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worked on the 1982 film Annie and was called back to reshoot part of a scene after having recovered from the surgery. The scene involved her character entering and exiting a closet to retrieve a necklace. She told the director, John Huston, that she was concerned about her chin looking different from entering the closet to exiting it, and he simply told her to "look determined". The scene is still in the film.[17]
In keeping with her promise to the anonymous benefactor who assisted her in 1954, she has contributed to scholarship programs at UCLA and the University of Hawaii to help people in financial need.[48]
Litigation [ edit ]
Burnett v. National Enquirer, Inc
In 1976, a false report in the nation's leading supermarket tabloid, The National Enquirer, incorrectly implied that Burnett had been drunk and boisterous in public at a restaurant with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in attendance. The fact that both of her parents suffered from alcoholism made this a particularly sensitive issue to her. Through years of persistent litigation, she won a judgment against the Enquirer, in 1981. Though the initial jury award of $1.6 million was reduced to $200,000 by a series of appeals, and the final settlement was out-of-court, the event was widely viewed as a historic victory for libel victims of tabloid journalism.[49][50][51][52][53][54][55]
The former longtime chief editor Iain Calder in his book The Untold Story, asserted that after the Burnett lawsuit, while under his leadership, the Enquirer worked hard to check the reliability of its facts and its sources.
Carol Burnett and Whacko, Inc. vs. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
In 2007, Burnett and Whacko, Inc. brought a suit against Twentieth Century Fox requesting at least $2 million in damages, alleging copyright infringement, violation of publicity rights, and misappropriation of name and likeness due to the use of her charwoman character and an altered version of "Carol's Theme", the theme song used in The Carol Burnett Show, without her permission. The character and theme were used in the "Peterotica" episode of Family Guy when the characters discuss the cleanliness of a porn shop and one of them states it is so clean because Burnett works there as a janitor. The charwoman is shown mopping the floor in the porn shop, and the characters subsequently discuss Burnett's ear tug and make a crude comment about it. Burnett and her company requested that Fox remove all references to her, the theme and the character but the studio did not.[56][57] The suit was ruled in favor of the defendant because the bit was a parody, which is protected by the First Amendment. The judge agreed that the portrayal was crude but stated that the character Burnett created was far more creative than anything the Family Guy team could come up with on their own.[58]
Memoirs and related works [ edit ]
Burnett and her oldest daughter, Carrie Hamilton, co-wrote Hollywood Arms (2002), a play based on Burnett's bestselling memoir, One More Time (1986). Sara Niemietz and Donna Lynne Champlin shared the role of Helen (the character based on Burnett); Michele Pawk played Louise, Helen's mother, and Linda Lavin played Helen's grandmother. For her performance, Pawk received the 2003 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play.[59]
In 2010, she wrote the memoir This Time Together.[60] and was nominated for the 2011 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album.
In 2014, she wrote the memoir Carrie and Me and was nominated for the 2014 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album.
In 2016, she wrote the behind-the-scenes memoir In Such Good Company, for which she won a Grammy Award in 2017.[61]
Filmography [ edit ]
Note: Made-for-TV movies are listed in the Television credits section.
Television credits [ edit ]
Theatre [ edit ]
As Calamity Jane in 1963
Books [ edit ]
Awards and recognition [ edit ]
Other honors [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ They Called Them Spectaculars
Citations [ edit ]Text Size: A- A+
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An expert said that the cess could be used to create a fund to battle the growing number of cases of online fraud in digital payments.
New Delhi: A high-level meeting on how to curb cyber fraud in digital transactions has proposed the imposition of a token ‘security fee’ on every digital payment in India.
The suggestion from the Department of Financial Services was among many others from participants.
Nasscom Internet Council head Prasanto K. Roy said that a fee on every digital transaction could be aimed at starting a fund to create better infrastructure to secure digital transactions, like the Swachh Bharat cess.
“A special fund could help develop security infrastructure, hire experts and secure online transactions, though a cess on digital transactions isn’t the best way of doing it,” he told ThePrint. “The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) need to encourage digital transactions by making them cheaper, not more expensive. There are other, better ways to fund digital security.”
Emails and calls to officials from the Department of Financial Services regarding the proposal received no response.
The focus of the meeting held on 13 September was to discuss measures to make digital transactions safer. The meeting, chaired by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, was attended by officers from the MeITY, Home Ministry, Department of Financial Services, Department of Telecom, Reserve Bank of India and Intelligence Bureau.
“The meeting was attended by all major stakeholders to discuss and recommend ways on how to make these transactions safer as the number of people shifting to digital payments are expected to increase by next year,” an official from the Ministry of Home Affairs said on condition of anonymity.
“It was also discussed that an Act needs to be in place for regularising digital payments, which will be looked after by the finance ministry, and to how fix the responsibilities of agencies,” the official said.
Cyber frauds targeting e-payments have been on the rise. Official figures say that cases related to e-wallets and e-payments (that were reported to banks) jumped from 13,083 cases in 2014-15 to 16,468 cases in 2015-16.
The Intelligence Bureau proposed the Indian government ensure the development of a software that detects attempts at cyber fraud. As per the suggestion, the software once developed should be incorporated by payment gateways so that customers can be alerted about suspicious transactions..
“There needs to be a machinery to detect out-of-bound transactions and the pattern of violations in cyber fraud cases. The machinery should be able to figure if the transaction is fraudulent by looking at its pattern and send alerts,” Nasscom’s Roy said.
MEiTY recommended the creation of a literacy campaign on digital payments to educate people and keep them secure.
“Most online frauds happen as people share their passwords, ATM pins, 3D secure pins, and there is a need to educate them about it. Also, a standard procedure for all e-wallets needs to be in place as right now anyone can make a wallet just by downloading the app. The KYC norms need to be strengthened for safer transactions,” the official from the Home Ministry said.
As a first step though, the Home Ministry has recommended the creation of a dedicated cyber-forensics lab. The ministry has suggested that 27,500 police personnel, along with 13,000 forensic officers, be trained on how to tackle cyber fraud cases.
“As of now we do not have the manpower or expertise to deal with cyber fraud cases, which is going to be challenging…we need to be prepared,” the Home Ministry official said.
Want to hear experts engage over the big issues of the day? We bring you Talk Point.
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Show Full ArticlePolice lead suspected shooter Dylann Roof, 21, into the courthouse in Shelby, North Carolina, June 18, 2015. REUTERS/Jason Miczek
(Reuters) - Friends of the white gunman who shot and killed nine black people inside an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina said he first talked about attacking a college campus, the Washington Post and NBC News reported on Friday.
The Washington Post reported 22-year-old Christon Scriven, a black neighbor of gunman Dylann Roof, said that during a recent night of drinking, Roof said he wanted to open fire on a school. At another point, Roof talked about shooting up the College of Charleston, according to the newspaper.
“My reaction at the time was, ‘You’re just talking crazy,’” Scriven told the Post. “I don’t think he’s always there.”
Scriven also told NBC News that Roof may have changed his plans after deciding the college campus was a harder target to access.
“He just said on Wednesday, everything was going to happen. He said they had seven days,” Scriven said to NBC News. “I just ran through my head that he did it [...] Like, he really went and did what he said he was going to do.”
Reuters could not verify the report as Scriven could not be immediately reached for comment.
Roof, 21, who authorities say spent an hour in Bible study with parishioners at the nearly 200-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church before opening fire on Wednesday night, appeared via video feed before a magistrate judge who on Friday ordered him held without bond.
He has been charged with nine counts of murder and a weapons offense.
The attack at the church nicknamed “Mother Emanuel” for its key role in African-American history followed a wave of protests across the United States in recent months over police killings of unarmed black men, focusing attention on racial bias in the criminal justice system and renewing a civil rights movement under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.”FIFA have option to lengthen ban...
Ourprovides the best breaking news online and ourfootball fan community is unmatched worldwide. Never miss a thing again!
FIFA have admitted Uruguay's Luis Suarez could potentially miss the rest of World Cup 2010 after receiving a red card for his handball against Ghana in the quarter-finals.The striker received his marching orders for saving a goalbound-header on the line in extra-time, with Asamoah Gyan missing the resulting penalty.Uruguay then progressed to the semi-finals after winning the following shoot-out 5-3, eliminating the last remaining African nation at this year's tournament.Suarez will serve an automatic one-match ban, ruling him out of the semi-final with Holland. Although FIFA's disciplinary committee will discuss whether his suspension should be extended further on the grounds of unsportsmanlike behaviour, which could jeopardise his involvement in either the final or the third-place play-off.FIFA spokesman Pekka Odriozola told a press conference: "For automatic red cards there is an automatic one-match suspension. The disciplinary committee also opens a case and they will be looking at that incident and taking a decision."FIFA's disciplinary code gives the committee the option of a longer ban for "unsportsmanlike conduct".His action is also contrary to FIFA's fair play code which states: "Winning is without value if victory has been achieved unfairly or dishonestly. Cheating is easy, but brings no pleasure".No trip to South Africa is complete without a visit to its most beautiful and sunniest city. Durban offers much more than sandy beaches, safaris, casinos and the World Cup, for information on what to do and see, please click hereHis slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.
–Robert W. Chambers, In the Court of the Dragon
Your pursuit of answers leads you across the sea A Phantom of Truth! The cursed play The King in Yellow was performed months ago, yet the strange happenings still persist, driving you to new vistas that have never been explored in Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Now, you leave Massachusetts behind for the glowing lights and alluring mysteries of Paris.
A Phantom of Truth, the second Mythos Pack in The Path to Carcosa cycle for Arkham Horror: The Card Game is on sale now! Pick up your copy at your local retailer or online through our webstore today.
Bienvenue à Paris
The King in Yellow was performed at Arkham’s Ward Theatre months ago, but the strange happenings that accompany the cursed play have failed to cease. After all you have seen, you know that these are more than coincidences, and you fear that something far worse is on the horizon. So far in your investigation, you’ve delved into the archives of the Arkham Historical Society and explored the twisted halls of Arkham Asylum, but you're still coming up short on answers. Now, as you venture into A Phantom of Truth, you to leave your city behind in the hopes of saving it.
Arkham is not the first place that The King in Yellow has been performed. This madness has come from Europe’s cultural hub of Paris… and the only way to move your investigation forward is to explore the play’s past. You begin your excursions at the famous Gare D'Orsay (A Phantom of Truth, 214), and from there travel by Rail to various parts of the city in search of the play’s director, Nigel Engram. Surely the architect of this madness will hold the answers you seek. But time is of the essence. You can feel each day that something beyond all imagining approaches and every night you are tormented by dreams of Carcosa with its black stars, twin suns, shattered moons, and twisted spires.
Soon these visions begin to haunt your days as you see a terrible Omen of Twin Suns (A Phantom of Truth, 223). The implication of this event spoils what would otherwise be a lovely sunset. Whether you are able to decode the meaning of this vision will determine whether your investigation is able to progress. If you fail this test, you must either remove one doom from the current agenda or suffer horrors to make up for the Intellect you lack. As the answers to your questions surrounding the play and these dreams begin to unfold, will the omens cease, or will the truth break your mind altogether?
Ville des Lumières
The city of lights holds many dark secrets, and in the shadowed alleys of Paris, the creatures you thought you left behind in Arkham seem to have followed you. As you continue your investigation through the city, you may have to fight your way out of a sticky situation. In a desperate case against foreign monsters, you may be encouraged to make a true show of Spirit, crying "I'll see you in hell!" (A Phantom of Truth, 189). This brave, but perhaps foolish, move immediately defeats you and causes you to suffer physical trauma, but it brings your non-Elite enemies down with you.
Beyond the everyday madness you are depressingly used to, another danger awaits. A tall, pale stranger seems to be following your every move as you explore the city. The question remains as to whether this man is an indifferent or a malevolent being, but you have come too far to take chances. In these desperate times, you may be forced to abandon the rules of civility and take a Cheap Shot (A Phantom of Truth, 194), using your agility to help you land an attack. If you successfully execute this Trick, you can automatically evade your enemy and leave them in the dust.
But you are not alone in your quest. Paris holds just as many friends as it does enemies. Over the course of your investigation, you may find reason to call upon locals such as Madame Labranche (A Phantom of Truth, 198) for assistance. As your mysterious benefactress, this Parisian lady may exhaust her ally card to enable you to draw a card when you have none. Or, if you are completely destitute after your trip abroad, you may exhaust her card to gain a resource. These favors should not be called upon lightly, but should you find yourself in dire straits, this could be the edge you need to keep your search for answers going.
In A Phantom of Truth, you become a stranger in a strange land in what you begin to suspect is not only a foreign country, but a foreign world entirely. You may feel yourself drawn across the city by some malevolent force, as if the choices you make are not your own, and the line separating sanity from madness begins to blur.
Don’t get lost.
Qui Vivra Verra
Journey across the sea to the city of lights. Explore Paris, find Nigel Engram, and get some answers even if they only hold A Phantom of Truth!SACRAMENTO — Slightly more than a year ago, Tommy Thompson was starring for Granite Bay High School, playing against the likes of Davis and Jesuit.
But in Monday night’s friendly match, the diminutive attacking midfielder lined up for the largest game of his life as the Sacramento Republic FC fell 1-0 to the English Premier League side West Bromich Albion in front of a crowd of 7,461 at Bonney Field.
After 58 minutes of up-and-down play, the on-loan San Jose Earthquake received a loud ovation from his hometown crowd as he departed the match with the Republic trailing.
“It’s a dream come true for me,” Thompson said about playing in front of those fans. “I got kids that I went to high school with out here. I got family out here. It’s exciting. It’s a great reception here in Sacramento and I’m happy to be a part of it.”
Perhaps the best chance of the night was Thompson’s in the 32nd minute when an Adam Jahn header fell to him near the corner of the 6-yard box.
The former Indiana Hoosier collected the ball, opened up his hips, and tried to place it far post, but hit it agonizingly wide.
Despite the miss, Thompson’s play saw him named man of the match and earned him a Twitter shout-out from West Brom player and English international Joleon Lescott.
“It’s really exciting. Me and my family grew up watching (the English Premier League),” the 18-year-old said. “It was really cool to get a chance to actually go against them. I thought we did well and got a good result.”
Republic FC started the match on its back foot when defender Nermanja Vuković took down Nigerian international Victor Anichebe in the box just 12 minutes into the match, leading to a penalty kick that Scottish international Graham Dorrans converted for the only goal of the game.
Sacramento battled back into the game, controlling more of the play after that, and when West Brom’s Craig Gardner was sent off in the 82nd minute, the Republic began throwing numbers forward to try to get a result.
Unfortunately for the home team, none of its 21 shots came to fruition thanks to nine saves from Modesto-born goalkeeper Boaz Myhill, who represents Wales at the international level.
Notes: Thompson will represent the MLS homegrown players in the first-ever MLS Homegrown Game, part of the MLS All-Star weekend festivities on Aug. 4. Thompson is considered a homegrown player because he came through the San Jose Earthquakes youth academy… This match was the first match that Bonney Field didn’t sell out its capacity of 8,000… Adam Jahn of El Macero started and played the first 70 minutes for the Republic.
— Reach Evan Ream at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @EvanReamI’m looking up at the sky as snow floats to the ground, covering everything around me. While the grey outside is being painted by mother nature, something else is happening in my eardrums. I have a new TAURUS song “No Thing Longing… Human Impermanence” on repeat, expanding into vast parts of my brain with each sound. This very special band will be releasing a new record entitled No/Thing very soon, but in the meantime you can check out this track below…I will say this about TAURUS – the layers and depth of their music is neverending, but all I want to do is hear more! You can pre-order No/Thing right HERE!
No/Thing Track Listing (song titles flow together as a parable):1. No Thing Longing… Human Impermanence2. Lives Long For Own3. Set Forth On The Path Of The Infinite4. Increase Aloneness5. Receed
All music was felt by:
Stevie Floyd – guitar, vocal, Hammond organ, ukulele
Ash Spungin – drums, vocals, synth, samples
Wrest (Leviathan) – vocals (track 5)
Billy Anderson – vocals (track 4), producer, engine ear
No/Thing will be released independently on April 1, 2014 via TAURUS’ official Bandcamp page and comes available in three options:
Record Box Set Option One:
– Wooden hand screen printed, stained and shellacked box with original Stevie Floyd art includes:
– No/Thing LP (colored vinyl), CD, download
– Life LP, CD, download (old record)
– 18” x 24” bleached black canvas tapestry/large backpatch
– lithograph lyric/art gold print on red linen paper
Record Box Set Option Two:
– Wooden hand screen printed, stained and shellacked box with original Stevie Floyd art includes:
– No/Thing LP (colored vinyl), CD, download
– 18” x 24” bleached black canvas tapestry/large backpatch
– lithograph lyric/art gold print on red linen paper
Record-Only Option Three:
– No/Thing LP (colored vinyl), CD, download
– lithograph lyric/art gold print on red linen paper
In related intelligence, TAURUS will bring their audio explorations overseas this Spring for a still-in-its-booking stages bout of live rituals which will include a special performance at the third annual Heavy Days In Doomtown festival in Copenhagen, Denmark. Further details to be announced in the coming weeks.
TAURUS defines rehearsed spontaneity; organized mathematical rhythms of the timeless organic. Their view, not of man but an abstraction. The abstract is real, the actual is invisible. It is their sense of space and time; seeing through the here and now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging… Life is an interval. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into granite and methane. The wheel constantly turns for all Life… yet all Life is temporary. All creating and recreating. Each movement so important. Each space equally as relevant. We are dustKaggle's annual March Machine Learning Mania competition drew 442 teams to predict the outcomes of the 2017 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament. In this winner's interview, Kaggler David Scott describes how he came in 5th place by stepping back from solution mode and taking the time to plan out his approach to the the project methodically.
The basics:
What was your background prior to entering this challenge?
I have been working in credit risk model development in the banking industry for approximately 10 years. It isn’t a massive stretch from my original degree in Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics.
I have been lucky to receive exposure to big data and data science through previous roles but decided I wanted to teach myself R and to improve my machine learning knowledge. The best opportunity seemed to be to utilise Kaggle datasets where I could to help with this.
What made you decide to enter this competition?
I had started using some of the titanic data to learn some R but I am a massive sports nut. So when the opportunity came up to get data to predict March Madness I couldn’t resist. This was my first entry in a Kaggle competition outside of the training exercises.
Let's get technical:
How did you approach the problem?
At first I dived into the data. As I played and wasn’t achieving the success I was hoping for, I had a realisation. How would I approach this problem at work? I had rushed into solution mode without planning out the project and hadn’t considered what I had expected to see. At that point I realised I had to consider 3 important things.
Finding out what the experts reviewed to predict March Madness (Experts). Be careful structuring my data to make sure I didn’t over fit (Data Construct). Figure out what model development technique I would use for my final model (Model Development).
Experts - Did any past research or previous competitions inform your approach?
No. It would have been a good idea but instead I started listing to podcasts on college basketball. This gave me an understanding of what the commentators use when they are evaluating a good team and looked to make sure this information was included in my final model.
Data Construct - What pre-processing and feature engineering did you do?
I spent most of my time creating a linear model predicting the best teams based on their regular season results using the points’ difference as the target variable. This gave me a rank order of teams that was my main predictor in my model. Outside of that my time was spent matching data from other sites to get things like Strength Of Schedule, etc.
I also made sure to split the data into enough segments that the model would not overfit. This included splitting the development data into a build and validation sample and leaving the test data provided for the last 4 years. Each change in the development was evaluated for consistency with the others.
What supervised learning methods did you use?
I kept it simple with a logistic regression. This is something I am very familiar with and something I thought it would work well for this problem.
Words of wisdom:
What have you taken away from this competition?
The main take away from this competition was that data and how you use it was more important than the modelling technique. I stuck with a basic logistic regression technique for the model development and it appeared to work well.
Looking back, what would you do differently now?
I would have factored in that games at the later stages of the tournament would be close. I ran out of time to consider that if teams met in the final 4 regardless of their rating before the tournament it is likely to be close. This meant that 1 upset towards the end of the tournament could have derailed my finishing position.
Do you have any advice for those just getting started in data science?
I don’t really have advice for getting started in data science but I would suggest having a go at the problem datasets in Kaggle. In the competitions I would suggest taking time to think about the problem and plan in advance before diving in. If you find out what the experts consider to be useful, chances are you won’t be far off.
Just for fun:
If you could run a Kaggle competition, what problem would you want to pose to other Kagglers?
I have more of a problem I would like to pose to other Kagglers. I am a massive F1 fan and I have always been interested in understanding what the car contributes and what the driver contributes. This way I could figure out the best driver of all time. I have a source of data that I would be happy post on Kaggle for some assistance if people are interested.
What is your dream job?
I am very fortunate that I really enjoy understanding what can be used to predict different events and learning new techniques as I go. My career to date has allowed me lots of opportunities to do this.Share. There and back again. There and back again.
My first thought upon starting Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition was, “Where’s Nietzsche?” Exactly 14 years ago today, the German philosopher’s quote about staring too long into the abyss would set the mood for the hours I would spend staring into the abyss of my screen with BioWare’s ambitious RPG, and its absence in the opening cinematic of this upstart version imparted visions of coming disappointments. Back in 1998, my Southern kin still feared this Dungeons & Dragons “foolishness,” and the sight of this proto-Hitchens’ words both appealed to my freshman optimism and evolving sense of Schadenfreude. My worries about the Enhanced Edition grew as I saw the admittedly primitive cinematic featuring Sarevok and the hapless soldier swapped for mere illustrations, which perhaps wouldn’t have been so bad if they hadn’t cut one of the soldier’s key lines. Things were looking grim, and I wasn’t even a minute in.
Exit Theatre Mode
The good news is that these concerns largely end once the title screen emerges from a pool of blood. This is still the Baldur’s Gate I knew and loved (complete with the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion), particularly if I’d smothered it with mods over the intervening 14 years. Oddly enough, that’s also one of its problems. At times, such as when you open the graphic options only to find nothing more than a toggle for full screen, all this "enhanced" business feels like a load of hogwash. The world of Faerun itself looks much as it did when I first booted it to escape the nonstop coverage of Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings, although a new option to zoom in and out of the action wisely stops just short of letting you study the sprites in all their pixelated glory. Higher resolution textures and improved spell animations enhance the visual experience for HD to a degree, but on a whole the project still looks its age.
The Enhanced Edition introduces plenty of tweaks, but they're so quietly woven into the interface that you may find it hard to believe Overhaul's done much at all if you haven’t played in a few years. Erased, allegedly, are more than 400 bugs that plagued the original, although my playthrough suggests that several new bugs made their way in as well. At one point, one of my party’s NPCs started receiving insane XP gains after each battle. Reloading my save fixed the problem.
The old, blurry GUI remains more or less intact aside from a widescreen modification, but its background colors now have a dubious tendency toward blues rather than greens and grays. The cumbersome inventory screen makes a comeback, but now it benefits from an expanded ground slot and improved tooltips designed to ease the entry for contemporary audiences less attuned to old school AD&D debates over THAC0 and saving throws. Gone are the cumbersome quest logs that demanded flipping through successive pages; in their place, we find the familiar drop-down toggles of contemporary games. Smaller improvements such as highlighted targets abound, and players who aren’t keen on creating their own characters with expanded options that include the class kits from Baldur’s Gate II can choose from a selection of premades.
Yet the Enhanced Edition manages to distinguish itself through a few standout additions. For one, there’s the Black Pits, a gladiatorial mode that throws you in 15 increasingly difficult battles of enemies for the amusement of Baeloth the Entertainer. It's fun, but I spent most of my time fighting the same battles to earn enough XP and gold for gear in the Black Pits shop to tackle the higher rounds with confidence. I found it most useful for experimenting with tactical battles to prepare for similar challenges in the campaign, and it contains just enough voiced story--complete with surprisingly adept voice acting--to keep it from feeling like a tacked-on sideshow feature. New players may enjoy using it for combat practice, as Baldur’s Gate remains as challenging as it ever was. Then as now, if you’re not prepared, it’s possible that you’ll find yourself dead after your first encounter with some run-of-the-mill assassin while still within the walls of Candlekeep. In an age when words like “enhanced” all too often carry the stain of oversimplification when applied to refurbished classics, Overhaul Games’ refusal to sacrifice the challenge of Baldur’s Gate warrants applause.
Other substantial changes to the Enhanced Edition come in the form of the three new heroes waiting to join you on your adventure. My favorite was Neera, a "wild mage" with an endearing demeanor that recalls the Merrills and Nymphadora Tonkses of the wizarding world, especially when her spells produced effects that barely outmatch her personality in their randomness. Then there’s Dorn Il-Khan, a dour warrior who you’ll meet grumbling around the Friendly Arm Inn, as well as the initially weak monk Rasaad yn Bashir, who’s showing off his tattoos to the folks at Nashkel. It’s a great credit to Overhaul that these three fit into the existing narrative as though they’ve always been there, and the roughly four hours you’ll spend on each of their quests reward you with engaging writing and an experience that’s at least on par with the rest of your adventures. Considering that there’s already over an hundred hours of gameplay in store in your existing tale as the ward of Gorion, that’s a decent addition.
Exit Theatre Mode
But do all the enhancements make it worth the purchase? It depends on your investment in the original. It’s worth mentioning that I played the Enhanced Edition on the PC, and I can attest that any player who’s already played a modded version of the original won’t find much reason to spend $20 on this entry save for the conveniences of the built-in enhancements. It thus seems aimed at a newer generation, but members of that generation will still have to adjust to its outdated mechanics and graphics. If they do, they’ll find that one of the greatest RPGs of all time has aged well enough to justify spending the extra $10 for bonus content and a pile of tweaks, as even now it captures a spark of what attracted so many of us to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in those early days of the internet. The story itself remains as engaging as ever (if somewhat generic), and you need only to play for an hour to appreciate how Baldur’s Gate's release marked a renaissance in high fantasy RPGs that continues to this day. If Overhaul manages to deliver on the cross-platform multiplayer gameplay with the upcoming mobile versions, that may be enough to establish this effort as the unequivocal superior to BioWare’s original.Welcome to Opensource.com's Women in Open Source Week
Opensource.com will highlight the efforts of women in open source from January 27 through February 7. We will be focusing some of our content specifically on women working in free and open source software fields and collaborating on projects ranging from open knowledge to open hardware.
Read articles from women coders, hackers, developers, community managers, and educators.
Hear unique perspectives from across the globe, like Noopur Raval in India whose work with the Wikimedia Foundation has revealed a substantial gap in Wikipedia articles on successful Indian women and on cultural traditions of lower castes.
Learn about the exciting experiences of women working on projects for GNOME, the Open Technology Institute, OpenStack, and Red Hat. Plus, get the latest from Limor Fried on open hardware initiatives at Adafruit Industries!
Stay tuned to this page for our growing collection of articles as they are published from January 27 - February 7 for our Women in Open Source Week. Follow #osswomen on Twitter for updates and commentary.
A special thank you to Marina Zhurakhinskaya for her help with this initiative.
Women in Open Source Week articles
View complete collection where you see this image
List of published articles
What I learned while editing Wikipedia » read the article
Noopur Raval shares her experience editing Wikipedia in India.
Open source events grow at the university » read the article
Luis Ibanez interview Catherine Dumas, a PhD student at SUNY Albany about promoting open source on campus.
5 tips: Leverage user-centered design in your open source project » read the article
Learn how user feedback can improve internal processes and collaboration, engage the community, promote non-developer contributions, and help you think more broadly about your open source project.
Got questions on open hardware? Just ask an engineer. » read the article
Limor Fried, founder and engineer at Adafruit Industries hosts an internet video show every week that answers questions about electronics, coding, and open hardware.
The participatory nature of the Internet strengthens fan communities » read the article
Women in fandom and the art of remixing media and creating new storylines in film and TV.
Like Arduino? Miniaturize your project with TinyCircuits » read the article
One product, the TinyDunio, won them the Internet of Things Award for Open Source Project of the Year in 2012.
Advice from 5 Joomla! project leaders: Part 1 » read the article
Hear from leaders in various departments at Joomla!
Golden opportunity for public libraries to meet digital needs of women » read the article
Public libraries (and public schools) have a critical role to play with improving the dearth of diversity in coding and open source.
Findings from working on Red Hat's installer » read the article
Anne Mulhern spends most of her time working on the installer, focusing mostly on its storage component, blivet.
The Women of OpenStack talk outreach, education, and mentoring » read the article
In the open source world, a women-only event seems counter-intuitive.
Make money and have fun in open source » read the article
Female role models who are making money with open source, and having fun doing it, will draw girls in.
Get more eyeballs: 5 steps to using design in your open source project » read the article
Five detailed steps for integrating user experience and design into your open source project.
Advice from 5 Joomla! project leaders: Part 2 » read the article
Five more leaders in open source sharing wisdom and advice for men and women interested in learning more about how to have a successful career in open source.
Engage women, have fun, get more out of your open source project » read the article
Women can pursue a career in open source software engineering at any stage in their lives—from college to mid-career and beyond.
Heard of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women? Learn more today. » read the article
Máirín Duffy of Red Hat interviews Marie Nordin of Fedora and a GNOME Outreach Program for Women intern.
Call to all open source communities: Emphasize inclusion » read the article
Being a woman in computer science... means being exposed to emerging technologies, solving new and difficult problems, and working to promote FOSS in my local community.
Let your code speak for you » read the article
As a big believer in innovation through open source development, a word of advice: Let your code speak for you.
What's the best entry point for women in computing? Open source. » read the article
Jen Wike interviews Leslie Hawthorn, a program committee planner for the annual Grace Hopper conference and its Open Source Day event.
Breaking down geek stereotypes in open source » read the article
Should femininity be a foreign language barrier that women need to overcome in order to have a career?
Dive in: Ten past articles on women in technologyThe Massachusetts Clean Energy Center is overseeing the construction of the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal
Once complete, the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal will be the first facility in the nation designed to support the construction, assembly, and deployment of offshore wind projects. The first of its kind in North America, the terminal has been engineered to sustain mobile crane and storage loads that rival the highest capacity ports in the world.
The terminal, which will be located inside New Bedford Harbor and protected by the hurricane barrier, will |
, ensuring that, at the very least, he or she doesn’t lose out. In this way, unselfish individuals actually benefit from their altruism.At least, that’s the theory. While other types of altruism have been observed and modelled (for example downstream reciprocity in which people help others who they have seen acting altruistically), upstream reciprocity has proven harder to pin down, until nowAkio Iwagami and Naoki Masuda at the University of Tokyo have simulated the way upstream reciprocity spreads through a network when the behaviour gradually dies out. It turns out that the type of network is crucial for ensuring the spread of the behaviour. In heterogeneous networks like those that most societies seem to form, upstream reciprocity seems to spread successfully.But interestingly, Iwagami and Masuda point out that certain individuals seem to benefit more than others. These individuals are “hubs” in these societies, people who have many links to other individuals. That makes sense, of course, because as this behaviour spreads, it is much more likely to pass through hubs than other points on the network.So the moral of the story is that if you want to benefit from altruistic behaviour, do two things. First, trigger altruistic cascades by performing many acts of unselfish behaviour. Second, become a hub with lots of links to other indviduals.Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0905.4007 : Upstream Reciprocity in Heterogeneous NetworksCCTV footage has emerged showing the moment three South Auckland schoolgirls crossed a busy road before being struck by a car.
The two five-year-olds and a 10-year-old were on their way to school when a car hit them near Otahuhu police station on Great South Road just before 9am, police say. The girls are now recovering in hospital.
The CCTV footage shows the girls preparing to cross Great South Road. They ran straight into the path of an oncoming vehicle.
Sergeant Matthew Child of Counties Manukau Police says initial indications from reports are that the vehicle was travelling at the speed limit or under, in the line of traffic going, through the green light.
He says the women driver had just dropped off her children at the primary school and was on her way home.
Police say the girls should have been accompanied by an adult crossing the busy road.Modi launches e-nagar project in Ahmedabad, 8 localities get free WiFi
India
oi-Aswathy
Gandhinagar, Feb 27: Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi made eight localities of Ahmedabad city WiFi enabled under the government's 'e-Nagar' project. The project will soon be extended to 53 towns in Gujarat, said Modi, claiming that digital India's new journey 'has begun from Gujarat'.
To mark Ahmedabad city's 603rd anniversary, Modi Skyped his message to the assembly constituency of Maninagar and announced various ambitious schemes and projects.
On the occasion, Modi also launched a three-month-long intensive cleanliness campaign under Mahatma Gandhi Cleanliness Mission that will culminate on the Mahatma's 150th birth anniversary in 2019. The agenda of the mission includes providing a toilet to every home and to uphold the dignity of women.
Modi's archrival Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar had earlier this month launched a 20 km free Wi-Fi zone between National Institute of Technology (NIT) Patna (located at Ashok Rajpath) and Danapur town present in western Patna. This stretch is allegedly one of the biggest in the world.
Oneindia NewsEvery so often, the presentational masks acquired down the years by British conservatism slip. If only for a moment, the supposed convictions Tory politicians bang on about are reduced to mere window dressing, and what cynical old lefties tend to talk about as the venal pursuit of class interests suddenly looks like a matter of unanswerable fact. In UK terms, this might be the political meaning of the Panama Papers and David Cameron’s woefully belated admission that he did benefit from his father’s offshore activities. In a season of Tory nightmares and whatever the knock-on effect for the Labour party, the upshot is a sudden and sobering look at what the Tories might actually stand for.
Ten questions the prime minister has to answer about the Panama files Read more
Cameron would like us to think of his politics as a hybrid of the two strands of conservatism that preceded him: the belief in hard work and self-reliance embodied by Margaret Thatcher, and the patrician, socially concerned Toryism which still has a place in some Conservatives’ hearts. The result has been what the Tories have been selling us for the last 10 years: a utopia of home ownership and endless graft, where so long as you avoid being on “welfare”, the joys of social mobility can be yours, and we are – of course – all in this together.
On a bad day, this can still look like the politics of spivvery and cruelty, but the way that Cameron’s poshness spoke vaguely of noblesse oblige and social concern was arguably central to holding the whole package together. Perhaps, in the English imagination, cut-glass vowels still suggest falling-down country houses, the reassuring smell of horses and tweedy penury. Certainly, when Cameron has had to distance himself from financial and corporate misbehaviour, his accent and disposition have proved quite useful.
But the reality, as the headlines now buzzing around the prime minister prove, is that what remains of the old landed classes has largely blurred into the moneyed elites whose habits have once again been revealed in this week’s news: rich enough to buy property in the most expensive districts of the world’s big cities, and well acquainted with the world of offshore finance. Yes, career politicians of the centre left have had their own problems with such associations, which partly explains why Hillary Clinton cannot shake off Bernie Sanders, and why the reinvented Labour party now defines itself against Tony Blair. But despite the fact that Tory links with financial sharp practice are as old as time, the right kind of story can still hurt them too.
Which brings us to the letter we now know Cameron wrote to the president of the European council in November 2013, warning him against transparency moves on offshore trusts, its neat fit with the Cameron family’s complicated finances, and the extent to which, as he now confesses, the prime minister himself benefited. Only weeks before his message to Brussels, Cameron had given a speech to the Conservative conference assuring anyone listening that “this party is on the side of working people”, and rather condescendingly identifying the latter as those who set store by “never giving up, working those extra hours, coping with those necessary cuts”.
Cameron and Osborne’s supposedly exacting approach to public finances obviously had its limits
“We build a land of opportunity,” he insisted. But in the letter, he specifically suggested to Herman Van Rompuy that offshore vehicles used for what high-end financial advisers call “inheritance planning” might best be left alone. Cameron and Osborne’s supposedly exacting approach to public finances obviously had its limits. And the prime minister clearly had a keen sense of his core constituency. As one wag put it on Twitter this week, “How fortunate for people with money in offshore trusts that the prime minister went out to bat for them.” Quite so. On top of Cameron’s problems, the role of an array of Tory donors named in the Panama Papers comes with an air of grinding familiarity. Then there are Osborne’s evasive answers to questions about whether he has benefited from offshore chicanery and other matters that are on the public record – such as the fact that in 2005, his family firm gained £6m from a complex London property deal with a firm based in the British Virgin Islands. And what of the Conservatives’ increasingly hopeless-looking candidate for London mayor?. Zac Goldsmith’s family wealth has long been held in a trust based in Switzerland, until 2010 he was registered as a non-dom, and he owns two valuable houses acquired through companies registered in the Cayman Islands. His veneer of ecological concern and vague bohemianism cannot quite distract from all this, nor from the fact that his quietly formidable Labour opponent Sadiq Khan is engaging in a modern class politics, to evidently positive effect.
Some Tories are keenly aware of this stuff. With a leadership contest looming, they advise that the party ought to think very carefully. It might cast its collective mind back to 2005 and the rash decision to spurn that council-estate alumnus David Davis. It should consider that, whatever his financial arrangements, Boris Johnson might carry too much of the whiff of metropolitan privilege, and that there might be more to be said for either the comparative ordinariness of Theresa May, or – judging from recent whispers – the up-by-his-bootstraps new work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb. We shall see.
Over the past few weeks I have spent more time than usual in London. One of the most illuminating experiences you can have in the modern capital is to take a ride on the Docklands light railway at around 6am, when the workers who keep the City going travel to their jobs. They have come from all over the planet, and they surely believeas a matter of instinct in the gospel of hard graft, self-reliance and social mobility that you hear from most Tory politicians.
The trains take them from the edges of south and east London – Beckton, Lewisham, Deptford – to Canary Wharf, which is when the awful inequality of modern Britain hits you like a hammer. And herein lies the problem for centre-right politics all over the world. As long as it seems to speak for the people in the Docklands penthouses rather than on the trains – the skivers rather than the strivers, perhaps – its problems will extend into the distance.For much of his political life, Narendra Modi has posed as the electorate’s savior from the impending and exaggerated threats his own rhetoric conjured up for them.
In the 2002 state elections in Gujarat, he set the theme for the campaign with a few deft sentences, “The songs which Sonia Gandhi and some English TV channels were singing about Gujarat after Godhra have obviously been heard across the border. Now mian Musharraf is repeating their accusations against me in an international forum. ”
Modi managed to convey that the dynasty which had ruled this country for so long was not only mocking a majority of the electorate but was also providing fodder to India’s greatest enemy—a mian no less— to exploit the aftermath of Godhra.
For the Lok Sabha election in 2014, he assumed the persona of thechaiwalla who, once and for all, would rid this country of the same dynasty, which, he now claimed, was threatening to usurp the achievements of icons such as BR Ambedkar. “It is unfortunate that these days Congress party's shehzaade (prince)—Gandhi—enjoys humiliating Baba Saheb Ambedkar by repeatedly saying that Congress has given this right or Congress has given that right. All the rights and laws have been given to us by Ambedkar.”
Over the years, in Modi’s speeches, the dynasty—from Sonia Gandhi to the shehzaade—had come to embody a world of inherited privilege that was running the country into the ground. Modi himself, on the other hand, became in this conception a man who had risen by the sheer dint of his hard work. His 56-inch chest was the bulwark between the people and feudal exploitation."Racetrack Playa" sounds like the screenname of an online teenager you're competing against in Need for Speed, but scientists recognize it as the name of a dried-up lake in Death Valley. For a century, scientific minds have been puzzled by a well-documented, poorly-understood phenomenon occuring at Racetrack Playa: Enormous stones, some up to 700 pounds, appear to have somehow moved themselves across the lakebed floor in random patterns, leaving a furrowed trail behind them.
No one had ever seen these "sailing stones" move, but many photographed the end result. The original thought was that the lakebed forms a thin sheet of ice on it, and that the wind then blows the rocks across it; but that theory was discounted after researchers calculated it would take wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour to move the rocks, while the wind at the Racetrack maxes out around 90 m.p.h. And if you're wondering why they don't just strap a GoPro camera onto a rock to see what's going on, scientists returning to the site over the years have calculated that the rocks move for short periods of time, just once every three years. That's a bit longer than your battery's likely to last.
However, a fortunate collision between two of these magic rocks provided planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz with an interesting discovery:Lorenz, studying the trails left by the stones, observed that one rock had collided against another and been deflected. "There was a rock trail and it looked like it hit another rock and bounced, but the trail didn't go all the way up to other the rock, like it was repelled somehow," Lorenz told Smithsonian Magazine. In other words, there was some kind of force-field-like barrier around each rock that prevented total contact.
What would spontaneously form a barrier around a rock, then later disappear? Lorenz realized that as moisture levels changed with the seasons, a collar of ice could form around the rock. With the rest of the lakebed covered in a thin, cold-but-not-frozen sheet of water, this ice collar would enable the rock it encased to float—slightly. It would lift it to the top of the water, but the rock's bottom, the part that was resting directly on the ground, would not have ice on it. Wind could then blow the rock across the water, and the bottom of the rock would dig a furrow into the lakebed. Later the ice and water would melt and recede.
Eventually, Lorenz employed a tried-and-true method for testing his nascent idea: the kitchen-table experiment. "I took a small rock, and put it in a piece of Tupperware, and filled it with water so there was an inch of water with a bit of the rock sticking out," he says. "I put it in the freezer, and that then gave me a slab of ice with a rock sticking out of it." He flipped the rock-ice hybrid upside down and floated it in a tray of water with sand on the bottom. By merely blowing gently on the ice, he realized, he could send the embedded rock gliding across the tray, scraping a trail in the sand as it moved. After decades of theoretical calculations by countless scientists, the answer seemed to be sitting on his tabletop.
Lorenz's full research paper, entitled "Ice Rafts, Not Sails," is available here.
Via Smithsonian MagazineHarry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in the US in 1998, though it was published in 1997 in London under its original name–Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I don’t think I read it for the first time until late 1999 or early 2000, but I then proceeded to reread it over 20 times. My parents, the very models of intuition, bought me Harry-Potter-themed sheets, pillow covers, and blankets, and I was even given a Harry Potter official (yeah, official, try beating that!) journal in which I took multiple notes. I still have it somewhere, but I’m pretty sure it says things like, “I wish I could go to Hogwarts” over and over. Because really, I spent the next 4-5 years spending most of my time thinking about how amazing life would be if Hogwarts were real. And that was pretty much most of high school.
So, onto the book! I spent most of my reread thinking about what it is that makes Sorcerer’s Stone (and the series overall) so special. If you really think about this story, there’s not a whole lot of new stuff at work here, or at least there doesn’t seem to be. Our hero is a character who lost both of his parents to an evildoer under mysterious circumstances and grows up with an inherited, innate power. The tragic childhood wrapped in an enigmatic narrative is nothing groundbreaking (which is not to say its not compelling), and the pairing of it with a magical ability that is both connate and unbreakable (despite the Dursley’s many attempts) makes this story sound kind of like a fairy tale, though there are certainly other comparisons one could make. The innate ability that will see Harry through the crappy situation is reminiscent of Oliver Twist, the awful, semi-family upbringing makes me think of Cinderella and her crappy faux-sisters, and the shadowy circumstances surrounding the Potter’s death (and Harry’s own orphan ingress into the narrative) recall texts like Tom Jones or even The Winter’s Tale. I don’t bring any of this up to bag on J.K. Rowling or her books; I’m 100% team Harry Potter. I’m just trying to figure out what makes these books so uniquely amazing and unbelievably compelling, because the structure, as I’ve just suggested, isn’t anything new (at least at the start), and the inclusion of magic in a narrative certainly isn’t the invention of Rowling. So, what’s so great about these books and, more specifically, what is it about this first book that makes it so great at pulling so many readers along for the ride?
I have no goddamn clue. Because the thing is, even though all of the pieces of the story are ones we’ve seen before (even later on, the stuff like Found Family, the team test to reach the last boss, the imposter syndrome Harry feels just before and right away at Hogwarts), they come together in a way that seems both successful and weirdly unique. My thought here (and this could be way off, so please tell me your thoughts) is that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in addition to the series at large, recreated the urban fantasy genre as something not necessarily centered on the spacially urban narrative as much as the tonally urban narrative. That is, the Harry Potter series (and book one specifically) carries some of the urban fantasy stuff people like Laurell K. Hamilton started up, but the real genius of Rowling is the way in which she takes the epic story of magical education, the stuff every little kid dreams about (“I have this special ability–which means I’m special–and I’m going to go to this magical school where everything is awesome and I can fly on brooms), and somehow makes it even more incredible by layering it with the sort of hum-drum coloring that the urban fantasy carries. It’s the distinction between looking at that really cool thing (the Balrog from Lord of the Rings for example) from afar in order to allow it to maintain a sense of mystique and getting so close that you can see the things that make it tangible and codifiable. For instance, the sorting ceremony at Hogwarts should be an enormous and regal sort of thing in this type of narrative, and it is for the most part, but the students are sorted by a dusty old hat that sings. This kind of dramatic undercutting is where Rowling really excels, and it tends to make her books better instead of cheaper, at least for me. I’m not really sure of anyone who has done this kind of thing as well as Rowling, though I can think of several who have since done it a lot worse…*ahem* Jim Butcher *ahem.* What are your thoughts?
