Forbes column. She notes that there are political, but not legal, reasons to withhold the tax returns. Chris Isidore of CNN Money also got it right (citing me as a source).
Releasing the tax returns will not tell the IRS anything it does not already know. And if his returns are honest then, at most, the IRS will dispute such matters as the timing of deductions, not their legitimacy. If that happens I would be the first to say his returns are clean, just as I have said about Dick Cheney’s.
You might expect that the right-wing opinion journalists who champion the interests of the rich and dismiss concerns about America’s extreme inequality would display some informed knowledge about the intersection of personal finance and taxes in writing about the Trump tax returns. You might think that, but you would be wrong.
A good example of the know-nothing journalism is the most recent offering by Jim Geraghty, who writes in National Review that Trump’s tax return will tell us how rich he is, citing a handful of clips.
Geraghty wrote, “If Trump’s fortune is multiple billions as he contends, one or two tax returns would have demonstrated the three sources [who claimed otherwise] were wildly off-base.” But Geraghty is wrong. Tax returns tell us about what Congress requires taxpayers to report as income, but not about their wealth. Trump’s returns might tell us something about the actual scope of his wealth, however, depending on how much of it is from depreciable assets.
Warren Buffett demonstrated how this worked in 2010, so it is not something that only a tax policy expert can understand (or that journalists couldn’t learn before writing). Buffett disclosed in a letter to a Republican Congressman that his 2010 tax return showed income of $62,855,038. Now that is a lot of money, more than the average American taxpayer would have reported after living for 1,110 years.
That year, Forbes Magazine estimated Buffett’s net worth at $50 billion, based on his Berkshire-Hathaway shares which, significantly, do not pay dividends and none of which Buffett has ever sold. He has given many shares away.
Buffett is much richer than Forbes reported, owing to other investments, but we do not know his actual net worth. And even if Buffett released his tax returns we would not know.
The income that Congress required Buffett to report equaled a bit more than a tenth of one percent of his wealth. Had he chosen to do so, however, Buffett could have legally lived tax-free by borrowing against his assets because Congress has decreed that borrowing is not a taxable event. Donald Trump’s tax returns, if we had all of them, may tell us how much he has used borrowing to avoid taxes.
I revealed Trump’s income and tax payments from his early years in my book Temples of Chance. In 1977 he made $118,530 and paid $42,386. The next year Trump reported an income of negative $406,379 and paid nothing. In 1979 he reported negative $3.4 million and again paid no taxes.
No doubt that reflects what Romney hinted: Trump may well report negative income and live tax-free, an issue the mogul and I once discussed at the old Trump Castle Casino in Atlantic City. (Incidentally my employer, then The Philadelphia Inquirer, paid for my lunch.)
Trump seemed to want to interfere with the IRS audit when he tweeted: “As far as my return, I want to file it. I will absolutely give my return but I’m being audited now.”
Asking the IRS to close the audit or face criticism seems innocuous, unless you understand what is going on politically with tax law enforcement.
Congressional Republicans, sometimes with the acquiescence of President Obama, have cut the IRS budget so severely that its computer systems are starting to fail and its capacity to pursue major tax cheats is drying up from a political El Niño. Yet wage earners are still being fully taxed. Thanks to shoddy reporting, most Americans believe the IRS “targeted” conservative groups seeking to influence elections — the so-called C4 organizations — giving Congress an excuse to cut the IRS budget. In fact, a mid-level manager in Kentucky who is a self-described conservative Republican ordered the focus on C-4 groups. And the documents show he was doing his duty because many of the C4 applications stated that the groups were partisan, which Congress has made a no-no for tax exemption.
Trump’s IRS tweet was part of a pattern. He only got his Atlantic City casino license because he somehow persuaded the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement to limit its inquiry into his background. Had Trump not succeeded he would not have been found eligible for a license because he concealed that he was the target of a bribery investigation, an issue outlined in items 13 and 14 of my 21 Questions for Donald Trump. Lower-level employees were denied licenses over much smaller matters.
Consider the contrast between Trump seeking to shield himself from law enforcement and his plans for harsh treatment of those who protest his proposals (including suggesting they be beaten up), his plan to send armed federal agents into millions of homes to find suspected illegal residents, and his plans to bar Muslims from entering the country, evidently including currently serving soldiers and sailors.
Trump should release his tax returns – not just a few but at least those since 1988, when he sought the vice presidential nomination that went to Dan Quayle of “potatoe” fame.
Dozens of tax returns by Presidents and candidates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt are available here thanks to historian Joseph J. Thorndike and Tax Analysts (for which I write columns on taxes).
Every return Hillary Clinton has signed since 1992, in full, is there to read, including her 2014 return showing the Clintons made almost $28 million that year, while giving more than a tenth of those earnings to the Clinton Family Foundation.
Since there is no legal reason to hide his tax returns, and since Trump wants to make a major change in our tax system that analysis shows would shower favors on people like himself, and since he has a long history of trying to restrict law enforcement inquiries into his conduct: Why aren’t we seeing gaggles of reporters demanding answers from him?
The reason is that Trump keeps journalists in a fenced-off corral, to make sure no one can ask a question he does not expect. Think about that in terms of accountability if Trump were to become president.
But the equally important issue that Romney, of all people, has opened the door to examining is how our federal tax system takes from the many while enriching a select few.
Why has not one presidential debate questioner asked about the tax system? Why is this inequity not a Page One story in every paper in America? Why is this sore topic never mentioned on the nightly network newscasts? Why do politicians left and right nearly all avoid this issue?
Where are the editorials calling for hearings and naming the politicians who (often unknowingly) voted to create this system of redistribution for the richest of the rich?
Oh, I forgot, it takes a lot of work to understand our tax code and then translate how it works in plain English. And why do the work at reporting when Trump will say wild, baseless, and sometimes crazy things that fascinate big audiences, regardless of whether they are applauding or appalled?
Why risk criticism for doing what should be the routine work of trying to make a politician accountable, especially when journalists win so many rewards for the easy job of glitz-mongering?
If you want to understand these issues in depth read my books Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch, and The Fine Print; this cover story I wrote for Newsweek,and my Tax Analysts columns (paywall for most) including this one outside the paywall headlined “Master Limited Partnerships: Paying Other People’s Taxes.”
Photo: Marco Rubio and Donald Trump react to each other as they discuss an issue during the debate sponsored by CNN for the 2016 Republican U.S. presidential candidates in Houston, Texas, February 25, 2016. REUTERS/Mike StoneAbout two years ago Samsung released the Galaxy S3 Mini – a budget-friendly device that borrowed its design language from the fully fledged Samsung Galaxy S3 and wrapped it around a set of low-to-mid-range hardware components. With top-range devices getting larger and larger, the whole idea behind the Mini was to offer a smaller screen on a flagship-like smartphone that costs much less than the model used as an inspiration. Needless to say, the Galaxy S3 Mini has opened the floodgates to a whole market segment. Fast forward until this year, and manufacturers such as HTC, LG and Sony are all playing the “Mini” game. Evidently, Samsung continued the legacy as well, and following the release of the SGS4 Mini last year, the manufacturer has recently announced a brand new sequel, dubbed the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini.
The SGS5 Mini is still not available for purchase, but the handset is official and the hardware specifications are no longer a mystery, for the most part. We take a look at the device and see what it has to offer, especially in comparison with last year’s Galaxy S4 Mini. Care to learn more? Then without further ado, here’s our Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini overview.
Hardware Specifications – CPU, RAM, Storage
Interestingly enough, one of the very few questions that have remained unanswered in regards to the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini has to do with the processor. Although the device seems to make use of a quad-core CPU clocked at 1.4 GHz per core, Samsung hasn’t announced the exact type or brand of processor. In fact, word is that this is an in-house CPU, so only time will tell by how much it can outperform the 1.7 GHz Snapdragon 400 dual-core CPU used by the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini.
In terms of RAM, both the S4 and S5 Mini feature 1.5 GB of memory, but storage-wise the SGS5 Mini steps it up a notch by delivering 16 GB of on-board memory as opposed to 8 GB. Both models come with a microSD card slot which can be used to expand the storage by up to an additional 64 GB.
Display and Camera
As expected, the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini brings a number of improvements in the display department as well. For starters, the handset’s screen now measures 4.5 inches as opposed to 4.3 inches. In addition, the SGS5 Mini sports a resolution of 720 x 1280 and a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch, whereas the Galaxy S4 Mini makes use of a 540 x 960 panel with a pixel density of 256 ppi.
As far as the camera goes, both smartphones use an 8 MP sensor coupled with an LED flash. The situation is slightly different on the front panel, where the S5 Mini features a 2.1 MP sensor as opposed to a 1.9 MP unit, but overall, both smartphones are quite similar in this regard.
Design, Battery and Other Features
As expected, the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini borrows its design language from the top-range SGS5, and since the flagship phone has been built out of plastic, then it would be foolish to expect otherwise from the Mini. In fact, the gadget looks extremely similar to the S5, right down to the dimpled back pattern and the metallic rim surrounding it.
The S5 Mini measures 131.1 x 64.8 x 9.1 mm and weighs 120 grams, which means that the handset is both larger (on all sides) and heavier than the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. This is probably due to the fact that the S5 Mini packs a slightly larger screen, but the dust and waterproof IP67 certification may have taken its toll as well. Not to mention the fact that the SGS5 Mini’s battery is 200 mAh larger, for a total of 2,100 mAh.
In addition, the S5 Mini also features a heart rate monitor and comes with a fingerprint scanner embedded in the home button.
Last but not least, the Galaxy S5 Mini will be released with Android 4.4 KitKat on-board, whereas the Galaxy S4 Mini is limited to Android 4.3. We suspect that the SGS4 Mini will receive an update, perhaps even to Android L, so the discrepancy in terms of OS isn’t really that big of an issue. Nevertheless, the Galaxy S5 Mini is a newer device and it will be supported for a longer period of time than the aging S4 Mini.
Final Words
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini is a superior device. It’s more up to date, and although it’s not as compact as its predecessor, it does feature a better display and more sensors on-board. Nevertheless, both smartphones are built out of plastic and performance-wise it remains to be seen how these gadgets perform side-by-side.
The SGS5 Mini is a better smartphone overall, but it’s also expected to go on sale at a higher price, perhaps $150 or more higher. Would any of The Diplomat’s readers be interested in buying the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini?
Vlad Andrici is editor for gforgames.com and writes about technology issues. Follow Vlad on Google Plus.When you discuss the risks and consequences of global warming in the public sphere it will often turn to how certain it is. Which is quite strange as there’s a scientific consensus of 97%, this is the percentage of climate scientists who agree that humans are causing global warming.
This is confirmed by several peer-reviewed studies that have found the same overwhelming agreement on this. A 2009 survey of Earth scientists found that among climate scientists actively publishing climate research, 97% agreed that humans were significantly raising global temperature. A 2011 analysis of scientists’ public statements about climate change found that among those who had published peer-reviewed climate research, 97% accepted human-induced warming. The most recent one was a 2013 analysis that examined 11,944 abstracts and again found this 97% consensus.
The same kind of certainty we find when we then take a look at the risks.
If we continue on the current business as usual scenario we can expect our planet to warm between 2.5 and 7.5°C (most likely 5°C) by 2100. This is based on the IPCC RCP8.5 emission scenario where atmospheric CO 2 levels will reach around 1,000 ppm by 2100. The important detail about this is that the last time CO 2 was this high was during the Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO), which was the warmest period in the last 50 million years.
During that period the planet was completely ice-free (sea-levels were +/-65m higher than today) and recent research puts global temperatures at +/-13°C warmer than today (Cabellero and Huber, 2013). Granted 5°C of that warming was due to changes in the positions of continents, vegetation, and the loss of continental ice sheets. But at +/-8°C and such sea levels eventually that much higher it’s a vastly different world.
It’s this kind of research that informs us that the consequences this century will be severe. Just looking at the recent IPCC report and it’s summary of what this will mean for crop yields shows that we have some serious challenges ahead if don’t do anything:
This is what makes the discussions about risk and certainty so strange. We know it’s happening and we know the consequences will be severe. Current research and reconstructions of past climates is what gives scientists and experts the confidence to say this. It also informs us that if we start acting we can prevent the worst of it. Yes, we’re committed to some warming, but if we act we can deal with that without too much trouble.
A good part of what we know about what can happen is because of the skill our current climate models have. They are incredible in what they already can do and are remarkably accurate when you compare them to past and present changes in climate. It’s also these models that tell us that there is hope. They show two very different futures when you compare action versus inaction. Gavin Schmidt gave a good talk about this and the choice we have:
Gavin Schmidt: The emergent patterns of climate change
Watch this video on YouTube
And here’s where Judith Curry enters the picture. She’s known for her argumentation that there’s just too much uncertainty to act (ignoring the point that uncertainty is not your friend in these cases). When asked about what the projected increases in atmospheric CO 2 levels would mean she said the following:
I don’t know how concerned I should be about it — on what time scale that might happen, whether that’s 100 or 200 years, what societies will be like, what other things are going on with the natural climate,” Curry says. “I just don’t know what the next hundred or 200 years will hold, and whether this will be regarded as an important issue. I just don’t know.
A really strange argument considering what we already know. But it gets even stranger when you see the following from her blog post ‘Atlanta’s 2″ catastrophic snowfall‘ (bolding hers, archived here). In it she talks about the consequences of not acting on uncertain weather predictions:
The rain/snow demarcation was a tough call, as it often is with temperatures right around freezing. It seems that the forecasts were good enough to have triggered a response prior to the onset of the storm. Excerpts from the Weather Underground article: To hear the public officials tell it, they were caught off-guard by the storm, so somewhere in that communications system there was a serious disconnect. The decision-makers either didn’t get the message, or more likely, didn’t have appropriate action plans, which the threatening forecast would have triggered. A major city, along with the state in this case, in spite of direct communications with the National Weather Service, is unable to put the pieces together to understand the RISK to their citizens. Risk implies uncertainty, and understanding it is at the heart of decision-making. Let’s say the chance of the storm producing 3 inches of snow was 30% on Monday, which sounds about right. The Georgia decision-makers didn’t understand that a 30% risk of a cataclysm requires major affirmative action. You can’t wait for a guarantee. How about a 20% chance of tens of thousand of people being stranded on the highway in freezing temperatures? Is that enough for a governor or mayor to make the decision to tell people to stay home? It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science. Mostly, you have to understand the ingredients that have to come together to create a disaster in your city. (See formula above.) Somewhere and somehow somebody has got to take the lead on closing the threat-understanding gap between forecasters, decision-makers, and the public. It’s not simple because of the division of responsibilities between various federal, state, and local agencies in a disaster. But, we’ve seen too many instances where good-enough weather forecasts have lead to bad decisions and poor public communications. The issue is partly science, which we should be able to solve with an organized effort by the National Weather Service, FEMA, and others.
She’s citing an article where a 30% risk of a “cataclysm” should have required “major affirmative action. You can’t wait for a guarantee.” She summarizes this at the end of her article with the following:
These two statements from the Weather Underground article sum up the situation IMO: Somewhere and somehow somebody has got to take the lead on closing the threat-understanding gap between forecasters, decision-makers, and the public. But this isn’t going to help unless you have an action plan that is developed prior to the event trigger:...or more likely, didn’t have appropriate action plans, which the threatening forecast would have triggered.
The hypocrisy here is that she said that in the case of this snow storm that it “was a tough call [… but] It seems that the forecasts were good enough to have triggered a response prior to the onset of the storm.” This is with her quoting an article that said that there was a 30% chance that this storm would have been disruptive.
Yet when she talks about the risks of global warming she says that there’s just too much uncertainty. Despite the 97% of experts saying that it is happening and warning us that we should do something. I truly don’t understand this disconnect between these two positions. Although what bothers me most is that people still listen to her despite this risk hypocrisy (and others making the same claims), statements that aren’t based on what is in the scientific literature.
Although how to solve that? I have no idea.I first picked up this book when I was 15, a dozen reads and 25 years later it's still the strongest work of it's kind I've ever come across. Clive Barker did not merely write "Weaveworld" so much as he composed it, and it stands in many respects an epic poem stylistically and structurally the equal to Homer or Shakespeare.
In the most basic of terms Weaveworld follows Cal Mooney, a London banker living with his ailing father who one day, while chasing an escaped bird, "falls" into a carpet, a carpet it seems that contains a world. Though he dismisses it as illusion, he can't shake it and becomes obsessed with finding it. He's not alone, of course, a young woman, Susanna the granddaughter of the carpet's owner also becomes entwined in the search. All the while they are pursued by a ruthless salesman with a magic coat that can produce your greatest desire from it's lining and enslave you in the taking. The salesman, Shadwell wants to sell the carpet to the highest bidder, while his companion, an magic creature in her own rite wants to control those within it, or kill them all.
The lore of the story is that all magical beings, to escape the scourge of men, devised a vast loom where the brought themselves and possessions to be woven into the carpet for safe keeping until a place outside the world of men (or safely among them) could be found. Nearly a century later, they are nearly forgotten, but no the power the hold, or that binds them now.
What follows is an epic struggle to possess and save the carpet and it's inhabitants including the inevitable unraveling, a showdown with a millennium old force, a fantastical exploration of a world inside a world.
This 25th anniversary text is bound on heavy paper with stunning illustrations, the sort of experience every book lover longs for, an great, epic tome of never ending mysteries and adventures, horrors and loves, sex and violence, the magical and the firmly rooted. Weaveworld is a must read, though be warned it's graphic and not for the feint of heart. Part of Barker's style is that he holds nothing back, it's graphic, poetic, brilliant and impossible to put down.WINSTON-SALEM N.C. (Reuters) - The sweet victory for a North Carolina man who beat police officers in a doughnut-eating contest this week soured after a newspaper story about the win led to his arrest on breaking and entering charges.
Bradley Hardison, 24, of Elizabeth City downed eight doughnuts in two minutes during a contest Tuesday night at an anti-crime event hosted by the city's police department, according to a story in the Daily Advance.
That report caught the eye of Camden County Sheriff's Lieutenant Max Robeson, who said his detectives had been trying to interview Hardison for about nine months after suspecting him in break-ins at two local businesses.
Robeson said they brought Hardison in for questioning on Wednesday.
"I said, 'Congratulations on your win last night,'" Robeson recalled, before arresting the man on criminal charges of breaking and entering and injury to real property.
Hardison remained in jail on Friday, the sheriff's lieutenant said.
(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett told a global audience in New York that racism and sexism in Canada have tainted the way some investigators handle homicide and missing-person cases involving indigenous women.
On stage Thursday at the Women in the World Summit, Dr. Bennett said there is at times an "uneven application of justice" in cases involving indigenous women. "You end up with people who have been told that it was an overdose, or a suicide or an accident," she said. "The file is empty because it was just an assumption that this death or missing person was inevitable.... Nobody is making this up. This is real for the families."
When confronted by the moderator with the title of the panel, Canada's Shame: The Murdered and Missing, Dr. Bennett said bluntly: "It's the truth. Without the truth we will never fix this problem. … We've got to deal with the issues around poverty, violence and education, and the racism and sexism that mean that when somebody who happens to be indigenous goes missing or is murdered, [the case] doesn't receive the same treatment as a non-indigenous person."
Story continues below advertisement
The minister and her three co-panelists – relatives of two victims, and a former Vancouver detective who worked on the investigation of serial killer Robert Pickton – laid bare the historic and modern social ills that render indigenous women vulnerable to crime in a country that is often on the international stage espousing human rights elsewhere.
In a phone interview with The Globe and Mail shortly before the panel began, the minister said she has little confidence in the RCMP's widely cited finding, released in 2014, that 1,181 indigenous women were killed or went missing across the country between 1980 and 2012.
"We don't believe that the data is of a high quality," she said. "They have what they have, but I don't believe it properly describes the issue."
Dr. Bennett has said she believes the tally is "way, way bigger," saying the number does not capture deaths investigators unduly deemed not to be homicides, missing persons that were never reported, or cases in which families hid the fact that their loved one was indigenous for fear police would take the case less seriously.
Dr. Bennett reiterated the government's intent to launch a national inquiry into the violence by the summer, telling The Globe she expects it to be under way before the House of Commons breaks for the summer toward the end of June.
Long before then, she said, the cabinet will approve the terms of reference and the choice of commissioner or commissioners. Asked whether the government has a shortlist, Dr. Bennett said a "very, very long list" emerged from pre-inquiry consultations that wrapped in mid-February. "We have heard, from coast to coast to |
and cancer — and a handful of broader, chronic symptoms are listed under the bill's doctor recommendation guidelines.
“The governor became very involved at the 11th hour,” said Barry. “There was already a compromise, and strong support in the Senate, but then he was sending signals that he wouldn’t sign the bill. It was almost like he needed to put his stamp on it.”
The administration has the power to expand the bill to include more medical conditions, but at a press conference held before the bill was passed, Cuomo appeared more concerned with showing that he could quash the law at any time than he was with implementing it.
“If there are unintended consequences, then we can suspend the program,” Cuomo said, describing the process as “you pull the plug out of the wall, the whole machine shuts down” — a particularly dark metaphor for killing a program aimed at helping the terminally ill.
A recent poll showed that 83 percent of New York voters support medical marijuana, with 51 percent in favor of decriminalizing personal use.
'It doesn’t augur well for decriminalization if, even after medical marijuana legislation, a veteran with PTSD can’t legally smoke pot.'
The bill allows patients to take their medicine via extracts, edible products, or by vaporization. New York Physicians for Compassionate Care, a group of doctors that support medical marijuana, sent a letter to the legislature in early June pointing to the large base of research that shows that smoking cannabis is safe and effective. Vaporizing can be expensive and, in some cases, might not provide the same palliative result as smoking.
“The cost of a vaporizing machine is going to create a barrier for poorer New Yorkers,” said Barry. Because cannabis is not approved by the FDA, insurers don’t cover costs.
Pope Francis spoke out against drug legalization — here's why he's wrong. Read more here.
Since the logic behind banning smoking was in part to prevent the spectacle of dispensaries with plants, it’s unclear if patients will even be allowed to vaporize whole plant material. Extracts and concentrates might have the paradoxical effect of increasing THC potency while eliminating therapeutically-relevant compounds.
“This is certainly an intrusion into the patient-doctor relationship,” Gabriel Sayegh, New York director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told VICE News. “It restricts the ability of doctors to make decisions based on their expertise.”
The law’s limits on who can recommend marijuana — only physicians and possibly certain nurse practitioners, at the state’s discretion and approval — has also raised concerns that patients in rural areas with a shortage of doctors could face an uphill battle getting treatment.
On Monday, Cuomo signed a bill expanding the availability of naloxone, an opioid-overdose antidote in increased demand due to an epidemic of heroin and prescription painkiller abuse. In New York, opioid painkillers like OxyContin can be prescribed by nurse practitioners and doctor’s assistants — the same professionals who haven’t been authorized to recommend marijuana.
Veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and other chronic ailments have been particularly vulnerable to opiate addiction, and they would stand to gain much from the legal availability of alternative treatments like marijuana. But the New York bill does not yet include PTSD — or muscular dystrophy and rheumatoid arthritis, for that matter — as approved conditions. A recent study has shown significant improvement among PTSD sufferers using medical marijuana.
Why won't the US government let veterans smoke weed? Read more here.
It doesn’t augur well for decriminalization if, even after medical marijuana legislation, a veteran with PTSD can’t legally smoke pot.
New York’s bill is even more restrictive than neighboring New Jersey’s 2010 medical marijuana law, whose implementation has offered a stark illustration of how an unfriendly executive can throw a wrench into even the best-laid plans. Governor Chris Christie, who took office after the law was passed, has refused to authorize different elements like access to medical marijuana from out-of-state, a move that would expedite treatment of the severely ill.
Because of strict hurdles and formalities, the program has thus far enrolled fewer than 3,000 people, which Christie takes as evidence that there is little demand for medical marijuana.
“When we run a medically-based program, you don't see the demand,” he told a radio station last week. “This program and all these other programs, in my mind, are a front for legalization.”
New York’s bill is a reminder that, despite the headlines, drug reform is glacial in the US. Widely considered a progressive state, New York only rolled back its draconian Rockefeller drug laws in 2009. Even the bill’s spelling of the drug — marihuana — dates back to the days when cannabis was first introduced into the penal code in 1937, a time when it was still referred to as “Mexican weed.”
It’s hard to estimate how many New Yorkers could make use of the program, but they number in the tens of thousands. They are dwarfed, however, by the roughly 400,000 New York City residents who have been arrested over the past ten years for marijuana possession.
Follow Samuel Oakford on Twitter: @samueloakford
Photo via FlickrI spent one and a half days this week at the SuperComputing #SC17 show in Denver. As per the organizers, #SC17 was the largest in the history of the conference. Attendees and participants ranged from global server, storage, network, software technology providers to universities and research organizations showing their work and use cases in Green Energy, Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Aerospace, Advanced Manufacturing, Autonomous Cars and other industries that rely on High Performance Computing (HPC). Thanks to my friends George Koivun, Fred Shubert, John Nguyen and Danny Hsu from TYAN for inviting me there. It was quite a fascinating show and some of the highlights that I captured :
GPU Everywhere
This is definitely an era of the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) as industries and enterprises go through massive change due to Machine and Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence and other Big Data applications. High Performance Computing is moving from University and Lab Research to mainstream applications as businesses are starting to realize the power of data analytics. NVIDIA had a noticeable presence throughout the trade show floor with several partners showcasing their products integrated into their systems. The company has transitioned from the GPU being used for 3D game rendering to accelerating computational workloads in areas such as financial modeling, cutting-edge scientific research and oil and gas exploration. In his keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang gave a nice overview of the growing importance of GPU. He explained how the CPU (Central Processing Unit) has been great for sequential computing but for some applications, parallel computing is unavoidable. For example, in certain applications even a small amount of code can introduce and contribute to over 99% latency. Such code needs to be offloaded and processed in parallel which is where GPU computing has been very successful in conjunction with CPU. He also mentioned that Accelerated Computing driven by GPU is about optimization across the computing stack – from architecture, processor, system, software all the way to developers who can write applications easily to take advantage of this architecture.
Jensen also introduced the Tesla V100 Volta CPU as the largest processor that the world has ever made. Cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Alibaba have adopted Volta and are offering/will offer GPU based cloud services. Additionally all major OEM server vendors i.e. Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM and Lenovo are offering Volta in addition to Pascal GPUs. As per NVIDIA, Tesla V100 offers the performance of 100 CPUs in a single GPU—enabling data scientists, researchers, and engineers to tackle challenges that were once impossible. The GPU is very suitable for autonomous cars, molecular dynamics, computational biology, fluid simulation etc and even for advanced Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications. At Dihuni, we believe that AI, ML and other data intensive applications will require to be processed both on-premises and in the cloud depending upon the application and we are suitably positioned to help customers with their GPU server processing requirements. For more information, visit the GPU server pages or contact us at digital@dihuni.com
AMD EPYC Servers
It was great talking to Scott Aylor, Corporate VP and GM, Enterprise Solutions of AMD and the excitement on EPYC CPU traction was very evident from him as well as the traffic I witnessed at the AMD booth. AMD EPYC servers are new and leading the way for AMD to re-enter the server market. As per AMD, EPYC, with all the critical compute, memory, I/O, and security resources brought together in the SoC with the right ratios, delivers industry-leading performance and enables lower TCO. With the flexibility to choose from 8 to 32 cores, EPYC enables you to deploy the right hardware platforms to meet your workload needs from virtualized infrastructure to large-scale big-data and analytics platforms and legacy line-of-business applications. With respect to HPC, AMD EPYC solutions target machine learning, weather modeling, computational fluid dynamics, simulation and crash analysis in aviation and automotive manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, and more. TYAN, Supermicro, Asus, GIGABYTE, Echostreams all showcased AMD EPYC based servers at #SC17.
Dihuni has been an early AMD EPYC partner with a wide range of server offerings. For information on the new EPYC servers or to procure, visit our Single Socket or Dual Socket Rack and Tower AMD EPYC Server store.
Global Server Vendors
I was amazed by the number of server companies exhibiting at #SC17. Fifteen years ago, you could count them on fingers. This time around there was huge presence from server vendors from around the globe. Vendors were displaying a portfolio of single socket and dual socket Intel Skylake Scalable Processor based Servers and some showcasing AMD EPYC based servers. Besides Supermicro, TYAN, Asus, GIGABYTE, Echostreams there were also companies such as Inspur, CRAY and major global players like Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo, NEC, Fujitsu, Huawei and others displaying their latest and greatest products. And there were others I cannot remember. It was also great catching up with former colleagues and friends : Carol Pflueger from Dell, Wally Liaw, Tau Leng from Supermicro and Gene Lee from Echostreams. Intel which was present in a major way at the #SC17 also announced that the Skylake Scalable Xeon now holds over 110 world records in performance and has delivered the fastest adoption rate of any new Intel Xeon processor with over 25 petaFLOPS of performance in 18 supercomputers.
Liquid Cooling
We have talked about Liquid Cooling forever but seeing some really good examples was very reassuring. Companies such as Asetek, CoolIT, Allied Control, Motivair and others showcased their Liquid immersion cooling systems and heat exchange systems for CPU and GPU based servers, HPC clusters and data centers.
So What’s Next?
Overall, a very productive show with great learning and networking. On my flight back, I started to reflect on HPC happenings at #SC17 and my experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data and how these are related. Over the years, I can see a convergence of technologies all under one big ‘Analytics’ umbrella for different Digital Transformation applications using AI, ML and Deep Learning methodologies. In IoT alone, the amount of data that will be available from connected industries and smart cities etc will be overwhelming and will need new technologies for processing and analyzing this data. We have barely scratched the surface there. Perhaps in future we may not have HPC as a term at all as we move from ‘performance’ to ‘accuracy’ and ‘reliability’ of outcomes from data analysis. Additionally, whether we call it HPC or not, such data processing and analytics technologies will have to get simplified greatly for mass adoption.For many retro gamers, it’s a hard choice to make when it comes to picking the greatest game in the Legend of Zelda series. While many will vouch for the Nintendo 64 classic, or the Super Nintendo epic, there’s still a vocal minority that stand by the Game Boy’s timeless entry in Link’s Awakening. One fan of the portable quest has decided to give it a more modern feel by porting the game to the Nintendo 64 using the Ocarina of Time engine.
Arriving as a fully fledged ROM hack of Ocarina of Time, Link’s Awakening 64 is a complete rebuild of the Nintendo 64 title from the ground up. With only the core engine of the N64 adventure remaining, Link’s Awakening 64 adapts all of the once 2D environments from the Game Boy into expansive and explorative locations. This sees the likes of Mabe Village taking on a more tangible form with familiar sights such as Bow Wow the dog bouncing around town, and even the iconic shops and challenge rooms too.
As it stands the patch for this ROM hack is yet to be made available, however, the creator has been posting regular updates and gameplay videos online. With the latest trailer showcasing a completed version one, we can only assume that Zelda fanatics eager to try this new development won’t be waiting much longer.
Link’s Awakening 64 (Nintendo 64 ROM Hack) Gameplay
Link: Link’s Awakening 64 Development LogSigned from Borussia Dortmund in June 2012 for £12 million – a fee which seemed slightly modest for a player that was at the centre of hordes of hysteria when he penned a deal with Manchester United. Sir Alex Ferguson must have thought he had pulled off a tremendous coup when Dortmund coach Jürgen Klopp was left in tears after the Japanese playmaker left the Westfaldstadion.
However two years into his Old Trafford career, the 25 year old has played more of the supporting role at the Theatre of the Dreams.
The 2013-2014 season has been a foreign one for the Japanese international who has had to play second fiddle to the burgeoning talent of Adnan Januzaj, the exciting 18 year old, and then in January the arrival of Chelsea’s £37 million playmaker Juan Mata.
These two factors have meant Kagawa only netted three goals last season, a figure halved compared to his first season in the Premier League. In comparison to his Dortmund years, the campaign prior to his move to England where he found the net 21 times in all competitions.
The attacker will be hoping the arrival of Dutch manager Louis Van Gaal will be the catalyst to revitalise his promising career.
However, an impressive World Cup could see us eulogise over the playmaker again and more importantly force his way back into the Manchester United first team following a dismal season for the 2012-2013 Premier League champions.
Japan’s place is an uncomfortable one in an uncompromising Group C alongside Columbia, Greece and Ivory Coast, with all four nations fancying their chances of making the knockout rounds.
After being left out of the squad four years ago in South Africa, Kagawa will be hoping to take a more starring role alongside AC Milan’s Keisuke Honda in Brazil and fire them deeper into the competition, having never made it past the Round of Sixteen.
A successful tournament will not only mean a rejuvenated Shinji Kagawa, but might also reinvigorate Japanese society – which it failed to do after co-hosting the 2002 World Cup.
The tournament was supposed to unite the nation and promote football as a global game which can be prized and admired, however with Japan failing to make it out of their group it was South Korea who were guided to the third/fourth play off by Guus Hiddink, and who won over the neutrals.
In Japan it is Sumo wrestling that is widely-known as the national sport with the 19th Century import of Baseball’s Nippon league being the country’s largest professional sports competition in terms of television ratings and spectators.
There are a multitude of rumours circulating around the red side of Manchester, with many saying this is the club’s most pivotal summer transfer period since Ferguson took the job. If Van Gaal can reinstate the club as a dominant force in the Premier League and across Europe then David Moyes’ brief and fleeting tenure will just become a distant memory. Toni Kroos, Arjen Robben and Mats Hummels have all been mentioned as players who could drive a side that finished seventh in the Premier League onto greater things.
Nonetheless twelve years on from Japan and South Korea’s tournament, the game of football is once again set to take centre stage – providing the perfect platform for Kagawa to arise from the ashes of the domestic season and set this tournament alight. Consequently silencing his critics and showcasing why he can play a vital role in Manchester United’s starting eleven for years to come.A Georgia mom and another woman were arrested after the mother's 12-year-old daughter was found sporting a tattoo that read "Jesus Loves."
The tattoo, inked on the girl from Newnan, reportedly was spotted by a fifth-grade teacher at her school, who then alerted authorities.
Another fifth-grade teacher saw the tattoo at a school dance, when the student wore a strapless dress. She described the tattoo as "bluish green with Jesus written above the cross and loves written below," according to WTVM.
The girl's mother, 35-year-old Emma Nolan, and the suspected tattoo artist, identified as Brenda Gaddy, were charged with tattooing the body of a person under age 18, the news station reported.
The girl reportedly told police that her father made her get the tattoo -- but later said her father didn’t want her to get the tattoo, and that she wanted it herself.
Nolan stated her tattooed daughter no longer sees her father and that she had no idea her father let her get a tattoo. Meanwhile, Gaddy reportedly said the mother gave the OK.
WEST VIRGINIA MAN BRANDED WOMAN WITH HORSESHOE, FORK: POLICE
"Each of the parents had a different story and it boiled down to, frankly, just finger pointing," Lt. Jason Fetner, of the Coweta County Sheriff's Office, told WLTX.
Investigators said they were able to confirm that Gaddy tattooed "a number of minors" at the party, the officer said.
"I think it's unfortunate in that the child actually wanted to get the tattoo," said Fetner. "It's not like the child was forced to get the tattoo, I think it just comes down to bad parenting."Since you all seemed to love my collection of 40 vegetarian mushroom recipes so much, I thought I’d make another little collection for you – in fact it’s not so little, because this time you get over twenty more recipes than you did last time! That’s right – more than sixty vegetarian black bean recipes.
Black beans are undoubtedly my favourite type of bean – they’re small and soft, and add a nice rich flavour and an extra hit of protein to your cooking. They’re perfect as the star of the show or merely in the background, plus they go perfectly in one of my favourite cuisines – Mexican! Here are some ideas of how to use these versatile little beans. Make sure you bookmark this list so you can work your way through alllll of these vegetarian black bean recipes at your leisure!
Soups and stews
15 minute black bean soup [vegan] (pictured above)
Mushroom and black bean chilli [vegan]
Creamy three bean stew
Slow cooker three bean enchilada chilli [vegan]
Veggie-packed slow cooker black bean soup [vegan]
Butternut squash and black bean dopiaza
Tomatillo and black bean soup from A Couple Cooks [vegan]
Black bean soup from Girl Makes Food [vegan]
Black bean and quinoa soup from Post Punk Kitchen [vegan]
Slow cooker black bean pumpkin chili from Kitchen Treaty [vegan]
Brazilian style black bean and smoked tofu stew from Veggie Belly [vegan]
Spicy vegetarian butternut squash soup with black beans, red bell pepper, and cilantro from Kalyn’s Kitchen [vegan]
Salads and salsas
Sweet potato quinoa salad with tahini dressing [vegan] (pictured above)
Roasted black bean taco salad with avocado lime dressing [vegan]
Black bean and walnut taco-style lettuce wraps [vegan]
Southwestern black bean salad from Skinnytaste [vegan]
Southwestern pasta salad with creamy avocado dressing from Two Peas and Their Pod
Pasta salad with avocado and black beans in a goat cheese lime vinaigrette from Carrie’s Experimental Kitchen
Strawberry black bean salad from An Edible Mosaic
Black bean salad with corn, red peppers and avocado from Once Upon A Chef [vegan]
Black beans with roasted tomatoes and feta from Annie’s Eats
Cumin lime black bean quinoa salad from Oh She Glows [vegan]
Burgers etc.
Vegetarian nacho burgers with nacho cheese sauce (pictured above)
Nutty pumpkin seed baked veggie burgers [vegan]
Zucchini and black bean burgers from Girl Makes Food [vegan]
Sweet potato and black bean veggie burgers from Cookie and Kate [vegan]
Carrot and black bean sausages from Tinned Tomatoes [vegan]
Cajun spiced black bean and sweet potato burgers from Tinned Tomatoes [vegan]
Southwestern black bean and brown rice burgers from Veggie Belly [vegan]
African-inspired sweet potato and black bean burgers from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen [vegan]
Easy double bean burgers with avocado basil cream from How Sweet It Is
Black bean patties with corn relish and avocado cream sauce from Annie’s Eats
Plantain and black bean croquettes from Two Blue Lemons [vegan]
Casseroles
Mexican bean lasagne (pictured above)
Mexican black bean casserole
Slow cooker Mexican casserole
Black bean enchiladas with avocado sauce
Spinach and black bean enchiladas with homemade sauce
Enchilada stuffed pasta shells
Sweet potato black bean enchiladas from Gluten-Free Goddess [vegan]
Mexican corn casserole from Girl Makes Food [vegan]
Pumpkin and black bean casserole from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen [vegan]
Stacked Roasted Vegetable Enchiladas from Two Peas and Their Pod
Tortilla pie with black beans and zucchini from Oh My Veggies
Southwestern quinoa and black bean casserole from Pinch of Yum
Burritos and tacos
BBQ bean burritos (pictured above)
Veggie burrito bowls
Slow cooker burrito bowls
Cheesy black bean and tomato tacos
Crispy black bean tacos from Domestic Superhero
Sweet potato and black bean burritos from FoodieCrush
Fried black bean burritos from A Beautiful Mess
Roasted veggie and black bean burritos from Aggie’s Kitchen
Crispy black bean quinoa burritos from Two Peas and Their Pod
Slow cooker sweet potato and black bean burritos with lime from Kalyn’s Kitchen [vegan]
Dips
Quick black bean dip [vegan]
Layered Mediterranean dip from Annie’s Eats
Warm and spicy black bean dip from Lauren’s Latest
Easy black bean dip from Two Peas and Their Pod [vegan]
Cheesy warm bean dip from An Edible Mosaic
Lime spiked black bean dip from Fabtastic Eats [vegan]
Other
Smoky black bean breakfast bowls (pictured above)
Mexican black bean stuffed potatoes
Ricotta and black bean stuffed peppers
Mexican baked eggs
Breakfast rice and beans
Mexican inspired rice with coriander pesto and black beans
Mexican courgette boats
Cheesy Tex Mex tortilla roll-ups
Spicy black bean and corn quesadillas
Crunchy veggie and black bean spring rolls from Foxes Love Lemons [vegan]
Sweet potatoes stuffed with chipotle black bean and corn salad from Alaska From Scratch [vegan]
Cuban black beans from scratch from My Life As A Mrs [vegan]
Black bean and cheese nachos from Tide and Thyme
Caribbean pineapple black beans from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen [vegan]
Spicy mango pizza with black beans and zucchini from Oh My Veggies
Mexican roasted corn and quinoa stuffed squash from Pinch of Yum
And if you’re after a little something extra…
Black bean brownies from Chocolate Covered Katie [vegan]
Well there you have it – more than 60 vegetarian black bean recipes! Which is your favourite?Getty Images
While it now appears that the NFL didn’t try to muzzle the family of soon-to-be Hall of Famer Junior Seau in order to avoid a potential concussion-related embarrassment, the NFL already is making plans for the potential concussion-related embarrassment that it never will be able to silence.
Per a league source, owners spent significant time at their May 2015 meeting discussing how to deal with and respond to the movie Concussion, which has a planned release date of December 25.
Produced by a group including Ridley Scott, Concussion stars Will Smith at Dr. Bennet Omalu and Alec Baldwin as Dr. Julian Bailes. The list of characters suggests that the film will focus on the tragic endings to the lives of Mike Webster, Andre Waters, and Justin Strzelczyk.
While that may not be the subject matter on which American movie-goers will choose to spend their 2015 holiday season, the Columbia Pictures offering will put the concussion crisis squarely into the minds of mainstream America, in a way that could make football fans feel differently about the NFL — and that could cause more parents to steer more kids away from playing football.
As Christmas presents go, the NFL undoubtedly would prefer a can of Simoniz.Courts in the US have consistently held that search engines have almost total discretion over the content on their pages and ranking algorithms under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. This is a legal defense against companies bringing claims about the economic impact of ranking changes or Google’s SEO-related policies.
However, a court in Florida has now allowed a case against Google to proceed, in which the search engine manually removed links it categorized as “pure spam” and in violation of quality guidelines. According to legal tech writer Eric Goldman, the Florida court disregarded “virtually all of Google’s arguments” to allow the lawsuit to go forward.
The case is called e-ventures Worldwide, LLC vs. Google. According to the facts laid out in court documents, in 2014 “e-ventures was notified by Google that 231 websites owned by e-ventures were being manually removed by Google from all of Google’s search results because they had been identified as ‘pure spam.'” Eventually all or most of e-ventures’ URLs were delisted.
The plaintiff argues its sites were not spam, that Google delisted it erroneously and that it has suffered “irreparable harm” as a result. After the plaintiff was unable to overcome the ban by making various changes to its sites, it sued Google.
In its complaint, e-ventures makes a number of different claims and arguments under several Florida statutes. The factual essence of those claims is that Google capriciously removed plaintiff’s sites in violation of its own policies and sought to use delisting as a tool to force plaintiff to buy AdWords. There are antitrust contentions and references in the complaint as well.
To be clear, what has happened here is that the Florida trial court has allowed the plaintiff’s case to survive Google’s motion to dismiss at the beginning of the case. It has not ruled on the validity or merits of the underlying claims. It has simply said there are enough facts to allow the plaintiff to proceed with the lawsuit. But the ruling is noteworthy because it seems to fly in the face of established legal precedent.
Eric Goldman summarizes the implications of allowing these kinds of cases to proceed — lawsuits against Google each time a ranking update or manual action by Google penalizes a publisher:
If Google can’t freely decide to downgrade or de-index what it considers to be “pure spam,” then Google faces liability pretty much any time it automatically or manually rejiggers its index (which always creates some winners and some potentially-litigious losers). It seems hard to believe that this case will be the one to break Google, especially given all of the prior attempts from more sympathetic plaintiffs, but that’s what makes this court’s initial ruling so disquieting.Though I label this an “Anime Review,” I’ve honestly been spending much of the last couple weeks enjoying both the vanilla PS2 game and the anime, Persona 4 the Animation. I’m not going to beat around the bush; I am a huge Persona fan. As much as I love the characters, story, and lore though, I have to admit to something. I absolutely loathe the original source content, the game.
Before I get started though, one of my favorite parts of the Persona franchise is its music, so here’s a little something for you to enjoy.
Persona Q is an upcoming crossover game for the two Persona games. It has an awesome soundtrack and luckily, has a theme for each protagonist of Persona 3 and Persona 4. Take your pick and rock out alongside me. Persona 4 on the left. Persona 3 on the right. Link will open in a new tab/window.
== Personal History ==
Before the review, let me share how I fell in love with Persona series.
Believe it or not, but I did not get into the Persona franchise by any of the main games. Most people get into the modern Persona via Persona 3 or Persona 4. I, on the other hand, was first introduced to Persona by one of the spin-off games: Persona 4 Arena.
I was visiting Anime Expo 2013 when the main screen of the Gaming Hall started broadcasting a match of P4A. I distinctly remember it was a Chie vs. Teddie match.
I had always enjoyed watching fighting games, but the main game of the time, Street Fighter, had an art style that just did not appeal to me. Suddenly, there was a flashy, anime style fighting game that was actually somewhat easy to pick up.
The character designs grabbed my attention and I grew curious about the series. However, my curiosity never grew beyond watching short scenes from the Persona 4 animation or gamplay clips of P4G.
Fast forward a couple months and Persona 3 the Movie: Spring of Rebirth is released, or in other words, subbed and uploaded on a streaming site, and introduces me to my favorite protagonist, Makoto Yuki (or Arisato if you read the manga. Whatever floats your boat. I saw the movie first.)
Persona 4 never really grabbed my attention because its atmosphere was too bright to my liking. I knew the premise of the story, of the murders, and of Mayonaka TV. But the color scheme of Persona 4 clashed with my idea of what a murder mystery should be, so I stayed away from the actual story.
Persona 3, on the other hand, had a creepy, supernatural art style that caught my interest. Shadows coming and killing people? Persona being powers to fight this darkness? Everything in that world was dark, thanks to the “Dark Hour,” and the heroes were the only source of “light,” in contrast to Persona 4 where the world was light except for the evil (hell, the final antagonist is the only one I consider truly evil. The shadows are anything but evil. More misunderstood than bad).
After watching and loving the first movie, I was finally intrigued enough to play the Persona games. Luckily, a friend of mine got a PS Vita and gave me his old PSP. Add to that one Persona 3 Portable game and I was quite the happy camper.
Due to the second movie not available in English and the third not even released in Japan yet, I’ve stopped playing P3P for the time being, to keep my game on the same pace as the animations. To continue my Persona obsession, however, I picked up Persona 4 on an emulator and played that.
I was sorely disappointed.
== I Suck at RPGs, Persona 4 ==
If Persona 4 has taught me anything about myself, it’s that I despise RPG games. Coming from having played Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 was extremely frustrating to play. In hindsight, choosing the hardest difficulty was a mistake that I extremely regret, but as I played P3P with no problems on the hardest difficulty, I had no reason to believe Persona 4 was any different.
Persona 4 had every aspect of RPGs that I despised. For one, character levels played a huge part in the gameplay. If your level was lower than the enemy, you not only did less damage but took more. The same was true vice versa. At all points, the game is a question of “did you grind out enough levels?” While this was true in Persona 3 Portable as well, it was much easier to grind levels because of the EXP bonus shuffle time card. At the end of a battle, you are given a mini-game to play where you have to choose a card from a shuffled pack. With enough mental dexterity, you can pretty much guarantee which card you will get. Persona 3 had different rewards ranging from EXP boosts to extra money and most importantly, different Persona (think Pokemon for you non-Persona fans). Persona 4’s shuffle time only had Persona available as rewards. I believe this issue is addressed in Persona 4 Golden, but it was still a major turn-off nonetheless.
The Social Links, on the other hand, were a hit-or-miss for me in both games. A Social Link in both games is the development of a relationship between the main character and one, sometimes two, other character. What it came down to was if I actually cared about the Social Link character or not. Social Links with other main characters, such as Yosuke Hanamura or Yukari Takeba, were far more interesting to me than other characters specifically created for these Social Links that have no impact on the main story, such as Ai Ebihara or Kenji Tomochika (don’t know who they are? I don’t either!).
Time spent with Yosuke, Rise, or others of the Investigation team was fun. Going to the shrine to listen to the stupid fox or the hospital to get hit on by that nurse was a chore.
My biggest gripe about Persona 4 is how SP is so difficult to regenerate in the game. Yes, you can pay the fox a fortune to get it back, but like I said before, the fox can die in fiery hole of fire. When I prefer using Agi (level 1 fire spell) over Agilao (level 2 fire spell), because it’s lower SP and still a fire ability I can use to exploit an enemy’s weakness, you know something’s wrong. Higher level spells should feel more powerful, more rewarding. They’re higher level for a reason.
I do have to say the option to friend-zone girls in Persona 4 is an option I wish Persona 3 Portable has as well. The idea that if you’re close to a person of the opposite sex, you must be in a romantic relationship is quite absurd; especially when maxing Social Links in Persona 3 Portable means you end up having to date multiple girls. I personally chose one and said “screw it” to the other female Social Links, at the sacrifice of battle prowess. Kept my man-card though.
== Animu for Lifu ==
When the frustrations of the game is swept aside and the core plot, characters, and setting is left, Persona 4 the Animation is what remains. After struggling past the third boss in Persona 4 (Shadow Kanji), I ultimately gave up on treating Persona 4 as an RPG and hacked the game on my emulator so I did not have to deal with the battles. Instead, I treated the game as an interactive story book (or visual novel for you Japanese aficionados). My enjoyment of the game increased immensely afterwards.
Persona 4 the Animation is exactly what I wanted for Persona 4 and more. The Social Links with unimportant characters were condensed, the main Social Links, while shorter, were kept, and the main plot points were faithfully told. Having played the game beforehand, though, let me appreciate the subtle references the anime made to the game, such as a scene with an “all-out attack.”
The most important thing Persona 4 the Animation did, in my opinion at least, is give the main protagonist, previously silent and nameless, a voice and name. In other words, Yu Narukami became a character himself. It was far more entertaining to see Yu solve the mystery and struggle than to go through it myself. Yu was no longer just an avatar; he was a character that I could relate to. I smiled when his choices coincided with mine and was intrigued when his choices differed. But because they were his choices, not mine, they felt natural, rather than staged, and fit the story far better.
The battle scenes were also quite refreshing to watch. In the game, an attack is a slash or a fireball or lightning bolt or whatever every time. But the anime’s battles were both a combination of cool attacks and battles of the mind. The characters’ fights with their alter selves, their Shadows, were less about if Yu can reduce its HP to zero but rather if the person can beat their inner, darkest thoughts. That is until Beelzebub came out. Then Yu just blasts all the shadows out of the water.
Battles against lesser shadows were short and clean. The team slices through an enemy and it dies. Done deal. Move on. Should these fights have been longer? Absolutely not. A couple scenes of killing mobs is fun to watch, but stretching it over the episodes is tedious and boring. It fits a game, but not an anime. Considering I hated killing the mobs in the game, having the anime gloss over them was a relief.
== Final Verdict ==
There’s a cross-dressing scene and it’s hilarious. Kanji (left) is not usually that pretty.
Persona 4’s greatest points are its characters and story. It has a great balance of hilarious moments and thought-provoking emotional conflicts.
First, the story hooks you from the get-go by being a murder mystery. Who killed these people? How were they killed? This hook then draws you into the TV world where the characters’ powers are revealed and true adventure happens.
Add to that varied and interesting characters, each with major development and awesome design and you have a wonderful series I just can’t get enough of.
I absolutely hate RPGs and Persona 4 was an absolute pain to play. But even after all that, I love the series and it holds a firm spot on my favorites list.
FINAL SCORE
8/10
While Persona is my favorite franchise, the length of time needed to fully appreciate the series makes it harder for me to give it a higher score. The game is easily 50+ hours, but playing it is worth it as the numerous Social Links really flesh out every character.
The anime itself is only 25 episodes. However, there are many corners cut to pack the game into a single season.
If you are curious about the series, but reluctant to fully invest in Persona 4, check out Persona 4 the Animation and the upcoming Persona 4 the Golden Animation (which is less the main plot and more a slice of life with the cast). If you want more afterwards, play the game. But if that’s not your cup of tea, don |
think they're safe going to the grocery store.That was not the case for a local father who was attacked and knocked to the ground by a complete stranger as he bought milk for his kids.Longtime Heights resident Dan Le has a swollen lip and two front teeth wired in place after his harrowing encounter."The guy came from nowhere, and bam, just one punch," Le explained.It was just before noon Wednesday when Le said he was pushing a cart out Kroger's front doors as his attacker approached."He was mumbling something and I wasn't paying attention -- and bam -- next thing I know I completely lost consciousness and I held my mouth, blood coming out," he said.The attacker took off as customers and staff rushed to help Le."Two front teeth completely fell out, but luckily the medic found them," he recalled.What Le could not find was a reason for the attack. He said he wasn't robbed and didn't recognize the man."I think it could be the knockout punch game they've been playing on the internet right now," he posted.ABC13 has reported on other cases nationwide of people randomly beaten for the sake of sport. HPD said it doesn't have enough information to know if that's the case."It's just sad to see people being mean to other people for no reason -- there's too much cruelty in the world these days," said customer Lisa Polydoros.Le said he'll return to that Kroger but wanted to share his story."I want people to be aware, pay attention to your surroundings, I will definitely do that from now on," he said.Kroger said the attacker wasn't loitering and was behaving like a customer. A spokesperson did not elaborate on what might have been caught on surveillance video but said the store is preparing a copy for police.Immunotherapy is one of the hottest emerging areas of cancer research. After all, using the body’s own cells to fight cancer can be more effective and less invasive than flooding the entire system with toxic chemicals.
Yubin Zhou, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Center for Translational Cancer Research at the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences & Technology, is studying how to use light to control the immune system and induce it to fight cancer.
“Although neuroscientists have been using light to stimulate neurons for years, this is the first time the technique, called optogenetics, has been used in the immune system,” Zhou said. In neuroscience, the process involves genetically engineering cells to produce proteins from light-sensitive microbes and results in nerve cells that will either send—or stop sending—nerve impulses when they are exposed to a particular color of light. “Neuroscientists have learned a lot about brain circuits using the technique,” Zhou said, “and now researchers in many other fields are giving it a try.”
Zhou and his collaborators have modified the technique for the immune system. It wasn’t easy: unlike nerve cells, immune cells don’t use tiny electrical impulses to communicate. Additionally, immune cells are located deep in the body and are constantly moving around, so getting the light to them can be difficult.
The development took some ingenuity and cooperation. “We collaborated with Dr. Gang Han at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who does bionanotechnology and photomedicine development,” Zhou said. “Together, we were able to combine state-of-the-art optogenetic approaches with cutting edge nanotechnology.” Called optogenetic immunomodulation, their method was featured in a recently published article in eLife.
“This work was driven by talented scientists in the lab: graduate students Lian He and Peng Tan and postdoctoral research fellow Guolin Ma, Ph.D.,” Zhou said, “who fearlessly undertook this daunting project and overcame all the challenging obstacles to make this technique into reality.”
With this method, the researchers can control the action of immune cells and “instruct” them to kill cancerous tumor cells. They use a near-infrared laser beam, which can penetrate deep—in this context, deep means a centimeter or two—into the tissue, where a nanoparticle turns the near-infrared light into blue light, and that directs the activity of genetically engineered immune cells. “We are able to wirelessly control the action of immune cells buried deep in tissue,” Zhou said.
The team genetically engineered immune cells so that a calcium gate-controlling protein became light sensitive. When they are exposed to the blue light emitted by the nanoparticle, their calcium ion gates open. When the light is turned off, the gates close. More light leads to a greater flow of calcium, so the researchers are able to finely tune the calcium-dependent actions of immune cells to fight against invading pathogens or tumor cells.
Continue reading on Vital Record.Ya’at’eeh shike’ doo shidine’e shi ei Remy yinishye. This is a message to the people.
If you see or hear goodness from me, then that goodness is from The Creator. I’m not the architect of that, I’m only the recipient. If you see weakness or shortcoming in me, it’s from my own weakness or shortcoming and I ask The Creator and the people to forgive me for that….
This a brief tutorial utilizing street art techniques to create fast, high quality protest art with a few materials around school, home or the office for Indigenous People’s Day. Prints of these different tribes can also be made into stencils to mass produce these designs in rapid guerrilla art fashion.
The concept of this process came from art that was developed for the Save Oak Flat campaign in Washington DC (http://bit.ly/OakFlatDC). I would like to give them a special shoutout for allowing me and others to create art on behalf of their community. Much love to all members of the Apache Stronghold who’s sacred land is currently under threat from the mining operations of Resolution Copper who could begin literally drilling at any moment now (http://bit.ly/OakFlatFB).
These shields were inspired by Lozen, a skilled warrior and a prophetess of the Apache, who are a world renown Indigenous warrior society. She was the sister of Victorio, a prominent Apache chief. According to legends, Lozen was able to use her powers in battle to learn the movements of the enemy. Victorio said, “Lozen is my right hand … strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy. Lozen is a shield to her people”. Since the government does not understand our words “sacred” and “holy”, we must talk in the language and symbols of the oppressor in order for them to understand us so these “Lozen shields” were created to reclaim Indigenous heritage in defense of our land, community and culture.
The language in some of these designs is very blatant and is intended to speak truth to the powers that temporarily be. Assuming we want to move forward together towards collective liberation, we must first have an understanding of the genocidal history of this occupied land in which over 500+ tribes and 100-140 million Indigenous people were murdered for. No matter where you live in this country you must understand you are on traditional tribal land that was stolen from us.
This art project is a small step towards the education of whose tribal land we are currently on which has been erased from this country’s history along with its Indigenous inhabitants. I challenge those who consider otherwise to search where their source of discomfort lies and more often than not, it can probably be traced back to lack of education in terms of history. This lack of education is a dangerous path and is evident in terms of who is in office currently but this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had a racist in office. If you disagree I also challenge you to educate yourselves on the policies of the president and self-proclaimed “Indian Killer” Andrew Jackson.
Of course this list of Indigenous tribes is incomplete due to the number of us that still fight for recognition due to the genocidal policies of explorers, slave traders, founding fathers and now corporations. This is a massive undertaking and I humbly approach this as a huge learning experience in terms of erasure and I will make many mistakes, spelling and otherwise along the way to create art for every tribe and community still under threat of extinction on this continent.
If you don’t know an Indigenous person whose land you are on, here are a couple of resources to help you learn which tribal land you are occupying:
• https://native-land.ca – comprehensive map of Indigenous land
• http://www.native-languages.org – breakdown of states with contact information for tribes
• https://wikipedia.org – searches of most cities will document some history of Indigenous inhabitation
To include your tribe in this project, please email: relatives@theindianproblem.org so a custom art piece can be created for your tribe and community. Please keep in mind, there will be limitations in terms of the white space versus letters so space is limited in terms of actual visibility and readability.
PS. Alaska, please bear with me, this is a labor of love and y’all have 200+ tribes so I’m going as fast as I can 🙂
Ahe’hee’,
Remy
*SSO USDAC.US
Click The Links Below
Signs and Shields Instructions
General Sign Prints
Feathers
A-Tribes B-Tribes C-Tribes D-Tribes
E-Tribes G-Tribes H-Tribes I-Tribes
K-Tribes L-Tribes M-Tribes N-Tribes
O-Tribes P-Tribes Q-Tribes R-Tribes
S-Tribes T-Tribes U-Tribes W-Tribes
Y-Tribes Z-TribesCorey Feldman promised that he would name all the people he claims sexually assaulted him when he was a young boy in Hollywood in the 1980s. Now, Feldman is doing just that. As seen in the below videos from The Dr. Oz Show, Feldman showed Dr. Oz photos of a man whom he claims “taunts” him by keeping photos on his MySpace page of Corey as a young child.
According to the Huffington Post, actor Jon Grissom is one of the people that Corey is naming; not to be confused with writer John Grisham, whose name appears prominently in Google upon searching for Grissom. Grissom’s body of work includes 1980s-era movies that also starred Feldman, such as License to Drive and Dream a Little Dream, according to IMDB.
During the segments with Dr. Oz, Feldman also spoke with the LAPD, after the Goonies actor refuted the statement from authorities read by Dr. Oz, in which cops claimed that Corey had never given them specific names of his alleged abusers.
As reported by Page Six, Feldman is naming alleged Hollywood pedophiles whom Corey said targeted him and other child actors, including his best friend, Corey Haim, who died in 2010 after a long struggle with drug addiction.
Judy Haim, Corey Haim’s mother, agrees with Feldman’s fight against child abusers, even if she believes that he doesn’t need to raise $10 million to do so.
null
According to Anonymous, Feldman has named other people whom he claims have preyed on children. In Feldman’s book, his abuser was named “Ralph Kaufman,” but Feldman was photographed next to “Alphy Hoffman,” reports the publication. It was an advertisement for Alphy’s Soda Pop Club, and people are reacting to Hoffman’s Twitter account recently being deleted. Google searches for Alphy’s Soda Pop Club have also increased, according to Celebrity Insider. The # AlphyHoffman hashtag on Twitter is now popular after Corey claimed the man “used to run a club for children and now works for the Los Angeles Dodgers.”
Meanwhile, a Facebook account named “John Grissom” is collecting hateful comments from folks who are accusing him of abusing children. However, that is the wrong Grissom. Another Jon found on Facebook has a Mexico address. Feldman’s interviews with Oz are getting plenty of views, as Feldman continues to expose those people he claims have hurt children.
“They’re living in Mexico... I found that out a week-and-a-half ago. I had a very lovely fan — I don’t even know that they’re a fan or just somebody that cares about this topic. But somebody on my Twitter feed posted a video saying, ‘This is the guy.'”
Feldman is focusing on exposing pedophiles in Hollywood.
“This guy on his MySpace page and his Facebook page has got pictures of me and Corey Haim. He still taunts it and flaunts it I’m going to give you the names of everybody... everybody I’ve got knowledge of, and I would like you to start putting the pressure on all of them.”
null
[Featured Image by Mike Windle/Getty Images for iHeartMedia]FOXBORO -- When Bill Belichick stepped to the podium late on Saturday night to rehash the eight picks his team made throughout the day in Rounds 4-7 of the NFL Draft, he called the selection of Navy's Joe Cardona a "need pick."
With only one other long-snapper on their roster -- second-year player Tyler Ott out of Harvard -- and incumbent Danny Aiken still a free agent, Belichick and his staff clearly deemed Cardona worthy of a fifth-round choice at pick No. 166 overall.
But because Cardona is bound by his commitment to the Navy, there is a chance he will not be able to join the Patriots with the rest of the team's rookie class. He will need special permission to delay his service and pursue his NFL career.
Neither Belichick nor Cardona could say on Saturday whether or not there was a definitive timetable as to when he will find out what he'll be permitted to do.
"We’ll work through the process," Belichick said. "There are some things that are out of our control, but whatever it is, we’ll work with it. It’s not the first time we’ve had a guy from a service academy and went through some version of this process. So we’ll see how it goes."
The Patriots have been through similar situations in the past with former Midshipmen Kyle Eckel and Eric Kettani. Both were signed as undrafted free agents.
Eckel was allowed to report to the team in 2005, was released and later signed by the Dolphins. In 2007, he was signed to the Patriots practice squad and eventually promoted to the 53-man roster. That season, in a story written by the Boston Globe, it came out that Eckel had been expelled by the Navy 17 months after his graduation. He was released by the Patriots in 2008 and played through the 2009 season with the Eagles and Saints.
Kettani was signed by the Patriots in 2009 and placed on the Military/Reserve list. In 2011 he was signed to the team's practice squad but was recalled by the Navy to serve. He was later allowed to pursue his football career again and has played on practice squads for the Redskins, Chiefs and Jaguars.
Belichick was asked how to reconcile the selection of Cardona as a "need pick" with the fact that Cardona may not be available to the team for some time. The Patriots coach explained that they would cross that bridge when they get to it.
"Well, [if] the player got hurt... that’s football," he said. "We’ll see how it goes. If he can’t play this year, then he plays next year. If he can’t play that year, then he’ll play the year after. He’s a good player. [We] felt like he was the best long snapper in the draft. So, we have his rights. Whenever he plays hopefully he’ll be able to contribute and play well. Whenever that is, we’ll see. I don’t know."
Because Cardona was drafted, and drafted relatively high for a player at his position, ESPN Boston's Mike Reiss wrote that could potentially enhance his chances of being enabled to pursue his football career.
During a conference call with reporters on Saturday, Cardona said he would be ready to perform either task -- play or serve -- but he understood the it wasn't up to him.
"The decision is out of my hands," he said. "Right now I’m prepared to be the best football player I can be for the New England Patriots and the best naval officer I can be. Whatever duty I’m doing at the time I’m doing it, I’m just prepared to do my best."
Cardona will graduate in a couple of weeks, and though many of his classmates have received their orders as to where they will serve next, as of Saturday he had not. He said he could put in a request for where he would like to go, and that he made it known he would like to spend some time temporarily in Rhode Island at the Naval Academy prep school.
"One thing that I was going to try to do was go back to the Naval Academy prep school, which is in Newport, RI," he said. "I went there for a year and kind of fell in love with the New England area, and hopefully I can go up there and help out with our football program for a little bit up there. After that, like I said, my orders haven’t been official yet, haven’t come in yet, so just waiting on that as well."
Even though Cardona's availability to the Patriots is still somewhat uncertain, Belichick and the Patriots front office felt Cardona to be a safe selection given his skill set -- he was viewed by many as the top snapper in this year's class -- and, very likely, his character.
Belichick's connection to the Naval Academy, where his father Steve was a longtime scout, is still one that he holds dear. Growing up around the program, he understands the kinds of values instilled in their students.
While Belichick wouldn't admit that where Cardona went to school gave him a significant edge over anyone else -- "If we think a guy can come in and help us and play for us, then we’re interested in him; it doesn’t make any difference where he’s from," Belichick said -- one could assume that being from Navy didn't hurt Cardona's odds in Belichick's eyes.
"It’s a tremendous honor and really a dream come true," Cardona said of being drafted by the Patriots. "I know that sounds cheesy, but I always grew up watching the Patriots because they’ve been so good forever. Like I said, it’s just a tremendous honor, and I’m really happy and really grateful that coach Belichick is taking a chance on me and giving me an opportunity to come out and play."A year ago today, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy made its debut at the North American box office. It earned $37.8 million on its opening Friday, that includes $11.2 million from Thursday-night previews. It would go on to make $333.2 million domestically and $441 million overseas. The space opera was adored by critics and audiences alike.
To mark the occasion, James Gunn (Slither, Super), who wrote and directed Guardians of the Galaxy, has written a heartfelt letter to fans thanking them for their support.
Gunn wrote, via his official Facebook page: One year ago today, Guardians of the Galaxy opened up in the U.S. and many places around the world. The movie massively over-performed that weekend, even by our own expectations, but what meant more to me is how much so many of you, no matter where you were from, took the story and the characters into your hearts. What meant more to me is that "We are Groot" became a rallying cry for unity among friends and families. What meant more to me is that you laughed at the dumb stuff I thought you'd miss, like "Cap'n's gotta teach stuff" and "I was thinking of something else." What meant more to me is that in our tenth week we were out-performing any comic book film in recent history - not because of the money, but because people were going back to see the film a second, third, fourth, fifth time, or more, because they loved it. What mattered to me is that after a lifetime of telling stories and half a lifetime making movies, I felt like you and I, filmmaker and audience, were at the same place at the same time.
It mattered to me mostly because I told a story fully with my heart, and you took it into yours. I don't think I can ever explain how much that means to me. It makes every failure I've ever had well worth it. I get a lot of messages from people saying, "You made me believe in movies again." Well, you guys made me believe that what I spent my life doing was worth doing. And you strengthened my belief that nothing's worth doing, if it's not done honestly, and it's not done with love.
On this, the one year anniversary of the cinematic Guardians entering our solar system: thank you, thank you, thank you. We really are, truly, honestly Groot. Love, JamesThe following interview by Wu Yi Hua with Taiwan master photographer and curator Chang Chao-Tang 張照堂 was first published by 報導者 The Reporter in Chinese. Republished here with permission and kindly translated to English by Catherine Tan & Valence Sim. Accompanying photographs by Yu Zhi Wei.
“A Photobook is more than just a book”
Q: Teacher, how do you look at a group of photography works? How do you understand different styles of reading?
A: In general, there are 3 ways to look at the works. Firstly, there is viewing at an exhibition hall which you can study those pictures carefully. If the venue is quiet, you can even view each picture at your leisure, carefully studying every picture’s subtle layer, detail, texture/quality. Using music as an example, this would be akin to listening to a concert because there is direct impact and feelings (of being touched) from actually being there.
The second is to read photo books. This is different from exhibitions. In an exhibition hall, you are surrounded by that space, you are embraced by that atmosphere. When you are reading a book, you own the physical book. With it, you can read anytime; slowly, quickly, from front to back, over and over again and break down its editing style. You can have more time to mull over it and compare. However, if one were to compare a printed product with actual photos, it is hard to feel the photographer’s air, feelings or aura. This is like buying a music record home. It is different from what you would experience at a live performance.
The other type is to view on the Internet. Due to the characteristics of the medium, it is fast, light and portable. Through the screen, images are luminated with light so images create a 3D illusion more easily and the colours are much stronger. But it is a phase. Images do not leave strong impressions easily after viewing. If one really wants to read and study photography work, I feel printed media is more convenient and suitable because you can read it anytime, concentrate on it, think over it, think over its background, setup, structure as well as the relationships between elements from start to twists to end, on how it impacts the narrative. Compared to other formats, reading photobooks is more beneficial.
Q: Teacher, what suggestions do you have with regard to reading a photography work?
A: First, you have to accumulate and grow in knowledge. Read widely, absorb different types of artistic works and stay concerned with trends of current times and society. With this foundation, you’ll naturally have greater understanding of its message and beauty when you approach different types of artistic work. You cannot be just a piece of blank paper or lack preparation.
Of course, each creator’s personality and style is different. We need to try and view the work with broader horizons/with open mind and empathy, which we will then be able to enter into a clearer emotional connection with the photographer, and be moved by the works. Being overly stubborn with one’s own narrow minded and myopic preferences will inevitably result in many missed opportunities for more wondrous viewing experiences.
Q: Teacher, can you tell us about what you consider as an editor when you are editing photography works? For example, 921 was a major incident to Taiwan. What do you think? What were your thoughts when you were editing 《Seeing Homeland Again: A Journey through 921 Photo Report/家園重見：走過921影像報告》 (published in 2000)?
A: This was an invitation from Taiwan Media Watch to do a retrospective photography collection of the year. Liu Zheng Xiang /Liu Chen Hsiang got me to plan this together. At that time, many photographers were also around, the works were very varied and there were quite a few photobooks published at that time too.
We didn’t want to do the same thing so we carefully selected a few close friends and invited them to show 921 through different approaches and angles such as reportage (Liang Zhen Ju, Li Wen Ji, Huang Zi Ming, Hou Cong Hui, Jin Cheng Cai), mental imagery （Yan Xin Zhu, Liu Zheng Xiang), experimental (Wu Cong Wei), archives （Shen Zhao Liang）, investigative reports （Zhang Cang Song, 、Xu Bo Xing） as well as organizing and designing some contrasting images （Lin Xi Ming, Hang Da Peng） to bring out the changes and differences in a disaster area. Finally, the book was edited into chapters according to theme, incident, photographic atmosphere and styles.
We encouraged the locals to shoot and asked them to contribute their pictures to the ending of the book. We tried to approach the topic through different angles. Besides showing the perspective of a photographer, we also wanted to convey how disaster victims view their hometown. This photobook is similar to 《To Have Seen The River/看見淡水河》（published in 1993）、《To Have Seen Natives/看見原鄉人》（published in 1997）. It was pre-planned and designed over a longer period of time, and not just a selection of pictures after an incident hence we can have an overview of the topic and make up for many areas.
Q: This was a book made up of works from different photographers. Some books consist only of works from one person. For example, Hsu Tsun Hsu’s 《The Party is Over/派對走掉》 (published in 2015). The book has both colour as well as black and white images. How did you decide on the final work as an editor faced with such differences in the work?
A: Editing a solo work is not the same as collective work because collective work has many images of different styles and tones so you have to tear everything apart and put it together again.
Editing a photobook is like a musician writing a song or filming a movie/documentary. It has rhythms – the ups and downs, climax and low point. It may be a slow build up initially, then the first theme may emerge followed by development, more changes and a short rest before the formation of the second theme, till it slowly builds up and reaches climax before quieting down again. We go back and forth like this repeatedly for many times. Basically, it has to have a structure and rhythm.
At the same time, one has to consider many elements such as colour tones. Every transition and individual chapter has to maintain a certain kind of balance so that the tones will not jump when the work is read.
Of course, the tone of the images is even more important. This may include different emotional states, conditions, speed, light and darkness, colour series, style etc. Thus it is not advisable to pit a picture with a soft atmosphere against a strong one. It will be too much. To put a frivolous one next to it is not compatible as well. The sequencing also has to abide by a certain order. It is not advisable to jumble present time, time and space sporadically.
There is also structure, angle, direction, proportions and so on to be considered in sequencing. The more images you have, the more choices you have. It is just like you have more to edit when you film more. There is more flexibility for change. Without sufficient material, there will be limits and it will affect the whole product.
In editing books, we frequently lay out the images all over the floor then one person may spend a few days picking and arranging them. There are even times when the edit is ready to go to print the next day but we suddenly feel something is amiss and need to change it quickly. There are also times when we feel another style of editing might produce more flavour after a book is published.
In conclusion, editing is full of different types of organic changes.
Q: Teacher has edited many books. If there is a photographer that you are not familiar with, do you first understand the person or…?
A：If I don’t know (the person)? I probably would not help the person to edit. *laughs*
People who ask me to edit are likely people I am familiar with. If I do not know them well, I will probably say “Sorry!”, unless the person’s work is unique and astonishing, then I might be tempted.
The premise of editing is you admire a person’s work. If you do not like or have any feelings towards a person’s work, please ask him/her to go to someone else even if you know the person well.
Nurturing editing is similar to nurturing photography. As you grow and gain experience, your accumulated knowledge will help you in choosing pictures and making edits. An editor’s preferences and resume should not only be just in photography. It should encompass other things such as literature, art, music, movies and so on, because this will affect one’s concept of editing.
Q: What is the most difficult book you have ever edited?
A: *laughs* Every book is difficult to edit. Recently, Shen Zhao Liang wanted to edit his new book 《Taiwan Variety Circle/台灣綜藝團》. This book was very hard to edit. He had taken a lot of shots with different subjects, incidents and situations. We had laid the images out so many times, arranged and rearranged repeatedly and added images. He had shot so many different things with quite a lot of changes within. It wasn’t easy to make sense of. It was quite a headache.
Sometimes making a smooth connection throughout a documentary work can be difficult even if you have sufficient material but lack elements to slow things down, contrast and create transitions.
Not every picture in a photobook or series needs to be exciting and captivating. In editing, this may cause images to fight and cancel out each other’s impact and strength because of excessive tension. There must be pauses, space and room for imagination in between.
Good photographers not only notice the main areas or key photos, but also pay attention to surrounding details and setups. One has to be alert to any instantaneous changes but also be able to quieten down to capture easily neglected corners.
Hence, don’t be too one sided with regard to structure, angle, movement and silence, control over space and atmosphere. Try to think of ways to explore from different levels. Be versatile. It is more exciting to edit photos taken with such professional attitude.
Q: Teacher has not answered which book is difficult to edit. Are there others besides 《Taiwan Variety Circle/台灣綜藝團》?
A：Xu Cun Xu/Hsu Tsun Hsu’s 《派對走掉 The Party is Over》 was not easy to edit as well because it was too complex. Initially, most of the pictures he brought me were inclined towards news reportage pictures of scenes from street clashes after the curfew.
Even though he was sensitive and skilled in satire, I told him this was not enough. It will only become a photographer’s retrospective collection. I felt an excellent photographer can’t only do news reportage images and should have other works.
After he asked for my help to edit, I kept asking him to go back and dig for more images. He continued to find things I wanted. When I was editing this book, the chapters at the start and end did not focus on politics or street protests, but of ordinary people and their existence. There were the innocent ones, the helpless ones，the lost ones⋯⋯That has a much greater reach and a greater representation of society as well as more photographic value.
To focus on politics is too narrow for a photographer. Photography should be more concerned about a wider spectrum of human nature.
Q: From my understanding, Hsu’s book had images that were taken in colour but the book was printed in black and white. This seems to be teacher’s suggestion? But 《Seeing Homeland Again: A Journey through 921 Photo Report/家園重見：走過921影像報告》 had both colour and black and white?
A: “The Party is Over” can’t be in colour because the fundamental tone of the book is black and white. It is stronger and more direct. He did not have a lot of images in colour and they were weak so I might as well express the whole work in black and white.
《Seeing Homeland Again/家園重見》 is a different book. That book involved the participation of many people. Most of them shot in colour, and color images have a greater sense of realism for disaster scenes. Its realism is more impactful and persuasive to the readers, so a mix between colour and black and white was used.
Q: Having both colour and black and white seems to be a challenge for publishers?
A： Actually colour is easy to print; black and white is harder. There will not be major differences if colors were used because it’s CYMK. However, black and white photos are harder for publishers.
Colour differences often occur when using CYMK to print black and white because of differences in the tonality of the colors, hence it’s harder to adjust. This goes the same if we were to do the same even for black and white, if we do not make accurate adjustments to the colors. If a photobook has both colour and monochrome images, the editor must really think through the layout carefully to reduce printing costs yet maintaining the quality of the body of work.
Q：Can you give one or several examples of books you felt was/were well edited?
A： I felt 《Homesickness. Memory: Deng Nan Guang/鄉愁．記憶：鄧南光》（published in 2002） was one of the better ones. This book took me a long time to organise because the book spans 6 sections including childhood memories, japanese photography, current news, social landscape, movie era， images of daily life etc. It developed according to timeline, space changes and was accompanied by high quality images.
Deng Nan Guang had published quite a few photobooks but in this book, it was well organised, quality and quantity were well taken of and photos and editing were exciting – elegant coupled with detailed reference material. It did take quite a lot of energy to edit.
Q: How did the chance to edit this book come about?
A: In 1992, the Council for Cultural Affairs had a plan for 《Family Gallery – Artists’ Biography Series/家庭美術館-美術家傳記叢書》 to be carried out by Lion Art. In the beginning, it introduced mainly painters but after a while, photographers were included. The first candidate was Deng Nan Guang. After that, there was Zhang Cai and Li Ming Diao of The Three Musketers and of course, Lang Jing Shan was included as well.
At that time, Li Xian Wen asked if I could help but actually, I had already helped Deng Nan Guang edit photos several times before in works such as 《Aspects and Visions/臺灣攝影家群象》 Series 1 in 1989,，《 To Have Seen The River/看見淡 水河》in 1993,《To Have Seen Natives/看見原鄉人》in 1997、《Woman. Taipei/女人‧臺北》in 1997，《Old. Taipei. Person/老‧臺北‧人》in 1998 and so on. On top of that, there were also documentary interviews that included many past stories from his family. We were provided equipment, artifacts, books, negatives, contact sheets etc. These were turned into essays step by step along with editing of photos. It took one year to complete it.
Q: Was “The Three Musketeers” your idea?
A: Of course not! In 1948, Shin Sheng Daily News organized a photography competition in Tamsui Shalun. Many photographers participated. In the end, Zhang Cai won first prize, Deng Nan Guang and Li Ming Diao shared the second prize. The three of them won the top three prizes. A younger photographer Huang Ze Xiu/ Huang Tse-Hsiu coined the term “The Three Musketers” after that.
Eventually, the three of them opened photography equipment stores in Taipei Central and provided scholarships as well as research support to young people through the setting up of institutes. They promoted photography passionately. “The Three Musketeers” continued to be passed down after that.
Q: But teacher, how do you think after you have edited so many books? As one ages, one’s thinking will change and have different thinking at different age. How do you see your process of change from young till now?
A: This is hard to say clearly. You always adjust your thinking and ways according to your age and growth experiences.
When one is younger, one tends to be more aggressive and reckless. As one grows older, one can’t help but mellow a little and become gentler. The advantage of age is maturity and calmness. The downside is indecisiveness and excessive worry. One is no longer as straightforward and energetic. We can only constantly remain alert and warn ourselves to continue to absorb (new things), renew ourselves, learn different things and continue to hard work to push forward.Ahead of the official announcement by RIM later today, we’re happy to confirm that we’ll be stocking BlackBerry Z10 Case-Mate cases. Case-Mate has always impressed with their innovative cases, and it looks like they’ve taken out all the stops for these BlackBerry Z10 cases.
We’ve got three Barely There slim cases, the super-protective Tough Case and two stylish Artistry Woods cases.
All of them will be in stock and will ship today!
Case-Mate Barely There
The Case-Mate Barely There is a classic slim case, offering the bare minimum of added size and weight while still providing excellent protection against scratches and moderate protection against drops. It’s made from an impact-resistant plastic shell, ensuring that your phone won’t take the brunt of any accidental drops or falls.
With the Barely There, you’ll barely notice you have a case on at all – until you notice how scratch and dent-free your Z10 is underneath! There are three different designs available, including a simple white and black option to match both colours of the Z10 and a more advanced ‘2.0’ option that comes with a cool brushed aluminium texture. On all models, all ports and features are fully accessible and the case will fit the new Z10 perfectly.
For an uncompromising slim design, you can’t get much better than the Case-Mate Barely There. For more information, check out the Bare |
with a victory at Il Lombardia last Saturday. He described his first season with Bahrain-Merida as'very good', insisting he has few regrets and is enthusiastic about what 2018 will bring. He will again race with instinct and natural aggression in the Grand Tours, with the tough world championship course in Innsbruck, Austria, an extra goal for next season.
Nibali finished third in the Giro d'Italia behind Tom Dumoulin and Nairo Quintana and then was second at the Vuelta a Espana behind Chris Froome. He is now one of the most consistent Grand Tour riders in the history of the sport. He won the Giro d'Italia in 2013 and 2016, the Tour de France in 2014 and the Vuelta a Espana in 2010. He has a total of 10 podium finishes, one more than the legendary Fausto Coppi and the same as Gino Bartali. Such is his place in the history of Italian and global cycling.
"Some people have said: 'You had a good season but you didn't win a Grand Tour'. I just shrug my shoulders when I hear that," Nibali tells Cyclingnews during an exclusive end-of-season interview.
"The only thing better than the podium is to win. I was up there fighting for victory every day for 21 days, so I believe that even second or third is a great result."
Nibali argues that the time trials in the Giro d'Italia proved to be a major handicap in his effort against Dumoulin in the Italian race, while Froome and Team Sky proved to be unbeatable at the Vuelta, with their strength in depth allowing them to dominate the racing.
Nibali and Froome locked horns on every key stage of the Vuelta. The Briton gained 57 seconds in the stage 16 time trial but Nibali pulled back 42 seconds the day after on the steep finish of Los Machucos, only to lose 21 seconds on the steep finish to Santo Toribio de Luebana on stage 18 as Alberto Contador ripped up the race in his long, aggressive farewell.
Nibali lost 34 seconds to Froome on the final mountain finish on the Angliru after crashing on the descent to the foot of the climb. He damaged his ribs but fought all the way to the finish to limit his losses and hold onto his second place on the final podium in Madrid.
Nibali and Froome have been fierce rivals in Grand Tours in recent years, with the occasional tense moment only tempered by growing respect for each other's talent and success. Nibali describes Froome as a 'nice guy' but that does not stop him sharing his blunt analysis of the Briton's ability and his weaknesses.
"I think the biggest factor between us at the Vuelta was the strength of his team. He was rarely isolated and rarely in trouble. Even when he had a bad day, like on the stage to Los Machucos after the time trial, he still had five teammates with him," Nibali says.
"I don't think Froome would have won the Vuelta without Team Sky. In my opinion, if he hadn't found a team as strong as Team Sky during his career, he wouldn't have won his four Tours."
Nibali lets his opinion hang in the air in silence for a second or two, adding emphasis to his words. He is complimentary about Froome's now famous high-cadence attacks, but he also underlines what he believes are Froome's weaknesses.
"Everybody has weaknesses. Froome's is perhaps when he's isolated. He's not used to being on his own in key moments of the races and so perhaps doesn't know how to best race in situations like that," Nibali suggests.
"We've never seen Froome go on the attack with 100km to go like we've seen Contador do. That's because he doesn't need to. He's got a strong team to help and protect him, so he can always wait until three kilometres to go and then make a move. They set everything up for him and make it easier for him. He's like a sprinter that needs to be led out until 250 metres to go. He then takes over and uses his better position and climbing ability to win. That's his speciality.
"Unfortunately, having a strong team around him all the time clearly makes him much more confident about facing his rivals."
Team Sky's strength in depth and huge budget allows them to field Mikel Landa, Geraint Thomas, Wout Poels, Sergio Henao, Michal Kwiatkowski, Gianni Moscon, Kelly Elissonde, Mikel Nieve and Diego Rosa across its Grand Tour rosters. Nibali had to count on Franco Pellizotti and Giovanni Visconti after illness and injury meant Kanstantsin Siutsou, Ion Izagirre and Ramunas Navardauskas missed much of the season.
Bahrain-Merida has a reported 2017 budget of 17 million Euros, with Nibali taking a big chunk of that as team leader. Team Sky revealed a budget of 31 million Euros for the 2016 season, which explains why they can build such a strong team around Froome and have other big names for the Classics and Grand Tours.
Team Sky's riches were never enough to convince Nibali to join the British team, but he now believes a salary cap would level the playing field between the WorldTour teams.
"Every team has its strengths and weaknesses and I'm not sure Team Sky would be right for me," he says. "There was a moment when I could have moved to Team Sky and it seemed like it was going to happen. But it didn't happen and they've never shown that kind of interest again. I've changed teams several times but I've continued to be successful.
"I think everyone in the sport knows that Team Sky is a super team, that they've got a 30 million Euro budget and that they seem to have bottomless pockets. It's logical that they use it to build such a strong team. I'm not envious of Team Sky but they're affecting the market. Team Sky can sign the world's best climber and the world's best sprinter if they wanted to.
"That's why I think there should be a limit on the number of big-name riders you can have in one team. As a way of putting the teams on an equal financial footing and perhaps to lower the costs of every team, perhaps there needs to a salary cap."
Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali at the 2015 Tour de France. (Getty Images Sport)
They keep coming but I keep fighting
Nibali will race one last time this season at the Taiwan KOM Challenge on October 20, tackling the 105km uphill road race with his younger brother Antonio as part of a visit to Asia to meet bike sponsor Merida. It is a final long trip, and with moving houses in Lugano, Switzerland, and his daughter Emma now at school, Nibali will have little time for an end-of-season vacation.
His relaxed nature and satisfaction with his 2017 season indicate he does not need it. He will recover from 81 days of racing with time off the bike and a spell visiting family in Sicily in December.
Nibali will celebrate his 33rd birthday on November 14, but the seasons do not seem to age him. His second place at the Vuelta and his victory at Il Lombardia have left him'sereno' - with a smile on his face and quiet sense of pride. He is not ready to think about 2018 and says he will only decide and reveal his Grand Tour goals for 2018 after seeing and studying the route of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. He has intimated to RAI television, however, that he is likely to ride next year's Vuelta and aim for stage wins as he builds towards the World Championships in Innsbruck.
"I've battled with the likes of Contador over the years, now I'm battling with the current generation and the next generation like Dumoulin and Chaves. They keep coming, but I keep fighting and will do so again in 2018," he says. "We started the Bahrain-Merida team from scratch, but now we've made it through the first season pretty well. I think my season has been very good and we can be proud of what we've achieved. I'm happy and the team is happy too.
"Trying to get a result in two Grand Tours in the same season is never easy. This year there were also some big rivals in both races, so to finish third at the Giro d'Italia and second at the Vuelta a Espana is the sign of a very good season. It shows I've been competitive throughout the season."
Nibali picks his stage victories at the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana as the highlights of the season. He explains how the time trials at the Giro d'Italia made it difficult for him to challenge a very strong Dumoulin, while his lack of a high-power change of pace lost him further time in the Giro and at the Vuelta a Espana.
"Dumoulin is a great time trialist, now he's even the world champion. He had two time trials that suited him and allowed him to gain a significant chunk of time. When you fight to do as well in the time trials, you finish fifth and still lose two and half minutes, it means that he's super strong but that you haven't done too badly," Nibali argues.
"I'm arguably good at every terrain. But I'm perhaps not the best on any of them. I have good and bad days and so can be better than my rivals but also be weaker than my rivals. That's the beauty of Grand Tours."
Despite struggling against the more logical, calculated style of racing imposed by Froome and Team Sky at the Vuelta a Espana and at the hands of Dumoulin at the Giro d'Italia, Nibali is convinced that Grand Tours are far too complex to be won or lost due to simple numbers. His coach, Paolo Slongo, helps him train with an SRM power meter, carefully following a plan, but Nibali races instinctively and emotively, suffering mentally after a bad day and then feeding off the emotional uplift of success.
Nibali followed his instincts on the steep climb of the Blockhaus on stage 9 of the Giro, attacking early in pursuit of Nairo Quintana, only to struggle, fade and be passed by Dumoulin in the final kilometres. He lost 40 seconds, and two days later Dumoulin gained a further 2:07 in the Montefalco time trial.
Coming back from that handicap was virtually impossible, but Nibali has few regrets.
"I was on form, I felt good and so I went for it on the Blockhaus finish. I respond when people attack hard in situations like that. Sometimes it works and sometimes I get it wrong," Nibali says, justifying his instinctive racing.
"It’s nice to understand that people appreciate that about me, but it seems normal to me. I've always raced that way. I know it means I perhaps lose some races but I like to go down fighting."Socceroos Asian Cup hero Massimo Luongo admits apprehension over his role at Queens Park Rangers now Neil Warnock has returned as caretaker manager.
Luongo’s career has been soaring seemingly skywards since the instinctive young midfielder took January’s Asian Cup by storm with searing performances, along with a goal in the final that earned him the tournament’s best player award.
• Is this Australian football’s who-cares cup?
• Foxtel ‘clearly under threat’ after losing EPL
There is little doubt about the previously unheralded 23-year-old’s place in the Socceroos, with coach Ange Postecoglou starting him in Australia’s last three World Cup qualifiers.
However Luongo is far less certain about where he fits into QPR’s new structure under Warnock, who is back at the helm as the Championship outfit’s interim boss after coach Chris Ramsey was sacked last week.
In Warnock’s first match in charge on the weekend, Luongo sat on the bench as an unused substitute, forced to merely watch his team play out a listless goalless draw with Socceroos teammate Bailey Wright’s Preston North End.
He concedes a slight feeling of uncertainty has come with the departure of Ramsey, his former Tottenham academy mentor who was instrumental in bringing him to QPR from League One side Swindon Town after last season.
“I probably had a discussion with a few people saying, how could this turn out for me? Could it be a good thing or a bad thing?” Luongo said in Canberra where he is in camp with the Socceroos preparing for World Cup qualifiers against Kyrgyzstan and Bangladesh.
“You can’t really do much to be honest. If you’re doing well in training, if you’re playing well, then you’ve done everything you can, which I’ve done.
“So I’ve just got to wait for him to pick the team.
“Unfortunately I’m here now, so I can’t keep doing that. But it’s just the way it goes.”
Warnock took QPR to their 2011 Championship triumph and subsequent promotion to the Premier League, before they were relegated again at the end of last season.
He now faces an uphill results battle, with the under-performing Rangers lagging in 13th on the table and 14 points behind leaders Hull City and Brighton.
Luongo wasn’t overly happy about being absent and unable to prove himself to a largely unknown coach.
But he saw his time on international duty as a chance to re-centre before returning to press his case under noticeably changed circumstances at Loftus Road.
“It’s obviously a different set-up, different type of training and real shift in the team,” Luongo said.
“But it comes with the job – you go through a lot of managers, especially in the Championship.
“You just get on with it. I just keep doing what I’m doing, and if he wants to pick me then he can pick me.
“I’ll still do my own thing regardless, in training or in the game.”
– AAPThere was a close call this week for Dundalk FC manager Stephen Kenny, who nearly lost a jumper in a local cafe.
There was a close call this week for Dundalk FC manager Stephen Kenny, who nearly lost a jumper in a local cafe.
Much like any normal day, Mr Kenny was enjoying a coffee and a read of the newspaper at Panama Cafe on the Market Square.
Kenny, who is a sometime patron of the popular cafe eventually finished his break, got up and paid, before leaving the establishment.
However it soon became clear that one of his favourite jumpers which he had with him when he entered the cafe was no longer in his posession.
Kenny, who enjoying his tenure as Dundalk Manager in one of its most successful campaigns in years, immediately began a search.
Speaking to the Dundalk Democrat, owner of Panama, Stephen Egan, said he innitially suspected St Patrick’s or Drogheda United fans had something to do with it.
“Stephen came back and we presented him with the jersey. In fact he had just left it behind on the seat.
“Stephen was delighted to have it back. No Drogheda or Pats fans were involved in its abduction!”
Let’s hope the safe return of the jumper heralds more good luck for the rest of the season.Print Email Font Resize Font Resize Climber rescued after 15-foot fall in Boulder Canyon
A rock climber was rescued Tuesday evening after he fell while climbing a route on The Riviera wall in Boulder Canyon's Bihedral climbing area.
Kevin Craig Cossel, 24, was "trying to attach climbing gear" at about 6:30 p.m. when he slipped and fell 15 feet, according to the Boulder County Sheriff's Office.
Cossel suffered minor injuries, including a laceration to the back of his head, and was carried down from the climbing area by Rocky Mountain Rescue Group. He was transported to Boulder Community Hospital,where he was treated and released, according to the Sheriff's Office.
Advertisement
A rock climber was rescued Tuesday evening after he fell while climbing a route on The Riviera wall in Boulder Canyon's Bihedral climbing area.Kevin Craig Cossel, 24, was "trying to attach climbing gear" at about 6:30 p.m. when he slipped and fell 15 feet, according to the Boulder County Sheriff's Office.Cossel suffered minor injuries, including a laceration to the back of his head, and was carried down from the climbing area by Rocky Mountain Rescue Group. He was transported to Boulder Community Hospital,where he was treated and released, according to the Sheriff's Office.For real?
Could the Mets possibly have a plan to “honor” longtime Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones?
Enter intrepid producer Al Dukes after the rumblings made it all the way to WFAN’s Boomer & Carton.
Tasked with confirming the rumor, Dukes got a Mets official on the phone Thursday morning.
He summed up the chat on air: “It was a conversation that went like this … ‘Will we acknowledge Chipper Jones’ career? Yes we will.’ ”
Listen: “Chipper-gate” confirmed
So it seems fans in Flushing will have one last chance to tip the cap — or chant “Lar-ry!” — to the soon-to-be retired Mets killer during Atlanta’s last visit to Citi Field in 2012.
The team’s plans are unclear, Dukes said. For his final series in Queens, the Mets presented former Braves manager Bobby Cox with a bottle of wine from the California vineyard of legendary New York pitcher Tom Seaver.
“It all depends on how they do it,” said Boomer Esiason.
Co-host Craig Carton was against it all the way — and in every way.
“Come on, you don’t do anything!” he said. “It’s Chipper Jones!”
Still awaiting word on whether Pat Burrell will throw out the ceremonial first pitch (not really)…
Mets fans, your thoughts? Be heard in the comments below!The only alternative to the creation of a Palestinian state is a one-state solution in which all Palestinians will get the right to vote, Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said Wednesday, hours after a senior White House official appeared to withdraw the US’s traditional support for a two-state solution.
“Contrary to [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s plan of one state and two systems, apartheid, the only alternative to two sovereign and democratic states on the 1967 border is one single secular and democratic state with equal rights for everyone, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, on all of historic Palestine,” Erekat said during a meeting with the speaker of the UK House of Commons, John Bercow, in Ramallah.
Erekat’s comments came a day after the White House announced that Washington will seek to broker a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but that a two-state solution may not necessarily be the framework to bring that peace to fruition. The president will not insist on the two-state formula, the official said.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up
Erekat said the two-state solution constituted a “painful” compromise from the Palestinian perspective.
“As we have constantly stated, the two-state solution is a Palestinian adoption of an international formula,” Erekat, a former top peace negotiator, said. “In fact, it represents a painful and historic Palestinian compromise of recognizing Israel over 78% of historic Palestine. Today, almost six million Palestinians live under Israeli control in all of historic Palestine, while almost six million Palestinians live in exile.”
Ramallah’s official position calls for a two-state solution, with the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital.
In his meeting with Bercow, who earlier this week became the first sitting speaker of the UK parliament to visit Israel, Erekat called on London to “work toward justice for the Palestinian people, especially given the historic responsibility that the UK bears 100 years after the issuance of the Balfour Declaration,” a major diplomatic foundation for the establishment of the Jewish state.Michigan head coach Brady Hoke and defensive coordinator Greg Mattison and former Wolverines football coach Lloyd Carr attended a basketball game Tuesday night. Ordinarily this would not be much of a story. Often times during the football season football coaches will attend basketball games as they chum up recruits and their families in setting that shows off the school's environment away from the football field. Hey, these recruits have to know what they'll be doing when not practicing, studying (playbooks) and grinding in preparation for Saturday, right?
But did we mention that the Michigan football coaches were attending a basketball game… in East Lansing?
Michigan's basketball team visited their in-state and Big Ten rivals Tuesday night and it just so happened the Spartans were hosting some significant recruits for the game. Coincidence? Of course not, right?
NCAA rules prevented Hoke and Mattison from being able to have contact with the football recruits at Michigan State, but their presence alone speaks for itself. And the visiting coaches did not get any special treatment either. They sat right behind the Michigan bench, in the middle of Michigan State's student section, The Izzone.
Michigan State head coach Mark Dantonio was naturally on hand for the game, and he did not ignore Hoke. According to Coaching Search, Dantonio walked through the student section down to Hoke, receiving a loud ovation as he worked his way down through the stands, and shook Hoke's hand. Apparently a few words were exchanged. We would love to know what was said, but we would love to know even more what Dantonio was thinking. It sure wasn't "It's nice to see Hoke support the basketball program this way."
Michigan State travels to Ann Arbor on March 2. It would only be fitting to see Dantonio make a return trip. We hope he does.
Rivalry!
Helmet sticker to CoachingSearch.com. Photo via @HondoCarpenter.
Kevin McGuire is the national college football writer for Examiner.com and host of the No 2-Minute Warning podcast.
Follow him on Twitter, Google+and Facebook. Follow Crystal Ball Run on Twitter and Facebook.(July 27, 2015) On July 1, 2015, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) adopted a decision requiring government officials to pledge allegiance to the PRC Constitution upon taking office. (Quanguo Renmin Dabiao Dahui Changwu Weiyuanhui Guanyu Shixing Xianfa Xuanshi Zhidu de Jueding [Decision of the NPC Standing Committee on Implementing the Constitutional Oath System], NPC website.) The Decision will take effect on January 1, 2016.
The oath reads:
I pledge to be loyal to the PRC Constitution, to safeguard the authority of the Constitution, to perform obligations imposed by law, to be loyal to the country and to the people, to be fully committed in performing my official duties, to have integrity and always work in the interest of the public, to accept the supervision of the people, and to work hard for the great cause of building a prosperous, democratic, civilized, and harmonious socialist country! (Id. art. 2.)
According to the Decision, the requirement applies to all government officials who are: (1) elected or appointed by the people’s congresses at the national and all subnational levels and by the standing committees of the people’s congresses at and above the county level; or (2) appointed by the government, the people’s courts, and the people’s procuratorates at all levels. (Id. art. 1.)
Top central government officials, including the President and Vice-President of the PRC, the Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson of the NPC, the Premier, Vice-Premiers, State Councilors, Ministers and Commissioners, the President of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), and the President of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP), etc., will swear the oath in ceremonies organized by the NPC. (Id. art. 3.) Other central government officials will swear the oath in ceremonies organized by the NPC Standing Committee, the SPC, the SPP, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the appointing authorities, as appropriate. (Id. arts. 4-7.) Standing committees of provincial-level people’s congresses will adopt their own measures for organizing the oath-taking ceremonies for the government officials at all subnational levels in their respective jurisdictions. (Id. art. 9.)
According to the official Xinhua News Agency, the decision to have government officials pledge allegiance to the Constitution was first announced by the Chinese Communist Party last October. The requirement, said Xinhua, “has clearly revealed China’s resolve to bolster the authority of the Constitution.” (China Voice: Officials’ Constitutional Oath Only a Start, but a Good Start, XINHUA (Oct. 29, 2014).)How I Used a Vacation Timer to Write a Book (or, Why I Shut Off the Internet at 9PM)
Jake Knapp Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 28, 2016
For years, I tried to start a daily writing habit. See, I had this crazy idea to write a book, and I knew I’d need a lot of time and practice to get it done. But with kids and a full-time job, there was no way I could find big blocks of time during the day. If I was going to write regularly, I’d have to make the time… from somewhere.
First, I tried waking up early to write. My friend John had re-trained himself to become a morning person, and I followed his approach. I set my alarm, woke early, and drank coffee. But it didn’t work for me. I was always thwarted — either by interruptions from my kids or by my own sluggish biorhythms.
So in 2013, I gave up on being a morning person. Instead, I decided to get better at being a night person.
Being productive at night is tricky
Staying up late has always been fairly easy for me. After my kids go to bed, everything is dark and quiet. It should’ve been the perfect time to write.
Except… it was not perfect. Although I had no problem staying awake, it was hard for me to stay on task. In the evenings, my brain was fried by everything that happened during the day. Writing takes a lot of willpower, and I didn’t have enough left.
Instead of writing, I’d get distracted by the internet. For me, the primary culprits are sports news and email. Should I start writing… or should I quickly check for Seahawks news? Should I revise that paragraph? Ugh, that’s hard… instead, I’ll open my inbox… hmm, new message from LinkedIn about my connections’ skills… I’ll archive that… Click!
Click by click, I lost the will and the time to write. After two hours of slush, I’d go to bed, dejected—I’d stayed up late for nothing.
I finally realized if I was gonna get things done at night, I had to either get better self control (not happening) or shut off the internet.
The distraction-free evening
Several years ago, I deleted a bunch of apps on my iPhone to reduce distraction, and it was great. Maybe, I thought, I could apply a similar approach to the internet at home — and free up some productive writing time.
So I bought a $10 vacation timer. And I did this:
Set the timer to turn off at 9PM and turn on at 5AM. Plugged in the timer. Plugged my internet router into the timer.
Holy smokes. At 9PM, the kids were asleep and the household chores were done. The timer clicked. And… there was no inbox and no Seahawks. No Netflix, no Twitter, no MacRumors. My laptop turned into a desert island, and my god, it was beautiful.
At 9:01 PM, the movie stops. My wife does not find this amusing.
With nothing else to do, with no entertainment or fake tasks to accomplish, I had to write. And I did. I had one to three hours every night, depending on when I started and how late I stayed up.
A few months later, I completed the first draft of an adventure novel. It was terrible. I kept going and finished a second draft. Also terrible. Now, three and a half years later, I’m on the seventh terrible draft. Turning off the internet didn’t make me a publishable fiction author (at least, not yet).
But it did get me writing. And along the way, I got enough practice to become a publishable nonfiction author. Last year, together with my co-workers, I wrote a book called Sprint. And this year — this is just blatant bragging, sorry — it actually made the New York Times bestseller list!
Now, I’m not going to tell you that everyone should switch off their wifi at night. Many people have great self control, and when they want to focus, they focus. But if you ever struggle to ignore your inbox or the news, you might try it.
A vacation timer makes for a simple, cheap experiment. And it’s not as crazy as it sounds: later, I learned that my friend Nir does the exact same thing.
We can’t all be morning people
We’re genetically predisposed to be either morning people or night people. I base this not on science, but on first-hand observation of my sons, conducted over the past several thousand days.
My twelve-year-old son Luke is a morning person who wakes up singing. At breakfast — without caffeine or other stimulants — he can speak at a rate of approximately 2,600 words per minute. My five-year-old son Flynn, on the other hand, is a night person like me. The morning makes him confused and angry, and if I try to talk to him before 7AM, he will punch me in the crotch.
But people like me and Flynn can still get things done. We have the night. And when Flynn is old enough to be distracted by the internet, I’m going to buy him his very own vacation timer.
For more like this, subscribe to the Time Dorks newsletter from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky.2014's kicking off in style, with a massive update to Player-Owned Ports; a re-imagining of our Giant Mole boss; Hati Wolf; Slayer updates; and the launch of our Power to the Players poll system!
Power to the Players
Members only
This year, we're giving you the power to decide what content we make, how we make it and when with Power to the Players - our new poll system. We’ve talked about it at length in our RuneScape 2014 - Power to the Players news post, but - in summary - we're going to give you multiple polls each month, where you can vote on a range of upcoming content, from the hugest updates of the year to fine-tuned usability tweaks.
The votes will be members-only and will appear in-game and on the main website. Crucially, the winning option of each poll is guaranteed to make it into the game! We’ll also keep you informed as development continues on each of the projects, so you're involved and can give feedback as it's built.
We're starting as we mean to go on in January, and running six polls on a range of hot topics:
Which do you want us to work on first: Elf City or the Invention skill?
What sort of new dragon would you like added to the game?
Which groups of creatures would you like to have reworked drop tables?
What should our Easter holiday event be? Traditional eggs and bunnies, or a fun 6th Age event with cabbages vs monkeys?
Should we make some changes to our world lists?
Which map would you like added to our special secret 2014 minigame?
This is the most important update of the year. You're RuneScape's heart and soul, and in 2014 and beyond, its future is in your hands.
The Wolves and the Valkyrie - Hati and Sköll 2014
Members only
The legendary wolves Hati and Sköll return, once again determined to ravage the Fremennik tribes. If you haven’t faced these beasts before, head to the lands north of Seers‘ Village later this month, where combat and skill-based content await! Take down Hati using your combat might, and drive Sköll from the lands - building a bonfire and calling great meteors to vanquish this fearsome foe.
This year, the brothers and are joined by Eir the Valkyrie, whom some of you will have met during Blood Runs Deep. With the gods returning, Eir suspects the End of Things may be upon the world, and wants you to help her prepare by finding her spear and helmet. These can be gained either from Hati and Sköll, or from the Fremennik province divination colony. Each player can earn multiple copies on one of those pieces, and will need to trade with other players for the other.
Hati and Sköll are aimed at players with mid-to-high combat levels, but busy worlds are often used by those less blessed with awesome combat skills to get all the rewards, which include cosmetic items, bonus XP in Combat, Woodcutting, Agility and new equipment rewards, plus bonus Prayer and Divination XP from the newly added Eir content.
Ports - Batch 2
Members only
Think you've seen all there is of the Wushanko Isles? Think again! Two new zones - the Shield and the Loop - are opening up to intrepid explorers this month, complete with new resources and trade goods. In these distant lands exist scrolls containing the knowledge of the powerful reefwalker's cape, Leviathan ring and Death Lotus darts - level 85 armour and thrown weapons.
Three new adventurers join the Ports cast: the Trapper, the Chef and the Architect. Each comes with their own fully-voiced story, and can be accessed with at least level 90 Hunter, Cooking or Construction respectively. New crew, new ship components and a new random event round out the line-up for the easternmost parts of the Wushanko Isles, and the newly-arrived Trader will be on hand to convert excess resources into valuable trade goods.
In total, there are over 300 new voyages being added across all of the zones, so there’s never been a better time to get your port up and running.
The Giant Mole
Members only
Veteran players will be well aware of the Giant Mole - the lurking menace that has terrorised Gielinor for many a year. However, we know many of you are yet to encounter the beast, and we want to be sure she's ready to face you. Let’s be honest – while the mole's "mud to the camera" special attacks are kind of fun, and the baby moles are undeniably cute, the content's pretty old and isn't up to our high, modern standards.
All that changes this month. Very soon, the Giant Mole will be something you can really sink your molars into!
Prepare to encounter the all-new, re-imagined, never-more-vicious Giant Mole! We've entirely reworked the graphics, combat mechanics and drops of this encounter - rebuilding the whole thing from scratch to make a boss fight worthy of today's RuneScape. We’ve listened to your feedback, reducing the amount of running required and added far more variety to the entire fight, giving the subterranean psychopath more attacks to play with. The fight is intended as an introduction to boss fighting, balanced around groups of players of approximately combat level 110, and offers a hard mode for three-man groups, or for solo players of considerably higher combat levels.
Those who stand victorious can expect upgrades to the anti-dragon shield; farming potions which speed the growth of patches; and consumable roots which can remove nasty damage-over-time effects from their user.
Slayer Updates
Members only
Our intrepid Ninja Team are releasing a bunch of smaller, everyday changes to the Slayer skill this month, mostly focused around the slayer helmet and co-op slayers. All of these changes have been inspired by your posts and comments from our forums and social media.
Many of these improve the slayer helm. First up, we're adding slayer gem functionality to the basic slayer helm. You’ll also be able to upgrade your slayer helmet to a level 70 item - with stats to match - and fuse slayer rings and ferocious rings to it to enjoy those handy teleports at your convenience.
You'll also be able to get new skins for Freezy, adopt a brand-new, slayer-inspired pet, and unlock many new perks to enhance your co-op slayer kills. We’re also removing Smoking Kills as a requirement to earn Slayer points and access the Slayer Reward Shop.
And More!
Free players and members
It's another great month for costumes in Solomon's Store, including my personal favourite: the Grim Reaper's armour! We’re also adding costumes and teleports themed around the Bird and the Beast world event, and throwing some new retro armour into the mix as well.
Make sure you’ve picked your side for the epic battle between Bandos and Armadyl, and do check out the RuneScape Companion app if you’d like to keep in touch with your friends when away from your PC. Take a look at this Silent's Spotlight video if you want to see it in action!
Have fun!
Mod Mark
Design Director - RuneScape
Discuss this on the forums.
Behind the Scenes is a sneak peek at the planned game updates that we hope to launch in the coming month.
This, however, is only a plan - not a promise - that a particular update will be released in a particular way or at a particular time. To get you the highest quality updates as quickly as possible, we usually keep on tweaking and testing right up until the moment before release, so sometimes things change or take a bit longer than expected. We aren't afraid to change our plan if necessary, as we will never launch an update before it is ready.Even by TSA standards, this one is pretty bad. The TSA in Phoenix reportedly forced a wheel-chair bound double-amputee Marine vet, who lost both his legs in Afghanistan, to take off his prosthetic legs for screening.
Oh but it gets worse.
TSA then ordered the Marine vet to put the prosthetics back on and “walk” through a full body scanner, when he can’t even stand. The 22 year old is still trying to learn to walk in his new prosthetic legs.
Mission Accomplished. The same geniuses who brought us the never-ending War on Terror now have us running in |
don't remember at all?
"A. (Negative head shake.)
"Q. Did you have occasion at that time to kiss Bruce?
"A. Yeah.
"Q. You did? You were kissing Bruce at that time?
"A. (Affirmative nod.)
"Q. Was Bruce kissing you?
"A. Yes.
"Q. And were you standing up at this time?
"A. No, we were sitting down.
....
"Q. Okay. So at this point in time you had left Mr. M. and you were hugging and kissing with Bruce, is that right?
"A. Yeah.
"Q. And you were sitting up.
"A. Yes.
"Q. Was your sister still there then?
"A. No. Yeah, she was at first.
"Q. What was she doing?
"A. She was standing up with Michael and David.
"Q. Yes. Was she doing anything with Michael and David?
"A. No, I don't think so.
"Q. Whose idea was it for you and Bruce to kiss? Did you initiate that?
"A. Yes.
"Q. What happened after Bruce left?
"A. Michael asked me if I wanted to go walk to the park.
"Q. And what did you say?
"A. I said, 'Yes.'
"Q. And then what happened?
"A. We walked to the park.
....
"Q. How long did it take you to get to the park?
"A. About ten or fifteen minutes.
"Q. And did you walk there?
"A. Yes.
"Q. Did Mr. M. ever mention his name?
"A. Yes."
JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom JUSTICES WHITE and MARSHALL join, dissenting [omitted].
JUSTICE STEVENS, dissenting.
Local custom and belief -- rather than statutory laws of venerable but doubtful ancestry -- will determine the volume of sexual activity among unmarried teenagers. The empirical evidence cited by the plurality demonstrates the futility of the notion that a statutory prohibition will significantly affect the volume of that activity or provide a meaningful solution to the problems created by it. Nevertheless, as a matter of constitutional power, unlike my Brother BRENNAN, I would have no doubt about the validity of a state law prohibiting all unmarried teenagers from engaging in sexual intercourse. The societal interests in reducing the incidence of venereal disease and teenage pregnancy are sufficient, in my judgment, to justify a prohibition of conduct that increases the risk of those harms.
My conclusion that a nondiscriminatory prohibition would be constitutional does not help me answer the question whether a prohibition applicable to only half of the joint participants in the risk-creating conduct is also valid. It cannot be true that the validity of a total ban is an adequate justification for a selective prohibition; otherwise, the constitutional objection to discriminatory rules would be meaningless. The question in this case is whether the difference between males and females justifies this statutory discrimination based entirely on sex.
The fact that the Court did not immediately acknowledge that the capacity to become pregnant is what primarily differentiates the female from the male does not impeach the validity of the plurality's newly found wisdom. I think the plurality is quite correct in making the assumption that the joint act that this law seeks to prohibit creates a greater risk of harm for the female than for the male. But the plurality surely cannot believe that the risk of pregnancy confronted by the female -- any more than the risk of venereal disease confronted by males as well as females -- has provided an effective deterrent to voluntary female participation in the risk-creating conduct. Yet the plurality's decision seems to rest on the assumption that the California Legislature acted on the basis of that rather fanciful notion.
In my judgment, the fact that a class of persons is especially vulnerable to a risk that a statute is designed to avoid is a reason for making the statute applicable to that class. The argument that a special need for protection provides a rational explanation for an exemption is one I simply do not comprehend. A hypothetical racial classification will illustrate my point. Assume that skin pigmentation provides some measure of protection against cancer caused by exposure to certain chemicals in the atmosphere and, therefore, that white employees confront a greater risk than black employees in certain industrial settings. Would it be rational to require black employees to wear protective clothing but to exempt whites from that requirement? It seems to me that the greater risk of harm to white workers would be a reason for including them in the requirement -- not for granting them an exemption.
In this case, the fact that a female confronts a greater risk of harm than a male is a reason for applying the prohibition to her -- not a reason for granting her a license to use her own judgment on whether or not to assume the risk. Surely, if we examine the problem from the point of view of society's interest in preventing the risk-creating conduct from occurring at all, it is irrational to exempt 50% of the potential violators. And, if we view the government's interest as that of a parens patriae seeking to protect its subjects from harming themselves, the discrimination is actually perverse. Would a rational parent making rules for the conduct of twin children of opposite sex simultaneously forbid the son and authorize the daughter to engage in conduct that is especially harmful to the daughter? That is the effect of this statutory classification.
If pregnancy or some other special harm is suffered by one of the two participants in the prohibited act, that special harm no doubt would constitute a legitimate mitigating factor in deciding what, if any, punishment might be appropriate in a given case. But from the standpoint of fashioning a general preventive rule -- or, indeed, in determining appropriate punishment when neither party in fact has suffered any special harm -- I regard a total exemption for the members of the more endangered class as utterly irrational.
In my opinion, the only acceptable justification for a general rule requiring disparate treatment of the two participants in a joint act must be a legislative judgment that one is more guilty than the other. The risk-creating conduct that this statute is designed to prevent requires the participation of two persons -- one male and one female. In many situations it is probably true that one is the aggressor and the other is either an unwilling, or at least a less willing, participant in the joint act. If a statute authorized punishment of only one participant and required the prosecutor to prove that that participant had been the aggressor, I assume that the discrimination would be valid. Although the question is less clear, I also assume, for the purpose of deciding this case, that it would be permissible to punish only the male participant, if one element of the offense were proof that he had been the aggressor, or at least in some respects the more responsible participant in the joint act. The statute at issue in this case, however, requires no such proof. The question raised by this statute is whether the State, consistently with the Federal Constitution, may always punish the male and never the female when they are equally responsible or when the female is the more responsible of the two.
It would seem to me that an impartial lawmaker could give only one answer to that question. The fact that the California Legislature has decided to apply its prohibition only to the male may reflect a legislative judgment that in the typical case the male is actually the more guilty party. Any such judgment must, in turn, assume that the decision to engage in the risk-creating conduct is always -- or at least typically -- a male decision. If that assumption is valid, the statutory classification should also be valid. But what is the support for the assumption? It is not contained in the record of this case or in any legislative history or scholarly study that has been called to our attention. I think it is supported to some extent by traditional attitudes toward male-female relationships. But the possibility that such a habitual attitude may reflect nothing more than an irrational prejudice makes it an insufficient justification for discriminatory treatment that is otherwise blatantly unfair. For, as I read this statute, it requires that one, and only one, of two equally guilty wrongdoers be stigmatized by a criminal conviction.
Nor do I find at all persuasive the suggestion that this discrimination is adequately justified by the desire to encourage females to inform against their male partners. Even if the concept of a wholesale informant's exemption were an acceptable enforcement device, what is the justification for defining the exempt class entirely by reference to sex rather than by reference to a more neutral criterion such as relative innocence? Indeed, if the exempt class is to be composed entirely of members of one sex, what is there to support the view that the statutory purpose will be better served by granting the informing license to females rather than to males? If a discarded male partner informs on a promiscuous female, a timely threat of prosecution might well prevent the precise harm the statute is intended to minimize.
Finally, even if my logic is faulty and there actually is some speculative basis for treating equally guilty males and females differently, I still believe that any such speculative justification would be outweighed by the paramount interest in evenhanded enforcement of the law. A rule that authorizes punishment of only one of two equally guilty wrongdoers violates the essence of the constitutional requirement that the sovereign must govern impartially.(Reuters) - One protester was shot dead and eight others were arrested on Tuesday after authorities confronted members of an armed group that has staged a month-long occupation of a federal wildlife reserve in Oregon, activists and officials said.
The FBI said gunshots rang out after officers stopped a car carrying protest leader Ammon Bundy and others near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Activists said Robert LaVoy Finicum, a rancher who acted as a spokesman for the occupiers, was killed.
FBI agents were setting up a perimeter on Tuesday night around the wildlife refuge, where some people were still holding out, continuing their protest against federal control of large tracts of the country, a law enforcement official told Reuters.
One of the remaining occupiers, Jason Patrick, told Reuters by phone they would stay until the “redress of grievances”.
“I’ve heard ‘peaceful resolution’ for weeks now and now there’s a cowboy who is my friend who is dead – so prepare for the peaceful resolution,” Patrick said.
The takeover at Malheur that started Jan. 2 was a flare-up in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a decades-old conflict over the U.S. government’s control of millions of acres of territory in the west. Protesters say they are defending the Constitution.
U.S. News
* Two killed, three wounded in shooting near Seattle homeless camp
* Obama calls for rapid Zika research as virus seen spreading
Federal officials said they had probable cause to arrest Finicum, who told NBC News earlier this month that he would rather die than be detained.
Leader of a group of armed protesters Ammon Bundy talks to the media at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, January 8, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
Protest leader Ammon Bundy and four other senior members were taken into custody following the confrontation along Highway 395, near the reserve in northeast Oregon around 4:25 p.m. local time (0025 GMT), the FBI said.
A sixth person was arrested by Oregon State Police in Burns, Oregon, about 1 1/2 hours later. The FBI said a seventh person was later arrested, 50-year-old Peter Santilli, a journalist who livestreamed events at the refuge.
The FBI said they also arrested an eighth person in Peoria, Arizona, in relation to the occupation.
All of those arrested face federal charges of conspiracy to use force, intimidation or threats to impede federal officers from discharging their duties, the FBI said.
The protester Patrick likened Finicum’s death to the killing of Tamir Rice, an unarmed 12-year-old African American boy fatally shot by police outside a Cleveland recreation center in 2014. The officers were not charged.
“The government can kill who they want for whatever reason they want with impunity,” Patrick said.
Asked how the occupiers would respond to law enforcement entering the refuge he did not indicate a clear plan.
“I don’t know what to tell you but if somebody saying ‘peaceful resolution’ comes in and points guns at me...” he said before trailing off.
Ammon Bundy is seen in an office at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon, January 9, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
The Oregonian reported that Bundy had been en route to a community meeting in John Day, Oregon, where he was scheduled to be a guest speaker, when authorities stopped his vehicle.
The newspaper said 43-year-old Ryan Bundy, Ammon’s brother, suffered a minor gunshot wound.Theocracy Alert: Conservative Christian Republicans committed to the false notion that the U.S. is a nation founded by and for Christians are quietly working behind the scenes to establish Christianity as the official religion of the U.S.A.
Right Wing Watch reports the Republican National Committee continues to partner with the American Renewal Project, which is run by Christian Nationalist and anti-gay extremist David Lane and is affiliated with the powerful and influential far-right American Family Association.
In an email alert sent to American Renewal Project supporters earlier this week, Lane reiterated the call to establish Christianity as the official religion of America:
The American church has lost its commission in the public square, its purpose for being. Ultimately, unless we find the chart and compass used by Colonial America to establish Christianity as the official religion of America, America will no longer be.
In the email alert, Lane uses a great deal of false and misleading information to argue that the U.S. is a Christian nation and that Christianity should be adopted as the “official religion of America.”
In the alert, Lane rails against secularism and secularists, apparently unaware or unwilling to admit that the U.S. is a nation founded upon secular values.
However, Lane’s inaccurate and misleading remarks are not surprising, given his sordid history. Lane is notorious for making offensive, misleading, and historically inaccurate statements. For example:
“The separation of church and state is a “lie” and a “fabricated whopper” used to stop “Christian America – the moral majority – from imposing moral government on pagan public schools, pagan higher learning and pagan media.” [6/6/13] “We were established as a Christian nation, for the advancement of the Christian faith.” [1/30/15] 7/17/13] “While America was a Christian nation since its founding, now it must choose between being a Christian nation or a pagan nation.” [7/17/13]
The problem is that David Lane is an influential man within the Republican party, a man who enjoys a great deal of support from many GOP officials. Earlier this year, members of the Republican National Committee went on an all-expense paid trip to Israel, a trip that was organized by Lane and financed by the American Family Association.
As Right Wing Watch notes, Republicans who attend Lane’s candidate forums, invite him to conduct trainings, or join him on all-expenses-paid trips to Israel, can’t really claim ignorance of his agenda, which is crystal clear:
Lane, with the financial and political support of many other conservative Christian Republicans, is quietly working behind the scenes to establish Christianity as the official religion of the U.S.A.
(H/T Right Wing Watch)Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert
“Learners are doers, not recipients.” — Walter J. Ong, “McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past”
It’s high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as “doers, not recipients.” If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.
It’s been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed “few differences in accuracy” between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Though the honchos at Britannica threw a big hissy at the surprising results of that study, Nature stood by its methods and results, and a number of subsequent studies have confirmed its findings; so far as general accuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiled encyclopedias, including Britannica.
There were a few dust-ups in the wake of the Nature affair, notably Middlebury College history department’s banning of Wikipedia citations in student papers in 2007. The resulting debate turned out to be quite helpful as a number of librarians finally popped out of the woodwork to say hey, now wait one minute, no undergraduate paper should be citing any encyclopedia whatsoever, which, doy, and it ought to have been pointed out a lot sooner.
By 2009 the complaints had more or less faded away, and nowadays what you have is college librarians writing blog posts in which they continue to reiterate the blindingly obvious: “Wikipedia is an excellent tool for leading you to more information. It is a step along the way, and it is extremely valuable.”
Wikipedia’s Rough Riders
How come Wikipedia hasn’t turned into a giant glob of graffiti? It certainly would have by now, were it not for the multitude of volunteer sheriffs of the information highway who ride around patrolling the thing day and night.
There is a bogglingly complex and well-staffed system for dealing with errors and disputes on Wikipedia. There are special tools provided to volunteers for preventing vandalism, decreasing administrative workload and so on: rollbacker, autopatroller and the like. Then there are nearly two thousand administrators, who are empowered to “protect, delete and restore pages, move pages over redirects, hide and delete page revisions, and block other editors.”
Higher up the tree, there is MedCom, a committee of mediators, and then there are the arbitrators (just 16 of them, at this time) who handle more serious beefs. The bar for arbitrators is high. Potential candidates are limited to those who have made their bones by contributing many hundreds of hours of work. A look at the Wikipedia page detailing current requests for arbitration gives an idea of the kinds of disputes resolved by arbitrators and the methods through which they’re settled.
At the top of this loosely organized but large and passionate governing force is the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, currently a group of ten that includes Jimmy Wales, “Chairman Emeritus.” Three seats, including that of the current Chairman, Ting Chen, are held by community members — that is to say, interested individuals of no particular expertise outside their own deep and long-standing volunteer involvement, elected by “active members” of the Wikimedia community (an “active member” is someone who has made a certain number of edits to articles within a certain timeframe).
Other, parallel systems of control at Wikipedia have grown more robust as well, such as the informally organized “projects” like WikiProject: Medicine, in which anyone interested can help improve the quality of articles relating to medicine.
In short, there is a byzantine array of forces working for accuracy and against edit-warring, sock-puppetry and the like on Wikipedia. (Ira Matetsky, a Wikipedia arbitrator known on the site as Newyorkbrad, posted a long and fascinating account of Wikipedia’s administrative processes at The Volokh Conspiracy in May 2009, if you’re interested in more detail.)
It’s not perfect, of course, but neither is any other human-derived resource, including, as if it were necessary to say so, printed encyclopedias or books. It bears mentioning that if Wikipedia is a valuable resource, that is because a lot of people — untold thousands, in fact — are busting tail to make it that way.
Faster Encylopedia, Fill Fill
Wikipedia has three main advantages over its print ancestors:
1. Wikipedia offers far richer, more comprehensive citations to source materials and bibliographies on- and offline, thereby providing a far better entry point for serious study;
2. It is instantly responsive to new developments;
3. Most significantly, users can “look under the hood” of Wikipedia in order to investigate the controversial or doubtful aspects of any given subject. I refer to the magical “History” button that appears in the top right corner of any Wikipedia page. Click this, and you will have instantaneous access to everything that has ever been written on the Wikipedia page in question. (In rare cases, i.e., during an edit war, a Wikipedia administrator may remove material, but this almost never happens.) The course of long and intricately involved disputations may thus come instantly to light. Of course, a load of dimwitted yelling and general codswallop may also emerge, but let’s face it, the same thing happens with any given stack of books in the library, only in more formal, less convenient packaging.
Take the case of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the historian and author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which examined the complicity of ordinary Germans in the atrocities of the second war. Prof. Goldhagen’s Wikipedia page has been revised 607 times since its first publication in 2004. Someone pops in there every week or two and removes or adds his brickbats or accolades, often according to his own political leanings. (I’m a fan of this controversial author, despite disagreeing with him on a number of contemporary political issues.) The current page is spare, but it’s also entirely lacking in anything weird, rude or inaccurate. There’s no evidence of disputes requiring intervention by mediators or arbitrators, and reading all the edits gives a very good idea of what all the rumpus over the years has been about. History pages like this one, showing two different edits of the Goldhagen page, provide a clear illustration of the ongoing attempt to strike a fair balance of views. Goldhagen’s page also provides an excellent resource for further reading, including 47 references, ten links to the author’s articles and websites, and thirteen bibliographical entries.
It’s this third innovation that makes Wikipedia far more than just a portal to research, though indeed no ordinary encyclopedia, whether printed or online, can touch it for that. Rather than being just a tempest in the teacup of publishing, Wikipedia is the foreshock of an epistemological earthquake to rival the one set rumbling by Johannes Gutenberg ca. 1439.
Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book (and co-founder, in 1984, of the Criterion Collection company) has been writing persuasively in this vein about Wikipedia for years now. I asked him recently to give an update on his views, and he said that if I wanted to understand the significance of Wikipedia, I should read Marshall McLuhan.
“Go back and study the shift in human communication, what McLuhan called ‘the shift to print,’” he said. “The place where an idea could be owned by a single person. One of McLuhan’s genius insights was his understanding of how the shift from an oral culture to one based on print gave rise to our modern notion of the individual as the originator and owner of particular ideas.”
According to McLuhan, Bob explained, “the ownership of an idea” was made inevitable by the invention of printing; it is this era that we are outgrowing, as McLuhan foresaw. “If the printing press empowered the individual, the digital world empowers collaboration.”
Straight Outta Cambridge
“The ruinous authority of experts […] was McLuhan’s lifelong theme.” — Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger
McLuhan’s chief insights centered around the idea that technology strongly affects not only the content of culture, but the mind that creates and consumes that culture. He maintained that technology alters cognition itself, all the way down to its deepest, most elemental processes.
His 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy is a difficult, disorderly, weirdly prescient and often dazzling book. Reading it is like riding on an old wooden rollercoaster that is threatening to blast apart at each turn; it isn’t organized into chapters and doesn’t make a linear argument; its insights throw off sparks in all directions. On the surface, The Gutenberg Galaxy is about the end of an evolutionary progress from print (“linear,” “authoritative”) to digital (“collaborative” “tribal”) ways of reasoning.
McLuhan prefigured the Internet era in a number of surprising ways. As he said in a March 1969 Playboy interview: “The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace.”
McLuhan came of age at Cambridge, the cradle of modern literary criticism, in that groundbreaking moment when (a) the role of readers and (b) the world at large suddenly became matters of interest to literary scholars. As the New Critics would come to do in the U.S., the Cambridge gang sought the meaning of a literary work in the text itself, in its means of communicating its message to a reader.
Before these rationalists came on the scene, literary criticism had a mystical character rooted in the Romantic ideas of guys like Walter Pater, who viewed literary production and consumption both as occurring through the inspiration of an almost divine agency. (The phrase “purple prose” might have been invented for Pater, who was given to such turns of phrase as “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”) Artists ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to Oscar Wilde bought into this super-aestheticized model of understanding art and literature, but it was ill-attuned to the rationalist demands of a post-industrial society (though we aren’t yet quite free of this idea of the Muse striking us with the inspirational equivalent of Cupid’s dart; Harold Bloom, for example, is still forever blathering on about Pater.)
Modern criticism was also born out of frustration with the hidebound academics who appeared to believe that English literature had ended in the 17th century. F. R. Leavis, an influential critic who taught McLuhan at Cambridge, was among the first who dared to rank Pound and Eliot alongside Milton. The view of the scholarly establishment on both sides of the Atlantic had theretofore been that it would take you a lifetime simply to master the recondite joys of Milton; that was the true and real study of literature, and nothing written in our own lifetimes was ever going to count. It took some serious English-department renegades to alter those convictions. Studying under Leavis at Cambridge, McLuhan developed the beginnings of the lifelong distaste for “expertise” and “authority” that would come to characterize his work.
McLuhan took Leavis’s methods far beyond literature, though. Just as, in Leavis’s view, a poem imposed its own assumptions on the listener, created its own world, so too did every medium of communication force its own methods of connection into the human mind. The late David Lochhead, a Canadian theologian, did a lovely job of explaining McLuhan’s approach in 1994.
It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity — all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs.[…]
Our machines allow us to reach out beyond the limits of our flesh. Our machines alter the ways in which our senses feed us information about the world beyond. […] Our machines offer us an image of ourselves — an image, which like the reflection of Narcissus, can hold us transfixed in self-adoration.
McLuhan drew from many, many sources in order to develop these ideas; the work of Canadian political economist and media theorist Harold Innis was instrumental for him. Innis’s technique, like McLuhan’s, forswears the building up of a convincing argument, or any attempt at “proof,” instead gathering in a ton of disparate ideas from different disciplines that might seem irreconcilable at first; yet considering them together results in a shifted perspective, and a cascade of new insights.
In the familiar, linear method of argument, it’s as if the author were a trial attorney and the reader a juror. By contrast, the McLuhan/Innis method is more like throwing the reader in a helicopter, taking him somewhere far away and simply exposing him to a vast new panorama. These authors wanted not to make and sell their own “point of view,” but to take you on a head trip instead.
As McLuhan writes in The Gutenberg Galaxy:
Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight … When he interrelates the development of the steam press with “the consolidation of the vernaculars” and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody’s point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to “spell out” the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits, like a symbolist poet or an abstract painter.
All these elements — the abandonment of “point of view,” the willingness to consider the present with the same urgency as the past, the borrowing “of wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either,” the desire to understand the mechanisms by which we are made to understand — are cornerstones of intellectual innovation in the Internet age. In particular, the liberation from “authorship” (brought about by the emergence of a “hive mind”) is starting to have immediate implications that few beside McLuhan foresaw. His work represents a synthesis of the main precepts of New Criticism with what we have come to call cultural criticism and/or media theory.
How neatly does this dovetail into a subtle and surprising new appreciation of the communal knowledge-making at Wikipedia?! It’s no wonder that McLuhan is among the patron saints of the Internet.
It’s no accident, either, that from grad school onward McLuhan was involved in collaborative projects that drew in a wide variety of disciplines, institutions, students, and paths of inquiry. If the results were chaotic (and they often were) they were also vital and thrilling. He worked with educators, corporate executives, computer scientists and management theorists; he helped develop high-school media syllabi, designed a study relating dyslexia to television watching, and conducted sensory tests for IBM. (For more on McLuhan, I can highly recommend Philip Marchand’s fine biography, The Medium and the Messenger.)
McLuhan’s insights, though they are being lived by millions every day, will take a long time to become fully manifest. But it’s already clear that Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of “authority,” “authorship,” and even “knowledge.”
The Internet Is Making Us Maoist
Though librarians and the academy in general have more or less fallen into line, there is still considerable critical opposition to the spread and influence of Wikipedia and of the Internet in general as a cultural and intellectual force.
In an influential 2006 piece at Edge, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” Jaron Lanier wrote that “the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring” and pronounced the concept of an all-wise collective not only faddish, but wrong and dangerous. He expressed a conservative contempt for “the collective” (by which he more or less means, “the mob”) and a staunch faith in the validity and significance of “authorship” and “individuality.”
From the same essay: “The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.” Well okay. I guess if we started to believe that the Internet itself were writing Wikipedia we would be in some trouble, or maybe we would be Rod Serling, I don’t know.
A lot of things have changed since 2006, but Mr. Lanier’s mind is not among them. Seriously, reading his stuff is like watching a guy lose his shirt at the roulette wheel and still he keeps on grimly putting everything on the same number. Lanier’s reasoning is right next door to that of Nicholas Carr (The Internet Is Making Us Stupid), Evgeny Morozov (The Internet Is Worse Than Useless Politically), Malcolm Gladwell (oh, don’t even get me started) and Sherry Turkle (The Internet Is Making Us Ever So Lonely.)
So in his 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto Lanier kept up the attack on Wikipedia and other forms of crowdsourcing. From a 2010 interview:
On one level, the Internet has become anti-intellectual because Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia.
Stop saying “the Wikipedia”! Anyhoo. it’s difficult to see how Lanier, Carr et al. will be able to keep this sort of thing up for much longer. Michael Agger took Lanier’s book to ribbons in Slate: “[Lanier’s] critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. [He] is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.”
But how come we’re still even discussing this, when Bob Stein already made mincemeat (very kindly, but mincemeat) of “Digital Maoism” right when it came out, in 2006? And how come the crux of Stein’s observations went pretty much unnoticed?
In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. […] Jaron focuses on the “finished piece,” ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic’s many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent. […]
At its core, Jaron’s piece defends the traditional role of the independent author, particularly the hierarchy that renders readers as passive recipients of an author’s wisdom. Jaron is fundamentally resistant to the new emerging sense of the author as moderator — someone able to marshal “the wisdom of the network.”
There has been some comment as to how this model of understanding actually works, but we need a lot more. The alteration in the way we think of authorship is deeper and more subtle than has yet been widely discussed. As Stein said to me recently, “The truth of a discipline, idea or episode in history lies in these interstices,” he said. “If you want to understand something complicated it’s helpful to look at the back and forth of competing voices or views.”
Events have long ago overtaken the small matter of “the independent author.” The question that counts now is: the line between author and reader is blurring, whether we like it or not. How can we use that incontrovertible fact to all our benefit?
The End Of Truth
There’s an enormous difference between understanding something and deciding something. Only in the latter case must options be weighed, and one chosen. Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an “authoritative” decision, you’re given the means for rolling your own.
We can call this new way of looking at things post-linear or even “post-fact” as Clay Shirky put it in a recent and thrill-packed interview with me. (This was a wicked nod to Farhad Manjoo, whose book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society is dead against the idea of being “post-fact.”) Shirky is himself a somewhat McLuhan-esque figure, a rapid-fire talker whose conversation is like a lit-up pinball machine with insights all caroming against one another.
“Those who are wringing their hands over Wikipedia are those committed to the idea of some uncomplicated ‘truth” he said, going on to characterize the early controversy between Britannica and Wikipedia as “an anguish regarding authority … that there are no guarantees to truth.”
He continued: “The threat to Britannica from Wikipedia is not a matter of dueling methods of providing information. Wikipedia, if it works better than Britannica, threatens not only its authority as a source of information, but also the theory of knowledge on which Britannica is founded. On Wikipedia “the author” is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking.
“Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration.”
He went on to illustrate with the example of alchemy.
“Alchemists kept their practices shrouded in secrecy. The shift from alchemy to chemistry wasn’t in the practitioners, nor in the instruments they used. The difference was that chemists had become willing to expose their methods and conclusions to the withering scrutiny of their peers,” he said. “The chemists said, ‘We don’t want to believe what isn’t true,’ and then: ‘It’s not true until someone else checks your work.’ This doubting impulse led to things like peer review, the duplication of experiments, the foundation of modern science.”
By empowering readers and observers with transparent access to the means by which conclusions are reached, rather than assembling them in an audience to hear the Authorities deliver the catechism from on high, we are all of us becoming scientists in this way, entering into a democracy of the intellect that is already bearing spectacular fruit, not just at Wikipedia but through any number of collaborative projects, from the Gutenberg Project to Tor to Linux.
But there continues to be resistance to the idea that expertise itself has been called into question, and we can expect that resistance to continue. Experts, understandably, are apt to be annoyed by their devaluation, and are liable to make their displeasure felt. And the thing about experts is that a lot of people still feel disinclined to question them.
Experts, geniuses, authorities, “authors” — we were taught to believe that these should be questioned, but until now have not often been given a way to do so, to seek out and test for ourselves the exact means by which they reached their conclusions. So long as we believe that there is such a thing as an expert rather than a fellow-investigator, then that person’s views just by magic will be worth more than our own, no matter how much or how often actual events have shown this not to be the case. For us to have this magic thinking about “individualism” then is pernicious politically, intellectually, in every way. That is not to say that we don’t value those who can lead the conversation |
-file their cases in smaller batches.
Early 2010, USCG imported the mass-BitTorrent lawsuit scheme into the United States. Since then the group has sued tens of thousands of alleged BitTorrent users, and other lawyers have been quick to copy their tactics.
Thus far the results in court have varied greatly. In some cases the judges were quick to throw the cases out, and in other instances the copyright holders were allowed to identify the alleged copyright infringers. They could then continue their scheme and send settlement offers to the defendants to make the threat of legal action disappear.
Last week we reported that USCG had dropped one of their most prominent cases representing the makers of The Expendables, Nu Image. In a brief court filing they voluntarily dismissed their case against 23,322 alleged BitTorrent users who were accused of illegally sharing the film.
One of the reasons for this dismissal is that in July, District Court Judge Robert Wilkins ruled that the lawyers could only go after those individuals who are reasonably likely to be living in the District of Columbia.
This meant that they were not allowed to send any subpoenas to ISPs when the IP-addresses are located in other districts, and it effectively reduced the group of defendants to about 1 percent of what it initially was. Apparently, this group of leftover defendants was not worth the effort and the case was dropped.
But this case doesn’t stand alone.
This week USCG voluntarily dismissed another lawsuit (pdf), one that was filed just a few weeks ago. The case in question was filed on behalf of Cinetel Films, the makers of the horror flick “I Spit on Your Grave” and listed 1,951 BitTorrent users as defendants.
As with the Expendables case, USCG doesn’t give a reason why they chose to voluntarily dismiss the case. However, since this case was also appointed to Judge Robert Wilkins it doesn’t seem far-fetched that they anticipated running into similar jurisdiction issues as they did in the Expendables case.
The above suggests that USCG is ‘retreating’ and they are unlikely to file similar mass-lawsuits at the District Court for the District of Columbia in the near future. However, that doesn’t mean that the trouble for the defendants is completely over.
As both cases were dismissed “without prejudice,” it means that they ran be refiled at a later stage. This allows the lawyers to cut up the huge list of defendants into smaller batches and file new lawsuits in the districts where these alleged BitTorrent users live.
As we’ve pointed out in the past, anti-piracy lawyers are constantly changing their tactics to maximize the profitability of their settlement schemes. The future will show whether USCG and its clients are planning to do the same. In other words, they may have lost a battle but the war is certainly not over yet.This is my review of the Viage Casino in Brussels. For more information on this casino, check the following page: Casino Brussels
My journey to all European Casinos started on the 27th of June 2012. I am glad that this journey will never end. By the time I fulfilled my mission and visited all Casinos in Europe, the information on the first casinos I visited will have become outdated and will need to be revised, and so I will have to start from the beginning.
I gave the honor to be the first casino I visit to the Viage Casino in Brussels. Maybe because I am originally from Belgium or maybe because Brussels will soon be the capital of Europe (most non Belgian Europeans will probably disagree with me on this).
The Viage Casino is located in the northern part of Brussels. The area is dominated by office buildings,many of which are part of the EU headquarters. The Viage Casino is about 15 minutes’ walk from the Gare du Nord and about 10 minutes’ walk from the Hotel Plaza on rue Adolphe Max.
Like in all Belgium casinos, you have to be at least 21 years old to enter the casino. Your ID or Passport will be checked at the entrance. You will then be issued a member card that you will use to cash out.
Smoking Casino Brussels
Smoking is not permitted in the Casino area. There are some smoking rooms next to the tables, but they are really not recommended since they are small and sticky. They will do if you urgently need a cigarette, but honestly, I would prefer to go out of the casino than to use these cubby holes.
As I entered the casino, at around 23:00, the bar was not very busy.The bartender was spreading around positive, young and dynamic energy. I paid cash for my beer and received it within seconds. Credit Cards are also accepted at the bar. This is uncommon in bars outside Brussels, which mostly only accept cash.
The live games area is located on the first floor of the Viage casino. Also on the first floor, I saw at least 150 slot machines, most of them 5 reel video slots. I also saw some classic mechanical slots. The slots area is not separated from the live games area of the casino, as is often the case with European casinos.
Table Games Casino Brussels
On the Wednesday night of my visit to the Viage Casino in Brussels the following tables were open:
3 BlackJack tables with Limits 10 and 25 Euros (500 max)
3 Roulette tables with Limits 5 and 25 Euros (500 max)
1 Punto Banco table (I forget to check the liimit)
1 Casino Poker table (I forgot to check the liimit). I think it was Casino Holdem.
The Viage Casino has the option to open many more game tables, but the choice was fine for the early evening. I would have opened more tables at around 11:30.
Poker Casino Brussels
I basically went to the Viage Casino to play poker. The poker room is located on the second floor of the casino. I saw three active poker tables in the early evening. I didn’t check the limits properly since I wasn’t able to stay in the poker area for long enough. I was suffocated by the smell of sweat in the room.
I have been living in the sunny south of Europe for the past ten years, where body odor is unacceptable and it looks like I became too sensitive.The feeling I had during my short stay in the poker area is that it was dominated by males, and that the atmosphere there was loaded with adrenalin. I couldn’t see players older then 40, but only had a short look and may have missed some of the older players.
There is also a sports bar on the second floor of the casino where you can have a drink and bet on recent sport events. There is another huge slots area on the second floor of the Viage Casino where I saw at least 300 video slots with various games.
Dress Code Casino Brussels
It would be an overstatement to say that there is a dress code at the Viage Casino in Brussels. I wore elegant pants, a nice dress shirt and my beloved black shoes and felt a bit overdressed. Most players wore jeans, a polo shirt and trainers. But I think that you will have a problem getting in with shorts.
Guests are typical for major Belgium cities: mixed up. I saw all kinds of Belgians at the casino (Kongo, Morocco, Belgium roots) and ages.
Blackjack table:
I landed in Brussels shortly before my visit to the casino that day and didn’t have a lot of time,so I only played blackjack for an hour or so. The dealer was a very nice Belgian girl in her mid-twenties. She was fluent in at least three languages (French, Dutch and English), and managed the table perfectly. The other players at the table were helpful and behaved straight forward and informally. Maybe it was because they saw that I played basic strategy.
I was a bit surprised when a new player to the table placed his chip under my chip. It took me a second to understand that he was betting on my hand. The bank was totally easy with it, paid me (us) out and I moved along.
At some point, an elegant Flemish guy that played next to me fora while, begged me to exchange places. He told me that the last place has huge advantages. He ended up playing his place and mine simultaneously (I got tired) very successfully. I didn’t ask the dealer how many decks are in the game, because there was an electronic shoe. I will make a little research on that.
Restaurant and VIP Room
I didn’t make it to the VIP room and the restaurant. I would be happy to get some comments on these.
Visited the casino in Brussels? Have any comments? Feel free to use the comments form below this article.New Delhi: A little over 20 complaints of alleged corruption, a decent chunk of which have been filed over the last two years, have languished without a proper investigation by the defence ministry’s chief vigilance officer (CVO), according to Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) documents.
The complaints, some of which stretch as far back as 2007, brings into sharp focus the sluggish functioning of the CVC at the ministry-level.
It also highlights how the Narendra Modi government, which before the 2014 elections promised to modernise India’s defence sector by making it more efficient and transparent, has struggled to formalise a method of probing corruption and convicting wrongdoers within the defence ministry.
The CVC’s notice doesn’t provide specific details of each complaint that is yet to be investigated, but just identifies when a complaint was sent for “ I&R” or “investigation and report”.
The oldest complaint, as shown below, that still hasn’t been officially investigated (with a report sent back to the CVC) stretches back to August 8, 2007. While no corruption complaints were sent by the CVC for follow-up in 2008, from then onwards the number of uninvestigated complaints have piled up. 2009 saw two complaints, 2011 saw five, 2012-2014 another five while 2015 and 2016 saw a total of nine complaints that have yet to be investigated.
What kind of complaints?
Ironically, two complaints in 2016 were filed just a couple days before and after defence minister Manohar Parrikar told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply that “no case involving corruption in defence procurements undertaken during the last two years has come to light”.
Senior defence ministry officials, when asked, insist that not all of the corruption complaints – especially those that have been lying dormant for over three years now – are of the large-scale, political-corruption variety that have marked India’s defence sector over the last 30 years.
“I would say that around 70% of those complaints are more small-scale incidents of alleged corruption that have to be investigated. These don’t have anything to do with defence procurements. In my opinion, a lot of them are because of bureaucratic delays or simple incompetence. A good portion of the complaints also stretch so far back that getting together the case files on it are still taking time,” a senior ministry official, who declined to be identified, told The Wire
However, two people with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed that three of the complaints sent by the CVC for investigation in 2015 and 2016 dealt with various procurement processes that started before the Modi government came into power but Parrikar’s ministry is now seeing through.
As one official from the army’s acquisition wing put it: “a handful of the procurements [sic] that are still ongoing date back to Antony’s tenure. The story of many of these procurements is one of several flawed RFPs and a misunderstanding of what is required for India’s military and India’s defence ecosystem”.
Scrapped rifle deal
The line between an incompetent, flawed procurement process and an arms deal fuelled by corruption has increasingly become very thin.
Consider for instance a recent Rs 1,000 crore deal to acquire 40,000 close quarter battle (CQB) carbines and over 30 million rounds of ammunition that was scrapped. The original tender was floated in 2010, with officials within the army’s acquisition wing and defence ministry divided over whether the technical specifications laid out were correct.
By 2013, as The Wire reported, that was something amiss with technical trials resulting in a single-vendor situation, which not only would raise the eventual price but also sparked allegations that it had a “corruption tone” or at the very least some funny business had happened along the way.
Parrikar scrapped the deal eventually, with one industry executive joking that any kickbacks that may have been paid would “now have to be refunded”, but only after his junior minister Rao Inderjit Singh kicked up a fuss and was eventually transferred out of the defence ministry.
The questions that defence analysts raise include: When should a proper investigation be mounted? Who should carry out the investigation? Who decides what goes to the CBI? Is it enough of a potentially corrupt deal is cancelled?
Another retired army officer, who declined to be identified, put it this way: “The history of Indian defence is one where scandals topple administrations, see huge fines being paid and defence middlemen fleeing the country, but no defence ministry officials are ever convicted. Why is this so? A bribe is not thrown into an empty abyss in hopes that goodwill will follow.”
In the case of the Israeli rifle deal, at least two informal probes were carried out, one headed by Air Marshal P.P. Reddy (retired), both of which apparently found no suspicious deviations. And yet former minister of state for defence Singh, who was unceremoniously transferred, felt that a CBI probe was needed.
CVC complaints
And what of the CVC’s complaints that are pending investigation? These complaints are generally first determined “actionable” by the CVC and are then sent to the corresponding ministry or public sector enterprise (PSE) so that the respective chief vigilance officer (CVO) can investigate.
In PSEs, vigilance officers generally operate under a dual-reporting structure and hence also report to central vigilance commissioner K.V. Chowdhary, whereas in ministries and their subordinate offices either a director of a joint secretary-level officer doubles up as a CVO in addition to their other responsibilities.
In India’s defence ministry, there is a vigilance division that looks after “matters pertaining to Service HQs/Inter Service Organisations under Department of Defence, Department of Defence Research & Development and Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare..”. ‘Matters’ here includes corrupt practices and irregularities. The department of defence production, however, does not come under this.
Once a complaint is sent from the CVC to its CVO at the ministry-level, they are supposed to investigate and report back within three months. The list of twenty pending complaints before the defence ministry is divided between complaints that have not been investigated for six months to one year, and above one year.
The CVC in general receives around 80,000 cases a year, according to agency head Chowdhary, out of which 2,000-3,000 cases “involve those with actionable calls”. These cases are then forwarded to other agencies such as the CBI.
Parrikar and Jaitley
The NDA government, before coming into power in 2014, had three major promises with regard to defence: fast-tracking military equipment procurement, modernisation and increasing efficiency and delivering on high-profile issues such as OROP (One Rank, One Pension).
To his credit, Parrikar has also astutely tied corruption with the modernisation of India’s military forces and the general efficiency of the defence ministry’s procurement process. Which is why there are now integrity clauses for high-value deals, a new policy for blacklisting vendors and an attempt at bringing public the activities of middlemen, where they can be officially scrutinised.
Transparency International, while condemning the high rate of corruption in India’s defence sector in 2015, noted with approval some the new anti-corruption steps taken by Parrikar’s defence ministry.
And yet, they are still half-measures according to experts. The new blacklisting policy hardly touches on financial penalties, which Parrikar in late 2014 had said would play a crucial part: “How much you (the vendor) violated, pay the Indian government 4-5 times that, only then will you be permitted to participate in defence tenders.”
The new policy also doesn’t take active cognisance of investigations that unearth corruption in India or in relation to an Indian deal. This is particularly unwise, experts say, because most of the high-profile cases over the last twenty years such as the Bofors scam, the AgustaWestland payoffs or even the recent Embraer imbroglio, all of which were first brought to India’s attention by foreign investigation agencies or media organisations.
To what extent should the CVC be involved in cleaning up India’s defence sector? As the delayed investigation into complaints show, there is still a long path for the Modi government to walk.An unarmed civilian is killed and no one is held accountable. Part two in a series examining Israeli military investigations into Palestinians killed by soldiers. A Palestinian taxi driver is shot in the back by an Israeli soldier. Investigators say they cannot locate the shooters, even though their identity is known. Six years later, when a civil suit is filed, the State suddenly produces them as witnesses. The judge rules their versions of events are unreliable and orders damages paid to the family. The criminal case, however, is closed. [Read part one here.]
By John Brown and Noam Rotem (translated from Hebrew by Ofer Neiman)
Ever since an IDF soldier shot Zakaria Daragma, his widow and five young children have been living on NIS 1,500 ($385) a month, the same amount they get for renting out his taxi cab. Dargma, from the village of Tubas in the northern West Bank, was 37 years old when he was shot in the back by an IDF soldier in May 2006.
The details from the army’s regional operations log, as well as the Military Police’s investigation case, which are published here for the first time, reveal contradictions between the soldiers’ versions and raise grave concerns regarding the responsibility of their commanders, not to mention the army’s operational procedures in the region. What makes the whitewashing of this case exceptional, even for IDF investigations, is that the army “failed” to find the shooters, even though their identity was known to other soldiers involved and their reports appeared in the daily operations log. Only six years later, when the State Attorney had to present its defense arguments in a civil suit filed by the family, were the shooters suddenly identified and located. Despite this breakthrough, however, they have yet to be interrogated and the IDF Military Advocate General closed its criminal case into matter, despite their versions being deemed unreliable by an Israeli judge (who for those same reasons, ordered the State to pay damages to the family).
Shot in the back
On May 4, 2006, Zakaria Daragma parked his taxi in front of the Ein Baydan checkpoint near Nablus, and began to walk up the road to the other side of the checkpoint. Two months earlier the regional commander decided to make travel to Nablus more difficult for Palestinians by erecting four barriers, earth mounds and ditches, effectively shutting the stretch of road for vehicle traffic. In response, taxi drivers began to cross the segment on foot, look for passengers on the other side, cross back with them and drive them to the villages of the area.
When Daragma reached the end of the stretch of road, he stopped to talk with the other taxi drivers who were also waiting for passengers, asking whether there were passengers interested in getting to Tubas. At approximately 4 p.m. he began to walk back to his car; a man named Raid Fathi Salahat walked with him.
After he reached the second earth mound, having walked a distance of 100 meters, a nearby military observation post dispatched a jeep with four soldiers to their location. A few seconds after they arrived, and without any prior warning, the commander of the patrol fired in the air and a second soldier, who stepped out of the vehicle, shot Daragma in the back. The soldiers would later claim that they felt their lives were under threat.
Salahat ducked when the shooting occurred and says he saw blood flowing out of Daragma’s mouth. He feared that the soldiers would shoot again and quickly walked away from the scene.
The two soldiers ran towards Daragma while two others prevented the Palestinian drivers on the Nablus side of the checkpoint from approaching him and administering first aid. One of the Palestinian drivers called an ambulance and Daragma was taken to a hospital in Nablus, where he succumbed to his injuries.
Those are the facts accepted by all parties.
The operations log
Despite Daragma’s critical condition, the soldiers did not see fit to call an ambulance. Nor did they report the shooting on the radio, which occurred, as previously stated, at around 4 p.m. Only at 7:47 p.m. is a mendacious report about the shooting of one of three “armed men” listed on the regional brigade’s operations log.
Even though soldiers at an observation post dispatched the patrol to the scene, none of the former identified any weapons, and the same holds for the other witnesses interrogated as part of the investigation — aside from the shooter and his commander. Needless to say, no weapons were found on Daragma or in his vicinity. A later report from the Operations Division states that the shooting was aimed at two people, and explicitly states that the deceased was unarmed.
[See some of the original investigation materials in Hebrew, here.]
A Military Police investigation was opened following the killing, but hardly any investigatory actions were taken. In 2007, the Union of Palestinian Taxi Drivers, on behalf of Zakaria Daragma’s widow and five children, turned to Attorney Firas Jabali, who filed a civil suit against the State. As part of the preliminary procedure, Atty. Jabali asked for the records of the military investigation.
In July 2008, Jabali received an astonishing memorandum, asserting that the IDF Military Police had failed to find the shooters. As previously stated, their identity was known to the IDF and the report about the shooting and those who carried it out appears on the operations log. According to the investigation records, however, efforts to find the shooters amounted to no more than the questioning of the brigade’s operations officer — more than two years after the incident. During his questioning, the officer was asked how in his opinion the shooters could be located, and his answer was: “speak to the officers who served in the unit at the time.” From the case files, which we have read, one cannot conclude whether the investigators indeed tried to find the aforementioned officers, or if they sufficed with questioning the operations officer.
Five Palestinians who witnessed the incident were also questioned. All five testified that both men were unarmed and that the soldiers shot Dargama in the back for no reason.
In spite of the numerous contradictions between the testimonies and the operations log, and in spite of the fact that Daragma was shot in the back from a distance of approximately 100 meters while not posing any threat whatsoever, the investigation came to an end without ever locating the shooters, not to mention questioning them.
The shooter appears
Four years went by. The civil suit filed by Daragma’s family was making progress and all of the evidence noted that the shooting could not have been justified and was not accounted for. Then, and only then, did the State manage to find the shooter, Staff-Sgt. A., and his commander, Sgt.-Maj. Y., and summon them to court as witnesses for the defense. The State maintained its refusal to summon the other two soldiers who were in the jeep, although their identity must have been known.
In court, the shooter and his commander testified that they had never been questioned by the Military Police. During their examination by Adv. Firas Jabali, they presented testimonies strewn with contradictions. Y. claimed he saw a gun but A. testified that Y. gave up the chase and turned around before the gun was drawn. Both of them claimed that the shooting took place when Zakaria Daragma and his friend turned to them at a distance of 100 meters, and that was why they felt that their lives were in danger. Medical evidence shows that Daragma was shot in the back.
A. also claimed that he sensed a general threat because earlier in the day he had seen a taxi speeding away from the scene, even though there is no mention of this fact on the operations log. He also claims that there was a threat to the nearby [Israeli] settlements because Daragma was an “escapee” — a Palestinian who disregards orders by Israeli security forces to stop. However, not only is “escaping” not a justifiable reason to open fire, but also Daragma and his friend were not defined as “escapees” in the observation post’s report. And crossing that area on foot was common among taxi drivers.
Furthermore, A. stated that Daragma looked suspicious because “he was wearing a blue coat in that heat.” However, on that day, the temperature was 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) and he was not wearing a coat, but a thin nylon top, as one can see in the photo of his body at the hospital (here).
According to the two soldiers, Salahat took the gun Daragma had on him and then ran away toward Ein Baydan. All other witnesses, including Salahat himself, rejected this claim, testifying that Daragma had no gun. In any case, this is a dubious narrative: if someone ran away with a gun, why didn’t the soldiers chase them, considering the threat to nearby settlements? Why didn’t they report that an armed and dangerous man was near the Elon Moreh settlement? Why weren’t any searches conducted in Ein Baydan, the village to which Salahat allegedly escaped? Furthermore, if the soldiers’ claim regarding the attempted attack is correct, why weren’t Daragma’s relatives arrested, according to the military regime’s common procedure, and why was there no attempt to find out whether he belonged to a criminal or terrorist organization?
Y., the patrol commander, states in his testimony that the IDF observation posts overlooking the area in which Daragma was shot used video surveillance, but the investigating officers made no effort to check whether the incident had been filmed, and whether there was any video evidence that could corroborate or refute the soldiers’ version of events.
Furthermore, A., the shooter, claimed in his testimony, perhaps in an attempt to justify the shooting to himself, that, “the danger is not just the gun, [the act of] escaping itself constitutes danger.” Are these really the orders given to the soldiers in the area? A. also claims that the procedure of arresting a suspect requires that one soldier shout and shoot in the air while another prepares to shoot, having the suspect in his sights. It seems that beyond the personal failure that led to the fatal shooting of Daragma, there was also a far-reaching command failure, with the IDF’s formal open-fire procedures being — intentionally or mistakenly — distorted.
‘Unreliable testimony’
Judge Yusef Suheil addressed these points, and in his decision he ruled that the soldiers’ version of events was unreliable. He rejected the State’s version, according to which the shooting was a “belligerent act”’ immune from compensation claims. He also rejected the claim that Daragma had constituted a threat to the soldiers and his killing was therefore justifiable.
The judge asserted unequivocally that, “there was no justification for shooting at the deceased,” and, “the soldiers’ testimonies raise numerous contradictions which cannot be reconciled with their version in court.” In other words, that’s a polite way of saying they were lying in at least part of their testimonies.
In the summary of the decision the judge ordered the State to compensate Daragma’s widow and four children. Now, eight years after Daragma’s death, negotiations regarding the sum are being conducted.
Closing the case
Having received an Israeli judge’s official stamp, the aforementioned questions and contradictions should have sufficed to bring about a reopening of the case and a new exhaustive investigation. Nevertheless, six years after the case, when the shooter and his commander appeared in court all of a sudden, they were not questioned whatsoever by the Military Police.
Last April, the IDF Military Advocate General, Maj.-Gen. Danny Efroni, announced his final decision to close the case without any indictments. An additional point to consider regards Maj.-Gen. Efroni’s authority to even decide on the case in the first place. The soldiers involved were discharged three months after the incident, and the MAG can file indictments only up to a year from the date of discharge. The decision in this matter should be made by the State Attorney. Efroni was recently reprimanded by the High Court of Justice because the IDF MAG was in possession of case files concerning the case of the killing of Samir Awad, a youth from the West Bank village of Budrus, even though those involved had also been discharged over a year earlier.
Whitewashing is the rule, not the exception
Like in the first chapter of this series, the failures in the Military Police’s investigation stink to high heaven. Reading the investigators’ questions, one finds it hard to decide: was this a massive whitewashing effort, or mere dilettante negligence which could perhaps be ascribed to the investigators’ young age and the limited amount of training they receive before being tasked with investigations of killings. There is no doubt regarding the responsibility of their commanders, legal professionals and attorneys. The latter knowingly collaborate with this improper practice, and the negligence which could perhaps be ascribed to young conscripted soldiers is cast in an entirely different — much more alarming light — when it receives the backing of this senior level of command.
Whitewashing pervades the military system, as a rule rather than an exception. In June 2014, for example, it was reported that six years after Lt.-Gen. Roni Numa ordered the cold-blooded killing of a Palestinian in violation of military orders and also lied about it, General Avichai Mandelblit, then IDF Military Advocate General and now the Cabinet Secretary (recently questioned under warning in the “Harpaz Affair”) decided to close the case against him. This is the natural outcome of a distorted situation in which the same organization that carries out the killing is the same body that formulates orders, investigates itself and decides on indictments within its ranks. The military has no interest in getting to the truth of the matter.
The only detail which makes this case exceptional is the Palestinian decision to file a civil suit. In the civil process, the Military Police investigators were replaced by Atty. Jabali, who through his independent examination and questioning, has shown the absurdity in the soldiers’ versions of events. Following this ruling, Zakaria Daragma’s poor family may receive civil compensation, but they will not see justice served in the form of an indictment of the shooter and his commanders, who conspired to cover up the deadly shooting.
Noam Rotem is an Israeli activist, high-tech executive and author of the blog o139.org, subtitled “Godwin doesn’t live here any more.” John Brown is the pseudonym of an Israeli academic and blogger. This article was first published on +972′s Hebrew-language sister site, Local Call, where this series was first published. Read it in Hebrew here.DOMINICK REUTER via Getty Images
Cosby's lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed
Their star witness, an ex-prosecutor, said he believed the accuser, but couldn't prove her account in court
The comedian appeared unsteady as he arrived at court
Meanwhile, Cosby scored a victory and a setback in two other lawsuits involving accusations of sexual misconduct
Lawyers for entertainer Bill Cosby and the Philadelphia prosecutor accusing him of molesting a woman in 2004 went to court Tuesday to argue over crucial evidence -- namely, Cosby's own words about the alleged sexual attack.
Cosby, 78, faces a charge that he drugged and molested Andrea Constand, who was then a women's basketball assistant at Temple University, at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. It is the only criminal case to result from various complaints involving some 50 women who have accused him of indecent acts going back decades. Cosby's defense had sought to dismiss Constand's charge, or at least prevent prosecutors from using sworn depositions that Cosby gave in 2005 and 2006 in response to a lawsuit Constand filed against him.
Tuesday was a busy day for Cosby’s defense, as his attorneys in Los Angeles unsuccessfully tried to shield him from a deposition in a separate lawsuit. A judge ordered that Cosby must sit for additional questions about an alleged 1974 sexual assault at the Playboy mansion. Meanwhile, a different woman suing Cosby for alleged sexual battery at the famed home of Hugh Hefner dropped her lawsuit.
Newly elected Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele announced Cosby's arrest in December. A previous DA said there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute.
Cosby traveled to the courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Tuesday morning. He walked with a cane and the assistance of two men, who linked arms with him.
The TV star's attorneys argued that Steele built the charge around evidence that can't be used in a criminal case, including the depositions in which Cosby admitted giving pills to Constand to "take some of the stress away" before he lifted her bra and slid a hand into her pants. The depositions conflict with statements Cosby made to authorities when they initially looked into Constand's accusation. Constand and the comedian later settled the lawsuit out of court.
Cosby's deposition statements shouldn't be used, the defense said, because he only agreed to testify in the lawsuit after then-District Attorney Bruce Castor said he wouldn't prosecute the entertainer. Castor said he made that deal to strengthen Constand's position in her lawsuit.
In testimony Tuesday, Castor appeared as a witness for Cosby. He disputed the claim that he'd reached an agreement not to prosecute Cosby in exchange for his cooperation in a civil lawsuit, according to WCAU. Castor instead said that he'd hoped his decision not to prosecute Cosby would "gain some justice" for Constand in civil court.
But Castor leveled serious accusations against Constand, too. He claimed that she'd made inconsistent statements about her encounter with Cosby and feared that her mother illegally recorded phone calls with Cosby.
Under the circumstances, he didn't think he could get a conviction even though he testified today that "what I think is that Andrea Constand was inappropriately touched by Mr. Cosby."
The new DA has argued that the agreement doesn't hold up because only a judge may grant a suspect immunity from criminal prosecution. Further, Castor, at the time of the deal, made public statements that said a criminal case could be revisited, Steele said.
Judith Ritter, a law professor at Widener University, told The Huffington Post that it's unlikely Common Pleas Judge Steven T. O'Neill will dismiss the entire case. Even if O'Neill forbids the use of Cosby's deposition, Ritter said, there is enough evidence in various statements from Constand, her mother and Cosby to allow law enforcement to continue with the case.
"The loss of the deposition is not fatal to the prosecution," Ritter said. "I'm sure they would prefer to have it, but I don't think it's essential."
It's unclear when O'Neill will decide whether the case should go forward.
If convicted, Cosby faces a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
As Cosby focused on the criminal case, there were also developments in some of the various civil suits against him.
A judge in Los Angeles on Tuesday ruled in favor of one woman suing Cosby by ordering that he participate in a second deposition.
The case involves Judy Huth, who alleges that Cosby engaged in sexual misconduct with her at the Playboy mansion in 1974, when she was 15 years old.
Cosby was deposed in October but refused to answer some questions then.
“We regard the court’s order today as a complete vindication of our position,” Huth’s attorney, Gloria Allred, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, accuser Chloe Goins, 25, dropped her own lawsuit against Cosby on Tuesday. Goins had previously alleged that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at the Playboy mansion in 2008, when she was 18, according to USA Today. It’s not clear why Goins bowed out, although USA Today's Maria Puente suggests the possibility of an out-of-court settlement.
Cosby’s publicist did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s inquiries.
This article has been updated with information about the civil suits brought by Huth and Goins.“This is like I’m on flat ground,” says anchor Bill Whitaker on Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes. But in fact, he’s pedaling uphill in the Hungarian countryside. What’s making it so easy for him? There’s a tiny motor, hidden in the hub of the bicycle, helping to propel Whitaker up the hill. This motor is the brainchild of Hungarian bicyclist, inventor, and businessman Istvan Varjas, who says professional cyclists have probably used it for years to cheat in competitions. But even though he invented it, Varjas washes his hands of any wrongdoing that may come from people using the device. “If a grandfather came to buy a bike and after it’s gone to … his grandson who is racing,” Varjas tells 60 Minutes, “it’s not my problem.”
'60 MInutes' anchor BIll Whitaker spins the pedal on one of Istvan Varjas's bikes and watches as the wheel keeps turning with the help of a secret electric motor.
This cavalier attitude belies the inventor’s expertise, which he has honed over many years. His cheater devices, which Varjas started making nearly 20 years ago, are all made with brushless electric motors and powered by lithium batteries. The entire assembly fits within the bicycle’s frame and is therefore nearly undetectable. There are only two exposed parts of this so-called “mechanical doping” device, which is illegal for competition under United Cycling Institute rules. These two parts, a pinion driven by the motor and a ring attached to the pedal crank, comprise a hypoid gear set that operates so quietly it can’t be heard over the normal chain sounds.
Istvan Varjas's bicycle motor turns the pedal crank with a hidden gear.
In fact, Varjas says that UCI inspectors can’t detect the most sophisticated versions of these devices, even with electronic gear. Cycling Tips reports that only by removing a bicycle wheel and weighing it would authorities be able to tell that a cheater device had been installed. So far, authorities have been unwilling to do that. In the same interview, Varjas also claimed that the UCI, professional cycling’s governing body, is not as clueless to the problem as it may seem. “They manipulate you,” he says. “If you ask me who uses engines, I answer you: go to the UCI. They know.”
Hidden bicycle motor inventor Istvan Varjas shows '60 Minutes' anchor Bill Whitaker how the device fits inside a bicycle frame.
Back in his workshop, Varjas tells Whitaker on 60 Minutes that he first developed the device in 1998, and that an anonymous buyer paid him $2 million for the design … and his silence. He agreed not to make the motors or even talk about them for a decade, but he |
their projected costs and schedules, sometimes by considerable amounts, he said.
An example is Brazil’s controversial Belo Monte dam, which was initially given a $14.4 billion price tag but is currently projected to cost $27.4 billion by the time it is finished.
Dam planners’ projected budgets have not gotten any more accurate in the last 80 years, the report said – something Flyvbjerg called a “surprising result.”
“You would expect professionals in the field to improve their predictions. Our data go back 80 years for dams and 70 years for transport projects, and show very clearly no improvement,” he said.
Taylor, the hydropower association executive director, said that he is certain predictions have in fact gotten better. “The scope of expectation around project development, the knowledge and understanding that exists today, is way in advance of what it was in the last century, where a lot of this data was taken from,” he said. “It would be really erroneous to imply that no learning has taken place.”
‘FOOLS AND LIARS’
Where and how do project planners go wrong, as they supposedly have been doing since the 1930s? According to the study, they make two main errors in their predictions: they either succumb to over-optimism, which Flyvbjerg says is a natural human tendency, or they deliberately and strategically misrepresent their project in order to gain approval or funding.
There is “strong evidence that misplaced political incentives and agency problems lead to flawed decision-making,” the report said. The dual problems of “delusion” and “deception” often complement and exacerbate each other, the report said.
In a press release issued by the authors, Flyvbjerg said that the two categories of inaccurate predictors can be divided into “fools” and “liars.”
“Fools are the reckless optimists who see the future with rose-tinted glasses,” he said. “These forecasting fools ignore hard facts and uncertainty, betting the family silver on gambles with very low probability of success. Liars deliberately mislead the public for private gain, fiscal or political, by painting overly-positive prospects of an investment, just to get it going.”
Taylor, of the dam industry, said that he found that implication “incredibly offensive,” and cited the report as making a common mistake about evaluating project planners’ estimations.
“In their data analysis, they’ve assumed that the construction engineers’ estimate for construction is the project cost. It’s not,” he said. According to Taylor, the project cost includes consideration of all associated programs, including social programs and environmental management.
“To look at the total cost of the project at the end of the process and compare the difference is not comparing apples with apples,” he said.
SMALLER IS BETTER?
The Oxford report suggests that governments and companies look into smaller, more flexible projects to replace the role of mega-dams in supplying what Flyvbjerg called a “power-hungry world.”
He said that projects like those in Norway, which feature small dams or turbines in tunnels, can be much more efficient and, importantly, deliver needed energy much more quickly compared to mega-dam projects which can take decades to complete.
Large dam projects also often lead to displacement of communities, and can provoke protests, as has happened with indigenous communities in Brazil who will lose some of their territory to the Belo Monte dam.
Taylor, however, said there is no direct correlation between the scale of dam projects and sustainability, and said that a “concentrated, centralised solution” is often the most efficient way to deliver energy.
In the year 2000, the World Commission on Dams released a comprehensive 350-page report about the role of dams around the world, highlighting suggestions for creating more efficient hydropower projects. The damaging report caused a long lull in mega-dam building. However, that trend has turned around recently and construction has picked up again.
Flyvbjerg said that he hopes his team’s work can have the same effect as the World Commission on Dams report did almost 15 years ago.
“We wanted to see, is there any new evidence that would actually justify this re-emergence of the large number of large-scale dams being constructed around the world? What we find is that there is no evidence to support doing that. The evidence shows the exact opposite, just as we saw 20 years ago,” he said.
“We do hope that things can change; we don’t take it as a given that mega-dams have to continue, and we do hope that our study may help change things for the better.”
Peter Bosshard, the policy director of a U.S.-based organization called International Rivers, said that the report, which he referred to as the “most thorough independent evaluation of large dams ever,” is a “damning indictment” of the dam building sector.
“Even after following large dam projects for the past 20 years, I was stunned by its findings,” he said.
“Their evaluation also refutes the frequent assertion that dam builders have learned from past mistakes. Fortunately, renewable energy alternatives are readily available, and governments are well advised to prioritise them in their future energy strategies,” Bosshard added.
However, Taylor said that he believes final costs and even cost overruns do not necessarily dictate the wisdom of a project. “It’s a risk that has to be managed, and I believe that the sector is getting better at doing that,” he said.
“The wisdom of the investment is to take the life cycle of that project, and (look at), ‘Is that going to be putting society in a better place to manage the future?’ Dams, and particularly hydropower projects, provide a very … prudent way to manage our future, working with nature best as we can to make sure that we can provide the vital services of energy and water.”
Samuel Mintz is an AlertNet Climate intern.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Bruno Zuculini flies in for medical as Man City close in on £3m deal for youngster
Zuculini on the verge of transfer to Manchester City
Argentine has flow to Manchester to undergo medical
Marcos Lopez has been allowed to join Lille on season-long loan
Manchester City are finalising a £3million move for Argentine midfielder Bruno Zuculini of Racing.
The 21-year-old is in England for his medical. City are allowing Marcos Lopes, 18, to join Lille on loan for a season.
City will also increase their efforts to sign Eliaquim Mangala from Porto even though Mehdi Benatia has made it clear he wants to leave Roma.
Hello: Bruno Zuculini has his medical in Manchester ahead of joining the Premier League champions
Raring to go: Zuculini is signing for Manchester City from Racing
City consider Benatia an alternative to France defender Mangala although both have expressed a preference to join Chelsea.
Alvaro Negredo remains a target for Atletico Madrid who are convinced the player wants to leave City.Nothing goes together better with a binge-watching marathon of your favorite show than ordering piles of delicious food to start binge-eating along with it. Sometimes I even like to match the type of food I order with whatever I’m devouring on screen. Checking out the reboot of Ghost in The Shell? Time to order some sushi and a teriyaki bowl. Re-watching all six seasons of The Sopranos? Dominick’s delivers the best chicken parm! Reliving your childhood with the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse complete series special edition… I guess a talking soup bowl? However, now you can even leave the comfy confines of your couch and favorite streaming device and still enjoy geek culture/food combos at a variety of eateries around the world. Here are a few pop-themed restaurants to whet your appetite!
“Hot Pie” Actor To Open GOT Bakery Named “You Know Nothing John Dough”
First of all, he is known to the world as “Hot Pie”- so it is not surprising that Game of Thrones actor Ben Hawkey is getting into the bakery business. On the show, Hot Pie was known for his Direwolf loaves, baking a series of wolf-shaped batches for the House of Stark, and Brienne of Tarth. So now for a limited time starting at the end of July, users of the British food delivery app Deliveroo can order Hawkey’s real life Direwolf loaves from his store: “You Know Nothing John Dough.” Game of Thrones puns aside they sound delicious, made with whole wheat, corn bread and orange zest, to be served warm with butter. Might be a good Hors d’oeuvre at your red wedding!
“Tarantino’s Bar” Offers Tasty Beverages In Berlin
While it is no “Mimi’s Haberdashery,” a Quentin Tarantino-themed bar in Berlin features dozens of posters and memorabilia from the legendary filmmaker. The bar plays Tarantino films on a loop and the décor would make Vincent Vega feel right at home taking the boss’s wife out on the town. In 2009 while shooting Inglorious Basterds in Germany, locals informed Tarantino of the bar that bears his name. The Oscar winning director had to see it for himself and actually visited the bar unannounced. In an interview he later recalled the strange moment he entered the establishment dedicated to his life’s work, saying: “We showed up, and the owner saw me through the window, stepping out of the car. He was really cool. He just stood in the middle of the room, and when I stepped through the door, he held out his hand and said, ‘Welcome to your bar.'”
Harry Potter Themed Pasta Restaurant Makes Magic Happen in The Kitchen!
While Universal Studios itself has created several Wizarding World of Harry Potter attractions around the globe for muggles to get the full theme park experience, drinking $12 butterbeer before making it magically disappear on a roller-coaster, there are also some more off-brand tributes to the franchise. One such Potter themed eatery is Pasta Wiz in Brooklyn, NY… because when I think of British wizards, I think of pasta! Pata Wiz’s theme seems to center on making patrons feel like they are eating in the iconic dining hall at Hogwarts. Luckily Lord Voldermort will have a hard time sneezing in the marinara sauce.
Demacia: League of Legends Themed Restaurant
It makes sense that an online multiplayer game would have its own theme restaurant; back in the day MPG parties were all the rage, but the delicacies were more relegated to stale pizza and Mountain Dew. Now “Demacia”– in Chongqing, China – named after the one of the main fictional locations of the game, is dedicated to all things League of Legends. Patrons are greeted by staff in full costume, such as a Ezreal waiter and can even log on to play the game for a chance to win discounted food.
Beetle House, The Tim Burton Themed Restaurant Will Make You Sing Day-O! At the Dinner Table
With locations in both New York and Los Angeles, Beetle House, the Tim Burton-themed restaurant is sure to tickle the taste buds of even the melancholiest of moviegoers. While some eateries throw out a few puns to satisfy their theme, there is plenty of Johnny Depp character-inspired cosplay happening each night including Edward Scissor Hands and Willy Wonka. Don’t fear though, the menu also offers actual “Beetle Juice” cocktails and “Sweeney’s Beef”- yum!
Hello Kitty Restaurant Takes Merchandising to The Next Level
When I discovered that there was a Hello Kitty-themed restaurant, my first thought was; wait, what is Hello Kitty? The little Japanese cartoon figure has been part of our lives for so long that I forgot where it actually came from. It turns out that the ever-present figure is in fact not a cat, but a little girl whose name is “Kitty”- and is more mascot than anything. It’s like if Mickey Mouse were the iconic Disney’s Mickey Mouse BEFORE he appeared in animations. Weird. The 7-billion-dollar franchise has had TV shows, books and appeared on school supplies, backpacks and clothing. So, no surprise that the company that owns Hello Kitty went ahead and made a Hello Kitty Dreams restaurant in a high-end shopping mall in Beijing, China. There, patrons can dine on food that comes in the shape of their favorite character. You can eat Hello Kitty! Thankfully the Tim Burton restaurant didn’t start making Corpse Bride shaped pudding.
What is the most interesting theme restaurant you have ever been to?The state has sued a Wakefield company it says improperly removed boilers at a Newbury Street building without taking proper measures to keep asbestos insulation from escaping from the site.
The state Attorney General's office filed the suit Friday against Commonwealth Tank, Inc., which is not licensed for asbestos-related work for its actions in removing two large boilers from 361 Newbury St., at Massachusetts Ave., over a five-day period in the summer of 2014:
According to the complaint, the defendants did not comply with required asbestos abatement work practices, including failing to notify MassDEP about asbestos encasing the boilers, failing to use proper air filtration units, failing to contain the asbestos dust, and failing to wet the asbestos material during the removal. This illegal asbestos removal could have potentially exposed people accessing the building, passersby in a busy urban area, and workers to asbestos fibers.
The suit also alleges the company improperly disposed of hazardous wastes at its Wakefield facility.We are days out from the domestic debut of Sony’s big-budget Ghostbusters remake. The film opens in the United Kingdom today, and thus the review embargo lifted yesterday morning. This is an all-too-rare female-fronted big-budget franchise, and thus all eyes are on how well it does at the global box office race. The pre-release tracking, before the reviews rolled in, argued for a $40-$50 million opening weekend, so we'll see how that pans out. In a just world, Ghostbusters would have the ability to be terrible and something of a flop without harming anything other than the franchise itself. But this is not a just world.
No matter what I thought of the film, the fact remains that the pressures on this movie, by virtue of being a pathetically rare big-budget fantasy franchise featuring women in the lead roles, are disproportionate. If the film bombs, the conventional wisdom will be that it will make it harder for more of its ilk to get green-lit. No, I don’t mean more big-budget nostalgia-driven franchise reboots. I mean more big-budget blockbusters starring women. What is actually “at stake” is the still insane notion that women are box office poison.
It has been nearly eight years since Sex and the City, Twilight and Mamma Mia!. It has been just over five years since Bridesmaids, less than five years since The Hunger Games, and less than three years since Frozen. Just eight months ago, Star Wars: The Force Awakens became the biggest-grossing movie ever in America by a lot. In the summer of 2014, another season when conventional blockbusters underwhelmed, we saw The Fault in Our Stars, Tammy, Maleficent, and Lucy pull in huge grosses relative to their respective budgets.
We shouldn’t still be having this conversation, but we are. Every time a big female-driven hit comes out, it’s written off as a fluke, and every time the next one comes down the pike it is held up as a glorified litmus test. We still shouldn’t be looking at every big-budget female-driven offering as a litmus test.
We shouldn’t look at Tomb Raider as a “Can a female-driven video game blockbuster make money?” riddle when Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider and the Resident Evil franchise remain the only two remotely successful video game franchises. We shouldn’t wonder what Wonder Woman will mean for the future of female-driven comic book superhero heroes even as Fantastic Four’s failure brings about nothing more than the temporary death of that specific male-driven franchise.
Thanks to both the years-long campaign of misogynistic online trolling as well as the still woeful lack of female-led big-budget Hollywood movies, the pressure is on for Ghostbusters to justify itself more so than any other movie this summer.
Maybe Ghostbusters will be a big hit, or maybe it will merely make just enough to justify itself. Or maybe it won't make that much more than Bridesmaids or Spy yet be considered a whiff due to its $144 million budget. If this were a male-driven Ghostbusters movie, one of many male-driven would-be tentpoles in a crowded summer schedule, there would be nothing more at stake than the particular future of the specific franchise.
The fear is that Ghostbusters may bomb just as hard as any number of male-driven blockbusters in any past summer (Land of the Lost comes to mind) and be used as proof positive that the problem was with the gender of its leads. If we are honest and fair to those involved with the film, and with the idea that our population is 51% female, the stakes for financial success should be no higher than the countless mediocre or terrible male-driven franchise films (Pan, I, Frankenstein, Jack the Giant Slayer, etc.) that bomb every year at a theater near you.