I was also really struck this time by the persistent obtuseness of the Dursely’s in terms of Harry’s unique qualities. It’s easy to forget that they know exactly what’s going on with him when he suddenly finds himself on the roof of the school or makes the glass disappear (apparently to let Nagini out?), but all of the punishments he receives for the extraordinary stuff are based on a knowledge that this is not intentional, at least we can suppose that’s the case. Not to draw too large a parallel to our world, but I couldn’t help but think of the ways in which the stubbornly ignorant and obtuse return to the old standard of putting their heads down and pushing with all of their might to fit those people who aren’t like them, the LGBTQ community for example, into a conventional mold. There’s no attempt to understand or appreciate or respect the other person; it’s just a blinders-on kind of situation in which you make them fit the mold you want or else. There is that little story about how Aunt Petunia tried to get Harry to wear a horrific sweater that kept shrinking the harder she tried to fit it around his head, and it struck me as an especially representative example of how the close-minded among us completely ignore every other factor in every situation except their desired effect. I haven’t really thought this comparison through all the way, and I’m sure it probably comes apart on some level, but I do think it can give us a little glimpse into how the willfully ignorant both approach situations of diversity and, similarly, how they fail utterly there. In conclusion: sit on it, Dursleys!
So, for my book one awards:
(My apologies for not having page numbers; I read it on my kindle, so I’ll just leave you with chapter numbers and titles)
Favorite individual character moment:
‘“There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten points to Mr. Neville Longbottom.”
Someone standing outside the Great Hall might well have thought some sort of explosion had taken place, so loud was the noise that erupted form the Gryffindor table. Harry, Ron, and Hermione stood up to yell and cheer as Neville, white with shock, disappeared under a pile of people hugging him. He had never won so much as a point for Gryffindor before.’
~~Chapter 17, “The Man With Two Faces”
❤ Neville
Favorite line:
“There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.”
~~Chapter 10, “Halloween”
Favorite chapter:
Chapter 16, “Through the Trapdoor” — We finally get to see the team working together and playing to their strengths. It also becomes painfully clear that our heroic trio is pretty much dependant on the awesomeness of Hermione.
Most Badass Hermione Granger Moment:
‘Hermione let out a great sigh and Harry, amazed, saw that she was smiling, the very last thing he felt like doing.
“Brilliant,” said Hermione. “This isn’t magic — it’s logic — a puzzle. A lot of the greatest wizards haven’t got an ounce of logic, they’d be stuck in here forever.”
“But so will we, won’t we?”
“Of course not,” said Hermione’
~~Chapter 16, “Through the Trapdoor”
And why won’t you be stuck in there forever, Harry? Oh yeah, because Hermione is an fantastic witch and she has an awesome brain to back it up!
AdvertisementsThe curves of over 10 released PSAT exams have been analyzed to bring you the most accurate prediction of your scores. For any given raw score, the entire range of scaled scores across all curves are computed along with the percentage of times each one has shown up in the past.
Your total score (out of 1520) will come from the math calculator and the reading and writing calculator (first two tabs). The separate reading calculator and the separate writing calculator at the end can be thought of as subscores that make up the full reading and writing score.
Note: Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. Because we do not take into account curves from sections that had faulty questions, the math calculator is based on fewer curves and may not give you a complete picture just yet.The International Criminal Court investigation in Kenya or the situation in the Republic of Kenya is an ongoing investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into the responsibility for the 2007–2008 post-election violence in Kenya.[1] The 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis followed the presidential election that was held on 27 December 2007.[2] The Electoral Commission of Kenya officially declared that the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was re-elected; supporters of the opposition candidate Raila Odinga accused the government of electoral fraud and rejected the results.[3] A series of protests and demonstrations followed, and fighting—mainly along tribal lines—led to many deaths, injuries and displacements.[3]
After failed attempts to conduct a criminal investigation of the key perpetrators in Kenya, the matter was referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.[4] In 2010, the Prosecutor of the ICC Luis Moreno Ocampo announced that he was seeking summonses for six people: Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, Industrialisation Minister Henry Kosgey, Education Minister William Ruto, Cabinet Secretary Francis Muthaura, radio executive Joshua Arap Sang and former police commissioner Mohammed Hussein Ali—all accused of crimes against humanity.[5][6] The six suspects, known colloquially as the "Ocampo six"[7] were indicted by the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber II on 8 March 2011 and summoned to appear before the Court.[8][9]
The government of Kenya and the National Assembly both attempted to stop the ICC process. The government appealed to both the United Nations Security Council and the Court itself regarding the admissibility of the case.[10][11] The National Assembly voted in favour of removing Kenya as a state party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty which established the ICC.[12] Despite this opposition, the suspects cooperated with the proceedings and attended preliminary hearings in The Hague in April 2011 and confirmation of charges hearings in September of that year.[13] The Pre-Trial Chamber II confirmed the charges against Kenyatta, Ruto, and Sang and declined to confirm the charges against Ali, Kosgey, and Muthaura.[14][15] The trial of Ruto and Sang began on 10 September 2013, while that of Kenyatta is supposed to begin on 5 February 2014. However, the Chief prosecutor has asked that the case be adjourned, citing lack of enough evidence required for trial.
Background [ edit ]
On 27 December 2007, a general election was held in Kenya, comprising parliamentary, presidential and civic elections.[16] The incumbent President, Mwai Kibaki, who represents the Party of National Unity and Raila Odinga from the Orange Democratic Movement were the leading candidates. Early indications showed that Odinga was likely to win the election,[16] however the results announced by the Electoral Commission of Kenya showed that Kibaki had been re-elected and he was sworn in as President.[3] Immediately after the Electoral Commission's announcement, Odinga rejected the result, claiming that widespread electoral fraud had taken place.[3] European Union electoral observers also claimed that the electoral commission had failed to ensure the credibility of the vote.[3]
In the days that followed violence spread throughout the country. An estimated 1,200 people died and more than 500,000 were displaced from their homes.[2] A government spokesman accused Odinga's supporters of "engaging in ethnic cleansing", while Odinga claimed that the President's supporters were "guilty, directly, of genocide".[17] Violence was mainly perpetrated along tribal lines; Mwai Kibaki is part of the Kikuyu tribe, the largest tribe in Kenya, while Odinga is a Luo.[18] Violence continued until a peace deal was agreed upon between Kibaki and Odinga under the mediation of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whereby Kibaki would remain as President and Odinga would take over the newly created office of the Prime Minister.[19]
Waki report and referral to the ICC [ edit ]
As part of the mediation between Kibaki and Odinga in 2008 the two parties agreed a series of accords. One of these was to establish the Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence, chaired by Kenyan judge Philip Waki to investigate the violence and particularly the actions of the police.[20] Waki's report recommended that the Kenyan government set up a special tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the worst crimes. and although both Kibaki and Odinga voiced support for a local tribunal, the idea was rejected by the National Assembly.[20] Waki passed his report, including a list of the names of those he considered most responsible for the violence back to Kofi Annan with instructions that it be passed to the International Criminal Court if progress with the local tribunal was not made. On 16 July 2009 the Waki commission delivered a copy of his report along with six boxes of documents and supporting materials to the International Criminal Court along with a sealed envelope containing a list of people who could be implicated in the violence. The prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo opened the envelope, inspected its contents and re-sealed it.[4] Initially the ICC gave the Kenyan government a deadline of July 2010 to establish a local tribunal before it would refer the case to the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.[20] The "Waki List" has so far not been made public, and there is speculation that it may contain more names than the six who were initially indicted by the ICC; consequently there have been some calls in Kenya for either the ICC or Waki to release the list.[21]
Pre-Trial Chamber authorisation [ edit ]
The International Criminal Court's prosecutor may open a formal investigation in one of three circumstances: when a situation is referred by the government of a state which the investigation concerns, when the situation is referred by the UN Security Council or under his own volition with authorisation from a Pre-Trial Chamber.[22][23] On 6 November 2009 the ICC Presidency assigned the situation in Kenya to Pre-Trial Chamber II and the prosecutor made an application to that chamber for authorisation to open a formal investigation on 26 November. The judges of the pre-trial chamber granted this authorisation on 31 March 2010.[24] The judges who made this decision, Ekaterina Trendafilova, Hans-Peter Kaul and Cuno Tarfusser noted in their written ruling that while Article 15 of the Rome Statute does allow for the Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute a case of his own volition, this is one of the more controversial aspects of the ICC.[25] In the ICC's history, this case was the first time the Prosecutor decided to investigate a case in this manner, with all prior cases being referred to the Court either by a national government, or by the United Nations Security Council.[26]
Judge Hans-Peter Kaul made a dissenting opinion in the judgment, but the judgment was passed by a 2–1 majority. In his dissent he wrote:
In essence, the main reason for this position is the following: both, my interpretation of article 7(2) (a) of the [Rome] Statute, which sets out the legal definition of "attack directed against any civilian population" as constitutive contextual element of crimes against humanity, and my examination of the Prosecutor's Request and supporting material, including the victims' representations, have led me to conclude that the acts which occurred on the territory of the Republic of Kenya do not qualify as crimes against humanity falling under the jurisdictional ambit of the Court.[27] — Hans-Peter Kaul
Suspects [ edit ]
William Ruto, one of the suspects charged with crimes against humanity
On 15 December 2010, Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo named six suspects, and made an application to Pre-Trial Chamber II for summonses to be issued to them.[5][6] The six men became colloquially known as the Ocampo Six (or Ocampo 6).[7] The individuals named by Moreno Ocampo were:
Legal representation [ edit ]
It was reported in 2011 that Kenyatta has recruited British lawyers Steven Kay and Gillian Higgins, who previously defended Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, to lead his legal team.[34] Francis Muthaura initially appointed another British lawyer, Karim Ahmad Khan, who previously led the defence of Charles Taylor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and subsequently also recruited Essa Faal and Shyamala Alagendra who both formerly worked in the ICC Prosecutor's office.[35] Ali's defence was led by Canadian John Philpot, Kosgey's by Julius Kemboi, and William Ruto appointed Dr. Kindiki Kithure and Katwa Kigeni. Kigeni is also representing Joshua Sang.[34] The Kenyan government has agreed to pay the legal costs of Francis Muthaura and Mohamed Ali due to their actions being taken in the course of their public employment.[36] This decision has attracted criticism from many Kenyans.[37]
Charges [ edit ]
The ICC's temporary headquarters in The Hague
The prosecutor presented the charges to Pre-Trial Chamber II as two separate cases, one case was the prosecution of Ali, Kenyatta, and Mathaura, and the second case is the prosecution of Kosgey, Ruto, and Sang. All six suspects were accused of crimes against humanity.[5][6]
The Prosecutor v. William Samoei Ruto, Henry Kiprono Kosgey and Joshua Arap Sang [ edit ]
In the case which concerns the Orange Democratic Movement's supporters' actions against the supporters of the government, William Ruto, Henry Kosgey, and Joshua Sang were charged with four counts of crimes against humanity. They were all accused of committing the crimes as indirect co-perpetrators at locations including Turbo town, the greater Eldoret area, Kapsabet town, and Nandi Hills town. Their charges were:
Murder, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute;[38] Deportation or forcible transfer of a population, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(d) of the Rome Statute;[38] Torture, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(f) of the Rome Statute;[39] Persecution, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute;[39]
The Prosecutor v. Francis Kirimi Muthaura, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta and Mohammed Hussein Ali [ edit ]
In the case which concerns the government's supporters' actions against the opposition, Francis Muthaura, Uhuru Kenyatta, and Mohammed Ali were charged with five counts of crimes against humanity. They were accused of committing these crimes as indirect co-perpetrators at locations including Kisumu, Kibera, Nakuru and Naivasha:
Murder, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(a) of the Rome Statute;[40] Deportation or forcible transfer of a population, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(d) of the Rome Statute;[41] Rape and other forms of sexual violence, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(g) of the Rome Statute;[42] Persecution, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute;[43] Inhumane acts, constituting a crime against humanity in violation of article 7(1)(k) of the Rome Statute;[44]
Pre-trial phase [ edit ]
Cuno Tarfusser, one of the judges of Pre-Trial Chamber II
Pre-Trial Chamber II ruled that there were reasonable grounds to be believe that William Ruto and Henry Kosgey were criminally responsible as indirect co-perpetrators of the crimes outlined in counts 1, 2 and 4, but in the case of Joshua Sang it ruled that his involvement was not essential to the commission of the crimes and so only ruled that there were grounds to believe he otherwise contributed to the crimes.[45] The Chamber rejected the request by the Prosecutor to include the charge of torture in count 3.[45] In the case of Kenyatta, Muthaura and Ali the Chamber ruled that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Uhuru Kenyatta and Francis Muthaura were guilty as indirect co-perpetrators of the crimes of which they were accused but in the case of Mohammed Ali, the Chamber ruled that his contribution was not essential to the commission of the crimes and so he was charged with having otherwise contributed.[46]
On 8 March 2011, Pre-Trial Chamber II issued summonses to appear for all six of the suspects in the two cases.[45][46] As with the decision to authorise the investigation by the Prosecutor, Judge Hans-Peter Kaul dissented and opposed the issuance of summonses.[47][48]
Initial hearings [ edit ]
On 7 April 2011, the initial hearing took place in the case of Ruto, Kosgey, and Sang, and the following day the corresponding hearing in the case of Kenyatta, Ali, and Mathaura also took place at the seat of the Court in The Hague.[13] During the hearing, presiding Judge Ekaterina Trendafilova expressed concern at some of the actions of the suspects, in particular speeches that may have been made in an attempt to incite further violence in Kenya. Speaking at the initial hearing she said:
It came to the knowledge of the Chamber by way of following some articles in the Kenyan newspapers that there are some movements towards retriggering the violence in the country by way of using some dangerous speeches. I would like to remind the suspects – and I'm not referring to anyone in particular but this is a general point to be made to all the suspects – that such type of action could be perceived as a sort of inducement which may constitute the breach of one of the conditions set out in the summonses to appear, namely, to continue committing crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court. Accordingly, this might prompt the Chamber to replace the summonses to appear with warrants of arrest. Ekatrina Trendafilova, [49]
At the initial hearings the chamber set dates for the confirmation of charges hearings to take place in September 2011. An application by the Office of the Prosecutor to impose conditions on the suspects' summonses including that they provide details of all their home addresses and that they pay a bond to the Court was rejected by Judge Trendafilova.[50]
Location of confirmation of charges hearings [ edit ]
In June 2011, Pre-Trial Chamber II requested that the Prosecutor, defendants, and victims comment on the possibility of holding the confirmation of charges hearings in Kenya rather than in The Hague.[51] This move was supported by Amnesty International, which claimed that holding the hearings in Kenya would bring the justice process closer to victims.[52] The idea of holding the hearings in Kenya was also supported by the defendants Francis Muthaura and Henry Kosgey, with |
better described as a war crime than a mistake, and it's an approach Clinton would repeat in Honduras and Libya in her role as secretary of state.
In Honduras, Clinton's State Department actively stalled the efforts of the Organization of American States to reinstate the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya.
Instead, she supported the effort to impose elections--rife with fraud and intimidation--meant to legitimate the coup that deposed him, which were presented to the public under the guise of "restoring democracy." Henwood quotes Greg Grandin, a historian of Latin America:
[E]arly on in the 2009 coup against Zelaya, when there was a real chance of restoring the reformist president, [Clinton] was working with the most retrograde elements in Honduras to consolidate the putsch... Democrats who support Clinton for president would be sympathetic to the coalition that was trying to reverse the coup: environmentalists, LGBT activists, people trying to make the morning-after pill available, progressive religious folks, anti-mining and anti-biofuel peasants, and legal reformists trying to humanize Honduras' lethal police-prison regime. And Clinton betrayed them, serving them up to Honduras' crime-ridden oligarchy. Hundreds of good people have since been murdered by the people Clinton sided with in late 2009 and 2010.
Two years later, as armed conflict raged in Libya in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, the regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi regime approached the U.S. with a proposal for a peaceful transfer of power, in return for regime leaders being able to leave the country safely. "Was the offer genuine and workable?" David Mizner asked in an important article for Jacobin. "We'll never know, because Clinton shut down the negotiations."
Instead, Clinton subverted even the Pentagon's efforts at de-escalation, and infamously out-hawked Bush/Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates in favor of a more aggressive approach.
Henwood reports that the offensive was sold to the public with what were later revealed to be a raft of lies. The falsehoods included a rumor, fed to Clinton by Sidney Blumenthal, while he was coincidentally collecting $10,000 a month from the Clinton Foundation, that Qaddafi was giving Viagra to his troops to encourage rape.
It's also worth noting that as a senator in 2007, Clinton voted, along with every Republican senator and 14 other Democrats, against an amendment to a military appropriations bill that would have sharply restricted the use in densely populated areas of cluster bombs, which are notorious for leaving behind unexploded shells that years later have killed tends of thousands of people who come across them--disproportionately children, who often mistake them for balls or toys.
CLINTON'S HISTORY of neocon-style hawkishness is matched by her consistent record of putting the interests of the rich and powerful ahead of the public good.
While at Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, Hillary defended local businesses from a power rate hike, on the grounds that increases in their rates amounted to an unconstitutional "taking of property." "This is now a common right-wing argument against regulation," Henwood notes. "Hillary was one of its earliest architects."
As a senator, Hillary was one of only a few Democrats to support Bush's proposal to expand the work requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients--despite the downturn in the economy. Of course, TANF itself was the weakened social safety net that remained after Bill Clinton "ended welfare as we know it"--with Hillary's vocal support.
Senator Clinton also voted in favor of making it more difficult for individuals and families to file for bankruptcy, a gift to banks and credit card companies that was sharply criticized at the time by then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren.
Henwood details an under-discussed element of the Clinton family's long involvement in Haiti: the attempt by the Hillary Clinton's State Department to rescue Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi's from an "attack on their property" that came in the form of the Haitian parliament unanimously passing an increase in the minimum wage to $5 a day.
Even after the Haitian government backtracked with a more modest, tiered proposal, the U.S. Embassy remained opposed, dismissing it as an economically unrealistic effort to pander to the "unemployed and underpaid masses."
Using international diplomacy to promote Corporate America's interests by overriding other nations' ability to pass labor, environmental and fair-use copyright regulations is of course at the heart of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an abomination that Hillary declared herself against last year after having helped to negotiate and promote the TPP as secretary of state.
THERE IS so much more. My Turn is both a quick read, but compact: nearly every line contains something you'll want to share with the Clinton supporters in your life. (You'll also want to tell them the ironic story behind the book's cover art, which some Clinton supporters have complained is sexist.)
But this raises a question of whether it's an effective method of weaning people away from the Democratic Party to simply inundate them with ever more facts about the record of people like Hillary Clinton.
In recent weeks, I've heard liberal supporters brush aside the fact that Bush-era neoconservatives are backing her candidacy--even though, 16 years ago, these same liberals used the threat of these same neocons to browbeat the left into supporting Gore over Nader.
I've also heard self-described radicals agree that Hillary is an extreme hawk who may well "start World War III," but then say that we still have to support her given who she's running against. I can almost hear their retort at the end of each paragraph I write in this article: "So do you prefer Trump?"
Here, we should keep in mind Henwood's note that while his book "is a polemic directed at a prominent figure," it is nevertheless vital to realize that "Hillary is not The Problem...By all orthodox measures, she is a highly intelligent and informed senior member of the political class. That is the problem."
Indeed, the problem is a system that narrows our choices to various shades of capitalist imperialism and austerity every election year without fail.
Until we manage to organize a genuine political alternative to it, we can expect the same dismal "choices," the same pressure to support the one that is (or at least seems to be) a bit less bad and a lot of ridicule from those who think it is level-headed and wise to surrender to the utter political alienation and defeatism of voting, year after year, for the "least worst" option.Will Australian Government Use Cost-Benefit Analysis To Kill Off Fair Use Proposal Once And For All?
from the set-up-to-fail dept
Discussions about copyright reform in Australia are now entering their fourth year, and the longer they go on, the worse the proposals become. That's in part because there has been a change of government in the interim, and the present Attorney-General, George Brandis, has made it clear he's firmly on the side of copyright companies, and indifferent to the Australian public's concerns or needs in a digital world.
One big problem for him and his maximalist friends is that a key recommendation of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), in its extremely detailed and rigorous analysis of the state of copyright in Australia, was to introduce a new fair use provision. This is absolute anathema for the copyright companies, which seem to hold that the law should only ever be changed in their favor, imposing a kind of copyright ratchet that prevents the public from gaining any substantial new rights. Simply dropping the fair use idea would be too obvious, so a way needs to be found to kill it off without causing an outcry against the Australian government's blatant favoritism. As ZDNet reports, maybe Brandis has found what he is looking for:
The Australian Attorney-General's Department has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis into the recommendation by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) to implement a fair use provision in the amendments that the government is proposing to make to the Copyright Act in order to adapt to the digital world.
The economic analysis, announced on Wednesday, will examine the cost effects that fair use would impose on copyright holders along with copyright user groups.
Brandis again affirmed his partiality toward content owners, claiming that the recommendation to implement a fair use defence was "a controversial proposal" and would weaken the rights of copyright owners.
"In considering the recommendations, we will be particularly concerned to ensure and we will approach the consideration of the report with the view that no prejudice be caused to the interests of rights holders and creators," he said in February 2014.
Although that sounds perfectly reasonable, the ZDNet story adds some important historical context from a year ago that Brandis probably hoped nobody would remember:Since by its very nature fair use allows the public to use copyright material in various ways without needing to pay a licensing fee, this means there will inevitably be some "prejudice" to the copyright companies, although minor in comparison to the major gains for eveyone else. However impartial and balanced the cost-benefit analysis will be, it is bound to expose the fact that if the public gains any new freedoms there will be a theoretical loss for the copyright holders.
And that, presumably, will allow Brandis to refuse to implement the ALRC recommendation on the grounds that he must defend the interests of creators, even though they would be among the greatest benefactors of a fair use provision, which would allow them to use existing works in new and exciting ways. But who cares about art when corporate profits are at stake?
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+
Filed Under: alrc, australia, copyright, copyright reform, cost benefit, fair use, george brandisOfficials in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s financial hub in the south, are discussing plans to impose heavy fines on Chinese tourists who “disrespect Vietnam’s culture and history” and are issuing Mandarin-language dos and don'ts targeting their northern neighbors.
The move comes after footage surfaced online of Chinese travelers harassing a banana hawker in Da Nang, a South China Sea coastal retreat that's popular among Chinese visitors. The clip only fueled nationalistic sentiments, which have been surging since The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against Beijing’s territorial claims in the disputed maritime region, to which Hanoi is a claimant.
Talking to VOA’s Vietnamese service, Mai Chi, a Ho Chi Minh-based tour guide for Chinese travelers, said intense Vietnamese reaction to the clip seems “politically motivated.”
“In the past, when Vietnam and China retained friendly relations, issues related to Chinese tourists were not reported much," Chi said. "But now, due to the political things going on, they were propagandized.”
Despite the apparent tensions, Chi says recent guided tours have yet to see any overtly hostile attitudes toward her clients. On Thursday, however, Vietnam's VnExpress International reported that Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism asked local police to expel 66 Chinese nationals, including tour guides, working illegally in the travel industry in the central province of Khanh Hoa.
Cross-border dialogue
The Vietnamese National Administration of Tourism early this month reportedly asked its Chinese counterpart to deal strictly with tourists who misbehave or break local laws when visiting Vietnam.
Around 1.8 million Chinese tourists visited the Southeast Asian country last year. This year, the number is expected to hit a record 2 million visitors.
In a separate development, some Da Nang residents have expressed concern over suspected jamming of radio transmissions, but Vietnam’s broadcast watchdog blamed technical errors for the issue.
Recent social media chatter about broadcast interference in at least two coastal provinces have alleged that China is jamming signals. A local official in Ngu Hanh Son district was quoted by Vietnamese media as saying that authorities suspect the interference comes from the sea.
Huynh Quang Trung, a Ngu Hanh Son district official, told VOA's Vietnamese service on Thursday that the issue has been resolved.
“The radio system has been replaced, and there is no longer any problem,” he said.
Officials said an initial investigation found that there had not been deliberate jamming, and instead placed blame on a “technical issue.”A few decades ago, it seemed like a distant dream for many Indians to go abroad and make it big. But there were a few who took that leap of faith and ventured into foreign lands, with the conviction to succeed. And they did.
We've all heard of Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, who are now heading world's biggest tech companies. Pichai in particular, had a rather humble beginning but his determination and intelligence has taken him far. These are stories worth telling because these are stories of grit and determination.
But did you know there are many such Indian stories that are waiting to be told? There are many Indians, right now, who are leading the Silicon Valley? They've pushed boundaries, created amazing products, and have risen to positions of incredible power. Almost all the major tech companies in the Silicon Valley have Indians who are heading various important departments and teams.
Here's a look at some of them.
1. Shantanu Narayen
Apart from being the CEO of Adobe, Shantanu also serves on the advisory board of Dell and UC Berkeley.
Shantanu Narayen was born and brought up in Hyderabad. He attended the Osmania University and got a degree in electronics engineering before moving to the US for higher studies. He started his career at Apple. He later founded Pictra Inc, the pioneer in the concept of sharing photos over the internet. Adobe came to know about his business acumen when they tried to acquire Pictra. And although the sale could not be completed, Adobe offered Shantanu a job as a senior vice-president of worldwide product research. That turned out to be a turning point in his career as Shantanu was instrumental in transforming Adobe, where he became the CEO in 2007.
2. Sanjay Jha
Sanjay Jha was the brain behind Motorola's second wind.
Born at Bhagalpur in Bihar, Sanjay Jha is now the world's foremost authority in the semiconductor business. He started his career at Qualcomm in 1994, and gradually worked his way up to become the COO of the company. After he left Qualcomm, he joined Motorola as the CEO in 2008, at a time when the company's fortunes were dwindling. He was responsible for resurrecting the dying business and then successfully selling it to Google for $12.4 billion. After Motorola, he joined GlobalFoundries, the second-largest semiconductor company, and he's among the top-paid CEOs in the United States
3. Sanjay Mehrotra
He holds more than 70 patents.
Sanjay Mehrotra went to school in Delhi. When doing his graduation at BITS Pilani, he got a chance to be transferred to UC Berkeley. However, he was denied US Visa multiple times. It was only after his father who prevailed upon the visa officer at US Consulate, that he could go to the United States. There, after completing his bachelor's and master's degree in computer science, he co-founded SanDisk in 1988. Now after 28 years of business, the company employees more than 9000 people and is worth $18 billion.
4. Vinod Khosla
Khosla is also helping develop open-source textbooks, in order to lower the cost of education.
At the age of 14, Vinod Khosla had decided he wanted to have a career in technology. He went to IIT-Delhi to get a degree in Electrical Engineering. He got a master's at Carnegie Mellon University and went to business school at Stanford. Two years after graduating from Stanford, he co-founded SUN Microsystems and served as their first CEO. After amassing a fortune, he became a venture capitalist with his firm, Khosla Ventures. He is also known for his philanthropic activities, and being a staunch advocate for clean energy.
5. Rashmi Sinha
She was named one of the World's top 10 women influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company.
Rashmi Sinha attained her B.A and M.A in Psychology at the Allahabad University. She then attended Brown university to get a Ph.D in cognitive psychology. After she did a computer science course at Brown, she decided to shift focus to Human-Computer Interaction. In 2006, she, along with her husband launched SlideShare, a social network where people could share PowerPoint slides and office documents. SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012 for $100 million. Rashmi is well known as one of the top women influencers in the Silicon Valley.
6. Ajay Bhatt
He created many computing innovations including the USB standard, and holds 31 other US Patents.
One of the least-known computer pioneers in the world, Ajay Bhatt is the man behind the USB standard, something that almost every electronic device in the world uses. Bhatt graduated from Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda in India and then went to The City University of New York before joining Intel in 1990, where he became the chief client platform architect. He has received various awards for his contributions to Computer Science, including the Achievement in Excellence Award, Outstanding Achievement in Science & Technology Award, and the European Inventor Award.
7. Vinod Dham
Vinod Dham now mentors young entrepreneurs in India and funds their startups.
There's something about innovating Indians and Intel. Vinod Dham is known as the 'Father of the Pentium chip', for his contribution to their development, which in turn, helped Intel get the monopoly in the computer processors market. Vinod got his electrical engineering degree at the Delhi College of Engineering. He also co-invented Intel's first flash memory technology, before being made the vice-president of the microprocessors division. In 1995, he left Intel to join their biggest rival, AMD, before becoming a venture capitalist and now focusses on funding early-stage startups in India.
8. Sabeer Bhatia
Sabeer Bhatia is the creator of Hotmail, the first browser-based email service.
He launched Hotmail in July 4, 1996, the American Independence Day, symbolising "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access user's inbox from anywhere in the world. As a 20-year old, Bhatia moved to Caltech from BITS Pilani as a transfer student, and then got a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. He began his career as a hardware engineer at Apple. He was excited by the idea of email in a browser, which led to the launch of Hotmail, which he successfully sold to Microsoft in 1998.
9. Amit Singhal
Fortune Magazine named him as one of the smartest people in tech.
Amit Singhal is the man behind Google search. A Google fellow, Singhal was born in Jhansi, UP and got his computer science degree at IIT-Roorkee. He then went on to get an MS at the University of Minnesota, Duluth and a Ph.D at Cornell. After his Ph.D, he joined AT&T Labs where he continued research in information retrieval. In 2000, after being persuaded by a friend, he joined Google's core search quality department. He rewrote the search algorithm in 2001 and went on to become the Head of Google search, a job he resigned from earlier this year.
10. Ruchi Sanghvi
Ruchi was Facebook's first female engineer.
When Ruchi was young, she wanted to join her father's business in Pune. However, after she got a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical computer science at the Carnegie Mellon University, she changed her mind. She got her first job at Oracle, where she worked for a year. In 2005, she joined Facebook, and was the first female engineer in the company. She was one of the primary engineers who worked on the earlier versions of the News Feed. After this new feature received a lot of criticism due to privacy concerns, Ruchi and her team put in a marathon 48-hour coding session where they fixed these issues. In 2010, she quit Facebook, and with her husband Aditya Agarwal, started a stealth collaboration startup called Cove, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2012.
11. Padmasree Warrior.
She was called the "Queen of the Electric Car Biz" by Fortune magazine.
Warrior has held several important positions during her career. She was born and raised in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, and went to IIT-Delhi to study chemical engineering. She then got her master's degree at Cornell University, and joined Motorola in 1984. 19 years later, she rose to become the CTO of Motorola. In 2007, she left Motorola to become the CTO at Cisco Systems, where she worked for 8 years before moving to NextEV, an electric vehicle company.
12. Om Malik
Om Malik made it big in technology news business.
Indian success stories in the Silicon Valley are not limited to software and hardware engineering. Om Malik was one of the pioneers in technology news blogging. Born in Delhi in 1966, Malik studied chemistry at St. Stephen's College, before moving to New York in 1993 while working for Forbes. In 1994, he launched DesiParty.com, an events site for Indians in the United States. In 2001, he launched GigaOM, one of the first tech blogs in the world. The blog is consistently ranked among the top technology news sites in the world.
We're proud of all these people, and hope Indians keep rising in the Silicon Valley.BEIJING, Aug 9 (Reuters) - A typhoon battered China's east coast on Sunday, killing eight people and forcing authorities to cancel hundreds of flights and evacuate more than 163,000 people.
Typhoon Soudelor killed six people in Taiwan earlier on the weekend then moved across the Taiwan Strait and slammed into the mainland's Fujian province late on Saturday.
It churned towards the neighbouring provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi on Sunday, the Xinhua state news agency said. The Tropical Storm Risk website downgraded Soudelor to a tropical storm as it moved inland.
Eight people were killed in Hangzhou city, CCTV state television reported, as heavy rain and wind toppled trees and triggered flash floods and mudslides.
Television showed partially submerged vehicles abandoned on flooded roads as soldiers waded through water, searching for victims.
More than 163,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Fujian and more than two million households suffered power outages, Xinhua said. More than 530 flights were cancelled and 190 high-speed trains were suspended.
In Taiwan, the rain and wind eased on Sunday although the Central Weather Bureau warned that conditions remained unstable as crews began clearing fallen trees, mud flows and other debris from blocked roads.
The storm killed six people on Taiwan with four missing and nearly 400 injured, authorities said.
Typhoons are common at this time of year in the South China Sea and Pacific, picking up strength from warm waters but losing it over land. (Reporting by Koh Gui Qing in BEIJING and J.R. Wu in TAIPEI; Editing by Robert Birsel)With injunctions against many of the federal protections the Obama administration offered transgender people this year, transgender students and their schools grapple with policies on bathrooms, changing rooms, sports teams, and more.
James Buck started his sophomore year little more than a week ago—and for the first time, he’s walking his high school hallways as an out transgender male.
“If I’m completely honest, it’s been less than six months since I really came out,” Buck tells Out. “I came out first to my friends. I was a little scared to talk to my parents because they’ve known me as a girl my whole life. It’s not just my transition; it’s theirs, too.”
The 15-year-old is returning to Green Mountain High School in Lakewood, Colorado, after a challenging summer not just for him personally, but for transgender students across the country.
On Aug. 21, a Texas federal judge halted a Department of Education guidance instructing schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and changing rooms matching their gender identity. That means schools can, at least for this school year, discriminate against transgender students by forcing them to use the bathroom of their assigned sex.
Buck describes how discrimination can hurt and confuse transgender students—even endanger them.
“Being told that you are not how you identify takes a massive toll,” he says. “If I go into the women’s restroom and I look very masculine, I still get yelled at. I get the looks, or I get kicked out. That’s not a fun feeling. Worst-case scenario, if I go into the men’s restroom and I’m not looking masculine enough, I could get beat up. It’s just scary.”
While debate rages across the country over transgender people’s access to basic facilities, Nathan Smith, GLSEN’s director of public policy, clarifies that, for transgender students, the schools themselves wanted guidance.
“You had school districts that were asking for direction on how to serve transgender students,” he says. “School leaders welcomed the federal guidance because it finally provided some clarity. Now, since the court ruling, they’re starting school back in a gray area. They were working on inclusive policies. They were training educators on how to serve transgender students. After the students themselves, this ruling hurts school administrators the most.”
As a GLSEN National Student Council member, Buck has seen the news this summer, but he admits he gets emotional when following the stories.
“The cases hit really close to home,” he says. “It doesn’t feel great to read those headlines like, ‘Trans kid gets blocked from going to bathroom.’ They don’t realize that students, that I, don’t belong in the other bathroom.”
With federal guidance on hold, schools must decide themselves how to connect with transgender students. Buck talks about a transgender male friend in southern Colorado who can’t use either restroom at his school. Staff explicitly told him he has to use a gender-neutral stall.
“The guidance was a tool for transgender students to argue from the ground up for their rights,” Smith says. “They had a federal document that they could point to and say, ‘I know what needs to happen’ and take that to their school leaders. Now these students are starting the school year in possibly discriminatory environments without the protections they thought they would have only a few weeks ago.”
Buck is lucky enough to set GLSEN safe spaces around his school, to work with counselors on transgender issues, and to participate in the school’s gay-straight alliance. He wants to try out for the school swim team in November—he’s been swimming since he was 5—but before he can even think about making the team, he has to consider his gender identity.
“I have to figure out which gender team I can join—if I can join the boys team—which bathroom I can use, which locker room I can,” he says. "I just wish people could realize I’m not going to go to the bathroom for any other purpose than that—going to the bathroom.”
Buck’s uncertainty, his anxiety, is what makes the need for transgender student protections so important.
“We know students do better in school if they feel more connected to the school community,” Smith says. “Losing this guidance puts the well-being of students at an even greater risk now.”Australia withdraw from Bangladesh tour
Australia’s Test stars are set to make this season’s Matador Cup one of the most competitive in the history of the domestic limited-overs competition, following the return to their respective state squads due to the postponement of the tour of Bangladesh.
Quick Single: Australia withdraw from tour of Bangladesh
Cricket Australia has also scheduled a two-day red-ball camp at Hurstville Oval in Sydney’s south on October 13-14, with the intention of ensuring its players have adequate preparation for the three-Test series against New Zealand, beginning November 5 in Brisbane.
WATCH: Smith disappointed by tour postponement
“The Tour of Bangladesh was going to be an important series for our relatively new-look Test team heading into the Australian summer, so we’re disappointed it won’t go ahead,” said Pat Howard, CA’s executive general manager of team performance.
“Given the circumstances, it’s important we give our Test players the best preparation leading into the summer so they will now be available to play in the Matador BBQs One-Day Cup throughout October to get valuable match experience in Australian conditions.
Quick Single: Paris primed for Warriors' campaign
“We will also hold a red-ball camp in Sydney to provide extra preparation for Australian players. We have scheduled this camp to fall in the quietest two-day period of the Matador Cup to limit player movement during the tournament.
“While we believe the red-ball camp will provide solid preparation for the Australian players, the first Sheffield Shield round will provide a long-form match opportunity for those players. We have therefore pushed back the first Shield round to start a day later on the 28 October to give the Matador Cup finalists an extra day to prepare for their first Shield match.
“Australian players will be made available for the first Shield round dependent on injury and workloads ahead of the first Test against New Zealand.”
The addition of the national squad’s players will have a flow-on effect to five of the six states (South Australia were not represented), who are expected to re-name their squads in the coming days ahead of Monday’s first round in Sydney.
In addition, Howard said the impact the reshuffle is set to have on the new Cricket Australia XI - a team assembled from all the state’s best young players who didn’t make their respective Matador Cup squads – will also be carefully managed.
Key dates
October 5 – start of the Matador BBQs One-Day Cup. Full fixture here
October 13-14 – red-ball camp with Australian Test players at Hurstville Oval, Sydney
October 25 – Matador BBQs One-Day Cup final
October 28 – Round 1 of the Sheffield Shield, which will be a day-night roundReported by Charlie Sheen
Infowars
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Related: Sheen Blasts Cowardly Corporate Media Refusal to Debate 9/11 Facts
Charlie Sheen’s Video Message to President Obama
[audio:http://www.infowars.com/media/20090908-CharlieSheenINT-Promises.mp3]
Alex Jones interviews Charlie Sheen.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with our 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, while he was out promoting his health care reform initiative. I requested 30 minutes given the scope and detail of my inquiry; they said I could have 20. Twenty minutes, 1200 seconds, not a lot of time to question the President about one of the most important events in our nation’s history. The following is a transcript of our remarkable discussion.
————————————————————————————————————————
Charlie Sheen – Good afternoon Mr. President, thank you so much for taking time out of your demanding schedule.
President Barack Obama – My pleasure, the content of your request seemed like something I should carve out a few minutes for.
CS – I should point out that I voted for you, as your promises of hope and change, transparency and accountability, as well as putting government back into the hands of the American people, struck an emotional chord in me that I hadn’t felt in quite some time, perhaps ever.
PBO – And I appreciate that Charlie. Big fan of the show, by the way.
CS – Sir, I can’t imagine when you might find the time to actually watch my show given the measure of what you inherited.
PBO – I have it Tivo’d on Air Force One. Nice break from the traveling press corps. (He glances at his watch) not to be abrupt or to rush you, but you have 19 minutes left.
CS – I’ll take that as an invitation to cut to the chase.
PBO – I’m all ears. Or so I’ve been told.
CS – Sir, in the very near future we will be experiencing our first 9/11 anniversary with you as Commander in Chief.
PBO – Yes. A very solemn day for our Nation. A day of reflection and yet a day of historical consciousness as well.
CS – Very much so sir, very much so indeed…. Now; In researching your position regarding the events of 9/11 and the subsequent investigation that followed, am I correct to understand that you fully support and endorse the findings of the commission report otherwise known as the ‘official story’?
PBO – Do I have any reason not to? Given that most of us are presumably in touch with similar evidence.
CS – I really wish that were the case, sir. Are you aware, Mr. President, of the recent stunning revelations that sixty percent of the 9/11 commissioners have publicly stated that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11 and that the Pentagon was engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack?
PBO – I am aware of certain “in fighting” during the course of their very thorough and tireless investigative process.
CS – Mr. President, it’s hard to label this type of friction as “in fighting” or make the irresponsible leap to “thorough,” when the evidence I insist you examine regarding 6 of the 10 members are statements of fact.
(At this point one of Obama’s senior aides approaches the President and whispers into his ear. Obama glances quickly at his watch and nods as the aide resumes his post at the doorway, directly behind me.)
PBO – No disrespect Mr. Sheen, but I have to ask; what is it that you seem to be implying with the initial direction of this discussion?
CS – I am not implying anything Mr. President. I am here to present the facts and see what you plan to do with them.
PBO – Let me guess; your ‘facts,’ allegedly supporting these claims are in the folders you brought with you?
CS – Good guess Mr. President.
(I hand the first folder of documents to the President)
CS – Again sir, these are not my opinions or assumptions, this is all a matter of public record, reported through mainstream media, painstakingly fact checked and verified.
(the President glances into the folder I handed him)
CS – You’ll notice sir on page one of the dossier dated August of ’06 from the Washington Post, the statements of John Farmer, senior council to the 9/11 commission, his quote stating, “I was shocked how different the truth was from the way it was described.”
PBO – (as he glances down at the report, almost inaudible) …. um hmm….
CS – He goes on to further state “The [NORAD Air Defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years….”
(the President continues to view the documents)
CS – On pages two and three, sir, are the statements, as well, from commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, commissioners Bob Kerrey, Timothy Roemer and John Lehman, as well as the statements of commissioner Max Cleland, an ex-Senator from Georgia, who resigned, stating:
“It is a national scandal. This investigation is now compromised. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.”
He also described President Bush’s desire to delay the process as not to damage the ‘04 re-election bid. They suspected deception to the point where they considered referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Mr. President, this information alone is unequivocally grounds for a new investigation!
PBO – Mistakes were clearly made but we as a people and as a country need to move forward. It is obviously in our best interest as a democratic society to focus our efforts and our resources on the future of this great nation and our ability to protect the American people and our allies from this type of terrorism in the coming years.
CS – Sir, how can we focus on the future when THE COMMISSION ITSELF is on record stating that they still do not know the truth??
PBO – Even if what you state, might in some capacity, begin to approach an open discussion or balanced debate, I can’t speak for, or about the decisions certain commission members made during an extremely difficult period. Perhaps you should be interviewing them instead of me. Wait, don’t tell me; I was easier to track down than they were?
CS – Not exactly sir, but let’s be honest. You’re the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, the buck stops with you. 9/11 has been the pretext for the systematic dismantling of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Your administration is reading from the same playbook that the Bush administration foisted on America through documented secrecy and deception.
PBO – Mr. Sheen, I’m having a difficult time sitting here and listening to you draw distorted parallels between the Bush/Cheney regime and mine.
CS – Mr. President the parallels are not distorted just because you say they are. Let’s stick to the facts. You promised to abolish the Patriot Act and then voted to re-authorize it. You pledged to end warrantless wire tapping against the American people and now energetically defend it. You decried the practice of rendition and now continue it. You promised over and over again on the campaign trail, that you would end the practice of indefinite detention and instead, you have expanded it to permanent detention of “detainees” without trial. This far exceeds the outrages of the former administration. Call me crazy Mr. President, but is this not your record?
PBO – Mr. Sheen, my staff and I authorized this interview based on your request to discuss 9/11 and deliver some additional information you’re convinced I’d not previously reviewed. Call me crazy, But it appears as though you’ve blindly wandered off topic.
CS – Sir, the examples I just illustrated are a direct result of 9/11.
PBO – And I’m telling you that we must move forward, we must endure through these dangerous and politically challenging years ahead.
CS – Mr. President, we cannot move forward with a bottomless warren of unanswered questions surrounding that day and its aftermath.
PBO – I read the official report. Every word every page. Perhaps you should do the same.
CS – I have sir, and so have thousands of family members of the victims, and guess what; they have the same questions I do and probably a lot more. I didn’t lose a loved one on that horrific day Mr. President and neither did you. But since then I, along with millions of other Americans lost something we held true and dear for most of our lives in this great country of ours; we lost our hope.
PBO – And I’d like to believe that I am here to restore that hope. To restore confidence in your leaders, in the system that the voting public chose through a peaceful transfer of power.
(An odd moment of silence between us. Precious time ticking away).
CS – Mr. President, are you aware of the number of days it took to begin the investigation into JFK’s assassination?
PBO – If memory serves I believe it was two weeks.