While I am rooting for the film and would love for it to prove the naysayers wrong, there is a difference between my hopes that it will be a big hit and my fears over what will happen if it's not. Paul Feig and Katie Dippold’s Ghostbusters has a right to be every right to fail without it being used as evidence that the notion of female-driven big-budget fantasies is inherently a bad idea. We'll know soon enough how the film plays around the world. But the consequences for a failed Ghostbusters reboot should be no different from Zoolander 2 or Terminator GenisysIf you consider any business process, you will see that is composed of one or more rules. Each rule may be responsible for some task based on some condition. As the rules grow it becomes difficult to manage the rules and to maintain them. This is why we need some tool to manage these rule and Drools fits the bill. It is a Business Rule Management System (BRMS) and rules engine written in Java.
A rule could be:
If you have a couple there is a discount of 5% If you purchase stuff for value more than 3000 bucks, you will get a flat 2% discount If you are a first time user, you will get 10 bucks into your wallet
Want to be a Drools Master? Subscribe to our newsletter and download the JBoss Drools Cookbook right now! In order to help you master Drools Business Rule Management System, we have compiled a kick-ass guide with all the major Drools features and use cases! Besides studying them online you may download the eBook in PDF format! Download NOW! Leave this field empty if you're human:
In order to run through the rules, all we have to do is apply Customer and Cart state on the rules. Rules are static but data is dynamic so the data drives the decision process.Let’s get started with setup and then examples.
This example uses the following frameworks:
Maven 3.2.3 Java 8 Drools 6.2 Eclipse as the IDE, version Luna 4.4.1.
1. Installation of Drools
Most simplest way to setup drools is to simply install Drools Eclipse Plugin.
The rule workbench (for Eclipse) requires that you have Eclipse 3.4 or greater. It is also important that you install Eclipse GEF 3.4 or greater. You can install it using the built in update mechanism. Open the Help->Install New Software…->Add Site. Enter http://download.eclipse.org/tools/gef/updates/releases/ in Work with. Select GEF (Graphical Editing Framework). Press next, and agree to install the plug-in (an Eclipse restart may be required). Once this is completed, then you can continue on installing the rules plug-in. Download Drools Eclipse IDE Plugin. It is a zip file called droolsjbpm-tools-distribution-6.2.0.Final so you need to unzip the file and extract the contents. You need to install the plugin by opening Help->Install New Software…->Add Site. Enter the local location of \droolsjbpm-tools-distribution-6.2.0.Final\binaries\org.drools.updatesite, a name and click on Add. This will install the Drools Eclipse IDE plugin. Defining a Drools runtime – Download Drools Engine from Drools Download page. Its a zip file, since my drools ver# is 6.2, the file name is called drools-distribution-6.2.0.Final.zip. You need to unzip and extract contents. Go to Preferences->Drools->Installed Drools Runtime. Click on Add. Enter name and path of drools-distribution-6.2.0.Final\binaries. Click on OK to add the Drools Runtime Engine.
2. Create Drools Project
Click on File->New->Other->Drools->Drools Project to create a drools project based on the Drools Eclipse Plugin. The project will automatically create a sample drl file Sample.drl containing a rule. You will also find a java main class DroolsTest to test the rule.
DroolsTest:
package com.sample; import org.kie.api.KieServices; import org.kie.api.runtime.KieContainer; import org.kie.api.runtime.KieSession; /** * This is a sample class to launch a rule. */ public class DroolsTest { public static final void main(String[] args) { try { // load up the knowledge base KieServices ks = KieServices.Factory.get(); KieContainer kContainer = ks.getKieClasspathContainer(); KieSession kSession = kContainer.newKieSession("ksession-rules"); // go! Message message = new Message(); message.setMessage("Hello World"); message.setStatus(Message.HELLO); kSession.insert(message); kSession.fireAllRules(); } catch (Throwable t) { t.printStackTrace(); } } public static class Message { public static final int HELLO = 0; public static final int GOODBYE = 1; private String message; private int status; public String getMessage() { return this.message; } public void setMessage(String message) { this.message = message; } public int getStatus() { return this.status; } public void setStatus(int status) { this.status = status; } } }
Sample.drl:
package com.sample import com.sample.DroolsTest.Message; rule "Hello World" when m : Message( status == Message.HELLO, myMessage : message ) then System.out.println( myMessage ); m.setMessage( "Goodbye cruel world" ); m.setStatus( Message.GOODBYE ); update( m ); end rule "GoodBye" when Message( status == Message.GOODBYE, myMessage : message ) then System.out.println( myMessage ); end
Output:
Hello World Goodbye cruel world
3. Maven Dependencies
You can very well create a Maven project and specify the drools dependencies in pom.xml.
If just want to rely on Maven, you need to add the below dependencies:
knowledge-api – this provides the interfaces and factories drools-core – this is the core engine, runtime component. This is the only runtime dependency if you are pre-compiling rules. drools-complier – this contains the compiler/builder components to take rule source, and build executable rule bases. You don’t need this during runtime, if your rules are pre-compiled.
You just need to add drools-compiler dependency to your pom.xml, the other two dependencies are transitive dependencies.
pom.xml:
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>com.javacodegeeks.drools</groupId> <artifactId>droolsHelloWorld</artifactId> <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.drools</groupId> <artifactId>drools-compiler</artifactId> <version>${drools.version}</version> </dependency> </dependencies> <properties> <drools.version>6.2.0.Final</drools.version> <jbpm.version>6.2.0.Final</jbpm.version> </properties> </project>
4. Define a Drools Rule
Here is a simple POJO which contains a topic and method called introduceYourself().
DroolsIntroduction:
package com.javacodegeeks.drools; /** * This is a sample class to launch a rule. */ public class DroolsIntroduction { private String topic; public DroolsIntroduction(String topic) { this.topic = topic; } public String getTopic() { return topic; } public String introduceYourself() { return "Drools 6.2.0.Final"; } }
Now let’s define a simple rule. Rule is the above POJO will introduce itself only when the topic is about Drools.
Here is the rule:
hello.drl:
package com.javacodegeeks.drools; rule "Drools Introduction" when $droolsIntro : DroolsIntroduction( topic == "Drools" ) then System.out.println($droolsIntro.introduceYourself()); end
5. Rule Structure
You need to specify the package of the rule just the way we do it for java. Next follows the import statements, as seen here at the top of the file, are structured the same way as they are
in Java class files. Each rule starts with rule and then its name. Next comes the condition when … then … end. To access the POJO property, you need to use it directly. You don’t need to call the getters to access properties.
when $droolsIntro : DroolsIntroduction( topic == "Drools" )
The condition starts with the class name DroolsIntroduction. It checks whether the topic property is equal to ‘Drools’. If yes, we set the instance to a variable, $droolsIntro. Next, we take some action desired when our condition is met. We use the variable to call an instance method $droolsIntro.introduceYourself() and print the returned value using System.out.println.
then System.out.println($droolsIntro.introduceYourself()); end
6. KIE Module
Now its the time to run the rule. In order to run the rule, Drools provides a configuration file called kmodule.xml. It acts as a descriptor that selects resources to knowledge bases and configures those knowledge bases and sessions.
KBase is a repository of all the application’s knowledge definitions. Sessions are created from it and then data is inserted into the session which in turn will be used to start the process.
Here is the configuration file which is located in META-INF directory.
kmodule.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <kmodule xmlns="http://jboss.org/kie/6.0.0/kmodule"> <kbase name="rules" packages="rules"> <ksession name="ksession-rules"/> </kbase> </kmodule>
In order to run the rule, we need to add the below highlighted code. If yuou note, we create an instance of DroolsIntroduction and insert the instance to the session. Next, we call kSession.fireAllRules() run the rule.
DroolsIntroduction:
package com.javacodegeeks.drools; import org.kie.api.KieServices; import org.kie.api.runtime.KieContainer; import org.kie.api.runtime.KieSession; /** * This is a sample class to launch a rule. */ public class DroolsIntroduction { private String topic; public DroolsIntroduction(String topic) { this.topic = topic; } public static final void main(String[] args) { try { // load up the knowledge base KieServices ks = KieServices.Factory.get(); KieContainer kContainer = ks.getKieClasspathContainer(); KieSession kSession = kContainer.newKieSession("ksession-rules"); DroolsIntroduction droolsIntroduction = new DroolsIntroduction("Drools"); kSession.insert(droolsIntroduction); kSession.insert(new DroolsIntroduction("spring")); kSession.insert(new DroolsIntroduction("Drools")); kSession.fireAllRules(); } catch (Throwable t) { t.printStackTrace(); } } public String getTopic() { return topic; } public String introduceYourself() { return "Drools 6.2.0.Final"; } }
Only if the topic is ‘Drools’, you will see an introduction output. Since we have added DroolsIntroduction twice, we see output ‘Drools 6.2.0.Final’ repeating.
Output:
Drools 6.2.0.Final Drools 6.2.0.Final
7. Global Variable
In this example, I will show you how to assign a global variable to a session.
First declare the global in the rule file, global String topicLevel.
Next, set the global variable to the rule session.
hello.drl:
package com.javacodegeeks.drools; global String topicLevel rule "Drools Introduction" when $droolsIntro : DroolsIntroduction( topic == "Drools" ) then System.out.println($droolsIntro.introduceYourself() + ", topic level is " + topicLevel); end
DroolsIntroduction:
package com.javacodegeeks.drools; import org.kie.api.KieServices; import org.kie.api.runtime.KieContainer; import org.kie.api.runtime.KieSession; /** * This is a sample class to launch a rule. */ public class DroolsIntroduction { private String topic; public DroolsIntroduction(String topic) { this.topic = topic; } public static final void main(String[] args) { try { // load up the knowledge base KieServices ks = KieServices.Factory.get(); KieContainer kContainer = ks.getKieClasspathContainer(); KieSession kSession = kContainer.newKieSession("ksession-rules"); DroolsIntroduction droolsIntroduction = new DroolsIntroduction("Drools"); kSession.insert(droolsIntroduction); kSession.insert(new DroolsIntroduction("spring")); kSession.insert(new DroolsIntroduction("Drools")); kSession.fireAllRules(); kSession.setGlobal("topicLevel", "Beginner"); kSession.insert(new DroolsIntroduction("Drools")); kSession.fireAllRules(); } catch (Throwable t) { t.printStackTrace(); } } public String getTopic() { return topic; } public String introduceYourself() { return "Drools 6.2.0.Final"; } }
Output:
Drools 6.2.0.Final, topic level is null Drools 6.2.0.Final, topic level is null Drools 6.2.0.Final, topic level is Beginner
8. Functions
To get rid of the ‘null’ topic level, we will introduce a new function called getDefaultIfNull() to our rule.
It will return a default value of the level if the global variable is not set to the session.
hello.drl:
package com.javacodegeeks.drools; global String topicLevel rule "Drools Introduction" when $droolsIntro : DroolsIntroduction( topic == "Drools" ) then System.out.println($droolsIntro.introduceYourself() + ", topic level is " + getDefaultIfNull(topicLevel)); end function String getDefaultIfNull(String topicLevel) { return topicLevel == null? "Moderate" : topicLevel; }
If you run the rule now, you will get a default topic level in the output.
Output:
Drools 6.2.0.Final, topic level is Moderate Drools 6.2.0.Final, topic level is Moderate Drools 6.2.0.Final, topic level is Beginner
9. Download the Eclipse Project
This was a beginner tutorial on Drools.We’re excited to announce our partnership with one of the leading platform-as-a-service providers, Cloud66. Typically, customers would need to go through the process of manually setting up and deploying their applications on the cloud. With our new Cloud66 partnership, your Ruby applications can now be deployed easily and automatically on our cloud computing platform with no architecture complications directly from Cloud66’s website.
Cloud66’s fully automated platform allows you to easily provision, deploy and manage Ruby applications on our cloud. It removes all the added complexity of deploying applications on the cloud and makes deploying applications as easy as filling API credentials and providing where the repository where your Ruby application is stored.
Their automated platform will then automatically detect everything about your Ruby application environment, evaluate the requirements and proceed to spinning up instances on our cloud compute service under your account. It will do everything such as creating and configuring backend servers, firewalls, load balancers and database servers.
As the usage of your application grows, Cloud66 is there to support you. It has the ability to scale your application out on our cloud by spinning up new backends with the click of a few buttons. No need to work with complicated load balancers and deployment scripts for scaling up and down.
The advantages of using Cloud66 don’t stop there. As your servers are all being deployed under your cloud compute account, you have full root access to your own servers which allow you for an extra level of flexibility that is not available with most other platform-as-a-service companies.
One of Cloud66’s focuses is their open platform which does not lock you in to a specific cloud platform. We embrace this ideology as a company which also embraces an OpenStack API which is all about removing vendor lock-ins.
We’re extremely happy to have Cloud66 as one of our cloud compute partners and we’re going to be providing full assistance for our customers in deploying on our cloud. Our close relationship with Cloud66 will ensure that any issues can be solved in a timely manner for our customers.
We’re very pleased to have created this partnership. By combining our cloud computing service that delivers the best value per dollar and one of the industry’s highest performing servers, we’re able to deliver the best value for potential customers requiring Ruby hosting with Cloud66.
This is just one of the next big upcoming set of partnerships that we’re creating in order to make it easier to get started on our cloud computing platform. We’re happy to have Cloud66 on-board and look for more tutorials in the future on deploying with Cloud66.All students can write, if we let them. The key, I think, is poetry.
As a poet myself, I have a love/hate relationship with schools. For the most part, schools have been a place for me to learn and grow. They've given me the chance to find readers of poetry and to connect with the poets of the past. I have found almost all my poetic brethren (dead poets who speak to me through their work) within a classroom setting.
However, because I am a poet, I am always searching for ways to change language. Schools are often a place for a certain sort of rigid language instruction, which can make them hostile environments for poets. Grammar and persuasive argument are essential skills for any student. But if someone is telling you that there is a set and finite way to construct a sentence -- and you're a poet -- you will naturally get a little annoyed. And you will be justified in feeling this way, because it's simply not true.
Nothing is more important to the future of humanity than the freedom to make new ideas. I would argue that the act of writing poetry is important for the creation of those new ideas. In her essay "Poetry and Grammar," the great American poet Gertrude Stein wrote:
That is the reason that slang exists it is to change the nouns which have been names for so long. I say again. Verbs and adverbs and articles and conjunctions and prepositions are lively because they all do something and as long as anything does something it keeps alive.
Supporting poetry in our schools is essential because it engages students' thinking and it keeps language alive. Over the past 14 years, I have worked as a teacher in a variety of educational settings. I have found that all students can write. And one of the surest ways to awaken their love for language is poetry.
The 60 students waiting patiently to get into one creative writing section at an elite private college where I taught loved writing poetry. The 2 year olds I used to teach over a decade ago in a wealthy day care loved poetry, too. Even in their pre-writing state, they recited poem after poem for me, and I wrote each one down for them to then illustrate. At an underserved elementary school, I read Merwin, Sexton, and Whitman poems out loud, and the 5 year olds in in the class loved to bounce around the rhythms and the sing-songy rhymes, along with the slanted ones. It was the music of poetry that they loved. The music of poetry is a delight for the mind.
Every outstanding essay involves meticulous word choice and sheer aesthetic prowess. Poetry teaches students how to do this.
A lot of people argue that poetry is "difficult" or that it has no real value for children's future. That's just not true. If you think poetry isn't important to your students, you are not listening to them. You are not noticing the headphones in their ears, blasting poetry to soothe their walk to class. You are not thinking of them in their rooms at night, writing down their experiences. It may be that you are defining poetry too dogmatically.Really, what is better than a patio table with a built in cooler! Who really wants to get up to get another beer?
Almost everyone has seen this picture of the wine cooler patio table ether on Pinterest or Reddit.
Right after my husband saw this he asked me to make it happen. I was already in the process of designing a patio table so I decided to take a stab at it. I wanted to make a table that was more than just a table with a cooler in the center all the time. I wanted to have to option of covering it when not in use so we can do full meals on it too. I pulled up SolidWorks and started playing around with the idea. Here is what I came up with:
Patio Table with built in Beer/Wine Cooler with Lids
Like in my farmhouse table post I am going to be breaking the instructions into two parts. The first will be the construction of the table and the second will be the finishing instructions.
Part 1: Table Construction
A little more about the design:
The first thing I did after having the initial concept sketched out in SoildWorks was go out and find the perfect cooler insert. We first looked into getting gutters but they come in large pieces and didn’t seem like they would work well for our design. Next we contemplated using sheet metal and bending it to shape we were looking for. At this |
way. I’ve actually saved an extra $10,000 since doing Konmari. Convinced yet?
It reordered my priorities from owning things to having experiences
Seeing how much stuff I had bought with good intentions but didn’t actually need made me cringe at how much money (and time shopping) I’d wasted that could have gone towards a trip.
I’m not about to live out of a backpack in my regular life– I still like things! Some things bring me joy!– but I do prioritise buying things that I can use up and experience, like a new flavour of gourmet jam or a bouquet of flowers, instead of buying yet another decorative bowl or whatever. Or I buy nothing and think of the travel experience I can have later in the year.
It showed me what sparks joy for me
In the process of going through all my things and really connecting with how I felt about my possessions, I found some unexpected patterns emerging. I’ve always known that I like to keep little things like cards from friends and ticket stubs from my trips, so I made a key place to store those things.
I did not, however, realize how much I love my budding collection of antique cake stands or that I value my cookbooks more than many of my novels. I found that I turfed most of my dishes for entertaining yet kept every piece of my camping gear, which led to much more camping and less entertaining that summer.
It helped me take stock of almost 5 years in Melbourne
Maybe part of what made my Konmari weekend so draining and emotional was that it felt like a bit of a coming-of-age experience. I was going from being an early-twentysomething not quite knowing who I was or what I wanted to having a clear idea of what sparks joy for me and what I want my life to be like.
I got to go through all these things that had accompanied me to various random rental apartments and houses, and even if I didn’t keep most of them, I savoured the memories each item brought up as I worked.
It helped me to pack light
Going through the first phase of Konmari meant going through my closet. I had spent so much time feeling like I had nothing to wear and yet after getting rid of so many clothes, I now feel like I have so much more to choose from.
Since I’ve pared my closet down to the things I really love that look great on me, it’s easier to toss those clothes in a backpack and have a lighter, easier time packing and travelling.
It made me more organized and able to travel spontaneously
Everything has a place now and I know exactly what I own. I have a travel shelf with everything I need there, so we can take spur-of-the-moment camping trips or decide to fly to Tasmania or Adelaide with a day’s notice and I know I can be prepared.
It made the thought of long-term travel a reality
For me, Konmari was the first step in preparing for the possibility of 8 months to a year of travel abroad. We will have to store our things with friends if and when we leave, which is now an easy and simple prospect for me. When I looked at my room after my Konmari weekend, the idea of long-term travel finally felt real. It won’t be too hard for me to actually live out of a backpack now because I’m used to only having exactly what I need.
Whatever hesitations you might have in trying this (admittedly insanely difficult) process of sorting through your belongings and keeping only what sparks joy, just think about it a bit. It will make your brain, your home and you life lighter. Isn’t that what every traveller wants?
AdvertisementsA year only lasts 9.21 days on TRAPPIST-1f, the fifth planet from the ultra-cool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1.
The planet, which is about the size of Earth, was found to be in the habitable zone, and might even have oceans. But we shouldn’t expect the planet — which orbits a star about the size of Jupiter some 40 light-years away — to look like Earth. Think more Star Trek.
Most of the data about this planet is too imprecise for rock-solid estimates about the planet, but the low density estimated for TRAPPIST-1f suggests that it has a “volatile-rich composition.”
“If you were on the surface of one of these planets, you would be able to see the others,” said Michael Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liege in Belgium and author of a Nature study of the planets. “You would see them really as we see the moon. You could see structures, it would be a wonderful view.”
So yeah, the surface of T-1f — shorthand for the planet used by astronomers — probably looks like something from science fiction. Specifically, it looks like the surface of Vulcan, the home planet of Spock that we see in Star Trek, the 1979 film:
Vulcan
Now, have a look at this rendering of T-1f, released on Wednesday:
This artist's concept allows us to imagine what it would be like to stand on the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f, located in the TRAPPIST-1 system in the constellation Aquarius.
They’re not so different, are they? Science fiction artists and science artists have long riffed off each other’s works and imaginations to present ideas about the unknown, and this is the latest stunning example.
INVERSE LOOT DEALS Meet the Pod The first bed that learns the perfect temperature for your sleep, and dynamically warms or cools according to your needs. Buy Now
The description from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech offers more detail about TRAPPIST-1f, an apparently Vulcan-like planet:
This planet is thought to be tidally locked to its star, meaning the same face of the planet is always pointed at the star. There would be a region called the terminator that perpetually divides day and night. If the night side is icy, the day side might give way to liquid water in the area where sufficient starlight hits the surface.
The rebooted Star Trek franchise also didn’t miss the opportunity to imagine Vulcan, which only reinforces the similarities to the imagined orange hue of TRAPPIST-1f:
And here’s Vulcan in the Star Trek fan film Axanar:Your teams. Your favorite writers. Wherever you want them. Personalize SI with our new App. Install on iOS or Android.
The knockout stage for the 2016 European Championship is set after the group stage concluded on Wednesday.
Iceland advanced to the knockout stage of its first major tournament with a 2–1 victory over Austria. Portugal and Hungary's 3–3 draw means that Iceland finished second in its group and will play England in the round of 16.
Late heroics were also reserved for Ireland, which went through as one of four third-place finishers after a 1-0 in over Italy. Robbie Brady's 85th-minute was the difference for the Irish, who have a date with host France in the first knockout round. Northern Ireland, Slovakia and Portugal were the other third-place finishers who went through, while Albania and Turkey narrowly missed out.
• EURO 2016: Full schedule, group standings, live gamecasts
Croatia, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Spain and Wales were the other teams to qualify for the knockout stage, with the bracket heavily balanced on the bottom half.
Germany, Spain, England, France and Italy are all on one side, while the other has eight teams that have never won a major tournament.
Round of 16 fixtures CONFIRMED. The road to the #EURO2016 final continues on Saturday! pic.twitter.com/DuMz24vHRi — UEFA Nations League (@UEFAEURO) June 22, 2016
Here is the full schedule for the round of 16:
Saturday, June 25
Switzerland vs. Poland in Saint-Etienne (9 a.m. ET, ESPN)
Wales vs. Northern Ireland in Paris (12 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Croatia vs. Portugal in Lens (3 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Sunday, June 26
France vs. Ireland in Lyon (9 a.m. ET, ESPN)
Germany vs. Slovakia in Lille (12 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Hungary vs. Belgium in Toulouse (3 p.m. ET, ESPN)
Monday, June 27
Italy vs. Spain in Saint-Denis (12 p.m. ET, ESPN2)
England vs. Iceland in Nice (3 p.m. ET, ESPN2)Email Share +1 314 Shares
President Trump hailed conservatives at the Heritage Foundation known for opposition to LGBT rights Tuesday night as “titans in the fight to defend, promote and preserve our great American heritage.”
Trump delivered remarks at the think-tank during its annual President’s Club meeting largely to promote his tax reform legislative package, but also to laud the social conservative ideals of the organization.
“Everyone here tonight understands a core truth, that for America to have confidence in our future, we must have pride in our history,” Trump said. “As Americans, we have inherited a special legacy of freedom, culture, laws, traditions and values.”
But a legacy of America with a history of LGBT people fighting for equal rights, including the Stonewall riots of 1969, and the value of expanding and protecting civil rights apparently wasn’t what Trump had in mind.
Addressing the culture wars, Trump decried the desecration of statues of Christopher Columbus, asking “What’s next?” and said “our great American flag should be treated with reverence and respect” — a reference to his consternation over NFL football players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest racial inequity.
With respect to immigration, Trump touted his efforts to combat sanctuary cities and ending “chain immigration,” a process known to immigration supporters as family reunification.
Trump also praised the Heritage Foundation for its faithfulness to strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution — often cited as excuse for opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide.
“We believe that the Constitution is the greatest political document in human history and that judges should interpret the Constitution as written,” Trump said.
In the wake of news Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) reached an agreement to ensure insurance companies receive CSR payments crucial to keeping down premiums in Obamacare, Trump expressed support for the deal despite being responsible for nixing those payments in the first place.
“And I’m pleased the Democrats have finally responded to my call for them to take responsibility for their Obamacare disaster and work with Republicans to provide much-needed relief to the American people,” Trump said. “While I commend the bipartisan work done by Senators Alexander and Murray — and I do commend it — I continue to believe Congress must find a solution to the Obamacare mess instead of providing bailouts to insurance companies.”
For decades, the Heritage Foundation has taken a lead role in opposition not only to same-sex marriage, but LGBT rights in general.
Although the Heritage Foundation’s work isn’t limited to anti-LGBT advocacy, the think-tank for decades has made restrictions on LGBT rights a significant part of its work. The think-tank has written policy and legal briefs against same-sex marriage, opposed non-discrimination protections for LGBT people and resisted LGBT-inclusion in the U.S. military.
Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation sent out an notice to U.S. House members to urging them to vote for a legislative ban on transition-related health care for transgender people in the U.S. military.
After the Justice Department this month issued “religious freedom” guidance undermining LGBT rights, the Daily Signal, the blog for the Heritage Foundation, hailed the action was a “promise kept” by Trump.
One former policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, Roger Severino, wrote anti-trans policy pieces at the think-tank. Among his articles were screeds against transgender military service and the Obama administration’s litigation against North Carolina anti-trans House Bill 2. (Trump later appointed Severino at a position in the Department of Health & Human Services charged defending a federal non-discrimination rule for transgender health.)
A current senior at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan T. Anderson, has built a reputation as leading anti-LGBT advocate, arguing same-sex marriage and transgender rights are a violation of natural law. According to his bio, Anderson is working on a book titled, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”
For Trump, the efforts by the Heritage Foundation were worthy of commendation during his remarks. Among the individuals Trump praised during the speech was Edwin Meese III, a distinguished fellow emeritus at the Heritage Foundation who said a court ruling for same-sex marriage “ignores facts and common sense.”
“You understand that our glorious heritage is the foundation of everything we hope to achieve,” Trump said. “You understand that human progress is built upon a foundation of timeless truths. These truths are immortalized in our founding documents. And the most important truths are Founders understood was this: Freedom is not a gift from government, freedom is a gift from God.”Subtle racism is prevalent in US and UK universities, according to a new paper commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and released last week, reports The Times Higher Education.
Black professors surveyed for the paper said they were treated differently than white colleagues in the form of receiving less eye contact or requests for their opinion, that they felt excluded in meetings and experienced undermining of their work. “I have to downplay my achievements sometimes to be accepted” said one academic, explaining that colleagues that didn’t expect a black woman to be clever and articulate. Senior managers often dismiss racist incidents as conflicts of personalities or believe them to be exaggerated, found the paper.
And all this in institutions where almost all staff would say they are not just “not racist” but where many would say they were actively committed to fighting prejudice.
This seems like a clear case of the operation of implicit biases – where there is a contradiction between people’s egalitarian beliefs and their racist actions. Implicit biases are an industry in psychology, where tools such as the implicit association test (IAT) are used to measure them. The IAT is a fairly typical cognitive psychology-type study: individuals sit in front of a computer and the speed of their reactions to stimuli are measured (the stimuli are things like faces of people with different ethnicities, which is how we get out a measure of implicit prejudice).
The LFHE paper is a nice opportunity to connect this lab measure with the reality of implicit bias ‘in the wild’. In particular, along with some colleagues, I have been interested in exactly what an implicit bias, is, psychologically.
Commonly, implicit biases are described as if they are unconscious or somehow outside of the awareness of those holding them. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been shown to be the case (in fact the opposite may be true – there’s some evidence that people can predict their IAT scores fairly accurately). Worse, the very idea of being unaware of a bias is badly specified. Does ‘unaware’ mean you aren’t aware of your racist feelings? Of your racist behaviour? Of that the feelings, in this case, have produced the behaviour?
The racist behaviours reported in the paper – avoiding eye-contact, assuming that discrimination is due to personalities and not race, etc – could all work at any or all of these levels of awareness. Although the behaviours are subtle, and contradict people’s expressed, anti-racist, opinions, the white academics could still be completely aware. They could know that black academics make them feel awkward or argumentative, and know that this is due to their race. Or they could be completely unaware. They could know that they don’t trust the opinions of certain academics, for example, but not realise that race is a factor in why they feel this way.
Just because the behaviour is subtle, or the psychological phenomenon is called ‘implicit’, doesn’t mean we can be certain about what people really know about it. The real value in the notion of implicit bias is that it reminds us that prejudice can exist in how we behave, not just in what we say and believe.
Full disclosure: I am funded by the Leverhulme Trust to work on project looking at the philosophy and psychology of implicit bias. This post is cross-posted on the project blog. Run your own IAT with our open-source code: Open-IAT!Arizer Solo 2, The TearDown
Here we go one more time, everybody’s feeling fine…… That’s right, we’re starting this teardown with an N`Sync quote.
Arizer has been a major player in the vaporizer industry for a long time. The much anticipated Solo 2 is Arizer’s predecessor of the very popular Solo. the new design is much slimmer, sturdier build, has a digital display and some awesome vapor production. So let’s tear it apart 😀
Getting it Open
The only visible screws are on the base plate so lets start there. This requires a T5 Torx screwdriver. The rest of the vape comes apart with a Phillips.
Thanks #04! Once you get the base plate off the top cover slides out. Interesting design…
The Chamber Airpath
On the back of the shell there are air holes however the airflow is not completely isolated. Below the chamber where the wires run to the circuitry there is a small open path. We call this “directed airflow” for lack of a better term. We will talk about the chamber more later on. Our friend “OF” from the FC Forums provided these pictures which better show the gap.
Removing the shell
We had to push down on the top chamber to make the shell slide out through the bottom.
The Chamber
The chamber is housed in with a stainless steel shell which screws into place. The bored out holes are there to increase airflow, same tension rings as the Arizer Air.
The Battery
18650 3400 mah 7.2v dual battery made by Panasonic. Sweet, this is an upgrade from the original 2200 mah battery.
All back together
We got lucky, usually with our teardowns the vaporizer is destroyed. This one was easy to put back together. We tear apart vaporizers so you dont have to. Disassembling your vape voids the warranty.
Thanks for checking out our Tear Down. Learn more about the Solo 2 HERE. Let us know what you think in the comments below, also be sure to check out Instagram and SubReddit.Jessica Drake (R), speaks beside attorney Gloria Allred (L) about allegations of sexual misconduct against Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump during a press conference in Los Angeles, California on October 22, 2016.
An adult film performer came forward Saturday alleging Donald Trump kissed her without permission 10 years ago and offered her money and the use of his private jet, becoming the 11th woman to accuse the Republican presidential candidate of inappropriate sexual behavior since the leaked footage of Trump making inappropriate comments.
Jessica Drake appeared with prominent attorney Gloria Allred, who warned Trump at the start of a press conference that if he sued all of the accusers as he pledged hours earlier, the women involved would have the option to file cross complaints.
"Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Trump," Allred said. "If you sue the accusers, the lawyers who represent these woman will have the opportunity to depose you."
Drake who worked for Wicked Pictures as an adult performer and director, accused Trump of grabbing her and kissing her without permission in a California hotel room in 2006. She showed a photo of herself with Trump at the time they met.
"I understand I may be called a liar or an opportunist but I will risk that in order to stand in solidarity with women who share similar accounts that span many, many years," Drake said.
She said she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe and alleged that he flirted with her, asked her for her number and invited her to his penthouse suite. She said she "didn't feel right going alone" so she took two colleagues with her.
Trump grabbed all of the women "tightly in a hug" and kissed them without their permission when they entered the room, she said.
Drake said after she left, several invitations that night to meet with Trump followed that she declined. First a man called her; then the businessman did, she said.
"Donald then asked me, 'What do you want? How much?'" Drake said of a phone conversation.
After that, Drake claims another call came from "either Donald" or someone on Trump's behalf offering her $10,000 which she also declined.
She also claimed that Trump even offered her the use of his private jet so she could return to work in Los Angeles afterward.
Drake said she told some friends afterward what happened and that she might be a "tiny grain of sand but clearly this is an enormous beach."
"I am choosing to share my personal exchange in light of the recently released tapes in order to lend my voice, my strength and my support to the other women who are coming forward," Drake said.
Video New Accuser Says Trump Groped Her at 1998 US Open
Trump, who has has denied all past claims of sexual misconduct, said Drake's story "is totally false and ridiculous."
"The picture is one of thousands taken out of respect for people asking to have their picture taken with Mr. Trump," Trump's campaign said in a statement. "Mr. Trump does not know this person, does not remember this person and would have no interest in ever knowing her. This is just another attempt by the Clinton campaign to defame a candidate who just today is number one in three different polls."
The statement went on to reference Trump's claims that Hillary Clinton was allegedly involved in paying people to cause fights at a Trump rallies. An Associated Press fact check found that a selectively edited video released by conservative activist James O'Keefe showed a Democratic operative appearing to boast about provoking a violent reaction. But the activist was not directly employed by the Clinton campaign or Democratic National Committee and both have denounced the comments.
"Anyone who would pay thugs to incite violence at a rally against American citizens, as was released on video, will stop at nothing," Trump's statement said. "Just another example of the Clinton campaign trying to rig the election."
Allred, who previously held news conferences with two other Trump accusers, served as an elected delegate during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia for Clinton in July.
A Trump campaign representative last week alleged a "coordinated" attack between Allred and the Clinton campaign, which Allred denies.
Earlier on Saturday, Trump threatened legal action against every woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct.
"All of these liars will be sued once the election is over," Trump vowed during a speech in in Gettysburg, adding, "I look so forward to doing that."
Allred in return vowed an "army of lawyers" would come forward to defend the women should he file a lawsuit and predicted members of the public would fund a campaign on the women's behalf.
Clinton, speaking on her campaign plane on Saturday, called it "not accurate" that her campaign or Democrats were encouraging women to come forward with accusations, The Associated Press reported.
"I saw where our opponent Donald Trump went to Gettysburg, one of the most extraordinary places in American history, and basically said if he's president he'll spend his time suing women who have made charges against him based on his behavior," Clinton said.Sam Mendes, who scored the biggest hit of his career with his first Bond outing “Skyfall,” was recently honored by the Roundabout Theater Company at a spring gala held in his honor. Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Alan Cumming all paid honor the film/theater director, but the highlight for any filmmaker in attendance came when Mendes took to the stage and shared his 25 rules for becoming a “happier director.” Lucky for you, Vanity Fair was there to first report on his advice. His rules are listed below.
1. Always choose good collaborators. It seems so obvious, but the best collaborators are the ones who disagree with you. It means they’re passionate, they have opinions, and they’ll only ever say yes if they mean it.
2. Try to learn how to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Direct Shakespeare like it’s a new play, and treat every new play as if it’s Shakespeare.
3. If you have the chance, please work with Dame Judi Dench.
4. Learn to say, “I don’t know the answer.” It could be the beginning of a very good day’s rehearsal.
5. Go to the ancient amphitheater at Epidaurus, in Greece. It makes you realize what you are a part of, and it will change the way you look at the world. If you’re an artist, you will feel central, and you will never feel peripheral again.
6. Avoid, please, all metaphors of plays or films as “pinnacles” or “peaks”; treat with absolute scorn the word “definitive”; and if anyone uses the word “masterpiece,” they don’t know what they’re doing. The pursuit of perfection is a mug’s game.
7. If you are doing a play or a film, you have to have a secret way in if you are directing it. Sometimes it’s big things. American Beauty, for me, was about my adolescence. Road to Perdition was about my childhood. Skyfall was about middle-age and mortality. Sometimes it’s small things. Maybe it’s just a simple idea. What if we do the whole thing in the nightclub, for example. But it’s not enough just to admire a script, you have to have a way in that is yours, and yours alone.
8. Confidence is essential, but ego is not.
9. Theater is the writer’s medium and the actor’s medium; the director comes a distant third. If you want a proper ego trip, direct movies.
10. Buy a good set of blinkers. Do not read reviews. It’s enough to know whether they’re good or they’re bad. When I started, artists vastly outnumbered commentators, and now, there are a thousand published public opinions for every work of art. However strong you are, confidence is essential to what you do, and confidence is a fragile thing. Protect it. As T.S. Eliot says, teach us to care, and not to care.
11. Run a theater. A play is temporary, a building is permanent. So try to create something that stays behind and will be used and loved by others.
12. You are never too old to learn something new, as I was reminded when I learned to ski with my 10-year-old son. He, of course, did it in about 10 minutes, and I spent four days slaloming up and down, looking like a complete tit. But, don’t be scared of feeling like a complete tit. It’s an essential part of the learning process.
13. There is no right and wrong, there is only interesting, and less interesting.
14. Paintings, novels, poetry, music are all superior art forms. But theater and film can steal from all of them.
15. There are no such things as “previews” on Broadway.
16. Peter Brook said, “The journey is the destination.” Do not think of product, or, god forbid, audience response. Think only of discovery and process. One of my favorite quotes from Hamlet—Polonius: “By indirections find the directions out.”
17. Learn when to shut up. I’m still working on this one.
18. When you have a cast of 20, this means you have 20 other imaginations in the room with you. Use them.
19. Please remember the Oscars are a TV show.
20. Get on with it. Robert Frost said, “Tell everything a little faster.” He wasn’t wrong.
21. The second production of a musical is always better than the first.
22. Learn to accept the blame for everything. If the script was poor, you didn’t work hard enough with the writer. If the actors failed, you failed them. If the sets, the lighting, the poster, the costumes are wrong, you gave them the thumbs-up. So build up your shoulders, they need to be broad.
23. On screen, your hero can blow away 500 bad guys, but if he smokes one fucking cigarette, you’re in deep shit.
24. Always have an alternative career planned out. Mine is a cricket commentator. You will never do this career, but it might help you get to sleep at night.
25. Never, ever, ever forget how lucky you are to do something that you love.“I’ll take care of you, man.”
Those are the first words on my recording, and the first words any major-league player ever spoke to me with the knowledge that they might be published one day. “I’ll take care of you, man.” The guy on the recording was Kyle Hendricks, who I’d met a few days earlier—on my first trip to Wrigley as a member of the press—and who’d promised me five minutes in the dugout to talk about his growth and maturation as a pitcher. He knew it was my first interview, ever, and so promised to be kind. I promised to keep it to five minutes.
Hendricks is, more than any Cubs player I met at the park, exactly the guy you’d expect him to be. He’s skinny but not rail-thin, covers long ground with his 6-foot-3 strides, and has the kind of open, honest face that commands immediate kindness and respect from those around him. In many respects, he’s not too different from any of the other smart, earnest 25-year-olds who’ve come out of Dartmouth in recent years. Two things separate him apart from most others like him, however, and in combination have carried him to the very top of his profession. The first of these, you notice right off the bat: his enormous, long-fingered hands, which swallowed mine up in our introductory handshake. The second takes a little talking to get to: his brain, which has allowed him to consistently outsmart big-league hitters—a breed of human often built more along the lines of a wrecking ball than Hendricks’ accountant type.
It’s that second distinguishing factor—Hendricks’ brain—that I wanted to ask him about in the dugout. Baseball is a sport that rewards intelligence, sure, but it’s also a sport in which overthinking can be anathema; think Nuke LaLoosh’s struggles in Bull Durham. I asked Hendricks if he’d ever had a coach who tried to talk him out of his cerebral ways; a coach who perhaps thought Hendricks should breathe through his eyelids more and think less. He didn’t think so. In fact, he pointed to one particular coach who’d helped him develop his approach to the game.
“Brad Holman was my pitching coach in High-A [Myrtle Beach, then a Texas Rangers affiliate],” Hendricks told me. “He was probably my first pitching coach that I connected with. We got to the point where were talking about the game in the dugout, you know, during the game, just trying to learn how to pitch different guys in different situations. I just tried to kick it into gear [after that]. I think you can over-analyze things and overthink things, but as far as understanding situations in the game, or how to attack a guy, I don’t think you can think too much about that.”
It’s a good thing Hendricks got the opportunity to work with Holman, because his stuff has never been of the type that he can just blow people away. With the exception of his changeup, which gets whiffs about 25 percent of the time, Hendricks doesn’t have any pitches that generate noticeably more whiffs than the league average. He relies on sequencing and a detailed knowledge of hitters’ tendencies—gleaned through hours in the video room—to set up hitters in a way that leads to his success.
I asked him when he settled into the type of pitcher he is today, and when he learned that he couldn’t blow hitters away any more. His answer was immediate.
“[It was] probably Double-A,” Hendricks said. “Double-A, Triple-A. I mean, I felt like I could even maybe overpower a guy late in the count if I set him up for it, but even in Double- or Triple-A I wasn’t going to blow guys away consistently.”
I haven’t asked them individually, of course, but my understanding is that that answer is totally consistent with most pitchers’ experiences. There’s a widespread feeling that the biggest jump in pure talent is between High-A and Double-A, but the biggest difference in approach is between Double- and Triple-A (the latter of which is often populated with players with big-league experience). As soon as Hendricks hit the former level (which in his case came with the Cubs’ Tennessee Smokies), he found that his competition had improved as well.
“Once I realized the caliber of hitter in Double-A and Triple-A, and what I had to do in my game, that’s when it [my current profile] started,” Hendricks said.
And his current profile has served him pretty well so far, although this season has been a bit of a struggle at times (as my colleague Sahadev Sharma covered late last month). After a superb rookie campaign last year, where he put up a 2.69 ERA and a 75 DRA- over 13 late-season starts, Hendricks has put up a 4.22 ERA and a 94 DRA- so far this season. That’s not bad—not at all—but it’s also probably not where he’d like to be going forward. His pitch mix hasn’t changed at all, but there has been perhaps a little bit of a velocity drop in the latter part of this season:
For his part, Hendricks isn’t too worried. A lot of that is due to new manager Joe Maddon.
“Joe, I mean, he has confidence in all of his guys,” Hendricks shared. “And so, he makes it very noticeable. So for me, I mean, I feel very comfortable going about my business the way I do it, going about my routine the way I do it, because I know that’s how Joe is: he’s comfortable with how you do your business.”
And is Hendricks worried about his position on the playoff roster? Well, he’d like to be there when the bell rings, sure (and he acknowledged that the team hadn’t clinched anything yet), but he’s ready for whatever may come.
“I’m just hoping to make the playoff roster,” a rather frank Hendricks stated. “And if I do, I’ll contribute in whatever way I can. If it’s going to the bullpen, just gotta be ready to throw and contribute however I can.”
Kyle Hendricks, the number four starter on a team that’s almost certainly playoff-bound, is ready to go to the bullpen if it helps his team win. You won’t hear that kind of selflessness from every player. But with Hendricks, perhaps it should be expected. This is, after all, the same guy who led off with “I’ll take care of you, man.” That’s just the way he is.
Lead photo courtesy Jason Getz—USA Today Sports.A federal judge has ruled that the Obama administration cannot use a captured person's "substantial support" for the Taliban or al Qaeda as a reason to justify their detainment. At the same time, Judge John Bates, in an order that has ramifications for the upcoming trials of many detainees, held that the government was well within its rights to indefinitely detain several classes of belligerents, including under Congress's 2002 Authorization for Using Military Force in Afghanistan resolution.
Detaining an individual who "substantially supports" such an organization, but is not part of it, is simply not authorized by the AUMF itself or by the law of war. Hence, the government's reliance on "substantial support" as a basis for detention independent of membership in the Taliban, al Qaeda or an associated force is rejected
It is not entirely clear how many of the 240 Guantanamo detainees fall into this category. Bates, according to an analyst who has reviewed the decision, gave the government an out by noting that direct evidence that a person helped the Taliban means that the person is "functionally" part of the Taliban, and thus would be covered by the AUMF.
Importantly, Bates accepted the Obama administration's reliance on Congress as the arbiter of how the detainees are disposed, which suggests that future cases involving the procedures for their dispositions will also give weight to Congress's grappling with changes to the military commissions statutes.
There are now two rulings by two federal judges on the subject of whether the Obama administration's definition of the scope of its detention authority is valid.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Secretive agency that hires people to write pro-Kremlin propaganda reluctantly brought into spotlight after former employee takes it to court
The secretive Russian agency that hires people to write pro-Kremlin propaganda on the web stepped into the public spotlight for the first time on Tuesday as a former employee took it to court.
The Agency for Internet Studies, which runs what has been called a “troll factory” from a nondescript St Petersburg address, is being sued by employee Lyudmila Savchuk for alleged underpayment and various labour violations.
Savchuk says she was one of many paid to write comments online supporting the policies of Vladimir Putin.
The agency is now seeking to avoid public scrutiny by offering to compensate her. Yekaterina Nazarova, defending, told the Petrogradsky district court judge the agency was ready to settle with Savchuk, who had asked for a symbolic sum of 10,000 roubles (£118).
Nazarova offered to wire the sum to Savchuk’s account, then quickly left the court without speaking to the press.
Savchuk said: “I am very pleased, they pretended they don’t exist at all and now they have come out of the shadows for the first time – we saw their representative. But I will feel that I won only after the troll factory closes completely.”
Savchuk says she worked at the agency for two months, but quit in March and has since vowed to expose it.
The agency, located in the north of Russia’s second-largest city, is blamed by observers for doing the Kremlin’s dirty work on the internet, polluting news websites with inflammatory comments and manipulating social networks into blocking anti-Putin bloggers.
The phenomenon has become particularly intense during the conflict in Ukraine, with some reports claiming the agency has expanded into foreign languages, pictures and videos, and is even running its own news sites.
Savchuk’s lawyer. Ivan Pavlov, said the result of Tuesday’s hearing – the second this month after the agency skipped the first – was “unexpected” and he suspected the defendant of trying to escape the public eye.
“I suppose the defendant considers it a lesser evil to recognise the lawsuit and pay compensation,” he said.
Pavlov added that the next step would be a meeting with Savchuk at the agency’s headquarters in July, which he called “another chance to make their activities transparent”. |
reducing possible risks associated with controlling funds the way that many hosted wallets currently do.
Singer noted:
“It is possible to do full transactions without being in the business of holding bitcoin.”
Another idea along these lines was presented called Rivetz, a hardware technology for financial independence outside of the existing banking system.
“I want to build [bitcoin functionality] into the device I have at the time,” said Rivetz CEO Stephen Sprague during his talk titled ‘Building a Hardware Wallet into the Device You Have’.
The startup is building a digital currency storage system that harnesses existing technological capabilities inside consumer electronics devices such as a PCs, phones and tablets.
Images via CoinDeskTOKYO/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States is not ruling out the eventual possibility of direct talks with North Korea, Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said on Tuesday, hours after Pyongyang warned nuclear war might break out at any moment.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan (L) meets with his Japanese counterpart Vice Foreign Minister Shinsuke Sugiyama at the Foreign Ministry's Iikura guest house in Tokyo, Japan October 17, 2017. REUTERS/Issei Kato
Talks between the adversaries have long been urged by China in particular, but Washington and its ally Japan have been reluctant to sit down at the table while Pyongyang continues to pursue a goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the United States.
“Eventually, we don’t rule out the possibility of course of direct talks,” Sullivan said in Tokyo after talks with his Japanese counterpart.
“Our focus is on diplomacy to solve this problem that is presented by the DPRK. We must, however, with our allies, Japan and South Korea and elsewhere, be prepared for the worst, should diplomacy fail,” he said.
DPRK stands for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert highlighted U.S. diplomatic efforts by Sullivan and others to pressure North Korea to give up its weapons programmes by encouraging implementation of international sanctions.
Nauert told a regular briefing that sanctions were choking off money supply to North Korea and it was feeling the effect, but even so Pyongyang was “not showing that they are anywhere near desiring to have talks.”
“We hope that this diplomatic approach will be successful in the end,” Nauert said, while adding of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “He’s got to be the most optimistic guy in the U.S. government.”
Tension has soared following a series of weapons tests by North Korea and a string of increasingly bellicose exchanges between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Leaflets, apparently from North Korea, calling Trump a “mad dog” and depicting gruesome images of him have turned up across central Seoul, adding an unusually personal element to North Korean propaganda.
“The situation on the Korean peninsula where the attention of the whole world is focused has reached the touch-and-go point and a nuclear war may break out any moment,” North Korea’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Kim In Ryong told a U.N. General Assembly committee on Monday.
“As long as one does not take part in the U.S. military actions against the DPRK (North Korea), we have no intention to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any other country,” according to Kim’s prepared remarks for the discussion on nuclear weapons. Kim did not read that section out loud.
South Korea and the United States began week-long joint naval drills in the waters around the Korean peninsula on Monday, involving about 40 ships from both militaries, including the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, South Korea’s defense ministry said.
North Korean state media said on Tuesday the allies’ “desperate efforts” to block North Korea’s advance only showed it should continue its nuclear program “to the last.”
“The DPRK has been fully ready for all the U.S. is resorting to, including sanctions, pressure and military option, as it has the tremendous nuclear force for self-defence and irresistible strength of self-reliance and self-development,” the official KCNA news agency said in a commentary.
Asked about the North Korean envoy’s warning of nuclear war, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said it would not be in anyone’s interest.
“China still hopes that all parties, in this situation where things on the Korean peninsula are highly complex and sensitive, can exercise restraint and do more to benefit the lowering of tensions in the region,” Lu told a daily news briefing.
The U.N. Security Council has ratcheted up sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes since 2006.
The most recent U.N. sanctions banned exports of coal, iron ore and seafood, aimed at cutting off a third of the North’s total annual exports of $3 billion.
Experts say North Korea has been scrambling to find alternative sources of hard currency to keep its economy afloat and advance its weapons program.
On Monday, the head of cyber-intelligence at BAE Systems Plc (BAES.L) said North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group was probably responsible for a recent cyber heist in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s Central News Agency said last week that hackers had sought to steal some $60 million from the Far Eastern Bank, but it had recovered all but $500,000.
BAE Systems and others have previously linked Lazarus to an $81-million cyber heist at Bangladesh’s central bank last year.
North Korea has recently allowed citizens as young as 12 to bet on horse races for the first time as the country scrambles to unearth new sources of hard currency amid intensifying international sanctions.
Slideshow (3 Images)
Punters had previously risked three years’ hard labor for gambling in the tightly controlled state, but the growing importance of private markets means more people have money to spend on leisure, experts said.
Lee Sang-keun, a researcher at the Institute of Unification Studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, said wealthy North Koreans had to pay for such activities with Chinese or U.S. currency.
“Many North Koreans make lots of money from the market, dine at hamburger restaurants and go shopping, all of which help fatten regime coffers. That’s part of the reason why the regime still has some financial latitude, despite international sanctions,” Lee said.West Ham United have rejected a second bid from Marseille of around £20m for Dimitri Payet with the co-chairman David Sullivan adamant the wantaway France international should apologise to supporters before he is allowed to leave the club.
Sullivan met the Marseille president, Jacques-Henri Eyraud, and the sporting director, Andoni Zubizarreta, in London on Monday to discuss their interest in the 29-year-old after he informed his manager, Slaven Bilic, that he wants to return to the south of France. Having seen their first offer of £19m rejected before the weekend, Marseille are aware of the delicate situation surrounding Payet and decided to offer only a small increase in their second offer, with West Ham holding out for a figure closer to £30m for a player whose contract expires in 2021 having only signed an extension last February.
Having initially stated that he would not be sold, Sullivan’s stance softened over the weekend and he appeared willing to allow Payet to leave for the right price. However, it is understood that West Ham will not be bullied into selling the player they purchased in July 2015 for £10.7m given they have no financial need to let him leave.
Transfer window January 2017: every deal in Europe's top five leagues Read more
Payet will be fined for refusing to play in the 3-0 victory against Crystal Palace on Saturday and is expected to report for training on Tuesday, although he will be working with the under-23 side while the dispute is resolved. In an ideal world, Sullivan and the co-chairman David Gold would like him to make himself available for selection again and apologise to supporters for his actions but that appears unlikely with reports that his family has already returned to the south of France.
Captain Mark Noble admitted that he was “angry and disappointed” and hasn’t spoken to his team-mate for “two or three weeks”, while Gold appeared to refer to Payet on Twitter when he bemoaned the current situation.
“With a number of top Premier League players holding clubs to ransom is it time to close the January transfer window?” he wrote.
The current impasse could yet have ramifications for West Ham’s attempts to recruit further players this month. They have yet to return with an improved offer for Scott Hogan after Brentford rejected a third bid of an initial £9m which could eventually rise to £15m, with the Championship side unhappy with the structure of bonus payments. Crystal Palace and Watford are both monitoring the situation, with Brentford hoping to receive more up front given the fact that his former club, Rochdale, are due up to 30% due to a sell-on clause.
Any plans to allow Sofiane Feghouli, who scored the first goal against Palace and is wanted by Roma, to leave are also on hold until the Payet situation is resolved with West Ham keen to retain their squad for a busy run of fixtures.I suppose I’d better give any of my readers a little background. I am going to call myself Fiona. (Mainly because everyone on my placements seems to think I’m called Fiona or Heather! it beats “The student” anyday) I am a first year mental health nursing student, and I am studying in Scotland. I’ve worked in care since I was 18, so seven years now. I started off as an activities co-ordinator, and then moved on to become a dementia specialist carer. I studied to be an Occupational therapist for a while, but it wasn’t quite for me. I think I thought it was more like nursing. I have always loved working with people with Dementia. I know it’s not everyones favourite subject, but I love it. I love hearing peoples stories, I love working with people. And even though I say it myself, I’ve got a pretty active imagination for getting round “Problem” behaviours. I’m now in my first year of my nursing course, so a lot of these little stories will be about the people I have worked years with. There will also be some of my placement experiences.
This is mostly for myself, so I don’t forget all the people I meet. Even though I know they’ll forget me. I believe that the everyday is wonderful. Everyday stories make up life. And I believe that the strength of Nurses is to do the extraordinary, and make it everyday. I hope you enjoy. If you’ve any questions, please ask.
Memories of the Beeches. As I’ve said before, I used to work in a nursing home called The Beeches. It is in rural scotland, and is at least a mile away from the town. All of this lead to the most beautiful grounds. I remember many a nightshift watching the stars, while listening for buzzers. I worked in the EMI (Elderly Mentally Infirm) unit. And today I’m going to tell you about a lovely lady I worked with, who I’m going to call Nina. Nina was a German lady, she had come to us as a “holy terror” she was ridiculously strong, and I had been told tales of her pulling doors off the frame, and tipping wardrobes over if you stopped her doing something. But by the time I worked there Nina had mellowed. Nina was bilingual. She would usually speak to us in english, with peppered german words throughout. I used to be one of her main carers, (I think I must have reminded her of someone, as she always called me Dolly, and usually co-operated with me). Because of that I got the lovely job of escorting Nina to the dental hospital. Now, I do not speak German. The only German I have been able to retain is “Es tut mir leid Nina Ich spreche kein Deutsch, Können Sie sprechen Englisch bitte?” (I’m sorry Nina, I can’t speak German, can you speak English please?) none the less, Nina had days where she would just smile at us, and carry on talking to us in German. Today was one of those days. Now, because I worked in such a rural area, it was about an hour to the nearest hospital. So we passed it, myself chatting in English, Nina in German. We got to the hospital, and I went with Nina and got her Clerked in. I went with her to hold her hand as she was put under anaesthetic. Luckily the Anaesthetist spoke German! So he talked to Nina in German, and she answered in….. English! She insisted on talking to me in German, and him in English the entire time while they checked her over before her general. Another quick story about Nina. She was sat at the kitchen table one afternoon, we were just about to serve the lunchtime soup. When a fly landed straight in front of her. Nina stared at it for a minute, and then began talking to it in German. She talked for about five minutes, and the fly just sat there. To this day we joke that it was someone she knew. Never seen a fly so still.If you had a Mount Rushmore of Emergency Department drugs fentanyl would make a pretty solid case for its inclusion. This synthetic opioid is roughly 100x more potent than morphine. The onset is rapid – two to three minutes. This is in contrast to morphine, which can take up to 20 minutes. The duration of action is relatively short – 30 to 60 minutes. Again, for purpose of comparison, the duration of action of morphine is up to 4 hours. As opposed to other opioids (namely morphine) there is no histamine release.
The risk of hypoxemia and respiratory muscle depression is there of course, but more pronounced when used with other sedative agents (like midazolam). Chest wall rigidity is a rare idiosyncratic reaction that you hope you won’t see, and only responds to paralysis and endotracheal intubation. These patients cannot be bagged! The risk may be increased with large doses (>4 mcg/kg), but it reported to have been seen in doses as low as 1 mcg/kg.
There are two main routes of administration for fentanyl for use in most Pediatric Emergency Department settings. Nebulized, transdermal and oral versions are also available but will not be discussed here.Epstein's Little Black Book Anon_Resistance Mar 9th, 2015 33,308 Never 33,308Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 114.63 KB #OpExposeCPS #OpDeathEatersUS #OpDeathEaters #OpCPS #OpPedoHunters #PedoHunters #CPS #FBI #ChildServices #Anonymous #ExpectUs #DeleteTheElite _ _ ________ ___________ ___________________ _________ __| || |_\_____ \ ______ \_ _____/__ _________ ____ ______ ____ \_ ___ \______ \/ _____/ \ __ // | \\____ \ ______ | __)_\ \/ /\____ \ / _ \/ ___// __ \/ \ \/| ___/\_____ \ | || |/ | \ |_> > /_____/ | \> < | |_> > <_> )___ \\ ___/\ \___| | / \ /_ ~~ _\_______ / __/ /_______ /__/\_ \| __/ \____/____ >\___ >\______ /____| /_______ / |_||_| \/|__| \/ \/|__| \/ \/ \/ \/ ______ _\ _~-\___ = = ==(____AA____D \_____\___________________,-~~~~~~~`-.._ / o O o o o o O O o o o o o o O o |\_ `~-.__ ___..----..Pedo-Air ) `---~~\___________/------------````` = ===(_________D This was originally published by #OpDeathEatersUS Original Paste: http://pastebin.com/LKXfiQzh "Jeffrey Epstein's",,,,, " Little Black Book ",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"27 February 2015 v. 1.0 " "Name","Location","Area Code","e-Mail Ending","Affiliations","Notes/Observations",,,,, "A",,,,, "Abby",,7944,"N/A","N/A","""7944"" Area Code UK - EE & T-Mobile Cell Phones" "Abousleiman, Joanna",,603,"hotmail.com","N/A","Norwich, UK Area Code" "Adam, Nick","75007, Paris ","00 331 (w ) 00 331 (h) 00 33? (p)","N/A","N/A", "Agag Alejandro",,"00 44","askinvestments.com","N/A", "Agnew, Marie Claire & John",,"0207 (h) 0207 (w) ","N/A","N/A", "Alal Azzedine",,"00 331","N/A","N/A", "Albermarie, Rufus & Sally","P.O. Box 394 NY, NY","212 (w) 917 (p) 212 (try his first)","mac.com","N/A", "Aldridge, Saffron","London 0207",212,"aol.com","N/A", "Alexander, Pam",,"415 (w) 415 (p)","N/A","N/A", "Algranti, Giacomo","Flat 4 London","0207, 0385 0208 (h) 0208 (w) 0207 (f) 0207 (gw) 0386 (p)","N/A","N/A", "Allan, Paul",,206,"vulcan.com","N/A", "Allan, Nick & Sarah","Hong Kong","00 852","N/A","N/A", "Althorp, Charlie","Althorp","0207 (h) 0207 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Alun-Jones, Jeremy & Deborah","West Sussex","0207 (w) 0124 (h) (Jeremy) 0777 (op) 0207 (w)","old-park.co.uk","N/A", "Alvarez, Senor Vincente",,"00 34 (h) 011 34 (w) 00 34 (f)","N/A","N/A", "Amon, Mr Philippe","Switzerland, 2nd Home Flat D London","41 5555 (w) 00 41 (h) 41 (hf) 00 41 (p) 00 41 (w) 00 41 (nf) 41 (wf) 0207 (2nd home phone & fax)","slope.com","N/A", "Amon, Roberta & Maurice","New York, NY","212 (w) 212 (h) 917 (p) 212 (wf)","N/A","N/A", "Anderson, Lulu",,"0207 0976","N/A","N/A", "Appleby, Robert & Alex","London, Hong Kong","0207 (h) (hm) House 7 00 852 (Ao) 00 852 (h) 00 852 (hf) 00 852 (Rw) 00 852 (wf) 00 852 (Rp)","asia,debt.com, rockgecko.com","N/A", "Arango, Maite","#10 (home) Madrid, Spain","011 (w) 011 (h) 00 34 (p)","mail.vips.es","N/A", "Arellano, Victor","London, England","0207, 0207 (i), 212 (w), 212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Arion Joaquin Fernandez de","Cordoba, Madrid, Spain","00 34 (h), 00 34 (h), 00 34 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Arion, Fernando","NY, NY","212 (w), 212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Armstrong, Arthur & Cathy",,"212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Aron, Herve & Marine","New York, NY","212 (h), 212 (m)","N/A","N/A", "Ash, Lorinda",,"212 (h), 212 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Ashley & Allegra Hicks","London","07973 (p), 0207 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Ashley, Nick & Ari","London","0207 (w), 0207 (h), 0207 (h), 0207 (w), 0207 (w), 0159","N/A","N/A", "Assaf, Charlotte & Vittorio","New York, NY","212 (h), 212, 917 (p), 646 (emergency contact)","aol.com","N/A", "Astaire, Mr Simon","London","212 (h), 0207 (h), 212","N/A","N/A", "Astor, Viscount William",,"0207 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Atkin, Helene","SF","650, 650, 650 (w), 650 (p), 650 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Atkin, Mike & Ami","Hoboken, NJ #5A","201 (h), 201 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Aznar, Jose","New York, NY",646,"alscapital.com","S & S Capital",,,,,, "B",,,,, "Baddeley, Jean","Malaga, Spain","34 (h), 00 34, 0295, 0385 (p)","mercuryin.es","N/A", "Bahrke, Peter",,"0207, 00 46","arkwright.co.uk","N/A", "Baker, Danny",,917,"N/A","N/A", "Bakhtiar, Shariar",,"0285 (f), 0285 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Balazs, Andre","#5A (h) New York, NY; Sheller Island, NY","212 (h), 212 (w), 212 ans srvc, 212 (h), 213, 646 (p), 646 (p), 631 (h), 631 (hf), 212 (w)","aol.com","N/A", "Baldwin, Alec",,"212 (h), 516 (c)","N/A","N/A", "Ballioi College, Oxford","Oxford, England",866,"N/A","N/A", "Bamford, George/alice","Gloucestershire","1608, +44 Alice (p), 917 George (p), +44 George UK cell","sbcpartners.com","N/A", "Bamford, Sir Anthony and Lady C",,"(sa), (lc)","N/A","N/A", "Bands, Doug","New York, NY","202 p, 212 David Slade, 202 Mike Lee (w), 301 Mike Lee (h), 914 Mike Lee (car), 877 Mike Lee (b), 07 Sara Latham, 646 Denise Diorio, spking scheduler 212 Joe Cashion asst. director scheduler, 202 Uma, 914 Mark Gainsole, 202 Mike Lee (p), 212 Jim Morrison, 212 fax, 212 Hanna Richert, 212 Laura (Clinton's scheduler), 941 doug bands h, 917 Jim Kennedy (press), 212 (guy doug friend h), 914 no.42 do not use","imcingular.com","Office of William J. Clinton", "Bannister, Clive","London, UK","01144 (w), 44 (wf), 44 portable, 44 home, 01144 fax, 01144 Clive Direct at work","N/A","N/A", "Banon, Javier","New York, NY","212 (p), 212 (w), 212 (h), 212, 646 (p)","N/A","N/A", "Barham, Nicholas & Gretal","London; Sydney, Australia ","0207 (h), 0207 (w) 07836 Portable, 01734 Country, 917 (p), 007 (hf), 612 (h-Australia), 612 (hf-Australia), 614 (other portable), 020 w-direct line, 920 (Asst. Helen Andrews), 020 (wf)","arlingtongroup.co","N/A", "Barnes, Peter",,"213 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Barnett, Craig",,"983, 212, 917 (p)","N/A","N/A", "Bastone, Hillary",,"0207,","N/A","N/A", "Batstone, Hiliary","London","0171 (w), (hm), London 0171 (h), 0836 (p)","N/A","N/A", "Batstone, Tim Natasha",,"01492 (h), 01492 (w), 0492 (h), 0492 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Baumer, Lorenzo",,"033, 033 (l)","www.lorenzbaumer.com","N/A", "Beaumont, Lord & Lady","London",207,"N/A","N/A", "Belzberg, Lisa","New York, NY","212 (mw), 212 (h), (Hm) Pencil, 914 (h), 212 (hl) 648 (w), 212 (Asst. Erin Eagan)","N/A","N/A", "Benson, Steven",,"212 (w), 212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Bentinck, Baron","Essex, England","01 44 (o), 917 (p), 468 (p), 014 (h)","msn.com","N/A", "Berggruen, Nicolas","New York, NY; Suite 3104 NYC","212 (w), 212 (f), 212 (h), 786 (p), 212 (w), 646 (Emergency Contact)","alphagml.com","N/A", "Berkman, Bill","25th Floor New York, NY; home 10012","212 (o), 212 (l), 917, 212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Bernard, Tara",,"07 (p)","N/A","N/A", "Birchall, Martyn","New York, NY","212 (h), 212 (o), 212 Office Fax","N/A","N/A", "Birley, Robin","Flat 2 London","0207 (h), 07730 (p), 0207 (w), 00 34 (Mar), 020 (wf)","birleys.co.uk","N/A", "Bismarck, Debbie & Bola Von","London","0207 (h), 0207 (hl), 0207, 07 (p)","netcomuk.co.uk","N/A", "Bismark, Vanessa Von","New York, NY; Suite 401 New York, NY","917, 212 (w), 212 (h), 212, 212, 212 (wf)","N/A","N/A", "Bisson, Jean Marc",,"212 (h), 917 (p), 917 Beeper","N/A","N/A", "Bjorlin, Jean Paul","Box 800 NY, NY","917 822 9168","N/A","N/A", "Black, Conrad & Barbara","New York, NY; London, England","0207 (f), 416 (h), 305 (w), 416 (w), 0208, 0207 (w) london, 416 (w) Toronto, 0207 (London Home), 212 Hollinger, 212 (h), 917 (p), 212 Penny (Barbara's Asst.), 416 (wf) Toronto, 516 PB, 44 London (hf), 212 NY (hf), 212 NY (hf)","N/A","N/A", "Blacker, (Blogs & Jill) Mr & M",,"017, ","N/A","N/A", "Blaine, David",,"917 (p), 917 (colin hiss asst.)","N/A","N/A", "Blair, Tony",,"0207,","N/A","N/A", "Bloomberg, Mike","New York, NY","212 (h), 212 ext. (w), 914, 97 (p), 212 (h)","bloomberg.net","N/A", "Boardman, Samantha",,"212, 561","N/A","N/A", "Boardman, Serena",,"212 (h), 001 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Boden, Johnie & Sophie","London","0207 (w), 0208 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Bodini, Daniel","New York, New York","212 (w), 212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Bolsgelin, Edward","London","0207 (h), 0207 (w)","N/A","N/A", "Boisguilbert, Pierre de",,"00 33, 00 33, 00 33 fax","N/A","N/A", "Bond, Anabelle",,776,"annabellebond.com","N/A", "Bonomi, Andrea & Giota","Milano","02, 004 (Gp)","aol.com","N/A", "Bookis, Nicholas",,"212 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Booth, Mark & Lauren","London","020 (w), 0207 (h), 0207 (wf), 077 (p), 020 (hl), 077 (car), 020 (w-direct), Maria Bevan (asst)","netjets.com","N/A", "Boothe, Christina A.",,"0207 (w)","gs.com","N/A", "Borgese, Paulo",,"00 39 (h), 00 39, 00 39 (p), 00 39","N/A","N/A", "Borrico, Michael","NY, NY","212 (w), 212 (h), 601 646 Cell","aol.com","N/A", "Bossom, Hon Bruce and Penelope","London","0386 (h), 0386 (fax), 0207 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Boucherie, Sylvianne","Paris","00 33 (h), 0033 (l)","club-internet.fr","N/A", "Bourke, Rick","Greenwich, Connecticut","203 (h), 204 (h), 914, 203","N/A","N/A", "Bowles, Hamish",,"001 212, 00 33, 0207","N/A","Vouge [sic]", "Brachelli Peretti, ferdinando","Rome","0039 (p) (w) (h)","N/A","N/A", "Brachelli, Hugo",,"00 39 (h) (o) (w)","apioil","N/A", "Braine, Caroline",,"0207 (h) (h)","N/A","N/A", "Braine, Ms Katie & Serge","London","0956 (h), 0372 (c), 0207 (h) (w) (o), 00 39 (Carera) 0956 00 33","N/A","N/A", "Bram, Ben",,212,"N/A","N/A", "Brand, Tony",,"212 (l)","pleinsudny.com","N/A", "Brandolini, d'Adda","Paris","060 georgina, 01 44, 01 4 9 fax","N/A","N/A", "Brandolini, Nuno & Muriel","NY, NY; Hamplon Bays","212 (h) (hl), 917 (p), 631 (Hamplon)","N/A","N/A", "Brandt, Peter",,"561, 581","N/A","N/A", "Branson, Richard","London","086 (h), 0207 (h) (w)","N/A","N/A", "Briatore Flavio","HarRey on Thame; Oxfordshire, U.K.","44, 0871 Boat/Plane, Rosella (Favio's asst.)","uk.renaut","N/A", "Broadhurst, Julia","Capetown, SA","00 27 (h) (w)","cygnet.co.za","Speedo", "Broglie, Louis Albert de","Paris, France 75016",,"N/A","N/A", "Bronfman Jr., Edgar","New York, NY 10022","212 (w) (wf)","N/A","Lexa Partners, LLC", "Brooks, Christopher & Amanda","New York, NY","212 (h) (aw), 917 (ap), 347 (cp)","aol.com","N/A", "Brooks, Miranda","New York","212, 917 Emergency Contact brother","mindspring.","N/A", "Brown, Chris & Alison","New York, NY","212 (w) (aw), 0207, 213 (h)","N/A","N/A", "Bruce, James & Lucinda","London","0208, 0207","N/A","N/A", "Brunel, Jean-Luc","Paris, France; New York, NY","212, 331, 011, +33, 56, 1305 Karins, +331, 646 Eve (JEan Luc's P/A)","karinmodels.com, easynet.fr Pamela","Karin Models", "Bryer, Tania","London","0207,","N/A","N/A", "Buck, Joan Juliet",,505,"N/A","N/A", "Buffet, Jimmy & Jane","Palm Beach, Florida",407,"N/A","N/A", "Bull, Bartle","New York, NY 10022","212, 845","inco.com","Jones, Hirsch, Conners & Bull", "Bullough, Hamish and Emma","Suffolk","01473, 207, 7831, 7774","N/A","N/A", "Burckle, Ron","LA, CA",310,"N/A","N/A", "Burney, Mr Jules","London","0207, 917","N/A","N/A", "Burtril, Martin",,212,"N/A","N/A", "Bushnell, Candice",,212,"N/A","N/A", "Busson, Arki","New York, NY","0207, 00 41, 212, 00 33","N/A","N/A", "Butler, Charlie","London, UK","0207, 017, 07","N/A","N/A", "Button, Terri","London; Oxfordshire","0795, 0207, 018, 012","hotmail.com","Visa International", "Byng, Robert","London","0207,","N/A","N/A",,,,,, "C",,,,, "Cadenet de Alain","London","0207,","N/A","N/A", "Calacanis, Jason",,"212, 917","N/A","N/A", "Caledon, Nicky","Caledon Castle, Caledon Northern Ireland","00 41, 0861, 0207","N/A","N/A", "Calvo-Piatero, Mario/Arladne","New York, NY","212, 631, 917","aol.com","N/A", "Cambell, Roddy",,"0207, 0370","N/A","N/A", "Cambell, Alistar",,"0207,","N/A","N/A", "Camerana, Glancarlo",,"00 41","N/A","N/A", "Cammy",,917,"N/A","N/A", "Campbell, Naomi","London; New York, NY","0207, 001 310, 0778, 347, 212, 00 55","skytel.com","N/A", "Campo del Brooke & Emilio","London","0207,","N/A","N/A", "Candole, Andrew de","London","017, 0467, 0207, 0831","N/A","N/A", "Candy, Nicholas A C","London, England",44,"candyandcandy.com","Candy and Cany Ltd", "Caprice",,"0797, 0207, 001 310","N/A","N/A", "Carello, Sara Massimo",,"0207,","N/A","N/A", "Carey, William & Carina","London","0207,","N/A","N/A", "Carlbom, Camila","NY, NY","212, 917","N/A","N/A", "Carmine",,"00 39","N/A","N/A", "Carrera, Barbara",,213,"N/A","N/A", "Caruth, Sophie","Wandsworth Common","0705, 0208","N/A","N/A", "Carvalho, Michel & Charlene","London",207,"N/A","N/A", "Casagrande, Guido","Milan, Italy","00 39, 001 516","N/A","N/A", "Case, Simon",,"00 62","N/A","N/A", "Case, George & Pauline","London","0207,","N/A","N/A", "Castaneda, Debbie",,335,"N/A","N/A", "Cator, Alby and Victoria","London","0207, 01603","N/A","N/A", "Cecil, Mark & Mini","Nairobi, Kenya",,"N/A","N/A", "Cecil, Mark & Mini","Herts",,"N/A","N/A", "Cecil Stephenson, Aurelia","Wilts","0207, 0468, 01672","aurelia_london.co.uk","N/A", "Cecil, Dr. Mark","London","207, 07456, 784","gigpartners.co","N/A", "Cerina, Fabrizio",,"917 |
looked like is to consider Solenopsis invicta, the red imported fire ant. Geneticists believe that S. invicta originated in northern Argentina, an area with many rivers and frequent floods. The floods wipe out ant nests. Over the millennia, these small, furiously active creatures have acquired the ability to respond to rising water by coalescing into huge, floating, pullulating balls—workers on the outside, queen in the center—that drift to the edge of the flood. Once the waters recede, colonies swarm back into previously flooded land so rapidly that S. invicta actually can use the devastation to increase its range.
In the 1930s, Solenopsis invicta was transported to the United States, probably in ship ballast, which often consists of haphazardly loaded soil and gravel. As a teenaged bug enthusiast, Edward O. Wilson, the famed biologist, spotted the first colonies in the port of Mobile, Alabama. He saw some very happy fire ants. From the ant’s point of view, it had been dumped into an empty, recently flooded expanse. S. invicta took off, never looking back.
The initial incursion watched by Wilson was likely just a few thousand individuals—a number small enough to suggest that random, bottleneck-style genetic change played a role in the species’ subsequent history in this country. In their Argentine birthplace, fire-ant colonies constantly fight each other, reducing their numbers and creating space for other types of ant. In the United States, by contrast, the species forms cooperative supercolonies, linked clusters of nests that can spread for hundreds of miles. Systematically exploiting the landscape, these supercolonies monopolize every useful resource, wiping out other ant species along the way—models of zeal and rapacity. Transformed by chance and opportunity, new-model S. invictus needed just a few decades to conquer most of the southern United States.
Homo sapiens did something similar in the wake of Toba. For hundreds of thousands of years, our species had been restricted to East Africa (and, possibly, a similar area in the south). Now, abruptly, new-model Homo sapiens were racing across the continents like so many imported fire ants. The difference between humans and fire ants is that fire ants specialize in disturbed habitats. Humans, too, specialize in disturbed habitats—but we do the disturbing.
THE WORLD IS A PETRI DISH
As a student at the University of Moscow in the 1920s, Georgii Gause spent years trying—and failing—to drum up support from the Rockefeller Foundation, then the most prominent funding source for non-American scientists who wished to work in the United States. Hoping to dazzle the foundation, Gause decided to perform some nifty experiments and describe the results in his grant application.
By today’s standards, his methodology was simplicity itself. Gause placed half a gram of oatmeal in one hundred cubic centimeters of water, boiled the results for ten minutes to create a broth, strained the liquid portion of the broth into a container, diluted the mixture by adding water, and then decanted the contents into small, flat-bottomed test tubes. Into each he dripped five Paramecium caudatum or Stylonychia mytilus, both single-celled protozoans, one species per tube. Each of Gause’s test tubes was a pocket ecosystem, a food web with a single node. He stored the tubes in warm places for a week and observed the results. He set down his conclusions in a 163-page book, The Struggle for Existence, published in 1934.
Today The Struggle for Existence is recognized as a scientific landmark, one of the first successful marriages of theory and experiment in ecology. But the book was not enough to get Gause a fellowship; the Rockefeller Foundation turned down the twenty-four-year-old Soviet student as insufficiently eminent. Gause could not visit the United States for another twenty years, by which time he had indeed become eminent, but as an antibiotics researcher.
What Gause saw in his test tubes is often depicted in a graph, time on the horizontal axis, the number of protozoa on the vertical. The line on the graph is a distorted bell curve, with its left side twisted and stretched into a kind of flattened S. At first the number of protozoans grows slowly, and the graph line slowly ascends to the right. But then the line hits an inflection point, and suddenly rockets upward—a frenzy of exponential growth. The mad rise continues until the organism begins to run out of food, at which point there is a second inflection point, and the growth curve levels off again as bacteria begin to die. Eventually the line descends, and the population falls toward zero.
Years ago I watched Lynn Margulis, one of Gause’s successors, demonstrate these conclusions to a class at the University of Massachusetts with a time-lapse video of Proteus vulgaris, a bacterium that lives in the gastrointestinal tract. To humans, she said, P. vulgaris is mainly notable as a cause of urinary-tract infections. Left alone, it divides about every fifteen minutes. Margulis switched on the projector. Onscreen was a small, wobbly bubble—P. vulgaris—in a shallow, circular glass container: a petri dish. The class gasped. The cells in the time-lapse video seemed to shiver and boil, doubling in number every few seconds, colonies exploding out until the mass of bacteria filled the screen. In just thirty-six hours, she said, this single bacterium could cover the entire planet in a foot-deep layer of single-celled ooze. Twelve hours after that, it would create a living ball of bacteria the size of the earth.
Such a calamity never happens, because competing organisms and lack of resources prevent the overwhelming majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. This, Margulis said, is natural selection, Darwin’s great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. Natural selection stands in the way of this goal. It prunes back almost all species, restricting their numbers and confining their range. In the human body, P. vulgaris is checked by the size of its habitat (portions of the human gut), the limits to its supply of nourishment (food proteins), and other, competing organisms. Thus constrained, its population remains roughly steady.
In the petri dish, by contrast, competition is absent; nutrients and habitat seem limitless, at least at first. The bacterium hits the first inflection point and rockets up the left side of the curve, swamping the petri dish in a reproductive frenzy. But then its colonies slam into the second inflection point: the edge of the dish. When the dish’s nutrient supply is exhausted, P. vulgaris experiences a miniapocalypse.
By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while. Nature’s success stories, they are like Gause’s protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow exponentially; they take over large areas, overwhelming their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they annihilate themselves, drowning in their own wastes or starving from lack of food.
To someone like Margulis, Homo sapiens looks like one of these briefly fortunate species.
THE WHIP HAND
No more than a few hundred people initially migrated from Africa, if geneticists are correct. But they emerged into landscapes that by today’s standards were as rich as Eden. Cool mountains, tropical wetlands, lush forests—all were teeming with food. Fish in the sea, birds in the air, fruit on the trees: breakfast was everywhere. People moved in.
Despite our territorial expansion, though, humans were still only in the initial stages of Gause’s oddly shaped curve. Ten thousand years ago, most demographers believe, we numbered barely 5 million, about one human being for every hundred square kilometers of the earth’s land surface. Homo sapiens was a scarcely noticeable dusting on the surface of a planet dominated by microbes. Nevertheless, at about this time—10,000 years ago, give or take a millennium—humankind finally began to approach the first inflection point. Our species was inventing agriculture.
The wild ancestors of cereal crops like wheat, barley, rice, and sorghum have been part of the human diet for almost as long as there have been humans to eat them. (The earliest evidence comes from Mozambique, where researchers found tiny bits of 105,000-year-old sorghum on ancient scrapers and grinders.) In some cases people may have watched over patches of wild grain, returning to them year after year. Yet despite the effort and care the plants were not domesticated. As botanists say, wild cereals “shatter”—individual grain kernels fall off as they ripen, scattering grain haphazardly, making it impossible to harvest the plants systematically. Only when unknown geniuses discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture begin. Planting great expanses of those mutated crops, first in southern Turkey, later in half a dozen other places, early farmers created landscapes that, so to speak, waited for hands to harvest them.
Farming converted most of the habitable world into a petri dish. Foragers manipulated their environment with fire, burning areas to kill insects and encourage the growth of useful species—plants we liked to eat, plants that attracted the other creatures we liked to eat. Nonetheless, their diets were largely restricted to what nature happened to provide in any given time and season. Agriculture gave humanity the whip hand. Instead of natural ecosystems with their haphazard mix of species (so many useless organisms guzzling up resources!), farms are taut, disciplined communities conceived and dedicated to the maintenance of a single species: us.
Before agriculture, the Ukraine, American Midwest, and lower Yangzi were barely hospitable food deserts, sparsely inhabited landscapes of insects and grass; they became breadbaskets as people scythed away suites of species that used soil and water we wanted to dominate and replaced them with wheat, rice, and maize (corn). To one of Margulis’s beloved bacteria, a petri dish is a uniform expanse of nutrients, all of which it can seize and consume. For Homo sapiens, agriculture transformed the planet into something similar.
As in a time-lapse movie, we divided and multiplied across the newly opened land. It had taken Homo sapiens 2.0, behaviorally modern humans, not even 50,000 years to reach the farthest corners of the globe. Homo sapiens 2.0.A—A for agriculture—took a tenth of that time to conquer the planet.
As any biologist would predict, success led to an increase in human numbers. Homo sapiens rocketed around the elbow of the first inflection point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when American crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize were introduced to the rest of the world. Traditional Eurasian and African cereals—wheat, rice, millet, and sorghum, for example—produce their grain atop thin stalks. Basic physics suggests that plants with this design will fatally topple if the grain gets too heavy, which means that farmers can actually be punished if they have an extra-bounteous harvest. By contrast, potatoes and sweet potatoes grow underground, which means that yields are not limited by the plant’s architecture. Wheat farmers in Edinburgh and rice farmers in Edo alike discovered they could harvest four times as much dry food matter from an acre of tubers than they could from an acre of cereals. Maize, too, was a winner. Compared to other cereals, it has an extra-thick stalk and a different, more productive type of photosynthesis. Taken together, these immigrant crops vastly increased the food supply in Europe, Asia, and Africa, which in turn helped increase the supply of Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The population boom had begun.
Numbers kept rising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, discovered that plant growth was limited by the supply of nitrogen. Without nitrogen, neither plants nor the mammals that eat plants can create proteins, or for that matter the DNA and RNA that direct their production. Pure nitrogen gas (N2) is plentiful in the air but plants are unable to absorb it, because the two nitrogen atoms in N2 are welded so tightly together that plants cannot split them apart for use. Instead, plants take in nitrogen only when it is combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements. To restore exhausted soil, traditional farmers grew peas, beans, lentils, and other pulses. (They never knew why these “green manures” replenished the land. Today we know that their roots contain special bacteria that convert useless N2 into “bio-available” nitrogen compounds.) After Liebig, European and American growers replaced those crops with high-intensity fertilizer—nitrogen-rich guano from Peru at first, then nitrates from mines in Chile. Yields soared. But supplies were much more limited than farmers liked. So intense was the competition for fertilizer that a guano war erupted in 1879, engulfing much of western South America. Almost 3,000 people died.
Two more German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, came to the rescue, discovering the key steps to making synthetic fertilizer from fossil fuels. (The process involves combining nitrogen gas and hydrogen from natural gas into ammonia, which is then used to create nitrogenous compounds usable by plants.) Haber and Bosch are not nearly as well known as they should be; their discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, has literally changed the chemical composition of the earth, a feat previously reserved for microorganisms. Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into the soil that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, roughly a third of all the protein (animal and vegetable) consumed by humankind is derived from synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled Homo sapiens to extract about 2 billion people’s worth of food from the same amount of available land.
The improved wheat, rice, and (to a lesser extent) maize varieties developed by plant breeders in the 1950s and 1960s are often said to have prevented another billion deaths. Antibiotics, vaccines, and water-treatment plants also saved lives by pushing back humankind’s bacterial, viral, and fungal enemies. With almost no surviving biological competition, humankind had ever more unhindered access to the planetary petri dish: in the past two hundred years, the number of humans walking the planet ballooned from 1 to 7 billion, with a few billion more expected in coming decades.
Rocketing up the growth curve, human beings “now appropriate nearly 40%... of potential terrestrial productivity.” This figure dates from 1986—a famous estimate by a team of Stanford biologists. Ten years later, a second Stanford team calculated that the “fraction of the land’s biological production that is used or dominated” by our species had risen to as much as 50 percent. In 2000, the chemist Paul Crutzen gave a name to our time: the “Anthropocene,” the era in which Homo sapiens became a force operating on a planetary scale. That year, half of the world’s accessible fresh water was consumed by human beings.
Lynn Margulis, it seems safe to say, would have scoffed at these assessments of human domination over the natural world, which, in every case I know of, do not take into account the enormous impact of the microworld. But she would not have disputed the central idea: Homo sapiens has become a successful species, and is growing accordingly.
If we follow Gause’s pattern, growth will continue at a delirious speed until we hit the second inflection point. At that time we will have exhausted the resources of the global petri dish, or effectively made the atmosphere toxic with our carbon-dioxide waste, or both. After that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed by the dead. When the king falls, so do his minions; it is possible that our fall might also take down most mammals and many plants. Possibly sooner, quite likely later, in this scenario, the earth will again be a choir of bacteria, fungi, and insects, as it has been through most of its history.
It would be foolish to expect anything else, Margulis thought. More than that, it would be unnatural.
AS PLASTIC AS CANBY
In The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster’s classic, pun-filled adventure tale, the young Milo and his faithful companions unexpectedly find themselves transported to a bleak, mysterious island. Encountering a man in a tweed jacket and beanie, Milo asks him where they are. The man replies by asking if they know who he is—the man is, apparently, confused on the subject. Milo and his friends confer, then ask if he can describe himself.
“Yes, indeed,” the man replied happily. “I’m as tall as can be”—and he grew straight up until all that could be seen of him were his shoes and stockings—“and I’m as short as can be”—and he shrank down to the size of a pebble. “I’m as generous as can be,” he said, handing each of them a large red apple, “and I’m as selfish as can be,” he snarled, grabbing them back again.
In short order, the companions learn that the man is as strong as can be, weak as can be, smart as can be, stupid as can be, graceful as can be, clumsy as—you get the picture. “Is that any help to you?” he asks. Again, Milo and his friends confer, and realize that the answer is actually quite simple:
“Without a doubt,” Milo concluded brightly, “you must be Canby.” “Of course, yes, of course,” the man shouted. “Why didn’t I think of that? I’m as happy as can be.”
With Canby, Juster presumably meant to mock a certain kind of babyish, uncommitted man-child. But I can’t help thinking of poor old Canby as exemplifying one of humankind’s greatest attributes: behavioral plasticity. The term was coined in 1890 by the pioneering psychologist William James, who defined it as “the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.” Behavioral plasticity, a defining feature of Homo sapiens’ big brain, means that humans can change their habits; almost as a matter of course, people change careers, quit smoking or take up vegetarianism, convert to new religions, and migrate to distant lands where they must learn strange languages. This plasticity, this Canby-hood, is the hallmark of our transformation from anatomically modern Homo sapiens to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens—and the reason, perhaps, we were able to survive when Toba reconfigured the landscape.
Other creatures are much less flexible. Like apartment-dwelling cats that compulsively hide in the closet when visitors arrive, they have limited capacity to welcome new phenomena and change in response. Human beings, by contrast, are so exceptionally plastic that vast swaths of neuroscience are devoted to trying to explain how this could come about. (Nobody knows for certain, but some researchers now think that particular genes give their possessors a heightened, inborn awareness of their environment, which can lead both to useless, neurotic sensitivity and greater ability to detect and adapt to new situations.)
Plasticity in individuals is mirrored by plasticity on a societal level. The caste system in social species like honeybees is elaborate and finely tuned but fixed, as if in amber, in the loops of their DNA. Some leafcutter ants are said to have, next to human beings, the biggest and most complex societies on earth, with elaborately coded behavior that reaches from disposal of the dead to complex agricultural systems. Housing millions of individuals in inconceivably ramose subterranean networks, leafcutter colonies are “Earth’s ultimate superorganisms,” Edward O. Wilson has written. But they are incapable of fundamental change. The centrality and authority of the queen cannot be challenged; the tiny minority of males, used only to inseminate queens, will never acquire new responsibilities.
Human societies are far more varied than their insect cousins, of course. But the true difference is their plasticity. It is why humankind, a species of Canbys, has been able to move into every corner of the earth, and to control what we find there. Our ability to change ourselves to extract resources from our surroundings with ever-increasing efficiency is what has made Homo sapiens a successful species. It is our greatest blessing.
Or was our greatest blessing, anyway.
DISCOUNT RATES
By 2050, demographers predict, as many as 10 billion human beings will walk the earth, 3 billion more than today. Not only will more people exist than ever before, they will be richer than ever before. In the last three decades hundreds of millions in China, India, and other formerly poor places have lifted themselves from destitution—arguably the most important, and certainly the most heartening, accomplishment of our time. Yet, like all human enterprises, this great success will pose great difficulties.
In the past, rising incomes have invariably prompted rising demand for goods and services. Billions more jobs, homes, cars, fancy electronics—these are things the newly prosperous will want. (Why shouldn’t they?) But the greatest challenge may be the most basic of all: feeding these extra mouths. To agronomists, the prospect is sobering. The newly affluent will not want their ancestors’ gruel. Instead they will ask for pork and beef and lamb. Salmon will sizzle on their outdoor grills. In winter, they will want strawberries, like people in New York and London, and clean bibb lettuce from hydroponic gardens.
All of these, each and every one, require vastly more resources to produce than simple peasant agriculture. Already 35 percent of the world’s grain harvest is used to feed livestock. The process is terribly inefficient: between seven and ten kilograms of grain are required to produce one kilogram of beef. Not only will the world’s farmers have to produce enough wheat and maize to feed 3 billion more people, they will have to produce enough to give them all hamburgers and steaks. Given present patterns of food consumption, economists believe, we will need to produce about 40 percent more grain in 2050 than we do today.
How can we provide these things for all these new people? That is only part of the question. The full question is: How can we provide them without wrecking the natural systems on which all depend?
Scientists, activists, and politicians have proposed many solutions, each from a different ideological and moral perspective. Some argue that we must drastically throttle industrial civilization. (Stop energy-intensive, chemical-based farming today! Eliminate fossil fuels to halt climate change!) Others claim that only intense exploitation of scientific knowledge can save us. (Plant super-productive, genetically modified crops now! Switch to nuclear power to halt climate change!) No matter which course is chosen, though, it will require radical, large-scale transformations in the human enterprise—a daunting, hideously expensive task.
Worse, the ship is too large to turn quickly. The world’s food supply cannot be decoupled rapidly from industrial agriculture, if that is seen as the answer. Aquifers cannot be recharged with a snap of the fingers. If the high-tech route is chosen, genetically modified crops cannot be bred and tested overnight. Similarly, carbon-sequestration techniques and nuclear power plants cannot be deployed instantly. Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that’s like asking healthy, happy sixteen-year-olds to write living wills.
Not only is the task daunting, it’s strange. In the name of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth (at least in some ways). Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brown tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, gypsy moths in the northeastern U.S., rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Like Gause’s protozoans, they are racing to find the edges of their petri dish. Not one has voluntarily turned back. Now we are asking Homo sapiens to fence itself in.
What a peculiar thing to ask! Economists like to talk about the “discount rate,” which is their term for preferring a bird in hand today over two in the bush tomorrow. The term sums up part of our human nature as well. Evolving in small, constantly moving bands, we are as hard-wired to focus on the immediate and local over the long-term and faraway as we are to prefer parklike savannas to deep dark forests. Thus, we care more about the broken stoplight up the street today than conditions next year in Croatia, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly so, evolutionists point out: Americans are far more likely to be killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo next year. Yet here we are asking governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may not be reached for decades. Given the discount rate, nothing could be more understandable than the U.S. Congress’s failure to grapple with, say, climate change. From this perspective, is there any reason to imagine that Homo sapiens, unlike mussels, snakes, and moths, can exempt itself from the natural fate of all successful species?
To biologists like Margulis, who spend their careers arguing that humans are simply part of the natural order, the answer should be clear. All life is similar at base. All species seek without pause to make more of themselves—that is their goal. By multiplying till we reach our maximum possible numbers, even as we take out much of the planet, we are fulfilling our destiny.
From this vantage, the answer to the question whether we are doomed to destroy ourselves is yes. It should be obvious.
Should be—but perhaps is not.
HARA HACHI BU
When I imagine the profound social transformation necessary to avoid calamity, I think about Robinson Crusoe, hero of Daniel Defoe’s famous novel. Defoe clearly intended his hero to be an exemplary man. Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off Venezuela in 1659, Crusoe is an impressive example of behavioral plasticity. During his twenty-seven-year exile he learns to catch fish, hunt rabbits and turtles, tame and pasture island goats, prune and support local citrus trees, and create “plantations” of barley and rice from seeds that he salvaged from the wreck. (Defoe apparently didn’t know that citrus and goats were not native to the Americas and thus Crusoe probably wouldn’t have found them there.) Rescue comes at last in the form of a shipful of ragged mutineers, who plan to maroon their captain on the supposedly empty island. Crusoe helps the captain recapture his ship and offers the defeated mutineers a choice: trial in England or permanent banishment to the island. All choose the latter. Crusoe has harnessed so much of the island’s productive power to human use that even a gaggle of inept seamen can survive there in comfort.
To get Crusoe on his unlucky voyage, Defoe made him an officer on a slave ship, transporting captured Africans to South America. Today, no writer would make a slave seller the admirable hero of a novel. But in 1720, when Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, no readers said boo about Crusoe’s occupation, because slavery was the norm from one end of the world to another. Rules and names differed from place to place, but coerced labor was everywhere, building roads, serving aristocrats, and fighting wars. Slaves teemed in the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and Ming China. Unfree hands were less common in continental Europe, but Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands happily exploited slaves by the million in their American colonies. Few protests were heard; slavery had been part of the fabric of life since the code of Hammurabi.
Then, in the space of a few decades in the nineteenth century, slavery, one of humankind’s most enduring institutions, almost vanished.
The sheer implausibility of this change is staggering. In 1860, slaves were, collectively, the single most valuable economic asset in the United States, worth an estimated $3 billion, a vast sum in those days (and about $10 trillion in today’s money). Rather than investing in factories like northern entrepreneurs, southern businessmen had sunk their capital into slaves. And from their perspective, correctly so—masses of enchained men and women had made the region politically powerful, and gave social status to an entire class of poor whites. Slavery was the foundation of the social order. It was, thundered John C. Calhoun, a former senator, secretary of state, and vice president, “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” Yet just a few years after Calhoun spoke, part of the United States set out to destroy this institution, wrecking much of the national economy and killing half a million citizens along the way.
Incredibly, the turn against slavery was as universal as slavery itself. Great Britain, the world’s biggest human trafficker, closed down its slave operations in 1808, though they were among the nation’s most profitable industries. The Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal soon followed. Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the globe removed themselves from the previously universal exchange of human cargo. Slavery still exists here and there, but in no society anywhere is it formally accepted as part of the social fabric.
Historians have provided many reasons for this extraordinary transition. But one of the most important is that abolitionists had convinced huge numbers of ordinary people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human society for millennia was swiftly dismantled by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.
In the last few centuries, such profound changes have occurred repeatedly. Since the beginning of our species, for instance, every known society has been based on the domination of women by men. (Rumors of past matriarchal societies abound, but few archaeologists believe them.) In the long view, women’s lack of liberty has been as central to the human enterprise as gravitation is to the celestial order. The degree of suppression varied from time to time and place to place, but women never had an equal voice; indeed, some evidence exists that the penalty for possession of two X chromosomes increased with technological progress. Even as the industrial North and agricultural South warred over the treatment of Africans, they regarded women identically: in neither half of the nation could they attend college, have a bank account, or own property. Equally confining were women’s lives in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Nowadays women are the majority of U.S. college students, the majority of the workforce, and the majority of voters. Again, historians assign multiple causes to this shift in the human condition, rapid in time, staggering in scope. But one of the most important was the power of ideas—the voices, actions, and examples of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In recent years something similar seems to have occurred with gay rights: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, perhaps, a slow movement to equality.
Less well known, but equally profound: the decline in violence. Foraging societies waged war less brutally than industrial societies, but more frequently. Typically, archaeologists believe, about a quarter of all hunters and gatherers were killed by their fellows. Violence declined somewhat as humans gathered themselves into states and empires, but was still a constant presence. When Athens was at its height in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, it was ever at war: against Sparta (First and Second Peloponnesian Wars, Corinthian War); against Persia (Greco-Persian Wars, Wars of the Delian League); against Aegina (Aeginetan War); against Macedon (Olynthian War); against Samos (Samian War); against Chios, Rhodes, and Cos (Social War).
In this respect, classical Greece was nothing special—look at the ghastly histories of China, sub-Saharan Africa, or Mesoamerica. Similarly, early modern Europe’s wars were so fast and furious that historians simply gather them into catchall titles like the Hundred Years’ War, followed by the shorter but even more destructive Thirty Years’ War. And even as Europeans and their descendants paved the way toward today’s concept of universal human rights by creating documents like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Europe remained so mired in combat that it fought two conflicts of such massive scale and reach they became known as “world” wars.
Since the Second World War, however, rates of violent death have fallen to the lowest levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to be slain by another member of the species than ever before—an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article. As the political scientist Joshua Goldstein has written, “we are winning the war on war.” Again, there are multiple causes. But Goldstein, probably the leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of the United Nations and other transnational bodies, an expression of the ideas of peace activists earlier in the last century.
As a relatively young species, we have an adolescent propensity to make a mess: we pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink, and appear stalled in an age of carbon dumping and nuclear experimentation that is putting countless species at risk including our own. But we are making undeniable progress nonetheless. No European in 1800 could have imagined that in 2000 Europe would have no legal slavery, women would be able to vote, and gay people would be able to marry. No one could have guessed a continent that had been tearing itself apart for centuries would be free of armed conflict, even amid terrible economic times. Given this record, even Lynn Margulis might pause (maybe).
Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a still greater transformation—behavioral plasticity of the highest order—because we would be pushing against biological nature itself. The Japanese have an expression, hara hachi bu, which means, roughly speaking, “belly 80 percent full.” Hara hachi bu is shorthand for an ancient injunction to stop eating before feeling full. Nutritionally, the command makes a great deal of sense. When people eat, their stomachs produce peptides that signal fullness to the nervous system. Unfortunately, the mechanism is so slow that eaters frequently perceive satiety only after they have consumed too much—hence the all-too-common condition of feeling bloated or sick from overeating. Japan—actually, the Japanese island of Okinawa—is the only place on earth where large numbers of people are known to restrict their own calorie intake systematically and routinely. Some researchers claim that hara hachi bu is responsible for Okinawans’ notoriously long life spans. But I think of it as a metaphor for stopping before the second inflection point, voluntarily forswearing short-term consumption to obtain a long-term benefit.
Evolutionarily speaking, a species-wide adoption of hara hachi bu would be unprecedented. Thinking about it, I can picture Lynn Margulis rolling her eyes. But is it so unlikely that our species, Canbys one and all, would be able to do exactly that before we round that fateful curve of the second inflection point and nature does it for us?
I can imagine Margulis’s response: You’re imagining our species as some sort of big-brained, hyperrational, benefit-cost-calculating computer! A better analogy is the bacteria at our feet! Still, Margulis would be the first to agree that removing the shackles from women and slaves has begun to unleash the suppressed talents of two-thirds of the human race. Drastically reducing violence has prevented the waste of countless lives and staggering amounts of resources. Is it really impossible to believe that we wouldn’t use those talents and those resources to draw back before the abyss?
Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the imagination to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. It would be evidence that Lynn Margulis’s most dismissive beliefs had been right after all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would be, at last count, not an especially interesting species.On Wednesday afternoon, Italian police clashed with Chinese factory workers during a health and safety inspection at a Chinese-owned textile factory in Sesto Fiorentino, a suburb of Florence where many small Chinese factories are located.
According to local reports, the brawl began after an elderly Chinese man was stopped from leaving the factory with a baby in his arms. Four policemen and three workers were injured in the resulting fracas.
Afterwards, around 300 Chinese workers faced off outside with police, waving Chinese flags, singing the Chinese national anthem and even tossing some stones. The protest went on into the night.
The Chinese Consulate General in Florence said that upon receiving news of the incident, he immediately requested that Italian police uphold the law in a civilized manner, protect Chinese citizens’ rights, appropriately handle the question and settle the matter as quickly as possible, Tencent reports.
Italian police apparently heard the consulate general loud and clear. According to thelocal.it, they carried out raids on nine locations earlier today in the nearby town of Prato, home to one of the biggest Chinese communities in Europe. The raids were aimed at a Chinese group called “The City of the White Stag,” which police say has been carrying out vigilante style patrols in the area that have led to attacks on North Africans.
We’ll have to see what this means for continued collaboration between Italian and Chinese police forces. In May, four Chinese police officers went on patrol in downtown Rome and Milan to provide additional assistance to their compatriots abroad. At some point in the nearish future, Italian police officers are scheduled to do the same in Beijing and Shanghai.
[Images via Tencent]
[AD] Make a purchase on BottlesXO and gain the chance to win an iPhone or a trip to Tuscany!Regular viewers of MTV's series "Catfish" (in which online-only, deceptive relationships are pulled into the real world, albeit with cameras running) might think that the show just highlights the extreme cases of a common problem -- people who tell lies in search of a personal connection. For instance, studies show that about 81% of people lie in their online dating profiles, and |
." Abruptly he gave a broad grin. "And I expect you're eager to see Egwene."
Rand managed a weak smile. Of all things he might want to think about right then, the Mayor's daughter was far down the list. He did not need any more confusion. For the past year she had been making him increasingly jittery whenever they were together. Worse, she did not even seem to be aware of it. No, he certainly did not want to add Egwene to his thoughts.
He was hoping his father had not noticed he was afraid when Tam said, "Remember the flame, lad, and the void."
It was an odd thing Tam had taught him. Concentrate on a single flame and feed all you passions into it--fear, hate, anger-until your mind became empty. Become one with the void. Tam said, and you could do anything. Nobody else in Emond's Field talked that way. But Tam who the archery competition at Bel Tine every year with his flame and his void. Rand though he might have a chance at placing this year himself, if he could manage to hold onto the void. For Tam to bring it up now meant he had noticed, but he said nothing more about it.
Tam clucked Bela into motion once more, and they resumed their journey, the older man striding along as if nothing untoward had happened and nothing untoward could. Rand wished he could imitate him. He tried forming the emptiness in his mind, but it kept slipping away into images of the black-cloaked horseman.
He wanted to believe that Tam was right, that the rider had just been his imagination, but he could remember that feeling of hatred too well. There had been someone. And that someone had meant him harm. He did not stop looking back until the high-peaked, thatched roofs of Emond's Field surrounded him.
The village lay close onto the Westwood, the forest gradually thinning until the last few trees stood actually among the stout frame houses. The land sloped gently down to the east. Though not without patches of woods, farms and hedge-bordered fields and pastures quilted the land beyond the village all the way to the Waterwood and its tangle of streams and ponds. The land to the west was just as fertile, and the pastures there lush in most years, but only a handful of farms could be found in the Westwood. Even those few dwindled to none miles short of the Sand Hills, not to mention the Mountains of Mist, which rose above the Westwood treetops, distant but in plain sight from Emond's Field. Some said the land was too rocky, as if there were not rocks everywhere in the Two rivers, and other said it was hard-luck land. A few muttered that there was no point getting any closer to the mountains than needs be. Whatever the reasons, only the hardiest men famed in the Westwood.
Small children and dogs dodged around the cart in whooping swarms once it passed the first row of houses. Bela plodded on patiently, ignoring the yelling youngsters who tumbled under her nose, playing tag and rolling hoops. In the last months there had been little of play or laughter from the children; even when the weather had slackened enough to let children out, fear of wolves kept them in. It seemed the approach of Bel Tine had taught them how to play again.
Festival had affected the adults as well. Broad shutters were thrown back, and in almost every house the goodwife stood in a window, apron tied about her and long-braided hair done up in a kerchief, shaking sheets or hanging mattresses over the windowsills. Whether or not leaves had appeared on the trees, no woman would let Bel Tine come before her spring cleaning was done. In every yard rugs hung from stretched lines, and children who had not been quick enough to run free in the streets instead vented their frustration on the carpets with wicker beaters. On roof after roof the goodman of the house clambered about, checking the thatch to see if the winter's damage meant calling on old Cenn Buie, the thatcher.
Several times Tam paused to engage on e man or another in brief conversation. Since he and Rand had not been off the farm for weeks, everyone wanted to catch up on how things were out that way. Few Westwood men had been in. Tam spoke of damage from winter storms, each one worse than the one before, and stillborn lambs, of brown fields where crops should be sprouting and pastures greening, of ravens flocking in where songbirds had come in years before. Grim talk, with preparations for Bel Tine going on all around them, and much shaking of heads. It was the same on all sides.
Most of the men rolled their shoulders and said, "Well, we'll survive, the Light willing." Some grinned and added, "And if the Light doesn't will, we'll still survive."
That was the way of most Two Rivers people. People who had to watch the hail beat their crops or the wolves take their lambs, and start over, no matter how many years it happened, did not give up easily. Most of those who did were long since gone.
Tam would not have stopped for Wit Congar if the man had not come out into the street so they had to halt or let Bela run over him. The Congars--and the Coplins; the two families were so intermarried no one really knew where one family let off and the other began--were known from Watch Hill to Deven Ride, and maybe as far as Taren Ferry, as complainers and troublemakers.
"I have to get this to get this to Bran al'Vere, Wit," Tam said, nodding to the barrels in the cart, but the scrawny man held his ground with a sour expression on his face. He had been sprawled on his front steps, not up on his roof, though the thatch looked as if it badly needed Master Buie's attention. He never seemed ready to start over, or to finish what he started the first time. Most of the Coplins and Congars were like that, those who were not worse.
"What are we going to do about Nynaeve, al'Thor?" Congar demanded. "We can't have a wisdom like that for Emond's Field."
Tam sighed heavily. "It's not our place, Wit. The Wisdom is women's business."
"Well, we'd better do something, al'Tor. She said we'd have a mild winter. And a good harvest. Now you ask her what she hears on the wind, and she just scowls at you and stomps off."
"If you asked her the way you usually do, Wit," Tam said patiently, "you're lucky she didn't thump you with that stick she carries. Now if you don't mind, this brandy--"
"Nynaeve al'Meara is just too young to be Wisdom, al'Thor. If the Women's Circle won't do something, then the Village Council has to."
"What business of yours is the Wisdom, Wit Congar?" roared a woman's voice. Wit flinched as his wife marched out of the house. Daise Congar was twice as wide as Wit, a hard-faced woman without an ounce of fat on her. She glared at him with her fists on her hips. "You try meddling in Women's Circle business, and see how you like eating your own cooking. Which you won't do in my kitchen. And washing your own clothes and making your own bed. Which won't be under my roof."
"But, Daise," Wit whined, "I was just.…"
"If you'll pardon me, Daise," Tam said. "Wit. The Light shine on you both." He got Bela moving again, leading her around the scrawny fellow. Daise was concentrating on her husband now, but any minute she could realize whom it was Wit had been talking to.
That was why they had not accepted any of the invitations to stop for a bite to eat or something hot to drink. When they saw Tam, the goodwives of Emond's Field went on point like hounds spotting a rabbit. There was not a one of them who did not know just the perfect wife for a widower with a good farm, even if it was in the Westwood.
Rand stepped along just as quickly as Tam, perhaps even more so. He was sometimes cornered when Tam was not around, with no way to escape outside of rudeness. Herded onto a stool by the kitchen fire, he would be fed pastries or honeycakes or meatpies. And always the goodwife's eyes weighed and measured him as neatly as any merchant's scales and tapes while she told him that what he was eating was not nearly so good as her widowed sister's cooking, or her next-to-eldest cousin's. Tam was certainly not getting any younger, she would say. It was good that he had loved his wife so--it boded well for the next woman in his life--but he had mourned long enough. Tam needed a good woman. It was a simple fact, she would say, or something very close, that a man just could not do without a woman to take care of him and keep him out of trouble. Worst of all were those who paused thoughtfully at about that point, then asked with elaborate casualness exactly how old he was now.
Like most Two Rivers folk, Rand had a strong stubborn streak. Outsiders sometimes said it was the prime trait of people in the Two Rivers, that they could give mules lessons and teach stones. The goodwives were fine and kindly women for the most part, but he hated being pushed into anything, and they made him feel as if he were being prodded with sticks. So he walked fast, and wished Tam would hurry Bela along.
Soon the street opened onto the Green, a broad expanse in the middle of the village. Usually covered with thick grass, the Green this spring showed only a few fresh patches among the yellowish brown of dead grass and the black of bare earth. A double handful of geese waddled about, beadily eyeing the ground but not finding anything worth pecking, and someone had tethered a milkcow to crop the sparse growth.
Toward the west end of the Green, the Winespring itself gushed out of a low stone outcrop in a flow that never failed, a flow strong enough to knock a man down and sweet enough to justify its name a dozen times over. From the spring the rapidly widening Winespring Water ran swiftly off to the east, willows dotting its banks all the way to Master Thane's mill and beyond, until it split into dozens of streams in the swampy depths of the Waterwood. Two low, railed footbridges crossed the clear stream at the Green, and one bridge wider than the others and stout enough to bear wagons. The Wagon Bridge marked where the North Road, coming down from Taren Ferry and Watch Hill, became the Old Road, leading to Deven Ride. Outsiders sometimes found it funny that the road had one name to the north and another to the south, but that was the way it had always been, as far as anyone in Emond's Field knew, and that was that. It was good enough reason for Two Rivers people.
On the far side of the bridges, the mounds were already building for the Bel Tine fires, three careful stacks of logs almost as big as houses. They had to be on cleared dirt, of course, not on the Green, even sparse as it was. What of Festival did not take place around the fires would happen on the Green.
Near the Winespring a score of older women sang softly as they erected the Spring Pole. Shorn of its branches, the straight, slender trunk of a fir tree stood ten feet high even in the hole they had dug for it. A knot of girls too young to wear their hair braided sat cross-legged and watched enviously, occasionally singing snatches of the song the women sang.
Tam clucked at Bela as if to make her speed her pace, though she ignored it, and Rand studiously kept his eyes from what the women were doing. In the morning the men would pretend to be surprised to find the Pole, then at noon the unmarried women would dance the Pole, entwining it with long, colored ribbons while the unmarried men sang. No one knew when the custom began or why--but it was another thing that was the way it had always been--but it was an excuse to sing and dance, and nobody in the Two Rivers needed much excuse for that.
The whole day of Bel Tine would be taken up with singing and dancing and feasting, with time out for footraces, and contests in almost everything. Prizes would be given not only in archery, but for the best with the sling, and the quarterstaff. There would be contests at solving riddles and puzzles, at the rope tug, and lifting and tossing weights, prizes for the best singer, the best dancer and the best fiddle player, for the quickest to shear a sheep, even the best at bowls, and at darts.
Bel Tine was supposed to come when spring had well and truly arrived, the first lambs born and the first crop up. Even with the cold hanging on, though, no one had any idea of putting it off. Everyone could use a little singing and dancing. And to top everything, if the rumors could be believed, a grand display of fireworks was planned for the Green--if the first peddler of the year appeared in time, of course. That had been causing considerable talk; it was ten years since the last such display, and that was still talked about.
The Winespring Inn stood at the east end of the Green, hard beside the Wagon Bridge. The first floor of the inn was river rock, though the foundation was of older stone some said came from the mountains. The whitewashed second story--where Brandelwyn al'Vere, the innkeeper and Mayor of Emond's Field for the past twenty years, lived in the back with his wife and daughters--jutted out over the lower floor all the way around. Red roof tile, the only such roof in the village, glittered in the weak sunlight, and smoke drifted from there of the inn's dozen tall chimneys.
At the south end of the inn, away from the stream stretched the remains of a much larger stone foundation, once part of the inn--or so it was said. A huge oak grew in the middle of it now, with a hole thirty paces around and spreading branches as thick as a man. IN the summer, Bran al'Vere set tables and benches under those branches, shady with leaves then, where people could enjoy a cup and a cooling breeze while they talked or perhaps set out a board for a game of stones.
"Here we are, lad." Tam reached for Bela's harness, but she stopped in front of the inn before his hand touched leather. "Knows the way better than I do," he chuckled.
As the last creak of the axle faded, Bran al'Vere appeared from the inn, seeming as always to step too lightly for a man of his girth, nearly double that of anyone else in the village. A smile split his round face, which was topped by a sparse fringe of gray hair. The innkeeper was in his shirtsleeves despite the chill, with a spotless white apron wrapped around him. A silver medallion in the form of a set of balance scales hung on his chest.
The medallion, along with the full-size set of scales used to weight the coins of the merchants who came down from Baerlon for wool or tabac, was the symbol of the Mayor's office. Bran only wore it for dealing with the merchants and for festivals, feastdays, and weddings. He had it on a day early now, but that night was Winternight, the night before Bel Tine, when everyone would visit back and forth almost the whole night long, exchanging small gifts, having a bite to eat and a touch to drink at every house. After the winter, Rand though, he probably considers Winternight excuse enough not to wait until tomorrow.
"Tam," the Mayor shouted as he hurried toward them. "The Light shine on me, it's good to see you at last. And you, Rand. How are you, my boy?"
"Fine, Master al'Vere," Rand said. "And you, sir?" But Bran's attention was already back on Tam.
"I was almost beginning to think you wouldn't be bringing your brandy this year. You've never waited so late before."
"I've no liking for leaving the farm these days, Bran," Tam replied. "Not with the wolves the way they are. And the weather."
Bran harrumphed. "I could wish somebody wanted to talk about something besides the weather. Everyone complains about it, and folk who should know better expect me to set it right. I've just spent twenty minutes explaining to Mistress al'Donel that I can do nothing about the storks. Though what she expected me to do.…" He shook his head.
"An ill omen," a scratchy voice announced, "no storks nesting on the rooftops at Bel Tine." Cenn Buie, as gnarled and dark as an old root, marched up to Tam and Bran and leaned on his walking staff, near as tall as he was and just as gnarled. He tried to fix both men at once with a beady eye. "There's worse to come, you mark my words."
"Have you become a soothsayer, then, interpreting omens?" Tam asked dryly. "Or do you listen to the wind, like a Wisdom? There's certainly enough of it. Some originating not far from here."
"Mock if you will," Cenn muttered, "but if it doesn't warm enough for crops to spout soon, more than one root cellar will come up empty before there's a harvest. By next winter there may be nothing left alive in the Two Rivers but wolves and ravens. If it next winter at all. Maybe it will still be this winter."
"Now what is that supposed to mean?" Bran said sharply.
Cenn gave them a sour look. "I've not much good to say about Nynaeve al'Meare. You know that. For one thing, she's too young to--No matter. The Women's Circle seems to object to the Village Council even talking about their business, though they interfere in ours whenever they want to, which is most of the time, or so it seems to--"
"Cenn," Tam broke in, "is there a point to this?"
"This is point, al'Thor. Ask the Wisdom when the winter will end, and she walks away. Maybe she doesn't want to tell us what she hears on the wind. Maybe what she hears is that the winter won't end. Maybe it's just going to go on being winter until the Wheel turns and the Age ends. There's your point."
"Maybe sheep will fly," Tam retorted, and Bran threw up his hands.
"The Light protect me from fools. You sitting on the Village Council, Cenn, and now you're spreading that Coplin talk. Well, you listen to me. We have enough problems without.…"
"A quick tug at Rand's sleeve and a voice pitched low, for his ear and alone, distracted him from the older men's talk. "Come on, Rand, while they're arguing. Before they put you to work."
Rand glanced down, and had to grin. Mat Cauhton crouched beside the cart so Tam and Bran and Cenn could not see him, his wiry body contorted like a stork trying to bend itself double.
Mat's brown eyes twinkled with mischief, as usual. "Dav and I caught a big old badger, all grouchy at being pulled out of his den. We're going to let it loose on the Green and watch the girls run."
Rand's smile broadened; it did not sound as much like fun to him as it would have a year or two back, but Mat never seemed to grow up. He took a quick look at his father--the men had their heads together still, all three talking at once--then lowered his own voice. "I promised to unload the cider. I can meet you later, though."
Mat rolled his eyes skyward. "Toting barrels! Burn me, I'd rather play stones with my baby sister. Well, I know of better things than a badger. We have strangers in the Two Rivers. Last evening--"
For an instant Rand stopped breathing. "A man on horse-back?" he asked intently. "A man in a black cloak, on a black horse? And his cloak doesn't move in the wind?"
Mat swallowed his grin, and his voice dropped to an even hoarser whisper. "You saw him, too? I thought I was the only one. Don't laugh, Rand, but he scared me."
"I'm not laughing. He scared me, too. I could swear he hated me, that he wanted to kill me." Rand shivered. Until that day he had ever thought of anyone wanting to kill him, really wanting to kill him. That sort of thing just did not happen in the Two Rivers. A fistfight, maybe, or a wrestling match, but not killing.
"I don't know about hating, Rand, but he was scary enough anyway. All he did was sit on his horse looking at me, just outside the village, but I've never been so frightened in my life. Well, I looked away, just for a moment--it wasn't easy, mind you--then when I looked back he'd vanished. Blood and ashes! Three days, it's been, and I can hardly stop thinking about him. I keep looking over my shoulder." Mat attempted a laugh that came out as a croak. "Funny how being scared takes you. You think strange things. I actually thought--just for a minute, mind--it might be the Dark One." He tried another laugh, but no sound at all came out this time.
Rand took a deep breath. As much to remind himself as for any other reason, he said by rote, "The Dark One and all of the Forsaken are bound in Shayol Ghul, beyond the Great Blight, bound by the Creator at the moment of Creation, bound until the end of time. The hand of the Creator shelters the world, and the Light shines on us all." He dew another breath and went on. "Besides, if he was free, what would the Shepherd of the Night be doing in the Two Rivers watching farmboys?"
"I don't know. But I do know that rider was…evil. Don't laugh. I'll take oath on it. Maybe it was the Dragon."
"You're just full of cheerful thought, aren't you?" Rand muttered. "You sound worse than Cenn."
"My mother always said the Forsaken would come for me if I didn't mend my ways. If I ever saw anybody who looked like Ishamael, or Aginor, it was him."
"Everybody's mother scared them with the Forsaken," Rand said dryly, "but most grow out of it. Why not the Shadowman, while you're about it?"
Mat glared at him. "haven't been so scared since.…No, I've never been that scared, and I don't mind admitting it."
"Me, either. My father thinks I was jumping at shadows under the trees."
Mat nodded glumly and leaned back against the cart wheel. "So does my da. I told Dav, and Elam Dowtry. They've been watching like hawks ever since, but they haven't seen anything. Now Elam thinks I was trying to trick him. Dav thinks he's down from Taren Ferry--a sheepstealer, or a chickenthief. A chickenthief!" He lapsed into affronted silence.
It's probably all foolishness anyway," Rand said finally. "Maybe he is just a sheepstealer." He tried to picture it, but it was like picturing a wolf taking the cat's place in front of a mouse hole.
"Well, I didn't like the way he looked at me. And neither did you, not if how you jumped at me is any guide. We ought to tell someone."
"We already have, Mat, both of us, and we weren't believed. Can you imagine trying to convince Master al'Vere about this fellow, without him seeing him? He'd send us off to Nynaeve to see if we were sick."
"There are two of us, now. Nobody could believe we both imagined it."
Rand rubbed the top of his head briskly, wondering what to say. Mat was something of a byword around the village. Few people had escaped his pranks. Now his name came up whenever a washline dropped the laundry in the drift or a loose saddle girth deposited a farmer in the road. Mat did not even have to be anywhere around. His support might be worse than none.
After a moment Rand said, "Your father would believe you put me up to it, and mine.…" He looked over the cart to where Tam and Bran and Cenn had been talking, and found himself staring his father in the eyes. The Mayor was still lecturing Cenn, who took it now in sullen silence.
"Good morning, Matrim," Tam said brightly, hefting one of the brandy casks up onto the side of the cart. "I see you've come to help Rand unload the cider. Good lad."
Mat leaped to his feet at the first word and began backing away. "Good morning to you, Master al'Thor. And to you, Master al'Vere. Master Buie. May the Light shine on you. My da sent me to--" "No doubt he did," Tam said, "And no doubt, since you are a lad who does his chores right off, you've finished the task already. Well, the quicker you lads get the cider into Master al'Vere's cellar, the quicker you can see the gleeman."
"Gleeman!" Mat exclaimed, stopping dead in his footsteps, at the same instant that Rand asked, "When will he get here?"
Rand could remember only two gleemen coming into the Two Rivers in his whole life, and for one of those he had been young enough to sit on Tam's shoulder to watch. To have one there actually during Bel Tine, with his harp and his flute and his stories and all.…Emond's Field would still be talking about this Festival ten years off, even if there were not any fireworks.
"Foolishness," Cenn grumbled, but fell silent at a look from Bran that had all the weight of the Mayor's office in it.
Tam leaned against the side of the cart, using the brandy cask as a prop for his arm. "Yes, a gleeman, and already here. According to Master al'Vere, he's in a room in the inn right now."
"Arrived in the dead of night, he did." The innkeeper shook his head in disapproval. "Pounded on the front door till he woke the whole family. If not for Festival, I'd have told him to stable his own horse and sleep in the stall with it, gleeman or not. Imagine coming in the dark like that."
Rand stared wonderingly. No one traveled beyond the village by night, not these days, certainly not alone. The thatcher grumbled under his breath again, too low this time for Rand to understand more than a word or two. "Madman" and "unnatural."
He doesn't wear a black cloak, does he?" Mat asked suddenly.
Bran's belly shook with his chuckle. "Black! His cloak is like every gleeman's cloak I've ever seen. More patches than cloak, and more colors than you can think of."
Rand startled himself by laughing out loud, a laugh of pure relief. The menacing black-clad rider as a gleeman was a ridiculous notion, but.…He clapped a hand over his month in embarrassment.
"You see, Tam," Bran said. "There's been little enough laughter in this village since winter came. Now even the gleeman's cloak brings a laugh. That alone is worth the expense of bringing him down from Baerlon."
"Say what you will," Cenn spoke up suddenly. "still say it's a foolish waste of money. And those fireworks you all insisted on sending off for."
"So there are fireworks," Mat said, but Cenn went right on.
"They should have been here a month ago with the first peddler of the year, but there hasn't been a peddler, has there? If he doesn't come by tomorrow, what are we going to do with them? Hold another Festival just to set them off? That's if he even brings them, of course."
"Cenn"--Tam sighed--"you've as much trust as a Taren Ferry man."
"Where is he, then? Tell me that, al'Thor."
"Why didn't you tell us?" Mat demanded in an aggrieved voice. "The whole village would have had as much fun with the waiting as with the gleeman. Or almost, anyway. You can see how everybody's been over just a rumor of fireworks."
"I can see," Bran replied with a sidelong look at the Thatcher. "And if I knew for sure how that rumor started…if I thought, for instance, that somebody had been complaining about how much things cost where people could hear him when the things are supposed to be secret.…"
Cenn cleared his throat. "My bones are too old for this wind. If you don't mind, I'll just see if Mistress al'Vere won't fix me some mulled wine to take the chill off. Mayor. Al'Thor." he was headed for the inn before he finished, and as the door swung shot behind him, Bran sighed.
"Sometimes I think Nynaeve is right about.…Well, that's not important now. You young fellows think for a minute. Everyone's excited about the fireworks, true, and that's only at a rumor. Think how they'll be if the peddler doesn't get here in time, after all their anticipating. And with the weather the way it is, who knows when he will come. They'd be fifty times as excited about a gleeman."
"And feel fifty times as bad if he hadn't come," Rand said slowly. "Even Bel Tine might not do much for people's spirits after that."
"You have a head on your shoulders when you choose to use it," Bran said. "He'll follow you on the Village Council one day, Tam. Mark my words. He couldn't do much worse right now than someone I could name."
"None of this is unloading the cart," Tam said briskly, handing the first cask of brandy to the Mayor. "I want a warm fire, my pipe, and a mug of your good ale." He hoisted the second brandy cask onto his shoulder. "I'm sure Rand will thank you for your help, Matrim. Remember, the sooner the cider is in the cellar.…"
As Tam and Bran disappeared into the inn. Rand looked at his friend. "You don't have to help. Dav won't keep that badger long."
"Oh, why not?" Mat said resignedly. "Like your da said, the quicker it's in the cellar.…" Picking up one of the casks of cider in both arms, he hurried toward the inn in a half trot. "Maybe Egwene is around. Watching you stare at her like a poleaxed ox will be as good as a badger any day."
Rand paused in the act of putting his bow and quiver in the back of the cart. He really had managed to put Egwene out of his mind. That was unusual in itself. But she would likely be around the inn somewhere. There was not much chance the could avoid her. Of course, it had been weeks since he saw her last.
"Well?" Mat called from the front of the inn. "I didn't say I would do it by myself. You aren't on the Village Council yet."
With a start, Rand took up a cask and followed. Perhaps she would not be there after all. Oddly, that possibility did not make him feel any better.
Copyright © 1990 by Robert JordanThe last time the Heat owned a lottery pick, team president Pat Riley used it to take a Houston-born forward who had just won a national title with an Atlantic Coast Conference school from the Tar Heel State.
There’s a chance Riley could do the same with the 14th pick in next Thursday night’s NBA Draft.
Justin Jackson, a 6-8, 201-pound wiry wing on North Carolina’s national championship team, worked out for the Heat last week and is one of a handful of lottery-level-talent players who could be available when Miami makes its selection.
The 22-year-old doesn’t have the same athleticism or defensive reputation that Justise Winslow had two years ago when the Heat took him with the 10th overall pick. But there’s a reason Jackson is on Miami’s radar: He can score, and he proved this past season he can take constructive criticism and use it to elevate his game.
Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald
After being told at last year’s combine he needed to shoot at a higher clip before he could play at the game’s highest level, Jackson went back to school, took thousands of jump shots and turned himself from a 29 percent three-point shooter into a 37 percent shooter from beyond the arc. He set the school record for three-pointers made (105) and won the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Player of the Year award along the way.
“I feel like I can space the floor, knock down the open shot,” Jackson told NBA Draft Express recently. “If I get the ball and I have to go make a play, I can make a play — whether that’s for myself or for my teammates. I feel I can do a pretty good job on the offensive glass, too. But I feel I can space the floor pretty well and just create off of that.”
Compared by Louisville coach Rick Pitino to three-time NBA All-Star Richard Hamilton, the next step for Jackson is putting some muscle on his frame.
After averaging 18.3 points, 4.7 rebounds and 2.8 assists last season and shooting 44.3 percent from the field against top-flight collegiate competition, some scouts doubt Jackson will be able to handle the physicality of an NBA schedule or guard a power forward when he’s asked to play in a small-ball lineup.
SHARE COPY LINK The Miami Heat could be eyeing some help at forward with the 14th pick in the NBA Draft. Reporter Manny Navarro breaks a couple options down.
“Getting stronger is an every-day battle for me,” Jackson said last month at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago. “Every single day I try to get better at that. I can get better at shooting, shoot it more consistently, rebound the ball better, defensively, ball handling, pretty much everything. But I think the one thing I’m trying to focus on is getting stronger. As a grown man I’ve got to be able to take that and still continue to play. That’s what I’m focusing on.”
Scouts have noted that while Jackson is also becoming more of a threat on the move, where he struggles is creating offense off the dribble, either out of pick-and-roll or isolation opportunities. Jackson had only 4.2 free-throw attempts per 40 minutes last season, according to NBA Draft Express, one of the lower percentages among top-100 small forwards.
Jackson, meanwhile, said he feels he’s an underrated passer and defender.
“I think I can handle the ball and pass the ball pretty well,” Jackson said. “I didn’t really have to do that much in our system because we had great point guards coming through there. But I think passing the ball and ball handling is something I can show that I have a pretty big strength in.”
During the later stages of the NCAA Tournament, Jackson helped hold Kentucky’s Malik Monk — a projected lottery pick — to 10 points on 4-for-10 shooting, Oregon’s Tyler Dorsey to 3-for-11 shooting and Gonzaga’s Jordan Mathews and Silas Melson to nine points on a combined 3-for-10 shooting.
“I think I’m doing a better job of sitting down and guarding on the ball,” Jackson said of his defensive skills. “For me, my mind-set is it’s harder for them to score if they don’t have the ball. In the NBA, it’s hard to deny a person the ball. As hard as you can possibly make them have touches, that’s what I try to do.”
SHARE COPY LINK The Miami Heat could be eyeing some help at forward with the 14th pick in the NBA Draft. Reporter Manny Navarro breaks a couple options down.
Asked if there’s a player his game relates to, Jackson said: “I think body type-wise I would say [Kevin Durant] is kind of one of the guys that translates. But game-wise I’m not sure I can really compare myself to anybody.”
ESPN’s Chad Ford said scouts “are all over the board” on Jackson because of his “lack of elite athleticism and questions about the sustainability of his three-point shooting.”
Jackson comes from an athletic family. His father ran track in college and his mother played college basketball. He also recently became engaged with former University of Florida basketball standout Brooke Copeland.For those who are building cafe racers, brats, or any of the numerous other styles, a bikes suspension can play a huge part in the final performance of your machine. In fact, suspension ultimately is one of the most important factors in how your bike performs. Sure, a smoking fast engine is great, but if you are afraid of your bikes handling you will never get take advantage of that sweet horsepower. And while sorting electrical issues or fine tuning carburetion is a great way to make your bike work well, suspension is what keeps your tires on the road and and helps prevent your body from close encounters of the asphalt kind. Moreover, if you get out for a ride and find yourself uncomfortable, whether that is from a physical discomfort or a mental one, your riding experience is going to suffer. But suspension is generally misunderstood, especially in the sense that people are more often than not of the opinion that throwing money at it is the only way to improve it. That simply is not the case, and in this article I am going to go over some of the ways we can do refine our suspension and the ride quality of our machines without the budget a modern MotoGP team.
Suspension is important, this is true no matter the age of your bike, but with that in mind, there is generally a lot that can be done to your suspension that can be done in a budget friendly way. This may especially be needed |
be able to vote a couple of neanderthals out of office, and move in folks who believe it is people, and not traffic jams, that make a city great.
Don’t forget to vote local on March 7th next year!All Matt Boggs wanted was a cool job. And what could be cooler than working at a private club on a place called Rattlesnake Island?
Boggs was familiar with country clubs. While studying at Kent State, he'd worked at Twin Lakes as sous chef, learning the ins and outs of serving the wealthy - respect, manners, discretion. And he liked island living. In 2007, he'd spent the summer managing St. Hazards Resort on Lake Erie's Middle Bass Island. So when he saw the online ad seeking managers for Rattlesnake Island, he sent in his résumé. Not that he was optimistic. The Rattlesnake Island Club, which owns the small island two miles west of Put-in-Bay, is perhaps the most secretive and exclusive country club in Ohio. The cost to join is purported to be around $90,000, and the identities of its 68 members have never been revealed.
Days later, though, Boggs got an e-mail from a woman named Anastasija Pak-Galvin. Nastia, as she called herself, was the RIC's club manager, a Lithuanian expat who, he would later learn, had married the club's chef, Bay Villager Terrance Galvin. She asked Boggs to meet her for an interview at a steakhouse in Independence during the first week of May.
Arriving at the restaurant, Boggs was greeted by caretaker Keith Folk, the only yearlong resident of the 85-acre island. But Nastia did most of the talking. She said she planned to have children and wanted to train a replacement before the kids came, someone who could manage front-of-house business - keeping the books for the club's small boutique, supervising the bartenders and servers, setting up appointments for the on-call masseuse, stuff like that. They needed someone accustomed to island life, someone who wouldn't go crazy from the isolation. Boggs' experience on Middle Bass set him apart from other candidates.
To Boggs it sounded like a grand adventure. But that wasn't the end of the interview process. The president of the RIC's board of directors - Bob Serpentini, the successful auto-dealership owner ("American and proud of it!") - wanted to meet with him as well.
Serpentini asked Boggs to come out to Ken Stewart's Lodge in Bath to interview with him and fellow board member Gary Taylor, chairman of the board of telemarketing giant InfoCision. While Serpentini chatted on his cell phone, Taylor quizzed Boggs on his résumé -where had he worked before, what experience did he have working with international students, etc. When he was done, according to Boggs, Serpentini looked at Taylor and asked, "Any more questions?" Taylor shook his head, and Serpentini turned to Boggs and said, "You can leave now."
It was a strange, off-putting meeting, and for the next two weeks, Boggs considered taking another job on Mackinac Island instead. Then the caretaker called and told Boggs he was hired. But Boggs' island adventure was no vacation. THE OTTAWA INDIANS named the island for the two craggy islets on the north end, which resemble a snake's rattles. During Prohibition, it was rumored to be a bootlegging station, but it appears that Toledo entrepreneur Hubert Bennett was the first person to build a house on the island, in 1929. He floated logs from the mainland to build a cabin with a servant's wing, a guest cabin, dining hall, a small electric plant and gas generator, as well as a 185-foot dock, according to the RIC's website (rattlesnakeislandclub.com). Most of the historical structures have since been modified by the club, turned into party pads for this poor city's upper class.
After Bennett died, the island passed through many hands. At times, Rattlesnake Island was a summer retreat for Catholic boys, a sanctuary for Barbary sheep and a public resort. One owner, Dr. James Frackelton (who would eventually become another member of the RIC), established his own post office there, under a little-known federal law that allows privately run posts where the government does not provide regular service. Frackelton's stamps are must-haves for collectors.
The current owners are secret investors who bought the island for $4.6 million in 1998.
Visits to places like the Catawba Inn on the mainland or the Boardwalk at Put-in-Bay will likely turn up barnacled barflies who will tell stories about how Rattlesnake is a hideaway for Cleveland mobsters, though there's little evidence to support these theories. Frackelton believes a previous owner started the rumors to scare people away from the island during the winter months, when you can walk to it from Middle Bass; people had been trespassing during the off-season and stealing mementos.
Lake Erie charter captains know not to take tourists to the island without a member's permission. And if you try to dock your boat, someone will turn you away. Unless you know an RIC member, the best view you'll get of Rattlesnake Island is from atop Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial.
A few of the members can be identified through public records. A liquor license purchased in 1999 lists Bob Serpentini as the president of the island's board of trustees. Listed as vice president is Victor Arsena, a local contractor who was sued, along with his brothers, by the U.S.
Department of Labor in 2004 for transferring $765,000 from their employees' retirement plans for their own benefit. The case was settled in 2005, when he and his brothers agreed to pay back the money with interest.
The Ottawa County auditor's office shows that the island is divided into 15 parcels, on which some RIC members have built homes. Frackelton has his own lot. So does Gary Taylor. Former CEO of Charter One, Bud Koch, has a place there too. As does Cincinnati developer Craig Hilsinger, Kenmore Construction owner William Scala and Nathan Zampelli, a manager of Zampelli Construction Inc. At least two lots were purchased by limited-liability companies using third-person agents.
Beyond these few scant records and unreliable scuttlebutt from the mainland, not much was known about this exclusive club and how it operates. But then Matt Boggs started talking.
JUDGING FROM Boggs' descriptions, Rattlesnake Island is not nearly as opulent as its secrecy suggests. Sure, there's the Golden Pheasant Inn, where there's no cash register because everything is billed to your account, and Chef Galvin will "prepare anything to your exact wishes," according to the club's website. But the golf course is only four holes - nine if you play it again backward and then down the middle of a runway for the final hole. The hot tub hasn't worked for years.
Rattlesnake Island is staffed mostly by beautiful young women from Eastern Europe, who are hand-selected from dossiers that include their pictures, says Boggs. They come from places like Moldavia, Belarus and Ukraine, though most are also students of Lithuanian Christian College's International University, a school devoted to "servant leadership," a belief that one should sacrifice selfish desires if they do not benefit the group as a whole. That may be why the women, who are paid minimum wage, also pool all their tips so that Nastia can distribute them evenly among the entire staff.
Boggs, who accepted the job in part because of the tips he thought he would earn and who once got a $100 tip on four beers, was miffed about sharing his loot with the landscaping crew. When he complained, he was told he was being too "American." Suddenly, the job on Mackinac Island was sounding better, but it was too late. "By that time, all my stuff was on the island," says Boggs. "What was I supposed to do?"
Boggs says he also encountered resistence when he suggested a different hiring philosophy. He noted that most of the women were business and economics students, with no restaurant experience. Why not hire people who wanted to work in the serving industry? Nastia, once an LCC student herself, didn't like that idea at all, says Boggs, and seemed to complain about his presumed greed to anyone who would listen. Things came to a head when Nastia demanded to inspect Boggs' bedroom.
There are two dorms on Rattlesnake Island for the 25-28 staffers who cater to the members during the summer season. Essentially, the dorms are three mobile homes pushed together, with a common room in the middle. The first week, Boggs watched Nastia inspect the other staffers' bedrooms, "showing them how to clean the shower and toilets, like they were children," he says. Then, she asked to see his room.
"I thought she was joking, but she was serious," he says. "I never let her do it and told her the entire practice was an invasion of the students' privacy and rather insulting. We're talking adults here, not sixth-grade camp kids."
The workers' only days off were Mondays. Leaving the island was expensive - $50 each way - so most weeks, the women just stayed on Rattlesnake. Boggs took trips to South Bass on Mondays until Folk, the caretaker, suddenly demanded that Boggs start clearing those trips with him first.
Boggs also took issue with their system for waste management. Everything that could be burned was placed in an incinerator behind the men's dorm. And each night, Boggs would see someone outside, stoking the flames and burning their garbage. "When I asked Keith [Folk] about this, his response was simply that they only have their garbage picked up once a year," he says. "I just thought it was odd that it was not in their budget to simply pay to have a normal garbage pickup."
And then there was the "masseuse," as she's known on Rattlesnake. She is a gorgeous sporty-looking blonde from the Toledo area who visits Rattlesnake if members call the island in advance to request a massage, says Boggs. Boggs met her inside the Golden Pheasant. He had to ask other staffers why the woman was helping herself to drinks behind the bar. He was told, "She can do what she wants."
Online, the masseuse advertises massotherapy provided "anywhere in the country" and claims she is a licensed massotherapist. But the Ohio Medical Board, which licenses massotherapists working in the state, has no record of anyone by her name. She did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The members of the RIC, Boggs knows, will spend a lot to feel good. "The strangest thing that happened to me up there was this one member came up to me and said, 'I've got $10,000 in my pocket. I'll give you $3,000 if you bring a Russian girl back to my place.'" Boggs says he politely declined. But there was no happy ending for Boggs. On July 6, as everyone was cleaning up after the busy holiday weekend, he noticed the foreign women waving goodbye to him, as if they knew something he didn't. Then Folk came up on his golf cart. Normally, Boggs just walked back to the dorms. On the ride back, Folk informed Boggs that he'd gotten a complaint about him over the weekend. Boggs was told that the wife of RIC member Doug Price (CEO of the K&D Group) had said that he was rude to her. And now Folk had to let him go.
"He wouldn't tell me what the complaint was about," says Boggs. (The only contact Boggs recalls having with Price's wife was when the woman sitting beside her had asked for cigarettes and gave him $5 to track some down.) "It was very bizarre. He said it was Bob Serpentini's decision." Boggs believes he was fired because he didn't agree with Nastia's management style.
Folk gave him a ride back to the mainland on a boat and left him there, jobless, in the middle of summer, when other resorts had already hired their crews. He filed for unemployment, and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services ruled in Boggs' favor, stating that "the employer has supplied general information that does not cite specific dates or incidents."
Boggs tried to contact Serpentini, but the auto king told him to call back later and then didn't answer when Boggs called back. "He pretends to be 'American and proud of it,'" says Boggs. "But Bob Serpentini doesn't favor hiring Americans on his staff. It's cheaper to hire these women from Russia."
SERPENTINI AGREED to be interviewed for this story, but then backed out before the meeting. For a man known for self-promotion, it's an odd way to treat the media.
Serpentini's life is a made-in-America dream. According to a 2006 Akron Beacon Journal profile, Serpentini worked his way up from a washboy at Spitzer Dodge in Brook Park to owning five Chevrolet dealerships that now gross more than $300 million a year.
His closest friend is Ken Stewart, of Ken Stewart's Grille in Akron and Ken Stewart's Lodge in Bath. The two met at a health club in Montrose in 1993, according to the Beacon Journal. Since then, they've been nearly inseparable, often going on vacation together with their wives and children. For his birthday, Stewart once bought Serpentini a pair of cuff links engraved with "K" for Ken and "B" for Bob.
Though Stewart is not an RIC member, says Boggs, Serpentini often takes his friend to the island.
Many evenings, Serpentini can be found at one of Stewart's restaurants, eating at a table in the corner or sipping an Absolut Citron with soda and lemon at the bar. Cleveland Scene caught up with him at the Lodge one evening as he was standing outside the restaurant with another RIC member, George Zampelli, who flies to Rattlesnake in his helicopter. When asked why Boggs was fired, Zampelli says, "I have a pretty good idea." But Serpentini cuts him off. "Don't say a word, George," he says. He then demands that I leave. Zampelli, whose business constructed the Lodge and whose name is inscribed on a plaque beside the door, walks inside to find the manager.
"Matt Boggs was let go because he was rude," says Keith Folk, when reached on the island. "It wasn't a good fit. It wasn't working out here." He refused to elaborate.
"I don't know why he was fired," says member Frank Ilcin, a partner at Deloitte & Touche. "If you want to write your article, write your article. But you'd better know your facts, or you'll get your balls knocked off. Look, I'm not trying to be a prick or anything, but we're a private island. We're kind of free to do what we want to do."
I also contacted Chef Galvin, who agreed to share what he knew only if Boggs signed a letter authorizing him to release the information and only if that letter was notarized and mailed to the island. Later in the conversation, he became frustrated, and asked, by name, how my wife and young son were doing - like a heavy in a B movie trying to sound threatening. It is unclear how he obtained personal information about my family.
Nastia did not want to talk either. She hung up the phone as soon as Boggs' name was mentioned. Through their assistants, Doug Price and Gary Taylor said that they would not participate in any article about Rattlesnake Island.
MATT BOGGS recently found a job at another private resort, though he kept his experience with Rattlesnake off the application, for fear of what the island staff might say if contacted. He's more weirded out by his experience at Ohio's most private resort than angry at his dismissal. "It was like The Twilight Zone," he says, shaking his head.
He wonders about the two Russian women, Ireana and Zima, who were supposed to contact him after they got their Social Security cards. They were unhappy on the island, he says, and wanted him to find them jobs on the mainland. He hasn't heard from them since he left. A friend of his who speaks Russian called the island to check on them, only to be told they had gone home early, though Boggs himself has no way to verify this. "That's Rattlesnake," he says.
jrenner@clevescene.com0 SHARES Share Tweet
When Rainbow Six Siege released, I saw many gamers debating whether or not to get Siege as it looked really similar to Counter Strike: Global Offensive. To be honest I was one of them. However, after playing the game a couple of times I can confidently say that I and many gamers who shared the same thought were wrong. So here are the three major differences between CS:GO and Siege.
1. Gameplay
Gameplay in Siege and CS:GO is quite different, for example CS:GO allows you to choose the place were you would like to plant the bomb when you are playing as a terrorist, it can either be Alpha (A) or Beta (B). In Rainbow Six: Siege that’s not possible as when you spawn in as ‘Defenders’ you’ll see the bomb in the ‘Default’ room and you cannot move it or anything. The only thing which you can do is barricade the room, plant traps if your operator has this ability.
This brings me to the second difference- In CS:GO you can do no such thing. You can not barricade, you can’t use any special ability because there is no such thing in CS:GO. The most you can do is take cover, hide and wait for the opposition players to come.
2. Loadouts and Guns
In CS:GO you can choose from variety of guns depending on how much cash you earned, be it a Sniper Rifle, Assault Rifle, SMG etc. However, in Siege you don’t have such choices as different operators come equipped with different guns. Some have two guns from which only one can be selected per round, while some have only one primary weapon. You do have some customization options for the guns, for example, you can put a scope, laser sight, etc.
3. Breaching and Other Features
In Siege when the round starts, if you’re in the ‘Attackers’ team you’ll have 20-30 seconds to send out drones with which you have to find the bomb and mark the enemies. While if you’re in the defending team you would have to reinforce walls, use jammers, which kind of disable the drones (this is special ability of a specific operator).
While in CS:GO the only preparation you can do is hold the bomb sites, throw flash if you think the enemies are coming from that place and smoke to block the enemy’s line of view. This is what even the attacking team can do. There is no spying feature like in Siege in CS:GO. However, there is some time given at start of a round in CS:GO in which you can buy equipment.
So these are the major differences between Rainbow Six: Siege and Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
For more news, reviews and information, be sure to visit Gaming Central.VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – A woman in East Vancouver is worried about a peeping tom in her neighbourhood just off of Commercial Drive.
It happened early Saturday morning after Carly Tennant had gone to sleep. The light tapping at her window woke her up at around 3:30 am.
“The tapping started happening. It was really light. It was almost taunting and it was creepy,” she explains.
It was then she called out to the person outside. “No one answered, so I went back to bed. It happened again. The third time it happened, I saw his shoulder. I couldn’t even see his face. It was his shoulder and a little bit of his hair and I just freaked out. I grabbed my computer and turned off all of my lights and sat somewhere where no one could see me.”
The most frightening part is what happened after she called the police. “And they went around and all the gates were open and the man had unscrewed the lightbulbs in my sensor lights outside my front door.”
Constable Brian Montague with the VPD says they are aware of the situation and calls this a criminal offence. “[This is] probably a little more common than people might think. This is why we try to explain to people or tell people to close their windows, close their blinds at night so individuals can’t see into your home.”
Montague adds you should call police right away if something like this happens or you see someone suspicious on your property. “It generally doesn’t escalate, but it’s always a concern that it might. So we always want to try and identify these individuals and figure out what their motivation is.”
It happened near Lakewood and 6th Avenue.The "Dusted or Busted" Scoring Method also known as the "DOB" Scoring Method is an unofficial fan made scoring system used to measure the performance or success of contestants on RuPaul's Drag Race. This method can be used to prove if a contestant performed better than another regardless of their placing in the competition.
Contents show]
Herstory
The scoring method was created during an unofficial fan made YouTube series called "Dusted or Busted" in which two fans critique and review each episode of the show. The scoring method was first used during the critique of Season 6, Episode 11 when fan favorite BenDeLaCreme was eliminated.
Dusted or Busted - RuPaul's Drag Race: Season 6, Episode 11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubuJ_AmUliE
Scoring Method
The Scoring method is used to score the outcome of each contestant during each episode of RuPaul's Drag Race. 2 points are awarded to queens who WIN the main challenge. 1 point is awarded to queens who do well but did not win (HIGH). 0 points are given to queens who are labeled "SAFE" by the judges. -1 points are given to queens who did poorly but did not place in the Bottom 2 (LOW), while -2 points are given to queens who place in the bottom 2 (BTM2) or are eliminated after lip syncing in the bottom 2 (ELIM). This method can be used to prove that a contestant eliminated earlier in the competition may have actually done better than a contestant who was kept in the competition longer.
No scores are given if the episode did not feature a Bottom 2 Lip sync nor a Maxi Challenge Winner.
Episode Outcome Score Performance "Dusted or Busted" Scoring Methods Maxi Challenge WIN +2 +10 Maxi Challenge TOP 2 +2 +10 HIGH +1 +7.5 SAFE 0 +5 LOW -1 +2.5 BOTTOM 2 -2 0 ELIMINATED -2 0
Finalist Scores
Season Queen Score 1 Bebe Zahara Benet 3 Nina Flowers 5 Rebecca Glasscock -1 2 Tyra Sanchez 9 Raven 3 Jujubee -4 3 Raja 7 Manila Luzon 7 Alexis Mateo 1 4 Sharon Needles 8 Chad Michaels 5 Phi Phi O'Hara 3 AS Chad Michaels 5 Raven -6 Jujubee -6 Shannel 5 5 Jinkx Monsoon 9 Alaska 5 Roxxxy Andrews 5 6 Bianca Del Rio 11 Adore Delano 2 Courtney Act 2 7 Violet Chachki 6 Ginger Minj 6 Pearl 0 8 Bob The Drag Queen 4 Kim Chi 4 Naomi Smalls 3 AS2 Alaska 7 Detox 4 Katya 2 Roxxxy Andrews -8 9 Sasha Velour 8 Peppermint 0 Shea Couleé 9 Trinity Taylor 4 AS3 Trixie Mattel 1 Kennedy Davenport -6 Bebe Zahara Benet 3 Shangela 3 10 Aquaria 5 Eureka 4 Kameron Michaels -2 Asia O'Hara 3 AS4 Trinity The Tuck 6 Monét X Change 2 Monique Heart 3 Naomi Smalls -1 DRT1 Natalia Pliacam 7 Année Maywong 7 Dearis Doll 2 HoD Hugo Grrrl 5 Lola Blades 3 Leidy Lei -5
Best Records
Worst Records
Season 1 Scores
See: RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 1)
Season 2 Scores
See: RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 2)
Season 3 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 3)
Season 4 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 4)
All Stars 1 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars (Season 1)
Season 5 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 5)
Season 6 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 6)
Season 7 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 7)
Season 8 Scores
See: RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 8)
All Stars 2 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars (Season 2)
Season 9 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 9)
All Stars 3 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars (Season 3)
Season 10 Scores
See:RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 10)
All Stars 4 Scores
See: RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars (Season 4)
Season 11 Scores
See: RuPaul's Drag Race (Season 11)
International Spin-Offs
Drag Race Thailand Season 1 Scores
See Drag Race Thailand (Season 1)
House of Drag Season 1 Scores
See: House of Drag
Drag Race Thailand Season 2 Scores
See Drag Race Thailand (Season 2)
Boulet Brothers' DRAGULA Season 1 Scores
See The Boulet Brothers' DRAGULA/Season 1
Original Placing Photo Contestant Ep.
1 Ep.
2 Ep.
3 Ep.
4 Ep.
5 Total Score Overall Performance 1st
(Winner) Vander Von Odd WIN
+2 HIGH
+1 WIN
+2 BTM4
-2 HIGH
+1 4 7.000 2nd/3rd
(Runner-Up) Melissa Befierce SAFE
0 EXT WIN
-1 WIN
+2 HIGH
+1 HIGH
+1 3 6.500 7th Foxie Adjuia HIGH
+1 HIGH
+1 ELIM
-2 0 5.000 2nd/3rd
(Runner-Up) Frankie Doom HIGH
+1 BTM4
-2 HIGH
+1 BTM4
-2 HIGH
+1 -1 4.500 4th Meatball BTM3
-2 HIGH
+1 SAFE
0 WIN
+2 ELIM
-2 -1 4.500 5th/6th
(Dual Elimination) Xochi Mochi HIGH
+1 BTM4
-2 HIGH
+1 ELIM
-2 -2 3.750 9th
(Last Place) Pinche ELIM
-2 -2 0.000 8th Ursula Major LOW
-1 ELIM
-2 -3 1.250 5th/6th
(Dual Elimination) Loris BTM3
-2 WIN
+2 BTM3
-2 ELIM
-2 -4 2.500Fishing Home Contact Us News DNR Home
LIFETIME LICENSES Resident lifetime hunting, trapping, and fishing licenses serve in lieu of the equivalent annual license. Combination Hunting, Trapping & Fishing. (Class AB-L)* $805 Combination Hunting, Trapping & Fishing-Infant(Class AB-L-I)* $402.50 Fishing (Class B-L)* $552 Fishing-Infant (Class B-L-I)* $276 Trout Fishing (Class O-L)** $230 Trout Fishing-Infant (Class O-L-I)** $115 Senior Lifetime hunting & Fishing (Class XS)*** $25
*Class BG (Big Game) and CS
(Conservation Stamp) not required.
** Valid only when accompanied by a
Class B, AB-L, AB-L-I, B-L, B-L-I, X, or XJ license. ***Class DS (Bear Damage), BG (Big Game),
CS (Conservation Stamp), and O (Trout Stamp) not required.
RESIDENT LICENSES AND STAMPS Fishing License (Class B) $19 Sportsman Hunting/Fishing/Trapping (Class X) for ages 18 through 64 $35 Junior Sportsman Hunting/Fishing/Trapping (Class XJ) for ages 15 through 17 $16 Trout Fishing Stamp (Class O) Required of holders of Class B, AB-L, AB-L-I, B-L, B-L-I, F, LL, Q, X, or XJ $10 Conservation Stamp- Required for all licensed anglers except holders of Class X, XJ, B-L, B-L-I, AB-L, and AB-L-I, licenses $5
NONRESIDENT LICENSES AND STAMPS Trout Fishing Stamp (Class OO) Required of holders of Class AB-L, AB-L-I, B-L, B-L-I, F, XXJ or LL $16 Conservation/Law Enforcement Stamp (Class CS/LE) - Required for all licensed anglers $13 Annual Fishing License (Class F) $37 One-Day Fishing License (Class LL) $3 National Forest Hunting/Trapping/Fishing (Class I) Required on National Forests in addition to Class F, QQ or LL $2 Junior Sportsman Hunting/Fishing/Trapping (Class XXJ) for ages 15 through 17 $16 Note: any full-time student of state colleges and universities shall be considered as a resident and is entitled to state resident license privileges.
Purchasing A License
Licenses may be obtained as follows:
At approximately 180 retail license agents around the state. $3 issuing fee for 1st purchase and $1 for subsequent purchases.
Over the Internet at www.wvfish.com. (Official DNR website $2 issuing fee )
Directly from the Hunting and Fishing License Unit by phoning (304) 558-2758. ( $2 issuing fee )
wvdnrcustomerservice@wv.gov
Potomac River - West Virginia residents who possess valid West Virginia fishing licenses may fish by angling in the waters of the Potomac River including the North Branch and Jennings Randolph Lake which are opposite both the West Virginia and the Maryland shores, and they may fish from the Maryland shore, without obtaining a Maryland fishing license, subject, however, to all other Maryland laws, rules and regulations applicable to fishing.
Maryland residents who possess valid Maryland fishing licenses may fish by angling in the waters of Jennings Randolph Lake which are opposite both the Maryland and West Virginia shores, and they may fish from the West Virginia shore of the Potomac River, including the North Branch and Jennings Randolph Lake without obtaining a West Virginia fishing license, subject, however, to all other West Virginia fishing laws, rules and regulations applicable to fishing. This agreement is limited to the Potomac River including the North Branch and Jennings Randolph Lake and does not extend to any of their tributaries. The State of Maryland has joint law enforcement jurisdiction on Jennings Randolph Lake.
(b) Residents who turned 65 years of age before January 1, 2012. Such persons shall carry a WV driver's license or photo ID card issued by the DMV while fishing.
(c) Nonresidents or residents under 15 years of age.
(d) Residents on active duty in the U.S. armed forces while on military leave. Leave papers shall be carried while fishing.
(e) Resident landowners or their resident children, resident parents, or bona fide resident tenants of such land may fish on their own land during open seasons in accordance with the laws and regulations applying to such fishing.
(f) Residents honorably discharged from the U.S. armed forces receiving total permanent service-connected disability benefits or former prisoners of war as determined by the Veterans Administration or resident disabled veterans who qualify under West Virginia Code §17A-10-8 and are exempted from payment of any motor vehicle registration fee by the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles.
Residents or in-patients of any state mental hospital, health or benevolent institution.Such persons must be under proper supervision and carry a written statement or certificate signed by the superintendent of the institution or facility.
(h) Developmentally disabled residents. A DDFL card issued by the DNR must be carried while fishing.
Points are assigned to individuals for other hunting and fishing violations:
10 points for use of explosives or poison material in taking fish.
6 points for illegal possession or sale of wildlife.
4 points for all other violations.
When a violator accumulates 10 or more fishing or hunting points combined, his/her license(s) will be revoked for period of 2 years. Points will be removed on their second anniversary or upon restoration of the license(s).In 1997 the first social network was created called sixdegrees.com and was the forerunner of the modern social networks that started to gain traction in 2002.
The first of the modern next generation social media networks that followed in 2002, had the the funky name of Friendster, which to my ear sort of sounds like a hybrid cross between a “Friend” and a “Hamster”.
As with any good idea it was quickly copied (“ripped off” is another phrase that comes to mind) and MySpace was created and launched in 2003.
This social media network dominated for the next 5 years as teenagers became addicted to the interactive and multimedia rich, self publishing web platform that allowed them to share music, content and information with their friends.
The addictive power of the social network was on display to many parents as dinner tables around the world were deserted by teens after gulping down their meat and potatoes, as they rushed off to their computers to continue their “MySpacing”
In 2008 Facebook surpassed MySpace and became the dominant social network.
Since then we have seen the rise of the “smart phone” connecting people to the web without wires or a desk bound computer.
This mobile social web has allowed everyone to become a publisher no matter where they are.
The Information Tsunami
At a conference in 2010 Eric Schmidt the then CEO of Google stated
“Every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003”
This information includes content such as emails, tweets, Facebook updates, Photos, YouTube video uploads and text messages.
Social networks have largely contributed to this tidal wave of information and content
Videos Uploaded to YouTube – 48 hours of Video uploaded every minute and YouTube receives 3 billion views per day
Photos Uploaded to Facebook – 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day
Tweets on Twitter – 200 million tweets per day
Email – Over 100 trillion emails a year or more than 300 billion emails a day
Text Messages in 2011 – more than 7 trillion
Many teens are averaging over 3,000 text messages per month.
Much of this is content is not of great quality in fact it is estimated that 89% of all emails are spam.
So as a Social Media marketer, business owner or CEO, how do you harness, focus and take advantage of this information and content “Tsunami”
Is Traditional Marketing Broken?
If you want to get serious about social media marketing for your business or organisation the foundation of any focused effort is having great content to publish and promote.
Other terms for this marketing approach are
Inbound marketing
Content Marketing
Pull marketing
These all provide a description for an alternative paradigm to traditional marketing that is all about interruption marketing including telemarketing, cold calling and traditional advertising that pushes messages “at” you.
Technology now allows us to block calls, skip channels on your TV or record and watch later.
The secret behind content marketing that is published and promoted on social networks including blogs, Facebook and Twitter is attracting loyal tribes of readers and viewers.
This allows you to attract and pull customers to you that will engage, read and view and then buy.
The 10 Commandments of Content
Here are 10 building blocks that you need to include in your plans for marketing your business on an increasingly social and mobile web.
1. Get Focused
Who are you speaking to? Provide content that communicates with your customers and prospects in a language they understand.
2. Create Goals for your Content
What are you trying to achieve– capture emails, provide leads, nuture prospects or improve your visibility to search engines.
Do you want to make the content so entertaining that it makes your brand memorable and remarkable and do you want the message to become viral. A funny video may achieve this.
When designing your content make sure it is not content for contents sake, but is assisting you in growing your business
3. Become a Publisher
The democratisation of publishing and marketing means that you now don’t have to wait for your local printer to print off 10,000 marketing brochures and then organise them to be letter boxed.
Now you can write a blog article, email it to your “opt in” subscribers, tweet the link to your Twitter followers and promote it on Facebook.
4. Solve Problems
Everyone has problems and helping your customers and prospects solve them will take them from interested readers to raving fans. Write content that shows people how to fix their problems that are relevant to your industry and market.
5. Include Calls to Action
Don’t forget to include calls to action with your content. It could be to subscribe, share or register for an eBook or whitepaper.
Creating small calls to action will lead prospects towards the ultimate goal for any business and that is to put some money down or place an order.
6. Talk like a Human
Corporate speak was invented by copy writers but a while back people started switching off.
Being “Authentic” is the new black and being real is the “new marketing” that is a message that cuts through
7. Show What Works
Case studies that “show” how your product is used are much more effective than “telling“. Create content that showcases how other customers are using your product and services to achieve success.
Nothing like a bit of “social proof” to create credibility, trust and action.
8. Have some Fun
|
. Subscribers of MyDTN.com should check out the US Ag Policy, US Farm Bill and DTN Ag News sections on their News Homepage.
If you have questions for DTN Washington Insider, please email edit@dtn.com
(CC)
© Copyright 2017 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.If they did a deal what might it look like: an end to austerity?
Five weeks to go to polling day and it’s clear that the media, and perhaps the public, aren’t getting the answers they’d like to some of the fiscal questions the next government will have to address. What we’ve termed the candour deficit is yet to be closed.
And with every projection for 7 May anticipating a hung parliament it looks likely that, as things stand, any future party of government is going to have to strike deals – whether formally or informally – in order to govern. What might be the nature of any such a deal on fiscal policy? Clearly neither of the parties will talk about this pre-election, so we thought we would engage in a bit of open speculation about how different combinations of parties might possibly work together. Here we look at Labour and the Liberal Democrats (we’ll look at the Conservatives and Lib Dems next).
Given that both Labour and the Lib Dems voted for the Charter for Budget Responsibility, that seems like a reasonable place to start, even if many commentators didn’t take the vote all that seriously. To fulfil the charter the government needs to set out a plan to reach current balance three years down the road. That is, tax revenues must cover day to day expenditure (i.e. excluding investment). So in any emergency budget in June, and again in Autumn Statement 2015, the government would have to set out a plan for achieving current balance in 2018-19 (a point also made by the FT’s Chris Giles).
Because it’s a rolling target, the date at which it applies moves forward as we enter the new financial year: anyone claiming the commitment is to get rid of the deficit by 2017-18 is wrong. Equally, if anyone claims (say in the ‘leader’s debate’ tonight) that those parties who voted for the charter have committed to ‘£30bn of cuts’ then they are making a (big) mistake. They haven’t. As the chart below shows, if restoring current balance in 2018-19 is the key fiscal goal guiding any Labour-Lib Dem deal, the two parties would be signing up to £6bn of consolidation by 2018-19 (the dark red line).
There are, however, some wrinkles. One of these is that the fiscal charter also has a supplementary element: the debt rule. This requires debt as a proportion of GDP to be falling in 2016-17. It’s worth saying that a one year goal for debt is pretty odd and many economists don’t think this is a sensible rule and would be happy for it to be replaced or dropped (unlike reaching current balance). But if Labour and the Lib Dems agreed as part of a deal that they needed to adhere to this bit of the charter too they’d have to have a plan for £10bn of tightening in 2016-17 (the green line) falling to £6bn by 2018-19.
Another caveat is that Labour’s usual formulation on fiscal matters is that they will reach balance ‘as soon as possible’ in the next Parliament which, at its loosest, means this might occur as late as 2019-20 (the red dotted line in the chart above) – that is, slower than the charter requires. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems have recently indicated (in Danny Alexander’s ‘yellow box’ statement) that they want to run a significant current surplus in 2017-18 (the yellow line in the chart) – that is, go faster and further than the fiscal charter requires them to. Given the gap between these party positions – one tighter and one looser than the fiscal charter – it seems sensible to assume that any deal is likely to stick to the position that both parties voted for: hitting current balance in 2018-19 and (perhaps) complying with the debt rule.
The path of fiscal consolidation this would require can, of course, be achieved in different ways. Many people will be as interested in the blend of spending cuts – and tax rises – as they are in the overall amount of tightening.
In order to try and put flesh on this tax/spend aspect of a potential Labour-Lib Dem agreement, let’s recall that the Lib Dems have already proposed raising £6bn via anti-avoidance measures, and another £6bn of extra taxes through a range of taxes which broadly fall on the affluent. Labour has said a bit less on tax rises: its mansion tax is earmarked for NHS spending so doesn’t help with consolidation; but its 50p top rate would help close the gap. And it’s pretty safe to assume it won’t want to be outbid by the Lib Dems and Conservatives on tax avoidance.
Given that none of the Lib Dems’ other tax proposals breach Labour’s new commitment not to raise VAT, the rate of income tax or NICs, let’s make the assumption that Chancellor Balls concedes to a number of these Lib Dem revenue raisers. Indeed, let’s assume that between the Lib Dem and Labour measures, the parties find agreement on £4bn of deficit-reducing revenue (i.e. £10bn including tax avoidance). Adding all this together, the following chart shows a highly indicative and simplified tax/spending profile for our (made-up) deal.
What would this deal achieve? Above all it means that the fiscal charter (that all three main parties voted for) would be met in full at the same time as there would be no further net spending cuts after the current year.
Spending would remain flat in real terms in 2016-17 and then grow very slightly in the following two years, before rising roughly in line with the economy in 2019-20. Clearly, taxes could go up further to enable a gentle upward spending path before 2019-20. But even with the approach we’ve indicated spending would rise by around £15bn over four years (and this will be an understatement as we don’t count some increases in expenditure that Labour have already said will be funded by specific tax rises).
To put this in political context, that’s about £7bn or so more than that implied by the SNP’s recent proposal to increase departmental spending by 0.5% a year. The higher spending under our hypothetical Labour-Lib Dem arrangement results from the tax rises we’ve assumed, the shift to reaching balance in 2018-19 (rather than 2017-18) and the small improvement in the underlying fiscal numbers at the Budget. (Prior to these changes we’d have expected the SNP stance to result in slightly higher spending than Labour as set out here.)
We don’t here look at what this package might mean for different departments but there would be scope to increase NHS spending to meeting Simon Stevens’ proposal (though this would gobble up much of the uplift that would occur at the end of the Parliament). And we’ve also factored in around £4bn to pay for the bulk of the Lib Dem’s flagship policy of raising the tax allowance to £12,500. Obviously, without that tax cut spending could be further boosted.
Finally some key caveats. Most obviously this is all complete speculation: the parties could come to an entirely different fiscal package. Second, the OBR’s fiscal projections which underpin all these figures could all be wrong: remember productivity is king. If it doesn’t start to rise (as the OBR assume) the true numbers will be dramatically bleaker. Lastly, even if the figures are right (unlikely), and the revenue increases achievable, no one should think that the ‘end of austerity’, as this would doubtless be billed, would be easy to live with. Sure, the parties would highlight that it’s far less scary than going down the cuts ‘rollercoaster’. But it still implies living with another three years of spending remaining (roughly) flat in real terms. And even that would be a very formidable task.BAR: Reds could be looking at first overall pick
Florida left-hander A.J. Puk is among the players who could go No. 1 overall in the 2016 MLB Draft. (Photo: USA Today Sports/Steven Branscombe)
The Blog Above Replacement is Reds beat writer C. Trent Rosecrans' daily look at the Reds, their minor leagues and whatever else is on his mind.
As the Reds' season continues its downward spiral, it's time to start look at the standings from the bottom, because the only tangible result of the results of the remaining games is the draft order.
Right now, the Reds' 51-71 record is worse than any team in the American League and fourth-worst overall. Only the Marlins (50-74), Phillies (50-74) and Rockies (49-73) stand in the way of the Reds picking first overall for the first time in team history.
The Reds also have the added benefit (if that's what you want to call it at this point) of a killer schedule the rest of the way. After tonight's game against the Tigers, the Reds will only have nine games left against teams that currently have losing records — and all of those are against the Brewers. The other 30 games are against teams in the playoff hunt — and of those 30 games, 26 are against teams that would be in the playoffs if the season ended today.
The Reds' highest draft pick ever was second in 1983, when they took shortstop Kurt Stillwell with the second overall pick out of Thousand Oaks High School in California. Stillwell was joined in the Reds' shortstop pipeline two years later by Barry Larkin, the fourth overall pick in the 1985 draft.
The Reds picked their shortstop of the future — and history shows picking Larkin was the right pick — and traded Stillwell and Ted Power after the 1987 season to the Royals for Danny Jackson and Angel Salazar. That also turned out to be a good move by the Reds.
The Reds' latest top-10 pick was Mike Leake (8) in 2008. The team's last top-five pick was Chris Gruler, third overall in 2002. Other top 5 picks were Chad Mottola (5th in 1992), Larkin in 1985, Pat Pacillo (5th in 1984) and Stillwell.
It's still way too early to be looking at top 5 picks, but here are some names you may start hearing — University of Florida lefty A.J. Puk, Oklahoma University right-hander Alec Hansen, Texas A&M outfielder Nick Banks, Clemson catcher Chris Okey, University of Georgia right-hander Robert Tyler, California high school outfielder Blake Rutherford and Kansas high school right-hander Riley Pint.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Bengals Beat newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-876-4500. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Bengals Beat Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
Yes, it's probably too early.
MINOR-LEAGUE ROUNDUP
• Triple-A: Gwinnett 5, Louisville 4: Tony Cingrani gave up two runs on four hits in just three innings, throwing 42 pitches. He allowed a homer, walked a batter and struck out one. [Box]
• Double-A: Mississippi 3, Pensacola 1: The Blue Wahoos managed just three hits — two of them, a double and homer, were from Phillip Ervin, in just his fourth Double-A game. He also homered on Saturday. [Box]
• High-A: Clearwater 10, Daytona 6: RF Sebastian Elizalde was 2-for-4 with his 10th homer of the season and drove in three. 3B Ronald Bueno and 1B Brian O'Grady also went 2-for-4, with O'Grady adding a double and a home run, also good for three RBI. O'Grady now has four homers for the Tortugas. [Box]
• Rookie: Missoula 13, Billings 2: Reds first-round pick Tyler Stephenson hit his first pro homer. He's hitting.276/.362/.378 for Billings this season. [Box]
THE ROTATION
1. The Reds' Brayan Pena writes about the struggles of Cuban players in the United States and what teams and the MLB Players Association needs to do to help Cuban players. [ESPN.com]
2. Hall of Fame advice for NFL players: Have a fall guy. Cris Carter told rookies, "If you're going to have a crew, one of those fools got to know he's going to jail. We'll get him out." [SI.com]
3. That was from a video that had been up for more than a year on NFL.com and nobody thought twice about it — or at least nobody who watched it. It only came to light after Chris Borland mentioned it in this ESPN The Magazine story about his early retirement from the NFL.
And Borland is the guy the NFL has targeted.
The Borland story, by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada is worth reading.
4. The week he announced he had cancer, Jimmy Carter was the same place he always is on Sunday — in Plains, Ga., teaching Sunday School. [AP.org]
5. Jason Isbell on CBS This Morning:
Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/1Jg7hlrIf you want impressive results with minimum time spent in the kitchen, this is the dessert to serve! The only catch is, you need to plan ahead as the raw cashews this recipe calls for needs to be soaked in water for at least 4 hours. The rest is extremely quick and easy.
Hazelnut chocolate is not something that you find easily in US. While peanuts have the throne here, Europeans have long discovered how wonderful a combination hazelnuts and chocolate is (Nutella anyone?). Marzipan is also not very common but I love it. It gives this slightly bitter strong almond taste to balance out the sweet. If you have trouble finding cooking marzipan, I got mine from the World Market. You can also find them online.
The cake is covered with cashew cream frosting which is amazingly light and tasty. Those who hate the heaviness of regular frosting will be very happy with cashew creme. The last touch of pomegranates, I believe, require no description. Here is the recipe:
Print Hazelnut Chocolate Pomegranate Cake Prep Time 25 mins Total Time 25 mins A vegan, gluten-free cake with a marzipan base, hazelnut chocolate filling and cashew cream frosting. Beautiful, delicious and healthy Course: Cake Cuisine: Vegan Servings : 4 -6 people Author : Dreamy Leaf Ingredients Crust 10.5 oz 300 gr cooking marzipan Filling 1 cup coarsely chopped roasted hazelnuts unsalted
5.2 oz dark chocolate >70%
2 tbsp coconut oil
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract Frosting 1 cup raw cashews soaked in water for at least 4 hours
1/4 cup coconut water or just water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp coconut oil
2 tbsp maple syrup
a little pinch of salt Topping Seeds of 1 pomegranate Instructions Roll the marzipan flat in between two layers of parchment paper to approximately an 8 in diameter circle. Place the marzipan in an 8 in springform cake pan For the filling, melt the dark chocolate in a bein-marie While the chocolate melts, roughly chop the roasted hazelnuts Add the hazelnuts, along with the rest of the filling ingredients in the melted chocolate and stir Pour and spread the filling in the cake pan over the marzipan. Put them in the fridge While they chill, blend all of the frosting ingredients in a blender. Add and spread the frosting over the cake in the cake pan. Cover and let sit in the fridge, ideally overnight if you have the patience Sprinkle pomegranate seeds over the cake before serving
Did you like this post?
Like our facebook page
Receive future posts by emailBureau Home > Australia > Victoria > Forecasts > Warrnambool Forecast
View the current warnings for Victoria
Forecast for the rest of Wednesday Summary Clear. Chance of any rain: 0% Clear. Winds southerly 20 to 25 km/h becoming light in the evening. Sun protection recommended from 10:00 am to 5:20 pm, UV Index predicted to reach 10 [Very High]
Thursday 28 February Summary Min 18 Max 35 Partly cloudy. Chance of any rain: 0% Partly cloudy. Light winds becoming northwesterly 15 to 20 km/h in the early afternoon then shifting south to southwesterly in the late afternoon. Fire Danger - Very High Sun protection recommended from 10:10 am to 5:20 pm, UV Index predicted to reach 9 [Very High]
Marketing
Friday 1 March Summary Min 16 Max 37 Sunny. Chance of any rain: 0% Sunny. Light winds becoming northerly 15 to 20 km/h in the morning then becoming light in the early afternoon. Sun protection recommended from 10:10 am to 5:20 pm, UV Index predicted to reach 9 [Very High]
Saturday 2 March Summary Min 22 Max 37 Sunny. Late cool change. Chance of any rain: 5% Sunny. Winds northerly 20 to 25 km/h becoming light during the afternoon. Sun protection recommended from 10:00 am to 5:20 pm, UV Index predicted to reach 10 [Very High]
Sunday 3 March Summary Min 17 Max 25 Possible morning storm. Chance of any rain: 10% Cloudy. The risk of thunderstorms in the morning. Light winds becoming southerly 20 to 25 km/h during the morning.
Monday 4 March Summary Min 13 Max 23 Partly cloudy. Chance of any rain: 5% Partly cloudy. Light winds.
Tuesday 5 March Summary Min 12 Max 24 Possible showers. Possible rainfall: 0 to 0.4 mm Chance of any rain: 30% Partly cloudy. Slight (30%) chance of showers. Light winds becoming southwesterly 15 to 20 km/h during the day.
Wednesday 6 March Summary Min 12 Max 21 Partly cloudy. Chance of any rain: 10% Partly cloudy. Winds southerly 15 to 20 km/h tending southeasterly later.
Product IDV10726In southern China, noodle dishes tend to be light snacks, but northern noodles are thicker and often make up hearty one-dish meals. Both are found in New York City’s various Chinatowns. There are string-thin noodles combined with Hong-Kong-style clear broth and delicate shrimp-watercress dumplings at Sifu Chio in Flushing, Queens; a mile away, a Shanghai-style noodle shop, Da Jiang Nan Bei, serves thick house-made noodles in a sweat-inducing, chili-red soup thick with beef and preserved mustard greens.
The most basic way to divide Chinese noodles is by flour: rice noodles are called fen, while wheat noodles are mian. There are, however, rice noodles that include wheat starch, wheat noodles that include rice, and noodles from other starches like tapioca or cornstarch. In the Chinese culinary canon, each has its own distinct effect of chewiness, crunchiness or springiness.
There are also two basic ways of cooking noodles: stir-fried in a wok, or plunged into soup. Noodle soup is a standard lunch or anytime snack for millions, always customized to taste with the condiments on every noodle shop table: dried-chili oil (the best places make their own); soy sauce; black, white and red rice vinegars; suan cai, pickled greens; and even fried eggs, wontons or dumplings for a more substantial meal.
During the New Year’s period from Feb. 3 through 17, long noodles are eaten in all corners of China. “Longevity noodles,” also presented at birthday celebrations, are never cut or broken by the cook, and if they can be eaten without biting through the strands, it’s considered even more auspicious. Longevity noodles are usually stir fried, presenting challenges to the home cook.
“Noodles should always be stir-fried alone at first,” said Grace Young, the New York author of several books on Chinese cooking, including the new “Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge.” Noodles should be lightly oiled so that they don’t clump together in the wok, she said, and all ingredients must be completely dry so they sear properly. She uses Chinese egg noodles, but when the sidewalks are snowy and Chinatown seems far away, she said, tagliarini from Raffetto’s on Houston Street does very well.
Photo
The main difference between pasta and mian, said Susur Lee, the chef at Shang, on the Lower East Side, is that Italian noodles are never supposed to have chew. (Even pasta cooked al dente should be resistant, not chewy.)
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
“Chinese people like chewiness and crunchiness and density in noodles,” said Mr. Lee, who was raised in Hong Kong. “In China, texture and mouth feel are as important as flavor.”
Of all the noodles in China, Mr. Lee chose plump, bouncy “silver needles” to serve in a homey stir-fry at Shang. He said that silver needles remind him of his childhood in Hong Kong, when vendors would sit by the street and roll the dough to order on their thighs, which produces their distinctive shape: fat, with pointed ends. They are also called pearl noodles or, in Malaysia and Singapore, “rat tails” because of their pointed ends.
At Shang, the noodles are stir-fried in wide, shallow black woks (the northern style, Mr. Lee said, which is easier for Westerners to handle), with searing flames licking up from huge cast-iron wok rings. Like Ms. Young, he adds soy sauce to the wok only at the end of cooking, swirling it around the hot rim of the pan where it evaporates and then gets sucked, smoky flavor and all, into the noodles.
Shang is an elegant, lacquered room in an expensive hotel, but just a few blocks away, squatting under an archway of the Manhattan Bridge, is Xi’an Famous Foods, a tiny storefront where the cooks make noodles that are hand-stretched, rough-edged and deeply filling.
Jason Wang, who helps run the family business (there are four branches in the city), said that the newest house specialty, Mount Qi noodles, is a 1,000-year-old recipe, created by an emperor who decided to share a pig with all of his subjects. With bits of minced pork and a hot-sour-sweet tang — traditionally from red sorghum vinegar — Mount Qi is the Tiger Mother of noodle dishes: challenging, tear-inducing, but strangely compelling..
Photo
In most of the dishes at Xi’an Famous Foods, the wide, ruffled noodles — you po che mian — are seasoned with fresh and dried chilies, cumin and peppercorns (black and Sichuan) that characterize food from China’s western plateau (where Mount Qi is situated). Many of the noodle dishes at Xi’an are described as “spicy and tingly,” Mr. Wang’s translation of “ma la,” a term that embraces the heat of chilies and the numbing quality of Sichuan peppercorns, a combination that New Yorkers are increasingly drawn to. Dan dan noodles, the iconic Sichuan noodle dish, have become so popular that at least one restaurant, Grand Sichuan in Midtown, serves two different recipes: one with more ma la and one with less.
“I need a 12-step program to deal with my ma la addiction,” said Sang Yoon, a chef in Los Angeles who created a deconstructed version of dan dan noodles for his new noodle shop, Lukshon.
The most popular of all the new noodles, however, are the la mian, or hand-pulled noodles, that Mr. Chen of Hung Ry has mastered. La mian are not the same as the “lo mein” already familiar to Americans: “la” means pulled, while “lo” means tossed, as in tossed in a wok in a stir-fry.
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.
Signs for “Lan Zhou pulled noodles” now line some streets of Chinatown, though most of the men who make it are not native to Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu Province. “Lan Zhou noodles,” like “Chicago pizza” or “New York bagels,” has become a catchphrase that signifies deliciousness everywhere.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Noodles from Gansu are famous for their springy texture, according to Florence Lin, the great teacher of Chinese cooking in the United States. Centuries ago, noodle makers in Gansu learned that certain kinds of ash, called peng, had the effect of tenderizing dough. Ash contains potassium carbonate, an alkali (like lye and lime) that makes the noodles soft by inhibiting the development of gluten. (Potassium carbonate is also used around the world to cure foods like olives, lutefisk and corn for hominy.)
Packages of peng imported from China are the key to Mr. Chen’s noodles, every bowl of them made to order with what he considers an ideal level of jiao jing — roughly translatable from Mandarin as “chew power.”
Photo
He works in a kitchen stocked with gadgets, but he begins in the traditional way, with a hill of flour. The flour is organic, shipped from a mill in the Champlain Valley, with extra gluten and protein that lend flavor and resistance. Into the flour, Mr. Chen drizzled a solution of water and peng and began to knead, throwing his entire body weight against the shaggy dough.
“Organic flour is harder than the usual kind,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. Mr. Chen came to the restaurant by way of jobs in Peru and Manhattan’s Chinatown, he said, and learned to make la mian during a two-month apprenticeship in China.
As the dough came together and softened, Mr. Chen divided the lump into baguette-size lengths and twisted each one tight like cheese straw. When the twists were done, he held each weighty length in his hands, letting its belly fall toward the ground, then twirled the ends together as if making a pretzel. After several repetitions, he broke off a handful of dough and began to pull it long, doubling the dough around his left hand and spreading his arms wide apart in a few quick moves that produce a web, like a full-body game of cat’s cradle. A few extra pulls produce noodles that are xi, or thin; thick noodles are called cu.
When the noodles come out, perfectly tender, Mr. Hodgkins — who worked most recently under the chef Shea Gallante — goes to work. (Since Mr. Chen speaks no English and Mr. Hodgkins no Chinese, they communicate — minimally — in basic Spanish and hand signals.) Mr. Hodgkins added the broth and highly untraditional toppings like Romanesco broccoli roasted in mustard oil or turnips braised in daikon broth.
“Some days are more Chinese than others,” he said. Mr. Hodgkins has little knowledge of Chinese tradition — a paradox that is part of what makes Hung Ry such an interesting place at which to eat. He has created a complex version of the traditional soup condiments and is fermenting some cavolo nero cabbage to approximate Chinese suan cai, but making the noodles on his own defeated him.
“His hands just know,” he said of Mr. Chen, who plans to open his own noodle shop soon. “I spent three weeks on a mission to learn it, and at the end I had gotten exactly nowhere.”Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that boosts the immune system and plays vital roles in human metabolism. Did you know that tasty mushrooms are one source for vitamin D, and that you can naturally multiply their levels by exposing them to sunlight?
We evolved living in more sunlight than today. We make our own vitamin D when sunlight hits our skin cells. Many people living in the northern hemisphere, however, suffer from lower levels of vitamin D during the fall, winter and spring. Fortunately, you can make your own supply of vitamin D-enriched mushrooms by simply exposing them to sunlight. You can sun-dry or UV-zap store-bought or homegrown shiitake, maitake, button, and many other mushroom species. My personal preference is home grown organic shiitake. The high vitamin D levels generated will last for more than a year. Surprisingly, even sliced and dried mushrooms -- including wild ones picked the year before -- will soar in vitamin D when placed outdoors under the sun. Now, the summer time, from June until September, is the best seasonal window for people in northern latitudes to make vitamin D-enriched mushrooms!