CS – Close. Seventeen days to be exact. Are you aware sir, how long it took |
Studios, GamerClipz, FlyinB, operativelawson
AdvertisementAir pollution is one of those things that we know is awful for our bodies, but it can be hard to see the actual impact. So even though about 3.7 million people died prematurely from air pollution in 2012 alone, it’s easy to forget day-to-day just how deadly that smoggy air can be. Scientists at the University of Melbourne are studying air pollution, however, and taking a close-up look to show people just how those airborne particles are harming our bodies.
Associate Professor Uta Wille and PhD candidate Luke Gamon at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Science have started examining pollution at the molecular level. According to their research, when an pollutant is inhaled, it damages the respiratory lining. After exposing peptides to nitrogen dioxide and ozone and examining the peptides with spectroscopy, they were able to look at the chemical damage in much more minute detail to see that damage as we’ve never seen it before.
Related: India’s Smog is Killing Off Crops that Could Have Fed 94 Million People
The research revealed that nitrogen oxide – the free radical that results from auto exhaust and fossil fuel power – and ozone caused much greater damage to the peptides than either molecule alone.
The United States has a variety of regulations in place to control air pollution, but they are constantly changing as science reveals new information about pollution. The researchers said that they hope the work they are doing will help policy makers make better decisions about controlling air quality, since we can better see exactly what is happening to our lungs when we breathe in pollutants.
Via Phys.org
Lead image via Shutterstock, image via BKShare
The smartphone industry has turned into one that includes familiar design, regardless of which phone you look at. Akyumen is here to shake things up, however, with its Holofone Phablet, a beast of a device that packs more than a few surprises.
Beginning with the exterior, the Holofone more than lives up to its name by featuring a massive 7-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display. You will definitely look silly with such a massive device on the side of your head when making calls, but at least you will have plenty of room to watch movies and play games.
If you need even more space, however, the Holofone includes a 35-lumen projector that can project images up to 100 inches on the diagonal. According to Akyumen, the projected image is of a “high resolution,” so we hope the projector shoots out at least 720p resolution images.
The Holofone has another trick up its sleeve: the ability to boot into either the aging Android 5.0 Lollipop or Windows 10. We are not sure whether the Holofone will be upgraded to either Marshmallow or the upcoming Nougat, but at least it will not have to worry about running Continuum from Windows 10 Mobile, since it runs Microsoft’s desktop operating system.
Elsewhere, a quad-core Intel Atom Cherry Trail processor and 4GB RAM power the Holofone, with the 128GB of onboard storage expandable through the MicroSD card slot. A 5-megapixel sensor is found around front, while the 13MP main camera features what Akyumen calls “super slow motion technology.” Meanwhile, the 3,500mAh battery promises to provide two hours of continuous projector use. Finally, the Holofone features 4G LTE connectivity and USB Type-C support.
If you are interested in the Holofone, keep in mind that the phablet is sold only in bundles through Akyumen’s website. The bundles start at $600 for the Education Package and go all the way up to $950 for the Advanced Package, which includes everything from a Bluetooth speaker to a game controller. Several packages of the white and silver Holofone are currently sold out, with bundles still available for the black and white variant. Any available bundles will ship out to customers beginning on November 5.This summer, there was a seismic shift within the private securities landscape. On July 10th, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 4-1 to lift an 80-year old ban on general solicitation, allowing those seeking capital to advertise their securities to the general public. This was a huge leap forward in wealth creation for this country as it allows those looking for money to position themselves right in front of people who not only have capital but, more importantly, are willing to invest it. These individuals - those with at least $200,000 of annual income and/or over $1,000,000 in assets - are classified as accredited investors.
Before September 23rd (the date these new rulings took effect), entrepreneurs seeking investment were forced to go the route of "back-door dealings" in order to gain the attention, and eventually the money, from accredited investors. Entrepreneurs had to personally know and have an existing relationship with the investors they brought on as there was no other method of attracting capital. With the introduction of general solicitation, entrepreneurs will be able to use a new exemption (Rule 506(c)) to target a large number of qualified investors at once via all manners of promotion and advertising. Everything from TV ad spots to Facebook updates to blog posts like this one are fair game for entrepreneurs to utilize during their fundraising rounds.
While this is game changing for entrepreneurs seeking funding as it increases their access to capital, the nuances of these regulations are likely to cause confusion. Prior to July 10th, the SEC turned a blind eye to general solicitation, allowing entrepreneurs to participate in demo days, pitch competitions and public meetings without fear of being regulated. With the laws now in effect, that blind eye will be replaced with enforcement around general solicitation. However, the definition of general solicitation is broad and open to interpretation - it can be anything from a conversation in a coffee shop to an official pitch. Therefore, even entrepreneurs who don't intend to generally solicit and advertise their investment, risk accidentally and unintentionally doing so - and if they do generally solicit they will need to abide by the new rulings.
For entrepreneurs who choose to file under rule 506(c) and generally solicit, there is now the responsibility to verify the accreditation status of any investor who participates in the funding round. Under the old rulings, investors could sign on a dotted line to self-certify that they were in fact accredited. But with the new rulings self-certification is no longer sufficient. Entrepreneurs raising capital through general solicitation must now take "reasonable steps" to ensure their investors are accredited.
The SEC outlines two non-exclusive ways to go about verifying an investor's accreditation status. One option is to simply ask an investor to pass along his or her IRS documents and tax filings so the entrepreneur can verify that the investor meets the required criteria. This process is fundamentally flawed however as sophisticated investors will be unwilling to disclose their personal information. Another method of verification is for the entrepreneur and investor to rely on third-party verification. This involves the use of the investor's CPA, broker-dealer, or investment advisor to verify the accreditation status on behalf of the investor. Websites such as Crowdentials have taken measures to streamline the third-party verification process while requiring no sensitive financial information. This gives entrepreneurs the safe harbor they need in order to stay compliant while giving investors the privacy they require.
These safe harbors are vitally important for those using Rule 506(c). Without them, entrepreneurs risk exposing themselves to the harsh penalties outlined by the SEC. Those that are found to be non-compliant while generally soliciting will be forced to return all the capital they raised in that particular fundraising round. While this in itself would have crippling effects for any company, the SEC won't stop there. The SEC has proposed a rule that states that if an entrepreneur brings on an investor without taking "reasonable steps" and that investor turns out to be unaccredited, the company could be banned from raising any capital for an entire year. These penalties are the SEC's attempt at protecting unsophisticated investors from being taken advantage of by scheming individuals only looking to make a quick buck. While the penalties are harsh, they are not only understandable, but easily manageable as well with a little outside help.
The SEC has not finalized all of the rules that are to be adopted regarding this legislation. In fact, all of the proposed rules are open for comment and those individuals that will be affected by this legislation are encouraged to go to the SEC website and voice their opinions. A lot of buzz has been surrounding the proposed rules as they seem to neuter the purpose of lifting the ban on general solicitation. If the proposed rules are adopted, businesses will have far more bureaucratic work to maintain a relationship with their investor and stay compliant. This extra workload would prevent any business from being agile and competitive.
The lifting of the ban on general solicitation has a lot to offer entrepreneurs and could very well create wealth for the startup community. Entrepreneurs are no longer limited to approaching the few accredited investors they may know - instead they can reach accredited investors wherever they may be. These rulings have removed the geographic barriers to startup capital. However, the rulings are very nuanced, open to interpretation, and carry significant penalties if they are not followed. Additionally, the ruling is not yet completed as the proposed rules have not yet been decided upon. It is absolutely essential that those raising capital stay fully educated about their options and the latest legal news in order to stay compliant. The times are changing and those that don't change with them will be left behind.NOTE: NBC Chicago will offer a live stream with complete race coverage beginning at 7 a.m. Oct. 8 right here.
Not able to make it to Chicago to watch your favorite runners cross the finish line in person?
We've got you covered.
Not able to make it to Chicago to watch your favorite runners cross the 2017 Bank of America Chicago Marathon finish line in person?
We've got you covered.
Whether you're at work, on the go or at home you can watch complete live coverage of the race on NBC 5 or on the NBC Chicago app from anywhere in the world.
We will offer a live stream with complete coverage beginning at 7 a.m. online and on-air. The coverage will continue until 11 a.m. on TV and a live finish line camera will stream until 2:30 p.m. on the NBC Chicago app and website.
Telemundo Chicago will offer Spanish coverage of the race on-air from 7-9 a.m. and online from 7-10 a.m. with a finish line camera streaming on the Telemundo Chicago app and website from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
COZI-TV will also the full race coverage and finish line camera from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Complete marathon footage will re-air on the channel from 7-11 a.m. on Oct. 14.
The 2017 Bank of America Chicago Marathon, the 40th anniversary race, steps off Oct. 8 in the city's Grant Park. This year's event is expected to be one of the largest finisher fields in Chicago Marathon history.Twice this year, a house party at 36 Woodward St. ended in gunfire. On Saturday, two died there, including the cousin of a Monroe County legislator.
Herbert Thomas (Photo: Provided)
Herbert Thomas loved to cut hair and dreamed of opening his own line of barber shops.
He got tattoos with the names of his sisters, nieces and nephews and dreamed of starting his own family, telling relatives that he would need a recliner big enough to fit all his children on his lap.
Instead, Thomas, 34, became another casualty of gun violence in Rochester this summer.
A shooting early Saturday at a house party on Woodward Street on the northeast side of the city left two dead and four others wounded.
Police announced Saturday night that they had arrested a suspect, William James, 30, a city resident, and charged him with second-degree murder.
Authorities have not identified the victims. But Thomas’ family — including one of his cousins, Monroe County Legislator and city firefighter Ernest Flagler-Mitchell — said they were certain he was one of the people killed.
“I want us to stop hating each other so badly.” Brenda Williams, Herbert Thomas' mother
Flagler-Mitchell said another cousin, whom he declined to identify, was with Thomas at the party and also was shot, but survived. Family members were unsure why the two men were at the party.
Thomas’ mother, Brenda Williams, said the community cannot accept the killings of so many young black men.
“I want us to stop hating each other so badly,” she said. “I want the violence to stop.”
Saturday’s killings came a little more than three weeks after a drive-by shooting left three young men dead outside the Boys & Girls Club on Genesee Street, and about 2½ weeks after the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Rashod “Shoddi” Lewis on Portland Avenue.
Police said they arrived at 36 Woodward St. in the city’s Marketview Heights neighborhood around 4:26 a.m. and found between 30 and 50 people at the house.
At least four victims were taken to area hospitals. One survivor remained in critical condition on Saturday night, according to police.
Neighbors said the house where the shooting occurred has been a consistent nuisance for the past year, hosting frequent, out-of-control parties in a neighborhood that otherwise had been stable. Residents said officers visited the home just hours before the shooting and several other times in the past week alone.
In March, two women were shot during a late-night party at the same house; they were treated at a hospital and released. Several residents said Saturday that they heard shots at the house since then, and that a small crowd beat a teenager in the street nearby about two days before the latest shooting.
The city filed a nuisance abatement proceeding in court last month against the owner of the home, who is listed as Sheldon O. Smith.
A foreclosure proceeding also is pending against Smith, who is listed in different public records as living in Long Island or Houston. He could not immediately be reached for comment. A man with the same name is listed as the owner of an East Main Street property where the city sought to demolish an unsafe home in 2013.
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Stories of violence
Jayla Simmons, who lives next door to the Woodward Street house, said that shortly before the shooting, a relative told her that she heard a man enter the neighboring home and say that he saw someone who shot him in the past.
Simmons said she called police, and shooting erupted soon thereafter. She saw two women jump out a window to escape. Simmons said she fled to the other side of her home, where she hid behind a couch.
She said she moved to the neighborhood about a month ago. She has children, but they have been staying with a grandparent because Simmons doesn’t think it’s safe for them at her apartment. She said she’s been using a board to help reinforce her door.
“It's this house. Everything else is fine. It's this house.” Jayla Simmons, who lives next door
“It's this house,” Simmons said. “Everything else is fine. It's this house.”
Other neighbors shared similar stories, saying that revelers often block driveways with their cars and spill into nearby yards. Kiara McCoy said she called police to complain about a party around 2 a.m. Saturday. Officers showed up, but the party resumed soon after they left, she said.
Katrina Cook, another neighbor, said police were at the house a few days in a row.
“This street is loaded with kids,” Cook said. “You still have a community that looks out for each other here.”
Residents, businesses and nonprofits have been working hard to revitalize this part of Rochester, and the city has invested about $4.4 million in Marketview Heights since 2008 to bolster homeownership and address blight. Two weeks ago, residents held a block party on nearby Weld Street to celebrate progress in the neighborhood.
Martin Pedraza, a member of a neighborhood group called the Marketview Heights Collective Action Project, said he was frustrated that problems persisted at the house even after the shooting there in March.
“It should have been shut down or had the people moved out of there,” Pedraza said.
A formal statement from the Collective Action Project applauded police for making a swift arrest, but also said the group hopes to work with the city to speed up proceedings against problem properties like this one in the future.
"We are a community that celebrates diversity, culture, family and friendship," the statement said in part. "Violence has no place in our neighborhood."
A knack for drawing, fashion
Thomas’ sister, Glenda Gano, said she got a series of calls about the shooting early Saturday. Several members of his family arrived at the scene Saturday morning. "Where's my child?" cried Williams, Thomas’ mother.
Police officers tried to comfort the family.
Herbert Thomas, a victim of a shooting on Woodward Street, plays with a nephew. (Photo: Provided by Thomas' family)
Thomas was one of five children, coming from a family of people who work and serve the community, Gano said. He called his mother almost daily and thrived on spending time with his nieces and nephews.
He had worked as a barber since he was a teenager and was gaining a following for his work, Gano said. He also had a passion and a knack for drawing and fashion.
Thomas died as he prepared to be a pallbearer at an aunt's funeral, Gano said.
“He was jovial and kind,” she said. “He was always about his family.”
County Executive Maggie Brooks and Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren called Flagler-Mitchell on Saturday to offer their condolences.
Less than a mile away, Rochesterians walked through the Public Market, largely unaware of the incident.
Arthur Evans of Rochester said he couldn’t believe how often he hears about gun violence in the news. He said the city is still trying to recover from the shootings at the Boys & Girls Club last month.
“That’s sad and my heart goes out to the families who lost a relative,” Evans said.
CLOSE Ernest Flagler-Mitchell talks about his cousin who was killed in the shooting on Woodward Street on Sept. 12, 2015. LAUREN PETRACCA/@laurenpetracca/staff photographer
At the scene, Flagler-Mitchell said he planned to work in the County Legislature on the issues of violence, mental health and guns. He questioned where illegal firearms are coming from.
"The hate, it's demonic," he said.
Despite her loss, Gano expressed faith in Rochester.
“This city is not dead,” she said. “It shall rise from the ashes of all these homicides, and we can come back stronger than ever.”
Includes reporting by staff photographer Lauren Petracca and staff writer Khristopher J. Brooks.
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/1F3RdVtWhen it comes to modern technical death bands, there are 2 trains of thought: Nile and Dying Fetus. Virtually all of the tech death metal bands follow either one of the two bands.
The first wave of death metal ended around 1996-1998. The second wave of death metal began 1998 with Nile's Amongst The Catacombs of Nephren-Ka.
Apart from Death, all of the other bands were beginning to sound stale, even Morbid Angel (though Formulas Fatal To the Flesh is a great album, it still sounds a bit old school). Death stood out from the rest of the first wave bands and did their own thing and that's what made Chuck so brilliant. So anyway, around 1998 the world needed something different from the death metal community. Out came Nile with Catacombs. It was fresh, it was exciting and that's the way tech death has been ever since. Dying Fetus' Killing On Adrenaline is also from 1998 and has the same kind of freshness as Catacombs.
Annihilation, for me, is Nile's best album and sounds like what they were working towards their whole time. Annihilation is Nile's Sgt. Pepper.
Best track: Cast Down The Heretic for sure.The Canadian government has launched a defense review that is widely expected to scale back or eliminate some of the military's planned equipment programs and could see niche roles emerge for the country's military.
But the Liberal Party government, which came to power in October promising a leaner, more agile Canadian military, has assured Parliament that some key roles, such as search and rescue operations and equipment, will remain untouched.
The government's all encompassing review, the first for the Canadian Forces since 1994, would be ready early next year and focus on the actual needs of the military, not what the various services want, said Harjit Sajjan, the country's defense minister. Sajjan said he expects the review to be made public in early 2017. It will guide the Canadian Forces on its roles for the future and set the stage for the equipment to be purchased.
"Important choices will have to be made," said Sajjan, backing away April 12 from his original claims that all capabilities were on the table.
The review had originally been tasked to examine whether the Canadian Forces still had a role to play in search-and-rescue operations. The Royal Canadian Air Force operates both fixed wing and rotary aircraft for those missions — a capability that forms the backbone of the federal government's search and rescue response.
Originally on the agenda for the defense review was an examination on whether any of those military aspects of search and rescue could be turned over to the private sector. However, Sajjan reassured Parliament that is no longer being examined.
"The previous government might have been looking at privatizing search and rescue," Sajjan told the House of Commons Tuesday, April 12. "But this government is not, because the Canadian Armed Forces play a critical role in search and rescue."
Sajjan noted that a plan to replace the country's CF-18 fighter jets as well as acquire new ships for the Royal Canadian Navy would proceed as planned and not be affected by the defense review.
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Canada is in the process of acquiring new supply ships and Arctic patrol vessels for the Canadian navy. The two supply ships are expected to be in the water by 2021. Work has also begun on the Arctic patrol ships, with the first vessel expected to arrive in 2018.
The Canadian government also intends to build a new class of ship to replace the existing destroyers and frigates. That project alone is valued at CDN $26 billion (US $19 billion) but actual construction is not expected to begin until after 2022.
Sajjan, however, did not provide a timeline on the replacement program for the fighter jets. But potential contenders to replace Canada's CF-18s include the F-35, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale, Boeing's Super Hornet and Saab's Gripen.
In addition, the Liberal government is delaying spending CDN $3.7 billion on "large-scale capital projects." That money, already promised to the Department of National Defence, would be delayed until 2022.
The types of equipment projects that will be affected by the funding freeze have yet to be released publicly.
Sajjan said he wants the military to be still versed in combat operations but suggested the Canadian Forces would examine building expertise in niche areas, highlighting in particular the need to expand capabilities in cyber warfare and space operations. "We have seen cyber space become an extension of the modern battlefield," he explained.
Future equipment acquisitions will have to be relevant to the new defense policy.
Sajjan said he has met with U.S., British and Australian defense officials to hear about ongoing efforts to transform those militaries for the future.
"My goal is to establish a renewed vision for our military," he pointed out.By Joseph Menn
SAN FRANCISCO, March 12 (Reuters) - While U.S. law enforcement agencies have long tried to stamp out networks of compromised computers used by cyber criminals, the National Security Agency has been hijacking the so-called botnets as a resource for spying.
The NSA has "co-opted" more than 140,000 computers since August 2007 for the purpose of injecting them with spying software, according to a slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept news website on Wednesday. ()
Botnets are typically used by criminals to steal financial information from infected machines, to relay spam messages, and to conduct "denial-of-service" attacks against websites by having all the computers try to connect simultaneously, thereby overwhelming them.
In November, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey told the Senate that botnets had "emerged as a global cyber security threat" and that the agency had developed a "comprehensive public-private approach to eliminate the most significant botnet activity and increase the practical consequences for those who use botnets for intellectual property theft or other criminal activities."
According to the NSA slide published by The Intercept, one technique the intelligence agency used was called QUANTUMBOT, which "finds computers belonging to botnets, and hijacks the command and control channel." The program was described as "highly successful."
Reuters reported in May that U.S. agencies had tapped botnets to harvest data from the machines' owners or to maintain the ability to issue the infected computers new commands.
The slide leaked by Snowden is the first confirmation of the practice, and underscores the complications for the NSA of balancing its major mission of providing eavesdropping capability with the less well-funded missions of protecting critical national assets and assisting law enforcement.
The Top Secret slide was marked for distribution to the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance, which includes the United States and Britain.
The NSA declined to confirm or deny the existence of the program. It is not known if the botnets hijacked by the agency were in other counties or in the United States, or if the botnets could have been recaptured by criminals.
Many botnet operations disable the machines' security software, leaving them vulnerable to new attacks by others.
In a written statement, an NSA spokeswoman said: "As the President affirmed on 17 January, signals intelligence shall be collected exclusively where there is a foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purpose to support national and departmental missions, and not for any other purposes.
"Moreover, Presidential Policy Directive 28 affirms that all persons - regardless of nationality - have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information, and that privacy and civil liberties shall be integral considerations in the planning of U.S. signals intelligence activities."
The Intercept article and supporting slides showed that the NSA had sought the means to automate the deployment of its tools for capturing email, browsing history and other information in order to reach as many as millions of machines.
It did not say whether such widespread efforts, which included impersonating web pages belonging to Facebook Inc and other companies, were limited to computers overseas.
If it did pursue U.S. computers, the NSA also could have minimized information about those users.Bitcoin Replace-By-Fee guide: fix stuck transactions, do doublespends
Igor Korsakov Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 25, 2017
In this article we will study what is Replace-By-Fee transactions and how to use them. Surprise, with RBF you can try to do doublespends!
Imagine situation when Alice sends coins to Bob. She creates and signs the transaction, and broadcasts it to the network for confirmation. Unfortunately, the transaction hangs unconfirmed for a long time, as it has low fee (or an ok fee under other circumstances, but at this point of time unconfirmed transactions queue is too big and miners prefer transactions with higher fees). What can Alice do? Her options: a) wait for a confirmation (might take a while) b) wait till transaction gets cancelled (most miners will exclude it from mempool) and freed coins would be spendable again (i.e. create transactions using those coins and most pools won’t reject it as doublespend, as old transaction got cleared from mempool) c) replace transaction, increasing the fee (RBF).
Thus, RBF — replace of existing transaction with a new one, increasing the fee. “Replace” means that new transaction will use same inputs (i.e. coins) as old one, and this would not be considered as doublespend (i.e. cheating). As result, only one transaction will be confirmed, mined and added to blockchain (most probably the one with higher fee).
RBF was introduced in BIP-0125
But kind of transaction is potentially replaceable? Good question. Transaction replacement was introduced by the Bitcoin designer himself Satoshi Nakamoto, but disabled at some point. It was then improved/upgraded to RBF and shipped in Bitcoin Core 0.12+. For replaceability, there’s a designated int field called nSequence, which signals which transaction is an older version and which one is younger. So, for the transaction to be replaceable nSequence should be lower than MAX (0xffffffff — 1). By default, most wallets set nSequence to maximum and you have to manually enable transactions replacement ability in settings. Here’s how it looks in Electrum:
Enable RBF in Electrum wallet
An example of decoded transaction:
...
"inputs": [
{
"addresses": [ "...." ],
"output_index": 0,
"output_value": 1010000,
"prev_hash": "...",
"script": "...",
"script_type":
"pay-to-pubkey-hash",
"sequence": 0
},
...
Sequence is indicated for each transaction input.
In Electrum after you enable RBF you’ll be able to increase transaction fee right in GUI. Right click the transaction and you’ll see it. But now we are going to manually create RBF transaction. Why? First of all, to better understand what’s going on. Second, for more versatility. In case of manual RBF we can specify totally different destination addresses, which can be considered a doublespend.
This is how it works. Alice wants to pay Bob for goods. Alice creates, signs and broadcasts transaction (which transfers coins to Bob), but intentionally sets low (or zero) fee. If Bob is not cautious enough he accepts unconfirmed transaction as payment and sends goods to Alice. After that Alice replaces the transaction with output addresses which Alice controls. Basically, Alice returns her funds. Bob got scammed. How can Bob avoid that? First, if Bob wants to accept unconfirmed transactions (for speed), don’t accept replaceable transactions (where nSequence is lower than MAX). Of course, ideal case when Bob waits for enough confirmations.President Donald Trump listens during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, March 9, 2017. Before most people are out of bed, Trump is watching cable news. Indeed, with Twitter app at the ready, the man who condemns the media as “the enemy of the people” may be the most voracious consumer of news in modern presidential history. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
By Joseph Ax and Grant Smith
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, has a magnificent course. Just ask its namesake, U.S. President Donald Trump, who until recently was quoted on its website saying the club "provides more than a membership – it's a true luxury lifestyle."
The business is worth more than $50 million and yielded more than $10 million from 2015 to early 2016, according to the financial disclosure form Trump filed last May. But seven months earlier, an attorney for Trump filed a lawsuit against the town of Ossining, New York, seeking lower taxes, claiming the course was worth only $1.4 million.
The lawsuit, which remains pending, has left at least one local official worried that taking a tough negotiating stance against a business owned by the world's most powerful political figure puts her town of 25,000 residents at risk of retribution.
"Are we, the puny town of Ossining, going to choose to go up against the president's company?" said Dana Levenberg, the town supervisor. "I wouldn't want to do anything that has negative repercussions for the town of Ossining."
Ethics experts said disagreements between Trump businesses and local governments create unavoidable conflicts of interest, since the federal government is a key source of funding and other benefits for municipalities and counties.
Over decades as a hard-charging businessman, Trump has been embroiled in numerous legal battles with local governments, from lawsuits to property tax appeals to zoning fights.
At least half a dozen disputes, including the Westchester lawsuit, remained unresolved as the Trump presidency began in late January.
"Donald Trump has shown to date that he can play hardball in these kinds of disputes," said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. "I would imagine any local official would at least have a moment of pause before going as hard as they otherwise would against the Trump companies."
But some local officials said they would handle Trump-related disputes in the same manner as any other, without fear or favor.
In Florida's Palm Beach County, where a Trump golf course was challenging its tax bill, the county mayor, Paulette Burdick, allowed that Trump's position as president "would pop into my mind" but insisted that officials treat every resident equally.
A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump Organization also did not respond to requests for comment.
Although federal conflicts of interest law does not apply to the president, Trump has nevertheless faced criticism since his election about the potential conflicts posed by his business empire. Past officeholders have generally placed their assets in a blind trust to avoid any appearance of impropriety.
Trump, however, has refused to do so, instead turning over day-to-day management of his companies to his two adult sons without divesting his stake. Ethics experts have said that solution does nothing to address the problem, since Trump still stands to profit from businesses that remain under the control of his immediate family.
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According to public records and interviews with officials, Trump's pending tax disputes at the time of his inauguration included cases in Florida, where his lawyers challenged the tax bills for two Trump-owned golf courses; Washington, D.C., where Trump's new hotel sued the district over its assessment; and Chicago, where Trump's company filed multiple lawsuits seeking property tax relief for a hotel.
New York City records show Trump companies were seeking tax breaks for commercial space at both Trump Tower and Trump International Hotel and Tower. The president also filed appeals in Los Angeles County over the value of his Beverly Hills mansion.
Over the years, Trump has repeatedly brought lawsuits against Palm Beach, Florida, for various issues related to Mar-A-Lago, his "winter White House," though no case is active. His golf courses also frequently require permits from local governments for construction and development.
Federal decisions on everything from antiterrorism funding to infrastructure projects can have an outsized impact on states and cities.The Belgian Federal Public Prosecutor's Office said it had arrested Amri Mohammed and Attou Hamza, who investigators say gave Abdeslam a ride back to Belgium the morning after the attacks in a Volkswagen Golf. A third man, a 31-year-old French national identified only as Ali O., for allegedly giving Abdeslam a ride later on, the prosecutor's office said.
Authorities said Ali O. lived in the Molenbeek area of Brussels, where much of the investigation has focused.
The Nov. 13 attackers were French and Belgian, and the man suspected of organizing the attacks, 27-year-old Abdelhamid Abaaoud, grew up in Molenbeek. He was killed during a raid in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
Abdeslam and his dead brother, both French nationals, lived in Molenbeek, authorities said.
The prosecutor's office said it had also arrested a 39-year-old Moroccan from Molenbeek, whom they identified as Lazez A. The office did not say how it thought he was involved in the attacks, but noted that investigators had found two guns and "traces of blood" in his car.
All of those arrested are charged with participation in the activities of a terrorist group and terrorist murders.
The announcement also included an alert for a man believed to have traveled to Paris with Abdeslam two days before the attacks. The prosecutor's office said Mohamed Abrini as caught on film with Abdeslam in a gas station on the highway to Paris. Abrini, 30, was driving a Renault Clio later used by the attackers, prosecutors said.
Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Abrini, the prosecutor's office said.
France has taken 165 people into custody and indicted 124 since the attacks, the country’s interior minister said on Tuesday.
Security officials have also conducted 1,233 searches and seized close to 200 arms — including "weapons of war" such as automatic rifles and explosives, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told parliament.
Cazeneuve didn't say what the indictments were related to or whether they were directly linked to the attacks.
Belgium, meanwhile, has placed its capital of Brussels on highest alert, with Prime Minister Charles Michel citing a "serious and imminent threat" to the city which is home of the headquarters of the European Union and NATO.
European officials were working feverishly on numerous fronts to stave off potential terror attacks while chasing leads from the latest one. Police raids in Europe thus far have failed to capture the primary person-of-interest in the Paris terror attacks: Salah Abdeslam.It's designed to be completely autonomous, as that will save the agency a bunch of money. Based on the details DARPA previously shared, the US Navy will deploy sonar buoys to give the drone an idea on where to go. After that, the ship will take over, using long/short-range sonar to detect stealthy diesel electric submarines and follow them around for months. Besides hounding foreign submarines, it can also be used for reconnaissance, to deliver supplies to other ships and counter undersea mines.
After ACTUV's unveiling and christening in Portland, Oregon, the agency will start demonstrating its long-range capabilities over the course of 18 months. That's not all Director Prabhakar announced at the media gathering, though. She also talked about DARPA's funding and other projects for 2017, including its plans to "launch 100 satellites in a 10-day period" using its XS-1 reusable aircraft.The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday not to extradite the eight officers that Turkey has accused of treason has added another thorn to the already strained relationship between Athens and Ankara.
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transcribed here).
Clearly, supporters of the anti-windfarm campaign travelled some distance to bolster the numbers at this meeting, and there seems to have been little effort to get a representative cross-section of the community. Some attendees were even recognised as campaigners against the Baynton wind farm near Seymour.
Campaigners against windfarms are entitled to rally their supporters. They shouldn’t claim they represent the views of the broader community. Studies by both CSIRO and developer Pacific Hydro have both indicated a high level of community support for wind farms, including in the areas where they are already built.
It would be good to have a real debate rather than these rallies orchestrated by one side. We have another opportunity next week.
Senators John Madigan (Democratic Labor Party) and Nick Xenophon (independent) will host two public meetings on the impacts of wind farms, advertised on the website of the Australian Environment Foundation (an anti-windfarm, pro-nukes, pro-logging group, not to be confused with actual environmental campaigners).
June 12th Portland. 7pm Portland Arts Centre
June 13th: Bacchus Marsh. 7pm St Bernards Church hall, 61 Lerderderg St
We encourage supporters of wind energy to attend and shed some light on the real benefits to communities from the wind industry.Some climbers wake before dawn to climb at empty crags. Kevin Corrigan sleeps in and shows up when those people go home. Noon Patrol is his monthly column about how climbers should have more fun, be nicer, and take the sport less seriously. For Kevin’s humor columns, see Unsent.
Photo: Andrew Burr
I’ve just returned from a self-imposed, seven-week climbing exile. I committed to the Rock Climber’s Training Manual plan and did nothing but hangboard. No rock. Not even plastic pulling beyond a warm up. Just 10 seconds on, 5 second off static hangs on the Rock Prodigy Training Board in Boulder Rock Club once every three days, for fifty days. I improved steadily, but the training had an unintended consequence: I barely saw my friends.
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Most of my friends are climbing partners. We don't hang out. Instead, we climb, or hike, or ski, or attempt absurd made-up challenges (“Do you think we could leave work in Boulder Friday, drive to Jackson, climb the Grand Teton, and get back in time for work Monday?”). These people are among my closest local friends—and make up the majority of my friends—and we only spend time together when it's based around an activity. I prefer this. Sitting and talking is OK, but I’d rather talk while marching uphill, struggling to breathe. The conversations are better.
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Unfortunately, this social system breaks down when your body does. While my recent hiatus was voluntary, I average one climbing injury per year that forces me to take time off against my will. In those months I have found myself in the company of only my girlfriend and my dog. It’s nobody’s fault. I don’t call my friends to get a beer because I’m not fond of bars, and they don’t call me because they’re busy doing the things that I wish I could be doing.
A couple of months of downtime isn’t a big deal, but when it drags on longer it can leave you feeling friendless. I moved to Boulder, Colorado from New York City in early 2014. My friend Eric followed in August of the same year.
“I made all of my new friends bouldering at the gym, and then working at the gym,” he said of his early days in the Front Range. “Climbers were the only people I was hanging out with at the time.”
In June of 2015, just ten months after he arrived, Eric found himself with a litany of issues in both of his shoulders and elbows: torn labrums, shredded tendons, nerves that needed to be relocated. He has had five surgeries in the past two years and has not climbed since it began. Beyond losing an activity he was passionate about, he also lost contact with a lot of people.
“Of the 15 people I hung out with regularly, I stopped hearing from 75 percent of them completely when I stopped climbing,” he said. “The rest I saw a few times to go to the movies or play boardgames. Then I slowly stopped hearing from them, too.”
To be fair, many people struggle to form new friendships in their adult years. Activities like climbing can be a shortcut to the process. But activity-based friendships are precarious, and losing all of them at once leaves you feeling frustrated and alone.
With my seven injuries in seven years (JEALOUS?), I have figured out a few strategies to combat these friend sloughs. Here are some ideas. They all require you to be proactive.
1. Go not climbing
Let your friends know that you’d still like to join them at the crag even though you can’t climb. Just getting outside and being with people can be nice, but your friends won’t think to invite you unless you express interest. Personally, I've found that I can have just as much fun by shooting photos of my friends climbing when my collateral ligament, elbow tendon, A2 pulley, shoulder labrum, or, most recently, levator scapulae says I can't climb.
2. Attend post-climbing festivities
Some injuries, particularly those to the lower extremities, can make getting to the crag difficult, but they shouldn't prevent you from joining your friends for their post-climb tacos and beer. Again, your friends will not think to invite you—which is ridiculous, who wouldn't want tacos? Be proactive and invite yourself: "Hey Carl, I can't make it to the crag because SAR had to break both of my legs to get them out of that offwidth, but let me know when y'all are getting tacos after and I'll meet you because I am a human being and therefor like tacos." Easy. After a couple of outings, your friends should catch on.
3. Turn climbing partners into friends
Prevention is the most effective way to continue having friends through an injury. I don't mean preventing the injury (that'd be nice), I mean establishing solid friendships beyond climbing before you get injured. Sure, you'll get a few pity hangouts from your climbing partners following the incident, but they'll soon feel they've fulfilled their obligation and stop calling. Luckily, it's not that hard to turn climbing partners into friends. It feels silly to explain to other adults how to make friends, but here are some suggestions anyway:
Start by learning about your climbing partner's life outside of outdoor sports; it's crazy how long you can climb with someone without learning about their personal life. Find some common non-climbing interests.
Start texting or Facebook messaging your prospective friend about non-climbing things. This shows them that you think about them outside of a climbing context, and gets them to do the same. For example, you could try "Did you see that Rick and Morty comes back at the end of the month? So stoked!" Other good options are: "Did you see that Game of Thrones comes back at the end of the week? So stoked!" or "We should start a band!"
Ask your prospective friend to hang out. There will be a lot riding on this first hang, so don't phone it in and play Monopoly, which is boring. Find something your prospective friend will be excited to do.
Continue to talk and hang out. You are now friends.
4. Pay it forward
You won't always be the one riding the injury train. When one of your climbing partners is hurt, make a point to find things you can continue doing together. Most likely, the person will remember the gesture and do the same for you next time you're out of commission.
You don’t need to maintain all of your climbing partner relationships when things go south—and this article isn't meant to imply that climbing partner relationships can't run deep. But a few close friends will help you stay sane through an injury until you can get back to the things you love.Netflix is withholding any action against actor Danny Masterson or his show, “The Ranch,” despite four rape allegations against him, the Huffington Post reported Friday.
“We are aware of the allegations and the subsequent investigation, and will respond if developments occur,” Netflix said in a statement.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is conducting an investigation into Masterson, best known for playing Hyde on “That’s 70’s Show,” after four women accused him of rape in the early 2000s, the Huffington Post reported on Thursday.
DANNY MASTERSON RAPE ACCUSATIONS FROM FELLOW SCIENTOLOGISTS RESURFACE
One woman, who filed her accusation in 2004 to the Los Angeles Police Department, alleged that Masterson, 41, raped her while she was “passed out.” When she reportedly came to and realized what was happening, she claimed Masterson choked her until she passed out again. Both she and the actor were members of the Church of Scientology.
Three other women, also church members, reported their claims directly to the Church of Scientology.
The LAPD’s case was squashed at the time, however, after 50 Scientologists wrote affidavits denouncing the woman’s story, the Huffington Post reported.
FROM KEVIN SPACEY TO DUSTIN HOFFMAN TO HARVEY WEINSTEIN: ARE THEIR CAREERS OVER?
As part of their probe, the district attorney’s office has compiled “compelling” and “overwhelming” evidence against the star including audiotapes, emails sent from Scientology members at the time of the alleged rapes, computer evidence and a handwritten letter Masterson sent threatening one of his alleged victims, the Huffington Post reported.
Masterson has reportedly not yet been charged with a crime.
On Oct. 17, Netflix announced the release date for the fourth season of “The Ranch,” long after news of the investigation was reported.
Masterson, and his co-star Ashton Kutcher, are currently filming the fifth season of the show, the Huffington Post reported.Friday night on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” host Bill Maher went after presumptive Republican nominee Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA)’s assertion that he gives millions away every year in charity. Giving the standard tithe to the Mormon church, in Maher’s opinion, somehow doesn’t have quite the same altruistic heft as donating money to help children in the developing world who need corrective surgery or feeding the hungry.
Spending millions of dollars each year to send proselytizing twenty-something missionaries all over the world is, Maher said, kind of a waste of money. Perhaps the missionaries should “save the book and the tie” and offer themselves to the people of famine-ravaged Namibia as food.
Maher asserted that the real problem here, however, is that when Romney’s money goes into what Maher first calls his “cult,” then softens to “ridiculous church,” taxpayers have to make up the shortfall. Charitable deductions, he said, take more than 60 billion dollars a year out of the public coffer, money that has to come from other programs and services.
“So it is fair,” he said, “to ask what constitues a charity.”
Watch the video, embedded via Mediaite, below:Kim Jong Il, who died Dec. 17, 2011, is at the center of media attention in North Korea. Reports, however, are not mentioning how the former Kim's policy decisions failed to address the impact of mass starvation on his people. File Photo by Yonhap
SEOUL, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- North Korea is preparing to pay a grand tribute to deceased leader Kim Jong Il, but the country appears to be stepping up the deployment of its citizens abroad to earn currency for its cash-strapped regime.
Kim, who died on Dec. 17, 2011, is being mentioned frequently in North Korea state media reports, Yonhap reported.
Pyongyang's KCNA stated "several countries" including Russia, Pakistan and Sweden, were observing the fourth anniversary of Kim's death by forming "retrospective committees."
North Korea also said in its statement the achievements of Kim Jong Il were being discussed and debated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hungary, Nigeria and Venezuela.
North Korean media outlet Uriminzokkiri featured a retrospective of Kim's life, including a report on Kim's 1996 visit to the North Korea side of Panmunjom.
While referring to the visit, Pyongyang stated that Kim never feared for the risk such visits posed to his personal safety, and that he held hands with North Korean soldiers at the truce village as he walked alongside them.
By 1996, North Korea was devastated by a widespread famine that would later kill millions of people, but state media did not mention how Kim's policy decisions failed to address the impact of mass starvation.
Kim Yong-hyun, a South Korean professor of North Korean studies at Dongkuk University, said most of North Korea's reports are to bolster public idolization of Kim Jong Un and establish his connection to the "Paektu bloodline" that defines dynastic rule in North Korea.
North Korea is still deeply impoverished, and Pyongyang employs all means available to bring in money from abroad.
South Korean television network KBS reported North Korea has been deploying its best visual artists to work in China to earn cash for the regime.
RELATED North Korean defector convicted of fraud for bribing officials
The artists, who were trained at Pyongyang's Mansudae Art Studio, are held in captivity six months at a time in Dandong, China, according to the report.
As part of an agreement with a Chinese firm, the painters are commissioned to produce 25 canvases a month – in return for a monthly payment of $20,000.
KBS reported North Korean artists are similarly deployed in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.Known for not mincing his words, Billy Corgan was in true form this morning (Dec. 9) during an interview on ‘The Howard Stern Show.’ The Smashing Pumpkins frontman discussed everything from the current state of the record industry and Pearl Jam as an inferior band to ex-girlfirend Courtney Love and, of course, the Pumpkins' brand-new album, ‘Monuments to an Elegy.’
‘Monuments’ -- the second installment of the band’s ongoing album cycle -- dropped today, and the Chicago alt-rock singer conceded, “I don’t even know why I’m putting out an album.”
Corgan is, of course, referring to the present state of the record industry and a decreased value in albums and overall music sales. But it’s not just any album -- it’s the Pumpkins’ ninth album in their 15-year career.
When Stern asked why, then, the singer-songwriter bothers to continue putting out new music, Corgan said it’s because he loves making music, but also because he loves the competition of the record industry and producing music alongside his contemporaries.
In the interview, Corgan included Nirvana among those contemporaries, but what about Pearl Jam?
“No, not even close,” the singer replied, adding that the Eddie Vedder -fronted band is “absolutely” derivative.
“I think if you stack my songs up; Cobain’s songs up and [Pearl Jam’s] songs, they don’t have the songs,” Corgan explained.
Corgan applauded Pearl Jam for continuing to maintain such a monster arena act over the years, but when Stern asked if the Pumpkins frontman was still friends with Vedder, Corgan said no.
“I haven’t been in a social frame with the guy,” he said.
Corgan went on to say that two singers’ friendship shifted as a side effect of fame. “I think a lot of people are transformed by fame,” he told Stern. “I knew one person and then there was another person.”
When asked whose songs he does admire, Corgan cited Kurt Cobain, but admitted their shared romantic involvement with Courtney Love complicated their relationship.
“He was living with my ex-girlfriend,” Corgan remarked. But did the Nirvana frontman “steal” Corgan’s girlfriend?
“No, I threw her out of my apartment,” the singer laughed.
Listen to the revealing interview in its entirety in the video above, and you’ll also hear the Pumpkins perform ‘One and All’ from their new album, along with a cover of David Bowie’s ‘Fame.’
And if you want more of Corgan’s fascinating details of life in the ‘90s grunge limelight, the frontman says he’s in the midst of writing a “massive” memoir.On Monday she bared her emotions by talking about how changes is good for the soul in a long essay posted to Instagram.
And two days later Tyra Banks bravely posted a selfie of her almost unrecognizable face completely make up free as she stared, wide-eyed, into the camera with a caption musing on the nature of honesty in beauty.
It revealed the beautiful 41-year-old's uneven skin tone, blotches and dark circles around her eyes.
Scroll down for video
'RawAndReal': Tyra Banks posted this selfie showing her completely make-up free face on Instagram on Wednesday saying, 'I decided to give you a taste of the really real me' as she mused about honesty in beauty
The America's Next Top Model wrote: 'You know how people say #no filter but you know there's a freakin' filter on their pic? Or maybe there's a smidge of retouching going on but they're lying and saying it's all raw & real?
'Well, this morn, I decided to give you a taste of the really real me. I wanted to smooth out my dark circles so badly!!! But I was like, "Naw, Ty. Show 'em the REAL you."
'So...here I am. Raw. And there YOU are...looking at me, studying this picture. Maybe you're thinking, "Whoa, she looks ROUGH." And if you are, great! You deserve to see THE real me. The really real me. #RawAndReal'
Her public face: The 41-year-old wore her more usual full war paint for the Daytime Emmy Awards held at Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles on April 26,
And it seems Tyra's fans supported her decision to bare all as the picture had pulled in 49,500 likes just an hour after she posted it.
It's a face very few people will have seen outside of her closest friends, family and her 50-year-old Norwegian photographer beau of two years, Erik Asla. The couple met on the set of Norway's version of Next Top Model two years ago and have been together ever since.
Tyra, who is prepping a reality show, The FAB Life, with model Chrissy Teigen, seems to be in a reflective mood about her life and career.
Looking great: But The America's Next Top Model host revealed the person behind the glitter in her brave selfie, saying, 'You deserve to see THE real me. The really real me'
On Monday, the cosmetics entrepreneur wrote: 'Linda said Peace Out! to her long locks and her career skyrocketed. I've said, Adios, boo to the catwalk and now I mentor others (on Top Model and off) to work the runway but I still feel like a new woman after cutting my hair.