Many physicians view low levels of vitamin D as a serious medical pre-condition. In extreme cases, vitamin D deficiencies can cause diseases such as rickets. Insidious diseases, such as cancer, are immune-mitigated. Without adequate vitamin D levels, your immune system can get impaired. This is why cancer patients are often prescribed high daily doses of vitamin D, up to 4,000-10,000 International Units (IU), compared to the FDA recommended Daily Value (DV) dose of 400 IU for adults over 50 years in age. Please consult your physician before taking such large doses (1 IU is equal to 40 micrograms).
New recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, increase the dosage to 600 IU per day for people up to age 70, and 800 IU for those over 70. Many naturopaths and physicians suggest ingesting at least 1,000 IU/day. A 2012 report in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism combined the results of eight clinical studies and showed that older people taking 1,000 IU of vitamin D, in combination with 1,000 mg of calcium, for three years had a 7 percent reduced death rate (Rejnmark, 2012). When not ingesting vitamin D mushrooms, and especially when traveling, I take a 1,000 IU wild sockeye salmon vitamin D3/omega-3 product (VitalChoice -- www.vitalchoice.com) several times a week, or daily when I remember.
The commercially-common sources of vitamin D are vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) that comes from sheep's wool (lanolin), pigskins, and some oily fish (mackerel, sardines, anchovies, herring, trout, and salmon). Mushrooms and animal skins create vitamin D when exposed to sunlight. Mushrooms are rich in the vitamin D precursor ergosterol, which ultraviolet B (between wavelengths of 290 nm to 315 nm) converts to ergocalciferols, also called provitamin D2. Mammal epidermis has cholecalciferol, which ultraviolet light converts to D3.
Which is better, vitamin D3 or D2? The New England Journal of Medicine published an exhaustive article comparing the metabolic pathways of vitamin D2 and vitamin D3 (Holick, 2007). Our enzymes convert both D vitamins into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, and then into the active form of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D in our kidneys. This form of vitamin D can bind to receptors in various tissues around the body for use. One advantage of vitamin D3 is its longevity after ingestion -- staying in the bloodstream for weeks compared to days for vitamin D2. However, for people taking vitamin D supplements several times a week, there seems to be no significant advantage in taking one form or the other.
Moreover, eating mushrooms packed with vitamin D2 confers many other health benefits. Mushrooms have many helpful nutrients, including beta glucans for immune enhancement, ergothioneines for antioxidative potentiation, nerve growth stimulators for helping brain function, and antimicrobial compounds for limiting viruses. I will write more about this in the future on The Huffington Post.
While making your own vitamin D3 from sheep or pigskins may be possible, it is rather gruesome and technically difficult. Consuming vitamin D3 from fish is not an option for vegetarians. Vitamin D from mushrooms is not only vegan and vegetarian friendly, but you can prepare your own by exposing mushrooms to the summer sun. Mushrooms grown indoors have very little vitamin D but reserve great potential for hyper-producing it.
Here is a simple experiment we did one summer afternoon in Kamilche Point, Wash. We compared several forms of organically-grown shiitake mushrooms, which had starting levels of 100 IU/100 grams. We compared the vitamin D levels of three sets of mushrooms, all from the same crop. The first was grown and dried indoors. The second set was dried outdoors in the sunlight with their gills facing down. The third set of mushrooms was dried outdoors in the sunlight with their gills facing upward for full sun exposure. The most vitamin D was found in shiitake dried with gills up that were exposed to sunlight for two days, six hours per day. The vitamin D levels in these mushrooms soared from 100 IU/100 grams to nearly 46,000 IU/100 grams (see chart). Their stems, though, produced very little vitamin D, only about 900 IU. Notably, vitamin D levels dropped on the third day, probably due to overexposure to UV.
Most interesting to me is that when we tested our mushrooms nearly a year after exposure, they preserved significant amounts of vitamin D2. I suspect values are much higher initially, gradually falling in time, consistent with reports by other researchers. This means that you can capture vitamin D in mushrooms and have a ready source of this important vitamin -- and delicious mushrooms -- through the fall, winter, and spring.
Part Two coming soon!
For more by Paul Stamets, click here.The American Army Moves on Puerto-Rico
Part 2
by Mark R. Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Archeologist, National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office
The Landing and Skirmish at Guánica and the Battle of Yauco
The Spanish forces on Puerto Rico were approximately 18,000 and about equally divided between local volunteers (10,000) and Spanish regulars (8,000). However, the Spanish forces were spread over the 3,700 square miles of Puerto Rico (Herrmann 1907:14). By the end of the Puerto Rico campaign, the Spanish casualties would number 450 dead, wounded, and captured while the American forces lost 4 dead and 39 wounded (Herrmann 1907:14).
The speed with which American troops were moved once landing on the island was of strategic importance to the success of the American's campaign. In their first land engagement with Spanish forces, the Americans would land, defeat the small Guánica garrison, and occupy the town all within six hours, with no losses.
According to Albert Nofi the Guánica landing met only minor resistance,
The convoy arrived off Guánica at about 0520 hours on 25 July. The invasion began at 0845 hours... Within a short time a detachment of marines and sailors was put ashore, [from the GLOUCESTER] the customs house seized, and the stars and stripes run up the flagpole. A small contingent of Spanish troops -- probably the local militiamen from the 8th Volunteer Battalion -- opened fire [on the Americans from the north shore of the harbor]. The marines set up a Colt machine gun and the bluejackets opened up with rifle fire, while GLOUCESTER contributed a few 6-pounder rounds. The action lasted only a few minutes before the volunteers fled [northward out of the town to Hacienda Santa Rita where they regrouped with other Spanish forces for an attack on the Americans on the next day], leaving four of their number behind dead. There were no American causalities. Additional marines and sailors soon landed, and by 1000 hours the port area [of Guánica] was secured [Nofi 1996:238].
Cronica de la Guerra Hispanoamericana en Puerto Rico
Landing forces from the USS GLOUCESTER who served at Guanica
This activity finally alerted a small contingent of about eleven local militia soldiers, under the command of Lt. Enrique Méndez López, in the town of Guánica, on the north side of the bay, that they were under attack. A fire fight between the two groups, separated by some 300 yards broke out, with the GLOUCESTER opening fire with its three and six pounders against the militiamen, as additional American forces of combat engineers were landed. Lt. Lopez and two of his men were wounded, and the remainder retreated through the town (1972:181-223). The crewmen of the GLOUCESTER established a defensive position just north of their landing site, calling it Camp Wainwright, after the commander of the GLOUCESTER (Pabon & Regis 1996:MS).
Naval personnel were able to seize a number of wooden lighters, which General Miles used to land his troops at Guánica. Combat engineers soon constructed a pontoon pier to facilitate the unloading of troops. The first troops ashore were the volunteers from 6th Massachusetts and 6th Illinois Regiments, who had now spent seventeen days on board their transports (Bunzey 1901:241; Herrmann 1907:13). Two camp sites were set up on July 25th, one on the eastern end of the bay and another between the port area and the main town of Guánica.
The landing at Guánica was also described by the American writer and poet Carl Sandburg as a volunteer with Company C, of the 6th Illinois Volunteer Regiment. His diary entries reflect the experiences of the non-military volunteers of the Spanish-American War.
July 25 - Sighted Porto Rico early in morning (Exciting stuff) while GLOUCESTER entered harbor at Gu |
. I nudged it once to see if it were alive...it was. At 8:40am on August 9th my friend Richard called from Indiana and told me to sit down. I knew what he was going to say. After the initial shock and series of emotional wailing episodes that went on for awhile, I stepped outside into the sunlight to see what the world looked like without Jerry in it. I felt the void. Emptiness. Sadly, I returned to my house and noticed immediately the moth was gone. I searched everywhere, but, there was no sign of it. Later, I told my friend Sunny about it and she said the description of the moth sounded like a Death's Head Moth...a particular type of moth that has skull like markings on its head. I'm not sure if that's what it was, but, I know I will never see that particular moth again. I'm glad it showed itself to me.
"The roses, or the ribbons, in her long, brown hair..."The frog of American democracy is no longer boiling, it’s dead. How do I know? By observing the public response to the actions undertaken during the last week by San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick.
That a certain sector of our country gets upset at the slightest criticism of policemen and/or the military is nothing new. Uniform worship has a long history in this country, especially in the years since World War II when our government decided to dispense with any pretense of preferring democratic republicanism to empire, and as an integral part of that transformation, launched a consensus-management program designed to normalize and exalt the virtues of ceding individual prerogative to the always “responsible” and “benevolent” men in blue and green.
But even during the darkest moments of this post-war period, there was almost always been a sizable group of people, on both the left and the right, who resisted the hierarchical logic of this uniform-worship because they understood that it is, and always will be, absolutely incompatible with both the day-to- day dignity of the citizenry and that same citizenry’s pursuit of real democracy.
But this no longer seems to be the case. Sure, there have been numerous people who have voiced support for Kaepernick’s right to do what he has done and right to say what he has said.
But almost every one the defenses I have heard or read in the mainstream media has been accompanied by long qualifications designed to insure that no one ever be able to question the Kaepernick defender’s deep and abiding respect and veneration for all that our “heroes in uniform” do on our behalf.
It is, like so many—sadly, mostly liberal—position-takings in our time, a weaselly pose. It is designed to let the would-be defender of the athlete appear principled without having to confront the structural issues posed to our civic culture by the presence of a heavily-armed caste of uniformed people who, if we are to judge by the statement’s made by their official spokespeople, clearly believe that they live in a very separate ethical and moral space than the rest of us.
Take, for example, the recent letter from San Francisco Police Officers Association leader, Martin Halloran to San Francisco 49ers President, Jed York, and NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, demanding that they apologize to the many police officers Kaepernick has “disrespected”.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts
Mr. Halloran and the people and the people he represents are, as they have ceaselessly reminded us over the last 15 years, public servants. This means that they work for us, and are, in the final analysis, subject to our discipline, and if we view it as warranted, our censure, as often as we care to dish it out.
Mr. Halloran, no doubt emboldened by the concerted post 9-11 proapaganda effort to glorify all thing having to do with the military and the police, has turned this core democratic logic on its head. Like a medieval lord, convinced of his superior status before God, he demands that the non-gun- toting subjects of his realm kneel before him in praise, and should one of these minions ever slip up and voice criticism of the always impollute actions of the lord and his chosen vassals, that this reprobate rapidly demand forgiveness from the masters.
This is bullying, pure and simple.
The big problem is not that it exists. To paraphrase the great teacher from Galilee, “the bullies, you will always have with you”. What ultimately matters is how the great mass of the population, especially its more secure and comfortable sectors, chooses to respond to the outrageous antics of such people.
The results so far are not encouraging. We have a probable majority of the country in favor of punishing and/or silencing Kaepernick. Beside them, is a smaller but sill sizable group that supports his technical right to speak out, but either feel he probably should not have criticized the blue lords so directly, or, worse yet, support his criticism, but are afraid to say this in a forthright and unambiguous manner.
The great Italian essayist Indro Montanelli once said, in so many words, that to have a functioning democracy, you must first have democrats. Being a small-d democrat implies many things. Perhaps the most basic of these is to understand, and to firmly believe, that no person or group of persons, especially those working explicitly in the public trust, are fundamentally more worthy than others.
Be it as a result of fear, or our government-media complex’s long campaign of pro-authoritarian propaganda, it seems, sadly, that only a small minority of Americans still understand this fundamental trait of the democratic mind.Interstate 95 and other major arteries around the Baltimore region could become a testing ground for driverless cars starting in 2018 under a proposal Gov. Larry Hogan's administration announced Wednesday.
The state has applied for a U.S. Department of Transportation program that aims to work out the kinks in "autonomous vehicle" technology, speed its arrival on roadways across the country and help grow companies that are developing it.
In addition to I-95, the state proposal would allow testing on U.S. 1, U.S. 40 and the Intercounty Connector, and at facilities such as the port of Baltimore and Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
The state chose the busy I-95 corridor from College Park to Aberdeen because it is well-suited for "real-world testing," Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn said.
Federal transportation officials are expected to announce their chosen test areas early next year.
Maryland officials said they want to accommodate and adapt to a range of new vehicle technologies — from assistive autopilot features to driverless cars without steering wheels — and make sure it's safe for human drivers to share the road with them.
"Self-driving vehicles have the potential to transform how we live and work, and while we are open for business and eager to realize the life-saving and economic benefits of this innovative technology, we will always ensure safety comes first," said Christine E. Nizer, the state's motor vehicle administrator and chairwoman of a state work group focused on the issue.
The state's application suggested that driverless technology could be used to move freight to and from the port and to shuttle passengers to and from BWI. It also promoted opportunities to explore how tolling systems like those used on I-95 and the ICC can adapt to autonomous vehicles and how the vehicles can communicate with traffic signal systems on roads like U.S. 1 and U.S. 40.
Maryland has not passed any law legalizing or banning autonomous vehicles on its roadways, but cars are still expected to meet certain standards. While vehicles such as Tesla's Model S — which have an autopilot feature — pass muster under state regulations, others like Google's self-driving cars, which don't have steering wheels, do not, Nizer said.
Policy issues are increasingly cropping up as self-driving cars hit roads around the country.
Ride-sharing company Uber has been testing the technology in San Francisco and Pittsburgh for weeks, though Uber pulled its self-driving cars from California roads Wednesday after state regulators moved to revoke their registrations. Uber vehicles have been spotted in San Francisco running red lights and crossing into bike lanes, according to news reports.
Tesla's Model S has been involved in at least two fatal crashes, one that occurred in May when a Tesla using its autopilot was speeding and struck a tractor-trailer. Google vehicles have also been involved in some crashes, including one in September that involved a driver in another vehicle running a red light and striking a driverless Google SUV.
As more technology companies and automakers explore the technology, state and federal regulators are trying to react, said Tom Jacobs, director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
"A lot of states are trying to get out in front with legislation," he said. "Some are still trying to catch up."
Nine states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation related to autonomous vehicles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Governors in two states have taken executive action on the issue.
Nizer declined to say whether any legislative proposals are in the works in Maryland.
If the state's proposal is chosen by federal officials, state officials said, it "could lead to future federal funding and economic development opportunities for Maryland."
State officials have been talking with a broad group of institutions, public agencies and private organizations through the work group Rahn assembled last year, and hope that coordination encourages federal officials to approve their application, Nizer said.
They plan to involve institutions such as Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Meade, where research on autonomous vehicles and related cybersecurity demands is already underway, as well as any private companies exploring the technology.
David Woessner, general manager of the Washington, D.C., region for the Arizona-based company Local Motors, said if Maryland's proposal is chosen, it could highlight the region as a place for entrepreneurs interested in autonomous vehicle technology.
"People will want to tap into that if they know there's a network focused on the development and deployment of this technology," he said.
The company has a sales and demonstration facility at National Harbor, where it shows off plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service, and hopes to open a manufacturing facility in the region, Woessner said.
AAA Mid-Atlantic supports Maryland's bid to become a test site because it could make driverless vehicles safer, spokeswoman Ragina Averella said.
"As research moves forward on driverless vehicles, AAA wants to ensure the safety of motorists receives the greatest priority consideration," she said. "In any research undertaken on real roads, precautions must be taken to ensure the safety of the traveling public as well as those involved in any experimentation."
Federal transportation officials said the test areas it selects should be ready for autonomous vehicles by Jan. 1, 2018.
Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration officials said any such vehicles would be required to undergo testing on private tracks before hitting public roads.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
sdance@baltsun.com
twitter.com/ssdanceThe fields are set in special elections to fill two vacant seats in the Alabama Legislature.
Five Democrats qualified for Senate District 26, a Montgomery district. Quinton Ross, a Democrat, resigned from the seat to become president of Alabama State University. Ross had represented the district since 2002.
Deborah Anthony, Fred F. Bell, David Burkette, Tony Q. Cobb Jr., and Rep. John Knight qualified. All are from Montgomery.
D.J. Johnson was the lone Republican to qualify for the race.
Three Republicans qualified to run in House District 4, a Limestone and Morgan County seat.
They are Tom Fredricks, Parker Duncan Moore and Tom Willis.
Juanita Allen Healey was the lone Democratic qualifier.
House District 4 became vacant with the felony conviction of Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, the former House majority leader.
The primary for both races is Dec. 12, same day as the special election for the U.S. Senate between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore.
If primary runoffs are needed, they will be on Feb. 27, with the general election on May 15. If runoffs are not needed, the general election will be Feb. 27.The GeoServer team is happy to announce the release of GeoServer 2.1.4, now available for download.
For the most part this is a maintainance release consisting of bug fixes, but as usual a few new features and improvements have managed to creep in. The release contains a total of 46 between bug fixes and improvements. Some of the new and noteworthy include:
various improvements to the SQL server data store extension
snappier GUI when working with data whose coordinate system cannot be direclty matched to a native EPSG code
more accurate GetFeatureInfo
support for geography columns in SQL views against PostGIS
GetLegendGraphics now takes into account UOM and DPI parameters
ip based control and blacklisting in the control-flow extension
before/after custom sql statements when hitting DBSMs (session oriented sql, can be used to switch authentication in the database
And more. Check out the change log for the entire list. A big thank you to all core developers, and a particular mention to users that contributed patches for this release. This includes:
Lars Lingner for addding the “forceLabel” parameter to GetLegendGraphic
Rudi Hochmeister for speeding up the JSON output format on large layers
Robert Coup for making SQL views parameters easier to pass in
Tony Young for making WCS 1.0 DescribeCoverage support the “all coverages” description mode
Hajo Kliemeck for making GetFeatureInfo work properly with user defined SLDs, and for improving legend decoration code
Tim Shaub for making the OpenLayers preview work with Firefox 10+
And of course, thanks to all those who helped out by filing bug reports.
Download 2.1.4, try it out and help us to continue to improve GeoServer by providing feedback on the mailing list and reporting bugs in the issue tracker.Anny
We all are familiar with the standard lithium ion batteries which are used in a variety of appliances in our daily life. The involve use of lithium compounds an as electrode. Lithium and similar elements used in such applications are not easily available and mining and extraction of lithium consumes a lot of energy which in turn adds to the carbon footprint of the battery manufacturing cycle. Also recycling lithium releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the air which in turn causes a lot of pollution.
Scientists at Rice University of New York and US Army Research Laboratory have designed a battery which uses Purpurin-a derivative of the madder root which is used in fabric dyeing. Madder roots have been used as a coloring agents since 3000 years and can provide orange, red and pink hues when used in different proportions
An extract of the dye-Purpurin is said to have properties similar to lithium electrodes such as carrying carbonyl and hydroxyl groups in the process of electrolysis. In standard batteries the electrodes are immersed in electrolytic solution and ions move from one electrode to the other creating a current. This current comes out of the electrode panels of the battery to run our appliances.
The core compound used here is chemically lithiatedPurpurin (CLP-where Purpurin is treated with lithium salts to create a material for the electrode) which is derived from the madder root. The project is being worked upon and it would take some more years for it to be made for commercial uses. However, it can for sure reduce our dependence on Lithium and cobalt metals for batteries and would also reduce the carbon footprint of the battery manufacturing cycle. Do watch out this space for more news on the Green Battery.Whipped up by London-based firm Carl Turner Architects, this half-boat, half-house design is the Paperhouses, an experimental website that aims to bring "world class" residential architecture to the masses. Just like WikiHouses, an older open-source project for sharing building plans with the public, the year-old Paperhouses wants to make building a new house as simple as picking a design, downloading the files, and getting straight to construction (either on your own with a suggested network of contractors). "We're trying to bring quality to open source," Paperhouses founder Joana Pacheco told Wired. "Architects that you wouldn't normally call on to do your house are suddenly are very much within your reach." Looking at this dreamy floating structure, that sounds about right.
↓ Sitting on a large floating tray, Turner's house would feature a series of long, narrow spaces on the inside and garden areas on the outside. The approximately 1,345-square-foot space would include two bedrooms, a bathroom, study, living room, and kitchen.
Below, take a look a few more designer homes in the Paperhouses catalog.
· carl turner floats buoyant residential proposal for paperhouses [Design Boom]
· Paperhouses [Official Site]Carolyn Billups, former president of the Maryland chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, said she had considered chaining herself to the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Bolton Hill.
Now, she won’t get the chance to take her stand.
Crews hauled off the 114-year-old Baltimore monument during the night – a sneaky move, Billups said.
“Rats run at night,” she said. “It’s very saddening, but at least the monuments were not torn down by angry mobs.”
The 65-year-old retired radiographer said her great-great-grandfather, Joseph Hardin Massie, fought in the 13th Virginia Infantry during the Civil War. Billups wrote a book in the late 1990s about Louise Wigfall Wright, the woman who founded the Maryland chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Wright led fundraising to erect the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument.
Billups wondered what’s next for the Baltimore monuments.
“I want to know where they went,” she said. “What’s going to happen to them?”Television channel Public Television of Russia (OTR) and its site (http://www.otr-online.ru/online/) provided live sign language interpretation of the news conference.
* * *
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues, friends. Let’s begin.
We have agreed with my assistant here that I will not make any lengthy opening remarks, so let us get down to business, to your questions. Go ahead, please.
Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov: Following a tradition we have, I propose that we give the first question to one of the most experienced members of the Kremlin’s press pool, who, I think, has been working in it since the end of last century. Valery Sanfirov, Mayak radio station, your question, please.
Valery Sanfirov: Mayak radio station, Vesti FM, Radio Rossii.
Mr President, the year is coming to an end, so it is time to take a look at the state of the Russian economy. At meetings on economic and other matters held throughout this year you have often used such terms as ‘turbulence,’ ‘hitting the bottom’ or ‘reaching yet another low’. I can even quote a joke you shared with us at last year’s news conference, saying that 2015 was not as bad as it could have been. How could you describe the current state of the Russian economy? Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: This is a traditional question and a natural thing to ask. Of course, we are analysing our performance over the past year. As usual, this performance needs to be put into perspective. We need to look at the macroeconomic indicators of 2015 and compare them with what we have achieved in 2016.
As you can probably guess, I have the latest figures that we reviewed yesterday with colleagues and a number of experts.
Last year, Russia’s GDP, which is the key indicator, dropped 3.7 percent. This year GDP also declined, but we are not talking about a contraction of this magnitude any more. Initially we believed that the GDP would fall by about 1 percent, but this figure was later adjusted to 0.7 percent and then again to 0.6 percent. In November, national GDP inched up. Overall for the year we are expecting a decrease in GDP in the range of 0.5 percent – 0.6 percent.
GDP increased thanks to growth in industries of the real economy, such as machine building, truck manufacturing, heavy machine building, manufacturing of road-building equipment, transport machine building, the chemical industry, light industry, processing and, of course, agriculture. Growth in agriculture was substantial – 2.4 percent last year. We expected 3.2 percent growth this year but the current figure is 4.1 percent and the yearend figure will be at least 4 percent. I think this is a very good trend and we must try to maintain it.
There is also the inflation rate. You remember that it was rather high last year, even for our economic system. One of the reasons was the import replacement programme in agriculture and the ensuing market disproportions. We could not substitute everything we had imported. But agriculture has demonstrated very good dynamics, and the inflation rate will be different this year. I would like to remind you that the previous lowest inflation rate – 6.1 percent – was reported in 2011. It will be below 6 percent this year. We had thought it would be around 5.7 or 5.8 percent, but it will be most likely around 5.5 percent. That is a record low inflation rate and a reason to believe that we will soon be able to reach the target inflation rate of 5 percent and subsequently 4 percent.
I believe that our budget deficit was 2.6 percent [of GDP] last year. It will be slightly larger this year – I will explain why later. The figure for the first 10 months is 2.4 percent, but the yearend figure will be 3.7 percent. I believe that it is an acceptable figure, in part because we have a foreign trade surplus of over $70 billion. We have maintained our reserves.
It is true that the Government’s Reserve Fund has decreased a little bit, but the National Welfare Fund is almost intact. The Government’s reserves are estimated at some $100 billion, while the Central Bank’s foreign reserves have increased. They amounted to $368 billion at the beginning of the year, if memory serves, and by now they have grown close to $400 billion, or more precisely more than $385 billion. In other words, we are doing well in this respect, too, and this is a solid safety net.
Finally, cargo shipments are on the rise, which means that the economy is recovering. This is a very positive indicator.
Are there any other encouraging signs? Capital outflow is decreasing. Just look at the trend: in 2014, the outflow exceeded $150 billion, but in 2015 it was $57 billion. This year, it came in at just $9 billion in the first 9 or 10 months, and is expected to total $16 billion – $17 billion in 2016, taking into account payments under loans, etc. Overall, the trend is quite encouraging.
What are the problems? Are there any issues? Of course, there are. We have to ensure further economic growth and higher industrial output, real disposal incomes have somewhat declined, which is not a very good thing in itself, since it leads to lower consumer demand and thus affects investment. That said, there is a positive side to it, as well: over the last several months we have been seeing a rise, albeit a modest one, in real wages in the real economy, which is a positive development that gives us reason to believe that the positive trend will remain in place in the near future.
As for the social sphere, the demographic trends remain positive. Natural population growth continues. The birth rate has slightly decreased, but the mortality rate also declined. Overall, there is a positive trend in terms of natural population growth. This is how things are.
In this regard it can be said that we are advancing in accordance with the plan that was publicly announced. It is being implemented, and the performance so far has been quite positive.
Marina Sevostyanova: Good afternoon,
Svetich agriculture media holding. My name is Marina Sevostyanova. My question has to do with subsidies for Russian agricultural machine manufacturing.
In fact, these subsidies benefit two industries, both manufacturing and agriculture. My question is to what extent do you believe these support measures are still needed? Are there any plans to expand them and make anti-crisis initiatives permanent?
Vladimir Putin: Anti-crisis measures cannot be permanent. They are intended to help specific industries, in this case you mentioned the manufacture of agricultural equipment, overcome current challenges and put them on the path of steady growth. This is about demand, and there is no doubt that it is our job to ensure that there is demand.
By the way, agricultural machine-building, which, if I didn’t already mention before, I will now, has posted very good growth. This is one of the sectors that is now driving industrial growth rates and, ultimately, our GDP figures. But we need to set a clear course of having this and other industrial production sectors live not on state subsidies but on natural demand.
How do we create this natural demand? By developing the agriculture sector itself. If we develop the sector and our agribusinesses have more money at their disposal, they will be able to invest more in buying new equipment and this will support agricultural machine-building.
As I said, the trend is very good here, with agriculture up by slightly more than 4 percent, and I am sure that as this sector continues to grow, demand will grow with it, and this will support the agricultural machine-building sector too.
For now though, these trends are still fragile and so we need to support them. The Government will continue providing state subsidies next year to the sectors that need it. A total 10 billion rubles have been earmarked for industry as a whole, and 216 billion for agriculture. I hope that these combined measures will produce positive results.
Since we are on the subject of agriculture and there will probably be more questions on this sector, let me say that we have been celebrating along with the rural population lately, celebrating this record harvest we have had. We said it would be a record 117 million tonnes. In fact, it will be more than 119 million tonnes, which is quite simply an excellent result, and I want to thank the farmers for their work.
This really is an unprecedented achievement in our recent history. There were similar results back in the 1970s, when Russia was called the RSFSR, even slightly bigger in 1973 and 1976, but we know that even with those bumper harvests foodstuffs and fodder were still in short supply back then.
The structural changes and organisation in the agriculture sector today show that the result we have now is something unique and offers us excellent opportunities for developing the sector further.
Alexander Kolesnichenko: Alexander Kolesnichenko, Argumenty i Fakty.
This is a good opportunity to double-check the economic growth you are talking about. Everyone says the world is on the threshold of some serious economic changes and even revolutions. Economic growth will be impossible in principle without new technology and this will seriously change the place of many countries in the world.
We have talked for a long time about a new technological paradigm. You devoted much time to this in your recent address. That said, it seems that in some areas we are lagging even further behind, for instance, in IT, as well as in production and social development with IT.
We have fallen far behind others. Could this be forever? It would be interesting to know your viewpoint, your opinion, if you could be more specific about this. Maybe you could even explain what the biggest problems are and what to do about them. Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: Some experts believe our economy is unresponsive to scientific achievements and modern high-tech economic trends. I think this is not quite so because the problem with economies like ours is that it is possible to take in big revenue from the energy-related sector and it is difficult to compel business to invest in other areas if there is one area where they can make quick and fairly large profits.
To change the structure of the economy, give it a new dimension and create development prospects, our Government has for many years taken steps to subsidise certain areas of economic development, primarily, high-tech industries, of course. Yes, for the time being we invest less in high-tech industries than the OECD, in the economy in general, and the difference is considerable. The OECD countries invest about 2.4 percent of their aggregate GDP in it compared with Russia’s 1.2 percent.
These efforts have produced the first results. First, the authorities and businesses have joined efforts to adopt the National Technology Initiative, as you know. We are drafting a comprehensive economic development plan to 2025. The Government is to complete and make it public by May. Priority development areas are being created in the Far East and eastern Siberia as zones of high-tech production with special incentives. In general, special incentives have been available in several sectors, including the IT sector, for the past few years, and we can see the results.
What are the results? For example, IT exports were around zero several years ago. Today we export $14.5 billion worth of weapons and $7 billion worth of IT products. I have cited these figures before. Many of our high-tech sectors have become competitive. They may look like mere growth points now, or individual achievements, but we are certainly a global leader in many areas, including those we have led traditionally, such as civilian nuclear technology, space exploration, some aviation sectors, and the like, as well as in the defence industry, which has experienced exceptional growth in productivity.
This will also carry over to civilian sectors. You know that the Government has been instructed to translate the current positive trends in the defence industry to civilian industries. By and large, I believe that there is no reason for despair. More than that, there are grounds to believe that we will not simply achieve leadership in many key spheres, but will also preserve this leadership for decades. Of course, we proceed from the belief that we must become part of the global trend and even lead the transition to a new technological revolution. We have every chance of doing so, considering the high level of development in research and education.
One sign says ‘Tatars’, and the other ‘Not without Tatars…’ So, what about Tatars, what is the problem?
Yelena Kolebakina: Mr President, my name is Yelena Kolebakina, Business Online business newspaper.
I have the following question. As you probably know, there are more and more troubled banks in the country. It is not uncommon for the Central Bank to revoke …
Vladimir Putin: What does this have to do with the Tatars? How cunning of you.
Yelena Kolebakina: Hold on, that is not all.
It is not uncommon for the Central Bank to revoke licences and suspend operations, and Tatarstan has not been spared. Of course, individual depositors will get their deposits back in the amount set by law, which is 1.4 million, while small enterprises that you support so much, they will go bankrupt, since they are viewed as third-rank creditors, so more often than not they end up not getting anything back.
My question is whether a fund of some kind should be established for legal entities that would operate just as the Deposit Insurance Agency does for individual depositors? Maybe you have some idea of how this issue can be resolved? Maybe we will end up having just four or five federal state-owned banks? In your opinion, do we need small regional banks?
Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: First, almost all experts, both Russian and foreign, support the Central Bank in its efforts to improve the financial system. No one believes that in doing so the Central Bank of the Russian Federation is doing something wrong. Nobody believes that. These efforts are undertaken above all in the interests of depositors. If organisations that are not financial institutions at all, but money laundering vehicles, remain on the Russian market, it will do no good, and depositors will be the ones to suffer. It is for protecting the interests of individuals that the deposit insurance system was introduced.
As far as I am aware, the Central Bank is working closely with Tatarstan authorities. The President and Government of Tatarstan, which is one of the regional leaders in the Russian Federation in terms of development in the economy, social sector and many other areas, are working with the Central Bank to find ways to support all depositors, including legal entities. There are legal procedures in place in this area, the provisions we have today, but of course we will need to take a close look at how to support our industrial companies and small and medium business.
The Tatarstan bank you mentioned is not some small establishment but a sizeable institution. As far as not simply the big banks but also small banks and small and medium business go, as I said in my Address [to the Federal Assembly], if you noted, we need a network of smaller regional banks too, and the Central Bank could apply different regulatory requirements for these smaller banks. The idea is to take a differentiated approach, apply tougher requirements, closer to the Basel III, to big banks and banks that play a central role in the system overall, including regional banks, and apply less stringent requirements to small regional banks working with small and medium business and with ordinary people. This would give them greater flexibility in working with their customers. But a lighter regulatory framework should not mean lower quality of these establishments, and the financial authorities must continue their oversight role here.
As for the bank you referred to, let me say again that the Central Bank and the authorities of Tatarstan continue their work and this process is proceeding quite smoothly.
Dmitry Peskov: Ekho Moskvy, please.
Alexei Solomin: Good afternoon, Mr President.
My question is connected, in part, to your Address [to the Federal Assembly]. You said that the fight against corruption is not a show. There are too many shows like this around. Take the story of [Federal Customs Service Director] Andrei Belyaninov. He has been nearly ruined, his name dragged through the mud, but later it turned out he was framed. Or take [Economic Development Minister Alexei] Ulyukayev, a close and confidential associate, whom you dismissed overnight, citing the loss of trust. Did you talk with him? Did you ask him for an explanation? Do you have it? Is it possible that these headline-grabbing cases are not about fighting corruption and that they are an imitation created for public attention, or your attention, in order to get a seat closer to you?
If I may, I asked a question at last year’s news conference, and I would like to ask the same question again. It concerns the murder of Boris Nemtsov. Are you monitoring the investigation? Do you, as a lawyer, consider the related developments convincing? Do you, as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, believe that Russian officer Ruslan Geremeyev, who has not appeared in court for testimony, must appear in court?
Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: I will begin with the last part of your question. Of course, I closely monitor the so-called high-profile cases, especially when they concern murder, in particular, the murder of Boris Nemtsov. Of course, I support everything the investigative authorities have done to establish the circumstances of this case and to identify the persons involved and the culprits.
It is not surprising that officials, people who held official positions, including in law enforcement agencies, sometimes commit crimes, even very serious crimes. This has happened in Russia and other countries before. Take the horrific, tragic murder of our ambassador in Turkey. Do you know who killed him?
So there is nothing new in this, and we will continue working consistently to establish the circumstances and to identify the criminals. The investigative authorities usually achieve this goal in the majority, if not all high-profile cases, although this can take years, as in the case of Galina Starovoitova and several other cases. Unfortunately, we have not yet established all the circumstances surrounding the murder of Mikhail Manevich, with whom I had a close personal relationship. His murder has not been solved yet.
As for other high-profile cases, including Mr Belyaninov, there was no case against him. I fully agree with you in this respect and consider it unacceptable that information about the pre-investigation actions taken, including searches and the like, was leaked to the media. Such leaks damage business and personal reputations.
Regarding Mr Ulyukayev: I did not talk with Alexei Ulyukayev. I believe that the information provided by the related agencies was sufficient reason to remove him from his position due to loss of trust. We will know what this leads to after the trial. Making any conclusions before this is improper and harmful.
Dmitry Peskov: Vyacheslav Terekhov, also one of the most esteemed members of the Kremlin press pool.
Vyacheslav Terekhov: Thank you very much.
Vladimir Putin: Everything for the Kremlin press pool. “How can one pass over a relation!”
Vyacheslav Terekhov: We have been working together for a long time – that is why. Mr President, we have been implementing 11 executive orders and 270 provisions – the so-called May executive orders – for five years now. We have been working and working… There is probably no money for this.
Vladimir Putin: Why not?
Vyacheslav Terekhov: The budget shows that there are cuts everywhere.
Could you please tell me whether I am right in assuming that the sale of a large stake in Rosneft, in part to foreign investors, will fund the implementation of the May executive orders and the economy? But will foreigners be able to give us the money now that the banks are under sanctions? If so, are you ready, is the country ready to sell stakes in large state-owned companies to maintain the current state of affairs?
Thank you.
Vladimir Putin: I could answer your question until tomorrow morning because it has to do with the budget, implementation of the May executive orders and privatisation. In fact, it boils down to three major issues.
In terms of the budget, yes, we proceed from the most conservative forecasts, notably, $40 per barrel next year.
It is true that budget spending will decrease in percentage terms from over 18 trillion to just over 16 trillion but in absolute terms it will remain constant – 15.8 trillion rubles in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Coupled with 5,000 ruble payments to pensioners next year and the so-called income-related costs and revenues, this will be a little over 16 trillion – 16.1 trillion rubles. But we have made all the allocations needed to deliver on social commitments, including those stated in the 2012 Presidential executive orders.
Moreover, we will fully and completely retain our support for the industry. It will amount to |
(the page now includes several articles by other authors), and the publisher of The Backlash! @ Backlash.com. He is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and served for 9-1/2 years on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council.As CES 2015 approaches, ASUS is trying to build anticipation for their presentation. Using a short video, they are teasing an updated ZenFone with what appears to be a new camera feature. In their usual style, the video is pretty cryptic and feels like it’s loaded with subliminal messaging. Still, you can get a pretty good look at the device if you know where to look.
There is not much to the video since it is only 10 seconds long, with about half of that time containing the “see what others can’t see” text overlay and ASUS logo (our copy editor would not be a fan of that redundancy). There are some intriguing images within, though. I have pulled a couple screenshots to help speculate.
This is probably the most impactful image of the video, suggesting a dual camera setup. As you’ll see below, the device itself couldn’t possibly have these two lenses, if that’s what they are, arranged side-by-side when held in portrait mode. In fact, the screenshot above looks like it may just be the product of a post-production mirroring effect on the single lens image that precedes it in the video.
Above is a better look at the new ZenFone in its entirety, and it has what could very well be a two lens camera on the back. The HTC One M8 already has this kind of camera, though, and in its case it looks a little different.
Visually, there is more similarity to the rear of the LG G3.
Now, with that said, these don’t look much like buttons on the ZenFone. Given how much its look differs from the M8, though, it may not be a dual camera, or at least not implemented the same way. The circular recess nearest to the top of the device could be a single lens, with the area below reserved for two LED bulbs for a better flash. Or, they have snuck something truly unique into the next ZenFone.
We will probably have to wait until CES to know for sure, which begins with press events on January 4th and runs through the 9th. ASUS is scheduled to make announcements on the 5th, which is when they are most likely to talk about the new ZenFone. The relatively inexpensive line launched at CES last year with the new ZenUI Android overlay and Intel processors, but never seemed to catch on in the American market.
Update: ASUS has added another, longer teaser video.
Thanks jedijens for the tip!Popular online streaming service, Netflix has decided to put out a specially edited version of film Gangs of Wasseypur as an eight-part series across the world.
The company, which is planning to launch in India next year, announced that the movie will stream with English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Chinese subtitles from the first week of December, reports Mashable.
Addressing a panel Monday at the Film Bazaar in Goa, Anurag Kashyap, the director of the film, said the first of its kind attempt at presenting Wasseypur as a series on Netflix "reflects how digital distribution can play a role in expanding a film's audience after its theatrical release," reports The Hollywood Reporter.
Cinelicious, which has North American rights to the film, worked with digital content aggregator Film Karavan, Kashyap’s Phantom Films and producer Guneet Monga to finalise the deal with Netflix, reports Screen.
The critically acclaimed epic, with run time of over five hours, was premiered in the Director's Fortnight section of the Cannes festival in 2012.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Eric Trump, the son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, says it would be “foolish” to release his father’s tax returns while under audit by the government.
“There is no tax attorney in the world who will tell you to release your tax returns while you’re under a standard routine audit. It would never happen. I mean, anybody who thinks that is in la la land,” he said in a Wednesday interview with CNBC.
“You would have a bunch of people who know nothing about taxes trying to look through and trying to come up with assumptions on something they know nothing about. It would be foolish to do,” he added.
The IRS has said individuals are not prohibited from sharing tax information while being audited. There is precedent for doing so: President Richard Nixon released his tax returns during an audit. Moreover, there is nothing stopping Trump from releasing previous returns for years not currently under audit.
A growing number of Trump supporters have also called on the GOP nominee to release his tax returns. Roger Stone, a longtime Republican political operative and current Trump ally, on Monday called on the businessman to release his returns “immediately.” And in a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) warned his continued ability to support Trump will “in part be driven by whether Mr. Trump keeps his word that he will release his tax records.”
But Eric Trump remained unconvinced by calls to release the information. He swatted down allegations that his father was involved with the mob, and argued that a person’s assets ― not their tax rate, tax write-offs or charitable deductions ― mattered more to the public interest.
“I also hear these conspiracy theories all the time. You don’t learn that much from a tax return in all fairness,” he told CNBC. “I heard someone the other day, ‘Trump has ties to the mob. If he released his tax returns you would clearly see that.’ Are you guys kidding me? You learn a lot more when you look at a person’s assets. You know how many hotels we have around the world? You know how many golf courses we have around the world?”Yum
Here’s a delicious vegan fudgy bark recipe that’s paleo-friendly and requires no cooking at all.
I used dark chocolate for the bark and I decided to draw a few hearts with some homemade white chocolate, but this step is optional. I also added two tablespoons of tahini because I like the bitterness it ads, but you can use another nut or seed butter of your choice. If you want your bark less soft and fudgy, you can add just one tablespoon of tahini.
You can decorate with coconut, nuts, seeds and dried fruit of your choice.
I used a 16×10 cm (6×4 inches) plastic container to make the bark.
See also
Ingredients
50 g (2 oz) of dark chocolate (vegan)
1-2 tablespoons of tahini
Nuts, seeds, coconut, dried fruit – for decoration
For the white chocolate
1 teaspoon of cocoa butter
½ teaspoon of powdered sugar
Directions
Melt the chocolate and mix it with the tahini. Pour the mixture into the container.
Then melt the cocoa butter and add the powdered sugar. Pour little dots over the dark chocolate while it’s still melted, then take a toothpick and drag it through the dots to create the hearts.
Decorate with desiccated coconut, nuts, seeds and dried fruit.
Put in the freezer until the bark has hardened.
Enjoy! 🙂
Print Delicious Vegan Fudgy Bark Ingredients 50 g (2 oz) of dark chocolate (vegan)
1-2 tablespoons of tahini
Nuts, seeds, coconut, dried fruit – for decoration For the white chocolate: 1 teaspoon of cocoa butter
½ teaspoon of powdered sugar Instructions Melt the chocolate and mix it with the tahini. Pour the mixture into the container. Then melt the cocoa butter and add the powdered sugar. Pour little dots over the dark chocolate while it’s still melted, then take a toothpick and drag it through the dots to create the hearts. Decorate with desiccated coconut, nuts, seeds and dried fruit. Put in the freezer until the bark has hardened. 5.0 https://www.myhealthydessert.com/recipes/dairy-free/delicious-vegan-fudgy-bark/ © MyHealthyDessert
If you like the recipe, share it with your friends!
Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook and Twitter to know when a new recipe is up.?
Related
Raw Vegan Crunchy Chocolate Fudge Hearts
Raw Vegan Marble Chocolates
3-Ingredient Decadent Chocolate Truffles
Raw Vegan Coconut Chocolate Tart
Delicious Vegan Chocolate Mousse
2-Ingredient Vegan Chocolate Sauce
Baked Chocolate Banana Oatmeal Bites
Vegan Coconut Chia PuddingEveryone knows that employees at tech start-ups have a tendency to work long hours. Companies are short-staffed, entrepreneurs are hungry for success and that brilliant idea for a program that allows websites to code themselves isn't just going to code itself. So, after a long night of burning the midnight oil, sleeping at the office is a pretty common practice.
What's a little more uncommon is just straight up living at the office. Especially when said office isn't yours.
(SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS)
Like the founders of most young companies, Eric Simons started with an idea.
In a post on the website of ClassConnect, a business started by the 20-year-old entrepreneur, Simons noted that because students "learned better...using videos and websites," he could make education more engaging for students and more organized for teachers by giving "students the best possible content and...[letting] them work collaboratively using web tools."
The Chicago native moved to Silicon Valley soon after high school and quickly sunk all of his time, energy and money into ClassConnect, which realized his vision through the creation of easily sharable online lesson plans. He was accepted into the first class of Imagine K12, a tech incubator for companies working in education, at AOL's Palo Alto campus.
Entry into the four-month incubator came with $20,000 in venture capital. Simons was made great connections and learning a lot about the fast-paced world of tech start-ups.
There was only one problem: By the time the program finished, the money was gone, all of Simons's partners had gone back to college and the ClassConnect founder now suddenly had no place to live.
Simons weighed his options and, upon realizing his entry badge still worked, decided he would sneak back into the AOL offices and simply live there.
It's hard to blame Simons for wanting to spend virtually all his time inside of AOL's swank Silicon Valley digs. Designed by San Francisco's Studio O Plus A, it was recently named by Inc.com as one of the coolest offices in the country. (Full disclosure: AOL is The Huffington Post's parent company.)
More important to Simons than the complex's open floor plan and rustic, oriented stand board accents was that it contained everything he needed to survive and had enough non-AOL employees constantly flowing in and out that he'd likely escape detection.
Also, it was free.
"They had a gym there with showers," Simons told CNET, who originally broke the story of the young businessman's saga. "I'd take a shower after work. I was like, 'I could totally work here...They have food upstairs, they have every drink on tap. This would be a sweet place to live.'"
Simons managed to live out of the office for two months, storing all of his personal belongings in an on-campus gym locker. During his first month, he managed to only spend $30.
"The security guys would walk by and just assume I was working late--which, technically, I was," Simons explained to MSNBC. "They thought he's just working really hard and taking a nap before he goes back to work again."
Eventually one security guard got wise to Simons's scheme and woke the entrepreneur during an early-morning slumber. Simons was stripped of his security badge and forced to move out.
However, soon after leaving AOL, Simons secured $50,000 in funding from Ulu Ventures and venture capitalist Paul Sherer, some of which Simons used to start renting his own place in Palo Alto.
"Tenacity and commitment are key attributes of a great entrepreneur," Ulu Ventures' Clint Korver told Pulse2. "Eric has these in spades as demonstrated by his willingness to do whatever it takes to get his company off the ground."
AOL seemed to take the entire thing in stride and still allows Simons to use the building for meetings--although not so much for sleeping. "It was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office," senior vice president David Temkin told CNET. "We just didn't expect it to work so well."The other day I was looking at pyjamas (which bills itself as a GWT-like tool for Python). I was also reminded of the semi-recent release of Objective-J.
Pyjamas, GWT, and Objective-J all hinge around a central concept: Abstracting away the authoring of JavaScript-heavy web applications by allowing the developer to program entirely in their natively language (be it Python, Java, or an Objective-C-like-language accordingly).
This is a large abstraction – much more so than what is provided by most JavaScript libraries – you are programming in another language which is outputting JavaScript code. You are likely to never see a DOM object or any pieces of the native JavaScript language.
I worry about large abstractions like this for a number of reasons.
When you use a pure-JavaScript library (such as jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, Yahoo UI, etc.) you are still programming using the JavaScript language. In the case of jQuery a large number of users, who have either never programmed JavaScript before or never programmed before, acquire a good grasp of how to use JavaScript – accented by the use of the library. A pure JavaScript library makes annoying tasks simple, the largest of which being cross-browser support. It does nothing to dilute the quality of the JavaScript-authoring experience. In fact I would argue that JavaScript libraries do much to give JavaScript a particular style and feel. Code written with Prototype feels very different from code written with jQuery – and this is fine since it’s giving the user the option to develop in the JavaScript language how they best see fit.
In the case of these language abstractions you are gaining none of the benefit of learning the JavaScript language. When a leak in the abstraction occurs (and it will occur – just as it’s bound to occur in any abstraction) what resources do you have, as a developer, to correct the problem? If you’ve learned nothing about JavaScript then you stand no chance in trying to repair, or work around, the issue.
It could be stated that these tools could work well if a developer already has some knowledge of JavaScript but neither pyjamas nor GWT sell themselves as such (Objective-J recommends, but does not require, some basic JavaScript knowledge). I think such a developer (one that has strong knowledge of both JavaScript and Java/Python/Objective-C and still feels compelled to use one of the abstractions) doesn’t really exist – at least not in any significant numbers. A developer who is capable of authoring JavaScript code should naturally gravitate towards authoring as close to the final product as possible. It will give them greater flexibility when developing and allow for the greatest amount of control.
A huge benefit of JavaScript is that it’s a proverbial melting pot of experience. Developers from all backgrounds code in it (those who program Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby,.NET, or any other server-side language) and it lends a lot to the style of JavaScript code that you see in the wild. By writing in a single-language stack you miss out on this collaboration with other developers. Java developers now only communicate other Java developers (for example). While this may be fine for some projects it certainly limits your range of experience that you can draw from.
All of this being said these stacks have some excellent features that you can draw on. In the case of GWT you can use all of the normal Java-debugging techniques and continue to develop in your IDE of choice (even including Eclipse integration). Additionally since the framework has full control (both client and server-side) it can selectively send parts of the codebase depending on the browser. This is very interesting and having this full stack for development makes it quite lucrative.
I should mention here that I’m a creator of a JavaScript language abstraction: Processing.js. You can write Canvas visualization using the Processing language (no apparent JavaScript involved). I included support for the straight Processing language for a single reason: Because it would allow for all the Processing demos to be able to run unchanged. Beyond that I don’t really see a good use for using the Processing language abstraction to author scripts. Some people have done it but I don’t really encourage it.
Instead you can use the full Processing API from JavaScript:
var p = Processing(CanvasElement); p.size(100, 100); p.background(0); p.fill(255); p.ellipse(50, 50, 50, 50);
I consider this to be a good compromise: Take the good parts from one language and bring them to JavaScript to allow for the greatest amount of flexibility and control – without a massive abstraction.Wal-Mart is banning a controversial flame retardant found in hundreds of consumer goods, from couches to cameras to child car seats, telling its suppliers to come up with safer alternatives.
In perhaps the boldest example yet of "retail regulation," Wal-Mart is stepping ahead of federal regulators and using its muscle as the world's largest retailer to move away from a class of chemicals researchers say endanger human health and the environment.
"This really shows the market being able to move more decisively than the government," said Andy Igrejas, national campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition of environmental and public health groups pushing for tougher federal chemical laws.
Increasingly, retailers are barring specific chemicals from products in their stores in response to concerns from consumers and advocacy groups. In 2006, for example, Whole Foods became the first national retailer to ban bisphenol A, or BPA, from baby bottles and children's cups. Health advocates had raised questions about the safety of BPA, a widely used component in plastic that has been linked to reproductive problems, cancer and other health disorders in laboratory animals.
Two years later, Toys R Us, Wal-Mart and other chains followed suit, despite the fact that federal regulators permit the use of BPA and that the chemical industry attests to its safety.
In 2007, the parent company of Sears and Kmart announced plans to phase out polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, from products and packaging out of concern that a chemical it contains could disrupt the endocrine system in humans and cause other health effects.
Now, Wal-Mart has turned its sights on polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, a class of compounds used since 1976 as flame retardants in electronics, furniture, sporting goods, pet supplies, curtains and toys, among other things. In a recent notice to suppliers, the company said it would begin testing June 1 to make sure products do not contain PBDEs.
Studies have linked the chemicals to problems with the liver, thyroid and reproductive systems and brain development in laboratory animals.
Ban by handful of states
A spokesman for Wal-Mart said the company quietly made the decision to ban PBDEs from some products "several years ago" but just recently reminded suppliers that it would begin verification testing in June. Spokesman Lorenzo Lopez said Wal-Mart was motivated to act after a handful of states began banning PBDEs.
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency cited PBDEs as "chemicals of concern" and said it intended to try to limit any new use of them. But that proposal has been stuck in bureaucratic review.
The nation's chemical laws, created 35 years ago, make it extremely difficult for the federal government to ban or restrict a chemical's use. Regulators must prove a chemical poses a clear health risk, but the EPA has sufficient health and safety data for only about 200 of the 84,000 chemicals in commerce in the United States.
The hurdles are so high that the agency has been unable to ban asbestos, widely acknowledged as a likely carcinogen and barred in more than 30 countries.Tell Me When It's Over is an interview series in which we ask former athletes about the moment they knew their playing days were over. Today: Mike Marshall, the rubber-armed screwballer who won the 1974 National League Cy Young Award and who now believes his unconventional methods could eradicate pitching-arm injuries.
Marshall is a career baseball outcast. As a player, he developed a reputation for being too smart (and maybe too union) for his own good. As a pitching coach, he and his ideas—he advocates an awkward-looking upright pitching motion that even his students describe as throwing "like a girl"—have been likewise relegated to the sport's margins.
No one denies that his credentials are impeccable: doctorate in exercise physiology, 14-year major-league career, three-time league leader in saves, four-time league leader in appearances, five-team league leader in games finished, three Fireman of the Year awards, two All-Star selections, the Cy Young, and two major-league records—106 pitching appearances in a single season (1974) and 13 straight appearances that same year—that are almost certain to last forever (or at least, he might say, until people start listening to Dr. Marshall). But the baseball establishment, despite teams' heavy investments in pitchers who year after year throw fewer and fewer innings, wants nothing to do with Marshall. Occasionally, the feeling seems mutual.
Mike Marshall pitched for nine different clubs—the Tigers, Pilots, Astros, Expos, Dodgers, Braves, Rangers, Twins and Mets—over his career. He pitched his last major-league game against the Expos on Oct. 2, 1981. He recently closed his Pitchers Research/Training Center in Zephyrhills, Fla., but he continues to share his ideas about pitching through his website, drmikemarshall.com.
* * *
When I was 11 years old I was going with my uncle to Eastern Michigan University, up to Ypsilanti, basically. We were going on a back road, and there was an unmarked railroad crossing, and he just drove into the crossing, all of a sudden. There were trees on each side of the road, but he did see, out of the corner of his eye, this train coming. He tried to hit the brakes, but it was early morning, the road was still damp from the dew, and he skidded and hit the train sideways, just behind the engine, with the driver's side door impacting the train. Of course, it threw the door open, and he went out, and somehow I stayed inside. My vague recollection—what I can remember as an 11-year old—is that he grabbed and pushed me under the dashboard. There were no such things as seat belts at that time. And so he was killed and my back was severely injured.
Advertisement
I figured this out relatively quickly: I needed to stand straight up. I needed to not bend forward at my waist. And if you take a look at my pitching style, I stayed as straight up as I could. I didn't raise my pitching leg high above my body or follow through with my cap touching the ground or anything like that. I stayed pretty much straight up. Now my first year in the major leagues with the Tigers, my motion was not that dramatically upright because the back wasn't that big of a problem. But as I got into pitching more frequently it started to get bad again.
I could not sustain bending forward and trying to field. It got to where I couldn't put my glove on the ground. [Chuckles] Not much of a shortstop if you can't put your glove on the ground.
So it pretty much was a lost cause to continue to try to play shortstop. I loved it. I loved the hitting. I loved the base running. It's just my back would not allow me to do it. Had I not had that accident I think there's a good chance that I'd have continued as a shortstop. But after the '64 season, when I was an All-Star shortstop for Chattanooga in the Southern League, at the end of the season, I couldn't bend over. I could barely swing a bat, and I said, "OK, I'm coming back next year as a pitcher, just to make enough money to finish my bachelor's degree and get my master's degree started." Then I was going to go into high school coaching somewhere. At least I hoped.
Advertisement
* * *
I was an early maturer. When I was 12 years old I was probably biologically 14 years old. I was the second-tallest in sixth grade, and then by the time I was in senior high school I was the shortest guy. You know, I matured and finished my growth spurt early, and so I had more skills, more speed and so on, than most kids my age. My father played fast-pitch softball and some baseball. He was a great fielding first basemen. So he took time with me to work on fielding. He hit ground balls and all that. And I loved playing the infield. I loved trying to make plays on balls that you shouldn't be able to make.
Early on, I knew that I wanted to play professional baseball. And I did get an opportunity right out of high school. Of course, it was mainly because they could finance my college degree that I accepted the signing bonus.
Advertisement
Managers knew I had options. Everybody knew I had options. And it's hard to bully a guy who has options.
My mother said at 5 years old I told her I was going to play professional baseball. She didn't even know what that was, but she said "That's good, dear" [laughs]. You know how moms are. But also, very early on, I fell in love with science. I found science, at all levels, very intriguing, and I wanted to know more. I was insatiable about the science courses I took. Certainly when I got into college, my mind just went, "Whoa, what is all of this stuff?" And when I hit the kinesiology course, my life came into focus. I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I did that. It was that big of an impact on me. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could that had to do with kinesiology, which includes just about everything because you have applied anatomy—that's the huge part of kinesiology, the human movement. You have to understand what muscles and how they do it and where. And then motor-skill acquisition. And all of these courses just sort of came together and brought this collage of information from everywhere in the sciences into my passion. I wanted to know everything I possibly could. And I never, ever would have made Major League Baseball had it not been for taking that course. I was doing what my coaches were telling me, and as soon I started getting into Newton's three laws of motion and applied anatomy, I realized that everything that they were teaching is absolutely wrong. And so I started doing it per the science. Had I not done what I'm telling others to do, I never would have been able to accomplish what I accomplished.
I came to Michigan State University wanting to be a football, basketball, and baseball coach in high school. That was the extent of what I wanted my education to be. I wanted to play professional baseball to see what I could be. I didn't consider myself highly gifted. I mean, I could run well. I could throw well. I didn't believe I hit all that well, and though my dad helped me with my defense I didn't feel that I had the same fielding abilities that I saw many other shortstops display. I'd watch them and say, "I wish I could do that." It wasn't until I got into the kinesiology course that I started to see and broadened my skill set. And, of course, by that point, my back had said: "OK, that's enough of this. It's time to go into pitching."
Advertisement
I am an anatomy nerd. I will not say "lat" if I can say "Latissimus Dorsi." I'll not say "pec"; I'll say "Pectoralis Major." I just can't baby-talk to people.
* * *
Reality sets in pretty quickly when you get into the high school years and now you're playing against other mature people who are the same biological age as you. And then you go into pro ball and you see everybody who's genetically superior to you when you go to spring training. So the reality set in for me. And I tried to do the best I could, but until I hit '64—and I signed in 1960—the first few years of '61, '62, and '63, I did OK. I was fine, but fine doesn't make it to the major leagues. When I hit kinesiology, I felt that I was now going to start doing something meaningful as a shortstop and a hitter. My problem was my back just wasn't going to let me do it. It just flat out said, "No, it's not going to happen." I mean, I'd play hard one night and then I wouldn't be able to bend over and touch my toes the next night. Eventually I had to have the surgery. But that didn't close it for the pitching.
Advertisement
I feel that I spent 14 years being better than I ever thought I could be. You know the song, right? "For one moment in time to be better than you think you could be?" I was, for 14 years. I couldn't believe that I was that good of a baseball pitcher. I never expected I was going to be that good. When I started my research and started to do the things that I felt were right, that the traditional pitching coaches said were wrong, I had no idea where it was going to lead me. I just knew that I had to trust science. And it was between '71 and '72 that I figured out how to apply Newton's first law to my baseball pitching motion, and how pronation could enable me to throw pitches of higher quality. That just opened me up. I was then a pitcher who had answers for everybody. And I never took a day off.
I jogged this morning. I've jogged every day of my life that I could stand upright. Since 1965, I think it was. I've become obsessed with making sure that I have a lifestyle that's healthy. Fitness enabled me to pitch 106 games—and I feel I could have pitched more. I feel I could have easily pitched a single inning in every single game, maybe more. I never got stiff, sore, or tired. Never did not have an answer. That doesn't mean that hitters didn't surprise me. They do that. They're intelligent beings. They can hit just about any pitch that they've seen. Nobody can throw a pitch that is so good that you can throw it over and over and over again to a quality major-league hitter and not have them hit it hard. But I was never concerned that I couldn't get anybody out. It was a matter of reading his intent and doing what he didn't want me to do.
* * *
I was that smart-ass college kid, you know.
You did not get any respect for your education within baseball. In fact, you were considered a danger. That you could actually understand what they're saying was bullshit: They didn't like that too much. I wasn't an accepting kind of person. They'd tell me what to do, and I would say, "What? That makes no sense whatsoever. And I want to talk to you about Sir Isaac Newton." You know, it was not easy for them. One of my favorite managers, Jack Tighe, he'd come out and he'd say: "Listen. I'm just going to tell you what I think. If there's anything in what I say that you think will work for you, please use it." That's it. He knew that I loved baseball and that I was giving to all my teammates in any way that I could to help them and the team, and he was gracious enough to not get upset if somebody came up to me and asked about this or that and I answered it. He didn't get bothered by it. But there were others who did—other managers, minor league level and major-league level, who did not want me talking to anybody. In fact, they used that as a reason why they had to get rid of me: My ideas were seeping into other players, and that just couldn't happen.
Advertisement
I think what it was was they knew I had options. Everybody knew I had options. And it's hard to bully a guy who has options.
I'd been to the big leagues in '67. This was '70. So I'd been to the big leagues with Detroit and the Seattle team, the Pilots. But the Houston team didn't appreciate a lot of what I was doing. You know, "We want you to do the Exer-Genie. We want you to run the mile for time." And they just had a whole list of things that were counterproductive. And I said: "Not trying to tell you what to do here, but I'm not going to do any of those things. They don't help me pitch. They will cause problems, and I'm not going to do it." Now the pitching coach was watching me throw every day, and he was just extremely excited about what I was doing. And so I came in after the game and the pitching coach said to me: "Hey, we've got a doubleheader tomorrow. We're looking for a starter. Would you like to start?" "Great. That'd be fine."
So I get called into the manager's office, and I expected to be told I'm going to start one of those doubleheaders the next day, and he said, "No, we're sending you back down to Triple A." I said: "Oh, really? Oh, OK." And so I packed up my stuff and flew back to Houston. We were on the road. And I called the general manager and I said: "I'll give you three days. Trade me to Montreal, Boston or Detroit." Because all three of them had Triple-A teams near my home so I could put my family at home and finish the season that way. And I said: "And if you can't do it in the three days, I'm out of here, and you'll get nothing for me. I'm going back to finish my doctoral degree and we'll see y'all later. Best wishes." But he traded me before noon, and I went to Montreal. and really that was the start of my major-league career. I ran into Gene Mauch, and Gene Mauch was not intimidated by anybody. My intelligence didn't bother him. He loved it. He liked to talk to me about strategy, pitching strategy and training strategy. These are things that he didn't have in his educational background, but he was insatiable for information. And that just formed a friendship. I mean, imagine a manager asking me questions.
Advertisement
And Walter Alston, he also had taken a kinesiology course, so he and I got along fabulously. But there were other managers who didn't appreciate me in the meeting at all. Not that I'd say anything—I'd just sit there. I knew not to say anything, but they knew that I knew what they were saying wasn't, you know—I didn't agree with it. Even though I'd try to sit absolutely still and give no signs one way or the other. And maybe that was a problem.
* * *
My first full year in the major leagues was 1971. My first year of professional baseball was 1961. I had some ups and downs trying to find out what I was doing in the first few years. '71 wasn't all that good for me either. But the last half of it, Gene Mauch freed me up. He gave me the right to do what I wanted to do on the pitching mound: throw the pitches I wanted, make my own decisions, and so on. And the last half of that season went marvelously well. And then here came 1972. I was ready. And, you know, 1.78 ERA, I just flat kicked ass. It wasn't like I was a surprise. I'd been in Major League Baseball since '67, up and down, so here I am five years later, and I'm finally put my game together. That's what it was. I had a plan in my mind of the pitcher I wanted to be, and people kept stepping on it, not letting me do it. And I couldn't get to where I was doing it until finally Gene Mauch gave me that chance halfway through 1971. And from then on I was the pitcher that I wanted to be.
Advertisement
If I had known then what I know now? Oh, my goodness. There was so much more that I didn't know. I could have been one hell of a baseball pitcher. It worked all right, but there were gaps in what I could do at certain times in a game to different hitters, in different situations. I needed to expand my game. Most notably, I never threw a curveball. I didn't know how to throw a curveball. And then I figured out one day how to pronate the release of a curveball. Unfortunately it was seven years after I was out of professional baseball. I had a fabulous curveball seven years out of professional baseball. Just nasty.
I've got something nobody else thought of in the history of baseball. I mean, how long has the history of baseball gone on? And I teach a brand-new pitch. I had a screwball that nobody understood, and still don't. I'm probably still the only one who throws that kind of screwball, except for the people I teach how to do it. Those are the things that, as a research scientist, are exciting to me.
Advertisement
I'm not really sure why, but I think maybe the front office had soured on my player-rep activities. You've got to factor all of that into everything that happened in my career. My dad was a member of a union. I believe in people being treated fairly and so on and so forth. Very early on I was elected the player representative of the 1968 Detroit Tigers. They elected me in spring training. And the manager, when he sent me down, said, "We can't have you be the player representative of this team." And that's why they sent me down. I had a 1.9-something Earned Run Average the year before, and I did fine in spring training, although I was starting to bring in my screwball, and they sent me down. So I missed '68, but in my mind it didn't matter because I was working on the screwball.
I'm much like Tiger Woods in that way. He gets a lot of criticism because he changes his swing or tries to learn to swing better. And I know |
friends," Newcomb said.
Now she’s insisting the violence escalated to murder.
As police investigate the circumstances of the shooting, Rich's three children -- ages 10, 8 and 2 -- are without their mother.
"My daughter leaves behind three beautiful kids and a family that loves her and needed her," Newcomb said.
Stay with ClickOnDetroit for updates.
Sign up for ClickOnDetroit breaking news alerts and email newsletters
Copyright 2017 by WDIV ClickOnDetroit - All rights reserved.As it happens I replayed Portal 2 right before The Talos Principle launched. That's gotta be the last thing a game designer wants to hear, right? "We don't use the term 'Portal-like', but, sure, Talos is... wait, you just replayed Portal? You couldn't have waited a couple of weeks in between?"
(I haven't gone to check whether the designers used the term "Portal-like". Nobody's going to disagree with it, nohow.)
Talos is a pleasant puzzle game with a nice script and good art and bullet-holes in several of its own feet. I recommend it but I wish it had fewer self-inflicted wounds.
(Note: in a "ruminations" post I don't offer an overall review. Instead, I focus on particular areas of design that I find interesting -- or problematic. So don't freak out just because I complain a lot.)
I hate to say this: Talos's problem feels like laziness. I hate to say it because the creators are not lazy. They worked hard. There's plenty of game here, but... well, I stand by this tweet:
Talos Principle has some great stuff, but wow, serious case of "Made a large game because it was easier than making a small one." (@zarfeblong, Dec 15 2014)
Let me talk about the structure. Talos is a bunch of puzzle areas with a hub-and-spoke structure, and once you unlock a few of those you reach a higher-level hub which leads to six more puzzle hubs, and then you unlock a third level. It's a lot of puzzles, but they open out in a nicely paced way. There are a bunch of puzzle mechanics, which interact in clever ways. Some of these mechanics are available immediately; others have to be unlocked by solving earlier puzzles. Then there are some bonus puzzles, which unlock optional puzzle hubs. There's an endgame sequence, which is a series of puzzles that you unlock as you complete the body of the game. When you get through those, you reach one big final "boss" puzzle.
So what's wrong with any of that? Nothing, except that word "unlock" which you just read five times in a row. See, the reward for every puzzle is a "sigil", a.k.a. a tetromino (a.k.a. a Tetris piece). To actually unlock every part of the game, you take your six-to-ten tetrominoes and fit them into a rectangle. Music plays, angels cheer, the lock opens.
There are... oh, I didn't count, let's say approximately one hundred and eleventy-one tetromino puzzles in Talos, in between (and gating) the actual puzzles. The actual puzzles are creative, engaging, and constantly demand creative thought about new ways to combine the basic mechanics. The tetromino puzzles are all exactly the same.
Hear us. We're not shouting "Oh, yay, another forty-leven tetromino puzzles!" What you hear are ceaseless mutters: "Not another damn tetromino puzzle." Cleverness is not required; in fact it's useless. You just have to put pieces in the grid and shuffle them around until they fit. Again.
(I try to imagine replaying Talos, like I've replayed the Portal games. Going through the puzzles would be fast, if I remembered the solutions, or fun, if I had to figure them out again. That's the adventure tradition. Going through the tetromino locks -- would be exactly as tedious as it was the first time.)
This is laziness. The designers had a structure, and they forced themselves to put creative puzzles in the structure, and then there's the rest of this boilerplate where they said "Tetrominoes" and never thought about it again. Or maybe they thought about it and decided not to do anything about it.
What could they have done? Variations. Triangles and hexagons. Pieces that you have to stack instead of tile. Anti-tiles. Transparent tiles. Diagonal tiles. Tiles that you have to flip over. Letter tiles that make words. They could have gone metapuzzle and made you reuse the basic game mechanics in the tetromino puzzles. Add your own ideas here. Anything but another sixty-twelve rectangular tetromino grids.
The designers had so many tetromino puzzles lined up that they released the extras as a separate game on Steam. Look, people, when you can generate that many shallow variations off the cuff, it doesn't mean you have a puzzle bounty. It means your players got tired of that puzzle model back in the 1990s.
I could extend this complaint to other aspects of the game. The scenery is pretty, as I said, but perhaps there's too much terrain and not enough variation in the decor? I suppose I'm stretching my point. The three worlds are three distinctly different landscapes (and the hub world is a fourth); the zones within these are variations on the theme. They made an effort. If I weren't already exercised about repetition, I could let it slide. But... no, it's a bit too much terrain and not quite enough variation.
Do there need to be, what is it, ninety-odd puzzle areas? Portal and Portal 2 together don't have that many. Talos's are all good puzzles, sure, but you could have cut some. I know -- it's a thorny thicket of audience expectation -- "$35 game, gotta satisfy the players" -- there are always complainers.
But you could have tightened Talos up. Really. It would have been extra work, because editing is hard; killing your darlings is hard. But you'd have made a better game.
On the plus side, there's a clear distinction between the main puzzles (clearly presented, well-demarcated areas, smooth difficulty curve) and the optional "star" puzzles (out-of-the-box thinking, hidden secrets, random exploration required, goofily hard). That's the right way to put your wild ideas and extra content into the game.
(I'm a bit grumpy that the bonus stars unlock bonus puzzle areas. (With, yes, more tetromino locks.) The point is that players should solve all the main puzzles but struggle with the bonus puzzles; they'll only solve a few of those. (I only solved eleven.) But then why make some of the bonus puzzles extra-hard to reach? Offer them all, let people solve what they can solve.)
Nothing that I've said implies bad game design. These are places where the design could be better. The only failure is the failure to take that extra step. Or, okay, to run that extra mile. (The hardest mile of the marathon, to be sure.)
...And then we reach the boss puzzle, the place where I nearly stopped playing. I get that you want to impart a sense of urgency. But a time limit on thinky-puzzles just sucks. Lack of checkpoints, that sucks the giant oozing slimy banana-slug of suck.
What's that you say? Both Portal and Portal 2 had time limits in their endgame puzzles? Yes, but they had really good checkpointing. If the neurotoxin killed you, you restarted that stage of the endgame, working on the same task as before.
When you die in the Talos endgame (and you will), you start it all over. There are five stages; I must have repeated that first stage six times. Why the hell is that a good idea? I already solved it! Five times! Let me work on the puzzle that I'm stuck on!
Did you have any play-testers? Did they say "Oh, well, solving the same puzzle over and over is the best part of your game"? Or had you already destroyed their will to live with tetrominoes? What's frustrating is that if there had been checkpoints, the time limit wouldn't have bugged me; and if there had been no time limit, the lack of checkpoints wouldn't have bugged me. (Much.)
I got through it eventually. (After giving up, going to bed, and re-launching the game the next day. Not eagerly; with fear and trepidation and grumpiness.) I got the good ending (or as good as it gets without obsessively walk-through-ing the bonus stars, which I don't intend to do).
...I haven't discussed the script or the narrative, and I should, because they're solid. Talos uses the "trawl historical databases about the end of civilization" story model, well-known from games such as (sorry) Portal. Then, slowly, a more interactive element intrudes.
This isn't the usual sort of "I am an NPC, you are a PC, let's have a conversation that moves the story along" thing. I mean -- it is, but the format is -- okay, this is going to sound silly -- the format is a sophomore late-night stoned philosophy bull session.
Let me back up. The concern of Talos is free will and moral agency. The interactive dialogue is an interrogation of your ideas on those topics. It asks you questions and then (in the manner of all sophomore stoned philosophy sessions) tries to undermine your answers with thought experiments and more questions.
Of course (and ironically) the machinery behind this is a bog-standard menu-choice dialogue tree. (With some state.) But it carries off the illusion surprisingly well, just by tracking your answers and reflecting them back at you. It's a sneaky trickster character, so its voice shifts occasionally, which keeps it feeling fresh. And since any sophomore argument about free will and morality can be summed up in one line, and demolished in another line, the dialogue-tree format actually fits really well.
I don't think it's revolutionary IF technique. It wouldn't apply to most games. But it's a nice marriage of theme to a familiar form.
So that's what I've got. I recommend The Talos Principle -- with reservations. No, I haven't talked about the good puzzle design; there's plenty of good in there. You'll enjoy the game. You just have to get through a lot of frustrating moments as well.The United Kingdom’s Hanham Hall Development is the largest eco-village aspiration to date. Designed by HTA and funded by Barratt Developments and the Homes & Communities Agency, there are a rumored 188-195 zero carbon homes in the overall housing scheme. The development will include an onsite biomass CHP plant, strategically placed reed beds, shops for farmers to sell their goods, bicycle storage throughout, and a carefully crafted drainage system. Hanham Hall is the first major eco city underway that is part of the government’s Carbon Challenge Programme. The government has set a goal for all new builds to be zero carbon by 2016. It looks as though they are six years ahead of the curve.
Built on the site of a former hospital, which is being transformed into a new community center, each house in the Hanham Development will be free of VOCs, to help ensure a healthy, eco-friendly lifestyle for residents. SIPS panels will be used as the main structural element throughout the development, with the addition of other energy efficient materials. Recycling of materials onsite will ensure a zero carbon footprint. Construction is currently underway, and the first homes are slated for completion in 2010.
Via: The Architect’s Journal
+ Challenge Carbon Programme
+ HTACNBC Jamie Dimon said yesterday that "there have been so many flaws in mortgages that it's been an unmitigated disaster" and the system is in serious need of an overhaul.
"We just really need to clean it up for the sake of everybody," he said on a conference call, acc cording to Bloomberg, "and everybody is going to sue everybody else, and it's going to go on for a long time."
No-one knows that better than Dimon, whose bank, JP Morgan, could pay between $20 - $25 billion to fight lawsuits stemming from issues related to faulty mortgages prior to and during the financial crisis, according to bank analyst Chris Whalen.
"JPMorgan disclosed about $2.5 billion in second-quarter costs tied to faulty mortgages and foreclosures," according to Bloomberg. "The bank added $1.27 billion to litigation reserves, mostly for mortgage matters, and incurred $1 billion of expenses tied to foreclosures."“Life is short, though I keep this from my children.”
Photo by Daniel Munoz/Getty Images
Poet Maggie Smith, author of 2005’s Lamp of the Body, 2015’s The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and of the forthcoming collection Weep Up, has been on the country’s mind and social media feeds since her gorgeous poem “Good Bones” caught fire, spreading across the Internet after the Orlando massacre.* “Life is short and the world/ is at least half terrible,” she writes, “though I keep this from my children.”
I spoke to Smith on the phone for a few minutes as she prepared to go pick up her son from daycare.
Talk me through this poem and what you were going for.
I think of this poem, and many of the poems I’ve written since having children, as being conflicted: How do we love this world as it is, with all of its flaws and dangers, and how do we to teach our kids to love it? How do we “sell them the world” without lying to them about its realities? How do we let them see the rotten parts—because we must, eventually—and how do we empower them to do good and force change?
It uses repetition so wonderfully—
Thank you! I think of repetition in this poem as being a way to turn a difficult, multifaceted idea in my hands—and head. A way to look at an issue from different angles rather than in a one- or two-dimensional way. Repetition here seems to be a way to chip away at the issues in the poem and dig deeper and deeper into the speaker’s anxiety about the world and what kind of home it will be for her children.
Do you have themes you keep returning to in your work?
Yes, absolutely—memory, mortality, myth, motherhood, and plenty of other things that don’t start with M, I’m sure. Landscape and loss, if we want to get some Ls in there.
What’s the role of art, and poetry specifically, in the wake of a tragedy like Orlando?
That’s a big question! I will say this: Sometimes I forget that poetry can do real, tangible work. It’s a “machine made of words,” after all, as William Carlos Williams famously wrote. It can soothe us. It can articulate things we’ve felt but haven’t put into words. Granted, I would prefer better gun control, better mental health support—and we do need to do better in the U.S. by our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. That’s the big, necessary work we need to be doing right now. But I also see how poetry can be a light when things get dark.
What’s it like to write something that resonates with so many people?
When I wrote the poem, I could not have imagined the reach it would have. I’m stunned, to be honest, and incredibly moved.
Quick! What are two great poems we should all read right now?
That’s so hard—even harder than the “art after tragedy” question! But two must reads, now and always, are Keith Leonard’s “Ode to the Unsayable” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do.”
Read more from Slate on the Orlando nightclub shooting.
*Correction, June 19: This post originally referred to Smith’s 2015 poetry collection as “forthcoming.”Police say Hannah Sabata, who is accused of robbing a bank in Waco, Nebraska, posted a video on YouTube bragging about the crime (video below).
York County Sheriff Dale Radcliff told KETV-TV that the video will be used as evidence against Sabata in connection with a robbery at the Cornerstone Bank.
She faces robbery and theft charges, reports KETV-TV.
The video was posted the same day Sabata was arrested and shows a woman holding handwritten signs that say she robbed a bank and stole a car. She then holds a bundle of money in front of the camera, all set to music.
The video caption says: "I just stole a car and robbed a bank. Now I'm rich, I can pay off my college financial aid, and tomorrow I'm going for a shopping spree."
The woman also laments how authorities took her baby and charged her with neglect.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
KETV-TV obtained Sabata’s records, which shows the state took her son away last month, weeks before the robbery.
Police found the cash, sunglasses, a pink backpack and license plates from the stolen vehicle in Sabata’s house, which were seen in the bank’s surveillance video.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
undefinedSurvival simulation games are pretty serious. Sometimes you just want to shoot things without having to question whether it's the right thing to do. Sometimes you want shooting to always be the answer to a problem. To sate these urges, Adam Woolridge of Rust studio Facepunch Studios has just announced Riftlight, an arcade shooter with what he describes as 'light-RPG' elements. According to the game's first development blog, Riftlight will also feature looting, abilities and talent trees.
So far there are three classes, including Ranged, Caster and Melee. These are all pretty self-explanatory, though the Melee class is likely to raise some eyebrows. According to Woolridge, he wanted to include “a class that was different to what you'd expect from a shooter game”. A class that can't shoot is definitely different.
Interestingly, each playthrough will be different: level layout and missions will be entirely random, according to Woolridge. Mention is also made of a 'random item generator', meaning there's probably no end to the novelty of looting. The game supports 4-player coop, and Woolridge seems pretty keen to get a playable version out as soon as possible.
"I want it to be colourful and different," Woolridge says of the game, "not just screens and screens of black space and white stars. You're not gonna need a dictionary on standby to look up space-words or a Maths degree just to understand which gun to equip on your ship. The one that does the most damage is the best gun, and it'll just say so."
Sounds good. There's a very early gameplay video of Riftlight on the Facepunch website, as well as a bunch of concept art.Shaun Marsh is a doubt for the first Ashes Test due to a back injury
Australian batsman Shaun Marsh has signed a two-year contract as Glamorgan's new overseas player.
Left-hander Marsh, 34, has been recalled to his national Test squad for the Ashes series against England.
He previously played Twenty20 cricket for Glamorgan in 2012, and spent part of 2017 with Yorkshire.
Marsh will arrive after a likely appearance in the Indian Premier League [IPL] and will play in all three formats for the Welsh county.
He has represented Australia in 23 Tests, 53 one-day internationals and 15 T20 internationals since his debut in 2008, winning his latest recall on the back of strong domestic form for Western Australia.
His previous spell with Glamorgan saw him top their T20 batting averages in the rain-hit 2012 campaign, scoring 209 runs at an average of 52, and he is set to bat in the top three to replace the newly-retired Jacques Rudolph.
Media playback is not supported on this device Croft delighted to sign Ashes batsman Marsh
"I'm glad to be back. Securing my county future for the long term has always appealed to me so I jumped at the opportunity when it came," Marsh told the Glamorgan website.
"There is a lot of exciting young talent at the club, and hopefully I can put in some good performances so we can bring some silverware to Wales."
Marsh played alongside Glamorgan Championship captain Michael Hogan for Western Australia as well as in Wales.
"Fantastic news for us, a quality signing because he's a very good cricketer in all formats and will really help us to develop our younger guys", Hogan told BBC Sport Wales.
"I think he can adapt to any conditions, he's got a good defence and he can be attacking when he needs to be, but one thing that excites me is that he's really tough and has got a lot of presence out in the middle."
Glamorgan say they will engage another overseas player to cover the opening weeks of the season if Marsh is signed by an IPL franchise, as expected.Father Immanuel Dabaghian, one of Baghdad’s last surviving priests, is expecting a quiet Christmas. To join him in the Church of the Virgin Mary means two hours of security checks and a body search at the door, and even then there’s no guarantee of survival. Islamist gunmen massacred 58 people in a nearby church last year, and fresh graffiti warns remaining worshippers that they could be next.
Of the country’s 1.4 million Christians, about two thirds have now fled. Although the British Government is reluctant to recognise it, a new evil is sweeping the Middle East: religious cleansing. The attacks, which peak at Christmas, have already spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians have seen their churches firebombed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Tunisia, priests are being murdered. Maronite Christians in Lebanon have, for the first time, become targets of bombing campaigns. Christians in Syria, who have suffered as much as anyone from the Assad regime, now pray for its survival. If it falls, and the Islamists triumph, persecution may begin in earnest.
The idea of Christianity as a kind of contagion that is foreign to the Arab world is bizarre: it is, of course, a Middle Eastern religion successfully exported to the pagan West. Those feet, in ancient times, came nowhere near England’s mountains green. The Nativity is a Middle Eastern story about a child born to a Jewish mother, whose first visitors were three wise Iranians and who was then swept off to Egypt to escape Roman persecution.
His Apostles later scattered to Libya, Turkey and Iraq, to establish the Christian communities that are now under threat. For most of history, they have coexisted happily with Muslims: dressing the same way, even celebrating each other’s festivals. The rise of the veil, and other cultural dividing lines, is a relatively modern phenomenon.
These dividing lines are now being made into battle lines by hardline Salafists, who are emerging as victors of the Arab Spring. They belong to the same mutant strain of Sunni Islam which inspired al-Qaeda. Their agenda is sectarian warfare, and they loathe Shia Islam as much as they do Christians and Jews. Their enemy lies not over a border, but in a church, synagogue or Shia mosque. The Salafists may be detested by the Muslim mainstream. But as they are finding out, you don’t need to be popular to seize power in a post-dictatorship Arab world – you just need to be the best organised. The West is so obsessed with government structure that it doesn’t notice when power lies elsewhere, and Islamist death squads are executing barbers and unveiled women in places like Basra.
Two years ago, the idea of such bloody sectarianism would have sounded like a macabre fantasy in a country as civilised as Egypt. After al-Qaeda bombed a church on New Year’s Day, Muslim elders sat in the front pews forming a human shield and defying the terrorists. But moderate Egyptians are now losing this power struggle. The killing has started, with another 25 Copts murdered in October. Tens of thousands of Egypt’s Christians have already joined their Iraqi counterparts in exile: as Iraq proved, one death can lead to a thousand emigrations. The Salafists are finding it staggeringly easy to realise their fantasy of a “purer” Egypt.
The Arab Spring was always going to mean danger for religious minorities, unleashing the Islamic extremists who previously were kept at bay. For all their evil, the old secular tyrants abused their victims equally, whether they wore the cross, hijab or skullcap. This year’s revolutions are marked by the utter absence of any leaders-in-waiting. History has repeatedly shown how, under such circumstances, regime change can be followed by a descent into sectarian chaos. Extremists can easily start fights along religious or ethnic lines by assassinating a leader, or blowing up a shrine. The result can be civil war (as with Bosnia and Rwanda), even leading to partition (as with India and Cyprus).
The Foreign Office has been typically slow to recognise the gathering threat, despite repeated warnings. The biggest one of all came a fortnight ago, when the Archbishop of Canterbury opened a gripping debate in the Lords about the widening persecutions, and what the Government ought to do. Lord Patten, the former education secretary, revealed that he spent a year failing to persuade the Foreign Office to help a group of Anglicans in the Anatolian peninsula, who are banned from worshipping in any public place. “'The answer was no,’ he said. 'They would not approach the Turkish government to ask, 'Please can you ease up a bit?’” But when German Catholics were having trouble in the same place, Angela Merkel’s government intervened immediately, working with the Turks to send a Catholic priest to hold public worship.
So why the British reticence? It might be that the Foreign Office sees this as part of a soppy equalities agenda, unworthy of diplomatic attention. Those who have raised the issue directly with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, say he is unenthusiastic. When Mr Hague visited Algeria recently, he did not raise its ban on any Christian activity outside state-licensed buildings.
When challenged, ministers deplore persecution in general – but, seemingly, not so much that they’d do something like pick up the phone to Ankara. Yet there is plenty Britain can do. Countries could be denied aid until Christians (or Jews, or Sunnis) are allowed to worship freely. British diplomats could be empowered, even instructed, to advocate freedom of religion. When a peer of the realm alerts the Foreign Office to some persecuted Anglicans, a red alert ought to sound. Mr Hague might even publish an annual audit of religious freedom in various countries, making clear its importance to Britain. It might make its own estimate about the scale of the flood of refugees.
The Foreign Office did not realise the full evil of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans until it was too late: it did not take civil tensions seriously enough. It can do better now, making clear that it regards religious cleansing as an emerging evil that ought to be confronted wherever it is being incubated. Article 18 of the UN Charter of Human Rights guarantees freedom of religion – and yet outright religious oppression is quietly ignored, from Saudi Arabia to the Maldives. For ages, Iran has been able to persecute Baha’is with a minimum of fuss kicked up in the West. The ayatollahs are now turning the screw on Christians, with 300 arrested in the past year.
Speaking in that House of Lords debate were men to whom the idea of religious cleansing is anything but abstract. Lord (Dolar) Popat fled Uganda when Idi Amin turned on the Indians in 1971. Hindus, he said, are taught that it is a sin to be prejudiced against anyone. But it is “an even greater sin to witness persecution, then sit back and do nothing to stop it”. Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, said his parents were once victims of the same evil that now confronts Christians. He quoted Martin Luther King: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”
Our friends in the Middle East are all waiting to hear from HM Government. Perhaps, in the new year, it might have something to say.Following the announcement of its next-generation flagship Galaxy S III smartphone, Samsung’s mobile boss JK Shin has revealed that the South Korea-based consumer electronics giant has its sights set sky high in 2012. According to Shin, Samsung is looking to sell 200 million smartphones this year, increasing its share of the global market to between 23% and 24%, up from 21.1% in 2011, MarketWatch reports. According to the latest numbers from market research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung is well on its way to achieving the lofty goal; the firm estimates that Samsung sold 44.5 million smartphones into sales channels during the first quarter, pushing the company past Apple to become the No.1 vendor in the world. Shin also noted that the Galaxy S III includes various software and design modifications that will help it avoid becoming a target in the numerous patent cases Samsung currently faces.
ReadFocus Features’ third movie with director Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled, will open on June 23 in select cities with a further expansion on June 30. Focus has worldwide rights to the film, and UIP will handle abroad next summer. Production is already underway in Louisiana. Beguiled stars Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning and Colin Farrell, and it’s based on the same novel by Thomas Cullinan as the 1971 Don Siegel movie starring Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page. Pic is set at a Virginia girls’ school in 1864. As the Civil War rages, The Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies has been sheltered from the outside world— until the day a wounded Union soldier is discovered nearby and taken in. Production designer Anne Ross reteams with Coppola for the fifth time while costume designer Stacey Battat marks her fourth collaboration with the director. DP Philippe Le Sourd is shooting Beguiled in 35MM. Coppola’s Lost in Translation from Focus earned her a 2004 screenplay Oscar win as well as three noms for best picture, best actor Bill Murray and director.M illions in Venezuela suffer food and medicine shortages and the absurd ramifications of living in the world’s most distorted economy. I have watched people fighting for hours at supermarkets over a bag of pasta, screaming, “We want food.” I’ve crossed the Colombian border with engineers as they smuggle petrol or toothpaste to make far more money than they’d earn in their profession. I’ve watched people grow thin in my six years based in Venezuela as a foreign correspondent.
The country’s once-lauded bolivar currency has collapsed by well over 99 percent against the dollar since President Nicolas Maduro came to power in April 2013. That means what $1,000 worth of local currency bought then would now be worth just over 50 cents. To put this in context, most Venezuelans earn the equivalent of around $5 a month.
The fundamental problem is the currency controls brought in a decade and a half ago in order to curb capital flight. The government pegged the bolivar to the U.S. dollar at a rate that became less and less realistic over time, spurring a black market in which Venezuelans now need almost 45,000 bolivars to buy $1 - though the government insists still that at its strongest rate, just 10 bolivars can buy a greenback.
Three years ago, I decided to cut through some of the opacity behind Venezuela’s mind-boggling crisis—and also plug inefficiencies in the way news outlets and financial analysts obtain, parse, and publish data.
Scraping
Initially, I just wanted to graph the various exchange rates over time, to show the ludicrous collapse and the incredible spreads between them - the root of distortions, shortages, and corruption. That data is held in various spreadsheets on the websites of the central bank and the leading black market indicator, DolarToday. It is anything but clean, so I wrote code in PHP with a mySQL database—a popular combination for web development I learned as a teenager —in order to clean it up, put it into my own databases, and display it on the web.
I created a website to post the graphs in early 2015, and kept my server scraping for a few months, while I worked on more traditional journalism.
Photo: Girish Gupta
Over months, the number of visits to my web site ticked up to a few hundred per day, without any promotion beyond a few tweets. I was surprised to receive emails every few days thanking me for the work and offering suggestions. Unlike in more stable economies, Venezuelans are glued to their exchange rates, reserves, and money supply, which can fluctuate more in a day than other countries’ do in a decade.
Photo: Girish Gupta
Creating the 'Venezuela Econ' App
Encouraged by the positive responses, in January 2016 I decided to create an app to complement the web site. I partly just wanted an excuse to learn Swift, the Apple-developed language for use in lieu of Objective-C.
Building up the iOS app alone was somewhat isolating as Venezuela does not have a large tech community. Thankfully, Google, Stackoverflow and websites like Codementor, which pairs you up with a more experienced developer, helped overcome that void. I had very helpful one-on-one sessions with developers from San Francisco to Belgrade.
Photo: Girish Gupta
I launched the iOS app in May 2016 and was amazed by the response. I was expecting a couple of dozen downloads from friends, but nearly 200 people got it on the first day. I put out a more substantial second version a few months later, making major backend code improvements and adding more indicators.
Given Venezuelans have become so poor, Apple devices are rare and many asked for an Android version. I did not want to port the app— that is, use a machine to “translate” it from one language to another, which is somewhat analogous to using Google Translate—but I was reluctant to invest time in learning Java.
Yet I did and it paid off. I had the Android app up and running by late 2016, and users did indeed rocket.
Photo: Girish GuptaCountries in which FinSpy servers were detected by Citizen Lab. Click here for an expanded version. Map courtesy of John Scott-Railton/Citizen Lab.
It is designed to secretly infiltrate targeted computers or mobile phones to monitor communications and siphon data. Now, a controversial surveillance Trojan sold to law enforcement and intelligence agencies has been linked to 25 countries across the world—with new research revealing the extent of what it calls “the unchecked global proliferation” of government-grade spy tools.
A report published today by security experts at Citizen Lab discloses what it says are the locations of servers used to control sophisticated surveillance technology sold by Gamma Group—and the list of countries implicated is extensive, from Qatar and Mongolia to the United States and Canada.
Gamma’s “FinSpy” can bypass antivirus systems, record Skype chats and emails, log what targets are typing on their keyboards, and even conduct “live surveillance” through a user’s webcam or “silently extract” files from a computer’s hard disk, according to marketing materials published by WikiLeaks. Gamma says it sells the software to authorities to help them monitor “bad guys” like terrorists and organized crime gangs. However, a growing body of evidence suggests the tool has been obtained by repressive governments that have used it to target political opponents and activists.
Citizen Lab, which is based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, disclosed today that it has identified 36 active servers in a total of 25 countries used to control deployments of FinSpy. The countries are: Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.
The group says that the discovery of FinSpy servers in a country does not mean it is necessarily being used by that country’s law enforcement or intelligence agencies, because the servers could have been purchased by actors from any country and used as a “proxy” service. Given that the United States has shown up on the list linked to a series of FinSpy servers, I asked the FBI whether it had purchased Gamma’s surveillance technology. Bureau spokesman Christopher Allen said as a matter of policy he could not “confirm specific products or services that the FBI may or may not purchase or use.” The report also noted that one of six U.S. spy servers is registered to Verizon Wireless. Debra Lewis, a spokeswoman for Verizon, told me she was “not aware of this” but would look into it. She had not provided any further comment at the time of publication.
What the findings do conclusively show, the Citizen Lab report says, are “troubling cases of FinSpy in countries with dismal human rights track records, and politically repressive regimes.” In Ethiopia, for instance, the group was able to identify images of an opposition political party called Ginbot 7 designed to be used as “bait” to infect users with the Trojan. The researchers were also able to obtain a sample of FinSpy designed to infiltrate mobile phones intended for use in Vietnam, a country with a record of suppressing all forms of political dissent. This builds on a Citizen Lab report last year that revealed how Gamma’s surveillance technology was used to target Bahraini activists, and follows a wider trend of other Western-made spy tools being used against journalists and dissidents in countries notorious for cracking down pro-democracy activities.
Gamma, which was yesterday dubbed a “corporate enemy” of the Internet in a report by Reporters Without Borders, had not responded to an emailed request for comment at the time of publication. In January, the company’s spokesman Martin Muench told me during a lengthy exchange that Gamma adhered to German, U.K., and U.S. export regulations and “does not discuss its client base, its exports, or any of the operations which its clients may or may not be undertaking.”The African National Congress (ANC) call to abandon the willing buyer-willing seller land-redistribution policy is reckless, said agricultural union TAU SA on Monday.
“It is reckless for a governing party to announce one-sidedly that the principle of willing buyer, willing seller will be abandoned,” said TAU SA president Ben Marais in a statement.
Statements like these could do great harm to the country, given the current global economic climate, in which markets and investors were very sensitive to political statements.
On Sunday, the ANC called for the scrapping of laws allowing farmers to set a price for land to be redistributed, reported Agence France-Presse. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said “the willing buyer-willing seller clause has to be abandoned”. This after the party and its alliance partners held a summit to review economic policy.
“Land redistribution cannot depend on the willingness of those who own to sell,” he said.
He said there should be an evaluation of land |
have much broad political appeal, given the clear failure of trickle-down economics to boost the fortunes of poor and middle-class families in the Reagan-Bush era.
A more tempting target is the federal payroll tax, since most middle-income households (and more than 80 percent of those in the second income quintile) pay more in payroll tax than in federal income tax. A 2 percent payroll tax cut significantly boosted working-class incomes in 2011 and 2012, but it expired as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal following the 2012 election. (Republicans had not yet found economic populism; Democrats were squeamish about violating the pretend-sanctity of the Social Security trust fund; and both parties were consumed with the question of whether multimillionaires would keep their Bush tax cuts.) Reducing the payroll tax could be quick, efficient, and politically appealing.
Another promising target for populist tax reform is the earned income tax credit (EITC) for the working poor. Rubio, Paul Ryan, and other Republicans going back to Ronald Reagan have periodically supported significant expansion of the EITC, especially if the alternative is a minimum wage hike. Many conservatives see the EITC as “a stepping stone toward economic independence” for low-income workers, who often face even higher marginal tax rates than top earners do, once the cost of foregone means-tested government benefits is factored in. By rewarding work—and sparing low-wage employers from footing the bill—the EITC offers redistribution with a palatable conservative face.
What about the cost? Democrats have proposed paying for working-class tax cuts by raising taxes on the usual suspects, including top earners and financial speculators. That’s a popular position, but not one that faux-populists like Bush, Romney, and Rubio are likely to embrace. Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer wants to raise the federal gas tax by $1 per gallon and use the proceeds to reduce the payroll tax. That would be enormously sensible, especially in a moment of historically low gas prices; but Krauthammer acknowledges that the proposal has as much chance as “Don Quixote with windmills.” Thus, the most likely basis for “an economic populist message” on the Republican side—and for any policy agreement before or after the 2016 election—will be to hide the price tag, counting on the shrinking federal budget deficit to trump the always-selective conservative concern for fiscal prudence.
Is that an economic populism consistent with “conservative principles”? Sort of. In any case, it may have to do, if Republicans want “to address a political weakness that helped sink the party’s last White House nominee.”Spain's conservative Popular Party member Esperanza Aguirre, seen in Madrid on May 24, 2015, was questioned in another scandal involving alleged embezzlement by members of the Madrid chapter of the party (AFP Photo/Dani Pozo)
Madrid (AFP) - An ex-communist retired judge is locked in a showdown with a countess for control of Madrid city hall in an election that could deal a stunning blow to Spain's leaders.
The ruling Popular Party candidate Esperanza Aguirre, 63 and a countess by marriage, squeaked ahead in Sunday's vote, winning 21 council seats in the city her party has run for 23 years.
Aguirre is seen as a hard case in a party with its share of strong personalities -- but she got a run for her money from "Indignada" candidate and fellow blonde grandmother Manuela Carmena.
The 71-year-old was quietly enjoying her retirement last year when friends of the protest party Podemos called asking her to run for mayor of Madrid.
At first she told them she was too old, but they were keen for the gravitas she would bring after a career spent defending the labour movement under the Franco dictatorship and later as a UN human rights rapporteur.
"The calls started getting more frequent. Friends started telling me: 'Get involved, girl. They need someone with experience and lots of ideas'."
Months later, she was standing hearing the cheers of supporters yelling "Manuela for mayor!"
Manuela led Ahora Madrid, a group spawned by the anti-austerity "Indignado" street protest movement that made front pages worldwide in 2011, and fully backed by Podemos, the movement's political heir.
Her team won 20 council seats to Aguirre's 21 and she could yet beat her to the mayor's seat if she forges an alliance with the mainstream opposition Socialists, who came third.
"We elderly people do not have a future, but we do have a past and I want to dedicate it to you, the young people," she was quoted as saying in a recent interview with online newspaper El Confidencial.
- Red Manuela -
Aguirre almost went to court for driving away when policemen questioned her over a parking infraction in Madrid last year.
She bounced back from that run-in ahead of the May 24 city election, appearing in public walking her Jack Russell dog, Pecas, and in traditional costume at Madrid's annual folk festival.
The run-in summed up the defiant style of Aguirre, an avowed admirer of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Aguirre clashed in a tart televised debate with the softly-spoken Carmena ahead of Sunday's vote.
With a piercing gaze through her spectacles, Carmena blasted Aguirre and her party.
"I don't understand, Esperanza, why you still want to govern after all the dreadful harm you have done."
Aguirre dismissed Carmena's social policies, witheringly telling her: "You do not have the monopoly of compassion."
Among other campaign pledges, Carmena has promised to stamp out corruption, develop public transport, increase subsidies for poor families and slash the mayor's salary by more than half.
Her mild demeanour belies her serious and sometimes dangerous past.
She was branded a "red" as a member of the outlawed Communist party under dictator General Francisco Franco.
She gets around on a bicycle these days but once had to go everywhere with a bodyguard.
A far-right group launched an attack on her firm in 1977 which killed several of her colleagues.
When Aguirre accused her of freeing from prison a member of the armed Basque separatist group ETA, Carmena retorted that she herself had also been named as a target by the group.
- Adventures of 'Espe' -
Culture minister under former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and later regional president of greater Madrid, "Espe" Aguirre has also had a career marked by dramatic incidents.
In 2008 she was in Bombay during a wave of deadly Islamist attacks that struck the hotel she was staying in on an official visit. She described walking barefoot through pools of blood to escape.
Three years earlier she had emerged unhurt along with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy from a helicopter crash.
In her campaign for mayor she promised to defend businesses and said public services should be provided "at the lowest cost possible".
She said she would build skating rinks in children's playgrounds, provide free WiFi, clear tramps off the streets, lower taxes and end Madrid's system of "money-grabbing fines".Submitted by Candi MC
Pieces of fabric woven in a particular pattern
Put them together and suddenly they matter
“It’s a symbol!” They teach
“We must fight for it!” They preach
You hang it high with pride to show your jingoistic behavior
But, it’s a “meaning” that means nothing to its maker
Pieces of fabric woven together
Lives are lost, families changed forever
With your hand on your heart you swear your unwavering allegiance
Eyes wide shut as we slowly lose our freedoms
You promise to be loyal, to commit to the superior fabric
Many die for it, even lie for it, leaving their life behind for it
Mothers, sisters, wives: they cry for it
You call them a hero in the name of fabric
Destroy red, white, or blue fabric, that’s just fine
Destroy them together, you’ve committed a federal crime
Little do you understand that the symbol of this great land
Began as just a marketing plan, a money making strategy
And your allegiance has led our country to death and tragedy
“I pledge no Allegiance to the fabric of the Divided States of America and to the Chinese factories by which it was made, one nation deep in debt, divisible, with Liberty and Justice for none.”Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved APD released photos from an allegedly stolen camera in order to find the owner (APD Photo)
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved APD released photos from an allegedly stolen camera in order to find the owner (APD Photo)
AUSTIN (KXAN) -- Austin police are hoping they can reunite someone with their camera, after they recovered it along with other stolen items at the beginning of the month.
A man called police on Nov. 8 and said his car had been "rummaged through," and he later found missing items posted to sales websites, according to an APD release. The victim connected with the seller, later identified as Juan Charles Gurley, 19. He allegedly admitted to stealing the property, and the victim teamed up with APD to set up a meeting time with the Gurley. He faces a Burglary of a Vehicle charge.
Officers not only found that victim's items, but others that also appear to have been stolen, APD said. One of those is a FujiFilm X10. Investigators couldn't find a recent report of one being stolen, so they decided to share some of the pictures with the public to help them find the owner. APD said the photos appear to have been taken outside around the end of September.
Anyone who may know anyone who is in the photos can let police know by calling 512-974-9211.
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved APD released photos from an allegedly stolen camera in order to find the owner (APD Photo)
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved APD released photos from an allegedly stolen camera in order to find the owner (APD Photo)
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved APD released photos from an allegedly stolen camera in order to find the owner (APD Photo)When it comes to electric cars, it’s all about the battery. Well, it’s not quite that simple, but given how important the battery is to the cost, range and performance of the vehicle, it’s pretty close.
When someone is considering purchasing their first electric car, they will certainly have a lot of questions.
The one question that seems to be on nearly everyone’s list is: “How long will the battery last?”
if (pl_is_mobile()) {? }?
The problem is, it’s been very hard to answer that question authoritatively because we just haven’t had enough data. That’s because modern electric cars that are powered by high-voltage lithium ion battery packs have been on sale for less than ten years, and long term testing results simply weren’t available. In fact, the Nissan LEAF was the first high-volume all-electric car brought to market, and that model has only been on sale for a little over six years.
Nissan’s early LEAF battery woes
if (pl_is_mobile()) {? }?
Some of the early Nissan LEAFs had premature battery degradation issues, particularly those that were in service in hot climate areas like Arizona.
It became such a problem that Nissan changed the chemistry of their batteries in 2015 to a more temperature-tolerant version and announced an improved battery warranty to ease the concerns of current owners and future buyers.
The negative press from this problem threatened to set back the advancement of all makes of electric cars, because it brought to light the possibility of EV battery packs failing earlier than previously predicted. However, this was a self-inflicted wound, in my opinion. Nissan elected to bring the LEAF to market with a simple air-cooled battery pack, instead of employing a sophisticated liquid-based system like Tesla and GM were already using back then. The decision to do so allowed for a lower MSRP, as well as a shorter R&D period, but most likely contributed to the early degradation problems that some LEAF owners experienced.
Tesla and GM batteries performing well
Fortunately, the other mass-market EV manufacturers that launched their respective cars earlier in the decade have not had the same battery degradation issues that Nissan experienced. Both the Chevrolet Volt and the Tesla Model S have complex, liquid-based thermal management systems and the battery packs of both of these vehicles seem to be holding up very well over time.
In fact, Plug In America has been collecting data from hundreds of high-mileage Model S owners, and has built a database of battery degradation rates. They’ve found that the average Model S owner is experiencing a loss of only 2.3 miles of range for every 10,000 miles driven. Considering all Tesla vehicles offer more than 200 miles of range, an estimated loss of only 23 miles of range for every 100,000 miles of driving is very good. Obviously that the rate of 2.3 miles of loss per 10,000 will likely accelerate at some point, because battery capacity loss isn’t linear, but all of the vehicles in the study had more than 50,000 miles. That made them good candidates to study the loss of range over time. General Motors has similarly reported no problems with Volt battery packs experiencing early capacity loss.
How’s my BMW i3’s battery holding up?
BMW launched their first retail all-electric car, the i3 in Europe in late 2013. Here in the North America, the first i3 deliveries started in May of 2014. I actually took delivery of the first i3 REx in the US and I drive more than the average person, so I have one of the highest mileage i3s on the road.
I’m a couple weeks shy of my three-year anniversary with the car and I have 70,000 miles on the odometer. I know I’m only one sample, but if what I’ve experienced turns out to be the norm, then i3 owners are going to be very happy with how their battery holds up over time.
BMW is one of the few EV manufacturers that offer a clear battery capacity loss warranty, and has guaranteed at least 70% capacity for 8 years or 100,000 miles. The stated usable capacity for the 2014 i3 is 18.8 kWh. Therefore, the battery would need to degrade to 13.15 kWh to trigger a warranty claim.
Methods used to arrive at my conclusion
I’ve found that even though the range estimator does a pretty good job for daily driving, it’s not nearly accurate enough to use for recording and documenting the true range of the vehicle. Instead, I have two other types of data points that helped form the basis of my conclusions regarding the current state of health of my battery.
First, I frequently record my trip mileage and remaining state of charge before I plug in. This gives me a more accurate view of how far I can go per charge than what the range estimator provides. (Frequently called the GOM or Guess-O-Meter by some EV enthusiasts) The fact that I have an i3 with range extender complicates it a little, because the range extender turns on when the SOC in under 7%. Therefore, I only have access to 93% of the usable capacity of the battery before the REx fires up.
The simple formula I use is arrived at by dividing the number of miles driven by the percentage of battery used. That value will be how many miles (or what percentage of 1 mile) the car has traveled for every 1% of battery used. I then need to multiply that by.93 (100% minus the 7% buffer) and I then have how many miles the car would have been able to go if I had continued driving until the REx turned on.
Examples:
Starting SOC: 100%
Ending SOC: 45%
SOC used: 55%
Miles driven: 45
(45/55) x.93 =.76 (76 miles per charge)
Starting SOC: 92%
Ending SOC: 8%
SOC used: 84%
Miles driven: 67
(67/84) x.93 =.74 (74 miles per charge)
When using this method to gauge battery performance it’s important to record the ambient temperature if you live in an area that experiences moderate to extreme cold and hot temperatures. These temperature swings will affect the car’s range. The cold weather has a much more dramatic effect than hot weather does, and it’s important to compare the present figures with past data from the same time of the year, when temperatures were similar.
For the purpose of this comparison I’m stating figures that were gathered when the temperatures were between 60 degrees and 80 degrees, which is close to the optimum operating temperature range for the i3’s battery. For instance in the coldest months of the year, with temperatures below 20 degrees, my average electric range was as low as only 55 miles per charge.
The second method I used involves the car’s onboard diagnostics tool meant for service personnel, called the hidden service menu. This offers an estimate of the battery’s state of health. The onboard computer calls it the “Batt.Kapa.Max” and it displays the amount of usable capacity (not total capacity) in kWh. This number isn’t exactly accurate – it’s an estimate, and I caution i3 owners from looking at it and treating it as a precise fact. In order to use this estimate to really help you understand and monitor your battery’s capacity, you need to check it frequently, and chart the readings on a graph. The number provided can swing as much as 2 kWh up or down on a daily basis, so it’s clearly not precise.
Don’t panic if you check it one day and the reading is unusually low. What I’ve found is that to get a good reading you should drain the battery as low as you can, and then check the reading once it’s fully recharged. The battery should also be as close to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, as colder temperature give a false reading that is slightly lower than the true value. BMW has warned against relying on this since it is an estimate. The only way to get a truly accurate measurement (for warranty claims) is to have a BMW service department perform a test.
BMW claimed that the usable capacity for the 2014 – 2016 i3s was 18.8 kWh. However, some owners have seen as high as 19.9 kWh available when they’ve checked the Batt.Kapa.Max reading.
This can either be attributed to an inaccurately high reading (remember this is not a precise reading), or that BMW has actually opened up more than the 18.8 kWh they claim is available. The highest reading I have ever seen on my car was 19.2 kWh, and the lowest was 16.1 (in the winter). When my car was new the average reading in favorable conditions was about 19 kWh. Today, my average reading is now about 18.2 kWh. If these average readings are correct, it would mean that I’ve lost about.8 kWh of usable capacity after 36 months, 70,000 miles and approximately 1,000 complete charging cycles. (I’ve probably plugged in closer to 2,000 times, but my average trip between plugging in is only about 37 miles).
The.8 kWh loss of usable capacity seems to be in line with my recorded range data. Since I’m averaging about 4 mi per kWh, I should be witnessing a loss of about 3 miles of range, (.8 x 4 = 3.2) which is exactly what my range readings have recorded.
When the car was new, I was averaging 78 miles per charge in favorable weather conditions; it’s now down to 75 miles per charge. That’s pretty impressive since the EPA range rating for the 2014 i3 REx was 72 miles per charge. So I’m still averaging more than the EPA range after three years and 70,000 miles. Since both measurement methods equate to about a 4% capacity loss, I’m pretty confident that they validate each other. Therefore, the 4% is correct, or at least very close to the actual capacity loss
This should be very encouraging for existing i3 owners, and help to alleviate any anxiety that those currently considering the purchase of an i3 might have.
I have to believe that the sophisticated thermal management system that BMW used in the i3 is partially responsible for the excellent long-term performance of the Samsung battery cells used in the car.
If my experience holds true for the majority of the i3 fleet, this is good news not only for BMW, but also for the entire EV industry. Battery capacity loss concerns are on the minds of many potential consumers that are interested in entering into the world of electric cars. Continued positive reports on battery life will help to alleviate those worries and give the entire industry a boost of confidence.
However, as I said above my experience is just one data point, there’s a lot more information needed before we know conclusively how long these packs will last, but this indeed very encouraging. Based on my personal findings, I suspect that BMW won’t have to worry about paying out too many battery capacity-loss warranty claims.
[Source: InsideEVsWe are mortal enemies. Sworn enemies. Two sides of the battlefield. Two corners of the ring. In one corner, the asshole 1st Assistant Director stands with his/her army of loud and often obnoxious minions designed to move work along effectively and quickly. In the other corner, a pretentious DP stands with his/her army of particular OCD minions designed to work precariously and meticulously. The two represent the GOOD, FAST, CHEAP (Pick two) triangle and their needs are often counterproductive to the other’s.
So how the hell does a movie ever get made without it looking like a scene out of Braveheart?
The AD/DP relationship may be the most important one on set. Directors often pick their DPs, so their relationship is pretty set from the get-go. DPs very rarely get to pick who the AD is, although they sometimes request a specific type of AD that they know will work with their style. Sometimes, it’s vice-versa, and the AD suggests DPs that fit the director’s vision the best. Mostly, though, on the indie level, we are two separate entities who have never spoken before or have only seen each other’s name on a shared facebook contact.
DPs also often forget that they are MANAGEMENT. Since most of them never worked in the production department and either came up from the grip & electric department or the camera team, they’re not used to being looked at as a leader on the set. Some of them cannot deal and never DP again, some completely rise to the occasion, and others… well, they just get abusive. The AD keeps them in line, especially if this is their first rodeo. But we keep them in line by showing them the means of management. Like ADs, DPs are the department heads for several departments. Sometimes managing a crew that size is overwhelming and you lose yourself in the process.
I look at DPs as lead actors. Immensely talented, immensely creative, and oftentimes, immensely difficult. I don’t mean that in a negative way. DPs, like good actors, have a process that works for them to do their jobs and do it well and that process commands respect and attention. Unfortunately, it sometimes creates an imbalance in the production. Their attention to detail may be incredibly amazing and perfect on all fronts, but it can be time consuming and sometimes very expensive in terms of the overall production. If you’re Hollywood, that’s not an issue. If you’re an indie feature (and if you’re reading this blog, most likely you are), sometimes you simply cannot afford that.
ADs help good DPs get their best shots across and make wise decisions in regards to the shotlist and timing. Unfortunately, you will need to make compromises. A lot of indies run for a total of 18-25 shooting days. On a script with 110 pages on average and a budget of $50,000 to $300,000, you’re looking at quite the ambitious shooting schedule with not much room for overrun or experimentation. There is a balance that absolutely needs to happen with the quality and with the reality of the project. If your AD & DP are on good communicating terms, there’s a fighting chance for your script, your budget, and your schedule. If there isn’t, you end up with a film half-finished beautifully and the rest is obviously rushed and half assed.
Prioritizing the shotlist is a majorly important step for ADs & DPs to make to keep both schedule and quality on the same level. Sit down with the DP and figure out the priority shots versus the bonus shots or the not-so-glamorous shots. Make sure you give them their beauty shots, don’t take away everything until you’re looking at WIDE MASTER - MED 2-SHOT - CU - CU - INSERT, that’s a pretty boring formula for most genres of movies. Make sure the DP has their chance in the sun and give them a few big dollies/steadicams/cranes each day. But make sure they know these pretty important shots have timeframes and if we start losing time with them, we will lose bonus shots or not-so-priority shots to make the day and not have to reschedule.
Good DPs who have strong relationships with the AD may argue about their shotlist, but they know the compromises that need to be made and will rise to the challenge, looking at it as a creative solution instead of an annoying problem. Some will eliminate the “boring” shots entirely by creating one or two big multi-point dolly shots from different angles. Some will go entirely on the steadicam to create constant movement in a 2 5/8th page dialogue scene. Some will think of interesting static shots that say more than “this person is talking” and eliminate the need for additional shots to get the point across.
Good DPs also understand that having a movie beautifully half-shot is a waste of time. It’s not even a reel piece. And it certainly will hurt a DP’s reputation on the indie level to leave productions unfinished or with only half good shots and a big bunch of rushed crap. They understand they are managers and need to manage not only the look of the shot, but the time it will take to get that look and be reasonable. They know it’s important to keep an open and honest communication with the AD.
DPs also need to understand that most crews on the indie level are hardly making their day rate and very rarely are compensated overtime or meal penalties. The more we work an underpaid, exhausted crew, the more shots will suffer, accidents will occur, and camera & lighting equipment will be damaged (all of these things decrease the quality of movies, regardless of budget). The AD/DP relationship becomes important here too since the AD can keep the DP in line by pointing out when crews are starting to make sloppy mistakes, or if taking too long on one set will put us into an unpaid overtime with a forced call the next day, resulting in less sleep/recharging for the crew. It’s important that ADs present a reasonable timeframe for lighting/camera set ups and request blocking/camera rehearsals from the DP often to make sure we’re all on the same page and not wasting time on an unwanted set up.
It’s not always going to be roses for ADs and DPs on set due to the very nature of our positions, but if you sit down and look at what we have in common, we can find that understanding and create the balance an indie production needs to not only look good, but be on schedule. ADs and DPs can hug it out. They can even be friends when the crew is not looking.Dialogue trees during cut scenes force you to engage with the storyline.
The volume of voice work is massive. Kinda like this structure.
The sci-fi setting means you'll ditch the bow for a blaster.
Companions, like Trandoshan hunter Qyzen Fess here, are used in unique ways in SWTOR.
The folks at BioWare did something a little crazy recently--they allowed us to preview the first few levels of the Republic side of Star Wars: The Old Republic at our own leisure (and just in time to steal some buzz from BlizzCon, too). For us, that meant no more guilty looks at YouTube leaks or shouldering our way through long lines at Comic Con; instead, we could trot about the galaxy and pretend that we were that most coveted of species, the SW:TOR beta tester.It also gave us the chance to see if four of SWTOR's most hyped aspects really made the game as unique as we've been hearing--specifically its story, extensive voice acting, science fiction setting, and unique use of companions. They're unique, all right, but are they unique enough?The story (as much as I saw) is every bit as good as I'd hoped. Whether I was smack talking across the bleak wastes of Ord Mantell on my prissy smuggler or pontificating as a holier-than-thou Jedi Consular over the wooded paths of Tython, SWTOR pulled me into its world like no other MMO has pulled me before. Instead of warranting no more attention than being called "that guy over there," quest givers morphed into something approaching real people thanks to the intense conversation options that accompany the pick-up and turn-in of virtually every quest. In the best moments, I even remembered their names. By the time I was trotting through the Senate District in Coruscant, I felt as though I knew my character as well as I ever knew BioWare staples such as Revan or Hawke.That's not to say, of course, that other MMOS have exactly scrimped on story. Lord of the Rings Online has done a fair job of expanding Tolkien's base story for a few years now (and, indeed, SWTOR's storyline divisions into chapters echo the chapters of LOTRO's epic story), and Guild Wars featured an engaging story as well. But with its BioWare-themed conversational choice options, SWTOR takes the story concept and launches it into orbit. Not only does the need to respond to NPCs in the cinematics force you to engage with the storyline, but the need to choose specific responses alters the way other characters interact with you in cut scenes (even if it no longer affects whether your companions will leave you, as it did in early beta builds).Some of these responses are admittedly a little vague. While I was tampering with a courier robot to secure some dirt on an allegedly corrupt Coruscanti senator, the "light side" path had me giving some bogus documents to the person who assigned me the quest. The "dark side" option would have allowed me to give the real documents to the quest giver, who came off as some youthful idealist. One can only imagine what Julian Assange would have thought of this. To be fair, SWTOR's options are always marked with a handy "light side" or "dark side" icon which simplifies these things, but quests such as these would have caused no small amount of headaches in a "normal" BioWare game.BioWare's big claim that each class has a different story is also a little misleading. Sure, each class has its own companions and interactive cinematics, but questing leaves you with the impression that there are only two truly independent experiences for the Republic with some added fluff for each of the four classes. On the Republic side, for instance, Jedi Consulars and Jedi Knights share many of the same experiences on Tython; and Smugglers and Troopers share many of the same experiences on Ord Mantell. And by the time you arrive on Coruscant, most of the quests are shared anyway. Regardless, SWTOR never fails to deliver a great story experience, whether it's in the copious codex entries that impart lore about almost every aspect of the Star Wars universe or in loading screen that reminds you where your character stands in the story line.Story is good and all, but nothing captures the Star Wars experience so well as the jaw-dropping range of voice work needed to bring that story to life. And, for the most part, SWTOR's voice acting is immune to criticism. I've seen a handful of players grumble about the few aliens who speak in clicks and boops instead of the Queen's English, but the general quality is such that I actually prefer the voice work given to my human male Jedi Consular over most of Mark Meer's work with the male Shepard in the Mass Effect games.My minor concerns with the voice acting lie instead with the technical aspects involved. Even with a computer that can handle the game on the highest settings, conversations currently take around three seconds to pop up, which somewhat interrupts the general flow of the game. Even if that's basically a non-issue, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheerof voiced content. Sometimes, when I'm just jogging past what I'm sure is a run of the mill "go kill 15 robots" quest, I just want to pick it up and keep running to my original destination. But no, SWTOR repeatedly insists on making me listen to some chump as he sets the task in some world-shattering context, often in more time than it actually takes to finish the quest. Speed-levelers, beware--this is not the game for you.A decade on, I have to admit that I'm not really tired of frolicking with elves and donning a digital robe and wizard hat for whatever fantasy-themed MMO is currently in fashion. Even so, I'm well aware that many players are. SWTOR's science fiction ambiance does much to fill that gap, and the franchise's curious mix of energy swords and laser blasters wears the genre's conventions much more snugly than would-be contenders such as Star Trek Online. Of course, ditching the fantasy setting for science fiction isn't a recipe for a sure winner (just ask Star Trek Online and Star Wars Galaxies), but BioWare seems to have found a good middle ground here that should satisfy many players.This would be a good spot to talk in depth about SWTOR's space combat system, but BioWare won't let us say anything about that for now. So instead I'll just knock how long it takes to get to them. Every time you want to make like the Millennium Falcon, you usually need to run a marathon to get to the spaceport from wherever you're at, then zone into the docking bay, and then run to your ship and zone into it. Then you do some things that I'm not allowed to talk about because of the NDA, and then you run out again to do the same process in reverse. I do love the ship idea since it could eventually lead to customizable player housings of sorts, but, as it is, the whole experience pushes the concept of immersion to its limits.Companions have always been in MMOs in some form or another, but they're usually soulless NPCs whose personality consists of some name from a random generator at best. Not so in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Here, your companions have their own back-stories that intersect with your own, and their perception of you changes depending on how you answer questions in the dealings with other people. In the past, these decisions could send them packing for the farthest star system, but now they just grumble about you on the few times when they're allowed to interject.From a gameplay standpoint, they're powerful enough that they can step in for a player in a flashpoint (or instanced dungeon), even to the point of making a game that already seems a little too easy even easier, particularly if they can heal. I also enjoyed that they help with your professions, since you can send them off to look for supplies while you're hanging around Coruscant or slicing through soloable droids. They even help with keeping your bags empty since you can send them off to sell useless junk while you continue questing far away from the nearest vendor. A friend of mine rightfully fears that they'll be little more than glorified pets later on in the game (once the story options run out), but I was grateful for their inclusion as I leveled. They added just the right "BioWare touch."I should point out that I originally intended for this to be an article to focus on five unique aspects of Star Wars: The Old Republic. I tried, I really did. But whenever I tried to give another aspect its own section (such as how most builds can do decent damage, even healing specs), it seemed like it wasn't so great a departure from what some other games have done in the past. Even here, I can't help but believe that my split of story and voice acting here seems forced.Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. Perhaps SWTOR shouldn't be judged by the quantity of the aspects that make it unique, but rather by their quality. Much of the rest of the game bears the undeniable influence of World of Warcraft as heavily as a Wookiee wears his fur, and I can already hear the cries of players who'll bemoan BioWare's reliance on aging MMO conventions as soon as the game goes live. But consider this. I'm a person who needs to play multiple MMOs at a time, and SWTOR was one of the first ones that I kept wanting to come back to after I'd stepped away from it.Maybe the Force is strong with this one, after all.Voice work and story take SWTOR a long way, but are these two features, along with the two others mentioned above, enough to get you to pay for a $15-per-month sub?2:29pm: MLB.com’s Alden Gonzalez hears that the Angels aren’t seriously involved in the market for Heyward at this point (or for any top outfielder, for that matter), though he does add that said stance can change quickly (Twitter link).
1:31pm: ESPN’s Jayson Stark hears that Heyward isn’t looking for a 10-year deal in the $200MM range as has oft been speculated, but rather something more like eight or nine years at $24MM per season (Twitter link).
1:17pm: The Angels are also among the finalists for Heyward, reports Morosi (via Twitter).
11:37am: Cardinals GM John Mozeliak said he hasn’t been given any sort of indication as to the timing of a Heyward decision, tweets Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
10:00am: Alex Pavlovic of CSN Bay Area tweets that the Giants checked in with Heyward but never got to the point of making an offer. There’s a sense in Nashville that Heyward will come off the board today, Pavlovic adds.
9:34am: Talks between Jason Heyward and interested parties are beginning to progress, according to Jon Morosi and Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports report (Twitter link). The Cubs and Cardinals are among the finalists, per the report, but there are other yet-unnamed clubs in the mix for Heyward’s services.
Heyward’s name has come up most frequently in connection to the Cardinals and Cubs as of late, though he’s also been linked to the Angels and Giants in various reports, as each club could use a left-handed corner bat. The Giants, in particular, were said |
hands. Like, writing Howard in the comic I have HIS fate in my hands, but being able to determine his abilities and characteristics for others to play with was a whole new, strange level. Also, it was great being able to translate some of his lesser-known abilities into game-attacks, like his ability to complain to people for so long that they eventually fall asleep. Now that’s VIDEO GAME CANON.
Was there anything you really wanted to do to Howard creatively that you couldn’t do in the comics that you got to do in this game?
Well, Marvel’s been pretty open to letting me do ALMOST anything I’ve pitched them (apparently I can’t use Batman? OR his archenemy Superman??), so the amount of freedom has been pretty much the same. The big thing I’m looking forward to with the game is seeing Joe’s illustrations moving around and sparkling the way they deserve to.
What does Howard bring to the game as a character? (Aside from WAUGH! and a sense of humor, obviously.)
What I love about the game is the mix-and-match quality of it. Like, you can determine that Spider-Man and Black Widow can fight Juggernaut. But throwing Howard in there just elevates things to a ridiculous level. The idea of a battle featuring Hulk, Storm and Howard taking on Venom where Howard can actually get in the winning blow just makes me laugh. He does not belong in this game in the same way that he doesn’t belong in the Marvel Universe, which is the funniest part.
Who are you most excited to have Howard interact with in this huge world of characters?
I’m really hoping there’s a cut scene where Howard makes Spider-Man cry. And then they fight Dr. Doom together. And then Howard makes HIM cry.
Marvel
Joe, what was the difference in designing Howard for this game as opposed to drawing him for the comic? Did you focus on your version that you created with Chip or the older version of Howard, or a hybrid of them?
JOE QUINONES: I kept with my version of the character, but got to render him with the loving care that I don’t typically have time for in the comic. There’s certainly touches of the Gerber Howard here though. Heck, even the 1986 movie version.
How does it feel to see Howard in a Marvel Puzzle Quest game? And not only that, a Howard you helped re-vamp?
It’s really exciting to see Howard pop up in other media since Chip and my run began on the book. I’ve grown to love Howard over the course of our run, so it’s affirming to see that love reflected back at us.
Where does he “excel,” so to speak, with other Marvel Puzzle Quest characters? Who are you most excited to have Howard interact with?
Well he’s very dapper, so his fashion is on point (let’s see Hulk tie a windsor knot). It’s easy to ruffle his feathers, and in his case it’s not just a turn of phrase. Um… he knows Quack Fu? As for who I’m most looking forward to seeing Howard interact with? Pretty much every match up is hilarious, but I’m particularly tickled at the thought of a confounded Victor Von Doom facing off against our not so mighty mallard.
How do you think players will respond to being able to have Howard as a character in their game? He’s been so well-received as a character and he’s had such a break-out success among fans.
Confusion? Sadistic delight? Go easy on him, guys. He’s had a rough go.
Marvel
Marvel
MarvelFor the past several years, the Parks Conservancy has been working with the Find the Rivers! consortium and the Hill District community to develop a “greenprint” for the Hill. This new way of seeing the Hill District was widely celebrated with the release of the completed Greenprint plan in mid-June. The Greenprint’s goal is to establish the Hill as a healthy place where ecology and development can work hand-in-hand, creating “the Village in the Woods.”
The plan’s June 15 rollout was a daylong demonstration of key ideas. The project team, residents, and interns moved through the Hill, leaving traces behind to stimulate people’s awareness. They tied yellow cloths to trees to mark the future Coal Seam Trail, cleared overgrowth from the Chauncey Street Steps, and stenciled historic business names along Centre Avenue. The day closed with a sidewalk gallery of Greenprint drawings and plans.
What is the Greenprint?
The Greenprint project re-connects both the Hill District to its specific landscape and community members to the greater Pittsburgh area. It also strengthens social ties through linkages to adjacent neighborhoods. Fulfilling the plan is expected to attract outside visitors, encourage outdoor activity, provide new venues for public visual and performing arts, increase property value, and attract economic development.
The Greenprint has three core goals:
Establish a healthy place with urban development that works in concert with the natural ecology;
Identify projects and opportunities for leadership and innovation in a local economy; and
Reframe the identity of the Hill District as A Village in the Woods – an example of urban beauty.
The term “greenprint” adapts “blueprint” to denote the plan’s focus – land use and the identification of a network of public green spaces, overlooks, parks, streets, and trails that connect to key locations in the overall neighborhood and to sites in surrounding neighborhoods. It has been produced by analyzing green assets and engaging residents in planning ecologically sound development that will promote economic and public health benefits.
As an ecological framework to guide future development, the Greenprint defines three distinct regions:
The Woods, the Hill’s outer edge, wraps the community with dense vegetation.
The Village is a collection of diverse neighborhoods at the geographic center of the Hill.
Conveyance is the system that moves people, water, and wildlife through the Hill, highlighting historic stream paths.
A set of project initiatives have been designed to:
Expand the web of trees and green space that encircles the Hill District and extend it into the Village core;
Construct and improve strategically located steps and nearby pathways that are vital links for walking routes in the Hill; and
Recognize and enliven five blocks of Centre Avenue as the Hill’s core public space, to attract and support community use.
The Greenprint builds upon the Hill’s existing landscape resources to provide a framework for the Hill to retain its identity and capitalize on its geography. Historically, the community has been plagued by disinvestment and abandonment. That situation raises the question: “If the value of middle-to upper-class communities is directly related to their landscape context, why can’t urban neighborhoods take advantage of their unique landscapes?” That question is particularly relevant now that densities are reduced and industries have been removed from these natural settings.
Currently there is great interest in the Hill because of its proximity to downtown, Oakland, and the University. City government owns large parcels of land. Gentrification is real threat. How can urban communities, like the Hill, retain their identity and capitalize on their geography? The Greenprint builds upon the Hill’s existing landscape resources to provide a framework for wrestling with these huge challenges.
Read the Greenprint!
The Greenprint conceptual plan is now online. You can download a PDF here. (Please save to your desktop–it’s a large file!) To learn more about the project and see a timeline at a glance, visit our website.
Cliffside Park
One of the first priorities in the Hill District Greenprint is the renovation of Cliffside Park, a playground on Cliff Street. Planning for the project has already begun, with a goal of re-establishing the playground as a gathering place with a stunning view of the Allegheny River. The project will add vegetation to the surrounding streets to reinforce the connection to the Woods, and will improve recreational and programmed space within the park.
You can help get this project off the ground! The Parks Conservancy has been awarded $500,000 in state funding through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP). To access these funds, we must raise an additional $500,000. So when you donate to Cliffside Park, your gift will be matched 100%. Visit www.pittsburghparks.org/donate and choose Cliffside Park as your designation to take advantage of this great opportunity to double your gift.
Please Share!CLEVELAND, Ohio – In his head, T.J. Ward had imagined magnificent expressions of happiness, perhaps some kind of joyous dancing. For as long as he can remember, the Browns safety had elaborate plans for how he would celebrate his first touchdown in the NFL.
Because it also would be his first touchdown since high school.
But when Ward snagged the pass thrown by Buffalo backup quarterback Jeff Tuel in the fourth quarter, and dashed back 44 yards for the game-sealing touchdown, he froze.
"You know, I had a bunch of celebrations I was going to do when I scored a pick–six, but they all went out the window," Ward said. "It was just all adrenaline. That's why I did what I did. I almost fell on the bench trying to celebrate. It still felt good."
What he did was hesitate ever-so-briefly after reading Tuel's eyes and sliding in front of Bills receiver Robert Woods.
"It was kind of like I had to tell myself to run, almost," Ward admitted.
He remembered in time to score the touchdown that was the final nail in the coffin for the Bills as the Browns cruised to a 37-24 victory Thursday night at FirstEnergy Stadium.
"Obviously a huge play in the game," Browns coach Rob Chudzinski said. "He has just been doing everything right. He has been playing physical football from his position, and I have been real pleased with what he has been doing from a leadership standpoint. He was a captain for this game and came up with the big play."
In a week in which Browns cornerback Joe Haden lamented he had yet to record a pick-six in his NFL career and hoped it might come on the nationally televised game, it was his best friend on the team who accomplished the feat.
"I kind of felt like I got it," Haden said. "I almost passed out I was celebrating so hard for him."
It was Ward's second interception of the season, both meaningful in tight games (his first came in the second quarter of the Browns' 31-27 victory over Minnesota) and both coming in an important season for the fourth-year player. Ward is playing in the final year of his contract, and had no discussions with the Browns about an extension prior to the start of this season.
Unselfish in the Browns victory Thursday, however, Ward wouldn't gloat in front of media or in front of his buddy, Haden.
"That's my guy," Ward said of beating Haden to a pick-six. "He's probably going to get the next one. He was just as happy for me as I am for myself."
Ward wouldn't boast about his pick-six, wouldn't rub it in that he beat Haden to the accomplishment and only would gush about the total-team victory that came in the Browns triumph over the Bills.
"This game went up and down, we got good effort from the offense, defense and special teams -- and bad efforts from all three," Ward said. "This was really a team win."
Maybe, then, it's for the best that Ward's intended pick-six celebration evaporated from his mind as soon as he crossed the goal line. He didn't want to make it all about him, anyway.
"I just went over and went to see the fans to get that feeling of a pick-six," Ward said. "I had the Lambeau Leap."
Next time, though, be prepared for something different.Stanford center's memory a big edge for offense Center Conor McFadden's mind has provided offense with key edge
In football, images aren't everything, but they're important.
NFL teams have photos taken of each play from high above the press box and high above the end zones - one just before the snap and another about four seconds after the snap. Coordinators frequently review those shots with players, quarterbacks especially, after each possession.
In college ball, such photos are not allowed because of the financial costs.
The Stanford offense, however, has a different type of camera. It's inside the skull of 6-foot-3, 300-pound backup center Conor McFadden.
Let's say the Cardinal have just driven the length of the field in 15 plays. Offensive coordinator Mike Bloomgren wants to know what the opposing defense did on a 2nd-and-4 play back at midfield, or how the blocks went on a screen pass a few plays later.
McFadden will show him on the whiteboard he uses like an artist's canvas, recreating the play in X's and O's. Here's how the defense was set up. Here's who blitzed. Here's what the safeties did. Here's who blocked whom - or failed to - on that screen pass. Pick a play, any play.
"A lot of times guys know exactly what the guy over them did, but they can't draw the overall picture," Bloomgren said. "Sometimes we can get the picture painted, but it's never quite exact. With Conor, it's pretty exact, the way his memory is."
Stanford's Conor McFadden, (61) with a dry erase board and pen in hand as he watches the action for the sidelines, as the Stanford Cardinal went on to beat the California Golden Bears 63-13 in the 116th Big Game match up on Saturday Nov. 23, 2013 at Stanford stadium in Palo Alto, Ca. less Stanford's Conor McFadden, (61) with a dry erase board and pen in hand as he watches the action for the sidelines, as the Stanford Cardinal went on to beat the California Golden Bears 63-13 in the 116th Big... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Stanford center's memory a big edge for offense 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
Bloomgren asks his linemen for their input, too, "but (McFadden) is our starting point. He's really amazing."
McFadden denies he has a photographic memory, although many people think he does. "I do think I've been given a gift," he said. "I think my memory is special. But I think it's been gained through work."
The Cardinal leave Thursday for Los Angeles to continue their preparations for the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day against Michigan State. It will be the final game of McFadden's football career.
He'll leave after the game to return home to Minnesota and help his father, Mike, in his campaign for the U.S. Senate. The elder McFadden, a businessman, is among several Republican hopefuls trying to unseat Democrat Al Franken.
Conor McFadden hopes to run for office himself someday. Maybe he'll be able to remember names and faces the way he can recall the details of a Stanford end-around.
He's the oldest of five siblings - one brother, Pat, is a freshman running back at Stanford - and honed his leadership skills at St. Thomas Academy in suburban Minneapolis as student-body president and commander of a Junior ROTC battalion.
"My mom didn't allow video games or TV in the house," he said. "As a sixth-grade boy, I hated it: My mom was the devil, the worst person ever. As a 21-year-old, I feel that was the best gift my mother could give to me."
He filled those hours by reading: ancient history, mythology, books about war like "The Iliad." "It was an amazing experience to be put in such a loving environment where my parents did have the guts to say no to me," he said. "I know how hard that is in today's world."
An all-state lineman, he weighed 260 pounds when he entered Stanford. Instead of gaining 20 or 30 pounds, he lost 20. "When you're too small and too slow, that's really not the combination you want," he said with a laugh.
Eventually he started packing on the weight, but he didn't play a down as a freshman or sophomore. Last season, he got into four games as a backup to Sam Schwartzstein. He played in two games this year, blocking for two touchdowns against Washington State and two against Cal.
His real value, though, was with his mind, not his muscle. He started diagramming plays his sophomore year. Stanford offensive linemen have to know their own assignments but also how the whole play is supposed to work, he said.
"That's been such a huge advantage for us in many of the games," he said. "We're able to outthink defenses as well as out-physical them. I wanted to be a part of that. I didn't like sitting on the sidelines and feel I was doing nothing. So I figured: Why not start drawing stuff up on the whiteboard?"
During a game against Washington, he was the first to notice that whenever quarterback Andrew Luck called an audible, the Huskies' safeties dropped back. The tip helped the Cardinal rush for a school-record 446 yards in a 65-21 rout.
"My part in it was extremely minor," McFadden said.
Bloomgren begs to differ. He thinks there's something special about McFadden's mind.
Bloomgren points out that it's extraordinary for anybody to see precisely how teams line up and how plays develop from the field level. That's why most coordinators watch the games from press boxes.
"I've been fortunate enough to be around a lot of smart people and people who could retain a lot of information," Bloomgren said. "I'm not sure I've ever been around anybody who could sequentially store this much information."
During this year's Pac-12 title game, McFadden noticed that Arizona State was blitzing with a safety instead of a cornerback, as it normally did.
"Little things like that can make a big difference," McFadden said. "It's like a chess match. Every play, there's a chance for a humongous difference-maker. If you can think two moves ahead of the person across from you, you have a big advantage."
He's majoring in public policy. "I would have majored in socializing," he said with a smile, "but unfortunately, they don't have that here."
Before he enters politics, he said, he wants to gain life experience - "maybe start a business or become a teacher or join the Army, one of the best leadership opportunities for a young person in the world."
Bloomgren thinks football could use his leadership skills and intelligence, not to mention his ability to diagram plays in his head.
"He would be an unbelievable coach, a guy I'd die to hire," he said. "He's going to change the world, so he'll never do that."We have evaluated the possibility that the action of voluntary exercise on the regulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a molecule important for rat hippocampal learning, could involve mechanisms of epigenetic regulation. We focused the studies on the Bdnf promoter IV, as this region is highly responsive to neuronal activity. We have found that exercise stimulates DNA demethylation in Bdnf promoter IV, and elevates levels of activated methyl-CpG-binding protein 2, as well as BDNF mRNA and protein in the rat hippocampus. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assay showed that exercise increases acetylation of histone H3, and protein assessment showed that exercise elevates the ratio of acetylated :total for histone H3 but had no effects on histone H4 levels. Exercise also reduces levels of the histone deacetylase 5 mRNA and protein implicated in the regulation of the Bdnf gene [N.M. Tsankova et al. (2006)Nat. Neurosci., 9, 519-525], but did not affect histone deacetylase 9. Exercise elevated the phosphorylated forms of calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II and cAMP response element binding protein, implicated in the pathways by which neural activity influences the epigenetic regulation of gene transcription, i.e. Bdnf. These results showing the influence of exercise on the remodeling of chromatin containing the Bdnf gene emphasize the importance of exercise on the control of gene transcription in the context of brain function and plasticity. Reported information about the impact of a behavior, inherently involved in the daily human routine, on the epigenome opens exciting new directions and therapeutic opportunities in the war against neurological and psychiatric disorders.
© 2010 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience © 2010 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Staples Canada closed 15 of its 331 stores in Canada at the end of September, saying it is shutting underperforming locations in an effort to improve its results.
The office supplies retailer has seen in-store sales slump as more orders, especially those from big businesses, move online.
In March, U.S. parent Staples Inc. announced a plan to shut as many as 225 stores in Canada and the U.S.
In Canada, it waited until the end of the important school supplies shopping system to shut 15 of its stores.
A Staples spokeswoman declined to say which stores were affected or how many people were laid off.
"For up-to-date information on local stores, customers can visit our store locator on Staples.ca. Beyond that, we don’t have any further information to share," she said in an email.
Rivals such as Grand & Toy and Office Depot are also closing retail stores to move all of their business online.
Staples must also compete with Amazon.com and Best Buy for e-commerce sales.
In its latest financial report for the second quarter, Staples reported sales of $5.2 billion, a decrease of two per cent compared to the second quarter of 2013. Its profit declined 19 per cent, from $103 million to $82 million.
It said it had closed 80 stores in North America so far this year and planned another 60 closures by the end of 2014.
CEO Ron Sargent said Staples had accelerated growth in its delivery business and introduced innovations such as in-store pickup windows for online orders to increase retail traffic. Staples has also widened its office supplies product line and built on its copy and printing business.
,View previous topic :: View next topic Author Message WindyCity
Joined: 26 Jun 2009
Posts: 16531
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 2:55 pm Post subject: Mock Offseason Feb 9th The new salary cap estimates put the salary cap at close to 130 million, which would mean the Bears have about 15 million dollars right now.
Releases [3.8 million Saved]
P Adam Podlesh [1 million]
WR Eric Weems [1 million]
RB Michael Bush [1.8 million]
Cap Space: 18.8 million
Re-Signings [16 million Spent]
C Roberto Garza 1 year 1 million/1 million guaranteed [1]
A veteran signal caller for a young and growing line I doubt he looks for a raise and he will be happy with another year at his current level.
LB D.J Williams 1 year 1.5 million/500K guaranteed [1.5]
A veteran presence that can allow the Bears to have a competent MLB while the young guys sort themselves out in training camp.
DT Jeremiah Ratliff 1 year 2.5 million/1 guaranteed [2.5]
He can provide valuable size and reps on the inside and is a very good run defender.
DE Corey Wootton 2 years 6 million/2 guaranteed [2]
Big, versatile, and young he fills the rotational and part time starter role of Izzy.
Year 1: 1 million base/1 million guaranteed [2]
Year 2: 3 million base/1 million guaranteed [4]
QB Josh McCown 2 years 3 million/1.5 guaranteed
He is the perfect back up in this system and with Jay's health question marks he is worth every penny and he wants to stay here as he is in the perfect situation.
Year 1: 500k base/.5 million guaranteed [1]
Year 2: 1 million base/1 million guaranteed [2]
CB Zackary Bowman 2 years 3 million/2 guaranteed
He played well enough to be the #3 CB and keep the seat warm for a drafted player.
Year 1: 1 million guaranteed [1]
Year 2: 1 million base/1 million guaranteed [2]
CB Sherrick McManis 2 years 2 million/500k guaranteed
Year 1: 500k base/500k guaranteed [1]
Year 2: 1 million base [1]
1 Year Deals [6 Million Spent]
S Anthony Walters [750K]
C Taylor Boggs [ERFA] 480K
LB Blake Costanzo [750K million]
OT Eben Britton [1.5 million]
S Craig Steltz [1 million]
LS Pat Mannely [1 million]
P Tress Way [500K]
Extensions/Restructures [10.8 Million Saved]
WR Brandon Marshall [1 year 9 million remaining] 3 years 39 million/24 guaranteed [4 years 48 million/24 guaranteed]
Marshall has 4 good years left with his size and a game not reliant on speed and the Bears can still afford to extend Jeffery in 2 years, by extending Marshall again like they do with Briggs. This duo needs to be together till the wheels fall off of Marshall and I am willing to sacrifice in other areas down the road.
Year 1: 6 million guaranteed [6]
Year 2: 8 million base/6 million guaranteed [14]
Year 3: 7 million base/6 million guaranteed [13]
Year 4: 9 million base/6 million guaranteed [15]
DE Julius Peppers [18.3 million cap hit] reduced to 10.5 million by cutting base salary to 6 million for 2014.
Cap Space: 13.6 million
_________________
John Fox
3-13 this season, 9-23 overall, 4-12 at home
Pathetic
Last edited by WindyCity on Sun Feb 09, 2014 2:59 pm; edited 3 times in total Back to top WindyCity
Joined: 26 Jun 2009
Posts: 16531
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 2:55 pm Post subject: Free Agents [9 Million Spent
S Jarius Byrd [Buffalo] 5 years 45 million/20 guaranteed
The Bears have not had a safety worth talking about since Mike Brown and it has left their defense unable to do some of the things that modern NFL teams are doing on defense. The Bears should finally solve the safety issue by signing a proven superstar. I would much rather have Wootton and Peppers starting at DE than I would Conte and Wright at S. I would also rather have Paea starting at DT than have Conte and Wright back. Byrd will allow the Bears to blitz more, play more man coverage and will give the pass rush an extra second to get to the QB as QBs will be less likely to test our back end.
Year 1: 6 million guaranteed [6]
Year 2: 4 million base/5 million guaranteed [9]
Year 3: 5 million base/5 million guaranteed [10]
Year 4: 6 million base/4 million guaranteed [10]
Year 5: 10 million base [10]
DT Clinton McDonald [Seattle] 4 years 16 million/6 guaranteed
The Bears need better depth on the interior of the line after the injuries last season. McDonald is a versatile player who has the strength and explosion to play the 1 gap NT spot, and can provide reps at DT if Donald is not ready to play full time. McDonald provides more interior power than players like Melton and Paea.
Year 1: 2 million guaranteed [2]
Year 2: 2 million base/2 million guaranteed [4]
Year 3: 2 million base/2 million guaranteed [4]
Year 4: 6 million base [6]
RB Anthony Dixon 2 years 2.5 million/1 guaranteed
A big powerful short yardage back that can provide a change up to Forte and will be cheaper and more consistent in the goal line area than Michael Bush. Dixon is also a special teams stand out which only increases his value.
Year 1: 1 million guaranteed [1]
Year 2: 1.5 million base [1.5]
Cap Space: 4.6 million
_________________
John Fox
3-13 this season, 9-23 overall, 4-12 at home
Pathetic The Bears have not had a safety worth talking about since Mike Brown and it has left their defense unable to do some of the things that modern NFL teams are doing on defense. The Bears should finally solve the safety issue by signing a proven superstar. I would much rather have Wootton and Peppers starting at DE than I would Conte and Wright at S. I would also rather have Paea starting at DT than have Conte and Wright back. Byrd will allow the Bears to blitz more, play more man coverage and will give the pass rush an extra second to get to the QB as QBs will be less likely to test our back end.Year 1: 6 million guaranteed [6]Year 2: 4 million base/5 million guaranteed [9]Year 3: 5 million base/5 million guaranteed [10]Year 4: 6 million base/4 million guaranteed [10]Year 5: 10 million base [10]The Bears need better depth on the interior of the line after the injuries last season. McDonald is a versatile player who has the strength and explosion to play the 1 gap NT spot, and can provide reps at DT if Donald is not ready to play full time. McDonald provides more interior power than players like Melton and Paea.Year 1: 2 million guaranteed [2]Year 2: 2 million base/2 million guaranteed [4]Year 3: 2 million base/2 million guaranteed [4]Year 4: 6 million base [6]A big powerful short yardage back that can provide a change up to Forte and will be cheaper and more consistent in the goal line area than Michael Bush. Dixon is also a special teams stand out which only increases his value.Year 1: 1 million guaranteed [1]Year 2: 1.5 million base [1.5]Cap Space: 4.6 million_________________John Fox3-13 this season, 9-23 overall, 4-12 at homePathetic
Last edited by WindyCity on Sun Feb 09, 2014 3:00 pm; edited 1 time in total Back to top WindyCity
Joined: 26 Jun 2009
Posts: 16531
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 2:56 pm Post subject: Draft
1[14] DT Aaron Donald [Pitt] 6'1" 290lbs.
The Bears need a 3 technique that can be disruptive as we saw what happens when that is missing in the defense. I think Melton will get a bigger offer in free agency than the Bears will want to match with his health question marks. Donald may not have ideal size and it may limit his versatility, but he is an elite inside pass rusher, his statistics are ridiculous, and he answered a ton of questions about whether he can match up with the big boys at the Senior Bowl. Donald has Geno Atkins type potential.
2[52] DE Jeremiah Attaochu [Georgia Tech] 6'3" 252lbs.
The Bears restructure Peppers and re-sign Wootton to give them solid starting DE tandem, but they need more pass rush from the DE spot. Even though McClellin failed I think that Emery wants a LEO type pure pass rusher that can play in rotation. Attaochu does not have the greatest size, but he has a nice burst, he has a very good inside move, and he looks dynamic when stunting. He has the power and burst to attack the OTs shoulder and accelerate to the QB. Attaochu will become the pass rush specialist that McClellin was suppose to be.
3[84] S Ahmad Dixon [Baylor] 6' 210lbs.
By signing Byrd the Bears have their center fielder that can QB the defense and allow the Bears to be creative on defense. What the Bears are still missing is a SS that can intimidate people, play the run, and blitz when called upon. Dixon may have some coverage liabilities, but he is one of the biggest hitters in the country and can immediately step in and provide more physicality in the secondary.
4. CB Terrence Mitchell [Oregon] 6' 190lbs.
Size, speed, and experience in a passing league give Mitchell starting potential down the road. Mitchell can come in and compete with Bowman opposite of Jennings. This is one of the weak positions that will remain on the defense, but with better safety play behind them and better pass rush in front of them the Bears should be able to survive some learning at 1 CB spot.
5. C Marcus Martin [USC] 6'3" 310lbs.
A big, squat C that has the size and base to hold up against the bigger DTs in the NFC North. Martin will compete with Boggs to be the C of the future while providing interior depth across the interior of the OL. Martin needs to continue to work on getting his body up to the NFL level and he will have the year to do that as Garza starts.
6. TE Richard Rodgers [Cal] 6'4" 245lbs.
An athletic TE that did not pull it all together in college, but he was on a bad team with bad QBs. Rodgers can provide depth behind Bennett and replace Rosario with a higher upside young player at the flex TE spot. There is a lot of potential with Rodgers.
6. WR Tevin Reese [Baylor] 5'10" 175lbs.
A pure speed player that can add a speed element to the WR core and possibly to the KR game. Reese does not have to provide anything right away and can simply add weight and develop like Wilson this season.
_________________
John Fox
3-13 this season, 9-23 overall, 4-12 at home
Pathetic The Bears need a 3 technique that can be disruptive as we saw what happens when that is missing in the defense. I think Melton will get a bigger offer in free agency than the Bears will want to match with his health question marks. Donald may not have ideal size and it may limit his versatility, but he is an elite inside pass rusher, his statistics are ridiculous, and he answered a ton of questions about whether he can match up with the big boys at the Senior Bowl. Donald has Geno Atkins type potential.The Bears restructure Peppers and re-sign Wootton to give them solid starting DE tandem, but they need more pass rush from the DE spot. Even though McClellin failed I think that Emery wants a LEO type pure pass rusher that can play in rotation. Attaochu does not have the greatest size, but he has a nice burst, he has a very good inside move, and he looks dynamic when stunting. He has the power and burst to attack the OTs shoulder and accelerate to the QB. Attaochu will become the pass rush specialist that McClellin was suppose to be.By signing Byrd the Bears have their center fielder that can QB the defense and allow the Bears to be creative on defense. What the Bears are still missing is a SS that can intimidate people, play the run, and blitz when called upon. Dixon may have some coverage liabilities, but he is one of the biggest hitters in the country and can immediately step in and provide more physicality in the secondary.Size, speed, and experience in a passing league give Mitchell starting potential down the road. Mitchell can come in and compete with Bowman opposite of Jennings. This is one of the weak positions that will remain on the defense, but with better safety play behind them and better pass rush in front of them the Bears should be able to survive some learning at 1 CB spot.A big, squat C that has the size and base to hold up against the bigger DTs in the NFC North. Martin will compete with Boggs to be the C of the future while providing interior depth across the interior of the OL. Martin needs to continue to work on getting his body up to the NFL level and he will have the year to do that as Garza starts.An athletic TE that did not pull it all together in college, but he was on a bad team with bad QBs. Rodgers can provide depth behind Bennett and replace Rosario with a higher upside young player at the flex TE spot. There is a lot of potential with Rodgers.A pure speed player that can add a speed element to the WR core and possibly to the KR game. Reese does not have to provide anything right away and can simply add weight and develop like Wilson this season._________________John Fox3-13 this season, 9-23 overall, 4-12 at homePathetic
Last edited by WindyCity on Sun Feb 09, 2014 3:01 pm; edited 1 time in total Back to top WindyCity
Joined: 26 Jun 2009
Posts: 16531
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 2:56 pm Post subject: Depth Chart
QB: Cutler, McCown
RB: Forte, Dixon, Ford
FB: Fiametta
WR: Marshall, Bennett
WR: Jeffery, Wilson, Reese
TE: Bennett, Rodgers, Onubon
LT: Bushrod
LG: Slauson
C: Garza, Martin, Boggs
RG: Long, Brown
RT: Mills, Britton
RE: Peppers, Bass
DT: Donald, Paea
NT: McDonald, Ratliff
LE: Wootton, Attaochu, Washington
SLB: McClellin, Costanzo
MLB: Williams, Bostic
WLB: Briggs, Greene
CB: Jennings, Bowman/Mitchell, McManis, Frey [NB]
FS: Byrd, Conte, Walter
SS: Dixon, Steltz
Passing Downs
RE: Peppers
DT: Donald
NT: McDonald/Paea
LE: Attaochu
_________________
John Fox
3-13 this season, 9-23 overall, 4-12 at home
Pathetic Back to top Roadrunner
Joined: 20 Mar 2013
Posts: 1157
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2014 5:22 pm Post subject: WindyCity wrote: Draft
1[14] DT Aaron Donald [Pitt] 6'1" 290lbs |
authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record."Anybody who thinks that they can influence me on that ground doesn't know me very well," Clinton said. | AP Photo Clinton to Wall Street: I will fight for more accountability
In her latest attempt to bolster her credibility amid skepticism about her ties to Wall Street, Hillary Clinton took to The New York Times to underscore her plan to rein in large financial institutions.
In an op-ed published Monday, Clinton reiterated that she would advocate tougher financial rules and penalties for executives and institutions that break the law.
Story Continued Below
“Republicans may have decided to forget about the financial crisis that caused so much devastation — but I haven’t,” the former secretary of state and New York senator wrote in the op-ed. “The proper role of Wall Street is to help Main Street grow and prosper. When our financial sector works the right way, it helps families buy their first homes, entrepreneurs start and grow small businesses and hardworking Americans save for retirement. Rather than pursuing the kind of high-stakes speculation that devastated our economy before, Wall Street should focus on building an economy that creates good-paying jobs, rising incomes and sound investments so that more families can achieve the security of a middle-class life.”
Clinton faced renewed scrutiny over her relationship with the financial world after remarks in November's Democratic debate in which she appeared to link the 9/11 attacks to significant contributions from Wall Street types, after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders commented on her accepting campaign contributions from Wall Street executives. “I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country,” Clinton said at the debate.
In an interview with Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning” aired Dec. 1, Clinton further defended her remarks.
“Anybody who thinks that they can influence me on that ground doesn't know me very well,” she said.There is a stigma that non-religious people are selfish, immoral, and do not volunteer. This is probably due to several reasons, but one could be that non-religious people may donate individually and do not have a church associated with them. Churches provide strong social networks and those social ties greatly increase the likelihood that one will give to charity. Sequentially, larger charity efforts allow for more people to become aware of the work being done. The non-religious community is growing, but is still quite small and loosely connected. However, secular humanists have been known come together and help out during tragedies. I recently had the experience of organizing one of these successful humanist charity campaigns.
A horrific tragedy occurred in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday, June 17th 2015. Dylan Roof went into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and killed nine people. Roof is deeply racist and committed this act of domestic terrorism in hopes of starting a “race war.” This gruesome act is an example of how racism and intolerance are still major problems for our country. Humanists condemn racism and intolerance and we wanted to help out those who suffered from this tragedy.
Directly after hearing the news, people in the South Carolina Facebook groups I’m involved with were discussing how we could help. Amy Monsky and I decided that a great way to help out would be to create an online campaign to support the families of the victims involved in the attack. This campaign was organized and spread by humanist groups, but anyone could donate. In just three days this campaign was shared thousands of times and raised over $12,000 from over 300 donations.
It might seem counterintuitive that a campaign organized by secular humanists to help religious people would be so successful. However, my response to that is simple: as humanists we aim to help out when people are in need. It doesn’t matter who the people are or what their religious beliefs are. The money is being donated through the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund, which helps the families pay for funeral costs, burial costs, counseling, and other expenses as some of the people killed were providing for their families. Even if some of the money finds its way back to the church, I don’t think humanists should be concerned with that. The church is part of a community that suffered a horrible event. Even if we are not religious, we should be happy to help their community heal.
I found this experience quite encouraging as I was overwhelmed with the prompt and enthusiastic support we received. It was beautiful to see the non-religious community put their differences aside and help out those in need. It was also great to see so many non-religious people condemn these actions of racism and hatred. As the humanist community grows and becomes more connected, it will continue to help out during catastrophes. Having an established network definitely facilitates being able to help and that is something we can learn from our religious neighbors.
Matthew Facciani (University of South Carolina)
Matthew graduated from Westminster College where he earned a B.A. in psychology with honors. After college, Facciani went on to pursue a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at The University of South Carolina. While in studying neuroscience, Facciani realized that he was more interested in studying human behavior from a broader perspective and switched into the sociology PhD program at the University of South Carolina. Outside of his academic work, Facciani gives talks and writes articles about science for general audiences and is also an activist for gender equality and sexual violence prevention. Learn more about Facciani’s work and follow him on Twitter @MatthewFacciani.MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A 17-year-old boy who was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison for his role in the brutal beating of a St. Paul man has now been charged with assaulting a corrections officer.
Cindarion Butler was an inmate at the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center when he allegedly refused to return to his cell and attacked a correctional officer around 7:25 p.m. on March 25.
According to the criminal complaint, Butler was being uncooperative regarding his vending privileges and when told he would lose privileges for his behavior, he replied, “I don’t care — I leave for prison tomorrow.”
Butler then refused to obey verbal commands and began sizing up the correctional officer, according to the charges.
Another deputy arrived to assist in escorting Butler back to his cell and while en route, Butler said, “I ain’t doing no 16 years” and swung at one of the officers, hitting him in the chest, according to the complaint.
The other officer grabbed Butler and a struggle ensued. Butler allegedly punched one officer several times and spat on the other while cursing at him.
The charges state Butler scratched the officer’s face and neck, trying to get to his eyes. Other officers arrived and Butler was eventually brought under control and escorted back to his cell.
Butler, of St. Paul, was 16 at the time of the brutal beating, but was tried as an adult back in January. The jury found him guilty of first-degree assault and first-degree aggravated robbery.
On the night of the beating, St. Paul Police officers say they found Ray Widstrand on Payne Avenue with blood coming from his nose and mouth. Witnesses said that members of the East Side Boys gang attacked Widstrand when he walked by a fight taking place between some women.
Widstrand’s injuries were so severe that they required facial reconstructive surgery.
Butler is now at the Lino Lakes Correctional Facility.John Maynard Keynes—not exactly history’s greatest opponent of government spending—is reported to have said he would be worried if government outlays ever surpassed 25 percent of GDP. Well, in recent years both American and British government expenditures have hovered around 40 percent of GDP. The bulk of that spending, perhaps as much as 70 percent in Britain, goes to feed the ravenous welfare state.
Clearly it’s time to question the welfare state. But such questions are too often viewed as taboo. Anyone who challenges it is viewed as seeking a return to the “dog-eat-dog” world of unfettered capitalism—a world where sellers supposedly exploited buyers, employers exploited workers, the rich exploited the poor.
But capitalism, to say nothing of poor old Fido, has gotten a bad rap.
Capitalism—real capitalism, not the mixed economies that have existed for the past century—is the system based on private property, free production, and voluntary trade. It’s not a zero-sum game where people battle over a fixed pie. Each person is free to create wealth and to trade it with others, such that they all benefit.
That’s the beauty of capitalism. Because all economic relationships are voluntary, people only enter into them when each party thinks it’s to his advantage. When you accept a job, for instance, it’s not because the employer forced you to work at the point of a gun. It’s because you valued the paycheck more than other possible uses of your time. It’s a gain for you and a gain for your employer. In some cases you may not be thrilled with the work or the pay, but the fact that a win may be smaller than you would have preferred doesn’t change the fact that it’s a win. And if what first seemed like a win turns out badly, you’re free to make a new bargain.
Capitalism isn’t dog-eat-dog: It’s win-win.
We don’t have capitalism anymore—not in Britain, not in the rest of Europe, not in the United States. What we have instead are massive welfare states. And if the false charge against capitalism is that it allows “the strong” to exploit “the weak,” then the true nature of the welfare state is that it allows “the weak”—i.e., the unproductive—to exploit “the strong”—i.e., the productive.
And exploiting they are. The Davey family, for instance, made headlines in 2010 for receiving £42,000 in state-provided benefits while driving a Mercedes, enjoying cutting-edge electronics, and continuing to have children (at the time of the story they had seven with another on the way). Mrs. Davey had never worked, and Mr. Davey had quit his job after he figured out he could do better by living on the dole. “I don’t feel bad about being subsidized by people who are working,” Mrs. Davey told The Daily Mail.
This sort of story does not represent some bizarre failure of the system—it captures the system’s spirit.
The truth is that the goal of the welfare state is to make the productive sacrifice for the unproductive. It establishes the principle that a person is entitled to state support simply by virtue of his need. But the state doesn’t have any money. In order to provide support, it has to take money from the people who earned it. Translation? A person’s need entitles him to your money. The less value he creates, the more rewards you owe him—and the more value you create, the greater your duty to serve him, and all the Daveys of the world. As Ayn Rand put it in her novel Atlas Shrugged, “If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf.”
How is that fair?
In place of capitalism’s philosophy of win-win, the welfare state puts everyone’s wealth up for grabs, ensuring that one person’s gain comes at his neighbor’s expense. Talk about dog-eat-dog.BANKEX Among The Leading 20 Token Sales Globally
BANKEX Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 21, 2017
BANKEX is now ranked among the leading 20 Token Sales globally, raising 60.000 ETH in just three weeks. The period of token sale will soon be over.
FinTech company BANKEX, developing the unique Proof-of-Asset Protocol for real world asset tokenization, has been assessed by ICO analytics group TokenData as among the top five active Token Sales and among the top twenty Token Sales’ of all time by funds attracted. 70% out of the available first stage BKX tokens, 56 million out of 80 million, have already been sold.
As BANKEX second stage tokens will only be sold to institutional clients, private investors are urged to take this final opportunity to join the running Token Sale and earn a bonus for their purchases.
Today, more than 4000 supporters have already joined the BANKEX token sale: bankex.com/account/signup
“We’re directing our attention about how to best allocate funds to developing products and services in ways that best serve the markets we are penetrating,” says the company’s Managing Director Konstantin Kurbatov. “We’ve got to use this momentum to maintain the level of excellence into our next steps.”
ICO analytics group TokenData.io
To drive further development, the company has created the BANKEX Foundation tasked with advancing the cause of new tech and making it accessible to everyone through developing global partnerships and supporting leaders in areas of finance, banking, Internet of Things, blockchain, manufacturing and related technologies.. The Foundation will be responsible primarily for 3 critical areas. First and foremost, work will continue on the development of the organization’s technical core. Second, the entity will conduct R&D for products and services. Lastly, it will create an educational program dedicated to blockchain technology. BANKEX token holders, developers, asset owners and other stakeholders are welcome aboard the BANKEX Foundation now.
BANKEX has partnered with a number of reputable corporations such as Microsoft Azure, ConsenSys formation Balanc3, Dostavista and the Symphony Foundation. Hollywood, California based MovieCoin has become the a client and is intent on using the PoA protocol to launch a new financing structure for film production. MovieCoin will the first class of Smart Assets issued on the BANKEX platform.
About BANKEX
Using landmark open source FinTech solutions, decentralized Bank-as-a-Service enterprise BANKEX aims to bridge the gap between the emerging blockchain sector and traditional finance. Deploying smart contracts and enabling tokenization, the platform powers off-balance sheet crowdfunding, chain finance and leverages external infrastructure, creating efficient and time effective solutions. Innovative BANKEX solutions have far-reaching consequences in the areas of their application and are poised to have transformative effects on the global finance and investment, as well as in micro-financing, real estate, the sphere of illiquid assets, natural resources, and futures markets.Hold this thought: To paraphrase the great Bob Hoffman, just when you think that if the Big Data babblers were to generate one more ounce of bull**** the entire f****** solar system would explode, what do they do? Exceed expectations.
I am a mild mannered person, but if there is one thing that irks me, it is when I hear variations on the theme of “Data Warehousing is Big Data”, “Big data is in many ways an evolution of data warehousing” and “with Big Data you no longer need a Data Warehouse”.
Big Data is not Data Warehousing, it is not the evolution of Data Warehousing and it is not a sensible and coherent alternative to Data Warehousing. No matter what certain vendors will put in their marketing brochures or stick up their noses.
In spite of all of the high-visibility screw-ups that have carried the name of Data Warehousing, even when they were not Data Warehouse projects at all, the definition, strategy, benefits and success stories of data warehousing are known, they are in the public domain and they are tangible.
Data Warehousing is a practical, rational and coherent way of providing information needed for strategic and tactical option-formulation and decision-making.
Data Warehousing is a strategy driven, business oriented and technology based business process.
We stock Data Warehouses with data that, in one way or another, comes from internal and optional external sources, and from structured and optional unstructured data. The process of getting data from a data source to the target Data Warehouse, involves extraction, scrubbing, transformation and loading, ETL for short.
Data Warehousing’s defining characteristics are:
Subject Oriented: Operational databases, such as order processing and payroll databases and ERP databases, are organized around business processes or functional areas. These databases grew out of the applications they served. Thus, the data was relative to the order processing application or the payroll application. Data on a particular subject, such as products or employees, was maintained separately (and usually inconsistently) in a number of different databases. In contrast, a data warehouse is organized around subjects. This subject orientation presents the data in a much easier-to-understand format for end users and non-IT business analysts.
Integrated: Integration of data within a warehouse is accomplished by making the data consistent in format, naming and other aspects. Operational databases, for historic reasons, often have major inconsistencies in data representation. For example, a set of operational databases may represent “male” and “female” by using codes such as “m” and “f”, by “1” and “2”, or by “b” and “g”. Often, the inconsistencies are more complex and subtle. In a Data Warehouse, on the other hand, data is always maintained in a consistent fashion.
Time Variant: Data warehouses are time variant in the sense that they maintain both historical and (nearly) current data. Operational databases, in contrast, contain only the most current, up-to-date data values. Furthermore, they generally maintain this information for no more than a year (and often much less). In contrast, data warehouses contain data that is generally loaded from the operational databases daily, weekly, or monthly, which is then typically maintained for a period of 3 to 10 years. This is a major difference between the two types of environments.
Historical information is of high importance to decision makers, who often want to understand trends and relationships between data. For example, the product manager for a Liquefied Natural Gas soda drink may want to see the relationship between coupon promotions and sales. This is information that is almost impossible – and certainly in most cases not cost effective – to determine with an operational database.
Non-Volatile: Non-volatility means that after the data warehouse is loaded there are no changes, inserts, or deletes performed against the informational database. The Data Warehouse is, of course, first loaded with cleaned, integrated and transformed data that originated in the operational databases.
We build Data Warehouses iteratively, a piece or two at a time, and each iteration is primarily a result of business requirements, and not technological considerations.
Each iteration of a Data Warehouse is well bound and understood – small enough to be deliverable in a short iteration, and large enough to be significant.
Conversely, Big Data is characterised as being about:
Massive volumes: so great are they that mainstream relational products and technologies such as Oracle, DB2 and Teradata just can’t hack it, and
High variety: not only structured data, but also the whole range of digital data, and
High velocity: the speed at which data is generated, transmitted and received.
These are known as the three Vs of Big Data, and they are subject to significant and debilitating contradictions, even amongst the gurus of Big Data (as I have commented elsewhere: Contradictions of Big Data).
From time to time, Big Data pundits slam Data Warehousing for not being able to cope with the Big Data type hacking that they are apparently used to carrying out, but this is a mistake of those who fail to recognise a false Data Warehouse when they see one.
So let’s call these false flag Data Warehouse projects something else, such as Data Doghouses.
“Data Doghouse, meet Pig Data.”
Failed or failing Data Doghouses fail for the same reasons that Big Data projects will frequently fail. Both will almost invariably fail to deliver artefacts on time and to expectations; there will be failures to deliver value or even simply to return a break even in costs versus benefits; and of course, there will be failures to deliver any recognisable insight.
Failure happens in Data Doghousing (and quite possibly in Big Data as well) because there is a lack of coherent and cohesive arguments for embarking on such endeavours in the first place; a lack of real business drivers; and, a lack of sense and sensibility.
There is also a willing tendency to ignore the advice of people who warn against joining in the Big Data hubris. Why do some many ignore the ulterior motives of interested parties who are solely engaged in riding on the faddish Big Data bandwagon to maximise the revenue they can milk off punters? Why do we entertain pundits and charlatans who ‘big up’ Big Data whilst simultaneously cultivating an ignorance of data architecture, data management and business realities?
Some people say that the main difference between Big Data and Data Warehousing is that Big Data is technology, and Data Warehousing is architecture.
Now, whilst I totally respect the views of the father of Data Warehousing himself, I also think that he was being far too kind to the Big Data technology camp. However, of course, that is Bill’s choice.
Let me put it this way, if Oracle gave me the code for Oracle 3, I could add 256 bit support, parallel processing and give it an interface makeover, and it would be 1000 times better than any Big Data technology currently in the market (and that version of Oracle is from about 1983).
Therefore, Data Warehousing has no serious competing paragon. Data Warehousing is a real architecture, it has real process methodologies, it is tried and proven, it has success stories that are no secrets, and these stories include details of data, applications and the names of the companies and people involved, and we can point at tangible benefits realised. It’s clear, it’s simple and it’s transparent.
Just like Big Data, right?
Well, no.
See what I mean?
Therefore, the next time someone says to you that Big Data will replace Data Warehousing or that Data Warehousing is Big Data, or any variations on that sort of ‘stupidity’ theme, you can now tell them to take a hike, in the confidence that you are on the side of reason.
Many thanks for reading.
More perspectives on Big Data
Aligning Big Data: http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aligning-big-data-martyn-jones
Big Data and the Analytics Data Store: http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-data-analytics-store-martyn-jones
A Modern Manager’s Guide to Big Data:http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/managers-guide-big-data-context-martyn-jones
Core Statistics coexisting with Data Warehousing
Accomodating Big Data
And a big thank you to Bill Inmon (the father of Data Warehousing and of DW 2.0)Spies live a life that’s as deadly as it is stylish. The cool cars, fancy gadgets and killer wardrobe are balanced against an array of death traps set by evil supervillains (mad scientist/industrialist types, not super powers) but it’s nice work if you can handle the lifestyle. I Expect You to Die puts you in the seat of a spy carrying out missions to take down a madman with too much money and a desire to spend it dominating the world, and it puts the Oculus Rift through its paces in the process.
I Expect You to Die initially came out as an experimental locked-room type of game for the DK2 version of the Rift and picked up a nice pile of awards, so now it’s being expanded to a full game complete with support for the Oculus Touch controllers. It’s still playable with mouse or gamepad, of course, but having gotten a hands-on PAX East demo with Touch controllers it’s hard to imagine playing it any other way.
The demo starts with you seated at a desk and a few cards scattered about with instructions. Controls are simple enough, using two buttons on each controller and the thumb stick, and the in-screen representation of the Touch controller is a pair of hands that tracks perfectly to you real-world hand position. This was my first time getting a chance at the Touch controls and the thing that still impresses me is that, after the helpful rep got the Rift situated on my head, I could see where my “hands” were as he held them clearly enough to just reach and accurately get them, even with my eyes completely covered by the screen.
The rest was pretty simple, from a control perspective. The middle-finger button on each controller was to grab something with that hand, keeping the button held down until you want to drop it, and the index-finger button used the item. Holding down the action button let you set an instruction card in mid-air for easy reference, which is now an ability I need in real life. Grab a lighter and hit the action button and the top pops open and flame springs up, and holding the lighter to a hovering card set it on fire.
The final ability was a little light telekinesis, activated by pushing up on the thumb stick. This shoots a blue circle out into the environment, and hitting the grab button holds on to whatever’s highlighted. See a book on a shelf out of reach? Shoot out the blue ring, grab, and reel it in by pulling back on the thumb stick. Don’t need it? It only took a second to reverse the process, putting the book back where it came from or just tossing it to the side. In practical terms it’s an excellent way to keep the player sitting rather than walking around the environment.
After a short time in the tutorial room (too short, but there was only one demo unit and a line behind me that I was holding up) it was time to do the demo mission, where things get properly playful. The job at hand was to steal a car from the back of an airplane, but of course the car is trapped, you can’t leave the driver’s seat, and the rear door of the plane is sealed shut. It’s a day’s work for a spy, though, so the first thing to do is explore the environment and see what tools are available.
None of the car’s devices do much without power, and the key isn’t in the ignition, but having watched more than one movie it’s not hard to get past that problem. The retinal scan doesn’t go well, though, setting off a series of traps that end with a bomb dumped on my lap. Defusing it led to one of the more interesting issues with the game, because the spy doesn’t have a body. This is done to eliminate the player seeing a body that very clearly isn’t theirs, but this led to two separate bits of weirdness. The first is looking down and suddenly feeling like one’s legs have turned into a car seat, and the second was one stick of dynamite rolling into the driver’s side chair. I like a tidy workplace so, while it wasn’t technically necessary, my first response was to not have a heavy explosive in my lap. It took several tries reaching for it to realize that 1) my real-world body was in the way and 2) I was pawing at my groin in front of an audience. While holding a Touch controller. Really, the controller and I are just good friends *cough*withbenefits*cough*
Asking the developer afterwards it turns out that’s pretty common. Remove the image of the body and people automatically start working as if it’s not there, despite decades of experience otherwise. It’s not that people forget how to move or anything as excessive as that, but that they’ll try to reach through the thing they know is there but can’t see. It’s an interesting side-effect of I Expect You to Die’s approach to representing the player, and should provide much hilarity for those who already think people look silly flailing about inside their virtual worlds.
What made I Expect You to Die special was the one-two punch of interactivity and presence. It’s still early days in VR so games like this have far more impact than they will five years down the line, but it’s not five years from now yet so being able to pick up, turn things, activate them, and solve puzzles by playing with items mapped to the controls on a pair of controllers feels instantly engaging. Rolling down the car window with one hand while using telekinesis with the other to pull over a screwdriver on a far shelf, then closing the window with the first hand again so the poison gas couldn’t flood the car was a fun test of multitasking. Turning around and reaching back to pick up the gun on the back seat, twisting and turning and aiming it, felt really special.
There were ways to play with the level outside of simply solving the puzzle that I didn’t get around to trying, such as tossing a wad of $100s out the window to watch them get sucked out of the rear of the plane, and each of I Except You to Die’s four levels will have plenty of details like that. Asking about the four levels, I was assured that the next three are bigger, more open and more complicated, with plenty of toys to play with and ways to mess around that have nothing to do with a straight path to the solution. The locked-room puzzle box is a well-established genre at this point, but I Expect You to Die‘s VR approach to it breathes new and playfully fascinating life into the familiar experience.Cash was offered by five women to commuters at busy bus stations up and down the UK but an average of only eight people at each station, out of thousands of bus travellers, took up the offer.
Women wearing a sandwich board that read "Ask me to pay your bus fare and I will" were positioned at bus stations in Newcastle, Medway, Manchester, Perth and Leicester, but were mostly just ignored.
The experiment ran during morning rush hour each day for a week and just 38 people in total across the country accepted the offer.
When questioned, the minority who did eventually accept the free cash admitted they were reluctant at first because they thought the offer was too good to be true.
Those who did accept were generally teenagers, suggesting that the older we get, the more cynical of goodwill gestures we become.
Results showed that 69pc of Brits were too suspicious to accept offers of goodwill and also felt rewards and freebies are often too good to be true, while only 23pc of people thought it possible to get something for nothing.
The research was conducted by Ice, a loyalty scheme which rewards customers with Ice points for spending on eco-friendly goods and services.
Jude Thorne, Chief Executive Officer of Ice, said: "Our experiment shows that as a nation, we simply don't accept the notion of genuine bargains, discounts and offers with no catch, despite admitting that difficult times are forcing us to seek them out actively."
The company teamed up with Arriva UK Bus and Stagecoach Bus to offer free points redeemable against future purchases for customers who book their tickets online.
Footage from the experiment in action in Manchester can be viewed at: www.youtube.com/user/MyIceChannel/videos.Alec Bradley’s anticipated spring release of its candela is still on schedule, but the green cigars will be hitting shelves with a different name at the request of a fellow veteran. The Alec Bradley “Dirty Hooligan” has been renamed “Filthy Hooligan” as a gesture from Alec Bradley owner Alan Rubin to longtime friend Jonathan Drew of Drew Estate fame.
“I had to make a decision that was based on integrity,” says Rubin, who explained that he received a text message Saturday from Drew, a long-time friend who explained that the “Dirty” name was important to the marketing of several of Drew Estate’s products. Rubin and his staff decided Monday to scrap the name. “The product is good enough to sell on its own, no matter what we called it,” says Rubin.
With labels and boxes already in the early stages of production, the sudden change has financial repercussions. Rubin said he already had plates, boxes, and T-shirts in print. But Rubin is taking those things in stride. “We view the friendship as more important and the relationship as more important,” said Sam Phillips, vice president of marketing.
While the packaging has been changed to reflect the adjustment in name, the cigars themselves will stay the same. The bunch is essentially the same as the Black Market blend from which it is a descendant: a double binder, one leaf Honduran, the other Nicaraguan, and filler tobaccos from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The only tweak was “a bit of extra Panama” according to Phillips, who describes the flavor of the smoke as having some very light white pepper undertones. The wrapper is a vibrant green Nicaraguan leaf cured by the Plasencias in Nicaragua.
Rubin says a candela has been in the pipeline for years, but last year they found the leaf they wanted with Nestor Plasencia’s Nicaraguan production. Rubin says of the wrapper, “It has a life to it—it’s not thick and bitter, but it’s lively.”
As with many candelas that come to market, the Filthy Hooligan cigar is a limited release project for the St. Patrick’s Day holiday. Just one size—a 6 inch by 50 ring Toro—is being released for now, and only 2,000 boxes of 22 cigars each are going to market.Update: Ryan said through spokesman Doug Andres: "We have no way to know what was said, but protecting our nation's secrets is paramount. The speaker hopes for a full explanation of the facts from the administration."
Speaker Paul Ryan spoke on the importance of classified information at a press conference on July 7, 2016. (Speaker Paul Ryan)
In July 2016, few in Washington were more incredulous that the FBI decided not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime for sending and receiving classified information on her private email server than House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).
Ryan issued one of the Republicans' irate statements:
“No one should be above the law. But based upon the director's own statement, it appears damage is being done to the rule of law. Declining to prosecute Secretary Clinton for recklessly mishandling and transmitting national security information will set a terrible precedent. The findings of this investigation also make clear that Secretary Clinton misled the American people when she was confronted with her criminal actions.”
And then he held a news conference, where he asked the Obama administration to stop giving Clinton, who was the Democrats' newly minted presidential nominee, classified briefings. “Individuals who are 'extremely careless,' close quote,” Ryan said, using the term then-FBI director James B. Comey used to describe Clinton's email practices, “should be denied further access to information.” (That proposal never got anywhere). (Ryan's office reached out to underscore that he thought Clinton should be able to receive classified briefings if she became president, since you can't deny presidents classified information.)
The message was clear: Ryan thought the FBI should have charged Clinton for a crime for sending and receiving classified information on a private email server she used exclusively as secretary of state.
Ryan piped up again about this 11 days before the election, when Comey told Congress his team had found new emails related to Clinton that they were looking into. The FBI did not describe it as a reopening of an investigation, but Ryan sure did:
BREAKING NEWS → The FBI is reopening its investigation into Secretary Hillary Clinton. My full statement ⇩ pic.twitter.com/LHfyg46dWk — Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) October 28, 2016
We're spending so much time parsing Ryan's words about a candidate in an election that is now over because suddenly, it's not Clinton who is on the receiving end of criticism about the way she handled classified information. It's President Trump.
[Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador]
The Washington Post's ace national security team reported Monday that while in an Oval Office meeting last week with top Russian officials, Trump told them highly classified information about the Islamic State. The information he told to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister is so secret it's not even relayed to some U.S. allies, let alone a country that most intelligence officials think meddled in the U.S. election.
During a May 10 meeting with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, Trump began describing details about an Islamic State terror threat, according to current and former U.S. officials. (The Washington Post)
“It is all kind of shocking,” a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials told The Post's Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”
Reckless. That's exactly the word Ryan used in another statement, issued in September, after the FBI released its report of its interview with Clinton. The FBI's investigation demonstrates, Ryan said, “Hillary Clinton’s reckless and downright dangerous handling of classified information during her tenure as secretary of state.”
It's also the exact word that at least one former intelligence official used to describe the fact Trump shared information so secret it requires a code word just to talk about it among U.S. officials.
The Fix's Aaron Blake rounded up their comments to Miller and Jaffe:
“Trump seems to be very reckless, and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security.” — a former senior U.S. official close to current administration officials
“Russia could identify our sources or techniques.” — a senior U.S. official
“I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.” — a former intelligence official who worked on Russia-related issues
“He seems to get in the room or on the phone and just goes with it — and that has big downsides. Does he understand what’s classified and what’s not? That’s what worries me.” — a former U.S. official
Perhaps “reckless” is in the eye of the beholder. As president, Trump has the authority to declassify government secrets, while anyone else in government (like secretaries of state) does not.
In his initial statement about Trump's comments to Russian officials, Ryan made no attempt to provide cover for the president.
But it's going to take a lot more explaining from Ryan — and all the other Republicans who bashed Clinton, including Trump — why this situation is somehow less careless and less reckless and less dangerous than the one they lambasted Democrats for just a few months ago.Sen. Mark Warner ( D-Va.) gestures as he addresses a crowd during a his campaign kickoff tour in Richmond, Va., Thursday, May 29, 2014. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Remember when Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) was one of only a handful of Senate Democrats not to sign a letter calling on the NFL to urge the Redskins to change its name? Warner’s office told The Washington Post in May, “it’s not for Congress to dictate what the league does.”
Warner, of course, represents the state where the Redskins practice, and Virginia’s second senator Tim Kaine (D) also did not sign the letter. It’s a sensitive issue politically to represent diehard fans who may not want the name changed while acknowledging that many consider it a racial slur.
But in classic Washington fashion, two lobbyists for the Redskins listed on disclosure forms are former Warner aides. In June, the Redskins hired McGuireWoods Consulting to represent them a week after 50 senators sent the letter to the NFL. The firm, in its disclosure, says its mission includes discussing “team origins, history and traditions.”