'It's all about taking BIG chances. Not being afraid to try NEW stuff. Not being afraid to say GOODBYE, SAYONARA, ADIOS, to things (like modeling careers) because there can be so many better things on the horizon (like starting your own company with your own bank$signs).
'Don't be afraid. Let the old go (Buh-Bye) and make room for the new (Hello, new life!!!). Is it a job that is just not right? A school? A toxic friend? A man? A woman? Cut whatever it is out of your life so you can fly. Love, TyTy'SINGAPORE: The iconic Rochor Centre will be used as a firing ground for a military training exercise for a week beginning Saturday (Jul 15), the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) confirmed on Friday.
The estate is currently vacant, and is scheduled for demolition after the Government acquired the four blocks of flats to make way for the 21.5km-long North-South Expressway.
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"Where opportune, disused places like Rochor Centre are used for homeland security training as they provide realistic urban training opportunities for our forces," MINDEF said in response to queries by Channel NewsAsia.
"This exercise is part of the SAF's (Singapore Armed Forces') efforts to strengthen its capabilities in homeland security operations," the ministry added.
Notice of the military exercise was first given on Thursday on the Attorney-General's Chambers' Singapore Statutes Online website.
The notice issued for the military exercise at Rochor Centre. (Photo: Singapore Statutes Online)
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Map showing where the military exercise will take place. (Photo: Singapore Statutes Online)
Training ammunition and pyrotechnics will be used during the week-long exercise, MINDEF said, and the estate will be cordoned off to ensure public safety and to prevent public alarm.
It added that residents in the area have already been informed of the exercise and advised to stay clear of the area.
No date has yet been given for the demolition of Rochor Centre.I’m one of those people who never gets sick. Well, hardly ever. So when what I assumed was the flu took me down early last week, I thought I was going to have to do my usual routine and just power through it. That’s what has always worked on those rare occasions when I feel a bug trying to get me.
It’s also the mindset that has come to permeate much of the nation, especially those in my generation who grew up with hard-working Midwestern ethics. We push through no matter what, getting the jobs done we said we’d do.
Since I work from home, pushing through is typically a bit easier for me than those who head into the office. I can still try to get a few things done and just take it easy when I start feeling tired. Even though I speak for a living, I can postpone some recording sessions, work on other things that don’t require my voice, and take frequent breaks. Or at least I usually could. Not this time.
When this sickness swelled into seven full days of not getting better, I finally asked my husband to take me to the doctor, where I was promptly diagnosed with pneumonia. This was actually a relief to me, since now I could get a prescription and have some good ol’ Western medical assistance to get me on the mend.
I learned a few things on my health journey this time:
Seven days is just too dang long! Yeah, I know. Heading to the doctor can be a drag, especially if we’re not feeling well. But I now know to act sooner than a week down the line if I’m experiencing a fever that just won’t quit.
Day five is my new benchmark for seeking medical attention. Fever or no fever, day five of an ongoing illness that shows no signs of improvement is a good time to get a professional opinion.
Cost should not deter you. If you’re concerned about the cost of the doctor visit and prescription, think instead how much you’re missing in lost wages due to illness. As it happens, the antibiotic my doctor prescribed was $2.38 (after running it through my insurance)!
Don’t be afraid to accept help. Yes, this one can be a tough one, too, especially for us hard-working, independent-minded Midwesterners. But if you get offers from friends and family to help – bring over food, take the kids out, make a grocery run, drive someone to their practice, etc. – TAKE THEM UP ON IT!
Be honest with your clients. Trying to do the work when you’re simply not up to it can end in disaster – or at least a really lousy end product. I know, many of us think we can be superheroes who can still do a stellar job when plagued by a cold, flu — or even pneumonia. But, alas, we are merely humans. When I told my clients what was going on, I was surprised that in nearly every case, they were willing to wait for me to get better to complete their job. Thank you!
Show appreciation. Whether it’s to your pals who picked up your groceries, your clients who were willing to wait for their jobs, or a loving spouse who cooked you up chicken soup at 2 a.m., remember to say thank you! This counts triple in the case of the loving spouse, who deserves some special love when it’s all over.
And last but not least: “cough it up (and spit it out)!” Sorry for the explicit grossness of that, but it’s an important step to speed up recovery. It’s also a technique we’re still working to help my young son master. And yes, it truly does help!
Stay well and warm this cold and flu season. I wish you all good health! And even though you may not need a vaccine against pneumonia, a flu shot could be a good place to start.Image caption Misrata has come under heavy bombardment throughout a two-month siege
Misrata has come under attack by Libyan government forces attempting to retake the besieged city.
Three people were reportedly killed as missiles slammed into the city's port, a lifeline for those seeking to escape to the rebel stronghold Benghazi.
Nato is enforcing a UN resolution to protect civilians in Libya amid a two-month revolt inspired by other uprisings in the Arab world.
The UN Security Council is meeting to discuss a statement on the unrest.
Proposed by the UK, France, Germany and Portugal, the draft statement condemns the deadly violence against Syrian civilians and backs a call made by Ban Ki-moon for a "transparent" independent investigation into the deaths.
A Nato air strike earlier damaged Col Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli.
That attack followed big explosions at the Libyan leader's sprawling Bab al-Azizia compound early on Monday, which government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim called "an attempt to assassinate the leader and other political leaders of this country".
The Tripoli strikes have sparked angry criticism from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who said the Western coalition had no mandate to kill Col Gaddafi.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday denied the alliance was trying to assassinate Libya's leader. He was speaking at a Washington press conference with UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox, who said it was clear that the Libyan regime was "on the back foot".
"[Col Gaddafi] is a liability for his people and his country and the sooner that he gets this message, the better," Liam Fox.
He also decried Libya's use of young mercenary soldiers on the front lines, saying it was a "sign of desperation from a regime that they resort to these sort of tactics".
Deadly shelling
The rebel-held city of Misrata has been besieged by government forces for two months, during which time parts of the city have had neither electricity nor water.
Continued sniper fire, street clashes and shelling have prevented people from venturing outside their homes to get food and medicine.
Human rights groups say more than 1,000 people have been killed in the fighting and many more have been wounded. Ships have been ferrying the injured to hospitals in the rebel stronghold, Benghazi.
Misrata under siege See the whole interactive map of Misrata
Access to the sea has been lifeline for the city, allowing residents to leave and aid to come in, says the BBC's Peter Biles in Benghazi.
At the weekend, Col Gaddafi's regime claimed to have suspended operations in Misrata, and its forces withdrew in places.
Since then, however, the deadly shelling has continued, with Misrata surrounded on three sides and seeing some of the worst violence since the siege began.
"It was horrific, like a scene from World War II," said Misrata resident Saddoun el-Misurati as rockets began falling on the port on Tuesday.
He told the Associated Press he had been waiting with his mother for a boat to evacuate them from the port with hundreds of residents and migrant African workers. The crowds scattered for cover when the shelling started, he added, and the ship - sent by the International Organisation of Migration - was forced to stay offshore.
Libya's government denies it has been indiscriminately shelling civilian areas.
RAF fighter aircraft "successfully attacked" three armoured personnel carriers near Misrata over the weekend, Prime Minister David Cameron's office said, but warned UK forces "must prepare for the long haul" in Libya.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said the UK was taking steps to evacuate 5,000 people from the city, as well as providing much-needed food, water and medicine supplies.
"The regime must grant unfettered humanitarian access, not just broken promises that puts aid workers and civilians at risk," Mr Hague told MPs on Tuesday.
Mr Hague said Nato's 1,500 strike sorties over Libya had "seriously degraded Gaddafi's military assets and prevented widespread massacres planned by Gaddafi's forces.
"They remain unable to enter Benghazi and it is highly likely that without these efforts Misrata would have fallen, with terrible consequences for that city's brave inhabitants."
Misrata: Reasons for deadlock Size of city and rebels' local knowledge
Ability of both sides to get resupply
Lack of coherent military strategies Misrata: City under siege
The UK has for weeks called for more commitment from Nato members to the operation in Libya, but on Monday Russia said the Western military intervention risked fanning a series of civil wars across the Middle East.
Italy, France and Britain last week agreed to send military advisers to assist the Benghazi-based rebel Transitional National Council (TNC) in its battle against pro-Gaddafi forces.
The US launched its first Predator drone strikes against pro-Gaddafi military positions over the weekend, which the Libyan government denounced as crimes against humanity.
Libya's government on Tuesday called for an African Union summit as soon as possible to mobilise the continent against the Nato air strikes.
Libya has also urged Russia to convene an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the "immoderate colonial and crusader aggression which has been hitting Libyan civilian targets", the state news agency said.
Mr Putin earlier criticised the Nato air strikes for going beyond the mandate provided by the UN Security Council resolution to protect civilians in Libya.
The UNHCR estimates some 30,000 civilians have fled their homes in Libya's Western Mountain region and crossed to southern Tunisia in the past three weeks, leaving some towns virtually deserted.
On Tuesday the first UNHCR humanitarian plane landed in Benghazi carrying relief assistance including hospital tents, kitchen sets as well as plastic sheets for shelter.
Meanwhile, it has emerged Libya has been taking advantage of a loophole in United Nations sanctions against Col Gaddafi's government by importing gasoline from the Italian refiner, Saras.
The shipment is legal because the buyer, Libya's General National Maritime Transport Company (GNMTC), is not on a UN blacklist.Sony are taking beta sign-ups for Planetside 2 beta right now. Massively mention that you can drop your name in the hat on the Planetsdie 2 beta page. Simply sign in with your Sony Online Entertainment Station login details for a chance of grabbing a spot. If you don't have a login, you can set up an account pretty quickly here. Of all the games you could get into early next year, Sony's massive MMOFPS sequel is a very hot ticket.
The beta application will only take your email address, for now. A note from SOE that appears during the signup process says that the beta will be "ramping up slowly" testers will be under a non disclosure agreement to begin with. It sounds as though Planetside 2's development is going smoothly. "A few weeks ago after a lot of really intense work we completed a major internal milestone on the game," writes creative director Matthew Higby in a recent blog post. "Everyone here at SOE is seriously stoked on where the game is at and where we're heading."
Planetside 2 is an exciting prospect. It'll feature battles between hundreds of players on eight-by-eight kilometre continents. Find out more in our Planetside 2 preivew.Gabriele Falloppio (1523 – October 9, 1562), often known by his Latin name Fallopius, was one of the most important anatomists and physicians of the sixteenth century.
Early life [ edit ]
He was born in Modena and died in Padua. His family was noble but very poor and it was only by a hard struggle he succeeded in obtaining an education. Financial difficulties led him to join the clergy, and in 1542, he became a canon at Modena's cathedral. He studied medicine at the University of Ferrara, at that time one of the best medical schools in Europe. He received his MD in 1548 under the guidance of Antonio Musa Brassavola. After taking his degree he worked at various medical schools and then became professor of anatomy at Ferrara, in 1548. Girolamo Fabrici was one of his famous students. He was called the next year to the University of Pisa, then the most important university in Italy. In 1551 Falloppio was invited to occupy the chair of anatomy and surgery at the University of Padua. He also held the professorship of botany and was superintendent of the botanical gardens. Though he died when less than forty, he had made his mark on anatomy for all time.
Medical contributions [ edit ]
Gabriel Falloppius explaining one of his discoveries to the Cardinal Duke of Ferrara
Falloppio's own work dealt mainly with the anatomy of the head. He added much to what was known before about the internal ear and described in detail the tympanum and its relations to the osseous ring in which it is situated. He also described minutely the circular and oval windows (fenestræ) and their communication with the vestibule and cochlea. He was the first to point out the connection between the mastoid cells and the middle ear. His description of the lacrimal ducts in the eye was a marked advance on those of his predecessors and he also gave a detailed account of the ethmoid bone and its cells in the nose. His contributions to the anatomy of the bones and muscles were very valuable. It was in myology particularly that he corrected Vesalius. He studied the reproductive organs in both sexes, and described the Fallopian tube, which leads from the ovary to the uterus and now bears his name.
The aquæductus Fallopii, the canal through which the facial nerve passes after leaving the auditory nerve, is also named after him. Fallopio’s contributions to neuroanatomy, however, are still of interest today due to attempts to better understand the structures he first found. He was interested in the sensory systems in the face. He centered his research on understanding the path of the nerves of the face and structures that lie in their tracks. Here, he left his name to two parts of the human face, only emphasizing his enormous influence on the study of the head. The facial canal was first described by Fallopio, who studied its path, structure, and contents. He also described the Fallopian hiatus, an opening in the anterosuperior part of the petrosal bone.[1]
His contributions to practical medicine were also important. He was the first to use an aural speculum for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the ear, and his writings on surgical subjects are still of interest. He published two treatises on ulcers and tumors, a treatise on surgery, and a commentary on Hippocrates's book on wounds of the head. In his own time he was regarded as somewhat of an authority in the field of sexuality. Fallopio was the first to describe a condom (in his writings, a linen sheath wrapped around the penis), and he advocated the use of such sheaths to prevent syphilis. In an early example of a clinical trial, Fallopio reported that he tested these condoms in 1,100 men, none of whom contracted syphilis.[2][3] Falloppio was also interested in every form of therapeutics. He wrote a treatise on baths and thermal waters, another on simple purgatives, and a third on the composition of drugs. None of these works, except his Anatomy (Venice, 1561), were published during his lifetime. As we have them, they consist of manuscripts of his lectures and notes of his students. They were published by Volcher Coiter (Nuremberg, 1575).
Fallopio argued against Fracastoro's theory of fossils, as described as follows in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology:
Falloppio of Padua conceived that petrified shells had been generated by fermentation in the spots where they were found, or that they had in some cases acquired their form from 'the tumultuous movements of terrestrial exhalations.' Although a celebrated professor of anatomy, he taught that certain tusks of elephants dug up in his time at Puglia were mere earthy concretions, and, consistently with these principles, he even went so far as to consider it not improbable, that the vases of Monte Testaceo at Rome were natural impressions stamped in the soil.[4]
Legacy [ edit ]
This was the golden age of anatomy and Falloppio's contemporaries included such great anatomists as Vesalius, Eustachius, and Realdo Colombo (whom he succeeded at Padua). It has sometimes been asserted that he was jealous of certain of the great discoverers in anatomy and that this is the reason for his frequent criticisms and corrections of their work. However, Heinrich Häser, an authority in the history of medicine, declared that Falloppio was noted for his modesty and deference to his fellow workers and especially to Vesalius. His purpose in suggesting corrections, therefore, was the advance of the science of anatomy.
Works [ edit ]
Kunstbuch Des hocherfarnen und weytberhümpten Herrn Gabrielis Fallopij, der Artzney Doctorn von mancherley nutzlichen Künsten. Sampt einem andern büchlin / durch Christophorum Landrinum außgangen. Manger, Augspurg 1578 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf
. Manger, Augspurg 1578 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf Gabrielis Fallopii Wunderlicher menschlichem Leben gewisser und sehr nutzlicher Secreten drey Bücher : vom Authore selbst in Ttalienischer Sprach publicirt, jetzund aber Teutscher Nation zu gutem in unser Muttersprach ubersetzet. Iennis / N. Hoffmann, Franckfurt am Mayn 1616 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf
. Iennis / N. Hoffmann, Franckfurt am Mayn 1616 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf Omnia, |
Gordon Hayward, the recent history between the Boston Celtics and the Utah Jazz is far from extensive. The teams have never squared off in the Finals, and there are no feuds between any of the current players.
Furthermore, the East has been weakened by an outflux of such superstars as Jimmy Butler to the Timberwolves, Paul George to the Thunder, and Paul Millsap to the Nuggets. Until Hayward moved to Boston, the best free agent to move east had been J.J. Reddick to the 76ers, leaving many people praying that a superstar would head to a weakened Eastern Conference.
Gordon Hayward was the prime candidate to leave a stacked West, and he did just that. Although it greatly decreases the Jazz’s chances to solidify a playoff spot, it clearly sets up the Celtics as the Cavaliers’ primary competition in the East. We may not have parity, but at least the available assets are conglomerating to give us the best heavyweight fights we can ask for.
Hayward never said the Jazz couldn’t win a title. He said he wants to win one with Brad Stevens.
Brad Stevens has seen the potential in Gordon Hayward since he was a high-school kid in Indiana. At at time when no college recruiters came knocking on the Hayward family door, Stevens was the one who hand-picked the 6'8" forward, and eventually Hayward followed him to Butler University.
What followed were two unexpected but unsuccessful title runs, the first of which still ranks as one of the most agonizing losses in American sports history.
The effect of Coach Stevens on Hayward’s life cannot be overstated as evidenced by his Player’s Tribune post, “Thank You, Utah.”
When he was looking for the right college to attend, Stevens was there to guide him. When he was debating when he should go pro, Stevens was there to guide him. When his NBA free agency rolled around, Stevens was there to guide him.
As Hayward says,
And that unfinished business we had together, back in 2010, when I left Butler for the NBA … as far as I’m concerned, all of these years later, we still have it:
And that’s to win a championship.
Many people fans are taking this line as a shot against the Jazz, implying that they are incapable of winning a championship especially in light of the term “winning culture” that Hayward used to describe the city of Boston.
Two things are true here: Gordon Hayward wants to win a title with Brad Stevens. This has nothing to do with Utah because Brad Stevens doesn’t coach Utah, and even that isn’t a shot against Quin Synder whom Hayward directly credits for the majority of his development into a star. It has nothing to do with Snyder and everything to do with Stevens.
The second truth is that Boston does have a winning culture. It’s impossible to look at the last fifty years of Celtics basketball (or the last seventeen years of Boston sports) without acknowledging the winning culture of the city. Utah has its own legends: John Stockton, Karl Malone, and Pete Maravich. With a few more deep playoff runs, Hayward could have cemented himself into that list as well, but he chose not to do so.
Ultimately, Hayward did decide to go to Boston but not because “the Celtics are better than the Jazz” or “Boston is a better city than Salt Lake City.” Both have their merits, and Hayward gave his props where they were due. He is a free agent, free to make his own choices, and it was a choice that cannot be singularly traced back to a bias for one franchise over another.SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHY has become an invaluable tool in the cause of human rights. David Hawk and Amanda Mortwedt Oh of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea used it to prepare a report providing unsettling details about a parallel set of prison camps in North Korea that exist along with the political camps exposed earlier. These are places with "gated high walls and barbed wire fences, guard towers, dormitories, and workshops or mines," further evidence that North Korea's leaders have carried out crimes against humanity.
Previously, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry reported in 2014 on a chain of penal camps in North Korea operated by the Ministry of State Security, or secret police. These political or concentration camps are hidden and extrajudicial, and people can be held incommunicado for life. Family members are held there also. The camps are used to "preemptively purge, punish, and remove from North Korean society" those whom the regime fears might challenge their rule or their ideology, Mr. Hawk says.
The new report fleshes out details of a second chain of punishment camps, run by the Ministry of People's Security, in which prisoners serve fixed terms and are not held incommunicado, and their families are not incarcerated. These camps hold those accused of regular crimes, such as murder, assault and theft, but Mr. Hawk points out they also hold prisoners accused of political "crimes" set by the state. They include taking part in unauthorized gatherings; criticizing the state or even expressing dissatisfaction privately; possessing "decadent" drawings, written materials, periodicals, music, movies or videos; and "foul, hostile, or superstitious activities." According to Mr. Hawk, the nation's criminal code has provisions that could get someone thrown into these camps for failing to follow state agency instructions, spreading rumors "that may lead to the distrust of the state or its agencies" and "not rightly selecting winning athletes for important competitions." In other words, pick the wrong team goalie, and you're off to jail.
Prisoners in this parallel gulag suffer the deprivations of the other concentration camps, including starvation, forced labor and brutal conditions that lead to large numbers of deaths. It is not known precisely how many prisoners the camps hold — satellite imagery shows them in almost every province — but the U.N. report had suggested 70,000 or more. Mr. Hawk says they have sometimes been called reeducation camps, but that is a terrible misnomer; what's going on is far more severe than just brainwashing sessions.
The Nazi concentration camps shocked the world. If such a horror is discovered today, shouldn't it prompt a response? Mr. Hawk has laid out the evidence of atrocity. So did the U.N. commission three years ago. North Korea is not only a testbed of nuclear weapons and missiles. It is also a black hole of human souls. That is another reason not to turn a blind eye to Kim Jong Un and his barbarous rule.Apparently in Japan, there’s an entire festival dedicated to figures for girls. Who knew? Of course this means an event filled with sexy, sexy men.. and some monsters as well! Lots of figures that fangirls (and fanboys, too!) have been waiting for, including MegaHouse’s long-awaited Izanagi in color. We also got a peek at Luke Von Fabre from the front, since we’d only seen the painted back before now. And to top it all off, Alpha x Omega’s Suzaku from Code Geass made a surprise appearance fully sculpted! Suzaku in particular looks spectacular, and MegaHouse did a fantastic job on bringing Izanagi to life. And Luke, well… finally we have an Altair figure that’s not just standing around! Hooray!
That’s not all that was on hand, as MegaHouse brought along Edward from Fullmetal Alchemist and some very adorable Tiger & Bunny mini figures showed up as well. Hit the jump to check them all out!
[via Yahoo Shopping’s Facebook]Saudi King Salman has ordered his forces to transfer all the images recorded by the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras of the Hajj stoning rituals in Mina to an unknown location to be hidden in a top secret data center, media reports said on Sunday.
"The Saudi king's order came after some videos showing the main cause of the Mina tragedy were released on the Internet," the Arabic-language Middle East Panorama news website reported.
It noted that another reason for collecting the Mina CCTV captured videos is related to a demand by the world Muslims and Hajj pilgrims to set up an international fact-finding committee to probe into the Hajj tragic incidents.
A stampede during one of the last rituals of the Hajj season killed more than 2,000 people and left 2,000 wounded.
The stampede occurred during the ritual known as "stoning the devil" in the tent city of Mina, about two miles from Mecca.
Some 155 Iranians have also lost their lives in the incident, while over 150 others have been wounded in the incident.
On Saturday, a well-known Saudi online activist said the kingdom’s authorities had been warned against overcrowding and a lack of organization prior to the crush that reportedly killed some 2,000 pilgrims in Mina, in one of the worst tragedies to hit the Hajj pilgrimage.
The activist known as @mujtahidd on Twitter wrote that CCTV cameras had recorded the excessive number of pilgrims nearly two hours before the September 24 stampede in Mina.
The activist added that the Saudi officials in charge had contacted high-ranking authorities ahead of the disaster, calling for reinforcements to maintain safety and manage traffic and crowds, but all to no avail.
Mujtahidd further noted that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has also issued an order that footage from police cameras as well as all telephone conservations remain under seal.
The revelations come as a host of pilgrims have stated that they are terrified to continue the ritual stoning of the devil in Mina due to what they call lack of organization and incompetency of Saudi security personnel in handling the affairs.
The tragedy has cast doubt on the ability of Saudi authorities to manage the large influx of pilgrims into the kingdom during the Hajj pilgrimage season every year.
Meantime, sources revealed that the convoy of Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud caused panic among millions of pilgrims and started the stampede.
"The large convoy of Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, the King's son and deputy crown prince, that was escorted by over 350 security forces, including 200 army men and 150 policemen, sped up the road to go through the pilgrims that were moving towards the site of the 'Stoning the Devil' ritual, causing panic among millions of pilgrims who were on the move from the opposite direction and caused the stampede," several Arab papers, including the Arabic language al-Dyar newspaper, disclosed on Thursday evening.
"That's why the ruler of Mecca has distanced himself from the case, stressing that the issue should be studied and decided by the King," it added.
No other source has yet confirmed the report, but observers said the revelation explains why two of the roads to the 'Stoning the Devil' site has been closed.
Eye witnesses said earlier that the Saudi police and security forces had closed two of the few roads to the stone column that were to be used by millions of pilgrims to do the 'Stoning the Devil' ritual on Thursday.
Saeed Ohadi, the head of Iran's Hajj organization, accused Saudi Arabia of safety errors and mismanagement.
He said for "unknown reasons" the paths had been closed off near the scene of the symbolic stoning of the devil ritual where the accident later took place.
"This caused this tragic incident," he told the Iranian state television.
Eyewitness accounts said that even after incident the Saudi security and military forces closed all paths leading to the scene and the bodies of pilgrims have piled up on each other.
/149If reports are correct, the trickle-down effects of Justin Trudeau’s decision may force young Syrian men to choose between the lesser of two evils back home
Justin Trudeau’s decision to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada before the end of the year has been widely welcomed by refugee advocates, but one aspect of his plan has drawn criticism: the widely reported decision to exclude single men from the resettlement program.
In some respects, this is an understandable move. The resettlement of 25,000 human beings from one continent to another is not an impossible task – to put it in context, more refugees arrived in Greece during each week in October – but it still will involve a great deal of coordination and tough decision-making.
Canada will take extra time bringing in Syrian refugees in order to 'do it right' Read more
Given that there are around 4 million desperate Syrian refugees still stuck in the Middle East, it won’t be easy to assess which 25,000 of them are most deserving of Canada’s generosity – particularly in such a short space of time. Restricting the field to families would arguably be a pragmatic way of making the choice more straightforward for Canadian officials.
Then there’s the security argument. Amid fears of the threat posed by Syrian refugees, perhaps Trudeau feels it would be easier to win over skeptics if the refugees he welcomes are parents with children. In the western id, the image of a doting father is much easier to swallow than one of a potentially disaffected youth.
But there are good reasons why it might have been better if Trudeau had held his nerve. An unmarried young man may not have a family to support. But he may have been a dissident in Syria – an opponent of both President Bashar al-Assad and his jihadist enemy, the Islamic State. His case should be considered on its merits, rather than being dismissed at the stroke of a pen.
Secondly, by excluding young Syrian men, you risk separating them from their families. An unmarried 19-year-old is technically an adult, and as such would not be eligible for a Canadian welcome. But his parents and young siblings might still qualify.
It remains to be seen how exactly Trudeau’s system will work in practice – but it could conceivably see vulnerable teenagers left thousands of miles away from their mother and father. Technically they’d be able to fend for themselves. But in reality they’d have been severed from both their emotional and financial support networks.
Thirdly, 20-something Syrian males arguably form one of the groups that are most at risk in the areas of Syria still controlled by the regime. Since his army is shrinking, Assad is press-ganging reluctant young men into the military. But many of them neither want to fight for a man who has overseen the deaths of over 200,000 of his own citizens, nor join forces with rebel militias, many of which have troubling links to extremism.
On the migration trail this year in Europe, the Guardian encountered several young men who say they need asylum because the only life left to them in Syria is the prospect of death on the battlefield. Majd, a Syrian schoolboy interviewed in Serbia, will soon turn 18 and so be ineligible for resettlement in Canada. But Majd’s story highlights the vulnerability of many refugees of his age and gender: he knew that if he stayed at home until adulthood, he risked being press-ganged into Assad’s ranks. He said his only remaining options were to either to fight for the rebels or leave Syria entirely. So he chose the latter.
“I wasn’t sure who was right and who was wrong, and I didn’t want to just join the army,” said Majd. “So I left.”
Walking alongside him, Nizam, a 24-year-old computer scientist, gave a similar account of why he fled Syria. “They want us to be rabbits in their war,” said Nizam. “But I’m a peaceful man and I don’t want to fight. The government is against us – and Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra [two of the main jihadi groups] want to kill us.”
If young men like Majd and Nizam are led to believe that they have little hope of gaining asylum through formal channels, there are two potential pitfalls. The first is that they will simply continue to walk through the Balkans to Germany, adding to the chaos at Europe’s borders. The second: they may conclude that they have no option but to pick a side in the Syrian war, worsening a conflict that many diplomats now accept can only be resolved politically.Survivors are evacuated from the scene of a shooting in San Bernardino, California, on Dec. 2, 2015. Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
In early reports of a mass shooting that killed 14 in San Bernardino, California—the U.S.’s deadliest since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012—eyewitnesses described seeing what they took to be three male shooters fleeing the scene. The facts were more surprising: The shooters were a husband and wife who had dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with her grandmother just hours before the rampage, claiming they had to go to a doctor’s appointment.
Around 96 percent of mass shooters are male, according to the Washington Post, and roughly two-thirds are white, according to a database compiled by Mother Jones; the vast majority, in accordance with stereotypes, are single and have limited ties to family or society. The only female shooter on Mother Jones’ map, Jennifer Sanmarco, had “no family or friends,” as one acquaintance told NBC News.
Investigators are trying to uncover the motives that drove Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, who was American, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, who was Pakistani. On Thursday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan told the New York Times that he has “not ruled out terrorism”—it’s worth pointing out that terrorists, too, are usually male—and on Friday, CNN reported that Malik had pledged “allegiance to ISIS” on Facebook, in a post written under a different name. We still don’t know much about Malik right now. But we do have an abundance of research on why she—as a woman shooter who was also a new mother—is such a statistical anomaly.*
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein dwelt on this point after a classified briefing with the FBI on Thursday. “You and I know that women—we wouldn’t leave a 6-month-old, our baby, to do this, to don tactical gear to go in and kill a bunch of people,” she told reporters on Capitol Hill after Democrats introduced a gun-control bill Thursday morning. “It’s not something a woman would easily do. So it’s going to be very interesting for me to see what her background was, what level of animus she had, because she had to have had a considerable level. … This was his grievance. … A woman is a woman. And her child has to be of maximum importance to her.”
Eric Madfis, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington Tacoma, says he doesn’t know of any cases where a husband-and-wife duo have perpetrated a mass shooting, although there are recorded cases of husband-and-wife teams who were serial killers or domestic terrorists. Most shooters are “single, separated or divorced,” according to a sweeping analysis of mass shooters that the New York Times published this October; Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado on the day after Thanksgiving, was twice-divorced and estranged from his children.
Though the average age for mass shooters is 35, many fall in the FBI’s peak window for violent crime, which is 16–24. This is a moment when people “are less likely to have significant attachments in their life that deter them from criminal violence,” as Pete Simi, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, has told Vice. “Those of us who are not committing crimes on a regular basis, [it’s] largely because there are constraints in our lives—we have things to lose.” Such a description seemingly wouldn’t apply to the parents of a baby.
According to reports, on the day of the shooting, Farook left an office holiday party “in anger after a dispute of some sort,” and then returned with Malik, heavily armed. Officials have also found “thousands of rounds of ammunition in their home as well as 12 pipe bombs,” and are now saying that the attack “was clearly premeditated, and does not fit the mold for typical workplace violence incidents,” according to the New York Times. One official told the paper, “You don’t take your wife to a workplace shooting, and especially not as prepared as they were.” Others, however, said that some signs pointed away from terrorism.
Mass shooters are often driven by the sense that they’ve been unjustly wronged, or given less than their due by the world. As Joni E. Johnston has written at Psychology Today, the most lethal mass shooters are often of the “pseudocommando” variety, exemplified by a person who
comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons, typically has no escape planned, and is pursing a highly personal and well-thought-out agenda of “payback.” … According to research, these revenge mass murderers tend to have been bullied or socially excluded as children. As adults, they tend to be highly sensitive to any slight or rejection and to spend time dwelling on past humiliations. Given the right circumstances, these obsessive thoughts turn into violent revenge fantasies to protect a fragile—sometimes overly inflated—ego.
That motivation could be at work here, but it’s rarely associated with violence perpetrated by women. We don’t entirely know why men are so much more likely than women to violently avenge a perceived loss of status. Theories run the gamut from the effects of testosterone to the influences of violent video games. In part, argues Lin Huff-Corzine of the University of Central Florida, women are simply less comfortable with guns. But experts also posit that our social construct of masculinity has something to do with the mass murderer profile. Men are conditioned to “exert social dominance, achieve a high social status, command respect, and demonstrate authority,” as Christopher A.D. Charles and Deniese Kennedy-Kollar have written in the Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice. This idea of what manhood is still exerts power over our collective imagination, even as it has less and less hold on the structure and function of our society.
Candice Batton, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, has spoken to NPR about how men are also more likely to transmute a sense of failure or shame into a sense of righteous anger toward some external group. Whereas women “are more likely to develop negative attributions of blame that are internal in nature, that is: ‘The cause of my problems is some failing of my own: I didn’t try hard enough, I’m not good enough,’ ” she says, men “are more likely than females to develop negative attributions of blame that are external in nature, that is: ‘The cause … of my problems is someone else or some force outside of me’. And this translates into anger and hostility toward others.”
Taken together, these arguments help explain the twisted mentality that drove Elliot Rodger to kill six people in revenge against “all you girls who rejected me,” or the way that poverty and high levels of male unemployment stoke the sick doctrine of white supremacy that Dylann Roof used to justify his shooting of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.
The feelings of entitlement behind so many mass shootings may explain why shooters skew not just male but white male. According to the findings of a 2013 study at the University of Washington: “Among many mass killers, the triple privileges of white heterosexual masculinity which make subsequent life course losses more unexpected and thus more painfully shameful ultimately buckle under the failures of downward mobility and result in a final cumulative act of violence to stave off subordinated masculinity.” As Madfis explains, “If we’re talking about mass murderers, they often have gone through life with a series of losses—they’ve failed in lots of respects, haven’t gotten jobs they wanted, been passed over for promotion, these kinds of things. Then something bad happens, they get fired, there’s kind of an acute event” that triggers the shooting.
This makes it all the more surprising that Farook and Malik were just two years married, new parents, and, at least in the perception of Farook’s co-worker, “living the American dream.” This tragedy doesn’t fit inside any of the frameworks available to us for understanding mass shootings. And as more details emerge, they may suggest a new, horrifying schema of violent crime.
*Update, Dec. 4, 2015: This article has been updated to include reports that Malik pledged “allegiance to ISIS” in a Facebook post.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the San Bernardino, California, shooting.Add the Electoral College to the running list of factors Hillary Clinton blames for her 2016 election loss.
And now, she wants it gone.
"I think it needs to be eliminated," the Democratic presidential nominee told CNN. "I'd like to see us move beyond it, yes."
As she embarks on her book tour for the newly released campaign memoir, “What Happened,” Clinton has cast blame on everything from James Comey to Russia meddling to voter ID laws – while assuming some responsibility herself – for her loss.
Of course, the Electoral College's role in her defeat is undeniable. She lost the Electoral College to Trump but won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes – if the U.S. elected presidents based on the popular vote, Clinton would be commander-in-chief.
But the Constitution dictates that electors representing each state must cast ballots for president.
Those electors are assigned based on the popular vote of each state.
Critics of the system have been trying to get rid of it for years. Before retiring, then-California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer proposed a bill to abolish the system in the wake of Trump’s victory.
Trump himself has alternately praised and ridiculed the system.Eddo André Brandes (born 5 March 1963) is a former Zimbabwean cricketer who played in 10 Tests and 59 ODIs from 1987 to 1999, spanning four World Cups. In the days when a number of Zimbabwe's players were amateurs with other full-time professions, Brandes was a chicken farmer.
International career [ edit ]
He took a hat-trick in an ODI against England in January 1997 that is still regarded as the highest by total average of the batsmen dismissed.[1] Only two months short of his 34th birthday, he remains the oldest player to have taken an ODI hat-trick.
Brandes gained fame for his noted and oft-quoted exchange with Glenn McGrath. After McGrath became frustrated at being unable to dismiss him, the bowler asked: "Why are you so fat?" to which Brandes replied: "Because every time I shag your wife she gives me a chocolate biscuit."[2]
After cricket [ edit ]
As of 2003 Brandes had moved to Australia to pursue a coaching career, and was formerly coaching the Sunshine Coast Scorchers who play in the XXXX Gold Brisbane Grade Competition. As of 2009 he runs a tomato farm on the Sunshine Coast.[3]Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule is an American comedy television series that is a spin-off of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! starring John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule. The series premiered on Cartoon Network's late night programming block, Adult Swim, on May 16, 2010. The program parodies 90's public-access television programs and follows Brule as he examines different facets of living. His extreme, possibly pathological, naivete and social awkwardness generally land him in embarrassing situations, though he largely remains ignorant of any embarrassment he's causing himself. As the series progresses, he reveals shocking and sometimes horrifying details about his past and personal life.
The series has completed four seasons of six episodes each. In the series Reilly interviews real people, whose reactions are genuine according to executive producer Tim Heidecker. He states that he intends for the humor to derive from Brule's character rather than the reactions of his guests. In post-production, the video is piped through a VCR to simulate poor production value.
Critical reception has been positive, with several reviewers highlighting the character of Brule while noting the aesthetic qualities as similar to other productions. The A.V. Club's Brandon Nowalk compared it to The Day Today and Brass Eye, while DVD Verdict's Dawn Hunt compared it to This Is Spinal Tap. The first two seasons were combined onto a single DVD release, made available on October 16, 2012 in Region 1.
Synopsis [ edit ]
The program follows Brule as he examines (or "checks out") different facets of living. His severe naïveté and social awkwardness generally land him in embarrassing situations, though he personally seems impervious to embarrassment. Each episode begins with a poem or lyric pertaining to the subject of the show. Dr. Steve Brule credits the work, usually mispronouncing the author's name; his mispronunciations are a staple of the show—in the first episode, he mispronounced the name of nutritionist Dr. Johnny Boden (actually Dr. Jonny Bowden[1]) both as "Dr. Jimmy Brungus" and "Dr. Jungy Brogan".
As the series progresses, he reveals shocking, and sometimes horrifying details about his past and personal life, such as his mother revealing that she would poison his food when he was a child to "slow him down." The series also has recurring characters names of Terry Bruge-Hiplo played by Robert Axelrod, as well as Doug Prishpreed, Carol Krabit and Scott Clam, played by actors Doug Foster, Carol Kraft, and Scott Stewart[2] respectively. All four have interlude spots on the show announcing movie reviews, news updates, or fortunes, all in the same style of low-budget cable access segments.
To simulate the poor quality of the video, the editors pipe their footage through a videocassette recorder (pictured) and hit the machine to simulate a jump in the vertical synchronization
Production [ edit ]
According to executive producer Tim Heidecker, Reilly interviews real people, with their reactions in the series being genuine.[3] He stated that the humor revolves around "not necessarily fooling these people. It's more the character of Steve Brule being completely clueless and a really strange guy."[3] Heidecker also stated that Brule's dialog for the series is mostly improvised.[3] During an interview for Esquire, Reilly was asked about his experiences on the show.[4] Although Reilly did not mind answering the question, he preferred not to elaborate on his character Steve Brule.[4] He stated, "his persona would be more interesting if left a mystery", and felt the more he would elaborate on Brule's character the less interesting it would become to him.[4]
To achieve the artifact-ridden quality of the video, the editors pipe their footage through a videocassette recorder; the post-production crew literally hit the recorder in order to simulate a jump in the vertical synchronization.[5] In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Heidecker elaborated on the aesthetic quality of the series: "It's a show that genuinely feels like this guy made it himself. It’s as if it's 4:30 in the morning he had snuck into the studio to make this show without getting permission. It's bare bones. Lots of technical problems. Just a mess. The whole thing is a big mess. A big beautiful mess."[3]
Episodes [ edit ]
The series has completed four seasons with six episodes each.[6] The first season premiered on May 16, 2010 in the United States; it concluded on June 20, 2010.[7] The second season premiered on March 18, 2012 in the United States; its season finale aired on April 22, 2012.[8] The third season premiered on February 27, 2014 and concluded on April 4, 2014.[9] Adult Swim, in an announcement made before its upfront presentation, revealed Check It Out! to be a returning show for its 2015-16 schedule in May 2016. The fourth season premiered June 18, 2016.[10] and concluded on July 29, 2016.
A 30-minute special entitled Bagboy aired on February 20, 2015.[11] A special episode depicting recurring character Scott Clam hosting in place of Brule (as a result of the events of the season 4 finale), aired on October 23, 2017.
Critical reception [ edit ]
The series has garnered positive critical reception; Ross Luippold of The Huffington Post gave the series a positive review; he noted Reilly's performance, stating he "may be the only actor alive who can get away with starring in critically acclaimed films during Oscar season... while concurrently starring in two Tim & Eric joints."[12] Lindsay Hurd of The Michigan Daily highlighted the stage design in her review; she stated "The show's set is just as amusing as Brule's lack of coherence... [the series] amounts to a gaudy-but-comical set that oddly matches Brule's reporting style."[13] Casey Burchby of DVD Talk "highly recommended" the series' first and second DVD release.[14] He praised the eponymous character, stating "John C. Reilly's Dr. Steve Brule is one of the most likable characters in recent TV history."[14] While he praised the series as "a rare example of a well-developed and justified spinoff", he found the series best enjoyed "parceled out one at a time".[14]
“ Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule isn't just a public-access parody or a character study. It's an exciting, inventive experiment surfing highs and lows together, a thoroughly modern pastiche of analog nostalgia, train-wreck television, awkward comedy, surrealist flights, and unsettling tactics. ” — Nowalk on the second season finale "Life"[15]
The series has received positive critical reception from The A.V. Club; the site has graded the first season three As, two Bs and one C grade.[16] Writing for the site, Brandon Nowalk felt the interviews for the second-season finale "Life" accentuates "a different facet" of the series' humor: "1990s absurdism."[15] He cited The Day Today and Brass Eye as two examples of this quality, while stating Brule's character is closer to Harry S. Plinkett than of Stephen Colbert or Sacha Baron Cohen.[15] He later regarded its third season as "a little lighter on the laughs than usual", but found it "slightly better produced", with the audience "growing accustomed to the usual blunders."[17]
In reviewing the first and second season D.V.D. release, Luke Bonanno of DVDizzy praised Reilly's character; however, he was critical of reprising the "bold characters" of Wayne and Jan Skylar from Awesome Show, stating that "such [characters] just aren't a good fit here and weigh down on the humor."[18] He panned the network's lack of promotion for the series and wished for more episodes per season "even if making it with Tim and Eric had to be a creatively-liberating blast".[18]
Dusty Somers of Blogcritics stated the portrayal of Dr. Brule "adds unexpected dimensions of naked vulnerability and a childlike fear of a world he doesn't understand."[19] Dawn Hunt of DVD Verdict gave the series 95 out of 100; he applauded the series as an "homage to the local cable access shows of the 1980s."[20] He compared the series to mockumentaries such as This Is Spinal Tap and stated that the visual look of the series "looks, feels, and sounds like it came straight from the MTV Generation."[20]
Home release [ edit ]
The combined first two seasons were released on DVD on October 16, 2012 in Region 1.[21] Entitled Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule: Season 1 & 2,[22] the DVD features episodes in production order.[20]Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Atlantic wants people to view climate change as a wartime situation. They demand Americans accept a lower standard of living, to defeat Global Warming.
According to The Atlantic;
Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War … Assuming we do manage to significantly accelerate deployment without cancerous levels of corporatist corruption, if emissions targets still remain out of reach, some growth must be temporarily sacrificed. At the same time, investment across the portfolio of energy technologies will need to continue. In other words, we are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes. What Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have. …
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/why-only-a-technocratic-revolution-can-win-the-climate-change-war/410377/
I must say, given repeated claims that subsidising green energy will stimulate the economy, it seems peculiar that greens also believe people should adopt a wartime austerity mentality, and brace themselves for a lower standard of living. Perhaps the economic stimulus will be delivered in the form of more green air miles, and an increase in the number of climate conferences.
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On a crowded Saturday in August at the Kentucky State Fair in Louisville, between vendors selling funnel cakes and Christian T-shirts, three volunteers manned a booth for Rand Paul’s Senate campaign. They smiled, waved, and seemed to be having a good time—until I stopped by and announced that I planned to hang out. “We can’t let you do that,” said one, who declined to give her name. So I talked to the only person who would give me the time of day—a woman in a wheelchair who had stopped by to grab a Paul bumper sticker. I asked her if she agreed with Paul’s stance that the Americans with Disabilities Act is an unfair burden to business owners. She looked to the volunteer for clarification, but now she, too, encountered the Paul campaign’s code of silence. “I can’t talk to you, ma’am,” the volunteer apologized. “I don’t want to mis-say something.”
Stalking jittery campaign workers certainly wasn’t how I’d hoped to cover Paul, who is seen as one of the tea-party-type Republicans most likely to capture a statewide seat this fall. But then, I didn’t have much choice: Paul, the son of libertarian stalwart Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), has gone to near-comic lengths to avoid what Sarah Palin calls the “lamestream media.” Everyone, from Paul and his top staffers to the lowliest door-knockers, has virtually stopped talking to reporters. The campaign did not return any of my phone calls requesting interviews over the course of three months. Even after |
cocaine was on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece, and all the heroin was on the right. In lines. You took whichever one you liked.”
John was married, briefly, but he was sexually voracious. He claimed to have slept with over 2,000 rent boys.
John’s ruin of the family estates in tandem with the annihilation of his own life was tragic, but far from unique. The British aristocracy is littered with stories of unmitigated spendthrifts who seem bent on self-destruction.
Take William Pole Tylney Long Wellesley, the 4th Earl of Mornington, for example, whose wife Catherine was believed to be the richest commoner in England in the early 1800s. Her estates were said to be worth £40,000 per year in rents—millions in today’s values.
“Wicked William,” as he was known, made short work of her fortune. He hosted endless and extravagant parties at Wanstead House, his wife’s Palladian family home in Essex. When his uncle—the Duke of Wellington—defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, he threw a garden fete for 1,000 dignitaries, including the Prince Regent.
However, his habits proved so costly that by 1836, he was being taken to court by his son after he sold furniture and pictures belonging to him to cover a massive ₤3,000 debt.
He once embarked upon an affair with the wife of a Coldstream Guard--Catherine was appalled when news reached her that the lovers had been seen making love on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. She contracted venereal disease from her husband, leading to her premature demise in 1825.
Mornington died in a rented room in London, on 1 July 1857, from heart disease. The obituary notice three days later in the Morning Chronicle claimed that he was, "A spendthrift, a profligate, and a gambler in his youth, he became debauched in his manhood... redeemed by no single virtue, adorned by no single grace, his life gone out even without a flicker of repentance."
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester—whose life was played by Johnny Depp in the 2004 movie The Libertine—was another celebrated rake. He was said to have been "continually drunk for five years" at the court of Charles II in the 1670s. The poet died of syphilis aged 33 in 1680.
George William Thomas Brudenell-Bruce (1863-1894), 4th Marquis of Ailesbury, was such a habitual gambler that by the time he was 28 had debts of £345,462. The writer Christopher Simon Sykes (full disclosure--he’s my second cousin once removed) said in his book Black Sheep that “he chose deliberately to mix with blackguards, having found that in that class alone he was treated with deference."
My favorite bonkers story related by Christopher Sykes, however, concerns Lord Orford, the nephew of Horace Walpole, who organized a competition with Lord Rockingham in which five turkeys and five geese were raced to London from Norfolk. There was a £500 purse. History, sadly, does not relate which class of fowl won.
But even if Orford did win the turkey-geese derby, the winnings clearly didn’t do much to alleviate his money troubles; in 1778, to stave off bankruptcy, Orford sold his grandfather’s entire art collection to Catherine the Great. It now forms the core of the collection at the Hermitage.
We must all fervently hope that the history of the wayward sons of the aristocracy does not repeat itself--and that Jamie Blandford does not end up selling Blenheim Palace to Vladimir Putin.Mamadou Sakho began the game against Arsenal on Sunday feeling a hint of trepidation - but by the time the final whistle sounded he was overcome with emotion after a whirlwind return to action.
Brendan Rodgers named the towering French defender in his starting side for the first time in the Barclays Premier League since Liverpool were edged by Aston Villa at Anfield in mid-September.
Dejan Lovren's groin problem led to Sakho being restored to the team as part of a three-man defence, a formation which has been deployed since the Reds' trip to Old Trafford earlier this month.
Sakho was punching the air in delight when Philippe Coutinho fired Liverpool's opener in off the post in the 45th minute - but the Frenchman was left frustrated moments later when Mathieu Debuchy hit back for Arsenal.
Olivier Giroud drove the ball through the legs of Brad Jones to score what was seemingly the match-winner, yet with seven of nine added minutes played at the end of the second half, Martin Skrtel battered a header home to clinch a point.
Watch the video here »
"It was an exciting match because it's a big game," Sakho told Liverpoolfc.com. "We had a very good mentality. We worked very hard and I think it was a good game for us. We deserved more than one point.
"I had a lot of emotion [at the end of the game] and I was very, very happy for the team because we worked for more than 90 minutes and we worked together with the fans. We were backed by the whole stadium and the whole team felt the same emotion.
"I'm happy because, before the game, I was thinking [about] whether I would be OK to play for 90 minutes because I'd been out for three months. But I'm happy because I feel very good. The team helped me. I felt a little nervous, but I think that's normal after three months."
Following the final whistle at Anfield, Rodgers expressed his belief that the Reds are capable of mounting a substantial top-four challenge this season, and Sakho was keen to echo his manager's sentiments.
"I think [finishing in the top four] is possible," said the No.17. "We have lots of quality. We saw in the game against Arsenal - we know that if we play together, we do better. We can play well and play stronger and play good football and this is a positive for the future.
"For me, we have to take it game by game because every point is important for Liverpool. Now we have to concentrate on each particular game to make sure we take three points. We have to communicate and we have to help each other. We have to stick together for the team."
Skrtel's 97th-minute equaliser was hammered bravely into the back of Wojciech Szczesny's net with the same bandaged head that had sustained a nasty cut earlier in the game due to a collision with Giroud.
"I went to speak with Martin and he told me he was OK," said Sakho, reflecting on the moment his defensive colleague lay injured on the Anfield turf. "He felt he could continue in the game. I'm not surprised by him. I know he has a big mentality and he is tough."Lobbying in the nation’s capitol is a billion dollar industry, but sometimes, companies dip their toes into state and local politics, as well. When giant corporations want to influence bills and national elections, they generally spread their money around, cozying up to a number of politicians and shaking hands with numerous government officials. However, at the local level, high-dollar financing is a bit more transparent.
Insys Therapeutics is a small player on the national scale. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that they spent only $120,000 lobbying in D.C. in 2016. But in Arizona, where the company is based, they forked over $500,000 — and they did it to keep marijuana illegal in the traditionally Republican state.
Last September, the Washington Post first reported the large donation, which was “one of the largest single contributions to any anti-legalization campaign ever.” Insys’ money was given to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, a localized political action committee that opposed the state’s ballot measure to legalize cannabis in 2016. That measure was ultimately defeated, and now the group is fighting the Arizona Marijuana Legalization Initiative, a bill that could hit Arizona ballot boxes on November 8, 2018.
According to the full text of the bill, acquired by Anti-Media via ballotpedia.org, the application was filed at the beginning of March. It states that “marijuana and cannabis have been used safely for thousands of years for recreational, medical, religious and industrial purposes.” The bill also cited a study funded in part by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that “did not show a significant increase in levels of crash risk associated with the presence of drugs.”
The bill proposes a number of changes that would essentially legalize marijuana. These include:
“There shall be no limit on the number of cannabis plants in a personal grow that are not yet in a state of florescence.”
“All persons at least twenty-one years of age are authorized to maintain a home garden provided the person obtains a transaction privilege tax license.”
“Commercial grows, home gardens and cannabis sales are not authorized within 1,000 feet of a school.”
According to the Washington Post, Insys has “developed a drug based on a synthetic ingredient, THC. Called Syndros, the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in July for treatment of AIDS and cancer patients’ symptoms.”
Insys was just given preliminary approval for Syndros from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) this week.
However, Insys has a shady history as a big pharmaceutical company, as they manufacture Subsys fentanyl, a deadly painkiller. An NBC report found that as of 2015, Insys had enjoyed sales of $147.2 million for their high-risk drug. They also came under investigation for the aggressive manner in which they were marketing and selling their drug. The NBC study quoted the Oregon assistant attorney general, who stated, “I’ve been investigating drug cases for about 15 years now, and the conduct that we saw in this case was among the most unconscionable that I’ve seen.”
For Insys, the fight against marijuana legalization has been long and arduous. In 2011, they retained the lobbying firm Hyman, Phelps & Mcnamara to nudge the DEA against legalization. In a statement to the Post, the company claimed they oppose marijuana legalization because “marijuana’s safety hasn’t been demonstrated through the federal regulatory process.”
Safer Arizona, the group fighting for legalization, features the tagline, “We don’t have a drug problem, we have a political problem,” on their website. Marijuana legalization in Arizona would be a huge step for nationwide legalization, as the state is seen as a stronghold of traditional American values. However, if big pharma continues to bankroll the opposition, the political action groups fighting against legalization will have more money to fund campaigns for local politicians who share their sympathies.
This work by the Anti-Media is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.SEQUEDIN, France -- Samia El Alaoui Talibi walks her beat in a cream-colored head scarf and an ink-black robe with sunset-orange piping, an outfit she picked up at a yard sale.
After passing a bulletproof window, El Alaoui Talibi trudges through half a dozen heavy, locked doors to reach the Muslim faithful to whom she ministers in the women's cellblock of the Lille-Sequedin Detention Center in far northern France.
It took her years to earn this access, said El Alaoui Talibi, one of only four Muslim holy women allowed to work in French prisons. "Everyone has the same prejudices and negative image of Muslims and Islam," said Moroccan-born El Alaoui Talibi, 47, the mother of seven children. "When some guards see you, they see an Arab; they see you the same as if you were a prisoner."
This prison is majority Muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.
On a continent where immigrants and the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in almost every prison system, the French figures are the most marked, according to researchers, criminologists and Muslim leaders.
"The high percentage of Muslims in prisons is a direct consequence of the failure of the integration of minorities in France," said Moussa Khedimellah, a sociologist who has spent several years conducting research on Muslims in the French penal system.
In Britain, 11 percent of prisoners are Muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the Justice Ministry. Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.
Sociologists and Muslim leaders say the French prison system reflects the deep social and ethnic divides roiling France and its European neighbors as immigrants and a new generation of their children alter the demographic and cultural landscape of the continent.
French prison officials blame the high numbers on the poverty of people who have moved here from North African and other Islamic countries in recent decades. "Many immigrants arrive in France in difficult financial situations, which make delinquency more frequent," said Jeanne Sautière, director of integration and religious groups for the French prison system. "The most important thing is to say there is no correlation between Islam and delinquency."
But Muslim leaders, sociologists and human rights activists argue that more than in most other European countries, government social policies in France have served to isolate Muslims in impoverished suburbs that have high unemployment, inferior schools and substandard housing. This has helped create a generation of French-born children with little hope of social advancement and even less respect for French authority.
"The question of discrimination and justice is one of the key political questions of our society, and still, it is not given much importance," said Sebastian Roche, who has studied judicial discrimination as research director for the French National Center for Scientific Research. "We can't blame a state if its companies discriminate; however, we can blame the state if its justice system and its police discriminate."
As a matter of policy, the French government does not collect data on race, religion or ethnicity on its citizens in any capacity, making it difficult to obtain precise figures on the makeup of prison populations. But demographers, sociologists and Muslim leaders have compiled generally accepted estimates showing Muslim inmate populations nationwide averaging between 60 and 70 percent.As the Denver Broncos take off for Santa Clara, California, for a week of joint practices and a game with the San Francisco 49ers, the competition for who’ll be under center on Sept. 11 seems to be coming to a head.
Throughout the week, second-year quarterback Paxton Lynch has and will take reps with the first-team offense, leading up to about a quarter and a half of time with the first unit in Saturday’s game.
But ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter told “The Drive” on Monday that if the quarterback battle continues to trend toward 2016 starter Trevor Siemian, Lynch may need to do something “dramatic” against the 49ers to win the job.
“And even then, I don’t know that’s going to happen,” Schefter said. “Even if Paxton Lynch went and threw for 300 yards and four touchdowns this weekend, you think they’re naming him the starter?”
Schefter touted Lynch’s abilities, calling him “very gifted and talented,” but he had questions that the young gunslinger “was ever going to develop,” especially in terms of leadership.
“I just think that certain people have certain presences to them. And it doesn’t mean that you have to be this dynamic leader. Trevor Siemian has a certain presence to him. Men are drawn to follow him,” Schefter said.
“Again, people mature. They change. That’s the idea of things. I was a lot different at 21, 22 than I am right now at age 50. But, Paxton Lynch, coming out, didn’t seem to me to be one of those guys that other men were drawn to follow.”
Schefter said that, to him, it didn’t seem that Lynch would be “one of those guys who people were drawn to” when he came out of Memphis in 2016.
But being a first-round pick, and one in which the Broncos moved up to select, Schefter said that you “hoped” someone would work with Lynch to develop that type of leadership quality needed to succeed in the NFL.
“And so far, it’s questionable as to whether or not that happens, at best,” Schefter said.
Follow digital content producer Johnny Hart on Twitter: @JohnnyHart7.
AlertMeIn the late 17th thru mid 18th centuries, piracy was the method of last resort for the downtrodden and dispossessed: men desperate for work; deserters from throughout the war-wracked Atlantic; runaway slaves seeking refuge from bondage; criminals (from debtors to cutthroats) escaping the long arm of the law. Today, pirates are most remembered through popular culture–as dashing rouges, foppish cross-dressers, menacing brigands and motley crews of mad men and degenerates. But the pirates and piracy of history were much more complex, individuals who chose the margins of society as preferable to the authoritarian rule of empires, creating a separate space where they sought to govern themselves through methods that were radical not only for their day, but our own.
September 19 is officially International Talk Like a Pirate Day. No. Seriously. That’s a thing. It allegedly began in 1995 over a game of racquetball between two self-proclaimed “pirate guys” John Baur and Mark Summers, who during their many groans and cheers began hurling popular “pirate slang.” The idea for an official “Talk Like a Pirate Day” was pitched to humorist columnist Dave Barry, who helped launch and promote it as a holiday in 2002.
Since then, it’s grown into a humorous day–where people dress up in eye-patches and wave Jolly Roger flags and try out their best “arrrgggh!” Facebook even has a feature, where you can change your page over into “pirate talk.” Popular culture has given us a variety of pirates: Treasure Island’s despotic Long John Silver, swashbuckling Errol Flynn, the foppish Jack Sparrow, The Simpson’s humorous Captain McCallister (Yarr!) and more. Pirate costumes, from the ruthless Captain Hook to the “sexy” buxom lass, remain a favorite for Halloween. There’s even a whole sub-genre of steampunk dedicated to pirate dress, where Ironclad and Airship pirates roam the seas and airs of our imaginations.
But the pirates of history were hardly entertaining, and treated with scorn by the global system they threatened to disrupt. Painted as a motley, multi-racial, anarchic rabble, what historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have identified as part of “a many-headed hydra,” pirates became pariahs of the first order. Thousands were captured or hanged throughout the Atlantic, as even competing empires (who were not above using pirates for their own use), sometimes joined ranks to crush this growing menace.
Piracy grew out of the harsh life of sailors and the general disparity of the 17th and 18th century that accompanied the era of large seafaring merchant vessels that shuttled commodities across the Atlantic.This was an era where legitimate merchant captains of commerce were considered absolute masters of their vessels, able to flog and even kill crew members as they wished. Men could be conscripted onto ships for debts or petty crimes, and spend much of their lives laboring in desperate indentured servitude. It wasn’t hard to identity sailors of this era, men who had lost limbs or who showed the scars and disfigurements of their dangerous work; the eye-patch and peg-leg and hooks we today take as play, were actually indicative of the precarious nature of the sailor’s profession. Others, like those who labored on slaving vessels, would never survive their voyage, dying from disease on the coast of Africa. As one observer noted of the time, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned.” Life for many sailors was thus a common struggle for subsistence and survival, leading many into a life of alcoholism and despair.
But such circumstances also brought resistance. It wasn’t surprising that rebellions and riots in much of the Atlantic world often took place in harbors and ports, where sailors railed against their merchant vessel employers and the imperial systems that depended upon this lucrative commerce. In the islands of the Caribbean, where colonial control was still lax in the 17th century, men and women deemed “the outcasts of all nations”–convicts, prostitutes, debtors, vagabonds, escaped slaves, indentured servants, disgruntled sailors and others on the margins of society–began to organize their own modes of self-governance. Mutinous sailors overthrow their repressive captains and officers, flew up the black flag that announced they saw no nation as their master, and declared themselves pirates. Soon this “motley crew,” as English authorities angrily denounced them, would take to the seas, preying on the valuable shipping lanes that crisscrossed the Atlantic and brought wealth to empires.
Many pirates demanded their vessels function different from the capitalist merchant ships. They drew up articles that called for a social order where loot was to be divided equally, captains were given limited power and created communities that cut across national, racial and cultural boundaries. These vessels could be highly class-conscious, as pirates took their revenge out on merchant vessels, robbing them of their goods and placing their officers on trial. A merchant captain captured by pirates could be placed under the justice of his crew, who were often given the chance to join into hydrarchy. How he had previously treated them would decide his ultimate fate. As historians Rediker and Linebaugh state, “the pirate ship was democratic in an undemocratic age…egalitarian in a hierarchical age.” It was literally, “the maritime world turned upside down.”
In this “motley crew” that thumbed its nose at authoritarian society, social boundaries were also much more fluid. Though not numerous, women found their place among pirate vessels–as evidenced by such prominent figures like Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Hundreds of people of African descent also found their way upon pirate vessels, with official accounts noting that “Negroes and Molattoes” were often present. On some pirate vessels, blacks made up as much as half or more of the crew–as for instance the famed Blackbeard, whose crew of one hundred boasted some sixty blacks. When Blackbeard was captured, one of these blacks, a “resolute Fellow, A Negroe” named Caesar, was ready to blow up his captain’s ship rather than surrender it to the British Royal Navy. Black pirate crew members were often part of the vanguard, taking the lead with the captain in boarding merchant vessels. Pirate culture, including pirate songs, dances and shanties, became deeply influenced by the presence of black sailors, who brought with them their creolized and African traditions. As Rediker and Linebaugh relate, “Black pirates were so common as to move one newspaper to report that an all-mulatto band of sea robbers was marauding the Caribbean, eating the hearts of captured white men.”
Slavery itself, booming in the 18th century, would play a key role in piracy. The crew of pirate Black Bellamy’s vessel was described as “a mix’t multitude of all Country’s,” amongst them British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Native American, free blacks and some two dozen Africans liberated from a slave ship. One of the most common commodities sailing the Atlantic at this time were slaves–packed into the hulls of merchant vessels to be sold in the Americas. With such lucrative cargo, slave ships quickly became key targets of pirates. Some captured slave ships only to sell the shackled human commodities located beneath deck. But not all. In other instances, perhaps influenced by the blacks that served amongst them, or showing a disdain for slavery and its link to the mercantilist system, pirates not only captured slaving vessels but liberated the Africans aboard–enticing them to join their crew. These freed slaves would help swell the ranks of piracy, and become a fearful sight in the slave-holding Atlantic, so much so that some took to calling pirate ships, “floating maroon” vessels.
In fact, what may have helped seal the fate of piracy, was the war it began against the very lucrative slave trade on the African coast. In the early 18th century slave vessels saw several mutinies, where sailors–often brutalized by officers–overthrew their captain and turned to piracy along Africa’s shores. Hundreds of pirates also understood that slaving vessels heading from Europe or the Americas were coming laden with goods (ammunition, rum, guns, textiles) for the trade in black bodies, and began to lay in wait for them before they could even reach the African coast. The most famous pirate who waged war against the slave trade was likely Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts, who headed an entire pirate convoy that sailed up and down the African coast, “sinking, burning, and destroying” slaving vessels, as well as plundering slave-forts for items, and often setting free slaves in the process.
Slave traders from Senegambia to the Gold Coast were thrown into panic at Roberts exploits, and financiers back in Bristol, Liverpool and London began demanding something be done to curb these acts that were costing them precious wealth. The House of Commons, answering the call, drafted a bill to end piracy. A British naval squadron was sent out which engaged and defeated Roberts pirate convoy, killing over a hundred. Captured pirates were held in slave dungeons alongside slaves and then hastily tried. Some were conscripted onto slave vessels while others were executed, their bodies left to hang along Africa’s slaving coast as warning for any other interlopers who dared disrupt the trade.
The defeat of Roberts was one of the turning points against hydrarchy, as various nations worked to crush the threat it represented. By the mid 18th century, the “golden” age of piracy had come to an end, as the Atlantic became safe for the merchant shippers of commodities–gold, guns, human bodies and the products of their labor–that would make empires and colonies wealthy.
Not all pirates of course shared such high ideals. Some were unsavory characters, who mimicked the worst excesses of the merchant vessels they sought to escape. Others were paid privateers in the service of feuding Empires. Still, there was much more to piracy than is put forth in our popular culture, which has turned them into figures of fright, comedy or fantasy for our imagination, while their actual radicalism and role in the turbulent Atlantic seems forgotten. Maybe it’s time for writers and creators of fiction, speculative and otherwise, to imagine a different image of this past that takes into account these many complexities.
If you agree, say “Arrrghhh!”
For more reading:
Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 170-1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000)
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NASA is going to Mars, perhaps as early as 2033. It won't be a short trip, however, at least not with current technology.
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According to a recent Boeing (NYSE: BA) presentation on NASA's plan for a manned mission to Mars, the best time to launch a spaceship from Earth to Mars is during "Mars Opposition," the time of year when Mars is closest to Earth, and directly opposite Earth in relation to the Sun. Such approaches come only once every 26 months, however. And even then, at the point of closest proximity between the planets, current engine technology relying on the burning of liquid fuel to propel a spaceship means a trip to the Red Planet will take at least six months -- one way.
But what if there were a better way to travel?
The NASA "mad scientists" at Eagleworks continue to work toward developing a fuel-less electromagnetic spaceship engine (not pictured). Image source: Getty Images.
Introducing EmDrive
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One technology NASA is evaluating to power such a Mars mission is called "EmDrive," short for Electromagnetic Drive. We first introduced you to EmDrive last year. Simply put, it's a device for converting electrical energy into microwaves, which in turn provide thrust to move a spaceship through space.
Initially, the thrust produced is minuscule -- about 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt. (So one kilowatt produces enough thrust to accelerate one gram of mass one meter per second per second.) But as the thrust continues over time, speeds increase. Ultimately, it's believed that an EmDrive-powered spaceship might permit Earth-to-Mars travel in as little as 10 weeks.
And here's the most amazing part: Scientists still can't quite nail down how EmDrive jibes with Newton's Third Law of Motion, as it appears to create thrust without any need to expel propellant. Electricity alone (generated from an on-board nuclear reactor or solar panels, for example) appears able to propel the ship. Thus, there's no need to spend millions of dollars, and millions of gallons of fuel, lifting propellant out of a planet's gravity well to fuel and power a spaceship.
Too good to be true?
Propulsion without fuel? An "engine" that runs without "gas"? EmDrive sounds too good to be true, but try as it might, NASA hasn't been able to prove that the EmDrive is a hoax (yet).
Not that it hasn't tried. First proposed by Britain's Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd in 2001, and later tested in China, NASA's "Eagleworks" Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory began studying EmDrive in 2013. Last month, The Christian Science Monitor confirmed that an Eagleworks report on EmDrive "has survived peer review" and has been published in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Journal of Propulsion and Power.
The Monitor goes on to clarify that merely passing review does not conclusively prove that EmDrive works as described. It does, however, confirm that Eagleworks' methodology was "sound," and lends support to NASA's plan to next test EmDrive in space.
What it means for investors
That's where things could get interesting for investors in the space arena. Currently, multiple companies are pouring billions of dollars into developing conventionally fueled engines to power spaceships on interplanetary flight -- everything from Aerojet Rocketdyne's (NYSE: AJRD) RL10 engine and its successors to the new interplanetary engines that Elon Musk is designing for his Mars Colonial Transport at SpaceX.
On one hand, if EmDrive survives testing in space, and continues to prove out the concept of fuel-less propulsion, this could render all those other investments in conventional engine technology obsolete. On the other hand, development of a working EmDrive propulsion system could open up new avenues for space tech companies to research. And by making space travel more efficient, and cheaper, it could further advance the creation of private companies seeking to develop space commercially.
In short, EmDrive may sound a lot like "Star Trek tech," and far-fetched to boot. But as long as EmDrive keeps passing every test NASA can throw at it, it remains a technology worth watching.
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The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.What does it mean to start a new chapter in your life?
How do you know when one chapter ends and another begins? Is it a physical boundary that you cross, or a mental boundary that you cross?
For many people, we identify “starting a new chapter in our lives” with major life events such as graduating school, starting a new career, getting married, moving to a new place, having kids, or retiring – but the truth is we can “start a new chapter in our lives” whenever we want.
We can have an infinite amount of new chapters in our lives. It all depends on when you’re willing to let something go, and when you’re willing to step in a new direction.
Starting a new chapter is ultimately something created in your mind. It’s the meaning you attach to the event that allows you to perceive the event as something that changes you or opens up a new door in your life.
One interesting thing I’m discovering more and more in psychology is the use of rituals or “symbolic behavior” to help people get over the past and open up a new chapter in their lives.
For example, there was a fascinating study published this year in The Journal of Experimental Psychology that looked at the many different ways people use rituals to help themselves overcome feelings of grief and loss.
They looked at 2 groups of people: individuals who had just experienced a failed relationship or a break up, and individuals who had just experienced the death of a loved one.
“Failed Relationship” Rituals:
Burning old pictures and letters.
Stopped listening to old music that reminded them of the person.
Returning to an old location, like where they had their first date, to “reflect” on the relationship.
Writing a letter expressing your feelings to the person (but never sending it).
“Death of a Loved One” Rituals:
Doing activities that they used to enjoy doing with that person.
Creating a song, poem, or piece of art and dedicated it to them.
Watching movies and listening to music that reminded them of the person and brought up positive memories with them.
Still setting up the dinner table for the lost family member or relative.
Rituals like these can be a very effective way to alleviate grief and loss, because they help the person find more “closure” with the experience – and once they have that, they have an easier time moving on and embracing the future.
Another really interesting thing about rituals, and using rituals to “start a new chapter in your life” is that there is no “right” or “wrong” way – all that matters is that they mean something to the person doing them.
To an outside person, a ritual can seem silly, ridiculous, or just plain stupid, but if the person doing the ritual finds meaning and comfort in it, then it’s a valid method toward helping them create a new chapter.
Our minds are extremely sensitive to meaning. And often times, something that we see as meaningful can have a much greater impact on our lives than something we only see as rational or logical.
So to really create change in yourself and your life, you have to play more with meaning. And this entails creating “rituals” for yourself, or acting in more “symbolic” ways – because the truth is that is what our brains really respond to.
Stay updated on new articles and resources in psychology and self improvement:As if running and completing a marathon was not a major feat worth acknowledging in itself, these runners made it known during the New York City Marathon that they stand against police brutality and injustice. Two Sikh runners decided to take this opportunity to spread awareness about a greater cause – the fight for racial justice.
Simran Jeet Singh and Jasdeep Singh participated in the NYC Marathon last Sunday, sporting T-shirts reflecting Colin Kaepernick's former NFL jersey No. 7. Simran, a professor of religion at Trinity University, and Jasdeep, a physician from New York City, paid homage to Kaepernick's #TakeAKnee protest, which has sparked more peaceful protests and ongoing conversations regarding police brutality and excessive force toward black people and the unfairness against all people of color and marginalized groups in America.
Simran said he and Jasdeep were captivated by the “clarity and poise” that Kaepernick has brought to the issue, so they wanted to honor the movement that the athlete started in 2016.
“I am committed to fighting anti-Black racism because my Sikh faith teaches me to confront any injustice I encounter in this world,” Simran told HuffPost via email. “It is not an option to ignore the deep oppression that our Black sisters and brothers experience in America, and each of us has a responsibility to help ensure that we realize real equity in this country.”
Last Sunday’s race was Simran’s sixth marathon, his fifth New York City marathon. Before, Simran said he often was targeted with racial slurs while running. Last year, he overheard people referring to him as a "dirty Muslim" or "that guy from ISIS" as he raced on. He said the race this year was the first time he'd run the NYC Marathon with no racial comments spewed at him.
Like many minority groups, Sikhs continue to be targets of xenophobia and racism in this country. Due to American unfamiliarity of the religion and oftentimes an unwillingness to learn, the misconception is often that Sikhs are Muslim, thus making them a major target of hate crimes, particularly since the incident on 9/11.
Simran said that he and Jasdeep commonly found themselves discussing social and political issues while training for the race, Jasdeep's first, by the way.
“We talked about how maintaining our Sikh identities in the world’s biggest race was a political statement in and of itself ― but we also talked about how we wanted to do something more explicit and more timely.”A startling fact is that there are in excess of a billion people who have some type of disability. That represents approximately 15% of the world’s population with a physical, sensory or mental limitation that interferes with their ability |
exercised. And so, had it been his intention to harm the United States, he could have just uploaded all these documents to the Internet or found the most damaging ones and caused them to be published. He did the opposite. The NSA and the rest of the country owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all of the work he has done to inform the American public without bringing about any harm to them.
AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, he understands the stakes right now. I mean, this is the first week of the Bradley Manning trial, who faces life in prison, possibly death, for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, on trial at Fort Meade—actually, the headquarters of NSA. Glenn Greenwald and William Binney, if you could give a final comment on this?
WILLIAM BINNEY: Who should go first?
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Bill Binney.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is why I find it so incredibly courageous—
AMY GOODMAN: No, Glenn.
GLENN GREENWALD: —to watch what he did, because he knows—sorry, because he knows exactly how the government treats whistleblowers, and yet he went forward and did it anyway. And what I really hope is that his courage is contagious, that people get inspired by his example, as I have been, and decide that they ought to demand that their rights not be abridged and that they have the full authority to stand up to the United States government without being afraid.
AMY GOODMAN: Will there be more exposés, Glenn Greenwald, that we can expect from you at The Guardian?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yes, there will definitely be more exposés that you can expect from me in The Guardian.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Bill Binney, very quickly, 10 seconds.
WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I’m sure—I mean, it was a conscious decision that he made to do what he did, and of course the government is going to try to get him, and he knew that. So, he’s—he is doing his—
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us—
WILLIAM BINNEY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —Bill Binney and Glenn Greenwald.Get the biggest Newcastle United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Newcastle United boss Rafa Benitez started to cut his squad with three first team squad members sent to train at the club’s Academy this week.
Senegal midfielder Henri Saivet, Achraf Lazaar and Tim Krul have all been told that their futures lie elsewhere and their representatives have been instructed to find them new clubs for next season.
Benitez stated to his whole squad at the start of pre-season he would be honest with each player and he has now told the trio where they stand.
All three began the summer at the club’s first team training base in Benton with Saivet even getting a chance in the 2-1 win at Heart of Midlothian.
But Benitez, knowing his squad must be reduced to 25 players by September 1, must start working closely with the group of players he sees fit to start the season.
However, more players could be moved on if Benitez makes the progress he is aiming to before the home game with Tottenham Hotspur in three weeks.
Benitez was asked if some players could stay and force their way into his plans but had said on Saturday after the 1-1 draw at Preston North End: “No, not all of them - we have too many.
“We have to get down to 25 players and try to adjust.”
Newcastle did not field any of their senior players in the reserves at Whitley Bay with Saivet, Lazaar and Krul knowing they must look for a new club if they want to play any type of football next season.I’m standing in a grey environment, ground below and dark sky on the horizon. Across from me is Moustafa Sharawy – only he isn’t really there. Instead, I see a disembodied holographic head, wearing an Oculus Rift, and a pair of hands. Moustafa waves hello and begins to speak to me. As he does the area around his mouth becomes distorted, like a sound wave, showing that he is speaking with me. He waves and says hello and I feel that familiar rush that only comes with Presence. A giant smile spread across my face and I couldn’t help but let out a joyous laugh.
And this was all before the attendant in the room handed me the Touch controllers.
I saw what would become my hands out in front of me. As the attendant worked to hand me the controllers I reached out and fumbled with them, struggling a little to get them on my hands from within the Rift. In the moment I was reminded of my first experience with the Vive, where I had reached out into virtual space and instantly was able to find the physical controller. This wasn’t quite the same case with the Touch controllers but this was also likely due to the fact that they are shaped much differently than the ghostly hands I saw in the virtual space in front of me. Despite this, I was eventually able to get my hands around the controllers. And then all the magic happened.
As a brief aside here, I would like to point out that Oculus was running this all on the Crescent Bay setup – using two positional tracking cameras pointed at me on the same side of the wall. I made sure to ask if there was any difference between these cameras and the one for the CV1 and it turns out that they are essentially one and same – minus the aesthetic changes. Also – the controls do lose tracking when they are occluded from the camera’s vision. Moustafa did say something about there potentially being some ways around that – but he wouldn’t elaborate further.
Moustafa and I began to chat a bit as he walked me through the controls. The finger sensor was very basic at this point, detecting only the index finger and thumb, which was a shame because the first thing I wanted to try to do was flick someone off – something I learned I couldn’t do. But oh well, I was able to make a thumbs up, point, and make a finger gun. Moustafa, determined to be my friendly Lyft driver through this magical experience reached out and said, “before we do anything else… squeeze the trigger and fist bump me,” I smiled and complied – even without the haptic feedback of the collision it was a moment that helped to solidify me in a state of Presence – a state that I would rarely, if at all, leave for the next fifteen minutes.
Moustafa started fiddling with some buttons on his controllers and in his hand I was able to see some mini screens – each one a different world that we would explore together. The first one he loaded up brought a table in between us which held a number of different toys and blocks to play with. I reached out and grabbed the first thing I saw, a toy truck, and almost subconsciously, my childlike wonder in the environment took over and I found myself running the car along the table, all the while making goofy motor noises with my mouth. I saw Moustafa’s avatar react as he laughed at me – apparently enjoying watching me in the demo as much as I was enjoying the demo itself.
“Try pushing the car along the table,” he said. I did and found that by changing the amount of force I applied I was able to move the car along the table faster or slower – just like I would if it were a real object. I could feel my cheeks beginning to hurt from how big my smile was getting.
“Now try knocking those blocks over.” I reached out, clinched my hand into a fist and punched the blocks hard, sending them flying all over the place – including one that flew right into Moustafa’s face bouncing off in utterly satisfying fashion – we both laughed again.
He then directed my attention to the tetherball hanging to my left. I reached out, gave it a smack and sent it spinning back over to his side. He smacked it back and for the next minute or so we engaged in a game of virtual tetherball, complete with headers (yes, the ball would bounce against the headset – sadly no haptics there). We even played a game of virtual ping pong, with balls I could drop, bound on the table, and pick up, and a paddle I could use to hit them or even smack smack things off the table with. After laughing playfully at my lack of coordination as I attempted to play virtual ping pong, Moustafa grabbed a black orb next to him and held it out in front of me. “Punch this,” he said.
I did and the world around me exploded into white before zapping us into space. As I began to get settled into my new surroundings I noticed the gravity had been turned off and the blocks were now all floating in space around me. I took this opportunity to have some fun in zero G, taping objects and watching them float into the abyss. It was good fun. “Alright, lets move on,” Moustafa said returning to the hand menu options and selecting a new environment.
This time a bridge and a number of other walls and objects appeared before me. Looking to my left I saw a collection of fireworks and a Looney Toons-esque stick of TNT. Next to them was a zippo lighter, which Moustafa asked me to hand to him.
I picked up the lighter and reached across the virtual table and he grabbed it out of my hand – pretty freaking cool. He then, with a very natural flick of the wrist, snapped the lighter open and on.
“Lets light some fireworks,” he said, the joy in his voice obviously apparent. I reached to my left and picked up a pair of sparklers, one in each hand, and touched them to the flame. Instantly they sparkled to life and I waved them around in the air as Fourth of July memories sprung to mind. We sat there for a while firing Roman Candles at each other, lighting TNT, and tossing it around the room – playing a couple games of hot potato as we tossed a lit one back and forth.
Satisfied, Moustafa directed my attention to the left. “See that controller there? Go ahead and pick it up.” In front of me was a green controller that looked similar to one of the Touch controls. I grabbed it and held it in my hand and it emitted a laser out infinitely into space. “Now look at that tank to your left, that line there is where you are aiming. If you point it at something and pull the trigger your tank will fire at that object. Try blowing up that wall over there.” I complied, pulling the trigger as the little RC tank launched a projectile across the table blowing up a section of the wall. Awesome. Moving the joystick on the actual controller (and the virtual one to boot) I was able to control the tank through the environment, similar to Sixense’s toy demo. We battled tanks for a moment before he finally landed the decisive blow, exploding my tank off the playing field.
“Alright, lets try this last one,” he said once again loading up the menu and selecting a new environment.
This time Moustafa stood to my side – a small section between us with a collection of boomerangs, laser guns, robots and sling shots. In front of us were a number of vases and various types of targets. “I know you probably want to try the guns first but I really want you to see this slingshot,” he said, handing it to me. I grabbed it in my right hand. Using my left, I grabbed the rubber and pulled back, a marble appearing loaded in it. Releasing it I fired it at the target.
But those lasers were calling my name. I picked them up and dual wielded them, blasting away at all the targets in the room. After a brief laser fight between the two of us, Moustafa pulled out another special weapon, pointed it at me and fired. Suddenly he towered above me – I had shrunk to the size of one of the toys on the table. As he spoke his voice boomed deep like a giant.
It was an awesome change in scale for sure. And led to giant Moustafa pulling the hands off the toy robot and handing them to me – oh yeah I had Hulk hands. He grabbed a plush bunny and held it in front of me like a boxing bag as I punched it. Great fun and it allowed me to see that the controls didn’t lose tracking despite fast movement.
He restored me to size as we concluded the demo with some more gunfire.
All in all, it was perhaps one of the most fun times I’ve had in VR. I can’t remember a moment where I wasn’t laughing, smiling or profusely (and profanely) expressing my happiness. I have tried to dissect what it was exactly that made it so great and I think I have figured it out. It wasn’t the 1:1 hand tracked controllers, that was definitely a part of it, as they were absolutely excellent (with incredible ergonomics – Carbon Design has really out done themselves since joining the Oculus family). But thinking about it long and hard it was the social interaction in combination with that tracking that made the Toybox so transformative. It was the most fun I have had in VR because it was a social experience. They say that VR is isolating – but this demo proves just how untrue that is.
Tagged with: oculus, oculus rift, oculus touchNY Times climate news shrinks 30% — another signpost in the decline of The Great Global Warming Scam
It’s not just the money that is leaving the room as reality bites, the chattering classes are not chattering about it so much either. The New York Times closed their Green Blog earlier this year, which covered energy and environment. Seven reporters and two editors were moved into different roles. Did that matter? Seems so.
Think Progress tells the sad story:
The decision was met with disbelief and consternation by many, although readers were promised that The Times’s environmental coverage would be as aggressive as ever, and that the decision was purely structural.
It’s always about “seeming” and not about doing isn’t it?
So much for “structural”, now there are 30% less stories:
Maxwell T. Boykoff, who tracks media coverage of the environment at the University of Colorado, reported to Sullivan that The Times published just 247 print articles that prominently featured climate change between April and September of last year, In 2012, there were 362 such articles during the same time period – that’s a decline of about one third. Furthermore, in that six-month period since the environment desk closed, there were only three front-page stories in which climate change was the main focus, compared with nine the year before.
The NY Times is just one of many cutting down on climate change related stories as I noted in The day the Global Warming death spiral began. That global trend continues as measured by the Carbon Capture Report. This graph includes all mentions of “climate change” so it includes skeptical articles too.
Carbon Capture Repor t: “This page summarizes all English-language monitored mainstream and social media coverage worldwide of Climate Change”
Milestones came and went
In the second half of 2013 we’ve had the fanfare release of the once-every-five-years AR5 report (as well as the more comprehensive and accurate NIPCC report) as well as the usual yearly two week junket. You might notice those small blips on the graph.
The cause is declining in popularity, but we’re still at the stage where the major players are pretending to go along — “it’s only structural” — and saying how much they are concerned even as their actions suggest the opposite. Look for the next shift where people don’t bother pretending.
One day people will rush to declare that they never really believed it.
POST NOTE The NY times itself admits the Green blog did not have a high readership.
“Times editors emphasized that they were not abandoning the subject — just taking it out of its silo and integrating it into many areas of coverage. The changes were made for both cost-cutting and strategic reasons, they said, and the blog did not have high readership”
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please wait... Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast)Media Breakthrough! 9-11 Press for Truth to Be Shown on Mainstream Television
I am very happy to announce that for the first time in our movements history, 9-11 Press for Truth will be shown on a mainstream media television station. KBDI Channel 12 in Denver Colorado has just confirmed that they will be showing this groundbreaking film during their upcoming pledge drive on June 3, 2009.
As has been the case in the recent past, Colorado 9-11 Visibility will be there manning the phone banks and expect to get some prime time during this showing to make our plea for a new investigation into the crimes of September 11th, 2001.
As many of you may know, this is not the first time that Colorado 9-11 Visibility has made an appearance on KBDI. Our most recent appearance was in March of this year during the showing of America, Freedom to Fascism. Our time at KBDI actually goes back a couple of years when one of our members, Michael Anderson approached the station about our group volunteering to man the phones during their pledge drive. As a perk for the volunteering organization, KBDI gives the opportunity to promote the group on-air during their time on the phone banks and promote we did! We do not know the whole story on what kind of effect we had, but during this initial appearance on KBDI, we handed out DVD's and other 9-11 related literature to the staff at the station. To me, they were friendly enough, but I felt their reception of us was lukewarm at best. What a nice surprise to us when we were invited back again and again for all subsequent pledge drives since and given and increasingly warmer reception. And now this! We are ecstatic over this as it is the result of years of determined work by our group of very dedicated activists here in Colorado.
You can see our previous appearances on KBDI here.
Congratulations to the makers of the film, and to the members of Colorado 9-11 Visibility, and BRAVO to KBDI Channel 12 in Denver for having the guts to do what no other television station in this country has done.The young Lincolnwood couple seemed to have it all: a 5,000-square-foot McMansion, a small fleet of luxury SUVs, $1 million in Facebook stock and a housekeeper and nanny who helped raise their children while they ran a thriving home health care business called "Patients First."
But Richard and Maribel Tinimbang's success was built on a lie, according to a federal indictment filed last week that said the Tinimbangs put themselves first, not their patients.
Federal authorities say the couple's "nanny" was in fact little more than an indentured servant — a Filipino immigrant whom they had forced to work on threat of deportation — while the couple's main business was bilking taxpayers.
Between them, and with the help of Richard Tinimbang's mother, Josephine Tinimbang, and 10 other defendants, the Tinimbangs allegedly committed a $45 million Medicare fraud between 2008 and 2014.
According to the indictment, the couple's business, Patients First Physical Therapy, purported to provide in-home therapy services to patients of three other companies in which their family also had a stake, Donnarich Home Health Care, Josdan Home Health Care and Pathways Home Health Care. But the patients they treated often weren't as sick as the Tinimbangs claimed, federal authorities allege.
In many cases, the couple and their employees falsified records to make patients appear more ill than they actually were, the indictment states. In others, they paid kickbacks of up to $1,200 for patient referrals, it alleges.
The couple are also accused of attempting to force a Filipino immigrant, whom they helped come to the U.S., to work for them illegally. While Richard Tinimbang had sponsored the woman's visa, saying he'd employ her as a $50,000-a-year "business consultant," he in fact employed her as a nanny and housekeeper for just $66 a day, regardless of how many hours she worked, the indictment states. The couple threatened to take her passport, and attempted to induce her to sign a "servitude contract" that would require her to pay them $25,000 if she left within seven years, it adds.
Two nurses who worked for the Tinimbangs previously pleaded guilty to their roles in the Medicare fraud scheme, as did a marketer, Sherwin Cubello, who admitted he received $300,000 in bribes and kickbacks from the Tinimbangs for patient referrals. Josephine Tinimbang and seven other co-defendants are awaiting trial.
Richard and Maribel Tinimbang, 38 and 40, respectively, did not return calls seeking comment Tuesday morning. They are due to make their first court appearances Thursday.
In addition to potential prison terms, the couple face the forfeiture of $45 million, plus the loss of their home, business, stocks and BMW, Land Rover and Mercedes SUVs if convicted.
U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon has made cracking down on Medicare and Medicaid fraud a priority, with several high profile, multimillion-dollar indictments since his 2013 appointment. The Government Accountability Office last year estimated that around $60 billion, or more than 10 percent, of Medicaid payments alone are lost to fraud, waste and other improper payments each year.
kjanssen@tribpub.com
Twitter @kimjnewsOne of the services currently planned for the Mystic (a new artisan that Nephalem will encounter in Diablo III's upcoming expansion, Reaper of Souls) is transmogrification. Designed to increase to hero customization, transmogrification will give players the ability to modify the appearance of their armor and weapons without compromising any of their power or potency.
While transmogrification is still under development and many details remain pending, a number of players have already begun to plan out their transmog sets. If you're thinking about doing the same (or are just interested in the idea), then we encourage you to join HonkMonk's discussion over on /r/Diablo. It's a great brainstorm about fashion in Sanctuary, ways to theme your Nephalem's gear, and inspiration for people who just aren't totally sure what to wear.
Players are also invited to share images of what their heros will look like once transmogrification is implemented. Here are a few examples created by Joorkax, haaany, and HonkMonk himself!
So, do you already have an outfit you're planning to transmogrify? Or maybe you'd love some advice on how to achieve a specific look? Let us know in the comments below, or dive in to HonkMonk's /r/diablo thread!Somehow, after the 1 p.m. games, the New England Patriots trailed the Buffalo Bills in the AFC East Division, falling to 1-2 at home and 2-2 overall. At least the Pats had company at 2-2; the New York Jets — a team many believed was trying to tank this season — beat Jacksonville 23-20.