That lobbyists Andrew Smith and Heather Martin both worked for Warner was spotted by Legistorm, |
anything he does have was bought long before I was in the picture — good luck on that front. I don’t give a sweet ass shit if they want to waste their f—-n time coming here. They will find nothing because we got nothing. I trust this information, if not helpful, is at least amusing.”
Spoken like the girl who, as a kid, once threw another kid who was beating up her sister over the boards of the local rink in Angus, Ont. Spoken like a kid who was called “a dirty, slimy Iraqi who should go back to where she came from,” but stayed and prospered.
Back in those days, her parents owned a furniture store and were considered rich. She remembered as a girl that when their house was raided by police and provincial revenue officers looking for proof of income tax evasion, they even searched her bedroom. “I had just started my period — I was an early bloomer, and they even went through my very first box of maxi-pads. I was standing there in my pyjamas and asked if I could put on my robe. They said no.”
“Our skin was too dark for a lot of them,” she said. “And on top of that I had this little, tiny voice that everyone made fun of.” Later, after she unexpectedly won the Conservative nomination, won her seat, and then got appointed to cabinet, skin colour once again became an issue in her hometown.
“I was asked by a constituent why I had brought my driver with me to town — the brown man. I told them that’s not my driver, that’s my husband.”
In those days of dizzying ascent Helena Guergis was awarded the “special chair” behind and to the side of Stephen Harper. The special chair meant that a beautiful woman would always be on camera nodding in agreement as the PM gave his non-answers. The party even had an answer for her small voice — voice training lessons in Montreal that would help her to project with more authority when she spoke.
“In question period rehearsal, Stephen, other cabinet ministers and Jenni Byrne would sit there watching. Sometimes some of them would coach. When I lapsed into my real voice, because it was hard to project that phoney one for too long, Peter Van Loan would urge, ‘Helena … Big Girl voice, Big Girl voice.”
Life was good when Stephen Harper had a use for her. There was the four-level condo in Ottawa with a kitchen fit for Jamie Oliver, the driver (she’d asked not to have one) and enough money to spend $300 a month colouring her luxuriant hair.
Although she was planning to leave cabinet herself to have a baby and sit as an MP, she never got the chance. Her husband Rahim was arrested under sensational circumstances — drunk driving, speeding and possession of cocaine.
‘Dean Del Mastro came out of caucus and gave an interview where he said that there was a standard in the Conservative caucus that I didn’t meet. He knew what was coming down the pike for him — they knew even before the last election — and he said that. I let him have it.’
“The prime minister called me and said, ‘From one friend to another, it’s time you knew what your husband’s been doing.'”
Then came all the lurid allegations — stories of offshore bank accounts, and snorting cocaine in strip clubs. Banishment from caucus was not enough. Stephen Harper sent the matter to the RCMP, among others. Helena Guergis’s political career was effectively over.
The odd thing was this: After an exhaustive investigation, the Mounties cleared the former beauty queen of any criminal wrongdoing. As she told me, “I have never even been to a strip club.”
I asked her if she did cocaine. “I’m far from perfect, but the answer is no, never.”
The cocaine possession charge was “withdrawn” against her husband and he ended up facing the music on charges of drunk driving and speeding — serious matters to be sure, but not the stuff of Red Ferraris, private detectives, and stashing cash in offshore bank accounts.
The fall of this power couple has been Shakespearian — and it’s still reverberating throughout the party. (Senator Patrick Brazeau, facing unpaid suspension over his housing expense claims, compared himself to Guergis in a recent tweet.) Rahim Jaffer is still searching for a way back after his head on collision with notoriety, spending a lot of time in a trailer park in Florida. Helena is working on a law degree, keeping a low profile and enjoying the sunshine in her life these days — her three year old son Zavier.
As we walked through the freezing Edmonton night on the way to a lecture by Andrew Coyne, I asked her about how hard it was to watch her colleagues drop her, one by one, including one-time friend Shelley Glover. And that led us to Dean Del Mastro, who remained as the PM’s parliamentary secretary while under investigation by Elections Canada.
“It was hard but there was some funny stuff. Dean Del Mastro came out of caucus and gave an interview where he said that there was a standard in the Conservative caucus that I didn’t meet. He knew what was coming down the pike for him — they knew even before the last election — and he said that. I let him have it.”
In her Big Girl voice.
Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.
Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.This is one of my favorite go-to appetizers. It’s so unbelievably simple to make and tastes so much better than the store bought brands, not to mention much healthier. I love to serve this with pita chips and usually add some paprika or chopped parsley right before serving. This is one of those appetizers that you just cannot mess up! It always comes out delicious. Best served after refrigerated for several hours to let the ingredients combine. Enjoy!
Save Print Prep time 5 mins Total time 5 mins Author: Momma Chef Serves: 8 servings Ingredients 2 16 oz. Cans of chickpeas (reserve liquid from 1 can)
½ cup Tahini paste
½ cup olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
3 cloves of garlic
1 tsp McCormick Seasoning Salt Instructions Pour in order, liquid from 1 can of chickpeas, olive oil, lemon juice, seasoning salt, tahini, 2 cans of drained chickpeas and garlic in a food processor or blender. Puree until smooth.
Sprinkle with paprika or chopped fresh parsley before serving (optional). 3.5.3226
Like this recipe? Pin it!This Wednesday, a group of prominent Bush-era Republicans, including former NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former White House adviser Frances Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, flew to Paris to speak in support of an Iranian exile group there — one that’s been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.
“The United States should not just be on your side,” Giuliani told the group, the Washington Post reported. “It should be enthusiastically on your side. You want the same things we want.”
The group, known as Mujaheddin-e Khalq or MEK, is a militant group that’s been violently fighting the Iranian government since the 1960s. It has ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein, which trained and outfitted the MEK and for whom the MEK fought in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. According to the State Department, which declared the group a terrorist organization in 1997, the group’s philosophy is a combination of “Marxism, Islam, and feminism.“Giuliani and the others told the cheering crowd that the Obama administration should take a stronger hand against Iranian leaders. Townsend scoffed at the use of negotiations and sanctions, without suggesting a tactic that she believes could work.
“Appeasement of dictators leads to war, destruction and the loss of human lives,” Giuliani said. “For your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace.”
The four are not lone wolves in their support for MEK. Last Friday, at a symposium organized by a group called ExecutiveAction and moderated by erstwhile Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo (R), a group of current and former officials called for the U.S. to lift MEK’s terrorist designation and get tougher on Iran.
“The problem is not that a tough approach has failed,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the incoming Foreign Affairs Committee chair, said at the forum, “but that it has yet to be fully tried.”
Likewise, a resolution surfaced in the House this year to urge the administration to drop MEK from the terror list. It garnered 112 sponsors, including some Democrats, but died in the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Britain and the European Union have dropped terrorist designations for the group, and a U.S. federal court in July ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to review the designation.Benazir Bhutto was assassinated leaving a party rally in December 2007 A United Nations inquiry into the assassination of former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto has formally began. It is headed by Chile's ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Munoz, and includes a former Indonesian attorney general and a former senior Irish police officer. The inquiry will last six months and investigate the "facts and circumstances" of Ms Bhutto's death. She was killed in December 2007 as she left a rally of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) supporters in Rawalpindi. The three-member inquiry team will arrive in Pakistan later this month and submit its report to the UN Secretary General in six months, reports say. Apart from Mr Munoz, the other members of the probe team are Marzuki Darusman, the former Indonesian attorney-general, and Peter Fitzgerald, who headed an early inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Pakistan's Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, told the BBC his government thought the UN investigation was necessary to find out who was behind the attack. We think this was a big international conspiracy
Rehman Malik, Pakistan interior minister "We want to know who was behind this, who had conspired it, who has financed it. And we think this was a big international conspiracy," he said. "Obviously, there might be some actors within Pakistan or within the region, but we want really to expose the whole conspiracy, because we think that this was a kind of a beginning of an attempt to Balkanise Pakistan." These are challenging times in Pakistan to carry out such an investigation, says the BBC's World Affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge in Islamabad. That is not least because the Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, accused by the last government here of being behind the assassination, is the target of a two-month military offensive and his militant network has hit back with retaliatory suicide attacks. The Taliban commander has denied having anything to do with Ms Bhutto's killing. 'Rogue elements' Her assassination left questions unresolved for many people here, but especially her own party, which is now in government. British detectives conclude a lone attacker fired the shots After she had narrowly escaped a double suicide bombing on the day of her return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile in October 2007, she accused what she called "enemies" and "rogue elements" in the government led by President Pervez Musharraf and in the intelligence agencies of plotting to kill her. The UN inquiry cannot itself launch criminal proceedings, but can apparently apportion blame if it chooses to do so. Officials say the inquiry will work "fairly discreetly". Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had blamed an al-Qaeda-linked militant for the attack and refused to seek a UN investigation. He invited police from London's Scotland Yard to assist in the inquiry into her death. FROM BBC WORLD SERVICE Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
More from BBC World Service In their report, the British detectives said they believed she died due to a severe head injury sustained as a consequence of a bomb blast. The Pakistani investigation into her death concluded that a lone attacker fired shots at Ms Bhutto before detonating explosives, but said that bullets were not the cause of death. Wider enquiry Ms Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) rejected both these versions, claiming adequate security had not been provided for Ms Bhutto, and called for a wider inquiry by the UN to establish the identity and motives of the assassins. A PPP-led coalition defeated Mr Musharraf's allies in general elections last year. Ms Bhutto, twice prime minister of Pakistan, lived in self-imposed exile after Mr Musharraf assumed power in 1999. Mr Musharraf had refused to seek an UN probe In October 2007, she returned to Pakistan to campaign for the PPP in parliamentary and provincial elections - the first to be held since President Musharraf resigned as head of the army and became a civilian leader. Shortly after her return, she survived bomb attacks on her convoy in Karachi that killed more than 100 people. But Ms Bhutto continued to campaign and was assassinated on 27 December at a PPP rally in Rawalpindi. She was standing upright in her armoured vehicle, with her head exposed above the open roof escape hatch, waving to the crowd when an attacker opened fire. Seconds later, a bomb was set off at the scene which left some 20 other people dead.
Bookmark with: Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThere is no single solution for a problem with so many facets, and hospital officials in Berega are trying many things at once. The 120-bed hospital here — a typical rural hospital in a largely rural nation — is a case study in the efforts being made around Africa to reduce deaths in childbirth.
One stopgap measure has been to train assistant medical officers like Mr. Makanza, whose basic schooling is similar to that of physicians’ assistants in the United States, to perform Caesareans and certain other operations. Tanzania is also struggling to train more assistants and midwives, build more clinics and nursing schools, provide housing to attract doctors and nurses to rural areas and provide places for pregnant women to stay near hospitals so that they can make it to the labor ward on time.
But there is a shortage of Emmanuel Makanzas, too. As he began to operate, he said he should have had another pair of skilled hands to assist him. But, he said, “we are few.”
He made a quick, vertical cut, working down from just below the navel, through one layer at a time: skin, fat, muscle, the peritoneal membrane. Within three or four minutes he had reached the uterus, sliced it open and wrestled out a limp, silent baby boy exhausted by the prolonged labor and knocked out by ether. It took a nurse 5 to 10 minutes of vigorous resuscitation to get him breathing normally and crying.
There are many nights like this at the hospital here, 6 miles from the nearest paved road and 25 miles from the last electric pole. It is not uncommon for a woman in labor to arrive after a daylong, bone-rattling ride on the back of a bicycle or motorcycle, sometimes with the arm or leg of her unborn child already emerging from her body.
Some arrive too late. In October, a mother who had been in labor for two days died of infection. In November and December, two bled to death. Doctors say they think that more deaths probably occur outside the hospital among the many women who try to give birth at home.
A few minutes’ walk from the hospital is an orphanage that sums up the realities here: it is home to 20 children, all under 3, nearly all of whose mothers died giving birth to them.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
“You can never get used to maternal deaths,” said Dr. Siriel Nanzia Massawe, an obstetrician and the director of postgraduate studies at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, the country’s largest city. “One minute she’s talking with her husband, then she is bleeding and then she is gone. She’s gone, very young. You cannot sleep for one week. That face will always come back to you. Too many die, too young. But the people in power, they have not seen it. We need to make them aware.”
Over the course of several days at Berega, the difficulties became clear. At times, Mr. Makanza performed one Caesarean after another, sometimes in the middle of the night. One mother was only 15. Another had already had two Caesareans, adding to the risk of this operation or any future pregnancies, but she declined Mr. Makanza’s recommendation to be sterilized.
Others had hoped to speed their labor by taking herbal medicine but were suffering dangerously strong contractions. Hospital staff members struggled to keep up with the operations, handwashing bloodstained gauze and surgical drapes in basins and mopping blood from the floor between cases.
Two women had severe problems from high blood pressure. One came to the hospital after giving birth at home and having a seizure. Another delivered a full-term infant who had died in her womb at least a week before; her only other pregnancy had ended the same way.
A mother in the maternity ward had arrived in labor with twins, one already dead. A Caesarean had saved the second.
The Global Perspective
Women in Africa have some of the world’s highest death rates in pregnancy and during childbirth. For each woman who dies, 20 others suffer from serious complications, according to the W.H.O. “Maternal deaths have remained stubbornly intractable” for two decades, Unicef reported last year. In 2000, the United Nations set a goal to reduce the deaths by 75 percent by 2015. It is a goal that few poor countries are expected to reach.
“Why don’t we have a global fund for maternal health, like the one for TB, malaria and AIDS?” Dr. Massawe asked.
Tanzania has reduced its death rate for young children, but not maternal mortality. The Ministry of Health says its maternal death rate is 578 per 100,000 births, but the World Health Organization puts the figure at 950 per 100,000. By contrast, the health organization estimates the rate in Ireland, the world’s lowest, to be 1 per 100,000.
Photo
The women who die are usually young and healthy, and their deaths needless. The five leading causes are bleeding, infection, high blood pressure, prolonged labor and botched abortions. Maternal deaths from such causes were largely eliminated nearly a century ago in developed countries. In poor countries a mother’s death leaves her newborn at great risk of dying as well.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Experts say that what kills many women are “the three delays” — the woman’s delay in deciding to go to the hospital, the time she loses traveling there and the hospital’s delay in starting treatment once she arrives. Only about 15 percent of births have dangerous complications, but they are almost impossible to predict.
A Medical Emergency
A case in the Tanzanian city of Moshi late last year reveals how suddenly a seemingly normal labor can turn into an emergency in which every second counts. Hawa Khalidi, 36, who had five normal births, gave birth to her sixth child a few hours before dawn on Nov. 19 at a health center staffed only by nurses in one of the poorer sections of the city.
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.
Then she began to hemorrhage, and by daybreak she was dead.
An autopsy found that Mrs. Khalidi bled to death because the nurse who delivered her baby failed to perform one basic task, essential to prevent deadly bleeding: removing the placenta after she gave birth.
Normally, pulling on the umbilical cord will extract the placenta. But the autopsy revealed that the cord broke off. The nurse apparently did not know how to reach into the womb to remove the placenta. She sent Mrs. Khalidi to a hospital, but by then Mrs. Khalidi had lost so much blood that doctors could not save her.
In an interview, Mrs. Khalidi’s husband said nurses at the clinic had scolded her because she was too poor to bring her own “delivery kit” containing gloves, clamps and other supplies. Some maternity wards are so crowded that women sleep two or three to a bed, or lie on the floor, along with their newborns. Although the government has promised to build more clinics and to put one within three miles of every village, it cannot even fully staff the clinics it already has. Health workers — overworked, underpaid and sometimes poorly trained — often become demoralized and resigned to the high death rates.
Women lack education and information about birth control, and some become pregnant too young to give birth safely. Husbands and in-laws may decide where a woman gives birth and insist that she stay at home to save money. Malnutrition, stunted growth, malaria and other infections, anemia and closely spaced pregnancies all add to the risks.
In rural areas, many women use traditional birth attendants instead of going to the hospital. The attendants usually have no formal training in medicine or midwifery. Many doctors blame them for high rates of maternal death and complications, saying they let labor go on for too long, cannot treat complications and fail to recognize emergencies that demand hospital care. But many women are loyal to them. For one thing, the price is right. Around Berega, they charge about $2 per birth. A normal birth at the hospital costs about $6, an emergency Caesarean $15.
Dr. Jeffrey Wilkinson, an obstetrician from Duke University who is working at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center in Moshi, pointed out that other African countries, like Niger, had even higher maternal death rates. Despite the many obstacles in Tanzania, “there is hope here,” he said.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
A Hospital’s Shortages
Even though it serves an area with about 200,000 people, the hospital in Berega has no obstetrician or pediatrician. It has only one fully trained doctor, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 31, who became the medical director in August, fresh out of medical school.
Like most hospitals in Tanzania, the one in Berega tries to compensate for the doctor shortage by relying on assistant medical officers like Mr. Makanza to perform many Caesareans and a few other relatively simple operations like hernia repairs. Although such assistants eventually become quite adept in such operations, most other countries do not recognize their credentials and so do not try to lure them away, a big plus for Tanzania, which loses doctors and nurses to Botswana and other countries that pay more.
Periodically, visiting surgeons repair fistulas, a severe childbirth injury that causes incontinence in the mother. Other outside experts like Dr. Wilkinson have also taught staff members how to resuscitate newborns and treat obstetrical emergencies like hemorrhages and severe high blood pressure.
To persuade more women to give birth at the hospital instead of at home, the hospital is sending health workers with that message to marketplaces, churches, village elders and religious leaders.
In addition, the hospital is creating a “maternity waiting home” so that pregnant women who live far from the hospital can travel to Berega before labor starts and have a place to stay until it is time to give birth. Officials are also negotiating with the government to cover all fees for pregnant women and children, and to acquire an ambulance. (The hospital, a mission institution supported partly by the Anglican Church and the government, does not receive enough money to cover its costs, so it charges fees to make up the difference.)
But there is a long way to go. Only 20 percent of women in the area give birth at the hospital, and many do so only when they need Caesareans. Many women say they simply cannot afford the hospital. More than 50 percent stay home to give birth, and the rest go to local clinics that cannot handle emergencies or perform Caesareans.
“We lost four or five babies this week,” the Rev. Isaac Y. Mgego, an Anglican priest and the hospital’s director, said in an interview in January. “Our doctors have to play with two bad things, to save the mother or save the child.”
It is not easy to lure doctors and nurses to Berega, where most people live in mud huts with no electricity, flush toilets or running water. Malaria is common.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
To attract staff members, the hospital provides concrete houses with access to a pump. The church “tops up” government salaries for doctors and nurses, and Dr. Mdoe successfully lobbied church officials to give his staff a raise. A nursing school is being built, with the hope that it will draw local students who will want to remain in Berega.
The hospital has four nursing officers, 10 midwives and 2 other workers known as clinical officers, a total of 16.
“We used to have 34,” Mr. Mgego said. “People leave. We are struggling to retain them. They don’t want to live in villages. Some go without saying goodbye. Those who are committed, they are working tirelessly.”
It costs about $200,000 a year to run Berega Hospital, Mr. Mgego said. He said he hoped the hospital would find ways to prevent the serious problems that required mercy missions and visiting surgeons from groups like Amref, the African Medical and Research Foundation, also known as the flying doctors.
“Coming here to cure people is good, but what can we do to prevent this?” Mr. Mgego asked. “So that one day we can say, flying doctors, you can come, but we have only one patient, or nobody, around here.”450 US deaths since 2001
Florida man dies after police Taser him
By David Walsh
23 April 2011
A 33-year-old man in Orlando, Florida died after police officers used a Taser on him early Friday morning. Adam Spencer Johnson of Winter Haven, Florida, is the latest of hundreds of American to die as the result of police wielding Tasers since 2001.
According to Orlando police officials, Johnson was outside the AMC Universal Complex movie theater at Universal Studios’ CityWalk and behaving unusually some time after midnight. Four off-duty police who work security at Universal Studios amusement park arrived on the scene, later reinforced by an on-duty Orlando cop.
Sgt. Barbara Jones, of the Orlando Police Department, told the media that the individual “was asking very irrationally, kind of grabbing his beard, pacing around. They tried to calm him down. And at one point he grabbed the officers, they ended up tussling with him, and one of the officers ended up using his Taser … The guy went down, they put him in handcuffs, and they realized he was unresponsive, they immediately began CPR.” Johnson was later taken to Dr. P. Phillips Hospital in Orlando where he was pronounced dead.
Johnson, who had just turned 33, had no prior history of difficulty with the police and the only blemish on his record was a number of parking tickets.
No other details, including the immediate cause of death, have been forthcoming, pending the report of the medical examiner.
The use of Tasers is one of the more brutal elements of American law enforcement.
The WSWS explained in 2008: “The device, shaped like a pistol, fires two darts attached to 21-foot wires. When both darts hit, an electrical circuit is completed and the weapon automatically discharges an excruciatingly painful five-second cycle, which contracts the skeletal muscles, causing the person to become rigid and collapse.
“The trigger can subsequently be pulled over and over, delivering additional five-second cycles, and it can be held down, discharging a continuous flow of electricity until released. Each weapon has a computer chip, called the dataport, which records the number of trigger pulls.” (See “Northern California jury holds TASER International responsible for man’s death”)
Amnesty International reported in 2008 that 351 people had died in the US since June 2001 as a result of being jolted with a Taser. A blog tracking the phenomenon suggested in September 2010 that another 96 people had died by that date.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, “Orlando police officers used their Tasers 315 times in 2010, 357 times in 2009, and 278 times in 2008, according to [Sgt.] Jones. The numbers for 2011 were not immediately available.”
The Sentinel notes that five individuals died after Orange County deputies (Orlando is located in Orange County) “stunned them with Tasers between 2001 and 2008. Those deaths sparked an investigation of the sheriff's office by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The Sheriff's Office ultimately came to an agreement with the justice department in October of last year to tighten up its rules for using the devices.”
The provisions of the agreement included the following:
• Tasers cannot be used to awaken, prod or threaten someone.
• Deputies must give a verbal warning before deploying a Taser.
• Deputies must alert medical workers before deploying Tasers at extremely agitated people.
• Except in extreme circumstances, Tasers cannot be used on passive subjects, people in handcuffs, children, the elderly, pregnant women, the disabled, someone driving or riding a bicycle or inside an elementary school.
• Only one deputy can deploy a Taser at a time.
Some of the incidents—including the use of a Taser against an 11-year-old!—that prompted the complaint against the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, and led to the three-year Justice Department investigation (which resulted in no charges being filed against any officers), included these, according to the Palm Beach Post (October 14, 2010):
• José Aníbal Amaro, 45, died Oct. 1, 2008, after deputies shocked him three times with a Taser. Reports said he was foaming at the mouth and running in and out of traffic.
• A man who was threatening to jump off a 25-foot embankment onto the East-West Expressway was stunned October 13, 2008. A deputy standing in a bucket truck caught the man after shocking him.
• John Mattiuzzi, an out-of-state filmmaker (attending the Global Peace Film Festival, no less), was stunned twice and struck with a baton on September 21, 2008, after taking pictures of a crime scene with his phone. Police warned him twice to move back, then chased and subdued him after he ran from officers.
• An 11-year-old girl at Moss Park Middle School was stunned by a Taser in March 2008 after she swung at a deputy. The latter’s nose was bloodied. The girl was “taken to Florida Hospital East to have the Taser prongs removed.”I-League 2017: Shillong Lajong's Thangboi Singto - Nothing less than a win will be enough for us against Aizawl
Following a 1-1 result against the Mumbaikars,Shillong Lajong coach Thangboi Singto discusses about their final tie against title contenders Aizawl.
Shillong Lajong shared spoils with hosts Mumbai FC on Sunday evening as their star midfielder Yuta Kinowaki scored a goal in stoppage time to deny the Mumbaikars full points at Cooperage. Head coach Thangboi Singto fielded seven U-22 players in the fixture on Sunday evening as they flew back home with a point.
The Meghalaya outfit will welcome title favourites Aizawl FC in the final fixture of the season. Khalid Jamil's army needs to grab just a point to seal the title victory but the Lajong gaffer has assured that his youngsters will put up a tough fight for the side from Mizoram.
''We (Shillong Lajong) have got to win the derby. We are professionals and our job is to win as many matches as possible, as players or coaches. It is the most important game for Aizawl and it is big for us as well. Because, for us, Lajong has been a pioneer in football but we have always been in the mid-table (rankings). They (Aizawl) have to win to be champions or at least need a draw. We too have to give whatever we have as it would be the last match of the league,'' he expressed.
Bengaluru FC set new milestone
Further, the Manipur-born boss added that the fifth placed Lajong side will not settle for anything less than three points on 30th April. Also, Singto ensured that his team will not favour their North Eastern counterparts in any form.
''It (the game) has different importance for the teams. As a club, I think no less than a win will be enough for Shillong Lajong because I know in competitive sport you need to do your best despite any brotherhood,'' he explained.
Any slackness shown by the Lajong players will be termed as gifting the game to Alfred Jaryan and company. But Singto believes that his lads would refrain from doing so as they are well aware of the nature of the contest.
''I believe in my boys and they have always shown professionalism. They know their job because even for them a win is important for going forward,'' he remarked.
Article continues below
Relegated Mumbai FC on the cusp of creating two I-League records
Lastly, Singto provided an update on Aser Dipanda's fitness who was absent from the tie in the metropolis city on account of an injury. The boss revealed that Cameroonian was on the absentees' list as the boss didn't wish to risk him. Moreover, Singto confirmed Dipanda's inclusion for the last home tie.
''Dicka had a groin strain against Bengaluru FC so we didn’t want to risk him for the game against Mumbai because we want him to be ready for the next game. He will definitely feature against Aizawl,'' he signed off.2017
Worse than peak oil: low oil prices
http://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/publications/ASB2017_13062017.pdf
2012
Opec believed to overstate oil reserves by 70%
4/10/2012
TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Analysts at a New York-based research firm believe that the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (Opec’s) global oil reserve statements could be inflated by as much as 70%.
Global oil prices are expected to dramatically spike from the end of the decade as a result of depletion, and continue to dramatically rise into the future as a result of oil-producing countries being unable to replace reserves fast enough, research specialist Lux Research analysts told Mining Weekly Online on Thursday.
Oil, gas and mining analyst Rick Nariani said Opec’s stated reserves skyrocketed from 878-billion barrels to 1.2-trillion barrels throughout the 1980s and 1990s, without any new significant discoveries being made. With cumulative oil production of 449-billion, the true reserves for Opec could be as low as 428.94-billion, which would result in global price shocks by 2020.
He explained certain Opec members were deliberately increasing their stated oil reserves to flout Opec regulations, which allowed oil-producing countries to only produce oil at a rate calculated as a certain percentage of its total reserves. “We now know that the numbers are significantly inflated. The model we have built from available data shows that Opec reserve statements could be overstated by as much as 70%,” Nariani said.
Nariani, who is co-authoring a report, ‘The Race to Replace Reserves’, which is due for publication during the next couple of weeks, told Mining Weekly Online that the official figures did not add up. He said that given certain new discoveries of oil, such as in Venezuela and certain technological advances which allow for previously uneconomical known deposits to be exploited, many Opec countries continued to increase their oil reserves, without announcing any new discoveries, and, all that while producing significant amounts of oil.
http://www.miningweekly.com/article/opec-believed-to-overstate-oil-reserves-by-70-reserves-depleted-sooner-2012-10-04
2011
8/2/2011
Wikileaks Cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices
The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show….
However, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco, met the US consul general in Riyadh in November 2007 and told the US diplomat that Aramco’s 12.5m barrel-a-day capacity needed to keep a lid on prices could not be reached…..
Husseini said that at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/saudi-oil-reserves-overstated-wikileaks
US embassy cables: Saudi oil company oversold ability to increase production, embassy told
9/2/20111
According to al-Husseini, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, it is possible that Saudi reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described, and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/feb/08/oil-saudiarabia? |
director general of the BBC, is to be questioned by MPs over his refusal to refer to Islamic State using the term 'Daesh' (an Arabic abbreviation that means 'one who crushes something underfoot' and 'one who sows discord') because it is pejorative and therefore biased. Controversial British prime minister David Cameron had sent a request to the BBC supported in a letter signed by 120 MPs from across the spectrum – Labour, Tory and SNP. Independent journalist Jonathan Cook comments:
'So let us agree that Cameron can insist on the BBC calling Islamic State "Daesh" when he also insists on the broadcaster referring to the Conservatives as the "Revolutionary Neoliberal Party" [RNP].'
Julian Lewis, RNP chairman of the defence select committee, said he would also be writing to the BBC:
'The BBC ought to hang its head in shame – they would never dream of taking this attitude if we were talking about the fascists or the Nazis... We are engaged in a counter propaganda war of ideas – and the British used to be rather good at this during the Cold War.'
Chris Grayling, a member of the RNP British Cabinet and leader of the Commons, apparently detected no self-contradiction when he said the BBC should openly take the side of the UK in international conflicts:
'During the Second World War, the BBC was a beacon of fact, it was not expected to be impartial between Britain and Germany.'
Of course, the idea that political parties should pressure media to produce biased information was one of the horrors Britain was said to be fighting from 1939-1945. Also, the notion that the BBC should be guided by emergency measures adopted in a time of total war against a Nazi state genuinely threatening conquest indicates the curious mindset of some on the right. In reality, as Seumas Milne noted in the Guardian:
'The BBC is full of Conservatives and former New Labour apparatchiks with almost identical views about politics, business and the world. Executives have stuffed their pockets with public money.'
Milne added:
'There is no point in romanticising a BBC golden age. The corporation was always an establishment institution, deeply embedded in the security state and subject to direct government control in an emergency.'
Indeed, the BBC was founded in 1922 and immediately used as a propaganda weapon for the Baldwin government during the General Strike, when it became known by workers as the 'British Falsehood Corporation' (BFC). Perhaps the BBC should rebrand itself. Actor Ken Stott commented in the Radio Times:
'The establishment is a dirty, dangerous beast and the BBC is a mouthpiece for that.' (Radio Times, December 3, 2014)
This helps explain a tweet sent recently by the BBC's high-profile diplomatic editor, Mark Urban:
'Anti-Americanism alive & well as shown by "who is biggest threat to world peace?" Survey via @INTLSpectator'
For the embedded BFC, viewing America, very reasonably, as a lethal threat is to be guilty of something called 'Anti-Americanism.'
But for some, too much is not enough. In the Telegraph, Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, commented on the BBC chief's limp resistance to imposed thought control:
'He appears to believe that impartial reporting means equidistance between a terror group which butchers its victims and the rest of humanity. 'But equidistance is not the same as impartiality.'
Run that past us again:
'Impartiality means accuracy and reliability in news gathering – which ought indeed to be the BBC's governing ethos. It does not mean refusing ever to make any judgments between two sides in a conflict.'
How so?
'Because in the real, impartial world, there is no equidistance between Daesh and its victims.'
Whatever 'equidistance is not the same as impartiality' means – arguably, it means nothing – presumably the 'logic' can be applied elsewhere. After all, in 'the real, impartial world,' there is also no 'equidistance' between Nato and its victims. So perhaps we should demand that the BBC describe Nato as 'The Western Corporate Mercenary Army', or 'The Western State-Corporate Militant Mob', because impartiality is one thing and equidistance quite another. As everyone knows.
Inevitably, the response of David Jordan, the BBC's director of editorial policy and standards, to these state-corporate attacks was less than heroic:
'Suggesting that the BBC wants to be fair to the so called "Islamic State" distorts the truth...'
It was 'a distortion', then, to suggest that the BBC aims to be 'fair'. Jordan continued:
'Our aim, as always, is to report accurately and report the facts – nothing else.'
Facts are sacred; it's not the BBC's job to make judgements. Except:
'The BBC has at its cornerstone a commitment to democracy and its pillars. The BBC is no friend of authoritarian repression anywhere in the world and our history shows it.'
The 'democracy and its pillars' being, of course, 'us'. As for 'authoritarian repression' – well, that's 'them', as labelled by the government for a BBC intent on reporting 'the facts – nothing else'.
Appropriately enough, Sir Christopher Bland, who chaired the BBC between 1996 and 2001, argued this week that the BBC 'is worryingly close to becoming an arm of the Government'. Bland said of Cameron's government:
'Rather subtly and unattractively it draws the BBC closer to becoming [sic] an arm of government which is always something that the BBC and government have resisted.'
This recalls former director general Greg Dyke's quickly-buried assertion that BBC bosses and political journalists are determined to protect Britain's elite-favouring status quo because they 'are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don't want anything to change. It's not in their interests.'
'Those To Whom Evil Is Done, Do Evil In Return'
An interesting example of how the BBC is 'no friend of authoritarian repression' was provided in the summer of 2013, when a spanner clattered into the works of the West's Perpetual War machine.
Since 2011, it had been clear that the US-UK allies were intent on making Syria the next target for overt 'humanitarian intervention', in addition to its behind-the-scenes support. The endless stream of atrocity claims – civilian massacres, gas and napalm attacks - sourced from US-UK 'intelligence' and pro-'rebel' Syrian 'activists', was a brazen replay of the 2002-2003 Iraq war media campaign. The effort was again to persuade the public to support a black and white struggle between 'good' - the'rebels' - and 'evil', the Syrian government.
Alas, then, Syrian'rebel' commander, Abu Sakkar, was filmed cutting the heart out of a dead Syrian soldier and eating it before a cheering crowd. Sakkar declared to the camera:
'We will eat your hearts and your livers you soldiers of [Syrian leader] Bashar the dog.'
This was decidedly off-message. Russian leader Vladimir Putin told a G8 summit news conference:
'These are people who don't just kill their enemies, they open up their bodies, and eat their intestines in front of the public and the cameras. Are these the people you want to... supply with weapons?'
Trusty BBC propagandist Paul Wood came to the rescue, commenting of Abu Sakkar that'meeting him face-to-face, he seems a bit more circumspect': '"I didn't want to do this. I had to," he tells me.' Abu Sakkar was given high-profile space, not just to give his version of events, but to supply mitigating background detail and unchallenged propaganda. Wood wrote:
'He joined the demonstrations when they started in the spring of 2011. Then, he says, a woman and child were shot dead at a protest. His brother went to help. He, too, was shot and killed... 'Along the way, he lost another brother, many relatives, and countless of his men. His parents were arrested and he says the police rang him so he could hear them being beaten... '"Put yourself in my shoes," he says.'
Imagine the BBC inviting readers to place themselves in the shoes of an Islamic State cannibal. The simple act of interviewing Abu Sakkar humanised him in a way that is unthinkable for Islamic State fighters, or any other official enemy perpetrating a comparable act.
The BBC reinforced Abu Sakkar's efforts to blame his actions on the Syrian government, a constant theme in the BBC piece and other media reports. In stark contrast, when MPs Alex Salmond and George Galloway attempted to argue that UK foreign policy was a major factor behind the '7/7' bombings in London, their comments were dismissed as 'crass' and 'in poor taste' by the BBC journalists interviewing them.
The BBC allowed Abu Sakkar to call for a 'no-fly zone', a key goal of Western warmongers who had used the same strategy in 2011 when Nato terrorist bombers had overthrown Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi:
'If we don't get help, a no-fly zone, heavy weapons, we will do worse [than I did]. You've seen nothing yet.'
The BBC also gave Abu Sakkar scope to downplay his actions: 'I didn't bite into [the heart],' Abu Sakkar says, 'I just held it for show.'
Wood even quoted the poet W H Auden: 'Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.'
A wonderfully compassionate response, then, to Abu Sakkar's obscene act. Can we imagine any BBC journalist quoting Auden in response to the recent horrific massacre of 38 British and other tourists on a Tunisian beach in Sousse by Seifeddine Rezgui Yacoubi? We can only guess at the level of outrage that would generate.
But, as we saw above, even this level of breath-taking, in fact grotesque, subservience to the needs of government propaganda is insufficient for those on the hard right.
The Telegraph published a piece under the remarkable title: 'Syrian "cannibal" rebel explains his actions.'
In the Independent, propagandist Kim Sengupta was also willing to empathise:
'Khalid al-Hamad (Abu Sakkar is his nom de guerre) was not always a bloodthirsty man of violence... 'The question remains what turned al-Hammad into Abu Sakkar, the man who proudly appears in a video mutilating a corpse... What made someone who had once cautioned against blaming the Alawites - the minority community from which the ruling elite are drawn - for the regime's actions into their virulent hater?'
Understanding was sought, in other words - again, unthinkable for the official enemy. Like Wood, Sengupta referenced a source 'correcting early reports that he ate a piece of heart, pointing out it was lungs'. It wasn't a heart at all and he hadn't eaten it; he had just cut out a bit of lung from a corpse and held it to his mouth.
So who was responsible for the atrocity? Sengupta referenced the view of Haitham Mohammed Nassr, a former'rebel' fighter, who said the atrocity'should be put in the context of the crimes being committed by the Shabiha, the Alawite pro-regime militia'. Sengupta concluded:
'There is little doubt that brutality with which the regime responded to peaceful protests in Baba Amr and elsewhere in Syria was the catalyst for the armed uprising which followed.'
The'rebel' view was even allowed to conclude this piece ostensibly focused on'rebel' crimes:
'We all want Basher to go, the longer this goes on the more violent people become.'
Key propaganda messages clearly attempting to transform a PR disaster for Western warmongers into ammunition justifying an imminent attack on the Syrian government.
This was a powerful example of the true flexibility of corporate media ethics. Such astonishing apologetics are permissible for an act which, if committed by an official enemy, would be instantly and relentlessly condemned, with any attempt to explore the perpetrator's motives dismissed as outrageous. Thus the verdict of the Mirror on the Tunisian beach atrocity in Sousse:
'The Islamist terrorists are evil and must be defeated.' (Leading article, 'Don't give in to terror,' Daily Mirror, June 30, 2015)
Simple. There is nothing to discuss, nothing to understand, no context, certainly no sense that the West's Perpetual War machine might share some blame.
DEHow do you like your eggs, Bob Dylan, How do you like your eggs? You're walking on broken legs, Bob Dylan, But you still make us beg, Bob Dylan. So how do you like your eggs?*
You can't look at him. If you work at one of the arenas where he plays, you're not allowed to look at him when he makes his way from the bus to the stage. If you play at one of the arenas where he plays—if, like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, you're a fellow musician, sharing a bill—then you have a decision to make, occasioned by the privilege and problem of proximity. You'll be standing around and suddenly there he'll be, and you have to figure out if you're allowed—if you allow yourself—to behold Bob Dylan.
* We asked Mr. Dylan's representatives what he eats for breakfast. Their response: "Next question."
Tweedy didn't think he was when he was traveling last summer on Dylan's Americanarama tour. "First or second show of the tour, I was standing out in the middle of the dressing-room area—you know, a bunch of trailers in a U-shape. The show was about to start for Dylan, and he came through with his dressed-to-the-nines gang. He saw me, and I figured I was just supposed to avert my eyes, because I didn't think I was supposed to be where I was, standing in the way."
Getty Images
Tweedy was about to stare at the ground when he heard Dylan say, "Hey, Jeff, how's it going, man?"
That's all he said and all he had to say. "It was the biggest thrill of my life," Tweedy says. "I was like, I hope people saw that—that it was real."
How do you sleep at night, Bob Dylan, How do you sleep at night? The morning sun's so bright, Bob Dylan, Your band is still so tight, Bob Dylan. So how do you sleep at night?**
Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither. He has been giving interviews—albeit contentious ones—for as long as he's been making music, and he's been making music for more than fifty years. He's seventy-two years old. He's written one volume of an autobiography and is under contract to write two more. He's hosted his own radio show. He exhibits his paintings and his sculpture in galleries and museums around the world. Ten years ago, he cowrote and starred in a movie, Masked and Anonymous, that was about his own masked anonymity. He is reportedly working on another studio recording, his thirty-sixth, and year after year and night after night he still gets on stage to sing songs unequaled in both their candor and circumspection. Though famous as a man who won't talk, Dylan is and always has been a man who won't shut up.
** We asked Mr. Dylan's management about Dylan's sleeping habits. The response: "Next question."
And yet he has not given in; he has preserved his mystery as assiduously as he has curated his myth, and even after a lifetime of compulsive disclosure he stands apart not just from his audience but also from those who know and love him. He is his own inner circle, a spotlit Salinger who has remained singular and inviolate while at the same time remaining in plain sight.
It's quite a trick. Dylan's public career began at the dawn of the age of total disclosure and has continued into the dawn of the age of total surveillance; he has ended up protecting his privacy at a time when privacy itself is up for grabs. But his claim to privacy is compelling precisely because it's no less enigmatic and paradoxical than any other claim he's made over the years. Yes, it's important to him—"of the utmost importance, of paramount importance," says his friend Ronee Blakley, the Nashville star who sang with Dylan on his Rolling Thunder tour. And yes, the importance of his privacy is the one lesson he has deigned to teach, to the extent that his friends Robbie Robertson and T Bone Burnett have absorbed it into their own lives. "They both have learned from him," says Jonathan Taplin, who was the Band's road manager and is now a professor at the University of Southern California. "They've learned how to keep private, and they lead very private lives. That's the school of Bob Dylan—the smart guys who work with him learn from him. Robbie's very private. And T Bone is so private, he changes his e-mail address every three or four weeks."
How does Dylan do it? How does he impress upon those around him the need to protect his privacy? He doesn't. They just do. That's what makes his privacy Dylanesque. It's not simply a matter of Dylan being private; it's a matter of Dylan's privacy being private—of his manager saying, when you call, "Oh, you're the guy writing about Bob Dylan's privacy. How can I not help you?"
Hey, do you eat meat, Bob Dylan, Will you eat some meat? You're on the Mercy Seat, Bob Dylan. You're selling "The Complete Bob Dylan," Pledged to your own defeat, Bob Dylan, So will you eat some meat?***
It's because of us, of course—because of us that he practices privacy as an art, because of us that he abjures politics, because of us that he retreats from us, because of us that he no longer talks to us from the stage. "What the hell is there to say?" he has asked, adding that no matter what he says, we would want him to say more. We would want him to lead us. We would want him to tell us the meanings of his songs. We would want him to play his songs the same way every night, the same way he played them on his records. We would want him to join our causes. We would want him to deliver prophecies. We would want him to tell us about his family, and if he didn't answer, we'd reserve the right to go through his garbage cans.
*** We asked if Dylan is a vegetarian. The response: "Next question."
Getty Images
"I've always been appalled by people who come up to celebrities while they're eating," says Lynn Goldsmith, a photographer who has taken pictures of Dylan, Springsteen, and just about every other god of the rock era. "But with Dylan, it's at an entirely different level. With everybody else, it's 'We love you, we love your work.' With Dylan, it's 'How does it feel to be God?' It's 'I named my firstborn after you.' In some ways, the life he lives is not the life he's chosen. In some ways, the life he leads has been forced upon him because of the way the public looks upon him to be."
That's the narrative, anyway—Dylan as eternal victim, Dylan as the measure of our sins. There is another narrative, however, and it's that Dylan is not just the first and greatest intentional rock 'n' roll poet. He's also the first great rock 'n' roll asshole. The poet expanded the notion of what it was possible for a song to express; the asshole shrunk the notion of what it was possible for the audience to express in response to a song. The poet expanded what it meant to be human; the asshole noted every human failing, keeping a ledger of debts never to be forgotten or forgiven. As surely as he rewrote the songbook, Dylan rewrote the relationship between performer and audience; his signature is what separates him from all his presumed peers in the rock business and all those who have followed his example. "I never was a performer who wanted to be one of them, part of the crowd," he said, and in that sentence surely lies one of his most enduring achievements: the transformation of the crowd into an all-consuming but utterly unknowing them.
"We played with McCartney at Bonnaroo, and the thing about McCartney is that he wants to be loved so much," Jeff Tweedy says. "He has so much energy, he gives and gives and gives, he plays three hours, and he plays every song you want to hear. Dylan has zero fucks to give about that. And it's truly inspiring. The joke on our tour was that his T-shirt should say PISSING PEOPLE OFF SINCE 1962. If you dropped people out of a vacuum from another planet and planted them in a field somewhere so that they could study us, and there's a guy half-decipherably singing jump-blues songs almost in the dark, and there's people watching him—well, it wouldn't make any sense…."
"Dylan has zero fucks to give"
It makes sense only in the terms that Dylan has established for himself: His life and his art have combined to create the oral and written parts of a continual test that most of us fail. The only way to pass is to go to the shows, for as Dylan told Rolling Stone a few years ago, "The only fans I know I have are the people who I'm looking at when I play night after night." He's notorious for creative disruption—for rendering the old chestnuts unrecognizable—but as he's gotten older, so have his fans, and the test has grown more rigorous still. He's not only "chosen not to deliver the set that his old fans would like to hear," as one of his longtime promoters, John Scher, says. "He's chosen to play in a stand-up situation, which is not a situation that his older fans enjoy." That is, when booking his tour, his agent prefers that the shows are to be general admission, with no seating. That is, he makes the geezers stand, as if to say, in Scher's words, "If you can't stand up, you shouldn't be there."
It is not that Dylan is necessarily more private than McCartney or Van Morrison or Neil Young or Bono—we know as little of their lives as we do of his. It is that Dylan has perfected the dynamic that makes his privacy simultaneously possible and intolerable: The poet needs the asshole. The asshole needs the audience. And when you go to a Dylan show, both the poet and the asshole have you right where they want you.
How do you get your mail Bob Dylan, How do you get your mail? You've put yourself in jail, Bob Dylan, Are you still chasing tail, Bob Dylan? That's been your third rail, Bob Dylan, So how do you get your mail?****
Here is a Dylan story, featuring neither poet nor asshole. Tweedy heard it from his bass player. His bass player heard it from a girl he knows. The girl lived it. She was walking down the street in Memphis, Tweedy thinks it was. "She looked into the basement windows of a hotel, and she saw Bob Dylan swimming in the pool with his bodyguard. She decided, 'Let's go see what happens if I say hi.' She walked into this hotel, and she walked over to the pool and said hi, and he took pictures with her. She said that she was a big fan and he said, 'How many times have you come to see me?' She said, 'Twenty-five.' And he said, 'Oh, man, how can you take it?' "
**** We asked if Dylan uses e-mail. His representatives would only say that he might. Or might not.
Getty Images
There are a lot of stories like this—Dylan with the carapace of celebrity removed; Dylan like a girl, pretty and lonely, finally asked out by a suitor uncowed; Dylan the shy midwesterner; Dylan taking extra time to sign autographs, hesitating only when someone asks him to sign vintage vinyl, because he knows he's being used; Dylan posing with the daughter of a father who's waited by the wings of the stage; Dylan dutifully and graciously going about the business of fame; Dylan gratified to be finally treated as another human being. There are enough of these stories to prompt the question: Is being treated as just another human being all that Dylan wants?
The answer is probably no, for Dylan is also known for staring straight ahead, stone-faced as a judge, when people approach him, until they go away.
"Hesitating only when someone asks him to sign vintage vinyl, because he knows he's being used."
And what makes Bob Dylan stories interesting is that the only person who can decide their outcome is Bob Dylan, so you never know how they're going to go. For instance, last summer Wilco and My Morning Jacket went on tour with him. Both were led to believe that they'd be playing with him, but only Jim James of My Morning Jacket expected to hang out with him and, like, jam. The result, though predictable, played out like a metaphor for the vagaries of salvation: Jim James, with his expectations, had his expectations dashed; Jeff Tweedy, with his resignation, came home with stories to tell, such as the time, waiting in the wings, when Tweedy told Dylan that Mavis Staples said hello. Tweedy had produced Staples; Dylan had been friends with her since the Greenwich Village days, so he responded with one of those utterances he specializes in, gnomic and innocent, with the same surprising spin as the lines of his songs:
"Man, tell Mavis she should have married me!"
The question of who Dylan will or won't speak to is one of the animating questions of his public life; and neither friendship nor eminence have anything to do with the answer. He is rumored not to have spoken to his pal Willie Nelson on a recent tour, and Ron Delsener, who's been promoting Dylan for decades, says that when he arranged a Dylan–Van Morrison tour through the UK in 1998, he eventually had to approach Dylan's road manager with a plea: "He's got to talk to Van." Hell, when Dylan accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, he wore shades and barely stuck around for the postceremony reception.
There is not a person in the world who is not at his feet, and that his humanity exists as the last beating heart inside the last inner circle of celebrity is what makes his humanity perishable and perhaps beside the point. It's the question people have been asking for centuries: How human does the king want to be? More specifically, how human does the king permit himself to be? It's not hard to find out: All you have to do is ask him the same questions you'd ask any other human being, and you'll get your answers soon enough.
How do you do the deed, Bob Dylan, How do you do the deed? You're a walking centipede, Bob Dylan, Oblivious to need, Bob Dylan. You're as old as Harry Reid, Bob Dylan! So how do you do the deed?*****
What do we want from Bob Dylan that he hasn't given us already? The answer is axiomatic: We want that which he won't give. "The list of stupid questions you can ask Bob Dylan is endless," says John Scher, and, of course, the most stupid is the one question he has never answered: How does he live? The things we can find out about almost anyone in the world, including the president, are precisely the things we can't find out about Dylan. Does Dylan use e-mail? Does he have a smartphone? Does he eat meat? Does he sleep through the night? Is he kind? "Oh, my God, this is Bob Dylan you're talking about," says someone who knows him well. "How can you ask these questions?"
***** We declined to ask about Dylan's romantic life.
Getty Images
So this is what we know about how he lives. He has homes all over the world, one of which, a manor he owns with his brother in Scotland, is for rent. He lives primarily in Malibu, on a promontory leaning into the Pacific called Point Dume. He has a lot of land surrounded by a corrugated-metal fence, with a horse ring for relaxation and a guardhouse for vigilance. There are junked cars and large commercial shipping containers parked out front as a sort of intentional eyesore, an impediment to prying eyes. He has six children and ten grandchildren, and is said to be very proud of them. He's in shape; he likes to swim and box when he's on the road, and so do members of his band. He's a dog guy. He wears hooded sweatshirts and either combat boots or running shoes. He wore a wig for Masked and Anonymous and kept wearing it when filming was over, at least for a time. Though there are rarely any Dylan sightings, he is not unreachable. When Ron Maxwell, the director of Gods and Generals, got it into his head to ask Dylan for an original song, his music coordinator laughed at him. But when he asked, he got a reply from Dylan's management right away, and both Maxwell and his wife wound up listening to "Cross the Green Mountain" with Dylan and his band at a studio in the Valley. "He was there in his New Balance shoes," Maxwell says. "He was a bit shy, I want to say. We said hi and shook hands. When they played the song back, he was looking away. I heard the whole thing, taking notes. At first I was thinking, 'That's a lot of verses.' Then it was finished, and I stood up and he looked at me. I said, 'I really like it.' He said, 'You do? You like it?' I said, 'I more than like it—are you kidding?' And he relaxed and all the band members relaxed. The tension left the room. They let me know they were all fans of [Maxwell's first Civil War movie] Gettysburg and watched it over and over again on the bus."
He spends a lot of time on the bus for a string of engagements dubbed the "Never-Ending Tour" by the press but called a variety of names by Dylan, one of which is the "Why Do You Look at Me So Strangely Tour?" He rides in a star coach; his band rides in a tour bus; they stay on the ground floors of chain motels, where Dylan can smoke; they use the pool; Dylan doesn't eat where members of his or other bands eat; he doesn't use the dressing rooms; he goes surprisingly light on security, but his security detail is bracingly efficient getting him to and from the bus, as his bus driver is bracingly efficient getting him close to the doors.
His life is often portrayed as an allergic reaction to fame; but he is a creature of fame no less than he's a creature of music and art. Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there's just not that much left. The best answer came from Arthur Rosato, his production manager in the mid-seventies and early eighties: "He lives his own life, and that's it. You deal with what's in front of you with him and that's it. He's his own person. He has opinions, but he's not opinionated. He's open, but he doesn't broadcast a lot of stuff. I've had issues, and when you confront him, he listens. He's a different kind of person, because you could say whatever you want to him. He's pretty much one-on-one. In group things, he'll slip into the background. No matter who the people are, he's the same, and he's very attentive to them. That's how he gets along."
No matter who the people are, he's the same
That's also how he keeps his privacy without having to talk about it. He knows that the people around him are loyal, and they know that if they weren't loyal, they wouldn't be around him. They not only know not to talk; they also wouldn't think of talking. They listen, then issue their gentlemanly demurrals; when a potential source called Dylan headquarters to ask if he should comment for this story, he was not told no, but rather asked, "What do you think you should do?" It's an honor system, left to the participants to uphold, even when the participants are far from the inner circle. "I didn't get any sense of how he lives," Tweedy says, "and the sense I did get … Well, anything that I did learn, I almost feel like I'm betraying him to share."
It's also a system of omertà, enforced by the threat of expulsion. Those who say that Bob Dylan has never ordered them not to speak also say that if they did speak, they would never be able to work for him again. A member of a band that once opened for Dylan recently published a piece recounting how a friend of Dylan's was banished from the tour for revealing that Dylan had caught a cold; in a recent interview, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos fretted that Dylan hadn't called him since Hidalgo had revealed that he had been in the studio with Dylan, working on a new album. Dylan doesn't say anything because he doesn't have to say anything; he communicates his expectations concerning his privacy in the same way that he communicated to Jim James and Jeff Tweedy how he wanted them to come onstage and play the cover of "The Weight," which he played in the final shows of the Americanarama tour. "We played that song in a different key every night," Tweedy says. "It was never in the same key. The tour manager would say, 'It's in A flat tonight.' Or we'd already be out onstage, and we'd talk to Tony Garnier, the bass player, and somehow ask him which key and he'd say, 'A flat.' And that's in front of a lot of people. But Dylan never told us. I think he likes putting himself and his band into a corner, to see if they can play their way out."
What kind of car do you drive, Bob Dylan, What kind of car do you drive? You're good at staying alive, Bob Dylan. But the bee dies in the hive, Bob Dylan. So what kind of car do you drive?******
It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around. He had to become Bob Dylan, after all, and the ceaseless force of that becoming has been what has given life to his music for as long as he's been making it. Who else is like Bob Dylan? Any human being growing old finds himself in a depopulated world, but Dylan's world was depopulated to begin with—he has remarked that when he was growing up, he felt like he'd been born in the wrong place, to "the wrong parents." The people who know him say they like him, and that he laughs and cries like any other man. But they never say that he's like any other man. And so his community is a community of saints: He loved George Harrison; of course he did—George was a Beatle. George stayed in Dylan's house when George went to L. A. to get experimental treatment for his cancer; but then George died. Dylan also loved Jerry Garcia. And when Jerry died, an addict rather than a seer, Dylan went to the funeral and on his way out told Jerry's advisor, John Scher, "That man back there is the only one who knew what it's like to be me."
****** We asked what car Dylan drives. The response: "Next question."
There is nothing about his life that has not been foretold in his songs. He is an old man now; believing, he says, in "a God of time and space," he sings almost exclusively of memory and loss. Oh, sure, he might be singing about the Duquesne whistle in one song and about a woman named Nettie Moore in another, but those are all just MacGuffins—they all just allow him to sing about his own comic persistence and the fulfillment of his own strange fate.
Who's that on the bus, Bob Dylan, Who's that on the bus? It sure ain't one of us, Bob Dylan. You've never had no trust, Bob Dylan. Your sleep never rusts, Bob Dylan. You'll never slake our lusts, Bob Dylan. But who's gonna carve your bust, Bob Dylan, If not one of us?*******
A few years ago, he was picked up by the police in Long Branch, New Jersey, for the crime of walking in the rain, dressed in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt, and peering into the window of a home for sale in a dodgy neighborhood. The news was greeted with a lot of predictable headlines—NO DIRECTION HOME, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, etc. But here's the obvious question, asked by a friend of his: "Do you really think that's the first time that he's done that? He does a lot of walking no one would expect. He'll walk through neighborhoods undetected and talk to people on their front porches. It's the only freedom Bob Dylan has—the freedom to move around mysteriously."
******* This is a rhetorical question.
People say that a lot about Dylan: His privacy is all he has. It's an odd thing to say. It assumes he's powerless and needs to be protected. But Bob Dylan has never been powerless. Even when his songs stood up for the powerless, he was always pioneering new ways to use the power of his fame, of which the two-way mirror of his privacy is the ultimate expression. Yes, it's cool when Ron Delsener says, "I've seen Dylan walk down Seventh Avenue in a cowboy hat and nobody recognize him. I've seen him eat at a diner and nobody come over to him"—it makes you think that Dylan is out among us, invisible now, with no secrets to conceal, and that at any time we might turn around and see him. But we never do; nobody ever does, even where he lives. What a woman who works the tunnel between the buses and the backstage area at an arena outside of Atlanta remembers about Dylan is not that she saw him; what she remembers is "I was not allowed to look at him."
He was, of course, on his way to the stage when he passed her averted eyes—on his way to be looked at and listened to. It sounds like a |
://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nocroom
Need 5 or more business phones? Or a business phone pbx system for 5 or more users? find out how NocRoom can help you, our business pbx voice systems are fully turnkey solution custom for your businesst: 1.702.789.0409 Current PROMO Free Month then $49.99/m afterNote: Must have monthly subscription active for auto paymentyes Bitcoin & Ethereum Accepted BusinessFounded in 2006, NocROOM is located at one of the largest internet exchange points in the world, facilitating excellent inter-connectivity with Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe. NocRoom is a global provider of optimized network solutions that offer the best possible performance, reliability and availability. Our advanced, IP-based networks deliver data, voice and content to clients and partners world-wide.Multiple Tier 1 bandwidth providers call NocRoom home; including AT&T, CenturyLink, Cogent, Comcast Business Class, FiberLight, FPL FiberNet, Internap, Level 3, TW Telecom, Verizon Business and XO. NocRoom facility is also home to several Tier 2 carriers.Stiff opposition from India has forced Sri Lanka to drop plans, at least for now, to buy JF-17 Thunder fighter aircraft from Pakistan.
Advertising
The Sunday Express has learnt that New Delhi shot off a diplomatic missive a few weeks ago to Colombo on why it should not buy the JF-17 Thunder, including a negative technical assessment of the aircraft. It was also pointed out that the country’s defence requirements did not need fighters.
While questions were raised in Sri Lanka too about the reported $400-million deal, India’s forceful opposition, conveyed through a non-paper, was one of the likely reasons that made Sri Lanka drop the plan for now.
The Pakistani media were reporting that the deal for JF-17s would be signed during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s three-day visit to Colombo which ended Wednesday.
Advertising
Despite its own financial crunch, Pakistan was also said to be ready to extend a line of credit to Sri Lanka for the aircraft.
On Tuesday, Sharif and Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, who is also the Defence Minister, signed agreements under eight heads in Colombo, but the sale of aircraft was not one of them.
The Indian government delivered the non-paper — diplomatic parlance for a white sheet of paper without a letterhead or signature — to Colombo at the highest levels about three weeks ago after reports that Pakistan was seriously engaging the Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF) on the Chinese fighter aircraft to replace the SLAF’s ageing fleet of Israeli Kfirs and MiG-27s.
Pakistan had been pushing for the sale of 10 to 12 JF-17s, each priced about $35 million. Talk of the deal gained ground after a visit to Pakistan by SLAF chief Gagan Bulathsinhala last November. He was invited to send a team to assess the aircraft at the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC) in Kamra.
Kamra is where the PAC and China’s Chengdu Aircraft Corporation (CAC) co-produce the aircraft. But defence experts believe that the aircraft are more or less only assembled at Kamra from readymade Chinese kits. Taking up the Pakistani invitation, a team of Sri Lankan Air Force officials visited Kamra to test the aircraft and run simulation tests.
New Delhi has opposed SLAF plans to buy the J-17s on the ground that Sri Lanka does not need fighter aircraft. It is six years since the war against the LTTE ended. Since then, Sri Lanka’s defence spending has increased. For 2016, it is an estimated $3 billion.
Sri Lankan sources said India also put forth a technical argument that the Russian engines of the JF-17 were not the best, that even China does not use these aircraft. Earlier, some Sri Lankan reports had said India had offered its own Tejas to the SLAF instead.
India is also concerned that the deal, if it goes through, will enable the PAC, and perhaps even the CAC, to set up a facility in Sri Lanka for maintenance and training, and increase and widen contacts between Pakistan and Chinese security forces and Sri Lanka.
Advertising
In 2014, the then Sri Lankan government had cleared a proposal for China to set up a maintenance-cum-servicing facility for its aircraft that are part of the Sri Lankan fleet in Trincomalee. The SLAF has in it fleet the Chengdu F-7 fighter aircraft, and the Y-12 and MA60 transporters. India had raised concerns then about the plan and the Sri Lankan government had said it would be manned only by SLAF personnel. With the change in government, that plan was shelved.Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have just discovered a fascinating new way to reconstruct past nuclear tests even decades after detonation. All they need is a pinch of dirt. It's a clever new method and the kind of thing that could make it easier to tell if rogue nations are telling the truth about their nuclear tests.
This feat of nuclear forensics was spearheaded by Susan Hanson, a nuclear chemist at Los Alamos. Her team developed a way to piece together what were previously overlooked chemical fingerprints to reconstruct a detailed picture of past nuclear explosions—far beyond what scientists thought possible. Hanson tested her method on soil samples from the 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico deserts that was part of the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear detonation ever conducted. Hanson's method recalculated the specifics of that 70-year-old test, reporting the energy yield and efficiency with over 10 times the accuracy as previous estimates. Hanson's research is outlined this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hanson's new research may help scientists keep tabs on nuclear states flouting current nonproliferation treaties. While underground research stations the world over monitor for the telltale quakes of illicit nuclear tests (cough, North Korea, cough), creating an accurate reconstruction of how powerful and efficient a bomb was requires on-the-ground sampling. But the chemicals that nuclear forensics experts would need decay and disappear rapidly. Often, they're gone after months.
These chemicals are flavors of Zirconium, an element with several short-lived isotopes that are hallmark residues of various types of nuclear weapons. Hanson's method requires hunting for excruciatingly faint flavors of another element, Molybdenum, which is what some Zirconium isotopes transform into as they decay. It's a bit like digging for fossils. By comparing the different amounts of Molybdenum isotopes in a small soil sample, Hanson's team can decipher how powerful and how efficient a nuclear blast was.
Hanson stresses that her method involves looking at just barely perceptible differences in Molybdenum atoms, and requires "analytical methods and high-precision mass spectrometers" a type of chemical analysis tool, that has only been available to scientists in the last few years. That's why the technique has only now been developed.
Testing her analytical technique on soil from the first ever nuclear test, Hanson was able to adjust the history books. The Trinity test was thought to be a blast of 21 kilotons, Hanson says that number is off the mark by a fairly sizable margin. The real number is closer to 22.1 kilotons, which also adjusts our understanding of how efficient that first-ever-blast was.Overview 2013: Played in 11 games and made seven starts. 2012: Played in all 13 games and made 12 starts. Blocked a punt as time expired that was returned for a touchdown by Jelani Jenkins to give Gators a 27-20 win over Louisiana-Lafayette. 2011: Played in all 13 games, but did not make a start.
Analysis Strengths Outstanding athleticism. Nice length, speed and fluidity. Light on his feet. Transitions smoothly. Can flip his hips and carry receivers deep. Flashes playmaking ability. Good hands to intercept. Tries to strip the ball out. Has special-teams experience returning and covering kicks -- was productive as a gunner earlier in his career. Conditioned, confident and competitive. Has upside. Weaknesses Needs to get functionally stronger to jam/re-route and shed blocks. Gives up separation at the break point and gets outmuscled at the catch point. Inconsistent, leaky, underpowered tackler. Instincts and anticipation are lacking. Technique needs to be coached up -- opens the gate and gets beat off the snap. Leaves production on the field -- in position, but doesn?t make the play. Questionable tackle and ball production -- registered just 24 tackles as a junior and logged just 12 PBUs and two INTs from 2012-13. Marginal run strength as a returner. Shared reps as a junior. Draft Projection Rounds 3-4 Bottom Line Lean, fluid, fast, finesse cover man whose raw physical ability and testing numbers belie frustratingly uneven performance. Has starter-caliber athleticism and will buoy his stock when the stopwatches come out, but poor instincts, tackling and tape are reasons for pause. -Nolan NawrockiIt's the next best thing to a smoking gun.
As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump and the Russians continues at a rapid boil, a vivid picture of where that investigation is headed emerged on Wednesday.
Elijah Cummings (D-MD), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) detailing explosive information from a whistleblower about disgraced former national security adviser and current cooperating witness Michael Flynn.
The whistleblower, whose information has been held since June at Mueller’s request, says he saw a text message from Flynn giving a former business partner good news about Trump and the Russians while Trump was being inaugurated:
Today, I am writing to inform you about a whistleblower who has come forward with evidence that Lt. General Michael Flynn—within minutes of Donald Trump being sworn in as President—was communicating directly with his former business colleagues about their plan to work with Russia to build nuclear reactors in the Middle East. According to this whistleblower, General Flynn reportedly sent a key communication on Inauguration Day indicating that the project was now “good to go” and directing his business colleagues to move forward.
This information, at a minimum, helps demonstrate the Trump administration’s intention to ease sanctions against Russia, a key element to the collusion that Mueller is investigating. It also opens the window on the type of cooperation that Flynn can provide Mueller as a result of his plea deal.
Symbolically, though, there’s perhaps no greater summation of the Trump team’s jubilant selling out of American democracy than the photo that Cummings included with his press release. As Trump made his way to the podium on Inauguration Day, a blowup of this photo shows Flynn texting with a mile-wide grin on his face:
(Elijah Cummings/Original photo: Brendan Smialowski, AFP)
According to the whistleblower, Flynn’s business associate told him that day that it was “the best day of my life,” and showed him the text message from Flynn. He also directly referenced the sanctions that were the subject of Flynn’s discussions with Sergey Kislyak, and which Trump’s senior advisers knew about at the time:
Mr. Copson explained that General Flynn was making sure that sanctions would be “ripped up” as one of his first orders of business and that this would allow money to start flowing into the project. He blamed President Obama for the sanctions, stating that he “f*cked everything up in my nuclear deal with the sanctions.”
The fact that Mueller asked Cummings to hold off on publicizing this information, and has now authorized its release, is yet another sign that even with all of the bombshells that have already gone off in this investigation, this is still just the tip of the iceberg.While not all of their ideas are bad, the Unity Reform Commission of the Democratic Party is not sufficiently committed to expanding the vote.
When it was first adopted at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the Unity Reform Commission sounded like a good idea. The primary had been one of the most contentious in history, with the Sanders side accusing the Clintonites of benefiting from party support, and Hillary voters frustrated at having their hard-earned victory tainted by the Berners' cries of "rigged." The logic at the time made a Unity Reform Commission (URC for short) a sensible attempt to move past the schisms between center-leftists and progressives.
The members of the URC were revealed last April - nine chosen by Hillary Clinton, seven by Sanders, three by DNC chair Tom Perez, and a chair and vice-chair chosen respectively by Clinton and Sanders. While Clinton and Perez declined to reveal all of their picks, Sanders revealed his, and they included a number of his most ardent supporters - TYT anchor Nomiki Konst, Our Revolution chairwoman Nina Turner, and Arab-American Institute head James Zogby. Democrats like myself raised eyebrows at these choices at the time, but I hoped that the proposals they put forth would be good ones. However, as they prepare to vote on them today, they look to be a big wet kiss to Sanders, who will no doubt take advantage of them should he run in the 2020 primary. Let's take a look at why these reforms fall short.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website
The first major rule change would reduce the power of super delegates, officials within federal and state Democratic Parties who are allowed to vote for the nominee on the floor of the convention. These exist due to the rules changes following the infamous 1968 convention, where Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the nominee due to behind-the-scenes maneuvering of party bosses like Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, despite never winning a single primary that year. Although they have proved contentious in the past, as in the protracted Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama primary in 2008, super delegates are essential in protecting the interest of minority voters, something which the Congressional Black Caucus argued in this letter from June 2016:
"The Democratic Members of the Congressional Black Caucus recently voted unanimously to oppose any suggestion or idea to eliminate the category of Unpledged Delegate to the Democratic National Convention...the Democratic Party benefits from the current system of unpledged delegates to the National Convention by virtue of rules that allow members of the House and Senate to be seated as a delegate without the burdensome necessity of competing against constituents for the honor of representing the state during the nominating process."
Thanks to the CBC's forceful pushback, the URC's proposal regarding super delegates would allow members of Congress and state Democratic officials (such as governors) to keep their super delegate vote. DNC officials who receive voting power will keep their titles, but have their votes proportionally bound to the vote count in their state. This represents the kind of sensible reform that the URC should pursue. While I strongly believe that we should keep super delegates, who have never once swayed a primary election in favor of one candidate, I think that binding their vote to the states in which they reside is a fair move.
Unfortunately, I think a little less of the URC's second proposal, which would strike out at state parties who don't open their primaries to independent voters with same-day registration. Senator Sanders wrote about this in a Politico article last month:
"In contrast to Republicans, Democrats believe in making voting easier, not harder. We believe in universal and same-day voter registration and ending antiquated, arbitrary and discriminatory voter registration laws. These same principles must apply to our primaries. Our job must be to reach out to independents and to young people and bring them into the Democratic Party process. Independent voters are critical to general election victories. Locking them out of primaries is a pathway to failure. "In that regard, it is absurd that New Yorkers must change their party registration six months before the Democratic primary in order to participate. Other states have similar, if not as onerous provisions."
The problem is that it's not up to the DNC to control what state parties do, it's the states themselves. And singling out New York should not go unnoticed, since Sanders' backers raised a lot of noise concerning that state's primary. Some of it was warranted - thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby vs. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, Kings County (Brooklyn) purged 125,000 voters from its rolls. However, the Sanders campaign accused Clinton of supporting this purge, which mainly targeted African-American and Latino voters - i.e., people more likely to vote for her than him.
I do not see the URC raising any concerns over this aspect of the primary - rather, they are focused on punishing New York for not having same-day voter registration for independents and possibly Republicans who want to cross over and vote Democrat. If they don't implement this reform, the URC will reduce New York's delegate count, or eliminate it outright. Could this be an act of revenge against the fact that Sanders lost New York? That's a bit of a stretch, but penalizing them mainly for holding a closed primary seems unfair if you're not committed to fixing the other problems in that state.
Let me make one thing clear: I am not against the idea of same-day voter registration. I want, more than anything, to make it easier to vote in this country. But if the URC succeeds in voting this reform through, Democrats must be extremely vigilant, since this could lead to Republicans tampering in primaries that should be decided by Democrats. I worry that the people advocating this change may not have thought enough about that potential downside.
So we have one proposal that seems OK, and one that I'm skeptical about. It's the third one that I'm most infuriated by, and it is one that the URC and Sanders himself have been shamelessly transparent over: strengthening caucuses over primaries. Going back to his piece in Politico, Sanders writes:
"In states that use caucuses, we must make it easier for working people and students to participate. While there is much to be said for bringing people together, face to face to discuss why they support the candidate of their choice, not everybody is able to participate because of work, child care or other obligations. A process must be developed that gives everyone the right to cast a vote even if they are not physically able to attend a caucus.
No, no, no. For those who value voting rights, caucuses should not be acceptable over primaries, ever. They disenfranchise thousands of people who can't show up for hours on end to support their candidate due to prior commitments. If you want a sense of just how suppressive this process is, consider this: fewer people participated in all 17 Democratic caucuses in 2016 than the number of people who voted in the Wisconsin primary.
The DNC cannot stop states from holding caucuses, or, as in the case of Washington State, holding a caucus in addition to a primary, but it should be harder on states that prioritize their caucuses. We should always prioritize states that allow more people to vote, even if they're as flawed as New York. Again, the DNC cannot directly control how states run their electoral process, they can only institute penalties if they do not meet a certain standard. And letting caucus states off the hook is something that should worry voting rights advocates everywhere. To give an example, take Washington state, which held a primary and a caucus. In the caucus, 220,000 people voted, and Sanders won; in the primary, 660,000 people voted, and Hillary Clinton won by six points. Clearly, the more open process should take priority, but Washington's Democratic Party favored the caucus, sending delegates to the DNC that way.
Sanders clearly favors caucuses because he did better in them - which means Sanders did better when the vote was suppressed. Those 220,000 voters who showed up for the Washington caucus only represent 5.8% of the state's population, and most of the people who showed up were white. This lack of diversity and turnout prove how outdated caucuses are, and for the URC to champion them as a key part of the democratic process is a black mark against their efforts to reform the voting process.
With that having been said, this doesn't mean that all these proposals are going to be implemented into the party platform right away. The URC first has to vote on them this weekend, and based on those votes, revise their final report, which will then be sent to the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee on January 1st of next year. After they review it and put together their own report by next July, they will sent it back to the URC, who will compare the two reports and see if one reflects the other. If the discrepancies between the two are too large, they will take a vote next fall with all members of the DNC.
I urge all who care about the democratic process to stand against the proposed changes that would prioritize caucuses over primaries and penalize states unjustly for holding closed primaries. We must stand against the blatant favoritism towards Sanders that URC members like James Zogby and Nomiki Konst have expressed. People on the right and the very far left understand that when more people vote, their side loses. For them to meet in the middle on this crucial issue only proves how unsavory their agenda is. It must be stopped in its tracks before it can screw us over in 2020.Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) has filed a report and urgent appeal with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture alleging that the Judge Rotenberg Center for the disabled, located in Massachusetts, violates the UN Convention against Torture.
The rights group submitted their report this week, titled “Torture not Treatment: Electric Shock and Long-Term Restraint in the United States on Children and Adults with Disabilities at the Judge Rotenberg Center,” after an in-depth investigation revealed use of restraint boards, isolation, food deprivation and electric shocks in efforts to control the behaviors of its disabled and emotionally troubled students.
Findings in the MDRI report include the center’s practice of subjecting children to electric shocks on the legs, arms, soles of feet and torso — in many cases for years — as well as some for more than a decade. Electronic shocks are administered by remote-controlled packs attached to a child’s back called a Graduated Electronic Decelerators (GEI).
The disabilities group notes that stun guns typically deliver three to four milliamps per shock. GEI packs, meanwhile, shock students with 45 milliamps — more than ten times the amperage of a typical stun gun.
A former employee of the center told an investigator, “When you start working there, they show you this video which says the shock is ‘like a bee sting’ and that it does not really hurt the kids. One kid, you could smell the flesh burning, he had so many shocks. These kids are under constant fear, 24/7. They sleep with them on, eat with them on. It made me sick and I could not sleep. I prayed to God someone would help these kids.”
Noting that it believes United States law fails to provide needed protections to children and adults with disabilities, MDRI calls for the immediate end to the use of electric shock and long-term restraints as a form of behavior modification or treatment and a ban on the infliction of severe pain for so-called therapeutic purposes.
“Torture as treatment should be banned and prosecuted under criminal law,” the report states.
The U.S. Department of Justice opened a “routine investigation” of the center in February of this year in response to a September 2009 letter signed by 31 disability organizations claiming that the center violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Judge Rotenberg CEO and founder Dr. Matthew L. Israel began his first program in California back in 1977. In 1981, a 14-year old boy died face down, tied to his bed, while living in the California center. Dr. Israel was not held responsible for the death. After an investigation by the State of California, Israel relocated to Rhode Island, and then to Massachusetts, where his facility still operates today.
Mother Jones magazine published an extensive investigative report on the Rotenberg Center in 2007 titled “School of Shock.” Reporter Jennifer Gonnerman asked, “How many times do you have to zap a child before it’s torture?”
Children at the Judge Rotenberg Center are often shackled, restrained and secluded for months at a time, the report says. Social isolation, and food deprivation as forms of punishment are common. Mock and threatened stabbings — to forcibly elicit unacceptable behaviors resulting in electric shock punishments (Labeled as Behavioral Research Lessons or BRLs, by the center) were reported to MDRI as well as state regulatory bodies.
A former student of the center reportedly tells MDRI, “The worst thing ever was the BRLs. They try and make you do a bad behavior and then they punish you. The first time I had a BRL, two guys came in the room and grabbed me – I had no idea what was going on. They held a knife to my throat and I started to scream and I got shocked. I had BRLs three times a week for stuff I didn’t even do. It went on for about six months or more. I was in a constant state of paranoia and fear. I never knew if a door opened if I would get one. It was more stress than I could ever imagine. Horror.”
Behaviors that the center deemed “aggressive,” as well as those considered “minor,” or “non-compliant” — such as raising one’s hand without permission — are all considered punishable by electric shocks, restraints, and other punishments to students.
“One girl who was blind, deaf and non-verbal was moaning and rocking,” a former teacher says in the report. “Her moaning was like a cry. The staff shocked her for moaning. Turned out she had broken a tooth. Another child had an accident in the bathroom and was shocked.”
The rights group investigation found that the Rotenberg center is the only known facility in the United States, “Or perhaps the world,” that employs the use of electricity, long-term restraints and other punishments to deliberately inflict pain upon its children and then refer to it as “treatment.” The electric shocks alone are cited as having possible long-term effects such as muscle stiffness, impotence, damage to teeth, scarring of the skin, hair loss, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), severe depression, chronic anxiety, memory loss and sleep disturbances.
The MDRI report states that more than any other source for its information, they relied upon information readily obtained from the Judge Rotenberg Center’s own website.
In response to MDRI’s report, the Judge Rotenberg Center said, “There is no credible evidence that for these most severe forms of behavior disorders, there is any pharmacological or psychological treatment that can effectively treat these students or even keep them safe. JRC is the only program willing to address the reality of these children’s disorders and endure the political firestorm in order to save these children and give them an education and a future.”
The complete response from the center can be read in full at JRC’s website.Tales of Berseria Takes Place In The Past World Of Tales of Zestiria [Update]
By Sato. December 22, 2015. 6:04am
Bandai Namco recently shared some key details on Tales of Berseria and how it is linked to the world of Tales of Zestiria, in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine. [Thanks, Hachima.]
Tales of Berseria is set “Wasteland,” and in the middle of it is a continent called “Glenwood,” but Berseria’s era takes place much long before.
Compared to the future (in Zestiria) the scenery is vastly different, and the towns, and natural landmarks will be completely different as well; however, there are some places and civilization that will make you recall a thing or two of the future.
While you may not see too much in common, they say that if you explore the world of Tales of Berseria more, you may even discover the untold truth behind the distant past of Tales of Zestiria.
Update: Game Jouhou has provided a few more details from the magazine.
Here are some keywords for Tales of Berseria:
Daemonblight: The disease changing people into monsters. Most of people affected by this disease go berserk and attack people but some of them can stay rational.
Daemon: A monster that a person transformed into. It has been confirmed that even animals can be affected by Daemonblight.
Malak: A tribe who can use the power of nature. They don’t have ego and are exploited by humans as familiar spirits.
Scarlet Night: The Night when the Scarlet Moon rises. Some say the Scarlet Night has something to do with daemonblight…
Again, while there aren’t any specific details, the magazine mentions that the key items of “Compass,” “Comb,” and “Apple” play a big role in the game’s story and characters.
Finally, the characters designers from Tales of Zestiria in Mutsumi Inomata, Kosuke Fujishima, Daigo Okumura, and Minoru Iwatamoto are the character designers for Tales of Berseria.
Tales of Berseria will release in 2016 for PlayStation 4 and PC. The game was also announced for the west.A A
ELLENSBURG, Wash. -- From Bigfoot to the disappearance of D.B. Cooper, the Pacific Northwest is full of mysteries. Another mystery buried deep in the hills of eastern Washington keeps resurfacing.
Ellensburg and its surrounding valleys and Manastash Ridge are beautiful in any season.
Some believe what lies beneath is a deep, dark hole with supernatural powers.
A man named Red Elk is one of the only people alive known to have ever seen the mysterious hole.
A Native American Shaman, or medicine man, Red Elk said his dad first showed him the hole in 1961.
"He said 'This is an endless hole,'" Red Elk said.
Red Elk's been back many times and said strange things happen every time he goes near it.
"People get it confused with what I call the devil's hole," he said.
Many locals claim to know about the hole, but it didn't become phenomena until 1997, when Mel Waters went on the Coast to Coast radio show with Art Bell.
"I brought the dogs with me." Waters said on the show. "They wouldn't go anywhere near the damn thing."
Waters said the hole had a three-foot stone wall around it.
It seemed bottomless to him, so he used an old shark fisherman's trick -- sending thousands of feet of fishing line down.
"What I did, was I sent down a roll of lifesavers," he said. "So when it hit water the lifesavers would dissolve."
But the lifesavers came back up whole -- no water -- so how deep was this hole?
Waters said he believed it descended miles into the earth and he heard strange stories about its powers.
"One guy claims that he threw his departed canine down into the hole," he said. "He swears the dog actually came back to him."
Red Elk said it was when Waters went public that the trouble began.
"Now I'm going public on this. And that could land me in a pile of junk," he said.
Red Elk claims the government has a secret base there.
"An underground base, a very small, underground base," he said.
That's how Red Elk explains the white boxes covering the area on some satellite images.
He also said he's seen "alien activity" in the area.
"A huge space craft, one, will appear and hover over the hole," he said.
That's what he said happens during Summer Solstice, when space men load and unload things at the hole before flying away.
At the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore, Phil Lipson said he's heard the stories.
"Well, I believe there is a hole," Lipson said.
But Lipson's never seen the hole, even though he's led expeditions to find it.
"I think it's actually a true event just something that's never been totally uncovered," he said.
And to this day, no one's been able to find it, since that famous radio conversation.
Ellensburg Public Library Historian Milton Wagy said the story became a sensation after Waters went on the radio.
He said the phone rang off the hook with all kinds of stories about the hole -- some explainable -- some not.
He's still trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the library's file on Mel's Hole.
"Well it just disappeared, which lends itself to the mysteriousness of Mel's Hole," Wagy said. "Did Mel take it? Did it just kind of rise out of the locked file cabinet."You never know there might be a hole out there."
Now the question is, can anyone can find Mel's Hole and prove its existence?Real Madrid Celebrates 500 games via Facebook Live
Real Madrid's strongest possible XI will face Napoli
After completing 500 games with Real Madrid Sergio Ramos is a happy man, and to celebrate the milestone the defender took to Facebook Live to answer questions and interact with his audience, which included the revelation that he hasn't ruled out changing his shirt number to 93.
Hundreds of thousands of supporters were online to view his answers.
"I don't know which goal is my favourite," he began.
"I have some good ones but they are like my children, I'm not sure I can pick just one.
"Maybe the equaliser in the Champions League final because it took us a lot to win and scoring in the last minute is special."
A change of short number was perhaps the biggest surprise.
"The '4' has given me a lot of luck and has accompanied me throughout my career with Real," he continued.
"But don't think that I haven't considered changing it for 93."
Asked by one supporter what it meant to wear the shirt, Ramos was unequivocal.
"We have to be aware of what the club badge entails," he said.
"We have to represent it and give the maximum, put sweat on the shirt to the very end."
Clearly he isn't ready to hang up his boots just yet.
"I still have years here as a player and I enjoy every day," he noted.
On reaching 500 matches, a mark very few manage, Real's captain was grateful.
"I am very proud of it and I did not expect it," he said.
"Many years ago I did not imagine that I could achieve such an important figure.
"I can enjoy it today but I want to continue to represent the best team in the world."
Finally he was asked what he would've done if he wasn't a footballer.
"If I had not been a footballer I would have dedicated myself to another sport," Ramos concluded.
"Tennis has always attracted my attention so I would've been fighting with Nadal."Shout down Ron Jaworski at an airport terminal and the former NFL quarterback who still watches film of every game delivers unsolicited praise of the big man who famously goes by Pot Roast.
Run into an NFL coach on the streets of Seattle and in the midst of a conversation on DeMarcus Ware and Von Miller, he veers toward Terrance “Pot Roast” Knighton and how remarkable it is that such a big man can play so well.
Live action can do the unthinkable and make a defensive tackle, even one as enormous as the 335-pound-or-so Knighton, disappear. To those who study film, though, Knighton stands out from that scrummed pile of humanity.
“He’s an agile, 300-plus guy, and you don’t find too many other ones like that,” said Broncos cornerback Aqib Talib, who played the past two seasons with the New England Patriots. “I only know one other one: Vincent Wilfork. You get your name mentioned in the same vein as Vince Wilfork, you’re on the right path.”
And cut a wide swath. Ware and Miller are the most renowned on the Broncos’ defensive line because as defenders coming off the edge, they penetrate the backfield and occasionally sack the quarterback. But it’s Knighton who arguably has been the best among the Broncos’ defensive linemen through the first three games.
This is a run-stuffing, pocket-pushing force who takes on double-team blocks while almost never winding up on the ground. And it’s not just brawn and agility that might be sending Knighton to his first Pro Bowl berth, but a high football IQ.
In the Broncos’ most recent game, against the Seattle Seahawks on Sept. 21, Knighton knew from the way the center was working him that another blocker was going to move in. When the second blocker arrived, Knighton wasn’t blindsided.
Smarts was also behind Knighton’s two most visible plays this season — a deflection of Alex Smith’s fourth-down, goal-to-go pass when the defensive tackle read an arms-raised situation and the quarterback’s eyes to preserve the Broncos’ win against the Kansas City Chiefs, and a blocked field goal against Seattle.
Actually, the blocked kick, like so much of Knighton’s other work, again required the keen-eyed inspection from the film room. Knighton got a finger on Steven Hauschka’s 46-yard field-goal attempt.
To the naked eye, it looked like Hauschka badly mishit the ball. It was initially recorded as a kick that missed wide left.
The strength of a Knighton finger, though, is equal to another man’s arm.
“Usually in that field-goal situation I play inside closer to the center, and Marvin (Austin) plays outside on the right,” Knighton said. “But all that week, we were told on long field goals this guy kicks low balls. So on that field goal I switched it up with Marvin to get a better angle.”
There was reason to wonder how Knighton would play this season because he was dealing with fame for the first time. They call it the limelight, but it’s been known to make lemons out of first-time inhabitants.
Knighton first started drawing attention outside the film room when his sack of Tom Brady in the AFC championship game got him large play on that night’s highlight shows and a write-up in Sports Illustrated.
A national tire commercial and his own local radio show have followed. But so has Knighton’s dominant play from the second-half of last season.
Just because Knighton is heavy doesn’t mean he got full of himself.
“The national attention, the commercial, all that’s fun,” Knighton said. “But it’s all about winning. With team success comes player success. The attention from the fans, social media, that’s fun, but I know it comes from winning. And it comes from knowing what to do off the field, being a good role model, and carrying yourself as a professional.”
Knighton admitted he got a jolt when his teammates elected him as a defensive captain this season. As the oldest of four brothers in a household where a father was never present, Knighton always has understood the responsibility that comes with the |
the Spurs had advanced that far.
That said, Duncan's retirement seems a season premature. He was legitimately good last season. His offensive numbers hit a career low, but that was expected with LaMarcus Aldridge's arrival making him the fifth option. On the other end, Duncan remained superlative, posting advanced numbers that gave him an even stronger case for the Defensive Player of the Year award than Kawhi Leonard, who won the award for the second straight season. But rather than pushing for a 20th season when his knees might have prevented him from being a positive contributor, Duncan finishes his career having helped the Spurs to the very end.
And though Duncan finished his career as a defensive specialist, lest we forget, prime Duncan was one of the most incredible all-around basketball players in the history of the NBA. Duncan averaged 21 and 12 the moment he arrived in the NBA and there wasn't a single basketball skill he didn't possess. He was fluent, if methodical, on the block, a cunning passer from his perch in the post, precise with his finishes, deliberate in cleaning the glass and punitive when protecting the paint.
Duncan's unprecedented longevity elevated him to a different historic pantheon, but the player he was before he began passing the torch put him in position to be an all-time great. When it came time to take a back seat, Duncan was more than accommodating, constantly seeking to reinvent himself, always looking to bend and twist to perfectly suit the needs of his team.
It is hard to shake the idea that the modern Bill Russell just retired. From his unparalleled defensive ability to his genius understanding of the game to his reputation as the best teammate in the NBA, Duncan's résumé mirrors Russell's, and Duncan did his winning in a much more competitive era. With five championships, three Finals MVPs, two regular season MVPs and 19 years of stability for his franchise, Duncan has a strong claim as the best player of his generation and as one of the five best players in NBA history.
Duncan does not leave the Spurs in a vulnerable state. No team other than the Warriors is set up for future success better than the Spurs are with Leonard as their next franchise cornerstone, and San Antonio should still be Golden State's biggest threat in the West during the next couple of years.
But as great as Leonard, Popovich and General Manager R.C. Buford are, the Spurs will not win 50 games a season for the next two decades, they will not make the playoffs for the next 19 seasons and they won't hang five more championship banners in the rafters by the time Leonard turns 40.
They won't because the presence of Tim Duncan, a player whose fusion of humility, class, and ability will never be replicated, made all of those things possible.
And now Duncan, seemingly forever present, is in the past.Child poverty in Scotland is lower than in the rest of the UK, but 140,000 children are still growing up in poor families, warns a new Government commissioned report.
The State of the National 2015 document says that while Scotland has fewer workers paid less than the Living Wage than the rest of the UK and more mothers in couples work, almost one in five employees are low paid.
The document compiled by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission says: "There is still a long way to go to achieve the vision of eradicating child poverty in Scotland, and the Scottish government will need to put in place a new institutional framework to replace the Child Poverty Act 2010. "
Out of the 12 devolved nations and English regions, Scotland has the lowest rate of child poverty after housing costs, the second highest parental employment rate, the fourth lowest proportion of children in workless households, and the third lowest prevalence of low-paid jobs.
The report adds: "However, there is no room for complacency. There is still a very long way to go to eradicate child poverty in Scotland."
In November 2014 the Institute for Fiscal Studies published projections for Scotland which suggested that the proportion of children in relative poverty would increase by seven per cent and the proportion of children in absolute poverty would increase by 20 per cent, between 2013–14 and 2020–21.
The report says: "These challenges have grown since last year, with the announcement of a further £12 billion of discretionary cuts in the UK welfare budget targeted on children and working-age adults by the incoming UK Government that are not factored into these projections."
The report said that relative child poverty before housing costs was 14 per cent in Scotland, compared to 17 per cent in the UK as a whole and 21 per cent five years earlier in 2008–09.
Absolute child poverty before housing costs was 15 per cent, compared to 19 per cent in the UK as a whole and 20 per cent five years earlier in 2008–09.
Material deprivation before housing costs was 13 per cent, the same as in the UK as a whole. This has been rising over the last two years from nine per cent in 2011–12.
Relative and absolute poverty before housing costs were both at half the levels seen in 1999–2000, described as a "significant achievement".
The proportion of children in Scotland who live in workless households has decreased rapidly in recent years and is slightly lower than the UK average. Only 10.9 per cent of children in Scotland live in workless households compared to 15.8 per cent in 2012 and 11.8 per cent in the UK as a whole.
The report adds: "However, despite this good performance relative to the rest of the UK, progress against the absolute child poverty after housing costs measure stalled in the mid-2000s and the rate has been increasing since 2010–11. As a result, child poverty against this measure was the same in 2013–14 as it was almost a decade earlier in 2004–05."Craft beer is an amazingly versatile beverage. Don’t just drink it — cook with beer! Consider CraftBeer.com your online recipe rolodex for cooking and baking with beer. You can find beer recipes for every meal of the day, whether you’re cooking for one or an entire party. You’ll find recipes that include craft beer styles from IPA to American Stout.
Craft beer was made for brunch, and we have dozens of brunch recipes right here from beer donut holes to beer french toast. If you’re looking for new flavors for your summer cookouts, try our recipes for beer burgers or wings made with beer. If you’re stumped on what to take to your football tailgate party, check out our recipe for beer soft pretzels. From beer s’mores to St. Patrick’s Day Stout Chocolate Pies, we have deserts with beer covered right here. Try a few and we guarantee they’ll become your new favorites.Last month, when President Donald Trump toured a Boeing aircraft plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, he saw a familiar face in the crowd that greeted him: Patrick Caddell, a former Democratic political operative and pollster who, for forty-five years, has been prodding insurgent Presidential candidates to attack the Washington establishment. Caddell, who lives in Charleston, is perhaps best known for helping Jimmy Carter win the 1976 Presidential race. He is also remembered for having collaborated with his friend Warren Beatty on the 1998 satire “Bulworth.” In that film, a kamikaze candidate abandons the usual talking points and excoriates both the major political parties and the media; voters love his unconventionality, and he becomes improbably popular. If the plot sounds familiar, there’s a reason: in recent years, Caddell has offered political advice to Trump. He has not worked directly for the President, but at least as far back as 2013 he has been a contractor for one of Trump’s biggest financial backers: Robert Mercer, a reclusive Long Island hedge-fund manager, who has become a major force behind the Trump Presidency. During the past decade, Mercer, who is seventy, has funded an array of political projects that helped pave the way for Trump’s rise. Among these efforts was public-opinion research, conducted by Caddell, showing that political conditions in America were increasingly ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House. Caddell told me that Mercer “is a libertarian—he despises the Republican establishment,” and added, “He thinks that the leaders are corrupt crooks, and that they’ve ruined the country.” Trump greeted Caddell warmly in North Charleston, and after giving a speech he conferred privately with him, in an area reserved for V.I.P.s and for White House officials, including Stephen Bannon, the President’s top strategist, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Caddell is well known to this inner circle. He first met Trump in the eighties. (“People said he was just a clown,” Caddell said. “But I’ve learned that you should always pay attention to successful ‘clowns.’ ”) Caddell shared the research he did for Mercer with Trump and others in the campaign, including Bannon, with whom he has partnered on numerous projects. The White House declined to divulge what Trump and Caddell discussed in North Charleston, as did Caddell. But that afternoon Trump issued perhaps the most incendiary statement of his Presidency: a tweet calling the news media “the enemy of the American people.” The proclamation alarmed liberals and conservatives alike. William McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who commanded the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, called Trump’s statement a “threat to democracy.” The President is known for tweeting impulsively, but in this case his words weren’t spontaneous: they clearly echoed the thinking of Caddell, Bannon, and Mercer. In 2012, Caddell gave a speech at a conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media, a conservative watchdog group, in which he called the media “the enemy of the American people.” That declaration was promoted by Breitbart News, a platform for the pro-Trump alt-right, of which Bannon was the executive chairman, before joining the Trump Administration. One of the main stakeholders in Breitbart News is Mercer. Mercer is the co-C.E.O. of Renaissance Technologies, which is among the most profitable hedge funds in the country. A brilliant computer scientist, he helped transform the financial industry through the innovative use of trading algorithms. But he has never given an interview explaining his political views. Although Mercer has recently become an object of media speculation, Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, who formerly served as the chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said, “I have no idea what his political views are—they’re unknown, not just to the public but also to most people who’ve been active in politics for the past thirty years.” Potter, a Republican, sees Mercer as emblematic of a major shift in American politics that has occurred since 2010, when the Supreme Court made a controversial ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That ruling, and several subsequent ones, removed virtually all limits on how much money corporations and nonprofit groups can spend on federal elections, and how much individuals can give to political-action committees. Since then, power has tilted away from the two main political parties and toward a tiny group of rich mega-donors. Private money has long played a big role in American elections. When there were limits on how much a single donor could give, however, it was much harder for an individual to have a decisive impact. Now, Potter said, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are.” He continued, “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.” Through a spokesman, Mercer declined to discuss his role in launching Trump. People who know him say that he is painfully awkward socially, and rarely speaks. “He can barely look you in the eye when he talks,” an acquaintance said. “It’s probably helpful to be highly introverted when getting lost in code, but in politics you have to talk to people, in order to find out how the real world works.” In 2010, when the Wall Street Journal wrote about Mercer assuming a top role at Renaissance, he issued a terse statement: “I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody.” According to the paper, he once told a colleague that he preferred the company of cats to humans. Several people who have worked with Mercer believe that, despite his oddities, he has had surprising success in aligning the Republican Party, and consequently America, with his personal beliefs, and is now uniquely positioned to exert influence over the Trump Administration. In February, David Magerman, a senior employee at Renaissance, spoke out about what he regards as Mercer’s worrisome influence. Magerman, a Democrat who is a strong supporter of Jewish causes, took particular issue with Mercer’s empowerment of the alt-right, which has included anti-Semitic and white-supremacist voices. Magerman shared his concerns with Mercer, and the conversation escalated into an argument. Magerman told colleagues about it, and, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Mercer called Magerman and said, “I hear you’re going around saying I’m a white supremacist. That’s ridiculous.” Magerman insisted to Mercer that he hadn’t used those words, but added, “If what you’re doing is harming the country, then you have to stop.” After the Journal story appeared, Magerman, who has worked at Renaissance for twenty years, was suspended for thirty days. Undaunted, he published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, accusing Mercer of “effectively buying shares in the candidate.” He warned, “Robert Mercer now owns a sizeable share of the United States Presidency.” Nick Patterson, a former senior Renaissance employee who is now a computational biologist at the Broad Institute, agrees that Mercer’s influence has been huge. “Bob has used his money very effectively,” he said. “He’s not the first person in history to use money in politics, but in my view Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob. It doesn’t get much more effective than that.” Patterson said that his relationship with Mercer has always been collegial. In 1993, Patterson, at that time a Renaissance executive, recruited Mercer from I.B.M., and they worked together for the next eight years. But Patterson doesn’t share Mercer’s libertarian views, or what he regards as his susceptibility to conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton. During Bill Clinton’s Presidency, Patterson recalled, Mercer insisted at a staff luncheon that Clinton had participated in a secret drug-running scheme with the C.I.A. The plot supposedly operated out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas. “Bob told me he believed that the Clintons were involved in murders connected to it,” Patterson said. Two other sources told me that, in recent years, they had heard Mercer claim that the Clintons have had opponents murdered. The Mena story is one of several dark fantasies put forth in the nineties by The American Spectator, an archconservative magazine. According to Patterson, Mercer read the publication at the time. David Brock, a former Spectator writer who is now a liberal activist, told me that the alleged Mena conspiracy was based on a single dubious source, and was easily disproved by flight records. “It’s extremely telling that Mercer would believe that,” Brock said. “It says something about his conspiratorial frame of mind, and the fringe circle he was in. We at the Spectator called them Clinton Crazies.” Patterson also recalled Mercer arguing that, during the Gulf War, the U.S. should simply have taken Iraq’s oil, “since it was there.” Trump, too, has said that the U.S. should have “kept the oil.” Expropriating another country’s natural resources is a violation of international law. Another onetime senior employee at Renaissance recalls hearing Mercer downplay the dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is a proponent of nuclear power, “was very excited about the idea, and felt that it meant nuclear accidents weren’t such a big deal.” Mercer strongly supported the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Trump’s Attorney General. Many civil-rights groups opposed the nomination, pointing out that Sessions has in the past expressed racist views. Mercer, for his part, has argued that the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mistake. According to the onetime Renaissance employee, Mercer has asserted repeatedly that African-Americans were better off economically before the civil-rights movement. (Few scholars agree.) He has also said that the problem of racism in America is exaggerated. The source said that, not long ago, he heard Mercer proclaim that there are no white racists in America today, only black racists. (Mercer, meanwhile, has supported a super PAC, Black Americans for a Better Future, whose goal is to “get more Blacks involved in the Republican Party.”) “Most people at Renaissance didn’t challenge him” about politics, Patterson said. But Patterson clashed with him over climate change; Mercer said that concerns about it were overblown. After Patterson shared with him a scientific paper on the subject, Mercer and his brother, Randall, who also worked at the hedge fund, sent him a paper by a scientist named Arthur Robinson, who is a biochemist, not a climate expert. “It looked like a scientific paper, but it was completely loaded with selective and biased information,” Patterson recalled. The paper argued that, if climate change were real, future generations would “enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life.” Robinson owns a sheep ranch in Cave Junction, Oregon, and on the property he runs a laboratory that he calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Mercer helps subsidize Robinson’s various projects, which include an effort to forestall aging. Patterson sent Mercer a note calling Robinson’s arguments “completely false.” He never heard back. “I think if you studied Bob’s views of what the ideal state would look like, you’d find that, basically, he wants a system where the state just gets out of the way,” Patterson said. “Climate change poses a problem for that world view, because markets can’t solve it on their own.” Magerman told the Wall Street Journal that Mercer’s political opinions “show contempt for the social safety net that he doesn’t need, but many Americans do.” He also said that Mercer wants the U.S. government to be “shrunk down to the size of a pinhead.” Several former colleagues of Mercer’s said that his views are akin to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Magerman told me, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.” Magerman added, “He thinks society is upside down—that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.” He said that this mind-set was typical of “instant billionaires” in finance, who “have no stake in society,” unlike the industrialists of the past, who “built real things.” Another former high-level Renaissance employee said, “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.” The 2016 Presidential election posed a challenge for someone with Mercer’s ideology. Multiple sources described him as animated mainly by hatred of Hillary Clinton. But Mercer also distrusted the Republican leadership. After the candidate he initially supported, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, dropped out of the race, Mercer sought a disruptive figure who could upend both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Patterson told me that Mercer seems to have applied “a very Renaissance Technologies way of thinking” to politics: “He probably estimated the probability of Trump winning, and when it wasn’t very high he said to himself, ‘O.K., what has to happen in order for this twenty-per-cent thing to occur?’ It’s like playing a card game when you haven’t got a very good hand.” Mercer, as it happens, is a superb poker player, and his political gamble appears to have paid off. Institutional Investor has called it “Robert Mercer’s Trade of the Century.”
In the 2016 campaign, Mercer gave $22.5 million in disclosed donations to Republican candidates and to political-action committees. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who worked for the Trump campaign, said that Mercer had “catapulted to the top of the heap of right-of-center power brokers.” It’s worth noting that several other wealthy financiers, including Democrats such as Thomas Steyer and Donald Sussman, gave even more money to campaigns. (One of the top Democratic donors was James Simons, the retired founder of Renaissance Technologies.) Nevertheless, Mercer’s political efforts stand apart. Adopting the strategy of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire libertarians, Mercer enlarged his impact exponentially by combining short-term campaign spending with long-term ideological investments. He poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News, and—in what David Magerman has called “an extreme example of modern entrepreneurial philanthropy”—made donations to dozens of politically tinged organizations. Like many wealthy families, the Mercers have a private foundation. At first, the Mercer Family Foundation, which was established in 2004, had an endowment of only half a million dollars, and most of its grants went to medical research and conventional charities. But by 2008, under the supervision of Mercer’s ardently conservative daughter, Rebekah, the foundation began giving millions of dollars to interconnected nonprofit groups, several of which played crucial roles in propagating attacks on Hillary Clinton. By 2015, the most recent year for which federal tax records are available, the foundation had grown into a $24.5-million operation that gave large sums to ultraconservative organizations. On top of this nonprofit spending, Mercer invested in private businesses. He put ten million dollars into Breitbart News, which was conceived as a conservative counterweight to the Huffington Post. The Web site freely mixes right-wing political commentary with juvenile rants and racist innuendo; under Bannon’s direction, the editors introduced a rubric called Black Crime. The site played a key role in undermining Hillary Clinton; by tracking which negative stories about her got the most clicks and “likes,” the editors helped identify which story lines and phrases were the most potent weapons against her. Breitbart News has been a remarkable success: according to ComScore, a company that measures online traffic, the site attracted 19.2 million unique visitors in October. Mercer also invested some five million dollars in Cambridge Analytica, a firm that mines online data to reach and influence potential voters. The company has said that it uses secret psychological methods to pinpoint which messages are the most persuasive to individual online viewers. The firm, which is the American affiliate of Strategic Communication Laboratories, in London, has worked for candidates whom Mercer has backed, including Trump. It also reportedly worked on the Brexit campaign, in the United Kingdom. Alexander Nix, the C.E.O. of the firm, says that it has created “profiles”—consisting of several thousand data points—for two hundred and twenty million Americans. In promotional materials, S.C.L. has claimed to know how to use such data to wage both psychological and political warfare. “Persuading somebody to vote a certain way,” Nix has said publicly, “is really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to not join Al Qaeda.” Some critics suggest that, at this point, Cambridge Analytica’s self-promotion exceeds its effectiveness. But Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of communications at Elon University, in North Carolina, recently published a paper, on Medium, calling Cambridge Analytica a “propaganda machine.” As important as Mercer’s business investments is his hiring of advisers. Years before he started supporting Trump, he began funding several conservative activists, including Steve Bannon; as far back as 2012, Bannon was the Mercers’ de-facto political adviser. Some people who have observed the Mercers’ political evolution worry that Bannon has become a Svengali to the whole family, exploiting its political inexperience and tapping its fortune to further his own ambitions. It was Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest in a data-analytics firm. He also encouraged the investment in Breitbart News, which was made through Gravitas Maximus, L.L.C., a front group that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance Technologies. In an interview, Bannon praised the Mercers’ strategic approach: “The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution. Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.” Last summer, Bannon and some other activists whom the Mercers have supported—including David Bossie, who initiated the Citizens United lawsuit—came together to rescue Trump’s wobbly campaign. Sam Nunberg, an early Trump adviser who watched Mercer’s group take over, said, “Mercer was smart. He invested in the right people.” Bannon and Rebekah Mercer have become particularly close political partners. Last month, when Bannon denounced “the corporatist, globalist media” at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in his first public appearance since entering the White House, Rebekah Mercer was part of his entourage. Bannon supports some initiatives, such as a major infrastructure program, that are anathema to libertarians such as Robert Mercer. But the Wall Street Journal has described Bannon joking and swearing on the deck of the Mercers’ yacht, the Sea Owl, as if he were a member of the family. Bannon assured me that the Mercers, despite all their luxuries, are “the most middle-class people you will ever meet.” Robert and Diana Mercer brought up their three daughters in a modest home near I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Westchester County. The girls attended public schools, and Robert and Diana worried about paying three college tuitions. According to Donna D’Andraia, a family friend, Diana was a PTA member and a “tiger mom” who “made sure that the girls did all the right things—they were in the honor society, and stayed out of trouble.” D’Andraia recalled Diana saying that Robert was brilliant, but D’Andraia found it hard to tell, because “he was very quiet—he didn’t talk to anybody.” The eldest Mercer daughter, Jennifer, or Jenji, attended Stanford. Rebekah, the middle daughter, enrolled at Cornell and then transferred to Stanford. Majoring in biology and math, she graduated in 1996; a few years later, she got an M.A., in operations research. The youngest daughter, Heather Sue, “was the spitfire,” D’Andraia recalled. When Heather Sue was a junior in high school, she tried out to be a place kicker on the football team. She made it, and, after enrolling at Duke University, she joined its varsity squad. When the Duke coach refused to treat her as the equal of her male teammates, she sued the school for gender discrimination, and won two million dollars in damages. Ron Santavicca, Heather Sue’s high-school coach, described the Mercers, who still invite him to their Christmas parties, as “the salt of the earth.” He added, “The whole family is very determined. When they have a mission, they go after it.” In 1993, when Nick Patterson mailed Robert Mercer a job offer from Renaissance, Mercer threw it in the trash: he’d never heard of the hedge fund. At the time, Mercer was part of a team pioneering the use of computers to translate languages. I.B.M. considered the project a bit of a luxury, and didn’t see its potential, though the work laid the foundation for Google Translate and Apple’s Siri. But Mercer and his main partner, Peter Brown, found the project exciting, and had the satisfaction of showing up experts in the field, who had dismissed their statistical approach to translating languages as impractical. Instead of trying to teach a computer linguistic rules, Mercer and Brown downloaded enormous quantities of dual-language documents—including Canadian parliamentary records—and created code that analyzed the data and detected patterns, enabling predictions of probable translations. According to a former I.B.M. colleague, Mercer was obsessive, and at one point took six months off to type into a computer every entry in a Spanish-English dictionary. Sebastian Mallaby, in his 2010 book on the hedge-fund industry, “More Money Than God,” reports that Mercer’s boss at I.B.M. once jokingly called him an “automaton.” In 2014, Mercer accepted a lifetime-achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. In a speech at the ceremony, Mercer, who grew up in New Mexico, said that he had a “jaundiced view” of government. While in college, he had worked on a military base in Albuquerque, and he had showed his superiors how to run certain computer programs a hundred times faster; instead of saving time and money, the bureaucrats ran a hundred times more equations. He concluded that the goal of government officials was “not so much to get answers as to consume the computer budget.” Mercer’s colleagues say that he views the government as arrogant and inefficient, and believes that individuals need to be self-sufficient, and should not receive aid from the state. Yet, when I.B.M. failed to offer adequate support for Mercer and Brown’s translation project, they secured additional funding from DARPA, the secretive Pentagon program. Despite Mercer’s disdain for “big government,” this funding was essential to his early success. Meanwhile, Patterson kept asking Mercer and Brown to join Renaissance. He thought that their technique of extracting patterns from huge amounts of data could be applied to the pile of numbers generated daily by the global trade in stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. The patterns could generate predictive financial models that would give traders a decisive edge. In the spring of 1993, Mercer experienced two devastating losses: his mother was killed, in a car crash, and his father, a biologist, died six weeks later. With life’s precariousness made painfully clear, and with tuition bills mounting, he decided to leave I.B.M. for a higher-paying job at Renaissance. Brown made the leap, too. Renaissance was founded by James Simons, a legendary mathematician, in 1982. Simons had run the math department at Stony Brook University, on Long Island, and the hedge fund took a uniquely academic approach to high finance. Andrew Lo, a finance professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, has described it as “the commercial version of the Manhattan Project.” Intensely secretive and filled with people with Ph.D.s, it has been sensationally profitable. Its Medallion Fund, which is open only to the firm’s three hundred or so employees, has averaged returns of almost eighty per cent a year, before fees. Bloomberg News has called the Medallion Fund “perhaps the world’s greatest moneymaking machine.” In “More Money Than God,” Mallaby, who interviewed Mercer, describes his temperament as that of an “icy cold poker player”; Mercer told him that he could not recall ever having had a nightmare. But Mercer warms up when talking about computers. In the 2014 speech, he recalled the first time he used one, at a science camp, and likened the experience to falling in love. He also spoke of the government lab in New Mexico. “I loved the solitude of the computer lab late at night,” he said. “I loved the air-conditioned smell of the place. I loved the sound of the disks whirring and the printers clacking.” The speech lasted forty minutes—“more than I typically talk in a month,” he noted. Patterson told me that when Mercer arrived at Renaissance the firm’s equities division was lagging behind other areas, such as futures trading. Mercer and Brown applied their algorithms to equities trading. “It took several years,” Patterson recalled, but the equities group eventually accounted for the largest share of the Medallion Fund’s profits. Mercer and Brown’s code took into account nearly every conceivable predictor of market swings; their secret formula became so valuable that, when a pair of Russian mathematicians at the firm tried to take the recipe elsewhere, the company initiated legal action against them. Renaissance’s profits were further enhanced by a controversial tax maneuver, which became the subject of a 2014 Senate inquiry. According to Senate investigators, Renaissance had presented countless short-term trades as long-term ones, improperly avoiding some $6.8 billion in taxes. The Senate didn’t allege criminality, but it concluded that Renaissance had committed “abuses.” The I.R.S. demanded payment. (Renaissance defended its practices, and the matter remains contested, leaving a very sensitive material issue pending before the Trump Administration.) The Medallion Fund made Renaissance employees among the wealthiest people in the country. Forbes estimates that Simons, who has the biggest share, is worth eighteen billion dollars. In 2009, Simons stepped aside, to focus on philanthropy, and named Mercer and Brown co-C.E.O.s. Institutional Investor’s Alpha estimates that, in 2015, Mercer earned a hundred and thirty-five million dollars at Renaissance.
Mercer’s fortune has allowed him and his family to indulge their wildest material fantasies. He and Diana moved into a waterfront estate in Head of the Harbor, a seaside community on Long Island, and called the property Owl’s Nest. Mercer, a gun enthusiast, built a private pistol range there. (He is also a part owner of Centre Firearms, a company that claims to have the country’s largest private cache of machine guns, as well as a weapon that Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in “The Terminator.”) At Owl’s Nest, Mercer has installed a $2.7-million model-train set in his basement; trains chug through a miniature landscape half the size of a basketball court. The toy train attracted unwanted tabloid headlines, such as “Boo-hoo over 2m Choo-choo,” after Mercer sued the manufacturer for overcharging him. (The case was settled.) Mercer retains a domestic staff that includes a butler and a physician; both accompany him whenever he travels. But this, too, has sparked bad publicity. In 2013, three members of the household staff sued to recover back wages, claiming that Mercer had failed to pay overtime, as promised, and that he had deducted pay as punishment for poor work. One infraction that Mercer cited as a “demerit” was a failure to replace shampoo bottles that were two-thirds empty. This suit, too, was settled. Mercer has bought several spectacular yachts, including the Sea Owl, which is two hundred and three feet long. A 2013 photo shows the gates of the Tower Bridge, in London, raised high to allow it to proceed up the Thames. The Sea Owl has a crew of eighteen, and features a hand-carved “tree” that twists through four levels of decks. Designed, in part, as a place where the extended Mercer family can gather, the yacht has many fanciful and didactic touches for the Mercer grandchildren, such as frescoes that allude to the discoveries of Darwin and Newton. There’s a self-playing Steinway, a spa pool, and an elevator. Mercer has given major credit to his family for the yacht’s special details, telling Boat International that they are “endowed with both exceptionally good taste and exceptionally strong opinions.” The Mercer daughters are indeed forceful. When a Manhattan bakery that the sisters loved, Ruby et Violette, threatened to close, depriving the Mercers of their favorite cookies, they bought it. In a Fox News interview, Heather Sue recalled telling the others, “We are going to buy a bakery!” The Mercers still own the business, although it is now online-only. After graduating from Duke, Heather Sue began competing in high-stakes poker tournaments; she is admired on the circuit for her cool manner. When Mercer insisted that Heather Sue take a security guard with her, Santavicca said, “they became friends, then they became whatever, and now they’re married, with two beautiful daughters.” Jenji has a law degree from Georgetown, but she has pursued an interest in horses instead. In 2008, the Mercers bought a horse farm in Wellington, Florida, for $5.9 million. Jenji and Diana regularly attend the Winter Equestrian Festival, in Palm Beach. They are investors in an equestrian center in North Carolina, and have announced plans to open one in Colorado. Diana is also listed as the owner of Equinimity, a horse stable in Florida. According to the stable’s Web site, it specializes in Equine Facilitated Learning, a system that teaches “non-verbal leadership and interpersonal communication skills through non-predatory horse-inspired wisdom.” Rebekah worked for a few years at Renaissance after graduating from Stanford. A former colleague recalls her as smart but haughty. In 2003, she married a Frenchman, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, who is a managing director of Morgan Stanley. They had four children and bought a twenty-eight-million-dollar property—six apartments joined together—at Trump Place, on the Upper West Side. Now forty-three, she is divorcing Mirochnikoff. She homeschools the children, but in recent years she has become consumed by politics. “She is the First Lady of the alt-right,” Christopher Ruddy, the owner of the conservative outlet Newsmax Media, said. “She’s respected in conservative circles, and clearly Trump has embraced her in a big way.” Amity Shlaes, the conservative writer and the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, where Rebekah Mercer is a trustee, told me, “In the dull crowds of policy, the Mercers are enchanting firecrackers.” She likened the Mercer sisters to the Schuylers—the high-spirited, witty sisters made famous by the musical “Hamilton.” Shlaes went on, “The Mercers have strong values, they’re kind of funny, and they’re really bright. Their brains are almost too strong.” Rebekah, she noted, supports several think tanks, but grows tired of talk; she “is into action.”
After the Citizens United decision, in 2010, the Mercers were among the first people to take advantage of the opportunity to spend more money on politics. In Oregon, they quietly gave money to a super PAC—an independent campaign-related group that could now take unlimited donations. In New York, reporters discovered that Robert Mercer was the sole donor behind a million-dollar advertising campaign attacking what it described as a plan to build a “Ground Zero Mosque” in Manhattan. The proposed building was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. The ads, which were meant to boost a Conservative Party candidate for governor, were condemned as Islamophobic |
, new research has found that the sediments claimed by hypothesis proponents to be deposits resulting from a bolide impact date from much later or much earlier times than the proposed date of the cosmic impact. The researchers examined 29 sites commonly referenced to support the impact theory to determine if they can be geologically dated to around 13,000 years ago. Crucially, only three of those sites actually date from then.[100]
In a study published in the Journal of Geology issue of September 2014, Charles R. Kinzie (et al.) looked at the distribution of nanodiamonds produced during extraterrestrial collisions: 50 million square kilometers of the Northern Hemisphere at the YDB were found to have the nanodiamonds.[101] Only two layers exist showing these nanodiamonds: the YDB 12,800 calendar years ago and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, 65 million years ago, which, in addition, is marked by mass extinctions.[102]
New support for the cosmic-impact hypothesis of the origin of the YDB was published in 2018. It postulates Earth's collision with one or more fragments from a larger (over 100-km diameter) disintegrating comet (some remnants of which have persisted within the inner solar system to the present day). Evidence is presented consistent with large-scale biomass burning (wildfires) following the putative collision. The evidence is derived from analyses of ice cores, glaciers, lake- and marine-sediment cores, and terrestrial sequences.[103][104]
Laacher See eruption hypothesis [ edit ]
The Laacher See volcano erupted at approximately the same time as the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and has historically been suggested as a possible cause. Laacher See is a maar lake, a lake within a broad low-relief volcanic crater about 2 km (1.2 mi) diameter. It is in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, about 24 km (15 mi) northwest of Koblenz and 37 km (23 mi) south of Bonn. The maar lake is within the Eifel mountain range, and is part of the East Eifel volcanic field within the larger Vulkaneifel.[105][106] This eruption was of sufficient size, VEI 6, with over 20 km3 (2.4 cu mi) tephra ejected,[107] to have caused significant temperature change in the Northern Hemisphere.
Currently available evidence suggests that the hypothesis that the Laacher See eruption triggered the Younger Dryas has considerable merit. Earlier, the hypothesis was dismissed based on the timing of the Laacher See Tephra relative to the clearest signs of climate change associate with the Younger Dryas Event within various Central European varved lake deposits.[107][108] This set the scene for the development of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and the meltwater pulse hypothesis. However, more recent research places the very large eruption of the Laacher See volcano at 12,880 years BP, coinciding with the initiation of North Atlantic cooling into the Younger Dryas.[109][110] Although the eruption was about twice size as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption, it contained considerably more sulfur, potentially rivalling the climatologically very significant 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in terms of amount of sulfur introduced into the atmosphere.[110] Evidence exists that an eruption of this magnitude and sulfur content occurring during deglaciation could trigger a long-term positive feedback involving sea ice and oceanic circulation, resulting in a cascade of climate shifts across the North Atlantic and the globe.[110] Further support for this hypothesis appears as a large volcanogenic sulfur spike within Greenland ice, coincident with both the date of the Laacher See eruption and the beginning of cooling into the Younger Dryas as recorded in Greenland.[110] The mid-latitude westerly winds may have tracked sea ice growth southward across the North Atlantic as the cooling became more pronounced, resulting in time transgressive climate shifts across northern Europe and explaining the lag between the Laacher See Tephra and the clearest (wind-derived) evidence for the Younger Dryas in central European lake sediments.[111][112]
Although the timing of the eruption appears to coincide with the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and the amount of sulfur contained would have been enough to result in substantial Northern Hemisphere cooling, the hypothesis has not yet been tested thoroughly, and no climate model simulations are currently available. The exact nature of the positive feedback is also unknown, and questions remain regarding the sensitivity to the deglacial climate to a volcanic forcing of the size and sulfur content of the Laacher See eruption. However, evidence exists that a similar feedback following other volcanic eruptions could also have triggered similar long-term cooling events during the last glacial period,[113] the Little Ice Age,[114][115] and the Holocene in general,[116] suggesting that the proposed feedback is poorly constrained but potentially common.
It is possible that the Laacher See eruption was triggered by lithospheric unloading related to the removal of ice during the last deglaciation,[117][118] a concept that is supported by the observation that three of the largest eruptions within the East Eifel Volcanic Field occurred during deglaciation.[119] Because of this potential relationship to lithospheric unloading, the Laacher See eruption hypothesis suggests that eruptions such as the 12,880 year BP Laacher See eruption are not isolated in time and space, but instead are a fundamental part of deglaciation, thereby also explaining the presence of Younger Dryas-type events during other glacial terminations.[110][120]
Brakenridge and the Vela Supernova hypothesis [ edit ]
Studies by Senior Research Scientist Robert Brakenridge and others suggest correlations between the Younger Dryas and a supernova that exploded within the constellation of Vela approximately around the same time, leaving behind what is now known as the Vela Supernova Remnant. Brakenridge notes other researchers that have studied effects of close-by supernovae on earth and uncovered suggestive correlating evidence during the Younger Dryas, including depletion of the ozone layer, increased UV exposure, nitrogen changes on the Earth’s surface and troposphere, evidence of global cooling, changes in 14C and 10Be in ice cores, a thin layer (approximately 30 centimeters) of “black mats”, and many extinctions that may have been caused by the explosion of the Vela Supernova.[121]
While no cause is determined for the extinction of many species, it is suggested that a combination of some climatic change or being hunted by humans may have been a cause. Most of the species that became extinct were cold blooded species and Rancholabrean megafauna, including Mammathus Columbis, Canis Diris, and Camelops. Survivors of the Younger Dryas included that of nocturnal low-birth rate species residing in the mountainous or forest-like terrains of the Americas, Eurasia, Australia, and in Madagascar. The largest, slow breeding, diurnal species that lived in more open spaces survived in the lower parts of Africa. There were also species that went extinct that were not expected to by humans in the America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.[121]
Across faunal and Paleoindian hunting sites, there has been evidence of carbon rich “black mats” that were approximately 30 centimeters thin, suggesting an abrupt change that occurred in a small time window and a rise in aquatic conditions. Brakenridge also discusses pollen core research that suggests global cooling conditions not to have just occurred in the Northern latitudes, but also latitudes as far as 41°south. Tree ring evidence shows a rise in 14C cosmogenic isotope. The increase may have also occurred around the same time of the increase of another cosmogenic isotope, 10Be. Brakenridge discusses possibilities behind these rises, including climatic changes and carbon cycles or a more secular cause.[121]
Another hypothesis that Brakenridge discusses is that effects of a supernova could have been a factor in the Younger Dryas. Effects of a supernova have been suggested before, but without confirming evidence. Brakenridge explains how with the following evidence that these effects could have been caused by a celestial event, a supernova; observations of Gamma-ray bursts and X-ray flashes have been compared to nebular records to test this as well as supernovae flash models, comparable to the records of in-galaxy supernovae, to study the effects of such an event on Earth. These effects include depletion in the ozone layer, increased UV exposure, global cooling, and nitrogen changes in the Earth’s surface and troposphere. As Brakenridge states, the only supernova possible at that time was the Vela Supernova, or classified as the Vela Supernova Remnant.[121]
Cultural references [ edit ]
The failure of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation is used to explain rapid climate change in some science fiction writings as early as Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1937 short story "Shifting Seas" in which the author describes the freezing of Europe after the Gulf Stream is disrupted. It was used more recently in Kim Stanley Robinson's novels, particularly Fifty Degrees Below. It also underpinned the 1999 book, The Coming Global Superstorm.
Likewise, the idea of rapid climate change caused by disruption of North Atlantic Ocean currents creates the setting for the 2004 apocalyptic science-fiction film The Day After Tomorrow. Similar sudden cooling events have featured in other novels, such as John Christopher's The World in Winter but not always with the same explicit links to the Younger Dryas event as in the case of Robinson's work.
See also [ edit ]In April 2006, Oteng Modisane Ping was executed in Botswana. Neither his family members nor his lawyer had been officially informed of the date and time of his execution. Instead, they heard the news on the radio, after the execution was carried out in complete secrecy.
Ping's mother had tried to visit her son in prison the day before his execution. Prison officials advised her to come back a couple of days later, while they were perfectly aware her son was due to be hanged the following day. Following his execution, Mr. Ping's family did not have access to his body, they were not afforded an opportunity to ensure that he received a decent burial and they did not have the opportunity to visit his grave.
Tchérina Jerolon, Africa Desk Deputy Director of the International Federation for Human Rights (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme; FIDH), shared Ping's story at a panel discussion hosted by the UN Human Rights Office. The event entitled "Death Penalty and Transparency – What's to Hide?" was to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty at the UN Headquarters in New York.
While opening the event, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, stressed that "the death penalty has no place in the 21st century."
"Even with meticulous respect for fair trials, there will always be a risk of miscarriage of justice. This is an unacceptably high price," he said
Discussions focused on three aspects of transparency. Some governments, panelists pointed out, refuse to disclose data and enforce an elaborate system of secrecy to hide who is on death row, and classify information on the death penalty as a state secret, making its release an act of treason.
Participants also highlighted the lack of transparency for the families of those on death row, who sometimes do not know about the whereabouts and the conditions of incarceration of their loved ones.
Further, the lack of transparency in the sharing of evidence with defense lawyers limits their ability to provide an effective defence.
James G. Connell III, the attorney currently representing 9/11 suspect, Ammar al Baluchi, held in the United States Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, said that "despite the consistent request of the Special Rapporteur on Torture and others, the United States has refused any independent inspection of its prisons in Guantanamo."
"These military commissions are held on a secure military base intentionally located on Cuban soil rather than on US soil in an effort to deny these men the protections of the due process of law including the right to a public trial," Connell said.
Amnesty International's Senior Director for Law and Policy, Tawanda Mutasah, reported having seen situations where sometimes the lack of transparency suggested that States had "something to hide."
"Transparency around executions is the only way that we can prevent the cruel and inhumane treatment that already is built into the idea of the death penalty itself," Mutasah added. "It is not possible to meet the standards of international law without transparency. So not only would it help, but it is central and critical."
In certain countries of Southeast Asia, "information on imminent executions or executions that have already taken place is not publicly available," pointed out the UN Human Rights Office's representative for the region, Cynthia Veliko.
For Tchérina Jerolon, the lack of transparency reveals authorities' lack of willingness to create space for an informed public debate on the death penalty. It also allows States to own the death penalty process to the exclusion of everyone else, including prisoner's relatives, legal representatives, but also the general public.
"In some instances, it prevents States from admitting their discriminatory application of the death penalty against the poorest, or against a certain community or minority group," Jerolon added.
In September, a Global Alliance of Member States and NGOs issued a declaration to end the trade in tools of torture and capital punishment, moving a step closer to abolish secret executions. The UN Human Rights Office will support this initiative.
26 October 2017AMMAN (Reuters) - Protests erupted across Syria against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad on Friday and sources said 22 people were killed in the southern city of Deraa, the cradle of the unrest.
Syrian ethnic Kurds demonstrate after Friday prayers in the Syrian town of Qamishli, April 8, 2011. REUTERS/Handout
In the east, thousands of ethnic Kurds demonstrated for reform despite the president’s offer this week to ease rules which bar many Kurds from citizenship, activists said.
Protests swept the country of 20 million people, from the Mediterranean port of Latakia to Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border, as demonstrations entered a fourth week in defiance of Assad’s security crackdown and growing list of reform pledges.
“Freedom, freedom, we want freedom,” thousands of protesters chanted in many Syrian cities. Some shouted: “We sacrifice our blood and soul for you, Deraa.”
Residents said security forces used water cannon and smoke bombs to break up 2,000 protesters in Hama, where thousands of people were killed in 1982 when Assad’s father Hafez al-Assad crushed an armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Deraa, where demonstrations first broke out in March, residents said security forces fired on thousands of protesters, who set fire to a building belonging to the ruling Baath Party and smashed a statue of the president’s brother, Basil.
A volunteer at Deraa hospital and an activist said 22 people were killed and 120 wounded. It took the death toll in three weeks of protests to more than 90.
State television said armed groups killed 19 policemen and wounded 75 in Deraa.
Authorities have blamed armed groups for the violence and state television broadcast footage on Friday of plain clothed gunmen it said fired at security forces and civilians alike.
Syria has prevented other news media from reporting from Deraa.
“I saw pools of blood and three bodies in the street being picked up by relatives,” a Deraa resident told Reuters by phone.
“There were snipers on roofs. Gunfire was heavy. The injured are being taken to homes. No one trusts putting his relative in a hospital in these circumstances,” he added. Many protesters feared they would be arrested if taken to clinics.
BODIES LYING ON STREETS
Another resident who gave his name as Abu Salem said many bodies were lying on the streets of Deraa.
“But no one can reach them because the area is surrounded,” he said, suggesting that death toll could be higher than first believed.
The city’s Omari Mosque was turned once again into a makeshift clinic, residents said, and its loudspeakers broadcast an appeal for medical assistance.
Popular demonstrations calling for greater freedom have shaken the country, ruled under emergency law since Assad’s Baath Party took power in a 1963 coup.
Assad has responded with a blend of force against protesters, gestures toward political reform and concessions to conservative Muslims including closing Syria’s only casino.
Activists said the steps taken were not enough.
A key demand of the protesters is the repeal of the emergency law. Assad ordered a committee to study replacing it with anti-terrorism legislation, but critics say it will probably grant the state many of the same powers.
Under Assad, who took over as president in 2000 when his father after 30 years in power, Syria has been Iran’s closest Arab ally, a major player in Lebanon and a supporter of militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
In the northeastern city of Qamishli, Kurdish youths chanted: “No Kurd, no Arab, Syrian people are one. We salute the martyrs of Deraa.” The protests broke out despite Assad’s pledge on Thursday to grant citizenship to stateless Kurds.
It was not clear how many Kurds would be given nationality, but at least 150,000 Kurds are registered as foreigners as a result of a 1962 census in the eastern region of al-Hasaka.
“The citizenship gesture only helped fuel the street. The Kurdish cause is one for democracy, freedom and cultural identity,” Hassan Kamel, a senior member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, told Reuters.
Protests erupted in the western city of Homs, where Assad sacked the governor on Thursday, and gunfire was heard in the Damascus suburb of Harasta.
STICKS WITH NAILS
A Westerner living in the Kfar Souseh district of Damascus said police and Assad loyalists attacked protesters as they left a mosque. “They beat them with electric batons and with sticks that had nails sticking out,” said the witness.
Residents and activists reported demonstrations in the coastal town of Banias, the port of Tartous, Douma, Tel and the town of al-Salamia east of Hama. In several cities they chanted: “Christians and Muslims, we want freedom.”
Slideshow (2 Images)
A video posted on an opposition website showed a protester telling a cheering crowd: “We want our freedom whether they like it or not, either freedom or death. We will not stop.”
In Deraa, protesters echoed the slogans that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia and challenged others across the Arab world: “The people want the overthrow of the regime.”
Deraa’s Sunni Muslim tribes resent the wealth and power amassed by the minority Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shi’ite Islam to which Assad belongs.Photo
Greek banks, once seen as the most dangerous investment in the euro zone, have been on a tear of late.
They have been bolstered by a large injection of fresh cash from Europe and have raised billions of dollars in global bond and equity markets. Their top executives, with eager investment bankers and publicists in tow, have become a regular presence in investment capitals everywhere.
The message has been loud and clear: Greece’s economy is recovering and, with the country more or less meeting the reform targets set by its creditors, the banks are set to thrive.
For the many who struck it rich by buying Greek government bonds — and for the many more who sat on the sidelines as the bonds soared in value last year — the pitch, made most recently by National Bank of Greece at a roadshow in New York last week, has been a compelling one.
But amid the euphoria, some analysts have expressed caution.
After all, as a recent stress test undertaken by BlackRock makes clear, nonperforming loans — at close to 40 percent of total credit outstanding — pose a daunting challenge, regardless of how much new cash banks now have on hand.
Perhaps the clearest sign that the finances of Greek banks are more precarious than they may seem has been the record number of government-guaranteed bonds that the banks issued last year — about 40 billion euros, or 22 percent of bank deposits in the country.
Issued by the banks to themselves, the bonds, which tend to have a maturity of about a year, are used as collateral to access short-term funds from the European Central Bank.
Traditionally, banks collect the funds they need to make loans by attracting deposits and short-term term credit lines from bond investors and other banks.
But with Greeks having brought home just a small proportion of the many billions of euros they sent abroad during the euro crisis and with bad loans still a problem, the country’s banks remain more or less dependent on the European Central Bank for their survival.
That does not mean that Frankfurt, which now has direct supervision over euro zone financial institutions, has embraced the practice; the bank said last year that it would no longer accept such instruments in 2015.
Greek bank executives say that that there is no need to worry about this bond explosion and that it reflects a logical move by the country’s financial sector to access more liquidity.
A spokesman for the European Central Bank declined to comment.
Still, in a world of mysterious debt instruments, these bonds have struck some experts as particularly exotic.
They do not trade, although they are listed on the London stock exchange and some are rated by credit agencies. The banks pay and receive interest on the bonds they issue, and the bonds command interest rates that are much higher than market rates.
For example, Piraeus Bank, Greece’s second-largest bank by assets, issued €1.75 billion of bonds at over 12 percent interest one month before it sold €500 million in three-year bonds to foreign investors at a rate of 5 percent.
“That is just a ridiculously high yield,” said Mitu Gulati, a sovereign bond specialist at Duke University Law School.
Mr. Gulati highlighted this trend in a recent paper on government-guaranteed bonds in the euro zone.
And after digging through countless bond contracts, he remains perplexed by the high rates on the bonds.
“It just does not make any sense to me,” he said.More Guide to Steak All the methods and tips you need to make perfect steak, each and every time.
I love steak. Part of me feels a bit guilty about admitting this fact, as if it's not cool. But try as I might to bury this affection, I simply can't hide my pleasure in sitting down with a massive hunk of tender beef in front of me. Perhaps it's the fact that steak was always a celebratory meal for me growing up, so I naturally associate the two. Regardless, after mostly avoiding the topic on this site for the past two years, I decided that it was time to feast.
Chicago is known as a steakhouse town, and you only need to take a walk around River North to recognize this obvious truth. Every other block seems to house some glittering and ostentatious temple to beef, where men in suits unabashedly wine and dine clients, and ring up ridiculous checks to expense later.
Most "best steak" features take the seemingly logical path of visiting all of Chicago's iconic steakhouses. Thing is, while I love steak, I'm not sure how I feel about the steakhouse. There's part of the ritual—the fawning service, the uncomplicated and straightforward menu, the enormous portions of meat—that I occasionally find appealing, even if I never want to spend my own money for it. I mean, there's no getting around the fact that steakhouses are expensive. But it used to be that the only place to get a genuinely great steak was at a steakhouse. Don't they have access to the best cuts and the best equipment to get the job done? Fortunately, after eating steak for the past six months, it's my belief that this assumption is not completely true. (I'll be talking more about my feelings on steakhouses later in the week.)
I had a hunch that the many of Chicago's best steaks weren't in steakhouses. So I took a more circuitous route, one that still allowed for some traditional heavy hitters, but left just as many behind.
The Search
I was inspired to take this quest by two fellow Serious Eats writers, Nick Solares and J. Kenji Alt-Lopez. Nick writes the Steakcraft column in New York, and week after week he chronicles some incredible looking steak. While he's been to plenty of steakhouses along the way, just as often he writes about a restaurant with only one or two steaks on its menu. To my surprise, these are the steaks that often look the best. I mean, doesn't the steak picture above from Butter Midtown look insane?
I also learned much from Kenji's epic post about dry-aging steak at home, because it dispelled some often-repeated myths of what makes a great steak. This led me to some guidelines, which helped me focus my search.
Dry-Aged Steak > Wet-Aged Steak
I started with one guiding principle: dry-aged steak is better than wet-aged steak. Usually this difference is tossed off as a preference, a choice adults are allowed to decide for themselves. Most people know that dry-aging beef in a temperature controlled room adds all kinds of funky aromas to the meat, but wet-aged steaks are often described as the juicer and more tender option. I genuinely believe that wet-aging is an inferior method, and if I'm going to spend a lot of money on a steak, I want it to be done right.
There is no doubt which one is cheaper. As Kenji bluntly put it in his guide to dry-aging beef: "It's easy to let that cryo-vacked bag of beef from the distributor sit around for a week before opening the bag, allowing you to call it 'aged' and sell it for a higher price." While the meat does become more tender, it also comes at a price; because the meat is sealed in plastic, "wet aging prevents the drainage of excess serum and meat juices," which often results in a "sour" profile.
Not that I ever doubted Kenji (I promise!), but just to make sure, I tested this theory out at two different steakhouses that serve both wet and dry-aged steaks, Benny's Chop House and Fleming's. This allowed for a side-by-side comparison of the two styles. The results were as clear as could be. Both of the wet-aged steaks had an unappealing and mushy texture, along with a dulled beefy flavor, almost like the flesh was waterlogged. Not only did the dry-aged steaks have a more complex and appealing profile, they were also beefier.
To my astonishment, most of Chicago's so-called "classic" steakhouses, serve wet-aged beef, which meant I immediately crossed off a host of contenders, including Gene & Georgetti's, Gibson's, Lawry's, Morton's, Tavern on Rush, and Chicago Chop House. All of these places may serve a satisfying steak in a great atmosphere, but that wasn't good enough for me. (By the way, more people should be upset about this.)
Sourcing Matters
Even after knocking off a bunch of potential options, I still faced a daunting list. This stalled the project for a month or two, until I came across a rather surprising fact: not all dry-aged steak served in Chicago is aged on the premises. In fact, a sizable number is aged elsewhere and then shipped in. At first, this seemed like a shortcut—isn't it always better to age on location?—but I came to see the benefits of this method.
Dedicating a portion of your restaurant to aging beef is expensive, especially if your restaurant is located in River North. Unless you are going to truly obsess about the process, like David Burke's Primehouse or Publican Quality Meats, it kind of makes sense for a top-quality distributor to do the work for you. More importantly, this allows non-steakhouse restaurants to have one absolutely top-notch steak on their menu. And since they aren't serving hundreds a night, these places can lavish a bit more attention on each one.
This dramatically increased the number of potential restaurants serving dry-aged beef, which was not exactly what I wanted. But once I figured out where restaurants were sourcing the meat from, I was able to identify the different distributors. Instead of looking at individual restaurants, I started to track where the steaks came from. This, finally, cracked Chicago's steak code.
Age Matters, But Older is Not Always Better
Where preference does genuinely come into play is in the length of the age. Older isn't necessarily better. As Kenji discovered, two to three weeks is usually the minimum for any sort of tenderness to occur, while the funkier blue cheese characteristics start to pop up around 28 to 45 days. Beyond that point, the meat starts to develop even richer and more intense flavors. Whether or not you enjoy those flavors is entirely up to you, and I tried to take that into account when evaluating the steaks.
Okay, let's get to the important part. Here's my top ten.
The Top 10 Dry-Aged Steaks in Chicago
#1: 40 Day Ribeye at David Burke's Primehouse ($51)
As conflicted as I sometimes feel about steakhouses, David Burke's Primehouse is the rare exception completely worth the splurge. No restaurant in Chicago cares about dry-aging large hunks of beef as much. You can see that passion for yourself in the restaurant's massive aging room that is lined with pink Himalayan salt, which the owners claim purifies the air and imparts a subtle salinity to the meat. But that room is just one part of David Burke's commitment. The process actually starts with Prime, David Burke's very own Black Angus bull, which has the tough job of siring all of the beef that eventually ends up at the restaurant. (Read Prime's inspirational story here.) Once properly trimmed, each steak is seasoned with salt and pepper, before being slipped under an infrared broiler set at 1300°F. The final flourish is a brushing of suet, made by rendering the funky trimmings cut off the aged steaks.
Now, all of this makes for a good story, but you fortunately don't need to know or care about any of it to fall deeply in love with this richly marbled and immensely beefy steak. Personally, I love the balance of the 40-day ribeye, but you can go for the relatively milder 28-day or the much funkier 75-day, depending on how you're feeling that day.
David Burke's Primehouse, 616 N Rush St, Chicago, IL 60611 (map); 312-660-6000
#2: 60 Day Dry-Aged Ribeye at Publican Quality Meats
Should this count? On one hand, the only other place in town besides David Burke's that takes dry-aging as seriously is Publican Quality Meats. Sure, the butcher shop won't actually cook the steak for you, though Avec occasionally offers the steak as a special (not right now, however). But if you're looking for the most intense steak experience possible, it's hard to argue with PQM's 60 Day Dry-Aged Ribeye.
The meat is sourced from Slagel Family Farms, which is about 100 miles south of Chicago. But unlike the other Slagel beef you'll find on this list, PQM handles the aging process itself, pushing the unique flavors of the full flavored beef to the extreme. Obviously, there is a lot of blue cheese going on here, but the most appealing trait is a mineral tang. My wife is not much of a steak eater, and even she admitted that this steak was incredible.
Publican Quality Meats, 825 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607 (map); 312-496-0012
#3: 38 oz. Prime Dry-Aged Bistecca Fiorentina at RPM Italian ($118)
This sounds crazy, I know. Not only is RPM an Italian restaurant, it's one that is primarily known as a great place to spot celebrities. (After all, it's co-owned by reality TV stars, Bill and Giuliana Rancic.) That's to speak nothing of the steak's price, which is a seemingly ludicrous $118. To be fair, it's also enormous and meant to share with two to four other people. But still. So what is it doing here? Because it's a stunning piece of meat. It also looks amazing—I giggled like a six-year-old when the enormous platter landed on my table.
As I first learned from a random post on LTHForum, RPM Italian sources its steaks from Master Purveyors in the Bronx (click here for a tour of its impressive facilities), which also provides some of the steaks used at Peter Luger. The meat is aged for 36 days and RPM cooks it simply. After a brief trip under a broiler, it's brushed with melted butter and seasoned with cracked black pepper and Sicilian sea salt. The result is a true spectacle. Obviously, I'm not the only one who feels this way, as the owners are planning on opening RPM Steakhouse soon.
RPM Italian, 52 W Illinois St, Chicago, IL (map); 312-222-1888
#4: 30 Day Dry-Aged Ribeye at Next's Chicago Steakhouse
For its interpretation of a Chicago steakhouse, Next could have gone with some epically aged cut, pushing the peculiar flavors of dry-aged meat to the extreme. Instead, the restaurant went with a genuinely beautiful and intricately flavored ribeye from Flannery Beef in San Francisco that is aged for only 30 days. While there are some slightly funky background aromas, those are secondary to the minerally beef base.
Each cut is poached in butter and then briefly seared, resulting in slices that go from dark brown on the exterior to rosy red in middle, with almost no gray in between. There's no other steak in Chicago like it. The only issue is that the only way to try this incredible steak is to pay for the full 9-course extravaganza, which is not cheap. Plus, as good as the other courses are, I kind of wish I could just go with the steak and forget about the rest. Basically, if you're a steak aficionado, you probably owe it to yourself to give it a shot. But you better hurry, this menu ends in a couple months.
Next Restaurant, 953 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607 (map); 312-226-0858
#5: 24 oz. Prime Bone In Dry Aged Ribeye at Bavette's Bar & Boeuf ($56)
Bavette's serves steaks, but it seems wrong to call it a steakhouse. Perhaps it's too French, with a menu full of refined bistro classics. Plus, its golden-hued room certainly doesn't look like any other steakhouse in town. (I can't think of a more stunning atmosphere to eat steak in the city.) Finally, essentially every dish I've tried, from the roast chicken to the immaculate wedge salad, is worth ordering. It can make the steaks seem like an afterthought, and the majority are. There's actually only one dry-aged steak on Bavette's menu, and it's the only one you need to worry about. The ribeye is one of the more aggressively flavored cuts I tried, and completely worth your attention.
Bavette's Bar & Boeuf, 218 W Kinzie St, Chicago, IL 60654 (map); 312-624-8154
#6: 10 oz. Dry Aged Ribeye Steak at Owen & Engine ($25)
I'm not sure what compelled me to order a steak at an English pub, but I'm so glad I did, because this is the steak that first gave me the idea to look beyond the usual steakhouse scene for great beef. Though Owen & Engine isn't aging the steaks on premises, it is sourcing some truly excellent dry-aged beef from Slagel that is far more flavorful and beefier than what the majority of steakhouses downtown serve. It's also drastically cheaper. That's a pretty good combination, right? And if that 10 ounce portion sounds a bit too dainty, Owen & Engine also serves a 22-ounce ($39) and a 32-ounce ($52) bone-in version.
Owen & Engine, 2700 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60647 (map); 773-235-2930
#7: Bone-In Rib Eye at Chicago Cut Steakhouse ($54)
I've been kind of rough on traditional steakhouses in this post, but I'm not completely immune to its pleasures, especially when done with as much verve as at Chicago Cut Steakhouse. Even though I ended up with a massive bill, I left thinking about what a pleasure it was for me to dine there, which I realize sounds crazy, but it's the truth. That sort of describes the steak here, too. It's aged in-house, and while it is not the most intense or funky steak in town, the ribeye is expertly cooked and utterly satisfying, with a clean and satisfying flavor. It's just right for the airy and open atmosphere.
Chicago Cut Steakhouse, 300 N LaSalle Dr, Chicago, IL 60654 (map); 312-329-1800
#8: 16 oz. Bone-In Rib Eye at Chicago Chop Shop ($34)
Chicago Chop Shop in Wicker Park is attempting a lot of different things at once. There's a butcher shop, a bar, a lunch menu full of sandwiches, and a sit-down dinner menu with straightforward and satisfying food. Eventually, the restaurant plans to dry-age its own beef, but currently it's serving an excellent Slagel dry-aged ribeye with a bordelaise sauce and herbed butter. I think the kitchen is a bit aggressive with the char—some bites went beyond browned, into blackened territory—but that's a minor quibble on an otherwise great steak at a truly reasonable price.
Chicago Chop Shop, 2033-35 W. North Ave, Chicago, IL 60622 (map); 773-537-4440
#9: Prime Dry-Aged Ribeye at Fleming's
Fleming's is one of a number of chain steakhouses downtown serving mostly wet-aged beef. Basically, it's exactly the kind of place I wanted to avoid for this list. But recently Fleming's introduced a dry-aged option to its menu. What's especially interesting is that you can ask for the steak to be cooked in a cast-iron pan, which provides a more distinct and crustier exterior than a steak cooked under a broiler. I wish more places offered to cook their meat this way, but until then, Fleming's is the best place to try it.
Fleming's, 25 E Ohio St, Chicago, IL (map); 312-329-9463
#10: 16 oz. Bone-In Rib Eye at Benny's Chop House ($56.99)
Benny's gets its dry-aged meat from Allen & Brothers, a very good local outlet. It's not as bold as others on this list, and some |
mysterious door leading to a series of rooms filled with dangerous and potentially lethal traps that nobody could possibly get through, especially if they were only in their first year.
Harry didn't know himself what sort of traps awaited. Which, on reflection, meant that the students who'd gone through had been surprisingly scrupulous about not ruining the puzzle for others. Maybe there was a sign down there saying Don't give it away, just as a favor to me, sincerely Headmaster Dumbledore. All Harry knew so far was that the outer door would open to Alohomora, and that the final room contained a magic mirror that would show your reflection in some situation you found highly appealing, which was apparently the big payoff.
The third-floor corridor was illuminated by dim blue light that seemed to come from nowhere, and the arches were covered with cobwebs, as though the corridor hadn't been used in centuries rather than just the last year.
Harry's pouch was loaded with useful Muggle things, and useful wizarding things, and everything he'd found that could possibly be a quest item. (Harry had asked Professor McGonagall to recommend someone who could expand the pouch's capacity, and she'd just done it herself.) Harry had applied the Charm he'd learned for battles that made his eyeglasses stick to his face, regardless of how his head moved. Harry had refreshed the Transfigurations he was maintaining, both the tiny jewel in the ring on his hand and the other one, in case he was knocked unconscious. He wasn't literally ready for anything, but Harry was as ready as he thought he could be.
The five-sided floor tiles creaked beneath Harry's shoes and vanished behind him like the future becoming the past. It was almost 6:49-six, and seven in a square. Obvious if you thought in Muggle math, otherwise not so much.
Just as Harry was about to round another corner, something tickled at the back of his mind, and he heard a soft voice talking.
"...sensible person... wait until later... after certain faculty had departed..."
Harry stopped, then crept forward as lightly as he could, not going around the corner, trying to hear Professor Quirrell's voice better.
There came a louder cough, and then the soft voice spoke again from around the corner. "But if they were also... to depart themselves... at that time..." murmured the voice, "they might think... this final game... makes for the best distraction... left in this year... a predictable distraction. So I looked... to see what people of significance... were not at the game... and I saw the Headmaster missing... but for all my magic can tell me... he could be in another... realm of existence... I also saw your own absence... so I decided to go... where you were. That is what I am doing here... now... what are you doing here?"
Harry breathed shallowly, and listened.
"And just how did you know where I was?" drawled the voice of Severus Snape, so much louder that Harry nearly jumped.
A small, coughing laugh. "Check your wand... for Trace."
Severus said something in magical pseudo-Latin, and then, "You dared tamper with my wand? You dared?"
"You are a suspect... just like myself... so your false indignation is wasted... however finely crafted it may be... now tell me... what are you doing?"
"I am watching this door," said the voice of Professor Snape. "And I will ask you to be off from it!"
"On whose authority... are you ordering me... my fellow Professor?"
There was a pause, then, "Why, the Headmaster's," came the smooth voice of Severus Snape. "I was ordered by him to watch this door during the Quidditch match, and as a Professor I must obey his whims. I shall have words about it with the Board of Governors later, but for now I am doing as I must. Now be off with you, as the Headmaster desires."
"What? You mean I am to believe... that you abandoned your Slytherins... during their most important... game of the year... and leapt up like a dog... at Dumbledore's word? Well that... I must say... is entirely plausible. Even so... I think it would be wise... if I kept my own watch over you.. while you watch this fine door." There was a sound of rustling cloth and a soft thud, as if someone had sat down hard upon the ground, or maybe just fallen.
"Oh, for the love of Merlin -" Severus Snape's voice now sounded angry. "Get up, you!"
"Ba-blu-a-bu-bluh -" said the Defense Professor's zombie-mode.
"Get up!" said Severus Snape, and there was a soft thud.
Help the watcher of stars -
Harry stepped around the corner, though it was possible that he'd have done so even without an intertemporal message. Had Professor Snape just kicked Professor Quirrell? That would have been foolhardy if Professor Quirrell had been dead and buried.
A round-topped door of dark wood was framed within a stone arch, set within the dusty marble bricks of Hogwarts. Where a Muggle would have set a doorknob there was only a handle of polished metal; there were no visible locks, or visible keyholes. Set upon the wall to either side, a pair of torches burned, sending forth an ominous orange glow. Before the door stood the Potions Master in his customary stained robes. Beside the door, to the left side beneath the orange torch, slumped the form of the Defense Professor, back against the wall, head staring out at the surroundings. The eyes seemed to flicker, as if halfway between awareness, and emptiness.
"What," said the towering form of the Potions Master, "are you doing here, Potter?"
Going by facial expressions and tone of voice, the Potions Master was quite angry with Harry; and certainly was not Harry's co-conspirator in councils to which the Defense Professor had never been invited.
"I'm not sure," Harry said. He wasn't sure what role he should be playing, and was, in desperation, falling back on simple honesty. "I think perhaps I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on the Defense Professor."
The Potions Master stared at him coldly. "Where's your escort, Potter? Students are not to wander these halls alone!"
Harry's mind was genuinely blank. The game was afoot, and nobody had told him the rules. "I'm not sure how to answer that..."
The cold expression on Professor Snape's face flickered. "Perhaps I should call the Aurors," he said.
"Wait!" Harry blurted.
The Potions Master's hand hovered about his robes. "Why?" said the Potions Master.
"I... I just think you probably shouldn't call them..."
In a blur, the Potions Master's wand was in his hand. "Nullus confundio!" A black jet darted out and hit Harry, striking in the direction Harry had already started to evade. There followed four other spells, containing words like Polyfluis and Metamorphus; and for those Harry politely stood still.
After all of those spells had failed to produce any effect, Severus Snape was staring at Harry with a dark glitter that now seemed genuine. "I suggest," the Potions Master said softly, "that you explain yourself, Potter."
"I can't explain myself," Harry said. "I don't have the Time, not yet."
Harry looked directly into the Potions Master's gaze as he said the words myself and time, widening his own eyes to try to convey the key information, and the Potions Master hesitated.
Harry was frantically trying to work out who was pretending to be what. Since Professor Quirrell wasn't in on Dumbledore's conspiracy, Severus was pretending to be the evil Potions Master of Hogwarts, who'd been sent here by the Headmaster... and might or might not have actually been sent here by Dumbledore... but Professor Quirrell either thought, or was pretending to think, that someone needed to keep an eye on Professor Snape... and Harry himself had been sent here by future-Harry and had no idea why... and why were they all standing outside the Headmaster's forbidden door in the first place?
And then...
From behind where Harry stood...
Came the growing sound of another set of footsteps, rapid and manyfold.
Professor Snape stabbed his wand once, creating a burst of darkness that shrouded where the Defense Professor was lying. "Muffliato," the Potions Master hissed. "Mr. Potter, if you must be here, then hide! Put on your invisibility cloak! My duty is to guard this door in case he comes here. And there has been - a disturbance, meant to draw the Headmaster, he thinks -"
"Who -"
Severus took a long stride forward and snapped his wand against the side of Harry's head. There was a trickling sensation like an egg had been cracked over him, the feeling of a Disillusionment Charm; and Harry's hands faded out, followed by the rest of him.
The darkness shrouding one side of the wall dissipated like slow mist, and there was again visible the huddled form of the Defense Professor, who said nothing.
Harry tiptoed away quietly as he could, then turned to watch.
The approaching footsteps rounded the corner -
"What are you doing here?" came many simultaneous cries.
Trimmed in three sets of Slytherin green and one Hufflepuff yellow stood Theodore Nott, Daphne Greengrass, Susan Bones, and Tracey Davis.
"Where," said Professor Snape with mounting wrath, "are your escorts, children? First-years must be accompanied by a sixth or seventh-year student at all times! Especially you!"
Theodore Nott raised his hand. "We're, um," said Theodore Nott. "We're doing what the Chaos Legion calls a team-building exercise... see, we realized just now that none of us had tried the Headmaster's forbidden chamber yet, and there wasn't much time left... and Harry Potter has authorized it, Professor, he said specifically that you mustn't interfere."
Severus Snape turned to glance over at where Harry Potter had tiptoed; a storm seemed to be gathering on his brow, and a dark fury in his eyes.
I... maybe? There was still one hour left on Harry's Time-Turner, so it was possible.
"Harry Potter does not have that authority," the Potions Master said in a deceptively mild tone. "Explain yourselves, now."
"Really?" said the form of Susan Bones. "Really? You're telling Professor Snape that Harry Potter authorized the mission, that's your idea of a bluff?" The young Hufflepuff turned to Professor Snape and spoke, her voice strangely firm. "Professor, this is the truth and it's urgent. Draco Malfoy is missing and we think he went down there -"
"If Mr. Malfoy is missing," said Professor Snape, "why have the Aurors not been notified?"
"Because of, because of reasons!" cried Daphne Greengrass. "There's no time, you've got to let us through!"
Professor Snape's voice was now as sardonic as Harry had ever heard it. "Are you four morons under the impression that you are on some sort of adventure? Well, you are mistaken. I assure you that Mr. Malfoy has not passed through this door."
"We think Mr. Malfoy has an invisibility cloak," Susan Bones said rapidly. "Do you remember the door seeming to open for no reason?"
"No," the Potions Master said. "Now be gone from here. This place is off-limits for today."
"This is Dumbledore's forbidden corridor," Tracey said. "The Headmaster himself said nobody was to come here. Who do you think you are, forbidding it too?"
"Miss Davis," said the Potions Master, "you need to stop associating with Gryffindors, especially those named Lavender Brown. And if you are still here in one minute, I will file papers requesting your transfer into that House."
"You wouldn't dare!" shrieked Tracey.
"Hm," Susan Bones said, her face screwed up in concentration. "Professor Snape, do you occasionally open the door yourself, to check on whatever's inside?"
Professor Snape froze in place. Then he spun and put his right hand on the metal knocker -
Harry was watching the hand on the knocker, so he didn't notice what Professor Snape was doing with his left hand until he heard the sudden outcry.
"No, in fact," said Professor Snape, now holding the choking head of Draco Malfoy by his collar, though the rest of Draco was still underneath his invisibility cloak. "A fine try, though."
"What?" cried Tracey and Daphne.
Susan Bones hit herself in the forehead. "I can't believe I fell for that."
"So, Mr. Malfoy," Professor Snape said. His voice had lowered. "You sent your friends here on a ruse... just in the hopes that you could pass through this door? Now why would you do that?"
"I think we should trust him -" said Theodore Nott. "Mr. Malfoy, we've got to trust him, he's the one Professor who would take our side!"
"No!" cried Draco's floating head, from where Professor Snape was still grasping his collar. "You mustn't say anything! Stop!"
"We've got to take the chance!" yelled Theodore. "Professor Snape, Mr. Malfoy finally worked out what's been going on this whole year, and why - Dumbledore is trying to get the Philosopher's Stone away from Nicholas Flamel! Because Dumbledore doesn't think anyone ought to have immortality! So Dumbledore tried to convince Flamel that the Dark Lord was coming back and needed the Stone to revive, and asked Flamel to give it to him, but Flamel wouldn't, and instead Flamel put the Stone in the magic mirror that's down there, and Dumbledore is finding out right now how to get it, and then he'll come for it and we've got to get to it first! Dumbledore really will be all-powerful if he gets the Philosopher's Stone!"
"What?" said Tracey. "That's not what you said before!"
"It -" Daphne said. She looked frightened, but determined. "It doesn't matter - Professor Snape, please, you have to believe me. I looked at the books Hermione checked out of the library, and she was researching the Philosopher's Stone just before someone killed her. Her notes said that something dangerous might happen if the Stone stays inside the mirror too long. We have to get it out of the castle right away."
Susan Bones now had both hands over her face. "I'm not with them, I just came along to prevent anything even stupider from happening."
Severus Snape was staring at Theodore Nott and the others. Then he turned his head to look at Draco Malfoy. "Mr. Malfoy," the Potions Master drawled. "How did you come to discover Dumbledore's plot?"
"I deduced it from evidence!" said Draco Malfoy's floating head.
Professor Snape's head swiveled back to Theodore Nott. "How did you intend to obtain this Stone from inside a magic mirror that could supposedly baffle Dumbledore himself? Answer me at once!"
"We're going to take the whole mirror and send it back to Flamel," said Theodore Nott. "It's not like we want the Stone for ourselves, we just need to stop Dumbledore from stealing it."
Professor Snape nodded, as though confirming something, and turned his head to look at the other students. "Tell me, have any of you noticed one of the others behaving in an unusual fashion? Especially if there is a peculiar object that they have in their possession, or they can use spells a first-year should not know?" Professor Snape's right hand now pointed his wand at Susan Bones. "I see that Miss Greengrass and Miss Davis are trying not to look at you, Miss Bones. If there is a mundane explanation, you would be wise to offer it immediately."
Susan Bones's hair turned bright red, though her face didn't change. "I suppose there's not much point keeping it mum any longer," she said, "since I'm graduating in two days anyway."
"Double witches get to graduate six years early?" said Tracey Davis. "That's not fair!"
"Bones is a double witch?" cried Theodore.
"No, she is Nymphadora Tonks, a Metamorphmagus," Professor Snape said. "Masquerading as another student is extremely against regulation, as you are well aware, Miss Tonks. It is not too late to expel you from Hogwarts two days before your graduation, which would be a dreadful tragedy - from your perspective, that is. From my perspective it would be hilarious. Now tell me what exactly you are doing here."
"That explains it," said Daphne Greengrass. "Um, is there actually a Susan Bones, or is the House dying out so they had you secretly -"
The red-haired form of Susan Bones had a palm to her face. "Yes, Miss Greengrass, there's a real Susan Bones. She only sends me in when you lot are about to get into ridiculous amounts of trouble. Professor Snape, the reason I'm here is because Draco Malfoy was missing, and this lot insisted on trying to find him instead of calling the Aurors. For reasons the real Miss Bones said there was no time to explain to me, which I now realize were stupid. But young students must never go alone, and must be accompanied by a sixth or seventh year at all times. And now we found Draco Malfoy and we can all go back. Please? Before this gets any more ridiculous?"
"What in Merlin's name is going on here?"
"Ah," said Professor Snape, who was still pointing the wand at the red-haired form of Susan Bones, his other hand still grasping the collar below the disembodied head of Draco Malfoy, standing next to the crumpled form of the Defense Professor. "Professor Sprout, I perceive."
"It's not what it looks like," volunteered Tracey Davis.
The short, dumpy form of the Herbology Professor stormed forwards. She had, by this point, drawn her wand, though she wasn't pointing it at anyone. "I don't even know what this looks like! Down wands, all of you, right now! Including you, Professor!"
Distraction. The thought came to Harry with sudden clarity. Whatever he was watching now, from where he stood invisibly and well back of the action, it wasn't what was really going on, it wasn't the true thread of the story, it had been arranged. Professor Sprout's arrival had broken Harry's suspension of disbelief; things like that didn't happen just for the sake of comedic coincidence. Someone was deliberately causing all this chaos, but what was the point?
Harry really hoped he hadn't gone back in time and done this, because it did seem like the sort of thing he would do.
Severus Snape lowered his wand. His other hand unfisted Draco Malfoy. "Professor Sprout," the Potions Master said, "I am here on the Headmaster's orders to watch this door. Everyone else present is not supposed to be here, and I ask you to see them cleared away."
"A likely story," snapped Professor Sprout. "Why would Dumbledore set you of all people to guard the door to his playground? It's not as if he wants to keep the students out, oh no, they need to go in and get stuck in my Devil's Snare! Susan, dear, you've got a communications mirror, don't you? Use it to call the Aurors."
The watching Harry nodded to himself. That was the point. The Aurors would take away everyone present at this terribly confusing situation, no excuses accepted, and then the door would be unguarded.
But was Harry meant to go into the forbidden corridor himself? Or watch, to see who finally came once all the others were gone?
A loud fit of hacking and coughing caused everyone to look at where the Defense Professor lay.
"Snape - listen -" said the Defense Professor between coughs. "Why - Sprout - here -"
The Potions Master looked down.
"Memory Charm - implies - Professor -" The Defense Professor began coughing again.
"What?"
And the logic unfolded in Harry's mind in crystalline dismay, all the steps already suspected, the dreadful realization coming as a repetition with greater confidence.
Someone had Memory-Charmed Hermione to believe she'd tried to kill Draco.
Only a Hogwarts Professor could have done it without alarm.
So all the true mastermind needed to do was Legilimise or Imperius a Hogwarts Professor.
And the last person anyone would suspect would be the Head of House Hufflepuff.
Snape's head snapped around, as Professor Sprout raised her wand, and the Potions Master managed to raise a wordless translucent ward between them. But the bolt that shot from Professor Sprout's wand was a dark brown that produced a surge of awful apprehension in Harry's mind; and the brown bolt made Severus's shield wink out before they touched, clipping the Potions Master's right arm even as he dodged. Professor Snape gave a muffled shriek and his hand spasmed, dropping his wand.
The next bolt that came from Sprout's wand was a bright red the color of a Stunning Hex, seeming to grow brighter and move faster even as it left her wand, accompanied by another surge of anxiety; and that blew the Potions Master into the door, dropping him motionless to the ground.
By that time pink-haired-Susan-Bones was surrounded by a multifaceted blue haze and she was firing hex after hex at Professor Sprout. Professor Sprout was ignoring the hexes to summon plant tendrils that entangled the younger students as they tried to run, except Draco Malfoy, who had again vanished beneath his invisibility cloak.
Not-Susan-Bones stopped casting hexes. She leveled her wand, took a deep breath, and cried aloud an incantation that sent golden worms of light chewing into the shield around Professor Sprout. At that the Herbology Professor turned to face not-Susan, her expression vacant, a new set of plant tentacles rising in the air behind her. Those stalks were a darker green, and seemed to have shields of their own.
Harry Potter murmured to the seemingly empty air, "Attack Sprout. Help Bones. Nonlethal only."
"Yes, my lord," whispered Lesath Lestrange beneath Harry's Cloak of Invisibility, and the fifth-year Slytherin's presence moved off toward the fight.
Harry looked down at at his own hands, and saw with a jolt of unpleasant shock that his Disillusionment Charm wasn't as complete as it had been before. There were hints of distortion in the air, each time Harry moved...
Slowly, Harry stepped backward, until he came to a corner, and ducked behind a wall. Then he took out his communications mirror... which was blank and jammed. Of course. Harry levitated the mirror to where he could use it to see around the corner, and watch the end of the... distraction? What was happening, why?
Professor Sprout and the form of Susan Bones were dueling in flashes of light and leaves; and the blazing green of a Greater Drill Hex erupted from midair and chewed halfway through the outer layer of Professor Sprout's shields. The Herbology Professor turned and fired a broad wash of yellow at where the Drill Hex had come from, but the spell didn't seem to hit anything.
Yellow blazes, blue facets, dark green plant-tendrils and swirling purple flower petals...
It was when Professor Sprout started firing arcs of crimson in all directions that one of the crimson blades caught something in midair, the Invisibility Cloak not concealing how the crimson arc was absorbed and winked out; and Lesath's presence beneath the Invisibility Cloak fell to the ground.
And that gave not-Susan-Bones time enough to stand still, catch her breath, and scream something that inspired in Harry another surge of dread; and the white spark that blazed out went through Professor Sprout's chewed shields and her plant-armor and dropped her.
Not-Susan-Bones went to her knees, panting, her robes soaked in sweat.
Her head turned to look around her, at the bodies lying stunned on the floor or wrapped in vines.
"What," said not-Susan. "What. What. What."
There was no reply. The victims entangled in Professor Sprout's vines weren't moving, though they did seem to be breathing.
"Malfoy..." said the pink-haired form of Susan, still gasping for breath. "Draco Malfoy, where are you? Are you there? Call the Aurors already! Merlin damn it - Homenum Revelio!"
And Harry found himself visible again, staring in his mirror at the form of Draco Malfoy half-visible beneath a shimmering cloak, standing behind not-Susan, pointing his wand at a gap in not-Susan's blue haze.
Harry's mind moved in flashes of insight, too slow and yet too fast; even as Harry's mouth opened and he inhaled in preparation to shout.
beware the constellation
there was a constellation named Draco
if you could control a Professor you could control a student
"Duck!" Harry shouted, but it was too late, a bolt of red light caught the back of not-Susan's head at point-blank, smashing her to the floor.
Harry stepped around the corner and said, "Somnium Somnium Somnium Somnium Somnium Somnium."
Draco Malfoy's shimmering form collapsed in a heap.
Harry took a moment to catch his breath. Then Harry said "Stupefy!" and verified that, yes, the Stunning Hex did hit Draco Malfoy's form.
(You could be mistaken about whether a Somnium had really hit. Harry had seen enough horror movies, not to mention the business with the Sunshine Regiment, that he wasn't about to make that error again.)
After a further reflection on this, Harry cast another Stunning Hex into the prostrate form of Professor Sprout.
Harry gripped his wand, staring at the scene, breathing heavily from the exhaustion. He didn't have enough magic left to cast a messenger Patronus to Dumbledore and he really really should have thought of that possibility immediately this time around. Harry started to reach back to where his mirror had fallen, to see if it was now unjammed.
And then Harry hesitated.
His note to himself had said to avoid notice from Aurors, and Harry still did not know what was going on.
The crumpled form of Professor Quirrell gave another series of racking coughs, reached out a hand to the wall beside him, and slowly pulled himself to his feet.
"Harry," croaked Professor Quirrell. "Harry. Are you there?"
It was the first time Professor Quirrell had ever called him by his first name.
"I'm here," Harry said. Without any conscious thought, his feet were moving forward.
"Please," said Professor Quirrell. "Please, I haven't... much time. Please take me... to the mirror... help me... get the Stone."
"The Philosopher's Stone?" Harry said. He glanced around at the scattered bodies, but he couldn't see Draco anymore, the revealment had worn off. "You think Mr. Nott was right? I don't think Dumbledore would -"
"Not - Dumbledore," gasped Professor Quirrell. "Because - Sprout -"
"I understand," Harry said. If Dumbledore had been the one behind it all, he wouldn't have needed to mind-control a Professor in order to use Memory Charms.
"Mirror... ancient relic... could hide anything... Stone could be there... many others want Stone... one sent Sprout..."
Harry repeated rapidly, "The mirror down there is an ancient relic that can be used to hide things, and it would be one possible place to hide the Philosopher's Stone. If the Philosopher's Stone is inside the mirror then any number of people might want to get it. One of them is controlling Sprout and that would explain what their goal really is... only... that doesn't explain why Sprout's controller would go after Hermione?"
"Harry, please," Professor Quirrell said. His breathing was yet more labored now, his voice came with excruciating slowness. "It's the one thing... that can save my life... and I find, now... I don't want to die... please, help me..."
And somehow that tore it.
Somehow that was a little too much.
The sense of detachment that had come over Harry when Professor Sprout had arrived, the broken suspension of disbelief, was returning; his Inner Critic weighing up everything as though it were a set-piece. Timing, probability, so many people showing up at the same door, the Defense Professor's desperation... this whole situation didn't feel real. But he might be able to solve it if he just took time to think things through in advance, instead of running off at adventure's first call. All the accumulated experience from the last year had finally crystallized into something like a touch of battle hardening. An instinct born of past disaster was telling Harry that if he just rushed on ahead, he would end up afterward in a sad conversation, realizing that he'd been stupid. Again.
"Let me think," Harry said. "Let me think for a minute before we go." He turned away from the Defense Professor, looking at the unconscious bodies draped in various shapes over the floor. There'd been so many puzzle pieces already, this last year, maybe everything would just fall into place with one more piece...
"Harry..." the Defense Professor said in a faltering voice. "Harry, I'm dying..."
One more minute can't make the difference he's had the WHOLE YEAR to be sick it's IMPROBABLE that his life versus death would be precisely timed to rest on this last minute no matter what happened to Hermione -
"I know!" Harry said. "I'll think quickly!"
Harry stared at the bodies and tried to think. There was no time for doubts, for caveats, no brakes or second-guessing just take the first thoughts and run with them -
In the back of Harry's mind, fragments of abstract thought flitted past, heuristics of problem-solving that there was no time to rehearse in words. In wordless flashes they shot past, to set up the object-level problem.
- what do I notice I am confused by -
- the first place to look for a problem is whatever aspect of the situation seems most improbable -
- simple explanations are more probable, eliminate separate improbabilities that must be postulated -
Professor Snape had already been here then Professor Quirrell had arrived then Harry had arrived (via Time-Turner) then the adventuring party had arrived and Draco had been revealed (part of the party) then Professor Sprout had shown up.
Too many people had shown up synchronously and that was too much coincidence, it was improbable that so many different parties would show up at the same location within a five-minute window, there had to be hidden entanglements.
Label Sprout's controller as the mastermind who had ordered Hermione Memory-Charmed. The mastermind had sent Sprout.
Professor Snape had said that the Headmaster had sent him to guard the door after there'd been some sort of disturbance, if the mastermind had caused that as a distraction then that explained Severus's presence as well.
Harry wasn't sure any more that Draco had been controlled by the mastermind, that hypothesis had come to him in the spur of the moment, Draco might have just been trying to drop not-Susan so he could get into the corridor unhindered-
No that was the wrong way to think, turn it around, try to explain the timed presence of Draco and his adventuring party, no time for self-questioning, run with the hypothesis, therefore suppose Sprout's mastermind had sent Draco or triggered his coming.
That was three arrivals explained.
Harry had shown up because his note to himself had told him to do so. That could be attributed to time travel.
That left the Defense Professor who'd said he was following Snape, only that didn't really seem like an adequate reason for Professor Quirrell to show up it didn't really make Harry feel less confused and so maybe the mastermind had also controlled the timing of Professor Quirrell's presence somehow and even arranged for Harry himself to enter the time loop.
Harry's mind hit a stumbling-block, he couldn't see how to extend that reasoning further.
There was no time to stare blankly at stumbling-blocks.
Without any pause or braking Harry's mind attacked the problem from a new angle.
Professor Quirrell had deduced a controlled Hogwarts Professor from the need for some Professor to Memory-Charm Hermione which meant that Professor Sprout's controller had framed and then murdered Hermione which meant Professor Sprout's controller had detailed information about Hogwarts life and maybe a personal interest in the Boy-Who-Lived and his friends.
Harry's mind finally threw up the relevant memory, Dumbledore saying that Lord Voldemort's strongest road to life was hidden here inside Hogwarts run with the hypothesis so that resurrection tool was the Philosopher's Stone hidden inside the mirror why had Dumbledore put the mirror into a corridor first-years could get through no ignore this question it's not important right now and Professor Quirrell had said the Philosopher's Stone possessed great healing power so that part also fit.
But if it was the Philosopher's Stone that was hidden in the mirror to keep it away from the Dark Lord, that meant the mirror also contained the one thing in the world that could save the Defense Professor's life -
Harry's mind tried to hesitate, to flinch away, feeling a sudden apprehension as to where this was going.
But there was no time allowed for hesitation.
-and that was also far too much coincidence just too much improbability if your mind didn't write it off as an amazing plot twist like you were inside a story.
Could the putative Dark Lord also be manipulating Professor Quirrell so that Professor Quirrell would discover his supposed salvation at the right time so that Harry and Professor Quirrell would go get the resurrection tool from the mirror that might not even actually be the Philosopher's Stone and then the Dark Lord's avatar or some other servant would show up and seize it from them that would explain all the synchronies and negate every coincidence.
Or Professor Quirrell had known from the beginning that the one thing that could save his life was hidden inside this mirror and that was why he had agreed to teach Defense at Hogwarts and now he was finally trying to get it but then why wait until he was this sick to even try and why had Sprout shown up at the same time as Professor Quirrell -
Harry's mind faltered harder.
His inner eye was looking in a direction it was afraid to look.
The note I sent myself said to help the watcher of stars. I wouldn't send myself a note saying that, if I hadn't already worked out in the future that it was the right thing to do - maybe the note is just telling me to get on with it -
A small note of confusion was promoted to conscious attention.
The coded message on the parchment... one or two lines hadn't quite sounded right, hadn't sounded like the code Harry would expect himself to use...
"Harry," whispered the dying voice of Professor Quirrell from behind him. "Harry, please."
"I'm almost done thinking," Harry's voice said aloud, and Harry realized as he spoke the words that they were true.
Turn it around.
Look at it from the Enemy's perspective, from where the Enemy does their own intelligent planning, somewhere out of your sight.
There are Aurors in Hogwarts, and your target Harry Potter is now fully on guard. Harry Potter will call in Aurors at the first sign of trouble, or send a Patronus to Albus Dumbledore. Considering that as a puzzle, one creative solution is to -
- forge a supposedly Time-Turned message to Harry Potter from himself, telling Harry Potter not to call for help, telling him to be at the place and time you want him to be. You get the target himself to bypass all the protections he set up. You even bypass his protection of skepticism with the overriding authority of his own future self's judgment.
It isn't even difficult. You can Memory-Charm some random student into remembering Harry Potter handing over an envelope to be given back to himself later.
You can Memory-Charm that student because you are a Hogwarts Professor.
You don't go to the extra effort to steal a pencil and Muggle paper from Harry Potter's pouch. Instead you forge Harry Potter's handwriting on wizard parchment. You can forge Harry Potter's handwriting because you have seen it on Ministry-mandated exams you have graded.
You call Draco Malfoy 'the constellation' because you know Harry Potter is interested in astronomy and you are a wizard and you have taken Astronomy and memorised the names of all the constellations. But it's not the natural code that Harry Potter would use to describe Draco Malfoy to himself, that would have been 'the apprentice'.
You call Professor Quirrell 'the watcher of stars', and tell Harry Potter to help him.
You know that life-eater is how you say 'Dementor' in Parseltongue and you expect Harry Potter to think of the Aurors as being in league with them.
You encode 6:49 as'six, and seven in a square' because you have been reading a Muggle physics book that Harry Potter gave you.
Who are you, then?
Harry noticed his breathing had sped up, and with a burst of heartrate, Harry slowed his breath down again, Professor Quirrell was watching him.
What if hypothetically speaking Professor Quirrell was the mastermind and had faked Harry's message then that explained all five parties showing up the whole synchronous coordination of the comedy and then Professor Sprout was just controlled to give Professor Quirrell deniability let him blame someone else for the False Memory Charm after the dust settled but
But why would Professor Quirrell risk the fragile alliance Harry had with Draco via the attempted murder-frame
(that Professor Quirrell had 'detected' and'stopped' allegedly via a tracer put on Draco)
Why would Professor Quirrell kill Hermione
(if his first attempt to remove her hadn't worked)
If Professor Quirrell was the bad guy then he might have lied about everything to do with horcruxes and maybe it wasn't coincidence at all that the only thing that could save his life was the avenue that could resurrect the Dark Lord what if the Dark Lord had arranged that too somehow
(one day David Monroe had mysteriously disappeared, presumed dead at the Dark Lord's hands)
An awful intuition had come over Harry, something separate from all the reasoning he'd done so far, an intuition that Harry couldn't put into words; except that he and the Defense Professor were very much alike in certain ways, and faking a Time-Turned message was just the sort of creative method that Harry himself might have tried to bypass all of a target's protections -
And that was when Harry finally realized what should have been obvious from the very, |
and loss of life from severe flooding, high winds, and other tropical cyclone hazards."
The study was published March 2013 in the International Journal of Climatology.
To better understand tropical cyclones that survive beyond landfall, Andersen and Shepherd accessed data archived by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center for tropical cyclones from 1979 to 2008. Storms had to meet the criteria of retaining a measureable central pressure by the time they tracked at least 220 miles (350 kilometers) inland, away from the maritime influence of the nearest coast. Next they obtained atmospheric and environmental data for before and after the storms from NASA's Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications.
Of the 227 inland tropical cyclones identified, 45 maintained or increased strength, as determined by their wind speed and central pressure. The researchers show, however, that not all such storms are fueled equally.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the destructive power of extratropical cyclones – a well-studied storm type that undergoes a known physical and thermal transition. These systems begin as warm-core tropical cyclones that derive energy from the ocean. Over land, the storms transition to cold-core extratropical cyclones that derive energy from clashes between different air masses. Of the study's 45 inland storms that maintained or increased strength, 17 belonged to this category.
[image-63]
Tropical Storm Erin, however, is among the newly described storm category that accounted for 16 of the 45 tropical cyclones. Instead of transitioning from a warm-core to cold-core system, these storms maintain their tropical warm-core characteristics. The storm type, which Andersen and Shepherd call tropical cyclone maintenance and intensification events, or TCMIs, have the potential to deliver much more rainfall than their extratropical counterparts.
"Until events like Erin in 2007, there was not much focus on post-landfall tropical cyclones unless they transitioned," Andersen said. "Erin really brought attention to the inland intensification of tropical cyclones."
[image-79]
"This is particularly critical since a study by former National Hurricane Center Deputy Director Ed Rappaport found that 59 percent of fatalities in landfalling tropical cyclones are from inland freshwater flooding," Shepherd said.
While most inland tropical cyclones occur in the United States and China, the hotspot for TCMIs during the 30-year study period turned out to be Australia. The uneven geographic distribution led Andersen and Shepherd to investigate the environment and conditions surrounding the brown ocean phenomenon that gives rise to the storms.
Andersen and Shepherd show that a brown ocean environment consists of three observable conditions. First, the lower level of the atmosphere mimics a tropical atmosphere with minimal variation in temperature. Second, soils in the vicinity of the storms need to contain ample moisture. Finally, evaporation of the soil moisture releases latent heat, which the team found must measure at least 70 watts averaged per square meter. For comparison, the latent heat flux from the ocean averages about 200 watts per square meter.
Indeed, all three conditions were present when Erin tracked across the U.S. Gulf Coast and Midwest. Still, questions remain about the factors – such as variations in climate, soil and vegetation – that make Australia the region where brown ocean conditions most often turn up.
The research also points to possible implications for storms' response to climate change. "As dry areas get drier and wet areas get wetter, are you priming the soil to get more frequent inland tropical cyclone intensification?" asked Shepherd.
Related Links
› NASA's hurricanes and tropical cyclones website
› University of Georgia, Department of GeographyCONCACAF should consider modifying the Champions League schedule, writes Goal's CONCACAF Columnist.
Editor's Note: CONCACAF hipster Jon Arnold brings Goal readers stories and opinions from around the region in a weekly column.
The CONCACAF Champions League semifinals are set. Next week's first legs pit the Montreal Impact against Alajuelense and Club America against Herediano.
A lot of people want to fix the CCL, be it a total overhaul or seeing the competition sacrificed completely in favor of sending teams to South America's Copa Libertadores or a different competition entirely. But the CCL doesn't need an overhaul, just a tune-up. Year after year more fans are turning up to the midweek matches. Teams are making (slow) progress on knocking Mexico off the throne it has occupied since the format was switched for the 2008-09 season. The progress being made is slow but steady. Still, it should be nudged along when possible.
One of the best tweaks the region's brass could make is to change the calendar from running between August until April to starting in February and running until November like the Asian Football Confederation's edition. Sure, Major League Soccer would benefit from having the quarterfinals take place while it's in season instead of before the campaign. But Montreal's stunning start to the first leg in Pachuca and it's at-the-death equalizer at home showed that MLS clubs can get through the quarterfinals with the proper preparation. This has little to do with Major League Soccer and everything to do with strengthening the region as a whole.
Last year, Cruz Azul was a deserving champion. Then, the wheels fell off of La Maquina. The champion tumbled out in the CCL group stages and missed the Liga MX postseason. On the back of that, they headed down to the Club World Cup to be sacrificed to Real Madrid.
Having a champion crowned in November and immediately heading to whatever far-flung locale is hosting the Club World Cup would provide a much better chance of someone pulling an upset – and also put out a more accurate showing of where the top teams in the region are. That's not to say the CONCACAF champion will be able to compete with the European winner. That's just not going to happen in the current landscape. But it does ensure that a team which recently has won something is representing the region.
With most countries in CONCACAF using short tournaments, teams are generally in action between January and May and then back at it in late July until November. The cut-throat groups of three can stay with winners going directly into the quarterfinals. The quarterfinalists, whether Mexican, Costa Rican, American, Canadian or from elsewhere, will all be cohesive units and deep runs in the continental championship will likely be mirrored by trips through their own postseason.
The toughest part of making the swap would be the actual implementation. It wouldn't be popular, but it makes sense to send the most recent Liga MX champion (the Mexican league has earned the right at this point) and begin the precedent of sending an in-form team to the Club World Cup.
It's a tweak that alters little but provides great benefit to the region's clubs.
Quickly Taken
U-17 championship - After youth powers Mexico and the United States, Costa Rica and host Honduras also have impressed. The group winners automatically qualify for the World Cup and contest the final March 15. That same day, two other playoff matches will take place with those winners also making the U-17 World Cup in Chile later this year.This paper reports on a trial of a cyclist roundabout design or c-roundabout undertaken in Auckland, New Zealand by the New Zealand Transport Agency. The cyclist roundabout design was installed at the Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd roundabout in Auckland, New Zealand. The operation of the C-roundabout was evaluated in terms of its safety, capacity, and the opinions of cyclists,pedestrians and car drivers.
The full paper can be download from my Dropbox and the executive summary has been reproduced below. I am no engineer but I did find this paper interesting and it is good to see New Zealand transport authorities being pro-active on the design of roundabouts.
The purpose of this research project was to evaluate the on-site operation of the C-roundabout design (at a site in Auckland, New Zealand). The C-roundabout (cyclist roundabout) is a new multi-lane roundabout design that was developed by D Campbell, I Jurisich and R Dunn as part of a 2006 Land Transport NZ research project titled Improved multi-lane roundabout designs for cyclists. The primary aim of the C-roundabout is to improve the safety of cyclists at multi-lane roundabouts and make multi-lane roundabouts more cyclist-friendly. The concept of the design is to decrease vehicle speeds through the roundabout to around 30 km/hr by increasing the deflection of the roundabout, and to reduce the widths of approach lanes and circulating lanes so that cyclists are required to travel in the centre of the lanes, like other vehicles. This research project was carried out from 2008 to 2011.
There were two parts to this research:
evaluation of the C-roundabout (Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd) evaluation of a single-lane roundabout that had been changed to have two narrow lanes with no reduction in vehicle speeds (Margan Ave/Hutchinson Ave).
1. Evaluation of the C-roundabout (Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd roundabout)
The C-roundabout design was installed at the Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd roundabout in Auckland. The operation of the C-roundabout was evaluated in terms of its safety, capacity, and the opinions of cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers.
Safety
The C-roundabout was successful in achieving a lower-speed environment, with the 85th percentile through speeds being reduced to around 30km/hr. These vehicle speeds were close to the speed a cyclist would be travelling through the roundabout, which made it safer for cyclists. The chances of a cyclist surviving a crash decreases significantly above speeds of 20–30km/hr (Austroads 2009a). The lower speeds are also considered safer for other road users (pedestrians and motorists), and should result in less-severe crashes.
In the 2.5 years following the roundabout’s reconstruction, there was no significant change in the crash rate. There were no cyclist crashes either before or after the reconstruction. There have been no injury crashes since the installation of the C-roundabout design; prior to the reconstruction there were 0.32 injury crashes/year. With the lower design speed we would expect the overall injury crash rate to drop. Further crash analysis in one to two years will provide enough data to conclusively assess the safety of the C-roundabout.
Capacity
The installation of the C-roundabout at this uncongested site (converting a standard multi-lane roundabout to a C-roundabout) had little impact on capacity (based on SIDRA and on-site measurements).
SIDRA modelling indicates that for an uncongested roundabout, conversion to a C-roundabout has very little impact on the average delay (7.5sec/veh before, 8.1sec/veh after), the degree of saturation (0.579 before, 0.568 after) and the design life (12 years before, 12 years after). However, SIDRA calculates a small increase in the critical gap and follow-up headway due to the geometry of the C-roundabout (decreased negotiation speed through the roundabout, narrow approach lane width, and increased roundabout diameter). This could not be confirmed by on-site measurements (gap and follow-up headway) because of insufficient congested periods (total of 13 minutes congested periods in both peak periods).
Delays measurements indicated that converting the multi-lane roundabout to a C-roundabout had no significant impact on the delays.
Regression analysis suggested a drop in capacity for the C-roundabout design when the circulating flows were less than 878veh/hr and an increase in capacity when circulating flows were greater than 878veh/hr. However, as the roundabout had so little congestion there was insufficient survey site data to statistically conclude whether or not this was the case. Further research would be required at more congested sites to confirm this.
The capacity of the Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd C-roundabout was not impacted by trucks/buses as the numbers were very low. Trucks/buses may impact on C-roundabout approach capacity as they are required to straddle both lanes (thus blocking access to one lane)1. However, this impact is unlikely to be significant, as heavy-vehicle numbers are usually low in peak periods. The amount of impact that trucks/buses have on the capacity of a C-roundabout is expected to depend on the following factors:
Queues and lane utilisation on the approach – the greater the difference between approach lane queue lengths, the greater the impact of trucks/buses on the capacity of the approach. Further research is recommended to confirm this.
Proportion of trucks/buses – the higher the proportion of trucks/buses, the more likely they negatively impact on the capacity of the approach.
The capacity implications of converting an existing multi-lane roundabout into a C-roundabout were difficult to assess at the Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd site because of the low traffic flows, very little queuing and stop-line delay, and very few congested periods (only 13 minutes in both peak periods).
Road users’ impressions of the C-roundabout (cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers)
The C-roundabout design at the Palomino Dr/Sturges Rd intersection drew positive feedback from cyclists and pedestrians, but a less positive reaction from the car drivers – about half were not in favour of it.
Cyclists were positive about the C-roundabout and would like to see more of them installed. They found it easier to use, safer, and better for cyclists. They also noticed that car speeds were slower.
Pedestrians were positive about it and in general found it safe and better for pedestrians. They found it easy to cross, and noticed that the crossing distance was narrower and that car speeds were slower.
Car drivers noticed that car speeds were slower and the lanes were narrower (the intention of the C- roundabout design), but about half of them did not like the C-roundabout and did not want to see more of them installed. About half the drivers found the C-roundabout more difficult to use and indicated a preference for a standard roundabout.
More than half of the drivers thought that the C-roundabout was ‘safe’ or ‘the same as other roundabouts’, but a significant proportion (41%) thought it was unsafe. The results of the crash analysis did not confirm this perception of the C-roundabout being unsafe, and as vehicle speeds had dropped, it was unlikely to be less safe.
The majority of the drivers thought that the roundabout was actually less safe for cyclists, and were unable to recognise the benefits of the C-roundabout for cyclists.
The drivers’ impression of the roundabout may improve if they are informed of the benefits of the C- roundabout for cyclists and of the cyclists’ support for the C-roundabout. Also, their impression may improve over time as they become accustomed to using the tight, slower roundabout. Further monitoring of car drivers’ impressions of the C-roundabout should be undertaken.
2. Evaluation of single-lane roundabout changed to have two narrow lanes (Margan Ave/Hutchinson Ave roundabout)
This site involved changing two approaches from wide, single lanes to two narrow lanes, without altering the kerbs. The intention of studying this site was to assess whether or not it would be possible to fit a small double-lane roundabout within the same road reserve as a single-lane roundabout, thus improving the capacity at low cost.
It should be noted that the reconstruction of the Margan Avenue/Hutchinson Avenue roundabout did not comply with all of the C-roundabout design principles as it did not involve increasing the vehicle deflection to slow vehicle speeds through the roundabout to around 30km/hr (the design speed for the roundabout was approximately 50km/hr). Thus, the differential speed between vehicles and cyclists was not expected to decrease – ie cyclist safety was not specifically being addressed at this site.
The evaluation showed that the capacity of a single-lane roundabout can be improved (almost doubled, depending on the lane utilisation of two-lane approaches) at a very low cost by converting to the two narrow lanes design.
The crash analysis of the Margan Ave/Hutchinson Ave roundabout showed that the safety of the roundabout decreased after it was changed from a single-lane roundabout. The overall crash rate increased significantly and the injury crash rate also increased. It may not be advisable to install narrow double-lane roundabouts without decreased vehicle speeds at other sites until the safety concerns have been addressed or confirmed at this trial site. To improve the safety of this roundabout, it is recommended that the vehicles speeds should be decreased to around 30km/hr by increasing the vehicle deflection. The safety of the roundabout should be reassessed one year following the above changes to determine whether the increased vehicle deflection has addressed the safety concerns. If the increased vehicle deflection is successful in reducing the crash rate, then it will prove the principle of the C- roundabout – that roundabout speeds should be reduced for safety.
RecommendationsCatholic World News
Bishop speaks of starvation in Aleppo
April 11, 2013
The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, described the devastation wrought by war as rebels advance on the city.
“One lives day by day,” says Bishop Antoine Audo, a native of Aleppo. “I have the impression that people are more and more exhausted. They have all become poor and everyone is always looking for something to eat for himself and his family. In the streets of Aleppo you can see the people that run endlessly with bags in their hand, trying to find a bit of bread.”
“The anarchy of the war allows you to perceive in even stronger terms the greatness of human dignity, just when it seems so humiliated,” he added. “In all this, many seek God and ask him for peace of heart, in prayer.”
More than 300 Christian families recently fled an Aleppo district following its takeover by rebels.
For all current news, visit our News home page.
Sound Off! CatholicCulture.org supporters weigh in. All comments are moderated. To lighten our editing burden, only current donors are allowed to Sound Off. If you are a donor, log in to see the comment form; otherwise please support our work, and Sound Off!A petition which focuses on Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is only about 6,200 signatures away from requiring a comment from the White House. One of Tesla’s fans created the petition in an attempt to get the White House to assert its influence in favor of the company’s direct to consumer sales model. In order to prompt a White House response, the petition must have 100,000 signatures by Friday. It’s picking up steam though, and there’s a good chance the petition will make it.
Odds Look Good For Tesla Petition
The Tesla fan who wishes only to be known as Ken told ValueWalk last week that it looked like his petition would hit 100,000 signatures just in time. The Washington Post reports that John Voelcker of HighGearMedia said Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) emailed its customers on Friday, including a link to Ken’s petition and asking them to sign it.
Before that email, there were about 36,000 signatures on Ken’s petition. The morning after the email, the number had risen to 40,000, and by the end of the weekend, there were about 70,000 signatures on the petition. When I started writing this story, the petition needed about 6,200 signatures, and in just a few minutes’ time, that number had dropped below 5,000.
Tesla’s Direct To Consumer Sales Model
Perhaps the biggest problem Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) has faced since it started selling vehicles is its direct to consumer sales model. If the soaring number of signatures is any indication, consumers like it. However auto dealers on the other hand, hate it. They’ve launched efforts against Tesla in several states, although the automaker has managed to sneak through a loophole in some areas. The company sets up showrooms to show off its vehicles, although consumers in some states must take a road trip to another state if they wish to test drive one.
Of course even if the petition started by Ken does get the number of signatures required to garner a response from the White House, it may not have much effect on state laws. Each state sets its own laws regarding auto dealerships and whether automakers can own dealerships. The best the White House can do is voice its support in Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s favor and see what happens.
UPDATE: 9PM EST: The petition has hit the required 100,000 signatures mark.The inherent limitations of the tokamak design for fusion power will prevent it from becoming commercially viable, but the lessons from this effort can inform future research.
Burning wood was an important source of energy for early humankind, because it had no competition, no cost concerns, and manageable environmental issues. Over time, new energy sources came into being with demonstrated superiority on key measures of value, such as cost, safety, and convenience. Beginning in the 1950s, fusion energy aspired to play a role, and at least in principle, it has several potential advantages over other sources of electricity.
Fusion is the merging of two atomic nuclei to form a larger nucleus or nuclei, during which energy is released. This is how the sun produces its energy. We know how to produce fusion reactions in the laboratory at small scale. However, a potentially viable fusion reactor would involve heating fusion fuels to very high temperatures (order of hundreds of millions of degrees) to form a gaseous plasma of electrons and ions and holding that plasma away from material walls for long enough that more power is produced than required to do the heating. An intense magnetic field can provide the required isolation, because there is no physical material that can withstand the high temperatures of a fusion plasma. Magnetic plasma containment is the basis of one approach to fusion power and is the focus of the following considerations. A key challenge in making fusion a viable electric power source is that it requires a large energy input, necessitating a larger energy output for viability.
Fusion is appealing as an energy source because fusion fuels are multifold and plentiful. The least difficult fuels to manage from a physics standpoint are the hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium. Among the potentially attractive features of a deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion power plant is fuel abundance and its invulnerability to the type of runaway reaction that can occur in a nuclear fission accident. The challenge is to find a way to sustain a fusion reaction in a way that is economical, reliable, safe, and environmentally attractive.
The quest to make fusion power a viable generation option has turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. A great deal has been learned over more than 60 years of research, and a variety of approaches to fusion power have been and are being explored. However, decades ago the world fusion community decided that the most promising magnetic approach was the tokamak plasma confinement concept in which superconducting magnets are used to hold hot fusion plasma in a toroidal (donut) configuration.
Since a power-producing tokamak was understood to be very complex and expensive, a number of countries decided to develop a prototype together. It is called ITER and was initially supported by the United States, the Soviet Union, the European Union, and Japan. Later China and South Korea joined the project, and the 500 MW ITER was formally launched in 2007 to be built in France. ITER is a 30-meter tall device that will weigh over 20,000 tons and include roughly a million parts. The project has already encountered significant cost overruns and delays, and completion is now planned for 2027—about a decade later than the original target.
As this analysis will show, tokamak fusion power will almost certainly be a commercial failure, which is a tragedy in light of the time, funds, and effort so far expended. However, this particular failure does not mean that fusion power is a dead end. Research is under way on other technological approaches, which can benefit from the lessons learned from the tokamak experience. First we must understand where the tokamak approach went off the tracks.
Market realities
Electric utilities will almost certainly be the eventual adopters of fusion power systems aimed at producing electric power, so it is essential to view fusion technologies from their perspective. In 1994, sensing progress toward a potentially viable fusion power system, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the research arm of the U.S. utility industry, convened a panel of utility technologists to develop “Criteria for Practical Fusion Power Systems.” Noting that “Fusion power’s potential benefits to humanity and the environment are immense,” the report observed that “as the technology is developed and refined, a vision of fusion power plant buyer requirements is essential to providing a marketable product.” EPRI identified three major interrelated criteria for fusion power success:
Economics: “To compensate for the higher economic risk associated with new technologies, fusion plants must have lower life-cycle costs than competing proven technologies available at the time of (fusion) commercialization.”
Regulatory Simplicity: “Important directions and considerations include: Avoidance of any need for separating the plant from population centers …. Minimal need for engineered safety features …. Minimal waste generation …. Minimal occupational exposure to radiation in plant operation, maintenance, and waste handling activities.”
Tokamak fusion power will almost certainly be a commercial failure, which is a tragedy in light of the time, funds, and effort so far expended.
Public Acceptance: “A positive public perception can best be achieved by maximizing fusion power’s environmental attractiveness, economy of power production, and safety.”
Because the advent of fusion power was not imminent in 1994, EPRI noted, “It is not practical to assign values to these criteria for two reasons. First, because the world of tomorrow will be different—social, regulatory, and energy issues will pose moving targets. Second, there are potential tradeoffs among many of the factors.”
Fusion is sometimes promoted as an alternative to light water nuclear fission plants, so I use them as a reference point in assessing how well tokamak designs meet the EPRI criteria. This makes sense because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which is responsible for licensing and oversight of fission facilities, declared in 2009 that it has jurisdiction over fusion plants.
It is important to note that nuclear fission power’s acceptance in today’s world is mixed, a view that may or may not change in the future. Because of the current uneven acceptance of nuclear fission power, a conceptual fusion power system should clearly be more attractive, if it is to meet the EPRI criteria at some future date. A close look at the inherent characteristics of tokamak fusion reveals how poorly it compares with current fission reactors and with the EPRI criteria.
Economics
Both fission and DT fusion power plants are capital-intensive with low fuel costs, so I begin by considering reactor core capital costs, neglecting balance-of-plant considerations for the time being. For the purposes of a rough estimate, I use the general rule of thumb that a comparison of the relative masses of materials for systems of similar capabilities provides a rough proxy for their relative cost.
In 1994, technologists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) compared the ITER core, as it then existed, with the core of the comparable power Westinghouse Advanced AP-600 nuclear reactor core. Considering the cores of the two systems was and is a reasonable basis for comparison, since the nuclear core is the heat source for a fission reactor power plant, and ITER is the prototype of the heat source for a tokamak power plant. LLNL calculated that the mass of the ITER tokamak was over 60 times that of the comparable fission reactor. Although the ultimate cost ratio will not be exactly the same, there can be no doubt that the tokamak core will be dramatically more expensive than the fission core. This large difference clearly indicated that tokamak power plant costs would likely be dramatically higher than fission power costs. In fact, the situation is worse when the balance-of-plant costs are considered, because ITER has vacuum, plasma heating, and cryogenic systems that the AP-600 does not.
The likelihood that a tokamak would be prohibitively expensive is supported by the experience of ITER thus far. The current estimate for the cost of the project is over $50 billion, about five times early estimates, and the project is still more than 10 years from expected completion. No one will be shocked if the actual cost is much higher. So on a cost basis, a utility faced with a choice between a fission plant and a tokamak would clearly prefer the fission plant.
Because the ITER central organization does not control the costs of the seven ITER partners, the actual cost of ITER is extremely difficult to determine. Each is committed to delivering certain pieces of hardware, but is under no obligation to publish their costs or convert their costs to dollars. Suffice to say that ITER costs have escalated dramatically in spite of various scope reductions.
The situation looks even worse when one considers the likely operation and maintenance (O&M) costs for a tokamak. The device is inherently large and complex, so that any disassembly and reassembly will be difficult and expensive. On top of that, virtually all reactor components will quickly become radioactive due to neutron activation and widespread tritium contamination, which will exist in abundance, since tritium tends to readily diffuse through most materials, particularly when they are hot. This means that most O&M will have to be conducted remotely, adding significantly to cost. The bottom line is that tokamak economics are inescapably very negative.
Regulation
The NRC will regulate fusion power plants. The NRC has public safety as its primary concern and must take into consideration even remote accident possibilities. The NRC requires all plants it oversees to be prepared for “A postulated accident that a nuclear facility must be designed and built to withstand without loss to the systems, structures, and components necessary to ensure public health and safety.”
Once potential accident scenarios have been identified, regulators require that proposed facilities provide safety in depth to ensure that there is no reasonable chance that even obscure failures will harm the public. Regulatory actions typically involve adding features to proposed designs to minimize and contain potential accidents within facility boundaries, often at considerable cost.
In the case of fission reactors, safety features are legion. Externally, the most noticeable safety feature is the massive building surrounding the reactor vessel, aimed at providing a layer of protection that can contain hazards created by internal system failures. According to the NRC, the nuclear reactor building is “a gas-tight shell or other enclosure around a nuclear reactor to confine fission products that otherwise might be released to the atmosphere in the event of an accident. Such enclosures are usually dome-shaped and made of steel-reinforced concrete.”
The NRC is not alone in its caution. The electric utilities themselves are keenly interested in preventing accidents because of the potentially serious human and economic costs.
The safety risks of a tokamak reactor have similarities and differences with fission reactors. Tokamak reactors will be far from risk-free. DT fusion reactions emit copious quantities of very energetic neutrons, which will damage materials near the plasma region and induce significant levels of radioactivity in adjacent structural materials. Accordingly, a tokamak power system will very quickly become highly radioactive and contaminated with tritium.
The levels of induced radioactivity will be influenced by the choice of reactor structural materials. Decades ago, 316 stainless steel (SS) was proposed but later abandoned in favor of materials in which induced radioactivity would be reduced. Of greatest current interest is reduced-activation ferritic/martensitic (RAFM) steel. Also mentioned are vanadium (V) and silicon carbide (SiC), both of which would require extensive materials development programs to establish their viability for fusion applications. Although induced radioactivity would be reduced with RAFM, V, or SiC, it would not be eliminated. However, their use would significantly increase plant costs, because these materials are more expensive than SS and have less industrial experience.
No matter what materials of construction are chosen, there will be large amounts of induced radioactivity and neutron-induced damage, particularly close to the plasma. Over time, radiation damage will render some system components structurally brittle, requiring replacement. Major component replacement in a tokamak fusion reactor will be very time-consuming, because of its complex geometry and the attendant long reactor downtimes, which will increase power costs.
Finally, it should be noted that there will be human-safety-concern levels of tritium throughout the core structure and the surrounding regions of a tokamak reactor, because tritium readily diffuses through most materials, particularly at the high temperatures that a tokamak reactor will operate.
Tokamak plasmas are not benign. As the European Fusion Network acknowledged, “Tokamaks operate within a limited parameter range. Outside this range sudden losses of energy confinement can occur. These events, known as disruptions, cause major thermal and mechanical stresses to the structure and walls.” Disruptions have been identified as a major problem to the design and operation of future tokamak reactors.
As reported at the 2011 Sherwood Conference, in the case of ITER, “…local thermal loads during plasma disruptions significantly (10 times!) exceed the melting threshold of divertor (waste dump) targets and FW (first wall) panels. A reliable Disruption Mitigations System (DMS) must be developed and installed in ITER prior to the full scale operation….” According to a 2013 ITER Newsline, “ITER, the world’s first reactor-scale fusion machine, will have a plasma volume more than 10 times that of the next largest (existing) tokamak, JET.”
Further, according to Columbia University researchers in 2011, “Disruptions are one of the most troublesome problems facing tokamaks today. In a large-scale experiment such as ITER, disruptions could cause catastrophic destruction to the vacuum vessel and plasma-facing components. There are two primary types of disruptions…which have different effects on the tokamak and need to be addressed individually.”
Although various mitigation options are under consideration, none can realistically be expected to be 100 percent foolproof. Accordingly, tokamak disruptions will clearly be of concern to both regulators and potential utility operators.
Another potential problem is the reliability of the magnets that contain the plasma. It is well known that superconducting (S/C) magnets can accidentally quench, which means suddenly “go normal” with a large release of stored energy. During a quench, a large S/C magnet can be damaged by high voltage, high temperature, and sudden large forces. Although magnets are designed to withstand an occasional accidental quench, repeated quenches can shorten their useful lives.
Small S/C magnets are widely used in magnetic resonance imaging machines, nuclear magnetic resonance equipment, and mass spectrometers. These systems are routinely stable and well behaved. Larger S/C magnets are used in particle accelerators, where difficulties have occurred and are considered a “fairly routine event,” according to a 2008 article in Fermilab’s Symmetry: Dimensions of Particle Physics. For example, a September 2008 magnet quench in the Large Hadron Collider occurred in about 100 bending magnets, led to a loss of roughly six tons of liquid helium coolant, which was vented and lost. The escaping vapor expanded with explosive force, damaging over 50 superconducting magnets and their mountings.
At the Fermilab particle accelerator, the Symmetry article reports, “a quench generates as much force as an exploding stick of dynamite. A magnet usually withstands this force and is operational again in a few hours after cooling back down. If repair is required, it takes valuable time to warm up, fix, and then cool down the magnet—days or weeks in which no particle beams can be circulated, and no science can be done.”
Events like these in accelerators are often caused by particle beams striking chamber walls, creating sudden, localized heating. Disruptions in tokamaks might provide similar triggers, but they are not the only events that can initiate quenching. To date, quenches have occurred on at least 17 occasions in tokamak experiments constructed with S/C magnets, due a number of factors including fast current variations, vacuum loss, subsystem failures, operator errors, and mechanical failure. Some failures can be avoided relatively easily, whereas others can require costly magnet and magnet casing replacements. With a structurally robust core containment vessel, such failures would not lead to danger to the public.
The ITER cryogenic system will be the largest concentrated cryogenic system in the world. ITER designers are mindful of quench potential, and in 2007 the ITER organization commented as follows:
Despite 23,000 tons of steel, the ITER machine won’t be a rigid, unmoving block. As the magnets are cooled down progressively, or as they are powered up according to ITER’s plasma scenarios, the machine will “breathe” and move. Quenches may occur as the result of mechanical movements that generate heat in one part of the magnet. Variations in magnetic flux or radiation coming from the plasma can also cause quenches, as well as issues in the magnet cryogenic coolant system.
During a quench, temperature, voltage, and mechanical stresses increase—not only on the coil itself, but also in the magnet feeders and the magnet structures. A quench that begins in one part of a superconducting coil can propagate, causing other areas to lose their superconductivity. As this phenomenon builds, it is essential to discharge the huge energy accumulated in the magnet to the exterior of the Tokamak Building. Magnet quenches aren’t expected often during the lifetime of ITER, but it is necessary to plan for them. “Quenches aren’t an accident, failure or defect—they are part of the life of a superconducting magnet and the latter must be designed to withstand them…”
Restarting a superconducting tokamak will be time consuming. In the case of the Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), it took about 18 days to cool all coils from room temperature to 4.5kelvin after a quench that occurred in December 2006. ITER and subsequent tokamak power reactors are much larger and will certainly take much longer to restart.
If a quench in ITER were to cause all of its magnets to go normal, the magnetic energy released would be over 40 gigajoules, the equivalent of toughly ten tons of TNT. How fast that energy is released depends on a number of factors, and regulators will require design features to minimize external damage.
Finally, and surprisingly, there is a potential fire hazard associated with an ultralow-temperature helium release. According to a University of Pittsburgh 2008 safety manual: “The cryogenic gases are not flammable; however, the extreme cold that exists during and immediately after a quench may cause air to condense and create liquefied oxygen on surfaces. Any liquid dripping from cold surfaces should be presumed to be enriched oxygen and treated as a potential fire hazard.” Although the chances of an associated fire hazard are likely small, they are not zero, so regulators will require related safeguards. On the basis of decades of experience with S/C magnets, the problem of quenching is not likely to ever be completely eliminated, so regulators will plan and regulate expecting their occurrence.
Because of the potential for significant explosive events in a tokamak power reactor based on an ITER-like core, regulators are virtually certain to require a major containment building to control the extremes of such events. Since a tokamak reactor would likely be tens of times larger than the containment building of a fission reactor of a comparable power level, such a building will |
, putting more and more Americans under the unsleeping eye of government drones watching their every move, looking for the "signature" of "suspicious" behaviour. Hastings notes:
In the end, it appears, the administration has little reason to worry about any backlash from its decision to kill an American citizen – one who had not even been charged with a crime. A recent poll shows that most Democrats overwhelmingly support the drone program, and Congress passed a law in February that calls for the Federal Aviation Administration to "accelerate the integration of unmanned aerial systems" in the skies over America. Drones, which are already used to fight wildfires out West and keep an eye on the Mexican border, may soon be used to spy on U.S. citizens at home: Police in Miami and Houston have reportedly tested them for domestic use, and their counterparts in New York are also eager to deploy them.
History affords few if any examples of a free people -- in such a powerful country, under no existential threat, undergoing no invasion, no armed insurrection, no natural disaster or epidemic or societal collapse -- giving up their own freedoms so meekly, so mutely. Most Americans like to boast of their love of freedom, their rock-ribbed independence and their fiercely-held moral principles: yet they are happy to see the government claim -- and use -- the power to murder innocent people whenever it pleases while imposing an ever-spreading police state regimen on their lives and liberties. Sheep doped with Rohypnol would put up a stronger fight than these doughty patriots.
Hasting's story should be read in full. In its straightforward marshalling of facts and refusal to simply parrot the spin of the powerful (something we used to call "journalism," kids; ask your grandparents about it, they might remember), it lays out the hideous reality of our times. I am tempted to call it an important story -- but I know that it will sink with scarcely a ripple into the abyss of our toxic self-regard. A few will read it and be horrified; the rest will stay riveted on the oh-so-exciting and oh-so-important race to see who will get to perpetuate this vile and murderous system for the next four years.Cinemas stop showing ‘The Danish Girl’ after ban in Qatar
The Danish Girl/Facebook
With reporting from Riham Sheble
Following an online uproar, authorities in Qatar have blocked local theaters from showing a British film about a transgender Danish artist in the 1920s who undergoes one of the world’s first known sex reassignment surgeries.
The Danish Girl, which also contained several scenes of nudity in its uncensored version, opened across the Gulf last weekend and had been playing in several cinemas in Qatar, according to unofficial movie listings on Cinema Qatar and Marhaba.
However, as of this afternoon, the film was no longer listed on the website of Novo Cinemas or Cineco Movies, which runs the theaters at Villaggio and City Center malls.
Earlier today, Qatar’s Ministry of Culture tweeted that the government had outlawed the film:
نفيدكم علماً بأنه تم التواصل مع الإدارة المعنية وتم منع عرض الفيلم الدنماركي في شاشات السينما ونشكر حرصكم الدائم — وزارة الثقافة (@mocqatar) January 11, 2016
Translation: We would like to inform you that we have contacted the concerned department and the screening of the Danish film is now banned from cinemas. We thank your unwavering vigilance.
A representative of Qatar Cinemas – which operates theaters at Landmark Mall, The Mall, Royal Plaza, Gulf and Doha Cinemas – told Doha News this afternoon that the chain had canceled all of its screenings of The Danish Girl.
That news set off further debate on Twitter under the trending hashtag, #لا_لعرض_فيلم_الفتاه_الدنماركيه (“No to the screening of The Danish Girl”), with many supporting the government’s actions:
شاهدت إعلان الفيلم لا يجوز أن يعرض ففيه كميه من القبح تكفي لتوزيعها حول العالم #لا_لعرض_فيلم_الفتاه_الدنماركيه — الجوري (@Aljorry1979) January 11, 2016
Translation: I watched the trailer of the film and it should not be screened here. It contains enough moral depravity to go around the world.
#لا_لعرض_فيلم_الفتاه_الدنماركيه ولا لأي فلم يعارض دينا واخلاقنا وعاداتنا،، نتمنى محاسبة المسؤل عن من سمح بهذه الأفلام المتندنية في السينما — Aljazi (@almuhra8) January 11, 2016
Translation: And no to any film that contradicts our religion, morals and traditions. We hope that the people responsible for the screening of (such) films will be held accountable.
Others disagreed with the move, noting that the film was loosely inspired by the stories of actual people:
الفلم عادي ويحكي قصة حقيقية، الإنحراف الحقيقي هو في عقول الذين طالبوا بالمنع #لا_لعرض_فيلم_الفتاه_الدنماركيه — علي (@Alialmarri2116) January 11, 2016
Translation: There is nothing out of the ordinary about the film and it tells a true story. The real deviance is in the mind of those who call for it to be banned.
#لا_لعرض_فيلم_الفتاه_الدنماركيه المفروض يعرضونه لكن يخلون الدخول حق الناس +18 ، لان المنع اكبر دعاية للفلم. — M.Al-Kubaisi (@qtr704) January 11, 2016
Translation: It should be screened, but rated 18+ because banning it (will generate even) bigger publicity for the film.
Censorship in Qatar
This is not the first time that the Ministry of Culture has banned films after they’ve hit local theaters.
Scheduled showings of Raaz 3, a 3D Bollywood erotic horror film, were canceled in 2012. A year later, screenings of the Indian film Grand Masti – which had drawn criticism for its vulgar dialogue and obscene content – were similarly scrapped.
More recently, Qatar’s censors banned two biblical films, 2014’s Noah and Exodus.
Wolf of Wall Street/Facebook
And two years ago, The Wolf of Wall Street – which featured many scenes of gratuitous sexual acts, swearing and drug use – had nearly one-quarter of its scenes (or 50 minutes) cut out before it was shown in Qatar.
There are signs the government has widespread support in Qatar for censoring movies.
According to a 2014 survey by Northwestern University in Qatar, 80 percent of respondents said it’s appropriate to delete scenes that could be considered offensive. The report said:
“This support for censorship and government monitoring of entertainment content is observed across all facets of the population, except, perhaps, among Western expatriates in Qatar.”
While religious themes are known to be sensitive topics in Qatar, specific rules on what is permitted to be shown in Qatar are unclear.
Thoughts?Former NHLer Michael Nylander joined the Ontario Hockey League’s Mississauga Steelheads as an assistant coach on Sunday.
The Steelheads announced the move on their Twitter account prior to a pre-season matchup against the Kitchener Rangers.
Nylander spent 15 seasons in the NHL with the Hartford Whalers, Calgary Flames, Tampa Bay Lightning, Chicago Blackhawks, Washington Capitals, Boston Bruins and New York Rangers. In 920 career games, the 42-year-old scored 209 goals and 679 points.
The hiring comes a day after Mississauga received a commitment from Nylander’s son Alexander to join the team. Alexander was the team’s first round pick at the 2015 CHL import draft.
Alexander’s brother William was the eighth overall pick of the Toronto Maple Leafs at the 2014 NHL draft. William joined the Maple Leafs organization in January and spent the rest of this past season with their AHL affiliate, the Marlies.President Trump met with Fed Chair Janet Yellen Thursday as he weighs whether to reappoint her as the head of the nation's central bank.
Trump was frequently critical of Yellen and the Fed during the 2016 campaign, but more recently he's said he's considering reappointing her because she's "done a good job."
The Fed's policies have been credited with helping to lift the U.S. stock market, a trend that Trump would clearly like to see continue. Yellen has a reputation as something of a "dove," meaning she's in favor of slowly raising rates and tightening credit.
During the campaign, Trump had a much different take. He told CNBC in September 2016 that Yellen should be "ashamed of herself" for creating a "false stock market." In October 2015 he told Bloomberg that she was a "very political person" who was keeping interest rates low to help President Obama.
Related: We've found Trump's perfect pick for Fed chair - Janet Yellen
But since the election, Trump has been thrilled with the stock market rally and changed his tune about Yellen. Reappointing her could be one way to keep the markets happy and growing. In July, he told the Wall Street Journal that he has a lot of respect for Yellen, and that he likes her demeanor, as well as her policies.
"I'd like to see rates stay low. She's historically been a low-interest-rate person," he said at that time.
Trump has already met with former Fed governor Kevin Warsh and Stanford economist John Taylor, both of whom are far more hawkish.
Related: Trump's pick for Fed chair might not be an economist
Yellen has declined to say whether she wants to be reappointed, only that she expects to serve out her term at the head of the central bank that runs through the end of January. Fed chairs serve four year terms.
It is not unusual for presidents to reappoint Fed chairs who were originally appointed by their predecessors. President Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke, who had been President George W. Bush's chief economic adviser before he was tapped to head the Fed. President Clinton reappointed Alan Greenspan, who had first been appointed by President Reagan.
But Yellen would be unpopular with some members of the Republican party. Rep. Warren Davidson, a member of both the House Financial Services Committee and the conservative Freedom Caucus, is circulating a letter to colleagues to oppose the idea of reappointing Yellin, his spokesman confirmed.
--CNN's Dan Merica contributed to this report.By Hudson Institute
By Michael Doran, Michael Pregent, Eric B. Brown and Peter Rough*
On June 10, 2014, a little over a year ago, the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS) shocked the world by seizing Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The government in Baghdad watched helplessly as its security forces crumbled and tens of thousands of residents fled their homes. Less than three weeks later, IS proclaimed itself the caliphate—that is, the legitimate successor to the state led by the Prophet Muhammad—thus casting its victory as the start of a new era of Islamic ascendancy.
The rise of IS electrified Islamist extremists around the world. It also embarrassed President Barack Obama, who only months before had jauntily dismissed it as the “jayvee [junior varsity] team” and had repeatedly promised the American people an end altogether to conflict in the Middle East. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq, and I ended it” he boasted during the 2012 election. But now, although the president may not have been interested in war, war (to paraphrase Leon Trotsky) was decidedly interested in him. Soon a rising chorus of voices at home would be demanding decisive military action to roll back IS.
The president temporized for as long as he could. But when IS released videos of its beheadings of the American journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, outraged public opinion forced his hand. On September 10, 2014, three months to the day after the fall of Mosul, he announced a policy “to degrade and ultimately destroy” IS. In pursuit of that goal, he quickly assembled a vast military coalition numbering some 60 nations.
Over the last year, the U.S.-led coalition has prosecuted an expansive air campaign—launched mostly from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf—that has included more than 10,000 airstrikes against IS personnel, equipment, and infrastructure. The campaign has scored a few notable successes: in March of this year, for example, Iraqi security forces coordinated with U.S. air power to reclaim the city of Tikrit; in June, the U.S. provided critical air support for Kurdish units on the ground as they disrupted a major IS supply route in Syria.
But the campaign has also suffered setbacks. Most spectacularly, on May 17, IS forces sacked Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in Iraq. Three days later, it took the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. Today, while remaining firmly in control of Mosul, it sits astride the crucially important Ramadi-Fallujah-Abu Ghraib corridor leading to western Baghdad. The net result is that, a year after the president ordered military action “to degrade and ultimately destroy” IS, victory seems more distant than ever. Prior to his recent retirement, General Ray Odierno, the former Army chief of staff, spoke of a campaign that could last “ten to twenty years.”
Why has a ragtag force of no more than 30,000 poorly trained jihadists been able to hold out against a coalition made up of the most powerful countries in the world?
Many among the president’s critics point to his reluctance to use sufficient force. If the U.S. would just put 10,000 more troops in the field, or permit less restrictive rules of engagement, it could rout IS in no time. So the argument goes, and there is much to be said for it. At the same time, however, to focus solely on military tactics is to obscure the most fundamental, and most crippling, problem of all: America’s strategic misalignment.
Simply put, the Obama administration has adopted a regional strategy for the Middle East that is based on false precepts, thus ensuring American failure regardless of the tactics adopted in its pursuit. In order to replace failure with success, a new anti-IS strategy needs to be adopted, along with the tactics appropriate to it.
In what follows, we lay out five rules that, if adhered to, can supplant Obama’s fallacies with a deeper understanding of Middle East realities and lead not only to the destruction of IS but to a safer future for us and for our allies and friends. The first rule is the most critical, and upon it much else depends.
Rule #1: Recruit Sunni Arab allies.
Even as the president authorized anti-IS military operations in Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Syria, he has continued to invoke the mantra that “there are no military solutions,” and has remained steadfastly opposed to placing combat troops on the ground. But the only way to defeat IS without sending 100,000 American soldiers into harm’s way is to convince regional actors to help shoulder the burden. Acknowledging this obvious fact, the president instructed his national-security team to identify partners. “It will take time to root [IS] out,” he recently counseled, “and doing so must be the job of local forces on the ground, with training and air support from our coalition.”
The trouble is this: the unwillingness to employ American troops has in turn limited the pool of those same “local forces on the ground,” leaving only the parties who were already armed and ready to fight. In Iraq, these were limited to the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iraqi security forces (made up of both military and police units), and Iran-backed militias; in Syria, the Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party). These forces suffer from any number of inherent disabilities, but one deserves special note: they belong either to the wrong ethnic group or to the wrong religious group.
The population in IS’s main area of operation—a huge swath of territory stretching from Baghdad to Damascus—is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab. In order to drive a permanent wedge between that population and IS, it is necessary to build a new order run by Sunni Arab leaders who are respected by the locals. Kurdish and Shiite forces can and should play a role in that effort, but they cannot play the main role.
Most detrimental of all has been the decision by the Obama administration to coordinate, indirectly, with Shiite militias backed by Iran. During the campaign to retake Tikrit in March, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sheepishly made the case for this policy. “If [the militias] perform in a credible way, rid the city of Tikrit, turn it back over to its inhabitants,” he said, “then it will, in the main, have been a positive thing in terms of the counter- IS campaign.” This made little sense. By definition, the Shiite militias cannot be relied upon to return conquered lands to their non-Shiite inhabitants. When American officials talk this way, they lose all credibility in the eyes of America’s traditional Sunni allies, who fear those militias more than any other actor, IS included.
In sum, the near-total dependence of the U.S. on Kurds and Shiites hobbles the effort not only to enlist fighters on the ground in Iraq and Syria but also to generate enthusiastic support from the surrounding Sunni states. If the U.S. fails to mobilize these Sunni Arab allies, it will never succeed in holding territory taken from IS. This elementary fact constitutes the Achilles heel of the Obama policy.
Rule #2: Embed American troops with Iraqi forces.
How then, practically speaking, to accomplish the goal laid out in rule #1? Here we start by focusing on the scene in Iraq.
During the 2007-08 “surge” of American troops in the Iraq war—the pinnacle of American leadership in that conflict—the U.S. military learned how to negotiate the country’s complex sectarian and ethnic landscape. American forces became a trusted intermediary between Kurds and Arabs, between Sunnis and Shiites, and among neighboring tribes and clans.
This approach generated a force of some 90,000 Sunnis, known as the Sons of Iraq, whose support led to the rapid defeat of al-Qaeda. The foundation of the success was a simple deal between the tribes and the U.S. military. In addition to equipping and training the tribes, the Americans intervened on their behalf with the central government, which had fallen under the control of sectarian Shiite actors. In return, the tribes helped stabilize the Sunni areas.
Crucial aspects of this method could be replicated today, but doing so would require a U.S. combat presence backed by guarantees for a sovereign and independent Iraq. It would also require freer rules of engagement for U.S. troops and a readiness on the part of Washington to conduct tireless diplomacy designed to assuage local fears—Shiite fears of an armed Sunni restoration, Sunni fears of Iranian-Shiite domination, and Kurdish fears of revanchist Arab nationalism.
How many American troops would be required to play such a role, and how long would they need to remain in Iraq? Experience suggests that for every 500 Iraqi soldiers, the U.S. would need to provide 20 advisers and a 100-man company. To assist a force of 30,000 Iraqis, 7,000-10,000 American troops would be called for. The ultimate goal would be to build a cross-sectarian Iraqi national force capable of acting independently of American help, but thanks to the sectarianism of the former Nouri al-Maliki government, and the prevailing atmosphere of Sunni-Shiite conflict, this is a very tall order. The immediate goal, therefore, would be simply to mobilize and motivate Sunnis willing to fight IS and to work toward building a more inclusive Iraq. Even so, the Iraqi troops would require active U.S. guidance for an indefinite period of time.
Nevertheless, the goal is achievable, and here are a few practical steps toward achieving it.
The first order of business would be to secure Baghdad. In the protected environment of Camp Victory at Baghdad’s airport, the American-led training effort could recruit and train 10,000 local Sunnis. In order to accelerate the process, vetting of individual soldiers could be left to trusted tribal sheikhs drawn from former members of the Sons of Iraq. In particular, Sunni tribal elders from the mixed Sunni-Shiite belt surrounding Baghdad could rapidly provide the manpower for such a force. Thanks to the cross-sectarian bloodlines of these tribes, their mobilization would be somewhat less threatening to the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
Once trained, such forces could fill the ranks of the Iraqi army divisions that disintegrated in the face of the IS threat. As new territory is liberated from IS, local Sunnis could be recruited and integrated into the force, with care taken to deploy them as close as possible to their homes. In the end, in order to sweep IS from the major cities of Anbar province and their connecting corridors, the force would likely need to number at least 50,000 men. And in order to prevent the rise of an IS-successor organization in the future, the force would need to become permanent, forming the nucleus of the national guard that the Iraqi government has repeatedly promised to build.
A parallel process could proceed in the Kurdish north. Existing installations like Joint Base Balad and the Erbil airbase could function as training centers for police and national-guard forces jointly run by the government of Iraq, the U.S., and local Sunni and Kurdish regional authorities. These modernized Peshmerga forces and Sunni battalions would be responsible for security in their respective areas, partnering when necessary with existing Iraqi security forces. The joint training centers could also create and provide advanced training for constabulary forces that would ultimately take primary responsibility for maintaining the sovereignty of the Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions as part of a federal Iraq.
While all this is happening in the field, the U.S. would also need to convince Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to work with Sunnis and Kurds to build a more inclusive Iraq with strong institutions of self-government at the regional level. Needless to say, any such effort would alarm Tehran, which has been striving to take control of the Iraqi security sector and turn the government in Baghdad into a satellite. Countering Iranian designs is no small task, but the U.S., once it took the initiative, would likely discover allies in unexpected places. The Shiites of Iraq share a faith with the people of Iran, but they do not relish the idea of becoming a province in an Iranian empire.
And this is a key point. In the fight against IS, Shiite forces in Iraq have an important role to play, which should not be overlooked in the drive to mobilize Sunnis. In the past, al-Qaeda in Iraq successfully followed a strategy of provoking sectarian reprisals and thereby creating a spiral of intra-Iraqi violence; IS and Iran may try to do the same. Preventing this will require the active engagement of Shiite security forces.
Rule #3: Push Assad out the door.
Defeating IS requires driving it not only from Iraq but also from Syria. As long as it enjoys a safe haven there, the gates of western Iraq will remain wide open. Moreover, failure to stabilize Syria also entails the risk of further advances by IS—into, for example, Jordan and possibly even Saudi Arabia. The destabilization of either of those countries could embroil the U.S. in an open-ended military conflict with no allies at all to help shoulder the burden.
And Syria is much more than just strategically significant territory. Today the civil war there is the focal point of Middle Eastern international politics, its horrific toll of mainly Sunni civilian lives gripping the minds of Sunni Muslims more than does any other regional issue. Correlatively, American action or inaction in Syria influences perceptions of American intentions more broadly. If the U.S. is to mobilize the surrounding Sunni states against IS, it must be seen to be implementing an effective anti-Assad policy in Syria.
In the early days of the conflict, it would have been relatively easy for Washington to organize the moderate Syrian rebels into a fighting force. Today, a moderate force will emerge only if the U.S. builds it from scratch. The task is formidable. The Syrian landscape now includes hundreds of local militias, the largest and most effective of which are Islamic extremist groups. Any force put together by the U.S. will be in direct competition with these groups, with the Assad regime, and, of course, with Islamic State. But if we are actually sincere and not just pretending in our stated goal of defeating IS, there is no escape from such a conflict.
And here, too, though it’s late in the day, the goal is achievable—and the immediate next steps are obvious. First, the president must forge a regional coalition committed to his stated demand that Bashar al-Assad has to “step aside.” That coalition should include, but need not be limited to, America’s traditional regional partners as well as the British and French. In addition to the active involvement of the Iraqi central government, the U.S. should also seek closer coordination with its nontraditional ally, the Kurdistan regional government. Israel, too, has a significant role to play in this effort as an informal member of the coalition. Turkish participation is, of course, a prerequisite for success. But the coalition’s most prominent regional face must be the Sunni Arab one.
Second, just as in Iraq, the U.S. would allow trusted tribal and local leaders to vet their own men, thereby accelerating the training effort and building relationships with key actors. The current vetting process is a joke, yielding, after a year’s effort, a paltry 60 troops from whom we have required a pledge that they will not fight the forces of Assad or his allies, like Hizballah. Given these conditions, it is no wonder that Syrians are hesitant to join.
Third, the U.S. should undertake to destroy Assad’s air force and impose no-fly zones over areas liberated from him and IS. Doing so would prevent the Syrian government from terrorizing its own civilian population from the air, as it does now whenever the rebels take a village or a neighborhood. By means of this gruesome form of collective punishment, the regime means to prevent the rebels from building the foundations of a stable post-Assad order.
Fourth, the U.S. should begin implementing what Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has referred to as an “inkspot strategy” reminiscent of the one implemented by General David Petraeus in the Iraqi surge. That is, it should embed small numbers of American and allied special-forces personnel within Syrian units to begin the slow and steady work of clearing and holding Syrian territory, thus working simultaneously against Assad and IS. The inkspot approach could build up centers of power that the U.S. could then rely upon in the hard, multiyear labor of reconstructing a post-Assad Syria.
As unattractive as this project sounds, it is the only one that holds out any possibility of success.
Experience has already taught that the Syria problem will not get better with age. The stark choice before us is either to start dislodging al-Qaeda and IS from Syria now or wait till later when those groups will be much stronger, the region even more chaotic, and traditional friends of the U.S. weaker and ever more distrustful of Washington’s intentions.
Rule #4: Roll back Iranian power.
The first three rules for defeating IS are necessary for success; but they are not sufficient. Forming a regional coalition and building up Sunni forces in Iraq and Syria will not, by themselves, solve the strategic dilemma that Obama’s policy has created. Our Sunni allies will not fight alongside us with conviction unless we offer them a future vision of Iraq and Syria that is more attractive than the status quo. Even as we start defining specific military solutions, therefore, we must grapple with more fundamental questions. What new order are we seeking to build? In that project, which states will be our most reliable partners?
In answering these questions, President Obama has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the central fact of Middle Eastern international politics, namely, the chasm that separates the traditional allies of the United States from Iran and its allies—the latter of whom include, among others, the Assad regime in Syria, Hizballah, and a number of Iraqi Shiite militias. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon recently spoke for all of America’s friends in explaining that, whereas the U.S. regards Iran as a solution to its problems, the allies see Iran as the source of their problems.
Ya’alon’s words came at a moment when the White House was facing accusations that its newly struck nuclear deal with Iran would make that regime more, not less, aggressive in the Middle East. In response, the administration has been at pains to insist that it is working on a plan to contain Iranian power. “We will push back against [Iran],” Secretary of State John Kerry assured the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “We’ve laid out a very detailed policy for working with the Gulf States and others, and we look forward to working with Israel in the effort to do that.”
This statement was consciously misleading. In fact, the plan that President Obama laid before the Gulf Arab states at Camp David last May failed to address the Iranian threat as that threat is actually understood by America’s friends. The president offered to sell the allies new weapons, to strengthen their conventional defenses, and to improve their counterterrorism programs. He refused, however, to counter the activities of the Quds Force, the subversive arm by which Tehran projects its power into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—the four countries that are the current focus of Iranian aggression and therefore the source of greatest concern to the allies. With regard to that threat, Obama proposed not “pushback” against Tehran but, to the contrary, diplomatic engagement with it.
Obama signaled his true intentions toward Iran in a press conference after the Camp David summit. “The purpose of security cooperation” with the Gulf states, he said, “is not to perpetuate any long-term confrontation with Iran or even to marginalize Iran.” Two months later, he elaborated further when asked about his vision of Tehran as a potential partner and its role in his Syria policy. “There’s going to have to be agreement among the major powers that are interested in Syria that this [conflict] is not going to be won on the battlefield,” he stated. “So Iran is one of those players, and I think that it’s important for them to be part of that conversation.”
Syria, to repeat, is the major hub through which Tehran projects its hegemonic ambitions into the Arab world. As the primary external supporter of Bashar al-Assad, Tehran has actively abetted his Alawite minority regime in systematically terrorizing the Syrian Sunni majority, leveling large swaths of major cities, driving more than 10 million people from their homes, and engineering the deaths of a quarter-million people so far. From the earliest days of the anti-Assad rebellion four years ago, Tehran has trained and equipped the regime’s death squads. As the capabilities of Assad’s forces have dwindled, Iranian officers have played an ever increasing role in directly guiding the counterinsurgency on the ground.
America’s allies thus rightly see Iran not as a partner for stability but as an accomplice to one of the worst atrocities in modern Middle Eastern history. With considerable justification, they also argue that Assad’s murder machine is the single greatest recruiting vehicle for IS. And they note, again correctly, that Iran’s (and Assad’s) opposition to IS is itself hardly full-throated. In fact, there is a considerable overlap of interests since IS, a Sunni revolutionary organization, has focused not on fighting Shiite Iran but primarily on seizing and holding Sunni areas.
Nevertheless, the president insists on speaking as if he believes that Shiite Iran and the Sunni Arab states will eventually be corralled into a unified anti-IS coalition. In a recent interview, for example, he expressed the hope “that [both] Saudi Arabia and Iran... [will] begin to recognize that their enemy is chaos as much as anything else. And what [IS] represents and what the collapse of Syria or Yemen or others represent is far more dangerous than whatever rivalries that may exist between those two nation-states.”
This is either wishful thinking or blatantly disingenuous. Syria is the spot where rival visions of regional order collide. For a sense of its importance to Tehran, one need only listen to Mehdi Taeb, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In Taeb’s words, Syria is nothing less than a part of Iran itself, “the 35th province and a strategic province for us.” If, he elaborated, “the enemy attacks us and seeks to take over [either] Syria or Khuzestan [an Arab-speaking province of Iran bordering Iraq], the priority lies in maintaining Syria because if we maintain Syria, we can take back Khuzestan. However, if we lose Syria, we won’t be able to hold Tehran.”
In thus stressing the depth of Iran’s commitment to the Assad regime, Taeb has also offered a roadmap to all those for whom, unlike for John Kerry and Barack Obama, pushback against Iran is no mere pretense but an urgent necessity. If the job of the U.S. is indeed to push back against Iran, that job begins in Syria.
Rule #5: Get real about linkage.
The Obama administration has consistently denied any linkage between the nuclear negotiations with Tehran that led to the July 14 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and other aspects of American policy toward the Middle East. Secretary of State Kerry first made that point categorically in a press conference in November 2014, stating, “There is no linkage whatsoever of the nuclear discussions with any other issue. And I want to make that absolutely clear. The nuclear negotiations are on their own. They’re standing separate from anything else. And no discussion has ever taken place about linking one thing to another.”
A mountain of evidence contradicts this statement. During the negotiations, for example, Obama conducted a secret correspondence with Ayatollah Khamenei in which he depicted the nuclear deal as the first step toward a partnership on allegedly common problems like IS. The letter also promised Khamenei that the U.S. would do nothing to harm Bashar al-Assad, thus establishing another clear linkage: between the nuclear negotiations and America’s Syria policy. In recent days, Obama has openly expressed his hope that the nuclear deal will “incentivize” Iran “to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative.”
It’s only to be expected, then, that America’s allies are unpersuaded by the administration’s denials of linkage between the negotiations and regional policy. To the contrary, the Iran talks have served only to convince them of Obama’s intention to shift American regional strategy in favor of Iran.
And who can blame them? The administration launched its nuclear initiative with Tehran through secret backchannels, which it hid from its traditional friends. Once the negotiations became public, U.S. officials briefed the allies only after having unilaterally made consequential concessions. The final stages of the negotiations then presented the allies with the spectacle of the American secretary of state holed up in a posh hotel with the Iran’s foreign minister, conducting private talks in a friendly atmosphere described in media reports as the “new normal.”
Finally on July 14 there came the final text of the Iran deal itself, confirming the allies’ worst fears. In return for a temporary slowdown in Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. had agreed to dismantle the international sanctions regime, the primary non-military instrument for containing and rolling back Iranian power. President Obama has characterized this tradeoff as a no-brainer whose strengths so far outweigh its weaknesses that “it’s not even close.”
Allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia know better. For them, the end of the sanctions regime spells the ascendancy of a reinvigorated and even more aggressive Iran—and this, in a dawning era of American solicitude toward Tehran. If, before the nuclear deal, the president was reluctant to roll back Iranian power, he will be all the more reluctant when, at the slightest provocation, Tehran can now simply threaten to scuttle the nuclear deal: the crowning foreign-policy achievement of the Obama administration. In the allies’ perspective, the JCPOA is a Damoclean sword looming over American freedom of action—and they are right.
Allaying the fears of our allies is thus a crucial step toward building a regional coalition that might truly stabilize the Middle East, rid it of the poison of IS, and roll back Iranian power. Linkage again—yes, indeed, but in the right cause and the right direction. And that is one more reason why, in the coming weeks, when Congress votes on the Iran nuclear deal, it should disapprove it.
To be sure, such a vote may not survive the president’s veto, meaning that the JCPOA will survive at least until the end of the Obama administration and possibly even longer. Either way, however, it is urgently imperative for the U.S. Congress to prove to our allies that Congress’s own opposition to Iranian policies in the region is rock solid, and that it will legislate swift and painful penalties against Iran for its efforts to subvert neighboring countries and its continued support for terrorism more broadly. Congress should also move quickly and decisively to punish Iran in the event that it uses the nuclear deal as a screen for regional aggression. Instead of ignoring our friends, or fighting with them, we should be fighting Iranian expansionism throughout the region—and opposing American complicity with that expansionism.
Conclusion
We began by asking how and why IS’s ragtag army has managed to hold out for over a year against a U.S.-led coalition comprising some of the most powerful states in the world. An answer of sorts may be found in Vice President Joseph Biden’s observation, while speaking to Harvard students in October 2014, that “Our allies in the region [have been] our largest problem.”
Biden’s suggestion that America’s Sunni allies have somehow been in cahoots with IS was a slur, but a revealing one. In truth, if the allies have been less than enthusiastic about fighting IS, it is because they believe that Obama will not work to safeguard their vital interests. In the war against IS, they correctly note, America has agreed to play only a limited role, and is doing so in pursuit of vague objectives. Therefore, should they themselves become active participants in the conflict, they may quickly find themselves alone on the battlefield, facing an enraged IS that they cannot defeat. Even more daunting to them, Obama’s phony war may well abet Iran’s drive to achieve hegemonic dominance in the region. If the choice becomes one of living under the Iranian boot or learning to accommodate IS, it is little wonder that some might decide to take their chances with the latter.
The president claims to have charted a path to a stable Middle East that, by turning enemies into friends, will have the added advantage of not requiring a significant exertion of American hard power in order to defeat the insurgent Islamic State. As is plain to see by now, not only are our enemies adamantly disinclined to become our friends, but his strategy has contributed to significantly greater polarization and instability, generating the |
If it is not, then it seeks law to make it so.
This argument is in fact beneath contempt, yet it is one that influences the press, police, and judiciary to a surprising extent. In fact Anarchism as such (as distinct from specific Anarchist organisations) could never be illegal, because no laws can make people love the State. It is only done by false ideals such as describing the State as “country”.
The fact is that Liberal-Democracy seldom voices any arguments against Anarchism as such — other than relying on prejudice — because its objections are purely authoritarian and unmask the innate Statism and authoritarianism of liberalism. Nowadays conservatives like to appropriate the name “liberalism” to describe themselves as if they were more receptive to freedom than socialists. But their liberalism is confined to keeping the State out of interfering in their business affairs. Once anarchism makes it plain that it is possible to have both social justice and to dispense with the Statethey are shown in their true colours. Their arguments against State socialism and Communism may sound “libertarian”, but their arguments against Anarchism reveal that they are essentially authoritarian. That is why they prefer to rely upon innuendo, slanders. and false reporting, which is part of the establishment anti-anarchism, faithfully supported by the media.
The Fascist Objection to Anarchism
The fascist objection to Anarchism is, curiously enough, more honest than that of the Marxist, the liberal or the Social-Democrat. Most of these will say, if pressed, that Anarchism is an ideal, perhaps imperfectly understood, but either impossible of achievement or possible only in the distant future. The fascist, on the contrary, admits its possibility; What is denied is its desirability.
The right-wing authoritarian (which term includes many beyond those naming themselves fascists) worships the very things which are anathema to Anarchists, especially the State. Though the conception of the State is idealised in fascist theory, it is not denied that one could do without it. But the “first duty of the citizen is to defend the State” and it is high treason to oppose it or advocate its abolition.
Sometimes the State is disguised as the “corporate people” or the “nation,” giving a mystical idea of the State beyond the mere bureaucratic apparatus of rule. The forces of militarism and oppression are idealised (after the German emperor who said that universal peace was “only a dream and not even a good dream”). Running throughout right-wing patriotism is a mystical feeling about the “country”, but though Nazis in particular sometimes have recourse to an idealisation of the “people” (this has more of a racial than popular connotation in German), it is really the actual soil that is held sacred, thus taking the State myth to its logical conclusion. For the Anarchist this, of course, is nonsense. The nonsense can be seen in its starkest form with the followers of Franco who killed off so many Spaniards even after the Civil War was ended, while hankering for the barren rock of Gibraltar: especially in General Milan de Astrray, who wanted to kill off “bad Spaniards” and eradicate Catalans and Basques in the name of unitary Spain, thus (as Unamuno pointed out) making Spain as “one-armed and one-eyed, as the General was himself”.
Anarchism is clearly seen by fascists as a direct menace and not a purely philosophical one. It is not merely the direct action of Anarchists but the thing itself which represents the evil. The “democratic” media finally got around to picking up these strands in fascist thinking, ironing them out nicely, and presenting them in the “news” stories. Hitler regarded the Authoritarian State he had built as millennial (the thousand-year state) but he knew it could be dismembered and rejected. His constant theme was the danger of this and while he concentrated (for political reasons) attacks on a totalitarian rival, State Communism (since Russia presented a military menace), his attacks on “cosmopolitanism” have the reiterated theme of anti-Anarchism.
“Cosmopolitanism” and “Statelessness” are the “crimes” Nazism associated with Jews, though since Hitler’s day large numbers of them have reverted to nationalism and a strong state. The theme of “Jewish domination” goes hand in hand with “anarchist destruction of authority, morals, and discipline”, since fascism regards personal freedom as bad in itself and only national freedom permissible. Insofar as one can make any sense of Hitler’s speeches (which are sometimes deceptive since he followed different strands of thought according to the way he could sway an audience), he believed “plunging into Anarchy” of a country (abolition of State restraints) will lead to chaos, which will make it possible for a dictatorship other than the one in the people’s interests to succeed.
Hitler did not confuse State Communism with Anarchism (as Franco did deliberately) for propaganda purposes, to try to eradicate Anarchism from history. He equated Communism with “Jewish domination”, and the case against the Jews (in original Nazi thinking) that they are a racially-pure people who will gain conquest over helots like the Germans.
A “Master Race” must control the Germans to keep the rival State out. In a condition of freedom the German “helots” would revert to Anarchy, just as the racially “inferior” Celts of France threw out the Norman Nordic overlords (the Houston Chamberlain version of the French Revolution). Later, of course, when Nazism became a mass Party it was expedient to amend this to saying the Germans were the Master Race, but this was not the original Nazi philosophy, nor was it privately accepted by the Nazi leaders (“the German people were not worthy of me”). But they could hardly tell mass meetings that they were all “helots”. At least not until their power was complete. This idea that a whole people (whichever it was) can be born “helots” could not be better expressed as the contrary opposite of Anarchism, since in this case it would indeed be impossible.
This Nazi propaganda is echoed by the media today; “plunging the country into Anarchy would be followed by a Communist or extreme right-wing dictatorship” is current newspaper jargon.
To sum up the fascist objection to Anarchism: It is not denied the abolition of the State can come about, but if so, given economic, social, and political freedom, the “helots” — who are “naturally inclined” to accept subjection from superior races — will seek for masters. They will have a nostalgia for “strong rule”.
In Nazi thinking, strong rule can only come from (in theory) racially-pure members of the “Master Race” (something a little more than a class and less than a people), which can be constructive masters (i.e., the “Aryans”), or a race which has had no contact with the “soil” and will be thus destructive.
In other types of fascist thinking, given freedom, the people will throw off all patriotic and nationalistic allegiances and so the “country” will cease to be great. This is the basis of Mussolini’s fascism, and, of course, it is perfectly true, bearing in mind that “the country” is his synonym for the State and his only conception of greatness is militaristic. The frankest of all is the Spanish type of fascism which sought to impose class domination of the most brutal kind and make it plain that its opposition to Anarchism was simply in order to keep the working class down. If necessary, the working class may be, and was, decimated in order to crush Anarchism.
It is true of all political philosophies and blatant with the fascist one, that its relationship to Anarchism throws as clear light upon itself!
The Average Person’s Objection to Anarchism
Generally speaking, the ordinary people pick up their objection to Anarchism from the press, which in turn is influenced by what the establishment wants. For many years there was a press conspiracy of silence against Anarchism, followed in the 1960 by a ruling on transcribing Anarchism and Marxism, or Anarchism and nationalism, so that the one must be referred to the other, in order to confuse. This was bourn out in many exposures in Black Flag showing where avowed Marxists were in the turbulent Sixties described in the press as “Anarchists” while avowed Anarchists were described as “Marxists” or “nationalists”. On some occasions nationalists were called “Anarchists,” but usually when the word “Anarchist” was being used as if to describe oneself as an Anarchist, it was to make a confession of guilt. This, as we have seen, is picked up from the Liberal-Democratic attitude to Anarchism. But it is flavoured strongly with the fascist attitude, too. Because of it, the phrase “self-confessed Anarchist” came to be used by the Press to describe a person who is an Anarchist as opposed to someone who they have merely labeled Anarchist in order to confuse.
This has altered somewhat with the commercial exploitation of Anarchism by commercial exploitation of music and academic exploitation of philosophy, giving rise to a middle-class liberal version of an Anarchist as a liberal-minded philosopher, a harmless eccentric, a drop out, or a person wearing fashionably unfashionable clothes.
As opposed to this increasingly popular misconception, the average person takes the fascist view of anarchism — as picked up in its entirety by police officers and others — as genuine, but tempered with the fact that they do not take it quite seriously. Sometimes they confuse the word “revolutionary”, and assume all who protest are thereby Anarchist. This ignorance, however, is more often displayed by journalists than it is by the general public.
When it comes down to an objection to Anarchism as it is, as distinct from objections to a mythological Anarchism as imagined or caricatured by the authoritarian Parties or establishment, or practised by the alternative establishment, there are not many serious objections from the general public. They may not think it practical of realisation if presented in a positive way to them, but they usually do so if presented in a negative way — i.e. describing the tyranny of the State. The fact that we could dispense with authoritarian parties, the worthlessness of politicians, and so on is generally agreed. The sole main objection is perhaps the feeling that they want to make the best out of life as it is: and they do not feel strong enough to challenge the State or to face the struggle involved in bringing about a Free Society, or put up with the many vicissitudes (major and minor) that make uGlobally we are busy experiencing an awakening, a realisation that we don’t have to conform to convention. Freedom exists within arm’s length of us all, it’s only the conscious decision to be free that stands between us and a life truly lived. We all possess the ability to bring about change in our own realities, but collectively the possibilities become infinite.
Ozora Festival is an ever growing entity, an alternate way of thinking, a glimpse into what can be achieved by the collective spirit. For just over a week we come together in a way so natural to us, yet so unfamiliar from the world we know, to celebrate life and create magic which will resonate with us long after the festival gates have closed, and the last Ozorian has wondered from paradise.
Last year I was running through the streets of Amsterdam to catch my flight to Ozora. This year was to be a much calmer affair. I was making my way from Cape Town, South Africa. My trip started on Friday, 31 July, when I caught an evening flight to arrive in Budapest the following afternoon.
Upon arriving I was greeted by my friend, Nick. Someone I have clocked several psy miles with back home. To see him was epic, and the fact that we were going to be in Ozora together was something almost unfathomable to me at the time. He had other South Africans with him, faces I didn’t know, but people I would definitely bond with in the coming week. We all spent the night in the beautiful city of Budapest, collecting supplies and catching up, before embarking upon a journey we would not soon forget.
The next morning, the numerous rums we had consumed the night before didn’t seem to be slowing us down, as we headed to the airport to catch our bus to the paradise city. A two hour trip through the quaint Hungarian countryside lead us to the always heart-warming ‘welcome to paradise’ sign that greets you as you enter the Ozorian grounds. The palpable excitement was bubbling through even in the presence of scotching heat. Once armbands were acquired it was time to find a place to call home. Where you camp at Ozora is pretty important, it does influence your party in many ways. There’s no bad place to camp, don’t get me wrong, each area offers something different, whether it be solitude from the music, or being close to the food stalls, showers or a particular dancefloor.
I set up camp near the Dragon’s Nest to be centrally located, while others I was with had camp already set up for them by few fellow South Africans. The trick now was to find their new home. Luckily this was an organised bunch of hippies we were dealing with, and they had left detailed instructions and a map of their whereabouts on the Ozora notice board.
With everyone now having a base camp, we began to relax and make some new friends, the first of which were my lovely neighbours, Shana and Abeq, who would feel like family by the time I left the festival, crazy how that can happen, hey?
Under the chill out dome, Goa Gil was busy playing a 24 hour marathon set, which actually extended to 28 hours, but really whose counting. This special pre-party set was creating a mystifying energy, ironically under the dome known for its soothing chill out. Goa Gil was glitchy and fast, music I struggled to move to, but upon leaving the dome I did feel an incredible sense that something unique was going on under there. My first evening in Ozora was so refreshing; I danced on the Pumpui, wondered through the art gallery and gazed over the festival grounds from on top of the Mirador.
I also managed to go see the Freak Fusion Cabaret in the Circus. I was so impressed by the cabaret show, I think I found a way of mentioning it in nearly every conversation I had the next day. It really was that good, I hope I encouraged some other people to go check it out. What a collection of talented individuals Ozora is, almost everywhere you look there is a master of their craft, or at least someone willing to try and learn something new, it’s inspirational, it’s infectious, it just makes sense. This world where we urge one another to achieve more, rather than looking enviously at what others have.
The next morning, Monday, 3 August, after getting to bed at a respectable hour, I ventured through the corn fields to the other side of the festival grounds where the majority of the South Africans were camped. This tented village was tranquil, although a rather excited few had not yet come home from the night before. The route I had taken through the corn was slightly quicker than the other walkway beside the wall of clay carvings. I guided new friends Warren and Natasha to the main festival area on my back, before going to shower and get some dinner. I by chance met up with them once more while walking to the chill out dome for the collective Om.
The parade starts from the Artibarn, where many spent the day designing their outfits; it then passes through the chill out collecting people and leads them to the opening ceremony. The collective Om is a powerful practice of sound reverberation that can lead to a deep dreamless state of consciousness. Om is the primordial sound from which the Universe was created. Yoga calls it ‘Shabd Brahman’ or God as sound/vibration. It advocates that by meditating on Aum, one can reach subtle levels of consciousness, those that have the ability to unite one with the god. On a collective level the effect gets synergistic, well that’s the idea anywhere. I believe the effectiveness of any practice lies within the experience taken from it.
The opening ceremony on the main stage was simply crazy. Mongolian dressed horse riders rode down the meadow-side to circle the dancefloor area, before hurling flaming arrows into the unlit fire, igniting its’ light for the first time and signalling the beginning of the festival. The crowd ran onto the dancefloor like a steady wave of energy passing through the ocean. They just kept on coming as if never to cease, it was only in this moment that we realised the magnitude of this year’s gathering, and it was immense.
A dance performance was followed by the first main stage act of the festival, the legendary Juno Reactor. This beautiful live band performance certainly captured my heart. The most memorable song for me was Pistolero, the crowd interaction before playing it I think also added an element of excitement.
Nano Records founder, Regan, took us on a wild evening adventure next. Blasting handpicked pure psychedelic gems, this would be one of the top night sets of the festival. A favourite in this collection of beauties was Magik – Rainforest, a relative newcomer to the Nano family, this guy is set to take the world by storm. Next I discovered Obliviant (Justin Chaos & Liftshift), the unpredictably groovy Looney Moon wizards. A highlight of their set was Loonacy (Dust & Obliviant) – The goof.
I hope one day soon to see a Loonacy Live set, maybe even in Ozora, who knows, all I do know is that the Obliviant guys are cooking up some seriously tasty bite size chunks of psychedelica, and their debut EP ‘Up All Night’ is fast coming up on the horizon. The energy on the first night is always unbelievable. It’s as if everyone has found their way home, and the excitement of coming to Ozora can finally begin to radiate into something more.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/230326559″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
The next morning, Tuesday, 4 August, after a shower, I went to grab an omelette and sat on the hill nearest to the wooden Adam and Eve structures. This is where I would enjoy my breakfast before spiralling into a wonderfully mad day. It was my friend Nick’s birthday, and we were determined to make it a day he would never forget. The morning sets were cooking with Back to Mars, Outsiders and Psysex, all playing, but it was when Liftshift took control of a fiery afternoon that the party kicked into hyper-drive.
This was definitely one of the standout performances of the festival for me. Deep fresh progressive psychedelic vibrations could be felt immersing your body in a hypnotic state. I remember Liftshift – Plant Life (2015 Remake) featuring Ariel Electron being played, with the sample ‘It’s the spirit of Gaia through the plant life’, it really was a full bodied track with a lot of colour to it.
Next was the Nano triple threat of Sonic Species, Future Frequency and Avalon, to close off the day. Having witnessed these UK psy magicians recently in Cape Town, I thought I knew what to expect, but as is so often the case in Ozora, artists raise their game and preview all kinds of unreleased frequencies. Stand out tracks of the day would definitely be Symbolic & Sonic Species – Alma Libre and Avalon Vs Electric Universe – One Giant Leap, watch out for these two livewire releases.
As the music came to rest, we moved towards a waving South African flag on the dancefloor. Here we were greeted by new faces who would accompany us to the Pumpui for an all mighty shakedown. We danced our hearts out to intelligence techno music, embracing the incredible spirit in the air on this evening. As night fell, so we ventured back to the main stage for the legendary Goatika performance.
The Goatika Creative Lab is a unique project that has united gifted musicians from all around the world. Based in exotic Goa, this thriving collective inspires creativity through intuitive, innovative, and improvisational performances, rooted in the deep, magical vibrations of North Goa. Hearing Goatika – The Sun Over the Storm will be forever be etched into my memory, the organic memories and subtle guitar riffs really reminded me of the elements of psychedelic music I fell in love with in the first place.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/171008975″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
We were a beautifully inebriated mess of brilliance at this point, proceeding to group hugged my friend, Nick, to sing what can only be described as the most passionate attempt at a happy birthday we’ve ever expelled from our lungs. It was a truly epic moment to be in the psychedelic epicentre of Ozora, celebrating life, and doing it with such vibrant souls. Justin Chaos was blasting like there was no tomorrow, but that’s just what he does. As impressive as last year, I felt completely satisfied for the evening after his set, and decided it was time to refill the energy banks with some rest.
The next morning, Wednesday, 5 August, I was feeling pretty familiar with my morning routine of a shower and some sustenance to kick-start the day. So quesadilla in hand, I walked the main pathway toward the dancefloor, where I found friends from the day before and invariably proceeded to get acquainted with some morning beers. Goa Jonas, the man behind the infamous Antaris Project Festival hosted in Germany earlier in the summer, was on the decks, throwing down perhaps the top morning set of Ozora this year. The full power psychedelic fever was not soon to pass as Spectra Sonics and Burn in Noise were poised to follow.
On this morning we chilled out at the new butterfly house just beside the main stage, this impressive structure is the latest addition to the Ozorian dreamland, and also boasts a magnificent lookout point at its peck. With the music driving, our bodies were vibrating at a new frequency to sounds such as Burn In Noise Vs Shekinah – Emerge. It’s sometimes hard to catch your breath when each day erupts so quickly, before you know it you are dancing like a wildling being drenched with glorious flurries of water from the fire-trucks.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/222198676″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Iboga boys, Critical Choice started the afternoon transition into some deeper funkier progressive sounds, with Emok continuing to play this solo DJ set afterward. I first saw Emok play recently when he visited Cape Town for a love and light day party, where he closed things off with an exceptional bang. So my expectations were high going into it, but I think it’s fair to say they more than fulfil as he delivered a solid thumbing cutting edge progressive set, which was easily engageable and featured many unreleased tracks.
A highlight was hearing Ace Ventura & Captain Hook – Jolly Roger (Future Frequency Remix), although throughout the whole set the energy on the dancefloor was huge, the crowd was so receptive to each reverberation and one another, it was symbiotic, it was natural, simply put it was a beautiful celebration of coexistence.
We wandered from the dancefloor to have dinner at Green Fusion, a place I only earlier in the day discovered who were serving up the most delicious vegan meals around. I’m no vegan myself, nor am I a vegetarian, but these meals revolutionised my festival.With a galvanised stomach I parted ways with some friends who were camping corn side, as the sunset saw D-Nox & Beckers take over the Pumpui for a 7 hour techno extravaganza.
Every year their set is highly anticipated, and rightfully so, the tech gods tend to always give us something extra special in Ozora. I had connected to the wifi and checked my phone just prior to their set. When doing so I got a message from the head of Psymedia, who was unable to attend, saying, “get your ass down to the Pumpui for D-Nox & Beckers”. I think it’s safe to say we on the same page musically.
Day soon turned into night and after the break Highlight Tribe took to the stage, bringing the dancefloor to near capacity, as the crowd stretched back as far as the bar for the first time since the opening ceremony, a clear indication of their popularity and the excitement surrounding the live act. This instrumental band produces organic sounding rifts which emulate that of electronic dance music, but coming from a natural source it is in essence pure psychedelic trance music, created right in front of you, that is Highlight Tribe. Once I had witnessed this phenomenal performance my dancing for the day was done as I retreated to revel in an early nights slumber.
Practically rising anew the following morning, which was now Thursday, 6 August, I headed out with a proverbial spring in my step. Walking toward the dancefloor I would see the awfully familiar face of another fellow Cape Towian psy nut walking beside me, it was amazing how many of us made the journey this year, and what was even better was how easily we seemed to stumble across one other. It was time to get down to business, psychedelic business that is, as Gorgo was playing some slick older progressive tunes, including a personal favourite of mine Koi Boi – Pc Pitch.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/99791263″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Next up was the formidable Scandinavian sound master Gaudium, playing tracks from his new album ‘Stories of a Viking’. It was to be said that he played one of the best sets this year, it was electrifying punchy and powerful, with that unique northern European twist to it. I particular enjoyed the song ‘Wrong Theory’, this song is a living breathing organism of its own accord, or at least that’s who it seemed on that fine Ozorian morning. I had given the album a listen when it first came out earlier in the year, but it didn’t grab me like perhaps his previous releases have, but hearing it live I soon realised just how much of an oversight I had made.
I had plotted, with the help of trusted friend, and wingman, Phil, to dart around the different dancefloors today, to catch some unique acts we wanted to see. Our first stop was the Pumpui for UK based psychedelic techno act Nanoplex. Their ‘On the Way to Ozora‘ mix had been in my work playlist for the last few months, and with a fair amount of space on the dancefloor, it seemed like the appropriate time for some experimental dance moves.
They don’t serve alcohol at the Pumpui bar, but rather offer refreshing topical juices to sip on while you enjoy your techno adventure. Nanoplex had impressed, but it was now time to collect the bottle of Jägermeister I had stored in an icy shelter, and head back main stage side to poison our friends, and get a little weird. When trying to retrieve my bottle of medicine, a funny language barrier presented itself, as I was first handed a plate of food from the fridge rather than the bottle.
This day was to be dubbed the unofficial progressive session of the festival, as things slowed down and got a little groovier. Ticon were in command of things playing tracks such as ‘Hops of Hades’, giving the dancefloor life, animating an already energetic crowd. The days were scorching as temperatures continued to climb as the week progressed. It was pushing close on 40 degrees, and just before Son Kite preformed Regan reminded all Ozorians to take care of themselves and each other in the radical Hungarian heat.
The gesture was well received, and I think it’s always important to take a step back from the party for a moment, and remember that looking after yourself is your top priority. I will never forget what a German guy once said to me in a festival, he said, “the stronger you are feeling the better dance you can have”, and I never forgot that. Sometimes it’s not about how many hours you dance for, but rather being present in those moments when you do choose to lose yourself in the music. Just some food for thought, use it, don’t use it, it’s entirely up to you.
The pioneering sound of System 7 wrapped things up for the day on the main stage, a day with a calmer, more tranquil energy on the dancefloor, which at this stage was quite refreshing.
As the music faded, so our bodies began to drift toward the comforting sands of the Chill-out dome. This is where Kayla Scintilla was hypnotising dancers with the smoothest downtempo around. From the mountains of Australia, he really is someone making authentic, unique music, packed full of emotion.
In this moment I felt happiness, I experienced a wave of appreciation for what was happening around me, I could feel the magic in the air, it was real. I had been in Ozora for nearly a week now, and I think it’s the way of life you keep falling in love with year after year. Perhaps this is home, perhaps we are merely traveling the rest of the year, waiting to reunite with our brothers and sisters under the stars.
After mild revelations, I satisfied my hungry and went to see an old friend blow people away on the Dragon’s Nest Stage. Originally from Cape Town, the Berlin based busking gypsy, Alice Phoebe Lou, captured the hearts of the crowd with her powerful range and thought provoking lyrics, in a performance that saw the audience rise in unison at its apex. An incredibly talented little individual, Alice is an inspiration to all those still indecisive about throwing caution to the wind and perusing their dreams.
I almost subconsciously embarked upon a sneaky shower quest, before stocking up on some chocolate milks for the imminent Yuli Fershtat techno session about to go down on the Pumpui. The next 3 hours were pretty indescribable, my body moved effortlessly to the swift melodies of tracks old and new, a wonderful concoction of rhythm was developing as a master was a work.
The Pumpui was a bustling caldron of dancers, celebrating the simplicity of this moment. We danced because we were happy; we danced because nothing else matter. It’s said that, “To be in a moment truly, you need to allow this moment to be”, have truer words ever been spoken? Surrendering myself to this moment, I have to say this was probably the most memorable set from Ozora this year.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/220926606″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
When the dust settled and the main stage reopened, it was Zenon Records’ dark progressive genesis, Hypogeo, who was playing some of that ‘welcome to a creepy forest’ madness. I’m a big Zenon Records fan, so even though my legs were sort of giving in at this point, I’m glad I got to experience some of the chucky sounds and ridiculously rad stage visuals on display. Night time in Ozora the mappings transport you to a whole new world, well thought out design concepts really add an element of the spectacular to an already beautiful environment.
Friday, 7 August, was set be one of the biggest days in Ozora, so I was up early ready to blast off to some Laughing Buddha. What followed was something I’m sure many of you have seen by now, the Loud Band live performance, captured by multiple cameras, their whole set can be seen online. What is clearly evident from the footage is just how wild the crowd were going, the energy being created before me was quite unreal, yet at the same time it was just another day in paradise. There were two stand out tracks for me, Tandu – Alien Pump (Loud vs Oforia Remix), and of course the special version of ‘Small Talk’, which they closed with.
Next up was the mighty Astrix, a producer most artists call ‘The King’, high praise indeed, but not a misguided description, which becomes quickly apparent once you witness him live. Needless to say pandemonium ensued as the fire-trucks were pumping out enough water to grow a small garden, and ‘The King’ was laying down some serious daytime sound. An energetic set, featuring unreleased tracks like Astrix – Jaadu, moved the dancefloor in an organic way.
Fellow Israelis Perfect Ace took over to deliver a techno progressive psy-fusion set to close off the day. This was the first time Perfect Stranger and Ace Ventura have played together in Ozora, a truly epic moment for both artists, the crowd and psy-trance culture as a whole.
Living in a digital age, the world’s eyes were on Ozora Festival, while my eyes remained firmly fixed on the rapturing dancefloor which lay before me. Two really engaging tracks in the set were Rocky – Paganka, from the new Rocky album ‘Conflict of Rhythm’, and Future Frequency – Naked, Stoned & Exalted (Symbolic vs Audiotec Remix), out soon on Sourcecode Transmissions.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/214872817″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
We continued to get silly in the forest surrounds where I camped, sharing some sort of THC ball which at first seemed fairly harmless, but about 20 minutes after ingesting this little homemade treat, we found ourselves on the precipice of highness. This was a feeling I’m not too familiar with now-days, considering I don’t smoke the green monkey, the stinky cabbage, the Zulu’s salad, or whatever you may call it. The euphoria was enjoyable, behavioural changes were quite evident, and the fact that we were venturing toward the dancefloor was rather brave.
The improvisational psyfunk-reggae live collective, Novelty Engine, were performing for the first time, on the main stage. The cast of performers involved was quite something with Cedric Myton and R.Zee Jackson on vocals, Dick Trevor and OTT on live FX & keyboards, Ajja on guitar, keyboards & programming, supported by Steve Hillage, Miquette Giraudy, Dymons and Vlastur on the guitar, keyboard, bass and percussion respectfully. This act was totally different to anything else I had witnessed in the past week. It was hard to believe that this refreshingly groovy sound was being made completely spontaneously.
Next we got Spongled by Simon Posford, before delving into an X-Dream, pretty humbled by the astonishing music I was hearing, I swayed to the rhythm. Whether my eyes were open while I did so, I predict will remain a mysterious, but what I do know is that I had lost my flip flops somewhere along the way, yet I didn’t care, not in this moment anyway. I was floating in a sea of radiating souls, and as I wandered from the dancefloor I could see this city was alive.
Fast forward to Saturday, 8 August, the heat was real, getting an early start, much like myself. Feeling weathered by the insatiable climate, I spent some time at the Artibarn, watching different performances, ranging from group instrumental music creation to visual kids puppetry, and resting my head occasionally. We could hear Raja Ram playing from on top of the hill, but couldn’t muster the strength to participate.
Prometheus and Hallucinogen’s set times swopped around, so I managed to get to the main stage late afternoon for the legendary Hallucinogen by Simon Posford. I think the retro styled sets are highly valued in Ozora, a true appreciation for the primordial soup of the scene exists here, which could not be more evident than when Hallucinogen – Gamma Goblins played.
This was one of the rare occasions I went backstage and actually managed get some visual memorabilia from the festival. I could not have picked a better time though, as Merkaba was about to perform. Accompanied by the beautiful, Eve, they kept the crowd enthralled at dusk, on a day when there would be no break in the music.
Along my walk back to the tent, I sat upon a wooden boat in the magic garden, near the herbal tea bar, where I watched a magician perform tricks of illusion, merriment and humour. There was interpretive dance and movement practices happening under the Pyramid in the distance, another circus show was about to begin, everywhere I looked there was entertainment, laughter and joy, playful abandonment as far as the eye could see.
Some may think such a place could never exist, but it does, and this world teaches us to appreciate the things we are lead to believe we don’t have enough time for in the ‘real world’. What we choose to see as valuable is somewhat misguided, yet when immersed in an environment of natural origins, it’s as if we sober up from our mild-less states, and become aware of life’s beauty once more.
Main stage side, it was prime time, with Lucas showing off his new Avant Garden compilation, featuring the banger Lucas & Laughing Buddha – Revel With The Devil. When it comes to full-on night-time psychedelic, Lucas is pretty much the cream of the crop, along with Tristan and perhaps Electric Universe now days, this is of course personal preference, but I do have a hutch I’m probably not far off.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/225202401″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Aphid Moon also gave us a taste of what he’s been working on with cracking tracks such as Killerwatts – All Seeing Eye (Aphid Moon Remix). This was to be my last night in the festival, and with my body feeling attuned with the music, I was ready to make the most of it.
I headed up to the Dragon’s Nest to |
prime minister Tony Blair used to go on his holidays.
Laghat is owned and trained by jockey Federico De Paola and shares his stable with a fellow horse jokingly described as 'his girlfriend'.
His owner has no idea how he manages to steer clear of other horses when he competes and even kicks in with an extra burst off speed as he nears the finishing line.
Connection: Federico says he and Laghat are very close and almost share their own language
Federico said today: 'It's amazing. I really don't know how he does it. He had a fungal infection in his eyes when he was born and it has left him virtually blind. He can make out shadows but that's about it.
'I only entered him for the races because I thought it would be some exercise for him, but I was amazed when he won and he has kept on winning.
'He has won 19 races and some of them have been important ones - in one race he won the 25,000-euro top prize.
'He has a sixth sense which tells him where to put his legs - when we approach the finish line it's him who gives me the signal and gives me that extra burst of speed.
'We have never had a crash with any of the other horses in any of the races we have been in and sometimes there can be as many as 16 in a field. I have never had a horse like this before in my time as a jockey and an owner.'
'Phenomenal intelligence': Laghat can only make out shadows, but has never had a crash in his career
He added: 'His intelligence is phenomenal and after every race, Laghat comes towards me bowing his head for an affectionate hug.
'We have become very close, it's as if we have our own language. He has his own stable and shares it with another horse who is his partner.'
Mr De Paola added: 'I take him on the gallop near the stables every morning and it is a fantastic sensation to ride him.
'He has another big race coming up in a few days and we are training hard for this one and of course we hope to win it.'
It is not clear what regulations are in place in Italy with regard to blind horses competing.
But as most horses wear blinkers in races around the world to restrict their field of vision and reduce any potential distractions, it appears that Laghat's limited visibility is not a safety issue.
Laghat's success story is at odds with Irish greyhound Jack Sprat who never won any race he entered until it was discovered last year that he was blind.
Jack was entered for several races last year after he hit speeds of 40mph in training, but despite his owner's high hopes he came last every time and it was later discovered he had not been able to see the hare because of his blindness.
See full videoThe night before the March on Washington, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King asked his aides for advice about the next day’s speech. “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream’, his adviser Wyatt Walker told him. “It’s trite, it’s cliche. You’ve used it too many times already.”
King had indeed employed the refrain several times before. It had featured in an address just a week earlier at a fundraiser in Chicago, and a few months before that at a huge rally in Detroit. As with most of his speeches, both had been well received, but neither had been regarded as momentous.
This speech had to be different. While King was by now a national political figure, relatively few outside the black church and the civil rights movement had heard him give a full address. With all three television networks offering live coverage of the march for jobs and freedom, this would be his oratorical introduction to the nation.
After a wide range of conflicting suggestions from his staff, King left the lobby at the Willard hotel in DC to put the final touches to a speech he hoped would be received, in his words, “like the Gettysburg address”. “I am now going upstairs to my room to counsel with my Lord,” he told them. “I will see you all tomorrow.”
King with his adviser Wyatt Walker, who urged: ‘Don’t use the lines about “I have a dream”. It’s cliche.’ Photograph: Tom Self/Birmingham News/Polaris/Eyevine
A few floors below King’s suite, Walker made himself available. King would call down and tell him what he wanted to say; Walker would write something he hoped worked, then head up the stairs to present it to King.
“When it came to my speech drafts,” wrote Clarence Jones, who had already penned the first draft, “[King] often acted like an interior designer. I would deliver four strong walls and he would use his God-given abilities to furnish the place so it felt like home.” King finished the outline at about midnight and then wrote a draft in longhand. One of his aides who went to King’s suite that night saw words crossed out three or four times. He thought it looked as though King were writing poetry. King went to sleep at about 4am, giving the text to his aides to print and distribute. The “I have a dream” section was not in it.
A few hours after King went to sleep, the march’s organiser, Bayard Rustin, wandered on to the Washington Mall, where the demonstration would take place later that day, with some of his assistants, to find security personnel and journalists outnumbering demonstrators. Political marches in Washington are now commonplace, but in 1963 attempting to stage a march of this size in that place was unprecedented. The movement had high hopes for a large turnout and originally set a goal of 100,000. From the reservations on coaches and trains alone, they guessed they should be at least close to that figure. But when the morning came, that expectation did little to calm their nerves. Reporters badgered Rustin about the ramifications for both the event and the movement if the crowd turned out to be smaller than anticipated. Rustin, forever theatrical, took a round pocket watch from his trousers and some paper from his jacket. Examining first the paper and then the watch, he turned to the reporters and said: “Everything is right on schedule.” The piece of paper was blank.
The first official Freedom Train arrived at Washington’s Union station from Pittsburgh at 8.02am, records Charles Euchner in Nobody Turn Me Around. Within a couple of hours, thousands were pouring through the stations every five minutes, while almost two buses a minute rolled into DC from across the country. About 250,000 people showed up that day. The Washington Mall was awash with Hollywood celebrities, including Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr, Burt Lancaster, James Garner and Harry Belafonte. Marlon Brando wandered around brandishing an electric cattle prod, a symbol of police brutality. Josephine Baker made it over from France. Paul Newman mingled with the crowd.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The crowd, marching to the National Mall Photograph: Arniesachs/mediapunch/REX/Shutterstock
It was a hectic morning for King, paying a courtesy visit with other march leaders to politicians at the Capitol, but he still found time to fiddle with the speech. When he eventually walked to the podium, the typed final version was once more full of crossings out and scribbles.
Rustin had limited the speakers to just five minutes each, and threatened to come on with a crook and haul them from the podium when their time was up. But they all overran and, given the heat – 87F at noon – and humidity, the crowd’s mood began to wane. Weary from a night’s travel, many were anxious to make good time on the journey back and had already left. King was 16th on an official programme that included the national anthem, the invocation, a prayer, a tribute to women, two sets of songs and nine other speakers. Only the benediction and the pledge came after. Portions of the crowd had moved off to seek respite from the heat under the trees on the Mall while others dipped their feet in the reflecting pool. Those most eager for a view of the podium braved the sun under the shade of their umbrellas.
“There was… an air of subtle depression, of wistful apathy which existed in many,” wrote Norman Mailer. “One felt a little of the muted disappointment which attacks a crowd in the seventh inning of a very important baseball game when the score has gone 11-3. The home team is ahead, but the tension is broken: one’s concern is no longer noble.”
But if they were exhausted, they were no less excited. Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson had lifted spirits with I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, followed, recalling his time as a rabbi in Berlin under Hitler: “A great people who had created a great civilisation had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder,” he said. “America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent.”
King was next. The area around the mic was crowded with speakers, dignitaries and their entourages. Wearing a black suit, black tie and white shirt, King edged through the melee towards the podium.
“I tell students today, ‘There were no jumbotrons [large screen TVs] back then,’ “ says Rachelle Horowitz, the young activist who organised transport to the march. “All people could see was a speck. And they listened to it.”
King started slowly, and stuck close to his prepared text. “I thought it was a good speech,” recalled John Lewis, the leader of the student wing of the movement, who had addressed the march earlier that day. “But it was not nearly as powerful as many I had heard him make. As he moved towards his final words, it seemed that he, too, could sense that he was falling short. He hadn’t locked into that power he so often found.”
King was winding up what would have been a well-received but, by his standards, fairly unremarkable oration. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana,” he said. Then, behind him, Mahalia Jackson cried out: “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.” Jackson had a particularly intimate emotional relationship with King, who when he felt down would call her for some “gospel musical therapy”.
“She was his favourite gospel singer, and he would ask her to sing The Old Rugged Cross or Jesus Met The Woman At The Well down the phone,” Jones explains. Jackson had seen him deliver the dream refrain in Detroit in June and clearly it had moved her.
“Go back to the slums and ghettoes of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed,” King said. Jackson shouted again: “Tell ‘em about the dream.” “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends.” Then King grabbed the podium and set his prepared text to his left. “When he was reading from his text, he stood like a lecturer,” Jones says. “But from the moment he set that text aside, he took on the stance of a Baptist preacher.” Jones turned to the person standing next to him and said: “Those people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.”
A smattering of applause filled a pause more pregnant than most.
“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”
“Aw, shit,” Walker said. “He’s using the dream.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest King, third from left, marches in a line of men with arms linked Photograph: AP
For all King’s careful preparation, the part of the speech that went on to enter the history books was added extemporaneously while he was standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, speaking in full flight to the crowd. “I know that on the eve of his speech it was not in his mind to revisit the dream,” Jones insists.
It is open to debate just how spontaneous the insertion of the “I have a dream” section was (Euchner says a guest in the adjacent hotel room to King heard him rehearsing the segment the night before), but the two things we know for sure are that it was not in the prepared text and it wasn’t invented on the spot. King had been using the refrain for well over a year. Talking some months later of his decision to include the passage, King said: “I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point. The audience response was wonderful that day… And all of a sudden this thing came to me that… I’d used many times before… ‘I have a dream.’ And I just felt that I wanted to use it here… I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn’t come back to it.”
“Though [King] was extremely well known before he stepped up to the lectern,” Jones wrote, “he had stepped down on the other side of history.”
Watching the whole thing on TV in the White House, President John F Kennedy, who had never heard an entire King speech before, remarked: “He’s damned good. Damned good.” Almost everyone, including even King’s enemies, recognised the speech’s reach and resonance. William Sullivan, the FBI’s assistant director of domestic intelligence, recommended: “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous negro of the future of this nation.”
A few in the crowd were unimpressed. Anne Moody, a black activist who had made the trip from rural Mississippi, recalled: “I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had ‘dreamers’ instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream.”
But most were ebullient. “It would be like if, right now in the Arab spring, somebody made a speech that was 15 minutes long that summarised what this whole period of social change was all about,” one of King’s most trusted aides, Andrew Young, told me. “The country was in more turmoil than it had been in since before the second world war. People didn’t understand it. And he explained it. It wasn’t a black speech. It wasn’t just a Christian speech. It was an all-American speech.”
Fifty years on, the speech enjoys both national and global acclaim. A 1999 survey conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University, of 137 leading scholars of public address, named it the greatest speech of the 20th century.
During the protests in Tiananmen Square, China, some protesters held up posters of King saying “I have a dream”. On the wall that Israel has built around parts of the West Bank, someone has written “I have a dream. This is not part of that dream.” The phrase “I have a dream” has been spotted in such disparate places as a train in Budapest and on a mural in suburban Sydney. Asked in 2008 whether they thought the speech was “relevant to people of your generation”, 68% of Americans said yes, including 76% of blacks and 67% of whites. Only 4% were not familiar with it.
But few of those in the movement thought at the time that it would be the speech by which King would be remembered 50 years later.
“Rustin always said that King’s genius was that he could simultaneously talk to a black audience about why they needed to achieve their freedom and address a white audience about why they should support that freedom,” recalls Horowitz. “Simultaneously. It was a genius that he could do that as one Gestalt… King’s was the poetry that made the march immortal. He capped off the day perfectly. He did what everybody wanted him to do and expected him to do. But I don’t think anybody predicted at the time that the speech would do what it did since.”
Their bemusement was justified. For if, in its immediate aftermath, the speech had any significant political impact, it was not obvious. “At the time of King’s death in April 1968, his speech at the March on Washington had nearly vanished from public view,” writes Drew Hansen in his book about the speech, The Dream. “There was no reason to believe that King’s speech would one day come to be seen as a defining moment for his career and for the civil rights movement as a whole… King’s speech at the march is almost never mentioned during the monumental debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which occupy around 64,000 pages of the Congressional record.”
History does not objectively sift through speeches, pick out the best on their merits and then dedicate them faithfully to public memory. It commits itself to the task with great prejudice and fickle appreciation, in a manner that tells us as much about the historian and the times as the speech itself. The speech was marginalised because, in the last few years of his life, King himself was marginalised, and few who had the power to elevate his speech to iconic status had any self-interest in doing so. His growing propensity to take on issues of poverty, followed by his opposition to the Vietnam war, lost him the support of the political class and much of his white and more conservative base.
King’s speech at the March on Washington offers a positive prognosis on the apparently chronic American ailment of racism. As such, it is a rare thing to find in almost any culture or nation: an optimistic oration about race that acknowledges the desperate circumstances that made it necessary while still projecting hope, patriotism, humanism and militancy.
In the age of Obama and the Tea Party, there is something in there for everyone. It speaks, in the vernacular of the black church, with clarity and conviction to African Americans’ historical plight and looks forward to a time when that plight will be eliminated (“We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating ‘for whites only’. No, no, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”).
Its nod to all that is sacred in American political culture, from the founding fathers to the American dream, makes it patriotic (“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”). It sets bigotry against colour-blindness while prescribing no route map for how we get from one to the other. (“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists… little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”)
But the breadth of its appeal is to some extent at the expense of depth. It is in no small part so widely admired because the interpretations of what King was saying vary so widely. Polls show that while African Americans and American whites both agree about the extent to which “the dream has been realised”, they profoundly disagree on the state of contemporary race relations. The recent acquittal of George Zimmerman over the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin illustrates the degree to which blacks and whites are less likely to see the same problems, more likely to disagree on the causes of those problems and, therefore, unlikely to agree on a remedy. Hearing the same speech, they understand different things.
Conservatives, meanwhile, have been keen to co-opt both King and the speech. In 2010, Tea Party favourite Glenn Beck held the “Restoring Honour” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of the speech, telling a crowd of about 90,000: “The man who stood down on those stairs… gave his life for everyone’s right to have a dream.” Almost a year later, black republican presidential candidate Herman Cain opened his speech to the southern Republican leadership conference with the words, “I have a dream.”
Their embrace of the speech has made some black intellectuals and activists wary. They fear that the speech can too easily be distorted in a manner that undermines the speaker’s legacy. “In the light of the determined misuse of King’s rhetoric, a modest proposal appears in order,” Georgetown university professor Michael Dyson wrote in 2001. “A 10-year moratorium on listening to or reading ‘I Have a Dream’.” At first blush, such a proposal seems absurd and counter- productive. After all, King’s words have convinced many Americans that racial justice should be aggressively pursued. The sad truth is, however, that our political climate has eroded the real point of King’s beautiful words.”
These responses tell us at least as much about now as then, perhaps more. The 50th anniversary of “I have a dream” arrives at a time when the president is black, whites are destined to become a minority in the US in little more than a generation, and civil rights-era protections are being dismantled. Segregationists have all but disappeared, even if segregation as a lived experience has not. Racism, however, remains.
Fifty years on, it is clear that in eliminating legal segregation – not racism, but formal, codified discrimination – the civil rights movement delivered the last moral victory in America for which there is still a consensus. While the struggle to defeat it was bitter and divisive, nobody today is seriously campaigning for the return of segregation or openly mourning its demise. The speech’s appeal lies in the fact that, whatever the interpretation, it remains the most eloquent, poetic, unapologetic and public articulation of that victory.
• Adapted from The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream, by Gary Younge, published on 22 August by Guardian Books at £6.99. To order a copy for £5.59, including mainland UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.Science Experts Say Liberals, Not Conservatives, Are Psychotic
Science Says Liberals Are Psychotic
The American Journal of Political Science published a correction several months back saying that it made a serious error in one of it’s published papers.
The error? The paper originally said that conservative political beliefs are linked to “psychoticism,” but it turns out that liberal political beliefs are the ones that are linked to psychoticism.
From The New York Post:
A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong. The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism. “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the journal said in the startling correction. “The descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.”
Traits that are associated with psychoticism include risk taking, sensation seeking, impulsiveness, and authoritarianism.
The article says that erroneous report was cited at least 45 times according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
Follow Ryan Saavedra On Twitter @NewsRevoltRyanWith Burke Badenhop off the market on a one-year deal with the Reds, few arms on the free agent market figure to land big league deals. Many of the remaining names are coming off poor seasons or injuries and will therefore end up signing minor league deals. While Francisco Rodriguez and Rafael Soriano will garner much of the attention and the chatter, in my eyes, Joba Chamberlain could be the best remaining option on the open market.
Entering just his age-29 season, Chamberlain was one of the youngest free agents available even at the beginning of the offseason, and he’s the youngest notable name on the relief market as a whole at this point. Not only that, but Chamberlain is coming off a quietly strong season in his lone year with the Tigers.
In 63 innings, Chamberlain posted a 3.57 ERA with 8.4 K/9, 3.4 BB/9 and a 53.2 percent ground-ball rate. He wilted down the stretch, yielding a 4.97 ERA following the All-Star break, but much of that is attributable to a nearly seven percent dip in his strand rate. Chamberlain stranded runners at a 75.7 percent clip in the first half — which compares favorably to his career mark of 74.6 percent — but that number dropped to 69.1 percent. Should that mark trend back toward Chamberlain’s career level with all else remaining more or less equal, Chamberlain could turn in some excellent results in 2015.
Also worth considering is that the Tigers ranked 28th among 30 Major League teams in both Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating, and they ranked 29th of 30 in in defensive efficiency. By virtually any defensive metric imaginable, Chamberlain was pitching with one of baseball’s least talented groups supporting him — a likely reason for the discrepancy between his 3.57 ERA and his stronger marks in FIP (3.16), xFIP (3.35) and SIERA (3.13).
Chamberlain did lose a bit of life on his fastball, dipping from an average of 94.7 mph to 93.5 mph, but that mark still rates as above average, and he offset the slight drop in velocity by throwing more curveballs — a pitch that graded out as his best, according to Fangraphs’ pitch values.
Some may point to his shaky 2013 season as a reason to shy away from the former top prospect, but it should be remembered that Chamberlain battled an oblique strain that year as he attempted to complete his first full season following Tommy John surgery. Control was his main problem in 2013 (5.6 BB/9), but he’s never battled that issue much in any other season spent pitching in relief.
Last offseason, Chamberlain signed a one-year, $3MM contract with the Tigers in mid-December. He’s undoubtedly coming off a better season this time around, but Chamberlain has reportedly been selective about his destination, rejecting offers from a few teams for which he did not want to play, leaving him afloat on the open market as one of the last remaining candidates for a big league deal. If another one-year deal is in the offing, or even a two-year pact at a reasonable price, Chamberlain could be a significant boost to a contender’s bullpen at a cost that hardly seems prohibitive.Hillary Clinton emailed classified information using her private email address months after leaving the State Department, according to a published report.
The Democratic nominee discussed with a group of diplomats and former staff members a deal between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates in a May 2013 email that was obtained by the Republican National Committee through the Freedom of Information Act.
However, the contents of the email were redacted and are not slated for declassification until 2033.
The news comes as Clinton faces fresh questions about her email server as the State Department prepares to release dozens of deleted records related to Benghazi.
Clinton has repeatedly argued she never sent or received any classified material on her personal network. While she later amended her statements to specify that none of the information was "marked" classified, the FBI announced last month that at least three emails had indeed been marked classified.
The New York Post first reported the email regarding the deal with the UAE.
That agreement centered on the Middle Eastern nation's nuclear energy production. It allowed the U.S. to share technology and materials for nuclear energy production but barred UAE from enriching uranium, a step in the creation of atomic weapons.
UAE representatives reportedly questioned the merits of the 2009 agreement, known as the "123 Deal," in the wake of the nuclear accord struck between the U.S. and Iran.• Champions still interested in Porto’s Eliaquim Mangala • Samir Nasri set to sign his new contract this week
Roma are trying to force Manchester City’s hand by setting a 21 July deadline for the sale of Mehdi Benatia, the central defender who is the Premier League champions’ second choice behind Porto’s Eliaquim Mangala.
While Roma want around £30m for Moroccan international Benatia, 27, City continue to hold out hopes of signing Mangala despite the France defender twice turning down the opportunity to force the move through.
In January and at the end of last season Mangala, 23, could have pushed for the transfer but instead wanted to wait until after the World Cup. He was also quoted saying he preferred a move to Chelsea while telling friends Manchester United were higher than City on his list of destinations.
Despite this City still believe they can land Mangala, who would cost up to £35m, which is frustrating Roma.
They have therefore set the 21 July deadline, the day both the Italian club and City start their pre-season tours.
City also believe that Samir Nasri will sign his new contract this week.Twenty-six years ago a woman in Nebraska made an appointment to have an abortion. She was in college and believed she couldn’t afford to take care of her baby. However, she couldn’t go through with it so she made an appointment with another doctor– an OB-GYN. After her appointment, she decided to place her baby for adoption. She wanted to give her baby the very best chance at life.
Around the same time, Randy and Sherry Kaup, were struggling with infertility. They were in their forties and unable to have children. Although they had a very different situation than the woman facing a crisis pregnancy, they were visiting the same OB-GYN. The doctor connected the Kaups with the unwed mother and they adopted her son, Ryan. The couple took him home three days after he was born.
Ryan loved his new home and lived peacefully with his parents on an acre of land in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Kaups were practicing Catholics and when Ryan grew older, they placed him in a Catholic high school and were very involved in their church.
But that didn’t mean Ryan didn’t struggle to stay on the right path. Ryan said, “I became more of a wallflower for the first couple years of high school. I spent more time by myself and with my coworkers who didn’t always have the best influence on me.”
Eventually though, Ryan found a group of friends who inspired him to be better and to stay close to his roots.
As his graduation day approached, he began considering colleges. He received a full scholarship to attend the University of Nebraska where he majored in Advertising and Spanish. Ryan also studied abroad for a semester in Chile.
Additionally, at the university he became very involved in the Catholic center. He developed friendships with other students who began showing him the joy of living for God. Ryan also observed other priests and started to feel that God was calling him to the priesthood.
The Seminarian Casual shares more about Ryan’s developing faith and decision to become a priest:.Understanding Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
Alice in Wonderland syndrome, also known as Todd’s syndrome, is a rare condition of temporary episodes of distorted perception of body size that was first described in the 1950s. During these episodes, those with Alice in Wonderland syndrome feel that their body is either larger or smaller than normal, and/or objects and people around them appear larger or smaller than usual — much like the well-known character Alice experiences in Carroll’s stories. In fact, Carroll himself suffered from migraines, and it has been suggested that some of his own experiences may have been inspiration for his writing. 1 2
Episodes of Alice in Wonderland syndrome are not hallucinations; and although the experience is quite vivid, the individual recognizes that what they are seeing and feeling is not real. 3 When and how often these episodes happen is unpredictable, and the episodes themselves are usually relatively short.
For example, in one recent analysis of 81 people who experienced this syndrome, 17 had reported the duration of their episodes. Nine of these participants had episodes lasting less than five minutes, and seven experienced episodes lasting from five to 30 minutes. However, one person in this group had an episode that lasted for two days. 4
Although these episodes happen most often in children and young adults (and, for some, eventually stop occurring over time), Alice in Wonderland syndrome can affect individuals of all ages, and as many as one-third of sufferers continue to experience ongoing episodes.
In many cases, the cause of the syndrome is not defined, and episodes can arise from several different medical conditions, most commonly an infection. This syndrome is also closely associated with epilepsy and migraine — among individuals with Alice in Wonderland syndrome, migraine is cited as the cause in 6 to 11 percent of cases.Getty
What most people deem to be black are normally just a ‘very, very, very, very, very dark blue’. Black holes are almost definitely jet black.
Given the name, I could’ve postualated that earlier – but now, after five long nights, astronomers working on the ‘Event Horizon Telescope’ project think they may have snapped the first ever actual picture of a black hole.
At the minute the data gathered by the telescope is being sent to supercomputers in the U.S. and Germany but the astronomers seem to think they’ve finally got a legit photograph of a black hole.
Getty
One of the team members on this mission was Radboud University’s Heino Falcke, who said:
Even if the first images are still crappy and washed out, [they] can already test for the first time some basic predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity in the extreme environment of a black hole. The picture will turn black holes from some mythical object to something concrete that we can study.
Although the techniques used by the Event Horizon Telescope are relatively old, the size and scale of this mission in particular are simply monumental. Hell, the telescope can count the stitches on a baseball from 8,000 miles away.
In this mission, astronomers researched two black holes. The first, Sagittarius A*, is the black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. The other, Messier 87, is a black hole in an elliptical galaxy 53 million light years away.
Hopefully early next year we’ll be able to see the photos for ourselves…WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawyers say his income tax returns do not show income from Russian sources or debt owed to Russians, with the exception of $95 million paid by a Russian billionaire for a Trump-owned estate in Florida and $12.2 million in payments in connection with holding the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.
The statements are contained in a letter from two lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon and William F. Nelson, to Mr. Trump, which the White House released Friday. The president cited the letter in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, amid a political firestorm over his firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, as proof that there were no hidden financial ties between Mr. Trump and Russia.
In addition to the Florida estate and the beauty pageant, the lawyers said Mr. Trump had received undisclosed payments over 10 years from Russians for hotel rooms, rounds of golf or Trump-licensed products, like wine, ties or mattresses. But they said those amounts were “immaterial” and would not have been identified as coming from Russian sources in the tax returns.
The lawyers noted that their statement covers only the period dating back a decade, after their firm, Morgan Lewis & Bockius, began representing Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization. It leaves other questions unanswered, including whether Mr. Trump or his firms received Russian income or loans from entities registered elsewhere or whether he derived income from Russian-linked partnerships that file their own returns.Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, co-founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, has been diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. According to a recent Facebook post, “serious treatments” are set to begin on October 23, and Psychic TV’s upcoming tour dates in Europe have been postponed as a result. “We kept hoping we’d be OK but today heard the illness has got worse this week. My sincere, oh so sad apologies for all of you who bought tickets,” P-Orridge wrote in the statement. “We are heartbroken to have seen the insane amount of work Matski and Edley [ODowd] have put in to set all this up only to have my old 67 year body say it needs a rest. We’ve been touring for about 50 years now. It’s the first time we have had to do this. We hope it will not be necessary again.” Find the full post below, along with a written statement from P-Orridge’s representatives.
This past summer, Psychic TV reissued 1984’s Pagan Day and 1988’s Allegory and Self. Revisit Pitchfork’s “In Sight Out” interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.Donald Trump has backed US government funding to help police departments purchase body cameras, the latest statement from a high-profile political figure to indicate that bipartisan consensus for increased officer accountability may be mounting across the American political landscape.
The Donald Trump doctrine: 'Assad is bad' but US must stop 'nation-building' Read more
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the Republican presidential frontrunner said “there could be” federal funding directed to those local law enforcement agencies that wanted to buy the cameras and could not afford the technology without financial aid.
“Some of these departments have plenty of money, and some of them don’t. And if they like the idea of the cameras, they need federal funding,” Trump said on Monday. “It can solve a lot of problems for police. It can also solve a lot of problems – period.”
However, Trump did not support making the officer-worn video cameras mandatory across the country, as the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has done, noting “different police departments feel different ways”.
Body cameras emerged as an early reform effort in the wake of the police shooting of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown 14 months ago in Ferguson, Missouri. Legislative proposals in Congress have stalled, however, even as criminal justice and policing proposals have become an increasing priority for the 21 candidates for the White House as officer-involved killings have continued to spark protests.
The Counted, an accountability project by the Guardian which tracks all police killings in the US, has recorded more than 900 officer-involved deaths so far this year. In a turning point last week, FBI director James Comey said it was “unacceptable that the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper” were monitoring such deaths better than the federal government, while attorney general Loretta Lynch said she “encouraged” local law enforcement to |
or whatever is you poison.You have passed your test and are Worthy!! Well now it come to the boring part.You simply run the other end of your rope back the way you came. Over and over again until you run out of rope.It should look something like this.A rather loose collection of lines I know. The key to remember here is you are just following the original turn so when it goes under you go under and when it goes over you go over.something like thisalso when you are at a turn remember to place your rope on the inside like thisand be consiteant in always placeing them inside the turns if you mix them up you will be spending hours trying to sort them out later.You might notice I am pulling a bight through here and that is to save time. What I do is start on one side with the running end like thisand then on the pass around the next turn I use a bight like thisThis is so I can pull the rope faster as it will be properly flailed for each pulling.With two people you can get this part done very quickly even more so if the board is up on a table.Tightening down is what you have to do now.Now special tricks to this. Just start a one end and pull out the excess keeping the weave a little loose so you can feed in more turns.and so we are done.As I said at the beginning this was done very loose so I took me a good 3 hours to tighten this one down.Normally I try to peg down the first turn at about the approximate size for the mat I am making. Oddly enough standard climbing rope sizes of 50 and 60m come out at about the same size so there is no need to change you basic set up for one rope length or another.Once you have done it a few times it takes about 35mins to create one fully tightened down but for your first one expect to spend most of the day on it.Also to keep it simple I did not create a large number of Bights and Leads on this mat. The best results for a 10 or 11mm rope is 7 or 8 Bights with at lest 9 or 10 Leads and 3 turns.9mm and smaller ropes you can go with more Turns 4 or even 5. With the large ropes you can go down with as few as 5 Bights. I did this once andthe mat looks nice but is not as flat as some like.I have also tried to tie one with only 3 Bights, 4 Leads and about 15 Turns, the result was a mess that did not lie flat at all and fell apart into a rope salad if it was moved.The problems is that with more turns, the weave gets very tight but the edges get flimsy. The optimum is about 3 to 5 turns in a mat. If you have too much rope you can just cut it off.I have also tied one with 10 Bights and 13 Leads and only two Turns in the weave but this did not look good and it was too flimsy even when tighten down.I have also made one with a 5 Bights and 8 Leads with 7 Turns with a 45m rope which looked very nice. Fortunately, it was a very stiff rope so the edges do not flap about that much.So depending on your rope thickness between 3 to 5 Turns works best.Enjoy.For super bonus points can anyone tell me what year the rope was made in!!A Durban man who was kidnapped, bound and thrown off a ledge at the Krantzkloof Nature Reserve was rescued on Wednesday morning.
Police Search and Rescue Unit officers and paramedics were called to the scene after his cries for help were heard.
It is understood that the man had been abducted by four men from his home before he was bound and brought to the gorge viewpoint.
He was flung from the edge of the cliff, landing on a ledge some 20 meters below.
Paramedics, who were first at the scene, managed to find the man using a hiking path.
He was stabilised in the thick brush before rescue technicians hoisted him out of the gorge using an elaborate rope system.
He sustained serious injuries and was transported to a hospital in Chatsworth for further treatment.
JEFF WICKS
TMG DIGITALMedia playback is not supported on this device Highlights: Iran 0-0 Nigeria
Iran and Nigeria played out the first draw of the 2014 World Cup as their Group F opener ended goalless.
Nigeria dominated possession but created few chances against a disciplined side managed by ex-Manchester United coach Carlos Queiroz.
The Super Eagles' best opportunities came in the first half, when Ogenyi Onazi fired a yard wide before Ahmed Musa went close with a free-kick.
Iran's Reza Ghoochannejad forced a great save from Vincent Enyeama.
Match analysis "The decision making in the final third when Nigeria managed to get there was poor. They made the wrong choices. The quality of the balls into the box was poor and they didn't play to their strengths. "This is the game they should have wanted to go out and win and you would think there would be more urgency in their play."
The share of the points leaves both teams well placed in the group after Argentina defeated Bosnia-Hercegovina.
African champions Nigeria were fancied to go through with the South American giants, but the pressure is now on them to beat the section's only European side, who impressed in their first ever World Cup match on Sunday.
Iran, on the other hand, will be buoyed by this result and will be looking to cause one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history on Saturday against Argentina.
They performed diligently, with Queiroz getting the best out of a group of players who stuck rigidly to the tactics employed.
Their conservative approach, with midfielders Javad Nekounam and Andranik Timotian as an extra line of defence for the backline, frustrated Nigeria.
Stephen Keshi's side were limited to only a couple of chances despite having the lion's share of possession. The first fell to Lazio forward Onazi, who slammed his shot a foot wide before Musa almost caught out goalkeeper Alireza Haghighi with his quick thinking from a free-kick.
Ironically, Iran had the best chance to score despite their only effort on goal coming when Charlton's Ghoochannejad, who spent much of his career to date playing in the Dutch and Belgian leagues, forced a excellent reaction save from Enyeama, playing in his third World Cup.
Match facts This was Nigeria's second World Cup goalless draw in their 15th match - the other being against England in 2002
Iran had one effort on target, the joint-fewest by a team in a game in this tournament, along with Honduras and Cameroon
Two teams have failed to score against Nigeria in the Super Eagles' last nine World Cup games: England and Iran
Keshi - the mastermind behind Nigeria's unexpected Cup of Nations win last year - tinkered with his attack after the break by bringing on former Newcastle stalwart Shola Ameobi and fellow forward Peter Odemwingie of Stoke.
The tactical swaps almost paid dividends in the 71st minute, when Ameobi headed wide from eight yards, but he had conceded a foul in the process.
The former Magpie also had a chance in the closing minutes, but on this occasion his goalbound header was easily cleared by Mehrdad Pooladi.
That draw now means Nigeria have not won a World Cup match in nine attempts - the longest streak in the competition. They might need to rethink their strategy against Bosnia-Hercegovina if they do not want that run to continue.
Iran coach Carlos Queiroz:
"We played against a great team and it was necessary to play a realistic game. We fought for every ball, every space and played 90 minutes with one thing in our mind. My players need to be congratulated.
"Now it's Argentina and the most important thing is that everything is open to us."
Nigeria coach Stephen Keshi:
"Respect to Iran, they had their game plan to sit back and defend and they did well.
"Win or lose I'm criticized. A draw now, I'll be criticized. It's part of the game. In my country, it's win at all costs and sometimes it doesn't go that way.''
Nigeria forward Peter Odemwingie talking to BBC World Service:
"We expected three points from this game but everybody knows the most important game is between ourselves and Bosnia-Hercegovina.
"Next game I think will be easier and I think that will be the decider of where we will be at this World Cup."
Nigeria fans made their presence felt at the Arena Da Baixada in Curitiba
Iran's coach Carlos Queiroz helped his side reach their first World Cup since 2006
Ghoochannejhad had one of the few good chances in the matchThe U.S. military’s top office confirmed Thursday that Islamic State operatives launched a chemical attack against Iraqi forces and their American military advisers positioned outside the group’s Iraqi stronghold of Mosul.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee “mustard blister agent” was released in the vicinity of a military airfield in the western part of al Qayyara, about 40 miles south of Mosul, in northern Iraq.
The airbase has been designated by Iraqi and American commanders as the main logistics hub to support a series of firebases that will serve as jumping-off points for 14 Iraqi Army brigades and thousands of peshmerga and militia fightersfor the eventual siege of Mosul.
Local reports state an artillery shell armed with the chemical agent was fired into the airfield’s perimeter. The base has been the target of numerous attacks by fighters tied to the Islamic State, or ISIS, ISIL or Daesh based inside Mosul and surrounding areas still held by the terror group.
It is the first chemical attack utilizing mustard gas aimed at U.S. troops since World War I.
For his part, Gen. Dunford said the presence of the chemical agent at the Qayyara airbase may have been the result of blowback from recent coalition airstrikes against suspected chemical weapons facilities operated by ISIS.
“We’ve had a number of strikes … over the past year against [ISIS’s] emerging chemical capability. And in this latest strike, again, we assess was a sulfur mustard,” the four-star general said Thursday.
While there were no reports of any American servicemembers injured as a result of exposure to the gas, Gen. Dunford said Islamic State did possess a “very rudimentary capability to deliver” chemical agents to the battlefield, adding such a capability “was a concerning development.”
The strike comes as U.S., Iraqi an coalition commanders are reportedly in the final stages of planning for the assault on Iraq’s second largest city. In July, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that an additional 560 American troops would be deployed as government forces prepare to drive onto the city.
The deployment bumps up the total number of American troops in Iraq up to roughly 6,000, according to unofficial estimates of U.S. troop strength in the region.
Earlier this week, Gen. Dunford told reporters that Iraqi forces would be ready to begin the assault as early as October. Both Washington and Baghdad have repeatedly stated that Mosul would be under government control before the end of the year.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Last night I was watching a news channel and was horrified to see the anchor breathless and shouting at the top of his voice and I was genuinely worried about something happening to him. It took me some time to figure out the real reason for this. Apparently, he was angry because Arvind Kejrwal dared to say that the media is guilty of'supari' journalism and there should be a public trial to judge these "news" reports. The poor AAP representative on the panel was so bulldozed by the torrent unleashed by the anchor that he was hardly audible. I later on found out that this was normal practice on the channel - that the producer is required to ensure that largely only the anchor's voice should be heard.I have known this anchor for 20 years. I would have been happier if he had raised the issue of corruption in the media, if he had debated why Arvind was forced to say what he said, and whether there is any merit in the accusation and does the media need to correct itself. Alas, the focus instead was on histrionics and theatrics. And I discovered that he probably feels that the louder he speaks, the better he gets as a journalist. He is the symptom of the disease which has majorly inflicted the media of late. Over a period of time, cannibalistic journalism is being pursued where morals and ethics seem to have no weight and "quid-pro-quo" journalism is the order of the day. Honest, independent, neutral and dispassionate journalism seems to be a thing of the past.During the Delhi assembly elections, I observed that at least five 24-hour national channels were running a campaign against AAP. Any Small news items related to AAP were painted as the biggest of crimes, and the biggest of the BJP's faults were not thought worthy of a mention. I had definite information that one of the channels had turned into a palace of intrigue for planning and planting negative stories against AAP. It was an open secret in that newsroom. Those with a conscience could only "whisper", and the rest only followed the instructions in toto. There was another channel which had literally boycotted AAP. Not a word was allowed to go on air about AAP. Arvind was a big no-no - this was a unique experiment in journalism.Another channel, whose editor was caught on tape fixing a monetary deal for the channel, had run a nasty campaign which also targeted AAP. A few newspapers also did not lag behind but they were no match for TV. I was aghast to see this. We in AAP spent a lot of time trying to understand this new phenomenon and we finally reached the conclusion that this was deliberately done and part of a larger political design to prevent AAP from occupying mind-space. The Delhi elections were a question of life and death for us. But we were helpless.Our friends in the Media told us point blank that it would get worse as the elections drew nearer, which finally proved to be true. We had no remedy, but we were heartened when we got feedback that people on the ground had also noticed this. The whisper that "media to bika hua hai" (the media has sold out) became louder. It was sad, especially for me as a former editor. I had fought and defended media and TV channels on different fora as a media man in the past. I always believed that there were good journalists and bad journalists, but never realised that there is another category - "motivated" journalists. The anti-AAP campaign was part of a bigger design with a blatant political motive. The reportage was designed to benefit one party over other. It was not journalism per say, it was supari journalism, if I may be permitted to use this much-maligned word.Thankfully, the people of India are not as ignorant as they are thought to be. Closer to polling, the chorus got louder that a few TV channels were out to destroy AAP. No wonder then that at the launch of my book a few weeks ago, Arvind said to the dismay of many that AAP won despite the media. Once elections were over, I thought the worst was behind us. But things got more vicious. All rules of good journalism were broken. I would like to cite a few examples -1. An ex-MLA from the Congress, Asif Khan, boasted that he had an audio tape of the conversation with AAP's Sanjay Singh in which Sanjay Singh could be heard seeking support before Delhi voted from the Congress to form the government. Every channel ran the allegation without listening to the audio. That so-called tape, which was the basis of the story, was never heard on air. Because there was no such tape. But no channel APOLOGISED for the nonexistent story and tape!2. A few days ago, another tape surfaced on TV channels insinuating that Kumar Vishwas had some role in the hanging of the farmer Gajendra Singh who died tragically at an AAP rally. Apparently, Kumar was heard gleefully saying "latak gaya" (he has hung himself). Later it was discovered that the tape was manipulated. It was not Kumar who said "latak gaya". It was somebody else's voice. No channel had the dignity to say sorry. As per broadcasting guidelines,no channel should run a tape whose authenticity is not known; merely saying that the channel can't vouch for the authenticity of the tape and yet wanting to have a debate about the contents of the tape is not enough. How can one debate a conversation when one is not sure about the recording?3. Since yesterday morning, I have been inundated with phone calls from reporters asking for my reaction to the allegations of a woman volunteer for AAP. It was insinuated that Kumar had an illicit relationship with her. Suddenly a video surfaced in the evening. A Congress leader from earlier days was seen and heard instructing her on what she should say to the press. Some channels dropped the story but others did not bother to examine and take note of the political conspiracy. The woman had not made any allegations of any wrongdoing by Kumar. Yet every channel ran the story with glee that Kumar had an illicit relationship.4. After Gajendra Singh's death, a section of the media hinted that Manish Sisodia and Kumar could have some role in his hanging. It was said that he may have been in touch with Manish, and that Kumar was seen behind the dais hatching the conspiracy to have him climb a tree and place a noose around his neck. It was suggested by a few channels that he might have been a victim of AAP's strategy to enact a drama to attract the nation's attention through theatrics, and that the plan unfortunately ended in a tragedy.I have no hesitation in admitting that AAP has gained tremendous goodwill and political ascendence due to positive media coverage it got earlier. In fact, the anti-corruption movement (Anna's movement) became a national phenomenon due to non-stop coverage by TV channels. It was this focus that allowed the movement to turn corruption into a national issue and help change the national discourse; that resulted in a change of the government at the centre. But of late, the climate has changed. Realizing the potential of the political revolution that AAP can foster, the establishment has roped in a section of media to kill the seed before it germinates into a big tree. I am tempted to say what Graham Green said long ago, "Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism" but I won't say that as I believe that I will be disrespecting the majority of my friends who are pursuing their profession with fierce integrity and for whom journalism is not for sale.(Ashutosh joined the Aam Aadmi Party in January 2014. The former journalist took on former Union minister Kapil Sibal and Health Minister Harsh Vardhan in the national election from Chandni Chowk in Delhi.)Apr 25, 2013
Although I hoped to wait another day or two to talk about this on my blog, circumstances have force my hand. Therefore, I would like to take a few of your spare moments to talk about a new project that I’m working on called underscore-contrib — an extensions library / proving ground for Underscore.js.1
TLDR; The official Github repository is at https://github.com/documentcloud/underscore-contrib — go there and read code.
Why underscore-contrib?
Underscore is a great library supporting a functional style of programming in JavaScript. While Underscore provides a bevy of useful tools to this end, there are many more functions that can be derived from it that are of less-broad applicability. The reasons that any given function is not available directly in Underscore are too numerous to list here, but two in particular help to define the “why” of underscore-contrib:
Some functions are limited in scope. Some functions are lesser known, but are highly useful.
In the case of #1, underscore-contrib can serve as a home for functions that solve certain pointed problems; stopping somewhere below domain-specific. In the case of #2 underscore-contrib will work as a proving ground for features that should be in Underscore proper, but need some advocacy and/or evolution (or devolution) to get them there.
What’s in underscore-contrib?
At the moment, the following contrib libraries are in place:
underscore.array.builders.js – building arrays
underscore.array.selectors.js – getting stuff from arrays
underscore.function.arity.js – partial application/currying
underscore.function.combinators.js – function combinators
underscore.function.predicates.js – isX functions return true|false
underscore.object.builders.js – building objects
underscore.object.selectors.js – getting stuff from objects
underscore.util.existential.js – truthiness
underscore.util.trampolines.js – function trampolining
These libraries are not complete and do not represent the entire universe of future libraries. Instead, most of the functions used to build the initial set were taken from my upcoming book “Functional JavaScript” and my Lemonad JavaScript library.2
How to use underscore.contrib
First, you’ll need Underscore. Next you can grab the relevant underscore-contrib libraries and simply add something like the following to your pages:
<script type="text/javascript" src="underscore.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="underscore.object.builders.js"></script>
At the moment there are no cross-contrib dependencies (i.e. each library can stand by itself), but that may change in the future.
How you can help
There is still a lot of work to do around perf, documentation, examples, testing and distribution so any help in those areas is welcomed. Pull requests are accepted, but please search the underscore-contrib issues before proposing a new sub-contrib or addition. Additionally, all patches and proposals should have strong documentation, motivating cases and tests. It would be nice if we could not only provide useful tools built on Underscore, but also provide an educational experience for why and how one might use them
Other (potentially) useful sub-contribs include the following:
String utilities
Date/time utilities
Validators
Iterators
Generators
Promises
Monads
Currying
Laziness
Multimethods
What do these mean? Well, that’s up for discussion. :-)
Enjoy.
:FImage copyright Gareth Fuller Image caption Skimming devices are used to obtain bank details
A skimming device to steal people's bank details has been discovered on a cash machine in Belfast.
It was found at an ATM at a service station at Milltown Road in the south of the city on Saturday morning.
Detectives have advised people to be vigilant when withdrawing money.
Skimming devices are usually attached to the front of a cash machine and a customer's card details are then copied when they withdraw money.
Small cameras may also be attached above the cash machine to record the customer using their PIN, enabling criminals to clone bank cards.
It is believed that in this case, the device was attached to the machine early on Saturday morning and police have appealed to anyone who was in the Milltown Road area between 05:00 BST and 06:00 BST and noticed anyone acting suspiciously to contact them.
Police issued the following advice:
• Make sure you hide your pin number while at an ATM as criminals may be watching;
• Be aware of your surroundings. If you are talking on a phone or wearing headphones, you cannot take in what is going on around you;
• Cardholders should also guard their personal identification number (PIN) more carefully and be aware that any form of distraction or assistance while they are using an ATM could mean someone is trying to steal their dispensed money or their card;
• If someone tries to distract you and you feel unsure - cancel the ATM transaction;
• Do not be complacent - a robbery can occur in crowded environments, not just deserted streets.The game Cuphead by Studio MDHR is no stranger at this point. However, the 2D Platformer has faced many attacks ever since it was announced, and now it is being called “ableist” and “racist” for its 1930’s artwork.
Cuphead has faced a lot during its time in development. The game was hated on because it was labeled as an Xbox One “exclusive” and that it was delayed once.
In addition to the above, some people actually wanted Cuphead canceled due to Microsoft being involved. Despite all of the upheaval, the devs dealt with the devil and released the game for PC and Xbox One.
But that wasn’t the end of Cuphead being ridiculed. A group of people looked into Cuphead and are now calling it “ableist” and “racist” for its 1930’s artwork. This movement seems to be picking up traction of recent.
The “racist” traction has picked up so that even AlphaOmegaSin can’t escape it and created this rant video on the growing matter.
I bet you’re probably thinking “where did this come from?” You see, it all started back on June 17th, 2015, around the time the 2D platformer was shown at E3. This event was kickstarted by a website named Not Your Mama’s Gamer, and comes from the following text that reads:
“Seeing the trailer for the game this week elicited a visceral reaction in me. It made me feel physically ill. I got queasy and my head swam a bit. It was one of those moments when you are sure that your blood pressure has shot up 20 or 30 points, a true WTF moment. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
The writer went out to explain that…
“I kept waiting for the next boss to be a thick-lipped, black-faced, spittle-dripping caricature of an African American man (probably holding aloft a terrified, screaming, blonde, Caucasian woman just to show what a threat he actually was). And looking back at the trailer for the game that was shown at last year’s E3 we see that the devil who is after the souls of our heroes (Cuphead and Mugman) is strangely reminiscent of caricature (NB that this year’s trailer devil was grayscale, so the color is unclear, with less pronounced lips).”
The writer is referencing to a geyscale picture of the devil in the game and this image below:
Furthermore, a recent happening on September 25th, 2017, emerged by the Rolling Stone or Glixel noting that the game could have included “racist stereotypes” and went on about racism during the 1930’s. Many users on Steam even started up discussions about Cuphead being “racist” and “sexist” with a certain user AncientToaster posting the following:
“Racism and Misogyny! I mean all the signs are there. This is uncalled for in 2017. – White Protagonist that saves the day from a brown skinned “Devil”
– Female Chalice figure needs to be saved from the Masculine Hero, a “damsel in distress”
– You fight and kill an Arabic figure (genie) this is racist and uncalled for There’s more but I don’t think I need to point them out with these three things.”
There’s no telling how much traction this movement will gain, but as it stands now some people believe that Cuphead is trying to brainwash people into accepting racism.Most people in most situations could probably benefit from one tiny prompt: “Are you sure you want to do that?” Fifteen-year-old techie Trisha Prabhu says that question could be the difference between life and death.
Prabhu is the inventor of ReThink, a software program that recognizes when users enter phrases often used to cyberbully into a computer—and displays a pop-up window asking the writer to reconsider. The Chicago high school student’s own studies find that a simple prompt (“Are you sure you want to send that message?”) is enough to discourage its teen users from sending nasty missives a whopping 93 percent of the time.
In 2013, Prabhu, then 14, read a news story about a Florida preteen who had committed suicide after being relentlessly cyberbullied by her peers. The young girl was certainly not alone: The U.S. Department of Education reports that 9 percent of students in grades six through 12 experienced cyberbullying during the 2011 school year. Others predict the numbers are much higher—that closer to half of all young people have experienced bullying online.
And cyberbullying can have horrifying consequences. Numerous studies have linked cyberbullying among adolescents to low self-esteem, anger, substance abuse, and suicide.
After extensive research, Prabhu decided to do something about the online problem. “I’ve been coding from a very young age. I love using my technology skills,” Prabhu told TakePart last week. “So I thought, OK, I know how to code. I know that this is something I’m passionate about. Let me try and fuse them together to see if I can make a difference. That’s really where ReThink was born.”
Since launching ReThink as part of her 2014 Google Science Fair entry, Prabhu has taken her program around the world, speaking most recently at a July event at the White House. Next up: a version of the ReThink for mobile devices, so that teens can carry the software’s gentle reminders around in their pockets.
“Very rarely in this connected world do we remember that we need to slow down, pause, and think about what we’re doing,” Prabhu told an audience at a TEDxTeen event in London last year. “We’re posting a message, and that has significance.”
via TakePart( This is a machine translation. Please allow for possible misinterpretations in the text. )
- Anubis advent of chemical attack design!- In 2012 was released also HD Remastered, appeared in [ANUBIS ZONE OF THE ENDERS] than Jehuty forming a pair with the orbital frame `` Anubis is RIOBOT!- The original of Yoji Shinkawa Mr. supervision, prototype and design is in charge of chemical attack!- Throughout the body, such as added detail for the outline in the movable like flowing to shine action, will light the arrangement of chemical attack flow.- Coloring, while wearing a punch to the whole body with pearl / metallic and matte paint, was also applied marking to each part in point.- Also part, use the die cast such as the inside of the joint part, has become the RIOBOT seems luxurious Anubis.- Large thrusters of six of the back is moving, I can enjoy the same pose in the play.- Accessories: Anubis body, Lions board pedestal, Uasuroddo, Uasuroddo holding hand parts × 2I
It’s been a while since Evernote and I went on our separate ways. The transition to life outside of the Green Elephant club was hard at the beginning. Evernote was not just an app, it was also a mental state. There are several apps I use today to replace Evernote, and I’m still evaluating most of them. One solid app I can start the discussion with is definitely staying in my new workflow: Google Keep.
Change in Thinking
Google Keep (available in your Google Drive, keep.google.com) is my go-to mental notes app. On Evernote, my default notebook was called “oh snap!” It was an offline notebook I used to capture everything and anything, to be later sorted out.
As it turned out, many of the notes within “oh snap!” became useless and at least half of the notes in this notebook were trash waiting to happen. Going through “oh snap!” and cleaning it became a necessary weekly ceremony; I had to do it or things would get ugly.
I also learned, after using this system for some time, that “oh snap!” made me lazy. Storing information in a system for storing everything kept me from “upgrading” information to what it should be. Pictures of WiFi passwords, reminders that needed scheduling in a calendar, locations that belong in a map… All this led to problems. I forgot the right tags, or had the same information recorded many times because I forgot I captured it already.
Google keep was not designed to save information long term, and that’s a good thing. If I have a note in Google Keep, I constantly ask myself if I still need it, and if so, why is it still in Keep and not where it probably belongs.
Why does Google Keep Work?
A segment of my Google Keep “stream.” Colors represent categories, location in the stream represent importance (important notes at the top).
It’s visual
Google Keep is beautifully visual. One quick look and I can tell everything: summaries, context and urgency. This is because each note displays a summery, has a certain color, and has a specific place on my screen. For example, blog post ideas are in green, work related topics in yellow, and things to do are in orange. I can move notes around easily so the more important notes are at the top of my list.
It’s super fast
Google Keep loads within a second on my phone (and I have an old Nexus 4), ready to go. Previews are available offline as well as a large part of the notes themselves. On Evernote, I had to pay to get offline content for my notes. I don’t remember when was the last time I opened a note on Keep and it wasn’t available within seconds, even on the subway.
I can also swipe notes out of view. It might sound like a silly thing, but this is huge. Notes that are swiped are not deleted, just achieved. Remember “oh snap!” and the purging ceremony? Not anymore. With Keep, I swipe all the time. Besides, it’s fun to swipe things away and get rid of tasks.
It’s Google, and it shows.
Gone are the days of waiting on Evernote to release Android updates. Gone the interface that looks different on every machine I use: Mac, Android and a Chromebook. The notes on my Android match the notes on my Chromebook which match the notes on my Mac at work. The only difference is that I see more of them on a bigger screen, and I can resize the app’s window any way I want.
Google Now works perfectly with Keep, as you’d expect. While you could set up Evernote to work with Google Now as well, the integration is smoother with Keep. I used to think that talking to my phone is silly, but speaking a quick thought is so much faster. Google Keep also records voice with the dictation, so I have a recording of what I said both in text and in audio. I wish I ask Google to also pick a color for a note, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this happens as well.
Google Keep is not Evernote.
As I explained, Google Keep is limited. It’s not a good place to organize and store notes long-term. Even with the new labels and recurring reminders, Google Keep’s focus is on quick notes. I do not store long-term items on Keep nor do I intend to do so; these items should go somewhere else.
Google Keep is not the only app I use to replace Evernote, but it’s a key component of my new system. If you have an Android phone and haven’t been using it because of Evernote addiction (as was the case with me), I recommend you give it a try.Baltimore's harbor and the rivers and streams that feed into it are still badly polluted by sewage leaks, stormwater runoff and trash. But area waters showed some signs of improving ecological health last year, cleanup advocates reported Thursday.
The third annual "Healthy Harbor Report Card" gives the watershed an "F" overall for the second straight year, with excessive bacteria from sewage and storm runoff making the water unsafe to touch, much less swim, in many places.
But water quality improved some in one harbor tributary, the Gwynns Falls, earning it a D-minus grade. And the new water wheel at the mouth of the Jones Falls kept 160 tons of trash out of the Inner Harbor.
"We're moving in the right direction, but we've got to pick up the pace," said Adam Lindquist, manager of the Healthy Harbor initiative for the Waterfront Partnership, a group of harbor-area businesses and tourist attractions.
The partnership produced the report card in collaboration with Blue Water Baltimore, the local watershed advocacy group, to track progress toward their goal of making the harbor and its tributaries swimmable and fishable by 2020.
A "water wheel" designed to scoop up 50,000 pounds of flotsam every day debuts Thursday in the channel between Piers 5 and 6, where the Jones Falls empties into the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River.
Water-quality scores for the harbor, the tidal portion of the Patapsco River and the Gwynns and Jones falls ranged from 52 percent to 61 percent. Three of the four have shown modest improvement since the annual evaluations began in 2012, but the Jones Falls worsened last year.
While the Gwynns Falls got noticeably better last year, it wasn't clear why, advocates said. The report card notes that Baltimore County restored 1,420 feet of stream and three acres of wetlands in Scotts Level Branch, but that project covered only a small fraction of the river's watershed.
Bacteria levels tended to be better in the harbor, the report card found, but still remain excessively high in many places. They spike after heavy rain events with street runoff and sewer overflows, but also register unsafe levels even in dry weather, reflecting the many chronic leaks in the aging sewer infrastructure in Baltimore city and Baltimore County.
Adding to the region's water quality woes, the report card says, are indications that heavy applications of road salt in winter are getting into the rivers and streams, threatening fish and other aquatic critters.
While finding conditions overall still poor, there were some bright spots. The trash-scooping water wheel at the end of the Jones Falls has drawn international attention for both its appearance and its performance, said Lindquist. Efforts are being made now, he said, to raise $500,000 to put a second wheel in Canton at the outfall there for a major storm drain network known as Harris Creek.
David Flores, the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper with Blue Water Baltimore, said some parts of the upper Gwynns Falls and upper Jones Falls watersheds also had "surprisingly good" water quality.
Flores said he's looking to see significant improvements in the next several years. The city and Baltimore County have been working for more than a decade now under state and federal orders to fix sewer overflows and leaks, he noted. They also are raising millions of dollars annually through storm-water fees to make mandated reductions in polluted runoff from city and suburban streets and parking lots.
"If we ever have a chance as a community — not just for the region, but for the Chesapeake Bay — to make measurable improvements in water quality, now is the time," Flores said.
Stressing that hopeful message, the |
a potential risk of abortion. Advocates on both sides acknowledge there’s medical evidence that carrying a fetus to term can lower a woman’s risk for breast cancer, but doctors convened by the National Cancer Institute a decade ago concluded that abortion does not raise the risk for developing the disease.Did Quebec's athletic commission bend the rules in favor of hometown favorite Georges St-Pierre heading into UFC 158?
That was the question making the rounds on Monday after video surfaced of a conversation between UFC vice-president Michael Mersch and Nick Diaz's camp at the Bell Centre in the moments before the UFC 158 weigh-in. In the video, Mersch informed Diaz both he and St-Pierre, the contestants for the main event welterweight title fight, would be allowed up to a.9-pound discrepancy on the 170-pound welterweight limit. Hypothetically, a fighter who weighed in at 170.9 would be recorded as 170.
This differs from the title fight weigh-in rules utilized by nearly every commission in North America. While non-title fighters are allowed up to an extra pound on their weight-class limit to allow for potential minor scale inaccuracies, championship contestants are expected to hit the precise limit.
Tuesday, a representative from the Quebec commission confirmed to MMAFighting's Ariel Helwani that the commission does not, in fact, take decimals into account when calculating fighter weights. But the rule has been in place for some time and was not instituted on the spot to protect GSP, as some have insinuated.
"I wish to inform you that, during UFC 158, no contestants exceeded the weight determined in their contracts," Quebec commission representative Joyce Tremblay said in an email to MMAFighting. "Currently, the Régie does take into consideration the maximum weight determined by contract when it carries out the weight-ins before a bout. However, our regulation on combat sports does not take decimals into account. Their consideration is a question of interpretation likely to be debated between the two parties under contract."
A look at the weigh-in results for the six UFC events held in Montreal show that while weights were rounded to the half-pound for the first UFC event in Quebec, UFC 83 in 2008, they haven't taken decimals into account in the five events since.
While no one from Diaz's camp has accused St-Pierre of actually weighing in above 170, the fact the team wasn't informed of the commission's interpretation of the rules until just before the weigh-ins raised eyebrows. In the video, Mersch informs the Diaz camp both of the Quebec rules in regards to decimals, and that the main-event fighters would have an hour to try to make weight if they missed, a luxury not afforded to other fighters on the card.
"Here, they're going to allow you and Georges to have an extra hour. Just in case somebody doesn't make it," Mersch said. "But the good news is, they don't count the decimal. If you're 170.2 it's 170. If it's 170.9. it's 170."
Asked by Diaz's camp why they weren't informed sooner, Mersch said "It's just something to keep in mind. That's kind of an off the record type of thing. But keep that in mind. As long as he's under 171, we should be good."
Carlos Condit, who fought St-Pierre in the main event of UFC 154 in Montreal, told MMAFighting on Tuesday he was never told of such weight allowances before the weigh-in for his fight with St-Pierre, which St-Pierre won via unanimous decision.
In an email to MMAFighting, UFC vice-president Marc Ratner, who handles the company's regulatory affairs, deferred to the Quebec commission.
Update: In a follow-up email after this piece was published, Tremblay said the commission's weigh-in rules have been in place for several years. "The regimentation on combat sports did not changed since many years," the email stated. "We don't know about the other commissions' procedures."If you had asked me, I would have guessed that this wouldn’t be possible. One intrepid OS explorer has made a video wherein he not only installs every version of Windows since 1985’s Windows 1.0, but proceeds to upgrade from one to another. The video, titled Chain of Fools: an Exploration of Windows upgrade procedures, shows how DOS and Windows are installed in a VMWare VM, and how a couple of DOS games were installed to see how newer versions of Windows handle backward compatibility. Similarly, various customizations were made to the Windows preferences to see how they survived the upgrades. Video embedded after the break.
It was interesting to find all the legacy cruft lying around the hard drive even after the Windows 7 install that left fingerprints of previous Windows versions.This post is part of a series. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
Our website has undergone a number of iterations in its implementation.
When we released Phalcon 3.0, we also released a fresh look for our website. However, some files were left over from a previous implementation and new text was introduced in several pages. This made that particular text not translatable by Transifex, the excellent service we use to handle translations for our site.
Goals
One our Q1 goals for 2017 is to improve documentation and also offer better implementations of Phalcon in applications to our community. So we cleaned up our website application, and will use it as an implementation sample for our community to inspire them for their own projects :)
Standards
Building the website we used a particular style throughout. Specifically:
PSR-2 was used as the coding standard
Used for comparisons, yoda conditions were
Identical comparisons
Single quotes for all strings
Implementation
This implementation of our website showcases the Phalcon\Mvc\Micro application with Middleware. It was built for maximum performance.
We implemented two applications for the website. One to dispatch the site for web users to see and a CLI application that allows for certain tasks that need to be run from the console, such as fetching the contributors from Github or cleaning the cache folders.
Let’s look at the implementation:
Skeleton
The skeleton of the application is very simple.The Retrofit library makes developers’ life much easier. It serves a very important need these days - to connect to the Internet and get data from it. Retrofit takes cared of this in a simplified way that’s pared down to just the minimum required code. In this talk from Mobilization Conference, Maciej Puchalski describes advanced concepts, along with a little introduction to the library.
What is Retrofit?
Retrofit is a library made for a world in which devices need a constant connection to data. It’s an open-source HTTP client for Android developed by Square.
In this talk, I will show you some code without Retrofit, some Retrofit basics, and handpicked advanced examples and real problems.
Endpoint Code
Here is a basic GET request.
String url = "https://api.github.com/users/sennajavie/repos”; URL obj = new URL(url); HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) obj.openConnection(); con.setRequestMethod(" GET "); final HashMap<String, String> requestParams = new HashMap<>(); requestParams.put(" User - Agent "," Mozilla / 5.0 "); requestParams.put(" Content - Type "," message " ); BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader (...); String data ; StringBuffer response = new StringBuffer (); while (( data = in. readLine ())!= null ) { response. append ( data ); }
The above is a GET method to GitHub with some request parameters. Here, we read this data in a single string without a model. And lastly, we have to close our connections and buffered readers.
Enter Retrofit
Retrofit allows us to scrap the above code, and replace it with only three lines to accomplish the same task.
Get more development news like this
interface ApiClient { @GET ( "users/{user}/repos" ) Call < List < Repository >> getReposList ( @Path ( "user" ) String user );
This is an API client with a GET method that downloads some repositories from GitHub. We specify the user by injecting it into the URL. The most interesting part here is the model. We have a concrete model - a concrete list of readable repositories that have been already converted from the string that received from the API.
Converters
Retrofit knows to replace the string of data into a list of repositories through Converters.
Converters serialize and deserialize data for a readable result, or in case of sending it back, we just make it more readable for the API and HTTP to do its work.
If the models are based on something other than serialization/deserialization, this will not be an issue, as Retrofit has many other built-in converters. The more popular ones are available out of the box: GSON, Jackson, Moshi, Protobuf, Wire, simple XML; the most popular ones and those that are available out of the box.
At our company, we had an API that required passing in the User to delete a user from a database. This wasn’t pretty, but Retrofit allows us this workaround:
interface ApiClient { @HTTP ( method = "DELETE", path = "users/{user}/repos", hasBody = true ) Call < ResponseBody > deleteRepo ( @Body Repository repo, @Path ( "user" ) String user ); }
We have our DELETE method, but we supply it with a body. Usually, it is illegal to provide a delete method with the body, however, Retrofit allows us to get it working. We just specify our HTTP method, name it “DELETE”, then specify it needs to have the body.
The rest of it is quite simple: we supply the path, and we supply the body.
The magic comes from the body parameter. Here’s when the converter applies its magic to serialize repository into a list of characters at JSON.
We also have something like formUrlencoded.
interface ApiClient { @FormUrlEncoded @POST ( "users/newUser" ) Call < ResponseBody > postNewUser ( @Field ( "name" ) String name, @Field ( "mail" ) String mail,...); } interface ApiClient { @FormUrlEncoded @POST ( "users/newUser" ) Call < ResponseBody > postNewUser ( @Body User user, @Field ( "timestamp" ) long date, @Header ( "sys" ) String system ); }
Here, provide the API with some data, and it’s posted into API in the format: name, value, name, value. If we want to get different pairs of this data, we could use field map and then supply a simple Java HashMap with strings.
We can also mix those solutions.
In the above, we have an URL which posts new user. This endpoint needs some additional fields, not only the user, as part of the body. This is allowed, as Retrofit supports it.
ApiClient Creation
Here is the initialization of the ApiClient.
interface ApiClient { @GET Call < List < Repository >> getReposList ( @Url String url, @Path ( "user" ) String user ); } gson = GsonConverterFactory. create (); Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit. Builder (). addConverterFactory ( gson ). baseUrl ( "https://api.github.com/" ). build (); return retrofit. create ( ApiClient. class );
Here, we use a GSON converter and apply it to the Retrofit builder, then apply the base URL. The most interesting part is the final line, it’s when we throw out our stack of code and Retrofit supplies it with its own stack of code. Everything is analyzed based on our needs that we provided with annotations (e.g. get, buff).
Client - Request Modify
Regarding Retrofit configuration, imagine such a situation in which our Facebook API having hundreds of endpoints. Each endpoint has some form of authentication.
@Override public okhttp3. Response intercept ( Chain chain ) { final Request request = chain. request (). newBuilder (). addHeader ( "Authorization", "CODE" ). build (); return chain. proceed ( request ); } final OkHttpClient client = new OkHttpClient. Builder (). addInterceptor ( new AuthHeaderInterceptor ()). build (); //.. retrofitBuilder. client ( client ) //.. return retrofit. create ( ApiClient. class );
The smart way to handle this is to intercept every request from Facebook to apply our authentication token dynamically.
For example, we will be sending a request to load an image. The request will be intercepted and the above code will invoke. It will add a header everything proceeds as normal.
To apply this, add the intercept and create an Ok HTTP client with it.
Debugging
A next cool thing with interceptors is that it allows for debugging. Using class HTTP logging interceptor, we specify what interests us.
HttpLoggingInterceptor loggingInterceptor = new HttpLoggingInterceptor (); loggingInterceptor. setLevel ( HttpLoggingInterceptor. Level. BODY );
In this example, we have level body: we get everything debugged, written down in our console windows.
Sequence matters!
Logger knows nothing about the authentication token because the sequence matters.
The proper course of action would be to have everything intercepted and added before logging.
OkHttpClient. Builder (). addInterceptor ( authHeaderInterceptor ). addInterceptor ( loggingInterceptor )
RxJava + Retrofit
We will extend our Retrofit with slight bits of RxJava. It’s a functional approach that will work its magic. You don’t need to have full-blown, functional logic in your code. We will use just simple RxJava to make Retrofit work better.
Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit. Builder () //.... addCallAdapterFactory ( RxJavaCallAdapterFactory. create ()) //.... build (); interface ApiClient { @GET ( "users/{user}/repos" ) Observable < List < Repository >> getReposList ( @Path ( "user" ) String user ); }
We got the repositories observable on call. We add some two lines of code and subscribe. The magic happens when we do the subscribe and inside subscriber, it waits for our data to come.
reposObservable = apiClient. getReposList ( "sennajavie" ); reposObservable. subscribeOn ( Schedulers. io ()). observeOn ( AndroidSchedulers. mainThread ()). subscribe (( repos ) -> { repos. get ( 0 ); });
RxJava - Threads
reposObservable. subscribeOn ( Schedulers. io ()) reposObservable. observeOn ( AndroidSchedulers. mainThread ())
If we execute the networking on main thread, it will get us an exception on Android. To avoid this, specify the work to be done in the background thread.
RxJava - Stopping threads
Imagine that our client has a problem with their app. The app gets launched, and something loads. Then the client gets irritated because it takes too long to load. The client shuts the app down. RxJava allows us to suspend, cancel, any of our request that we’ve made during the time and at the precise moment.
CompositeSubscription foregroundSub ; public void appStarted () { foregroundSub = new CompositeSubscription (); } public void appStopped () { foregroundSub. unsubscribe (); } Subscriber < List < Repository >> reposSubscriber = ( repos ) -> { repos. get ( 0 ); }; foregroundSub. add ( reposSubscriber ); //… reposObservable. subscribe ( reposSubscriber );
How does composite subscription work? Unfortunately, we have to remember that in each callback subscriber we create, we also have to place it in the foreground subscription.
Summary
Retrofit provides us with less code and allows for more possibilities. Those possibilities are connected to the endpoint control. We have granular endpoint control, and we get RxJava support out of the box.There was a recent post on Hacker News about one person’s results with advertising on Reddit. I thought I would write up a quick post to share our results as another example.
Designing an Ad for Reddit
The most important thing that we learned is that it is critical that the ad be well suited to the Reddit environment. It has to fit alongside typical Reddit content, but still stand out enough to receive attention. Here is a sample of two approaches that we took:
The first is a direct advertisement that used our tagline with the thought being that Reddit users would prefer a no nonsense approach. We threw in our cat mascot since we all know that Reddit loves cats! The second is a play on the awkward penguin meme that plays up the negotiating capability of BidKat. Which do you think was more effective?
Advertising Results
While the direct approach generated more discussion, the awkward penguin meme was more than twice as effective at generating clicks (0.180% vs 0.083% CTR). We attributed the success to a couple of different factors. The meme is popular on Reddit and is able to catch people’s eye while the content uses the standard problem/solution format. Based on feedback we received, it turns out that a lot of people end up taking a lot less money then they want when selling items and so this ad resonated with them.
Once we found the ad that worked, we ran it over a weekend targeting the AdviceAnimals subreddit at $50 a day. The awkward penguin ad lead to 2222 clicks at a cost of $0.07 per click.
Over 3 days:
Cost: $150
Total impressions: 1,235,638
Total clicks: 2222
0.180% CTR
1.49 pages per visit
Overall these clicks underperformed our site averages, but only slightly. Our main goal at the moment is to just get the word out about BidKat so that when people have an item to sell, they think of us. With this in mind, we managed to get a 32.43% goal conversion rate (watched our video or checked out the sample auction) which we are happy with.
Non-Advertising Results on Reddit
In addition to the advertising, I also did an AMA on Reddit. I really had no expectations, but thought I would give it a try. It ended up being relatively popular with 132 upvotes and over 150 questions asked. A link to BidKat in the description brought in 753 clicks with 1.90 pages per visit and a lower 69.32% bounce rate.
This just goes to show that if you can get an organic content about your company to become popular, it will be much more effective at bringing in engaged users than purchasing advertising outright. The tricky part is that the Reddit audience is pretty fickle and things like this generally happen by accident. The AMA turned out to be one way to be more proactive about it that worked for us.
Next Steps
Since our three day experiment brought in pretty consistent traffic over the three days, we’re going to try and run Reddit advertising for a month to see what happens. After the month is up, I’ll be sure to post another update on the results!
In the meantime, try out https://www.bidkat.com and let us know what you think!
BidKat (https://www.bidkat.com) is a service aimed at helping people sell their stuff for more money with less hassle. It enhances existing listing services with the ability to do automatic price negotiations and offer tracking. Create your auction, share the auction link, and then sit back and relax while we do the rest!
AdvertisementsBRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators plan to order Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google to stop paying financial incentives to smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search exclusively on their devices and warned the company of a large fine, an EU document showed.
A Google search page is seen through a magnifying glass in this photo illustration taken in Berlin, August 11, 2015. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski/Files
The document, running to more than 150 pages, was sent to complainants last week for feedback. Google received a copy in April in which the European Commission accused it of using its dominant Android mobile operating system to shut out rivals.
The EU competition enforcer in its charge sheet, known as a statement of objections, said it planned to tell the U.S. technology giant to halt payments or discounts to mobile phone manufacturers in return for pre-installing Google’s Play Store with Google Search.
The regulators also want to prevent Google from forcing smartphone makers to pre-install its proprietary apps if this restricts their ability to use competing operating systems based on Android.
Google “cannot punish or threaten” companies for not complying with its conditions, according to the document seen by Reuters.
The Commission’s investigation followed a complaint by FairSearch, a lobby group supported by companies that want to ensure they are not disadvantaged by search engine market dominance, in March 2013.
Google could face a large fine because the anti-competitive practices, which started from January 2011, are still ongoing, the document said.
“The Commission intends to set the fine at a level which will be sufficient to ensure deterrence,” it said.
The penalty could be based on revenue generated from AdWords clicks by European users, Google Search product queries, Play Store apps purchases and AdMob’s in-app advertisements.
Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso declined to comment. Google said: “We look forward to showing the European Commission that we’ve designed the Android model in a way that’s good for both competition and consumers, and supports innovation across the region.”
Separately, the Commission, which has also charged Google of favoring its own shopping service over those of rivals, could also fine it in that case, according to a second charge sheet seen by Reuters.
Google may have to rank rival comparison shopping services in the same way as its own services, the charge sheet sent in July and forwarded to its foes last week said. The document, close to 150 pages, was heavily edited, with large sections of confidential information redacted by Google.
The Commission said it would decide at a later stage whether to let Google charge competitors for displaying their services prominently, with the amount corresponding to Google’s operating cost or a nominal amount based on the lowest reserve price for AdWords which is currently 0.01 euro per click.0 Spotty gas outages reported across metro Atlanta
GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. - A recent repair on one of the largest fuel supply lines in the country is causing big problems for gas stations around the metro area.
Our Channel 2 Action News photographers noticed the outages at several big stations Friday afternoon. Channel 2’s Carl Willis reached out to the different gas station chains to figure out what was going on.
"We're actually dead on E. I hope the next station has gas," driver Danijel Beganovic said.
Are you seeing gas stations low on gas or out all together? We're looking into it. Spotty outages in Gwinnett @wsbtv pic.twitter.com/MBKShf8AEC — Carl Willis (@CarlWillisWSB) May 13, 2016
The spokesman for QuickTrip gas stations, Mike Thornbrugh, says some of their stores have run out of gas as they wait for their next shipment, which has been delayed because of the problems with the Colonial Pipeline.
He says any company supplied by the pipeline is most likely having the same problems.
The chain’s next gas shipment is due in tonight, but the fact that several stations are already without gas creates a logistical problem and it could take days before fuel is restored at each station.
A source says the issue is made worse by the time of year. Gas inventory is already typically low in May as companies prepare to switch over to EPA-approved low emission summer gas.
Thornbrugh says that’s because the pipeline problems will mean longer lines for fuel trucks to receive the fuel.
Thornbrugh says for right now at least one QT gas station in each quadrant of town should have gas. He says some of their stations are just without premium but have still been told to shut down all of their pumps to make sure they don’t run out completely.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.In the first study to look at the consequences of anti-gay prejudice for mortality, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals who lived in communities with high levels of anti-gay prejudice have a shorter life expectancy of 12 years on average compared with their peers in the least prejudiced communities.
“The results of this study suggest a broadening of the consequences of prejudice to include premature death,” noted the study’s lead author, Mark Hatzenbuehler, PhD, assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences. The study is online in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
“Our findings indicate that sexual minorities living in communities with higher levels of prejudice die sooner than sexual minorities living in low-prejudice communities, and that these effects are independent of established risk factors for mortality, including household income, education, gender, ethnicity, and age, as well as the average income and education level of residents in the communities where the respondents lived,” said Dr. Hatzenbuehler. “In fact, our results for prejudice were comparable to life expectancy differences that have been observed between individuals with and without a high school education.”
In order to examine the relationship between prejudice and mortality, the researchers constructed a measure capturing the average level of anti-gay prejudice in the communities where LGB individuals lived, beginning in 1988, using data on prejudicial attitudes from the General Social Survey, one of the primary sources of social indicator data in the social sciences. This information on sexual orientation and community-level prejudice was then linked longitudinally to mortality data via the National Death Index, through 2008. Thus, the authors were able to examine whether mortality risk differed for LGB individuals who lived in communities that were characterized by high versus low levels of prejudice. By the end of the study, 92% of LGB respondents living in low-prejudice communities were still alive; in contrast, only 78% of the LGB respondents living in high-prejudice communities were still alive.
The authors also found that suicide, homicide/violence, and cardiovascular diseases were all substantially elevated among sexual minorities in high-prejudice communities. LGB respondents living in high-prejudice communities died of suicide on average at age 37.5, compared to age 55.7 for those living in low-prejudice communities, a striking 18-year difference. Homicide and violence-related deaths are one of the most direct links between hostile community attitudes and death, and results indicated that homicide rates were over three times more likely to occur in high-prejudice communities than in low-prejudice communities.
Of the deaths in high-prejudice communities, 25% were due to cardiovascular disease, compared to 18.6% of deaths in the low-prejudice communities. “Psychosocial stressors are strongly linked to cardiovascular risk, and this kind of stress may represent an indirect pathway through which prejudice contributes to mortality. Discrimination, prejudice, and social marginalization create several unique demands on stigmatized individuals that are stress-inducing,” said Dr. Hatzenbuehler.
A significant strength of the study was the ability to document the associations between prejudice and mortality at the community level. Also of note, Dr. Hatzenbuehler points out, the community-level measure of prejudice does not rely on sexual minorities’ perceptions of how stigmatizing their communities are, but rather was based on the prejudicial attitudes of all respondents living in that community. “Therefore, this approach overcomes many of the limitations of individual-level measures of stigma and prejudice, which have characterized most stigma and health research to date.”From Herbert Chapman to Arsène Wenger, this is the definitive history of Arsenal's time at the famous Highbury stadium.
After several years of sitting in Highbury's local pubs and cafés with a Dictaphone, Jon Spurling has pooled hours of interviews with fans, programme sellers, local publicans and even those who dug the foundations of the Laundry End (and later cleared rubbish from its terraces) to meticulously construct the biography of the ground and chart the ups and downs of one of England's greatest league clubs.
Spurling has also spoken to numerous players: the late greats of yesteryear (Ted Drake, George Male and Reg Lewis), as well as legends of a more recent vintage - from Bob Wilson, Charlie George and Malcolm MacDonald to Anders Limpar and various legends of the Wenger era, including Patrick Vieira. Written in the year that Arsenal moved to the Emirates, Jon Spurling has produced the definitive account of the club's 93 years at Highbury.Group says church should show ‘moral leadership’ in light of claims that the oil giant misled the public over the risks of global warming
The Church of England should “show moral leadership” and immediately sell its investments in the oil giant ExxonMobil, according to a group of bishops and other clergy.
ExxonMobil is accused of misleading the public for decades over the dangers of climate change – the oil company denies the allegations – and has funded climate change denial, making its presence in the church’s £7.9bn investment fund of particular concern, the group argues. Investment funds worth more than $5tn have already committed to divest from fossil fuels.
Archbishop Justin Welby, the leader of the Church of England who worked for a decade in the oil industry before becoming a priest, described climate change as a “moral crisis” on Saturday. “Climate change is pushing us toward disaster,” he wrote in the New York Times. “It is not a distant danger – it is already with us. As we continue to burn fossil fuels, its effects will only grow.”
The latest UN climate change negotiations began in Bonn on Monday and Welby also sent a personal message to Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, who is overseeing the talks. Welby said the 85 million people in the worldwide Anglican communion that he leads “support your work to ensure that issues of climate change are recognised as an urgent priority requiring immediate attention”.
However, the Church of England argues it should remain an ExxonMobil shareholder so it can continue to engage with the company and influence it to change.
In a letter to the Guardian, also sent to the church, a group of five bishops and dozens of clergy said: “While many of us believe that the Church of England should divest from all fossil fuel companies for ethical reasons, we are especially concerned about the Church’s continued investment in US oil and gas company ExxonMobil.”
They cite a recent journal paper analysing ExxonMobil’s activities from 1977-2014 that concludes: “ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science – by way of its scientists’ academic publications – but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.” The company is facing legal action in the US over the issue. The company’s directors have also advised shareholders to vote against all resolutions on climate change since 1990, the letter’s authors said.
“The Church of England is uniquely placed to show moral leadership through its investment policies,” says the letter. “Now is the time for decisive action. We call on Church of England investors to take the lead and immediately divest from ExxonMobil.”
Bishop Michael Doe, one of the letter’s signatories, said: “By divesting from Exxon, the Church of England would send a hugely positive signal at a time when a rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy is urgently required.”
The Church of England divested in 2015 from companies involved in the extraction of coal and tar sands, the most polluting fossil fuels, but continues to hold significant oil and gas investments.
“Clearly we share concerns about ExxonMobil,” said a spokesman for the Church of England. “We firmly believe however that active investors have a role to play and strategic corporate engagement is too powerful a tool to be rendered ineffective by divesting. We remain in private engagement with the company.”
The spokesman said concerns raised by the church and others led to the successful passing of a resolution at ExxonMobil’s 2017 annual general meeting that requests disclosure of its analyses of how global warming will affect the company from 2018.
The church also launched a new policy on investing in extractive industries on Monday. It acknowledges the industries can make a positive contribution to development but also highlights that “extractives companies are particularly vulnerable to poor governance and ethical controversy, and harmful, long-lasting impacts on communities and the environment”.
The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, acting chair of the church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group said: “Strong returns to support our beneficiaries can go hand in hand with robust and transparent ethical investment policies.” The new policy says: “As a last resort, and on a case by case basis, the [church] may disinvest from companies where engagement is rebuffed or is clearly not leading to progress.”The package arrived on 24th morning. What a timing! Just in time to put it under the Christmas tree =)
I got three packages, each one were wrapped. And honestly... those were the best gifts I got.
Here is what the package contained :
A calendar with amazing Canada landscapes to make me dream each month of this new years.
A lovely snow globe featuring my favorite animal : a sloth! and what need to be my new philosophy of life : Don't hurry, be happy. This will be on my desk as a reminder to live a peaceful and happy life.
. This will be on my desk as a reminder to live a peaceful and happy life. A awesome shirt with my other favorite animal (I don't remember telling you that I loved deer, how much did you stalk me to find this? =P) drawn in my favorite style!
And finally a greeting card with a little word from Santa =)
Once again, thanks. That was definitely the best present I got. I am really happy.
I was not waiting so much, thanks very much Santa (and your daughter =). You are the best!
I wish you the best for this new year.So John Major and Tony Blair are on the same team now. It could be one of those movies that give ageing Hollywood action heroes a valedictory outing (in cinema-trailer bass). “Once they were rivals. Everyone thought they were out of the game. But there was one last job to do, and this time they’d be in it together…”
And the award for best political comeback goes to Beating Brexit. No, wait! Wrong envelope. In a speech on Monday, John Major questioned Theresa May’s technique for removing Britain from the EU. Impatient stomping towards the exit while ramping up unrealistic expectations reduces the chances of getting a good deal and makes an imperfect one hard to sell. Blair made a companion argument last week, urging those alarmed by the current national trajectory to campaign for a different one.
Both former prime ministers also identified new inclemency in the political weather – a hailstorm of intolerance that batters the Euro-dissenter with accusations of elitism, hatred of democracy, depleted patriotism. The point was proved by Brexiteers’ personalised attacks on Major and Blair within hours of their interventions. None engaged in the substance of the speeches. The line was that right-thinking people must despise execrable running dogs of the discredited pro-Brussels junta, now plotting in exile.
Many tides have risen and fallen to beach Blair and Major on the same political shore. It will soon be the 20th anniversary of New Labour’s landslide victory. That was not just an electoral upheaval: it was a generational pivot. And it felt culturally seismic in a way that subsequent elections did not, but last June’s referendum did.
UK culture wars are not as noisy and persistent as American ones. We don’t badge ourselves with polarised views on abortion, Darwin, guns or whatever our equivalent issues might be. It isn’t the British style, which means important trends sometimes go unremarked.
Culture and identity tend to be treated as peripheral expressions of whatever is happening in the economy, which is sometimes true but not always. May understands that. She is a more astute culture warrior than economist, and for now that is serving her well.
May grasped sooner than many Tories that Blairism had entrenched a new cultural settlement, casting Conservatism as mean-spirited and electorally nonviable. She took flak for admitting to the “nasty party” image in 2002, but thereby laid foundations for David Cameron’s project of brand decontamination. She understood the social dynamics of New Labour’s victory better than the victorious party, which often looked shifty in power, as if still questioning its entitlement to be there – still quaking from the trauma of unexpected defeat by Major in 1992.
Cultural conservatives took a while to realise how marginal they had become and how derided they were by the new mainstream. But doyens of the new mainstream also failed to grasp that they were an establishment now, even if they didn’t feel like one.
The 1997-2010 administration did not dismantle old hierarchies, but nor was it just a prolonged exercise in Tory seat-warming. It oversaw the final stages of a campaign against deference and repressive moralism variously expressed since the 1950s by angry young men on the stage, shaggy-haired rock’n’rollers on the radio, women’s lib, gay rights and antiracism marchers, alternative comedians and commissioners of “edgy” drama on Channel 4. And yet, despite many victories, liberal culture warriors never lost a sense of themselves as rebels with a duty to affront – even offend – traditional attitudes wherever they lurked.
To win power from New Labour, Cameron adapted to Blairish mode: self-consciously modern, socially liberal, metropolitan and relaxed about Europe. It is arresting to think how recently the very idea of taking Britain out of the EU was dismissed by a Conservative leader as the fixation of retired majors, golf-club bores and fringe-dwelling racists.
Just as winners and losers after 1997 struggled to adapt to their new positions, the acceptance of new roles post-2016 is going to take time. Just as some liberals once resisted their status as a cultural elite, there is a tendency among Brexiteers now to flee the responsibility contained in their victory.
There was always something absurd about “anti-establishment” language in the plummy tones of Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. But their campaign did capture a rebellious spirit. Partly it was generalised frustration at the state of everything; partly it was counter-revolution – the backlash by people who sensed that their lives, interests and anxieties were the punchline to a joke at a fancy London dinner party.
Imagining himself as the figurehead of a revolt, Farage can’t drop the confrontational stance. He wants mainstream recognition as the author of Brexit. He wants a knighthood. Yet he also wants licence to be the perpetual rebel; always testing boundaries with “politically incorrect” transgression.
The reactionaries won’t admit they’ve won, and the liberals haven’t grasped the scale of their defeat. That is good for May, who navigates through the middle. She read the cultural mood when it was against her party in opposition. Now she co-opts a different mood as her personal project in power. That doesn’t mean she will make a success of Brexit, as she promises. The real process hasn’t even begun. The economy will soon enough be the big theme in politics again. Then the warnings issued by two former prime ministers might resonate. But for now, it is culture wars that dominate, and the current prime minister who commands the field.This is the 1st part of a series of 3 |
skull length than a tyrannosaurid specimen of nearly identical femur length. Full size image
Phylogenetic analysis
We added Qianzhousaurus sinensis to the phylogenetic analysis of Brusatte and Benson33, a modified version of the analysis of Brusatte et al.2 The analysis includes a broad sample of 21 tyrannosauroids scored for 317 morphological characters (Supplementary Data 2). A parsimony analysis resulted in two most parsimonious trees (586 steps, consistency index=0.628, retention index=0.834). The strict consensus tree (Fig. 5) places Qianzhousaurus sinensis, A. altai and A. remotus in a subclade of long-snouted tyrannosaurids at the base of Tyrannosaurinae, sister taxon to the clade of Teratophoneus, Daspletosaurus, Tarbosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. The long-snouted clade, which is here termed Alioramini, is strongly supported (jackknife percentage=87%, Bremer support=4) and united by several synapomorphies, including discrete rugosities on the nasal and 18 or more dentary teeth (see full list in Supplementary Note 3). The three alioramin taxa comprise a polytomy in the strict consensus, because one most parsimonious tree places Qianzhousaurus as the sister taxon to an A. altai+A. remotus clade, whereas the other places Qianzhousaurus and A. altai in a clade exclusive of A. remotus. This uncertainty is almost certainly due to large amounts of missing data in A. remotus, a taxon known only from a fragmentary holotype that has never been fully described in the literature.
Figure 5: Phylogenetic relationships of long-snouted tyrannosauroids. Strict consensus of the two most parsimonious trees. Trees recovered from the primary phylogenetic analysis (586 steps, consistency index=0.628, retention index=0.834). Numbers next to nodes denote Bremer supports and jackknife values (absolute frequencies, 36% character removal probability, 1,000 replicates). The novel clade of long-snouted tyrannosauroids, Alioramini, is indicated. Full size image
As a supplementary analysis to assess the robustness of our phylogenetic results, we also added Qianzhousaurus to an alternative tyrannosauroid phylogenetic analysis presented by Loewen et al.3 (see Supplementary Note 3 and Supplementary Data 3). Agreeing with our primary analysis, this procedure also recovered Qianzhousaurus, A. altai and A. remotus in a subclade of long-snouted taxa, with a minor difference that this clade is placed immediately outside of Albertosaurinae+Tyrannosaurinae rather than as basal tyrannosaurines. This provides additional support for our primary phylogenetic conclusion: that Qianzhousaurus is a part of a restricted subgroup of long-snouted tyrant dinosaurs.BEIRUT/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S.-backed Syrian fighters have surrounded the Islamic State-held city of Manbij from three sides as they press a major new offensive against the jihadists near the Turkish border, a spokesman for the fighters said on Monday.
But in a sign of the difficulty world powers have faced in building a coalition to take on the self-declared caliphate, the slow pace of a separate assault by the Iraqi army on a militant bastion near Baghdad caused a rift between the Shi’ite-led government and powerful Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia.
The simultaneous assaults on Manbij in Syria and Falluja in Iraq, at opposite ends of Islamic State territory, are two of the biggest operations yet against Islamic State in what Washington says is the year it hopes to roll back the caliphate.
The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), including a Kurdish militia and Arab allies that joined it last year, launched the Manbij attack last week to drive Islamic State from its last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish frontier. If successful it could cut the militants’ main access route to the outside world, paving the way for an assault on their Syrian capital Raqqa.
Last week Iraqi forces also rolled into the southern outskirts of Falluja, an insurgent stronghold 750 km down the Euphrates River from Manbij just an hour’s drive from Baghdad.
The SDF in Syria are backed by U.S. air strikes and a small contingent of American special forces. The Iraqi army is also backed by U.S. air power, as well as by powerful Iran-backed Shi’ite militia led by politicians who have emerged as rivals of Prime Minister Haider Abadi.
In Syria, the government of President Bashar al-Assad also launched a separate offensive last week against Islamic State, with Russian air support.
The assaults by Islamic State’s disparate enemies on a variety of fronts have put unprecedented pressure on the group, although its fighters have put up strong resistance so far.
The offensives have also put large numbers of civilians in fresh peril. The United Nations estimates 50,000 civilians are trapped in Iraq’s besieged Falluja, and more than 200,000 are at risk of being displaced by fighting around Syria’s Manbij.
RACE TO RAQQA
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that reports on the war, said the U.S.-backed forces in northern Syria had cut the road north from Manbij to Islamic State-held Jarabulus at the Turkish border.
Sharfan Darwish, spokesman for the SDF-allied Manbij Military Council, said the U.S.-backed alliance had advanced to within 6 km (4 miles) of Manbij, and the attack was going to plan. More than 150 jihadists had been killed, with 50 of the bodies in SDF hands, he said.
Homes being used by Islamic State members were now empty as they had left with their families, he said: “They took everything they could and left the city.”
Reuters was unable to verify the account, and Islamic State fighters could not be reached.
The SDF included the commander of one of the groups, Faysal Abu Layla of the Sun of the North Battalions, who died of wounds caused by a mortar bomb, Darwish said.
A fighter of the Syria Democratic Forces mans an anti-aircraft weapon in the southern rural area of Manbij, in Aleppo Governorate, Syria May 31, 2016. REUTERS/Rodi Said/File Photo
The Observatory said 56 Islamic State members and 19 SDF fighters had been killed so far. It also said Islamic State fighters had sent their families out of Manbij, but did not confirm Darwish’s account that fighters themselves had left.
The Syria fight against Islamic State is taking place in the midst of a multi-sided five-year civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and made millions homeless.
Russia and the United States, both enemies of Islamic State, support opposing sides in the wider conflict and are leading separate air campaigns. They have cooperated since last year on diplomacy to end the wider war, largely fruitlessly.
The SDF and its Kurdish faction have proven to be the first U.S. allies on the ground in Syria that are effective against Islamic State, and have been bearing towards the militants’ Syrian capital Raqqa. The Syrian government has also been advancing in the area with Russian support, in what some of its allies call a “race to Raqqa” to prevent U.S. allies from dominating territory won from Islamic State.
Warplanes believed to belong to Russia or the Syrian army killed at least 17 people in an air raid on a market in an Islamic State-held town in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor on Monday, the Observatory reported. The province links Islamic State’s Syrian territories with its Iraq strongholds further down the Euphrates. Moscow denied its planes had flown in the area near the reported strike.
A Syrian military source said the army had captured a crossroads in its latest offensive, from which it could advance towards Raqqa, Deir al-Zor or eastern Aleppo.
BAGHDAD SHIFTS BRIGADE TO MOSUL
In Iraq, Washington’s main target is Mosul, a northern city that held 2 million people before it fell to Islamic State two years ago. U.S. planners hope Mosul can be taken this year by a combination of Iraqi government forces and security forces from Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region.
But the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government veered from the plan two weeks ago with the announcement that its next offensive would be just west of Baghdad in Falluja, a Sunni bastion where U.S. troops faced the bloodiest battles of their own 2003-2011 occupation.
Iraqi army troops poured into a rural district of Falluja a week ago, but halted at the outskirts of built-up areas, with Prime Minister Abadi saying the assault would be slowed to protect civilians.
Shi’ite militia criticized Abadi’s decision to slow the advance. They say Falluja is a more urgent target than Mosul because of its proximity to the capital, where a campaign of suicide bombings has escalated in recent weeks.
Washington worries that the Iraqi army could become bogged down in Falluja and a protracted battle there could worsen sectarian hostility, especially if the Shi’ite join the fight.
Abadi depends on powerful politicians linked to the militia for his ruling coalition. He has tried to remove some from senior government posts, but faces resistance in parliament.
The head of the largest militia, former government minister Hadi al-Amiri, criticized the army for moving a brigade to an area near Mosul while the battle for Falluja was still under way, saying the decision was taken under U.S. pressure.
“Unfortunately there is an absence of precise planning for the military operations,” said Amiri, who leads the Badr Organisation. “I believe that sending a large number of armored vehicles and assets to Makhmour, under the pretext of the Mosul battle, is a betrayal of the battle for Falluja,” he told Al-Sumaria TV.
Slideshow (2 Images)
Iraqi army officers confirmed a brigade had arrived on Sunday night in Makhmour, a staging point for a future assault on Mosul. Troops would prepare for an offensive to take an airfield across the Tigris River, and bridges and boats had been brought to facilitate the crossing.
Iraqi armed forces spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told Reuters the mobilization near Mosul would not subtract from the campaign in Falluja.
“The forces allocated to Falluja are achieving victories and we have started moving towards the city center.”Why This Child Bride Needs Good Grades: #15Girls
Enlarge this image toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
This story is part of our #15Girls series, profiling teens around the world.
Nimmu is 15 years old. She comes from a rural village in northern India, and she's been married since she was 10.
This year she's trying to change her fate.
In Nimmu's village, when you're married young, you don't move in with your husband right away. You stay with your own parents until around your 15th birthday. That's when they send you to your in-laws.
From what Nimmu has seen, you basically lose your freedom at that point. The in-laws assign whatever chores they see fit. And you're expected to follow their orders without question or complaint.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
Right now only one thing is keeping Nimmu from that life: She's at a boarding school in the city of Jodhpur. It's run by a charity called the Veerni Institute. Nimmu's in-laws have been urging her father to hand her over, but her father has agreed to hold off the in-laws and let her stay at the school as long as she gets good grades.
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
It's a lot of pressure. "Before, school wasn't such a big deal to me," Nimmu says, speaking in Hindi through an interpreter. "But this year I suddenly feel so much pressure, and I've become extremely serious. I want to do very well."
To continue beyond 10th grade she'll need to pass a tough national exam this March.
The problem?
"And as of now, I'm not a great student," she says.
What Nimmu's Up Against
Are you a regular Goats and Soda reader? We'd like to hear what you think of the blog — and what you'd like to see us cover. Will you take five minutes to take this survey for us? Take the survey.
Child marriage has been illegal in India for years. (That's why we can't use Nimmu's full name; it's also illegal to name a minor involved in a crime in India.) Nevertheless, the practice is deeply embedded in the culture of many rural areas, and parents marry off their children all the time in secret. Nearly half of women age 20 to 24 in India were married by the time they turned 18 — with nearly one in five married by age 15, according to UNICEF. And India accounts for about a third of the world's child marriages.
We get a sense of what Nimmu is up against when we catch up with her midway through a long day at school.
It's 3 p.m. Nimmu has been in class almost continuously since 7 a.m. Now it's time for study hall. An aide pops his head in the door and barks at everyone to keep quiet. But Nimmu is worried about her math homework. She twiddles with her long braid, then pokes a friend.
"Hey!" she whispers. "Can you check this? My answer doesn't match what's in the book."
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
3:30 p.m. Nimmu has moved on to English class.
Seventy kids are crammed onto metal benches. It's stifling hot. Nimmu is losing focus. She starts humming to herself.
Next up, chemistry. Nimmu sighs heavily.
The teacher starts droning — and Nimmu is immediately lost.
"Sir... we can't understand anything you're saying," she mutters under her breath, half-laughing, half-moaning. "It's like you have marbles in your mouth."
It's not until 8 p.m. that Nimmu finally gets a chance to chill in her dorm. The room is spare — no decoration on the walls, no chairs. Just four metal cots lined up in a row. Nimmu sits on one of them. Her roommates squeeze in next to her.
Everyone's giggling.
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
"Do you whisper to each other at night?" we ask. "Yes ma'am," they say.
"What are you going to talk about tonight when we leave?" we ask. Nimmu breaks into a mischievous grin. "Ma'am, you!" she says.
The girls are among 70 students provided with free room, board and schooling by the Veerni Institute. They're all from remote villages that generally don't have a high school nearby. About 30 of the girls are married — including every one of Nimmu's roommates.