The Dallas Cowboys ran into a buzz saw in the form of, yes, the Los Angeles Rams. They’re 3-1 now and the Cowboys, on the shortlist of Super Bowl contenders at the start of the season, sit at 2-2 even with the services of running back Ezekiel Elliott.
The Houston Texans won a game with offense, ringing up 57 points against Tennessee, including five touchdowns from Deshaun Watson, tying an NFL rookie record.
The Atlanta Falcons lost for the first time this season, leaving the Kansas City Chiefs as the NFL’s only undefeated team. And the New Orleans Saints took their much maligned defense all the way to London to shut out the Miami Dolphins.
There were some major injuries during the 1 p.m. games: Julio Jones left the Falcons’ loss to Buffalo with a hip injury and did not return, Vikings rookie running back Dalvin Cook left the team’s loss to Detroit with what is feared to be an anterior cruciate ligament injury, and Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota left the team’s loss to Houston with a hamstring injury.
Related: [Vikings fear rookie running back Dalvin Cook tore his ACL during loss to Lions]
During the 4 p.m. games, Oakland quarterback Derek Carr left the team’s matchup against the Broncos in the second half with an injury. Carr was clutching his back after being sacked, and did not return.
In Tampa Bay, Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. left with a dislocated finger before returning, and then left again with an ankle injury before returning later in the team’s loss to the Bucs. The defeat dropped the Giants’ record to 0-4.
As far as the protests that marked last weekend went, the strongest message of the day came when Marshawn Lynch of the Oakland Raiders arrived for the 4:25 p.m. game in Denver wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed: “Everybody vs. Trump.” Cam Newton of the Panthers raised a fist after he scored a rushing touchdown against New England.
About 30 members of the San Francisco 49ers — who had not played since Sept. 21, before Trumps comments about the league and kneeling players during a speech in Alabama — took a knee for the anthem. Their teammates stood behind them with hands on kneeling players’ shoulders and the other over their hearts.
In a statement, the team said in part: “It is important that we continue to emphasize that despite our different backgrounds and beliefs, we still love each other and are truly a brotherhood. Our gesture today was an intentional effort to demonstrate that. Make no mistake, we love this great country and have tremendous respect for our military and veterans who have sacrificed so much for our right to express ourselves freely. We passionately want what is best for this country and all its citizens.”
Otherwise, the early games were marked by players who, for the most part, remained standing. The Los Angeles Rams linked arms and Robert Quinn raised a fist in protest. Members of the New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys stood, as did members of the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers. Several members of the Buffalo Bills took a knee.
Several members of the Cleveland Browns stood, with fists raised.
The Miami Dolphins and New Orleans Saints started things Sunday morning, with the Saints collectively taking a knee before their game in London, before rising and linking arms for the singing of the national anthem. Meanwhile, three members of the Dolphins, tight end Julius Thomas, safety Michael Thomas and wide receiver Kenny Stills, continued to kneel during the anthem, performed by Darius Rucker.
The anthem for the 1 p.m. games was shown by CBS, but not by Fox, which reverted to the usual practice of selling that time to advertisers on the regional broadcasts. The anthem is typically only shown on telecasts on the Thursday night kickoff game and before the Super Bowl.
Related: [Three Dolphins kneel and Saints link arms as a new day of NFL anthem protests begins]
“As is standard procedure, regionalized coverage of NFL games airing on Fox this Sunday will not show the national anthem live; however, our cameras are always rolling and we will document the response of players and coaches on the field,” Fox said in a statement.
Watch more!
After players of several NFL teams kneeled, locked arms or stayed in their locker rooms during the national anthem on Sept. 24, President Trump said his criticism of the protests “has nothing to do with race.” (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
President Trump had tweeted at NFL players about the anthem, writing Saturday night: “Very important that NFL players STAND tomorrow, and always, for the playing of our National Anthem. Respect our Flag and our Country!”
On Thursday night, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers called for the message to be redirected because many were interpreting it as directed at the military.
“It’s never been about the national anthem. It’s never been about the military,” he said. “We’re all patriotic in the locker room. We love our troops. This is about something bigger than that — an invitation to show unity in the face of some divisiveness from the top in this country. And I’m proud of our guys. This has been a galvanizing situation for us.... [A]s much as some people want us to just shut up and play football and keep the politics to the politics, sports and politics have always intersected. And if we can help continue a conversation through demonstration of unity... I think that’s a good thing.
Watch more!
For the second consecutive Sunday, several NFL players took a knee during the national anthem or raised their fist. (Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
“We could hear some USA chants as it started, which is fantastic. Could also hear some negativity being yelled during the anthem. Semantics there, right? What’s disrespectful to the anthem? Yelling things during it or standing at attention with arms locked, facing the flag? That’s for you to decide.”
Related: [Anthem protests began with a few players. Then Trump’s tweets engulfed them all.]
On Friday, the Seattle Seahawks announced that they would channel their protest into the Seahawks Players Equality and Justice for All Action Fund, which players said would support education and leadership programs addressing equality and justice.
Top Story Lines
Back to court: The NFL and NFLPA aren’t talking settlement in the Ezekiel Elliott case. (Read more)
Quietly, O.J. Simpson is released from prison: What’s next for the 70-year-old Hall of Famer isn’t yet clear. (Read more.)
Not so elementary: Deshaun Watson will make teams that passed on him regret it. (Read more)
Two-game suspension: The NFL suspended the Bears’ Danny Trevathan’s hit on Davante Adams of the Packers. (Read more)
At least Green Bay has time to heal: The Packers won easily but took a terrible beating. (Read more)
What’s gotten into the Redskins’ defensive line? Tomsula. (Read more)
Washington will try its luck again in prime time: Five story lines for Monday’s Redskins-Chiefs game. (Read more)
Paying it forward: A Redskins player offered a college kid free tickets — in exchange for charity work. (Read more)
Trump takes a beating on ‘SNL’: Alec Baldwin, as the president, said in the “Saturday Night Live” premiere that “People say I remind them of an NFL player because I’m combative, I like to win and I might have a degenerative brain disease.”
Jay-Z performed, sending a message with a No. 7 “Colin K” jersey.
Injury News
Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones left the team’s loss to Buffalo with a hip injury and did not return.... Vikings running back Dalvin Cook suffered a scary looking left knee injury and was ruled out for the rest of Minnesota’s loss to Detroit. Coach Mike Zimmer said he fears that Cook has suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury, and the rookie will have an MRI on Monday.
Titans QB Marcus Mariota left the team’s loss to the Texans with a hamstring injury and did not return. He was replaced by Matt Cassel.
Raiders WR Michael Crabtree has already been ruled out of Oakland’s 4:25 p.m. EDT game against the Denver Broncos.
4 p.m. Inactives
T.J. Ward
Paxton Lynch
D.J. Humphries
Eric Reid
Michael Crabtree
Gareon Conley
Fletcher Cox
Fantasy football advice
Best and worst fantasy matchups: Maybe Week 4 will be a little more predictable. (Read more.)
Five moves you simply must make: You simply must start Joe Mixon. (Read more.)
Analysis: Marcus Mariota’s breakout is coming and the future looks very bright. (Read more.)
Fantasy scout: Can Jay Ajayi capitalize on a jolly good matchup? Here’s what you need to be watching this week. (Read more.)
Week 4 cheat sheet
Everything you need to know before you set your lineup. (Read more.)
The Fantasy Football Beat
The Post’s fantasy football experts get you ready for Week 4. (Listen.)
Cindy Boren arrived at The Post in 2000 as an assignment editor in charge of baseball and NFL/Redskins coverage. She switched to full-time writing, focusing on national sports stories and issues, when she founded The Early Lead blog in 2010.
Post RecommendsMrs. Hillary Clinton presented the challenge of finding situations where she had supported wall street. It’s not much of a challenge. One theory suggests she forgot the internet exists when she made this statement. The internet is loaded with examples of her associations with, and support for, Wall Street philosophies. The connections are complex, to be sure. They include her paid public speaking appearances, her political fundraising, her son-in-law’s hedge fund, the Clinton Foundation, and donations from other nations.
This is one example of how it works. Before Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State, Saudi Arabia contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. After becoming Secretary of State, the Saudis asked her for military jets. Two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing, who manufactures the F-15, contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation (according to a company press release). This finalized the deal, with Mrs. Clinton playing middle man and making a hefty profit.
The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, putting weapons in the hands of governments who had donated money to the Clinton Foundation. Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation. While Secretary of State, she also authorized $151 billion in deals for 16 countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation. In essence, a foreign nation makes a donation to the Clinton Foundation, later they request weapons. A major business, typically listed on Wall Street, then makes a donation to the Clinton Foundation (or perhaps to her son-in-law’s hedge fund, described later in this article) to get the contract, and finalize the deal. (Are these donations tax-deductible? Are “we” ultimately paying for Boeing’s donations/bribes?)
Between 2000 and 2008, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton earned $109 million. Some of the money came from the what are called speeches, but are in fact private meetings (reporters and recording devices are not allowed). One hundred and nine million dollars!!! The average American will never see that kind of money. Wall Street businesses have been steady clients. In 2011 and 2012, Bill Clinton gave speeches to a number of Wall Street firms, including American Express, Bank of America Corp, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Holdings plc, JP Morgan Chase, Jefferies LLC, the Mortgage Bankers Association, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Pershing LLC, TD Bank, the Vanguard Group, UBS AG and Wells Fargo & Company. The starting fee of Mrs. Clinton’s husband, per speech, was $165,000. Mrs. Clinton’s fee is roughly $200,000 per speech for the same client base. These “speeches” are essentially backroom deals made with a presidential candidate.
People in the finance, insurance, and real estate industries donated $21 million to Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Securities and investments were her third largest source of campaign donations behind wealthy lawyers and retirees. Citigroup Inc management staff donated $765,192. Goldman Sachs staffers were next, making donations of $682,990. DLA Piper came in fourth, Morgan Stanley was in fifth place, and JP Morgan Chase came in sixth.
In 2002, Mrs. Clinton’s husband began a public health non-profit that grew into ‘The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Global Initiative, which holds forums for international leaders, was separately incorporated from the foundation in 2010, at the request of the Obama Administration, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. After she stepped down as Secretary of State, the two funds were reunited (they were briefly separated by legal technicalities, but never “really” separated in terms of staffing, etc.). The Clinton Global Initiative has disclosed its donors by using financial ranges, but not by using specific amounts. Citi Foundation, Barclays Capital, and Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund have each donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton’s foundation. Citigroup Inc, McKinsey & Company, Bank of America Foundation, Barclays PLC, and UBS Wealth Management USA have donated between $500,000 and $1 million. Additionally, Deutsche Bank AG, Deutsche Bank Americas, Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, and Morgan Stanley have each given between $251,000 and $500,000.
Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, is a founding partner in Eaglevale Partners LP. This is a $400 million hedge fund started in 2011. A New York Times investigation found “tens of millions of dollars raised by Eaglevale can be attributed to investors with some relationship or link to the Clintons.” The investors include an overseas money management firm connected to the Rothschild family; and Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd C. Blankfein.
Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, said in April 2014,
“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.”Two Egyptian officials claimed the country's warplanes had begun bombing positions in Benghazi, the second-largest city in neighboring Libya, on Wednesday, in an attempt to wrest control of the city from the Ansar al-Sharia Islamist militia. The mission, which will be led by Libyan pilots, would mark the highest-profile collaboration between the two North African countries, both of which are beset by instability, since they experienced simultaneous Arab Spring revolutions in 2011. The Egyptian government has officially denied the news.
According to the Associated Press, the mission is slated to last three to six months and will "eventually involve Libyan ground troops recently trained by Egyptian forces."
The Libyan government has struggled to keep the country together in the three and a half years since an uprising overthrew longtime dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. An oil-rich nation with a population of just 5 million, Libya has not yet formed a government able to rule over the country's vast territory. Islamist militias now control Tripoli, the country's nominal capital, and successfully pushed Libya's "official" government out of Benghazi in June.
The largest of these groups is Ansar al-Sharia. Best known in the U.S. for its role in the 2012 attacks on the American embassy in Benghazi, Ansar al-Sharia has taken responsibility for attacks on both sides of the Libyan/Egyptian border. Ansar forces have fought for Benghazi against General Khalifa Hifter, a one-time opposition figure in Qaddafi-era Libya who has cooperated with Egyptian forces.Michael Valpy is a senior fellow at Massey College and a fellow |
sexual assault by the NYPD before March 17; but there were several on that day (one woman reported being grabbed by five different officers), and they’ve continued since then. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a newly adopted “unofficial policy” of the police rank-and-file — just like covering badge numbers.
What we’re witnessing is the reality behind that Officer Friendly mask. This is what happens when the state perceives the general population as a threat, and drops the pretense that The Policeman is Your Friend.
People in predominantly black and Hispanic inner city neighborhoods — where police hardly bother to hide the fact that they see the local population as an occupied enemy that must be cowed by superior force — have seen this ugly face for decades. But in recent months, the radical upsurge in police violence at Occupy demonstrations, combined with ubiquitous cell phone video, have introduced the naked face of power to many in the white middle class public for the first time.
Lt. Pike of the UC Davis police force, methodically directing pepper spray into the upturned faces of peaceful (and predominantly white) college students, was a revelation to many in the burbs. But while it was the first sight for many, it won’t be the last. Because this is what the state looks like when it can no longer afford to maintain the facade of democracy. All that nasty stuff that used to happen to “those other people” beyond that Thin Blue Line — “It’s Giuliani time!” — is coming soon to “people like us.”
The American state has operated in a manner, if not lawful at least “regular,” toward most white middle-class folks most of the time, because it could afford to. It showed its nasty side to racial minorities and radicals, because they were less successfully socialized into consensus reality — and nobody “who counted” would listen to them anyway. But most of the public absorbed its conditioning in a more-or-less satisfactory manner. They believed this was a “free enterprise society” in which people with great wealth mostly earned it, giant corporations got that way through superior performance, the state represented all of us rather than some “ruling class,” and if you didn’t like the law you should work for change within the system — all that Pleasantville stuff. Constitutionalism and legality’s comparatively no-muss no-fuss — but only so long as the cultural reproduction apparatus successfully manufactures consent.
Now the conditioning’s starting to wear off. A dangerously increasing number of people understand that the system’s rigged in the interest of the 1%, and folks like us are playing in a crooked game. The state and the corporate ruling class that controls it have been stunned as measures that ten years ago would have gone through without a hitch, like SOPA and ACTA, suffered unexpected losses to networked movements. The system can’t work when too many people notice the man behind the curtain.
The state’s functionaries are beginning to realize how high the stakes really are. In response, its shock troops are dropping the Officer Friendly masks. So get ready: The state, before it’s over, will be as nasty as it has to be.
Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society. his written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online.Republican Gov. Scott Walker as a witness in the criminal trial of his former aide Kelly Rindfleisch? Yes please!
Gov. Scott Walker may be called to testify as a prosecution witness in the trial of former Walker aide Kelly Rindfleisch, a court filing shows. Rindfleisch faces four felony misconduct charges for doing campaign work while at her job in Milwaukee County as deputy chief of staff to Walker in 2010, when Walker was county executive and a candidate for governor. Rindfleisch is accused of making numerous campaign calls while at work in her county office, which was 25 feet from Walker’s. State law bars public employees from doing campaign work in public buildings or while working a government job.
While Gov. Walker is the highest-profile name on the witness list submitted by Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, a number of the names on the list read like a who’s who of Republican Party of Wisconsin movers and shakers.
There’s Brett Davis, Wisconsin’sMedicaid director (appointed by Gov. Walker), along with Michael Huebsch, a former Republican state lawmaker and the current Secretary of the Department of Administration (appointed by Gov. Walker). There’s also Keith Gilkes, Walker’s 2010 campaign manager and former chief of staff at the Capitol, along with Jim Villa, who worked as Walker’s chief of staff during Walker’s time as Milwaukee County Executive. And no John Doe proceeding would be complete without Cullen Werwie, Gov. Walker’s official spokesperson at the Capitol. You might recall that Werwie has been granted immunity from prosecution in the John Doe probe, so no doubt his testimony will be riveting and informative.Rachael Ray Pregnant? (Photos)
has been in Los Angeles over the weekend to attend the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony on Friday night at the famed Kodak Theater. The Rachael Ray Show won the Emmy for Best Talk Show, beating out, whose morning show had taken the award four years running.
The paparazzi captured the cooking maven on Robertson Boulevard doing some shopping on Saturday with her gorgeous husband John Cusimano, lead singer in the band The Cringe.
Rachael has been putting on some weight over the past few months leading to speculation that the couple are finally expecting their first child. Check out the flowing dress that the television host is wearing in this photo. Her dress from Friday night was more form fitting but not clingy. She appears to be more curvaceous that she used to be - that's for sure.
Another explanation might be that she is doing more than tasting all of her culinary creations. We'll keep a watchful eye on things and keep our viewers posted. In the meantime, check out the good looking couple doing some L.A. shopping below.
The star has been on hiatus from her show this month. It should be interesting to see what she has to say when she returns from her time off.
Photos: WENNCathy Newman has written about the “traumatic” abortion she underwent 10 years ago in an essay blasting protesters who harass women trying to access terminations at clinics.
The Channel 4 presenter had an abortion at 14 weeks after learning her baby would likely die before birth or duirng labour because of a rare condition. If it survived, doctors said it would likely be paralysed, blind and deaf.
Newman wrote about her experiences in the Daily Mail after investigating the growing anti-abortion movement in the UK for Dispatches: Undercover that has seen women being handed misleading medical advice by proponents of it who wait outside clinics.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
She said she experienced the consequences of this movement first hand when a nurse told her there could be a delay on having her termination approved by two doctors, which is required by law, because doctors were worried about facing the "wrath" of the anti-abortion movement by signing it off.
Shape Created with Sketch. Women on the front line of America's abortion war Show all 3 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Women on the front line of America's abortion war 1/3 IA28-34-Abortion-2.jpg Campaigners take to the streets to protest for and against abortion AP 2/3 IA34-Janis.jpg Janis Lane has picketed abortion clinics for 30 years 3/3 IA28-34-abortion-3.jpg Terri Herring, an anti abortionist activist AP 1/3 IA28-34-Abortion-2.jpg Campaigners take to the streets to protest for and against abortion AP 2/3 IA34-Janis.jpg Janis Lane has picketed abortion clinics for 30 years 3/3 IA28-34-abortion-3.jpg Terri Herring, an anti abortionist activist AP
“Even as I was waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect outside the operating theatre, the consultant compounded my sense of loss and guilt by offering me advice on contraception, in the mistaken belief that I was a teenage mum and this was an unwanted pregnancy, despite my medical notes making very clear my circumstances," she wrote.
“So yes, I found having an abortion hugely upsetting. And I can only imagine how much more difficult it would have been if I’d had to run the gauntlet of protesters, questioning my decision, issuing me with misleading advice about the medical risks of terminating, showing me gruesome pictures of aborted foetuses, or comparing abortion to the Holocaust.”
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) said many women who chose to have an abortion already have children and do not need "anti-abortion extremists" to tell them what it means to be pregnant or have a baby.
A Bpas spokesperson told The Independent: “Anti-abortion extremists target women outside clinics in an attempt to make them feel guilty or scared. The idea that they are there to help women is absurd – if women wanted to talk to anti-abortion activists about their pregnancy they would seek them out. Instead, they have sought the help and advice of regulated, NHS services.
“The behaviour of anti-abortion extremists is a major concern for the women who attend abortion clinics for treatment and the women who work in them. The government needs to take this matter seriously and act to stop this campaign of intimidation before it escalates any further.”
Dispatches Undercover: Britain’s Abortion Extremists airs on Channel 4 at 11pm on Wednesday.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowOn this day in 1956, IBM introduced the IBM 305 RAMAC — the first computer with a hard drive. It boasted capacity for less than 5MB of data stored on 50 24-inch disks.
Fast forward to today. The progress achieved in the computer storage market is quite astonishing. Although necessary, storage itself isn't something that normally gets us excited, but we've decided to mark this important anniversary by exploring how people have gotten creative with hard disk drives.
From upcylcled drives made into jewelry, to discarded drives transformed into sculptures, we've found 10 interesting examples of hard drive creations from all around the world. Take a look through the photo gallery below and let us know in the comments which you like — and why.
10 Unique Hard Drive Creations [PICS]
Image courtesy of VISTGreetings NS2 community! Wasabi and Obraxis here with an important news update. Today marks a very important day in Natural Selection 2 History: the day in which the game’s future has the potential to be a whole lot brighter, thanks to its own community. Dating way back to the original NS1, you guys have made selfless efforts to improve and enhance the Natural Selection experience as well as keeping the franchise alive for years after release. We are happy to announce that Unknown Worlds Entertainment has approved a team of experienced and passionate community members to help carry on the development of NS2 into a potential patch 266 (and hopefully, beyond!).Unknown Worlds Entertainment is a small team, currently their time and resources are going into exciting new projects. However, because they love NS2 so much, they have entrusted their very valuable IP in the hands of the NS2 community, who will nurture and cherish it in order to continue to evolve NS2, as it always has. This win-win scenario will allow Unknown Worlds to focus on their next project and we get to potentially continue to create new patches for NS2!It means that now with Unknown World’s blessing, we as a community can forge patch 266. We can hopefully start to incorporate the best the community has to offer, such as bug fixes and popular features...with many more ideas for the future!For the everyday player, they can now rest easy knowing that NS2’s future developments will be in the trusted hands of a team of experienced NS2 players just like them, who only wish to see NS2 become bigger and better than ever before! There is potential for greatness, but we will have many hurdles to overcome along the way. While these things take time to implement and grow, we plan on being very open with what we are actively working on. Afterall, it is by the community, for the community!As with any community driven project, we want to recognize those who have contributed to the growth of NS2. We have reinstated a community recognition project called Squad 5. For example, if you have helped out with a notable bug fix, made a nice mod that enhances core gameplay, or created a killer map, you could get a sweet Squad 5 badge in recognition. It will show up both on the forums and in game next to your name! You can head over to the Squad 5 section of the forums to nominate a player! http://forums.unknownworlds.com/categories/squad-five One of the biggest changes is that the on-going development of the game will be more publicly visible. We want to share with the community what we are working on. Not only that, but our Community Development Team will be accessible and active on the forums and social media. You’ll also likely run into them in live streams, podcasts, or even just in game!You may have already met some of these folks, but now they will be operating in NS2 Community Dev Team (CDT) capacity. So, put your hands and claws together to the men and women who will voluntarily dedicate their time and experience to the continued long term growth of NS2, you can reach them on the forums, twitter and steam.NS2 Development Leadership - ns2wasabione NS2 Development Leadership - obraxis Bugs and Gameplay Programming - samus_droid Bugs and Gameplay Programming - McGlaspie Bugs & Engine DevelopmentUI Features, Bugs and Map Touching - mendasp Art and GUI DesignNSL Competitive Community Relations - dyphan Technical Support and QA - ironhorse386 Video Patch Change Logs & Trailers - ISEGaming Map, Mod Creation and Testing - SCC_Loki UWE Test Lead & North America Play Test Lead - narfwak North America Play Test Lead - ns2decoy UWE Test Lead & Europe Play Test Lead - Explosifbe In celebration of this new dawn, Natural Selection 2 will be part of an 80% off Humble Bundle sale from May 19th to May 21st. Better hurry and share that sale goodness because there has never been better time to play Natural Selection 2! https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/naturalselection2_storefrontUS retail giants have courted controversy for selling an Israeli soldier's Halloween costume for children and an "Arab" nose that civil liberties groups called offensive and racist.
Walmart, the US' biggest employer, quickly withdrew both items. EBay told AFP news agency that it had withdrawn the nose, but Amazon continued to list both costumes and said it would not comment.
We don't allow items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance. Spokesperson, eBay
The row comes as renewed violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has killed at least 64 Palestinians and nine Israelis in the last three weeks.
The United States celebrates Halloween on Saturday when children dress up in costumes and go trick or treating. Adult costume parties are also popular nationwide.
RELATED: Halloween costumes unmask cultural stereotypes
Amazon advertised the soldier's costume for $29.99. The outfit has a two-star rating and has attracted a slew of negative remarks on the website branding it "disgusting".
On eBay, the costume was advertised with the picture of a child wearing the uniform and holding a toy gun in his right hand.
Amazon also advertised the "Sheik Fagin Nose" and a "Sultan Nose Latex Appliance" illustrated by a picture purportedly showing an Arab in a head dress with an oversized nose.
Religious intolerance
A spokesman told AFP that Amazon would not be commenting. EBay said that it had withdrawn the nose from its listings.
"We don't allow items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance," an eBay spokesperson told AFP by email.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) welcomed Walmart's decision to withdraw the costumes and joined other pressure groups in calling on other retailers to follow suit.
"The costumes are very problematic and offensive to many people," said ADC president Samer Khalaf, blaming the Israeli military for the death and occupation of Palestinians.
"Such a symbol of fear, violence and a long history of dispossession should not be used for entertainment purposes."
Campaign groups say the costumes are not only racist, but could fuel hate crimes against Arab Americans.
Racist costume
A 19-year-old man is facing charges in New York after a 41-year-old man was stabbed in the chest this month by an attacker who made anti-Arab statements, police said.
RELATED: Arab-American group calls on Walmart to drop 'offensive' costumes
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said that odious costumes were an annual problem.
"It seems to be a perennial thing, that every year around this time, there is an offensive, racist Halloween costume that has to be challenged," he said.
"Given that Israeli soldiers are currently abusing Palestinian civilians and have been... I think it's very inappropriate to have this as a children's costume," he added.
The campaign groups did not refer to other children's military outfits offered for Halloween, including a Navy SEAL costume - the elite US unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
The United Nations on Wednesday warned that the recent surge in deadly violence between Israelis and Palestinians, is leading them towards a "catastrophe".Novel Psychoactive Substances are synthetic or “designer” drugs which have increased in popularity in recent years. Such drugs include Foxy, Smiles, “bath salts” such as Flakka and Meow Meow, psychedelics such as NBOMe (pronounced “N-bomb” a.k.a.: “25i”), and synthetic cannabinoids (commonly referred to as Spice and K2 drugs). Many of these new drugs are marketed as “legal” highs, appearing on the drug market and out in the open in an effort to circumvent controlled substance legislation.
New street drugs continue to emerge at a rapid rate. According a recent UN World Drug Report, in 2015 alone, the emergence of 75 new drugs were detected, bringing the overall world-wide count to almost 700 “new” street drugs identified. However, in the U.S., national drug use surveys only ask respondents about their use of a couple of non-specific categories of new street drugs such as “bath salts”. Furthermore, few studies in the U.S. have focused on use among one of the highest-risk populations—electronic dance music (EDM) nightclub and festival attendees.
Researchers at New York University Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) and Kings College London set out to rectify this dearth of information. Their paper, “Examine Correlates of New Psychoactive Substance Use Among a Self-Selected Sample of Nightclub Attendees in the United States,” was recently published in The American Journal on Addictions.
“We found that among a self-selected sample of nightclub attendees in the U.S., a large range of novel substances were reported,” noted said Joseph J. Palamar, PhD, MPH, an affiliate of CDUHR and an assistant professor of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC). “And, young attendees, males, and those who attended nightclubs more frequently were at increased risk of reporting use.”
The data were drawn from the Global Drug Survey, led by senior author Dr. Adam Winstock, MD, founder and director of the Global Drug Survey, Ltd, which surveys tens of thousands of nightclub attendees around the world every year. The analysis focused on the 2,282 U.S. residents who reported attending a nightclub within the last year. Respondents were asked whether they have ever used 58 specific new street drugs, and the researchers examined correlates of self-reported use.
Almost half the sample (46.4%) reported ever using a new street drug, and the most commonly reported new drug used (by a quarter of the sample) was synthetic cannabinoids, commonly referred to as “Spice” and “K2” in the U.S.
“Spice drugs have been a major problem here in the U.S. in recent years,” notes Dr. Palamar, “especially here in the big cities. Prevalence has dropped significantly in recent years, but antithetically, we found that nightclub attendees are still at very high risk for at least trying such products.”
Trypatmines such as DMT and 4-AcO-DMT were reported used by 23% of the sample, and alarmingly, 5% reported use of the new psychedelic called NBOMe (pronounced “N-bomb”).
“It’s alarming that 5% of nightclub attendees reported use of NBOMe as this drug is extremely potent, dangerous, and hard to dose,” said Dr. Palamar.
About one out of ten surveyed reported use of synthetic cathinones—commonly referred to as “bath salts” in the U.S. Methylone (“M1”) was the mostly commonly used “bath salt” in this study with one out of ten respondents reporting lifetime use. However, the researchers caution that many club-goers may be using “bath salts” without knowing it.
“Since Molly powder is so adulterated here in the U.S., it is very likely that many respondents used bath salts unknowingly—in their Molly,” said Dr. Palamar. “We actually found last year that many club-goers who reported Molly use had their hair samples test positive for bath salts”.
The researchers found that more frequent nightclub attendance was strongly associated with increased risk of use of new street drugs. Attending nightclubs every week more than doubled the odds of reporting use.
“We found nightclub attendance was not related to self-reported use of synthetic cannabinoids,” said Dr. Winstock. “Therefore, while synthetic cannabinoids are the most prevalent new street drug in the U.S. and worldwide, we found that these drugs tend to be used more often by individuals who do not frequent the nightclub scene.”
The researchers also found that being unemployed increased the odds for reporting use of synthetic cathinones or synthetic cannabinoids.
The researchers stress that prevention and harm reduction initiatives need to be adapted to reduce the risk of harm among in this population, where increased rates of experimentation and environmental characteristics may augment and combine to increase risks associated with consuming lesser-known psychoactive substances.
The researchers also note, as the data is drawn from web surveys, there will be biases inherent in the respondents—the ones who chose to respond may be more experienced in the drug culture, and as such may not be representative of the wider population, so it is important not to interpret the findings reported as prevalence estimates.
“Every year we conduct the Global Drug Survey to help identify emerging substances and new trends in drug use,” said Dr. Winstock. “The web-based design actually improves our capacity to access otherwise hidden populations to answer these kinds of questions among people who use illicit drugs.”
Researcher Affiliations:
Joseph J. Palamar, PhD,1,2 Monica J. Barratt, PhD,3,4,5 Jason A. Ferris, PhD,6,7 Adam R. Winstock, MD8,9,10
1Department of Population Health, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York City, New York
2Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, New York University College of Nursing, New York City, New York
3Drug Policy Modelling Program, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW, Sydney, Australia
4National Drug Research Institute, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
5Centre of Population Health, Burnet Institute, Melbourne, Australia
6Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
7ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course, Institute for Social Science Research,The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
8South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, London, United Kingdom
9Addictions Clinical Academic Group, King’s College London, Maudsley Hospital, London, United Kingdom
10Global Drug Survey Ltd, London, United Kingdom
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the participants who gave so generously of their time to complete the Global Drug Survey. We are grateful for the promotion of GDS by a long list of world media partners, see www.globaldrugsurvey.com. We are also indebted to Stuart Newman for his programming skills and patience.
No external funding was received specifically for this study. J.P. was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lead this secondary data analysis (K01 DA-038800, PI: Palamar). The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Australia and the National Drug Research Institute in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University are supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Substance Misuse Prevention and Service Improvement Grants Fund. M.B. is a recipient of a National Health & Medical Research Council Early Career Researcher Fellowship (APP1070140). M.B. gratefully acknowledges the contribution to this work of the Victorian Operational Infrastructure Support Program received by the Burnet Institute. J.F. is a recipient of a National Health & Medical Research Council Early Career Researcher Fellowship (APP1089395). The funders played no further part in the research process, and the views expressed in this paper should not be seen as representative of the views of the funders.
Declaration of Interest
Dr. Winstock is founder and managing director of Global Drug Survey, the independent drug use data exchange hub that conducted the study. There is nothing further to declare.
About CDUHR
The mission of the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR) is to end the HIV and HCV epidemics in drug using populations and their communities by conducting transdisciplinary research and disseminating its findings to inform programmatic, policy, and grass roots initiatives at the local, state, national and global levels. CDUHR is a Core Center of Excellence funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Grant #P30 DA011041). It is the first center for the socio-behavioral study of substance use and HIV in the United States and is located at the New York University College of Nursing. For more information, visit www.cduhr.org.
About the Global Drug Survey
GDS is comprised of experts from the fields of medicine, toxicology, public health, psychology, chemistry, public policy, criminology, sociology, harm reduction and addiction. Using anonymous on-line research methods Global Drug Survey runs its annual survey in 10 languages and is hosted by partners in over 20 countries. GDS promises its subjects total anonymity. Survey findings are frank, honest, and revealing. GDS insights into personal decision-making about drug use are unparalleled. Our international networks of researchers and specialists have extensive experience in data analysis and report writing. We prepare reports for government, public health institutions, corporate health organizations and policy groups.
About NYU Langone Medical Center
NYU Langone Medical Center, a world-class, patient-centered, integrated academic medical center, is one of the nation’s premier centers for excellence in clinical care, biomedical research, and medical education. Located in the heart of Manhattan, NYU Langone is composed of four hospitals—Tisch Hospital, its flagship acute care facility; Rusk Rehabilitation; the Hospital for Joint Diseases, the Medical Center’s dedicated inpatient orthopaedic hospital; and Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, a comprehensive pediatric hospital supporting a full array of children’s health services across the Medical Center—plus the NYU School of Medicine, which since 1841 has trained thousands of physicians and scientists who have helped to shape the course of medical history. The Medical Center’s tri-fold mission to serve, teach, and discover is achieved 365 days a year through the seamless integration of a culture devoted to excellence in patient care, education, and research. For more information, go to www.NYULMC.org, and interact with us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.There is half a dozen low power torque sensing mid drives on the market right now that advertise themselves as being between 250 and 750 Watts. The one thing that all these ‘low power’ drive units have in common is that there is absolutely no way to program the drive unit to do anything much other than what it is set to do from the factory. The most frustrating part is that often they have built-in speed limiters that you have to install special defeat-devices to overcome. Many of these defeat devices plug-in between the speedo and the main drive unit and halve the speed that the drive unit thinks you are going at (so when you are going 20mph the drive thinks it is only 10mph). With the 1000W nominal Bafang Ultra Max drive unit all that has changed. Bafang has released a new beefy drive unit that can run at a variety of voltages with no speed limits and that programs using a similar cable and software as the BBS02 and BBSHD. This article is about understanding the programming for the Ultra Max and understanding how to change your programming to get the most fun factor out of your drive unit.
I tested a prototype 1000W Ultra Max about 8 months ago and found it a little too heavy and a little underpowered for my taste. That drive unit was several pounds heavier than the BBSHD and yet it still only seemed to produce about the same amount of peak power as a BBS02 (about 1400W). Although I liked the concept of a high power torque sensing mid-drive, I wasn’t crazy about the implementation. It felt too much like the BBS02 which is half the cost and half the weight of the stock 1000W Ultra Max.
When Luna got their first batch of production Ultra Max drives the first thing they did was hack the controller to put out 2500W of peak power. This turns the ho-hum 1000W Ultra Max into a real 40mph drive unit to be reckoned with.
To program the Ultra Max you simply need the same programming cable as you would use for the BBSxx series drive. Before you keep reading this article, you should reference this article on programming the BBSxx as there is lots of information on the cable and the quirks of the programming software. In order to program the Ultra Max, you will need the latest version of the Bafang programming software which you can download here. Thanks to Roshan from Biktrix for sending me these files. Biktrix is a Bafang mid drive focused dealer out of Canada that is selling an Ultra Max with their Juggernaut Ultra FS sold here for $3599. Biktrix has a very good reputation and the Ultra FS is sold with three different tire sizes and several fork options as well as numerous custom battery options 11.6Ah, 17AH & 20Ah that snap right into the frame. Programming your Ultra Max voids whatever warranty you think you might have on this drive. Do it at your own risk and don’t come crying to me when you break it (this is why we can’t have nice things).
I spent about 4 hours messing with the torque sensing variables on the Ultra Max drive as Lunacycle was having trouble with the drive unit producing way too much power from a standstill at the higher power levels. The settings I am showing in this article I’m going to call ‘Karl’s special sauce’ for the Ultra Max. It’s been trail tested and approved, even at the highest power levels with a 2500W peak Ludicrous controller. You can certainly program it differently so that it will put out a lot more power from a standstill, but it will feel pretty lurchy and not smooth and refined like I think that a torque sensing mid drive should feel. The best part of programming the Ultra Max yourself is that you can fine-tune the torque sensing system to get exactly what you want out of it.
This article is going to just breeze over the first 3 pages of the programming menu as most of the variables have the same effect as the BBSxx programming and are already outlined in this article. The only thing to pay attention to is on the first page the Limited Current(A) should be set to 30 amps if you have a Non-Ludicrous 1000W Ultra Max to get maximum power. With the Ludicrous controller the amps are doubled and it ships from the factory with Limited Current(A) set to 25 amps which really delivers about 50 amps to the drive. If you want to set the Ultra Max to 60Amps you can set the Limited Current(A) to 30, but you void your non-existent warranty with the Ludicrous controller and all bets are off (the drive is already pretty scary at 50Amps). If you like living on the edge then don’t let me stop you, but I tested this drive extensively at 50Amps and I can say that it is plenty powerful at that power level.
In order to access the program with the torque setting, you need to run the executable Controllerst_torque.exe inside the zip file. If you want to download Karl’s special sauce instead of entering in all the data manually then you can download this file and rename it from.doc to.el and then select FILE->LOAD from the Controllerst_torque.exe and then browse to find the.el file.
Pedal Assist Screen
On page 2 you will need to select the Pedal Type as “BB-Sensor-32” for the PAS to work properly. If you want more explanation on what these settings do, then you can check out the hacking guide which outlines each setting individually. I spent a lot of time messing with these settings and as near as I can tell the Ultra Max seems to ignore most of the settings on the Pedal Assist screen.
Throttle Handle Screen
The throttle screen seems very similar to the settings for the other Bafang mid drive units. To check what the settings do then check out this document. I didn’t spend much time messing with this screen’s settings. One of the issues with the Ultra Max is that if the speedo magnet stops working then the drive AND the throttle both stop working. This means that if you are miles from home you’re going to be stuck with cycling the power on your ebike so you can get 1 minute of riding then continually cycling your drive unit every minute the entire way home. I messed with some of the settings to keep this from happening, but I could not fix the problem. Luckily the Ultra Max has a much more powerful magnet that can be several centimeters away from the sensor instead of just a few millimeters. Incidentally, the prototype version of the Ultra Max did not have this problem and continued to function even with a non-functional speedo, go figure.
The Torque Screen
Keep in mind I am by no means an expert in Bafang Ultra Max programming, I’m just some guy who got my hands on the tools and spent a couple hours messing around to see what happens when you change variables. Before I get into this a note on safety.
SAFETY NOTICE
The Bafang Ultra Max is an extremely high power torque sensing drive unit which means that if you mess with the programming wrong and then put even the slightest amount of pressure on the pedals then you can suddenly get a 4hp motor with a chain that will chew through your fingers like a hot knife through play-dough. I say this in all seriousness, as I have seen at least 5 gruesome pictures on facebook of fingers that have been mostly chewed off and then sewn back on from people not being careful enough with their high power mid-drives. Treat your ebike like it’s a chainsaw and you’ll probably be OK (assuming you aren’t a chainsaw juggler). Normally I’m a funny guy, but I’m not being funny about this, your fingers belong on your hand, not stuck in between your chain and your chainring. *ouch* Remember, safety fourth.
Before you start messing with the settings you should click on the CONTINUOUS GET button on the bottom left and then push down on the pedal. It’s interesting to see what the TqVoltate(Mv) shows depending on how hard you push. As near as I can tell the torque sensor on the Ultra Max is pretty accurate and seems to sample at a pretty high rate (although not as high as the Bosch mid drive system which samples several thousand times a minute). What the software does is takes this mV (millivolt) input and maps it to kilograms and then the rest of the settings use the kg variable NOT the mV input. The mapping of mV ranges to kg is what happens on the top 1/3 of this page.
Base Voltage: I don’t know what this does, I would leave it alone
Error Voltage Min \ Max: I suspect that these numbers are what will throw an error code if the torque sensor for whatever reason falls below or above these numbers. You can see when using the CONTINUOUS GET button at the bottom that the range of numbers from the torque sensor stays between these numbers. I would not change them.
Delta Voltage: I messed around a bit with these numbers and they are a way to change the sensitivity of the torque sensing unit along ALL the speed ranges of the motor. I believe the way it works is that the program splits up the incoming voltage so that is it changes by a certain amount then it assumes that there is that amount of pressure on the pedal. By lowering these numbers you make the torque sensor more sensitive and responsive to foot pressure, by raising them you make it less sensitive to pressure (so you have to push harder to get the same results).
0 Speed Boost time: Unknown, I wouldn’t mess with it.
SPD0-SPD100: These columns represent the % of the highest RPM ability of the motor that it is currently spinning. Do not think that it has ANYTHING to do with the speed that the wheel is turning because it just doesn’t.
The Ultra Max spins at different speeds based on what voltage you’re driving it at. I tested the drive at 52v but according to Bafang’s website, it will work between 48v and 60v nominal (I have not tested it with a 60v nominal pack). There are two different RPMs listed on the website n0 RPM which I assume is the max RPM using throttle only and nT RPM which I assume is the max RPM using the torque sensing only (no throttle). Since the optimal pedal cadence is around 90 RPM for human beings, these numbers make sense. The pedals and the chain wheel on the Ultra Max are ‘locked’ and spin at the same speed. This is unlike other lower powered mid drives |
vanished. At one point, he went to a superior with what he believed to be a mistake. The Iraqi Federal Police had rounded up innocent people, he said. Get back to work, he was told.
Fishman, who interviewed the gender counselor in whom Manning confided, wrote that after “a targeting mission gone bad in Basra … Manning felt that there was blood on his hands.” He could no longer participate in criminal activity, and reporting it up the chain of command was futile. “i was a *part* of something … i was actively involved in something that i was completely against,” Manning said in the online chat. Hence the resort to WikiLeaks.
Manning took to heart what, according to Fishman, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks once wrote: “Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.”
Commentators who routinely side with the government against whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing in foreign affairs have had a field day in attributing Manning’s actions to her personal issues. They seem to believe that no one could be moved by moral principle to do what she did. That says more about them than about Manning. As Greenwald writes, “The notion that these reactions to wholly unjustified, massive blood-spilling is psychologically warped is itself warped. The reactions described there are psychologically healthy; it’s far more psychologically disturbed not to have the reactions Manning had.”
Motive is really a secondary matter. Manning has ripped the mask off the American imperial war machine. Who really cares why? Even if Manning did it for money, we would still owe her a debt of gratitude for showing the American people — and the rest of the world — what the two-faced U.S. “leaders” are all about.
It’s too much to hope that Barack Obama will do the right thing and pardon Manning. Obama pronounced her guilty before the court martial. But we can hope that Manning’s term is as short and easy as possible. (Let’s not forget the cruel treatment she has already undergone at the hands of her captors.)
Thank you, Chelsea Manning. You are an inspiration.It may be time to review the adage ‘sex sells’, not only because this tired old maxim caps creativity but because it simply doesn’t work.
New research has show that using sexually explicit imagery in magazine and TV ads puts women off buying products, unless it is a superior and expensive item.
The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest this disparity is down to the fact that women have evolved to see sex as a special and prized act. If the price is hiked to suggest exclusivity, women’s instinctively unfavourable reaction toward sexual imagery softens.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
“Women generally show spontaneous negative attitudes toward sexual images,” writes psychological scientist Kathleen Vohs, a researcher at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues. “Sexual economics theory offers a reason why: The use of sexual imagery is inimical to women’s vested interest in sex being portrayed as infrequent, special, and rare.”
To test their theory, Vohs and colleagues Jaideep Sengupta and Darren Dahl made men and women watch adverts for women’s watches. The watch was either associated with a sexually explicit image or a majestic mountain range, a more neutral seen. Some ads priced the watch at $10 and others at $1,250.
The participants were made to memorize a 10 digit code before watching the advert to prevent them over-analysing their reaction.
Vohs writes: “As predicted, women found sexual imagery distasteful when it was used to promote a cheap product, but this reaction to sexual imagery was mitigated if the product promoted was expensive. This pattern was not observed among men.
“Furthermore, we predicted and found that sexual ads promoting cheap products heightened feelings of being upset and angry among women. These findings suggest that women’s reactions to sexual images can reveal deep-seated preferences about how sex should be used and understood.”
This isn’t the first study to show women dislike over-sexualised adverts. Despite ongoing research in this area, the percentage of adverts using sex to sell products rose from 15 percent to 27 percent from 1983 to 2003.
According to a study in 2012, by Tom Reichert, a professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Georgia, 22 percent of ads included sexualised women while only 6 percent featured men in a prone position.
Yet research presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention in 2006,showed that the more seductive the model in an advert, the more it left the women bored and uninterested.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowTed Soqui / Corbis Homeless people live in motor homes and campers near Venice Beach, Calif.
Tim Barker never thought he'd have to live in his truck. Four months ago, the plumber was in a one-bedroom apartment in California's San Fernando Valley, with a pool and a Jacuzzi. Then, on his birthday in October, he and 199 other plumbers were laid off by their union, Local 761 in Burbank. Now Barker's son sleeps on the sofa of his cousin's one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, and Barker sleeps on the roof of the apartment building or in his 2003 Ford Ranger pickup. "I'm 47, and I've never lived in my car," says Barker, a husky 220-lb. single father with sandy hair and a rapid-fire voice. In January, as torrential rains pelted the streets of Southern California, father and son were sleeping in the truck in San Pedro, next to the Los Angeles Harbor. "We were able to spend four nights in the Vagabond Motel, but for two nights we slept in the car," says Barker. "It was raining, cold, and the cat was jumping on us. We both got sick."
For people who cannot afford rent, a car is the last rung of dignity and sanity above the despair of the streets. A home on wheels is a classic American affair, from the wagon train to the RV. Now, for some formerly upwardly mobile Americans, the economic storm has turned the backseat or the rear of the van into the bedroom. "We found six people sleeping in their cars on an overnight police ride-along in December," says John Edmund, chief of staff to Long Beach councilman Dee Andrews. "One was a widow living in a four-door sedan. She and her husband had been Air Force veterans. She did not know about the agencies that could help her. I had tears in my eyes afterwards." (See TIME's photo-essay "The American Economy: Down and Out.")
"Cars are the new homeless shelters," says Joel John Roberts, CEO of PATH (People Assisting the Homeless) Partners, the largest provider of services for the homeless in Los Angeles County, which had nearly 50,000 people homeless in 2009. Of these, experts estimate that up to 10% live in vehicles even though doing so is illegal in most of the county. A similar situation is true for many other regions across the nation, especially in the Sun Belt. A woman lives in her BMW in Marina Del Rey, a swank L.A. address on the coast. PATH outreach workers Jorge Guzman and Tomasz Babiszkiewicz say she was an executive recruiter until the Great Recession. "She was self-employed for 36 years," says Guzman. "Now she sits in the car with a blanket and reads. She has not told her daughter." (See the 50 worst cars of all time.)
Barker, the out-of-work plumber, has checked out shelters, motels and homeless-assistance programs throughout the Los Angeles area as he scrambles to find a roof for his son and him to sleep under. "We went down to a shelter in downtown, but it was bad heroin, crack, smells. Randy looked at me and said, 'Dad, get me out of here. It's spooky.' Now I am trying to get assistance to get into an apartment in San Pedro so Randy can get back in school." PATH outreach workers are talking to Barker about his possible eligibility for federal assistance with rent and utilities under the new federal homelessness-prevention program. (See how the new federal homelessness-prevention program works.)
One problem Barker has discovered with living in a pickup truck is keeping track of things. "My cousin is our ace in the hole," Barker says as he stands in a crowded one-bedroom apartment that has seen better days. On his cousin's cluttered coffee table sits a worn yellow briefcase covered with union stickers; it's stuffed with unemployment forms, birth certificates, old utility bills and school application papers for Randy, a skinny 12-year-old who loves basketball. (Is 1 in 50 American kids homeless?)
People who fall into homelessness say it feels like a spiral. A layoff, a medical emergency or a domestic quarrel sets off a chain reaction of bad luck. And the risk of falling into the economic abyss has increased, even in better times. Writing before the housing bubble burst and Wall Street collapsed, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker showed that the big difference between 30 years ago and today is the dramatic growth in income volatility. American family incomes now rise and fall much more sharply from year to year, and this is happening at the same time that public and private safety nets have eroded.
See pictures of the recession of 1958.The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has announced their final parliamentary candidate, who will be standing in the Leicester West constituency. Heather Rawling has called for an alternative “budget for the working-class”, in the wake of the Chancellor’s budget of deepening cuts.
“This Tory-Lib Dem Coalition has been a disaster for the 99%, whilst the super-rich 1% at the top of society have never had it so good.”
Mrs Rawling, a retired teacher, and long-standing trade unionist, has spent her life involved with grassroots struggles for social change in Leicester explained:
“We live in one of the richest countries in the world, yet all the Coalition can offer us is another £30 billion worth of cuts, including £12 billion from welfare. With increasing demand for pay day lenders, and queues at food banks growing, people need an alternative to austerity.
“There is plenty of money in society. We just have to make sure that the super-rich pay the billions of pounds of tax that they owe us. This is something that TUSC promises to do.
“Labour is no longer a working-class party and has promised to carry on with the Tory cuts if elected. In January this year not one of Leicester’s three elected Labour MP’s voted against the Coalition Government’s ‘Budget Responsibility Charter’ — which meant they all agreed on the necessity for another £30 billion to be cut from the budget.
“In stark opposition to Liz Kendall, who is loyal to the Blairite faction of the Labour Party, I will put the needs of normal people before the needs of big business. I say this because Ms Kendall is one of the vice chairs of Progress, a pressure group acting within the Labour Party that was set up by Lord David Sainsbury.
“TUSC has no super-rich backers and is only funded only by members of the working-class. This contrasts strongly with Ms Kendall’s involvement with Progress which has received funding from corporate interests like the City of London Corporation and the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.”
“Having organized itself as a fighting voice for the working-class, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has attracted a record number of anti-austerity candidates this year, and so far is standing over 130 candidates in the General Election.”What is a good Pencil for drawing outlines?
Faber-Castell sell a range of high quality lead pencils but any high quality pencil will suffice. It’s worth paying £2-£3 for a good graphite pencil. Pencils vary for a 2H (Hard) to a 4B (very soft) or even softer than that. The softer a pencil, the more it smudges. When transferring an outline to pastel paper using tracedown, I recommend using a HB Pencil or even an F Pencil if you can get hold of it. This F Pencil is between a HB and B strength. You can use the same pencil to go over the outline on the pastel paper. Sometimes on delicate areas where you don’t want hard lines to appear under your work, I use a B or a 2B. I go over the outlines which means as I proceed with the picture, I can erase them slightly. This is more difficult to do with the HB pencil line.
For me, I think a good drawing pencil would be a B or 2B but if you want more delicate shading, you can then use a softer pencil such as 3B, 4B etc.
Before I started painting professionally, I used to draw cartoons for my children and still do occasionally. When doing cartoons, I used a 2B pencil as it was softer and easier to erase.
With cartoons, you want to avoid using the very soft pencils unless you’ve no intention using colour on top. This is because the soft pencil will affect the colour application i.e. watercolour or ink. We mentioned this subject on episode 40 of our podcast – listen online by clicking here.
What’s your favourite pencil to use and what do you use it for? Let us know in the comments below.Firaxis turn-based strategy game Civilization 5 is now a part of the Steam Workshop, 2K Games has announced.
This means players have access to Steam's mod database, as is the case with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. You can browse, comment, rate and subscribe to Civilization 5 mods directly from the Steam Workshop or in-game. You can keep track of mods from your favourite authors and create mod collections to share with friends. Additionally, mod authors can post their mods in Steam Workshop
Steam business development chief Jason Holtman said: "Civilization 5 is a fantastic addition to the Steam Workshop. We hope that the Steam Workshop will provide another avenue for the many talented Civ 5 mod creators to have their work seen and played by millions of Civ 5 fans."
The Civilization 5: Gods & Kings expansion pack launches on 19th June.Last Monday, Nikki Haley, the Governor of South Carolina, held a press conference to announce the identity of the state’s next U.S. Senator. Everyone already knew the identity of the state’s next ex-U.S. Senator: Jim DeMint, who is giving up his seat to become president of the Heritage Foundation. And most people already knew the name of his replacement: Tim Scott, a recently elected congressman who had quickly emerged as the consensus choice. Scott, who is forty-seven, is a former businessman, having worked in insurance and real estate, and he has strong ties to the conservative movement. He is also African-American, which is one reason why Haley said, on Monday, “It’s a historic day in South Carolina.” Only three states (Mississippi, Massachusetts, and Illinois) have ever sent African-American senators to Washington; now, South Carolina will become the fourth.
Jim Geraghty, blogging for the National Review, predicted that “Tim Scott will instantly become a major figure in the G.O.P., as the lone African-American Republican in Congress.” This seems likely—although it seems likely, too, that both his supporters and his detractors will run into difficulties when they try to talk about the link between his race and his prominence. In her introduction on Monday, Haley, who is Indian-American, wisely declined to provide a brief history of race and Republicanism. Instead, she delivered a perfectly ambiguous statement, emphasizing her own identity while deëmphasizing Scott’s:
It is very important to me, as a minority female, that Congressman Scott earned this seat. He earned this seat for the person that he is; he earned this seat for the results he has shown; he earned this seat for what I know he’s going to do in making South Carolina and making our country proud.
The success of a black Republican can present an awkward situation for partisans on both sides. Republicans, generally inclined to mock the liberal fascination with race, suddenly find themselves moved to expound upon the importance of breaking racial barriers. Meanwhile, Democrats, who normally love to celebrate African-American firsts, experience an uncharacteristic onset of reticence. In a much-debated New York Times Op-Ed, the political scientist Adolph L. Reed, Jr., explained why he wasn’t celebrating. Reed, who is black, has written about himself as a member of “the left,” and he is deeply critical of the conservative movement; in his essay, he made passing reference to what he called “thinly veiled racism” among Tea Party Republicans. And he argued that while Scott’s elevation “seemed like another milestone for African-Americans,” that perception was misleading. He cautioned against “cheerleading over racial symbolism” and suggested that Scott was merely the latest in a long line of “cynical tokens” put forward by Republicans.
That last formulation—“cynical tokens”—helps explain the sense of outrage in many of the responses to Reed’s piece. A blogger known as Patterico quoted Reed and asked, “Who’s the racist again?” John Steele Gordon, at Commentary, accused Reed of calling Scott “essentially an Uncle Tom,” adding, “if he’d like to see a real racist, he needs only to look in a mirror.” And Patrick Brennan, at the National Review, detected “lazy noxious racialism” in Reed’s argument; he felt Reed was implying that “blacks who do join the G.O.P. constitute some kind of race traitors.”
The term “token” is widely used, and perceived, as an insult; Reed’s column was read as an attack on Scott, even though he was careful to direct his criticism at the Republican Party, not the Senator. And certainly it’s striking that Reed’s essay, which sought to affirm the importance of African-American political power, also had the effect of belittling an African-American politician. To call Scott a token is to imply that he is less autonomous, and therefore less respectable, than his white Republican counterparts. The odd, unspoken suggestion is that it would have been less “cynical”—more honorable, perhaps—if Haley had appointed a white conservative, instead.
In his essay, Reed also claimed that Scott’s conservative political agenda was “utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans.” In response, Brennan, at the National Review, found various polls purporting to show that African-Americans actually support various conservative policies. There’s no need to rely on polls and wishful thinking, though: in 2014, when South Carolina holds its special election, black voters in the state will get a chance to decide whether Scott shares their priorities or not. If they vote against him, he may well carry the state, regardless. (South Carolina is about sixty-six per cent white.) In that case, the Republican Party might find that it has diversified its congressional delegation without significantly diversifying its electorate.
That situation—the existence of black Republicans who don’t attract significant black support—isn’t necessarily evidence of extraordinary political cynicism. Equally, though, left-leaning commentators aren’t necessarily “noxious” for pointing out the difference between getting Republicans to vote for a black candidate and getting blacks to vote for a Republican candidate. If Democrats believe that racial diversity is important, shouldn’t they want the Republican caucus to be more diverse, too? Shouldn’t Scott’s appointment be cause for celebration among liberals, even if he doesn’t share their political agenda? And if Republicans want to break racial barriers, then shouldn’t Scott’s appointment remind them how far they have to go? If it makes sense for Republicans to be proud to have a black senator in their party, then wouldn’t it also make sense for them to be bothered by the relative absence of black voters?
Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.Denzel Washington admits the Academy Awards are “unfair.”
The two-time winner addresses the lack of diversity at the annual awards in an interview with “60 Minutes” airing on Sunday, Dec. 18.
“I’ve lived it. I’ve been the guy at the Oscars without my name being called……when my name is called…when everybody thought they was going to call my name and they didn’t,” the 61-year-old star says.
RELATED: Denzel Washington Visits His Childhood Librarian, Grants Her 99th Birthday Wish
While he might agree that the process is unfair, Washington encourages performers not to give up. “Yeah, and so what? You going to give up? If you’re looking for an excuse, you’ll find one,” he says, adding that race is one of many excuses. “You can find it wherever you like. Can’t live like that. Just do the best you can do.”
Washington is once again earning Award Season buzz for “Fences”, a stage adaption he both directs and stars in, which opens in theatres on December 25.President Donald Trump said he never would have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general had he known he’d recuse himself from the Russia investigation, and warned that special counsel Robert Mueller would cross a red line if he expanded the investigation to include Trump family finances, in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times on Wednesday.
“Sessions should have never recused himself and if he was going to recuse himself he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.” President Donald Trump
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” Trump said. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
Trump also accused former FBI Director James Comey of lying, and said that when Comey warned him in January that a former British spy had compiled a dossier of sensational allegations against Trump, he interpreted it as a threat. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there [as leverage],” Trump said. Trump went on to say Comey’s testimony before Congress was “loaded up with lies,” though he did not specify them.
Despite reports that Mueller may be investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice for firing Comey, Trump said he didn’t believe it. “I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Trump was also critical of Mueller, alleging conflicts of interest by him and lawyers in his office, and said the Russia investigation should not delve into his family’s finances. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia,” he said.
Speaking about Russia, Trump dismissed recent reports that he had a second, previously undisclosed meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the recent G-20 meeting, saying they exchanged “pleasantries” between dinner and dessert, that they talked for about 15 minutes and the subject was Russian adoptions. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting,” Trump said, referring to a June 2016 meeting attended by his son, Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer who had offered them damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Trump again denied he had knowledge of that meeting, and said he didn’t need any help at the time. “There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said.If one were to start a podcast today, what subject matter should they choose to increase their chance of success? Certainly, with over 400,000 podcast titles in existence and 1,000 more being added weekly, the world isn’t craving another comedy or sports podcast. Or is it?
It is hard to determine whether we are in the first inning of podcasting, or at “peak” audio with a cornucopia of choice including AM/FM radio, satellite, owned music, streaming, and of course podcasts. The impediments of discovery and limits of personal time are the enemies of so much choice.
The impediments of discovery and limits of personal time are the enemies of so much choice.
We know from history, a myriad of factors lead to success in content - execution and timing top the list. We also know that certain content genres tend to perform better than others. Just look at TV and its ability to constantly reinvent medical drama shows over the years from Marcus Welby, M.D. to Grey's Anatomy. Some story areas are durable and rich.
When we approached the idea of delving in and examining podcast content by genre, we had no ideology other than being pretty sure no one ever needs another podcast about podcasts – rather we simply wanted to see what is currently “printing” in podcasting as a matter of interest and general direction.
We confined ourselves to Apple’s 16 major podcast categories as delineated in iTunes. Some are pretty logical and clear, while others are a bit of a hodge-podge. None-the-less, it is a good place to start.
We took a look at the Top 200 podcast chart from iTunes on a random day in October to see what categories dominate and in what proportion.
We took a look at the Top 200 podcast chart from iTunes on a random day in October to see what categories dominate and in what proportion.Union Calendar No. 168
H. R. 3200
[Report No. 111–299, Parts I, II, and III]
To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Mr. Dingell (for himself, Mr. Rangel, Mr. Waxman, Mr. George Miller of California, Mr. Stark, Mr. Pallone, and Mr. Andrews) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Ways and Means, Education and Labor, Oversight and Government Reform, and the Budget, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned
Reported from the Committee on Energy and Commerce with an amendment
[For text of sections 321 and 322, title IV of division A, subtitle A of title I of division B, and title VIII of division B, see copy of bill as introduced on July 14, 2009]
[Strike out all after the enacting clause (other than sections 321 and 322, title IV of division A, subtitle A of title I of division B, and title VIII of division B) and insert the part printed in italic]
Reported from the Committee on Ways and Means with an amendment
[For text of title VII of division B and for division C (and the original sections of the bill that fall within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means), see copy of bill as introduced on July 14, 2009]
[Strike out all after the enacting clause (other than title VII of division B and division C) and insert the part printed in boldface roman]
Reported from the Committee on Education and Labor with an amendment
[For text of sections 161 through 163, 322, and 323 and title IV of division A, division B, section 2002 and titles I through IV of division C, and subtitles A, B, C, and E of title V of division C, see copy of bill as introduced on July 14, 2009]
[Strike out all after the enacting clause (other than sections 161 through 163, 322, and 323 and title IV of division A, division B, section 2002 and titles I through IV of division C, and subtitles A, B, C, and E of title V of division C) and insert the part printed in boldface italic]
Committees on Oversight and Government Reform and the Budget discharged; committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union and ordered to be printed
A BILL
To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. Short title; table of divisions, titles, and subtitles.
(a) Short title.—This Act may be cited as the “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009”.
(b) Table of divisions, titles, and subtitles.—This Act is divided into divisions, titles, and subtitles as follows:
DIVISION A—AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE CHOICES DIVISION A—AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE CHOICES
Title I—Protections and Standards for Qualified Health Benefits Plans
Subtitle A—General Standards
Subtitle B—Standards Guaranteeing Access to Affordable Coverage
Subtitle C—Standards Guaranteeing Access to Essential Benefits
Subtitle D—Additional Consumer Protections
Subtitle E—Governance
Subtitle F—Relation to Other Requirements; Miscellaneous
Subtitle G—Early Investments
Title II—Health Insurance Exchange and Related Provisions
Subtitle A—Health Insurance Exchange
Subtitle B—Public Health Insurance Option
Subtitle C—Individual Affordability Credits
Subtitle D—Health Insurance Cooperatives
Title III—Shared Responsibility
Subtitle A—Individual Responsibility
Subtitle B—Employer Responsibility
Title IV—Amendments to Internal Revenue Code of 1986
Subtitle A—Shared Responsibility
Subtitle B—Credit for Small Business Employee Health Coverage Expenses
Subtitle C—Disclosures To Carry Out Health Insurance Exchange Subsidies
Subtitle D—Other Revenue Provisions
DIVISION B—MEDICARE AND MEDICAID IMPROVEMENTS DIVISION B—MEDICARE AND MEDICAID IMPROVEMENTS
Title I—Improving Health Care Value
Subtitle A—Provisions Related to Medicare Part A
Subtitle B—Provisions Related to Medicare Part B
Subtitle C—Provisions Related to Medicare Parts A and B
Subtitle D—Medicare Advantage Reforms
Subtitle E—Improvements to Medicare Part D
Subtitle F—Medicare Rural Access Protections
Title II—Medicare Beneficiary Improvements
Subtitle A—Improving and Simplifying Financial Assistance for Low Income Medicare Beneficiaries
Subtitle B—Reducing Health Disparities
Subtitle C—Miscellaneous Improvements
Title III—Promoting Primary Care, Mental Health Services, and Coordinated Care
Title IV—Quality
Subtitle A—Comparative Effectiveness Research
Subtitle B—Nursing Home Transparency
Subtitle C—Quality Measurements
Subtitle D—Physician Payments Sunshine Provision
Subtitle E—Public Reporting on Health Care-Associated Infections
Title V—Medicare Graduate Medical Education
Title VI—Program Integrity
Subtitle A—Increased Funding To Fight Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Subtitle B—Enhanced Penalties for Fraud and Abuse
Subtitle C—Enhanced Program and Provider Protections
Subtitle D—Access to Information Needed To Prevent Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
Title VII—Medicaid and CHIP
Subtitle A—Medicaid and Health Reform
Subtitle B—Prevention
Subtitle C—Access
Subtitle D—Coverage
Subtitle E—Financing
Subtitle F—Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Subtitle G—Payments to the Territories
Subtitle H—Miscellaneous
Title VIII—Revenue-related provisions
Title IX—Miscellaneous Provisions
DIVISION C—PUBLIC HEALTH AND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT DIVISION C—PUBLIC HEALTH AND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
Title I—Community Health Centers
Title II—Workforce
Subtitle A—Primary Care Workforce
Subtitle B—Nursing Workforce
Subtitle C—Public Health Workforce
Subtitle D—Adapting Workforce to Evolving Health System Needs
Title III—Prevention and Wellness
Title IV—Quality and Surveillance
Title V—Other Provisions
Subtitle A—Drug Discount for Rural and Other Hospitals
Subtitle B—Programs
Subtitle C—Food and Drug Administration
Subtitle D—Community Living Assistance Services and Supports
Subtitle E—Miscellaneous
SEC. 100. Purpose; table of contents of division; general definitions.
(a) Purpose.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—The purpose of this division is to provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending.
(2) BUILDING ON CURRENT SYSTEM.—This division achieves this purpose by building on what works in today’s health care system, while repairing the aspects that are broken.
(3) INSURANCE REFORMS.—This division—
(A) enacts strong insurance market reforms;
(B) creates a new Health Insurance Exchange, with a public health insurance option alongside private plans and cooperatives under subtitle D of title II;
(C) includes sliding scale affordability credits; and
(D) initiates shared responsibility among workers, employers, and the government;
so that all Americans have coverage of essential health benefits.
(4) HEALTH DELIVERY REFORM.—This division institutes health delivery system reforms both to increase quality and to reduce growth in health spending so that health care becomes more affordable for businesses, families, and government.
(b) Table of contents of division.—The table of contents of this division is as follows:
Sec. 156. Application of State and Federal laws regarding abortion.
Sec. 157. Non-discrimination on abortion and respect for rights of conscience.
Sec. 321. Satisfaction of health coverage participation requirements under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
Sec. 322. Satisfaction of health coverage participation requirements under the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.
Subtitle A—Shared responsibility Subtitle A—Shared responsibility
PART 1—INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY PART 1—INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
Sec. 401. Tax on individuals without acceptable health care coverage.
PART 2—EMPLOYER RESPONSIBILITY PART 2—EMPLOYER RESPONSIBILITY
Sec. 411. Election to satisfy health coverage participation requirements.
Sec. 412. Responsibilities of nonelecting employers.
Subtitle B—Credit for small business employee health coverage expenses Subtitle B—Credit for small business employee health coverage expenses
Sec. 421. Credit for small business employee health coverage expenses.
Subtitle C—Disclosures To carry out health insurance exchange subsidies Subtitle C—Disclosures To carry out health insurance exchange subsidies
Sec. 431. Disclosures to carry out health insurance exchange subsidies.
Subtitle D—Other revenue provisions Subtitle D—Other revenue provisions
PART 1—GENERAL PROVISIONS PART 1—GENERAL PROVISIONS
Sec. 441. Surcharge on high income individuals.
Sec. 442. Delay in application of worldwide allocation of interest.
PART 2—PREVENTION OF TAX AVOIDANCE PART 2—PREVENTION OF TAX AVOIDANCE
Sec. 451. Limitation on treaty benefits for certain deductible payments.
Sec. 452. Codification of economic substance doctrine.
Sec. 453. Penalties for underpayments.
(c) General definitions.—Except as otherwise provided, in this division:
(1) ACCEPTABLE COVERAGE.—The term “acceptable coverage” has the meaning given such term in section 202(d)(2).
(2) BASIC PLAN.—The term “basic plan” has the meaning given such term in section 203(c).
(3) COMMISSIONER.—The term “Commissioner” means the Health Choices Commissioner established under section 141.
(4) COST-SHARING.—The term “cost-sharing” includes deductibles, coinsurance, copayments, and similar charges but does not include premiums or any network payment differential for covered services or spending for non-covered services.
(5) DEPENDENT.—The term “dependent” has the meaning given such term by the Commissioner and includes a spouse.
(6) EMPLOYMENT-BASED HEALTH PLAN.—The term “employment-based health plan”—
(A) means a group health plan (as defined in section 733(a)(1) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974); and
(B) includes such a plan that is the following:
(i) FEDERAL, STATE, AND TRIBAL GOVERNMENTAL PLANS.—A governmental plan (as defined in section 3(32) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974), including a health benefits plan offered under chapter 89 of title 5, United States Code.
(ii) CHURCH PLANS.—A church plan (as defined in section 3(33) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974).
(7) ENHANCED PLAN.—The term “enhanced plan” has the meaning given such term in section 203(c).
(8) ESSENTIAL BENEFITS PACKAGE.—The term “essential benefits package” is defined in section 122(a).
(9) FAMILY.—The term “family” means an individual and includes the individual’s dependents.
(10) FEDERAL POVERTY LEVEL; FPL.—The terms “Federal poverty level” and “FPL” have the meaning given the term “poverty line” in section 673(2) of the Community Services Block Grant Act (42 U.S.C. 9902(2)), including any revision required by such section.
(11) HEALTH BENEFITS PLAN.—The terms “health benefits plan” means health insurance coverage and an employment-based health plan and includes the public health insurance option and cooperatives under subtitle D of title II.
(12) HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE; HEALTH INSURANCE ISSUER.—The terms “health insurance coverage” and “health insurance issuer” have the meanings given such terms in section 2791 of the Public Health Service Act.
(13) HEALTH INSURANCE EXCHANGE.—The term “Health Insurance Exchange” means the Health Insurance Exchange established under section 201.
(14) MEDICAID.—The term “Medicaid” means a State plan under title XIX of the Social Security Act (whether or not the plan is operating under a waiver under section 1115 of such Act).
(15) MEDICARE.—The term “Medicare” means the health insurance programs under title XVIII of the Social Security Act.
(16) PLAN SPONSOR.—The term “plan sponsor” has the meaning given such term in section 3(16)(B) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
(17) PLAN YEAR.—The term “plan year” means—
(A) with respect to an employment-based health plan, a plan year as specified under such plan; or
(B) with respect to a health benefits plan other than an employment-based health plan, a |
of the other big changes announced in Metamorphosis 2.0 might hold the key to solving the problem.
So, how can Wizards tie together three disjointed one-set blocks each year? The answer here is the return of core sets. Core sets are unique, since they typically have a much looser mechanical theme, which means Wizards can use the core set to act like the second set of all of the one-set blocks in Standard, pushing mechanics and tribes that might need a bit more help while also punishing mechanics and tribes that might be too good in the Standard format. More importantly, this can be done preemptively. While we don't know what the next year of Magic sets will hold, Wizards does, which means tribes, mechanics, and sets from the near future can be foreshadowed and supported before they even see print, with the help of the yearly core set. Taking full advantage of the one set each year where the typical rules of modern set design are loosened a bit is likely the single most important thing Wizards can do to make sure the new one-set block structure succeeds and we avoid problems like energy and Block Constructed Standard in the future.
Conclusion
Our current Standard format does a great job of illuminating both ends of the spectrum when it comes to making unique mechanics and tribes in the one-set block structure, which might actually be a good thing for Standard moving forward. Seeing the parasitic nature of energy, combined with the Ixalan tribes' struggle for relevance with only a single set of support, will hopefully get Wizards thinking about how these types of mechanics and tribes can be balanced in the one-set block structure that is just around the corner. While it certainly isn't impossible to have a balanced Standard with each mechanic and theme only having one set of support, it will be more difficult, even with the core set on the horizon to help smooth things out. Finding this balance, where Dinosaurs and Pirates are playable but not so parasitic that they reduce choice and deck-building decisions, will be the key to Standard's success under the new structure, so hopefully Wizards takes a hard look at what has gone right and what has gone wrong with Kaladesh and Ixalan, and uses these lessons as a guide through the transition to one-set blocks.
Anyway, that's all for today. What do you think? How can mechanics, tribes, and themes be balanced with only one set of support? Are we doomed to a Standard that is essentially a bunch of Block Constructed decks battling it out, or can the return of the core set tie everything together in a way that makes sense? Are there any other potential solutions worth considering to make sure standard is balanced under the one-set block structure? Let me know in the comments! As always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.As a resident of the upstate portion of New York (not the Big Apple) I have written frequently about the depressing, negative effects which liberal tax and spend policies combined with strangling regulatory burdens have had on the state, as well as the economic death spiral which has followed. Many of the complaints I hear from residents of the more rural, upstate region center on the unbalanced power held by New York City and the complete disconnect between the government and the more conservative, rural communities to the north and west. But even as a person studying and experiencing these effects first hand, I don’t think I ever grasped the full impact of this disparity in the way it’s spelled out by William Tucker of the American Media Institute.
Upstate New York is becoming Detroit with grass. Binghamton, New York — once a powerhouse of industry — is now approaching Detroit in many economic measures, according to the U.S. Census. In Binghamton, more than 31 percent of city residents are at or below the federal poverty level compared to 38 percent in Detroit. Average household income in Binghamton at $30,179 in 2012 barely outpaces Detroit’s $26,955. By some metrics, Binghamton is behind Detroit. Some 45 percent of Binghamton residents own their dwellings while more than 52 percent of Detroit residents are homeowners. Both “Rust Belt” cities have lost more than 2 percent of their populations. Binghamton is not alone. Upstate New York — that vast 50,000-square mile region north of New York City — seems to be in an economic death spiral. The fate of the area is a small scene in a larger story playing out across rural America. As the balance of population shifts from farms to cities, urban elites are increasingly favoring laws and regulations that benefit urban voters over those who live in small towns or out in the country. The implications are more than just economic: it’s a trend that fuels the intense populism and angry politics that has shattered the post-World War II consensus and divided the nation.
That comparison between the city of Binghamton and the wreckage of Detroit is a true eye opener, but it’s not the only such story in the non-city portions of the state. IBM was once the powerhouse of employment in the greater Binghamton area, employing more than 16,000 people as recently as the late 1980s. Today the entire complex has been sold to local developers and the computer giant employs a few hundred people (many of whom are contractors) renting out a tiny portion of the old complex. Kodak employed 62,000 people in Rochester during the same period as IBM’s heyday. Today there are roughly 4,000 workers. Xerox and Bausch & Lomb were also huge employers there but are now largely (or entirely) gone.
These stories are repeated over and over again in cities and towns across the upstate region, so it’s more than coincidence. Tucker ties it all together.
The economic woes of the Empire State trace back to Albany, and a state government that is legendary for its ability to tax and spend. Strict election laws insulate incumbents of both parties, making the state legislature the longest-tenured in the nation. Petitions to put insurgent candidates on the ballot require tens of thousands of signatures and are regularly rebuffed by the courts on technical grounds. Ballot initiatives that have led to tax reform in other states are not permitted. Politicians are protected from voters and have built a spending machine unmatched in virtually any other state. New York, despite its shrinking population, spends more money than all but a handful of states. The primary example is Medicaid. New York is the only state that forces its cities and counties to help finance Medicaid. As a result, for every dollar appropriated by Albany, Washington contributes two — and New York’s local governments must kick in a fourth.
Pay particular attention to the section on Medicaid highlighted above because it’s a fight which is raging in states across the nation today. The effect here has been nothing short of devastating. From the top down perspective, as Tucker documents, the state of New York spends more than twice as much money on Medicaid as California while serving less than half the number of people. The “revenue sharing” scheme put in place by Democrats from the city has left some places like Chenango County with fully one half of their property tax income going to Albany just to pay for Medicaid. If you think half is bad, Erie County – home to the Buffalo Bills – sends every dime of their property taxes to Medicaid and they are essentially bankrupt.
Returning to the initial premise of this piece, we’re not seeing a red state vs blue state problem here. It’s large, liberal cities run by high spending Democrats using their numeric advantage to pass policies which bleed smaller, more rural areas to death. It takes place in many states other than New York, too. Pennsylvania is a study in two countries, really, with the urban centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh constantly at war with the rural land known as “Pennsyltucky” stretching between them. I’m sure you can find more examples in your own back yards.
But what is the solution? There have been debates raging for years in the Empire State about finding some way to split off New York City as its own state or allowing portions of upstate to secede and sign on with somebody else. But as long as the cities hold the numerical edge on the votes in the state government, there’s not much that anyone can do. It’s a culture war over a way of life and the economic realities of wildly different societal climates. And there’s no end in sight.Both Cruz and Trump are great candidates, there is no doubt. When you hear either of them speak you think finally, we have the brightest GOP presidential lineup we’ve had in almost a decade. Unfortunately we are all falling into that trap again set up so well by the media, by the bloggers, journalists, the politicians and the left.
What is it? Stabbing each other in the back.
People have been asking me for months, “Who do you like? Who is your favorite?” I’ve answered, I do have my favorites but I’m going to continue observing and see who is the one diligently looking at the prize and moving forward when others will get their feet stuck in the mud forgetting that crawling is the best way out.
I love both candidates. I believe both are on the ball. Trump and Cruz, Cruz and Trump.
Donald Trump
As a New Yorker, I began watching Trump as the “builder/developer guy” in the mid 80s. He was one of the very few non-Jews with big dreams who everyone was laughing at in NYC because of his big mouth, and many criticized him because of his immigrant wife–but they certainly didn’t mind taking his money. For charities, for their payrolls, for the pizazz he brought with the paparazzi wherever he went. Trump became a NY icon, this white, poofy haired blonde from Queens. He played big and hard but he stayed on the ball with his eye on the prize. Privately (which also became public), we New Yorkers watched his family life, his kids and how he treated them, with respect and love and he never forgot that family is first in all his interviews. After his very public affair with Marla Maples, Trump stayed pretty quiet during his divorce from first wife Ivana. Even then, after they divorced, they still remained cordial enough to stay under the radar, putting their family’s well being first. Donald’s children have earned their education and have been placed in entrusted positions with wisdom to run their company successfully and not just be trust fund babies who will throw it away.
From what I’ve personally observed, Donald Trump always had values. They may be “New York City values” but we are talking the old New York City values, where you help the guy who fell down next to you, or help that lady in the stroller down the stairs, or walk the little old lady carrying her grocery bags across the street. In addition, Mr. Trump was never known to party. To me, as loud as he was, he always seemed to value life and to make fun of it, never losing the sight of family and friends and trying to do his very best to make that possible. And yes, the older he got, the more loud he became about what was right and wrong.
As a young man, Trump was not born with a silver spoon, working hard to get deals done, having to deal with thugs in the construction building industry, including mafia, the unions and teamsters. It was a hard climb. Then he got flack for marrying an immigrant, something I personally heard whispers of in the social upper WASP circles. Trump was never a part of the system; he fought hard and won his own place. One has to admire that and he is still fighting the system. He is fighting our corrupt governmental system.
Ted Cruz
Then there is Cruz. I love this guy. He’s a gentleman. He has a great sense of what we Americans have lost in the past decade: the loss of security, the loss of being able to take care of our families without worrying if someone gets sick. The support that we Americans should be getting when we come back from war or when we are in need because we have to take care of all the illegals and criminals first. The ridiculousness of some of the liberal groups regarding religion, abortion, birth control and more. He understands the 2nd Amendment issues that are being manipulated by our government and politicians so that they can look good but don’t do anything to stop the cause of the murders that do go on. The mental health system and the health system where we are taxed if we don’t buy it and if we have it, we can barely afford it.
We can see that Ted Cruz is a well adjusted individual with firm values and as a Christian I can see that he leads with Christ in his heart. I admire that, he is a fighter.
Both Cruz and Trump have shown us how angry they are. They are angry with what’s happened to our country, angry that we have become almost like a third world country but still pretending to be rich and giving our money away and placating to despots and terrorists or pretending they don’t exist.
I think people are forgetting that the focus in a presidential race is to win. Yes everyone has their preferred candidate but they need to look at the bottom line. Trump said we need to see who is electable; who can win. Who can get people to vote other then just the conservatives/GOP. We need the middle class, the young folks struggling for a college education, the former Democrats and everyone in between to come vote. We need the down trodden, the seniors, the Vets, and blue collar workers–those are the people who have lost the most, living paycheck to paycheck.
What makes me mad is when I see people on our own side who criticize our candidates so vehemently and maliciously, taking cues from gossip-style articles in order to make the other one look bad. (By the way, many of those articles are written by Leftist bloggers, following Alinsky’s commands…)
On the other hand, Cruz and Trump have both brought up valid points in regards to each other and instead of criticizing, I hope people will do their own research and search for the truth. But they need to listen to each other as well.
Bottom line, I admire both Cruz and Trump and in my eyes, they are a tie.
So I recommend that everyone pay close attention to the marketing power of the Democrat Party. They will use every bullet these candidates shoot at each other as their weapons. Instead of criticizing our top 2 candidates, let’s focus on criticizing the Democrat weapons that have almost killed our society. Debate all you want about who is better but electability is what will count in the end.Jackson Street Books, Inc. owner Tony Arnold said Athens can't support a used book store anymore.
He closed the doors of the shop on Sunday after 31 years of business.
Arnold said he has seen reading go out of style and the downtown area attract less tourists and local shoppers since he began running the store in the 1990s. Those are two of the many reasons he said it was time to stop selling books one by one.
"Factor in decreasing interest in books, aliteracy, downloading texts, competition with other forms of recreation like video games, all of that stuff, all of these things that people get wrapped up in instead of reading to enrich their lives - that's what you're fighting against. You're fighting against all the books on Amazon. The obstacles are essentially endless," Arnold said.
The name Jackson Street Books will live on as a wholesaler. Arnold will continue to run the business selling batches of books to collectors or other book sellers, he said. He will keep the space on Jackson Street until he can find another.
On Monday, Arnold was working inside his shop selling boxes full of the more than 55,000 books that crowd the wooden shelves inside.
The store is now only open to book sellers, not the public.
"Unfortunately this business just isn't profitable anymore unless you can sell books by the box-load, or better yet the car-full," Arnold said.
He just finished ringing up a few customers with boxes full of books, totalling to a couple hundred dollars for each transaction.
One book dealer inside the store Monday, Kenneth Mallory, of Decatur, said he can often find books here he can sell for a profit in another part of the country.
"It's the context of where something is sold. A book that I can buy at the Florida book fair for $300, when I take it to the New York Park Avenue Armory in April, I can sell it for $1,000," Mallory said.
Mallory and another book seller in the shop on Monday, David McCord, said they often act as middle men bringing the right book to an interested audience to turn a profit.
"There's a few different avenues to sell books now. There's the Internet, but it's a marketplace that is very volatile. The prices go up and down. … There are book fairs nationally, and that tends to be the higher end of the book seller food chain. … There's also special collections or archives or collectors you can sell to," McCord said.
Those are the avenues Arnold said he'll be looking into in the future. He wants to whittle his stock down to collectables and first editions.
In the last decade fewer and fewer general book enthusiasts stop in Jackson Street Books, Arnold said. In the 1990s avid readers would spend $500 a weekend at the store regularly, he said. That doesn't happen anymore.
"What we've seen more and more is people having an extremely specific and obscure want and they come here looking for that, and it's like a needle in a haystack. The chances of any bookstore having that one particular thing you're looking for is almost nonexistent," Arnold said.
Arnold said he found it wasn't profitable to sell individual books to the public now.
"We finally got to the break even point where in a strictly mathematical sense it wasn't worth being in business anymore," Arnold said.
While he hasn't lost hope in all bookstores, he said he thinks Athens won't be able to support one anymore.
"We used to have tourists, people visiting The Classic Center, visiting parents or visiting scholars from overseas would stop in here, but downtown just isn't the same," Arnold said.While the Obama Administration presents its ultimate goal in Syria as propping up “vetted, moderate rebels” as an alternative to ISIS, those self-same rebels are increasingly allying themselves outright with ISIS.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the most endorsed faction from the US perspective, is eagerly attaching itself to ISIS, with FSA commander Bassel Idriss admitting he regularly collaborates with ISIS in attacking Assad government forces along the Syria-Lebanon border.
Fighting at the border crossing in Qalamoun is a joint FSA-ISIS operation, and Abu Fidaa, the head of the local Revolutionary Council, says that a “very large number” of FSA fighters have joined ISIS outright.
The US has been funding and arming the FSA for many months now, and recently, reports are that a lot of those arms are ending up in ISIS hands. It wasn’t clear how that was the case, but overt alliances between the two makes it more obvious.
But the administration wants to pump even more arms toward the FSA, a move that even politicians nominally allied with the FSA aren’t sure is a good idea. The aid seems destined to give ISIS even more US weapons than it already has.
The various rebels are nominally in conflict with ISIS, a fact that gets hyped whenever US arms are up for grabs, but their interrelations are far more complicated than that, and the only constant among them is that they are all hoping for power in post-Assad Syria.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzIn May 2014, an open letter from well-meaning individuals surfaced urging President Obama to authorize improvements on travel, communications, and trade between America and Cuba.
Image Source: wfp.org
This letter included a call for government-endorsed aid to small farmers, cooperatives, and other private agricultural microenterprises in Cuba, a measure which poses great benefits to the two countries.
America has always pursued environmental conservation and carbon emissions reduction efforts throughout its variegated industries. A smart way for it to adopt sustainable practices in its agriculture is to learn agro-ecology from Cuban farmers.
Organic farming in Cuba
Image Source: cityfarmer.info
When the end of the Cold War dissolved Cuba’s agricultural chemical supply from the Soviet Union, nationwide farming struggled. To address this, the state deployed the country’s top soil and plant scientists, agronomists, and hydrologists to work hand-in-hand with farmers in developing agriculture without the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
As a result, the polycultural processes of agro-ecology, which utilizes nature’s cycles and systems in crop production, now dominate Cuba’s fields and plantations. Planting strategically to eliminate weeds, cultivating flowers to draw pest-repelling insects, and growing nitrogen-fixing beans to fertilize produce organically, the average Cuban farmer sees improved yields through a viable practice and a commendable carbon footprint due to independence from fossil fuel-based methods.
Mainstreaming agro-ecology in America
Image Source: agroecology.appg.org
U.S. support for Cuba’s “Campesino a campesino” or farmer-to-farmer agro-ecology training program can help both small Cuban farmers and American farming immensely. If this knowledge-dissemination model has successfully educated as many as 100,000 Cuban agricultural families in a mere decade, sufficient sponsorship and international knowledge exchange can expedite the mainstreaming of these climate rehabilitative, agro-ecological techniques in Central and North America.
To read more about Heriberto Lopez Alberola’s pro-private sector stance on U.S.-Cuba relations, visit this blog.
AdvertisementsFormer president Barack Obama appeared for jury duty in Chicago on Wednesday, but he was not chosen to serve.
Wearing a sport coat, shirt and no tie, the former leader of the free world waved to onlookers as he approached the Richard J. Daley Center, according to the Associated Press.
Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans told reporters that Obama was not selected for duty, according to the AP, but still, it was an unusual day in the downtown court complex.
Though Obama and his wife, Michelle, have said they plan to live in Washington while their daughter Sasha finishes high school, they still own a Georgian-style home in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.
Obama left his Chicago home Wednesday morning, his motorcade parked in a secure garage underneath the Daley Center building, and he arrived in court by 10 a.m., according to the Chicago Tribune. He used the same private elevator judges use to make it to the 17th-floor jury assembly room, where he ran into reporters, attorneys and court staff eager to see him, the Tribune reported.
[Citizen Obama, welcome to jury duty]
A court clerk exclaimed, “He’s gorgeous!” when she saw Obama, according to the Chicago Tribune.
While waiting in the jury assembly area, the Tribune said, prospective jurors are allowed to bring reading materials and use their cellphones. They are paid $17.20 per day.
In a video posted by Twitter user @1992AngelM, Obama is walking around the jury assembly room, shaking hands. He can be heard saying, “Thanks everybody for serving on the jury, or at least being willing to.”
“This looks like Chicago right here,” he says in the video. “I like that.”
Obama sightings are frequently shared on social media, such as the photos and videos of the former president’s trip to the British Virgin Islands, which included a video showing him in shorts, polo shirt, flip-flops and a backward hat.
The 2010 State of the Union address kept Obama from appearing for jury duty the last time he was summoned. Evans first told county commissioners that Obama, who encourages civic engagement, would serve, and told the Tribune that: “He made it crystal clear to me through his representative that he would carry out his public duty as a citizen and resident of this community.”
The Tribune reported that other high-profile Chicagoans have reported for jury duty, including Oprah Winfrey. And other former presidents have also done it.
George W. Bush, more than six years after the end of his presidency, sat through the jury selection panel at George Allen Dallas County Civil Court building in August 2015 but was not chosen as a juror.
Former president Bill Clinton became Prospective Juror No. 142 in federal court in Manhattan in March 2003, but was eventually dismissed for the case involving a gang shooting in the Bronx, according to the New York Times.