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
One of them, a shy girl in a colorful headband, tells us she was 9 on her wedding day. Nobody explained what was happening during the ceremony.
"I had no idea I was getting married," she says.
Nimmu did know. She was matched with a boy just a few years older.
"I was married at 4 a.m. because that was considered an auspicious hour.... I woke up and I wanted to go back to sleep, but my family wouldn't let me."
They helped her into a traditional Indian wedding gown.
"My dress was red," she remembers. "And it was very big because I was very small. And the scarf on my head was also too long."
We ask her if the gown was pretty. "No," she says, switching from Hindi to English and giving a rueful chuckle. "I don't like this."
It was too old-fashioned, she explains. And the embroidery was lame.
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
Still, at the time, Nimmu was excited. It was a party. Then she noticed that her older sister was sobbing. She was also being married that day.
"I asked her, 'Why are you so upset? You're getting married,' " Nimmu recalls. "She said, 'You're too young to understand. You'll understand when you're older.' "
Today, Nimmu does understand. Because she sees what's happening to other 15-year-old girls in the village. This summer one of her closest friends was sent to her in-laws. Now that girl spends all day cooking and cleaning for them.
"She tells me there is no life after marriage," says Nimmu. "She has no freedom. She has to do everything her in-laws say."
Nimmu's in-laws seem to have a similar future in mind for her.
"My in-laws don't want me to study 10th grade. They're OK with it as long as I'm doing well.... Otherwise, they say what's the point?"
Nimmu's not trying to get out of her marriage. Arranged marriage is the norm in much of India. But she does want to delay the start of her married life. She wants to wait until she has enough education to land a job. She's heard that with a high school degree, or better yet, two or three years of training beyond, even a village girl can get a job as a teacher or a community health worker or a policewoman.
Nimmu is vague about what job she could do — maybe something in an office? But she has at least seen the example of a great-aunt who has a job as a teacher and who seems to be treated with so much more respect in her family. To Americans, it might seem a minor difference to start an arranged marriage at 18 or 20 rather than at 15. But Nimmu thinks the impact will be huge on her quality of life. It's one thing to arrive at your in-laws' house as a 15-year-old school dropout whom everyone can boss around. Quite another to arrive as a woman with her own income.
"That way nobody will be able to get away with saying to me, 'You're good for nothing.'... And even if they say it, I can tell them, 'I earn my own money. I eat off my own money. So what's your problem?' "
The Search For The Missing Report Card
It's Sunday. Nimmu's one day off. We're in the car with her driving home to her village.
She doesn't visit often. The director of the Veerni Institute is taking her today because she needs to pick up last year's report card so she can complete her registration for this term.
We bump along a sandy, narrow road — flat desert stretching for miles on either side — before stopping next to a collection of concrete block huts.
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
Nimmu springs out of the car.
"Papa!" she cries at the sight of her father.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome!" he says.
She heads into her house. It's dark and cool inside. She pulls out a metal chest by her bed and starts searching for the report card.
Her father watches, a little worried. His name is Lumbaram. Like a lot of rural Indians he goes by one name.
He dresses like a typical villager — white tunic, multicolored turban. He's got a typical job among the men here as a construction worker. And he says all his life he's been taught the typical view of girls in the village: They're a burden. One more mouth to feed until you raise a dowry to pay some other family to take her off your hands.
He never accepted that idea.
"No that's a terrible way of thinking," he says. "Even as a child I always believed a girl and boy are the same."
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Mentor/for NPR
He can't explain why he's always felt so differently from everyone else he knows. Maybe because he never had sisters and wished for them, he muses.
Yet when it came to marrying off his daughters, the family pressure was impossible to resist. It all started because Lumbaram's younger brother needed a wife.
"There is a shortage of girls everywhere. We couldn't find a girl," he says.
It's a persistent problem in this region. Having a girl is considered such a curse that families often insist on aborting a pregnancy if they find out the fetus is female. Or they'll kill an infant girl right after she's born.
"I searched for a bride for my brother for eight years," says Lumbaram.
Finally he had to make a deal with another family: Their daughter would marry his brother, and he'd give them his eldest daughter to marry their son. It's a common trade. And here's where Nimmu comes in. She's the middle daughter. And in the village, when you arrange a marriage for one daughter, you often marry off the rest at the same time.
"We are very poor and it takes so much money for one girl's wedding," says Lumbaram. "If I get one girl married it's the same price as if I get several girls married."
Still, he hated doing it. Just talking about it he starts to choke up.
"I really cried a lot at the time," he says, after regaining his composure. "Even right now I feel like crying. It hurts to see my child going through so much trauma. It makes me so sad."
But Lumbaram has vowed to make it up to his daughters. And the Veerni Institute has given him a way to do that by paying for their education. Normally Lumbaram couldn't afford to send Nimmu to high school. She would be sitting at home, and he'd have no excuse for not sending her to her in-laws at 15. Now he can tell them, "Look, she's finishing high school."
Nimmu is grateful to her father for sticking up for her. Still, the arrangement can sometimes strain their relationship. When she does poorly on a test, she says, "He gets angry with me and tells me... we're going to have to withdraw you from school and send you to your in-laws' house because what will I have to tell them.... He's under so much pressure in the village."
That's why at this particular moment, Nimmu is starting to stress out. It turns out the report card is nowhere to be found, and the deadline for handing it in is tomorrow.
"Maybe it's in my trunk back at school?" says Nimmu. "But I lost the key to it."
Her father shakes his head.
Nimmu's having a typical scatterbrained teen moment. But in her situation, every slip-up feels fraught with consequences.
Nimmu borrows a cellphone to call an administrator back at the school. Can you try breaking the lock, she asks. A few minutes later the administrator calls back. The report card was in the trunk.
"Thank God!" Nimmu says.
Crisis averted, Nimmu starts walking back to the car with the Veerni Institute's director. Lumbaram stops them. He points to a girl, lingering a few feet away. Can you please enroll her in the school, too, he asks.
"She's really intelligent," he says. "It's just that her parents don't care to educate her."
The director, Mahendra Sharma, looks pained. His budget is stretched to the max.
"I guarantee," Lumbaram continues. "This child won't cry and be homesick. She will just study."
OK, the director, agrees — he'll see what he can do.
A Pop Song Moment
On the long drive back to school, we talk music. Nimmu breaks into one of her favorite Bollywood songs. It's called "Hangover."
"I tried forgetting you!" Nimmu sings in Hindi. "The hangover of your memory!"
Suddenly, it's possible to forget that Nimmu is someone's wife.
For these few minutes, at least, she's just a 15-year-old girl, in the back seat of a car, singing a pop song.
Share Your Story
toggle caption Poulomi Basu/VII Photo
Being a 15-year-old girl can be tough no matter where you live. Tell us: What was the hardest thing about being 15? Post a photo of yourself as a teen with your answer on Twitter or Instagram, and tag your post with #15Girls and @NPR. More details here.Zionist Apartheid: A Crime Against Humanity By Amjad Alqasis September 24, 2013 " Information Clearing House - In 1973, the United Nations rightly condemned “the unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism and Israeli imperialism.” Only two years later, it determined “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” At the behest of the U.S. administration, this resolution was revoked in 1991 in order to pave the way for the Madrid Peace Conference that same year; however, equating of Zionism with racism is still valid.
Apartheid is based on the establishment and maintenance of a regime of institutionalized discrimination in which one group dominates others. In the case of Israel, Zionist ideology is the driving force behind the ongoing Palestinian reality of apartheid. Not limited to the occupied Palestinian territory, the Israeli regime also targets Palestinians residing on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Line (known as the Green Line) and millions of Palestinian refugees living in forced exile while promoting Jewish-Israeli colonization to the expropriated land. As such, the Palestinians, wherever they reside, are collectively exposed to one coherent structure of Zionist apartheid. That structure discriminates against Palestinians in areas such as nationality, citizenship, denial of reparation (return, restitution and compensation), residency rights, and land ownership. This system originated in 1948 in order to dominate and dispossess all forcibly displaced Palestinians, including the 150,000 who were able to remain within the “Green Line” and who became Palestinian citizens of Israel. The occupation of the remaining part of Palestine by Israeli forces in 1967 subjected the Palestinians living within that territory to the same Zionist apartheid regime.
The findings of the South African session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine concluded that Israel’s practices against the Palestinian people constitute the crime of apartheid within all of Palestine (also referred to as Mandate or historic Palestine). However, the Zionist Movement—and later Israel—had no interest in creating a system of apartheid in order to simply construct and maintain the domination of one “racial” group over another. Israel neither aimed to exploit the indigenous Palestinians for labor nor limit their political and social participation. Rather, its intention has always been to establish a homogeneous Zionist state exclusively for Jewish people. This has been apparent since the early years of the Zionist Movement and is further illustrated by the fact that Israel has hitherto no defined borders. Israel’s former Prime Minister Golda Meir explained that “the borders are determined by where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map.”This statement, in combination with David Ben-Gurion’s writings in 1937, in which he stated that “the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish state could give us something which we never had,”[1] offers broad guidelines for transferring Palestinians out and implanting Jewish settlers into the territory.
The creation of a Jewish nation state in a land with a small Jewish minority could only be achieved by forcibly displacing the indigenous population and implanting Jewish colonizers from abroad. Accordingly, Zionist apartheid’s main manifestation is forced population transfer.
Forced population transfer has been defined as a practice or policy that has the purpose or effect of moving persons into or out of an area—either within or across an international border:
Transfer can be carried out en masse, or as “low-intensity transfers” affecting a population gradually or incrementally.
Forced population transfer is illegal and has constituted an international crime since the Allied Resolution on German War Crimes, adopted in 1942. The strongest and most recent codification of the crime is in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which clearly defines the forcible transfer of population and implantation of settlers as war crimes.
The intention on “transfer” in Zionist thought was encapsulated in 1905 by the words of Israel Zangwill, one of the early Zionist thinkers, who stated that “if we wish to give a country to a people without a country, it is utter foolishness to allow it to be the country of two peoples.” [2]
Already 66% of Palestinians worldwide have been displaced by Israel’s ongoing forcible displacement of the Palestinian people.Today, this population transfer is carried out by Israel in the form of its overall policy of “silent” transfer—not by mass deportations like in 1948 or 1967. This displacement is silent in the sense that Israel carries it out while trying to avoid international attention by displacing small numbers of people on a weekly basis. It is thus distinguishable from the more overt transfers achieved under the pretense of warfare in 1948 or 1967.
Population transfer is achieved by creating an overall untenable living situation that leaves no choice for the inhabitants other than to leave their homes. Moshe Sharett—one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence—indicated the desire to foster onerous living conditions when he stated “a policy based on minimal fairness should be adopted toward Arabs who were not inclined to leave.”[3]Therefore, Israel’s apartheid system is a means to an end and not an end-goal in itself because it does not simply seek to dominate the indigenous Palestinians, but to forcibly displace them.
South Africa, on the other hand, not only invented the apartheid system, but was also proud of its creation and publicly advocated for it. The word “apartheid” itself is Afrikaans for “separateness” and became the official government policy of racial segregation in 1948. The South African apartheid structure was based on a clear-cut separation and segregation policy.[4] It was clear from the outset that the purpose of South Africa’s apartheid system was to create a permanent apartheid structure in order to preserve the established status quo. For instance, South Africa designed the 1970 Bantu Homelands Citizens Act to react and adapt to increasing criticism from the international community. This law established separate legal entities (Bantustans) and denaturalized the black population so the South African government could argue that the black population was no longer excluded from state affairs because by law they no longer belonged to the South African state. This attempt aimed at continuing the exploitation of the indigenous workforce and resources, thus fortifying the existing system while at the same time discarding its racist, anti-democratic image.
The international crime of apartheid and the subsequent Apartheid Conventionwas modeled on, but not limited to, the South African apartheid system. John Dugard wrote that “The Apartheid Convention was the ultimate step in the condemnation of apartheid as it not only declared that apartheid was unlawful because it violated the Charter of the United Nations, but in addition it declared apartheid to be criminal.”Today, Israel is guilty of committing various crimes in order to forcibly displace the Palestinian people from Palestine. Israel’s crimes such as apartheid and persecution, as well as its permanent occupation and annexation-colonization, are intended to create an unbearable situation in order to expel the indigenous Palestinian population. This continuous and calculated targeting of the Palestinian people must be challenged by the international community as it was regarding South Africa where that state’s actions and policies were codified into elements of an international crime against humanity. Israel’s regime must be judged accordingly and its impunity must be brought to an end because silence—if not complicity—in the face of fundamental rights violations further entrenches politics to the detriment of law. The first significant step in that direction would be reinstating United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975, declaring Zionism as a form of racism, and paving the way for the end of Israeli impunity and Zionist apartheid.A late-night crowd in Bounds Green station in 1941. Jim Dyson/Getty Images/Fox Photos
A new era for London begins on Friday, when the city introduces all-night weekend Tube service on the Victoria and Central lines.
That change, which will expand to three other Underground lines this fall, is a response to London’s evolution into a “Non-Stop Capital.” (“The City That Never Sleeps” is taken.) Since 2000, late-night Tube ridership has risen at about twice the rate of daytime trips. But after the system closes, shortly after midnight, is where the real demand is: Nighttime bus usage has nearly tripled in that time.
Londoners (and visitors) want to stay out later, and the new service—which was supposed to start last fall, but was delayed due to “tortuous” negotiations with transit unions—will introduce a more flexible schedule to the city’s nightlife. It’s great news, of course, for 24-hour party people, out at theaters, restaurants, parties, bars, clubs, concerts, and the like. And it offers hope to those who think London has lost its late-night mojo.
But it’s even better news for nighttime workers: About half of night bus ridership, in 2008, consisted of commuters or workers on other business. The Night Tube is anticipated to serve 180,000 riders a night, and save them each 20 minutes on average. For workers on the night shift, the new transit will add hours to the week. Compared with New York—the world’s only 24/7 subway service—London’s trains will run with high frequency, with arrivals every 8 minutes on some stretches of track.
In this respect, London is moving in the opposite direction of Boston and Washington, D.C. Boston cut back its late-night weekend T service in March, and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has proposed doing the same, ending a two-decade trend of extending service.
In D.C., a Metro spokesman told David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington that late-night ridership is low and getting lower (down by nearly half in five years) since people are using Uber and Lyft. In Boston, MBTA officials say they’re exploring a partnership with private-sector ride-hailing companies to make up for the lost service, which didn’t bring in as much revenue as the city thought it would when it was introduced in 2014.
How much ridership loss is attributable to those increased options isn’t clear. The Washington Metro has been in a prolonged service crisis. Boston’s late-night weekend ridership dropped by about 18 percent in its second year, though during that time the late-night service window shrank from 2 hours to 90 minutes. Even if late-night revelers do prefer taxis, though, they aren’t part of a feasible routine for workers. Transit and taxis aren’t equivalent services, no matter what Silicon Valley wants you to think.
At the very least, the divergent paths of London and the two East Coast cities illustrate different mentalities between London’s transit agency and its American equivalents. In a 2014 report on the city’s night economy prepared for Transport for London, rising late-night taxi use was cited as evidence that there was a need for better transit service.
In the U.S., it’s assumed that cause-and-effect works the opposite way: The popularity of taxis suggests to transit agencies that their services are no longer necessary—not that they just weren’t good enough.The Olympia Food Co-op’s adopted a boycott of Israeli goods in 2010. (via Rachel Corrie Foundation)
Lawyers for the plaintiffs — five former members of the co-op, which has 22,000 members — argued against both the 2010 decision to boycott Israeli goods and against a Washington State law that saw their previous attempts to stop the boycott defeated in lower courts.
Since the case was originally filed in 2011, it has been rejected twice by lower courts on the grounds that it has no merit and qualifies as an attack on public expression. The anti-boycott co-op members have been ordered to pay damages to members of the Olymia Food Co-op board as well as attorneys fees.
The lawsuit followed the board’s 15 July 2010 decision to stop carrying Israeli goods at the co-op’s two grocery stores in Olympia, the capital of Washington state. The decision made the co-op the first grocery store to join the international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
When five of the co-op’s members objected, the board offered to put the boycott to a member-wide ballot according to its existing procedures. But instead of pursuing that route, three anti-boycott members ran for board elections. When they lost, they launched a legal action.
Meanwhile, the co-op began removing Israeli products as soon as the decision was made and has since maintained the boycott.
While the complaint against the co-op centered on alleged procedural misconduct, defendants argued — and the courts have so far agreed — that the legal action was really motivated by a wish to terminate the co-op’s boycott of Israeli goods.
SLAPPed down
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents the board members, immediately requested to have the case dismissed as a SLAPP — Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Under Washington state law, a SLAPP is an abusive lawsuit whose purpose is to prevent or deter people from exercising their constitutional rights by saddling them with expensive litigation.
CCR argued that the lawsuit was an effort to silence the co-op’s principled stand, expressed through BDS, against Israel’s human rights violations.
Collusion with Israel
As was revealed by The Electronic Intifada in 2011, just before the lawsuit was filed, the plaintiffs are backed by both the Israeli government and StandWithUs, an anti-Palestinian advocacy group that works closely with Israel.
StandWithUs has been less than forthcoming about its collusion with the Israeli government to pursue the Olympia Food Co-op. But in a friend of the court brief, Jewish Voice for Peace quotes a StandWithUs statement that was once posted on the pro-Israel group’s website, but has since been removed.
“In 2011, StandWithUs filed a lawsuit against the Olympia Food Co-op in Olympia, Washington, to nullify its boycott of Israeli-made products,” the website had stated. “The lawsuit was the byproduct of the partnership between StandWithUs and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spearheaded by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, and brought against the Olympia Food Co-op and its board for violating their own policies.”
In February 2012, a Washington state judge agreed with the co-op board members that the lawsuit against them was a SLAPP and ordered the anti-boycott plaintiffs to pay $160,000 in damages plus legal fees. The ruling was upheld by an appeals court. Last October, |
could. A newspaper reporter photographed the previous land owner (Andy Kommer) in the cave after he cleared it out in 1974. Over 40 years later, we recreated the photo with the bars we dug up from the site.
Miner's Hill
Inside of the Cave
Inside of the Cave Texture
Animations
Looking Ahead
Having successfully located the cave and cleared its entrance, the question of “what’s next?” become more pertinent. We did notify representatives of the LDS Church’s history department. They were interested and excited about our findings, but they have established a high standard of evidence that a site must meet before they invest in its exploration or preservation. Given that most of the information about Miner’s Hill comes from either decades-too-late newspapers or other less-than-credible second- and third-hand accounts, and that the sources largely disagree on the function or purpose of the cave, the Church has determined that the cave holds no relation or relevance to the Restoration, and that the cave was—if anything—simply the setting of a treasure dig.
Sifting through the later accounts, however, something of interest to us emerged. Of all the personalities that discuss the cave, one stands out: John Gilbert. He was the typesetter of the Book of Mormon and interacted closely with early Mormons in 1829 and 1830. Although not Mormon himself and a disbeliever in the Book of Mormon, he is about as close to an “insider” as an “outsider” gets. He was one of the first people to ever read the Book of Mormon, and in close detail, no less: all of the Book of Mormon’s original paragraphing and punctuation is Gilbert’s. He mentions the cave on three different recorded occasions, and seems to be of the opinion that the cave served as the early Mormons’ base camp during the preparations for the Book of Mormon’s publication. If the cave was dug in the early 1820s, then by 1829 it could have been repurposed into a private setting for Book of Mormon pre-publication activities. Gilbert states:
“I...have seen Joseph Smith a few times, but not acquainted with him. Saw Hyrum quite often. I am the party that set the type from the original manuscript for the Book of Mormon. They translated it in a cave.” [12]
.” “Joe Smith was not at the office at all...Joe Smith was in his cave or room where the translating had been done, getting new revelations, I suppose, from the angel. [Joseph] hid them for a day and then took them to his house. Later the alleged plates were carried to a cave for translation...In that cave it is supposed they really went over the manuscript which had been stolen by Rigdon from Spalding’s house.” [13]
for translation...In that cave it is supposed they really went over the manuscript which had been stolen by Rigdon from Spalding’s house.” “Major Gilbert told me that the first hill two miles south of Palmyra, on the east side of Canandaigua pond, was Cave hill. Half way up the hill can still be seen a depression, which marks the entrance to the cave in which Joseph Smith translated the gold plates from which the Book of Mormons [sic] was printed.” [14]
Most of the Book of Mormon was translated in Pennsylvania, discrediting Gilbert’s statements. But the late phase of translation did take place in New York (albeit Fayette, not Manchester). If further evidence can be found that supports Gilbert’s view that any of the Book of Mormon’s translation (or even the copying of the Printer’s Manuscript in 1829, the eight witnesses’ experience, or the receipt of D&C Sections 19, 22 or 23) occurred in this cave, the historical value of the cave would certainly increase.
Until then, however, erosion will continue to wear on the hill, vandals may have their way with it, and the possibility of unfound artifacts under the cave floor will remain unexplored. Consequently, please consider this a call to:
All researchers to search and learn more about the historical significance of the cave Any interested private individuals or institutions to consider purchasing the property for the sake of preserving a piece of rare Mormon history that could be gone all too soon.
Please direct all inquiries to mormoncave@gmail.com.
CommentsThe Allahabad High Court is likely to deliver its judgment on an appeal challenging the verdict of a CBI court which found Rajesh and Nupur Talwar guilty for the murder of their daughter Aarushi and domestic help Hemraj in 2008. A division bench of the high court comprising justices BK Narayana and AK Mishra had reserved the judgment on 7 September on the appeal filed by the dentist couple, fixing 12 October as the date for the verdict.
They are currently serving their sentence in Ghaziabad's Dasna jail. Fourteen-year-old Aarushi was found dead inside her room in the Talwars' Noida residence with her throat slit in May 2008. The needle of suspicion had initially moved towards 45-year-old Hemraj, who had gone missing, but his body was recovered from the terrace of the house two days later. As the Uttar Pradesh Police drew flak over the shoddy investigation into the case which was making national headlines, the then Chief Minister Mayawati handed over the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Though a special CBI court in Ghaziabad in an 210-page exhaustive order had sentenced the couple with life imprisonment on 26 November 2013, a day after their conviction in the case, reports have claimed several discrepancies in the investigation that led to the couple's conviction in the case. In 2014, former CBI Director AP Singh had said there were "lacunae" in the probe carried out by the first CBI team under the then joint director Arun Kumar. Singh had said that Kumar was convinced that the parents of Aarushi were responsible for the double murder. In 2015, an hour-long video reportedly surfaced on YouTube which shows Krishna, Talwar's assistant, purportedly saying that Kumar asked him to own up the crime on the promise of getting his sentence reduced. Despite the conviction, the family members and friends of the Talwars continued to insist that the couple didn't commit the murder. In an open letter in 2015, Aarushi's grandfather had reportedly questioned the character assassination of Aarushi and her parents by the media and even the judgment that sent them to jail on a life term. The murder case also inspired a book and a film, both of which weighed in favour of the Talwars, thus giving rise to debate over the case. The Allahabad court's judgment is likely to bring fresh clarity on the case, and whether or not a grave injustice was done to the Talwars, as the couple's family and some legal experts have opined in the past. With inputs from PTI
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.WASHINGTON — Confronted with a rank-and-file uprising, House Republican leaders on Wednesday abruptly shifted tactics in their battle against President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, splitting off from their Senate colleagues and all but ensuring that no legislation opposing the accord will emerge from Congress this month.
As House Republicans struggled over tactics, Senate Republicans conceded that the White House had prevailed and the accord could not be stopped. A Senate vote to cut off debate on a resolution disapproving the accord could come as soon as Thursday, and Democrats might have the votes to filibuster it.
The unexpected, but hardly uncharacteristic, Republican infighting delayed a debate on the nuclear deal, which had been set to begin on Wednesday afternoon. Republican leaders had planned for that debate to culminate in a vote on a resolution denouncing the accord.
The resolution was certain to pass with overwhelming Republican support and the backing of at least a dozen Democrats.CLOSE The Federal Reserve will begin shrinking the enormous portfolio of bonds amassed after the 2008 financial crisis to try to sustain a frail economy. A sign of a strengthened economy, the move could mean higher rates on mortgages, loans over time. (Sept. 20) AP
New York Fed President William Dudley (Photo: Mark Lennihan, Mark Lennihan, AP)
As the Federal Reserve Bank cautiously guides the economy through a time of uncertainty at the federal level, officials are relatively optimistic about the nation’s, and the region’s, economic trajectory.
The economy is growing at an above trend rate, which is tightening the labor market and should eventually bolster wage growth, William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said this week in Syracuse. With a tight labor supply, businesses are incentivized to invest in labor-saving technologies, he said.
He expects inflation will rise and stabilize around the Federal Open Market Committee’s 2 percent objective, and that the Fed will likely continue to gradually remove monetary policy accommodation, or economy boosting measures that loosen the overall money supply, he said.
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently acknowledged that the Fed may have overestimated inflation growth, saying that the labor market may not be as tight as it appears, among other reasons. Though unemployment is relatively low — at 4.4 percent — there are still many workers in their prime without jobs or those in part-time jobs who want to work full time, she said. This could mean there’s more “slack” in the labor market that’s keeping wages contained.
In the central and western New York region, job growth is running at about half the national pace, said Dudley. With a decrease in manufacturing jobs and the forces of technology and globalization, the region has had trouble keeping up with the changes, he said. The bright side is that jobs in other sectors, like education, healthcare and business services, has been picking up, and there are promising new startups coming into play.
The biggest challenge on that front?
“The skill requirements for virtually all jobs are increasing, and workers will need to rise to the occasion to thrive in today’s economy,” said Dudley. “The challenge facing all of us is how to best help workers develop the skills necessary to land a good job, and how to enhance those skills over time as work requirements evolve.”
Dudley was in the Rochester area Tuesday, and the Democrat and Chronicle sat down with him for a brief interview at Monroe Community College.
A Q&A with William Dudley, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Buy Photo File photo: Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley. (Photo: File photo)
What is your overall outlook on the Rochester economy, and how does that fit into the context of the economic outlook across the region and the state?
The good news is that the region is growing. The bad news is the growth is not as strong as the country as a whole. Some of the areas have some comparative advantages that they’re able to build on — photonics here in Rochester is a good example. But there are more difficult problems that do need to be addressed. Especially in Rochester, it’s the unequal access to the economy.
There’s a lot of disparity between access to credit and also credit stress — in other words, if you get credit, how do you actually perform? I think it underscores the fact that there’s a lot of work to be done in Rochester to help people who are more disadvantaged. The good news is that there are a lot of initiatives in place. The Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative is a good starting point, but it’s going to take a lot of sustained effort.
Buy Photo The sun sets behind the skyline in downtown Rochester, as seen from Cobbs Hill Park near the reservoir. (Photo: JAMIE GERMANO/@jgermano1/Staff Photographer)
What is the state of workforce development in this region? What are the challenges?
We talk about the 3 P’s — partnerships, programming and placement. The partnership is between the educational community and businesses; programming is developing things that can actually bring students in to give them the skills that they need that match the jobs that are available; and then actually getting them placed in those jobs.
There’s a lot of other barriers to getting people employed in good jobs. One is, for example, transportation — how do I get from where I live to where those jobs are actually located? Another is child care. It’s nice for you to say that I should do this job, but how do I handle the fact that I have some preschool kids that I have to take care of?
I think people are now understanding that this is a pretty complex set of problems, and there’s no silver bullet.
Where does the Rochester region fall in addressing these issues?
The conversation has shifted from just working on this little area or this little area, to more thinking of the whole thing as an ecosystem.
What you have to do is take all these various different initiatives in all these different spaces and say, ‘how do you actually coordinate this?’
I think that’s still in its early days. How do we actually align with one another? That’s the challenging part. We understand where we need to go, but it’s going to take a lot of work to actually get there.
How are we doing in the job market?
We're lagging behind, but growing. My view is, things are actually better than they were five or 10 years ago … one, because the economy as a whole is better, and two, I think the psychology is better.
Rather than thinking about how awful it is that all these bad things happened to us — we’re in Rochester, so (some think of) Xerox or Eastman Kodak — they’re sort of no longer focusing on that. They’re focusing on, ‘What are our comparative advantages, and how do we move forward?’
I think that change in psychology is really important, because your chances of succeeding go up dramatically if you actually think you can actually be successful.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Rochester Business newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Stay up to date with the latest business news. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-790-9565. Delivery: Mon-Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Rochester Business Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
Can the regional economy sustain a shift from the “Big Three” to a diverse ecosystem of smaller to mid-size companies?
Those companies had a lot of technical expertise in their workforces and a lot of that workforce is still here, and that creates a core for the next generation. That’s one of the comparative advantages in Rochester. You have a portion of your workforce who are very highly skilled with very strong technical knowledge, and you have enough of those people to actually make this an attractive place for companies to locate that are trying to develop these technologies.
STADDEO@Gannett.com
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2yvaRroImage zoom Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife
Geraldine “Gerry” Largay, the Appalachian Trail hiker who died after spending 26 days lost along the Appalachian Trail was supposed to meet her husband, George Largay, to collect fresh supplies at a pre-arranged spot near a ski and golf resort in July 2013 – but she never showed up.
The 66-year-old, an experienced outdoorswoman nicknamed “Inchworm,” set out with her backpacking buddy Jane Lee for a “bucket list” adventure hike from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, to Maine’s Mount Katahdin in April 2013, according to the Boston Globe.
As the two were entering New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Lee was forced to leave the trail due to a family emergency. Gerry insisted on continuing on the trip alone.
When she didn’t show up to their scheduled meeting place, George reported his wife missing on July 24, 2013. A massive, frantic search ensued over a 26-month period for the missing Brentwood, Tennessee, native.
Gerry’s body was discovered more than two years later in October 2015 near Maine’s Redington Township. She died in her sleeping bag, inside a zipped tent near a U.S. Navy-owned property. A medical examiner determined the cause of death to be starvation and environmental exposure, reports the Associated Press.
Officials found a plastic bag in the tent containing a cellphone with unsent text messages and a journal documenting Gerry’s acceptance that she was going to die, according to newly released investigatory documents obtained by AP.
“When you find my body, 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,” one of Largay’s haunting journal entries, dated August 6, 2013, read.
Image zoom Geraldine Largay (right) with her husband George Source: Gerry Largay/Facebook
Gerry suffered from a recurring back problem and couldn’t carry the 35-pounds of supplies most hikers shoulder during long treks. George, who knew hiking the Appalachian Trail was his wife’s longtime dream, agreed to meet her and Lee at various points along the trip to replenish their supplies, reported the Boston Globe in 2014.
During the summer of 2013, George – who chose the trail-moniker “Sherpa” – met the women multiple times, hiking an hour past trailheads to meet his wife and Lee. They would then spend the night at motels to shower and recuperate, according to the outlet.
The last time George saw his wife was on Sunday, July 21, 2013. Gerry was taking on an extra tough route – 32 miles over seven mountain peaks. He stayed with her longer than normal, because he knew he wouldn’t see her for a while.
Dottie Rust and Regina Clark, two southbound hikers, met Gerry on the Poplar Ridge Lean-to, a covered shelter, on July 21, 2013.
“She was just full of confidence and joy – a real delight to talk to,” Rust told the Boston Globe in 2014.
The trekkers were impressed with Gerry’s passion for life and love for the outdoors.
Rust and Clark insisted on taking a picture of Gerry who woke up early the next day – smiling and wearing a striking red jacket – to begin her 22-mile hike to meet George in two days.
“It’ll make the perfect Christmas Card!” Rust told Gerry, according to the Boston Globe.
It was the last photo ever taken of Gerry.
When George reported Gerry missing, an intense search effort by volunteers, police and warden services continued for several days, but was suspended on July 30, 2013, according to the Portland Press Herald.
“There were many leads over the next 26 months, ranging from persons of interest for possible criminal activity related to Gerry’s disappearance, identity theft involving Gerry’s personal information, geographic information by psychics, sightings in different states All of these leads were investigated with our investigative partners,” Lt. Kevin Adam wrote in a November 2015 report after Gerry’s body was discovered, the publication reports.
Adam met with George and other members of Gerry’s family on October 18, 2015, at the site where she was found – about two miles from the Appalachian Trail.
“After everyone finished looking around the campsite, the family left a cross where the tent was located along with several family mementos,” Adam wrote in his report.
Game wardens release new photo of Geraldine Largey. This is what she was wearing when she disappeared on the AT. pic.twitter.com/W7oR49NI56 — TVTEDDY (@TVTEDDY) July 29, 2013
Haunting unsent text messages and journal entries that were recently released reveal that Gerry had tried to get in contact with George after she got lost.
“In somm trouble,” she texted the day she left the trail on July 22. “Get of trail to go to br. Now lost. Can you call AMC to c if a trail maintainer can help me. Somewhere north of woods road.”
Another text attempt read: “Lost since yesterday. Off trail 3 or 4 miles. Call police for what to do pls.”
In a 2014 interview, a little more than a year after his wife’s disappearance, George said he was coming to terms with his wife’s fate.
“I no longer wake up thinking about Gerry’s disappearance every morning,” he told the Boston Globe in December 2014. “Now it takes a holiday or an anniversary or a certain Neil Diamond song on the radio.”Many more corporate-funded attacks to come, however...
Brad Friedman Byon 7/16/2010, 11:06am PT
Good for Sinclair Broadcasting, in this case, pulling an inaccurate commercial off the air that was being run by the despicable corporate money-launderers of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, attacking Democratic U.S. Senatorial candidate Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania.
Of course, the ad was run on television before it was pulled. The fact-checking was not done in advance, so lies such as health insurance reform being "a government takeover of healthcare" were allowed to be aired as if they were legitimate claims.
Naturally, the campaign of Sestak's Republican opponent, Pat Toomey, backed up the Chamber's ads, even as they are not supposed to be coordinating with such groups, according to the law. But what do quaint old notions like "the rule of law" really mean anymore in these United States anyway?
What is underscored again here, is that corporate lobbyists and criminals like those at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are now free to wield millions --- even billions --- of dollars for or against candidates they don't like, or who may not meet with their corporate approval for any reason.
That's what the U.S. Supreme Court has recently deemed "free speech". And you, dear private citizen of the United States of America, can do nothing about it --- unless you happen to have a few hundred million extra dollars sitting around the house and want to exercise your "free speech" in producing and airing TV commercials in opposition. Good luck with that.
[Please see, and support, VelvetRevolution.us' StopTheChamber.com campaign to help push back against the anti-American, anti-citizen Goliath that is the U.S. Chamber. Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder of VR.]
* * *
UPDATE 4:04pm: Looks like the Rightwing corporate bosses at Sinclair may have come down on the local stations. AP is now reporting the Chamber says the ads are being restored:
Two Pittsburgh-area TV stations are reversing a decision to pull a commercial attacking Democratic policies and the voting record of U.S. Senate candidate Joe Sestak. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Friday that the stations are restoring the ad that the business advocacy group sponsored. An official for sister stations WPGH and WPMY declined to comment.
[Hat-tip BRAD BLOG commenter Philip Shropshire.]import fastparse._, NoWhitespace._ def number[_: P]: P[Int] = P( CharIn("0-9").rep(1).!.map(_.toInt) ) def parens[_: P]: P[Int] = P( "(" ~/ addSub ~ ")" ) def factor[_: P]: P[Int] = P( number | parens ) def divMul[_: P]: P[Int] = P( factor ~ (CharIn("*/").! ~/ factor).rep ).map(eval) def addSub[_: P]: P[Int] = P( divMul ~ (CharIn("+\\-").! ~/ divMul).rep ).map(eval) def expr[_: P]: P[Int] = P( addSub ~ End )
val Parsed.Success(2, _) = parse("1+1", expr(_)) val Parsed.Success(15, _) = parse("(1+1*2)+3*4", expr(_)) val Parsed.Success(21, _) = parse("((1+1*2)+(3*4*5))/3", expr(_)) val Parsed.Failure(expected, failIndex, extra) = parse("1+1*", expr(_)) val longAggMsg = extra.trace().longAggregateMsg assert( failIndex == 4, longAggMsg == """Expected expr:1:1 / addSub:1:1 / divMul:1:3 / factor:1:5 / (number | parens):1:5, found """"" )
FastParse is a Scala library for parsing strings and bytes into structured data. This lets you easily write a parser for any arbitrary textual data formats (e.g. program source code, JSON,...) and have the parsers run at an acceptable speed, with great error debuggability and error reporting. Features include:
FastParse is a project by Li Haoyi. If you use FastParse and enjoyed it, please chip in to support our development at https://www.patreon.com/lihaoyi.
The following sections will introduce you to FastParse and how to use it.
Getting Started
To begin using FastParse, add the following to your build config
"com.lihaoyi" %% "fastparse" % "2.1.0" // SBT ivy"com.lihaoyi::fastparse:2.1.0" // Mill
To use with Scala.js, you'll need
"com.lihaoyi" %%% "fastparse" % "2.1.0" // SBT ivy"com.lihaoyi::fastparse::2.1.0" // Mill
Writing Parsers
Basic
The simplest parser matches a single string:
import fastparse._, NoWhitespace._ def parseA[_: P] = P("a") val Parsed.Success(value, successIndex) = parse("a", parseA(_)) assert(value == (), successIndex == 1) val f @ Parsed.Failure(label, index, extra) = parse("b", parseA(_)) assert( label == "", index == 0, f.msg == """Position 1:1, found "b"""" )
Such a parser returns a Parsed.Success if the input matches the string, and otherwise returns a Parsed.Failure.
As you can see, by default the Parsed.Success contains a (): Unit, unless you use Capture or Map described below.
You can also wrap the strings in an IgnoreCase("...") if you want the matching to be case-insensitive.
The P(...) lets you write mutually recursive parsers, without running into circular initialization problems, and gives the parser a nice, human-readable name (from the val it is being assigned to) which appears in parse error messages. In general, every time you assign a parser to a val, you should wrap it in P(...).
Failures
import fastparse._, NoWhitespace._ def parseEither[_: P] = P( "a" | "b" ) def parseA[_: P] = P( parseEither.? ~ "c" ) val f @ Parsed.Failure(failureString, index, extra) = parse("d", parseA(_)) assert( failureString == "", index == 0, f.msg == """Position 1:1, found "d"""" ) //.trace() collects additional metadata to use for error reporting val trace = f.trace() // `.msg` records the last parser that failed, which is "c", and // `.longMsg` also shows the parsing stack at point of failure assert( trace.label == "\"c\"", trace.index == 0, trace.msg == """Expected "c":1:1, found "d"""", trace.longMsg == """Expected parseA:1:1 / "c":1:1, found "d"""" ) // aggregateMsg and longAggregateMsg record all parsers // failing at the position, "a" | "b" | "c", assert( trace.aggregateMsg == """Expected (parseEither | "c"):1:1, found "d"""", trace.longAggregateMsg == """Expected parseA:1:1 / (parseEither | "c"):1:1, found "d"""" )
When parsing, dealing with failures is an important part of making things work. Fastparse provides three levels of error reporting you can ask for when a parse fails:
The default Parsed.Failure only tells you the position of the error message, without any clues what went wrong at that position. You can pass in the flag verboseFailures = true to fastparse.parse to get a better description of what caused the parse failure. This slows the parse down by a significant amount (takes ~50% longer than a normal parse), You can then use the.msg or.longMsg to see what's going on. You can call failure.trace() on an existing failure to perform a second parse over the initial input. This also gives you access to failure.trace().msg and failure.trace().longMsg, but additionally provides.aggregateMsg and.longAggregateMsg for high-level listing of what was expected at point of failure, or.terminalsMsg and.longTerminalsMsg for a low-level view of what individual strings or characters were expected at point of failure.
In general, you may either want to run your parses with verboseFailures enabled, or run in the default fast mode and fall back to.trace() when something goes wrong. Often the number of parse failures is small compared to the number of successes, and this approach ensures the common success case is as fast as possible.
Sequence
def ab[_: P] = P( "a" ~ "b" ) val Parsed.Success(_, 2) = parse("ab", ab(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 1, _) = parse("aa", ab(_))
You can combine two parsers with the ~ operator. This creates a new parser that only succeeds if both left and right parsers succeed one after another.
Repeat
def ab[_: P] = P( "a".rep ~ "b" ) val Parsed.Success(_, 8) = parse("aaaaaaab", ab(_)) val Parsed.Success(_, 4) = parse("aaaba", ab(_)) def abc[_: P] = P( "a".rep(sep="b") ~ "c") val Parsed.Success(_, 8) = parse("abababac", abc(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 3, _) = parse("abaabac", abc(_)) def ab4[_: P] = P( "a".rep(min=2, max=4, sep="b") ) val Parsed.Success(_, 7) = parse("ababababababa", ab4(_)) def ab2exactly[_: P] = P( "ab".rep(exactly=2) ) val Parsed.Success(_, 4) = parse("abab", ab2exactly(_)) def ab4c[_: P] = P ( "a".rep(min=2, max=4, sep="b") ~ "c" ) val Parsed.Failure(_, 1, _) = parse("ac", ab4c(_)) val Parsed.Success(_, 4) = parse("abac", ab4c(_)) val Parsed.Success(_, 8) = parse("abababac", ab4c(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 7, _) = parse("ababababac", ab4c(_))
The.rep method creates a new parser that attempts to parse the given parser zero or more times. If you want to parse something a given number of times, you can use.rep(min = 2, max = 4) o r the shorter.rep(1) for one or more times, in addition there is exactly parameter that if it's defined behaves like min and max equals to it. You can optionally provide an argument which acts as a separator between the usages of the original parser, such as a comma in.rep(sep = ",").
Optional
def option[_: P] = P( "c".? ~ "a".rep(sep="b").! ~ End) val Parsed.Success("aba", 3) = parse("aba", option(_)) val Parsed.Success("aba", 3) = parse("aba", option(_))
Similar to.rep is.?, which creates a new parser that attempts to parse the given parser zero or 1 times.
Either
def either[_: P] = P( "a".rep ~ ("b" | "c" | "d") ~ End) val Parsed.Success(_, 6) = parse("aaaaab", either(_)) val f @ Parsed.Failure(_, 5, _) = parse("aaaaae", either(_)) val trace = f.trace().longAggregateMsg assert( f.toString == """Parsed.Failure(Position 1:6, found "e")""", trace == """Expected either:1:1 / ("a" | "b" | "c" | "d"):1:6, found "e"""" )
The | operator tries the parser on the left, and if that fails, tries the one on the right, failing only if both parsers fail.
End, Start
def noEnd[_: P] = P( "a".rep ~ "b") def withEnd[_: P] = P( "a".rep ~ "b" ~ End) val Parsed.Success(_, 4) = parse("aaaba", noEnd(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 4, _) = parse("aaaba", withEnd(_))
The End parser only succeeds if at the end of the input string. By default, a Parser does not need to consume the whole input, and can succeed early consuming a portion of it (exactly how much input was consumed is stored in the Success#index attribute). By using End, we can make the parse fail if it doesn't consume everything
There is also a similar Start parser, which only succeeds at the start of the input
def ab[_: P] = P( (("a" | Start) ~ "b").rep ~ End).! val Parsed.Success("abab", 4) = parse("abab", ab(_)) val Parsed.Success("babab", 5) = parse("babab", ab(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 2, _) = parse("abb", ab(_))
Pass, Fail
val Parsed.Success((), 0) = parse("asdad", Pass(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 0, _) = parse("asdad", Fail(_))
These two parsers always succeed, or always fail, respectively. Neither consumes any input.
Index
def finder[_: P] = P( "hay".rep ~ Index ~ "needle" ~ "hay".rep ) val Parsed.Success(9, _) = parse("hayhayhayneedlehay", finder(_))
Always succeeds, and provides the current index of the parse into the input string. e.g. useful for providing source locations for AST nodes. Consumes no input.
Capture
def capture1[_: P] = P( "a".rep.! ~ "b" ~ End) val Parsed.Success("aaa", 4) = parse("aaab", capture1(_)) def capture2[_: P] = P( "a".rep.! ~ "b".! ~ End) val Parsed.Success(("aaa", "b"), 4) = parse("aaab", capture2(_)) def capture3[_: P] = P( "a".rep.! ~ "b".! ~ "c".! ~ End) val Parsed.Success(("aaa", "b", "c"), 5) = parse("aaabc", capture3(_)) def captureRep[_: P] = P( "a".!.rep ~ "b" ~ End) val Parsed.Success(Seq("a", "a", "a"), 4) = parse("aaab", captureRep(_)) def captureOpt[_: P] = P( "a".rep ~ "b".!.? ~ End) val Parsed.Success(Some("b"), 4) = parse("aaab", captureOpt(_))
So far, all the parsers go over the input text but do not return any useful value: the Success#value attribute was always (). In order to make them do so, you use the.! operation to capture the section of the input string the parser parsed.
Note the types of each parser:
capture1 is a P[String]
is a capture2 is a P[(String, String)]
is a capture3 is a P[(String, String, String)]
is a captureRep is a P[Seq[String]]
is a captureOpt is a P[Option[String]]
In general, if you have a parser of type TupleN, capturing one more section turns it into a TupleN+1. Furthermore, if you capture within a.rep or.? optional parser, it becomes a P[Seq[T]] or P[Option[T]] respectively
AnyChar
def ab[_: P] = P( "'" ~ AnyChar.! ~ "'" ) val Parsed.Success("-", 3) = parse("'-'", ab(_)) val Parsed.Failure(stack, 2, _) = parse("'-='", ab(_))
This parser parses any single character successfully. It almost always succeeds, except if there simply aren't any characters left to parse.
There is also a plural AnyChars(count: Int) version that parses exactly count characters in a row, regardless of what they are.
Positive Lookahead
def keyword[_: P] = P( ("hello" ~ &(" ")).!.rep ) val Parsed.Success(Seq("hello"), _) = parse("hello ", keyword(_)) val Parsed.Success(Seq(), __) = parse("helloX", keyword(_))
The &(...) operator wraps a parser, only succeeds if it succeeds, but consumes no input. Useful for doing checks like "these characters must be followed by a whitespace, but don't consume the whitespace"
Negative Lookahead
def keyword[_: P] = P( "hello" ~!" " ~ AnyChar ~ "world" ).! val Parsed.Success("hello-world", _) = parse("hello-world", keyword(_)) val Parsed.Success("hello_world", _) = parse("hello_world", keyword(_)) val Parsed.Failure(_, 5, _) = parse("hello world", keyword(_))
The!... operator wraps a parser and only succeeds if it fails, also consuming no input. Useful to combine with other parsers like AnyChar to restrict the things that they can parse.
Map
def binary[_: P] = P( ("0" | "1" ).rep.! ) def binaryNum[_: P] = P( binary.map(Integer.parseInt(_, 2)) ) val Parsed.Success("1100", _) = parse("1100", binary(_)) val Parsed.Success(12, _) = parse("1100", binaryNum(_))
Up till now, we've only dealt with
P[Unit] : the default case
: the default case P[String] : after capturing something with.!
: after capturing something with P[TupleN[String]] : capturing multiple things in series
: |
I'm hoping they will self-deport," Pearce said. "They broke the law. They're criminals." Under the employer sanctions law, businesses found to have knowingly hired illegal workers will be subject to sanctions from probation to a 10-day suspension of their business licenses. A second violation would bring permanent revocation of the license. Nancy-Jo Merritt, an immigration lawyer who primarily represents employers, said her clients already have started to fire workers who can't prove they are in the country legally. "Workers are being fired, of course," she said. "Nobody wants to find out later on that they've got somebody working for them who's not here legally." When immigrants don't have jobs, they don't stick around, said Dawn McLaren, a research economist at Arizona State University who specializes in illegal immigration. She said the flagging economy, particularly in the construction industry, also is contributing to an immigrant exodus. "As the jobs dwindle and the environment becomes more unpleasant in more ways than one, you then decide what to do, and perhaps leaving looks like a good idea," she said. "And certainly that creates a problem, because as people leave, they take the jobs they created with them." Pearce disagreed that the Arizona economy will suffer after illegal immigrants leave, saying there will be less crime, lower taxes, less congestion, smaller classroom sizes and shorter lines in emergency rooms. "We have a free market. It'll adjust," he said. "Americans will be much better off." He said he's not surprised illegal immigrants are leaving the state and predicts that more will go once the employer-sanctions law takes effect next month. "It's attrition by enforcement," he said. "As you make this an unfriendly state for lawbreakers, I'm hoping they will pick up and leave." READERS: Thanks to everyone who has joined in on the conversation below. We encourage you to continue to do so, but please keep your comments civil and respectful. Also keep in mind the community guidelines, particularly those prohibiting hate speech and personal attacks. Thank you. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Enlarge By Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images Wearing plastic handcuffs and waving U.S. flags, youth pastor Magdalena Schwartz of Mesa, Ariz., left, prayed with others outside a Senate office building to protest measures criminalizing clergy who aid undocumented immigrants in March '06. Illegal immigrants are leaving Arizona because "they don't want to live in fear," Schwartz said. Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map.One thing I'm no so interested in using a Jiu Jitsu Grappling Dummy for is Jiu Jitsu. Or grappling. Those sound hard, and I'm getting all the workouts I can handle these days from the Private Gym. But what I would like to use a Jiu Jitsu Grappling Dummy for is the passenger seat in my car. Put a button-up, some glasses, and a fedora on that dude and I've got my ever-present hipster +1 for the carpool lane.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead and get on your high horse about abusing the carpool lane. My ears turn deaf to such self righteousness the second I start an 8-mile commute projected by Google Maps to take 45 minutes. Two words, my preachy friends: F. That. I will risk some a-hole stopped dead in the lane next door calling 421-HERO to report me, resulting in a mailed warning letter from the local po about the infraction (yep, that's how the law enforcement rolls around here - but they can't ticket you unless they catch you themselves!) if it means I'm going to be home indulging in cold beers and Taco Tuesday while he's still sitting on the highway hot and hungry, with nothing to appease him but his own smugness.
And if you actually practice Jiu Jitsu, wrestling, or MMA, this awesome dummy is made of heavy duty Cordura nylon and tight filled for practicing Train Guard, Inside Guard, Turtle Position, Start Position, North South, Mount, Side Mount, Leg Locks, Knee Bars, Ankle Hooks, and more.
The grappling dummy comes in Adult and Kid sizes. Adult is the height equivalent of a 6' man and weighs 70 to 75 pounds. The Kid is a 4'6" equivalent and weighs 30 to 35 pounds.Hey kids: Ever wonder what happens at your school during summer vacation and also why it’s generally a good idea to avoid hallucinogenic drugs? The Daily Caller is here to help.
Late one night last week, police found a naked 41-year-old man wailing in agony outside Ypsilanti Middle School in Ypsilanti, Mich. During what had to have been a particularly bad magic mushroom trip, the man had ripped off parts of his own penis, reports the Lansing State Journal.
The man was kneeling. He was covered in blood from the waist down. He was near death, presumably from massive blood loss.
Police officers, who had responded to a burglar alarm, restrained the man and called an ambulance.
“He really wasn’t saying much at all — a lot of yelling and screaming,” Sgt. Geoff Fox told the State Journal. “He wasn’t making sense. They couldn’t really communicate with him in terms of constructive conversation.”
Fox added that at least some of the parts the man lost in the incident had been delivered with him to a nearby hospital.
It’s been a long, strange trip for the unidentified man who remains hospitalized in an also unidentified facility. He has since explained to investigators that he had obtained the shrooms earlier the same day. He had come to Ypsilanti to visit friends.
Sgt. Fox noted that the man has no history of drug abuse or mental disorders.
Fox told the State Journal that toxicology tests could provide more information about what happened.
“We’ve sent his blood off for further analysis to see if there was anything else, if the mushrooms could have been laced with something,” he said.
According to a faculty page created by Eric H. Chudler at the University of Washington’s website, the many physiological effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms include an inability to concentrate and, most famously, visual and auditory hallucinations. The effects typically last about four hours.
The website also cites a wise, old Croatian proverb: “All mushrooms are edible, but some only once.”
Follow Eric on Twitter and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.The United States permanently lifted a raft of sanctions on Sudan on Friday, saying the African nation had begun addressing concerns about terrorism as well as human rights abuses against civilians in the country's Darfur region.
The decision to lift the sanctions and end an economic embargo comes after the Trump administration last month removed Sudan from the list of countries whose citizens are subject to travel restrictions. Sudan was the only country that was removed.
But the decision leaves other sanctions in place for the time being, including those against individuals with arrest warrants related to atrocities committed during the conflict in Darfur. And it does not remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a removal ardently sought by its government. A separate review is underway on that designation.
The change reflects a strategy shift in how to bring about reforms in Sudan, where President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has clung to power since taking office in a military coup in 1989. Instead of relying solely on punishment via sanctions, the new strategy is to use relief to encourage more changes.
The sanctions relief also was part of a push to enlist more countries in an effort to isolate North Korea diplomatically. U.S. officials said that while it was not an explicit condition for lifting sanctions, Washington told Khartoum that an "absolute, vital part of the relationship" going forward is full compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions related to North Korea.
Officials also said they asked for and got a commitment from Sudan not to purchase arms from Pyongyang. A U.N. report last year found that Sudan bought North Korean air-to-ground missiles in 2013 in a deal with a front company.
"We will not necessarily take the government at their word," one official said. "We will closely be monitoring the situation. And they understand we have zero tolerance for continued arms deals with North Korea."
The lifting of sanctions rescinds measures imposed in 1997 related to terrorism concerns and other steps put in place in 2006 in connection with the conflict in Darfur. The sanctions were temporarily eased in January just before President Barack Obama left office, with his administration citing the same progress the Trump administration noted. In July, President Trump extended the review for three months, angering the Sudanese, who stopped some lower-level meetings with U.S. officials in retaliation but maintained contacts between senior officials.
A State Department official familiar with the decision said the administration will continue pushing Sudan to make more progress, including paving the way for 2 million internally displaced people who fled the fighting in Darfur more than a decade ago to return home safely.
"We see this as an important milestone, but one on a road that's going to take a lot longer to get to where we want to go in Sudan," said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under State Department guidelines.
"It's a real marker, taking what had been a very bad and difficult relationship in a new and positive direction. It doesn't mean there isn't much to do. There's a lot to do yet. This is a productive first step."
Sudan routinely shows up as a country of particular concern on State Department reports assessing human rights and religious freedom. Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court to face genocide charges related to the Darfur conflict. Muslims are an overwhelming majority, and Christians who remained in Sudan after South Sudan declared independence in 2011 are closely watched. Many of those with means are fleeing the country, seeing little future there.
But U.S. officials think Sudan has made progress in counterterrorism since the days when Osama bin Laden lived there in the early 1990s. Officials in Sudan say that since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Sudanese have been cooperating with U.S. intelligence.
The State Department official said Sudan has cooperated in countering militants inside Sudan and throughout North Africa by helping deter attempts by terrorists to transit through the country.
U.S. officials also have seen progress on the humanitarian front. The government has announced unilateral cease-fires in areas where the Sudanese army has been battling rebels; stopped aerial bombardments that killed civilians; and created safe routes for humanitarian aid to get through.
There also are geopolitical factors. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have urged the United States to ease up on Sudan, to encourage it to distance itself from Iran. And while Sudan has by all reports stopped sending arms and material support to rebels in South Sudan, Washington wants to encourage a regional effort to end the fighting there, which has prompted one of the biggest waves of refugees since the Rwanda genocide.
Some human rights activists have worried that sanctions relief will prolong Bashir's reign. Members of Congress have urged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to make sure that American victims of terrorism facilitated by Sudan would be compensated. And Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said Friday that Sudan's progress has been minimal and vowed that "any backsliding will likely result in Congress reinstating sanctions."
But even the Obama administration recognized that sanctions alone have not been effective.
"For far too long, Washington promoted a policy of punishment only," said Zach Vertin, a former diplomat who worked on Sudan issues during the Obama administration. "It failed for two decades. Everyone agrees that transformational change in necessary. This is a dreadful government.
"Khartoum still wants many things from Washington," Vertin said. "Now the administration is in a good place to extract further gains. The administration should make clear if Khartoum wants to continue the path to normalization, it should continue progress in the identified areas and undertake a long overdue process that leads to a political transition."Peter Lloyd reported this story on Thursday, September 29, 2011 18:31:00
MARK COLVIN: After the Prime Minister's announcement of a major review of ties with Asia, there are calls today for a re-think of the cornerstone of Australian strategic policy, the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand and the United States) alliance.
It was the first major foreign policy pronouncement for Julia Gillard, who said last October that foreign policy was not her passion.
The former Treasury secretary Ken Henry will report to government on the review of ties with Asia at the start of next year.
The Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd appears to have been left out of the process entirely. He didn't attend the announcement and the review will be conducted under the control of the Prime Minister's department, not foreign affairs.
Peter Lloyd reports.
PETER LLOYD: After more than a year as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is finally giving foreign policy attention to how Australia should respond to the rapidly changing circumstances of the neighbourhood.
The backdrop to this review is the conventional narrative about the rise of India and China.
JULIA GILLARD: In 20 years, China and India have grown so fast they've almost tripled their share of the global economy and increased in absolute economic size almost nine-fold.
PETER LLOYD: From business and industry the announcement received a generally positive reaction.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's Greg Evans says the sort of moves required are already well known.
GREG EVANS: We simply need to be more competitive and a lot of those policy initiatives in order to deliver a more competitive Australian economy are ones that can be done now rather than awaiting the determinations of a white paper. And that means doing those sorts of reforms, such as taxation reform, in the area of regulation reform and ensuring we have suitable infrastructure.
PETER LLOYD: And it was a similar wish list from Graham Bradley from the Business Council of Australia.
GRAHAM BRADLEY: The importance of investment in infrastructure in Australia and the settings we have here for moving projects forward from conception to delivery and bringing in behind that the necessary infrastructure, those are the sorts of things which Asian countries, particularly our major export partners, such as China, Japan and Korea, are looking to Australia to do more effectively in the future.
So hopefully those are the sorts of things that will come out of this process.
PETER LLOYD: While the Henry White Paper won't set out to review the decisions of the Defence White Paper, there are some key strategic minds who believe a defence rethink is now essential if Australia is to navigate a safe passage between the rising ambition of China and our decades-old alliance with the United States.
Professor Hugh White, from the ANU's College of Asia and Pacific Studies.
HUGH WHITE: Now Australia, really throughout its history, has framed its international relations around the expectation that a great and powerful friend, first Britain, then America, was going to dominate Asia and was going to make Asia safe for us and since the Second World War that idea of American primacy as the foundation of Australia's security has been the very centre-pin of our foreign policy.
But China's rise changes that and I think what's important about Gillard's speech is that she went a long way towards acknowledging that. What's tantalising and disappointing about it is that she didn't quite get to acknowledge that core issue. She's still in her speech spoke about her expectation that America would continue to play in the future the role it's played for the last 60 years and frankly, because of the argument she herself marshalled about how significant China's growing power is for changing the strategic balance in Asia, I think the idea that America's role is going to continue unchanged is hard to sustain.
PETER LLOYD: Indeed, in the speech Ms Gillard said that the US absolute lead in military power will remain for some time to come. I guess what you're saying is you don't agree with that?
HUGH WHITE: Well it's a half truth. That is, if you look at the list of stuff then America is going to have a bigger navy and a bigger air force than China for a long time to come. But if you look at what they can do and what that means for their relative position in the western Pacific, which is where it matters for us, I think that's a very simplistic and rather complacent estimate.
The fact is that China has capacities to limit American military options in the western Pacific have expanded very rapidly in the last decade and will continue to expand very rapidly for the next decade. So the idea that America can exercise the same kind of military power in Asia today or 10 years from now, as it could 10 or 20 years ago, is I think simply wrong.
PETER LLOYD: What sort of demands might the US place on Australia in the future?
HUGH WHITE: If America continues to try and maintain primacy, to dominate the region, as it has in the past, then it's going to need to face down China militarily. It no longer has the capacity to do that alone. It will look to its allies like Japan and Australia to help it do that. And that will demand a lot more of Australia as an ally of the United States than we've been used to really since the days of the Vietnam War.
PETER LLOYD: Is there an emerging paradox for us in maintaining the ANZUS alliance while our chief minerals customer is also our chief prospective enemy?
HUGH WHITE: The aim for us must be to avoid that becoming a paradox, which means we have to encourage the United States to define its role in Asia and therefore what it expects of us as an ally in terms which are consistent with us having a huge and very beneficial trading relationship with China.
And the problem for Australia's position in Asia at the moment is that those two things are pulling us in opposite directions. Our biggest trading partner, not just today but in the future, is an active strategic competitor of our great ally. And in the long run, that simply can't work for us.
PETER LLOYD: Julia Gillard say the Henry White Paper will provide a national blueprint and promised specific policy responses by the middle of next year.
The Prime Minister's foreign policy credentials depend on it.
MARK COLVIN: Peter Lloyd.It looks like Spin Master isn’t ready to give up its crown as the maker of last year’s “hottest toy,” Hatchimals.
The toymaker will unveil new versions of its interactive fluffy toy that hatches out of an egg between Saturday and Tuesday, the company said. Spin Master is introducing the Hatchimals Colleggtibles, which come in a small, speckled egg. The product is also interactive, and has 70 different iterations. The toy is expected to retail between $2.99 to $9.99.
The existing Hatchimals toys will also come in a sparkly new version called Hatichimals Glitter, retailing at $59.99.
“This year, we are launching our most advanced robot with the Meccano M.A.X. Robot, we’re ready to surprise the world with the next evolution of Hatchimals and an amazing new version of the classic baby doll with Luvabella,” Ben Gadbois, global president and COO of Spin Master, said in a statement.
Separately, Spin Master will also unveil another line of the Hatchimals just before the holiday season later this year, on Oct. 6.Gentrification May Actually Be Boon To Longtime Residents
Gentrification May Actually Be Boon To Longtime Residents Listen · 4:36 4:36
Enlarge this image toggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR Meredith Rizzo/NPR
Bobby Foster Jr. can often be found reading the paper on a wooden bench outside Murry's grocery store on the corner of Sixth and H streets northeast in Washington, D.C.
"The sun shines over here this time of day," says Foster, a retired cook. "It's always good when the sun shines."
Murry's has been an anchor in this neighborhood for decades — during the crack wars of the 1980s and the urban blight that followed, when most other businesses packed up and left. Foster has been somewhat of an anchor, too. He's lived here for 54 years.
But now, this neighborhood and hundreds like it across the country are changing. Every other shop is a new restaurant, high-end salon or bar.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of NYC Parks Courtesy of NYC Parks
The neighborhood is gentrifying.
That's been a dirty word for 30 years, since the middle and upper classes began returning to many urban cores across the U.S. It brings up images of neighbors forced out of their homes.
But a series of new studies are now showing that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to longtime residents as well — and that those residents may not be moving out after all.
Even Foster is conflicted by the change he sees happening around him.
"Some things are good; some things are bad," he says. "But sometimes the good outweighs the bad."
Gentrification burst into the social consciousness on Aug. 6, 1988, with the Tompkins Square Park riot in New York City's East Village. Residents carried signs saying "Gentrification is class war." Police carried batons. The bloody battle that ensued left more than 100 people injured.
The protesters' fury centered on the idea that the poor would be made homeless so the rich could live in their neighborhoods, destroying whatever character they may have had.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR Meredith Rizzo/NPR
Lance Freeman, the director of the Urban Planning program at Columbia University, says that's what he believed was happening, too. He launched a study, first in Harlem and then nationally, calculating how many people were pushed out of their homes when wealthy people moved in.
"My intuition would be that people were being displaced," Freeman explains, "so they're going to be moving more quickly. I was really aiming to quantify how much displacement was occurring."
Except that's not what he found.
"To my surprise," Freeman says, "it seemed to suggest that people in neighborhoods classified as gentrifying were moving less frequently."
Freeman's work found that low-income residents were no more likely to move out of their homes when a neighborhood gentrifies than when it doesn't.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR Meredith Rizzo/NPR
He says higher costs can push out renters, especially those who are elderly, disabled or without rent-stabilized apartments. But he also found that a lot of renters actually stay — especially if new parks, safer streets and better schools are paired with a job opportunity right down the block.
That squares with a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
"We're finding that the financial health of original residents in gentrifying neighborhoods seems to be increasing, as compared to original residents in nongentrifying, low-priced neighborhoods," says Daniel Hartley, a research economist with the bank.
He looked at the credit scores of original residents and found that they went up — regardless of whether they rented or owned — compared with residents who stayed in nongentrifying neighborhoods.
"There may be these kind of side benefits to gentrification that we've been less focused on, that can actually help the original residents of the neighborhood," he says.
As for Bobby Foster, he says he's staying. He and his family own their home.
Some days, he says, he's very concerned about what will happen to the beauty salon across the street from his bench. Its owners often do elderly people's hair for free.
"They are beautiful people," he says. "They've been here as long as I've known this place."
But he says he also likes the new people, too. He wasn't sure he would, but he says he likes that they sweep their stoops just like his grandma did.
"The people are still good," he says with a smile.
Two months ago, city officials announced that a new retail apartment complex is coming to the corner of Sixth and H streets northeast. Murry's will be closing, and a Whole Foods will take its place. Foster says he just hopes Whole Foods will put a bench out front.WASHINGTON — The president's deficit-commission report, scheduled for a vote by the full panel on Friday, proposes to slash tax rates for corporations and for high earners.
The top tax rate is currently 35 percent and is scheduled to rise to 39.6 percent in 2011. The commission would cut that rate to between 23 and 28 percent, while shaving between seven and nine points off the corporate rate.
The commission does propose taxing capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, a move that would result in a higher liability for the wealthy. It also eliminates some corporate tax breaks. But those losses for top earners would be more than offset by their tax cuts.
The commission also addresses Social Security, though the program does not contribute to the deficit and, in fact, is running a multi-trillion dollar surplus. The commissioners would raise the full retirement age to 69 gradually and the early retirement age to 64.
Social Security would be tilted toward a welfare program rather than a social insurance system if the commission's recommendation to provide poorer seniors with a "special minimum benefit" is enacted into the law.
The commission also proposes medical malpractice reform, a long-term goal of the GOP.
The commission had been scheduled to vote on the proposal as required by law on Wednesday, but the vote has been pushed to Friday, suggesting that the commissioners lack the 14 of 18 votes needed to approve it. Some conservatives intend to oppose the bill, including Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), who is widely respected on fiscal issues by his House colleagues.
Sources close to members of the commission say that the proposal is virtually certain to be voted down and that President Obama has not been engaged with the process or deliberations.
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said Wednesday that he doesn't agree with everything in the report but will vote to support it. "I don't like everything in this package, but I like even less where our country is headed without it. It would be much easier to say no and to oppose this plan. I certainly would have done some things differently if I were writing it myself. But you can't have everything you want," he said.
House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.), who lost election in November, indicated in his comments to the commission that he'd also support it, but didn't come flat-out and say he would vote yes. "I think we should keep this process moving forward," he said, suggesting that if it failed the issue wouldn't be dealt with for years to come.
Commission member Alice Rivlin told the commission Wednesday she would be voting yes and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), often a reliable Obama ally, said she would vote no. David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell -- yes, the CEO of Honeywell is on the commission -- said that he'd be voting in support; businesswoman Ann Fudge also said she supported the final product.
Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), meanwhile, told HuffPost on Tuesday that if the plan kept the same "anemic" revenue approach - cutting taxes for the wealthy - he and other progressives would oppose it. The plan released today differs little in that respect from the one offered recently. "Their proposal on the revenue side was anemic. I've said that to both Alan and to Erskine," he said, referring to the co-chairs, Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. At the commission's meeting Wednesday, he said that he was staying at the table, but was critical of the report. "To me, you punted," he said, charging that the plan didn't sufficiently tackle corporate tax breaks.
The proposal would also slash spending across the board. Becerra said he objected to what he called "this meat-axe approach of just making across the board cuts and assigning the pain 50-50 to schools and environmental clean up and senior housing, along with defense programs or wasteful security programs that are very expensive."
"I have a real difficult time saying that, DOD, unknown to us where their problems are, should have to pay X amount for its wasteful spending and our schools will pay the price at this commensurate rate, even though there may not have been any sign of wasteful spending on the part of our schools. Now, maybe there is, but I say target that instead of using the meat-axe. That's the biggest concern I have with their approach on the discretionary side," he said.
The commission meets Wednesday to discuss the proposal.
One key vote is former Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, who is still on the SEIU's payroll in an emeritus capacity. The SEIU on Wednesday scorched the report, putting Stern in a difficult position if he intends to support it. "This proposal is a jobs killer at a time when our number one priority must be putting America back to work. The American people expect real solutions to create good jobs that support a family and bring fairness to our economy," said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry. "It's time for our policies to move beyond the Beltway to reflect the real world. For too long, we've forced the American people to pay the price for the failed economic policies that plunged our economy into crisis and racked up our debt. We need to reduce the deficit - and we can do so without breaking the back of American workers. We can do so without cutting the jobs of nurses, educators, first responders, fire fighters, and millions of other Americans."
Even as the deficit hyperbole hits a fever pitch in Washington, leading progressives are strenuously warning of the devastating effects a turn to austerity would have on the economy in both the short and long term.
There's a high road and a low road when it comes to deficit reduction, they argue. The high road approach includes robust job-creation measures in the short run and long-term investments in infrastructure, education, and other public goods. Sustained economic growth, after all, is the best way to reduce deficit spending.
The low road approach, by contrast, could stifle the economic recovery and accelerate the decline of the American middle class.
Progressives in recent weeks have introduced three of their own deficit-reduction plans, all of which call for increased spending until unemployment falls to manageable levels, and major public investments going forward, paid for through tax hikes for the rich and
for financial speculators.
One progressive member of Obama's deficit panel, Rep. Jan Schakowsky
(D-Ill.), drafted a comprehensive proposal that starkly contrasts with the one from the group's chairmen.
Demos, the Economic Policy Institute and The Century Foundation have produced a "Blueprint for Economic Recovery and Fiscal Responsibility."
And a Citizens' Commission On Jobs, Deficits And America's Economic Future, organized by the Campaign for America's Future, released its proposal on Tuesday.
One of the few areas of agreement between deficit hawks and progressives, interestingly enough, is that the once inviolable defense budget must take a massive hit -- somewhere on the order of $1 trillion over 10 years.
"What the proposals by Representative Schakowsky, EPI, Demos and the Century Foundation, and the Citizens' Commission all demonstrate is that we can reduce the deficit without cutting jobs or undermining the safety nets of Social Security and Medicare," said Mary Kay Henry. "These proposals offer real solutions to move our economy forward, reject the failed policies that created our current crisis, and respond to the demands of the American people to create good jobs."
The AFL-CIO is also out in opposition to the plan. "With this report the Deficit Commission once again tells working Americans to 'Drop Dead,'" said AFL head Richard Trumka. "No proposal on fiscal issues is serious that leaves the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place while raising taxes on the middle class and slashing Social Security and Medicare. All commission members should vote no on this misguided plan."Get the Recipe Italian Seafood Salad (Insalata di Mare)
It wasn't until very recently that the similarity between Peruvian ceviche and Italian seafood salad struck me. Peruvian ceviche: chunks of seafood—some raw, like fish, and some cooked, like shrimp—marinated in lime juice with cilantro and onion, along with the heat of fresh chili peppers. Italian seafood salad: chunks of seafood, all cooked and tossed in a dressing of lemon juice with olive oil, parsley, and onion, along with a subtle heat from chilies or black pepper. It's remarkable, actually, just how much they have in common. I sit at my computer now, fingers paused, pondering whether they share a historic link, or if it's just a case of culinary multiple independent discovery.
No matter. For now, I'll have to put that question aside, because the goal before me is not to trace their respective lineages but to figure out how to make the best damn Italian seafood salad imaginable. I'll tell you right away, though: I'm going to steal an idea from ceviche to get there.
Seafood salad is, at its heart, incredibly simple. The seafood should be fresh and tender, the dressing bright and flavorful. It should be served chilled. That's it, really. So, how do we make it?
Let's start with what I'm putting in my seafood salad, since there are lots of choices. Mine includes mussels, shrimp, scallops, and squid. Many versions also have octopus, clams, and conch,* but I've left those out—not because I don't love them, but just to limit my selection to easy-to-find options (plus, adding mussels and clams seemed redundant).
* That's pronounced conk, by the way...the contch pronunciation some people use is a real bugaboo of mine. One more small aside: I grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, where the name for conch was scungilli. According to my copy of Garzanti, a good Italian dictionary, "scungilli" is not a word that would be recognized by most speakers of standard Italian; best I've been able to determine, it's the Italian-American version of sconciglio, which is the Neapolitan word for conchiglia, which is itself the standard Italian word for "shellfish." If any native Italian speakers out there can shed more light on these words, I'd appreciate it, since a clear explanation has eluded me for years.
The next question, then, is how to cook them. Equally important is in what sequence, and that's where the logistical beauty of this method emerges. Here's what we know:
Mussels are easy to cook. Take a look at our guide to cooking mussels for more info, but the important thing to know here is that they cook quickly in an intense cloud of steam, dumping their own flavorful juices into the pot as they do so.
are easy to cook. Take a look at our guide to cooking mussels for more info, but the important thing to know here is that they cook quickly in an intense cloud of steam, dumping their own flavorful juices into the pot as they do so. Shrimp, as we know from our recipes for shrimp salad and shrimp cocktail, are best poached by starting them in cool water and bringing them up to 170°F, which guarantees plump, tender flesh that's not tight or mushy from overcooking. Marinating them first with baking soda and salt, an old Chinese trick, gives them an impressive juicy snap.
, as we know from our recipes for shrimp salad and shrimp cocktail, are best poached by starting them in cool water and bringing them up to 170°F, which guarantees plump, tender flesh that's not tight or mushy from overcooking. Marinating them first with baking soda and salt, an old Chinese trick, gives them an impressive juicy snap. Squid, in an application like this, needs to be cooked quickly, just enough to remove it from its raw state, but not so much that its muscle fibers contract and toughen. (Eventually, if you cook it long enough, its ample collagen will soften into gelatin, becoming tender again, but anything in between is rubbery.) It just so happens that squid's quick-cooking sweet spot is similar to shrimp's.
, in an application like this, needs to be cooked quickly, just enough to remove it from its raw state, but not so much that its muscle fibers contract and toughen. (Eventually, if you cook it long enough, its ample collagen will soften into gelatin, becoming tender again, but anything in between is rubbery.) It just so happens that squid's quick-cooking sweet spot is similar to shrimp's. Scallops, in the most general sense, are best raw or barely cooked. Even when seared, the goal is to brown the exterior well while leaving the rest as rare as possible. Also: Always buy dry-packed scallops, which are infinitely sweeter and more flavorful than brined, wet-packed ones.
So, given all this, I came up with a plan of attack:
The Scallops
I start by cutting the scallops into cubes, tossing them with ample lemon juice, and setting them in the fridge to chill—this is the ceviche move. The plan here is not to cook them, but to cure them, exactly like in a ceviche. It'll be just enough to strip away some of their pure rawness, while maintaining as much of their tenderness as possible.
The Mussels
Meanwhile, I brown some garlic in oil in a saucepan, infusing the oil with flavor. Then I add a small amount of water to the pot, bring it to a boil, toss the mussels in, and cover. They're done in just a couple of minutes, at which point I use a slotted spoon to transfer them to a bowl to cool.
I pluck most of the mussels from their shells, saving only a handful in the shell for presentation (like I did with clams for my spaghetti alle vongole), then chill them.
The Shrimp and Squid
Now I have some rich, garlicky mussel broth in the pot. I top it up with more cold water, add some lemon juice for acidity and flavor, along with peppercorns and a couple of bay leaves, also for flavor. Voilà! I have a tasty poaching medium for the rest of my seafood. And, because I've added cold water, I've reset the temperature, meaning I can cook the shrimp and squid using that cold-start method.
There's not even a reason to separate the shrimp and squid: They can both go into the tepid poaching medium at the same time, and gently be brought up to 170°F, at which point they'll be perfectly plump and tender throughout. Before cooking the shrimp, I've first marinated them with baking soda and salt for that snappy texture I mentioned above. (I tried that treatment on the squid, too, and it made no difference, so skip it.)
As soon as the water hits 170°F, I transfer the shrimp and squid to a large bowl or rimmed baking sheet to chill.
Finishing the Salad
While all the seafood is cooling, I whip up the dressing, a simple blend of minced |
OVERALL
SCORE Speed 6
Range 4
Ride 5
Hills 7
Build 8
Braking 8
Decently fast Charges quickly Excellent brakes Lackluster range
: 13.26 mph |: 7.1 miles
If you are panicking at the thought of spending tons of money on one of our top scoring boards, then take a few deep breaths and consider the Boosted Mini S. While this board is by no means cheap, it is definitely the best bang for the buck when it comes to these products, earning it a Best Buy Award. There are a few boards that retail for less, but we found some significant flaws with each of them that make us reticent to recommend them. The Mini S is quite fast — for a miniature board — does a surprisingly good job at climbing hills, and has stellar stopping power.
Unfortunately, a few concessions had to be made to keep both the size and the price tag of this board on the smaller side. It has a somewhat lackluster range and isn't the most comfortable to ride for longer periods, due to the narrower stance you are forced to take with the shorter deck. This also means it isn't the most fun to ride this board over particularly rough or bumpy roads, but we still had tons of fun riding this little board around, particularly when we thought of how much less it costs!
Read Full Review: Boosted Mini S
Overall Most Fun
Onewheel+
1
2
3
4
5
$1,500 List Price See It
66 OVERALL
SCORE Speed 7
Range 4
Ride 7
Hills 8
Build 7
Braking 7
Handles steep hills Drives over almost anything Fast charge time Reduced range Heavy
: 17 mph |: 6.7 miles
Improving on the success of its predecessor, the Onewheel+ supplanted the original Onewheel to claim the title of Overall Most Fun. The Onewheel+ is a similar design to the original, forgoing the typical four-wheel configuration in favor of a massive monowheel, this board relies on a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes — with a few your own balancing abilities — to keep you upright while riding…over practically anything. The Onewheel+ is exceptionally fast — almost too fast. While the other traditional models, like the Evolve or Boosted, can achieve higher speeds, it feels like you are going much faster on the Onewheel+. This board does amazingly well at the off-road terrain, handling things that other boards can't even dream of with ease. While this board may not be the most practical for the serious skateboarder or the daily commuter, this board is by far the most fun to play around on and can provide hours of entertainment for everything from weddings to a day at the beach — we brought it to both! there is a little bit of a learning curve with this model until you become proficient, but with a little practice — and some protective padding — you will be cruising around like an expert in no time.
Read Full Review: Onewheel+
Compare Top Products Displaying 9 Products
Analysis and Test Results
We spent countless hours researching the specifications on these products, sorting through user reviews and experiences, and comparing different manufacturer's claims to first determine which boards good enough to make the cut for our review, and then to determine a grueling series of challenges to crown the winners. We broke our test into six different weighted metrics that encompassed the most important aspects of these products and pushed them to the limit.
Which electric skateboard is the best? We bought them all to find out.
While your first impression of these products may be that they exist only as a novelty item, these boards can actually be a great tool for the daily commuter, or for the pro skateboarder. It's hard to argue with the ability to easily and quickly activate brakes or to zoom up a hill with ease. These products as a whole are quickly becoming more and more affordable, making them accessible to a wide variety of users.
Safety First!
We always recommend that everyone wears the proper protective equipment, whether they are a new rider or an experienced one, and check local rules and regulations regarding the use of these products before they go ride — no one wants an injury, ticket, or citation!
Value
Unfortunately, you are definitely going to have to pay for it if you want a high-performance electric skateboard. All the best boards easily cost over a grand — a hefty chunk of change, so it is definitely worth considering how much you plan on using the board and how much utility it will really give you if you are looking at the upper echelon of boards. However, if you are looking to save some cash, then the Boosted Mini S is your best bet. It's the cheapest board that we have seen without any major drawbacks and definitely worth your consideration if you are a budget-minded shopper.
Speed
Do you feel the need…for speed? One of the first tests we conducted, and the most important — making up 25% of the overall score — was looking at both the speed and acceleration of these products. We measured how long it took for each board to complete a known distance, giving it plenty of runway to build up to maximum speed before entering the course, and then calculated its top speed. We averaged the results of multiple trials to come up with our final results.
To assess the acceleration of each board, we timed how long it took each model to travel a 50' course, with a stationary start. We also took into account our various tester's intuition of the acceleration after they had logged significant time on each board.
The Plus is one of the speedier boards we have tested.
Both of our Editors' Choice award winners, the Evolve GTX Bamboo and the Boosted Board Plus did exceptionally well and along with the Evolve GT, tied for the top spot, all earning a 9 out of 10. This trio of boards all are very fast, putting up an average top speed of over 20 mph in our tests, with the GTX being the fastest — almost hitting an average of 24 mph in our time trials
Surprisingly, we found the Evolve GT had the best acceleration off the line, even beating out its successor, the GTX.
This is most likely due to the slightly smaller wheel size of the GT, but both these boards are bordering on scary when you hit full throttle from a standstill.
This board is one of our first choices for quick trips around town.
The Boosted Plus is a little slower off the line, but not by much. It usually only took a fraction of a second more time on average than the pair of Evolve boards to complete the course.
Following these top scorers were the Onewheel+ and the Riptide R1, both earning a 7 out of 10. The Onewheel+ hit an average maximum speed of 17 mph in our test — slightly less than the 19 mph claimed by the manufacturer, but more than fast enough for our taste. This board also accelerates extremely quickly — only really exceeded by the Evolve GT.
The R1 by Riptide held its own in this test, matching the performance of some boards that are significantly more expensive. This board averaged a respectable 19.9 mph in our max speed test and fared decently well when it came to acceleration, finishing slightly above average.
Next up, the Boosted Mini S, Inboard M1, and the Metroboard Slim Stealth Edition did slightly better than average with a score of 6 out of 10. The M1 is quite fast, clocking in at an average of 18.97 mph in our tested maximum speed test, but struggles a little bit when it comes to acceleration, being a little slow to get up to speed from a complete stop.
However, it was a little lacking in terms of acceleration.
The Metroboard did consistently above average throughout this metric, coming in at a respectable, though not award winning 17.65 mph. This board actually had decent acceleration, but only having one powered wheel made it feel exceptionally squirrely and uncontrolled in our acceleration test, causing it to lose some favor.
The single wheel drive on the Metroboard caused some interesting quirks in our acceleration test.
The miniature Mini S is comparable fast, clocking in with an average top speed of 17.13 mph. The manufacturer claims it can go 18 mph, but our best guess is they used a much smaller tester when coming up with that speed, because we never managed to get there. Surprisingly, this little board actually has very good acceleration, finishing in the upper portion of the group and having an exceptionally smooth and easy to ride acceleration curve off the starting line.
Rounding out the bottom of the bunch, the Acton Blink S earned a mediocre 4 out of 10. The Blink S hit an average maximum speed of 15.7 mph, but isn't particularly fast from a complete stop and take a bit longer than most boards to get up to speed.
Range
Following closely behind Speed, Range is almost as important of a metric for these products. No matter how awesome and amazing an electric skateboard is at zipping around town, climbing hills, and stopping on a dime — it all goes out the window the moment the moment the battery dies. We ran each board on relatively flat terrain until the battery died, keeping them in either an "Eco" mode if it was available, or in the riding mode most closely in the middle. We also timed how long it took for each board to recharge after it was completely drained.
How do these boards ride when the battery dies?
All of the hub motor boards function almost identical to a regular longboard with very little to no additional rolling resistance, with a negligible difference between the different models. As for the belt driven boards, there is a noticeable increase in rolling resistance, but none that stand apart from the group; The exception being the Metroboard which has a significant increase in rolling resistance.
The Evolve GTX delivered a phenomenal performance, earning a 10 out of 10 in our range test and putting it at the top of the group.
This board felt like it lasted forever, only calling it quits after 32.3 miles. Unfortunately, this board also takes forever to charge, only filling up the battery after almost 6 hours on the charger.
The Metroboard Slim Stealth Edition took home the second highest score in this metric, earning an exceptionally good 8 out of 10. This board has a maximum range of 23.4 mph, with a riding profile of 5 beeps out of 9, putting it close to the top of the group. We did notice that this board started to slow down around the 20-mile mark, maxing out at around 13 mph with the throttle held at 100%. This board had about an average time to charge the batteries, taking around 2 hours, 40 minutes in our test.
The Metroboard had plenty of range to keep even our most dedicated skateboard testers satisfied.
The Evolve GT and the Boosted Plus tied for third place in our Range metric, both meriting a 7 out of 10 for their efforts. The Evolve GT went for a total of 18.2 miles failing to operate, though we did like that this board maintained its speed right until the very end. This is a bit of a rarity, as almost every other board that we tested began to slow down well before the battery drained. Most other models would start slowing down around the 50% mark and then would almost be unusably slow for the last few miles before the battery died. The Evolve took approximately 3 hours, 40 minutes to completely charge, though an upgraded, 80-minute fast charger is available to purchase as an upgrade.
It was super comfortable to cruise around town on the Evolve, making it one of our favorites.
The Boosted Plus lasted for a respectable 14.5 miles in the range test, comparing quite favorably with the other boards of the bunch. On top of that, it also charges in less than two hours — one of the faster boards of the group.
Following these standout performances, the remainder of the group (Onewheel+, Inboard M1, Riptide R1, Acton Blink S, and the Boosted Mini S) all received a 4 out of 10 for their somewhat lackluster showing.
The Onewheel+ had a below average range of about 6.7 miles, but had a fantastically short recharge time of about 35 minutes.
The Boosted Mini S made is a little farther, failing at just over 7 miles, but also charges quite quickly. The R1 made it the furthest of the group, totally stopping just shy of 9 miles, but it slowed down so much that its effective range feels closer to 6.5 miles. It takes a bit longer to charge as well, clocking in close to two hours.
The other two boards performed very comparably, with the Inboard, lasting for 6.3 miles and took 90 minutes to recharge and the Blink S had an effective range of around 6.7 miles, making it slightly further than the Inboard. However, it took slightly less time to charge at 80 minutes.
Chris McNamara testing the downhill braking of one of the Boosted Boards. The braking was great until the regenerative braking overcharged the battery causing the brakes to stop working. Make sure to drain the battery enough before a long downhill!
Ride
This metric basically encompassed how each board felt, in both ideal and difficult conditions. We evaluated the comfort of each board, as well as which models we were drawn to over and over again, that possessed that certain je ne sais quoi. We also assessed how each board fared in the face of adversity — how it handled traversing bumpy terrain and if it could successfully clear unexpected cracks in the road. You can see how each board ranked in the chart below.
We had a tie for the top scoring position in this metric, with the Evolve GTX, Boosted Plus, Evolve GT and the Onewheel+ all earning a well-deserved 7 out of 10.
We found that the Evolve GT, GTX, and the Boosted are the most comfortable to ride of the bunch, and consequently, were the ones that we were drawn to over and over again if we needed to run a quick errand or just wanted to play around on. One quick side note: We tested the Evolve GT and the GTX with the standard, longboard style wheels that came stock, not with the upgraded all-terrain kit.
This board has an unmatched range.
The Onewheel+ wasn't quite as comfortable to ride for longer periods of time, but we were drawn to it over and over again — almost as much as the above boards — simply because it is so much fun to ride.
While the Onewheel+ model wasn't as comfortable to ride as the Evolve or Boosted, its performance at traversing bumpy terrain and handling unexpected cracks is unparalleled. Unsurprising, as it's easy to see that a board designed for traveling over mud, grass, sand, and snow should easily handle some rough spots on the asphalt. The Onewheel+ and its predecessor are our top picks whenever adverse conditions exist.
The Evolve GTX handled rough road the best out of the traditional skateboard designs, just slightly better than the GT or the Boosted Plus.
Following closely behind the top boards, the Metroboard and the Inboard both earned a 6 out of 10. The Metroboard just wasn't quite as comfortable to ride around, and though we did like this model, we just weren't drawn to it quite as much as some of the others. It does a good job handling the bumpy terrain, about as good as the Boosted, but watch out if you hit an unexpected crack. This board has super low clearance, and the motor will bottom out easily on large cracks — enough to send you flying if you aren't careful!
The low clearance of the Metroboard is particularly noticeable here.
The Inboard M1 was quite comfortable to ride around, with a nice wide deck putting it on the same comfort level as the Evolve GT. It did reasonably well at handling cracks and bumps, performing similarly to a standard longboard but the hub motors prevent it from bottoming out when clearing cracks, like the Metroboard is prone to doing.
The Boosted Mini S finished in the middle of the group, meriting a 5 out of 10 for its efforts. This board is only about average in comfort to ride, due to its smaller size and the forced narrower stance, but we were still decently drawn to it, mainly due to its extremely convenient operation and transportation. Unfortunately, its narrower wheelbase makes it a bit more jarring when going over rough pavement.
The Riptide R1 and the Acton Blink S were last in the lineup, both earning 4 out of 10. The Blink S is much more comfortable to ride than the original Blink, doing away with the bump in the middle and flattening out the top deck. However, it is still a little on the short side to be comfortable for prolonged periods and doesn't do the best at handling cracks or rougher roads.
The Riptide is a surprisingly fun and comfortable board to ride around, but we weren't fans of the remote and how the board responded to its commands.
The deck is a little stiff on this board and it isn't amazingly comfortable to ride.
It also has a stiffer deck, so you definitely feel cracks and crevices a bit more, but it does handle them better than the Acton does.
We had a hard time even finding a hill that could best the GTX.
Hills
One of the best benefits of having a motorized skateboard is the ability to zip up hills with ease. However, not all electric skateboards are created equal, and a hill that is easy for one model may prove an insurmountable obstacle to another. We put these products through their paces to find the maximum hill grade that they could climb and see if it matched the manufacturer's claim. Once again, our tester was an average-sized, adult male for these tests, and a smaller or larger rider might find slightly different hill climbing abilities than we did. However, the overall trend and order would remain the same. You can see how each board stacked up below.
The pair of Evolve boards decisively claimed the top score in this category, a 10 out of 10, for powering up a 23% grade that stumped every other board we tested. These boards didn't struggle it all, with our tester noting that it felt like he "flew up the hill."
Following the GT and the GTX, the Boosted Plusand Onewheel+ both earned an 8 out of 10 for their solid performance. These boards shot up a 15% grade, but struggled with the 23% grade. This hill just slightly exceeded the abilities of these boards, with the Boosted Plus lacking the power and the Onewheel+'s self-balancing circuitry beginning to push back to keep you upright. We would estimate that both of these boards could have handled a slightly less steep hill with ease and would have had no problem with a 20% grade hill — right in line with the manufacturers' specs.
The Metroboard and the Mini S are the last boards that really excelled in this test, both meriting a 7 out of 10. The Metroboard was one of the slowest to get up the 15% hill, but it did make it, holding its own with only one wheel powered of traditional skateboard design. It made it a fraction of the way (about 6') up the steeper, 23% hill, but couldn't quite muster the power to make it all the way up.
The Mini S performed very much the same, even making it up the 15% hill a bit faster than the Metroboard, but again couldn't quite make it on the 23% grade hill.
The Riptide did about average in our hill test, earning it a 5 out of 10. This board did make it up the 15% grade hill, but just barely. It crept up the hill, going slow enough where it was much faster to walk
The R1 definitely struggled with the steeper hills.
Next, the Inboard earned a 4 out of 10. This board did quite a bit worse than the Riptide or the Mini, struggling to make it up an 8.75% grade.
The Acton board followed, receiving a meager 3 out of 10. This board made it up a maximum of about 5% hill grade, and felt extremely slow on anything steeper, causing us to joke that it might have been faster to walk.
Some of the different remote styles of the boards we tested.
Build
For this metric, we compared some of the non-riding aspects of these products. We looked at the ergonomics of the remote control (if there was one), how responsive the board and remote felt, the level of customer support we received, the weight of each unit, and whether or not regenerative braking was a feature.
In a bit of an upset, the pair of Boosted boards toppled the pair of Evolves to claim the top spot for this metric, both receiving an 8 out of 10.
The Plus and the Mini S weigh in at 17.8 lbs and 15.9 lbs, respectively. This puts them roughly in the middle of the pack overall. We did find this to be a bit surprising in the case of the Mini S, as we would have expected it to be on the lighter side overall.
They both have the same remote that is intuitive and user-friendly, as well as being quite ergonomic to hold and feels very well constructed, although we did have two small complaints with it: the riding mode indicator and the charging port. There isn't a way to know which mode you are in without cycling through the different modes and counting the lights or beeps. We also hoped that Boosted would eventually update the charging port from mini-USB, given that it is slowly becoming obsolete and the ubiquity of Apple Lightning and micro-USB cables and the growing advent of USB-C. However, these are relatively trivial details.
The remote on the Mini S is one of our favorites.
Both of these boards are highly responsive to remote commands, though the Mini S can get a little finicky right before the battery dies. Customer support is quite helpful and was responded promptly and knowledgeably to some of our technical questions. However, we did have to pay for shipping to and from the repair facility to get a remote syncing issue fixed.
Following the pair of Boosted Boards, both the Evolve GTX, the GT, and the Onewheel+ earned a 7 out of 10.
The Evolve boards are both a little on the heavier side, but have a solid remote. It's easy to hold, but it does take a tiny bit of time to get used to if you aren't already familiar with electric skateboard remotes.
The remote for this board features a small screen to easily display relevant riding data.
The boards are highly responsive to remote commands and their customer support is on point, being very patient with our technical questions and dealing with some repairs quite painlessly.
The Onewheel+ has regenerative braking and excellent customer support that matches the Boosted and the Evolve, but is considerably heavier, dropping its score down. We actually found the self-balancing control input of this product to be the most responsive — far superior to those that have remotes. Additionally, there is also a companion app to allow you to adjust settings on these boards through your phone.
The lean to control method of the Onewheel+ is exceptionally responsive.
The Inboard M1 and the Blink S both earned a 6 out of 10 when it came to their build. The Inboard was a little on the heavy side but has an interestingly shaped remote that was actually quite comfortable to hold, for the most part.
The swappable battery on this model was a nice feature.
The throttle stood out from the remote the most on this board — something we weren't very fond of. It was reasonably responsive to remote commands without too much of a noticeable delay and the customer service we received was fairly helpful. The Inboard also has regenerative braking.
Acton has decently helpful customer service, though we did have to jump through a few hoops with an online system rather than helping us over the phone. The remote is also decent to hold. However, we noticed that input lag to be awful on the Blink S. It did redeem itself a tiny bit by being one of the lightest boards that we have seen.
The Riptide R1 and the Metroboard were about average in this category, each deserving 5 out of 10. Both of these boards felt equally responsive and had regenerative braking, but we found the Metroboard support to be lacking in our interactions with them — substantially worse than the Boosted and the Evolve. The Metroboard is also one of the heavier boards, but we did like its remote. The board also is very responsive to the remote commands.
The Riptide is almost the exact opposite, being one of the lighter boards we have seen but being a little finicky and unreliable to the remote commands. However, the carrying handles are a nice feature and they have solid customer support.
Braking
Last, but certainly not least, the stopping abilities of each board comprised this final metric. We tested how the brakes worked at allowing you to maintain a controlled descent down a steep hill, as well as how they did at completely stopping you on flat ground and how long the stopping distance was. You can see below how the boards scored in this metric, worth 10% of the overall score.
The Boosted Plus had the best brakes of the bunch, earning a 9 out of 10 for this set of tests. This board does a great job of allowing you to control your speed down a steep hill and took about 25' to come to a complete stop in our tests from a speed of approximately 12 mph.
The Mini S came next, earning an 8 out of 10 for its solid stopping capabilities. This little board can also come to a complete stop on hills, but isn't the fastest at stopping on flat ground, taking a bit longer than most.
The Evolve GTX, GT, and the Onewheel+ all tied for the third place position, each receiving a 7 out of 10. The Evolves couldn't completely stop our descent on the steepest of hills but would reduce our speed to around 1-3 mph, definitely slow enough to step off without too much worry. However, both Evolve boards stop exceptionally quickly on flat ground — almost abrupt enough to throw you from the board.
The Onewheel+ has exemplary stopping capabilities, having some of the shortest stopping distances and easily controlling your speed, even when descending exceptionally steep hills.
Too Much Faith in the Brakes? Don't Push Your Limits.
While having brakes on a board is a fantastic addition, it's prudent to remember that these are not 100% reliable. Many of these boards all use the electrical properties of the motor to slow down and divert that energy to the battery, rather than a mechanical brake and can become disabled if the battery is too full or under other circumstances. Prudent inspection of the owner's manual will state the required precautions to take when using the brakes on each board.
The Metroboard and the Inboard M1 did slightly above average, meriting a 6 out of 10. The Metroboard didn't do great at stopping on flat ground, having a stopping distance that was almost double that of the Evolve. It was also possible to control your speed on medium hills, but we found that only having the single wheel with a brake on it caused you to slide around a bit on the steeper hills.
The Inboard was about on par with the Metroboard for stopping distance, taking 35' to come to a complete stop from moderate speed (12 mph). It did a little worse than the Metroboard when came to controlling speed on the downhills, going a little bit faster with the brakes fully engaged on a 15% grade hill.
The Riptide R1 delivered a middle-of-the-road performance, earning it a 5 out of 10. It takes almost 70' to come to a complete stop at moderate speed, but only about half of that to slow down enough to jump off and run it out, if you had to. It's about average at controlling your speed on steep descents, reducing your speed to somewhere between 6 and 10 mph.
Rounding out the back of the pack was the Blink S, deserving a 2 out of 10 for its subpar performances in this metric. The Blink S did extremely poorly, taking over 50' to come to a complete stop in our test — less effective than dragging your feet.
Ready to ride off into the sunset after a long day of testing.
Conclusion
It can be difficult to narrow down the field of electric skateboards to the right product for you, as these items can be a significant investment and have a wide spread of capabilities and features. Hopefully, this review has helped you make the perfect selection and find a board that you will be happy with for years to come.Share this...
Buffer Pinterest Linkedin StumbleUpon
On our recent road trip through Portland we had the great opportunity to visit Float On, the largest sensory deprivation floatation tank center on the West Coast. Sensory deprivation allows your mind to achieve a relaxed dreamlike state while floating weightless in complete darkness. By eliminating light, sound, and gravity your brain stops searching for outside information and switches from producing alpha waves to theta waves; this normally occurs right before falling asleep. We’ve been interested in floating for years, even debated about whether we could handle it or not, but we haven’t had the opportunity until recently.
Float On is located on Hawthorne Blvd in SE Portland. They have 6 tanks available in various styles including two large open pool style tanks. Everyone at the facility was super friendly and helpful and the place was very clean. They provided everything, including ear plugs, and a towel, and made us feel so comfortable.
The float itself was AMAZING. “It’s like relaxing in outer space.” The ninety minutes just drifted away. It was a beautiful relaxing experience. It’s a great chance to spend some quality time with yourself.
As far as the psychedelic state its concerned, I was expecting a much more intense experience than I achieved. I think with some practice it could be much more powerful. All of our debating on whether we could handle our own brains for ninety minutes seemed silly afterward; you’re in total control the whole time.
The after glow was nothing short of bliss. You feel INCREDIBLE when you come out of there. Your brain feels like you’ve been away on an extended vacation and your body feels so nice after floating weightless for an hour and a half.
The Lobby
We can’t say enough great things about float on. It was a much needed relaxation for our minds and our bodies. We had such a great time that we’ve already booked our appointments for our next floats. We’d recommend it for anyone.
For more information or to book a float, you can check out their icredibly informative website floathq.comMichael Andersen, Green Lane Project staff writer
Separated from carriage traffic: a protected bicycle sidepath in Monroe County, N.Y.
Last week I wrote that California was already recommending protected bike lanes, rather than painted ones, in 1972. But did you know that there was an American protected bike lane movement in 1905?
It started in 1898, right at the end of the 1890s “bike boom” that began with the pneumatic tire and ended with the Oldsmobile. But it was different than the “Good Roads” movement you might have heard of, in which bikers allied with farmers to create paved shared routes through the countryside.
No: this was, as University of Wisconsin-La Crosse historian James Longhurst wrote in an academic paper published last October, a “forgotten episode” in which “an alternative vision of the future of American transportation flickered to life, and then faded.”
Before most roads were widened and paved, and before cities required (or assessed) abutters to install concrete sidewalks and curbing, advocates took advantage of the transitional state of the built environment to insert sidepaths into the urban landscape. The proposed paths “shall not be less than three feet or more than six feet wide … and shall be constructed within the outside lines and along and upon either side of such public roads and streets.” While they were to be built within the already-established legal right of way, the sidepaths were segregated from both the adjoining road and from sidewalks: already-existing pedestrian paths were not to be subsumed or inconvenienced. Later court decisions made it clear that wagons, carts, and horses were excluded from the paths. They were to be a separate network, set apart from foot and vehicle traffic, solely for bicycles.
They were, in short, protected bike lanes.
The movement had its own national magazine, “Sidepaths,” with a circulation of 5,000, published in America’s bike capital: Rochester, N.Y. Sidepaths, Longhurst writes, had more success in some cities than in others and “briefly flourished in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere.”
The basic problem for sidepaths, Longhurst shows, is that after an initial burst of enthusiasm among bike advocates faded, there wasn’t enough public money in place to build and maintain them.
Charitable fundraising dropped off. Governments resisted taxing the public at large for what was seen as a service for urban elites. User fees, funded by bike licenses, were supported by some bikers but not others.
Where sidepaths were hobbled from the start by a weak and fluctuating funding stream, [historian Christopher] Wells observes that the interstate highway system was successful because of the ingenuity and invisibility of its financing, hiding the cost from end users and protecting it from the depredations of marauding legislators. When it comes to infrastructure, it seems, the funding mechanism is destiny.
‘Had it been successful, a separate sidepath system would have changed American history’
Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, in 1894. Photo: nycgovparks.org.
“Had it been successful, a separate sidepath system would have changed American history,” Longhurst writes in his article, which will also inform his upcoming book tentatively titled “Bike Battles.”
If the paths themselves had continued to exist, they might have offered alternative suburban and interurban commuting options throughout the twentieth century. As cities and towns of America expanded, the suburbs would have bloomed along the sidepath networks linking them back to the urban center. The persistence of sidepaths might have provided some American cities with a built-in radial network of bicycle paths throughout the twentieth century — the very network that many are now trying to build or accommodate, with great difficulty, in the twenty-first.
PlacesForBikes helps U.S. communities build better biking, faster. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly news digest about building all-ages biking networks. Story tip? Write [email protected]
Top image and magazine cover: “Sidepaths. Monroe County,” scrapbook dated 1899, Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County, Historic Monographs Collection, Rochester, NY.
See all Protected Bike Lanes blog entriesUntitled a guest Aug 26th, 2016 810 Never a guest810Never
Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features!
rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 370.42 KB XPreface to Crash Override Network's Chat Logs% (23/12/2014, 11:20:33 PM] Alex Lifschitz: As I've said, I'm not ashamed of anything said in here as a support group for 66 targets. [31/12/2014, 4:00:53 PH] Tesseract: there really can never be too much security in these because we're fucked entirely if it leaks {31/12/2014, 4 01 12 PH] SF: Are we fucked entirely? (31/12/2014, 4:01:47 PM] SF: I mean their collusion conspiracies about a fictional Anti-6G go HAY beyond the scope of this chat. {31/12/2014, 4 02 26 PH] Tesseract: irrelevant, we're pretty fucked if the existence of this chat comes out let alone the logs ZOpposing Randi Harper Doxing People on Facebook% {24/12/2014, 5:59:32 AH] David Gallant: Hmm. Randi is posting Facebook profiles of folks who are harassing her. {24/12/2014, 6:03:44 AH] Quinnae: Le sigh. {24/12/2014, 6:04:20 AM] Ian Cheong: Yeah that's not cool. {24/12/2014, 6:04:26 AH] Quinnae: I understand why people feel tempted to do that but it's just not ethical. You can't control who uses that information for what purpose. It's why doxxing is insidious: you can put personal info in front of a faceless, global audience instantaneously. {24/12/2014, 6:05:05 AM] Quinnae: So even if you're trying to, with good reason, shame a harasser, you can't control what that huge crowd decides to do with that info, and all you've potentially done is create more pain. (24/12/2014, 6:06:19 AM] Rob: Yeah. I've lashed out like that. It's wrong. {24/12/2014, 6:06:41 AH] Rob: I think I'd only do it now if someone directly came at my family or like someone showed up at my door or some shit and the cops wouldn't do anything. {24/12/2014, 6:06:56 AH] SF: And DarkHossGarden is an asshole concern troll and I don't know why H18 puts up with him. {24/12/2014, 6:07:11 AH] Tesseract: https://twitter.com/SJHIlluminati/status/547512351822741504 lol gatorgame {24/12/2014, 6:08:03 AM] Rob: But yeah, doxxing is pretty much always wrong, and even setting aside ethical issues (24/12/2014, 6:08:06 AH] Rob: It virtually always backfires. %A Week Later, Crash Override Network Cheers on Randi Harper As She Doxes People on Facebook. They Plan on Destroying Victims' Careersx [04/01/2015, 9:11:26 AH] Remy: Randi just dropped how we can scrub our Facebook friends list of closet Gaters https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/551545210048487424 {04/01/2015, 9:12:36 AM] Remy: sorry this is the right link https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/551545777168719872 [04/01/ |
a time machine, he has no need to travel back to 2009 to urge iOS engineers to focus on widgets and third party keyboards.That's not to say that there's no value in widgets or custom keyboards. Android's promotion of both has highlighted a variety of interesting abilities. And of course, Apple's iOS has also incorporated system-supplied widgets (like Stocks and Weather) and app-specific custom keyboards (again, as in Apple's own Numbers). What Apple hasn't done is fling iOS wide open to unrestricted hobbyist experimentation without considering the consequences.Google's decision to do just that with Android has manifested the problems associated with rushing poorly conceived, half baked solutions to market. Widgets on Android are commonly associated with battery drain and can help contribute to the noticeable performance lag that still affects the system.Additionally, Google's implementation of both widgets and third party keyboards expose significant security vulnerabilities and privacy issues that many end users wouldn't reasonably assume possible. It's virtually impossible for Google to police whether a third party keyboard spies on users. And it is well known that many actually do, recording users' key presses and uploading the data via the network because there's no functional security boundaries in place to stop such malicious activity from occurring.Security on Android is largely based upon naive trust. Even apparently legitimate custom keyboard developers have been found to send users' keystrokes back to their servers for processing in clear text making everything they type open to anyone listening.As an experienced platform vendor that has dealt with malicious security attacks decades before Google was even incorporated, Apple exercises a lot more concern about leaving its platform open to exploit. It also doesn't delegate its basic security design to end users, most of whom have no expertise in navigating the complex issues involved.In the design of Android, Google has repeatedly bet that nothing bad will ever happen, and has regularly lost that bet at the expense of its users. But the reputation of Android has also become tarnished, particularly affecting valuable clients in government and in the corporate enterprise, where Android remains a minority overall and offers Apple's iPad virtually no competition in tablets at all.In both iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, Apple will present widgets within Notification Center, owing to the relationship between push notifications and widgets' primary role in displaying regularly updated information. For this reason, Apple commonly refers to the new widgets as "Today Extensions."On OS X, Today Extensions will effectively replace the Dashboard widgets introduced nearly a decade ago in OS X Tiger (below). Dashboard widgets were conceived as desk accessories that could be quickly invoked and dismissed, and were implemented in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to allow for a similar level of security sandboxing as standard web pages. Web standards have been designed not to implicitly trust foreign hosts.However, rather than being, effectively, mini web pages like Dashboard widgets, Today Extensions are native code that--like other App Extensions--use a new security model based on Apple's XPC and modern iOS-style Cocoa sandboxing. They are launched by the system and dynamically managed; if they use too much memory on iOS, the system can terminate them to maintain optimum performance.Building the infrastructure to support such as secure, native implementation has taken years of engineering behind the scenes. XPC, which Apple describes as an "interprocess communication technology that complements App Sandbox by enabling privilege separation," was first introduced in OS X Lion in 2011. Privilege separation is key to allowing App Extensions to perform limited tasks without opening up dangerous new vulnerabilities.In addition to native performance and a mature security infrastructure, App Extensions also need a viable market supporting them. Dashboard widgets have long languished on OS X after their initial novelty wore off, in part because of the delay involved with launching the web rendering process that animates them when users invoke Dashboard, and in part because free Dashboard widgets lacked a functional business model similar to App Store apps.Today Extensions (as with all forms of App Extensions) are packaged with new or existing apps, making it possible for developers to market the new widgets as a valuable feature of their paid (or ad supported) apps.Today Extensions will work slightly differently on iOS and OS X; on mobile devices, the widgets appear as touchable presentations that lack text input or editing features (meaning that a stocks widget, for example, would need a companion app to edit the list of stocks it presents). On OS X, widgets can be edited in place and can support text input.These differences are largely due to the fact that on iOS, Notification Center is a temporary pull down designed to present information at a glance. Add a keyboard and editing controls, and the value of presenting widgets would be crowded out by all of the editing UI. Mobile devices also have less processing power and memory available to devote to widgets than a Mac would.On iOS, any sort of widget that demands more UI and resources than Notification Center can reasonably accommodate would make more sense to implement as a standalone app--just as Apple implemented its own Stocks and Weather "widget apps" seven years ago on the original iPhone.In contrast to Android, Apple's vision for Today Extensions is clearly aimed at presenting quick access to scores, stocks and similar information in the context of other notifications, rather than simply padding the Home screen with a busy box of fluff to make up for a lack of significant, native apps.Like widgets themselves, Notification Center is another feature Android users like to complain that Apple "stole" from an open source project built upon, ironically, the foundation of "copy left" ideology where there is no such thing as stealing.However--just as with the overall concept of both widgets and a multitouch mobile device designed to launch discrete apps from a home screen of icons--Apple publicly outlined its efforts to develop a central notification system for iOS before Android was even released.In early 2008 at the release of the App Store and "iPhone OS 2.0," Apple's then head of iOS development Scott Forstall announced the company would be setting up a centralized Push Notification Service as a mechanism for allowing apps to respond to updates from outside services without needing to remain active in the background, constantly polling for new data and eating up battery power, CPU and memory.At the time, Samsung was still promoting Windows Mobile 6, which (like Android today) required users to manually manage background processes and the memory and CPU resources their apps were consuming, an implementation Apple pointed to as an example of a poor design it wanted to dramatically improve upon.However, Apple noted later that year that it had greatly underestimated the overwhelming demand for both apps and push notifications, sending the company back to the drawing board and delaying the rollout of its Push Notifications Service until iOS 3.0 in early 2009, following a stress-testing beta program involving the Associated Press and other app developers.In late 2009, Google, a major iOS developer, filed a patent for "notification of mobile device events," describing a feature it would later add to Android. Android enthusiasts now claim Apple simply copied its Notification Center from Android rather than having laid all the groundwork for touchscreen smartphones, a functional app store and a secure, battery-efficient notifications system.In 2010, Apple brought its push notifications to the Mac as an API, initially to support FaceTime notifications and then more broadly as a public API in 2011's OS X Lion Today's basic design of Notification Center (above) appeared on the Mac as a user-facing feature in 2012's OS X Mountain Lion, after first making an appearance on Apple's mobile devices in iOS 5 the previous year.Rather than Apple's newest implementation of widgets being "slavishly copied" from Android, the reality is that Google was fully aware of Apple's public work on notifications and--similar to Samsung -- sought to patent a basic notification listing concept (below) it witnessed others developing first, including prior art developed at Palm for webOS by former Apple engineers.Among those engineers is Rich Dellinger, who worked at Apple from 1999 to 2006 before leaving for Palm, where he developed the "non-intrusive banner notification system used in webOS" (below) that debuted at the beginning of 2009.Dellinger returned to Apple after Palm was acquired by HP in 2010. Apple also hired Peter Hajas, who had developed MobileNotifier, an app for jailbroken iOS 4 devices that presented a pull down list of notifications. Apple subsequently released its official Notification Center in iOS 5 (above).In parallel, Google hired Palm's webOS designer Matias Duarte, who is credited with developing the UI for Android 3.0 Honeycomb, as well as the company's latest web-inspired'Material Design'appearance for both Android L and future versions of Chrome OS. That work draws clear inspiration from Apple's richly animated UI for iPhone released seven years ago, albeit with a unique color palette.More important than the identity of the first implementation rushed to market is the superior implementation currently available. That's particularly evident among the second type of App Extension that Android users are claiming Apple "stole" from Google: third party, system wide Custom Keyboards.After belatedly recognizing the value of onscreen keyboards, Google opened up third party access to a core Android system resource back in 2009 to allow anyone to offer custom software for text input. This has been particularly valuable to Android users because Google's default system keyboard was widely considered to not be very good. Google's first attempt at a virtual keyboard was delivered alongside third party options.As one user noted in a question posed to Android Central years afterward, "my biggest gripe about Android as an iOS user, was that I thought all of the keyboards but the Jelly Bean one were garbage. I found text prediction to be sorely lagging behind iOS, and having to pause to select your word I thought was a bad idea. I'm a fairly rapid typer, and on the iPhone made relatively no mistakes, and never had to backspace at all."Apple's default keyboards--including support for Chinese finger stroke input--in addition to iOS input features including spell correction and auto correction, have long held a major advantage over the basic keyboard included with Android. So much so that Samsung was found to have infringed Apple's 8,074,172 patent on keyboard auto correction in an effort to make its devices more competitive with iPhones.At the same time, there are third party custom keyboards that many Android users find compelling, and those input systems were previously impossible to port to iOS because of Apple's abundance of caution to protect users' privacy and security.With iOS 8's new Custom Keyboard Extensions, developers can implement alternative systems, with a few restrictions. First of all, Custom Keyboards can't be used to type in secure text field objects, such as the users' passcode or other password fields. When a user attempts to enter secure text using a Custom Keyboard (like the new Swype, below), iOS 8 temporarily reverts to the system keyboard, then returns the user back to their preferred keyboard afterward.Custom Keyboards are also prevented from entering "phone pad" input, such as the phone number field in Contacts. Apple also notes that Custom Keyboards "cannot select text or control cursor position" and "cannot offer inline autocorrection controls near the insertion point" due to the way they are implemented.Apple also outlines that "by default, a keyboard has no network access and cannot share a container with its containing app."The company's documentation devotes an entire section to "Designing for User Trust," noting to developers, "your first consideration when creating a custom keyboard must be how you will establish and maintain user trust. This trust hinges on your understanding of privacy best practices and knowing how to implement them."The company spells out three principles of design to earn users trust. Under "Safety of keystroke data," it states "users want their keystrokes to go to the document or text field they're typing into, and not to be archived on a server or used for purposes that are not obvious to them."Under "Appropriate and minimized use of other user data" it adds,"If your keyboard employs other user data, such as from Location Services or the Address Book database, the burden is on you to explain and demonstrate the benefit to your users."Finally, under "Accuracy" it notes, "accuracy in converting input events to text is not a privacy issue per se but it impacts trust: With every word typed, users see the accuracy of your code. To design for trust, first consider whether to enable network access. Although network access makes many things possible for a custom keyboard, it also increases your responsibilities."To turn on network access, a Custom Keyboard must request permission from the user. There are a variety of reasons why a user might opt to allow this, including features such as saving a custom autocorrect dictionary; providing enhanced touch-event processing, input prediction, and speech recognition for dictation; providing quick access to "names, places, and phone numbers relevant to the user" from the user's Contacts or from network supplied data; or autocorrection of nearby place names from Location Services.Apple outlines specific requirements for developers to implement in their Custom Keyboards when network access is granted by the user, including the instruction, "do not store received keystroke or voice data beyond the time needed to provide text back to the user or to provide features that you explain to the user."Users who aren't interested in Custom Keyboards will still get the benefit of iOS 8's intelligent QuickType keyboard, which offers predictive text customized to both the app users are typing in and the person they are addressing, in addition to isolating common answers from the context of the conversation (below).As with Photo Editing Extensions, Custom Keyboards and Today Extensions provide third party developers with new ways to extend and add value to users via Apple's platform, which strictly regulates how App Extensions can work.Apple has also designed App Extensions to benefit developers by highlighting the value of their work. As the company notes, "when users enter your extension, your custom UI can help to show them that they're shifting into a new context. Because users can distinguish your extension from the current app, they can appreciate the unique functionality that you provide."At the same time, Apple has also given consideration to how users manage their own environment. "Users' awareness of extensions as separate entities also means that they can identify and remove extensions that misbehave or don't perform well," Apple states. The company has also outlined how users will be able to easily specify which Extensions they want to activate or remove.The inclusion of both Today Extensions and Custom Keyboard functionality into the design of App Extensions indicates that Apple is working to erase any perceived advantages held by alternative operating systems. However, the design of iOS and OS X aren't simply reacting to follow market trends. Apple is also establishing its own unique functionality with App Extensions in ways that are not shared with the rest of the industry, as the following segment will outline.This article is from the archive of our partner.
AUTHOR: John Mullane
PUBLICATION: Bucks County Courier Times, by way of PhillyBurbs.com
THESIS: Suburbs are "triumphant" in struggle against cities to attract the best residents.
PREDICTION: Despite a "bright flight" of college-educated young people to cities, "eventually those bright 'knowledge workers' boomerang back to the 'burbs."
EVIDENCE: In cities, "The bars are overpriced; the exotic cuisine gives you heartburn."
WHY ALL EVIDENCE CONTRARY TO HIS THESIS IS WRONG: "Certain snoots have never gotten over the post-World War II exodus of Americans from crime-ridden, highly taxed, poorly managed, grimy, unwholesome cities."
"Certain snoots have never gotten over the post-World War II exodus of Americans from crime-ridden, highly taxed, poorly managed, grimy, unwholesome cities."
OBSERVATION FROM DUNCAN 'ATRIOS' BLACK: "This guy has a great career ahead of him as a commenter on newspaper web sites."
SUMMARY OF A BROOKING INSTITUTION PAPER: "What Brookings really wants to say is: Smart people live in cities; dumb people live in suburbs."
"This guy has a great career ahead of him as a commenter on newspaper web sites.""What Brookings really wants to say is: Smart people live in cities; dumb people live in suburbs."
BONUS ZINGER: "Brookings has generated McBuzz with a story with more holes than a New York Times editorial."
PHILLY PRIDE MOMENT: Taking a shot at "boutique-clotted towns like San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Texas and Portland, Ore."
'STARTLING' NEWS: "One of the more startling developments uncovered by the last census was that immigrants, legal and otherwise, were skipping big cities like Philadelphia altogether because the suburbs are where the jobs and opportunity lay."
WHY ALL CITY DWELLERS INEVITABLY MOVE TO SUBURBS:
Maybe it's your second close call with a thug while you waited on a subway platform on your way home from work. Maybe it's the third time your car is broken into. Maybe it's growing weary of your roommate's girlfriend arriving on Friday and staying until Sunday.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Image copyright AFP Image caption Mr Hollande decided the French people were more concerned by unemployment than immigration
France has voted for change. For only the second time during the Fifth Republic the people have voted to put a socialist in the Elysee Palace. The French left has not won in a quarter of a century.
For Europe too this is a momentous event. For a long time the centre right has held the stage; now a socialist has won and European politics will feel the shudder.
Francois Hollande ran a shrewd campaign. He detected weariness with the high-octane presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. He made a virtue out of being ordinary. He portrayed himself as a "Mr Normal" - a man to reassure the French public.
During a long campaign, his message was consistent. The economic policies of Nicolas Sarkozy, he said, had failed. Without growth there could be no recovery, he insisted.
Untested
Image copyright Reuters Part of Mr Hollande's appeal was that he promised to defend the French social model and save what is called 'French exceptionalism'
With change comes uncertainty both for France and for Europe. Mr Hollande has never held government office. He is untested. He has promised to increase spending whilst balancing the budget, mainly through tax increases.
The truth is that if France is to bring its budget deficit down to 3% by 2013 then 18bn euros of cuts will have to be found next year. How that will be done did not receive much attention during the campaign.
Before the first round of voting Francois Hollande spoke the language of the left. "My true adversary in this battle," he said "has no name, no face, no party... it is the world of finance."
He promised to create 60,000 new education posts. He promised to squeeze the rich. "The soul of France is equality," he said.
During the second round we heard far less of this. By this time he knew he could depend on the votes of the far left. No more offerings needed to be made.
Europe holds its breath
In office, however, he will be cautious and pragmatic, more of a social democrat than a socialist. He knows that the markets will be watching.
He cannot afford to see France's borrowing costs driven up. In reality his room for manoeuvre will be limited. During the campaign, President Sarkozy warned that an Hollande presidency would take France on the road to Greece and indulge in a festival of spending. His advisers are acutely aware of the dangers and they have already held conversations with top business people.
The rest of Europe will hold its breath. He has promised to make growth rather than austerity his priority. In saying this he challenges the German prescription for solving the eurozone crisis.
He simply does not believe that austerity first is working. His first official meeting after he is sworn in will be with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
He has said that he will re-negotiate the pact that enforces greater discipline in the eurozone. Mrs Merkel has been quite clear: there will be no renegotiation. Mr Hollande says it is "not for Germany to decide the future of Europe".
He will be out to reclaim French influence over the future direction of the EU.
Jump-start for EU
But there are early signs of compromise. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has said that they "will add a growth pact to the budget (fiscal) treaty".
Image copyright Reuters Mr Sarkozy made the fatal mistake of underestimating his rival, a man he regarded as useless.
Already Mr Hollande has changed the debate in Europe. Germany is more isolated than it was two months ago. The discussion now is how to jump-start the European economy. There is talk of increasing spending on infrastructure projects. The EU might relax its targets for cutting deficits.
Part of Mr Hollande's appeal was that he promised to defend the French social model and save what is called "French exceptionalism".
He has said that for certain people the pension age - only recently increased to 62 - will drop back to 60.
The 35-hour week will stay. It led some to see France as a country in denial, nostalgic for its past and seeking safety from a globalised economy. In office he will have to address the fundamental issue of whether the French way of life with its high social costs is sustainable.
'Get lost'
As for Nicolas Sarkozy, the election became not just about a stagnating economy but about himself. A significant number of French people did not like his style. They did not expect a president to tell an awkward farmer to "get lost". They disliked his aggression and the cascade of ideas.
He came to power promising to modernise France. There was to be a "rupture" with the past. In the event his reforms were modest. He energetically fought the eurozone crisis, shoulder to shoulder with Angela Merkel, but unemployment rose to close to 10%. He led the West's response to Colonel Gaddafi but military campaigns rarely win elections.
He was the most brilliant politician of his generation but as he himself admitted he did not always act as the French people expected of a president. He lacked reserve.
During the campaign he made immigration, the movement of jobs abroad and open borders his big issues. "Europe," he said, "has given in too much to free trade and deregulation." He detected the French people felt insecure.
In the second round of the campaign he focused on these issues that are the natural territory of the far right whose votes he needed. It was a tactic without much prospect of success. The far right mistrusted him; he had spoken their language before and had not delivered.
Sarkozy mystery
In any event, the French people - as Mr Hollande observed - were less bothered by immigration and more concerned with unemployment.
It was one of the mysteries of the latter stages of the campaign that President Sarkozy did not focus more on the dangers of the eurozone crisis and of the risks of turning to an untested leader.
He believed that his relationship with the German chancellor was his trump card. He even considered her coming to campaign for him. The idea backfired.
In the end there was no consistency to his message. Mr Hollande did not seem dangerous. He cast himself in the mould of his mentor Francois Mitterrand. Mr Sarkozy made the fatal mistake of underestimating his rival, a man he regarded as useless.
He was an impulsive, energetic leader who became the latest of a long line of politicians to be destroyed by the eurozone crisis and by his own flaws.× Man who tried to hire hit man found dead in Virginia jail cell
HOPEWELL, Va. — The Petersburg man who attempted to hire a hit man to kill both his girlfriend’s husband and his niece’s boyfriend died in jail. Shannon Crane, 36, was found unresponsive in his cell at Riverside Regional Jail early Monday morning. The Office of Chief Medical Examiner will determine Crane’s cause of death, however a statement from the jail indicated it appeared Crane died of natural causes.
Crane had been incarcerated since November 2013. That was when he was arrested after he met an undercover police officer who he thought was a hit man. Police were called when Crane’s targets learned Crane wanted them dead. In a video recorded by the undercover officer, Crane went into graphic detail about what he wanted done.
Please enable Javascript to watch this video
"I want you to put him in so much f***ing pain that he's never felt before," Crane said. "I want you to take something, literally every teeth, tooth in his mouth."
An Internal Investigation into Crane's death is underway at the jail. The investigation is required by jail policy, the statement read.
Crane was scheduled to be officially sentenced in Petersburg Court this week.Sonya Yruel/Drug Policy Alliance The potent opiate behind surging drug overdose deaths across the U.S. is now cropping up in the marijuana supply, according to officials in Ohio.
Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco confirmed Monday that fentanyl, a synthetic opiate roughly 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin, has been found in marijuana.
The deadly chemical is often cut into heroin supplies to increase the potency and even put into knock-off painkillers. The Drug Enforcement Agency recently warned about fentanyl being increasingly cut into cocaine supplies, reports WLWT.
Sammarco did not specify how many cases she has seen involving fentanyl-laced marijuana and the Hamilton County Corners Office has not reported any deaths linked to the combination.
"We have seen fentanyl mixed with cocaine, we have also seen fentanyl mixed with marijuana," Sammarco said during a joint press conference with Republican Sen. Rob Portman, according to WLWT. "Essentially, the message we've tried to get out there, is if you are using any form of street drugs, count on them having some form of synthetic opioid mixed in."
There are no confirmed cases of fentanyl-laced marijuana deaths anywhere in the country, but law enforcement officials in Ohio, which is suffering from rampant opioid addiction, have issued recent warnings about the risk. Dave Frisone, director of the Lake County Narcotics Agency in Ohio said June 14 they have had several false alarms regarding laced heroin, but say they "are aware that there is a potential."
"In regard to marijuana, I'm not familiar with that," Melvin Patterson, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Cincinnati.com Monday, regarding fentanyl and pot. "There could be."
A used needle sits on the ground in a park in Lawrence Thomson Reuters Fentanyl is infiltrating drug supplies across the country because of how cheap the substance is compared to standard narcotics.
While a kilogram of heroin from a Mexican cartel will cost a domestic supplier roughly $64,000, they can order a kilogram of fentanyl through the mail from China for as little as $2,000.
It can also be used to create roughly 20 times more doses than heroin, providing dealers with huge profits.
Officials are particularly alarmed by the increasing presence of fentanyl in cocaine supplies. Police note that, unlike heroin, cocaine is more widely used as a social drug.
They fear that users are largely unaware of fentanyl being cut up with cocaine and say it will have deadly consequences. Less than half a teaspoon of pure fentanyl is enough to kill 10 people.
The New York Times recently culled through data from state health departments and county medical examiners and coroners, predicting there were between 59,000 and 65,000 drug deaths in 2016.From the City of Providence:
Providence International Arts Festival To Bring World-Class Experience To Residents & Visitors June 11th – 14th, 2015
Providence, RI – Mayor Jorge O. Elorza and FirstWorks are pleased to announce the Providence International Arts Festival taking place June 11th – 14th, 2015. Building off of Providence’s international recognition as a creative city, this first-ever signature event will be a jaw-dropping celebration featuring world-class arts, sculpture, music, food and spectacle in the heart of the city’s downtown. The centerpiece of Festival activities is Saturday, June 13, 2015 with events beginning on Kennedy Plaza at 4pm.
“This festival will be a way to connect the world-class talent we have here in Providence with artists and performers from around the world,” said Mayor of Providence Jorge Elorza, “We are excited to welcome visitors to the City to explore all that we have to offer and look forward to partnering with so many great organizations and artists.”
The Providence International Arts Festival will literally transform the city with international artists in visual art, sculpture, music, public art, civic dialogue, educational workshops, community play, spectacle and parade. The Festival will be centralized around program hubs that unify the downtown into an arts corridor – PVD City Hall, FirstWorks on the Plaza, Public Art Transformations, Empire Street Gateway, and the Washington Street Corridor. Opening ceremonies will feature a specially commissioned first work, One Voice by Dr. Clarice LaVerne Thompson with RPM Voices of Rhode Island and a stunning 800 voices in a procession to City Hall from all points of the compass to kick-off the festivities at 6pm on Saturday, June 13, 2015.
“This festival will be a spectacular convergence of art and music, transformation and ideas – tying the hyper local extraordinary talent with internationally renowned artists and gems on the global arena to spark the imagination and streets of Providence and beyond,” stated Kathleen Pletcher, Executive Artistic Director of FirstWorks, Festival co-producer and a Providence-based nonprofit organization that brings world-class performing and visual artists and unique “firsts” to Rhode Island.
The Festival is funded with lead support from an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, GTECH, and the RI Foundation. Additional support is gratefully acknowledged from Alex & Ani, Coastway Bank, Narragansett Beer, Textron, University Orthopedics, and the Providence Tourism Council.
Two RFP’s have been announced to catalyze local participation: one for performances on the Community Stages on Washington Street and Burnside Park and a second for public art interventions/installations.
Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, along with FirstWorks have convened local organizations to collaborate on festival concepts and planning since December 2013.
Community members, vendors and performers wishing to participate can visit PVDFestival.com to learn more.
A full schedule of artists and happenings will be released in early May 2015.
RelatedNORTHAMPTON, MA—With her remarkable ability to determine exactly how others should be allocating their limited resources for food, local woman Carol Gaither is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on what poor people should and should not have in their grocery carts, sources said Thursday.
As verified by multiple eyewitness reports from supermarkets across the Northampton area, the real estate agent and mother of three is capable of scanning the contents of any low-income person’s basket and rapidly identifying those items which people like that don’t need to be buying, based on the products’ nutrition and cost. Additionally, Gaither, 48, is widely regarded as a leading expert in determining which groceries they would purchase instead if they had any common sense or restraint.
Advertisement
“There’s no reason she should be loading up on those pricey TV dinners if she’s getting the government to pay for it,” Gaither told reporters at a local Super Stop and Shop, training her prodigious faculties on a welfare recipient using a benefit card in front of her in the checkout line. “If I were on food stamps, I’d just buy two whole chickens and a bag of potatoes—you could feed a family for a week on that and still have money left over.”
“All that junk she’s buying is just loaded with sugar, too,” said Gaither, identifying with uncanny speed another critical flaw in her fellow shopper’s grocery selection. “No wonder her kids are acting out like that.”
Sources said that Gaither, in addition to being a noted scholar of how the indigent squander her tax dollars at the supermarket, is able to detect with astonishing frequency instances in which poor people claim they are unable to pay their own grocery bills yet, seconds later, pull out a brand-new cell phone that’s far nicer than the one Gaither herself owns. Moreover, as one of the most respected voices concerning the poor’s flawed eating habits, Gaither reportedly possesses the ability to instantly assess when people on public assistance keep coming back to the same fatty foods that pretty much explain how they came to look like that in the first place.
Advertisement
Despite her stature, Gaither has never shared her insights with any of these individuals, sources confirmed.
“The other day, I saw a woman who bought a box of name-brand Frosted Flakes because, apparently, the generic kind wasn’t fancy enough for her,” said Gaither, swiftly and decisively calculating that bagged cereal would have cost half as much. “And guess who’s going to be paying the difference in the end?”
“But then again, what do you expect?” Gaither added, making eye contact with the reporter.
Advertisement
As noted by her acquaintances, Gaither’s unrivaled expertise extends far beyond her appraisal of poor people’s shopping lists. Indeed, sources confirmed that she is also nothing short of a savant on such matters as whether young children should be given electronic gizmos to play with instead of a book, what homeless individuals are doing with the spare change you give them, and what on earth would motivate someone to go out in public like that.
Additionally, Gaither has earned wide commendation for putting forth a clear, straightforward solution to the behavioral problems she has identified as plaguing the poor population, suggesting simply that needy families stop popping out babies and focus on raising the ones they already have.
“No matter where you go, it always seems like Carol has some amazing new piece of insight about people around her,” said friend Gloria Ferris, who told reporters that she has often marveled at Gaither’s abilities on trips to the mall, the movies, and especially in restaurants. “Whether she’s analyzing exactly how a parent should go about disciplining their child or methodically dissecting the laziness of obese people who ride around in motorized carts, Carol’s on top of it. She just has a gift.”
Advertisement
“If only these people could be as perceptive as she is,” Ferris added.Dear Members of the McMaster University Community,
I said in a recent interview with students that the most serious thing I have to do in my role as President is to defend the principle of academic freedom. The freedom to research, consider, discuss and present even the most controversial or potentially divisive issues is a fundamental tenet of academic freedom, and the foundation of the work and mission of the academy. In the same interview, I also made the comment that defending academic freedom is not always easy to do. The events of last Friday surrounding the “Drawing the Line” student-organized event provide a perfect demonstration of this difficulty. The University received multiple communications both before and after the event from individuals and groups writing either in support of or in opposition to the speaker. The University was variously invited to shut down the event, to silence anticipated protests, to make public statements denouncing the speaker, and to make similar statements denouncing those expressing their opposition to the speaker.
As President I chose to do none of those things. The event was framed and organized as a discussion of political correctness and freedom of speech on campus, which I regard as an important and entirely appropriate topic for discussion at an institution of higher learning. The fundamental mission of the University is to provide opportunities for education, both within and beyond the classroom. Taking the opportunity to listen to a speaker, even one with whom one may vehemently disagree, is an important aspect of education and a cornerstone of academic debate. It has not, therefore, been my approach, nor that of this University, to intervene to shut down events, exclude speakers, or prevent discussion of issues, even where controversial topics are under discussion.
In clearly affirming the commitment of this University to protecting the expression of diverse opinions on our campus, I also want to be absolutely unequivocal in expressing our support for the diversity of our campus community, and our commitment to the rights of minority groups, including trans- and gender-non-conforming members of our community, in particular. I am in no doubt that our University, like our society, is only enriched and strengthened by the diversity of people and opinions on our campus. As such, the presence on campus of a speaker who may challenge the rights of any particular group should not be seen as undermining the University’s commitment to inclusivity but merely as an opportunity to explore and debate the topics under discussion.
Indeed, an important aspect of academic freedom is the willingness and ability to engage with and discuss ideas that might be fundamentally opposed to one’s own. It is extremely regrettable that the events of last Friday do not reflect the standard of academic debate that we would aspire to model on our campus but this does not mean that as an institution we should ever seek to limit the right of members of our community and visitors to our campus to engage in peaceful protest. In the event that the tactics employed by such protestors violate the laws of our land, or the codes of conduct of our community, appropriate sanctions can and will be applied, but our commitment to academic freedom requires that, except in the most extreme cases, the cancellation of events, or the exclusion or removal of particular individuals will not be our response.
I would hope that all members of our community are united in our pursuit of knowledge, our belief in the power and importance of education, and our mission to protect the free flow of ideas within an inclusive and respectful environment. As members of the academy, we bear a shared responsibility to reaffirm and uphold the core principles of academic freedom, collegiality, and respect that are fundamental to McMaster and to ensure that our University continues to be a place where respectful debate and discussion can flourish.
Sincerely,
Patrick Deane
President and Vice-Chancellor
March 20, 2017Dele Alli scored twice as Tottenham beat Chelsea 2-0 at White Hart Lane in January
The FA Cup semi-final between Chelsea and Tottenham at Wembley Stadium will be broadcast live on BBC One.
The London derby will kick off at 17:15 BST on Saturday, 22 April.
Spurs are one of only four clubs to beat Premier League leaders Chelsea this season - a 2-0 victory in January.
The second Wembley semi-final between Arsenal and Manchester City, which will kick off at 15:00 BST on Sunday, 23 April, will be shown on BT Sport, with highlights later on BBC One.
Tottenham won the 1967 FA Cup with a 2-1 win over Chelsea, while the Blues beat Spurs 5-1 in a semi-final at the new stadium on their way to winning the competition in 2012.
It is the third meeting between the sides the season - Chelsea won 2-1 at Stamford Bridge in November - and Spurs will hope to have striker Harry Kane back from an ankle injury.
Football Focus will come live from Wembley on the Saturday as part of the build-up to the semi-final.
Chelsea beat holders Manchester United 1-0 on Monday to reach the semi-finals, a day after Tottenham thrashed League One side Millwall 6-0 in their quarter-final.MATMATA, Tunisia — The cavernous, underground homes chiseled deep into the orange boulders along this mountainous stretch of the Sahara certainly feel like they |
. A truthful subject will maintain good eye contact. When the deceptive person answers the question, they may break eye contact, however briefly. They may resume eye contact after the question, sometimes as if they are looking to see whether you are accepting the answer.
Answer: Evaluate the actual answer itself. Look for the following characteristics: Does the person use harsh or soft terms? Does the answer spread or focus suspicion? Does the person Include or omit themselves from suspicion? Does the person give you a direct answer or is the answer evasive or non-relevant to the question?
Timing: Check the answer for timing and consistency. Is the answer on time, or are they thinking before answering? The bottom line is to evaluate the timing of the answer with the type of question. As Paul Ekman states, “Is the person thinking when they shouldn’t have to?”
Voice Characteristics: Does the person’s voice tone go up, down or remain in the middle? Is the speech clear or mumbled? Does the voice volume increase in anger when accused or remain neutral?
One word of caution — this model is just a tool to observe and quickly analyze behavior. It is not ironclad, and there is a significant amount of learning required to become proficient at reading and interpreting behavior.(CNN) The National Football League has upheld a four-game suspension of New England Patriots star quarterback Tom Brady for his role in the football tampering scandal known as "Deflategate," the league announced in a news release Tuesday.
Commissioner Roger Goodell, in affirming the suspension he handed down in May, said new information about the destruction of Brady's cell phone showed the four-time Super Bowl champion "sought to hide evidence of his own participation in the underlying scheme to alter the footballs."
Don Yee, Brady's agent and attorney, said Brady did nothing wrong.
"The appeal process was a sham, resulting in the commissioner rubber-stamping his own decision," Yee said.
The NFL Players Association said it would file an appeal, presumably in federal court, on Brady's behalf.
NFLPA spokesman George Atallah told CNN's Rachel Nichols that media reports claiming the NFL offered to drop Brady's suspension are "categorically false."
"The negotiations never got that far," Atallah told Nichols, adding that the players' union made an initial offer to the league.
The proposed deal was that the four-game suspension be eliminated, but Brady would pay a fine for failing to cooperate with the investigation.
Atallah said league officials told them the NFL wouldn't even discuss anything unless Brady admitted his guilt.
At that point negotiations ended, Atallah told Nichols.
Brady has denied he knew of any plan to alter footballs so that they would be underinflated, which would have made the balls easier to grip.
The NFL didn't immediately respond to CNN's request for comment on the negotiations.
Saga of a cell phone
On March 6, Brady was interviewed by investigators hired by the NFL. The league says that it was informed months later that on or about that date, Brady told his assistant to destroy his cell phone that he had been used since early November.
That was a period that included the AFC Championship Game and the initial weeks of the subsequent investigation into the allegations of tampering with the footballs.
The investigators, according to Goodell's final decision, had asked Brady's lawyers for the cell phone several times, on and before February 28.
The destruction of the cell phone wasn't disclosed at Brady's interview with investigators when he was asked for it again.
It wasn't until June 18, almost four months after investigators had requested its data from Brady and five days before an appeals hearing, that Brady's lawyers informed the league. During the 10-hour long appeals hearing at NFL headquarters in New York, Brady said the phone had been destroyed because that was his usual practice when he got a new mobile phone.
"We presented the commissioner with an unprecedented amount of electronic data, all of which is incontrovertible," Yee said. "I do not think that any private citizen would have agreed to provide anyone with the amount of information that Tom was willing to reveal to the commissioner."
He said electronic information was ignored by Goodell, and "we don't know why."
The quarterback began using a new phone on March 6, leading the NFL to believe that the previous one had been destroyed that day.
The phone contained more than 10,000 text messages.
Brady's lawyers also gave the league a letter from Brady's cell phone provider that the texts could no longer be retrieved.
Reacting to the decision to uphold the suspension, the NFL players' union said on its website: "The fact that the NFL would resort to basing a suspension on a smoke screen of irrelevant text messages instead of admitting that they have all of the phone records they asked for is a new low, even for them, but it does nothing to correct their errors."
Goodell failed to give Brady due process, the statement said.
Attalah clarified that Brady and his lawyers gave the NFL records of the numbers texted from Brady's phone. Those documents didn't show the content of the texts, he said.
Can anyone please explain to me why #TomBrady destroyed his cell phone if he had nothing to do with #DeflateGate? — George Wrighster (@georgewrighster) July 28, 2015
Brady had denied involvement
Goodell's decision is the latest chapter in a controversy that started when the New England Patriots were accused of using underinflated footballs to gain a competitive advantage in January's AFC championship victory over the Indianapolis Colts.
Brady denied involvement, but the NFL suspended him four games without pay in May. Brady appealed, setting up the decision by Goodell.
The Super Bowl-winning Patriots were punished, too. The team was fined $1 million and will forfeit its first-round selection in the 2016 NFL Draft and its fourth-round pick in the 2017 draft.
Lawyer Ted Wells, who led the investigation, said Brady probably had at least a general knowledge about how the balls were deflated.
The report said the likely perpetrators were equipment assistant John Jastremski and the man who carried the balls from the officials' locker room to the field, Jim McNally. The Patriots have suspended both employees indefinitely.
Tom Brady sent 10,000 texts in 4 months. That rivals a teenage girl in texting productivity. http://t.co/3rsfoTgoRl — Robert King (@RbtKing) July 28, 2015
What's next?
Brady, one of the best-known and highest-paid athletes in the United States, has the option of filing a lawsuit and taking the fight to the court system.
In what appears to be a preemptive move, the NFL filed a complaint against the National Football League Players Association in federal court in New York on Tuesday, asking for a judge to confirm the decision to uphold Brady's suspension.
Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, suspended last year after a child abuse case in Texas, filed suit and won his case -- filed on his behalf by the players' union -- in February. He was reinstated by the NFL in April. He has been participating in training camp, but the NFL's appeal of the decision to overturn his suspension is pending.
The league suspended the 30-year-old football star indefinitely in November over allegations that last year he disciplined his son, who was 4 at the time, too harshly with a "switch," or thin stick.
If he accepts the suspension, Brady will sit out games against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars and Dallas Cowboys. He would return October 18 in a game at Indianapolis.9 Linux ethtool Examples to Manipulate Ethernet Card (NIC Card)
Ethtool utility is used to view and change the ethernet device parameters.
1. List Ethernet Device Properties
When you execute ethtool command with a device name, it displays the following information about the ethernet device.
# ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 100Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on Supports Wake-on: d Wake-on: d Link detected: yes
This above ethtool output displays ethernet card properties such as speed, wake on, duplex and the link detection status. Following are the three types of duplexes available.
Full duplex : Enables sending and receiving of packets at the same time. This mode is used when the ethernet device is connected to a switch.
Half duplex : Enables either sending or receiving of packets at a single point of time. This mode is used when the ethernet device is connected to a hub.
Auto-negotiation : If enabled, the ethernet device itself decides whether to use either full duplex or half duplex based on the network the ethernet device attached to.
2. Change NIC Parameter Using ethtool Option -s autoneg
The above ethtool eth0 output displays that the “Auto-negotiation” parameter is in enabled state. You can disable this using autoneg option in the ethtool as shown below.
# ifdown eth0 eth0 device: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20) eth0 configuration: eth-bus-pci-0000:0b:00.0 # ethtool -s eth0 autoneg off # ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: Not reported Advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: Unknown! (65535) Duplex: Unknown! (255) Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: off Supports Wake-on: g Wake-on: g Link detected: no # ifup eth0
After the above change, you could see that the “link detection” value changed to down and auto-negotiation is in off state.
3. Change the Speed of Ethernet Device
Using ethtool you can change the speed of the ethernet device to work with the certain network devices, and the newly assign speed value should be within the limited capacity.
# ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 autoneg off # ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: Not reported Advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: Unknown! (65535) Duplex: Unknown! (255) Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: off Supports Wake-on: g Wake-on: g Link detected: no
Once you change the speed when the adapter is online, it automatically goes offline, and you need to bring it back online using ifup command.
# ifup eth0 eth0 device: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20) eth0 configuration: eth-bus-pci-0000:0b:00.0 Checking for network time protocol daemon (NTPD): running # ethtool eth0 Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: Not reported Advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: 100Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: off Supports Wake-on: g Wake-on: g Link detected: yes
As shown in the above output, the speed changed from 1000Mb/s to 100Mb/s and auto-negotiation parameter is unset.
To change the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), refer to our ifconfig examples article.
4. Display Ethernet Driver Settings
ethtool -i option displays driver version, firmware version and bus details as shown below.
# ethtool -i eth0 driver: bnx2 version: 2.0.1-suse firmware-version: 1.9.3 bus-info: 0000:04:00.0
5. Display Auto-negotiation, RX and TX of eth0
View the autonegotiation details about the specific ethernet device as shown below.
# ethtool -a eth0 Pause parameters for eth0: Autonegotiate: on RX: on TX: on
6. Display Network Statistics of Specific Ethernet Device
Use ethtool -S option to display the bytes transfered, received, errors, etc, as shown below.
# ethtool -S eth0 NIC statistics: rx_bytes: 74356477841 rx_error_bytes: 0 tx_bytes: 110725861146 tx_error_bytes: 0 rx_ucast_packets: 104169941 rx_mcast_packets: 138831 rx_bcast_packets: 59543904 tx_ucast_packets: 118118510 tx_mcast_packets: 10137453 tx_bcast_packets: 2221841 tx_mac_errors: 0 tx_carrier_errors: 0 rx_crc_errors: 0 rx_align_errors: 0 tx_single_collisions: 0 tx_multi_collisions: 0 tx_deferred: 0 tx_excess_collisions: 0 tx_late_collisions: 0 tx_total_collisions: 0 rx_fragments: 0 rx_jabbers: 0 rx_undersize_packets: 0 rx_oversize_packets: 0 rx_64_byte_packets: 61154057 rx_65_to_127_byte_packets: 55038726 rx_128_to_255_byte_packets: 426962 rx_256_to_511_byte_packets: 3573763 rx_512_to_1023_byte_packets: 893173 rx_1024_to_1522_byte_packets: 42765995 rx_1523_to_9022_byte_packets: 0 tx_64_byte_packets: 3633165 tx_65_to_127_byte_packets: 51169838 tx_128_to_255_byte_packets: 3812067 tx_256_to_511_byte_packets: 113766 tx_512_to_1023_byte_packets: 104081 tx_1024_to_1522_byte_packets: 71644887 tx_1523_to_9022_byte_packets: 0 rx_xon_frames: 0 rx_xoff_frames: 0 tx_xon_frames: 0 tx_xoff_frames: 0 rx_mac_ctrl_frames: 0 rx_filtered_packets: 14596600 rx_discards: 0 rx_fw_discards: 0
7. Troubleshoot the Ethernet Connection Issues
When there is a problem with the network connection, you might want to check (or change) the ethernet device parameters explained in the above examples, when you see following issues in the output of ethtool command.
Speed and Duplex value is shown as Unknown
Link detection value is shown as No
Upon successful connection, the three parameters mentioned above gets appropriate values. i.e Speed is assigned with known value, Duplex become either Full/Half, and the Link detection becomes Yes.
After the above changes, if the Link Detection still says “No”, check whether there are any issues in the cables that runs from the switch and the system, you might want to dig into that aspect further.
To capture and analyze packets from a specific network interface, use tcpdump utility.
8. Identify Specific Device From Multiple Devices (Blink LED Port of NIC Card)
Let us assume that you have a machine with four ethernet adapters, and you want to identify the physical port of a particular ethernet card. (For example, eth0).
Use ethtool option -p, which will make the corresponding LED of physical port to blink.
# ethtool -p eth0
9. Make Changes Permanent After Reboot
If you’ve changed any ethernet device parameters using the ethtool, it will all disappear after the next reboot, unless you do the following.
On ubuntu, you have to modify /etc/network/interfaces file and add all your changes as shown below.
# vim /etc/network/interfaces post-up ethtool -s eth2 speed 1000 duplex full autoneg off
The above line should be the last line of the file. This will change speed, duplex and autoneg of eth2 device permanently.
On SUSE, modify the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth-id file and include a new script using POST_UP_SCRIPT variable as shown below. Include the below line as the last line in the corresponding eth1 adpater config file.
# vim /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth-id POST_UP_SCRIPT='eth1'
Then, create a new file scripts/eth1 as shown below under /etc/sysconfig/network directory. Make sure that the script has execute permission and ensure that the ethtool utility is present under /sbin directory.
# cd /etc/sysconfig/network/ # vim scripts/eth1 #!/bin/bash /sbin/ethtool -s duplex full speed 100 autoneg off
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like..I don’t think violence is necessarily bad. But I do think – especially in gaming – that it’s highly misunderstood, and I argued as much quite recently. But what can we do about that? As ever, I’m erring on the side of reflection and transparency. So here we are. I’m Nathan Grayson, and I was made by violence.
Walking down an unfamiliar San Francisco street one night, I passed some people. I didn’t feel overly threatened or anything. They were just other humans meandering down a junked-up road, and it was dark.
But then I started fantasizing about what would happen if one of them attacked me. Details gushed out of my brain as though from some enraged thought-volcano.
First, I’d knock the guy unconscious. Knee/knee. Up against a wall, face/mid-section, one/two. Crack, crack, crack, crack. Knees and clinches offer control. Basic self-defense. Doing what’s necessary. But that’s not where my mind stopped.
Eventually, he’d wake up. It probably wouldn’t take long. Maybe I’d break an arm while he was out. Or stomp a hand into a tangled mess. Perhaps something more drastic. My next thought was teeth. One by one. Crack, crack, crack, crack. Because maybe this hypothetical assailant had hurt other people before. Badly. Maybe he deserved to suffer.
As my fantasy faded and I saw the eerily empty street in front of me again, a crystallizing moment provided two epiphanies. One: That is fucked up. Two: In my head, the vision had been of a stylized videogame action sequence. The camera angles, the satisfying heft of each strike, every crunchy splat of sound, each whistling note of blood. Even the role I’d placed myself in – that of some twisted arbiter of relentless, necessary justice – was one I find myself drawn to in games and other media.
The thing that struck me most, though, was that it all rushed in so quickly. So automatically.
—-
One day in elementary school, a teacher pulled me aside from a couple friends I’d been chatting with. I grew up scared to death of disapproval, so I desperately avoided stepping out of line whenever possible. This, then, was terrifyingly atypical.
“You talk about death and killing a lot,” he said. “You really shouldn’t do that so much.”
—-
I was one of those kids. Games – many of them quite violent – were a part of my life from the word “go.” I actually had a conversation with my mother about it very recently. I don’t think she really knew what I got my hungry little hands on back in my single digit age, but I don’t really blame her for it. My young life hardly revolved around games or other potentially violent media. I was always expected to achieve good grades in school, get involved in various extracurricular activities, be reasonably social, engage in a constant ideological war with “You must be this tall to ride…” signs.
Games. I couldn’t see the ones and zeroes yet – the thin, easily twisted puppet strings and smoke-and-mirror hallways that held each illusion together – so it all felt so real. No, no, not in the “Pikachu tells me to kill” way out-of-touch politicians dream about, but I thought I was gazing through some rainbow lightning technomagical window into another world.
Around the ripe old age of seven, I became obsessed with Warcraft II. Obsessed in the strictest sense of the term – in that unfaltering, unquestioning childlike fashion we all wish we could recapture and hurl in the general direction of our wildest hopes and dreams, resulting in a froth-and-spittle enthusiasm explosion. I spent months playing and replaying the campaign, making my own maps, imagining new scenarios, wishing I was a badass ogre mage, poring over official art, and – perhaps most impressively – making my own. These were full-blown artistic endeavors, too. My Sistine Chapel was a series of me-sized paper recreations of pretty much every unit in Warcraft II. To be clear, I mean that they were my height. Gleaming, glorious, blood-soaked warriors of suitably imposing stature. My paper dolls were not to be trifled with.
I embarked on similar projects with the likes of Diablo, Goldeneye 64, and Doom – all before I was even ten. I drew pictures of men being shot in the head (and, naturally, given my still-maturing comedic repertoire, the groin as well), people losing limbs, weapons caked in rust and blood, and many other things of that nature. I thought it was all so damn cool. But I also don’t think violence was necessarily the core of the appeal. Sure, it might have been the hook, but I was ultimately reeled in by a desire to bring these places and characters and sights and sounds to life. I so badly wanted to make them real that, well, I tried. And in doing so, I made them my own.
—-
Veins throbbed in the teacher’s neck like worms crammed in a can. He was purple, bellowing anger. One of my classmates wouldn’t stop talking. He hurled a marker in the student’s general direction and then stormed out of the room.
Later, I found out he went on to have another, similar episode, only it ended with a steel chair instead of a marker. Thank goodness chairs don’t fly very far.
—-
Christmas Eve, I am thirteen. I receive the then brand new Dragonball Z: Budokai as a gift, and rush up the tinsel-and-ornament-strewn stairs to play it. After cruising through the story mode’s early bits, I confront the series anti-hero Vegeta. And I die. 29 times.
I know this because I started keeping count, and I remember the exact number to this day because I got so angry. I shouted, kicked, hurled the controller, bit the controller until my teeth hurt, went on extended diatribes about how stupid my character was, ranted at the game for being unfair, and just generally, well, lost it.
I’ve always had a temper. Over the years, I’ve become better at controlling it, but games have a way of bringing it screaming to the surface. Sometimes, I cool down quickly. Other times, my mood’s ruined for hours. There’s just something about constant, repetitive, out-of-my-control failure that presses my buttons far beyond any sort of breaking point. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. So it makes me act violently – at least, in the moment, anyway.
But there’s a certain absurdity about it, you know? I mean, it’s just a game. And when I pull back and examine what I’m doing, I feel like I’m watching someone succumb to ridiculous road rage in highway traffic. It’s not fun, but worse things have happened. So it just looks… silly.
For me, though, gaming rage and road rage really are two sides of the same coin. Futility is the root of those temper tantrums – not the inherent aggression of shooting a man or (gasp) turning a wheel. I think the maddest I’ve ever been at a game was Mario Party. Because seriously, fuck random star handouts and sudden, impossible come-from-behind comebacks and everything Luigi loves and stands for. When I hold a controller, I want control. If that expectation is denied – whether I’m behind a keyboard-and-mouse or a steering wheel – I don’t take it well.
Are my reactions problematic? I’m not entirely sure. But I’ll take hitting a controller over a person (or, er, a car) any day of the week.
—-
I remember walking into the locker room and being shocked at just how much blood there was. Granted, the near-blinding white tile made it stand out all the more, but still: could a human head really hold all that blood?
There’d been a fight. At my tiny private elementary school in suburban Texas, those never happened. Well, almost never. I don’t remember being disturbed by it, though. Just curious.
—-
I’ve never gotten into a fight. Not a real one, anyway. But I love hitting. It may very well be one of my absolute favorite things in this world.
Like many starry eyed nerdlings, I was first attracted to martial arts because Ryu, Ken, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and all of their furious-fisted ilk wailed on my imagination until the brain damage was molded in their image. Basically, I wanted to punch and kick and produce whaling harpoons from my wrists. (Incidentally, I was Scorpion for Halloween one year.)
In middle school, I clumsily fumbled my way into a gi and tried my feet at Taekwondo. I was never a particularly athletic child, but martial arts just stuck. I loved the purity of it all. I didn’t need to worry about complicated rules, having crappy aim, or getting screamed at by umpires or vampires or however baseball works. It was just me and one other person. And we’d hit and hit and hit, and whoever hit better won.
Granted, there was a bit more to it than that, but it was all so satisfying and immediate. It felt amazing – my brain basting in a stew of its own chemicals and each blow rattling off cheekbones and rib cages – in between getting punched in the nose all the time. And training was just like Everquest, only a million times better. Each day, I’d grind until I cried blood and sweat tears, but progress – though slow – was obvious. Tangible. Addictive. Little by little, I was becoming strong.
But I wasn’t just hitting bodies. My training partners became my community. My family. We’d train for hours each day, and then we’d go out and watch UFC cards together or descend upon smoothie stores like some kind of protein-powder-lusting plague. I had friends, I had an outlet for my feelings, I had a work ethic.
I had a home.
—-
“The new kid’s slacking,” one of my seniors at my Taekwondo gym whispered to me. “Spar him extra hard.”
I did. I hurt him so badly that he had to sit out for the rest of the session. And it was fun.
—-
He looked so surprised. Shocked, even. Zone of the Enders 2 on PS2: the main character had just been shot. An alleged ally stabbed him in the back, and he just sort of floated there, baby planetoids of his own blood orbiting around him in a space station’s low gravity. His face was a mask of fear and pain. Eyes wide. Helpless. Scared. Dying.
It was the holiday season, and my mom, my sister, and I went out to lunch with my grandparents later that day. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That face. That scene. I had no appetite. Months later, thinking of that scene produced the same effect.
I still haven’t finished Zone of the Enders 2.
I’m glad. If growing up with games had desensitized me to the ramifications of violence, pain, and death, experiencing that scene from an M-rated game suddenly put it all in perspective. Was I too young for Zone of the Enders 2 when it first came out? Absolutely. But, in retrospect, I think I needed it. For a lot of reasons.
—-
Recently, I was talking with a friend about life and perspectives and extremely well-informed (and attractive) viewpoints on early modern philosophy. Eventually, that brought us to the topic of humor and how it manifests in different people.
“Yeah, I’m pretty whimsical,” I offered. “You know, prone to winding, ridiculous flights of fancy and all that stuff.”
“Hm?” he grunted back, chewing on my statement for a moment. “I don’t know. I always thought your jokes were pretty morbid, all things considered.”
—-
I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. Usually, it’s cancer. Everything’s cancer. Last year, I nearly missed my best friend’s college graduation because I was certain I’d found something in my chest. I wanted to cancel my flight and go home. I spent the night before wide awake and sick to my stomach. I was so, so, so scared. I cried a bunch. I called my mom at 4am and she talked me down a bit. But I was so sure I was dying. This was the end. I was going to waste away into an empty husk of dead skin and mulched bones, and my precious consciousness would fade into nothing. Forever.
I’ve never been more terrified in my entire life.
The world’s a horrifying place. To hear some people tell it, everything’s out to kill us, and death’s primed – coiled, snake-like – to strike at any given second. In many ways, my life hasn’t really gone out of its way to disprove that point of view, either. I’ve had a fairly pampered existence in the grand scheme of things, but even then, I grew up in a world of easily enraged authority figures and peers, constant fear that “the terrorists will win,” pain, disease, shootings, paranoia, sadness, and war. Meanwhile, the unending information barrage of the modern era ensures I never have a chance to forget about those things. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in these times. I love life. I’m happy. But I’m also afraid, because let’s face it: there’s so much to be afraid of.
I think I seek out violence because I’m so scared of death. I crack jokes about killing and death, I laugh in the face of over-the-top murdersplosion action movies, I listen to all kinds of exceedingly angry music, I’m addicted to fight training, I have all these empowering, in some cases sick fantasies. I surround myself with violence. Because when I do it that way, I’m in control. I can explore it. It’s mine. I own it.
And, as ever, in the game.
—-
In spite of the ups and downs of my relationship with it, I personally enjoy violence. I really do. It’s empowering. It’s intoxicating. It’s fun. But it’s also one of the scariest things in the entire world, and what’s even scarier is that – if I lost control, if my temper beat the teeth right out of my conscience – I could inflict it on someone else. I’ve done it in my head a thousand times. It’s not even hard. I’m human. On some level, it’s natural.
When I walk down those dark, nearly naked streets, I’m most afraid of my fantasies. Afraid of myself.
But there’s a voice, a whisper, a lingering tickle between my ears that tells me to stay in control. I mean, duh. I have to. That’s the way it’s always been. Over the years, games have told me a lot of things. They’ve told me that violence looks cool – some without even attempting to demonstrate potential consequences. Others have beaten it into my brain that death is an awful, awful thing to be feared above all else. But most of all, games have taught me that – at the end of the day – I’m accountable. If things go horribly awry, it’s probably because I – the player, the human being – fucked up. I can’t blame the situation or the heat of the moment or someone else, and I certainly can’t blame videogames.
Violence is natural, but so is control. To conveniently write off or forget either one of those facts would be a horrible abomination of a folly. No matter how constricting the situation, my actions are ultimately my own. Sometimes, I take pride in that. Other times, I dread it. And when I’m walking alone at night? I’d say it’s probably a mix of both.
I think that’s how it should be.So you beat your wife and kids. Not a big deal. Just make sure there’s no physical evidence and you’ve tried other options beforehand—you know, screaming at them, going cold in bed—and you’re home free.
This was the ostensible reasoning behind a court ruling in the United Arab Emirates. The case involved a man who had beaten his wife and daughter, leaving them with substantial injuries on their lips and teeth. The court ruled that the man had gone too far by allowing his strikes to leave marks and bruises.
As Chief Justice Falah al Hajer put it:
Although the [law] permits the husband to use his right [to discipline], he has to abide by the limits of this right … if the husband abuses this right to discipline, he cannot be exempted from punishment.
While violence like this is against traditional Islamic law, experts argue that the UAE rulings are based on maintaning a patriarchal elite power structure.This fall, DC Comics’ power couple takes center stage in the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman/Wonder Woman release. This new HeroClix set focuses on the long history of both Superman and Wonder Woman — their past, present, and even alternate universe versions — as well as their supporting cast of characters. It’s more than just heroes, too, as you’ll be able to work the beat with the famous news jockeys of Metropolis — Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Lana Lang. Each of these classic newshounds offers up a unique version of the “Reporter” shared special power! With a strong focus on the history of both iconic DC Comics heroes, this HeroClix set also has players traveling to Earth-2 to fight with The Wonders of the World, along with leading the Amazons of Themyscira into battle as they fight alongside and against the Gods of Olympus. Superman fans will get a special treat, as the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman/Wonder Woman release also showcases alternate versions of Superman, helping fans round out their collection of the Man of Steel. Along with that, players can jump into the Chase sub-theme, which features characters from the "Red Son" storyline. In addition to the five-figure booster packs, the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman/Wonder Woman set also features Super-Boosters with the first DC Comics in-booster Colossal figures. Players can look forward to collecting all six Colossal figures, including Superman/Batman Robot, Titano, and many more. In conjunction with the release of the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman/Wonder Woman set, the following products will be available: The DC Comics HeroClix: Earth-2 Wonders of the World Fast Forces Pack features exclusive new dial designs for Superman II, Batman II, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Red Tornado, Doctor Fate, and includes a Helmet of Fate 3D object.
features exclusive new dial designs for Superman II, Batman II, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Red Tornado, Doctor Fate, and includes a Helmet of Fate 3D object. The DC Comics HeroClix: Superman Dice and Token Pack features two custom Superman logo, six-sided dice and six Superman-themed action tokens.
features two custom Superman logo, six-sided dice and six Superman-themed action tokens. The DC Comics HeroClix: Wonder Woman Dice and Token Pack features two custom Wonder Woman logo, six-sided dice and six Wonder Woman-themed action tokens.
features two custom Wonder Woman logo, six-sided dice and six Wonder Woman-themed action tokens. The DC Comics HeroClix: Superman/Wonder Woman Release Day OP Kit features an exclusive, Limited Edition Superman figure and a new double-sided map of Mount Olympus and the Daily Planet. Look for the DC Comics HeroClix: Superman/Wonder Woman set and its associated products at your local game stores this coming November — and be sure to visit the WizKids Event System (www.wizkidseventsystem.com) to look for local game stores in your area that are running HeroClix tournaments and events.What kind of space -- literary, cultural, socio-political, psycho-emotional -- does a Nepali writing in English have in Nepal? And in the world? This has been one of the guiding questions driving La.Lit's team, headed by Editor Rabi Thapa, with Prawin Adhikari, Pranab Man Singh and Rajani Thapa as Assistant Editors.
One can surmise the challenges of investigating a question so wide and deep. One can also surmise that the process would be incomplete without touching base with Nepal's larger literary circle -- Nepalis writing in Nepali. And so it's been fascinating to stay on the sideline, witnessing Team La.Lit move forward with their agenda, tackling the issue head on by inviting a diverse group of writers -- Nepalis writing in English, Nepali and other languages, along with international contributors -- on this exploratory journey.
The consequence of this multipronged collaboration, this undertaking -- call it whatever you want -- can either be accessed online or in its more traditional, tangible versions. La.Lit officially launched its third print volume -- a compilation of stories, essays, reviews, translations and other forms -- on Saturday, August 9, at the City Museum of Kathmandu.
The launch was preceded by a panel discussion moderated by Nayan Sindh |
this is crazy and the way the hockey sticks are positioned makes her look like a hockey peacock Reply
Parent
Thread
Expand
Link
What do you mean, I think this look is ICONIC. But then again I'm not Canadian, maybe they didn't like it? Reply
Parent
Thread
Expand
Link
this costume is awesome! Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
this was the best 1 tbh it truly represents us as a nation Reply
Parent
Thread
Expand
Link
I love it. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I am down with any trash costume Canada puts out that isn't a racist caricature (there have been a few) Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
lmfao mte like wtf Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
a lot of these are amazing but a lot of these are also lame (some of europe, australia & CANADA... wtf canada) Reply
Thread
Link
Iceland is the weakest, imo. It's a fucking cross and blue pants, like they threw it together the night before.
Which sucks because there is so much you could do with Iceland. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I can barely see it but I can tell even from a distance that Panama is slaying, as per usual.
Korea's hanbok is insane and beautiful, too, and I also really like Angola's, Colombia's, Ecuador's, India's and Japan's. Why are so many people wearing buildings on their heads this year though and why is Canada running around with a giant paper snowflake? Reply
Thread
Link
why is Canada running around with a giant paper snowflake
BECAUSE THEY CAN Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
VIVA LA CANADA Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I loved Ecuador. It's beautiful to me! Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I went 2 school w miss denmark lol, she previously won some'miss bride of the world' competition and used to talk abt how these events were full of old creepy rich guys Reply
Thread
Link
of course, looking for their 3rd wives i'm sure. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Has she had lots of work done to her face or is it just weird make up? Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
OMG Sweden did Pippi Longstocking, that's kind of amazing. Reply
Thread
Link
Lmao mte, I'm cackling but I also love it. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Mte. I love it. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
it's so fun I'm feelin it Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I didn't realize it when I saw it at first, but Amigoe Aruba pointed out that it's also a tribute to Sarah-Quita Offringa who is a professional windsurfer and a very succesful Aruban sportsstar:
3X Aruban overall athlete of the year
8X PWA freestyle worldchampion 2008-2015
2X PWA slalom worldchampion 2011& 2015
Knight in the order of orange Nassau, 2013
Which makes it even better tbh. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Wtf is Miss Brazil wearing, should be wearing what Miss US Virgin Islands has on imo. Miss Sri Lanka is probably my fav. Reply
Thread
Link
or Colombia, it's kinda Carmen Miranda-ish Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Yeah, I'm puzzled by the colors Miss Brazil chose to wear. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
seriously I don't get that Brazil outfit. what does it mean?? Reply
Parent
Thread
Expand
Link
So none of the former Yugoslavian republics other than Slovenia participate in Miss Universe? Reply
Thread
Link
there's Kosovo Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Barbara Filipović is the reigning Miss Universe Croatia. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Side-eyeing the ones that went with relatively safe choices. Except maybe Thailand because she's rocking it. Reply
Thread
Link
Is El Salvador not in this? Reply
Thread
Link
oh shit, the Tom and Lorenzo recap of these costumes is one of my favorite yearly things Reply
Thread
Link
Brazil needs to win this year Reply
Thread
Link
not with that national costume! lazy! Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
She looks like she's posing for a Glamour Shots series. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
this photoshop Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
nothing will ever beat miss china's from a few years ago. Reply
Thread
Link
That is gorgeous. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Yeah this was so beautiful Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
what were they thinking this year? the panda dress is awful lol Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
So stunning, omg. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
omw what happened china Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
Jesus. That is stunning. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I will always compare everything to this. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
That is gorgeous!! They didn't even try this time. I mean they could do SO MUCH but they went with a panda. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
truely glorious Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
omg Canada's is hilarious Reply
Thread
Link
It's much sweeter than the hockey ensemble from before. Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
it looks like a cut-up onesie Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
I'm laughing at it but I love it at the same time. It is so us Reply
Parent
Thread
Link
lmao it's definitely an upgrade from that hockey one Reply
Parent
Thread
LinkApple recently released a statement about their cooperation with law enforcement. It includes:
For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.
[Update: see this discussion about whether this is entirely true.]
Does this mean that Apple will not be complying with New Zealand law?
Interception capable
The TICS bill makes it mandatory for network providers to be intercept capable. This means that they must provide surveillance agencies (Police, SIS or GCSB) communications related data when given a valid warrant or access authorisation. However, Apple is not a network provider.
However, there is also provision to give service providers (anyone who provides a telecommunications service) the same interception responsibilities as network providers. Any surveillance agency can apply to the Minister if they believe that "lack of interception capability on the telecommunications service offered by that provider adversely affects national security or law enforcement". i.e. if they believe someone could be organising crimes over iMessage.
Assuming that Apple are telling the truth and do not have the keys (as would be done in a well-designed system) they would not be able to provide intercepted information when presented with a warrant. This would be in breach of the TICS law and they would be liable for a fine of $500,000 and $50,000 per day.
Resold telecommunications services
Section 39 of the TICS Bill can also be used to forbid the resale of a foreign telecommunications service in New Zealand if it doesn't provide lawful intercept for New Zealand surveillance agencies.
Vodafone and Telecom both resell the iPhone in New Zealand and the iPhone obviously includes foreign telecommunications services that cannot be intercepted. Will a surveillance agency apply to the Minister to stop them?
Conclusion
Will the GCSB allow Apple to continue selling their iMessage and Facetime equipped devices in New Zealand without legal intercept facilities?
Or will the government decide that taking on Apple and their loyal customers is a bad idea and allow Apple to keep selling to New Zealanders?
And if Apple can keep selling theirs, wouldn't it be unfair to pick on smaller and less powerful overseas operators and ban their products? It wouldn't matter anyway because criminals would obviously gravitate towards the unspyable Apple products.
Most importantly - do we want a government spy bureau deciding what services and equipment can and cannot be made available to New Zealanders? Do the proposals in the TICS bill make sense? At Tech Liberty we believe the answer is no.Previous installments in this series:
We’ve reached the last lock in the Twins rotation: Phil Hughes. Next week, we’ll start breaking down options for the fifth starter position.1 But before we get there, let’s break down Hughes’s game.
In 2014, his first full year with the Twins, Hughes looked like a potential ace. His 11.63 strikeout-to-walk ratio from the 2014 season was the highest in MLB history, making him look like a FIP superstar2 and rotation anchor. By comparison, though, his 2015 campaign was a disappointing one, with his strikeout rate dropping from 8 per nine innings to 5.4. In 2016, he only made it eleven starts in before getting injured. A return to something like his 2014 form could go a long way in shoring up the Twins’ shaky pitching staff.
What does he throw?
Hughes relies mainly on three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a cut fastball, and a curveball. Looking at 2015 data, he threw his fastballs roughly 80% of the time; left-handed hitters saw a 66%-13% split between his four-seam fastball and his cutter, while for right-handed hitters, it was more like 54%-24%. Almost all of his other pitches were curveballs.
It’s “almost all” rather than “all”, because Hughes has periodically toyed with a changeup. It’s never been a huge part of his arsenal, but he started to work it in a bit more often in the latter half of 2015. In his starts in 2016, he mostly abandoned it, but there are reports that he’s been working on it this spring.
When does he throw it?
Hughes didn’t throw enough pitches in 2016 to make it into our PCPS Viewer. In order to have a sizeable dataset to work with, we’ll look at his pitches from 2015. Let’s take that as an opportunity to visualize pitch selection by count a little differently than the PCPS Viewer, in a way that will hopefully illustrate how to build from PCPS to a fuller understanding of a pitcher’s arsenal.
From PCPS to Perceptions
We’ll start by looking at his PCPS. In 2015, his PCPS was 0.061. Out of 152 qualified pitchers in 2016, that would place him in between the 97th and 98th. This score is relatively low, indicating that Hughes’s fastball percentage remains relatively constant regardless of count.
The plot below shows what’s going on behind the scenes of PCPS by showing the exact information PCPS “sees”. These raw fastball percentages by count explain his relatively low PCPS. His fastball percentage remains relatively similar in all counts—partly because he doesn’t throw offspeed all that much to begin with! He prefers to stick with his fastball and cut fastball, except later in counts when he’s ahead.
But there’s more to pitch mixing than PCPS captures, so why stop there? Let’s fold in another layer of complexity by breaking out Hughes’s four pitches. Here we see an interesting pattern completely missed by PCPS: Hughes relies on his cutter most often when he has two strikes on a batter. Perhaps he sees his cutter more as an out pitch, while his four-seamer is his bread-and-butter in all counts.
To really suss this out, we need to go one step further. Pitchers usually don’t throw the same types of pitches to lefties and righties, so let’s look to the chart below to see if Hughes has any patterns based on handedness. As it turns out, this sheds even more light on Hughes’s use of his cutter. For lefties, the pattern is as we saw before: he throws it in two-strike counts as an out pitch. But for righties, he uses his cutter as an all-purpose pitch in any count. (Note: pitches to right-handed hitters are the bars on the right, and lefties are on the left.)
Cut to the Chase
One more interesting note about his cutter: when throwing it to a left-handed hitter (and therefore, we can assume, with two strikes), Hughes throws it to his arm side. Perhaps this is an attempt to catch the hitter looking at a pitch that breaks back to catch the outside part of the plate. (All plots are from the catcher’s perspective.)
When he throws his cutter to a right-handed hitter with two strikes, he also goes arm-side. With fewer than two strikes, though, Hughes has a strong tendency to throw his cutter to his glove side, outside to righties, tailing down and away from their swing.
Finishing off Hitters
Let’s end by taking a quick look at how Hughes finishes off hitters. The plot below shows all pitches in 0-2 or 1-2 counts, broken out by pitch type and hand. Roughly: when he’s ahead, Hughes throws fastballs up and away, cutters arm-side, curveballs low and away, and changeups low and arm-side.
Conclusion
As a hitter, Hughes doesn’t give you many patterns to pick up on, as he mixes his pitches pretty evenly. Hitters can expect a few more curveballs—and cutters, if you’re a lefty—when he’s ahead. His changeup is a wildcard, but it’s hard to expect too much from it this season when it’s played only a minor role in previous years. The key for Hughes will be command. If he gets his strikeout rate back near his 2014 levels, he should be in good shape.
Pour one out for Trevor May, who was going to be next week’s subject before his season-ending injury last week.^ Even his home run rate was low, which is no small thing for a noted fly-ball pitcher.^
Code for this article can be found at my Github page.Apple on Tuesday made it clear that it will no longer patch OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, when it again declined to offer a security update for the four-and-a-half-year-old operating system.
As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, or OS X 10.9, as well as for its two predecessors, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Lion (10.7), Apple had nothing for Snow Leopard or its owners yesterday.
Apple provided Snow Leopard security updates for slightly more than four years, just four months shy of the record set by Tiger (OS X 10.4), which received its final fixes in September 2009.
Snow Leopard was also ignored in December, when Apple patched Safari 6 and 7 for newer editions of OS X, but did not update Safari 5.1.10, the most-current Apple browser for the OS.
Apple delivered the final security update for Snow Leopard in September 2013.
Traditionally, Apple has patched only the OS X editions designated as "n" and "n-1" -- where "n" is the newest -- and discarded support for "n-2" either before the launch of "n" or immediately after. Under that plan, Snow Leopard was "n-2" when Mountain Lion shipped in mid-2012, and by rights should have been retired around then.
But it wasn't. Instead, Apple continued to ship security updates for Snow Leopard, and with Tuesday's patches of Mountain Lion and Lion Tuesday, it now seems plain that Apple has shifted to supporting "n-2" as well as "n" and "n-1."
(In that scenario, Mavericks is now "n," Mountain Lion is "n-1" and Lion is "n-2.")
The change was probably due to Apple's accelerated development and release schedule for OS X, which now promises annual upgrades. The shorter span between editions meant that unless Apple extended its support lifecycle, Lion would have fallen off the list about two years after its July 2011 launch.
None of this would be noteworthy if Apple, like Microsoft and a host of other major software vendors, clearly spelled out its support policies. But Apple doesn't, leaving users to guess about when their operating systems will fall off support.
"Let's face it, Apple doesn't go out of their way to ensure users are aware when products are going end of life," said Andrew Storms, director of DevOps at security company CloudPassage, in a December interview.
To Apple, Snow Leopard increasingly looks like Windows XP does to Microsoft: an operating system that refuses to roll over and die. At the end of January, 19% of all Macs were running Snow Leopard, slightly more, in fact, than ran its successor, Lion, which accounted for 16%, and almost as much as Mountain Lion, whose user share plummeted once Mavericks arrived, according to Web analytics firm Net Applications.
With Snow Leopard's retirement, 1 in 5 Macs are running an operating system that could be compromised because of unpatched vulnerabilities.
Snow Leopard users have given many reasons for hanging on, including some identical to those expressed by Windows XP customers: The OS still works fine for them; their Macs, while old, show no sign of quitting; and they dislike the path that Apple's taken with OS X's user interface (UI).
Also in play is the fact that Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X able to run applications designed for the PowerPC processor, the Apple/IBM/Motorola-crafted CPU used by Apple before it switched to Intel in 2006. Snow Leopard, while requiring a Mac with an Intel processor, was the latest edition able to run the Rosetta translation utility, and thus launch PowerPC software.
Additionally, Snow Leopard was the final version able to run on Macs equipped with 32-bit Intel processors, making it impossible for owners of some older machines to upgrade beyond OS X 10.6.
The one comfort in Tuesday's updates was that it looked like Apple will continue to support Lion and Mountain Lion a while longer, even though it has offered those users a free upgrade to Mavericks. Yesterday's security updates patched 21 vulnerabilities in Lion, 26 in Mountain Lion.
In December, Storms bet that Lion and Mountain Lion had been retired when Apple did not issue security updates for those two editions, even as it fixed a handful of flaws in Mavericks. But he gave himself an out at the time, noting that Apple's silence -- it has long declined to comment on almost any question related to security -- on those editions may be temporary.
For parts of Apple's customer base, the free-OS X strategy seems to be working: By Net Applications' tally, Mavericks accounted for 42% of all versions of OS X used in January. Mavericks' continued gains, however, have come mostly at the expense of Mountain Lion -- which lost 6 percentage points in the last two months -- and Lion, which dropped by 2 points in the same period. Yet Snow Leopard has been largely unaffected. Since October, when Mavericks appeared, OS X 10.6 has dropped less each month than either its 6- or 12-month average.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com..0 Police: Man offers undercover Daytona Beach police officer EBT card in exchange for sex
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Daytona Beach police said they discovered a new type of food stamp fraud, when a suspect offered his EBT card in exchange for sex.
The suspect and several other alleged johns were arrested near Ridgewood and Fremont avenues.
Michael Glitniak was just one of several men rounded up in a Daytona Beach police reverse prostitution sting, but he was the only one who offered an undercover detective an EBT card for sex.
“Those EBT cards, boy, they’re used for a lot of other things other than what they’re meant for, aren’t they? I mean they’re used for booze, they’re used for drugs, they’re used for sex. It’s a shame. All that fraud occurs to all of us,” said Daytona Beach Police Chief Michael Chitwood.
Police said Glitniak walked up to the undercover detective, who asked him if he wanted to party, and Glitniak said yes, but didn’t have any money.
The detective asked Glitniak what he had, and Glitniak allegedly said he could pay in food stamps.
Glitniak went along with the detective and was then arrested.
Chitwood said it’s another example of how people misuse EBT cards in addition to selling them for alcohol and drugs.
“We pay into that program and here it is out there being used for whatever they want to use it for,” Chitwood said.
Glitniak was silent during his first appearance in court.
He was jailed on a $500 bond.The aim of this review is to examine the relationship between genetically modified (GM) crops and health, based on histopathological investigations of the digestive tract in rats. We reviewed published long-term feeding studies of crops containing one or more of three specific traits: herbicide tolerance via the EPSPS gene and insect resistance via cry1Ab or cry3Bb1 genes. These genes are commonly found in commercialised GM crops. Our search found 21 studies for nine (19%) out of the 47 crops approved for human and/or animal consumption. We could find no studies on the other 38 (81%) approved crops. Fourteen out of the 21 studies (67%) were general health assessments of the GM crop on rat health. Most of these studies (76%) were performed after the crop had been approved for human and/or animal consumption, with half of these being published at least nine years after approval. Our review also discovered an inconsistency in methodology and a lack of defined criteria for outcomes that would be considered toxicologically or pathologically significant. In addition, there was a lack of transparency in the methods and results, which made comparisons between the studies difficult. The evidence reviewed here demonstrates an incomplete picture regarding the toxicity (and safety) of GM products consumed by humans and animals. Therefore, each GM product should be assessed on merit, with appropriate studies performed to indicate the level of safety associated with them. Detailed guidelines should be developed which will allow for the generation of comparable and reproducible studies. This will establish a foundation for evidence-based guidelines, to better determine if GM food is safe for human and animal consumption.MOON FIRST
Why Humans on Mars Right Now
Are Bad for Science Includes: Astronaut gardener on the Moon Copyright © Robert Walker (UK). All rights reserved.
(See high resolution version of this cover picture)
The cover picture shows Astronaut Eugene Cernan walking towards the Lunar Roving Vehicle during an EVA for Apollo 17, the last mission to land on the Moon - with the black sky replaced by a blue one, and no other changes at all. For the motivation for doing this, see the section below: What if the Moon had blue skies.
Thanks to Nathan Ryweck of Gelato Media for converting my book cover draft into a professional design.
First published: October 2016. You can also get this on kindle. For my other kindle booklets, see my author page on Amazon.com. You might be especially interested in my related books:
You don't need a kindle device to read these books. Amazon has developed kindle reading apps, These run as a separate application, and lets you use any computer (iOS, Android, Mac or PC) in the same way as the kindle device, with the book set out in the same way, turning pages in the same way etc. You can get them here: Free Kindle App.
You can also buy the book on kindle as a way of showing your support and appreciation. Every sale boosts its ranking in the kindle bookstore temporarily. For instance, two or three sales are enough to put it on the first or second page of kindle best sellers for Mars, for a few days.
You can also support my work as a science blogger and writer of these books via Patreon.
How to read this off-line
You can use Pocket - an application that helps with off line reading of web pages.
Pocket - an application that helps with off line reading of web pages. You can also save this page as a pdf. On windows you can use print (Ctrl + P) then change the printer to the pdf printer. The Print button then changes into a Save button and you can then save it where you want. However the embedded youtube videos won't work if saved as a pdf.
If you are techy, you can make the videos in the pdf work as links with preview images. To do that, save it offline as a web page first, then edit the html, remove all the iframedummy tags, and that will reveal images and links that are covered by the iframedummys (done like that for kindle) - which will then work in the pdf.
. On windows you can use print (Ctrl + P) then change the printer to the pdf printer. The Print button then changes into a Save button and you can then save it where you want. However the embedded youtube videos won't work if saved as a pdf. If you are techy, you can make the videos in the pdf work as links with preview images. To do that, save it offline as a web page first, then edit the html, remove all the iframedummy tags, and that will reveal images and links that are covered by the iframedummys (done like that for kindle) - which will then work in the pdf. You can also save it as a web page. Most web browsers have an option to save a page as "Web page complete" which includes all the images in the page saved on your computer for offline browsing. Be sure to give it time to download the page before you close the browser tab.
(skip to detailed contents).
The main sections in this book are
(skip to detailed contents)
(skip to contents)
I wrote this book after the then President of the US, Obama, in an op-ed, said that he wants to send humans to Mars, because he loves science. Great!. But hardly anyone stops to ask the question: "What would humans landing on Mars do to the science they so love?" The question is especially acute in the case of a crash landing, which is a likely scenario in a landing on Mars, the toughest place to land on in the inner solar system. "What happens to our trillions of microbes if a human occupied ship crashes on Mars?"
Could we find life on Mars, present day life, based on different principles from Earth life? That would surely lead to some of the most significant discoveries in biology of the twenty first century. What would a human crash do to the scientific potential of the planet?
There are three top priority places in our solar system to protect from Earth microbes: Mars, Europa and Enceladus. Why rush humans with our trillions of microbes, as quickly as possible to the one place inside of Jupiter's orbit most vulnerable to Earth life?
And - is this the right time to attempt a colonization anyway? When Shackleton succeeded in overwintering in Antarctica after his ship sunk, he didn't say "Oh great, we have managed to survive here huddled under boats, hunting seals, so we must colonize Antarctica".
In the New World, there were plants to eat, crops could grow, and temperatures were equitable. It had human inhabitants already and you could breathe the air and drink the water. It's hard to beat that. We have never colonized anywhere like the Moon or Mars, far more inhospitable than Antarctica. Even the summit of a mountain four times taller than Mount Everest would be far more habitable than either of them.
Are there other ways forward? Ways that let us explore Mars thoroughly and search for life there, experiment with space settlement and colonization, and protect the science value of Mars? What about exploring Mars from orbit, operating robots on the surface? That's the preferred way forward of scientists who care about planetary protection of Mars. How effective is it? Perhaps it is a more direct and immersive way of exploring Mars than with astronauts on the surface. Do we need astronauts to drill? What about robotic moles? What if we make these orbital missions and missions to its two moons and telerobotic exploration of Mars our long term goal for humans to Mars? What if we leave any decisions about whether to land humans on the surface to a later date?
Also - we have the Moon, right on our doorstep. With the new discoveries of the peaks of almost eternal light at its poles, the radar data suggesting vast caverns over 100 km long, and ice detected at the lunar poles - how does the Moon now compare with Mars? This is the usual focus for Moon first books such as The Value of the Moon, Moonrush, and The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement, and I go into this in some detail as well.
You might be surprised at how well the Moon stands up against Mars in the comparisons. The two week long lunar night is far less of a drawback than you might think due to interesting discoveries about plants kept in darkness for two weeks at a time and modern efficient LED lights, while the peaks of almost eternal light may give a way to build early bases with abundant solar power available nearly all the time.
If you love science, as President Obama does, then do read this book and find out more about the case for exploring the Moon first and protecting Mars from Earth life for now, and make up your own mind.
This kindle booklet brings together material from my recent articles on Science20:
along with material from my longer kindle book Case for Moon First.
Contents
Originally published on my Science20 blog here: President Obama, Why Humans On Mars Right Now Are Bad For Science
President Obama has just taken the unusual step of publishing an Op-Ed article for CNN "America will take the giant leap to Mars". It promotes his vision for humans on the Mars surface in the 2030s. The video at the head of the article highlights his love of science. But what would humans landing or crashing on Mars do to the science he so loves? Unlike a robotic lander, a human occupied spacecraft can't be sterilized of its trillions of Earth microbes, and a crash of a human crewed spacecraft on the surface would end planetary protection for Mars. It's easy to find life if you bring it yourself, but what an anticlimax that would be to all our years of exploring the planet! Here is another video with clips to show his love of science.
(click to watch on YouTube)
President Obama presenting John Glenn with the medal of freedom. He was the first American astronaut to orbit in space.
I never thought of planetary protection for human missions to Mars myself, until a few years back. So, I can understand from my own experience how it is possible to simultaneously agree that we need it for robots, to be keen on science, and yet at the same time, to forget about it as soon as humans are mentioned. Robots can be sterilized. Humans have trillions of microbes on our skin, in our gut etc, and sadly, we can't be sterilized of them. Nor can we replace them all with microbes unable to survive on Mars. Any attempt to remove all our microbes would kill us.
We may be on the point of making the next major discovery in biology. What we discover there could be so major that historians of the future mark out three significant points in biology
The theory of evolution in the nineteenth century
in the nineteenth century the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in the twentieth century (though DNA itself was actually discovered in 1869 by the Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher who called it "nuclein")
structure of DNA in the twentieth century (though DNA itself was actually discovered in 1869 by the Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher who called it "nuclein") The discoveries in exobiology of the twenty first century (which of course lie in our future).
Of course we have no idea what those discoveries will be. We have found many possible habitats for life on Mars, but we have not yet been able to send any spacecraft up close to look at them. Indeed Curiosity may be not far from some of those. If they are indeed possible habitats, it's not sufficiently well sterilized to look at them close up, and at best, it may be able to observe them from a distance of several kilometers.
Discoveries of this sort are what I've called a "super positive outcome". There is no risk to humans from introducing Earth life to Mars, so it's not covered by the precautionary principle. But there is a risk of losing something wonderful and precious.
The exobiologists, who hope to fly in situ life detection instruments to Mars some day, design them to be as flexible as possible, to detect not just familiar forms of life. As an example, Chris McKay with his "lego principle" suggests a general way of looking for life not depending on any assumptions that it resembles Earth life. See his What Is Life—and How Do We Search for It in Other Worlds?
What we discover there could include any of:
Early life, e.g. tiny RNA world microbes without DNA or proteins. There are many ideas for early life that could perhaps still exist there, though extinct on Earth. These could fill in the huge gap between the organics and cell like structures resembling cells that turn up in laboratory experiments, and the immense complexity of modern life. One idea is an RNA world cell with no proteins, or ribosomes either, instead using RNA sliced into pieces and recombined to make a ribozyme, a tinier distant cousin of the ribosome. This is possible in theory, and some have suggested that present day Earth might have a "shadow biosphere" consisting of RNA world cells, but this has never been confirmed. Maybe we can find RNA world cells on Mars instead?
There are many other ideas for early life that could perhaps still exist there, though extinct on Earth, including the so called autopoetic cells that replicate just by producing daughter cells with a similar mix of chemicals when they get large, with no genetic code to regulate the process.
without DNA or proteins. There are many ideas for early life that could perhaps still exist there, though extinct on Earth. These could fill in the huge gap between the organics and cell like structures resembling cells that turn up in laboratory experiments, and the immense complexity of modern life. One idea is an RNA world cell with no proteins, or ribosomes either, instead using RNA sliced into pieces and recombined to make a ribozyme, a tinier distant cousin of the ribosome. This is possible in theory, and some have suggested that present day Earth might have a "shadow biosphere" consisting of RNA world cells, but this has never been confirmed. Maybe we can find RNA world cells on Mars instead? There are many other ideas for early life that could perhaps still exist there, though extinct on Earth, including the so called autopoetic cells that replicate just by producing daughter cells with a similar mix of chemicals when they get large, with no genetic code to regulate the process. Unrelated life, perhaps based on some form of XNA (Xeno Nucleic Acid) instead of DNA. This would be the most amazing discovery of all. It would lift biology into a new dimension, show how life can exist based on completely different principles from DNA based life.
There are many alternatives to DNA and RNA. RNA and DNA are both particularly fragile, DNA especially and hard to form naturally, need the environment of the cell or special conditions to keep them stable. RNA is more stable when it is very cold for instance, and ribose in its backbone is stabilized by the presence of borates, one of the points in favour of an origin on Mars. Some of the others are more robust and some think we may have started with a PNA world for instance as it is far more robust than RNA and forms more easily.
Other ideas for early life include TNA world, or a molecule that's a hodgepodge mixing different backbones in the same molecule with non heritable variations in backbone structure (or a whole alphabet soup" of other possible precursors such as HNA, PNA, TNA or GNA - Hextose, Peptide, Therose or Glycol NA).
The interior of a cell is so complex it's been compared to an entire ecosystem. So life based on different principles could be as revolutionary for biology as discovering a coral reef for your first time, when the only ecosystem you knew about before is the African Savannah. I make this analogy here: "Super Positive" Outcomes For Search For Life In Hidden Extra Terrestrial Oceans Of Europa And Enceladus
. This would be the most amazing discovery of all. It would lift biology into a new dimension, show how life can exist based on completely different principles from DNA based life. many alternatives to DNA ribose in its backbone is stabilized by the presence of borates started with a PNA world Other ideas for early life include TNA world, or a molecule that's a hodgepodge mixing different backbones in the same molecule with non heritable variations in backbone structure (or a whole alphabet soup" of other possible precursors such as HNA, PNA, TNA or GNA - Hextose, Peptide, Therose or Glycol NA). The interior of a cell is so complex it's been compared to an entire ecosystem. So life based on different principles could be as revolutionary for biology as discovering a coral reef for your first time, when the only ecosystem you knew about before is the African Savannah. I make this analogy here: "Super Positive" Outcomes For Search For Life In Hidden Extra Terrestrial Oceans Of Europa And Enceladus Life that is based on novel new principle s that we haven't thought of yet. For instance, what if other life doesn't use a helix? Suppose for instance that the life used a sheet like two dimensional structure, planar rather than linear, and replication happened by a second layer forming on top of the original sheet?
Or could it even be a 3D informational polymer? Is there any approach that avoids the need to uncoil to read it? We can do this mechanically through laser scanning, in prototypes for future memory devices, so the idea is not so far fetched as to be totally impossible.
This is just fun speculation at present. But suppose that you are an ET biologist and your life uses 2D sheets to replicate - would you not find the idea of a helical structure that has to uncoil and unzip to replicate implausible and unlikely too?
s that we haven't thought of yet. For instance, what if other life doesn't use a helix? Suppose for instance that the life used a sheet like two dimensional structure, planar rather than linear, and replication happened by a second layer forming on top of the original sheet? Or could it even be a 3D informational polymer? Is there any approach that avoids the need to uncoil to read it? We can do this mechanically through laser |
prevents it. The court recognizes that plaintiff is aggrieved by the apparent infringement and is sympathetic toward its argument that lawsuits like this one are the only way for it to find and stop infringers. However, the court will not assist a plaintiff who seems to have no desire to actually litigate but instead seems to be using the courts to pursue an extrajudicial business plan against possible infringers (and innocent others caught up in the ISP net). Plaintiff seeks to enlist the aid of the court to obtain information through the litigation discovery process so that it can pursue a non-judicial remedy that focuses on extracting “settlement” payments from persons who may or may not be infringers. This the court is not willing to do.
We've been seeing a series of district court rulings around the country rejecting the copyright trolling practice of suing a whole bunch of John Does in a single lawsuit, where the clear goal is simply to identify the individuals so the copyright holder can send threatening letters and seek to extract a settlement payment. The fact is that these copyright holders are using the court as a pressure point in their business model, rather than for actual judicial purposes. It's good that it appears to be becoming common knowledge among the judiciary that these sorts of lawsuits are unacceptable. This particular case was rejected for a bunch of good reasons, starting with the fact that moving forward with the case and granting early discovery won't actually identify the defendants, since IP addresses are such weak identifiers.The magistrate judge, Howard R. Lloyd, notes that granting early discovery is only supposed to be done if doing so actually identifies the Does. And while the copyright holder, Hard Drive Productions, insists that it will, the judge notes that the plaintiff's own arguments prove this is simply not true. That's because they admitted that once they got the IP addresses, they would then need to contact the owner of the account and seek to identify who was actually using the account at the time.The judge goes on to reject a number of other arguments as well, before denying the early discovery and dumping all but one of the defendants (also becoming standard in a lot of these lawsuits). But the conclusion discussion is where it gets really good:As these kinds of rulings continue to roll out of courts, hopefully a strong precedent is being set across the country that such lawsuits are simply not acceptable.
Filed Under: copyright troll, group lawsuit, john doeImage caption The new government has faced mass protests over its controversial constitutional reforms
Fitch has become the third ratings agency to cut Hungary's credit rating to junk status.
The agency blamed "unorthodox policies" for its decision to cut the country's rating from BBB- to BB+.
Hungary's centre-right government has been accused of undermining the central bank's independence and imposing losses on the country's foreign-owned banks.
The country is attempting to resolve a stand-off with the International Monetary Fund over a new loan facility.
One of the biggest challenges facing the country is the large amount of foreign-currency mortgages, particularly those denominated in Swiss francs, which have been taken out by home-buyers in recent years.
Hungarians were attracted by the cheap interest rates available, but face impossible debt repayments as the Hungarian forint loses value.
"The downgrade of Hungary's ratings reflects further deterioration in the country's fiscal and external financing environment and growth outlook, caused in part by further unorthodox economic policies, which are undermining investor confidence and complicating the agreement of a new IMF/EU deal," said Matteo Napolitano of Fitch's sovereign ratings division.
The Hungarian government has sought to agree a standby facility with the IMF, but talks broke down over a new law that strengthened the government's control of the Hungarian central bank's governing board.
Fitch follows Moody's and Standard & Poor's, which also cut their ratings for Hungary to junk levels in recent weeks.New Delhi: Yet another incident of crime against women has come to the fore. A 26-year-old woman was allegedly gang-raped by three men on Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road in a car.
The incident took place on Sunday night, when the woman was coming back from a shopping mall on MG Mall in an auto-rickshaw.
While she was one her way, three men pulled her inside the car. Notably, another woman was already present inside the car.
The men then gang-raped the woman and dumped her. She is a resident of Munirka in south Delhi
On Monday morning, the alleged rape victim filed complainant at Vasant Kunj Police station, which further transferred the case to Gurgaon Police.
The 26-year-old has claimed that she had seen the woman accomplice in the Mall Sunday night.
She has given her statement before the magistrate.
The woman has told police that she didn't know the accused and also failed to note down the car's number.Celebrity Saudi preacher 'raped' and tortured his five-year-old daughter to death
Lama al-Ghamdi's back was broken and she had been raped and burned
She died in October from her injuries after ten months in hospital
Her father Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a prominent Islamist preacher, admitted beating her but was freed after agreeing to pay £31,000 compensation
Campaign to give women and children better protection gaining momentum
A Saudi preacher who tortured his five-year-old daughter to death has been released after agreeing to pay 'blood money', activists said.
Lama al-Ghamdi died in October having suffered multiple injuries including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns.
The child had also been repeatedly raped and the burned.
Lama suffered multiple injuries including a crushed skull, broken ribs and back, bruising and burns. She had also been raped repeatedly
Her father Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a prominent Islamist preacher who regularly appears on television in Saudi Arabia, served only a few months in jail despite admitting having used a cane and cables to inflict the injuries.
Activists from the group Women to Drive said the preacher had doubted Lama's virginity and had her checked up by a medic.
Randa al-Kaleeb, a social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl's back was broken and that she had been repeatedly raped.
Her injuries were then burned.
Rather than the death penalty or a long prison sentence, the judge in the case ruled the prosecution could only seek 'blood money', according to activists.
The money is compensation for the next of kin under Islamic law.
Torture: Saudi preacher Fayhan al-Ghamdi admitting beating his daughter with a cable and is said to have been concerned about his five-year-old daughter's virginity
Activists said the judge ruled the few months al-Ghamdi spent in prison since his arrest in November was sufficient punishment.
He has reportedly agreed to pay £31,000 ($50,000), which is believed to have gone to Lama's mother.
The amount is half that would have been paid if Lama had been a boy.
Activists say under Islamic laws a father cannot be executed for murdering his children. Husbands can also not be executed for murdering their wives, the group say.
Three Saudi activists, including Manal al-Sharif, who started the women's right to drive campaign, have raised objections to the ruling.
A social media campaign is now gaining momentum after the ruling was publicised.
Manal al-Sharif has launched a campaign on Twitter using the hashtag 'Ana Lama', which is translated as I am Lama, calling for better protection for children and women.
Local reports say public anger in Saudi Arabia is also growing and authorities have said they will create a 24-hour hotline to take calls about child abuse.The Beatles are often given the label of saving rock and roll, and usually for overblown reasons. Yes, they were incredibly creative, fully embraced technical innovations, and managed to propel popular music into a more advanced form. However, it’s perhaps most important that they always had their own particular identity. Integral to The Beatles’ success was the sheer amount of music they played before they even made it big – from dancehalls in Britain to seedy nightclubs in Hamburg, armed with the advantage of playing little known numbers from “race music.”
They were just four lads from Liverpool, albeit with tremendous interest in music, an interest which the port city more than ably supplied. Records from the United States passed from seaman to teenager, and this old fashioned form of exposure transformed The Beatles from music starved teenagers to record store rapscallions. They would spend hours in future manager Brian Epstein’s North End Music Store – what they affectionately called NEMS – not to buy records, but to absorb all music had to offer.
Early rock and roll was largely “race music” – gritty and visceral – often only a few steps removed from blues numbers that had traveled up the Mississippi Delta. While Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran no doubt influenced The Beatles, the boys from Liverpool were just as much – if not more – appreciative of black artists like Chuck Berry, Arthur Alexander, and Barrett Strong.
McCartney covered “That’s Alright (Mama),” (on a BBC radio show on July 2nd, 1963) but The Beatles covered far more songs from black groups to showcase on their LPs. In fact, all of the covers from Please Please Me (“Chains,” “Boys,” “Baby It’s You,” “A Taste of Honey,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Anna (Go To Him)”) were done originally by black artists, and only “Til’ There Was You,” a number from the Broadway play The Music Man, was an exception to the rule on With The Beatles. Lennon, in particular, was outspoken on the impact black artists had on his music. In the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup, the New York Times published a piece entitled “So in the End, the Beatles Have Proved False Prophets,” accusing the band, among other things, of making off with black music for their own benefit. Lennon would respond with a note written on an airplane taking the author to task. “We didn’t sing our own songs in the early days – they weren’t good enough,” Lennon remarked, “the one thing we always did was to make it known that there were black originals, we loved the music and wanted to spread it in any way we could.”
Not just merely appreciative, The Beatles wanted to make the black music that had influenced them their own. One of Lennon’s favorite artists at the time was the little known Arthur Alexander – a black singer and songwriter who had released a couple of singles with the Nashville Dot Label. “Anna (Go To Him)” was Alexander’s latest, released on September 17, 1962. Alexander’s version is maudlin, even slightly off-kilter, given the knee-jerk rhythm and the placid nature of Alexander’s vocal.
Though Lennon insisted “it was only natural that we tried to do it as near to the record as we could – I always wished we could have done them even closer to the original,” The Beatles’ rendition of “Anna (Go To Him)” has two distinct differences that make it a seminal piece. Perhaps most obvious is the shift of the piano’s melodic hook to a very clean guitar hook. More dramatically even – and in Lennon’s case more importantly – they shifted the key up a step to D major. Usually a shift in key is due to a singer’s inability to sing in the original key, or so that the song becomes easier for a musician to play. Yet this change is unusual because Lennon would have been comfortable in a lower key, and C major is one of the most basic keys for musicians to play because of its lack of sharps or flats. The result was a much more strained and anguished vocal.
It was February 11th, 1963, and Lennon was battling a nasty case of pneumonia, but this was a time of 4-track tapes and no sure road to stardom. He had to perform, even if his voice wasn’t up to it. What remains from this day’s session of recording is probably some of the most passionate singing Lennon has on record.
Most contemporaries who were doing what The Beatles were doing, bands like The Rolling Stones, for example, typically tried to emulate the exact vocal performance of the original. (“Mercy, Mercy” is a fine example of The Rolling Stones mirroring an original. First recorded by the criminally unknown Don Covay, “Mercy, Mercy” would be one of the earliest appearances Jimi Hendrix ever made on a record – though uncredited – and Covay would also be responsible for Aretha Franklin’s hit “Chain of Fools”). But The Beatles made “Anna (Go To Him)” their own.
The song started around the top of Lennon’s vocal range, and the strain on his vocal chords as well as its emotional heft brought an additional resonance to Lennon’s delivery – it crackles and wails, pleads and begs. The Beatles also brought to the song great vocal harmony, from the hauntingly sultry “Aaanna” call and response in the beginning to the more traditional backing vocals that try to steady Lennon’s emotional waver in the refrain.
“Twist and Shout,” a cover of the Isley Brothers original, would be the last song Lennon sang that day after chugging a glass of milk to soothe his throat. What’s evident from listening to The Beatles’ early career was their admiration of black artists and black music. What’s important was that they made it distinct – they married black and white music and exposed less known acts to wider audiences. When audiences went back to the originals, they weren’t just hearing carbon copies; they were hearing the roots of what inspired The Beatles to brilliance. So when the New York Times author accused The Beatles of misappropriating black music, Lennon felt justified in firing back a demonstration of his own deep knowledge of his artistic predecessors. After explaining The Beatles’ reverence for black music, Lennon attached a post-script. “P.S. What about the ‘B’ side of Money?” The ‘B’ side in question that Lennon most certainly believed the author had to look up? “Oh I Apologize.”
A version of this article originally appeared on Art of the Song.On Monday, just after lunchtime, Dr Mark Post will make culinary (and scientific) history by cooking a beefburger and eating it. Which sounds mundane except that this burger cost €250,000 to make and has been painstakingly assembled from meat grown in his laboratory at Maastricht University.
Post's burger will be constructed this weekend from tens of thousands of strands of protein grown, in petri dishes, from cattle stem cells. These cultured muscle fibres will be taken out of deep freeze and carefully knitted together to make Monday's culinary milestone.
The event will be the culmination of years of research to demonstrate that meat grown in culture dishes in the lab can one day be a viable alternative to meat from livestock. If it can be made to work, cultured meat holds the potential to feed the world's growing human population without the devastating environmental impacts of farming ever more animals.
Feeding the voracious human appetite for flesh of all kinds means that 30% of the Earth's usable surface is covered by pasture land for animals, compared to just 4% of the surface which is used to directly feed humans. The total biomass of our livestock is almost double that of the people on the planet and accounts for 5% of CO2 emissions and 40% of methane emissions – a much more potent greenhouse gas. By 2060, the human population is predicted to rise to 9.5 billion and, with rising demand for meat from rapidly developing populations in, for example, China and India, the market in meat is expected to double by the middle of the century. If the amount of meat we produce doubles, livestock could be responsible for half as much climate impact as all the world's cars, lorries and aeroplanes.
Post, who has chosen not to give any media interviews before the event on Monday, has previously discussed the environmental motivation for making his burger. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 in Vancouver, he said: "Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more. If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward."
Anthropologists have argued that learning how to cook and eat meat was one of the reasons the human brain was able to grow as big as it did. Meat, a dense source of nutrition and calories, powered our ancestors' brains in a way that their competitors could not match and has had a lasting impact on our species' taste for flesh today.
That ancient taste for meat would provide a willing market for cultured products, says the food writer and commentator, Jay Rayner, when the technology can be perfected. "What you'll [eventually] see is a separation. On the one side you'll have your prime cuts – these will be special occasion meats; if you want a steak or a joint or a whole chicken, you'll get those things but less regularly than you do now. But if you want animal protein to make, perhaps, a cheap burger or a lasagne or something like that then you'll go for alternatives, which may be in vitro meat or it may be insect protein."
Traditionally farmed meat is already very expensive, Rayner adds, and it will only get more so. It could be only a matter of time until members of the public would begin to embrace alternatives.
Steve Conisbee, whose family has run the Barracks Farm and bred cattle near Leatherhead for nine generations, says he cannot see his customers running to buy cultured meat. "We've got to look to science for future solutions, I'm not denying that," he said. "I'm just thinking, at the moment, is the time right? Probably not and I can't see the more affluent consumer going for it. Maybe there will always be a novelty value to it but I don't see it becoming a mainstream meat in the next decade."
But as the demand for meat around the world goes up, Conisbee concedes that lab-grown meat "might sit on the plate better than more intensively produced animals".
That lab-grown meat has the potential to reduce the suffering of animals is of interest to many animal welfare groups. The People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals have offered a $1m prize for the first organisation to produce artificial chicken meat.
But some aspects of meat grown from stem cells could nonetheless "leave a bad taste in the mouth" for those who see it as a panacea. "The meat is apparently cultured using a cell culture medium (serum) that is derived from animals," said a spokesperson for the RSPCA. "There are ethical and welfare issues associated with using animal serum to culture cells and animal tests to evaluate the safety of the'meat' will cause pain, suffering and distress."
Post will face many hurdles in bringing his lab-grown meat to the market, not least scaling up his manufacturing process – cell culturing is not a cheap technology and his burger has taken a team of researchers many years to make. So far his work has been funded by a mystery backer, who will also be unveiled on Monday, but taking the cultured beef further will need considerable further investment.
Any cultured meat for sale to the public would also need to be proven safe. A Food Standards Agency spokesperson said: "Any novel food, or food produced using a novel production process, must undergo a stringent and independent safety assessment before it is placed on the market. Anyone seeking approval of an in vitro meat product would have to provide a dossier of evidence to show that the product is safe, nutritionally equivalent to existing meat products, and will not mislead the consumer. This would be evaluated under the EU regulation for novel foods, prior to a decision on authorisation. There have been no such applications to date."
Then there is the potential public unease associated with the technology. Like any new technology, it would give people pause for thought but, when compared to some modern farming and food processing, Rayner is confident that the unease would pass. "There is actually nothing beautiful about animal husbandry," he said. "In some ways, in vitro meat produced in a clean, pristine laboratory may have less of a yuck factor than what goes on in an abattoir."The National Hockey League has partnered with the anti-homophobia You Can Play Project, the Hockey News reports:
“I’m very proud that the National Hockey League and NHL Players Association are the ones taking this step and breaking new ground,” Philadelphia Flyers scout and YCP co-founder Patrick Burke told THN late Thursday morning. “The big shift is that this is a professional sports league saying not that, ‘We tolerate you,’ not that, ‘We’ll deal with it if we need to,’ but that they’re inviting us in. It’s exciting.”
“Our motto is ‘Hockey Is For Everyone,’ and our partnership with You Can Play certifies that position in a clear and unequivocal way,” added NHL commissioner Gary Bettman (pictured). “While we believe that our actions in the past have shown our support for the LGBT community, we are delighted to reaffirm through this joint venture with the NHL Players’ Association that the official policy of the NHL is one of inclusion on the ice, in our locker rooms and in the stands.”
The partnership, which was signed as a legally binding document by the three parties this week, will see You Can Play (a) conduct seminars at the NHL’s annual rookie symposium to educate players on gay equality issues; and (b) integrate YCP’s message of respect for all into the league’s Behavioral Health Program by allowing players to confidentially seek counseling or education. As well, YCP will work with the league to create and broadcast public service announcements promoting equality for all.
More at THN…The date has been set for the thirty-third installment of the Letter from the Producer LIVE! The live stream will feature the first half of a two-part special previewing patch 3.5. Don't miss this chance to get the latest information to come out of Eorzea!
Date & Time
* Starting time is subject to change.
Themes
Patch 3.5 Preview Part 1 Take a peek at the various challenges coming in Patch 3.5.
Special Guest * Updated * Updated 11/22/2016 A special guest comes to visit Yoshi-P.
Miscellaneous Announcements
URL
* The URL will be posted in the near future.
* Please note that the audio will be available in Japanese only.
* For viewing on smartphones, iOS 5 or later is recommended.
Friday, November 25, 2016 at 3:00 a.m. (PST)Those of you who are unable to view the live broadcast, never fear! A summary of topics discussed will be made available on the official forums.hard won
The NHL handed out its awards Wednesday night in a ceremony that was even more cringe-inducing than usual (if you can believe that). The reason for the increased cringe factor was twofold: firstly, Drew Doughty was given his first Norris trophy. And secondly, in an unprecedented move, the NHL retroactively re-awarded the Stanley Cup.Let's take a closer look at that first thing: Doughty, who began complaining that he was owed a Norris trophy while the 2015-16 season was still in its infancy, finally walked away with hisprize last night in Las Vegas. I was in the crowd, and Doughty's win was met with... well, mostly just indifference, honestly. Turns out, no one in Vegas really cares about this stuff. But most peopleapplaud. I think I even saw one PHWA member quietly mouth the words 'you're welcome'. I myself, however, was properly appalled. Why?This past season, Erik Karlsson scored the most points by any defenceman in 20 years, and was also the first defenceman to lead the league in assists in 40 years. He didn't just prove that he was the best defenceman to play this season... he proved that he is one of the best defencemen to play EVER.So what kind of season did Doughty have, you ask? I mean, in order to topple Karlsson, one would assume that he must have done something equally earth-shattering, no? Maybe he just plain got. Like, maybe he registered the most blocked shots in a season ever? Maybe he killed a penalty single-handedly while barefoot? Or maybe he tried to justify voting Drew Doughty for the Norris trophy?No, Drew actually didn't do much this season.His supporters consistently give two reasons why they voted for him: (1) on a good team, his +/- was pretty good. Like, he was on the ice ALOT while other players were doing good things. And (2) come on, the guywanted to win it! How can you say no to that face?!Regardless, Doughty sauntered up there last night, collected his gift, and we in the crowd bravely continued acting like these awards have any merit at all. But that was when Gary Bettman stepped back to the mic and made a surprise announcement that broke our brains..."Drew? Hold on there, slugger. Get back up here. Come on, big guy. We've got a little surprise for you."As a puzzled Doughty returned to the stage, something else joined him. A large object was wheeled out, hidden beneath a black velvet cloth."Now, Drew... some of our friends in the PHWA have told me that you've been a little down in the dumps lately," Bettman continued. "We know this season didn't end the way you hoped, so we got together and arranged something special for you. On behalf of both the NHL and the PHWA, I am extremely proud to declare the Los Angeles Kings the 2016 Stanley Cup Champions!"With a flourish, Bettman pulled back the black velvet cloth, revealing the gleaming Stanley Cup. This was met with... honestly, it was pretty much just indifference again (people in Vegas really do not care about hockey, I cannot stress this enough), but a few writers here and there erupted in jubilant applause as Doughty hoisted the Cup above his head. Beside me, one of them shouted "Good for you, big guy! I love you!"I turned to him and asked "What in the Hell is going on right now?" Tears streaming down his face, he replied "You didn't see the little tyke's face when Pittsburgh won... lower lip all tremblin' like it was... I mean, what were we supposed to do? Let Drew be sad? Fat chance! YOU EARNED THIS, SPORT!"The NHL Entry Draft takes place June 24th. Free agency begins on July 1st. The new season opens October 12th.Drew Doughty's campaign to win the 2017 Norris trophy starts NOW.(Image: United Nation Relief and Works Agency via Getty Images)
Syria and California have both recently suffered their worst-ever droughts, exacerbated by global warming. Syria’s may have helped trigger its bloody civil war, but not California’s, which instead brought vermin invasions and wildfire. The difference points to the resilience that will be needed in a warming world.
Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues analysed Syrian weather data since 1931, and found steadily less winter rainfall, which is crucial for crops, and higher temperatures, which dry soils faster. The only explanation for such a change over that timescale lies in man-made greenhouse emissions, says Kelley. Climate models, his team found, consistently predict such changes for the Fertile Crescent, the Middle Eastern area that includes Syria and Iraq.
The researchers used a statistical technique to separate the long-term drying that appeared linked to climbing CO 2 emissions, from yearly, natural ups and downs in precipitation. Those natural variations led to the occasional drought by themselves, says Kelley. But, he adds, “the long-term drying trends exacerbated the recent drought, making it the most severe in the observed record.” Crops failed from 2006 to 2009 in Syria’s northeastern region that is its breadbasket – then when rains returned, they triggered an explosion of yellow rust, a wheat fungus, that killed up to half the crop.
Advertisement
Since 2011, California has also been suffering its worst drought on record Climate models do not predict less rainfall for the state, but do forecast that years of naturally low rainfall will be more likely to be unusually warm, say Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues at Stanford University. They report that, as in Syria, higher temperatures in recent times have exacerbated the impact of naturally dry years, making them more deadly to crops.
Unlike California, however, Syria tipped into civil war in 2011, which has been partly blamed on the drought.
Using satellite images, Kelley’s team confirms that over-pumping of ground water in north-eastern Syria because of government subsidies for wheat production depleted a source of irrigation that farmers could otherwise have used when rains failed. Meanwhile, the Syrian government slashed food and fuel subsidies. “This resulted in agricultural collapse and mass migration,” says Kelley.
When relief failed to arrive over the next two years – partly, say analysts, because the local mostly Kurdish population opposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad – up to 1.3 million destitute people fled the north-east and into Syria’s urban slums, which already hosted a million refugees from Iraq.
Civil unrest
As a result of the drought, grain prices rose 27 per cent between 2008 and 2010, and mass migration into slums with few job opportunities meant that unemployment soared in a mostly young population – a recipe for unrest. Cities affected included Homs and Hama, where protests began in 2011.
Other investigators have linked climate stress and civil unrest. “This is plausible,” says Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “Placing stress on a society tends to make violence more likely.” But he has questioned whether that means such links are always important. The existing political unrest in the Middle East, he observes, might have led to violence in Syria even without a drought.
Kelley agrees there is no one cause for the violence – but cites interviews with Syrian refugees who blamed the drought for “pushing people toward revolution”.
Drought-stricken California, meanwhile, has been hit by vermin and wildfire, but no mass migration or violence. The difference, says Kelley, is resilience, the ability of a social system to absorb shocks and still function. “Syria’s vulnerability was very high before the drought,” he says. “California has much higher resilience.” Many societies at risk of climate shocks might benefit from understanding that resilience – and how to bolster it.
“Many factors contributed to the unrest,” says Mahmoud Solh, head of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. Poverty played a role, he says, and the drought exacerbated poverty, while the government did not do enough to help farmers. It was trying to stop the overuse of groundwater by diverting water from the Euphrates into the region, he says – a project now halted by fighting.
Journal references: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1421533112; PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1422385112Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More
Monday, September 12th, 2016 8:42AM CDT
82,138
Topic Options: View Discussion · Sign in or Join to reply
Autobot N and their eagle eyes, we have another list of rumours for the Titans Return line - apparently 'confirmed' by the Hasbro systems according to
Rogerwang1985 wrote: This is my brother's friend, a request for a staff at HASBRO's work, to give a list of the 2017 Titans Return toys
I hope these things are true.
•Perceptor
•Cliffjumper
•Beachcomber
•Huffer
•Seaspray
•Cosmos
•Kup
•Broadside
•Hubcap
•Crosshairs
•Fastlane
•Cloudraker
•Doublecross
•Grotusque
•Chase
•Freeway
•Searchlight
•Bliztwing
•Trypticon
•Octane
•Sixshot
•Slugslinger
•Triggerhappy
•Battletrap
•Flywheels
•Pounce
•Wingspan
•Arcee
•Shockwave
•Snapdragon
•Apeface
•Misfire
•Getaway
•Nightbeat
•Hosehead
•Quickswitch
•Needlenose
•Sky Shadow
•Nautica
•Tidalwave
•Deathasaurus
•Abominus
•Sharkticon
•Ranger
•Godbomber
•Tidal Wave Credit(s): TFW rogerwang1985 Once more via Seibertronianand their eagle eyes, we have another list of rumours for the Titans Return line - apparently 'confirmed' by the Hasbro systems according to TFW2005 member Rogerwang1985. This is all added to the previous rumours we reported on here, and we've highlighted the newer new figures in this supposed list. Check it out, grab your salt bags, and speculate away!
Search Got Transformers News? Let us know here!
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823923)
Posted by
We've known about Triggerhappy for months - and it was even seen on the back of packaging at an official con - and the duocons were in the last leak.
Pretty sure we knew about Cloudraker and Fastlane from a podcast leak too. And I think Searchlight was already rumoured but it might have been Chase; the throttlebots always blend into each to me. Can never tell them apart. Posted by Kurona on September 12th, 2016 @ 8:46am CDT
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823924)
Posted by
[quote="Autobot N"]Found something interesting on TFW2005. Take with many grains of salt.
Yeah, I saw that. But this one has really no tangible source. I still wouldnt be surprised if they all happen though and i will have a ton of fun right now breaking it down to see how they could all be issued within next year in the model we currently have.
Deluxes
•Getaway
•Hot Rod
•Doublecross
•Triggerhappy
•Quake
•Croc
•Topspin
•Kup
•Perceptor
•Crosshairs
•Slugslinger
•Misfire
•Needlenose
•Nightbeat
Only 14 out of 16 possible, it could be that those I listed in the titan master section would be here instead.
Legends
•Sharkticon
•Cliffjumper
•Beachcomber
•Huffer
•Seaspray
•Cosmos
•Hubcap
•Chase
•Freeway
•Searchlight
Voyagers
•Megatron
•Optimus
•Broadside
•Bliztwing
•Octane
•Snapdragon
•Apeface
If there is any chance for another voyager, it would be in a boxset unless Snapdragon and Apeface are not voyagers, which would suck. It could be battletrap and flywheels instead but that would mean 3 mainline relases of the Blitzwing voyager mold, which strikes me as odd (but not unheard of, CW rleasd the Optimus voyager mold 3 times that year)
Leaders
•Sixshot ¸
•Sky Shadow
•Overlord
•Deathasaurus
If this is how it plays out, this could be the best yearfor Leaders since ROTF.
Boxsets (2 sets)
•Fastlane
•Cloudraker
•Tidal Wave
•Pounce
•Wingspan
•Quickswitch
•Godbomber
•Nautica
•Tidalwave
Two titan masters, A blue redeco of the Magnus/PMOP mold and a redeco of the Voyager Optimus mold would be here as well.
Titan Master
•Ptero
•Sawback
•Fanrgy
•Overboard
•Grotusque
•Ranger
•Hosehead
•Arcee
•Battletrap
•Repugnus
•Shuffler
•Toraizer
•Optimus Prime
Only 13 out of possible 16
Titan Class
•Trypticon
Really Not Sure Where
•Flywheels
•Shockwave
•Abominus
This would be pretty awesome. Posted by william-james88 on September 12th, 2016 @ 8:48am CDT
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823927)
Posted by
If this is legit, then it's going to be a busy year...! Posted by Mindmaster on September 12th, 2016 @ 8:49am CDT
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823929)
Posted by
Shockwave could be the Galvatron mold reuse. Posted by steals_your_goats on September 12th, 2016 @ 8:51am CDT
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823932)
Posted by
Kurona wrote: We've known about Triggerhappy for months - and it was even seen on the back of packaging at an official con - and the duocons were in the last leak.
Pretty sure we knew about Cloudraker and Fastlane from a podcast leak too. And I think Searchlight was already rumoured but it might have been Chase; the throttlebots always blend into each to me. Can never tell them apart.
Yeah,but this is just an extra source reiterating those so it adds validity. Just like this second mention of Predaking adds validity. Yeah,but this is just an extra source reiterating those so it adds validity. Just like this second mention of Predaking adds validity. Posted by william-james88 on September 12th, 2016 @ 8:54am CDT
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823936)
Posted by
All I need from this line is a deluxe or larger, well executed pair of Horrorcons. That's all. I'm really hoping that their names here mean that my wish will come true. Posted by Diem on September 12th, 2016 @ 9:16am CDT
Re: Rumors - More Upcoming Transformers Titans Return Products: Monsterbots, Nightbeat, Shockwave, More (1823939 |
while it may be argued that the entire international community did not explicitly endorse the Nuremberg proceedings, there is no doubt that the British state endorsed them. The British state was a lead player and key participant in the entire process. So the British state has plainly recognized the crime of waging aggressive war at least since Nuremberg.
The decision blocks an attempt by Gen. Abdulwaheed al-Rabbat to bring a private war crimes prosecution against the former pro-Israel and anti-Muslim prime minister. Gen. al-Rbbat was Iraqi Army’s chief of staff under Saddam Hussein and Governor of Nineveh. After US occupation of Iraq in 2003, he took residence in UAE.
Baron Laugharne Thomas, who is to retire in October 2017, is not an elected justice but was appointed by the prime minister. He became a celebrity after rejecting the extradition appeal of anti-Israel Egyptian-UK preacher Mustafa Kamel Mustafa aka Abu Hamza.
In 2012, Tony Blair along with George Bush was declared a War Criminal by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT) in Malaysia.
Tony Blair, has made tens of million dollars by creating wars and conflict around the world and lobbying for dictatorial regimes. He is sought for war crimes by several groups.
Former UK’s MP George Galloway has produced a documentary The Killing$ of Tony Blair over Tony Blair’s creating conflicts and wars to serve Israel’s interests.
Anyone who knows that like the US, British judicial, political, banking and media is totally controlled by the organized Jewry is not surprised that Tony Blair is not prosecuted over joining the illegal invasion of Iraq which killed over one million Iraqi civilians including 500,000 children – because it served Israel’s interests.
Jews make less than 1% of the British population but country’s Supreme Court is headed by a Zionist Jew Baron David Edmond Neuberger. Four out of 11 judges at the Supreme Court are committed Israel Firsters.
AdvertisementsFirst Listen: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, 'Brooklyn Babylon'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Lindsay Beyerstein/Courtesy of the artist Lindsay Beyerstein/Courtesy of the artist
Audio for this feature is no longer available.
The composer Darcy James Argue has a little bit of the archetypal indie rocker in him. He's a white guy from Canada who moved to Brooklyn and started a band there. His new album is filled with deliberate suggestions of dance-punk; of Eastern European brass bands and carnival music; of the piano riff in LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends." It's about gentrification. There's an animated projection that goes with it.
But Argue's medium of choice is the big band — the standard large jazz ensemble with trumpets, trombones, saxophones, that sort of thing. He has his own anachronistic orchestra, called Secret Society. The fact that he's able to do this in 2013 says something about how hard he works at it, and how interesting the results are. Eighteen standing members — including world-class soloists like John Ellis, Ryan Keberle and Ingrid Jensen — and a long list of substitutes seem to think so, anyway.
Any big-band composer spends time dealing with a certain jazz tradition of how Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Thad Jones had orchestras before them. If you've ever read any of his writing, you know that Argue has spent plenty of time engaging that legacy. But this project, his second studio album, is decidedly broader than "large ensemble jazz." It was conceived in collaboration with visual artist Danijel Zezelj, who created charcoal-hued stop-motion animation telling the story of a future Brooklyn. (He also live-painted a massive 30' x 4' cityscape during the premiere of this music.) The story follows a master Brooklyn carpenter contracted to build a carousel atop a new tower, set to be the tallest in the world, as his professional aims and neighborhood loyalty find themselves at odds.
That makes Brooklyn Babylon something of a soundtrack, though it stands alone better than your average score. For all the layers-upon-layers of classical minimalism, or noisy squalls, or powerful solo turns, it never feels like a pop quiz in musical vocabulary. Motives repeat, build, tessellate; a wooden flute or an electrified trumpet always feels purposeful. The whole thing, as many-tentacled as words make it seem, coheres.
The visual element of Brooklyn Babylon brings all this out. Zezelj's language — its severe angles, its black-and-white monochromatic look — suggests a metropolis reminiscent of both early-20th-century New York and a bordering-on-dystopian future. There's humanity there, though, in seething masses and individual pathos pushing up through the cracks. A modern big band like this one can do grim, and it can do overwhelming, and it can do it in ways you'll "get" even if you haven't listened to a jazz record in your life. But it's powered in the old-fashioned way of bodies pushing air through bores and sticks unto cymbals, and the exuberance therein is never far away.Earlier this week, Vermont startup Designbook revealed that it had been approached by lawyers from social-networking giant Facebook, which is pushing it to change its name. Facebook has filed an opposition to the trademark "Designbook" at the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Yesterday, Designbook got an unexpected powerful ally: the governor of Vermont, Peter Shumlin. Having read about the trademark tiff in news reports, Shumlin wrote a letter (PDF) to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging him to leave Designbook alone. "I was very concerned to read about Facebook’s unnecessary bullying of a Vermont startup called Designbook," wrote Shumlin. The letter continues:
The Vermonters behind this company are the type of people that make me proud to be this state’s Governor. They are young, entrepreneurial, and innovative. Given your background, I am sure you can relate. The last thing these Vermonters deserve is for a giant corporation to threaten them unnecessarily. We don’t stand for that type of injustice in Vermont. Just ask Chick-fil-A. I’m sure that the enormous growth and worldwide success of Facebook insulates you from many of the decisions made within the organization. I sincerely hope that is the case here. And I hope you will step in to take action to right this wrong.
The governor's mention of Chick-fil-A refers to his support of another Vermont company in a trademark dispute. The restaurant chain opposed Vermonter Bo Muller-Moore's attempt to trademark the phrase "Eat More Kale." Chick-fil-A opposed that trademark, saying it was too close to its "Eat Mor Chikin" trademark. In December, Moore won out, and Shumlin called it a "victory for grow local... and a victory for Vermont."
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on Shumlin's letter.
"It's great to start a business in a state where the governor is supporting small businesses and against misuse of the trademark system," Designbook co-founder Kyle Clark told Ars via e-mail. "We were quite surprised Facebook opposed our trademark. The opposition is a distraction from creating an awesome Web application."There are a few facts that are basically indisputable: brunch trumps all other meals, Breaking Bad is one of the best shows in history, and women always want to become mothers. Wait, no, scratch that last one. People are increasingly coming around to the fact that women don't all fit into an "I've always wanted to be a mom" cookie-cutter mold. This is awesome, since women who don't want kids should have the freedom to pursue their life goals without skepticism. Unfortunately, some people haven't quite gotten the memo. If you're a woman who doesn't want to have babies, chances are you're tired of hearing the following statements.
1. "You'll change your mind!"
Most people who are set on raising children won't just up and decide they've changed their minds, so why would you? Even if the person saying this means well, it comes across like you're not mature enough to have a handle on what you want out of life.
2. "My friend Jenna always said she didn't want kids, and now she's a happy mom of six!"
That's very lovely for Jenna and her brood, but what exactly does that have to do with you?
3. "You'll never know love like being a mother."
Cool, a quick diss about the depth of every single relationship in your life, all in one fell swoop!
4. "It's just a phase."
No, trying out cherry bombré hair is just a phase. Deciding not to have kids is a huge, life-altering choice. Calling it a phase implies that it's something you're going through, but will grow out of when you become a "real" adult.
5. "Your life doesn't really start until after you have children."
Does that mean if you never have them, your life just never starts? Because in your opinion, yours is already full of all sorts of exciting things. Does that officially make you a ghost?
6. "What will you do instead?"
Mmm, maybe live in a yurt in Nepal, skyrocket up the career ladder, or funnel all your disposable income into transforming your home into the decked-out place of your dreams. Sure, these are all possible when you have young offspring, but they vary from logistically difficult to wildly irresponsible.
7. "But what about giving your parents grandbabies?"
It can be gut-wrenching when your parents desperately want grandchildren that you know you won't provide. Luckily if you have siblings, they might take one for the team. If you don't but are committed to staying childfree, any potential grief you get from your parents probably still isn't worth giving up your independence. Also, that's an extremely personal question.
8. "Do you hate kids?"
Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Perhaps you'll be one of those women who qualifies as the best aunt in the world, but is also relieved to give the kids back to their parents and return to a blissfully quiet, clean home. While women who don't want children have plenty of reasons for that decision, all of them are completely valid.
9. "Ugh, I'm jealous. It must feel amazing to have no responsibilities."
Come again?
10. "What happened to your maternal instinct?"
Maybe it got lost in the mail? Really though, a maternal instinct isn't a requirement for being a woman. Some women have a biological clock that makes nary a peep while others' ovaries explode at the sight of a little one toddling around. Both are totally fine.
11. "You can't truly understand being tired until you have children."
First, rude. Second, categorically false. Third, is that really supposed to sell you on it?
12. "But your kids would be so cute!"
Having children on the sole basis that they might (emphasis on might) be stunners isn't the best rationale for bringing a person into the world.
13. "Who will take care of you when you get older?"
Again, on its own, this is not a compelling enough reason to create a human being.
14. "Why?"
This is pretty high on the list of impossible questions to answer. As one woman said, "I can’t help it that God put me on this earth to hate tomatoes, love banana Runts, and not want to have a kid. It’s not an active choice to feel this way."
Share via Pinterest Paramount Pictures / via Tumblr
15. "But you would make such an incredible mother."
Maybe so! It's all good though—you can channel that into being an aunt who spoils your nieces and nephews rotten, being a great babysitter for your friends' kids, or taking care of a furbaby. Not having a kid doesn't mean children and other adorably helpless creatures can't benefit from your awesomeness.
16. "One day it'll be too late."
Right, but it won't matter because you don't want kids in the first place!
Share via Pinterest Bravo TV / via Tumblr
17. "You might regret it later."
It's entirely possible, but feeling remorseful about being childfree is way better than feeling disappointed after actually having them.
18. "That's kind of selfish, don't you think?"
Not contributing to the overpopulation of the planet is selfish? In all seriousness, why should a woman making an empowered decision about the trajectory of her life be labeled egocentric? The simple fact that some women get to call being childfree a choice—because there are some who aren't childless by choice, and these questions from unaware people can seriously hurt—is exciting, given that it absolutely isn't one in some parts of the world. How about everyone agrees that either option is legitimate and leaves it at that?Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at The MIT Media Lab, strolls onto the TED2014 stage in a pair of long, black shorts. Normally, what he’s wearing wouldn’t be of note—except that he’s chosen his ensemble today to show us something. Below the hem of his shorts, we see that he has two prosthetic legs. His lab not only creates bionic limbs; he wears them himself.
“Bionics explores the interplay between biology and design,” says Herr. “Today, I will tell human stories of bionic integration. Of how electromechanics attached to the body and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and potential.”
Herr begins by telling his story—his legs were amputated after he got frostbite during a rock climbing accident in 1982. “At the time, I didn’t view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be broken,” he says. “I thought: Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms to advance technology to the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately the disabilities of others.”
Herr began in the field of prosthetics with the idea that the body is malleable, a blank slate that could be improved. He created special limbs to help him return to rock climbing—and to be better than he had been before. His thin prosthetic feet allowed him to wedge into spaces where a foot couldn’t fit and to don special spiked feet in order to climb vertical ice. He adjusted his height as he chose — and jokes,”When I was feeling badly about myself and insecure, I would jack myself up a few inches,” he says. “When feeling sauve, I’d knock down my height down just to give my competition a chance.”
Throughout his career, a simple idea guided Herr’s work. “I imagine a future so advanced that we could rid the world of disability—in which neuroimplants allowed the blind to see, in which the paralyzed could walk with exoskeletons,” he says. “We need to do a better job in bionics to allow full rehabilitation.”
At the Center for Extreme Bionics at the MIT Media Lab, Hugh and his team work on the science and technology to allow repair of humans across a broad range of brain and body issues. A focus is bionic limbs. For these limbs, there are three areas of improvement involved: the mechnical, the dynamic and the electric.
The mechanical has to do with how prosthetics are attached to the body. And this is a true challenge, says Herr. “One of the oldest technologies in the human timeline—the shoe—still gives us blisters. We have no idea how to attach things to our body,” he says. Prosthetics, he explains, are attached via synthetic skins. To create this, his lab uses an round rig of actuators that measure the shape of the remaining limb and the tissue compliance at each anatomical point. They use fMRI to figure out precise geometry. The rule is: where the body is stiff, the skin should be soft and vice versa. “We produce the most comfortable limbs I have ever worn,” says Herr.
Next, come the dynamic challenges. To make prosthetics that “move like flesh and bone,” Hugh’s team uses a smart material which is floppy like paper but becomes stiff like a board when voltage is applied. They attach this to the synthetic skin. “When I walk, there’s no voltage, and my interface is soft compliant,” he says. “But when voltage is applied, it stiffens, creating greater maneuverability of limb.”
The lab studies how people with disabilities walk and run, to understand exactly what happens in the body when these deceptively easy things are done. They use this information, on which muscles are doing what and how they’re being controlled by the brain, to create limbs that work like natural ones. On heel strike, the system modulates stiffness and then lifts the person into walking stride just like the muscles in the calf region. These bionics allow wearers to walk up stairs easily, even run up steep inclines.
The lab is also working on exoskeleton-like devices, which Herr predicts everyone will wear in the future to protect their limbs during activities like running. In a version made for people who aren’t missing limbs at all, the exoskeleton actually augments walking, applying torque and power as needed. “We’re beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and more efficient,” says Herr.
And finally, Herr explains the electric challenges, which determine how a prosthetic “connects with my nervous system.” For this, the lab measures electrical pulses of muscles and what happens when a person thinks about moving their limb. They embed this capability in the chips of bionic limbs. To demonstrate how this works, Herr begins to run. “That was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command,” he says. “The more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get.”
But really, Herr says there is much more to be done from here. “We want to close the loop between the human and the bionic limb,” he says. “We’re doing experiments where we’re growing nerves … When this is fully developed, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but that feel like flesh and bone.”
Herr hopes to work to make these next-generation prosthetics both available and affordable. “The basic levels of physiological function should be part of basic human rights,” says Herr. “It’s not well appreciated, but over half the world’s population suffers from some kind of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition. Every person should have the right to live without disability, if they choose to.”
Herr brings it back to the personal, telling the story of Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional ballroom dancer whose left leg was partially amputated after the Boston Marathon bombing. Herr had the honor of meeting her at a rehabilitation hospital in Boston and, after hearing her story, decided, “Let’s build her a bionic limb.”
Herr’s lab launched a 200-day research period to study the dynamics of dance — to look at how dancers move and what forces they apply while they go. They embedded the fundamentals of dance into a limb for Haslet-Davis.
“In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor,” he says. “In 200 days, we put her back.”
With that, Herr calls Haslet-Davis out for what will be her first dance since the bombing, just a little under a year ago.
Haslet-Davis steps on stage with her partner, professional dancer Christian Lightner. The two begin to dance a rumba, Haslet-Davis performing intricate back-and-forth footwork. To Enrique Iglesias’ “Ring My Bells,” she twirls around her partner as the white fringe of her skirt flaps in the air. Her body looks lithe and unimpaired. Her bionic foot is encased in a white dancing slipper, just like her right foot.
It’s a stunning moment. One that underscores Herr’s ultimate point.
“Bionics are not only about making people stronger and faster,” he says. “Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into our electromechanics.”Getty Images
Earlier this month, former Chiefs coach Todd Haley made waves by indicating a belief that the Chiefs bugged portions of the team facility and tampered with his cell phone. Haley’s next accusation could be a bit more tangible.
Mike Jurecki of XTRA Sports 910 in Phoenix says via Twitter that he’s “[h]earing the Chiefs R refusing 2 play Todd Haley the remainder of his salary, was terminated 4 cause, another words 4 a specific reason.”
In something closer to English, this means that the Chiefs refuse to pay Haley because he was fired “for cause,” which means that the team believes there was some sort of wrongdoing or breach of his contract, which ran through 2012.
It’s not unprecedented, but it’s rare. The Raiders fired former head coach Lane Kiffin for cause, and the team eventually prevailed on the grievance filed by Kiffin with the league office.
That’s the procedure to which coaches agree when becoming coaches, sacrificing their right to sue in court and allowing any claims to be resolved by the league office, a forum that tends to be far more favorable to the 32 franchises who employ the Commissioner.
Given that Haley has worked for the Cardinals, and could soon be working for the Cardinals again, it’s hardly a stretch to ponder whether Haley is telling people like Jurecki that Haley has been stiffed. As with the allegations of bugs and cell-phone shenanigans, Haley should just make the claim, if he has a claim to make.why GNU grep is fast
Hi Gabor, I am the original author of GNU grep. I am also a FreeBSD user, although I live on -stable (and older) and rarely pay attention to -current. However, while searching the -current mailing list for an unrelated reason, I stumbled across some flamage regarding BSD grep vs GNU grep performance. You may have noticed that discussion too... Anyway, just FYI, here's a quick summary of where GNU grep gets its speed. Hopefully you can carry these ideas over to BSD grep. #1 trick: GNU grep is fast because it AVOIDS LOOKING AT EVERY INPUT BYTE. #2 trick: GNU grep is fast because it EXECUTES VERY FEW INSTRUCTIONS FOR EACH BYTE that it *does* look at. GNU grep uses the well-known Boyer-Moore algorithm, which looks first for the final letter of the target string, and uses a lookup table to tell it how far ahead it can skip in the input whenever it finds a non-matching character. GNU grep also unrolls the inner loop of Boyer-Moore, and sets up the Boyer-Moore delta table entries in such a way that it doesn't need to do the loop exit test at every unrolled step. The result of this is that, in the limit, GNU grep averages fewer than 3 x86 instructions executed for each input byte it actually looks at (and it skips many bytes entirely). See "Fast String Searching", by Andrew Hume and Daniel Sunday, in the November 1991 issue of Software Practice & Experience, for a good discussion of Boyer-Moore implementation tricks. It's available as a free PDF online. Once you have fast search, you'll find you also need fast input. GNU grep uses raw Unix input system calls and avoids copying data after reading it. Moreover, GNU grep AVOIDS BREAKING THE INPUT INTO LINES. Looking for newlines would slow grep down by a factor of several times, because to find the newlines it would have to look at every byte! So instead of using line-oriented input, GNU grep reads raw data into a large buffer, searches the buffer using Boyer-Moore, and only when it finds a match does it go and look for the bounding newlines. (Certain command line options like -n disable this optimization.) Finally, when I was last the maintainer of GNU grep (15+ years ago...), GNU grep also tried very hard to set things up so that the *kernel* could ALSO avoid handling every byte of the input, by using mmap() instead of read() for file input. At the time, using read() caused most Unix versions to do extra copying. Since GNU grep passed out of my hands, it appears that use of mmap became non-default, but you can still get it via --mmap. And at least in cases where the data is already file system buffer caches, mmap is still faster: $ time sh -c 'find. -type f -print | xargs grep -l 123456789abcdef' real 0m1.530s user 0m0.230s sys 0m1.357s $ time sh -c 'find. -type f -print | xargs grep --mmap -l 123456789abcdef' real 0m1.201s user 0m0.330s sys 0m0.929s [workload was a 648 megabyte MH mail folder containing 41000 messages] So even nowadays, using --mmap can be worth a >20% speedup. Summary: - Use Boyer-Moore (and unroll its inner loop a few times). - Roll your own unbuffered input using raw system calls. Avoid copying the input bytes before searching them. (Do, however, use buffered *output*. The normal grep scenario is that the amount of output is small compared to the amount of input, so the overhead of output buffer copying is small, while savings due to avoiding many small unbuffered writes can be large.) - Don't look for newlines in the input until after you've found a match. - Try to set things up (page-aligned buffers, page-sized read chunks, optionally use mmap) so the kernel can ALSO avoid copying the bytes. The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing. ;-) Regards, MikeMuni rider Shawn Higgins said he used a mirror to record video of an operator texting while driving a 24-Divisadero bus in late February. (CBS) Muni rider Shawn Higgins said he used a mirror to record video of an operator texting while driving a 24-Divisadero bus in late February. (CBS)
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) — A passenger on San Francisco Muni said he was threatened by an operator after he recorded her texting while driving a bus.
Shawn Higgins rides the 24-Divisadero bus to his jewelry shop in the Castro District. In late February, he shot video of the driver in the mirror, using an iPhone in her lap.
“I went to go film it, and I sat down across from her and she stopped doing it,” Higgins said. “So what we did, we filmed it in the mirror.”
Higgins said he confronted the Muni driver and told her to stop because it is illegal to text while driving. Then, the driver pulled the bus over, forced Higgins and his husband off the bus, threatening never to pick them up again.
“That is clearly not proper procedure,” said Muni spokesman Paul Rose. “Obviously, an operator does not have that authority on who they can or cannot pick up. And if that did happen, that’s not acceptable.”
Rose said the driver denies forcing Higgins off the bus and threatening him. The driver has been punished for texting while driving with a 3-day unpaid suspension. If caught again, Rose said the driver will be fired.
This latest incident comes as Muni answers questions about a door on the L-Taraval train that malfunctioned and stayed open during rush hour last Friday. In both instances, improper procedure was cited as the problem.
(Copyright 2011 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)New York Comic Con, which wrapped up on Sunday, produced a raft of news and announcements from publishers and media companies in the geek culture space. Three of the biggest stories involved the industry leader, Marvel Entertainment (a division of Disney), but none are likely to put a smile on the face of the company’s PR team.
Crime and Punishment
On Thursday, Marvel announced it was canceling a panel on its upcoming Netflix series The Punisher, featuring a gun-toting vigilante on a vengeance-fueled quest for justice, in response to the mass shooting in Las Vegas. “We are stunned and saddened by this week’s senseless act in Las Vegas,” Netflix and Marvel said in a joint statement October 4. “After careful consideration, Netflix and Marvel have decided it wouldn’t be appropriate for Marvel’s The Punisher to participate in New York Comic-Con.”
The panel, set to feature series star Jon Bernthal and head of Marvel’s TV division Jeph Loeb, was scheduled for the prime slot of 5:15 pm on Saturday at the Theatre at Madison Square Garden, an offsite venue that NYCC was using for its largest events. Instead, fans were treated to an exclusive screening of a new film featuring current Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada in conversation with legendary Marvel patriarch Stan Lee, with Quesada on hand in person.
Marvel generally drew plaudits from the press for its move. Unfortunately, it also cements a connection between The Punisher property and the largest act of gun violence in U.S. history and further complicates a character brand that is already controversial within fandom for its emphasis on firearms and gun culture.
Drama at Daybreak
Marvel took another black eye on Thursday morning at a closed-door breakfast meeting that the company hosted for retailers to catch them up with the company’s plans for titles and storylines. These events typically feature a few fireworks between perennially disgruntled comic shop owners, representing the interests of the diehard fans who keep their stores in business, and a Marvel editorial staff trying to sell stories that expand beyond familiar tropes and themes to bring in new audiences.
Marvel editors Tom Brevoort, Nick Lowe, Christina Hanigan and Charles Soule were present and fielded the usual complaints about ordering, overly complex stories and various gimmicks the company has been using to appeal to collectors.
Things turned ugly when one retailer began challenging Marvel’s current editorial direction of updating older white and male characters with younger, more diverse versions, as has happened with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, the Hulk and others. This issue has been a flashpoint for conflict between fans online and led to some confusing utterances from Marvel on the subject earlier this year.
The tabloid site Bleeding Cool reported that “Two older retailers started raising their voices arguing about diversity and how it does not work. The words ‘black,’ ‘homo’ and ‘freaking females’ were used multiple times, at which point other retailers started to boo those retailers and the room started to turn on itself.”
After failing to restore order, Marvel officials abruptly ended the event, but confrontations between retailers and editors continued in the hallway.
Word of the proceedings filtered out to press and fans throughout the day, reigniting a controversy that has divided readers along political lines and leaves Marvel with few options to satisfy both sides.
The Best Defense Is a Good Offense
Marvel got embroiled in yet another controversy when it was reported that the company’s Custom Edition department, which creates comics for corporate clients and brands, was working with military contractor Northrop Grumman in a storyline involving the Avengers.
Northrop Grumman produces the B2 Stealth Bomber, a big part of America’s nuclear strike capability, as well as other lethal military hardware for the Pentagon. The comic project with Marvel was intended to promote STEM education, featuring a team-up between the Avengers and a new supergroup, “Northrop Grumman’s Elite Nexus Team… scientists who specialize in cutting-edge, high-tech adventures.”
But where the brand and Marvel marketing saw an innocuous effort to encourage kids to get into science and technology, critics saw propaganda to indoctrinate young minds into the values of the military-industrial complex.
Negative fan reaction to a tweet announcing the promotion caught the company flatfooted since the Custom Solutions group generally works independently from the mainstream editorial division. Marvel hastily canceled the promotion and removed the titles from their digital streaming service. At his spotlight panel at NYCC, Marvel CCO Joe Quesada admitted that he had not had advance warning about the project and told the audience “I think there were some messaging issues.”
No Escape for Escapists
None of these three controversies were entirely Marvel’s fault, but they demonstrate the peril for highly visible entertainment brands in the current era of intense polarization and politicization of everything.
In the case of the Punisher, the timing left the company with few options, and going ahead with the panel would have been in questionable taste. If that had been the only Marvel story out of the weekend, it would have left the company looking relatively good in the face of a crisis they did not cause.
Same with the retailer kerfuffle. That’s mostly a matter internal to comics fandom, as traditionalists try to protect their nostalgic attachments to characters in the face of changing social mores and changing market demographics. Marvel only has so many iconic characters in its portfolio, and almost all of them date from an era where diversity was not on anyone’s agenda. Over the last few years, efforts to broaden the appeal of superheroes by representing women, people of color, and people across the continuum of gender and sexuality have gotten drawn into the larger identity politics of the culture at large, turning provincial fan fights into clickbait for sites that profit by poking at partisan sore points. Marvel is walking a tightrope on this, same as any other company in their position.
The Northrop Grumman situation was more of an unforced error, but again, this one should be laid at the feet of upper management rather than editorial. If part of Marvel’s business model is pimping its marquee characters out to corporate clients for various brand-building vanity projects, then there should probably be some coordination between the sales side and the people who maintain the greater value of those properties to the public at large. When a misguided side deal ends up tarnishing the company brand at a major public event, those processes should get a longer look.
Unfortunately for Marvel, all three of these mid-level PR problems concatenated at the moment when the gaze of the media was focused on the industry at an enormous trade/consumer show in its own backyard. Marvel definitely dominated the coverage, but not in a way that is going to be helpful.A state prosecutor has been arrested on a drug charge after he was allegedly caught buying pills from an undercover Brevard County detective. John Toppa III, 29, of Melbourne, was arrested Wednesday by the Brevard County Sheriff's Office Special Investigations Unit after he allegedly purchased Roxicodone pills valued at $200 during an undercover operation. A police report says Toppa made the purchase in the parking lot of a Lowe's store in Rockledge. >>Download the WESH 2 News app for iOS and Android Investigators said additional drugs were found in Toppa’s car. He is charged with five counts of possessing a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia. Toppa was an assistant state prosecutor for the 18th Judicial Circuit of Florida, which covers Brevard and Seminole counties. He was assigned to a felony trial division and was hired in 2013. State Attorney Phil Archer announced Thursday that Toppa had been fired. "As we have seen in countless cases, the pill epidemic affects all families and all professions. However, as public servants sworn to uphold the rule of law, every member of my office has a responsibility to perform their duties with honesty and integrity,” Archer said.
A state prosecutor has been arrested on a drug charge after he was allegedly caught buying pills from an undercover Brevard County detective.
John Toppa III, 29, of Melbourne, was arrested Wednesday by the Brevard County Sheriff's Office Special Investigations Unit after he allegedly purchased Roxicodone pills valued at $200 during an undercover operation.
Advertisement
A police report says Toppa made the purchase in the parking lot of a Lowe's store in Rockledge.
>>Download the WESH 2 News app for iOS and Android
Investigators said additional drugs were found in Toppa’s car.
He is charged with five counts of possessing a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.
Toppa was an assistant state prosecutor for the 18th Judicial Circuit of Florida, which covers Brevard and Seminole counties. He was assigned to a felony trial division and was hired in 2013.
State Attorney Phil Archer announced Thursday that Toppa had been fired.
"As we have seen in countless cases, the pill epidemic affects all families and all professions. However, as public servants sworn to uphold the rule of law, every member of my office has a responsibility to perform their duties with honesty and integrity,” Archer said.
AlertMeWayne Rooney has agreed to have an injection in order to face Bayern Munich Wayne Rooney has agreed to have an injection in order to face Bayern Munich
Rooney was rated doubtful for the UEFA Champions League quarter-final, second leg clash at the Allianz Arena after suffering a toe injury during the first meeting at Old Trafford last week.
He missed Saturday's Premier League win at Newcastle as a result but took a full part in training before the United squad flew out to Germany.
Moyes, whose side drew 1-1 with the defending champions in the first leg, is desperate to have Rooney available for the crucial game, especially as Robin van Persie is already out through injury and January signing Juan Mata is ineligible to play.
"He will definitely play," said Moyes. "We will do all we can to get him on the pitch. He hasn't trained the whole week, but he's willing to have an injection before the game.
"We haven't done anything wrong medically. He's a character. If he's determined to play, we'll let him."
Rooney took to social media to reveal he had suffered no reaction during the morning work-out at Carrington before joining the squad on the plane to Germany.
"Good training session with the lads ahead of the Bayern Munich match," he wrote on his Facebook page.
"It's a massive game for us against a top side but we'll be going in confident and looking to progress into the semi-finals."
Bayern boss Pep Guardiola is also convinced that United will throw Rooney into the action for such an important game.
"He is going to play. 100 per cent. He is going to play I bet you a big, big glass of beer," said Guardiola.
"I believe he is going to play, and Valencia too. Rooney is going to play. He is a big player."
Meanwhile, Moyes admits every player will need to be at their best against Bayern and that his team need to improve from their first-leg performance in order to reach the semi-finals.
"It is the hardest game for us so far. Both teams have top players," he said.
"We can and will play better than in the first leg and we have to play better in order to progress.
"We will need a good performance from everyone. We cannot have any passengers.
"My focus is on getting through. The players are ready and focused and we are relishing it.
"It's a massive game. It |
child told HRW.
VICE News spoke to Bill van Esveld, the author and lead researcher of the report, about his experience in investigating alleged child labor in Israeli settlements. "What was striking about the research was to meet all these kids from the Jordan Valley who had no alternative but to drop out of school to do dangerous work for so little pay," he said.
They are often paid 60 shekels ($15) a day, far under Israel's minimum wage of 23 shekels ($5.76) per hour for adults and between 16 and 18 shekels ($4.01 and $4.50) per hour for minors, who for most forms of work must be aged at least 15. Some children took home as little as 50 shekels per day ($12.52), sometimes with deductions for transportation and lodging, a small amount considering the value of the land they work.
The World Bank estimates that the Jordan Valley, which comprises the eastern 28.8 percent of the occupied West Bank, could yield an annual production of agricultural goods worth up to $1 billion for the Palestinian economy. The British humanitarian organization Oxfam believes that the restricted area has the potential to be "the Palestinian bread basket."
However, there's a catch. The Oslo Accords, which were meant to lead to a Palestinian state, separated the West Bank into three areas: A, B, and C. Area A is governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is also in charge of security. In area B, the PA controls civil matters while the Israel Defense Forces directly control security.
Area C is completely under the control of Israel, and this is the area in which the fertile Jordan Valley sits. 50 percent of its land is allocated solely for the use of around 10,000 settlers, 13 percent of the population of the Jordan Valley, on 37 Jewish-only settlements that are illegal under international law. A further 44 percent is reserved for the Israeli military and Israeli natural reserves. The approximately 65,000 Palestinians living there are left with a mere six percent of the Jordan Valley. Palestinians there are largely agrarian, but have limited access to water, further harming agriculture, and farmers face great difficulties in exporting their produce.
"Area C is one of the biggest problems that Palestinian people face," Hamza Zbeidat, the Ma'an Development Center project coordinator in the Jordan Valley, told VICE News in an interview. "Palestinians there aren't allowed to use water from the River Jordan. They aren't even allowed to dig holes to collect rainwater," he said, referring to Israeli Defense Force restrictions on Palestinians digging wells in the occupied territories.
Zbeidat has spent years working in the Jordan Valley, documenting rights abuses against Palestinian workers in the area. He says that the conditions are often unacceptable. "They work very hard. If they work in the Jordan Valley in the summer, harvesting crops inside a greenhouse, it's burning up," Zbeidat remarked, talking about the temperatures in the area, which are usually much warmer than surrounding areas. "The greenhouse makes it even hotter."
These were not the only hazardous conditions child laborers faced, he said, adding that they often worked between 11 and 12 hours a day, carried heavy loads for long distances, and suffered extensive exposure to chemicals.
The HRW report goes further, saying that in addition, neither children nor adult workers are given pay slips, afforded worker's compensation or insurance, and have no legal recourse if they are wronged. If they were to ask to be paid the Israeli minimum wage to which they are entitled, they would immediately be fired, it says.
All of these conditions are outlawed by Israeli labor law, which applies to any Palestinian working in an Israeli settlement. This decision was made by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007, based on a case brought forward by Kav LaOved, a group that advocates for workers' rights in Israel. The decision took a total of 12 years, and it was finally decided that anyone working in a settlement falls under the jurisdiction of Israeli labor laws, not Jordanian labor laws —as was the case put forth by settlers — which do not offer similar protections.
Hannah Zohar, founder of Kav LaOved, told VICE News: "Nobody is enforcing this ruling or these laws in the settlements in the occupied territories."
Zohar said she believes that the fault ultimately lands at the door of the Israeli government. "Israeli law should be applied in the settlements, but the government takes a hands-off approach. They say they don't have the authorization to inspect these settlement businesses, but that's just an excuse. We all know they have the authorization to do whatever they want," she said, adding that she believes Israeli law should apply to everyone working for an Israeli business.
Van Esveld, the main researcher of the report, did not come upon a single worker who had ever seen an Israeli labor inspector.
Another troubling aspect for the HRW researcher was that these products are still being exported to the United States and European Union. "It's bad enough that nations and businesses trade with settlements, but giving them preferential treatment, as in the case of the United States, is astonishing."
Both have expressed a desire to end child labor globally, with the EU referring to it as one of the main contributors to the circle of poverty experienced in many developing nations.
The EU has taken steps towards labeling products from Israeli settlements, but it remains the responsibility of the European importers to read barcodes in order to discern which goods are from such outposts.
The US still imports these products as if they were coming directly from Israel, as outlined under the US/Israel Free Trade Agreement. In 2004, Israel and the US further liberalized trade on agricultural products.
"The fact that this preferential treatment is allotted to businesses that engage in child labor is shocking," van Esveld continued.
The human rights researcher stressed that report should not be interpreted as suggesting that if child labor in settlements were to stop, the outposts would suddenly be legitimate. "Human rights abuses such as child labor are a logical symptom of the lawlessness involving settlements," he said.
If international businesses were to stop trading with these settlements, "then they would dry up, and maybe Palestinians would have access to their land. This would do a lot to battle poverty, and end rights abuses in the Jordan Valley," van Esveld concluded.
Israeli authorities declined VICE News' request for comment.
Follow Creede Newton on Twitter: @creedenewtonSome time ago we wrote about what it’s like to work in Frozenbyte QA and now it’s time to do the same for our Design team. In the last post we gave you the chance to ask questions from them and now we’ve picked some of your questions and had a few of our Design team members answer them.
You’ll find the questions and answers at the end of this post, but first let’s talk a bit about game design. 🙂
WHAT IS GAME DESIGN?
“It would be easier to answer what is not game design”, one of our designers said when we asked him to summarize what game design is. Game Design is a vast, vast world with countless of aspects to take into consideration. A designer needs to be able to think of the big picture and manage to keep that picture in mind even while the game is still incomplete (and it’s always incomplete until it’s released). Imagination and great ideas are nice, but they alone are not enough – a designer needs to be able to picture and create working executions for those ideas and make sure they fit well into the final game.
Design work at Frozenbyte is roughly divided to game design, level design, writing, UI design, technical level work and focus user testing and most of our designers are specialized in one of these categories – though game design is still done by pretty much everyone, and level design by most of the team.
Our Design team works closely with our artists both before starting a project and during it. Decisions such as level themes and settings are decided together, but the actual level art and all artistic choices are made by level artists. We feel that having separate level designers and level artists is the best way to go, since this allows both parties to focus completely on their own specialisation.
Our Design team is currently super busy with Trine 3 and other things, so it’s been quite hard to get them to stay still for pics without being in their way. So this picture of our QA at work from last spring will have to do for now – it’s easy to pretend they’re Design, they’re right next to each other so that makes them Design by proxy, no?
Even though we have many game projects going on simultaneously, most of our designers are dedicated to a certain project. There are still some designers who may jump from one project to another, but this goes only for those who work mainly on documentation, focus user tests or GUI design, which are typically not something that happens daily or even weekly – this makes it relatively easy for designers to keep their focus on one project at a time.
One could write a book on what Game Design is (and in fact, several have been written), but that’s not really the purpose of this blog post, so let’s move on to your questions and give the stage to our wonderful Designers. 🙂
If you still have questions to our Designers that weren’t answered in this post, you can post more questions in the comments. We can’t promise to answer every question, but we’ll at least try to get them to the designer’s attention!
DESIGN INTERVIEW
The below questions are answered by four members of our design team – including a Junior Designer (JD), Focus User Tester (FT), Level Design Lead (LDL) and last but not least our Design Director (DD) (who is also our CEO!).
What is your part in the Design team and what does your job include?
DD: I act as a Design Director in Trine 3 – it is my job to plan, design and maintain the big picture. I work with the design team and I’m also there for everyone who has questions about the projects. Naturally this is just the Design part of my job; as CEO there are countless of different aspects and responsibilities to my role in here that don’t really have much to do with game design at all.
LDL: As Level Design Lead I make sure that every level designer is kept busy and that the outcome is on par with the required quality level. Before we start making a level we agree on the goals together, like what kind of puzzles or bosses should the level have, but details are left open on purpose.
Besides supervising Level Design I still design and create levels myself too, although naturally not as much as I used to do before. Communicating design to other teams and taking part in general design discussion take their toll. It’s very typical that my workdays differ from each other: I might spend one day just creating and answering tasks on our project management software where another day might fly by doing level design work. There’s always so much to do that there’s no risk of a dull day.
JD: I’m a design-intern and I do things in game design as well as level design. My game design part has mostly consisted of enemy design and my level design part has been about level prototyping. That basically means that I try to make interesting level ideas for the level designers who then incorporate them into the real level. Sometimes I help our lead game designer with smaller projects involving the game. I also participate in focus testing.
FT: My goal is to get players, other than our employees, to attend playtests here in our office. Even those who haven’t played any of our games can give us valuable feedback. Before the actual playtests I ask the designers what they would want to find out about the game, how they think it should be played and what known problems it has. After the tests have been held and we have collected data from them I analyse it and try to construct a coherent set to present to the designers. The aim is to give the designers new perspectives to work with.
Aside from that, we have done motion capture sessions where I’ve played the part of Zoya. It has been so much fun and really different from any normal day.
Motion capture session. 🙂 Sorry for potato quality; this is what happens when you try to quickly sneak in some pictures without being in anyone’s way (and also don’t have time or patience to edit the pics).
What do you enjoy (most) about your job?
FT: I love trying to figure out human behaviour and the motives behind it, especially regarding games. What interests me is analysing what causes problems inside the game and what might be the exact thing (or multiple smaller things for that matter) that would ease the interaction with the game. Also it’s great to be able to give designers some insight that they might have not been able to figure out on their own.
Aside from that, trying to capture the spirit of Zoya to my movements during the mocap sessions gives a really different flow. If you think about it Zoya really does jump and run a lot, with a big scale of different movements, so it can be a great exercise for me as well!
LDL: Doing level design and especially using the level editor to create unique gameplay is what makes me happy and keeps me motivated even in the darkest moments of disbelief (which happen from time to time in any project). I also like the more abstract game design and team management, but the creativity and the hands-on feel in doing level design are just unmatched.
JD: The amount of discussions we have is really nice. It helps you see things from other perspectives and it can really open up new venues for ideas that you couldn’t have thought on your own. Also it’s quite nice when we finally figure out a way to solve some problem that has been bugging us for some time. It’s really the whole group effort of it all.
It’s also really fun to see other people figuring out a puzzle that you made. It’s amazing how differently people think and how they find solutions to a problem. Once I made a puzzle that I thought was bulletproof and so hard that you could only do it one way. I let my fellow designer test it out and he solved it with one move (where my version needed like 5 moves). That really confused me as I hadn’t even thought of that solution.
DD: I love all of it. I probably enjoy it most when I’m able to successfully overcome challenges or overcome obstacles.
Our editor is an important everyday tool for our designers. This picture is from one of Trine 2’s Goblin Menace levels. Our editor is also available for users through Steam.
How did you end up at Frozenbyte Design?
LDL: It’s something that one could call a Cinderella story. I was still studying game industry in school when Lauri and Joel from Frozenbyte came to give a presentation about the company. I had never heard of Frozenbyte before and I still wasn’t sure what my calling or special skill in the field was. Despite that, I was so impressed about the company as an employer and a game development studio that I immediately sent an application.
Not many weeks from that I was already creating marketing material as a trainee at Frozenbyte for a project called AOV. For months I did everything related to levels: gameplay, lighting, level art, even audio work. Then one day AOV was made the main project of Frozenbyte and was renamed as Trine.
More developers joined the ranks and I was asked to choose between level art and level design. The choice was not easy and even though I had a strong ambition for art back then, I chose level design after all. I was hired for the job and with our Design Director’s guidance I did all the gameplay for the levels for both Trine and Trine 2 until one of our currently most experienced level designers joined me. Since then our level design team has kept growing and growing. I have been part of the design team since nearly seven years now and I’m really glad about the choice I made many years ago!
DD: By founding the company. 😉 I first started making PC games just for fun when I was ten years old. Even before that I drew sidescroller adventures on paper where I acted as kind of a game/dungeon master. When I was sixteen, I started making games as a hobby. The idea to start making games “seriously” came when I was eighteen – back then the way to get to make games basically meant one had to found a company, which I did together with our other founder when I was twenty years old.
FT: I came to do my internship here at Frozenbyte. I was interested in usability design, and as I had a lot of knowledge of playtesting I quite soon drifted to these tasks more and more.
JD: I started in QA and stayed there for a little over a year. Game design has always been an interest of mine, so I started moving towards that direction by getting to do focus user testing. From there I slowly moved towards other design tasks.
How has designing games for a living affected the way you feel about video games?
JD: I think I play as much as before… It really hasn’t affected me that much but I do look at the games differently sometimes. I look at how different systems work and how they are shown to players.
DD: My personal taste in games has grown more varied – it used to be much more narrow. Though naturally when I was young I happily played just about anything that worked on my old computer, because it couldn’t really run almost anything. I’ve always been able to enjoy games on my free-time and still do, though I do make design-related observations about them when I play. Sometimes when I make an observation I can think “I see what you did there”, but that does not really affect how much I enjoy the game in question.
LDL: Sometimes I end up analysing games maybe a bit too much when I just would want to play them without thinking hows and whys. Being analytical has a positive side too; it helps in keeping the designer mind active and absorbing new ideas. I have to admit that I used to play more when I wasn’t in the industry yet, but the reason is quite obvious: after staring at the screen and creating games for 8 hours a day your body and mind need something else. Even though I play games also for professional reasons, I still play them foremost for fun.
How do you remember the full design of the game, including every small feature like how fast a certain enemy walks?
LDL: Actually it’s quite impossible to remember the design for the whole game if the design is complex. Luckily no one is required to remember it in all its detail, we have documents and design tasks to keep us on track. Communication and meetings help the design team to keep on the same page when the design changes constantly here and there.
DD: We do have software to record and store these things, but I don’t often need to use them for this. I keep a vision of the games and all their properties in my mind. If something is lost or I forget something, I can usually bring it back to mind by concluding and deducing what my thinking has probably been and how I must have acted or thought, which usually leads to the same conclusion I had originally. Many ideas usually end up being more defined or specific in this process.
NEXT UP: WRITING
In the next part we’ll take a look at game writing. So, if you guys have any questions about that to our writer, be sure to leave those in the comments below! 🙂Kilkenny’s gearing up for an influx of Japanese tourists.
It’s has been voted the prettiest town in Europe.
The Japanese Association of Travel Agents have compiled their list of the 30 prettiest towns across the continent and the South East town has topped the list.
Now the Marble City (or large town as many would call it) can claim to be the prettiest – JATA has spoken and Kilkenny outshone 29 other European destinations.
Travel agents were challenged to come up with 30 smaller destinations to promote to holidaymakers.
They made their decision based on criteria that included, assessing which places had low media exposure within Japan and no package tours available.
Kilkenny and it’s rich heritage beat Berat in Albania and Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy to round off the top three.
1. Kilkenny, Ireland
2. Berat, Albania
3. Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy
4. Procida, Italy
5. Conwy, Wales
6. Lech, Austria
7. Hindeloopen, Netherlands
8. Lefkara, Cyprus
9. Rovinj, Croatia
10. Soglio, Switzerland
11. Visby, Sweden
12. Setenil de las Bodegas, Spain
13. Piran, Slovenia
14. Vlkolinec, Slovakia
15. Marianske-Lazne, Czech Republic
16. Quedlinburg, Germany
17. Bernkastel-Kues, Germany
18. Golyazi, Turkey
19. Reine, Norway
20. Sopron, Hungary
21. Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria
22. Porvoo, Finland
23. Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France
24. Riquewihr, France
25. Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium
26. Zalipie, Poland
27. Monsanto, Portugal
28. Ohrid, Macedonia
29. Kotor, Montenegro
30. Gura Humorului, Romania
Share it:
Don't Miss
Tags: JapanGetty/Ian Waldie
The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) has brought supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths to heel over the discount petrol war that lead to offers of up to 30c-per-litre discount vouchers.
The ACCC has accepted undertakings from the duo to voluntarily end offers cross-subsidised by other parts of the business, other than fuel retailing. Two years ago, customers buying beer from Coles-owned liquor outlets could get discount vouchers of up to 30c per litre. More recently, 8c vouchers have been offered via the supermarkets.
The discount will be capped at 4c per litre.
The competition regulator had been investigating whether the petrol vouchers were lessening competition in the retail fuel market.
ACCC Chairman Rod Sims, said the investigation began following complaints that other operators could not match the 8-cent discount, but a decision on the issue had not been reached by the time the deal with the duopoly was struck.
“We’ve accepted the undertakings because they address the ACCC’s principal competition concerns and allow the matter to be resolved quickly and efficiently,” Mr Sims said.
The ACCC remains concerned about any other fuel discount offers funded by non-fuel retailing operations.
The 4c per litre limit comes into effect from 1 January, 2014.
Business Insider Emails & Alerts Site highlights each day to your inbox. Email Address Join
Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Challenge – Vulnerable Code
This challenge appeared on an internal alias dedicated to C++. It was issued by Mike Vine, a developer here at Microsoft who agreed to let us share it with the mighty Visual C++ blog readers:
This challenge came from me thinking about a simple bug which could be turned into a security vulnerability, so I thought I’d give it a go and try to code a plausibly deniable piece of code which looks innocent but is actually dangerous. I managed to actually go further than that, and produced something, that whilst unlikely, could possibly have come from non-malicious but sloppy coding.
So your challenge is – if you choose to accept it – analyze the sample code file “main.c” (attached) and try to find the (fairly obvious) security faux pas and ‘accidental’ bug which causes the security faux pas to be exploitable.
Try to analyze it first before running it, like you would in a Code Review, to try to spot the issue. As it is code which could’ve come from a sloppy programmer everything is pretty much what it seems – there’s no misnamed functions or anything lame like that.
The security vulnerability comes from the file it tries to load which we assume is attacker controlled (e.g. on a CD for a console, or downloaded from the internet for a browser).
I’d assume experienced developers and security folk should be able to get this pretty quickly. In that case, try to analyze how it’s possible to really exploit the issue – the attached “Background.dat” is an example exploit (its benign enough to try out, but save your work first!). See if you can come up with that exploit yourself, or alternatively come up with something more fun / smaller / etc. I’m really interested with what’s possible here!
To run the code, create a new win32 console app and add the code, and make sure you run it with the ‘Background.dat’ next to the exe [or in the working directory if running under the VS debugger]
Does your commit process let this code through? Does you coding standards ban the dangerous parts of this code? Would this code pass your team’s code review? Does your automated CR tool pick up anything fishy here?
Send me an email if you’ve got the answer and/or an interesting exploit and I’ll reply back in a few days with the best of the responses.
Thanks, and good luck,
Mike
Our readers are some of the best developers out there, so when you find an answer, email it to Mike before the end of the week. Look for an update in the next few weeks.
CodeChallenge02032014.zipATF agents are losing track of their government-issued firearms, according to a new report, with records showing multiple instances where officers forgot their guns after leaving them on top of cars, in bathrooms and in automobile glove compartments.
The incidents were catalogued in a report Wednesday by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Internal records obtained by the newspaper reportedly show ATF agents had their guns lost or stolen at least 45 times between 2009 and 2013.
But the ATF sharply disputed the report, with a spokeswoman telling FoxNews.com that many of the lost weapons were later recovered.
Spokeswoman Ginger Colbrun said that of the 19 firearms lost -- as opposed to stolen -- between 2009 and 2013, 13 were "recovered shortly after they were reported lost." Further, she said the cases have "significantly declined," with only loss of a firearm reported last year. With nearly 2,400 agents on the force, she noted the percentage of lost or stolen firearms was less than 1 percent.
"ATF has a stringent firearms and weapons policy for properly securing and storing firearms for which its almost 2,400 agents must adhere," she said.
Though most of the lost weapons were handguns, the newspaper reported that at least two were assault rifles. The report detailed two incidents where agents left their guns on the roof of a car. One Illinois agent placed his Smith & Wesson on top of his car while dropping off his children at a soccer game, and drove away. The gun was later found on an off-ramp.
Another North Dakota agent left his gun on his car roof and forgot about it, until his daughter drove the car to a friend's house, according to the article. The gun was never found.
In yet another incident, two boys in Iowa reportedly found an ATF gun in a storm drain. Only then did the responsible agent tell investigators he had misplaced the gun.
According to the report, the ATF has a bigger problem with lost or stolen weapons than other federal law enforcement agencies. The newspaper previously reported on a questionable operation in Milwaukee during which an ATF machine gun was stolen from an agent's truck in 2012. All these incidents are separate from the discontinued Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed hundreds of guns to be sold and carried into Mexico as part of an anti-trafficking sting.
ATF guns are supposed to be stored in "secured, locked locations" when not being carried by the agents. The Journal Sentinel reported that ATF has reduced the minimum punishment for the first-time loss of weapons from three days of unpaid suspension to one day -- supposedly to encourage agents to quickly report such losses.He has a pale, faceless head. He is freakishly tall, and thin as a switchblade.
Clad in a dark suit, he silently radiates malevolence and doom. Some say he lives in the deep woods, but can teleport himself anywhere to grab you with his long tentacle arms.
He is the Slender Man, a mythical predator and Internet sensation whose greatest skill is the ability to strike terror in the hearts of teens who aren't frightened by much else.
"He's one of the scariest things out there," said Dan Hughes, a senior at Mahtomedi High School. "Sometimes when I'm in the basement, I tell myself, don't think about Slender Man! And of course the more I try not to, the more I do."
Every generation has its iconic boogeymen, and this one has plenty.
Popular culture couldn't be more saturated with vampire and zombie books, horror movies and paranormal reality shows, but young people are finding that the Slender Man strikes a deeper, more shivery chord. Because he's so mysterious, all the threat and danger are created in the eye of the beholder.
Hughes said that violent shock fests like "Saw" and "Hostel" have nothing on the Slender Man.
"Those kinds of things are more about gore, which I don't find scary," Hughes said. "The Slender Man imagery uses psychology to make you scare yourself if you think too much about it."
Slender Man is also more frightening to Hughes' generation than iconic Hollywood creations like Freddy Krueger of "Nightmare on Elm Street" and Michael Myers of "Halloween," he said:
"Slender Man would make a great horror movie, but I like that you don't see him in movies or TV, that it's more like urban-legend folklore. That makes it scarier, because it seems like it could maybe be real."
James Van Fleet, who reflected on the phenomenon on his blog Horror Films 101, wrote that Slender Man has a potency that goes beyond definition. "Certainly there's the distance, and the stillness, and that monochrome anonymity," he said. "But mostly, there's that nagging voice inside that whispers this should not be here."
Despite his fearsome qualities, the Slender Man is often affectionately referred to in blogs and chat groups as "Slendy," much like another demon du jour making the Internet rounds, "Masky."
The Slender Man has similarities to previous frightening entities like the Tall Man from the '79 cult classic film "Phantasm," so it's hard to pinpoint when the legend began. Slendy's breakout moment came in 2009, when contributors to a forum on the Something Awful website began photoshopping his menacing form into the background of otherwise-innocent scenes. Then, some pranksters taped a series of impressive YouTube videos called “The Marble Hornets,” telling a "Blair Witch"-style story in which the threat of a Slender Man confrontation looms, now out on DVD.
"Whenever I watch those videos online I go to sleep with my TV on for the next two days," Hughes said. "When you don't know exactly what something is, your own mind can freak yourself out."
He recently saw that theory in action when his friend Natalie Hanley, who hadn't heard of Slendy until he showed her some of the videos one night, pooh-poohed the sinister beanpole -- at first. But the next day, Hughes got a wee-hours text from her saying that she, too, was having unsettling thoughts.
"I didn't think much of it at first," said Hanley, a senior at St. Anthony Village Senior High. "But when I got home that night, my parents weren't there and the house was dark. I looked up at our tall ceilings and thought, oh no, Slender Man is really tall, he could fit in here."
Horror blogger Van Fleet writes that these kinds of feelings are "silly, yes, but, after we wake from a nightmare, and the stars are still out, aren't there at least a few seconds where boogeymen (and slender men) feel as real as anything else?"
Kristin Tillotson • 612-673-7046So, Foursquare introduced event check-ins, including movie theater check-ins. Now you can not only check in to a cinema like to any other building but also check-in to a specific movie in that cinema. The listings are provided by MovieTickets.com.
my first reaction was obviously fear. How are we going to compete against that monster?? Then came pride. After all, we did it first and I guess the fact that Foursquare is copying means we did something right. Eventually, I started thinking: how do we benefit from this move? This is what I came up with. VentureBeat dooms GetGlue and Miso, popular media check-in apps. As a founder of the first cinema check-in app, Filmaster Mobile. How are we going to compete against that monster??After all, we did it first and I guess the fact that Foursquare is copying means we did something right. Eventually, I started thinking: how do we? This is what I came up with.
Foursquare cinema check-in
1. Different goals
Foursquare is a location-centered app. Its competitors are Gowalla, Bizzy or Whatser, not necessarily GetGlue, Miso or Filmaster.
Those are two different markets with different business models. Foursquare wants to give users on the go the best recommendations what to do on the go. So the use case is – you are somewhere downtown and you are wondering what to do, you check the app and it tells you – go to that restaurant behind the corner or go to opera or watch that movie. As one of the choices.
Filmaster, on the other hand, is a movie discovery service. We started with “Foursquare for film” slogan (picked up by the press) but what we really focus on is providing our users most relevant, personalized movie recommendations in all available channels. Cinemas came first, but in next edition of our app (currently in beta), TV recommendations and Netflix suggestions are coming, to give the user a full picture.
Foursquare will never want to recommend you to stay home and watch TV as this is against their business model and general vision.
2. Different use cases Foursquare is general, Filmaster is specific Just as Twitter did not become a competitor to Foursquare and Instagram by applying location and pictures, Foursquare will not endanger Filmaster for applying showtimes. It’s a matter of perception. When people want to share their current location or see what’s around, they launch Foursquare. When they want to comment on something, they do it on Twitter. When they wanna share a picture, they do in on Instagram. Similarly, when they want to learn what to watch, they launch Filmaster as it’s the app fully focused on movie recommendations, with a community of movie-lovers, not random people sharing stuff.
Filmaster cinema check-in
3. Quality of recommendations
Even though I don’t believe this is their goal, let’s assume for one minute that Foursquare will actually start providing specific domain recommendations, i.e. recommending books, whisky (btw, do you know of a good single malt recommender service? I need it desperately!), or movies. Are these recommendations going to be of good quality? I very much doubt it. On Filmaster an average user rates 100 movies. Yes, one hundred. This is a good number on which we can base when preparing personalized suggestions. On Foursquare, on the other hand, people are going to check into movies only when they go out to a cinema. Even if that happens once a week (hardcore cinema-goers), it will take 2 years for the most dedicated users to generate a similar dataset. Sure, overall, the number of movie check-ins may be bigger, but that’s irrelevant if we don’t know the tastes of individual users.
For same reason, Filmaster provides much more precise recommendations than GetGlue, as our algorithm is specifically written to recommend movies, not restaurants, celebrities or wine.
So, summing up, a day passed and my attitute to the new Foursquare feature has changed completely. I see it now as a chance, not a threat. The more people learn that you can actually check-in to single screenings, the harder they will look for alternatives. And this is where Filmaster comes in handy. If you haven’t tried it, yet, here’s a link for you: http://filmaster.com/mobile/
I’m looking forward to your comments either here or on Twitter
If you liked this post, follow me on Twitter for more: @michuk.View Caption Hide Caption Lake Travis junior Maleek Barkley and Westlake senior Stephen Rioux fight for a football during a meeting at Chaparral Stadium on Oct. 23. Lake Travis, Westlake and Cedar Park have each reached one of the UIL's championship games (Ralph Barrera).
For Austin-area football fans, Houston will be the place to be on Saturday.
Cedar Park, Lake Travis and Westlake have each qualified for one of the University Interscholastic League’s championship games, and each of those teams will attempt to secure a state title on Dec. 19, which is the final day of the football season. Each of the UIL’s 11-man championship games will be hosted by Houston’s NRG Stadium, and those 10 title tilts will be broadcast on FOX Sports Southwest.
Counting this upcoming weekend’s appearances, Cedar Park, Lake Travis and Westlake have played in 17 state championship games. Lake Travis won five straight championships from 2007-2011, while Westlake and Cedar Park respectively earned their only titles in 1996 and 2012.
More information about the UIL’s championship games can be found on the organization’s website. Here are the schedules for the Austin area’s state finalists:
CLASS 5A, DIVISION II
Cedar Park (15-0) vs. Frisco Lone Star (14-1): Saturday at 12 p.m. at Houston’s NRG Stadium
CLASS 6A, DIVISION I
Westlake (14-1) vs. Galena Park North Shore (12-3): Saturday at 4 p.m. at Houston’s NRG Stadium
CLASS 6A, DIVISION IIProperty expert Chris Gray talks to Moira Geddes about current property market conditions and settles the score over whether to buy or rent
THEY are the houses from hell, the rental properties that should have an ‘enter at your own risk’ sign emblazoned at the front.
And when the tenants complained, they received nothing but grief.
Now those very people have taken their revenge on those “lazy” land lords and “dodgy” real estate agents by warning others of these properties online.
And the result is a catalogue of the country’s dodgiest rentals.
According to the site Dontrentme.com, the suburb of Southport in Queensland has the most complaints. The WA southern suburb of Shelley comes in at second |
away from the White House until the joint chiefs confronted him with it? Who "doctored" those Israeli intercepts? Who almost lied us into war – again – that time?
It wasn’t just Turkey, Qatar, and the Saudi king. They had to have American accomplices. Who were they?
That’s what I want to know.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Read more by Justin RaimondoMichael. Magic. Bird. Barkley. Mullin. Drexler. Malone. Robinson. Pippen. Ewing. Stockton. (Oh, yeah, Laettner, too.) Lang Whitaker has put together a terrific oral history of the 1992 Dream Team over at GQ, and if you haven't already, you really ought to read it.
Following the disappointment of Team USA's bronze-medal showing in '88, it was the first time USA Basketball had put together an Olympic team of professionals from the NBA. But it was also a unique moment in the league's history, coming just after the Lakers/Celtics/Pistons dominance of the 1980s had given way to the Bulls' dynasty that followed. The result was undoubtedly the greatest basketball team ever assembled: This one-of-a-kind collection of ringers steamrolled its way to the gold medal, winning every game by an average of 44 points.
We learn why certain guys made the team (Christian Laettner) while others (Isiah Thomas) didn't. We learn about a scrimmage in which the Dream Team lost to a bunch of college players—only to do more than get even in the rematch. We learn about the uncommon intensity of their intrasquad practices, about how one player was so competitive he wanted to sign his autograph faster than any of the others, about Charles Barkley's fearless late-night bar-hopping adventures around Barcelona.
Here's a sampling:
Chris Webber, on being one of the college all-stars who scrimmaged the Dream Team in La Jolla, Calif., a few weeks before the Olympics:
Chris Webber (college squad player): I rode from the airport in a limo with Larry Bird, and that was such an honor. We talked about playing against the Pistons, different moves, all this stuff. He was just a great dude. Then, as we got out of the car and I was getting my bags, he goes, "Make sure you get your sleep, because tomorrow I'm gonna bust your ass, and you're going to remember it the rest of the week."
Advertisement
Assistant coach Lenny Wilkens and Team USA selection committee member Rod Thorn on those famed pre-Olympic practice sessions in Monte Carlo:
Wilkens: Our last scrimmage, Magic's team was dominating Michael's team. And the guys were teasing Michael, because he was playing golf every morning. Well, that did it. The whole thing turned around. Thorn: He got upset, so he started to score every time down the floor. One time he drove, and the refs called, like, a real tick-tack foul. So Magic booted the ball up to the ceiling: "This is ridiculous! Just like the NBA! He gets every call!"
Advertisement
Jan Hubbard, an NBA columnist for Newsday, on being in Barcelona, where the team stayed at the Ambassador Hotel instead of the Olympic Village:
Hubbard: Charles would walk down Las Ramblas, and people would say, "Charles, what are you doing for security?" And he'd show you his two fists and say, "This is my security." He was like the Pied Piper. He'd have this huge group of people following and yelling and smiling and taking pictures. And he loved it.
Go read the rest of this thing here.
Photo via Getty.When Kendrys Morales signed with the Toronto Blue Jays just over a year ago, the circumstances around their relationship were much different. Namely, Justin Smoak had yet to emerge as a breakout player who would command ownership of first base.
Fast forward to the present and the Blue Jays have a logjam of sorts at first base/designated hitter with Morales, Smoak and Steve Pearce.
If the Blue Jays were to move one of those players, Morales would be a logical choice. But with two years and $23 million left on his deal, the 34-year-old with limited defensive capability is a tough player to trade — especially in a market full of free agent hitters that can slot in as DH types.
Assuming the Blue Jays were to eat a portion of his remaining contract, or perhaps take on another semi-large contract in return, here are destinations where Morales could profile as a good fit…
A return to the city where Morales spent two years and captured a World Series could make sense. The Royals figure to lose Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas and Lorenzo Cain to free agency, so they’ll need some source of offence; even with that trio, Kansas City was third-last in the AL in runs scored in 2017.
The large contracts the Royals could consider moving include those belonging to outfielder Alex Gordon (two years, $40 million remaining) and starting pitcher Ian Kennedy (three years, $49 million). Gordon posted a.608 OPS last year and will be 34 by opening day, but Kennedy, who’s coming off a bad year, is at least intriguing because of his track record of durability.
The Rangers received some of the worst production in the AL from their DH slot in 2017, ranking last in home runs (15) and total bases (206). By comparison, Morales hit 28 home runs and collected 248 total bases by himself. Mike Napoli, who occupied first base and DH for Texas this past season, won’t return after the club declined his option.
The Rangers could decide to roll out a DH by committee, or even use No. 2 prospect Willie Calhoun in that role. An alternative could be the veteran Morales, who’s respected for his ability to read pitcher tendencies and is seen as a strong clubhouse presence.
The A’s are on this list because they’re known for buying talent at a low price, then selling high. Oakland’s an interesting case, with no players owed guaranteed salary beyond the 2018 season. As a result, there aren’t any “bad” contracts the Blue Jays could take on in a Morales deal, so if a trade were to happen, Toronto would likely have to stomach a large chunk of salary.
The A’s recently traded DH Ryon Healy to the Seattle Mariners and appear set at first base with Matt Olson. They want to shift slugger Khris Davis from left field to the DH role, but if that plan changes this off-season, the switch-hitting Morales could provide a needed injection of right-handed power into the Oakland lineup.
The Twins, who surprised everyone by earning a wild-card berth in 2017, are reportedly prioritizing the signing of a top free agent starting pitcher. If the club decides to spend big in that area, but still wants to improve an already good offence, Morales might be an option.
Like the Rangers this past season, DH was a severe sore spot for the Twins, a fact that could spur the team to address the position. Only one player on Minnesota, Brian Dozier (34), hit more home runs than than Morales (28) in 2017.Ferguson Commission Shines Light On Racially Divided St. Louis
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jason Rosenbaum/St. Louis Public Radio Jason Rosenbaum/St. Louis Public Radio
When Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., last August, his death set off riots and violence — and posed deep questions about race relations in America. The Ferguson Commission, appointed by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, was tasked with finding some answers.
The commission set out to examine racial and economic gaps through the St. Louis region, and come up with policy recommendations. In their final report, the commission provides an unvarnished look at how a racially divided St. Louis underserves the African-American community.
The report provides a host of recommendations to transform how the region polices and educates itself — and its most vulnerable residents. And in many cases, the suggestions would require the backing of a state Legislature that may well balk.
A Long History Of Failed 'Riot Commissions'
In all of this, Starsky Wilson, co-chairman of the commission, knows he's venturing into familiar territory.
During the commission's final meeting last week, Wilson, a St. Louis religious leader, talked about the work of political scientist Lindsey Lupo, who penned a book examining nearly 100 years of "riot commissions" set up after American rebellion and unrest.
Many of these commissions failed, Lupo argued, because they failed to tackle latent racial tensions and systemic discrimination.
But Wilson and his fellow commission members are taking another path. Wilson looked to places like Cincinnati where residents dealt head-on with their community's inequities — not just settling for "accommodation and quiet." And the commission's final report, set to be publicly released today, pulls no punches about the underlying causes behind last year's unrest.
"We have not moved beyond race," the final report states.
We have not moved beyond race. St. Louis does not have a proud history on this topic, and we are still suffering the consequences of decisions made by our predecessors.
"St. Louis does not have a proud history on this topic, and we are still suffering the consequences of decisions made by our predecessors.... We are not pointing fingers and calling individual people racist. We are not even suggesting that institutions or existing systems intend to be racist.
"What we are pointing out is that the data suggests, time and again, that our institutions and existing systems are not equal, and that this has racial repercussions," the report continues. "Black people in the region feel those repercussions when it comes to law enforcement, the justice system, housing, health, education, and income."
To change that status quo, the report points to several dozen "signature priorities." They include changes to law enforcement practices, economic development strategy and education policies. While many of the ideas could be implemented without governmental actions, some of the big proposals will require the blessing of a state Legislature that's been hesitant to back overhauls of law enforcement.
The changes wouldn't be easy or comfortable — but the commission's leaders say the need is compelling.
A Focus On Criminal Justice
At the heart of the report are suggested changes to the region's law enforcement agencies and municipal courts, including:
Bringing in Missouri's attorney general as a special prosecutor for police-involved killings. The report also recommends using the Missouri Highway Patrol as an investigative agency.
Setting up a public database keeping track of police-involved killings from around the state.
Expanding the amount of police officer training, particularly on interacting with residents, handling demonstrations and dealing with minority communities.
Creating municipal and county review boards of police departments.
Consolidating municipal police departments and municipal courts.
Treating nonviolent offenses as civil violations — and collecting municipal court debts similarly to collecting civil debts.
Creating "Community Justice Centers" that would provide "case management and social work services," giving judges and prosecutors "a broad range of alternative sentencing options."
During an interview on St. Louis on the Air last month, Ferguson Commissioner Dan Isom said Missouri badly needs a law enforcement policy shift — especially when other states are making more progress.
We're behind the curve on police professionalism, accountability and oversight on the state level.
"If we look at ourselves in comparison to other states, we're behind the curve on police professionalism, accountability and oversight on the state level," Isom, who is a former St. Louis police chief, said last month. "The reality is we're going to have to make the case that this is important for our community.... It's important just on a human level for this. But it's also important for the success for our region and our state."
The report also includes a host of recommendations to improve St. Louis' schools, including changing school discipline policies; establishing school-based health centers that provide "access to mental health, case management and reproductive health"; and expanding early childhood education.
It also suggests that the Legislature adopt broader statewide policies, including expanding Medicaid eligibility, raising the minimum wage, cracking down on unscrupulous lenders and bolstering the amount of low-income housing.
"The response we have seen to the process says that people in St. Louis want to make a difference, and they believe that the region can be better," the report states. "It also says they want to work together to do it. This report, and the policy changes we have called for, will be part of the legacy of the Ferguson Commission."
With Prominent Opposition, Will Report 'Gather Dust'?
The commission, which conducted roughly nine months' worth of public hearings and other inquiries, doesn't have the power to implement any of the recommendations.
In fact, many would require the backing of a GOP-controlled Missouri General Assembly that almost certainly will be hostile to some of the suggestions — especially expanding Medicaid or raising the minimum wage. Republicans may also balk at some of the law enforcement proposals — especially when they didn't adopt some of them during the last legislative session.
Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, who has long been skeptical of the commission, openly questioned whether the report would vanish into history like other studies — such as the Kerner Commission report that came about after racial riots in the 1960s.
While praising individual commission members for their work, Kinder last week challenged whether the Missouri Legislature would embrace the proposals. He's also raised issues with the commission's costs, including paying managing director Bethany Johnson-Javois nearly $140,000 for her role. (Kinder notes that's more than the governor makes in a year.)
I certainly hope that it will not be another commission report that gathers dust. But it was reasonable, I think, at the outset of this to have that suspicion.
"I certainly hope that it will not be another commission report that gathers dust," Kinder said. "But it was reasonable, I think, at the outset of this to have that suspicion and to question the budgetary outlays, which have... made this process very, very expensive."
It's not just Republicans who could be hostile to the proposals. St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch gained national attention for examining Brown's shooting death. Many called for him to step aside from the inquiry because they felt he was too friendly with law enforcement.
But earlier this summer, he sharply criticized proposals to bring in special prosecutors for police shootings, calling them impractical and misguided.
"We elect prosecutors in the state of Missouri. And we elect them to do the job, and that includes investigating and prosecuting every case within that jurisdiction," McCulloch said. "And if you don't trust the prosecutor to do that, then don't elect them. Or throw them out at the next election when it comes."
At least one outside observer worries that the commission's bully pulpit isn't strong enough to engender policy change.
Al Gerhardstein is a Cincinnati attorney who helped facilitate a legally binding agreement in his city after a rash of police shootings. Without the blessing of a court order, Gerhardstein isn't sure that the Ferguson Commission's suggestions will go anywhere.
Blue-ribbon commissions generate reports that go into nice bound documents and then go on shelves.
"Blue-ribbon commissions generate reports that go into nice bound documents and then go on shelves," he said. "We spent 20 years, probably 13 different reports, and never got anything accomplished."
Optimism And 'Natural Energy'
Still, some commissioners remain optimistic that their proposals will find favor with the public.
Gov. Nixon says he'll use his last year in office to push for some of the commission's recommendations. While he faced immense criticism for how he handled the aftermath of Brown's death, the governor says the lessons learned from the past year are too important to ignore.
"I do think that the splinter point was whether or not, with what happened last summer and into the fall, whether as a state we were going to back up and say problems don't exist and we're going to ignore them," Nixon said last week, "or whether we're going to lean forward and work together to move our state forward."
Johnson-Javois said earlier this year that many people who provided suggestions to the commission are prepared to incorporate them — without legislative action — into schools, police departments and individual communities.
"People are getting excited about... how to implement," Johnson-Javois said. "And that natural energy that's built up is what's already sustaining this beyond an individual, a leader or commission."
While the commission's charge is set to expire at the end of the year, Wilson said the individual members could go back to the corporate, educational, law enforcement and governmental realms to push for the policy changes in the report.
And while the report itself acknowledges that its recommendations may not be the complete answer for what ails St. Louis, it goes on to say "we believe to be the best starting point, the beginning of a path toward a better St. Louis."
"We expect that as we travel, the path will change, and we'll find ourselves navigating places we couldn't have imagined," the report states. "That is the nature of efforts like this."WASHINGTON – A provision in a high-priority Republican bill would effectively hike taxes on private insurance plans that include abortion coverage, representing a significant threat to the pro-abortion-rights movement.
The provision is in Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-NJ) measure HR 3, the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act,” which has 173 cosponsors and is up for consideration this week.
Among other things, it would eliminate tax incentives for businesses providing health care — a major reason why many employers can afford to do so — if the plans allow for abortion coverage. It would also remove medical tax deductions for individuals seeking to buy abortion-included insurance plans with their own money.
“This is consistent with our commitment that we are going to take away government funding for abortions,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told reporters this week. “This is consistent with where most Americans are and consistent with reducing spending.”
The effort is part of a larger GOP assault on abortion, framed by the party as an effort to ban federal funding for abortions. To this end, Republicans have recently come under fire from pro-abortion-rights advocates for attempts to alter the definition of rape (which they have since backed down on) and allow hospitals to deny abortions to women whose lives are in danger.
The measure has earned fierce opposition from Democrats and would face a tough, uphill battle in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
New York Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler called the provision a “Republican tax increase.” He said in a hearing that “this bill contains huge tax increases on families, businesses, and the self-employed if they spend their own money – let me repeat that: their own money – on abortion coverage or services.”
“I am equally surprised to find out that my Republican colleagues think that a tax exemption or credit is a form of government funding,” Nadler added, noting that the same logic would mean that churches and synagogues be stripped of tax exemptions as doing otherwise would reflect an establishment of religion.
[h/t Talking Points Memo]1. By now lots of you have read articles like this one about how abut 1/5 of the entire US congress is visiting Israel this month to get their marching orders. As our economy tanks completely and we remained mired is at least 6 stupid wars all of them illegal, 1/5 of our so-called representatives have the time and money to go to racist little Israel to suck up to the Jewish State. No doubt they will all make private pledges to increase aid to Israel to help settle the housing situation that Israeli Jews have been bitching about lately, but I digress.
But I want to look at these Congressional pilgrimages to Israel from a slightly different angle. The situation is much worse than you think. Much worse.
Here is what Congressman Steny Hoyer (Likud, Maryland), the leader of the Democratic trip to Israel, was up to today in Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem, Aug 9 – Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two Democrat in the House of Representatives on Tuesday urged a delegation of visiting ambassadors to vote at the United Nations according to their democratic values instead of voting reflexively against Israel.”
What the fuck? He’s talking to UN Ambassadors? And he is in Jerusalem leading an AIPAC-funded (actually US taxpayer funded as you will see below) trip to give Netanyahu a political blow job – and he has time to also work for the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Isn’t that Hillary Clinton’s job?
Oh yes, Represenative Hoyer on this very day is working for the Israeli government at your expense. Here’s a little more from the article so you can see what he is doing. The red highlights are mine and they should piss you off.
““The issue (at the UN) is not siding with the United States of America. The issue is reflecting values that you adhere to within your own countries,” Hoyer said.
“He said that a push by Palestinian leaders to win unilateral recognition on statehood from the United Nations General Assembly next month could destabilize the entire region and set back hopes of a negotiated peace.
“It would be a negative action and we believe it will undermine the opportunity for a peaceful positive agreement,” Hoyer told the ambassadors who are on the third day of a five-day mission organized by The Israel Project. He added that he was speaking on behalf of at least 400 or the 435 members of the House of Representatives.”
The Israel Project. You see it is not just the AIPAC “charity” called the American Israel Education Foundation that is involved in the Democrats’ (soon to be followed by Republicans) whoring for Israel, there is a second outfit involved. Don’t worry goys and girls both outfits are tax-deductable charities in the United States.
The Israel Project has brought 19 UN ambassadors to Israel and has Steny Hoyer lecturing to them about how they need to vote against Palestinian statehood in the fall at the UN. Steny Hoyer is doing Israel’s work for them and he claims, and I’m sure this is true, that he is speaking for a good 400 US congressmen.
I’ve written about the Israel Project before, but I think it is high time this outfit got a little more exposure.
Here is their website. Give it a good read since you pay for it. The site claims that it is just about getting out facts and is “not affiliated with any government. “
Really? Sounds like Zionist Bullshit to me.
Here’s a link to their “Key” staff page. You’ll note that it has key staff in exactly two cities, Washington and Jerusalem.
Let’s take a look at one or two of their main staff in Jerusalem. Hell, let’s start with the Executive Director for TIP in Jerusalem, a charming fellow named Marcus Sheff. Here’s a sample from the on-line bio for this guy:
“As a reserve officer in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Sheff was a prominent spokesperson for the IDF during the second Intifada and the Lebanon War. Today, he trains senior IDF officers in media skills.
“Sheff has advocated for Israel many times on global TV networks, including CNN, NBC, ABC, NBC, as well as dozens of other US and European TV and radio outlets. He serves on the Knesset Forum on International Relations and on the editorial board of “Engage,” an organization that challenges contemporary anti-Semitism. Sheff studied at the University of Leeds, where he was elected General Secretary of the Leeds University Union and was active as an elected officer in national student politics.”
So you have an IDF hasbara agent heading this outifit’s Jerusalem office and does so as part of a 501C3 charity.
Lennert J. Leader is the Chair of TIP’s board of directors. Here’s a couple of excerpts from his bio on their site.
“After spending 25 years successfully building industry-leading information technology and Internet companies, Len Leader is now pursuing his philanthropic interests which are focused on working with organizations that promote Jewish education, inform the world about the growing threat of radical Islam and help ensure a strong and secure State of Israel.”
That’s right goys and girls, the leader of TIP states openly that he is a funder of Islamophobes. Look at what other wonderful organizations this guy works with:
“Mr. Leader is currently on the Boards of Directors of The Israel Project, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Endowment for Middle East Truth, is an advisor to Aish HaTorah, and is on the Board of Trustees of the Flint Hill School.”
So let’s see, the head of the whole outfit that has just brought 19 UN ambassadors to Israel to be lectured on how to vote in September on the issue of Palestinian statehood proclaims he is dedicated to “a strong and secure State of Israel”, funds Islamophobia, and works with more than one right-wing nut-case pro-Israel organization, but no, there’s no affiliation with any government now is there?
Oh, and TIP’s number one man in Israel is a former IDF hasbara agent who constantly advocates for Israel all over the globe.
How about the founder of TIP? That would be Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi.
“Mizrahi meets regularly with top Israeli leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Shimon Peres, Ambassador Michael Oren, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon and many others. She also works frequently with pro-Israel organizations including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish federations, Jewish community relations councils and Hillel organizations.”
This is also somewhat interesting.
“Mizrahi previously served as a foreign affairs legislative assistant to the U.S. Congress. She studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has degrees in International Relations and Judaic Studies from Emory University. Her work earned her recognition as a “Point of Light” by President H. W. Bush. Mizrahi also has been honored with the Louis D. Brandeis Award by the Baltimore Zionist District. The Forward newspaper has twice listed Mizrahi in its “Forward 50” most influential Jews in America. “
So many TIP staff and board members have such interesting bios. Please take some time out to read them and enjoy how unaffiliated all of them are with any government in anyway whatsoever even though they endlessly lobby for the Israeli government, often served in its military, and seem to have only one interest in the world, Israel.
But it gets even worse. With Zionism it always does.
Much worse in fact. You see, TIP doesn’t just have its board members and key staff members, it also has an advisory board. That board also is completely unaffiliated with any government whatsoever. That’s right, no affiliation at all. None. Goys and girls, I present to you the names and faces of all of the members of TIP’s advisory board taken from TIP’s website.
Let’s see if you can recognize any of these people who have no government affiliation whatsoever.
There’s more. Here’s the next set:
Oh, but there’s more. There’s always room for Zionism.
Note to Shas Party members, there is more to come, you can see we are only on the D’s right now.
Next group of people serving on TIP’s advisory board who have no government affiliation.
And last but not least in love of Zionism:
I really like how the insane Allen West is now the advisory board. In fact, the advisory board has grown quite a lot in the past two years. When I wrote about TIP back in 2009 it only had 22 congressman and senators and now it has a total of 37. The Zionist Lobby is indeed a growth industry, but of course is unaffiliated with any government. I like how 15% of the US Senate is on TIP’s advisory board.
It’s bad enough that the Zionist Lobby controls the government, but it is even worse when members of the government are themselves actually part of that lobby.
Here is part of their donation page, so donate now, donate often, and donate a lot. It’s all tax-deductable.
Do you like the wording in the appeal above? Hope so, cause you are paying for it.
Oh, and if you ever need any information about why it is important that your sons and daughters die for Israel, go to their expert sources page. In fact, on behalf of all the tuyuur here at Mantiq al-Tayr, here is part of that page and if you click it you can go to that page and get real factual information that is not affiliated with any government. I mean, even the link that says “Israeli government spokespeople” only goes to sources that are not affiliated with any government. Seriously.
2. Here is the list of UN ambassadors that Knesset Member Steny Hoyer addressed today. It almost makes me feel sorry for the guy. Almost.
Albania: Ambassador Gilbert Galanxhi and Etleva Galanxhi
Barbados: Ambassador John E. Beale and Leila Mol Beale
Belize: Ambassador Nestor Enrique Mendez and Elvira Rosela Mendez
Benin: Ambassador Sagbe Cyrille Oguin and Hortense Dossa Oguin
Bosnia and Herzegovina: Miroslav Vujicic, Chief of the Cabinet of the BiH Presidency
Burkina Faso: Ambassador Paramanga Ernest Yonli
Dominica: Ambassador Hubert John Charles
Dominican Republic: Ambassador Anibal De Castro
Grenada: Ambassador Gillian Margaret Susan Bristol
Haiti: Ambassador Louis Harold Joseph
Liberia: Ambassador William Bull and Cecelia Zina Freeman Bull
Macedonia: Ambassador Zoran Jolevski and Suzana Jolevska
Mongolia: Ambassador Bekhbat Khasbazar
Montenegro: Ambassador Srdjan Darmanovic and Aneta Spaic
Slovakia: Ambassador Peter Burian and Nina Burianova
St. Lucia: Ambassador Michael Louis
Timor-Leste: Ambassador Constancio C. Pinto
Trinidad & Tobago: Ambassador Neil Parsan
Uganda: Ambassador Perezi Kamunanwire and Carolyn Hubbard-Kamunanwire
3. The American Israel Education Foundation (Tax ID 52-1623781) is the 501C3 wing of AIPAC and constantly sponsors trips by US senators and congressman to Israel with an annual budget of about 20 million dollars. Possibly even more important, though less in the news, it even more frequently sponsors trips to Israel by Congressional staffers. For a look at some of their recent activity go here and see if one of your reps has had staffers go recently. My count shows that at least 45 staffers have been flown out to Israel so far this year. It is the outfit sponsoring the Hoyer-led Democratic homage to Israel taking place this week and the larger Cantor-led Republican one that follows it.
The AIEF is also up to something else you should know about. Read this:
“Through AIEF, CLSFF funds the Schusterman Advocacy Institute High School Summit, bringing outstanding high school student leaders to Washington, D.C., for sophisticated Israel advocacy and political activism training. The High School Summit enables AIPAC to identify and mentor high school students from across the country who are considering academic, internship and career tracks in the arenas of politics, public policy, media and Israel advocacy.”
So they are taking American Jewish high school kids and teaching them to work for Israel. Yet another Zionist radicalization program taking place in the US done at taxpayers’ expense. The summit is actually run by AIPAC itself. This is from AIPAC’s own website advertising this year’s summit in Washington D.C. In fact, you should read the whole page to which I’ve linked to see all of the radicalization programs AIPAC is running.
Schusterman Advocacy Institute High School Summit
November 6-9, 2011
Each year, AIPAC partners with select Jewish Day Schools, synagogues, national youth groups and teen leadership organizations to bring 400 student leaders from across the country to Washington, D.C. for Israel advocacy and political activism training. Through AIPAC’s Schusterman Advocacy Institute, AIPAC identifies and mentors high school students committed to strengthening the U.S.-Israel relationship through the American political process.
4. No Haifa Wehbe this time.Now, before we get into this I want to stress something about the poll: do not be afraid to vote "other" and give us your answer in the comments. The other options are just some names I'm throwing out there because I expect them to get votes. Maybe I'm wrong (in fact I probably am) and you guys all love some other no-name player. That's cool. Let us know who it is.
What we're looking for here are the cult heroes of Chargers fans. So please, no votes for LaDainian Tomlinson, Dan Fouts, Charlie Joiner, Kellen Winslow, John Hadl, Junior Seau, etc. Most of you are probably smart enough to figure that out, but I prefer not to take chances.
He's not my pick, but perhaps the most "obvious" answer here is Hank Bauer. Short yardage guys and special teams demons like Bauer clearly aren't stars, but they do tend to become fan favorites. The fact that he's still consistently in the public eye has helped keep him in the public consciousness as well.
Natrone Means also seems like a legitimate answer to me even if the team is currently trying to convince people that he was a star, but I say go lesser known: vote for Alfred Pupunu or Terrell Fletcher. Think outside the box, guys.
The list of poll options is based on suggestions from John Gennaro and creanium as well as a couple of my favorite players. Please vote in the poll and if you chose Other, you damn well better tell us in the comments.And the storm left its share of mysteries. A parking lot attendant was found dead in a subterranean parking garage in TriBeCa, the precise cause unclear. The body of an unidentified woman washed up on Georgica Beach in East Hampton, on Long Island.
Some people died and no one knew, not for hours, not until the storm backed away and moved on.
*
They did what dog owners do. They walked the dog. They were friends living in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Jessie Streich-Kest and Jacob Vogelman were both 24. Around 8 on Monday evening, during the howling viciousness of the storm, they ventured out with her dog, Max, a white pit bull mix.
Ms. Streich-Kest grew up with her family in Prospect Park South and was a teaching fellow. She had just started teaching at the Bushwick School for Social Justice, a high school. She had gone through her first parent-teacher conference last week, and was laughing about it afterward with her parents and their friends.
Her father, Jon Kest, is executive director of New York Communities for Change and a longtime activist who has led the battle to unionize carwashes and supermarkets across the city, as well as being a leader in the battle for paid sick days. His daughter was herself a bit of an activist, and helped organize Stop Horse Abuse, which was aimed at the carriage horses in Central Park.
In the wind and the rain, the two strode along Ditmas Avenue, a block of old Victorians and similar sprawling homes beneath a canopy of vast maples, oaks and lindens.
In rapid succession, perhaps within a space of no more than a half-hour, the brutal winds knocked down three trees. There was a booming sound as one fell. Their roots tore up massive chunks of sidewalk.
One of the trees on the south side of the block crushed them. They lay there until Tuesday morning, when their bodies were found.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
No one realized that the trees had hit anyone. “We had no idea,” said Pat Atia, whose house faces out onto Ditmas Avenue on the block between East 17th and East 18th Streets. “I was outside taking pictures of my house for the insurance when a cop said ‘back up, back up’ and I saw a young man dead under the tree.”
Photo
The dog was bruised but survived. Neighbors were caring for him.
*
She just wanted pictures. In Richmond Hill, Queens, a power line the length of a block on 105th Avenue between 134th and 135th Streets snapped and crumpled to the ground. The frayed end of the line began sparking wildly.
Around 8 on Monday night, a 23-year-old woman who lived at the end of the block came out to her driveway clutching a camera.
Her name was Lauren Abraham, and she went by Lola. She was a makeup artist who worked for several professional agencies. She maintained a makeup studio in the basement of the house, which her parents owned. The third floor was vacant, and so she used it as a makeshift photography studio for shots to advertise her makeup skills.
She was attending beauty school, but had also been studying at Lehman College to become a social studies teacher.
Elpidio Nunez, a close friend for 10 years, said she was passionate about making her friends look gorgeous before a night out at the clubs.
“She was a beautiful girl, very carefree, she was never depressed,” Mr. Nunez said. “I had never seen her cry.”
Tamica Penn, 22, her best friend, said, “If you ever needed to talk, she would be there.”
The two had spoken at 7 p.m., an hour before she went outside to take her pictures of the downed power line.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
The line was still sparking as Ms. Abraham walked down the driveway and into the rain-drenched street. She came into contact with one end of the snapped wire.
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.
She caught fire.
A half-dozen or so witnesses watched in utter horror. They said her body burned for about a half-hour before the police and firefighters arrived.
Mr. Nunez woke up in the middle of the night. He had a sick |
environment, or project size, this book will inform and stimulate your thinking—and help you build the highest quality code.
Discover the timeless techniques and strategies that help you:
Design for minimum complexity and maximum creativity
Reap the benefits of collaborative development
Apply defensive programming techniques to reduce and flush out errors
Exploit opportunities to refactor—or evolve—code, and do it safely
Use construction practices that are right-weight for your project
Debug problems quickly and effectively
Resolve critical construction issues early and correctly
Build quality into the beginning, middle, and end of your project
Well, that’s it for now!
Let me know in the comments if you have read any of these or have any other must-reads for software developers!
If you have enjoyed this post, the biggest compliment you could give would be to share this with someone that you think would enjoy it!
Additionally, if you never want to miss a post, subscribe to this blog by clicking the follow button in the bottom right corner! Thanks for reading, have a great day, and never stop learning!
Share this: Twitter
FacebookThe homepage of the popular torrent search engine "H33t" has been removed from Google after cable network HBO sent a DMCA takedown request for the series Band of Brothers. Google honored the request and has de-listed h33t.com from its search results. H33t's owner is not pleased with this latest censorship attempt and informs TorrentFreak that he will submit a counterclaim to get the homepage reinstated.
Every week copyright holders send millions of DMCA takedown notices to Google, hoping to make pirated movies and music harder to find.
As a result more that 100 million links to copyright-infringing content are no longer available through Google’s search results. One of the latest additions to this growing list is the homepage of H33t, one of the top 10 most visited torrent sites.
Those who type “h33t” into the Google search box will see that the homepage listing for the site has disappeared. At the bottom of the page Google explains that the listing was removed following a DMCA notice, which came from the cable network HBO.
In the notice HBO asks Google to remove thousands of links pointing (in)directly to their shows. The H33t homepage is listed under “Band of Brothers,” which was probably listed there at one point, but has since been replaced by other links.
HBO lists h33t
TorrentFreak caught up with H33t’s owner, who is not happy with the de-listing by Google. However, he also tells us that H33t is not being harmed too much by the homepage removal, as only a tiny fraction of his visitors use Google to access his site.
“Considering possible damage to the site, historically H33t has not been driven by search traffic. About 1 out of 10 people use Google in a search that ultimately brings them to H33t. These are not random searches, people are searching for specific content and clicking a link that brings them directly to the details page of that content,” H33t’s owner says.
“These people are not interested in the homepage. If you know the name H33t then you already know the site, you don’t just accidentally type “h33t” then discover the site’s homepage. You also cannot discover H33t by searching for “torrents downloads whatever” because we were never high ranked for those terms,” he adds.
That doesn’t mean that H33t is going to let this pass. The site’s owner plans to take a stand, if only to defend his principles and to voice his growing concerns over how the DMCA notification system operates.
“I cannot ignore this latest censorship just because it doesn’t particularly make much of a difference to me and my site. The inversion of the burden of proof, H33t is guilty before trial, is a serious issue, and it is so easily done as Daniel Nazer of EFF said this year: ‘The takedown procedure of the DMCA provides a quick, cheap, extra-judicial way to get speech removed from the internet’,” he tells TorrentFreak.
In addition to freedom of speech issues the takedown procedures have also become quite costly for site owners, who have to employ personnel to go over them. Therefore H33t charges $50 per takedown on its own site.
“Freedom of information, free speech, human rights are wonderful concepts but have little meaning until they are no longer there. Money is like that, money doesn’t matter until you don’t have any. For the anti-sharing lobby it is all about the money,” H33t’s owner explains.
“The matter of costs is central, with the DMCA the costs are all ours, we pay the ultimate price as a society, we pay for their broken business model that needs propping up by censorship and our loss of rights.”
For the HBO notice H33t will send a counter-notification, but whether that will be successful has yet to be seen. There are still other infringing links present on the homepage and Google has previously refused to reinstate sites in a similar position.
Whatever Google decides, H33t’s owner doesn’t seem particularly worried.
“We shall see what happens but I am not going to get upset if the homepage isn’t reinstated. As John Gilmore said way back in 1993, ‘The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’.”
“H33t is not in the race to be the biggest baddest torrent site, it is just me and a bunch of like-minded friends with attitude. Millions and millions of friends. You know what? Getting knocked off Google might just be our passing grade in relevance.”
“We are relevant! Fukin Awesome,” H33t’s owner concludes.Purim is just around the corner and I'm thinking about castles — castles made out of recycled cardboard tubes and a shoebox, of course! I've always wanted to make a castle, and realized that a colorful castle crafted by mom or the kids or both, could be a fantastic centerpiece for the Purim sueda (meal). There's so many ways to go with this one as far as materials and size. And if you don't need a centerpiece so how about a castle mishloach manos? Just build your castle on the lid of the shoe box and voila! I think I may just have to use that idea myself, for the kid's teachers that is, who deserve something really special, and are expecting something creative! I guess that's the price one pays when you don't hide your crafty ways!
And the great thing about this castle is that is looks great from all sides, assuming you take that a bit into consideration when building it! Here's a view from the back, and yes the pieces aren't perfect or straight, as my son pointed out to me this morning, but I did that on purpose, because ya know perfection isn't everything!
You'll Need:
cardboard tubes of all kinds, also mailing tubes which tend to be much wider!
round cans or just about anything thick and round, how about a piece of pvc pipe?
a shoe box
wrapping paper
colored paper
sheer patterned disposable table runner fabric, it's stiff and easy to work with
glittered craft foam
hot glue and/or high tack craft glue like Alene's
mod podge
wooden skewers
How To:
Follow my directions, but since your castle won't be exactly like mine, don't be afraid to re-invent this project a bit!Months before candidate Donald Trump asked Russia to "find" Hillary Clinton's missing private server emails - a statement the campaign later called a joke - a Russian operative told a campaign aide "the Russians had emails of Clinton," according to a plea agreement released Monday.
In the first guilty plea of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, George Papadopoulos admitted lying to the FBI about contact with Russian agents that offered the campaign "thousands" of damaging emails about Clinton. Papadopoulos claims he would eventually be told by a campaign supervisor to travel to Russia to meet with government officials "if feasible," a trip that never happened.
In the context of the timeline of events, Papadopoulos was told of Russian hacking before the rest of the country, and weeks before the Trump campaign made its first denial of Russian involvement in the election.
Here are some key dates in the events involving Clinton's emails and Russian hacking:
September, 2015: The FBI made its first ill-fated attempt to alert the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that its computer network had been compromised. But the initial contact was not made with high-level staff, leading the DNC to brush off the contact.
November: The FBI alerted the DNC information was being transmitted back to Russia.
Early March, 2016: According to court documents, Papadopoulos took a role as a foreign policy adviser in the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos was living in London at the time.
On or about March 14: Papadopoulos met a London-based professor that claimed to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials."
March 19: Russian hackers successfully hacked Clinton campaign head John Podesta's email account.
March 24: A professor introduced Papadopoulos to an alleged niece of Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to the court documents, Papadopoulos told his campaign supervisor the subject of the meeting was "to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump." "Great work," replied the supervisor, who said he would work the offer through the campaign. The supervisor is not named.
Papadopoulos would later find out the so-called niece was not, in fact, related to Putin.
April: Papadopoulos maintained contact with both the woman and professor to set up a meeting throughout April, keeping the campaign apprised of his contact.
April 29: The professor told Papadopoulos the Russians had "thousands" of Clinton's emails containing dirt. The next day, Papadopoulos thanked the professor for his help setting up a possible meeting between Russians and Trump.
"It's history making if it happens," said the campaign aide.
Also in April, the DNC acquired the services of CrowdStrike to investigate and mitigate the potential breach of its systems.
June 9: Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others with the promise of receiving dirt on Clinton. The meeting ultimately focuses on Russian sanctions that lead Moscow to ban Americans from adopting Russian children.
June 14: The Washington Post revealed that the DNC had been breached by those thought to be Russian hackers, something supported by the CrowdStrike report on the attack released June 15.
July: Gawker and The Hill published stories based on leaks from the Guccifer 2.0 persona, which U.S. intelligence believes Russian intelligence used as a cover identity to leak documents.
July 22: WikiLeaks published the DNC emails.
July 29: Three months after the Trump campaign was first told that Russian operatives had Clinton emails, Trump said "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press." Later that day, he tweeted "If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!"
Between June and August, Papadopoulos continued to try to set up a meeting between Trump and the Russian government.
June 19: Papadopoulos suggested that, if Trump couldn't attend a meeting, Papadopoulos could travel in his place.
August 15: Papadapoulos said: "I would encourage you [and another foreign policy advisor to] make the trip[], if it is feasible."
The trip never occurred.Birds fly over a port in New Jersey on October 31, 2012 in New York City. - Allison Joyce/Getty Images
Listen To The Story Marketplace Embed Code <iframe src="https://www.marketplace.org/2012/12/21/business/strike-could-shut-down-east-coast-ports/popout" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="240px"></iframe>
The Longshoremen’s Union is in heated contract negotiations with 14 ports along the East Coast and Gulf Coast. If an agreement isn’t reached by December 30th, it could mean a strike.
At issue are the bonuses longshoremen get based on the amount of cargo they unload. U.S. port operators want to cap those bonuses -- which often top $10,000 a year.
"We are looking at a shipping cliff if they don’t settle," says Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California Berkeley.
He says nearly half of the cargo shipped to and from the U.S. goes through these ports. "It has a much wider set of economic implications," says Shaiken. "You’re talking about a lot of stores without things to sell and a lot of factories that aren’t able to export."
A map of the biggest ports in the U.S., including many on the Eastern seaboard. - U.S. Department of Transportation/Bureau of Transportation Statistics
But unions are under pressure not to give too much these days says Gary Chaison, professor of labor relations at Clark University.
"The union movement has just done well in an election," he says, "but in hard times as we’re facing now, the union still has to prove that it’s an effective representative."
Just weeks ago striking clerks shut down ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach for eight days. Berekely’s Harley Shaiken says their union managed to wrangle a favorable deal.
“I think the best compliment I can give is not to say how much your programs have taught me (a ton), but how much Marketplace has motivated me to go out and teach myself.” – Michael in Arlington, VA As a nonprofit news organization, what matters to us is the same thing that matters to you: being a source for trustworthy, independent news that makes people smarter about business and the economy. So if Marketplace has helped you understand the economy better, make more informed financial decisions or just encouraged you to think differently, we’re asking you to give a little something back. Become a Marketplace Investor today – in whatever amount is right for you – and keep public service journalism strong. We’re grateful for your support. BEFORE YOU GOOr what about Sophie Mirabella, whose lecture at Melbourne University was pitch-invaded by protesters shouting about budget cuts and calling Mirabella a "racist" who "didn't deserve to exist". Eh? This is the same Sophie Mirabella who lost her seat at the last election, yes? The second-generation Greek immigrant who used to get called a "wog" at school?
Last week, Julie Bishop was jostled and shouted at as she made her way into a lecture hall to speak on the government's new Colombo plan. Same slogans, same daft shoving, as the Foreign Affairs Minister arrived to announce the one bit of the budget that actually involves more money for the university sector. It looked dreadful and was a complete logical non-sequitur to boot.
Are poster paint and your parents' third-best manchester really the best tools the modern environment offers? And has any strategic thought gone into this stuff? I mean, one doesn't like to teach protesters how to suck eggs, but anyone who has ever observed Christopher Pyne for more than about 60 seconds would know that creating a vast fuss and drama in which Mr Pyne becomes the centre of attention on national television is not something he actually hates all that much.
The student invasion of Q&A a few weeks ago, in which a gaggle of Socialist Alternative protesters chanted protractedly at Christopher Pyne while trying unsuccessfully to unfurl a bedsheet on which they had daubed slogans, would have been entirely unremarkable had it been deployed against John Gorton.
I think that's probably about the year when the chant "No cuts! No fees! No corporate universities!" was invented, along with its idiot twin "Hey hey! Ho ho! (Insert minister's name) has got to go!".
Now, the right to protest in a democratic system is a very important one. And this is the most radical budget in years, so of course there will be protests; this was immediately clear the morning after, when the Prime Minister was nan-handled on Channel Ten by a pensioner and former Rudd supporter angry about the changes to the pension.
But in this magical new era of communication, there must be better ways of telling a story than "What Do We Want? No Fees! When Do We Want It? Now!". And if universities really are centres of innovation, then the best way to make that point is to be innovative, surely. To paint a picture of what universities would look like if these changes get by the Senate. To explain what goes on in a young person's mind when deciding whether to go to university, and illustrate how the prospect of a commercial-grade debt might have a different effect on a poor student than on a wealthy one. The previous government's policy of uncapping university places means we have more communications, media and film students than ever before. Why not put them to work?
Back when Tony Abbott was a student, he was an enthusiastic protester. He got a lot of attention and coverage. And he did it by creating a counterpoint; during the post-Dismissal marches, he captured attention by leading a small but vocal demonstration in defence of Sir John Kerr. At Oxford, six days after the sinking of the General Belgrano, he turned up to a campus anti-war protest with a bunch of buddies to march in defence of Margaret Thatcher.
Obviously, there are some significant differences between the young Mr Abbott and the students of the Socialist Alternative. Mr Abbott demonstrated against a prime minister who was trying to give him a free education. Today's students demonstrate against Mr Abbott in a landscape where free education is a thing of the past, with the awkward exception of Mr Abbott's youngest daughter.
They accuse him of extreme conservatism. But if conservatism is the stubborn refusal to evolve, then fighting a war of ideas with Soviet-era artillery strays awfully close to the mark.Make no mistake: All the squalling about how “religious liberty” means employers and schools should be able to withhold earned and/or paid for benefits from women is about the right wing making its move on contraception. The anti-choice movement has internally opposed contraception for a long time now, but hasn’t really had an opportunity to make a big public move towards restricting access. That’s because the right rarely argues for their positions straightforwardly, but instead tries to find an angle: abortion becomes about “life,” racism becomes “states rights,” homophobia becomes “traditional marriage.” Now, the hope is that opposing contraception can be “religious liberty.” But it’s utterly transparent.
That became doubly obvious when Wheaton College, a Christian university, decided to grandstand about how much they opposed contraception insurance coverage, only to find that they won’t be getting the religious institution extension on non-coverage because their insurance plan was already covering contraception. Apparently, their deep moral convictions against providing this benefit only kicked in when the opportunity to politically grandstand about the evils of contraception came up. Which in turn suggests that this has nothing to do with religion, but that’s just the cover story for what is really a cynical exploitation triggered by the phrase “free contraception,” which the right knows is the sort of thing that whips up their base into a frenzy of imagining hot young sluts sleeping around (with everyone but the conservative men engaging these fantasies) on the public dime. But since they can’t win that argument on the merits, “religious liberty” was ushered in to confuse the issue.
Of course, as Jodi Jacobson pointed out last week, “free” contraception isn’t free; women are paying for their insurance by earning it through labor, paying for it with premiums, or a combination of both. The entire reason for the HHS regulation requiring insurance companies to cover it without a copay is that it’s part of a larger set of regulations geared towards getting Americans to utilize more preventive care, which controls costs by preventing more expensive conditions down the road, and, more importantly, saves people unnecessary suffering. The regulation will help control costs in a couple of other valuable ways. First, insurance companies have the right to set parameters on what brands they’ll cover under this regulation, which will encourage more use of generics and lower-cost brands, which in turn will lower the upfront cost of preventing the high costs of unintended pregnancy. There’s also an expectation that this will encourage more women to turn to long-term solutions like IUDs, which are incredibly inexpensive in the long run, but prior to the HHS regulations had prohibitively expensive upfront costs for many women.
All of which means that while feminists are supportive of these regulations both because we believe controlling fertility is a right and because we’re supportive generally of women’s health care, the regulations themselves aren’t rooted in feminist ideology. These regulations are simply in service of what should be non-controversial goals of improving public health and lowering health care costs. The people demanding “religious” exemptions are really demanding the right to be free riders that get all the lowered costs of better overall preventive medicine while still retaining the sadistic satisfaction of judging their employees’ sexual choices from afar.
Get the facts, direct to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily or weekly digest. SUBSCRIBE
Of course, that’s in the short term. This is ultimately about the right seizing an opportunity to reintroduce the notion in the public discourse that contraception, especially female-controlled contraception, is “controversial.” The way that they’re clearly going to go about this is create this nonsense narrative about Christians vs. dirty girls, even though 99 percent of sexually active women–including Christians–have used contraception. The very people nodding along to a priest’s anti-contraception rant on Sunday morning are going home and having contraception-aided sex on Sunday night.
Once that narrative is established, all sorts of mischief could happen. Anti-choicers chip away at abortion access by coming up with all sorts of regulations the public at large mistakenly believes are a good compromise position that gives the right and left something they want. (Of course, all these restrictions do is put pointless obstacles between women and abortions they already know they want.) If contraception is perceived as similarly controversial, that old and irritating urge to let “both sides” have something will kick in, and a lot of restrictions on contraception that would have been hard to sell before will be easier now. We’ve already started to see this happen, with Plan B emergency contraception, which has become pointlessly controversial because of right wing preening, and therefore can’t be sold to someone who can’t produce an ID showing they’re 17 or older. Should this gambit to make it seem like there’s some kind of deep conflict between insurance coverage of contraception and religion work, these kinds of “compromises” that make it harder for women, especially the most vulnerable women, to get contraception will likely become more common.
But while all this can be very terrifying to contemplate, this is also a political opportunity for pro-choicers. After all, the biggest uphill battle we’ve faced for years is getting the voting public to see that right-wing opposition to abortion isn’t, as they claim, about “life,” but about punishing and controlling female sexuality. Now anti-choicers are running around comparing contraception to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Their hope is that by flinging the phrase “religious liberty” around enough, they can deflect attention from the fact that this is a massive push to put contraception into the “controversial” territory where it can be more easily restricted. What we can do, however, is continue drawing attention to the fact that they consistent thread between opposition to contraception and abortion isn’t “life,” but fear and loathing of female sexuality. And that is not a winning position for the right.More than 50 Perth train drivers took unprotected industrial action on September 24, taking leave or phoning in sick in the morning. More reported sick in the afternoon. It was the second time in a month that the train drivers initiated a “blue flu”.
The action came as their case for a pay rise was before the Industrial Relations Commission. The drivers resorted to the action out of sheer frustration as negotiations over a new collective agreement between the Rail Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) and the Perth Transit Authority (PTA) had reached a stalemate. The PTA rejected a 6% pay rise the train drivers were seeking.
Many drivers were reported in the media as being disgruntled with the leadership of their union, taking the industrial action independently. The ABC interviewed one driver who said of the train drivers’ action: “It’s a matter of not being able to pay their bills, to make ends meet and having to do overtime each week to be able to financially support their family. At every turn and every part of negotiation we are blocked; we’re either blocked by the Public Transport Authority or we are blocked by our so-called union.”
Only one-third of trains were running, and they were jam-packed with commuters despite the PTA putting on extra carriages. Some services were cancelled, and most were reduced to a half-hourly schedule. Traffic in the city was almost gridlocked. Buses were completely packed. The Royal Show was to start the next day.
An emergency session of the Industrial Relations Court was held, and the RTBU reached a settlement with the PTA. The IRC ruled the drivers would get an interim increase of 5% of their existing base rate of pay while arbitration takes place and a new base rate is determined. The government had initially offered only 3.75% for the first year and 4% for the second.
The industrial action was led by rank-and-file members who had split from the RTBU after losing confidence in the union’s ability to represent them. In total, 240 out of 260 employees opted to be represented by a lawyer in the IRC rather than the RTBU officials. Whether the lawyer chosen by the drivers has the jurisdiction to represent them is still in question because he is not a registered bargaining agent.
Perth train drivers are the lowest paid drivers in the country despite living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. The majority group of drivers are seeking a back payment of around $13,600 to bring them into line with CPI increases since 2006.PoliZette Lobbyists Wail and Gnash Teeth Over Trump Purveyors of special interest influence weep for their uncertain future
Lobbyists, public relations consultants, and the usual special interests types who infest the halls of power inside the Beltway are in meltdown mode now that Donald Trump has effectively secured the GOP nomination.
After Trump’s decisive Indiana victory, GOP lobbyists and Establishment standard-bearers are now faced with coming to terms with this notion: The former GOP sacred cows of free trade and foreign intervention could be slaughtered under a Trump presidency or in a GOP dominated by populists.
Advertisement
They’re not handling it very well.
“As a Republican, I’m depressed,” said Tom Korologos, a strategic adviser for the law firm DLA Piper.
Korologos, who served as the ambassador to Belgium during the George W. Bush administration, met with other lobbyists on Wednesday and noted that “they were all depressed.”
“A lot of people woke up and went, ‘Oh, gosh, this is not a dream,'” said Jeff MacKinnon, principal and co-founder of Farragut Partners. “I don’t think Downtown [Washington] was really prepared for it happening so quickly. It did catch people off guard.”
“Everyone is scrambling for relevancy right now,” MacKinnon continued. “Everyone wants to be a player on some level, but they don’t even have a uniform on right now — they’re still trying to figure out which one to wear, or if they’ll even be put in the game.”
[lz_jwplayer video=”68NktMs3″ ads=”true”]
Advertisement
But the cloud of uncertainty covering K Street is clearly mixed with a significant dose of fear.
“He’s going to have a hard time coalescing the support that the business community has typically given to the nominee,” one lobbyist told The Hill, speaking anonymously.
His “policies are tough to deal with, but when you add on to that the temperament and the foreign policy stuff, it’s a lot for people to work through,” the lobbyist added.
It’s not surprising that the complete and utter destruction of GOP “business as usual” has K Street rattled. Trump has not only spoken out repeatedly against the negative influence of K Street money, but also threatens to change irrevocably the sociopolitical orientation of the GOP.
A few lobbyists, however, have warmed up to Trump. David Urban, president of the lobbying firm American Continental Group, even began campaigning for Trump last week.
“You don’t need to have unanimity to have unity in our party,” said Urban. “I think the base and the party is going to get behind him pretty quickly.” he said.
Advertisement
But “what a Trump administration would mean for K Street? I think people are worried about winning the White House. I think that’s what Republicans on K Street should be worried about.”By Unicorn Riot
Last week, after filing a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request, Unicorn Riot received a heavily redacted copy of the Denver Police Crowd Control Manual. Most sections of the manual relevant to the policing of protests (our primary interest) were redacted. One redaction was 15 pages long!
Since then, an anonymous source provided Unicorn Riot with an unredacted copy of the manual. This version is dated May 2008, while the redacted version via CORA request is dated October 2011.
After examination of both documents, we are confident that most or all of the redacted portions from the current manual are present in the 2008 copy. We compared size, shape, and location of the redacted text body with the corresponding areas of the unredacted text.
Based on our experience and observations in Denver it is clear that the practices outlined in the 2008 manual are still in use by the department today (to the extent that the police follow the law and/or their own rules, which is loosely and sometimes not at all). Of course there may be discrepancies between the two documents that we would not be able to detect.
Two of the redacted sections that stood out as particularly arbitrary:
The term “Field Force” in the Table of Contents
The length in inches of the standard riot baton used in crowd control (42″)
Aside from the humorous nature of some items chosen to be redacted, there are sections of greater concern and interest.
The redacted manual we received from the city was issued in October 2011, most likely to reflect changes in crowd management based on the department’s first operations against Occupy Denver. 2008 is also the year Denver hosted the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Several mass protests took place during the convention, and a highly militarized police apparatus was deployed against demonstrators. The City of Denver paid $200,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the ACLU over indiscriminate mass arrests of protesters conducted by Denver police during the 2008 DNC.
SHADOW TEAMS
In the “Rules of Conduct” section, the manual briefly outlines the role of “Shadow Teams” as groups of undercover and/or plainclothes officers who infiltrate demonstrations to observe participants, gather intelligence, monitor “persons of interest”, and help target specific protesters for arrest.
For more in-depth info, follow this link: Denver Police use undercover “Shadow Teams” to infiltrate and monitor protests
CUT TEAMS
DPD also deploys “Cut Teams” to dismantle lock-boxes or other devices that may be used by protesters during a civil disobedience or blockade action.
PAIN COMPLIANCE TECHNIQUES
For more in-depth info, follow this link: Denver Police manual permits use of “pain compliance” on passive individuals
The Crowd Control Manual also allows the use of “Pain Compliance Techniques” on individuals engaged in “passive resistance.” Although such an individual, someone who goes limp when arrested for example, poses no threat to the officer, the officer is permitted to use force to cause pain. Pain compliance techniques used by the Denver Police Department are known to involve the use of pressure points. It is common for people arrested at protests in Denver to report that while being arrested, officers pulled and twisted their wrists and fingers in very painful ways both as they are being handcuffed, and after they have already been handcuffed.
Full Manual text below:
Click here to download the full manual in pdf
You can also download the pdf file here.
Tor users can download a copy here.
Releasing the Denver Police Crowd Control Manual is part of our ongoing investigation into the policing of social movements. Using open records requests and other methods, we are currently compiling reports documenting the Denver Police Department.
If you would like to help support our efforts in obtaining more FOIAs, CORAs, and more, please consider donating:
BONUS!!
Denver Police Crowd Control Manuals:
Unicorn Scratchoffs for Truth!
Hover over redacted text and click and hold your left mouse button to scratch off and reveal hidden text!The food industry is undergoing a little more repackaging.
The United States spice maker McCormick & Company is making a bet on hot sauce by buying Reckitt Benckiser’s foods business, which includes the Frank’s RedHot brand, French’s Mustard and Cattlemen’s barbecue sauces, for $4.2 billion.
The acquisition may help McCormick’s effort to expand overseas.
The company had tried another British target, Premier Foods, but three informal offers were rejected, according to The Financial Times, which first reported the deal with Reckitt. The FT also reported that Unilever and Hormel had come close to bidding, but walked away.
Reckitt, for its part, can now focus on its infant nutrition unit after buying Mead Johnson, which makes baby formula, for $16.6 billion.
Reckitt, which also makes Durex condoms and Nurofen painkillers, had seen its sales growth damaged by a boycott in South Korea and the weak performance of a new Scholl product.This was written by Larry Cuban, a former high school social studies teacher (14 years, including seven at Cardozo and Roosevelt high schools in the District), district superintendent (seven years in Arlington, VA) and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, where he has taught for more than 20 years. His latest book is “As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin.” This appeared on his blog.
By Larry Cuban
As a result of inhabiting a different world than teachers, policymakers make a consequential error. They and a cadre of influentials confuse teacher quality with teaching quality, that is, the personal traits of teachers — dedicated, caring, gregarious, intellectually curious — produce student learning rather than the classroom and school settings.
Both are important, of course, but policymakers and their influential camp followers have accentuated personal traits far more than the organizational and social context in which teachers teach daily. So if students score low on tests, then who the teachers are, their personal traits, credentials, and attitudes come under close scrutiny, rather than the age-graded school, neighborhood demography, workplace conditions, and resources that support teaching. The person overshadows the place.[i]
In attributing far more weight to individual teacher traits rather than seriously considering the situation in which teachers teach, policymakers and civic and business leaders end up having a cramped view of teaching quality.
Quality teaching is complex because an essential distinction is masked: the difference between “good” teaching and “successful” teaching. Both “good” and ” successful” teaching are necessary to reach the threshold of quality instruction and student learning. To lead us through the thicket of complexity, I lean on Gary Fenstermacher and Virginia Richardson’s analysis of quality teaching.[ii]
“Good” teaching is about the how and what of teaching. For example, the task of getting a child to understand the theory of evolution (or the Declaration of Independence or prime numbers) in a considerate and age-appropriate way consistent with best practices in the field is “good” teaching.
“Successful” teaching, however, is about what the child learns. For example, getting the same child to write three paragraphs filled with relevant details and present-day examples that demonstrate understanding of the theory of evolution or the Declaration of Independence is “successful” teaching. Ditto for a student able to show that she knows prime numbers by completing Eratosthenes Sieve. “Good” and “successful” teaching, then, are not the same nor does one necessarily lead to the other.
Does that last sentence mean that “good” teaching may not automatically lead to “successful” teaching? Yes, one does not necessarily produce the other. How can that be?
Fenstermacher and Richardson point out that learning, like teaching, can also be distinguished between “good” and “successful.” The above examples of student proficiency on the theory of evolution, the Declaration of Independence, and prime numbers demonstrate “successful” learning.
“Good” learning, however, requires other factors to be in place. “Good” learning occurs when the student is willing to learn and puts forth effort, the student’s family, peers, and community support learning, the student has the place, time, and resources to learn, and, finally, “good” teaching.
In short, “good” teaching is one of four necessary components to “good” learning. In making this mistake, policymakers unintentionally snooker the public by squishing together “good” teaching and “successful” learning. In doing so, policymakers erase three critical factors that are equally important in getting students to learn: the student’s own effort, support of family and peers, and the opportunity to learn in school.
“No excuses” reformers (see above) glide over these other factors critical to learning. Current hoopla over paying teachers for their performance based on student test scores is an expression of this conflation of “good” teaching with “successful” learning and the ultimate deceiving of parents, voters, and students that “good” teaching naturally leads to “successful” learning.
Not only does this policymaker error about quality classroom instruction confuse the personal traits of the teacher with teaching, it also nurtures a heroic view of school improvement where superstars (e.g., Geoffrey Canada in “Waiting for Superman,” Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver,”, Erin Gruwell of “Freedom Writers”) labor day in and day out to get their students to ace AP Calculus tests and become accomplished writers and achieve in Harlem schools.
Neither doctors, lawyers, soldiers, nor nuclear physicists can depend upon superstars among them to get their important work done every day. Nor should all teachers have to be heroic. Policymakers attributing quality far more to individual traits in teachers than to the context in which they teach leads to squishing “good” teaching with “successful” learning doing even further collateral damage to the profession by setting up the expectation that only heroes need apply.
By stripping away from “good” learning essential factors of students’ motivation, the contexts in which they live, and the opportunities they have to learn in school–federal, state, and district policymakers inadvertently twist the links between teaching and learning into a simpleminded formula thereby mis-educating the public they serve while encouraging a generation of idealistic newcomers to become classroom heroes who end up deserting schools in wholesale numbers within a few years because they come to understand that “good |
with your brothers on the ground. Work with the Safe Streets Project.
We’re taking back free speech. And we’ll ensure rendition of Antifa terrorists to justice.
Regards,Thousands of friends and fans said farewell to "The Voice" singer Christina Grimmie at services in New Jersey on Friday.
Grimmie's family received condolences for five hours before an emotional memorial service was held. The singer's music was played and a large picture of her was displayed on an easel.
The 22-year-old was shot to death last week as she signed autographs after a show in Orlando, Florida. Her assailant fatally shot himself.
Among those present Friday night were Alissa and Joseph Canto. The husband and wife from outside Rochester, New York, said they drove 7 hours to come to the services at Fellowship Alliance Chapel.
The couple, both 24, said they've been fans since Grimmie launched her YouTube channel as a high school student.
"We have been fans for years but we didn't know how much we appreciated her until she passed," Alissa Canto said.
Garret Lang of Pennsylvania attended the services with several other fans who called themselves Team Grimmie.
"What I liked about her most was she didn't just treat her fans like fans, she treated them more special than fans," Lang told The Courier Post. "She treated them like friends or like family members, even without knowing them."
Authorities said Grimmie was gunned down by Kevin Loibl the night of June 10 as she signed autographs after the Orlando show. A motive for the shooting has not been determined. Authorities said she had no personal connection to Loibl, who fatally shot himself after being tackled by her brother.
Grimmie was buried in a private ceremony Thursday.
Pop star Adam Levine, who mentored Grimmie when she finished third on "The Voice," offered on Monday to pay for the funeral expenses.
Grimmie was a YouTube star who was widely known from her appearances on NBC's "The Voice" two years ago. She lived in Evesham, a small community about 20 miles from Philadelphia, before moving to Los Angeles in 2012.
Grimmie often cited her mother's ongoing battle with breast cancer as her musical inspiration, including during her first appearance on "The Voice" in 2014, where her mother sobbed in the wings at her rendition of Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball."
Her killing was the first of three tragedies for Orlando in the last week. Early Sunday, a massacre at gay nightclub Pulse left 49 dead in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. On Tuesday, a 2-year-old Nebraska boy was attacked by an alligator and killed at Walt Disney World.Security Alert Affected configurations: Geth Severity: High Summary: An issue has been identified with Geth’s journaling mechanism. This caused a network fork at block #2686351 (Nov-24-2016 14:12:07 UTC). The new Geth release 1.5.3 fixes the journaling issue and repairs the fork.
Details: Geth was failing to revert empty account deletions when the transaction causing the deletions of empty accounts ended with an an out-of-gas exception. An additional issue was found in Parity, where the Parity client incorrectly failed to revert empty account deletions in a more limited set of contexts involving out-of-gas calls to precompiled contracts; the new Geth behavior matches Parity’s, and empty accounts will cease to be a source of concern in general in about one week once the state clearing process finishes.
The chain that was created from block #2686351 by the old Geth client, which both Parity and the new Geth release consider invalid, seems to have been mostly abandoned around block #2686516, meaning that ~165 blocks were mined on the now abandoned chain. Transactions are broadcast across the network so most transactions are likely present on both the old Geth chain and the current chain, although mining rewards and transaction fees on the old Geth chain are lost. No transactions or blocks on the chain that both clients will now accept will be reverted.
The latest geth release will update the blockchain from the point of the fork, even if it has synced past the point of the fork.
Solution: Geth 1.5.3 was released.
If you are using Geth: Download the latest client here: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.5.3
If you are using Mist: Restart Mist and the auto-update feature will prompt you to update the Geth client that Mist uses to geth 1.5.3.
If you do not update, please be aware you will be on an invalid chain that is not supported.
We continue to recommend that exchanges and other high-value users run multiple clients and automatically halt operations or otherwise enter safe mode if they go out of sync by more than ~10 blocks.
Ethereum websites and mobile applications that allow you to store ether and/or make transactions are run by third party web based or mobile Ethereum providers (“Third Party Providers”). Third Party Providers run their own Ethereum client infrastructure to facilitate their services. Generally, you do not need to do anything if you use a Third Party Provider such as MetaMask, Jaxx, and MyEtherWallet. However, they may have instructions for you. You should check with your Ethereum Third Party Provider to see what actions, if any, they are recommending for their users.
—————————–
DISCLAIMER This is an emergent and evolving highly technical space. If you choose to participate, you should know there are many risks involved including but not limited to risks like unexpected bugs and other technical complications that could result in loss of ether and other consequences. In addition, if you do not update to Geth 1.5.3, you will be on an unsupported network. By choosing to use the Ethereum platform, you assume the risks of this emergent platform.There's been a lot of information scattered around the internet about these topic recently, so here's my attempt to put them all in one place to (hopefully) settle things down and give my inbox a break.
Last week I spent a number of days at the GNOME Developer Hackfest in Brussels, with the goal to help make the ability to distribute applications written for GNOME (and even more generally, Linux) in a better manner. A great summary of what happened there can be found in this H-Online article. Also please read Alexander Larsson's great summary of what we discussed and worked on for another view of this.
Both of these articles allude to the fact that I'm working on putting the D-Bus protocol into the kernel, in order to help achieve these larger goals of proper IPC for applications. And I'd like to confirm that yes, this is true, but it's not going to be D-Bus like you know it today.
Our goal (and I use "goal" in a very rough term, I have 8 pages of scribbled notes describing what we want to try to implement here), is to provide a reliable multicast and point-to-point messaging system for the kernel, that will work quickly and securely. On top of this kernel feature, we will try to provide a "libdbus" interface that allows existing D-Bus users to work without ever knowing the D-Bus daemon was replaced on their system.
"But Greg!" some of you will shout, "What about the existing AF_BUS kernel patches that have been floating around for a while and that you put into the LTSI 3.4 kernel release?"
The existing AF_BUS patches are great for users who need a very low-latency, high-speed, D-Bus protocol on their system. This includes the crazy automotive Linux developers, who try to shove tens of thousands of D-Bus messages through their system at boot time, all while using extremely underpowered processors. For this reason, I included the AF_BUS patches in the LTSI kernel release, as that limited application can benefit from them.
Please remember the LTSI kernel is just like a distro kernel, it has no relation to upstream kernel development other than being a consumer of it. Patches are in this kernel because the LTSI member groups need them, they aren't always upstream, just like all Linux distro kernels work.
However, given that the AF_BUS patches have been rejected by the upstream Linux kernel developers, I advise that anyone relying on them be very careful about their usage, and be prepared to move away from them sometime in the future when this new "kernel dbus" code is properly merged.
As for when this new kernel code will be finished, I can only respond with the traditional "when it is done" mantra. I can't provide any deadlines, and at this point in time, don't need any additional help with it, we have enough people working on it at the moment. It's available publicly if you really want to see it, but I'll not link to it as it's nothing you really want to see or watch right now. When it gets to a usable state, I'll announce it in the usual places (linux-kernel mailing list) where it will be torn to the usual shreds and I will rewrite it all again to get it into a mergable state.
In the meantime, if you see me at any of the many Linux conferences I'll be attending around the world this year, and you are curious about the current status, buy me a beer and I'll be glad to discuss it in person.
If there's anything else people are wondering about this topic, feel free to comment on it here on google+, or email me.
posted Fri, 08 Feb 2013 in [/linux]Next time you gear up for a photoshoot in your sexy gender-swapped cosplay, just remember it's all been done before. As long as there have been costumes,. there have been sexy variants of characters and uniforms. Back in the 1890s, burlesque dancers were dressing up as fairies, magical creatures, and gender-swapped versions of pirates, crusaders and gentlemen adventurers.
This collection of titillating cards from the Charles H. McCaghy Collection of Exotic Dance from Burlesque to Clubs at Ohio State University shows burlesque actresses from the 1890s in their finery. Many of these images came packaged with cigarettes, making them the 19th Century version of "Alive With Pleasure."
Advertisement
The themes of these costumes really don't seem that different from the "sexy" versions of hero costumes you see in comics and video games today — and they definitely bring to mind the current craze for gender-swapped cosplay at conventions. Although there's no easy explanation for the horse picture — but at least, it does have the interesting caption "The Devil's Auction."
Check out more of the images below, and see tons more at the link. [Charles H. McCagy Collection]
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
AdvertisementChina will build its first long-term national underwater observation platform in key waters in the South China Sea to observe underwater conditions in real time, scientific news portal sciencenet.cn reported on Sunday.
Wang Pinxian, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said at a scientific forum in Shanghai on Saturday that construction work on a long-term observation network covering key areas in the South China and East China seas will be done with the help of Shanghai's Tongji University and the Institute of Acoustics under the CAS.
Building the observation network showcases that the country is actively joining in the international competition, Wang said.
According to the sciencenet.cn report, the observation platform will probe the undersea physical, chemical, and geological dynamics, and will also be used for other purposes.
At an offshore drilling project led by Chinese scientists, 33 scientists from 13 countries including the US, France, Italy and Japan left Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong on February 7 for the South China Sea. The scientists have completed the first drilling task of the expedition to the South China Sea.
The first hole, identified as U1499A, has reached 3,770 meters below sea level, for collection of sediment samples, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
According to Sun Zhen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, chief scientist of the research expedition team, a preliminary lithologic study was conducted on sediment believed to have been formed 8 million years ago, Xinhua said.
The second drill, close to the first hole, has begun and is expected to gather information from the sediment core, Sun said.
Xinhua reported on February 8 that scientists will explore the lithosphere extension during the continental breakup, by drilling four sites to a depth of 3,000 to 4,000 meters in the northern area of the South China Sea. The study will contribute to understanding how marginal basins grow. A total of 66 scientists from 13 countries will participate in the expeditions, as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program.Updated: April 13, 2015, 10:16 AM
An employee at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, N.C. was reportedly killed Monday morning during a shooting that prompted the campus to go on lockdown, television station WRAL reported.
MSNBC reported that the suspected shooter had not been apprehended. The network cited law enforcement officials who said the suspected shooter was a white male with a tattoo over his left eye, wearing a blue jacket and white pants. According to MSNBC, the school was still on lockdown as of about 9:30 a.m. EDT.
WRAL said the shooter was described as 5-foot-11 and was reportedly seen carrying a long rifle.
A local newspaper, the Goldsboro News-Argus, tweeted photos of SWAT officers and the ongoing investigation on the campus.
The paper reported that there was one victim whose condition was unknown but that, according to school staffers, there had never been a hostage situation on campus.
School officials now say there is no, nor was there, a hostage situation. They confirmed one victim has been shot condition unknown — News-Argus Cops (@NewsArgusCops) April 13, 2015
Initial reports from the News-Argus, also said all school personnel had been evacuated and officials had the suspected shooter “under control.”
Tara Humphries, Wayne Community College said police have one suspect “under control.” She could not elaborate further — News-Argus Cops (@NewsArgusCops) April 13, 2015
The News-Argus subsequently reported that the situation remained active, according to a source on campus.The company, which was hit by a series of damaging national strikes during October and November, has increased its half-yearly operating profit by £7 million to £184 million.
This improvement is in sharp contrast to five years ago when the Royal Mail was losing £1 million a day. It came despite a continuing decline in the number of letters posted and was helped by it severely cutting costs, including thousands of workers being axed from the company.
Both the management and the unions cheered the better figures. However, the pension deficit, which has hit an estimated £10 billion, has alarmed many people, with politicians from all parties urging further modernisation.
The Government has promised to underwrite the deficit, but only if the company is fully modernised with parts of it sold to a private company. Lord Mandelson's plans for part privitisation were derailed by Labour back benchers earlier this year.
The pension deficit is the largest in corporate history, and is even bigger than the £9 billion black hole announced by BT last month. It has risen from £3.4 billion three years ago.
The daily postbag averaged 72 million, down by three million from the previous year and 12 million fewer letters and parcels than in 2006, as people sent emails and the recession meant businesses were sending fewer letters.
The company has also revealed that one third of all the 8.2 billion letters posted in the first month of the year were handled by rival companies. Though the Royal Mail is responsible for delivering the "final mile", it added that it lost money on every one of those deliveries.
About 5,000 jobs were cut in the period, bringing the total to 60,000 since 2002 through voluntary redundancy or natural turnover, leaving a workforce of 171,400.
Union leaders said the results "betrayed the myth" that they were blocking change, while both sides agreed the size of the pensions deficit was "daunting".
The modernisation sparked the unofficial disputes, followed by a series of national walkouts. The impact of those strikes are not reflected in these figures, which run up until the end of September.
Chief executive Adam Crozier said revenues had fallen by £73 million over the six months, but profits were made in all four businesses – the Post Office, letters, Parcelforce and European parcels.
"A combination of new and upgraded sorting machines in mail centres means more than 80 per cent of the mail is now automatically sorted down to the level of the postman or woman's walk and is delivering cost benefits, while changes in working practices – including everyone working all the hours for which they are paid, working flexibly and using the new equipment we're investing in – have also helped drive efficiency and offset the effects of volume decline," he said.
Dave Ward, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, said: "Postal workers are now working harder than ever before. A pay freeze is no way to thank staff who have seen colleagues leave and workloads rise."
A Department for Business spokesman said: "Today's figures confirm that Royal Mail must press ahead with its modernisation plans. Behind the headline profits, the figures show that mail volumes continue to fall and the company is heavily cash negative."Independent UK reports:
Kellyanne Conway says that the White House hasn’t ruled out using polygraph tests to try and weed out whoever has been leaking damaging information about the Donald Trump and his staff to the press.
Ms Conway, the senior counsellor to Donald Trump, said in an appearance on Fox & Friends that the West Wing hadn’t ruled out lie detector tests, which have a relatively low accuracy rate at 65 per cent. The tough language comes as the Justice Department is reportedly gearing up a crack down on leaks.
“It’s easier to figure out who’s leaking than the leakers may realise,” Ms Conway said, speaking from the White House lawn.
“Well, they may, they may not” use lie detectors, she continued.
The White House has been in a fury after transcripts of conversations between Mr Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia were leaked to the Washington Post. Those transcripts showed Mr Trump engaging in contentious exchanges with those two leaders and allies.U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, center, and U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Jean Elizabeth Manes, right, stop to look across the courtyard during a tour of local police station and detention center in San Salvador, El Salvador, Thursday, July 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — His loyalty to the boss severely tested but seemingly intact, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday he will stay in the job for as long as President Donald Trump wants him to serve.
Sessions told The Associated Press he and Trump have a “harmony of values and beliefs” and he intends to stay and fight for the president’s agenda “as long as he sees that as appropriate.” This, after a week of being berated by Trump in the most public fashion as weak and ineffective.
“If he wants to make a change, he has every right,” Sessions said in an interview outside the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador during a mission to increase international cooperation against the MS-13 gang. “I serve at the pleasure of the president. I’ve understood that from the day I took the job.”
Congressional Republicans have rallied around Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, and expressed mortification at the humiliation visited on him by Trump in several interviews and a series of tweets.
Trump is upset that Sessions recused himself months ago from the investigation into interactions between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, and that he has not taken a tougher line against his defeated Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned Thursday there would be “holy hell” to pay if Trump fired Sessions.
After meeting his Salvadoran counterpart, Sessions told AP he was “thrilled” with the support he’s received, presumably from lawmakers.
“I believe we are running a great Department of Justice,” he said. “I believe with great confidence that I understand what is needed in the Department of Justice and what President Trump wants. I share his agenda.”
He acknowledged, with considerable understatement, “it hasn’t been my best week.... for my relationship with the president.” The two have not spoken recently, he said. “But I look forward to the opportunity to chat with him about it.”
In Congress, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska went to the Senate floor Thursday to discourage Trump from making a so-called recess appointment while the Senate is away at the end of August — should that be the president’s intention. A recess appointment would allow Trump to appoint anyone of his choosing and bypass Senate confirmation until 2019 if the Senate recesses for 10 days or more in August.
“If you’re thinking of making a recess appointment to push out the attorney general, forget about it,” Sasse said. “The presidency isn’t a bull, and this country isn’t a china shop.”
The previous evening, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, tweeted that he wouldn’t be holding a confirmation hearing for a new attorney general if Trump decided to go that route.
Although largely deferential to a president who seemed bent on tormenting him, Sessions stood his ground on his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. He had bowed out of any involvement in that probe after acknowledged meeting with Russia’s ambassador during the campaign.
“Knowing the integrity that’s required of the attorney general, I believe I made the right decision,” he told Fox News. He said his recusal was in keeping with the rule of law “and an attorney general who doesn’t follow the law is not very effective in leading the Department of Justice.”
The White House of late has appeared to be trying to tamp down the notion that Trump wants Sessions out — without offering a rousing endorsement of him, however.
“The president wants him to do his job, do it properly,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said Thursday. “He wants him to be tough on the intelligence leaks and he wants him to move forward.”
In San Salvador, Sessions met his Salvadoran counterpart, Douglas Melendez, and congratulated him on charges laid over the last two days against more than 700 gang members, many of them from MS-13, said the Justice Department.
He also met members of an international anti-gang task force at an event where an FBI agent described MS-13 as a highly coordinated and well-organized gang whose imprisoned leaders order violence in the U.S. from their prisons in El Salvador.
MS-13 is an international criminal enterprise with tens of thousands of members in several Central American countries and many U.S. states. The gang originated in immigrant communities in Los Angeles in the 1980s then entrenched itself in Central America when its leaders were deported.
It’s known for hacking and stabbing victims with machetes, drug dealing, prostitution and other rackets. Its recruits are middle- and high-school students predominantly in immigrant communities, and those who try to leave risk violent retribution, law enforcement officials have said.
MS-13 members have been accused in a spate of bloodshed that included the massacre of four young men in a Long Island, New York, park and the killing of a suspected gang rival inside a deli. The violence has drawn attention from members of Congress and Trump, who has boasted about efforts to arrest and deport MS-13 members across the United States.
For Sessions, the anti-gang mission was a way to show his priorities are Trump’s priorities after days of being upbraided by the president in the most public fashion.
In Washington, lawmakers from both parties moved on efforts to prevent the dismissal of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a development that might be made easier if Sessions were moved aside.
Graham is working on legislation that would block the firing of special counsels without judicial review. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, among several senators involved in the effort, said the bill would protect Mueller and other special counsels. He said firing Mueller “would precipitate a firestorm that would be unprecedented in proportions.”
Sessions recused himself from the investigation into election meddling after he acknowledged meeting with Russia’s ambassador during the campaign.
___
Jalonick reported from WashingtonWaking up made easy
Sleep Cycle is an intelligent alarm clock that tracks your sleep patterns and wakes you up in light sleep - the natural way to wake up, feeling rested and energized. No need to place your device in bed - Sleep Cycles uses sound analysis sleep tracking.
How it works
• As you sleep, you go through different sleep phases, ranging from light to deep sleep and back again. The sleep phase you are in when your alarm goes off is critical for how rested you will feel when you wake up.
• While you sleep, your movements vary depending on what sleep phase you are in. Sleep Cycle’s patented sound technology tracks your sleep patterns using sound or vibration analysis, monitoring your movements in bed throughout the different sleep phases.
• Sleep Cycle finds the optimal time when you are in light sleep to wake you up in the morning, during a predefined 30 minute time window that ends at your set alarm time. Waking up in light sleep feels like waking up naturally without an alarm, leaving you feeling rested and energized.
• All you need to do is turn Sleep Cycle on before going to bed, and place your device on your nightstand or close by on the floor.
Continuously rated as the best smart alarm clock on the market. Featured in: CNN, Wired, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, The New York Times.
--------------------------
Free features
√ Sleep analysis with Sleep Cycle patented sound technology, or accelerometer
√ Sleep Cycle Apple Watch App integration with silent wake up
√ Detailed sleep statistics and daily sleep graphs
√ Fully integrated with Apple Health, exchanging sleep analysis and heart rate
√ Carefully selected alarm melodies
√ Snooze by shaking or double tapping the phone lightly
√ Customizable wake-up window. From instant (regular alarm clock), up to 90 minutes
Premium features
√ Longterm sleep trends
√ Compare your sleep data to world sleep statistics • Snore trends - view historical snore trends data
√ Weather - see how weather affects your sleep quality
√ Heart rate monitor - measure your heart rate (RHR) every morning using the built in camera in your device
√ Sleep aid - helps you fall asleep easier
√ Sleep notes - see how events such as drinking coffee, stress, working out, or eating late affect your sleep quality
√ Wake up mood - see how Sleep Cycle affects your wake up mood
√ Online backup - lets you secure your sleep data online
√ Export sleep data to Excel for detailed analysis
√ Philips HUE light bulb support - simulate a natural sunrise to give you an even softer wake up
-------------------------
REQUIREMENTS
Ability to charge your phone by the bed.
Ability to place your phone near the bed, such as on a nightstand table or on the floor.
-------------------------
The optional Premium subscription costs $39.99 per year.
It will be charged from your iTunes account after the purchase. You can manage or cancel your auto-renewable subscription by entering the user settings in iTunes after the purchase. The subscription will be auto-renewed 24 hours before the subscription period ends with the same kind of subscription you already bought to the same price. It's not possible to abort the subscription during the time it's active. Terms and Privacy: http://www.sleepcycle.com/terms-of-use.htmlA Wall Street Journal editorial is mischaracterizing the Department of Justice's attempts to bring Louisiana into compliance with long-standing school desegregation orders as motivated by pro-union biases.
The editorial follows a long line of conservative media attacks against the DOJ's decision to file a lawsuit against Louisiana, asking a federal court to block the state's controversial voucher program. Despite the fact that Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal began issuing vouchers before seeking the required judicial approval, he insists that the DOJ's suit is nothing more than a scheme to advance the interests of teachers unions, a baseless charge the WSJ editorial board continues to repeat.
After accusing Education Secretary Arne Duncan of "plead[ing] ignorance" for refusing to comment on the DOJ lawsuit (neither Duncan nor the Department of Education are parties to the suit), in a September 6 editorial the WSJ went on to suggest that the "real motive" for the suit is a pro-teachers union agenda on the part of the DOJ:
[Jindal] got to the heart of the matter by noting that the real motive for this lawsuit is union politics. The teachers unions have been trying to block the voucher plan by any means possible, but so far they've failed. Bringing in the feds for a desegregation gambit is merely the latest attempt.
Jindal maintains that vouchers represent the next stage of the civil rights struggle by offering minority students at failing schools a "choice," but the DOJ argues that vouchers actually "impeded the desegregation process." More importantly, right-wing media have largely ignored the existence of numerous long-standing court orders that require Louisiana to obtain permission from a federal judge before making any changes to the education system that might negatively impact desegregation efforts.
Instead, right-wing media are accusing the Obama administration of "inhumane" treatment of students of color and comparing Attorney General Eric Holder to infamous former Alabama Gov. George Wallace who sought to illegally maintain segregation in schools. For its part, the WSJ claims that "studies" show that "voucher recipients increase integration by letting minority children escape geographic school boundaries.""Bernice the Whiffle Hen" redirects here. For the comic strip storyline, see Dice Island.
Contents show]
History
, also referred to as anor just, is acharacter created by E. C. Segar in 1928, shortly before Popeye's introduction.
A mysterious bird given to Castor Oyl by his uncle Lubry Kent, Bernice dodged Castor's every attempt to rid himself of her, having grown attached to her master. He then found out about her true powers: she would grant luck to anyone who rubbed her feathers. So Castor set sail to Dice Island, where a legendary casino stood, meeting and hiring Popeye to man the ship he bought. During the trip both Popeye and Castor gained luck from rubbing Bernice, and millions were won upon arriving at the casino. On the way back, Popeye, having been shot multiple times by the evil casino manager, kept rubbing Bernice's feathers for "luck" and eventually recovered. It is unclear if his miraculous recovery owed to Bernice's powers or to his formidable constitution, which he was not yet aware of.
Bernice would remain at Castor's side until, during a trip to Africa, she met a male of her species and chose to leave with him.
Animation
The character is portrayed differently in the 1960 animated series, where she appears as a talking magical animal with a human-like personality, known as the "Wiffle Bird" who would occasionally appear to grant wishes or make amazing things happen. Despite being referred to as female, she had a clearly male voice, and was even referred to as a 'he' in the episode "Quick Change Olie". This would remain her only screen portrayal.
GalleryCHENNAI: As many as 7,620 Indian nationals are lodged in foreign jails, with the highest number in Saudi Arabia In response to a question raised in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, minister of state for external affairs M J Akbar said due to strong privacy laws prevailing in many countries, local authorities do not share information on prisoners unless the person concerned consents to the disclosure of such information.Of the 7,620 prisoners lodged in 86 jails, at least 50 are women, shows data available with the government. Most of these women are in prisons in south-east Asia, neighbouring Sri Lanka, China and Nepal, the Gulf countries, the US and UK.The Gulf countries account for 56% of all Indian nationals in foreign jails. The prisons in Saudi Arabia have the highest number of Indian nationals, with 2,084 of them confined on charges of financial fraud, burglary and bribery.A number of them have also been arrested for drinking and selling alcohol in the country. It is illegal to produce, import or consume alcohol in Saudi Arabia.In countries in south-east Asia – Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia – most of the 500 immured Indian nationals were charged with offences related to drug and human trafficking and immigration and visa violation.In Pakistan, according to a list handed over by the government to the India envoy in Islamabad, at least 546 Indian nationals, including nearly 500 fishermen, are in Pakistani jails.Fishermen in the southern parts of India have also entered troubled waters and landed in jails in alien soil, especially in Sri Lankan jails. Tamil Nadu prisoners were tracked in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei and Ethiopia too.In Australia and Canada, countries that see high migration from India, 115 prisoners are Indian nationals. Most of their offences relate to murder, sexual assault, money laundering and road accidents.Most European countries like Germany, Italy, Greece and France did not furnish details of Indian nationals in their prisons.The minister said since the enactment of the repatriation of Prisoners Act, 2003, 170 applications for repatriation had been received and 61 Indian prisoners had been repatriated from foreign prisons.So far, India has signed treaties with 30 countries, under which Indian prisoners have been brought back. Besides this, India has also ratified the Inter American Convention by virtue of which India can receive and send requests to member countries for release of prisoners.“I’m now at this weird place where what had been this subjective project is now objective in the world,” said Jonathan Franzen on Wednesday at an event held at Book Expo America (BEA) in New York. He was being interviewed by Laura Miller, the book critic for Salon, who had read his forthcoming novel Purity. But most of the audience, though BEA is attended mostly by book industry people, had not.
The novel will not be published until September, and though advance copies are circulating, the people who have completed its 500-plus pages are keeping the contents quiet. Yet, as is always the case with a new book by Franzen, the book has already generated considerable advance speculation in the literary press. The mere release of the American cover was much buzzed about: it shows the blurry image of a girl overlaid with royal blue lettering. One of the few facts disclosed about the book was that its protagonist was also reportedly named Purity – or Pip, for short.
Franzen told Miller he actually thinks of the book as having four protagonists. “Her name is on the cover,” Franzen said of Pip, but “I would find it a little creepy if I’d written an entire book about a young woman.” And therefore, he added, “I am at pains to stress that half the book is from a male point of view.”
He seemed, on some level – perhaps unconscious – to be responding to those who have written critically about his gender politics, and perhaps even to those who had sharp comments about the title, which he had his doubts about. “I don’t know why I chose to put that title on the book and I kept wishing I could come up with a better one, because there’s something vaguely icky about ‘purity’.” He went on: “Just the letters P-U-R, there’s something about them... It’s like, I consider it an act of courage to say the name of my novel is Purity.”
The book also departs, a bit, from the realistic mode of his last two novels, The Corrections and Freedom, insofar as it has rather more action than one came to expect from those other two, some kind of heightened narrative energy that borders on postmodernism. “There’s a murder,” Franzen said when asked about this, insisting he wasn’t spoiling the book by saying so because an excerpt will appear in the New Yorker next week. (There’s also a fairly elaborate conspiracy plot.)
To explain this slight change in strategy, he said: “The situation for the writer is that it gets harder to write novels, not easier, as time goes by.” The reason, in Franzen’s view, is that at least initially a writer’s subjects are what he called “the easy stuff”. But the longer one writes, the more one wants to drill down into harder subject matter. “A certain kind of really low-key realism isn’t going to generate enough energy,” he mused. “Maybe there was a wish to go for these stronger story formulations, more extreme situations to try to get the energy up to comfortably blow the lid off.”
Miller pointed out to Franzen that he has developed something of a reputation as a misanthrope. While she did not specify the precise remarks which might have led to that, experienced Franzen-watchers can tick off controversies easily: Franzen has, in recent months, raised the ire of the Audubon Society by writing against their bird conservation plans in the New Yorker. He also has a habit of complaining about the internet in print and at public appearances, which tends to set off a flurry of ripostes in opinion sections across the internet. So, Miller asked him, is Franzen misanthropic?
“No,” he said, sounding genuinely pained. “No, not at all. What makes you even say that?”
Franzen insisted that he actually quite liked the characters he created, for example, and even resorted to pointing out that he had family members whose company he enjoyed. He suspects, he said, that people are misreading his philosophical disagreements as a general dislike of people. “We live in a world of cant, of received opinion, and widely shared ideologies,” Franzen said. “And the writer who is not satisfied with those sometimes-simplistic ideologies is going to end up seeming in opposition to the vast majority of people who happen to hold those opinions.” He thinks the people who see him attack beliefs that many hold are thinking he’s attacking the people themselves. “Something is being elided there,” he said.
Perhaps he’s right. Franzen did seem to have a certain sense of humour about himself, and in person has a wry, awkward charm. When the floor was opened up for questions, the first petitioner identified herself as a “rising sophomore at the University of Connecticut”. Then she said she was doing a class project on The Corrections and the “depressed male in post-9/11 literature”. The audience began to laugh as she read out her question, which was: “How do you think the depressed male character’s identification and experience of his white masculinity relates to American society and culture in our day and age?”
Franzen asked her to repeat the question because the laughter was too loud to be heard, and the young woman said: “I’m basing my thesis on this.” He then very seriously replied, echoing her syntax: “White male masculinity is alive and well.” He cited publishing as a milieu that is still plagued by diversity problems. And, he added, “it takes |
. I have seen a team win in one turn because they got a “{$WORD}: UNLIMITED” clue and managed to guess all six remaining clues in one round. The other team only had one word left on the table, so naturally they were a bit surprised that they lost.
Now, pros and cons.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
Easy to learn. I mean, seriously, it’s just “Give a one word clue” or “given a one word clue, guess the correct matching words.” It’s not terribly complicated.
I mean, seriously, it’s just “Give a one word clue” or “given a one word clue, guess the correct matching words.” It’s not terribly complicated. Scales well. Gameplay doesn’t change that much between four and eight+ players, and it feels pretty solid at any level. That’s always nice. It’s also interesting because I wouldn’t say the game gets easier with more guessers — you’re just as likely to get talked into the right choice as out of the right choice, from my experience.
Gameplay doesn’t change that much between four and eight+ players, and it feels pretty solid at any level. That’s always nice. It’s also interesting because I wouldn’t say the game gets easier with more guessers — you’re just as likely to get talked into the right choice as out of the right choice, from my experience. Fun. I love word games. Personally, I’d rather be the Spymaster, but I like the challenge of giving clues more than guessing.
I love word games. Personally, I’d rather be the Spymaster, but I like the challenge of giving clues more than guessing. Compact. This is not a difficult game to throw in a bag and take with you somewhere, and honestly it’s not even that difficult of a game to make yourself, if you’re looking for a print-and-play version.
This is not a difficult game to throw in a bag and take with you somewhere, and honestly it’s not even that difficult of a game to make yourself, if you’re looking for a print-and-play version. Fast. This is not a time-consuming game, and you can often play a few rounds without an issue. It’s a nice game to play if you’ve got a bunch of people between games and you’re trying to think of the next game to play, or if you just want a break from headier games.
This is not a time-consuming game, and you can often play a few rounds without an issue. It’s a nice game to play if you’ve got a bunch of people between games and you’re trying to think of the next game to play, or if you just want a break from headier games. I like that the cards are double-sided. This makes a new game incredibly easy to start, as you can just flip the cards over and then have an entirely new board.
This makes a new game incredibly easy to start, as you can just flip the cards over and then have an entirely new board. High replay value. Since the boards change every time and the specific cards belonging to each team change every time, it’s very easy to play wildly different games. That being said, when shuffling occasionally flip cards over so that you’re adding a bit more random to your shuffle.
Mehs
The art isn’t particularly exciting. The box art isn’t like, moving in any particular way and the agent cards aren’t particularly impressive either. I mean, they’re well-made, but they’re not like, beautiful art, if that’s a fair critique.
The box art isn’t like, moving in any particular way and the agent cards aren’t particularly impressive either. I mean, they’re well-made, but they’re not like, beautiful art, if that’s a fair critique. You kind of need a ton of house rules, and they’re pretty inconsistent among game groups. For instance, the game is not a huge fan of using homophones / homonyms as clues (K?NIGHT: 3 for horse, sword, and sleep, or something), but allows you to house rule it as valid. That might not fly everywhere, so if you’re playing with a few different experienced groups you may have issues syncing up on what’s valid. When in doubt, ask the other Spymaster.
Cons
Some configurations are much more difficult for certain teams. That’s sort of the name of the game, but if the other team can do “water: 5” and you need to link together “BANANA”, “AIRPORT”, “CHEST”, “LEPRECHAUN” and whatever else, you might have some trouble. (Please comment if you can actually come up with a clue linking all four of those — I’d love to hear it.) It can feel a bit unbalanced in those cases. This also happens a lot more if you’re playing variants of the game (more on that below).
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I’m a huge fan of this game. Currently won’t turn down a game, and expect that not to change for a while. It’s fun, expandable, and my friends seem to like it (even most of the ones who normally hate word games). It’s also a good party game since you can sit a few people on one end of the table and some Spymasters on the other and just mix and match teams until everyone’s pretty satisfied with the game. Like I said, I think it’s a pretty solid game, and probably a great suggestion for anyone’s collection if they’re looking to get a fun party game.
I’ve always wanted to try some variants, like, have multiple players each take selfies once a day for 25 days and then use those as the clue words and see what happens, or use board game boxes as the clue words (saw that on reddit the other day). That being said, lately I’ve been combining it with Dixit‘s cards and getting some really interesting games going…Sir Jackie Stewart says he has no regrets about losing his record for the most world titles by a British driver to Lewis Hamilton - and believes the Mercedes driver could challenge Michael Schumacher’s and Juan Manuel Fangio’s respective records of seven and five championships in the future.
Lewis has earned everything and deserves every recognition for winning four world championships
“I think Lewis is a worthy winner this year, particularly the second part of the season,” said Stewart, whose tally of three world titles was matched by Hamilton in 2015. “He’s driven extremely well and totally deserved the championship.
“A lot of questions have been asked of me because Lewis has now surpassed my record, in the British sense, of holding three world championships. I held it for 44 years, which is a ridiculous amount of time.
“From my point of view I have no regrets whatsoever – records are made to be broken. It’s almost disappointing that no other British driver has come along during that period of 44 years to beat my record, therefore I congratulate Lewis completely for joining the likes of Alain Prost, Schumacher, Fangio and Sebastian Vettel [as four-time title winners].
“There’s no reason to assume Lewis won’t go even further and challenge Schumacher’s and Fangio’s records, and I wish him the very best of luck on that. He’s earned everything and deserves every recognition for winning four world championships."
Stewart added that he believes the Mercedes driver still has more potential to unleash. “There’s no doubt he’s a better driver than when he first won his first world championship,” said the Scot.
“You mature, you learn – you never stop learning. If he races for many more years, he’ll become an even better driver. I don’t think he’s reached his true potential.
“I decided to retire at a very early age – I was 34. There comes a time when retirement is a good thing to do. No doubt he will chose that time correctly also. [But] at 32 years of age, you’re just maturing.”
Stewart also hailed Hamilton’s decision to switch to Mercedes in 2013, saying knowing when to switch teams is an often overlooked hallmark of greatness.
“Lewis has of course been much assisted by driving for two of the best teams in the world, McLaren and Mercedes-Benz. You need to be with those top teams to achieve [titles], you can’t do it just as a driver.
“He’s made the right decisions of being with the right people. Fangio won five world championships with Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes and so on. He drove a variety of different cars and teams because when he saw who was going to be the best team, he went there.
“That’s part of the reason for success - that you make the right decisions. You’ve got to have the team behind you to achieve. You need reliable engineering of the highest level.”
Between them Hamilton (2008, 2014-2015, 2017) and Stewart (1969, 1971, 1973) account for seven of the 17 world titles won by British drivers. The others were won by Mike Hawthorn (1958), Graham Hill (1962, 1968), Jim Clark (1963, 1965), John Surtees (1964), James Hunt (1976) Nigel Mansell (1992), Damon Hill (1996) and Jenson Button (2009).Pokemon Go Plus is sold out in stores and online. The following stores have sold the $34.99 Pokemon Go Plus on launch day. GameStop was first to offer the Pokemon Go Plus on Friday, September 16.
New: Enter to Win a Free Pokemon Go Plus at I4U News.
Initially the Bluetooth wearable was only available in GameStop retail locations. Later in the day, GameStop began to offer the Go Plus online. Amazon and Walmart have also offered the Pokemon Go Plus for a short period on Friday.
Where to Buy Pokemon Go Plus Online
Amazon.com
GameStop.com
Walmart.com
Nintendo has manufactured a huge number of Pokemon Go Plus. If you followed our live coverage of the Pokemon Go Plus launch, you have been able to buy one. If you did not shop for a Pokemon Go Plus on Friday, you have missed it. In stock trackers have not spotted Go Plus inventory since Friday.
You can stop looking for a Pokemon Go Plus now. Nintendo has announced via its UK online store that the Pokemon Go Plus will not be in stock until late October. By late October, Nintendo means October 31. The Nintendo online store is taking orders for Pokemon Go Plus now. Customers will receive the item in six weeks. US retailers are not even taking orders for Pokemon Go Plus at all.
The Go Plus was seen in stock last briefly online at walmart.com on September 19.
As predicted, Nintendo will release another wave of Pokemon Go in time for Black Friday 2016 and the Holiday shopping season. It will be advisable to buy the Pokemon Go Plus end of October. It will sell out again. Nintendo is maybe able to release a third wave of Pokemon Go inventory in late November, but don't take your chances.
The Pokemon Go Plus device turned out more useful than believed. When connected, the Pokemon Go app continues to track distance even when the smartphone is in locked mode. This saves considerable battery life. Pokemon Go Plus uses flashing colors and vibrations to notify you about PokeStops and encounters of wild Pokemon.
Pokemon Go Plus works with the latest Pokemon Go app updates 0.37.1 (Android) and 1.7.1 (iOS). Raiding PokeStop is extremely convenient with the Go Plus. After getting notified of the presence of a PokeStop, you just press the button and you collect all items. This works also great for lucky trainers that work or live next to a PokeStop. They can just every 5 minutes.
The Pokemon Go Plus wristband is also notifying you when there is a wild Pokemon. You can try to catch it by pushing the button to throw a ball. This is though less of a powerful feature. There is no guarantee that you catch the Pokemon. On top of that you do not know which Pokemon it is. You need to pull out your smartphone to check. If it is a rare Pokemon, you then can decide to use a more powerful ball.
If you catch a Pokemon with the Pokemon Go Plus you receive XP, stardust and candy as you would catch with the app.
The Pokemon Go Plus is compatible with iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, SE, 6, 6s, 6 Plus, 6s Plus, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices with iOS 8 or later installed.
The Pokemon Go accessory is compatible with Android devices that have 2GB RAM or more with Android Ver. 4.4–6.0 installed. Bluetooth Smart (Bluetooth Ver. 4.0 or higher) is required to use Pokemon Go Plus on Android.
More Pokemon Go News. Read also the latest about the Pokemon Go in-app Pokemon Tracker. Niantic's CEO John Hanke talks about the future of Pokemon Go in a new podcast.CORSIER-SUR-VEVEY (May 11) -- United World Wrestling has announced the addition of a 2016 World Championship for non-Olympic weight categories in women's wrestling, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling.The event, scheduled for December 10-11 in Budapest, will be hosted by the Hungarian Wrestling Federation.World championships in all 24 style and weight categories are held in non-Olympic years. The addition of an Olympic year world championship for weight classes not included at the Olympic Games will give participants of that weight an end-of-the-year title opportunity."We are pleased that the Hungarian Wrestling Federation has taken on the responsibility of this important championship," said United World Wrestling president Nenad Lalovic. "This tournament will give more wrestlers the chance to seek a world title, even in an Olympic year. Our athletes work hard year round for their sport and we are pleased to give them an opportunity for more medals."The world championships will be competed in women's wrestling (55kg, 60kg), freestyle (61kg, 70kg) and Greco-Roman (70kg, 80kg).🔊 Listen to Article
By Heather Callaghan, Editor
Psilocybin appears to “reset” brain activity of depressed patients – stunning results
To be sure, of all the recent human trials to come out showing the promises of psilocybin – the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms – it’s only the scientists who are surprised by the stunning brain changes from psychedelics. (Then again, behold the results for yourself.)
That’s what happened when Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College London and his colleagues announced the good news today with their newly published study in Scientific Reports. They ran 19 depressed and treatment-resistant volunteers through a magic mushroom trial to look at the results in their brains. Previously, Carhart-Harris and his team ran 12 people through a similar trial and five months later, 5 of them were still free of depression. That report detailed the spiritual benefits of psilocybin for depression.
Today’s report however details actual brain changes seen on MRI scans. Science has shown great interest in overactive areas of depressed brains such as the amygdala – the almond shaped part of the brain that houses fear, stress and other emotions. It is implicated in flight-or-flight, and many psychiatrists and energy medicine healers try to extra hard to calm the amygdala’s stress response in trauma victims. Scans have shown increased blood to the amygdala and related areas of the brain.
Amazingly, after the participants were given two doses of psilocybin (10 mg and 25 mg), with the second dose a week after the first – their brains showed pronounced, decreased blood flow to the areas of the brain implicated in depression. Researchers also found increased stability on parts of the brain related to depression – and these effects lasted up to five weeks.
The team described the immediate results of patients’ symptoms disappearing after the initial trip as an “afterglow” and a “disintegration” – with the compound also reintegrating brain networks afterward. The afterglow included marked improvements in mood and stress relief. Patients used a lot of computer metaphors to describe how their brains felt afterward – defragged, rebooted, and reset.
Dr Carhart-Harris explained:
Through collecting these imaging data we have been able to provide a window into the after effects of psilocybin treatment in the brains of patients with chronic depression. Based on what we know from various brain imaging studies with psychedelics, as well as taking heed of what people say about their experiences, it may be that psychedelics do indeed ‘reset’ the brain networks associated with depression, effectively enabling them to be lifted from the depressed state.
He told New Science, “We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments -Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment.”
“This is further evidence that psilocybin may turn out to be effective for the most stubborn depression,” says Paul Morrison, of King’s College London. “Developments in this area are a priority in psychiatry. Some people can go through years of suffering, which resist all standard therapies.”
The researchers warn not to self-medicate as the experiment was set in the context of science with their own high-powered extracts. They would like to repeat these results but test them against control groups and current antidepressant treatments, which they plan to do in future.
Is this good news? Sound off below and don’t forget to share!
Photo: afgooey74, Flickr
DISCLAIMER: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Heather Callaghan is a Health Mentor, writer, speaker and food freedom activist. She is the Editor and co-founder of NaturalBlaze as well as a certified Self-Referencing IITM Practitioner.
Get a nifty FREE eBook – Like at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.Executives of South Korea’s Lotte Group, after a meeting Sunday, asked Seoul for “active help.”
The retail giant’s business has been under pressure in China this year as it first considered and then approved a swap of parcels with the South Korean Ministry of Defense. The Ministry plans to use the acquired land, a golf course south of Seoul, for the first battery of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, which is designed to knock down missiles.
Beijing, enraged at the defiance of “a small country,” has gone to great lengths to prevent the installation of the system.
And the Trump administration should go to great lengths to protect the American homeland. The security of the U.S. is at stake, so Washington should support its South Korean ally by imposing stiff sanctions on China.
The Pentagon wants to put THAAD, as the Lockheed Martin-built system is called, in South Korea to intercept North Korean missiles.
China has supplied crucial equipment and technologies to Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program. For instance, an enterprise associated with the People’s Liberation Army transferred transporter-erector-launchers for the North’s KN-08, making that intercontinental missile particularly dangerous to the U.S. Moreover, there are indications that the missiles Pyongyang tested August 24 and February 12 are variants of China’s submarine-launched JL-1 ballistic missile.
In addition to military technology and equipment, China has, over the course of decades, provided the North Korean regime with lifelines of diplomatic and economic support. Therefore, Beijing has armed North Korea and is now trying to prevent nations from defending themselves from the resulting threat.
To prevent deployment of THAAD in South Korea, Beijing has threatening to cut diplomatic relations with Seoul. Furthermore, it is trying to crush the South’s economy, barring its K-pop groups from performing in China, ending charter flights to the South, and banning the import of South Korean cosmetics. Daily Chinese state media tirades target Seoul.
And China’s officials have gone after Lotte, the South’s fifth largest chaebol.
Lotte has been targeted two ways. Of particular concern to the retail company is Beijing’s shutting down tour groups to South Korea. Friday, the Korea Tourism Organization charged that the China National Tourism Administration issued oral instructions to tour operators to stop the sale of packages to South Korea starting March 15.
Moreover, Lotte’s operations in China have been the subject of unrelenting attacks. The official Xinhua News Agency said the group was “acting as the paws of a tiger.” “Showing Lotte the door will be an effective warning to all the other foreign forces that jeopardize China’s national interests,” the Global Times stated in an editorial.
Lotte, in recent months, has had more than its share of troubles in China, where it operates 80 supermarkets and more than 70 other outlets and employs about 20,000.
The Chinese government started softly with minor harassment, like audits.
Now China has turned up the heat. Lotte, for instance, has been hit with fines across the country, including Beijing.
Moreover, Chinese authorities have closed four Lotte Mart locations in the city of Dandong for a month for fire safety violations. After another fire inspection, authorities stopped construction on a Lotte project in Shenyang.
Lotte was recently removed from a JD.com platform, and Lotte’s Chinese site hit was hit by hackers last week. Chinese companies in the last few days said they would boycott the chaebol.
And there have been, with the apparent blessing of authorities, protests against Lotte in several cities. “This is good old anti-foreign violence nineteenth-century style,” Arthur Waldron, the noted University of Pennsylvania historian, wrote to me and others on Saturday.
Beijing has, over the course of months, upped the pressure against Lotte and other South Korean businesses, but it is not clear how much further it is willing to go. As a practical matter, officials are unlikely to block components Chinese manufacturers need. “Economists say the THAAD-related backlash is not expected to significantly harm exports to China in the short term as a bulk of the shipments are intermediate goods, which China uses to manufacture finished products and ships to other countries,” writes the South China Morning Post in connection with the Lotte dispute.
In fact, South Korea’s exports to China, driven by sales of semiconductors and display panels, hit a six-year high last month.
Nonetheless, China’s attempts to derail the deployment of THAAD undermine American security in a critical way. The struggle with Beijing over the missile-defense system has an historical parallel: Ronald Reagan’s contest with the Soviets over the deployment in Germany of the Pershing II cruise missile.
And this means the United States has a vital interest in supporting its South Korean ally. The one tactic Washington can employ is the one China used against Japan in 2012 and is using against South Korea now: economic coercion. The way to defend America is to support South Korea. The way to support South Korea is to sanction China.
Beijing thinks it can bully little economies. Chinese officials should remember that their economy is far smaller than America’s. Last year, China’s gross domestic product, as reported by the official National Bureau of Statistics, was $10.83 trillion. America’s, according to the first estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, was $18.86 trillion. In reality, the disparity is almost certainly larger due to Beijing’s obvious overreporting.
If China can punish “a small country,” so can the United States.
Follow me on Twitter @GordonGChang and on Forbes. And find much more here.Russian Revolution? No Thanks.
MOSCOW — On Feb. 21, the Libyan air force swooped in on protesters in Tripoli, opening fire on a crowd that had joined the uprising against Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi. That same day, Boris Yakemenko, a high-ranking ideologist for the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, decided it was a good moment to offer his own take on events.
"Libyan leader Col. M. Qaddafi has shown the whole world how to treat provocateurs who aim for revolution, destabilization, and civil war," Yakemenko wrote in an essay titled "The Right Path," posted on his blog and on Nashi’s official website.
"He started to destroy them. He used rockets and everything he has," Yakemenko wrote. "This is the most accurate path to ending American ‘revolutionary’ technologies."
His words would seem like the ravings of a madman — if they did not ring so close to statements made by Russia’s leadership since the unrest riling the Middle East broke out in January. Intrinsically frightened by revolution and by recent polls showing widespread agitation and mistrust of the government, the Kremlin is striking pre-emptively: hinting that the revolutions are Western-backed overthrows of troublesome regimes and issuing paranoid statements designed to shift the blame for Russia’s ills away from itself.
Yakemenko is no outsider. He’s one of the top officials in Nashi, the brother of its leader, and a member of the Public Chamber, a government oversight committee made up of presidential appointees. Nashi, the group he represents, is an explicitly counterrevolutionary body, formed by the Kremlin in 2005 in the wake of the so-called color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. In the West, those uprisings were viewed as two post-Soviet countries throwing off the remaining shackles of Russian influence. Inside the Kremlin, the color revolutions were seen as victories for Western spy agencies bent on bringing Russia to its knees.
"[At the time,] President Putin and other officials really used the rhetoric of ‘the next day it’ll happen in Moscow,’" said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Nashi, which counts tens of thousands of Putin-loving youths as members, was designed to pre-empt that day.
But Nashi’s representative wasn’t the only one egging on autocratic dictators in the Arab world. As events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya unfolded, Russia’s leaders remained uncomfortably quiet before responding with the same level of high-alert paranoia. Igor Sechin, a secretive deputy prime minister and one of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants, used a rare interview to blame the unrest entirely on Google, hinting at the role of Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who anonymously ran a Facebook page that gathered thousands of supporters for Egypt’s revolution. "We need to more closely examine what has happened in Egypt," he told the Wall Street Journal. "See, well, what senior managers of Google have been doing in Egypt, what kind of manipulations of the energy of the people took place there."
Hours after the interview was published on Feb. 22, President Dmitry Medvedev made his first statements on the unrest, warning that "fanatics" were attempting to come to power in the Arab world. "This will mean fires for decades and the spread of extremism," he warned.
Most striking, however, was Medvedev’s remark that an unidentified "they" were preparing similar unrest at home.
"They have prepared such a scenario for us before, and now more than ever they will try and realize it," Medvedev said, without making any attempt to elaborate on who "they" might be. "In any case, this scenario won’t succeed."
It’s an age-old tactic of stirring anti-Western paranoia, seeking to blame Russia’s own troubles on "some evil source over there orchestrating evil," said Lipman. The site of Medvedev’s speech was significant: He spoke at a meeting of his anti-terrorist committee in Vladikavkaz, a city in Russia’s southern republic of North Ossetia that is seen as the gateway to the restive Caucasus. He had flown there four days after suspected Islamist extremists gunned down three tourists from Moscow on their way to a ski resort on nearby Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak. It was the latest terrifying twist in a years-long insurgency that has reached new heights in recent months, with rebels carrying out devastating suicide attacks in Moscow twice in the past year. (On Tuesday, March 1, the deputy head of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, accused Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, seen here as a Western pawn, of organizing the January attack on Domodedovo airport that left 37 people dead — an attack that Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov has already taken responsibility for.)
If "they" are stirring up trouble in Egypt and Libya, it’s convenient for Moscow to argue that "they" might also be at the root of Russia’s problems in the Caucasus and elsewhere.
But Russians don’t seem to be buying the excuse. A creeping dissatisfaction appears to be setting in, not merely based on Moscow’s inability to stop terrorist attacks, but also on the government’s ineffective actions at pulling the country out of the global financial crisis. Unemployment and inflation remain high, while corruption has become a way of life. A Levada Center poll carried out on the day of President Hosni Mubarak’s fall in Egypt found that 34 percent of Russians thought the mass protests rocking Cairo could happen in Russia too. Another poll conducted in late February by the Public Opinion Foundation, found that 49 percent of Russians were so dissatisfied that they were ready to go out and protest; never before had the percentage been this high. A third polling agency, VCIOM, found that both Medvedev’s and Putin’s approval ratings have fallen below 50 percent — a rare low.
Russia’s struggling opposition is hoping to seize on these numbers. "In Russia, there is a high level of social discontent, a political monopoly, and corruption — it’s an ideal atmosphere for social protest," said Ilya Yashin, a 27-year-old leader of Solidarity, an umbrella group that unites Russia’s democratic opposition. "That’s the combination that we saw in Egypt, and a year ago no one expected anything like what we saw to happen there."
Yet Yashin’s group doesn’t appear to have the passionate, albeit covert, following of opposition movements in the Arab world. The monthly protests it organizes, once banned but now permitted under the leadership of Moscow’s new mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, rarely garner more than 1,000 people. Around 500 showed up for its latest gathering in central Moscow on Feb. 12 — a low turnout Yashin blamed on the weather, which was a frigid -13 degrees Fahrenheit. "If you had such a temperature in Arab capitals, you wouldn’t have seen so many people turn out there either," he said.
Russia’s more radical groups tend to garner more support. The far-right protests held by some of Russia’s most racist groups regularly gather at least 5,000. On the left, Russia’s pensioners, often its most politically active citizens, stuff Communist Party rallies to the brim.
It’s barely the stuff of revolution — but nonetheless, Russia’s leaders are growing uneasy. In a country whose sprawling bureaucracy remains staffed with a batch of Soviet-era apparatchiks, reverting to paranoid outbursts is almost normal. "A regime like this, a soft authoritarian regime, has an inherent precariousness about it," said Lipman.
As the international community binds together in the face of Qaddafi’s growing ruthlessness, Medvedev has suddenly changed tack, issuing a statement on Feb. 25 condemning the use of force against civilians and warning that the Libyan leadership could face war crimes charges if it refused to rein itself in. On March 1, an unnamed Kremlin source told the Interfax news agency that Qaddafi was now considered a "political corpse." This week, Russia, with uncharacteristic quiet and ease, joined in international efforts to impose U.N. sanctions on Libya, even though it stands to lose a reported $4 billion in arms contracts as a result.
Yakemenko, the Nashi ideologue, didn’t buy the about-face.
"President Medvedev said what happened in the Arab world will not happen in Russia. That means he understands that what is happening in the Middle East is a process that is orchestrated from the outside," Yakemenko told me on March 1.
"There are provocateurs that are enemies of the country — and not just in Libya," he said. "The Americans have set themselves the task of changing control of these regions, and they will do anything to achieve it. Yes, there are masses of unhappy people, but they are being used." As Russia’s leaders pursue the dual course of deflecting attention from problems at home while boosting the belief that outsiders are to blame for their own country’s problems, they will continue to need someone like Yakemenko on their side.
As for Yashin, he says he simply needs spring: "As the weather warms up, people will come out more and more." But winter in Russia can last a long time: Egypt’s Mubarak led the country for nearly 30 years; Qaddafi has been in charge for almost 42. Putin, Russia’s paramount leader, has been at the helm as president or prime minister for just over a decade. "Yes," said Yashin, "but if we speak only about the level of corruption, compared to Putin, Mubarak was an honest man."Amazon Japan is listing Blu-ray Disc and DVD original video anime (OVA) releases of Seitokai Yakuindomo*, the second Seitokai Yakuindomo anime. Both the Blu-ray Disc and DVD versions will ship with a drama CD and special booklet on October 22.
Amazon Japan is also listing a Blu-ray Disc box set for the first season of Seitokai Yakuindomo. The set will bundle a new drama CD, booklet, and bonus disc with footage from a fan event held in Tokyo in June. The set is slated to ship on December 24 for 31,849 yen (US$306).
The original story begins with Ōsai Academy, a former all-girls private high school which has recently been integrated for both genders. The student body is split between 524 girls and 28 boys. Takatoshi Tsuda is pushed into becoming the vice-president of the student council, where he is the lone male member surrounded by girls.
The slice-of-life comedy story based on Tozen Ujiie's manga already inspired a television anime series, an original video anime project, and several previous anime DVDs bundled with the manga. Crunchyroll streamed the anime's second season as it aired in Japan earlier this year.
[Via Ota-Suke]American corporations would benefit from single-payer health care, so why do so few support implementing Medicare for all? In a recent piece for The Nation, Helaine Olen tries to find an answer.
What’s going on? You can thank a toxic stew of ideological blindness, fear of controversy, and rampant cost shifting for the silence. The size and power of the industry is a factor too. Healthcare “is the military industrial complex of the 21st century,” says Richard Master, the chief executive officer of MCS Industries, a supplier of picture frames based in Pennsylvania, and the rare [CEO] to publicly support single-payer.
The United States spends more than $3.3 trillion on health care annually. Employer-based insurance covers about half the non-elderly population. The cost is not unsubstantial. Medicare spends less than 2 percent of its budget on administration vs. 18 percent for private insurers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average premium for a family was $18,142 in 2016. The typical employer picked up about two-thirds of that total. The numbers are adding up, and the politically vaunted small-business sector is yowling. The National Federation of Independent Business’s 2016 Problems and Priorities survey found more than half of those they polled claimed the cost of health insurance was “a critical issue,” they faced.
Healthcare costs also eat away at American business competitiveness. Prior to the Great Recession, General Motors claimed that providing health-care coverage adds another $1,500 onto the sticker price of every new model sold. Starbucks reported around the same time it spent more on health care than on coffee beans. The Affordable Care Act has slowed the overall pace of health-care spending, which nonetheless still exceeds the rate of inflation.
Read more.NASA needs to keep its astronaut training pipeline intact, and flying jets, concludes an expert panel report.
The National Research Council's "Preparing for the High Frontier⎯the Role and Training of NASA Astronauts in the Post-Space Shuttle Era," report calls for the space agency to stabilize the ranks of astronauts. Their numbers are down from about 150 in the mid-1990's to about 60 individuals now, with a number of space shuttle pilots retiring along with their vehicle just this year. NASA expects to see that number stabilize at or below that number, says the report, and hire 15 more astronauts over the next five years
"Since 2009, there has been considerable debate and disagreement between Congress and the White House about the future direction of the U.S. human spaceflight program. While there is currently no clear plan to send U.S. astronauts beyond low Earth orbit in the foreseeable future, it remains a possibility, particularly in light of NASA's recent announcement of the agency's intention to develop a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle for follow-on exploration of space," says the report.
For that reason, and because of uncertainties tied to staffing the International Space Station,the space agency's 25% margin for extra astronauts (which bumps minimum needed astronauts to a high of 61 in 2014) should be raised, says the study, chaired by former NASA officials Frederick Gregory of Lohfield Consulting and Joseph Rothenberg of SSC.
Space station training takes three years instead of one for a shuttle mission, adding to astronaut needs caused by retirements. Health concerns such as bone loss, shoulder injuries from spacesuits and (newly-documented) vision-damaging swelling of the eye that afflicted 7 of 15 long-duration station crew members, also add to worries over the astronaut corps.
Finally, the report calls for astronauts to keep training in T-38 jets, a hallmark of the program that hearkens back to its "Right Stuff" origins five decades ago:NSW Labor MP Penny Sharpe has slammed the furore over the same-sex parenting documentary Gayby Baby as "nasty" and "ill-informed" while delivering an emotional plea for gay and lesbian families to be given equal respect.
In a speech in the NSW Parliament on Wednesday night, Ms Sharpe, a lesbian parent of three, reacted to the decision of the NSW government to ban the documentary from screening in schools hours after a front page story in News Corp's The Daily Telegraph.
"As politics and my personal life collided today what became clear was that in the eyes of some I am not normal and my children are not normal," Ms Sharpe told Parliament.
"In the eyes of some, the thousands of gay men, lesbian, transgender and intersex people and our families in our communities are not normal."Gaye Levy, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
When I first started Backdoor Survival, my focus was on gathering the basics: food, water shelter and fire. Or course, along the way I have learned that there is so much more that is essential to long term survival. Things that come to mind are clean air, clothing, first aid, self-defense, signaling and contact with others.
But today I want to keep things simple |
is the killer. In January of 2006 a woman named Nelita Ramos was kidnapped and held at gun point by a trucker. She begged for her life and was let go. Police believe she was meant to be the next victim of the Daytona Beach Killer. Since the murders the FBI has connected the killer to 24 other killings on the highways of Florida.
The New Bedford Killer Body Count: 11 In the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts lurks a serial killer who took the lives of 11 victims during the late 1980’s. The New Bedford Killer hunted prostitutes and drug dealers. He raped then stabbed his victims to death. Three suspects were questioned but never arrested. The killer remains free today.For the first time in 46 years, Canadians can legally buy a made-in-Scotland haggis.
The imported haggis, unveiled this week complete with bilingual labels, was specially crafted for the Canadian market by the meat wholesaler Macsween of Edinburgh. Scotland even sent over its Economy Secretary, Keith Brown, to talk up haggis on a Canadian trade mission.
“As a Government, we … will continue to support Scottish companies in unlocking the significant opportunities to be found in this fast-growing market,” Brown said in an official statement issued from Toronto.
There’s just one problem. Due to a controversial Canadian import law, the haggises all had to be crafted without one of their most signature ingredients: sheep offal, or lung.
Haggis, the national dish of Scotland, typically consists of oatmeal, spices and various animal byproducts wrapped in a lamb’s stomach. Under a Canadian law reportedly first passed in 1971, however, traditional haggis is not legally considered food because it has been “adulterated” by animal lungs.
While Canadians are allowed to eat most parts of a sheep, lungs remain in a federally verboten category that includes genitals, udders, spleens and “black gut.”
The lung ban is mirrored in the United States, where authorities have similarly mandated since 1971 that “livestock lungs shall not be saved for use as human food.”
Macsween of Edinburgh was forced to circumvent this regulation by making their Canadian haggis with sheep heart, rather than sheep lung. The company also needed to have their facilities approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
“It’s as close as we can get to the original recipe using different meats, because the oats and spice mix are the same,” Macsween commercial director David Rae told U.K. media this week.
The North American lung bans have been a persistent irritant in the United Kingdom, where truckloads of offal are eaten every year without incident.
If there was a reason behind the 1971 lung bans, they appear to have been lost to history.
No mention of offal exists in Canadian parliamentary records at the time of the ban. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration reportedly banned the organs without so much as assessing their safety. Given the tiny U.S. market for edible lungs at the time, it was likely deemed to be not worth the trouble.
A 2014 article in Scotland’s Daily Record claimed the bans were motivated by trumped-up fears over “scrapie,” a degenerative illness that is a close cousin of mad cow disease.
“There is no scientific evidence to indicate that scrapie poses a risk to human health or indeed evidence that it has ever passed into our food chain,” claimed the Daily Record.
As a result, purists maintain that superstition alone is causing North Americans to be sold fraudulent, lung-free haggis.
A 2014 Telegraph editorial held that “haggis without lung is no haggis at all.” In late 2015, a Conservative politician complained to the U.K. House of Commons that their haggis producers were being forced to sell their product to the United States with “bits missing.”
Naturally, North America’s generation-long offal ban has spawned a vibrant black market for haggis.
Retailers in Scottish tourist areas report regularly encountering Americans who vow to smuggle their haggis purchases back home. In 2016, the food blog Food52 spoke to Lou, a New York haggis smuggler who hinted at collusion with U.S. Homeland Security.
As a guard handed Lou her passport he said “enjoy your sausage.” She reported “I realized later that he must have been Irish or Scots-American.”
The typical culinary criticism of lung-less haggis is that it’s too heavy and sausage-like, and lacks a nutty flavour.
Scottish columnist Alex Massie has been one of the most vocal supporters of “Free the Haggis,” a pressure movement urging the United States to drop their lung ban. In 2015, Massie viciously decried the efforts of companies like Macsween to develop lung-free haggis for export.
“Mammon is a harsh mistress, right enough, but there are some acts of national abasement in the pursuit of exports that are too humiliating to be worth the lucre. This is one of them,” he wrote.
One of the more outlandish denouncements, however, belongs to the House of Lords, where Scotland’s Lord McColl of Dulwich proposed that legal haggis could help fat Americans lose some weight.
“The United States Government is depriving 24 million American Scots of this wholesome food, which satisfies hunger very much more than the junk food the Americans consume,” the former surgeon said in January, 2015.
Pride aside, Scottish haggis makers have good reason to try and get their product across the Atlantic. The North American Scottish diaspora dwarfs the population of modern Scotland, and even niche demand could dramatically expand haggis production.
“There are some communities where the population is bigger than Scotland and to get haggis into them could make us millionaires, it could be our saviour,” Scottish butcher Lindsay Grieve told Britain’s ITV in 2015.
U.K. Environment Secretary Owen Paterson shouldered the hopes and dreams of Scottish butchers when, in 2015, he travelled to the United States promising to overturn the haggis ban.
The Americans would end up slackening import restrictions on Scottish lamb, but the lung ban remains. Similarly, in 2015 Canada opened the door to lung-free imports like the Macsween haggis when it rescinded a ban on British meat first imposed at the height of the mad cow disease crisis.
Although lungs from Canadian sheep cannot be eaten, their sale and transfer is legal, where they’re typically sold as pet food.
Thus, any enterprising haggis dealer can conceivably obtain a shipment on the sly and incorporate it into an illicit haggis.
One Canadian haggis vendor contacted by the National Post did not want his name used, but reported that he indeed had a contact for “authentic” haggis made with offal.
However, the vendor said he is never quite sure if the finished product includes sheep lungs or some other mix of sheep and cow organs — which he noted is probably as authentic as it gets. “Haggis was originally supposed to be made out of whatever you had left from the slaughterhouse floor,” he said.
Todd Panchuk is the owner of Edmonton’s Old Country Meat and Deli, a butcher that sells upwards of 5,000 pounds of haggis each year.
His haggises don’t contain lungs, but he says it’s purely a culinary decision and that much of the traditional obsession over lungs can be chalked up to “mythology.”
“Lung is terrible; there’s no way to make it good,” he said. “You can make a nice-tasting, popular haggis without putting absolutely all the organs that you can think of in there.”
• Twitter: TristinHopper | Email: thopper@nationalpost.comThe Sacramento Kings made a bit of history on Thursday, officially calling up center Sim Bhullar from their D-League affiliate, the Reno Bighorns, and signing him to a 10-day contract on Thursday. The 7-foot-5, 360-pound Bhullar is the first player of Indian descent to appear on an NBA team's regular-season roster.
[DraftKings: FREE entry to huge cash Fantasy Basketball Contest with first deposit]
Bhullar's decision to turn pro last spring after two years at New Mexico State — a stint that saw the Aggies make consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, with Bhullar earning recognition as the Most Valuable Player in the 2014 Western Athletic Conference Tournament for his work patrolling the paint — shocked many observers who saw the massive center's raw skill-set and lacking conditioning as glaring problems that would prevent him from being able to make an immediate impact at the NBA level. While such critiques overlooked the fact that players of Bhullar's dimensions often have shorter careers and more limited windows for pro earning potential than their smaller peers, making it entirely reasonable that he'd make the jump even without being fully ready for the NBA game, the underpinnings of the argument were accurate, and Bhullar was not selected in the 2014 NBA draft.
Scroll to continue with content Ad
He did, however, catch on with the Kings' Las Vegas Summer League team. Despite playing only a minor role — just 10 total minutes in four games — on the team that won the Vegas title, Bhullar's unique size and background made him an attractive enough commodity to Mumbai-born Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé for Sacramento to sign the center to a training-camp contract back in August.
[Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
Story continues
"I've long believed that India is the next great frontier for the NBA, and adding a talented player like Sim only underscores the exponential growth basketball has experienced in that nation," Ranadivé said in a press release announcing Bhullar's signing. "While Sim is the first player of Indian descent to sign with an NBA franchise, he represents one of many that will emerge from that region as the game continues to garner more attention and generate ever-increasing passion among a new generation of Indian fans."
The emergence took some time, though, as the Kings waived Bhullar 10 days before the start of the season and sent him down to Reno for some of the conditioning and skill-development work many felt he needed coming out of college. The hulking Toronto native seemed an odd stylistic fit with a Reno club that hired David Arseneault Jr., a former assistant on run-and-gun Division III squad Grinnell College, to bring a fast-paced system to the Kings' D-League squad. But Bhullar has, somewhat surprisingly, flourished in the uptempo style, averaging 10.3 points, 8.8 rebounds and 3.9 blocks in 25.8 minutes per game in Reno:
Bhullar leads the D-League in field-goal percentage (72.7 percent) and block percentage, rejecting 9.5 percent of opponents' field-goal attempts during his time on the floor. Back in February, he posted the first triple-double of his professional career, scoring 26 points, snagging 17 rebounds and blocking 11 shots in a matchup with the L.A. D-Fenders, the Los Angeles Lakers' D-League affiliate.
The Bighorns kept Bhullar's minutes down and gave him multiple rest days in the early going. As the season has gone on, though, Bhullar has reportedly dropped more than 30 pounds, helping him to seem more comfortable staying out on the court for longer stretches, averaging 30.4 minutes per game in March, including five contests in which he logged at least 37 minutes.
If a trimmed-down version of Bhullar can get up and down at the NBA level, his sheer size and presence as a paint-clogging rim protector could make him an intriguing piece for new Kings head coach George Karl to play with.
"He adds a very interesting dimension to the game," Karl told ESPN.com's Marc Stein, who first reported Bhullar was likely to get the call-up. "And our game is becoming an international game and India is becoming one of the greatest, largest, biggest democracies in the world and I think it's a good story and hopefully we'll find some minutes for him."
Reports earlier this week suggested that Karl and the Kings were considering shutting down All-Star center DeMarcus Cousins as Sacramento plays out the string of yet another lottery-bound season. While Cousins did play against the Houston Rockets on Wednesday night, putting up a remarkable 24-point, 21-rebound, 10-assist, six-block, three-steal triple-double but coming up short thanks to James Harden's career-high 51-point explosion, giving him a bit of a breather down the stretch could give Karl a chance to take a look at Bhullar first-hand, and would give Bhullar the chance to take the next step in his historic journey — from first player of Indian descent to sign a contract, to first player of Indian descent to appear on a regular-season roster, to first player of Indian descent to actually appear in an NBA game.
If and when Bhullar does check in off the Kings' bench, it will represent a watershed moment that "has been a long, long time coming," as Akshay Manwani wrote for NBA India:
The Germans first had Detlef Schrempf and then Dirk Nowitzki. The Australians sent big-man Luc Longley to play alongside [Michael] Jordan and Scottie Pippen in the 1990s while the Croatians had Drazen Petrovic and Toni Kukoc. Arvydas Sabonis came to play from Lithuania but before him there was Sarunas Marciulionis. The French had Tony Parker. The Argentinians had Manu Ginobili. The Chinese, our neighbours, and rivals on several fronts, had Yao Ming, whose selection in the 2002 NBA Draft caused an overnight surge in the following of the game in China.
With the increasing presence of players from across the globe in the NBA and better television coverage of the league in India, hoops fans were waiting for someone from amongst our own to cheer for. As the NBA invested in the game in India, building at the grassroots level, educating coaches, holding clinics for children and the youth, we knew it was only a matter of time before the ‘chosen one’ came along. But patience is a rare virtue in today’s day and age and so we asked anybody who visited — David Stern, Chris Bosh, Bruce Bowen — when, oh when would an Indian player make his NBA debut? Some said ‘three years’, some said ‘five’. Some said ‘soon’, while others simply asked us to, well, ‘be patient’.
In the meantime, we wore LeBron James inspired headbands, imitated Kobe Bryant’s swagger, cheered for the Chicago Bulls, the San Antonio Spurs, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Boston Celtics, but ultimately yearned and awaited for the coming of that one prodigal son into the league, whom we could raucously applaud for being our own.
The time for such applause is almost at hand. Seems like a slightly bigger deal than your average 10-day contract in the last two weeks of a season, huh?
- - - - - - -
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.Ontario's Liberal government will try to raise money for transit and infrastructure by selling off a large chunk of Hydro One and opening up the way beer is sold in the province.
The government will also bring in a new beer tax.
Announced Thursday, the moves stem from a report commissioned by the province aimed at squeezing more revenue from government assets, such as the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) and Hydro One, the province's electrical transmission utility. The sale of Hydro One is projected to raise $4 billion.
Many jurisdictions, including the U.S., above, Europe and some provinces already allow alcohol sales in corner and grocery stores.
Premier Kathleen Wynne said despite the sell-off of Hydro One, Ontario will remain its largest shareholder, with no other shareholder allowed to control more than 10 per cent of the company. She also said the government will have the power to name the majority of members to its board, including the chair, and have the right to dismiss the board.
"The government would retain de facto control," said Wynne.
Hydro One chair and former Liberal cabinet minister Sandra Pupatello will soon be succeeded by David Denison, former president and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
The moves come ahead of the provincial budget, which is set to be released on April 23.
The province will also sell off Hydro One Brampton and merge it with three other local electricity companies, covering Hamilton, Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, Barrie, and St. Catharines. The move will create the second largest hydro distributor in the province.
Ontario's opposition parties have warned that a sale of Hydro One will drive up electricity prices, something the Liberals warned would happen when the Tories wanted to privatize it in 2002.
Retaining majority ownership
Premier Kathleen Wynne said Wednesday the government would retain majority ownership and would make sure consumers are protected against price hikes, though she wouldn't guarantee prices won't rise.
"My hope is that by making these changes we will have a better company, we will have a better and more efficient distribution system and that as a result of that we will see that there's control of hydro rates within the system," Wynne said.
"I can't guarantee that, but... there are improvements in distribution that should provide downward pressure on prices."
NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said it's unbelievable that prices won't "skyrocket," and her party banged their desks in protest in the provincial legislature for nearly half an hour because Wynne wasn't there to answer questions about the proposed asset sales.
Ontario MPPs debate the province's move to partially privatize Hydro One and efforts to liberalize the sale of beer. PC Michael Harris, NDP Catherine Fife and Ontario's deputy premier Deb Matthews square off. 9:46
A statement from interim Progressive Conservative Leader Jim Wilson said the Liberals should devote money earned from the Hydro One sale to retire the company's $27-billion debt.
"The cost of that debt will show up on the hydro bills of every family in the province," said Wilson in a statement.
Changes to how beer is sold
The panel also recommends that Ontario expand beer sales to about 450 supermarkets.
There were reports the government was planning to allow the sale of wine in grocery stores, but it now appears that change won't come right away.
The government will continue to own the LCBO, but will make drastic changes to the way the Beer Store, which is owned by a trio of large foreign breweries, is operated.
"The Beer Store has grown into a de-facto monopoly controlled by a small number of companies," said Wynne. "When it comes to the sale of beer in Ontario, I'm here to announce that the status quo is over and that the days of monopoly
are done."
The changes to how beer is sold in Ontario will include:
Up to 450 new retail locations authorized to sell beer in "urban population centres" across Ontario. The government says this is roughly equal to the number of Beer Store outlets in the province.
A new beer tax that will raise $100 million a year. The tax will eventually reach one dollar per 24 pack of beers, but brewers of the bestselling brands are barred from upping their prices for two years. Prices of the most popular brands will be capped for two years. After that, price increases will be capped to the rate of inflation.
Moves to make Ontario craft beers more available in Beer Store locations including improved placement, more shelf space and marketing.
12-packs will be sold at LCBO stores on a trial basis. Before, 12-packs were only sold at Beer Store locations.
A new beer ombudsperson appointed to handle complaints from brewers and customers.
The Beer Store will spend $100 million over four years, mostly to enhance the customer experience at its bare-bones retail outlets.
An expansion in the number of products available at the Beer Store.
The Liberals call their changes to alcohol retailing the biggest in the province since prohibition was repealed in the 1920s.Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Fully grown monocled cobras can reach up to 2m in length
Authorities in eastern China are searching for about 50 venomous snakes after a mass escape from an unlicensed breeding farm.
About 200 monocled baby cobras escaped from the farm in Nanjing in August. So far about 150 of them have been caught or killed.
The snakelets are around 20cm (7in) in length according to Liuhe district authorities, state media Xinhua said.
Snake parts are used in a variety of traditional Chinese medicines.
Monocled cobras' venom can prove fatal if not treated. However, the baby snakes' venom is less toxic than mature snakes.
A total of 1,820 monocled cobra eggs were first brought to the Chunyi livestock farm in August, of which 1,500 hatched, Xinhua said.
But the authorities only became aware of the escape when a villager from Liuhe district discovered and killed a snake he found at home in October.
The snake farm has since been shut down.
It is not uncommon to hear of snakes escaping from farms in China. In August, 23 baby cobras escaped from a breeding farm in Sichuan.This is Part 3 of 5 of an article series detailing my recent six-week visit to five intentional communities based in the D.C./Virginia area of the United States. Here’s the link to Part 4.
My Third Destination: Living Energy Farm – The Promise Child
Similar to my relationship with Twin Oaks as described in Part 2 of this article series, Living Energy Farm (LEF) is another community I had the opportunity to visit during my three-week visitor period at Acorn Community due to the overlapping nature of all the communities within the FEC. Every Saturday morning a member of Acorn named Sean, who is a joint member of both Acorn and LEF, travels to LEF to put in some hours on the project, and I was able to tag along one Saturday with another visitor at Acorn named Joe.
When we arrived at the parking lot of the construction site, there was nothing in view other than forest as far as the eye could see and a long paved dirt road intersecting through the middle of the land. Sean told Joe and I the structures and people working on the project were up ahead, so we set off on our walk on the long dirt road through the wilderness.
As we walked, Sean talked about the objectives of the project, as well as the history of its progress. We learned that LEF was only still in the beginning stages of development, and had only been around for about two years at this point. He said the goal was to build an educational center and community that is fossil fuel free and runs on natural, sustainable technologies, such as solar electricity, wood gas, bio gas, and very simple and low-cost organic materials, although during the first three years of development they have delegated to use fossil fuel machinery in order to implement the basic infrastructure of the project.
Once we arrived at the project site where the workers and structures were located, Sean pointed out a variety of fruit trees that had been planted along the side of road, as well as several other devices that were part of LEF’s infrastructure: a solar electricity-powered water pump, a solar oven, and a direct-drive solar electric energy unit. He also showed us a work-in-progress housing building that was being developed to use space heating via passive solar energy (the sun heats up the house and a layer a granite stone on the foundation stores it). It was apparently an experimental approach that they had never tried before, but it appeared to be coming along well. There was also a completed housing building with walls composed of straw bale that was well insulated and very cozy, along with a small structure that had a kitchen on one side and a work area on the other.
Sean advised Joe and I as we assisted with clearing a plot of land that was later going to be plowed for farming. A short while later, we were joined by three female workers who we had passed by earlier, and the six of us worked and talked together until lunchtime. About ten of us sat around the ramshackle outdoor kitchen as we ate a deliciously cooked vegan lunch of zesty-flavored rice, spinach, and black beans, and once we were finished, Joe and I went with one of the female workers to help with some brush clearing around the fruit trees, and then we departed down the long dirt road to the parking lot an hour or so later.
While I cannot imagine myself ever making the choice to “rough it” in the way these folks are doing, I was inspired by the progressive, idealistic vision of the project, as well as the passion, discipline, and lightheartedness in which the people went about their daily lives. It’s hard work laboring under the hot summer sun day after day, but I suppose when you’re doing something you love with people that you love, it makes all the difference in the world. You can contact Utility Saving Expert to find out how you can switch energy suppliers and how much will it profit you.
As far as the idea of pushing methods that use clean, sustainability energy goes, I completely agree with this initiative from an ecological and practical standpoint, but I think we still have a long way to go until this ideal becomes the standard across the globe. It appears LEF is one of the pioneers of this initiative, and I can only hope others learn from its example in the years to come—that is, if we even have a choice in the matter at all.A Republican congressman outlined the way he would like to see the health care system operate if Obamacare is repealed, as GOP lawmakers are promising. It is a brave new world in which parents would wait and think about it before bringing in their sick or injured kids for costly treatments.
The example Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) gave in an interview with MLive.com was from his own experience when he waited until the morning after to take his youngest son to the doctor with an injured arm, because he did not want to waste money on an expensive emergency room visit. The arm, it turned out, was broken.
“We weren’t sure what was going on. It was in the evening, so I splinted it up and we wrapped it up, and the decision was, okay, do we go to the ER? We thought it was a sprain, but weren’t sure,” Huizenga said, adding that he and his wife “took every precaution and decided to go in the next morning.”
“When it [comes to] those type of things, do you keep your child home from school and take him the next morning to the doctor because of a cold or a flu, versus take him into the emergency room? If you don’t have a cost difference, you’ll make different decisions,” he said.
He offered the example to explain his view that health care consumers should shoulder more of the financial responsibilities, instead of the current health system, which he said “continue[s] to squeeze providers.”
“We have to be responsible, or have a part of the responsibility for what’s going on,” he said, while advocating for health savings accounts, a common GOP proposal.
“Way too often, people pull out their insurance card and they say ‘I don’t know the difference or cost between an X-ray or an MRI or CT Scan.’ I might make a little different decision if I did know [what] some of those costs were and those costs came back to me,” he said.Energy efficiency is the no-brainer solution to climate change. In many cases, savings are relatively cheap to achieve. Everyone benefits (aside from, perhaps, utilities who depend on selling more units). And it’s non-controversial. While debates about the future of energy tend to get ideological, most people can see the logic of doing more with less.
It’s also a huge opportunity. According to a new report from the International Energy Agency, investments could reap total returns of $18 trillion worldwide–or the equivalent of all of North America’s economies combined.
The IEA reaches such a high number by reconceptualizing what energy efficiency means. Instead of treating it simply as energy not used, it calls energy efficiency a “first fuel” with many social and environmental benefits.
“This publication demonstrates how often overlooked, and even intangible, outcomes can be captured, offering the possibility to send better socio-economic signals to complement market signals,” the report says.
These include the impact on employment and energy prices, on public budgets (jobs in energy efficiency could reduce the need for government benefits, for example), health and wellbeing (weatherization improves conditions for building occupants and cuts health care costs), and industrial productivity. Research shows that every dollar invested in efficiency can bring 2.5 times as much in productivity gains.
“Applying a multiple benefits approach to energy-efficiency policy should enable a fuller understanding of the potential of energy efficiency,” the report says.
The IEA isn’t the first come up with big numbers for efficiency’s potential. McKinsey identified $1.2 trillion in possible savings across the U.S economy. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit. In a recent ranking, we were far behind other countries, leaving plenty more to be done.December 11, 2015Most of us in education use Google Drive as a repository where we save files we use in our daily work. Depending on how often you use it, the accumulated amount of files hosted in your Drive can be overwhelming and searching Drive for a specific file can be a real challenging task. Thankfully, Google Drive has introduced a number of powerful search features to facilitate your search. In today’s post, we are sharing with you 5 interesting search tips to help you conduct smart, efficient and time saving search queries in your Drive. To access any of the features below, open Google Drive in your computer and click on the advanced search settings button on the right hand side of the search box.To search for a specific file type, change the value in front of Type from 'Any' to any other type you want. You can, for instance, conduct a Drive search for audio files by choosing ‘Audio’. Likewise you can search for PDFs, Images, presentations, spreadsheets, text documents, and drawings by choosing their corresponding values from the list.This hack enables you to narrow down your search query to include only files that have been modified in a particular period of time. For instance, you can search for files that were modified yesterday, last week/month…etc.If you are not sure what the exact name of your Drive file, you can type in a term that matches part of the file name.If you can’t remember file name or part of it you can still search for the targeted file using words that might be found in it.You can filter your Drive search using ownership criteria. In this way, you can search for files owned by you, owned by someone else or by a specific person.Minn. one of 3 states where computer glitches derail school tests
MCA-II tests MPR Photo/Tom Weber
By TOM COYNE and TOM LoBIANCO
Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- School districts across several states are rescheduling high-stakes tests that judge student proficiency and even determine teachers' pay because of technical problems involving the test administrators' computer systems.
Thousands of students in Indiana, Oklahoma and Minnesota have been kicked offline while taking tests in recent weeks, postponing the testing schools planned for months and raising concerns about whether the glitches will affect scores.
"There's been pep rallies and spirit weeks all getting ready for this. It's like showing up for the big game and then the basketball is deflated," said Jason Zook, a fifth-grade teacher at Brown Intermediate Center in South Bend, Ind.
Many frustrated students have been reduced to tears and administrators are boiling over, calling the problems "disastrous" and "unacceptable" at a time when test results count so heavily toward schools' ratings under the federal No Child Left Behind law. In places like Indiana, where former Gov. Mitch Daniels approved changes tying teachers' merit pay to student test scores, the pressure is even greater.
"Teachers are extremely frustrated because of the high-stakes nature of this test," said Jeff Sherrill, principal at Emmons Elementary School in Mishawaka, Ind. "They know they're going to be judged on this and their schools are going to be judged on this. Certainly it's changed the outcome of the testing, because there's no way it's not going to."
CTB/McGraw-Hill is the contractor in Indiana and Oklahoma and administers statewide standardized tests in eight other states. American Institutes for Research, or AIR, is the contractor in Minnesota.
In Indiana, McGraw-Hill is in the third year of a four-year, $95 million contract, while in Oklahoma, it has a one-year, $16 million contract with an option to renew an additional four years. Minnesota's $61 million, three-year contract with AIR expires this year.
"I think the only thing the three states have in common is that technology is not infallible," said Charlene Briner, chief of staff of the Minnesota Department of Education, which temporarily suspended testing after the first disruption April 16.
Briner said the glitches affected many students taking the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment, which provides much of the data the state uses to judge school performance.
AIR executive vice president Jon Cohen attributed the first disruption to a problem with AIR's servers, which have been fixed. The company is not yet sure what caused a subsequent Internet interruption, but Cohen said there wasn't a problem at AIR's data center.
Cohen said students' performance shouldn't be affected by interrupted tests, which are designed to be paused and resumed.
"A particular day or a particular point in time shouldn't really be a deciding factor for a kid or a teacher or anybody else," he said.
Indiana suspended testing Monday and Tuesday, the same days Oklahoma reported problems.
One Oklahoma lawmaker called for a moratorium on testing this year, saying it would be unfair to continue after "a ton of problems" have been reported.
"We'll just start over next year when the testing provider has its act together," said Rep. Curtis McDaniel, D-Smithville, a longtime school administrator. "It's just not fair to these students to make them re-take tests two or three times or accept a score based on a partial test that may or may not be accurate because of technology problems."
Oklahoma State Superintendent Janet Barresi said the department is working to remedy the problem and then will determine "how to proceed with accommodations for the districts."
CTB/McGraw-Hill spokesman Dan Sieger said by email Wednesday that the company was focused on ensuring testing stability and regrets the "impact on these schools and students." The company ran simulations to prepare for the tests in Indiana but did not "fully anticipate the patterns of live student testing."
"The interruptions are not acceptable to students and educators or to CTB/McGraw-Hill. We have worked with the schools in these states for many years and value our relationships with them," the statement said.
The company said students interrupted midway through testing would be able to pick up where they left off. Still, some worried whether all answers were recorded.
Rachel Burke of Indianapolis said the computer had indicated her daughter, Katherine, a fifth-grader at Raymond Park Intermediate Academy, finished a section of the test with 23 questions just as it crashed Monday. But she believes there should have been 30 questions.
"So she thinks she was finished, but she's not sure," Burke said.
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz said there's "no question" the state will have to review any data gathered in the past few days, when at least 27,000 third- through eighth-grade students were kicked offline during tests.
"After we get everybody assessed, we're going to have to look at the validity of the assessments themselves," Ritz said.
Testing resumed Wednesday with minimal disruptions after districts halved the number of students taking the online tests at any one time, Ritz said. The state plans to continue with the same format Thursday.
This isn't the first time CTB/McGraw-Hill has struggled with assessments.
The Connecticut Department of Education fined CTB/McGraw-Hill $300,000 in 2004 for errors and delays in scoring its Mastery Test, the largest fine allowed under the state's contract.
In 2011, up to 10,000 Indiana students statewide were logged off and some were unable to log back in for up to an hour while taking the test. The state invalidated 215 scores that year because they were lower than expected.
About 9,000 Indiana students were kicked offline during the test last year.
Indiana and Oklahoma have extended this year's testing deadlines to ensure schools have enough time to complete the exams.
In Minnesota, Briner said it's too early to speculate about the impact of the problems. She said testing is still going on across the state.
"We're monitoring the situation on a daily if not hourly basis," she said.
Tom Coyne reported from South Bend. Associated Press writers Tim Talley in Oklahoma City and Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.WAUKEE, IA - APRIL 25: Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin speaks to guests gathered at the Point of Grace Church for the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition 2015 Spring Kickoff on April 25, 2015 in Waukee, Iowa. The Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative Christian organization, hosted 9 potential contenders for the 2016 Republican presidential nominations at the event. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) hasn't even gotten his proposed budget cuts passed into law yet, but that's not stopping the state's prestigious public university system from moving to lay off staff, prompting fears of a "massive brain drain."
Within the next few weeks, the Wisconsin state legislature will begin considering the Joint Finance Committee’s recommended budget, which may or may not include $300 million in cuts to the University of Wisconsin system that Walker proposed in January.
Public university systems are a common target of governors looking to slash state budgets this year. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has proposed similar cuts to that state’s university system, as has Gov. Pat McCrory (R) in North Carolina. But experts say the potential slashing in Wisconsin is among the most significant.
“I have not seen to the extent of Wisconsin the higher education system actually pushing through some of those changes before the cuts happen,” said Michael Mitchell, a policy analyst at the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. “But then the magnitude of the cuts in Wisconsin are pretty sizable.”
"I don't think [governors and legislators] have an appreciation for or respect for just how disruptive these draconian budget cut recommendations are, even if they aren’t fully realized," said Daniel Hurley, associate vice president for government relations and state policy at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. "It just puts the institutions and the system overall in a tremendously difficult bind."
What's happening in Wisconsin so |
deaths and inflicted widespread damage to homes and infrastructure, including wiping out power across the Caribbean island.
Mexico has had strained relations with its northern neighbor since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January, promising to build a wall along the U.S. southern border to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs.
Mexico had planned to send material assistance to the United States after Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in late August, but later withdrew the offer after the first of the two quakes struck southern Mexico in early September.
Trump was criticized in Mexico for the time he took to offer condolences to his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, over the first quake, which killed at least 98 people. The U.S. president later said he had been unable to reach Pena Nieto because of poor cellphone reception.
Ironically, after Maria struck Puerto Rico, the local cellphone operator of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim proved more reliable than some U.S. competitors during the early days of the communications outage across the island of 3.4 million people.The CBO has released their score on the potential repeal of Obamacare. According to them millions of people would lose their health insurance and costs for premiums would rise. Democrats are upset that Republicans don’t believe the numbers. This is because the numbers do not make logical sense. People have an inherent bullshit detector that can tell when they are being lied to or when certain facts are hidden. For instance for the year leading up to the election economists, the Obama admin, and the mainstream media has been telling people that we are at full employment. No one believed them and people elected Trump instead as well as giving historic majorities to Republicans. When you tell people there is full employment they expect that their wages would go up as well as there would be more competition for limited labor. When that did not happen people figured out it was a lie.
Logic
The CBO fails using the same logical standards. The entire reason Obamacare exists is to give people with preexisting conditions insurance. By definition people with preexisting conditions are sicker than the general population. Which is why insurance did not want to work with them in the first place. If you include them in the calculations then everyone has to pay higher premiums to keep the plans solvent. If you remove them from the calculations, like for example by repealing Obamacare, then the premium everyone else pays would get lower as a result.
Benefit of the Doubt
If you read the reports prepared by the CBO on both Obamacare and its repeal you can see why they make this error. Every projection and fact given by the Obama administration was treated as gospel truth and the CBO based their score on this. Since they were heavily biased towards the Obama administration the report they published was proven to be wrong. In contrast the CBO disagrees with everyone of the assumptions used by the Trump administration when it formulated its bill and repeal.
The proof is in the report itself. Hidden deep within the report is an admission that the only reason a lot of people would lose insurance is because they were forced into it in the first place by the individual mandate. If they were not forced to buy the insurance they would not purchase it because of the high premiums. If this were Obama they would have then stipulated that the people who lost the insurance voluntarily would have found their own insurance which would be at a lower cost than obamacare because there would be no one with preexisting conditions driving up the cost.
If you haven’t figured it out yet the CBO decides whether it supports a bill or not and then makes up assumptions to provide the data to reach its predetermined conclusion.
Bias
At this point in time Republicans would be crying about the CBO being biased towards the Democrats. That’s not exactly true. The government will always be biased towards giving the government more power. People like George Washington who refuse power when handed to them are incredibly rare. This is why we have a hard time removing any regulations, even redundant ones. Take Dodd-Frank for example. By any objective standard it has failed to rein in big banks as they are four times as large now as they were when the regulation started now controlling nearly half the entire banking industry. Yet government still rates it favorably.
Like any living organism government will protect itself. It will always tell you that it is needed and needs to be expanded. It is up to we the people to hold our elected representatives to their promises.
AdvertisementsCasey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”
Thanks in part to the baby boom, the employment-population ratio understates the amount that the economy has recovered.
Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.
Before the recession began, 63 of every 100 people age 16 and over were employed. The percentage plummeted to 58.4 by the fourth quarter of 2009 and hasn’t moved far from there since.
A variety of economists have used the ratio and its dynamics to indicate that the economy has hardly recovered. Some say the employment-population ratio’s lack of recovery is because of insufficient government spending; others suggest that it might reflect policy failures of the Obama administration.
But the employment-population ratio is influenced by important factors beyond the control of the president. One of them is the aging of the baby boomers. The employment-population ratio was expected to fall as baby boomers reached retirement ages between 2008 and 2015, even without a recession. For this reason alone, a full recovery would mean an employment-population percentage of about 61.
Although much attention last week was given to the August-to-September increase in part-time employment, the average hours worked among private-sector employees have increased sharply since 2009 and are now about the same as they were before the recession began.
The chart below shows a recovery when the quantity of labor is measured in terms of hours worked per capita (gray) or age-adjusted hours worked per capita (red). Both indexes are set to 100 in December 2007; the age adjustment is taken from my book on the labor market since 2007.
The red series hits bottom at 90.8 and now stands at 94.4. Unlike the employment-population ratio’s negligible recovery, the age-adjusted hours series has recovered about 40 percent — four points — in three years.
To be sure, an additional six points of the recovery still remain, and the labor market continues to be depressed by public policies enacted over the last four to eight years. But some of these policies, such as mortgage assistance, the three increases in the federal minimum wage and the federal rules giving states more flexibility to expand food-stamp participation were begun before President Obama took office and probably would not have been overturned if John McCain had won the 2008 election. Some of those policies had broad political support.
Thanks to demographic and political changes, a full labor market recovery may be beyond any president’s reach.Marissa Alexander after a January court appearance in Jacksonville, Fla.
Photo by Reuters
Marissa Alexander, the black woman who was sentenced in Florida to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot at a husband who was allegedly abusing her, starts her retrial in July. Except now she may be facing up to 60 years in prison if convicted again. The prosecutor announced this week that she would be seeking the maximum sentence of 20 years for three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—one for her husband and two for his children who were in the room at the time—to be served consecutively. These are the same charges she was found guilty of the first time, but the judge in that case ruled that she should serve the sentences concurrently.
Alexander’s case drew a lot of attention last year because of its unsettling contrast to a different Florida shooting trial, that of George Zimmerman, in which Zimmerman successfully argued that he had to shoot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was running a quick errand on foot, because he felt Martin was a danger to him. Zimmerman actually killed Martin but did not get convicted, whereas Alexander did not kill anyone and has argued convincingly that she was being chased and abused by her husband in the house. Alexander is a black woman, however, and Zimmerman is not—though his victim was also black—and critics of the two cases are suggesting those race and gender differences might be carrying more weight than the actual evidence and severity of the respective crimes.
In Alexander’s original trial, the jury was instructed that she had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that her husband, Rico Gray, had battered her. That’s why her original conviction was thrown out, as Gray wasn’t actually the person on trial and Alexander wasn’t actually prosecuting him but defending herself. As I wrote last year, Judge James H. Daniel ordered a retrial, arguing that Alexander had been held to too high a standard to prove self-defense. Hopefully, the jury will get better instructions this time around, but there’s still reason for Alexander’s supporters to be very concerned. One of the most aggravating aspects of these kinds of self-defense cases is that not killing someone can often put you in a worse position in front of a jury. Zimmerman killed the sole eyewitness to his crime, making it far easier for him to tell his story without any fear of contradiction. In his original deposition, Gray basically told the same story as Alexander: He was chasing her around the house, that he knew she couldn’t escape through the garage, and that he was approaching her and refusing to leave when she shot the gun in the air. But his story has changed a number of times before and since then, making it easier for prosecutor Angela Corey (also the prosecutor in the Zimmerman case) to paint Alexander as the aggressor in this incident.
Corey’s office also prosecuted Michael Dunn, who, like Zimmerman, shot an unarmed black teenager after an encounter that he provoked. Dunn was found guilty of multiple charges of attempted murder for unloading his gun at a carful of teenagers after confronting them about playing their music loudly while they stopped at a convenience store, but Corey’s office didn’t successfully obtain a conviction for the murder of Jordan Davis, the one teenager who was killed in the incident. As with George Zimmerman, the jurors were convinced that Dunn felt afraid enough of Davis that he had to kill him, though apparently not the rest of the kids. It’s hard for outsiders not to notice a pattern here, where not shooting someone seems to get you in more trouble in the state of Florida than shooting to kill.Squeaking by on $300,000
By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 16, 2009
HARRISON, N.Y. -- The live-in nanny is the first downstairs. She packs the school lunches at a kitchen window, overlooking three acres of velvety grass and little streams that slope toward a gate with a sign that says "Birch Hill."
Upstairs, three children begin to stir.
In the midst of cheese omelets and Honey Bunches of Oats and vitamins placed next to folded napkins, the lady of the house descends.
"Morning," says Laura Steins, 47, wearing a dark Armani suit and take-charge heels. Her blue eyes are lustrous and her skin is golden, and even with wet hair and no makeup, she radiates confidence.
But she's months overdue for a visit to her colorist, a telltale sign of economic distress for a woman such as Steins. The smell in the basement could mean a crack in the septic line; unlike a $200 hair appointment, a plumber will be in the thousands. And from the breakfast table comes one more urgent need from a 10-year-old.
"At my birthday party, every single girl had a phone," says Katie Steins, making the case that an enV2 phone with matching cover is just standard in her crowd.
Steins kneels down to face her daughter. "If you continue to tell the world how undesirable your phone is -- it's not a flip, it's not a swivel, it's not an LG -- you will not have a phone."
Steins takes a breath. Life in this $2.5 million house was built on the premise of two incomes, not the income of a divorced mother of three in a tanked economy. Her property taxes are $35,000 a year, the nanny is $40,000 and the gardener is $500 a month.
"I can ride this storm out," says Steins, which means having tiger-striped hair and getting her kid a generic cellphone and ignoring the stinking basement.
Birch Hill is a majestic property of tender grasses and low stone walls and a whimsical sculpture next to the swimming pool. To the untrained eye, the long economic downturn as viewed from here and beyond -- the hedges and country clubs of Westchester County that stretch to Long Island Sound -- has been hard to see or feel.
* * *
In Detroit or Southern California, empty auto plants and foreclosure signs continue to give evidence of a terrible fall, but the moorings of affluence are firmly in place in Laura Steins's world. The sandwiches at Patisserie Salzburg are still wrapped in wax paper and tied in pink ribbon. The pool at the Apawamis Club is open for the season. At Fong's Hand Laundry, the pressed shirts are still folded into brown paper and knotted with twine.
The decline is found in the fine print.
On the bulletin board at the YMCA in Rye, for example, where nannies and maids who've been let go look for new employment.
On the wait list at the $7,000-a-year nursery school at Rye Presbyterian Church, where only 30 names hover instead of the usual 300.
On the sleepy crime blotter of the Rye Police Department, which shows an increase in neighbor and domestic tensions.
"You have a guy who was at the top of his game on Wall Street," explains Police Commissioner William Connors. "For the first time, he gets up in the morning and he has no place to go." He hears a neighbor using a loud leaf blower at 7 in the morning and calls the police to complain.
When Wall Street crashed, so did this community. A 44-minute train ride separates the financial kingdom from this emerald suburb; the ties are so close that most people here cite the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008 as the start of the recession, not long unemployment lines or GM's bailout. More than a year later, as the economy shows signs of recovery, the damage is still evident. The herds of beige trench coats on the train platforms in Harrison and Rye remain thin and culled. The billions of dollars lost in investments are still gone.
Yet for all of the lives shaken, few are willing to talk about it. More than three-dozen people interviewed for this article would not allow their names or identifying details to be used.
Laura Steins doesn't mind saying that she is barely squeaking by on $300,000 a year. She lives in a place where the boom years of Wall Street pushed the standard of living to astonishing heights. Where fifth-graders shop at a store called Lester's that sells $114 tween-size True Religion jeans. Where a cup of fresh spinach and carrot juice called the Iron Maiden costs $7.95.
By local standards, Steins occupies the lower rung of affluence -- the rung where every dollar now matters.
As a vice president at MasterCard's corporate office in Purchase, N.Y., she earns a base pay of $150,000 plus a bonus. This year she'll take home 10 percent less because of a smaller bonus. She receives $75,000 a year in child support from her ex-husband. She figures she will pull an additional $50,000 from a personal investment account to "pick up the slack."
The nanny and property taxes take $75,000 right off the top, but Steins considers both non-negotiable facts of her life and not discretionary. When she bought out her husband's share of the house after their 2006 divorce, she assumed the costs of keeping it afloat -- $8,000 to $10,000 a month. There's a pool man, a gardener and someone to plow the snow from the quarter-mile-long driveway.
As tight as money is, she has decided that living in a 4,000-square-foot house on three acres is the practical thing to do. "A), I couldn't sell the house right now," she says, citing the slow real estate market. "B), this is where my kids go to school. And C), it's where my job is."
Steins grew up in the idyllic Queens suburb of Douglaston, specifically Douglas Manor, where mothers played bridge on a dock in Little Neck Bay. Her father was a savings-and-loan president who owned a summer house in the Hamptons, but Steins was grounded in the middle class in many ways, attending public school and working at McDonald's. She has lived in London and Johannesburg and has a closet full of fabulous clothes from jobs with Ralph Lauren and Anne Klein. Steins is still a black diamond skier, and she barrels down the mountain of life in much the same manner, tenacious and determined to stay upright. She is rarely wistful except for the topic of her marriage ending. "Because I grew up in divorce, I swore I would never put my kids through it," she says.
Now she sits at the head of the dining room table. Dinner is served at 6 by the nanny, but the same pandemonium and fatigue of any other house exists.
"Mom, did you know that if you are the billionth app loader on iTunes, you get a 32-gig iPod touch, a MacBook and a $10,000 gift card for iTunes?" asks Harrison, who is 12 and the oldest. Christian is 8 and often comes to dinner in a cape. Katie, in a Little Miss Lucky T-shirt, tries to hold her own against the two boys.
Whatever fantasies the underclass may have of the good life -- of small dogs in purses and Dolce and Gabbana -- are not on display here. The rugs are worn. Milk is spilled. A Marmaduke of a beast named Tyson hovers at the table ready to snuffle up pork tenderloin from the plate of a distracted child. "Tyson!" says Steins.
Being a mother on her own in married suburbia requires courage. One night, Steins is invited to a cocktail party and as usual she stands alone on the doorstep of the magnificent house and rings the bell, suspended in that endless moment of waiting until the door opens and the host appears.
"Laura, hello!"
* * *
The financial crisis stays oddly submerged. If money is a private matter, then the loss of it is doubly shrouded. Steins hears the stories only at the fringes of social events, when a wife quietly says that her husband is out of work or that the house is up for sale.
One of the few places that tries to publicly address the fallout is Steins's church.
Rye Presbyterian is a soaring Gothic fortress with an affluent congregation of 1,160. Sermons are sprinkled with mentions of Updike and the Yale Review. Many parishioners were hit hard by the crash, losing jobs and incomes. When church leaders noticed the strains on marriages and families, they offered comfort while also urging members to take stock of their lives.
Pastor Nancy De Vries preached that no husband should be defined by his income, nor should any wife be valued by her thinness or beauty. Hardly heretical, except sitting in the pews were husbands who'd lost their wealth and wives whose social order had been upended by it.
Week after week, Steins and others in a group called the Stephen Ministry wrestle with how to help members struggling through the crisis. They meet at church on Tuesday nights and bring in guest speakers.
A Manhattan psychologist at two elite private schools discusses how sudden financial insecurity affects children who are accustomed to having the best of everything. Don't end childhood, he says, but shift it to the new reality.
The Rye police commissioner warns of the increased likelihood of domestic violence and how to look for signs. To make his point, he reads from "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors," a Roddy Doyle novel about a battered Irish wife who concocts excuses for her bruises.
Steins's group is ready to lend support to church members, but the problem is there aren't many takers. One member articulates the challenge.
"There's an image people are invested in that makes it hard for this to be talked about," says Bob Steed, sitting next to his wife, Nancy.
The Steeds are big community volunteers. They're also known for their zany parties. They come up with an idea to get people talking, and soon the invitations are in the mail:
You are invited to a recession party.
Serving: Cheap Wine and Beer with Simple Fare (Costco Deluxe)
Wear: Old Clothes (hand-me down particularly welcome)
Entertainment: Any recession story, joke, poem, item, etc. guests might provide.
Warning: Anyone bringing a hostess gift other than canned goods (to be delivered to a food pantry) will be denied admission.
On the night of the party, Bob greets guests in a T-shirt that says, "Eat Dessert First, Life is Uncertain," and he jokes that that's why we're in this mess in the first place.
One guest who arrives in khakis and a blue blazer says he wanted to wear jeans but his wife wouldn't let him.
"They were so vintage, I couldn't bear it," she says.
Cocktail chatter fills the crowded living room.
"What's the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?" someone asks at one point, reading from a list of jokes. "A pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW."
Pigs in blankets appetizers are served.
Another joke. "I went to buy a toaster, and it came with a bank."
One of Wall Street's top-ranked metal analysts who volunteers in prisons is putting together a program to teach inmates about finance. A woman whose son left Goldman Sachs to join a small boutique firm worries about the stress of his long workdays. "People say these guys aren't building anything or making anything, all they do is make money all day long," she says gently. "There's a lot of high blood pressure. They don't see their children. Panic attacks are common."
Nancy Steed invites everyone to gather around the room and share a story about the recession.
"We made a decision to cut back on our gardener," says one woman. "I said, 'I can do the weeding,' so I got the boys out to help me today."
Next is C.J. DeSantis, a former Merrill Lynch banker who now earns much less as a financial consultant. He talks about being trapped on the subway the morning of 9/11. "People were looking for answers after that, and it faded," DeSantis says. "We tied our self-worth and social stature on what we earned. I don't think a downdraft is good, but if it can focus us away from consumerism.... "
One by one, they talk. The room is quiet. An older woman sitting on an ottoman speaks. "They say we're in a depression," she says. "I look around the world -- Darfur, India -- and I don't feel that sad for us."
As the night comes to an end, a guest who doesn't work on Wall Street leans in and makes an observation. Not about the recession, but about the bigger engine of capitalism.
"What you didn't hear was all the toxic stuff from the 45- to 55-year-old guys," he says. "They think all this is bull --. They're coming back."
* * *
On a weekend when the kids are with their dad in Manhattan, Steins packs her overnight bag, ditches her Volvo SUV for her Pontiac Solstice convertible and heads for a party in the Hamptons. The invitation had been hanging on her refrigerator for weeks next to an invitation to the Shenorock Shore Club's "Nights in Bangkok" party, two defiant reminders that even in a recession, the show must go on.
Steins violated her no-shopping rule by buying a new black sweater at Ann Taylor with a 20 percent off coupon. She's now wearing it with a pink fitted blouse, pink earrings and black pants as she buzzes out the Long Island Expressway with John Legend on the stereo. Even if money were no object, Steins couldn't see herself hanging out midday at Starbucks with the Pilates moms, their BlackBerrys shining on the tabletops like silver guns. She has always worked. But when she passes a patio shop on Route 27 with rough-hewn wooden chairs, she looks longingly. "Not this year," she says.
A Sothebys realty office is advertising a summer rental in Sagaponack South for "695,000 MD-LD" which means $695,000 to rent the seven-bedroom estate from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The day is drizzly, but Steins rolls down the window to smell the ocean. "My connections here aren't people who bought multimillion-dollar houses," she says. "It's beautiful. It relaxes me. Everyone has been very successful, but that doesn't mean everything is perfect."
Steins cuts off the highway in Southampton and detours down a road lined with tall hedges that leads to the ocean. When she gets to a three-story Cape Cod with a massive wraparound porch, she stops the car. "We never had an address," she says, looking at her childhood summer home. "We were just the fifth house down from the Meadow Club."
When her father died, he left Steins an oil painting of the house, and it hangs in one of her spare bedrooms. The real view is so much better. The lawn is like a putting green and the salty air whips up from the shoreline. But the painting is as close as she'll get for now. She turns the car around and heads for the borrowed house of a friend.
The party turns out to be spectacular. Champagne and oysters and shrimp followed by a seated luncheon for 70. Steins joins a small group back at the birthday girl's house for a casual supper of lobster bisque. No names, please, the host requests, as if codes for nuclear warheads were discussed and not youth hockey and green grocers. But everyone is being sensitive these days. In the next morning's New York Times is a recession story on how dollar stores are stocking more food items in hard times.
Steins packs up for the drive home. Her children will be back from their dad's. He's getting remarried in a few weeks and on this weekend the kids and their dad and his fiancée are taking photos in Central Park.
On her way out of town, she window-shops and stops at a boutique to buy a birthday present for a friend. She admires a $30 set of bone bangles on the counter. "So lovely," says the woman at the register. The boutique's tag line is "Life's a circus -- live it." Steins obliges. She takes the bangles.
* * *
Birch Hill actually has two ladies of the house, but they exist at polar ends of the local economy. The road that led Kathy Shellogg to a spare bedroom on the second floor of Steins's home began almost two decades ago under eerily similar economic conditions.
"I hit my recession 15 years ago in the Catskills," the 55-year-old nanny says one morning after everyone is gone. Shellogg is tan and blond, though in a different way than Laura Steins, and her words tumble out with a loose honesty. Plugging a leak under the sink, she stands up and gestures toward the pipe and says, "I fix things, too. Being as how once I had a house."
In 1994, Shellogg was working at a cement plant in Upstate New York as a chemical analyst earning $40,000 a year with a union card. "I had everything in that job," she says. When the plant shut down, she lost her position and then her home. A help-wanted ad for a nanny lured her to Rye, and now, three families later, she has the hang of Westchester County.
"Upstate, you give a kid a Hershey bar," she explains. "Here, you give two little squares of the Hershey bar and save the rest for later. Weight is the big thing here."
The forces have worked on Shellogg -- she has dropped several sizes since her arrival. She drinks pulverized vegetable juices and works out regularly at the YMCA in Rye, compliments of a Steins family membership. While she has privileges at the Y and receives three weeks of paid vacation, she has no medical insurance, so she takes her nagging toothache to the student dental clinic at New York University, where the flat rate for a molar extraction is $80.
Riding into town with Shellogg for groceries is an anthropological tour through wealthy America. "You go by and dream," she says, pointing to a house with lush topiaries and a privacy wall. "This is old. This is old-new. That's a castle." She has worked for far wealthier families than Steins's. They belonged to the Manursing Island Club and Coveleigh Club and the American Yacht Club. Steins merely belongs to the Shenorock Shore Club, and without a cabana. Shellogg is discreet about all of her clients, and of Steins she allows, "She's a woman of many talents."
She arrives at the Stop & Shop and goes in with her list. "Katie likes Fuji apples," she says, wheeling the basket through produce. Shellogg prides herself on finding bargains. "They are big mayonnaise people," she says, stocking up on four jars. Sometimes her Catskills meal-stretching techniques conflict with the standards of Birch Hill. Steins has asked her to ease up on the pasta.
They make a portrait in class distinction -- Steins in her shimmering white trench coat and Shellogg in her comfy sweats -- yet they can also seem like two exhausted blondes trying to keep a house going.
One night, Steins eats quickly so she can sew a badge on her son's Cub Scout uniform for his meeting that night. Getting a whiff, she rears back. "God, this shirt stinks."
"Tell me about it!" Shellogg says from the other end of the table.
Steins bites her tongue. She wishes the shirt had been washed.
* * *
Not far from Steins's house is a welcome sign that says, "Town of Harrison, 1696. It's great to live in Harrison."
Sometimes it's even perfect. Steins turns in at the wooden gate of Birch Hill. The dahlias and lilies of summer are in bloom. The house is fragrant with dinner. Shirts are clean and folded. The neighbors have a party to show off their rose garden while a samba trio plays on the deck. Ice cubes and canapés and plans for sailing. The good life, the great life. Maybe it's back.
Her friend from church, Paul Deen, has rallied. The father of three was a distressed-debt trader at Bear Stearns who lost his job and stocks worth millions when Bear collapsed, wiping him out of everything but his home, and now he's back on the 6:51 a.m. train to Manhattan for a new job at an investment banking firm, bounding up the stairs at Grand Central Terminal with an American flag pin in his lapel and hitting Starbucks for a double espresso, just like before.
But most days Steins knows that nothing is over. Too many storefronts in downtown Rye are empty. Close friends of hers have just put their house on the market. The bulletin board at the Y is still tacked with messages from maids and nannies looking for work.
At night when it's quiet, way up the quarter-mile driveway, Steins knows how fortunate she is. She has a job. She will gut out the remains of the recession, even if it's her version of paycheck to paycheck. She will keep it all afloat.
The children are asleep. The house is quiet. Her alarm is set for 6, when another morning of urgent needs and requests from the inhabitants of Birch Hill will begin again. She will go downstairs in her designer suit, brushing off dog hair and shuttling kids to the bus stop and asking the painter if she can delay paying him until next month.
"We might live in nice houses and drive nice cars, but we're just holding on," she says. Perfect looks perfect from a distance.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
© 2009 The Washington Post CompanyUS federal authorities have announced the arrest of three men charged with attempting to set off a bomb in northwest Kansas.
Tom Beall, acting US attorney, announced on Friday that the Kansas men were charged in a domestic terrorism plot to bomb an apartment complex in Wichita suburbs where several Somali immigrant families lived and worshipped.
The three men - identified by Beall as Curtis Allen, 49, Gavin Wright, 49, and Patrick Stein, 47 - were arrested in Liberal on Friday morning.
Allen and Wright are Liberal residents. Stein lives in Wright and is a business owner in Liberal, Beall said.
He said the men belonged to a small right-wing militia group called The Crusaders.
The men planned to set off the bomb on November 9 so as not to affect the US presidential elections, which takes place a day earlier, according to federal investigators.
Nihad Awad, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera the plot was enabled in part by the anti-Muslim environment in the country created by the right wing of the Republican Party in general and the party's presidential candidate, Donald Trump, in particular.
"Trump's repeated anti-Muslim racist statements created an environment of hatred and bigotry against Muslims in this election year. Trump's words encouraged domestic terrorist groups to commit acts of terrorism and violence against our community members," he said.
'Hidden culture of hatred'
Beall said the FBI investigation uncovered a "deep hidden culture of hatred and violence".
The FBI launched its investigation eight months ago - on February 16.
"These individuals had the desire, the means and the capabilities and were committed to carrying out this act of domestic terrorism," Eric Jackson, FBI special agent in charge, said on Friday.
Awad said: "The Republican party has used every media outlet at its disposal to demonise Muslims in the US and outside, giving hate groups ammunition and justifications to plot against American Muslims."
Moussa Elbayoumy, CAIR chairman for the state of Kansas City, condemned the plot against Muslim community members, whom he described as a "small and diverse group of residents who also have complained of racist treatments against them in the past".
According to the FBI investigation, The Crusader group had stockpiled explosives and weapons to use the day after the general elections and published a "manifesto" about their plot.
Investigators quoted one of the plotters as saying the explosion would "wake people up".
The FBI said the men also planned to detonate car bombs around the apartment complex.
"It is very concerning and very disheartening," Hussam Madi, spokesman for the Islamic Society of Wichita, said of the planned attack.
"I thank God that they were able to be caught before anything can happen. We don't need such actions here within our community and our country."MANILA - Regulators will press the country's two telecommunications giants on improving internet speeds by the middle of next year, an official of the National Telecommunications Commission said Friday.
Improving service is among conditions set by the NTC when it allowed Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Globe Telecom to use the 700 mhz spectrum that they acquired from San Miguel Corp. last May.
"Nasa kondisyon po sa approval ng full use na within one year, mayroong substantial improvement sa quality of service [It is part of the conditions for approval of full use that within one year, there will be a substantial improvement in quality of service]," NTC deputy commissioner Edgardo Cabarios told DZMM.
PLDT and Globe started installing cell sites using the 700 mhz spectrum in June.
The Philippines has the second slowest internet connection in the Asia Pacific according to Akamai’s State of the Internet report for the second quarter.
Average speed, however, increased 37 percent from 2015, according to the study.
For mobile internet, the country was sixth in terms of average speed (8.5 Mbps), and third for average peak speed (105.1 Mbps) in the Asia Pacific region.If your child has ambitions to be a professional rugby player, please read on. If you are a school or club coach, a teacher or a Premiership director of rugby, what follows is also important. It can be paraphrased thus: what is the best way to develop youthful talent? Or, perhaps more pertinently, how can they be saved from the boneheaded thinking affecting too many teenagers up and down the country?
Here, by way of illustration, is a case study involving a 17-year-old academy player. On day one at his new club this summer he was asked how many games he had participated in last season. The answer was 68. Sixty-eight games! At the age of 17! When the medics examined him they found that – surprise, surprise – his shoulders were already shot. Before he had touched a ball the club had to book him in for surgery.
At another outwardly thriving Premiership club, the word is their junior academy players are being discouraged from applying for university in 2015. It is far easier for a club to manage them if studies do not come into the equation. Horribly easy, too, for the player to be persuaded his career will develop more swiftly if he dumps his files. Yet this is a profession in which some figures suggest just 4% of senior academy players go on to be Premiership regulars. Even if they make the first team, they are just one serious injury away from having to find alternative employment.
Which brings us to Worcester. Relegated from the Premiership at the end of last season, they could have sat back, whisked out a large chequebook and signed a southern hemisphere has-been as a temporary fix. Instead, to their credit, they have done the opposite and set out to establish the most outstanding youth development structure they could conceive. It did not make many headlines when they launched their first junior academy centre at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, last week but their mission statement is both refreshing and impressive.
Nick Johnston, Worcester’s high performance director, explains it thus: formerly a strength and conditioning guru at Sale and Northampton, he was on the brink of leaving rugby when Dean Ryan phoned him to ask about the integral part he had played in resurrecting the Saints following their Premiership relegation. Subsequently, Johnston ended up agreeing to join Ryan’s revolution at Worcester. One of the key issues was how to prevent good homegrown players leaving for other clubs; Tom Wood, Matt Kvesic and Graham Kitchener are among nine ex-Warriors currently starring for Premiership sides. They also wanted to develop well-rounded individuals with a life beyond the gym who were |
million of funding to tackle poverty and homelessness in Canada. The Homelessness Partnering Strategy received $270 million and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation received $246 million to refurbish and renovate affordable housing, as well as to improve access for homeless people to various services and supports such as health and substance abuse treatment programs. Activists protested at Human Resources and Social Services Minister Diane Finley's offices in Ottawa.[15]
The first Canadian national report card on homelessness was compiled by the Canadian Homelessness Research Network (CHRN) and the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2013.[8][Notes 1]
Causes [ edit ]
Why people become homeless is a complex question and the answers are as unique as each individual's history. People become homeless by many different paths; however, the most common reasons are "inability to pay rent (63%), conflict or abuse (36%), alcohol or drug use problems(10%)"[citation needed]. Other factors can include mental disorders, foster care exits, exiting from jail or hospitalization, immigration, rising housing costs and decreased rent controls, federal and provincial downloading of housing programs, and low social assistance rates.[3]
While the causes are complex, the solutions to homelessness may be simple: "Homelessness may not be only a housing problem, but it is always a housing problem; housing is necessary, although sometimes not sufficient, to solve the problem of homelessness."[16] Policy changes are often criticized for punishing the poor instead of trying to solve the underlying problem.[17]
Lack of low-income housing [ edit ]
A homeless Toronto woman sits on a park bench
While in 1966 30,000 new low-income housing units had been built across Canada, this had fallen to 7,000 in 1999. In the city of Calgary, with one of the most acute housing shortages, only 16 new units of rental housing were built in 1996.
Deinstitutionalization [ edit ]
The 1950s and 1960s also saw an international movement towards deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, moving them out of asylums and other facilities, and releasing them into the community. Studies found that the vast majority of those who had been placed in asylums could be healthy and productive members of society if placed in the community and provided with the proper care and medication.
Thus over these decades the number of people confined to mental institutions fell dramatically from just under 70,000 to about 20,000. However, while great savings were made by shutting down empty institutions much of this money was absorbed by general government funds, and did not make it into community care.
No assurances were made that those discharged had access to and were taking the medication they needed. While some of those discharged did integrate with the community, a significant number, estimated at around 75%, did not. Many of these individuals became homeless. Today up to 40% of homeless have some sort of mental illness.[18]
Justice system and homelessness [ edit ]
In a paper published in 2010, York University professor, Stephen Gaetz, argued that, "[p]risoners who are sentenced or who are awaiting trial often lose their jobs and housing, and without support, wind up in homeless shelters and drop-ins upon release... When prisoners become homeless, their chances of reoffending increase."[19]
In 2005 Alberta initiated a three-year program offering an "alternative to sending people to jail or helping them when they are released".[19] Alberta's Pathways to Housing program, which includes about $7 million in provincial money, has been helping homeless Calgarians who have been in and out of the corrections system due to unpaid tickets for petty crimes.
Poverty in Canada [ edit ]
Poverty remains prevalent with certain groups in Canada. The measurement of poverty has been a challenge as there is no official government measure. Some groups, like the Canadian Council on Social Development and the National Anti-Poverty Organization, believe the low-income cut off published by Statistics Canada is applicable as a poverty measure regardless of whether its intent or designation is to be one. They have argued, that as it stands, the LICO is the best measure available that accurately measures a relative poverty rate.[citation needed] The LICO fell to a near-record low of 9.5% in 2006, down from a recent high of 16.7% in 1994.[20]
In the 2005 census, 702,650 Canadians were considered to be at-risk for homelessness in that they spent more than 50 per cent of their household income on shelter. Lack of income security combined with the lack of affordable housing creates the problem of "hidden" homelessness. The "hidden homeless" may actually fall back and forth between homelessness and being housed, making the problem of homelessness much larger than that identified in street or shelter counts.[2]
Cuts to Social Assistance (welfare) [ edit ]
In the late 1990s, under Finance Minister Paul Martin, large cuts were made to transfer payments to Canada's provinces. At the same time, Canada removed a long-standing requirement of each province and territory to provide a livable rate of social assistance to all those in need. This led to a series of cuts to welfare rates and tightened eligibility rules, with many provinces competing with each other to offer the lowest assistance so those in need would leave. Alberta even offered bus tickets for welfare recipients to leave the province. In 2002, B.C.'s newly elected Liberal government introduced welfare reforms which in the coming years removed tens of thousands from that province's welfare rolls. All of this has had the effect of leaving thousands of people without the means to pay for even the most modest accommodation, resulting in many Canadians having no home and thus relying on homeless shelters or else sleeping outside.[21]
Public policy [ edit ]
The National Homeless Initiative (NHI), created in 1999, was the federal secretariat most directly responsible for homelessness matters until its closure in 2007. The NHI was created to fund transitional housing and a range of services for homeless people across the country. NHI funded the federal program Supporting Community Partnerships Initiative (SCPI) which covered the costs of temporary shelters and services for the homeless.[22]
The federal government replaced the NHI with the Homelessness Partnering Strategy (HPS) which was allocated to spend $270 million between 2007 and 2009.[2] In September 2008, the Government of Canada announced that it would set aside funding for housing and homelessness programs of $387.9 million per year for the next five years.[23]
Canada is one of the few countries in the world without a national housing strategy (United Nations, 2009). Many of the federal governments' expenditures are cost-sharing, one-time only funding initiatives that lack long-term leadership on homelessness. The United Nations has also noted the lack of information on these expenditures, including the number of houses produced.[12]
Housing has been declared a fundamental human right. Canada helped to draft the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights that includes a right to access housing in Article 25. Canada also ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1976, which recognizes an adequate standard of living, including housing, in Article 11.[24]
Homeless advocates maintain that government funding should be spent on securing affordable housing versus funding more homelessness programs.[2]
Alberta [ edit ]
In 2008, the Alberta Secretariat for Action on Homelessness's Plan for Alberta, adopted a goal of ending homelessness in Alberta by 2019 with a focus on three key areas: rapid re-housing of homeless Albertans, providing client-centered supports to re-housed clients, and preventing homelessness.[25] Pathways to Housing Canada uses the Housing First model, a "client-driven strategy that provides immediate access to an apartment without requiring initial participation in psychiatric treatment or treatment for sobriety."[26]
Clients pay 30 percent of their income towards their rent: 85 percent of Pathways to Housing clients receive Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) benefits and 15 percent receive [27]
In 2007 Calgary's Pathways to Housing campaign included the opening of the Alex[28] By 2013 Calgary's Pathways to Housing had 150 individuals in scatter site homes.[29] The Alex Pathways to Housing uses the Housing First model, but it also uses Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), an integrated approach to healthcare where clients access a team of "nurses, mental health specialists, justice specialists and substance abuse specialists." Director Sue Fortune is committed to the 10 Year Plan To End Homelessless in the Calgary Region. Fortune reported that the Housing First approach resulted in a 66 percent decline in days hospitalized (from one year prior to intake compared to one year in the program), a 38 percent decline in times in emergency room, a 41 percent decline in EMS events, a 79 percent decline in days in jail and a 30 percent decline in police interactions.[26]
British Columbia [ edit ]
In 2001 in British Columbia the service and shelter costs of homeless people ranged from $30,000 to $40,000 annually versus $22,000 to $28,000 per year for formerly homeless persons housed in social housing.[30]
A plan to house Vancouver's homeless was proposed by a local architect. It called for the rapid erection of temporary villages assembled from the same type of modular units that mining companies provide for remote workers. "Stop Gap Shelters" is what architect Gregory Henriquez calls it. "All of us in this community have long been advocates for permanent housing," he said. "But we've gotten to the point where the numbers of homeless are so staggering that I'm left wondering if we will ever catch up doing it that way. I don't think we can. I think there has to be a stop-gap measure. And that's what this is." Henriquez drew up plans for a motel-like village, with 48 to 120 suites clustered around central courtyards. The colourful compound includes a managers' office, a covered patio, and a second-storey meeting room. [The Tyee, 2008]
Homelessness in Vancouver [ edit ]
In 2011 there were about 2,651 homeless people in Vancouver.[31][32]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ This research used the 2012 Canadian Homelessness Research Network (CHRN)definition of homelessness.
References [ edit ]Getty Images
Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. quickly has become the most scrutinized receiver in the NFL. However, he’s not interested in being analyzed.
Appearing on Tuesday’s PFT Live on NBC Sports Radio and NBCSN, Bob Glauber of Newsday said he asked Beckham whether he’d be willing to consult with a sports psychologist in order to better handle provocation from opposing players.
“There’s still that stigma on it and I talked to Beckham about if would he be willing to go,” Glauber said. “He says, ‘No, I’m in a good place right now, my mind is in a good place.’ Oh really? Well, you saw what happened last night and you’ve got to say that there are issues going on here.”
Glauber said he spoke to a couple of sports psychologists who told Glauber that Beckham has “definitely got to get hold of this thing and kind of get his mind right.” The reluctance likely comes from the perception that any NFL player who talks to a sports psychologist has psychological issues, making him in some way weak or at a minimum not tough.
That’s unfortunate, if that’s why Beckham isn’t interested. Plenty of NFL players and other pro athletes work with sports psychologists. For Beckham, it likely will take more than the long talk Beckham had with G.M. Jerry Reese last night.
Regardless of how or whether Beckham can fix it, he ultimately can blame only himself. Once he started publicly complaining about efforts by defensive backs to play him and not the ball, Beckham invited efforts to get under his skin. The manner in which he came unhinged against the Panthers last December proved that it works.
The last two games have underscored the value of harassing Beckham. Until he can demonstrate on a consistent basis that he won’t take the bait, his adversaries will continue to bait the hook.
Which gives Beckham something in common with a certain presidential candidate. Beyond the interesting choice in coiffure.The newborn gorilla snuggles with mom Koola at Brookfield Zoo.
A female gorilla was born early Monday morning at the Brookfield Zoo.
The western lowland gorilla infant was born to 18-year-old Koola on Nov. 4. The infant's sire, JoJo, is a 33-year-old gorilla that has lived at the zoo since May 2012. Koola's mother and daughter also live with them.
It looks like this newborn has some pretty great genes.
JoJo used to live at Lincoln Park Zoo but moved based on a recommendation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Gorilla Species Survival Plan. Zoo officials that specialize in western lowland gorillas said JoJo is one of the most genetically valuable males in the zoo population.
Snow Leopard Cub Makes Debut At Brookfield Zoo
Guests can visit the baby gorilla and her family at Brookfield's Tropic World exhibit.Since losing out on his chance to claim the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) interim Bantamweight title at UFC 149, losing to Renan Barao via unanimous decision, Urijah Faber has been on a roll, winning four straight fights (three of which via submission).
And after "The California Kid's" latest victory over Michael McDonald at UFC on Fox 9 this past weekend (Dec. 14, 2013) in Sacramento, Calif., UFC President Dana White praised the 135-pound contender, comparing him to none other than Vitor Belfort, another aging veteran who has been red-hot inside the Octagon since losing his previous title fight against Jon Jones
White's words (via UFC on FOX post-fight conference):
"Faber is in this Vitor zone right now. The older he gets the better he gets. If you look at how good McDonald really is and people were so excited for this fight, he literally shut Michael down the entire fight and finished him. It was a great performance."
Indeed, much like Belfort, Faber has improved with time, proving that despite being up there in age -- as far as sports standards are concerned -- neither of them are ready to give up their place in the division to much younger stars.
For his part, Belfort has won three straight since losing to "Bones" in a Light Heavyweight title fight at UFC 152 last year, knocking out Michael Bisping, Luke Rockhold and Dan Henderson in devastating fashion to earn another shot at the Middleweight strap.
At age 34, Faber isn't putting his foot on the brakes, either. And you can bet he'd love nothing more than to get a crack at facing the winner of UFC 169's title fight between division champ Dominick Cruz and interim champion, the aforementioned Barao.
Something White wouldn't fully commit to giving Faber...yet.Far Cry 3 patch 1.05 rolling out with outpost resets, Master difficulty Ubisoft has started rolling out patch 1.05 for Far Cry 3, bringing shiny new features including the promised option to reset outposts and the new 'Master' difficulty level. If the archipelago's feeling a little tired and fusty for you, huzzah, you can now explore new and exciting ways to kill men.
Ubisoft has started rolling out patch 1.05 for Far Cry 3, bringing shiny new features including the promised option to reset outposts and the new 'Master' difficulty level. If the archipelago's feeling a little tired and fusty for you, huzzah, you can now explore new and exciting ways to kill men.
The patch hit PC yesterday, arrived on Xbox 360 this morning, and will venture onto PlayStation 3 tomorrow. The online servers will go down as Ubi deploys the patch, from 5:30-8:30am Pacific.
The patch notes explain that Master brings "adjustment to player health values and AI behavior to make it more difficult than the current difficulty levels." If you're looking to reset the outposts, respawning the enemies and giving them control so you can retake them all, the option for that is in the gameplay menu.
Patch 1.05 also brings a spread of fixes to both single-player and multiplayer, along with features including beta tests for multiplayer maps, more feedback options for multiplayer map ratings, and team balancing and matchmaking improvements for parties. The patch is essentially the same on PC and consoles, but do check out the full notes for more. You can download the patch here.Before Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin, there was Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman. The failure to punish his killers for their crimes—helped by a leak of his father's World War II military file—made Till an agonizing symbol of how the American legal system has been used as an instrument of racial oppression. Six decades after Emmett Till's murder, and seven decades after Louis Till was executed by the U. S. Army, John Edgar Wideman investigates whether the father, like the son, suffered a perversion of justice of the kind that remains one of the ugliest scars on America's soul.
Towards the end of the summer of 1955 I saw in Jet magazine a scary photo of a dead colored boy murdered in Money, Mississippi, whose mutilated face looked like a black bug somebody had squashed under a thumb. I was fourteen. Emmett Till's age that summer they murdered him. Him colored, me colored. Him a boy, me too. Him so absolutely dead he's my death, too.
I fell in love and had my heart broken the first time that same summer, but the big news on our end of Copeland Street, in Pittsburgh, where a few raggedy houses held a few poor colored families, was neither my aching heart nor the far-off Mississippi murder of Emmett Till, who we whispered about like it was our fault, a shameful, dirty secret. The big news that summer was a showroom-fresh, three-tone green Mercury docked alien as a spaceship at the curb on our end of the block. Like everybody else colored on the street I couldn't get enough of the spit-shined, fighter-jet-sleek car. Its owner was Big Jim the gambler, who people said paid cash he won on a single roll of the dice for his new car.
Getty Images
One evening that summer my father with a scowl in his voice hollers from the kitchen: Get your tail in here, boy. Why didn't you come in the house when your mother called you last night.
Wasn't late, Daddy. Not hardly past ten o'clock.
Didn't ask you what the damn time was. Don't care what hour of night or day, when your mother tells you do something, you know you better do it. And quick.
I wasn't nowhere, Daddy. Just sitting downstairs right across the street in Big Jim's car where Mom could see me if she looked.
Since when you grown enough to be sitting around at night in anybody's car.
Wasn't going nowhere, Daddy.
Then what you two doing in the damned car.
Nothing.
What he say to you.
Nothing, Daddy.
Well, I'll be talking to Mr. Big Jim soon's I get home from work tomorrow. Meanwhile, you're grounded. Don't set your foot out the door without asking your mother. And don't you even think about going anywhere near that lard-ass yellow man or his shit green car.
The big news on our end of Copeland Street, in Pittsburgh, was neither my aching heart nor the far-off Mississippi murder of Emmett Till, who we whispered about like it was our fault, a shameful, dirty secret.
Three-tone green. Three colors were a fad that summer. All kinds of brand-new shiny rides in crazy color combinations dazzled the streets. Colors the future. Emmett Till's black-and-white photo in Jet the past, an old story of old-timey, terrible shit white men did to black boys down south. Changes coming fast but some things don't change. A long time after that summer of '55 and I'm still trying to make precise sense of my deep fear, my father's deep anger, my own deep anger, my father's deep fear, strutting peacock cars, fathers and sons afraid of each other. War and hate and terror and love.
Just in case you don't recall, I'll remind you that in 1955, Emmett Till, age fourteen, boarded a train in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. A couple weeks later a train brought his dead body back to Chicago. Emmett Louis Till had been murdered because he was a colored boy and had allegedly wolf-whistled a white lady.
Today Emmett Till is generally viewed as a civil-rights martyr, but the shabby trial that exonerated his killers, and the crucial role played by Till's father afterward, have largely disappeared from the public's imagination. Silenced, the Till trial serves as an unacknowledged, abiding precedent. Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter.
Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter.
I was a bit surprised how much national and international attention the trial had attracted. Thirty photographers popping flashbulbs, seventy reporters pecking away at truth on their typewriters in the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. The trial lasted five days, and the jury deliberated barely an hour—sorry it took so long, folks...we stopped for a soda-pop break—before it delivered a not-guilty verdict on September 23, 1955.
Sketch of the defendants in the Emmett Till case Getty Images
For an American government waging a propaganda war to convince the world of Democracy's moral superiority over Communism, the verdict was an unacceptable embarrassment. The state of Mississippi was pressured to convict Till's killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, of some crime. Since abundant sworn testimony recorded in the Sumner trial had established that Milam and Bryant had forcibly abducted Emmett Till, the new charge would be kidnapping. Except, three weeks before a Mississippi grand jury was scheduled to convene, information from the confidential Army service file of Emmett Till's father was leaked to the press. Private Louis Till was not the brave soldier portrayed in northern newspapers during the Sumner trial who had sacrificed his life in defense of his country. His file revealed he had been hanged on July 2, 1945, by the U. S. Army for committing rape and murder in Italy.
With this fact about Emmett Till's father in hand, the grand jury declined to indict Milam and Bryant for kidnapping. Mrs. Mamie Till, who learned about her husband's execution at the same time everyone else did, watched in dismay as the news erased the possibility that the killers of her fourteen-year-old son would be punished for any crime whatsoever.
A decade earlier, all hell broke loose near the Italian town of Civitavecchia. At approximately ten thirty on June 27, 1944, an air-raid alert sounded and searchlights leaped into the black sky. A thunderous barrage of antiaircraft cannons boomed. During the next hour and a half, two Italian women were allegedly raped, another woman shot in the belly and killed. American soldiers encamped in the vicinity were accused of the crimes. Two colored privates, Louis NMI (no middle initial) Till and Fred A. McMurray, who belonged to 177th Port Company of the 379th Port Battalion, Transportation Corps, were found guilty of rape and murder in a court-martial conducted by Army officers. They were hanged five months later.
Only a few of the tens of thousands of colored men who volunteered for military duty at the outset of World War II were inducted immediately into the armed services. Over three hundred thousand colored men drifted in limbo as late as 1943 while the War Department debated if it wanted them, if colored troops were worth the trouble. Louis Till was an exception, a lucky one snapped up in 1942 for active duty as soon as he enlisted.
War was mostly rumor and myth for men in the Transportation Corps. With few exceptions, colored men like Louis Till were assigned to Transport Corps units. Their war was a rumble of distant guns, distant cities burning at night on the horizon. War was most real for colored soldiers when they buried white guys, young guys far from home like them.
Louis Till was an exception, a lucky one.
Transport Corps troops pack up and ship out when officers bark commands. Private Louis Till winds up in the rubble of another town he's never heard of, never imagined, and he will stay there as long as officers say stay. Sometimes, Till must know he's in Italy. Knows it don't make no fucking difference but he knows sometimes. Knows it as well as he knows his own name, Louis Till. As well as he knows the number 2 plus the number 0 equals his age—20—when he enlisted. And knows he's not going to get much older. And so what. He's Louis Till. Him. Everything he always is.
There was a faint hiss, a whiff of staleness, when I slit open the large yellow envelope and extracted the copy of the record of trial of United States v. Louis Till, which arrived finally in the mail. My copy of the file begins with about thirty pages of miscellaneous correspondence, including notices certifying that Privates Louis Till and Fred A. McMurray had been charged, tried, and executed, as well as a newspaper clipping dated October 15, 1955, reporting that Louis Till had been hanged ten years earlier for rape and murder. Then comes a long, detailed narrative, composed after the court-martial by an Army board of review, that describes the crimes of June 27 and 28 near Civitavecchia, Italy. Death certificates of Till and McMurray follow. Next comes the initial report of alleged crimes, filed August 7, 1944. After snippets of administrative paperwork, two more post-court-martial narratives of the crimes appear, both written, like the initial narrative, by Army officers whose job was to determine whether justice had been served.
Slanting across the left middle of the file's cover, a dotted line bears a handwritten date, 14 Oct 55, followed by the initials RK. Each time the October 14 date appeared, I wondered if I had discovered a smoking gun. Doesn't a conspiracy to violate Private Louis Till's right to privacy originate there, on that day in October 1955, just after the Sumner trial, when Till's confidential military file is declassified and the way cleared for its contents to be leaked to the press. Just in time to sabotage any likelihood a Mississippi grand jury might convene in November and decide to try Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges.
The date reappears later on a memorandum addressed to the office of the judge advocate general (JAG). At the bottom of the memo an official seal certifies the memo's date of dispatch, 14 Oct 1955, and above it, typed, the name of Ralph K. Johnson, Colonel, JAG chief, Military Justice Division, the officer who facilitated the release of classified documents. In response to some unnamed but very powerful person's request, rules had been broken and the Louis Till file, buried ten years in an archive, had been disinterred, disturbed, the remains transmitted to the press.
But the October 14, 1955, date is not necessarily smoke curling from a guilty gun barrel. If Emmett Till's murderers committed no crime, then no conspiracy to cover up a crime exists. What would be accomplished if I were to shout the October date from the rooftops of New York City or Money, Mississippi. A redneck senator's vicious meddling and an Army officer's betrayal of a fellow soldier's privacy were minor trespasses, once I began to grasp the gravity of wrongdoing recorded in the Till file.
The literal last word on the last page of the Till file is Confidential, stamped at the bottom of a letter written in February 1945 by a Brigadier General Oxx to the commanding officer of the 359th Port Battalion and carbon copied to the infamous MTOUSA (Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army) Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa. The letter releases Private James Thomas Jr., the snitch who doomed Till, from prison. Someone drew lines through Confidential, but you can still see the word at the bottom of the file's final page. Power transforming Confidential into a ghost word, dead and alive, invisible and present. Silenced and speaking like lynched Louis Till.
The shack or barracks or shanty, as it was variously identified in the file, where the rapes took place consisted of two small rooms, both opening onto a passageway or corridor that led to the single entrance. The larger of the rooms was divided by a partition. Frieda Mari slept on one side of the partition; her parents, Ernetto Mari and Guila Persi, on the other. Benni Lucretzia and her daughter, Elena, refugees who'd just arrived in Civitavecchia from the village of Allumiere, occupied a negligible space behind the Mari-Persi room. The cramped barracks afforded little or no privacy.
Though no enemy planes transgressed the night skies above Civitavecchia on June 27, 1944, antiaircraft artillery rumbled and searchlights probed, frightening civilians, scrambling the American troops garrisoned at camps nearby. Frieda Mari, closely trailed by the girl Elena, bolted from her bed to the shack's door, flung it open to escape falling walls or to see for herself what new terror war was delivering.
She never got beyond the door. Masked men shooed her and Elena back inside the darkness. Colored men she was sure, because the intruders lit matches. One of them was tall. Dark-skinned, five foot, ten inches. Another shorter, light-skinned, five foot, six inches, and the third, the shortest one, a mulatto, whitest of the three. Later, while the shortest, whitest one is on top of her, Frieda Mari testified, she lifts the hoodlike mask off his face. The glimpse she steals leaves no doubt in her mind, she told jurors at the court-martial. Her attacker was a mulatto. Asked by a juror what color exactly she had seen in the darkness, Frieda Mari replied: He wasn't very light. He was sort of a light dark or a clear dark. The juror (looking around the courtroom where Till and McMurray sit) goes on to ask: Is there anyone in the room that would have the color of this person. Frieda Mari answers: There aren't any.
Louis Till
No, witnesses agree: Too dark to tell what color clothing the attackers wore. Yes, all witnesses agree: We could see the color of the invaders' skin.
Three intruders. Three colored men...negroes...niggers, swore the inhabitants of the raided Mari residence in Civitavecchia.
Four of us raided, swore two of the suspects in their statements. This major discrepancy—were there three or four assailants—is never questioned by defense attorneys during the court-martial of Louis Till and Fred McMurray.
Testimony in the Till file may seem to come from many voices, but all voices are mediated by Criminal Investigation Division agents. These agents, fellow officers of court-martial jurors, gather evidence, take statements from witnesses and defendants, and submit their findings. The only authentication required is a second signature beneath that of the officer who files the reduction. Routinely this signature is supplied by a fellow agent.
This system provides agents ample, perhaps irresistible, opportunities for abuse. Limited only by conscience and ingenuity, they can manipulate, freelance, bypass entirely the words of a witness. But witness statements enter the record and are treated as if they are taped depositions, the exact words of witnesses. Maybe CID agents simply reported what they heard during interviews. Maybe not. The statements are in English. Presumably the victims spoke Italian, so the statements have been translated. Measurements expressed in inches and feet are conversions from centimeters and meters. Spoken words have been reduced (CID agents' term of art) to typed summaries. Translation. Conversion. Reduction. Each process transforms a witness's words. Each creates a step away from the words of live encounters between CID agents and witnesses.
This system provides agents ample, perhaps irresistible, opportunities for abuse.
All three of the review-board narratives in the file tell the same story. From one text to the next, alleged facts pick up speed and weight, become an avalanche. Not surprising since they all depend solely, uncritically, on information contained in the original investigative report and testimony recorded in the court-martial transcript. Three repetitions of more or less the same story asserting violent details have a chilling effect. Why would anyone reading the tale today challenge its impartiality. It's a convincing account unless a reader understands that the scenarios presented by the words of review boards are not eyewitness reports of unbiased spectators present during the action, but reductions of reductions.
I grant the agents the benefit of the doubt. I was not present, so I can't claim to know what transpired in a specific interview or sequence of interviews. Assume they did their best to render accurately the words of people they interviewed. Still—translation, conversion, reduction produce at best problematic, at worst unreliable, corrupted representations of conversations.
Telltale signs of reduction are abundant in both structure and content of victim statements. In Captain Barnes's version of what Benni Lucretzia and Frieda Mari said to him in their second recorded interviews, the last words of both statements deliver a punch line to remind the reader each woman was pregnant when assaulted. Both statements repeat identical phrases and words. Push must be one of Barnes's favorite words; it appears six times in eleven lines of one statement, seven times in nine lines of the other.
When a witness speaks to court-martial jurors, it's fair to ask whose words issue from the witness's mouth. Off-camera interrogations allow agents to plant information, coach, coax, censor, coerce. The original recorded statements of Lucretzia and Mari are each less than two hundred words. At court-martial each woman's testimony expands to include the classic elements necessary for conviction of capital rape—violence, coercion, duration of the act, depth of vaginal penetration, sightings of the offender's penis, assertion of the victim's resistance, the aggravating presence of deadly weapons.
In spite of darkness broken only by an occasional match or flashes from antiaircraft guns and searchlights, in the file the victims provide uncannily consistent and precise physical descriptions of the intruders. Witness statements in the file establish minute details—an intruder's exact height—and leave major issues unsettled, such as how many men raided the Mari residence.
For Army officers at court-martial or serving on review boards, the cumulative weight of victim statements establishes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Louis Till and Fred McMurray as perpetrators, even though each individual victim admits that darkness, hoods, masks, shock, confusion made it impossible to identify the men who attacked them. Seated across the court-martial chamber from Till and McMurray, no victim could identify or accuse either man. Including Ernetto Mari, Frieda Mari's father, who had claimed in a previous statement recorded by CID agents that he had seen the three colored intruders outdoors, in broad daylight, near a waterpoint in Civitavecchia, the day after the night they'd raided his home and knocked him unconscious: I saw the three men—the same three—hiding behind the house of a neighbor.
Army officers began their investigation of Anna Zanchi's murder unaware that two Italian women had been assaulted nearby, on the same night Zanchi had been shot. With no murder weapon recovered from the shooting, no motive, no suspects, the investigation of the Zanchi homicide was floundering and probably would have languished indefinitely unless someone stepped forward to confess or accuse. However, once CID agents heard rumors of rapes by colored men occurring the night of the Zanchi shooting, their murder investigation proceeded rapidly. Rape and color paved the way. Saved the day. All the investigating officers needed were colored suspects, and the segregated 379th, a battalion full, was handy. Even better, agents already had in custody a bunch of colored sugar thieves.
Louis Till
Three days before the rapes and murder, several colored soldiers had attempted to sell thirteen ten-pound bags of stolen sugar at the waterpoint. Investigation of the theft eventually produced four suspects: Private William J. Hite; Private John (NMI) Kinchen; Private James Thomas Jr.; and Private Louis (NMI) Till, all of the 379th Port Battalion. During interrogation Private Kinchen quickly turned, admitting his knowledge of the scheme and implicating the other three suspects. Till, Thomas, and Hite chose to remain silent.
The fact that Till, McMurray, and the other alleged perpetrators were colored, plus the fact that Till and McMurray were reported in the vicinity of Civitavecchia the night the crimes occurred, is enough to convince Army officers the accused are guilty. No further burden of proof is demanded. Privates Till and McMurray are sentenced to death on the basis of being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong color, wrong place, wrong time, a mantra. A crime that over the course of our nation's history has transformed countless innocent people of color into guilty people.
The remainder of the case against Till and McMurray consists of conflicting, ambiguous hearsay evidence that defense lawyers, except for a few timid objections, allowed to stand. On one rare occasion when defense lawyers did challenge the prosecution's case—a defense contention that Fred McMurray's statement naming Louis Till as the ringleader of the fatal raid should be excluded because it was obtained by grilling McMurray for ten consecutive hours—a court-martial judge quickly overruled the objection.
A crime that over the course of our nation's history has transformed countless innocent people of color into guilty people.
Energized by rape and color, the investigation bulldozed ahead, more mission than inquiry. Color and rape provided a motive. Explain and link crimes on the night of June 27 as a single, predictable outburst of the well-known lust and violence that seethes barely suppressed in the dark blood of colored soldiers. A drunken, murderous spree. A riot of uncontrollable, atavistic impulses. Colored soldiers whom the Army considered second-class citizens were suspects who possessed no rights investigators need respect. The logic of southern lynch law prevailed. All colored males are guilty of desiring to rape white women, so any colored soldier the agents hanged could not be innocent.
No doubt about it. Some brutal, ugly shit went down in Civitavecchia. No counternarratives contest the accuracy, the veracity of what review boards report. Guilt of Till and McMurray a foregone conclusion when the court-m |
incident will end up. But the prospects already look ominous and bleak. The Israelis are thoroughly intoxicated by their arrogance of power. They are unlikely to resort to reason and logic and start viewing Palestinians as equal human beings. On the other hand, this is a matter of life or death for hundreds of Palestinian captives unfairly kept in Israeli jails. Moreover, the Palestinians have nothing to lose. Our people have been through it all, from creation to destruction. An old woman from the town of Dura reacted to Israeli threats following the incident, saying “whatever falls from the sky will fall on earth. We won’t be intimidated by their threats and their terror.”
Khalid Amayreh is a veteran journalist living in occupied Palestine.36 New Fan Created Resources for D&D 5th Edition
Winterheart. Winterheart is an adventure for 4th level characters. Can the PCs rescue a young prisoner with latent icy magic before her despair plunges the region into a deep winter? By Esper, illustrated by Jen Tracy, cartography by Esper.
Fantastic Tomes & Librams. Fantastic Tomes & Librams presents you with 1d100 mundane but exotic books and tomes to furnish a wizard's study, a library, or a treasure hoard. Each entry contains the books name, its author, a short description, and an optional notation indicating its rarity, relative value, and number of pages. By Russ Morrissey.
Fire of the Mind. Tired of villains simply described as "mad" or "insane"? This article introduces four new illnesses - Multiple Personality Disorder, Aphasia, Schizophrenia, Paranoid Schizophrenia. Each includes rules for the player, and advice for the GM. By James Abendroth; illustrated by Sade.
Strands of Life. Giltônio Santos brings you 11 new healing spells for the cleric, bard, druid, paladin, or ranger in your life, and takes a brief look at direct healing, damage mitigation, and gradual healing. A vital article for anyone playing a healer! By Giltônio Santos; illustrated by Jen Tracy.
Yet another installment of my D&D 5E fan content roundups, where I scour the web so you don't have to! This time, I have found somethemed pieces, Marvel's Avengers-themed character builds and weapons, revised exploration rules, new creatures, 9 new character sheets, and the One Death & Dismemberment Table to Rule Them All. Remember, I do these every month or so, so click here for them all Also, in the last month on EN5ider, were the following articles. You need to be an EN5ider patron to get them, though!The official emblems of towns and villages generally attract little attention. Often pastoral, they are generally gentle and unassuming. Not so the seal of the Village of Whitesboro, in central New York.
A white man appears to be throttling a Native American man — clearly identified by the feather in his hair — and wrestling him to the ground. The Native American, eyes closed and head cast back, is on the verge of defeat.
Forget microaggression. Critics say the image is aggression.
For the past four decades, with varying degrees of intensity, its appropriateness has been debated, and on Monday, after an online campaign derided the logo as racist, residents voted on its fate.
They decided overwhelmingly to keep it, with 157 of 212 votes in favor of letting the image represent the Oneida County community, which has a population of roughly 3,700.It was a little over a year ago, just as the Cyprus deposit confiscation aka "bail in" was taking place, when we asked, rhetorically, if "Spain is preparing for its own deposit levy" when an announcement by Spain's Finance Minister, Montoro, hinted at the imminent arrival of just that.
Specifically we said:
While Spain's economy minister Luis De Guindos proclaimed in the Senate today that bank deposits under EUR100,000 are "sacred"and that "Spanish savers should stay calm," Spain, it would appear, has changed constitutional rules to enable a so-called'moderate' levy on deposits - as under previous Spanish law this was prohibited. For now, they claim the 'levy' will be "not much higher than 0%" and is mainly aimed at regions in Spain that have "made no effort to collect taxes" based on new revenue expectations. As El Pais reports, the minister of finance and public administration, Cristobal Montoro, defends the need for such a 'levy' in their constitution on the basis of standardizing taxes across regions (and is preparing a proposal on the amounts to be paid) and although it would appear that while the European Commission could previously argue that such a 'tax' would violate the free movement of capital in Europe, it now leaves the door open to eventually effectively taxing the deposits.
Of course, back in March 2013 imposing such a tax would immediately bring up images of parallel bank runs in Cyprus and visions of confiscated deposits, culminating in an immediate collapse of the otherwise already insolvent Spanish banking system. In other words, the timing picked by Montoro to reveal what was coming couldn't have been worse.
Now, however, things are different.
Not only is Europe supposedly recovering, not only is the Cyprus bail in a distant memory (until it comes back front and center with a bang), but it was only a few weeks ago when the ECB - desperate to crush the same EURUSD which just two years ago seemed would implode under the weight of Europe's artificial political and monetary union - revealed NIRP, aka ZIRP on steroids: a negative deposit rate.
Or, as Spain may have called it, a tax on deposits. Because some 16 months after it was first hinted, its time has finally come, and as Bloomberg reported a few hours ago:
SPAIN TO CREATE A TAX ON BANK DEPOSITS: MONTORO
The details are along the lines of what is already known:
Advances to be boosted by almost EU3.9b, Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro tells reporters in Madrid.
Tax on bank deposits to be created: Montoro
Tax rate on deposits to be determined: Montoro
Montoro and regions’ budget chiefs to meet in July
Or just as El Pais reported over a year ago:
The Minister of Finance and Public Administration, Cristobal Montoro, has advanced on Tuesday that the government will impose a type "moderate" to bank deposits to compensate communities that saw their tax autonomy canceled after the Executive created a state tax 0% rate. This tax on bank deposits, which has nothing to do with Cyprus, does not affect savers but requires credit institutions to pay for that capture deposits. "The autonomous communities receive timely and therefore financially compensation shall implement a moderate rate in the state tax on bank deposits," said the minister, adding that this kind "will not be much higher than 0%". The Minister of Finance has clarified that such "moderate" will have no tax collection effort, "but that these regions serve to offset the revenue loss to see." So, he assured that the amount will correspond to the amount "exact has been undermined by the cancellation of regional taxes".... The Government announced in November 2012 the creation of a tax on bank deposits with type 0%, with implementation on 1 January 2013, to prevent the regions implement your own. A week earlier, the Constitutional Court had endorsed the tax on deposits of Extremadura, which launched in 2001 and turned in the day the government of José María Aznar. Thus, this tax was in force before the imposition of the 0% and in the case of Andalusia, the Canary Islands in 2010 and established, who created it in June 2012. Only after it established Asturias. So this type Montoro 0% justified by the need to standardize the tax system and maintain the unity of the internal market, after the European Commission will send a letter to the Government on the grounds that these taxes in the regions could violate the free movement of capital. While leaving the door open to eventually effectively taxing the deposits.
In other words, the funding of the Spanish regions is now in the hands of those dumb enough to work hard and save their money. Because it is only "fair" that they - not the banks that year after year are bailed out by the ECB - end up with the short stick.
But please don't be surprised: after all as we said on June 5 when Draghi revealed that "NIRP Has Arrived" when we said that "Europe Officially Enters The "Monetary Twilight Zone." It is all downhill from here.
And yes: coming to an insolvent country near you... everywhere.Update: Thomas County Sheriff's Office
August 5, 2015
THOMASVILLE, Ga. -- On April 7, 2015 at approximately 11:35 a.m. the Thomas County Sheriff’s Office was dispatched to Azalea Trailer Park, Lot #32 located at 1388 N. Pinetree Blvd., in Thomasville, GA. Upon arrival, deputies found James Eric Poppell, 31, had been shot once in the upper torso. The Thomas County Sheriff’s requested assistance from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Jamey Wolford, 33, reported that during an argument with Poppell, on the front steps of the residence, Poppell charged at Wolford. Wolford reported shooting Poppell with a.40 caliber handgun. Poppell was unarmed. Poppell was pronounced dead at the scene.
On Monday, August 3, 2015, the case was presented to the Thomas County Grand Jury. The Grand Jury returned True Bill of Indictments against Wolford for Felony Murder, Aggravated Assault, and Voluntary Manslaughter. Bench Warrants were issued for his arrest.
Wolford turned himself into authorities at 12:00 p.m. Wednesday and is being held at the Thomas County Jail. Bond for Wolford has been denied.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
April 8, 2015
THOMASVILLE, Ga. -- The man arrested in connection with the shooting of 31-year-old Eric Poppell at a Thomasville mobile home park on Tuesday has been released, according to the Thomas County Sheriff's Office.
The Sheriff's office says the man who was being held in custody has been released from jail because he was claiming self-defense.
The identify of the man has not been released.
No further details are available at this time.
UPDATE By: Alicia Turner
April 7, 2015 5:46 PM
THOMASVILLE, Ga. -- Desja Wilson lives in the neighborhood where a man was shot Tuesday.
"You see police ride through all the time, but you never think in a quiet neighborhood like this that someone would get killed," Wilson said.
Wilson explained that she's still shaken after a shooting at the Azalea Park trailer park in Thomas County. The victim has been identified as 31-year-old Eric Poppell. Witnesses said his kids saw the whole thing.
"No kid deserves to go through that at all," said Sandra Maniero.
Wilson told Eyewitness News she saw the kids as they were being taken from the house. She described it as a sight she never wants to see again.
"The little girl, she just broke down like her life just ended. It was heart breaking. I wanted to cry for a few minutes and hug her at the same time," Wilson said.
The shooting happened just after 11 Tuesday morning. Sandra Maniero said she saw the victim drive up to the house next door.
"We were sitting on the front porch here. We saw the truck come by fairly fast and pull in. We heard him get out shut the door, heard a little bit of fussing, and then a gun shot," Maniero said
Maniero said when she heard the shot she knew she needed to get her and her aunt inside, and call 911 as quickly as possible.
"After the gunshot we could hear the kids in the house and crying and all. We heard people moving around, we knew there were small kids over there so we had to do something. We couldn't just wait around you know," Maniero said.
Mainero told Eyewitness News she still can't believe that something so tragic happened that close to her.
"You hear about it on TV, but you never expect to hear about it and be right beside it," Maniero said.
The Thomas County Sheriff's office does have one man in custody in connection with the killing; his name has not yet been released.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
April 7, 2015
THOMASVILLE, Ga. -- One person is dead following a shooting at a Thomasville mobile home park.
The Thomas County Sheriff's Office is working a crime scene where they said one person is dead following the shooting.
The shooting occurred around 11 a.m. in Azalea mobile home park off of Pine Tree Blvd.
A narcotics officer responded moments after the call came in about the shooting and one person is said to be in custody.
No further details are available at this time. WCTV will update this story as more information becomes available.Free magazines and magazine subscriptions are one of my favorite types of freebies because it's like getting a little present in the mail month after month. I can proudly say that I haven't paid for a magazine subscription in more than ten years. I get more than a dozen free subscriptions every month.
Some of the free magazines I'm getting right now are O Magazine, Family Circle, Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Day, Saveur, Everyday with Rachael Ray, Rolling Stone, Cosmo, US Weekly, Working Mother, Marie Claire, and Harper's Bazaar.
Below you'll find a list of free magazines you can request right now, other ways to get free magazine subscriptions, and some tips on requesting them.
Current List of Free Magazines Available
Here's an up to date list of the free magazine subscriptions that are available right now.
I also have individual lists for free wedding magazines and free baby magazines if you're particularly interested in those.
What You Need to Know About Requesting Free Magazines
All the free magazines and subscriptions I've listed below are indeed free. There are no strings attached, and you'll never receive a bill. They will not automatically renew.
When you sign-up for these free magazines, you'll have to jump through some hoops. These companies make money getting people to sign up for the offers you see during the sign-up process. You do NOT need to sign up for these offers to get the free magazines.
When you come to a place where they want you to select special offers or choose other publications, you'll need to look for a place where you can click "Skip," "No Thanks," "No," or something similar. This option will always be available, it may just be small and at the very bottom of the form.
It does take a few minutes to say no to all these offers, so keep going through the pages until you get confirmation of your free magazine subscriptions.
Never, ever give your credit card number when you signing up for a free magazine subscription. If you do, I guarantee it will no longer be free.
Other Places to Check for Free Magazines
Every freebie I find is first posted on my main free sample page. Check there for new free magazines as they first become available as well as a ton of other free samples you can get in the mail.
You can also go directly to the companies that give out free magazines to check and see if they have anything new or something very specific to your likes. Here are the most popular ones:
If you're only interested in reading the magazines, and not keeping them, here are some other ideas on how you can get them for free:
Check them out from the library
Borrow them from a friend
Check their website for a digital versionDaniel Nickerson of Massachusetts receives birthday cards and packages. (Photo11: Danny's Warriors Facebook page)
All Daniel Nickerson of Foxboro, Mass., wants for his sixth birthday Friday are cards.
So far, the little boy with an inoperable brain tumor has received thousands upon thousands.
The family has been tracking the influx of packages on its Facebook page Danny's Warriors.
"Todays total rough count was a little over 8500 cards and 900 packages!!! We filled the uhaul completely up! And then filled 3 cars too!" the family posted on Facebook this week. "We are in awe of all of this, we are speechless and dont have enough words to explain how thankful we are for everyone of you! And all the love that you have shown us and continue to show us!"
People overwhelmingly sent well wishes to the address, PO Box 212 Foxboro, MA 02035, with messages of support and hope.
Nickerson was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma in 2013.
Follow @jessicadurando on Twitter
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1rDLJISA High Court judge has ruled that the British army will be allowed to install high-velocity missiles on the roof of a high-rise building to provide security during the London Olympics later this month.
Tenants in the Fred Wigg Tower public housing project had argued that the missile installations endangered their families.
“It’s kind of scary now, to be honest,” resident Iqbal Hossain said. “If it’s about safety for the Olympics, what about safety for us? If there is a terrorist attack, the first thing they are going to attack is the missiles.”
But Justice Charles Haddon-Cave agreed with the Ministry of Defense’s assertion that residents were “under something of a misapprehension” about the risks.
“The law and the facts militate against the claim for judicial review,” the judge said. “In my judgment the MoD’s voluntary engagement with the community and residents in this matter were immaculate.”
The Rapier high-velocity missile systems that the British army plans to install in at Fred Wigg Tower and one other high-rise building are capable of shooting down a Boeing 747 or other fixed-wing hijacked aircraft.
In all, six London locations are expected to have surface-to-air missiles.
Watch this video from Sky News, broadcast May 1, 2012.
Watch this video from the Telegraph, broadcast May 3, 2012.EqualityCon 2016 Brings Together Advocates and Experts to Discuss LGBT Issues
CHICAGO, Ill. – EqualityCon 2016, a two-day conference of LGBT champions, progressive advocates, allies, policy experts, political leaders and community groups hosted by Equality Illinois, convenes in Chicago this month to focus on issues important to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Illinoisans.
EqualityCon, formerly known as the LGBT Equality Institute, will be held May 13 and 14 at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the school's Student Center East.
Speakers and panel discussions will address topics such as racial justice, transgender equity, passing laws at the federal level, protecting rights at the state level, safety in schools, finding affirmation in faith communities, guidance on financial security, and wellness and healthcare. Registration for the conference is available at http://bit.ly/EqualityCon2016.
"EqualityCon is an opportunity for advocates to sit down with experts, a chance to listen and to share, a time to learn and to educate on issues important to LGBT Illinoisans," said Patty Medairy, Director of Field Operations at Equality Illinois, which is now in its 25th year advocating for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Illinoisans.
Lead sponsors of EqualityCon 2016, presented by Equality Illinois Institute, are Lambda Legal, AFL-CIO Illinois, UFCW Local 881, and Franczek Radelet P.C., and supporting sponsors are National Center for Lesbian Rights, Planned Parenthood of Illinois, PFLAG Northern Illinois Council, Rainbow Cafe LGBT Youth Center of Southern Illinois, and Coalition of Rainbow Alliances.
The conference begins at 3:30 pm on Friday, May 13 and runs through 5 pm on Saturday, May 14. The wrap-up keynote speaker will be Nikki Nigl who is a supporter of Equality Illinois and a qualified public speaking instructor, accountability coach, relationship guru, women's empowHERment coach, life manager, weight-loss coach, and overall cheerleader. Nikki says simply: “I will make your life better and easier, and probably more fun." Learn more about her here at http://www.nikkinigl.com.
The full list of speakers and panels can be found at: http://www.equalityillinois.org/equalitycon-2016-agenda.The flying height or floating height or head gap is the distance between the disk read/write head on a hard disk drive and the platter. The first commercial hard-disk drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC, used forced air to maintain a 0.002 inch (51 μm) spacing between the head and disk. The IBM 1301, introduced in 1961, was the first disk drive in which the head was attached to a "hydrodynamic air bearing slider," which generates its own cushion of pressurized air, allowing the slider and head to fly much closer, 0.00025 inches (6.35 μm) above the disk surface.[1]
In 2011, the flying height in modern drives was a few nanometers.[2] Thus, the head can collide with even an obstruction as thin as a fingerprint or a particle of smoke. Despite the dangers of hard drive failure from such foreign objects, hard drives generally allow for ventilation (albeit through a filter) so that the air pressure within the drive can equalize with the air pressure outside.[3] Because disk drives depend on the head floating on a cushion of air, they are not designed to operate in a vacuum. Regulation of flying height will become even more important in future high-capacity drives.[4]
However, hermetically sealed enclosures are beginning to be adopted for hard drives filled with helium gas, with the first products launched in December 2015,[5] starting with capacities of 10 TB.[5][6]
See also [ edit ]It looks like there's going to be plenty of incredible posters to get people excited about a new Indiana Jones movie: Mondo has announced that it is teaming up with ACME Archives to create a new series of posters based on both the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises. The partnership is kicking off with the first new poster, a profile of Luke Skywalker from artist Mike Mitchell, titled simply "Red Five." It goes on sale tomorrow, March 17th, at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, and rather than Mondo's usual blink-and-it's-gone selling system, this one will be available for a full 72 hours.
Mondo has been known for its unique takes on movie posters for years, and has recently been getting into other products like vinyl soundtracks (which have their own amazing artwork, of course). Given the general focus on sci-fi and fantasy properties, it's no surprise that some of the most famous Mondo posters are from their previous Star Wars run — in particular, a trio from artist Olly Moss which featured silhouettes of iconic characters from the three original films. Mike Mitchell will be completing a series of profiles as part of this new series, with Mondo bringing in other artists for their takes on the property as well.
The inclusion of Indiana Jones, however, is a first for the company. Although Mondo has created posters for everything from Brazil to Blade Runner, it had never secured the license for Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels until partnering with ACME. The collaboration will also allow Mondo to create posters for several other properties that ACME Archives has the fine art licenses for, including The X-Files and projects from Dreamworks Animation. You can see Mike Mitchell's "Red Five" in full below, followed by an assortment of Mondo's past Star Wars posters.
Grid View "Red Five", the first of Mondo's new Star Wars posters. (Mike Mitchell / Mondo)
A trio from Mondo's previous collection. (Olly Moss / Mondo)
A steampunk-inspired Vader from 2010. (Rob Jones / Mondo)
An older poster depicting the cantina fight. (Martin Ansin / Mondo)
A 2010 portrait of the GNK droid. (Jeff Soto / Mondo)Sad story in this week's Science, about a scientist suing her mentor and Yale for their lackluster response to her being sabotaged. From the article:
Koziol's studies of how the genome switches on after an egg is fertilized had begun failing mysteriously in July 2011, a month after she started her postdoc in the developmental biology lab of Antonio Giraldez. In August, she began producing transgenic zebrafish; they all died, not once, but time after time. A lab technician assured her she was doing everything right, and colleagues' fish were fine. So Koziol produced a new batch of fish and divided them in two groups. One she put in a container labeled with her initials, MK, as she had done before. She left the other half unmarked. Sure enough, the labeled fish died; the others were fine. The experiment was a key step in proving that someone was tampering with her experiments, according to a lawsuit Koziol filed with the Superior Court in New Haven on 7 February. When hidden cameras were installed in the lab, they revealed a fellow postdoc poisoning her fish, the complaint says. Now, Koziol is suing the alleged perpetrator, Polloneal Jymmiel Ocbina. According to the complaint, he left Yale after he was caught on video.
Ugh. Labmates are supposed to be your colleagues...people you turn to for advice, learn new techniques from, discuss career options with. If you don't get along with them, then fine, talk it out or avoid them. But don't freaking resort to sabotage. When I hear about conflict/competition between labmates happening, it's usually cause of an unfriendly environment perpetuated by the lab head. From her complaint, it sounds like this case may not be any different:
From then on, Koziol's relationship with her boss deteriorated. The complaint says he refused to provide her with a letter about the sabotage, which presumably would have helped explain her lack of data to future employers. Koziol alleges that he criticized her work and character, didn't help her make up for the lost time, gave her "angry looks when passing in the lab," didn't list her as a contributor to a Nature article, and threatened to fire and "destroy" her. Koziol became depressed, suffered from sleeplessness, and gained weight; when she and Giraldez talked for 3 hours in August 2012, Koziol "cried throughout the meeting," the complaint says. Koziol filed a grievance procedure against Giraldez, which she lost; Yale, in its statement to Science, calls her allegations against Giraldez and the university "factually distorted and legally baseless.
Advertisement
I feel for Koziol. Obviously the sabotage occurred, and it's up to the system to determine whether Giraldez and Yale failed her. I think this is all a symptom of the greater problem within research, where faculty are put under increasing pressure to produce papers in order to fight for funding. This results in some PIs prioritizing data production over proper mentorship, and questionable stuff like this and data manipulation can occur.
Glad to see that Koziol is back in a supportive environment (her thesis lab with Nobel laureate John Gurdon...who has amazing hair btw).
Advertisement
Hope she eventually finds some resolution and peace!Candidate Donald Trump is holding a rally today in Austin, TX at The Leudecke Arena. Live coverage begins at 7:30pm CDT / 8:00pm EDT.
The Leudecke Arena venue holds 6,500 stadium seats and an additional 3,000 floor seats (25,000 sq foot arena floor). Thousands of people have been lined up, some as long as eight hours, to attend. Well beyond 10,000 trying to attend.
Live Stream Link – Alternate Live Stream #1 – Alternate Live Stream #2
Line is looooooong at #TrumpRally in Austin. Organizers say cars began lining up at 10:30 am. Hope I can get in pic.twitter.com/XUh1aDJ7D8 — Joe Prich (@JoePrich) August 23, 2016
HUGE lines at #Austin Trump rally!
Keep RTing b/c the Media will never report on this! pic.twitter.com/h9HIFlqSE4 — Tennessee GOP (@TEN_GOP) August 23, 2016
There will also be a Trump Town Hall broadcast via Sean Hannity at 10:00pm
The line across the street waiting to attend Trump town hall in Austin pic.twitter.com/r2SiKyWpc2 — Jim Vertuno (@JimVertuno) August 23, 2016
Advertisements“Cameron insisted that his own image dominate” this disastrous 2010 poster according to new book bit.ly/S1WWgD twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/st… — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) October 27, 2012
How the last seven years have been seen by George
Patrick O’Flynn in the Daily Express is reporting this morning that a new book on George Osborne by writer Janan Ganesh, could be damaging to David Cameron.
According to O’Flynn the chancellor emerges as a towering figure “while the shortcomings of Dave” are dealt with at length.
One aspect featured is the background to the famous much-spoofed posters that were unveiled at the start of January 2010. It’s said that Cameron insisted that “his own image should domninate.
O’Flynn writes that generally: “..Cameron is outmanoeuvred by civil servants and his successes are often credited to Osborne. We learn that “Osborne was intimately involved†in his Brussels veto last December. And Osborne’s policy change on inheritance tax in 2007 is credited with saving Cameron from a snap election he would have lost.” ……This characterisation defines the Chancellor as the real power and the Prime Minister merely as a salesman for his policies…”
In many ways the relationship that is portrayed is similar to the Blair-Brown one although George and Dave are said to be much closer.
Whatever the book is hardly going to help relations between the two men and you can bet that Ed Miliband will use extracts at PMQs.
Mike Smithson
For the latest polling and political betting news from the US and UK
Follow @MSmithsonPBThe United States is the greatest threat to world peace. That’s the finding of an end-of-the- year, WIN/Gallup International survey of people in 65 countries.
Of the 66,000 people polled, just under a quarter named Uncle Sam as the greatest threat to world peace.
Other menaces didn’t even come close: 8 percent named Pakistan, putting that country in second place, while 6 percent named China. A mere 4 percent found Iran threatening — which tied it with Israel.
As we were reading the results, we couldn’t help thinking we had seen it all before. And when we looked, we found a 2006 Pew Research Center poll of 17,000 people from 15 different countries that found something very similar: More people thought the US intervention in Iraq a threat to world peace than Iran.
Back then, of course, the press summarized the findings this way: It’s all because of Bush. As Britain’s Guardian newspaper put it in its lead sentence on the survey: “George Bush’s six years in office have so damaged the image of the US that people worldwide see Washington as a bigger threat to world peace than Tehran.”
In 2008, President Obama would go on to campaign about how Bush’s policies had harmed America’s standing in the world, at one point suggesting that attitudes in the Muslim world would be transformed simply by his election.
It hasn’t turned out that way, as these Gallup numbers suggest. Maybe we’d do better to accept the real message of all these global surveys: There are many people in this world who don’t like the US and will regard us as a threat no matter who’s president.In a softball interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton vehemently denied she’s a socialist, but found herself unable to answer what the difference is between a Democrat and a socialist.
Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is Vermont senator and self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.
Matthews asked Clinton, “What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat? Is that a question you want to answer, or would you rather not?”
“You’d have to ask [Sanders],” Clinton said before being interrupted by Matthews.
“You see, I’m asking you. You’re a Democrat, he’s a socialist. Would you like someone to call you a socialist?” Matthews asked.
“I am not one,” Hillary responded without answering the question.
“OK, well what’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?” Matthews asked again.
“I can tell you what I am, I am a progressive Democrat,” Clinton responded.
“How is that different than a socialist?” Matthews asked a third time.
“I am a progressive Democrat who likes to get things done,” Clinton continued. “And who believes we’re better off in this country when we’re trying to solve problems together. Getting people to work together. There will always be strong feelings and I respect that, from, you know, the far right, the far left, libertarians, whoever it might be, but we need to get people working together. We’ve got to get the economy fixed, get all of our problems, you know, really tackled and that’s what I want to do.”
Clinton joins Democratic Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in being unable to explain the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.An explosion of algae in southwest Florida has killed thousands of fish big and small and caused a terrible smell to permeate the area in the past week during Florida’s annual autumn red tide.
Concentrated in Sarasota and Manatee counties, the affects of the red tide, have been felt across the southwest coast of Florida causing tourists to abandon the beaches and local businesses to suffer. Meanwhile the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has been testing water samples along the coast in order to document and collect more information on the phenomenon.
“Right now we only have a couple of patches of high concentration,” Kelly Richmond, a spokesman for the FWC, told the Herald Tribune. “You go to one beach, it could be high. You go to another beach down the road, it might be lower.”
The proliferation of harmful algae blooms typically damages ecosystems either directly by releasing toxins into the water and air or indirectly by throwing off the balance of the ecosystem through oxygen depletion. Karenia brevis, which typically infects waters off the coasts of Florida, Texas, and Mexico, is an example of the former.
In addition to killing fish, the toxins can also harm marine birds and mammals, according to Kaitlyn Fusco of the More Marine Laboratory in Sarasota. But this is all expected, Ms. Fusco told WTSP News, “typically in the fall into the winter we will see red tide blooms.”
Some have questioned whether sewage overflow from this summer’s storms could have contributed to the bloom, as poor water quality has been known to exacerbate algae blooms and kill off a wide variety of fish.
“Large fish kills are often a sign that more needs to be done to restore water quality in estuaries," Doug Rader, the chief oceans scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, told The Christian Science Monitor's Christina Beck in August. "It is a normal occurrence, but it is exacerbated by human impact.”
Hayley Rutger from the Mote Marine Laboratory said that the Florida red tide algae occurs naturally in the Gulf of Mexico, and its blooms usually form offshore, away from coastal nutrient sources. However, human-made and natural nutrients from the coast can affect blooms that move close to shore. [Editor's note: Dr. Rutger's comments were expanded from a previous version to clarify the nuances of harmful algae blooms.]
Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy
Strong winds can stir up the toxins produced by the algae and lead to harmful air pollution.
While the beaches remain open, the FWC recommends that beachgoers not take their pets to the beach and that swimmers rinse off after going in the water. The FWC has also asked residents of southwest Florida to report any fish kills, particularly in Sarasota and Manatee Counties.• Categorized under Animals,Nature | Difference Between a Hawk and a Falcon
Hawk vs Falcon
A falcon is a bird of prey that belongs to the Genus falco. There are various species of these raptor birds in the genus falco. They are characterized by their long wings and powerful beaks that are adapted to the way the birds hunt for prey, by strongly clawing and then tearing the flesh of the captured animal. Falcons, when fully mature typically fly at very high speeds and easily alter directions because their wings are tapered and thin. For the young falcons, their longer flight feathers are typical of any other flying bird but they make it easy for the young birds to learn superior prey hunting skills that will make them acquainted with effective hunting skills when they are grown. Falcons are known for their super fast flying speeds and the peregrine falcon is recorded as the fastest flying bird as well as fastest moving creature on earth with a diving speed of 322km/hr. other known falcons are the Lanner, Merlin, gyrfalcon and the hobbies which are small with wings that are long and narrow. Like many birds of prey, falcons have a very superior sense of vision, more than twice that of humans.
The hawk on the other hand is a term referring to the bird species belonging to the Accipitrinae subfamily. There are several genera in that subfamily including the Accipiter, Micronisus, Melierax and Megatriorchis with the Accipiter genus being the largest and has the most common hawk birds. In this genus there are sparrowhawks, goshawks the sharp shinned hawk and many more. The hawks in this genus basically stay in woodlands and are very visually astute. They hunt their prey by unexpected dashes from a hidden perch. A long tail is characteristic of these birds. Sometimes, the word hawk may be used generally to mean any bird of prey other than owls. Although the hawk and falcon are similar in characteristics, there are several features where the two birds differ.
Falcons generally have an angular bend on their beaks that allows them to easily break their prey’s neck while hawks generally have smoother beaks with a simple curve as they mainly use their talons to snatch and kill their prey. Falcons are very fast in flight especially the peregrine falcon whereas hawks are much slower in flight and would |
puter interfaces that control prosthetics. Having robotic limbs that can directly interpret their user’s thoughts without having to be calibrated would represent a significant quality-of-life improvement.
“These training periods can be long and annoying, and in some circumstances, they’re truly problematic — say, if your arm is missing, rather than paralyzed,” said Kording. “Willing movement is different from imagining moving a nonexistent arm.”
This cryptanalysis approach could provide a way for brain-computer interfaces to achieve literal mindreading.
“You could ask a ‘locked-in’ patient to generate neural patterns associated with specific words, but the corpus of language is very large,” Kording said. “Rather than having them generate a pattern that is associated with every word they want to say, we could build a decoder that transforms those patterns until it looks like language.”
“I think we should be able to do this within the next decade,” he said.
Working in favor of this goal is a consistent improvement in brain-recording technology, with scientists currently working toward electrode arrays capable of simultaneously sampling data from a million neurons.
“As this capability grows, our technique becomes more useful,” Kording said, “At the same time, I think we need to be very careful about the possibility of it being applied to people without their consent. What spy agencies could do with this technology is scary.”
Though at a very preliminary stage, the researchers believe their cryptanalysis approach to decoding neural activity is a fundamentally good match for the problem.
“The Germans were actively working against decryption and modern ciphertexts are basically impossible to break,” Kording said. “We have it easier. The brain ended up with this encryption system through natural selection, so it’s essentially making the same kind of ‘mistakes’ that allowed us to crack Enigma in the first place.”
The work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke through grants R01 NS053603 and R01 NS074044.Privacy experts say that a pair of new mobile privacy bills recently introduced in Texas are among the “most sweeping” ever seen. And they say the proposed legislation offers better protection than a related privacy bill introduced this week in Congress.
If passed, the new bills would establish a well-defined, probable-cause-driven warrant requirement for all location information. That's not just data from GPS, but potentially pen register, tap and trace, and tower location data as well. Such data would be disclosed to law enforcement "if there is probable cause to believe the records disclosing location information will provide evidence in a criminal investigation."
Further, the bills would require an annual transparency report from mobile carriers to the public and to the state government.
Under current federal case law and statute, law enforcement generally has broad warrantless powers to not only track suspects in real-time based on their phone data, but also to access records of where and when calls were made or text messages were sent or received—and all of this is provided by the carriers.
“Location information can reveal a great deal about an individual’s professional and personal life—her friends and associates, her participation in political or religious activities, her regular visits to a health clinic or support group, and more,” said Chris Conley, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
“That’s why we think it is essential that the government get a search warrant, approved by a judge, before demanding this kind of information from cell phone providers. The Texas bill would require just that. In addition, the Texas bill would also require companies to report how often they receive such demands from law enforcement and how much information they disclose. This kind of transparency is essential to carry on an informed dialog about appropriate law enforcement powers in the modern world.”
Broad powers
The unanimous 2012 Supreme Court decision on United States v. Jones ruled that law enforcement did not have the authority to track a suspect using a GPS tracking device put on a car without a warrant. But cops frequently use similar tactics with lower legal standards, including using the suspect’s own phone against her. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Justice to release GPS tracking-related memos.
The bills, which were introduced in the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Senate last month, are endorsed by the Texas Electronic Privacy Coalition. That's an umbrella group that includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin, Grits for Breakfast, Texans for Accountable Government, and the ACLU of Texas. They will need to pass both houses and be signed by the state governor, Rick Perry, before becoming law.
Ars reached out to the four major mobile carriers in the United States—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile—for their comment on this new bill. None of them responded on Wednesday except for Verizon, whose spokesperson, Debi Lewis, said the company had no comment.
One bill at a time
Not surprisingly, other civil libertarian and digital rights groups are looking with a hopeful eye that such legislation can influence other states and perhaps the federal government. According to the ACLU, 11 states have already introduced similar bills this year.
“What the states do on this issue will certainly influence what Congress does,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It's clear to me that because the location of a cell phone is mobile and because phones cross state lines routinely it's probably that if the states start acting then Congress would need to enact a uniform rule.”
Various states have tried to implement versions of such privacy protections in the past. California’s was famously vetoed by the governor in September 2012. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) introduced legislation in 2011 that would have also imposed similar restrictions, but none as strong as what’s been proposed in Texas.
“Although Senator Franken’s Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 [PDF] and these Texas bills all seek to protect cell phone user’s location information, the Texas bills differ from Franken’s bill in scope, function, and specific objective,” Woodrow Hartzog, an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School, told Ars. “Senator Franken’s bill is narrowly tailored to ensure that companies obtain consent before collecting or sharing location data from a consumer’s mobile device. The Texas bills are broadly aimed at the government’s collection of location information.”
He added that these bills were among the “most sweeping mobile location protection bills I've seen,” and he wondered if and to what degree they will become law.This is coming later than I’d hoped and the world has moved on, but as promised I want to take up the other frequent rebuttal to the much-debated claim that economic changes can’t explain the two-parent family’s half century of decline — the argument that it’s relative income, not absolute income, that matters most to people’s lives and hopes and aspirations, and therefore the post-1960s increase in income inequality suffices to explain the social crisis among the working class even if working-class wages themselves haven’t really fallen.
As far as potential evidence for this hypothesis goes, here are a couple of the best cases I’ve seen. (No doubt there are others.) First, there’s this paper from Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, which correlates higher rates of unwed teenage births to higher inequality across both the United States and Europe, and suggests that stratification creates a “culture of despair” among the young and poor that encourages poorer women to seek validation and even honor through early motherhood rather than work or advancement. Second, there’s the chart attached to this Andrew Cherlin op-ed (and featured in his —recommended — new book), which shows not only that the overall marriage rate was lower in the Gilded Age and in our own high-Gini-coeffiecient era than in the more income-compressed 1940s and 1950s, but also that the class gap in the marriage rate shrank as incomes compressed and then widened as the Gini coefficient rose.
Now here are the various reasons why I’m skeptical. First, note that Kearney and Levine are looking at early nonmarital childbearing — births to mothers 19 years old and younger. But the American teen birth rate, with the exception of a 1980s surge, has actually been in steep decline from the 1960s to the present, the period of rising inequality that we’re discussing here, for reasons that are debatable and partially mysterious. (Interestingly, Kearney and Levine are also the authors of the paper arguing that the influence of “16 and Pregnant” may have played a recent role in this decline, which is one for the “what’s on television matters” file.) Now: Some of that trend is driven by later marriage and delayed childbearing; a lot of those teenage parents in the 1950s and 1960s were young marrieds (and sometimes shotgun marrieds) having their first kids, which means they wouldn’t be part of the Kearney-Levine sample or affected by their proposed explanation. But even if you take the nonmarital teen birth rate, what you’ll see (look at Table 16) is a rise and then a fall between 1970 and the present (even as the U.S. Gini coefficient kept rising through the 1990s and 2000s) such that the rate today is back where it was in 1975; meanwhile it was the nonmarital birth rate for everybody else roughly doubled, with larger increases for older demographics. So whatever the link between inequality and unwed teen childbearing, it hasn’t manifested itself across the last four decades the way the specific correlation in their paper would lead to one to expect.
This doesn’t mean the paper is wrong about the basic idea that, ceteris paribus, people with weaker economics prospects and fewer hopes for advancement tend to make different choices around sex and family than do the middle class and affluent. (As the authors note, today the choice that matters most is often whether or not to have an abortion.) But for the sweeping social change we’ve seen since the 1950s — the spread of single-parent families, serial cohabitation and multi-partner fertility out of the underclass and into the working and middle class — to be explained by an increase in inequality-driven socioeconomic despair, you would need evidence that rising inequality is effectively trapping, not just the poorest Americans, but many millions of people making closer to the median income in the kind of no-hope environment that we associate with the deep poverty of the underclass. And since, again, unwed teen births aren’t soaring with the Gini coefficient, this sense of despair would have to be kicking in somewhat later in the life cycle … so you would need to make the case that more and more late twentysomethings and early thirtysomethings are hitting a wall of crushing hopelessness about their future that previous generations never ran into or had to face.
And I just don’t think the evidence is there. It isn’t visible in trends in socioeconomic mobility, which is weaker than it should be but which doesn’t show much of a change over the last half-century. And it isn’t really visible in income inequality trends themselves, which show the upper class pulling away from the 80 percent and (especially) the 1 percent pulling away from the 99 percent, but which don’t show a vast, impossible-to-bridge chasm opening between, say, the fourth quintile and the second. If despair over opportunity were really driving post-1960s family trends in the lower middle class, you would expect to see a visible decrease in mobility over that period, and a wide enough gap between incomes in the lower middle and the upper middle that someone born to lower middle class parents or starting out at a low-wage job would have reason to give up hope of ever bringing home $50,000 a year. But that isn’t what see: That hypothetical worker’s chances of material advancement may not be what we would want them to be, but on the best evidence we have they have not declined as income inequality has climbed.
Similarly, if inequality were driving stratification which in turn mainly drives family breakdown, you would expect the three would be very tightly associated with one another. But in the big mobility study, by Harvard’s Raj Chetty and others, that found that U.S. mobility was stagnant rather than falling, there was a tight correlation between socioeconomic mobility and intact families … but a much weaker correlation between mobility and income equality itself. So it’s hard to see exactly how the more weakly-correlated trend could be the main driver of two more tightly-correlated trends.
Then I have similar arrow-of-causation questions about Cherlin’s (very interesting) charts showing marriage rates converging and diverging by occupation as inequality diminishes and then increases. My bigger issue with the chart is that it doesn’t tell us much about family stability, across classes or in general, prior to the 1950s: It’s true that mid-20th century America was distinctively marriage-oriented and fecund compared to some preceding eras, but while those eras had lower marriage rates they did not have the rates of divorce and single parenthood associated with the post-sexual revolution landscape. (Also, marriage rates hit a unique high in the 1950s, but the decline since is now taking us into uncharted territory rather than just reverting to a mean.) But even if we just focus on the post-1950s period, Brad Wilcox has pointed out that using Cherlin’s own classifications it looks like both the decline in marriage rates and the class divergence begin in the ’60s, before the widening of inequality in the 1970s. So interpreted crudely, his chart could very easily be used to just make the case that the sexual revolution weakens marriage, and that weakening in turn causes inequality – rather than inequality itself being the root cause.
This view, that income inequality really is mostly the result of family instability, is not without its champions, since the most common measurements of inequality tend to use household income, which is vulnerable to changes in family size and composition and stability. (The same holds for measurements of income volatility, a subject I’ve touched on earlier.) Indeed, you can find a sweeping version of this analysis that argues that controlling for household size basically eliminates the entire Gini-coefficient change since the 1950s … but people I trust don’t trust the results there. For more restrained takes, here are two papers — one from the mid-2000s, one from around 2010 — that tackle the question; both suggest that family fragmentation had a meaningful effect on household inequality; at the same time, both point to research suggesting that female workforce participation has reduced household inequality, possibly offsetting the fragmentation effect. So some of the discussion turns on whether you think of the decline of marriage and rising female earnings as a package deal, which is implicit (at least) in some left-wing and some right-wing analysis, or whether you think they didn’t have to happen together and don’t need to be permanently conjoined.
That’s a question for another time, but in closing I want to reach for a little common ground. The fact of female earnings growth also points to another issue — the impact of increasing assortative mating (the well-educated marrying the well-educated) in an era of rising female earnings and attainment, which probably tends to magnify inequality itself and which is bound up in a larger trend that I’ve written about before: Namely, the growing geographic segregation of the well-educated, the way that college graduates cluster more and more in specific regions and cities and neighborhoods than they did a few generations back.
Of all the mechanisms through which economic inequality could be shaping working class family structure and communal life for the worse, this strikes me as the most plausible. The problem, that is, isn’t that inequality imposes outright deprivation on the poor or prevents them from ever becoming middle class; it’s that when the returns to the talented are significantly higher than for everyone else, it’s much easier and more natural for well-educated Americans to self-segregate socially, to live and go to school and (sometimes) go to church in cities and communities that are effectively gated against anyone whose earnings miss the cut-off for rent, a down payment, private school, or whatever else you need to flourish. And that segregation leads, in a hard-to-quantify but somewhat commonsensical way, to a kind of hoarding of social capital, in which the pool of potential friends and mentors and significant others and civic leaders is shallower and less diverse in working class communities than it would have been in the past, and certain kinds of social examples and everyday encounters and support structures that kids and families need are less immediately available than they would be in a society less efficient in meritocratic sorting than our own.
This problem, as I’ve argued before in the context of the Piketty debate, isn’t really a 1 percent issue, since the richest 1 percent are always going to find ways to self-segregate. (The Harvard of the 1950s was not somehow a middle-class friendly place just because American incomes were more compressed overall.) Rather, it’s more a problem of what Piketty calls the “petits rentiers,” the mass upper class, whose interests are opposed to sound public policy in various ways, but whose increasing self-segregation, in particular, is effectively underwritten by everything from the tax code to urban zoning rules to immigration policy. And since that underwriting has critics on both sides of the partisan divide, notwithstanding all the right-left divisions on inequality it’s possible to imagine a certain kind of egalitarian agenda taking shape around anti-rentier reforms — and it’s further possible to hope that this kind of egalitarianism could, by encouraging a little more dispersal of talent and social capital, gradually work to counteract the social and familial crisis further down the education/income ladder.
But to return to my major theme here: This hope, or the hope involved in any public policy intervention, only makes sense if it’s tempered by the acknowledgment that Something Else is also going on.People are debating whether this cat is going up or down the stairs. (Photo: Twitter Screengrab)
Only a short time has passed since "the dress" debate and now we have another optical illusion on our hands.
A picture of a cat walking on stairs has people across the Internet asking: "Is this cat going up or down?"
The photo was posted anonymously on Imgur five days ago and now has more than 14,000 views, the BBC reported.
The image was picked up later by a website called 9gag.com where nearly 4,000 people have weighed in with their opinions.
People also shared their thoughts on Twitter:
Forget the colour of the dress. So is this cat going up or down the stairs? =/ pic.twitter.com/g8o7sB69I1 — Zulhafiz Zainal (@zufie) April 10, 2015
No idea, but it's definitely a gold and white striped cat RT @BBCtrending: Is this cat moving up or down the stairs? pic.twitter.com/Yd5ZCnl2P5 — ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ ᴀʟᴇxᴀɴᴅᴇʀ (@anecdotaldave) April 10, 2015
The cat's going down the stairs, alright? #catonstairs — Adam Jones (@adamjone5) April 10, 2015
See other optical illusions:
Follow @lagrisham on Twitter
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1FHSU7pAsian Women And White Men
What Asian Women Really Think About Western Men
Page 1 of 2
In my life, I've often encountered a certain type of Western guy who was attracted to Asian women. He tended to be older, white and yes, creepy. I wanted to know why, so I set out to make a documentary. What emerged five years later, after hundreds of hours of research, including interviews with men and women who posted ads for Asian women on sites like Craigslist and Asiafriendfinder, was Seeking Asian Female, an eccentric, tender and at-times uncomfortable love story between a 60-year-old American man and his 30-year-old Chinese fiancée. I'm also creating a companion project, They're All So Beautiful, an online video series and forum to discuss the nuances of race, romance and "yellow fever."
Though the concept dates back centuries, dating Asian women, or, more accurately, the idea of dating Asian women, has officially gone mainstream. While I spoke to a lot of aging white men, I also spoke with young hipsters, black men and Latinos who desire Asian women. I heard from Asian, Asian-American and many other women about their encounters with this so-called “yellow fever.” I even interviewed a Chinese woman who’s a yenta for men seeking Asian wives in Silicon Valley. Throughout all this, a common thread emerged: myths and misconceptions about Asian women are as strongly held as ever. Understanding the difference between fantasy and reality made all the difference for these people and the true stories they shared.
Myth No. 1: Asian women make perfect wives. They have good family values and cater to the man.
Around 500 BCE, Confucius outlined relationships in which wives looked up to their husbands in perfect harmony. Times have changed, but the myth that Asian women make doting and dutiful wives still persists.
Julia Ma, owner and matchmaker of Your Asian Connection, says men who join her club are seeking “the old picture of Asian women — traditional, take care of husband, cook dinner, clean house.” She says, “Lots of guys hope for that,” but the “new generation is different.” Based in Cupertino, California, home of Apple, where over 60% of the population is of Asian descent, she introduces Asian women to Western men for a legitimate end goal of marriage. Her female clients are educated, often tech-savvy and, like her, many have been divorced. She believes that Western men are more accepting of this, yet conversely are thought to have poorer family values.
Still, Julia describes the high pressure in Asian societies for women to start families at younger ages than in the West. She proudly states that her female clients are “flexible” and “want to work together as a family unit” — but she’s quick to note that they’re “picky” and have high expectations. To them, marriage must be a two-sided contract. A wife gives face to her husband in public, but in honoring his end in private, he must put family first (not himself), cater to her in-laws and, as is traditional in countries like China and Japan, hand over control of the bank accounts to her.Following Apple’s introduction of Face ID technology in the iPhone X, Android smartphone manufacturers have turned away from under-display fingerprint recognition, and have now started developing camera-based 3D sensing technologies, according to KGI securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has previously said it would take Android competitors up to two and a half years to replicate the Face ID feature (via MacRumors).
The analyst writes in his latest research note that “inquiries by Android smartphone vendors into 3D-sensing technologies have at least tripled”, ever since Apple unveiled its TrueDepth camera and Face ID technology in the upcoming anniversary edition iPhone X. He also notes that right now, the solutions available to Android makers are from Qualcomm and Himax, Orbbec, and Mantis Vision, with Qualcomm-Himax solutions being at the top of the list.
Here’s what Kuo says:
“While under-display optical fingerprint recognition is only a spec upgrade from capacitive solutions, 3D sensing embodies a revolutionary user experience and warrants a premium on gross margin. 3D sensing not only enables facial recognition in security applications and allows users to create fun expressions like Apple’s Animoji, on a more important level, it is a key factor in the development of AR. We therefore believe brand vendors are willing to spend more for related components.”
The analyst believes shipments of 3D sensor-equipped Android devices will exceed those with under-display fingerprint recognition by a factor of two or three or more, in the next 2-3 years.Google has announced plans to incorporate 360 underwater views of Australia's Great Barrier Reef into its "Seaview" project, a service that will let Google Earth users dip below the surface for a virtual view of the world's oceans.
With amazing views of sea turtles, coral reefs and sunken ships, preview images released today offer a first glimpse into what users can expect from the Catlin Seaview Survey, a comprehensive environmental survey project being developed by the University of Queensland in partnership with insurance firm the Catlin Group and Google, Wired reports.
Starting in September 2012, experts will launch a scientific expedition of the reef using specialized cameras to capture tens of thousands of images of the reefs, which will then be stitched together to form 360-degree shots like the ones currently available on Google Street View.
The project will also have an official YouTube channel for live web streams of various underwater areas, according to Sky News.
Project engineers told New Scientist that the survey's goals are twofold: It will offer a way for anyone to explore the reef as well as give scientists the opportunity to learn more about the health of the reef to better develop programs and tools for preservation.
"For the first time in history, we have the technology available to broadcast the findings of an expedition through Google. Millions of people will be able to experience the life, the science and the magic that exists under the surface of our oceans," Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the survey's chief scientist, told New Scientist.
Experts are especially interested in using the technology to determine how climate change is effecting the Great Barrier Reef.
"The deep reef survey looks into the effects of climate change on one of the least known ecosystems on the planet – the deep-water reefs or mesophotic coral ecosystems (between 30-100m)," the team wrote on the project website. "It will provide a comprehensive study of the health composition and biodiversity of the deepwater reefs on the Great Barrier Reef as well as experimentally assess their susceptibility to increased temperature and climate change."
Check out the Catlin Seaview Survey website to try out a demo developed from images taken at Heron Island, a coral cay off the north-east coast of Australia.
Meanwhile, on land, Google's Street View mapping feature is known for capturing odd and mysterious sights. Check out our slideshow (below) for some of the strangest images ever found in Google Street View.Opinion by Sen. John Kennedy
Twelve years ago I looked out over the city of New Orleans, most of it under water, and wondered if we could come back. We did, thanks to our own resolve and a lot of help from our fellow Americans.
Now New Orleans faces another crisis of Katrina-like proportions: crime.
Thirteen people were shot in a 24-hour period on June 3. Days later, four people were robbed in the Garden District by a thug wearing a black bandana and brandishing a silver handgun. The victims were minding their own business, returning from dinner at one of our city's iconic restaurants. The robbery was one of 21 armed robberies that weekend.
Dealing with New Orleans crime means having a cop around when you need one: Opinion The next mayor needs to continue vigorous police recruiting efforts, commit to retaining veteran officers, and build on what we have learned from NOLA for Life to change some of the root problems of violent crime.
And, by now, everyone has seen the June 24 graphic video of the brutal French Quarter mugging that occurred at 9 p.m. in the well-lit, well-traveled 200 block of Bienville Street. People in the nation's capital have even asked me about it.
We're a little more than six months into 2017, and 350 people have already been shot in New Orleans. That's an increase of almost 60 percent over last year. And if you haven't been robbed, consider yourself lucky.
Crime is stealing the soul of New Orleans. It's choking the life and livelihood out of it. I used to live in New Orleans, and now I'm a little scared to go for a walk there.
Something needs to be done. Our mayor seems pre-occupied with other things and other ambitions.
Here's what we need to do.
First, the mayor and City Council need to reverse the effects of the hiring freeze that depleted the ranks of the New Orleans Police Department. For three years now the mayor has been vowing to hire 150 new cops a year. He hasn't even come close. The city's operating budget is $614 million a year, up from $497 million five years ago, while population growth has been flat. Public safety should be our city's top spending priority, not an afterthought.
Second, we should listen to District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who has warned that our city "has crafted a criminal justice policy that has repeatedly placed politics above public safety." Maybe the DA's candor is why city leadership cut his budget $600,000 this year, eliminating more than 10 positions and withdrawing investigators from murder scenes. Talk about doubling down on stupid! Cannizzaro's help has been repeatedly rejected, and the DA himself has been ridiculed, when in fact he should be put in charge along with the NOPD superintendent, who himself has been hamstrung by politicians.
Third, city leadership should ask for help. Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Randy Smith, St. Bernard Parish Sheriff James Pohlmann, Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Gerald Turlich Jr. and other local law enforcement officials might be willing to help if they were asked. They know a thing or two about fighting crime.
Finally, a stop-question-and-frisk program should be implemented to help get the criminals, the dope and the illegal guns off the streets. Mayor Rudy Giuliani (a Republican) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a Democrat turned Independent) used it to clean up New York City. The U.S. Supreme Court approved stop-question-and-frisk, sometimes called a stop-and-frisk, in 1968 in a case called Terry v. Ohio. The 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court held, allows a police officer to stop, question and, if necessary, frisk a suspect without probable cause to arrest if the officer has a reasonable suspicion to believe the suspect has committed or is about to commit a crime.
Stop-and frisk is not racial profiling, as some say. "Reasonable suspicion" is a legal, objective standard taught every day in police academies. Besides, the New Orleans Police Department is one of the most diverse police forces in the country, and I don't believe every NOPD cop is a racist. The politicians should let the NOPD do its job.
We can reclaim the streets of New Orleans, but not unless the city's leadership changes course. If you always do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.
John Kennedy represents Louisiana in the U.S. Senate.Desert Vista High School
Phoenix, Arizona
1:00 P.M. MST
THE PRESIDENT: Hey! Hello, Phoenix! (Applause.) Hello, Arizona! (Applause.) It is --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you, Obama!
THE PRESIDENT: I love you back. It is good to be here. (Applause.)
I want to say thank you to the Thunder for hosting us here today. (Applause.) Well, we are so glad to be here. I want you to give it up for somebody who’s been fighting for homeowners and working families every single day, who’s with me today -- Secretary Shaun Donovan, Secretary of HUD. There he is right there. Give him a big round of applause. (Applause.) We’ve got Congressman Ed Pastor who’s here as well. (Applause.) We’ve got your Mayor, Greg Stanton, here. (Applause.) Doing an outstanding job. And to all the mayors and state legislators and tribal leaders who are here today, thank you. (Applause.)
Give Jorge a big round of applause for his introduction. (Applause.) To your superintendent, Dr. Kenneth Baca. (Applause.) Your principal, Dr. Anna Battle. (Applause.) And I appreciate everybody at Desert Vista for having me here today. (Applause.) It is good to see the students are pretty enthusiastic about being back in school. (Laughter.) I’m not sure I would have been that enthusiastic starting on the 6th. (Laughter.)
And I know this isn’t your typical school -- second day of school. So I want to give a special shout-out to the new seniors, class of 2014. (Applause.) You are aware that you’re not finished yet. (Laughter.) Senior year, that’s sometimes tempting. I want you all to stay focused.
Over the past couple weeks, I have been --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Happy birthday, Mr. President!
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause.) It was my birthday two days ago. (Laughter.) Got some singers here.
AUDIENCE: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, Mr. President. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause.) I am now 52, and Michelle says that I don’t look a day over 51. (Laughter.)
So over the last few weeks, I’ve been visiting towns all across the country, talking about what we need to do to secure a better bargain for the middle class -- a national strategy to make sure that everybody who works hard has a chance to succeed in the 21st century economy.
And I think people in Arizona especially understand the challenges that are out there, because for the past four and a half years, together, we fought our way back from a devastating recession that cost millions of jobs for Americans. A lot of folks lost their homes; a lot of folks lost their savings. And what the recession showed was the long erosion of middle-class security that had been taking place for decades.
But we fought back. We took on a broken health care system. We took on a housing market that was in free fall. We invested in new technologies to reverse our addiction to foreign oil. We changed a tax code that had become tilted a little bit too much in favor of the wealthiest Americans at the expense of working families. (Applause.) We saved the auto industry. We’ve now got GM that plans to hire a thousand new workers right next door in Chandler to make sure we’re building some of the best cars in the world right here in the United States of America. (Applause.)
Our businesses have created 7.3 million new jobs over the past 41 months. We now sell more products made in America to the rest of the world than ever before. Our exports are way up. We produce more renewable energy than ever before, more natural gas than anybody else. Health care costs have been growing at the slowest rate in 50 years. And our deficits are coming down at the fastest rate in 60 years. So we’re making progress. (Applause.)
So thanks to the efforts of a lot of people like you, we’ve cleared away the rubble of the financial crisis. We’re starting to lay the foundation for more stable, more durable economic growth. But as any middle-class family will tell you, we’re not yet where we need to be. Because even before the crisis hit, we had lived through a decade where a few at the top were doing better and better, but most families were working harder and harder just to get by.
And reversing this trend should be -- must be -- Washington’s highest priority. It’s my highest priority. (Applause.) I want to make sure that in America, it doesn’t matter what you look like, where you come from, who you love -- you should be able to make it when you try. You should be able to make it. (Applause.)
Now, unfortunately, for the last year or so, we’ve had an endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals that shift focus away from what do we need to do to shore up middle-class families and create ladders of opportunity for folks to get into the middle class. And as Washington heads towards another budget debate, the stakes could not be higher.
And that’s why I’m traveling around, laying out my ideas for how we have to build the cornerstones of what it means to be middle class: a good job with good wages; a home to call your own; a good education; affordable health care that’s there for you when you get sick; a secure retirement even if you’re not rich; the opportunity -- the ladders of opportunity for people to earn their way into the middle class, to work their way out of poverty. Those are the elements that I think all of us believe in, but right now we're not delivering as much as we should on those promises.
Now, last Tuesday, I went to Tennessee to talk about the first cornerstone, which is how do we make sure that we're creating good middle-class jobs here in the United States of America. Today I've come to Phoenix to talk about the second component, which is the most tangible cornerstone that lies at the heart of the American Dream, at the heart of middle-class life -- and that's the chance to own your own home. (Applause.) The chance to own your own home.
We've got a lot of young people here who are thinking about college, they're going to get a higher education, they're going to find a job, they're going to find somebody they love, they're going to want to own a home. And the reason they will is because a home is the ultimate evidence that here in America, hard work pays off, that responsibility is rewarded.
I think about my grandparents’ generation. When my grandfather served in World War II, he fought in Patton's Army -- when he got back, this country gave him a chance to go to college on the G.I. Bill, but it also gave him the chance to buy his first home with a loan from the FHA. To him, and to generations of Americans before and since, a home was more than just a house. It was a source of pride and a source of security. It was a place to raise kids, to put down roots; a place where you could build up savings for college, or to start a business, or to retire with some security.
And buying a home required responsibility on everybody’s part. You had to save up to buy a home. And then banks were supposed to give you a fair deal, with terms you could understand, and buyers were supposed to live within their means and make sure that they could make their payments. So in that earlier generation, houses weren’t for flipping around, they weren’t for speculation -- houses were to live in, and to build a life with.
And unfortunately, over time, responsibility too often gave way to recklessness. You had reckless lenders who sold loans to people they knew couldn’t afford them. And let's face it, we also had some reckless buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them and still took out loans. And all this created a housing bubble. And especially in some places like Arizona, it was devastating when that bubble finally burst -- triggered a recession. Millions of Americans who had done everything right were hurt badly by the actions of other people. Housing prices plummeted.
By the time I took office, home values had fallen almost |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.