Joe Biden was called for jury duty in Delaware in January 2011 while he was serving as vice president but was not chosen to be a juror.
The Washington Post reported that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. reported for jury duty in Montgomery County, Md., in April 2015. He was being considered for a civil case involving a car crash but was not selected.
A 50-year-old man told the Tribune he was excited about possibly seeing Obama Wednesday.
“It’s cool,” Ronald Stubbs told the Tribune before reporting for jury duty. “I would love to see the former president.”
Rachel Siegel contributed to this report.
Read more:
Barack Obama is building a library — and grappling again with Chicago politics
Obama said leaving Malia at college was ‘like open heart surgery.’ Of course he cried.
She was a historic first lady, but Michelle Obama says some never saw past ‘my skin color’Although actor Kriti Sanon is just three films old, she has already been directed by some of the best filmmakers and co-starred with actors such as Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. However, it wasn’t an easy start for her, considering she had to face some bizarre criticism in the aspiring actor phase.
“There were some low phases in my life; there were films offered by big banners, but they were not the best debut projects. So, I had to tell myself that I should be patient and good things will happen to me,” says Kriti, who was born and brought up in Delhi and shifted to Mumbai to try her luck in Bollywood.
The actor, who turned 27 on Thursday, adds, “There were days when I was annoyed and irritated. On some days, I used to cry, because there was nothing to keep me busy. There were also times when I met a few people who told me that something was not right about me — someone told me, ‘You’re too good-looking. There has to be some sort of imperfection in you to look real on screen.’ I think I did feel low, but at the same time, I did have people who believed in me a lot. That’s what you need. I think that gave me a little more confidence.”
Kriti, who made her debut with Tiger Shroff in Heropanti (2014), went on to star in Dilwale (2015) and this year’s Raabta. Her personal life made headlines when she was linked up with her Raabta co-star Sushant Singh Rajput. Neither of them has ever accepted it publicly, and Kriti says that negative stories do affect her.
“I think I’ve made peace with all these rumours, but having said that, I’m also human and anything written about me does affect me. Though I know that the news is not true, being written in a negative way does make me feel bad. But it’s more important to move on from such things and focus on something exciting and positive,” says Kriti, who will soon be seen in Bareilly Ki Barfi.
Follow @htshowbiz for more
First Published: Jul 28, 2017 13:06 ISTAlmost exactly one month after this year’s version of Surly Brewing Co.’s Pentagram shipped, information has surfaced about a variant that is being worked on.
According to filings with the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the Minneapolis, Minn.-based brewery will be releasing Barrel-Aged Pentagram, a 9.4 percent ABV dark sour ale brewed with 2-row pale, Belgian crystal, chocolate and dark Munich malts as well as Columbus hops before being aged in red wine barrels sourced from California for 18 months. However, this version of the ale has been aged in rye whiskey barrels for an additional period before being bottled.
Surly has released a barrel-aged version of Pentagram before in 2014, but that version was a draft-only option aged in High West rye whiskey barrels and came in at a lower 6.7 percent ABV.
Barrel-Aged Pentagram will be packaged in 750ml bottles. An email sent the brewery was not immediately returned.The Sleeping Habits of the Rich and Famous
Tim By
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Who would’ve known Winston Churchill’s sleep habits were actually more similar to the public than Ben Franklin’s. It’s true though. Churchill was a huge advocate for naps. Like many old and young alike, napping seems essential to everyday life.
It does seem like a lot of our world leaders don’t get much sleep at night. Five hours looks like the most normal time anyone can get. Obama’s facts are skewed because he is only woken up early when important things take place. Like if we’re sending a drone to bomb a school, or if our embassy is being overrun by extremists.
Ok, that was harsh. I know America’s leader makes massive decisions that include life, death and acts of unthinkable conclusions. Maybe if the president was granted an entire full night’s sleep, our country would experience more educated decisions when it comes to foreign policy. Possibly not, but our leaders need to have the options to nap.
Napping is like taking a lunch break. It is necessary. It will help you be more efficient at work. A small break for every employee will create a culture which abides to our new generation’s work ethic.
Tim Co-Founder After a quick stint in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Tim moved to Austin, Texas at the ripe age of one. He then spent the next 17 years there experiencing all that Austin had to offer. Nightlife, music,...
13.4kYoung Thug and Future perform during Day 2 at The Meadows Music & Arts Festival at Citi Field on Sept. 16, 2017 in New York City.
Future and Young Thug are ready to shake things up at midnight with their new collaborative effort.
On Thursday (Oct. 19), Future and Thugger set the internet ablaze after they announced the news on their respective social media pages. First, Future tantalized fans by posting the cover art of their forthcoming project. The cover art consists of two menacing pythons tangled onto one another. "MIDNIGHT #SUPERSLIMEY," Future wrote on his Instagram.
Later, Thugger followed suit with several tweets on Twitter. "Midnight SUPERSLIMEY," he tweeted after posting the cover art. "I'm SUPERSLIMEY ILL FUCK AROUND AND SLIME OUT FUTURE."
Fans have been salivating for a possible project from the Atlanta tandem for sometime now. After the "Wyclef Jean" rapper teased fans with behind-the-scenes flicks from a video that took place last August with Future, Casino and Young Scooter, questions arose as to whether something big was on the way.
As well, on Wednesday, Young Scooter suggested that the fourth installment of his Street Lottery series would include both Future and Thugger. "#STREETLOTTERY4 FEATURING @1future @youngthug ON THE WHOLE TAPE GONE BE CRAZY," he wrote.
Check out the messages below.
Midnight SUPERSLIMEY https://t.co/H3N2V8AYJK — Young Thug ひ (@youngthug) October 19, 2017
I'm SUPERSLIMEY ILL FUCK AROUND AND SLIME OUT FUTURE------ — Young Thug ひ (@youngthug) October 19, 2017These reworked seasonal songs may get you out of the holiday spirit.
Be warned. These reworked seasonal songs may get you out of the holiday spirit.
The #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong hashtag trended on Twitter on Friday as tweeters spoiled their favorite Christmas songs by inserting President Donald Trump into the mix.
Check out some of the best posts below:
You're A Mean One, Mr. Trump #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— Oh Christmas T (@tlcprincess) December 22, 2017
#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer Which Medicare No Longer Covers Because the Top 1% Got a Tax Cut
— Trump Thoughts (@TrumpDotDotDot) December 22, 2017
#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong Come let us abhor him.
— Eileen Sateriale (@ewsateriale) December 22, 2017
All I Want For Christmas Is Impeachment#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— Luisa Haynes (@wokeluisa) December 22, 2017
#addtrumpruinanxmassong
Deck the halls w/ burning crosses
Me-me-me-me-me me-me-me-me
Show the serfs that we're their bosses
Me-me-me-me-me me-me-me-me
FOX is praising - I'm amazing
Me-me-me me-me-me me-me-me
Cap it off with nukes a-blazing
Me-me-me-me-me me-me-me-me
— Loretta Dill n (@lorettadillon) December 22, 2017
#addtrumpruinanxmassong
Dashing through the bill
So the rich don't have to pay
Ryan is his shill
Laughing all the way
The Mercers and the Kochs
Giggle with delight
What fun it is to screw the poor
Dictatorship's in sight.
Swindle bill
Swindle bill
Swindle all the way
— Peregrine (@Lies_Are_Chains) December 22, 2017
Trumpnuts Roasting over An Open Fire #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— View from my Office (@viewfrommyoffic) December 22, 2017
Baby it's a Cold War outside #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— HAY! (@HAYhowsitgoing) December 22, 2017
#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
I Saw Mommy Kissing Her Retirement Fund Goodbye
— Apodcalypse (@Apodcalypse) December 22, 2017
#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
Oh come all my Faithful pic.twitter.com/jjnSM5kdkj
— Stevius the Great (@steviusthegreat) December 22, 2017
12 dummies dumbing,
11 liars lying,
10 tweets-a-coming,
9 ladies accusing,
8 ties a-taping,
7 dentures a-flying,
6 slurs a-shpeaking,
5 golden seats,
4 angry birds,
3 french fries,
2 turtle sundaes,
And a dead squirrel as a hair piece#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— Craig Rozniecki (@CraigRozniecki) December 22, 2017
Do you fear what I fear #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— GrossMzConduct (@monalisa4068) December 22, 2017
He'll tweet while you are sleeping
He'll tweet when you're awake
He'll tweet when things are bad or good
He'll tweet until things break#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— Kushaan Shah (@kushaanshah) December 22, 2017
Oh, bring us some figgy Putin #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— RedBrown (@RedChazAz) December 22, 2017
You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I'm telling you why,
Robert Mueller's coming to town!#AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— Alex (@Neoprankster) December 22, 2017
O Covfefe, All Ye Faithful #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSong
— Christmas Peña (@chrispenartist) December 22, 2017
Deck the Halls with creepy decorations. #AddTrumpRuinAnXmasSongpic.twitter.com/4aevgKOv5k
— Eric's on the naughty list because he (@LVGambler123) December 22, 2017
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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Watch Late Night With Seth Meyers on Yahoo View.Isis will only be defeated by regional powers in the Middle East, John McDonnell has said. However, he said the Labour party wouldn’t make any decision on how to vote before hearing David Cameron’s proposals.
This morning the shadow chancellor appeared on the Andrew Marr show, he said Labour hadn’t yet decided whether there would be a free vote on airstrikes against Isis in Syria. McDonnell said the issue had to be debated by the shadow cabinet and then it would be discussed with the Parliamentary Labour Party.
McDonnell said that the party needed to see what David Cameron’s plan is before making any decisions, a sentiment also echoed by Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson. This comes after a United Nations resolution calling for action against Isis by any and all means.
Next week Cameron will outline his case for the UK taking part in the bombing campaign against Isis in Syria. The Prime Minister will address the foreign affairs select committee’s opposition to to airstrikes last month, in particular the concern that there is no no coherent international strategy for defeating Isis or ending the Syrian civil war.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has expressed extreme doubts over the effectiveness of airstrikes. Yesterday he told activists “the dreadful Paris attacks make the case for a far more urgent international effort … to reach a negotiated settlement of the Syrian civil war – and end the threat from Isis.”
However, a number of backbench MPs, such as John Woodcock MP and Liz Kendall MP, have indicated that they might vote for airstrikes if it comes before the Commons. George Osborne said the vote will only be called when the Government are sure they will have the numbers needed for their plans to pass through the Commons.
McDonnell explained his concerns over airstrikes, saying that a bombing campaign plays into Isis’ narrative where UK and US involvement is painted as a “crusader invasion”. He also rejected comparisons with WWII reportedly made by Cameron who is thought to be telling MPs to act like “Churchill not Chamberlain”
The Shadow Chancellor urged for a more sophisticated approach to the situation and said that the vote should not take place on a party political basis. “On the ground Isil has to be defeated by the regional powers in the Middle East…That’s the most effective long term security we can get,” he said.
McDonnell also asked Osborne to “end the cuts to policing”. He said the Chancellor would have his support on this issue if he chose to reverse cuts, and that there would be “no political game playing” on such |
button. You should see a new volunteer fieldset appear.
Removing Attendees
The requirements for remove are trickier. We want users to be able to remove extraneous attendees, but not be able to remove all of them. In other words, the page needs to have at least one fieldset at all times.
To solve this, we will only show a remove button for an attendee if more than one exists. Fortunately, our views are Just JavaScript™, so this shouldn't be a problem.
To keep our view code clean, let's create a new variable within the view for our logic:
//... view() { var showRemove = (entry.volunteers.length >= 2) return m('.entry-form', /*...[truncated]...*/) }
showRemove will be true if there are two or more attendees, and false if there is only one. This will help us prevent the user from removing the last volunteer.
Now we can elegantly add a remove button to our view:
//... view() { var showRemove = (entry.volunteers.length >= 2) return m('.entry-form', [ m('h1', "Entry Form"), m('h3', "Please enter each volunteer's contact information:"), entry.volunteers.map(function(volunteer, idx) { return m('fieldset', [ m('legend', "Volunteer #" + (idx+1)), m('label', "Name:"), m('input[type=text]', { value: volunteer.name }), m('br'), m('label', "Email:"), m('input[type=text]', { value: volunteer.email }), // === Here it is! === \\ showRemove && m('button', { onclick() { remove(idx) } },'remove') ]) }), m('button', { onclick: add }, 'Add another volunteer') ]) }
Beautiful! When showRemove is true, the && will continue and render the button. Otherwise, the && will short-circuit to false and show nothing (Mithril does not render falsey values).
We're done!
Two-Way Data Binding
...well, almost done.
Try this: fill in the first fieldset, and then add another volunteer. Oh no, our data got lost! This happens because we only implemented one-way data binding — from component state to view. We still need to implement the other direction — from view to state.
To do so, we need to respond to the onchange event. As it turns out, it is not that difficult:
m('label', "Name:"), m('input[type=text]', { value: volunteer.name, onchange(e) { // <-- new! volunteer.name = e.currentTarget.value } }),
And that's all it takes. Notice how there is no magic going on here – we're only doing a simple assignment to a plain value. This is something I really appreciate about Mithril.
The reason the above code works is because Mithril will redraw after running a browser event callback. It all goes something like this:
value: volunteer.name – Assign volunteer name to input box onchange() {... } – Bind a callback to the onchange event Initially, Mithril renders the page; it takes our view and uses it to efficiently construct the DOM. Later, the user types something into the input box, triggering the onchange event The callback bound to onchange runs, setting volunteer.name = to what the user typed in. After this callback is done running, Mithril redraws – it repeats steps 1-3, updating all views automatically!
If you're coding along, take the pattern we just wrote for the name input, and update the email input to match.
Finishing Up
Lastly, let's complete the view by adding a submit button to the very end, right under the "Add another volunteer" button:
// Don't forget your commas! m('button', { onclick: add }, 'Add another volunteer'), m('br'), // <-- New! m('button', { onclick: submit }, 'Submit') // <-- New!
Once again, we've done a bit of wishful programming, as submit does not yet exist; that is coming up next.
7. Completing the EntryForm Component
Now for the final step: submitting the form. As suggested by the previous step, we need to add a submit function to our component. Here's what it looks like:
function submit () { Entry.create(entry) m.route.set('/') }
Wow, only two lines! Here we are taking all data the organizer has typed in ( entry ), and passing it to the model to turn it into "real" model data! Put another way, we're persisting our view-model data. Afterwards, we use m.route to redirect the organizer to the EntryList page.
If you're coding along, try it out now!
In a real application, submit would be the perfect place to initiate confirmations, run validation, etc.
That's it folks, we're done. You can view the full gist here, or run git checkout mithril-part-1-solution in the git repository.
Conclusion
In this post we covered:
What a Mithril component is (plain JS object with a view property)
property) How to do client-side routing with m.route
The concept of view-model and view state
Two-way data binding
Showing a modified view based on a conditional
Committing new model data within a component action
How almost everything is plain JavaScript!
Because Mithril uses functional JavaScript constructs, we can refactor our view in ways that are framework-agnostic, allowing us to construct the architecture that's right for our application. Mithril is a wonderful, lightweight framework that embraces JavaScript-the-language instead of trying to abstract over it. For this and many other reasons, Mithril has persisted as my frontend framework of choice for the past five years.
In part 2, we will implement both the Total and Coupon components. Until next time!
Further ReadingScalia: These court rulings would’ve erased America from history
Arizona is beleaguered by an illegal alien population larger than the size of any colony when the Constitution was ratified. Yet the state is completely prevented by puny lower courts from protecting its self-determination (sovereignty). At the same time, the island state of Hawaii, under our misguided and corrupt conception of the federal judiciary, has the ability to violate the self-determination of the entire nation and demand that the federal government bring in unlimited number of immigrants from the Middle East.
Turning state sovereignty on its head
Once again, the Justice Department found itself in the palace of the Ninth Circuit this week defending national sovereignty on an issue that should never have come before a court. Given that national sovereignty and immigration statutes no longer have meaning, the three-judge panel haggled with plaintiffs and the DOJ during oral arguments not over the law but over the meaning of the Supreme Court’s edict to allow in anyone with “bona fide” ties to America from countries included in the immigration moratorium order.
In July, the six liberal justices on the Supreme Court refused to stay the temporary injunction of Judge Watson, who ordered the administration to allow in all brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins not only of citizens but even of immigrants residing in America. SCOTUS kicked the decision back to the Ninth Circuit, which dealt with the issue during Monday’s hearing. But there’s one important detail that has been lost in the circus of judicial supremacy and stolen sovereignty: the lead plaintiff in this case is the state of Hawaii. How can a state get standing, much less win on the merits, to require the federal government to bring in more immigrants than it desires in order to satisfy a state?
Which brings us to Arizona.
For years, the federal court system has tampered with every effort by Arizona citizens to deal with their systemic problems caused by illegal immigration. Every commonsense law enforcement initiative, voting integrity law, and financial protection act was “struck down” by the wacky district judges and the Ninth Circuit. The courts said over and over again that the federal government has so much power over immigration that a state can’t even independently complement or enforce immigration laws.
Yet now the courts are saying states can demand more immigration and even strong-arm the plenary federal power over immigration to do so. They have flipped sovereignty on its head — upside-down, inside-out — narrowly interpreting sovereignty as the least common denominator of the desire to restrict between the federal and state governments rather than the greatest common factor of each one’s desire to protect its own sovereignty.
Which brings us to Justice Scalia.
Nobody explained this concept better than Scalia, in his dissent in Arizona v. U.S. on the state’s 2010 immigration enforcement law, S.B. 1070. But first some background on S.B. 1070.
S.B. 1070 had four major provisions: It made illegal immigration in Arizona a state crime, made it a misdemeanor for an illegal to seek employment in the state, authorized warrantless arrests of those suspected of being here illegally based on probable cause, and required law enforcement to make a reasonable attempt to ascertain the immigration status of those lawfully detained when there is reasonable suspicion to believe they are here illegally.
District Judge Susan Bolton invalidated all the provisions, as did the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court “struck down” the first three provisions, but upheld the provision requiring law enforcement to check immigration status.
Scalia would have upheld all four provisions, and in his mind, it wasn’t even close. Arizona was the victim, while the lawless courts and their allies in the legal profession were the aggressors.
Scalia began his dissent by noting that states have complete sovereignty over their territory unless their acts are specifically and directly barred by the federal government:
Today’s opinion, approving virtually all of the Ninth Circuit’s injunction against enforcement of the four challenged provisions of Arizona’s law, deprives States of what most would consider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there. Neither the Constitution itself nor even any law passed by Congress supports this result.
He went on to prove how the Founders and early political leaders gave immigration policy to the federal government in order to protect the sovereignty of the states, not violate it:
In other words, the naturalization power was given to Congress not to abrogate States’ power to exclude those they did not want, but to vindicate it.
Thus, both the Constitution and the inherent right to sovereignty rooted in social compact theory dictates that federal control over immigration should primarily be in one direction: more restrictive than states would want, not less restrictive. Now, obviously, once the feds were given final say over immigration, the letter of the law dictates that states cannot prevent immigrants from settling within their borders where statute otherwise authorizes it. However, as Scalia noted, a state “has the sovereign power to protect its borders more rigorously if it wishes, absent any valid federal prohibition,” and in this case, “Arizona is entitled to have ‘its own immigration policy’—including a more rigorous enforcement policy—so long as that does not conflict with federal law.”
Yet, over the past decade, Judge Susan Bolton and several other leftist judges have stolen the sovereignty of the state and voted down, like a super-legislature or an executive veto, every commonsense measure that passed either via state law or ballot initiative. She overturned an anti-smuggling law in 2014 as well.
In 2006, 77 percent of voters approved Arizona Proposition 100, which denied bail to illegal aliens charged with “serious felony offenses.” After this measure was “struck down” by the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. In dissenting from the denial of certiorari, Thomas and Scalia were furious. “Our indifference to cases such as this one will only embolden the lower courts to reject state laws on questionable constitutional grounds,” wrote Thomas.
Returning to the Ninth Circuit case involving Hawaii, ponder for a moment the astonishing hypocrisy of courts upholding federal powers over immigration to such an extreme that states cannot even complement federal laws, while at the same time, states that want liberal immigration policies can directly veto federal laws. Further juxtapose this with the growing list of lower courts that are not only upholding sanctuary laws but mandating sanctuary cities by preventing states and localities from cooperating with ICE detainer requests.
The rulings of these lower, Congress-created courts, which overturn immigration law, popular sovereignty, the social compact, and settled case law stating courts have no jurisdiction over immigration, are now considered the law of the land.
The forgotten man of Arizona
What about the forgotten man of Arizona who never violated any law? Take heed of what Scalia wrote at the end of his partial dissent in Arizona v. U.S., universally heralded by conservatives and libertarians:
As is often the case, discussion of the dry legalities that are the proper object of our attention suppresses the very human realities that gave rise to the suit. Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. Thousands of Arizona’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants—including not just children but men and women under 30—are now assured immunity from enforcement, and will be able to compete openly with Arizona citizens for employment. Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.
There is something fundamentally wrong when lower court judges can destroy our heritage, values, and sovereignty and twist the Constitution and natural law in the most grotesque fashion without facing any reprisal, check, or balance. There is something fundamentally wrong when people delegitimize the pardon of one sheriff — whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s decision — but unquestionably support the de facto judicial pardons of millions of illegal aliens, including some of the most violent ones, even though courts manifestly lack such power. Moreover, Obama illegally “pardoned” (plus gave affirmative benefits to) 900,000 illegal aliens, including the likes of Salvador Diaz-Garcia, who allegedly raped a 19-year old American and broke almost every bone in her face, and yet the courts are using those illegal pardons as a cudgel against Arizona.
Scalia posed the following question at the end of his epic dissent, addressing the political problems of stolen sovereignty at the hands of a lawless executive. The same applies today to the lawless judiciary:
Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws? A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding?
With polls showing Arizona’s junior senator, Jeff Flake, down by as many as 26 points in his primary against Kelli Ward, an unprecedented position for an incumbent, it’s very possible that the people of Arizona are ready to answer this question.Laura Loomer, a right-wing activist known for her “journalism” practice of harassing politicians and actual journalists, took to Twitter after news broke of a terror attack in New York City to unveil her deep disdain for all Muslim people.
Yesterday, in the wake of a terror attack that killed eight people in Manhattan, Loomer took to Twitter and Periscope to continue her shtick of harassing actual news reporters and espousing conspiracy theories about breaking news events. Her typical routine took a dark twist, however, when investigators revealed the suspected attacker was a domestically radicalized Muslim associated with ISIS.
When information about the attacker’s identity was publicized, Loomer launched into a full-out Muslim-bashing meltdown that only grew more intense with the passage of time.
Loomer began by identifying herself as a “Proud Islamophobe” and labeling Muslims “savages” who “ruin everything”:
Then let me be the first to say I never want another Muslim entering this country EVER AGAIN! #ProudIslamophobe https://t.co/1ULHhhorYn — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 31, 2017
Leave it to Muslims to ruin everything. People can’t even enjoy #Halloween without those savages f**king everything up for everyone. https://t.co/KNRwUM7EJk — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 31, 2017
She later stated that “Islam is cancer” and “we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world”:
How many more people need to die before everyone agrees that Islam is cancer & we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world? — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 31, 2017
Loomer then declared there is “no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same”:
There’s no such thing as a moderate Muslim. They’re ALL the same. It’s time for us to accept this reality. I refuse to watch more ppl die. — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 31, 2017
Loomer later lashed out at The New York Times for sending a hijab-wearing reporter to cover the attack:
.@nytimes sent a female Muslim hijab wearing reporter to cover #ISIS terror attack in NYC. I asked her to disavow, she laughed & refused! — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 1, 2017
Loomer claimed that Muslims “deserve” anti-Muslim sentiments in the wake of the attack, urging people to “bring it on”:
They deserve it. Maybe when they all decide to condemn Islamic terror I might feel bad for them, but for now, bring it on. #BanIslam https://t.co/WHwdxkZqwK — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 1, 2017
When news reports revealed that the attacker worked as a driver for Uber, Loomer suggested making a Muslim-free alternative to the ride-sharing service so she never has to “support another Islamic immigrant driver”:
Someone needs to create a non Islamic form of @uber or @lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver. — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 1, 2017
Loomer then revealed that she generally tries “not support Muslim owned businesses companies” in New York and complained that immigration policies make that mission difficult:
I generally try to not support Muslim owned businesses companies here in NY. That shouldn’t be hard to do in US, but w/ immigration it is. https://t.co/6wySEQQWkR — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 1, 2017
Despite her far-out tactics and transparently bigoted views, many right-wing outlets such as Fox News, Infowars, Wayne Allyn Root and Mike Cernovich continue to host Loomer as a reputable journalist.TURKISH security forces captured the suspected gunman who killed 39 people at the Reina nightclub attack in Istanbul on New Year's Eve.
Abdulkadir Masharipov, described by officials as a well-educated terrorist who speaks four languages, was detained by cops in the city's Esenyurt district, just 25 miles from where the deadly assault was carried out.
22 A bloodied Abdulkadir Masharipov pictured following his arrest in Istanbul
22 Masharipov was detained just 25 miles from the scene of the New Year's Eve shooting at the Reina nightclub
22 The suspect was filmed being marched out of a house surrounded by police and reporters
22 Local media reported that the terror suspect resisted arrest
Enterprise News and Pictures 22 The gunman opened fire in a packed nightclub on New Year's Eve in Istanbul, killing 39 people
The Uzbek national, who was operating under the alias Ebu Muhammed Horasani, was caught after over two weeks on the run.
The huge manhunt involved around 1,000 cops, detectives and other officers scouring through 7,200 hours of CCTV footage and over 2,000 public tip-offs.
A special operations task force swooped on a council-owned house reportedly rented by Masharipov's friend on Monday night.
He reportedly resisted arrest and was detained in front of his four-year-old son.
The alleged fanatic, said to be 34-years-old, underwent medical checks before being taken to a police headquarters for questioning.
related stories 'I'M INNOCENT' SECOND man wrongly accused of Istanbul terror attack speaks out after 'his passport is leaked by cops 'I DIDN'T KNOW HE WAS ISIS FANATIC' Istanbul gunman's wife tells cops she only knew of atrocity when she saw it on TV ‘MY HEART GOES OUT TO HER FAMILY' CBB star Shilpa Shetty pays tribute to fashion designer pal killed in Istanbul attack NEW YEAR TERROR What happened in the Istanbul attack and who carried out the New Year's Eve nightclub shooting? INCHES FROM DEATH Istanbul attack victim cheats death when Santa killer's bullet bounces off his MOBILE PHONE HUNT FOR isis SANTA KILLER ISIS claims responsibility for Istanbul attack that left 39 dead in New Year's Eve nightclub Video SANTA CLAUS KILLER Moment terrorist dressed as Santa guns down 39 in Istanbul nightclub in New Year's Eve massacre
Officials said he confessed to carrying out the massacre shortly after interrogation began.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters: "The vile terrorist who attacked the place of entertainment on New Year's eve and led to the loss of so many lives has been captured".
He added: "What is important is for the suspect to be captured and for the forces behind it to be revealed."
Istanbul governor Vasip Sahin said that the captured nightclub attack suspect is an Uzbekistan national who trained in Afghanistan.
He is believed to have entered Turkey illegally in January 2016, and arrived in the city on 15 December.
Reuters 22 The living room of a hideout where the alleged attacker of Reina nightclub was caught by Turkish police on Monday night
Reuters 22 Filthy flat in Esenyurt is where police swooped on terror suspect and three alleged accomplices
Reuters 22 A copy of the Koran sits in the flat where Abdulgadir Masharipov was found
Reuters 22 Bags of cash from several countries was found in one of the bedrooms
AP:Associated Press 22 A note which says the author will 'be in the other place' was among documents uncovered at the flat
Reuters 22 Reporters stand near the door to the flat which was blasted open by police on Monday night
Getty Images 22 A man walks through the kitchen where four people were arrested
Dogan news agency published what it said was the first image of the alleged attacker.
It showed a bruised, black-haired man in a grey, bloodied shirt being held by his neck.
The alleged gunman's friend, reportedly from Iraq, and three women from Somalia, Senegal and Egypt were also were detained.
His son was taken into protective custody following the police raid.
Earlier, his wife and one-year old daughter were caught in a police operation on January 12.
Police established his whereabouts four or five days ago, but delayed the raid so they could monitor his movements and contacts, NTV reported.
The television channel also broadcast footage showing plain-clothed police taking away a man in a white top and sweat pants, forcing his head down.
The station said the images showed the gunman's Iraqi friend being taken to a police vehicle.
22 Police released this still of the alleged killer from his'selfie video'
Twitter 22 Shooter was filmed on CCTV blasting party-goers as he stormed nightclub
Police were carrying out raids on other suspected ISIS group cells at the same time.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu posted a Twitter message thanking the interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, police and intelligence organisations "who caught the Reina attacker in the name of the people."
Depraved terror group ISIS claimed the attack was in reprisal for Turkish military operations in northern Syria
The brutal assault took place just 75 minutes into 2017 and also left a reported 69 people in hospital.
At least 600 revellers were celebrating at the popular nightspot in the early hours of New Year’s Day when the attack took place.
The gunman arrived by taxi and produced a weapon, reportedly a Kalashnikov, from the boot before shooting dead a policeman and civilian at the entrance.
Rex Features 22 Another man believed to be an Iraqi was detained in the police raid
Haberler 22 Police also arrested three women from Egypt, Somalia and Senegal
Haberler 22 Two of the three women arrested along with Abdulkadir Masharipov
Masharipov, an Uzbek national, is said to have arrived in the Turkish city from the centre of the country on December 15.
Hurriyet reports that an ISIS cell operating in the central region of Konya consists of Uzbeks who provided Masharipov with support.
Uzbek fighters have become deeply embedded in ISIS and have fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They are also said to have secret outposts in some major Russian cities as well as having ties to Muslim extremists in China.
22 Harrowing pictures show the carnage left inside the Istanbul club after the shooting
22 The gunman fired an estimated 120 bullets at clubbers
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus has said the nightclub attack had been carried out professionally with the help of an intelligence organisation.
He did not name the organisation suspected of being involved.
Hundreds of people were gathered at the swanky Reina nightclub to celebrate the end of a tumultuous 2016 only to become the first victims of 2017.
Most of the dead in the attack on the upscale club were foreign nationals, from the Middle East.
The gunman reportedly left Reina in a taxi.
22 CCTV footage shows the man believed to have carried out the massacre in Istanbul
Reuters 22 Paramedics rushed the scores of wounded people to ambulances after the Istanbul nightclub attack
Getty Images 22 Relatives mourn Fatih Cakmak, 35, a security guard who died in the Reina nightclub attack
Following the massacre distressing images later showed the aftermath of the massacre, with the bloodied bodies of the victims piled on top of each other.
According to reports, terrified partygoers lept into the freezing waters of the Bosphorous river to escape the horrific scenes.
It was initially reported that the killer entered the nightclub wearing a Santa hat, based on early CCTV footage of the attack.
But the Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildrim has said there was no truth to the reports.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368Donald Trump has hired veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio, a libertarian who worked for Rand Paul’s campaign.
Trump brought Fabrizio on board after consulting with his new convention manager Paul Manafort, who absorbed many of the duties previously handled by Corey Lewandowski, sources tell Infowars.
Lewandowski, on the other hand, wanted to hire Ted Cruz’s former pollster Kelly Ann Conway.
Fabrizio, who sources describe as a street fighter with a healthy obsession with winning, has years of experience as a political and corporate strategist who specializes in quantitative and qualitative opinion research.
He also has experience in assessing government waste, such as his 2008 study showing the average Massachusetts voter believes the state wastes 41% of its funding.
Fabrizio, like Trump, has also been targeted by the establishment media for interjecting libertarianism into the GOP.
For example, in 2014 the National Review accused Fabrizio of “misrepresenting” the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of Americans with his poll questions, but their accusations backfired given the comments from readers.
Besides working on the Rand Paul campaign, Fabrizio also worked on Kentucky’s Gov. Matt Bevin’s win in 2015 and served as an adviser for the Senate campaign of Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis, a libertarian-leaning Republican.Play on.
People with anxiety handle how they grapple with the disorder in different ways.
Some ignore it, others use medication, and still others seek out talk therapy.
12 Things Only People With Anxiety Can Teach You About Life
I have tried all three of those approaches and found that a combination of the second two are the most helpful.
That said, if you’re a person with an anxiety disorder, you’re not just going to magically be healed one day.
I manage my anxiety well, but I still get panic attacks and I still have anxious days. That just comes with the territory.
That’s why, when I read that researchers have literally created A SONG that has reduced anxiety by 67% in everyone who listens to it, I basically went running for my headphones.
Researchers at MindLab in the UK teamed up with Marconi Union to create a song specifically designed to soothe and reduce stress.
The musicians teamed up with sound therapists to create music that would lower the heart rate, blood pressure, and actual cortisol (the hormone that causes stress) levels of the people listening to it.
The result is an eight-minute track called “Weightless” that the neuroscientists in charge of the program say is so effective that you SHOULD NOT listen to it while you drive.
As a person with a generalized anxiety disorder, I know how easy it is to feel isolated, desperate, and afraid.
If a song like this can take away some of that hurt, why not try it?
One thing I’ve discovered as I’ve begun to write more about anxiety and talk more about it on social media is that anxiety is more common than you might think, especially among people in Generation Y.
Why is this anxiety so common among me and my peers?
The answer is actually kind of surprising.
Researcher and writer Rachel Dove reported that more than half of all female university students report feeling anxiety, and in researching why, she found:
“The rise of technology, overly-protective parenting, and “exam-factory” schooling are among the reasons psychologists suggest for our generational angst. Another, brought up on multiple occasions by my peers and by psychologists I spoke to, is the luxury (as ungrateful as it sounds) of too much choice.”
It might sound silly, but it makes a lot of sense.
10 Quick Ways To Relax When You’re Freaked Out And STRESSED Out
Life can be a lot easier when you don’t have any choices to make.
Being given a multitude of options can be, well, deeply overwhelming.
Combine that with the pressures of “success,” whatever that means, and the fear of missing out on ANYTHING fun, perpetuated by social media, and you’ve got a perfect storm for anxiety.
You need to find the treatment that works best for you.
It doesn’t matter if that treatment is a song, a pill, a long walk, or talking to your therapist for an hour or two every week.
Do what you need to do to feel as awesome as possible, because you ARE awesome, and just because your brain goes a little haywire sometimes that doesn’t make you worth less as a person or be less cool to know.
This guest article originally appeared on YourTango.com: The One Song You Need To Hear That Cuts Anxiety By More Than Half.
Researchers Created a Song to Help Combat AnxietyAnother year another ukulele festival...... Hang on, that sounds dismissive, that's not what I meant. For anyone who has ever been to a GNUF event before, this is not just another ukulele festival, it's a return to what I think is the best ukulele festival there is. So, eight months later, in a new earlier calendar slot, my third Grand Northern Ukulele Festival Diary.
Workshop with Manitoba Hal
Heidi Bang Tidy
Eek and Elsie
Mike Hind and Ben Rouse
Michael Adcock
Edward Alice
No Direction Hot Boys
Liam Capper-Starr
Kiki Lovechild
Krabbers joined by Les Hilton on harmonica
Ian Emmerson makes his return
Sarah Maisel and Craig Chee joined by Ben Rouse
The Mersey Belles
Ben Rouse
Manitoba Hal
The Quiet American
The finale on day one
Tim and Jake Smithies - Dead Mans Uke
Spen Valley Troubadours
Mike Warren
Francesco Albertazzi
Chonkinfeckle with Andi Cooke
Zoë Bestel
damn
Still in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, this year GNUF once again looked to develop itself further. 2014 was a huge event on the worlds ukulele calendar, headlined as it was by the Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain, but if there is one thing I have learned in the last few years about these organisers it's this. They DON'T rest on their laurels. They wanted to build further on 2014 to create another world class event, and I think they did just that. Heck, I won't even go with the usual pattern of building things up for the reader in order to give you the final, cheesy knockout punch that tells you what I thought. I'll say it right away. This was theyet. By far.This will be a long blog post, go grab yourself a coffee and read at your leisure!2015 saw the Grand Northern Ukulele Festival back in Huddersfield in the UK with a bigger festival in terms of acts but in a new, on the face of it smaller, venue. Now that may come across like some sort of Doctor Who magic, but it comes down to a clever new choice of venue. This time, and for the first time for GNUF, we had true multiple performance stages. Like 2014, we had a main stage and a fringe stage (once again in a SUPERB record store in Huddersfield called Vinyl Tap) but this time we had a third. Yes, a three stage ukulele festival, allowing more acts and more choice for the punters.Multiple stages may at first make you think 'hang on, I can't possibly see everything', and that is true. But think about it, all the great music festivals have multiple stages and they do so for good reason. Partly it allows more acts to get an opportunity to play, but it also allows the audience to do a bit of work selecting what they want to watch. This is a GOOD thing. Choice an variety are good (note, that word 'variety' is going to become a theme in this diary). No festival can provide for every taste, and for me the answer to that is not simply to fill a Main stage with headliners, but the sensible choice is to provide more breadth and more variety (told you).Another thing to bear in mind here. Because I could not be in two places at once, I had to pick the acts I wanted to see and therefore can't talk about every performer in this blog. Nothing personal - just matter of fact. There were some I was gutted to miss on stage, but by missing them I would have been gutted to miss others. So apologies here to Professor Pete and Doctor Dick, Adam Franklin, The Toots, Jamie Cooper, Michael Shepherd, Robin Evans, Feckless and Fuddle and all the Fringe performers for having to miss you. Heck, I even had to miss my dear pals Chonkinfeckle which tells you everything.And with that clumsy and overly long introduction out of the way, on with the diary.....and things start badly. Not festival related, but in a horrific repeat of 2014, what would ordinarily be a 1 hour 30 minute journey for me, in reality takes my wife and I FOUR hours to make. It would seem that the UK Government roadworks programme for 22 May 2015 had been deliberately adjusted to inconvenience me in the biggest way possible. Those who follow me on Facebook will recall the frustrated outpourings of a man who HATES motorway delays.. but no matter, we arrived (late) safe and sound.Friday at GNUF does form part of the programme of events. More informally I guess, but it's more than just a 'turn up at the pub' kind of night.Arrive..Food...And then we need some ukulele. Well, I say 'need some ukulele' what Friday at GNUF really means to me is meeting up with old friends, making new ones, and doing that weirdest of things what wouldn't have happened 'back in the day' - Meeting up with people you know on social media but haven't met as yet.That's always a weird one that comes stained with a certain amount of worry ( I must say). You see, we all talk to people from all around the world on social media but,'sure, he sounds great, she is wonderful'. But you always have a twinge of worry / doubt that when you actually meet them it will all be horrible. For 2015, I knew the vast majority of the performers, but there were some pretty big names on this bill that I hadn't as yet met. You know, the Craig Chee, Mike Hind, Aaron and Nicole Keims of this world. Frightening huh? Without wishing to fall back on the ukulele code that some uke players live by that 'all ukulele players are WONDERFUL because it's such a happy instrument', I am pleased to say that this Friday I met some of the nicest people I know. And that's not just blowing smoke where the sun don't shine - without exception, ALL really nice people.So yes, Friday was still low key, but I arrive at a PACKED Head Of Steam Pub next to Huddersfield Station to find an Mike Hind entertaining a crowd in a way that I have learned lately he is SO good at. The pub is shoulder to shoulder, and I struggle to get in. We buy some drinks and listen to Mike through the window. (He is good, he won't mind). A quick word on that, GNUF in 2014 used the same pub but I felt, on looking back, that the performance side was more secondary and it really was a case of it being full of uke players strumming from club song books. That's cool, but I personally thought it needed acts on from the off. I've learned this weekend (as if I didn't know it before) that Mike Hind should be top of that list..I digress. I am outside listening... Hey, there's Sarah! - so great to see Sarah Maisel again. I've not seen here since I was in Cheltenham some years before, but at that time she was not yet to become engaged to marry one Mr Craig Chee, who was also coming to the festival to perform.What a nice guy! It kind of figures I suppose. Heck, I KNEW Sarah was a nice person from the first time I met her so why should she hook up with anything less. Here's the thing with Craig / Social media, |
for father-son relationships worldwide.
Being primarily a North American yogi also means that I cannot speak to the politics of KYM/KHYF from an Indian point of view. Having spent some time in India, I know that KYM/KHYF is embedded within a web of cultural influences that I will never fully understand. I hope that my postmodern and North American critique inspires something equal from an Indian counterpart, who can speak to the meaning and position of KYM/KHY within Indian yoga culture particularly, and Indian culture generally.
3. Resorts and Ashrams, Vacations and Pilgrimmages: Where Shall We Find Yoga?
As I described last winter, the Anusara situation presented a kind of systemic vata derangement with regard to relationship, intimacy, and home. Too much air and wind element, too much wandering-lust, too many qualified elders bailing out of the tour bus, too many householders borrowing against their homes for yoga vacays with John, too many DVDs, too many breathless people opening their unboundaried hearts at too many eco-resorts. The violations of Kausthub and the so-far hunkered-down responses by KYM/KHYF, by contrast, seem to have the sticky coating of excess kapha. Entrenchment disguised as stability. Stunted infantile sexuality. Self-satisfaction disguised as authority. Possessiveness over teachings disguised as “lineage purity”.
Constitutional imbalances aside, both organizations project the same distortion: yoga as an exoticism to be purchased in a place more hallowed than your hometown. There are differences, but I believe each system leads us away from our hometowns and existential facts. Friend hawked the pseudo-Tantra of “follow the Shri”, while KYM/KHYF promotes the throwback transcendentalism of Patanjali. Friend was always a little more accessible in the “manifesting abundance” department, offering a liberal distribution network: he vended in conference centers and wellness destinations, and assessed his students by video. The Desikachars, by contrast, have leveraged their exoticism through an opposite, scarcity model: you have to make a pilgrimage to their home to get the goods. In a way, Kausthub has bridged the two models with his travelling training show, but the umbilicus of his authority reaches back to Chennai.
Here’s my main point: between the junkets to Shringri-la and the devotional pilgrimage to the feet of teachers upon which we project our unintegrated wishes, I believe our daily experience, local resources, and workaday lives – which is where our yoga is really found and learned in the end – are vastly undervalued. Our studio newsletters and yoga magazines are filled with advertisements for places that are anywhere-but-here.
Why not just stay home and build grounded communities, rather than corporate satellites for cultures not our own? Is it too plain-Jane? Too every-day? What is this star-dust in our eyes?
4. Assessing the Memes and Products of Corporate Yoga
I’ve gleaned certain things from the opposing memes of Anusara and KYM through the years. The pilgrimage to KYM seems heavier in tone and commitment than zipping up to Denver to Blow Your Mind™. Those I know who have gone to Chennai speak of their trips in low voices, using few particulars. They use the word “authentic” a lot. They take their time with their words, cloaking what they have learned with caution and humility. This is in stark contrast to the barkers of Shringlish, who couldn’t seem to refrain from bullying everyone with the presumed divinity of everything. They’ve recently gone quiet, thankfully.
The KYM/KHYF product seems to be framed by the journey to KYM/KHYF, a pilgrimage to make contact with the body of the son of the father who lived there once: T.K.V. is the lineage-holder of a kind of cryogenized shaktipat. I imagine he has needed to hold this power close, because he offers no easily-extractable method, as does Friend. You can’t boil yoga therapy down into UPA-style sound-bites, sellable in 20-hour doses in Puerto Vallarta. Yoga therapy demands the touch of a master so intuitive and specialized, it cannot be packaged. You have to sit at his feet for years to learn how to do it. It’s so very complex, you might just have to be his very son to understand it, inherit it, to own it, and to pass it on.
The Anusara product offered a lot of excellent instruction, but seemed to stake out its financial position through a kind of grandiose self-validation scheme, available to everyone who could pay to play. The KYM/KHYF product is subtler and richer, projecting a hushed sanctimony, and available to those willing to devote themselves to months per year in India, and a lifetime in the master’s shadow. On the Anusara side we have a product that shareholders are eager to divorce from its disgraced inventor. They can afford to dispense with Friend, because they can divide his product from his charisma. But on the KYM/KHYF side we see a product that is intrinsic to the master’s DNA. If T.K.V. is found conclusively to have sheltered his son from ethical scrutiny, what would be left of the organization he has built upon his character and his family name? He seems to have delegated relatively little substantial authority, except to his son. Even one of his most prominent Western students, Gary Kraftsow, was forced by some behind-the-curtain intellectual property-rights battle to rebrand his teaching syllabus as “American Viniyoga”. “American”, as in: “parts of it came from somewhere else, but now it’s mostly my own thing.” The message seems to be that real viniyoga remains safe within the Krishnamacharya gene pool, although they no longer even use the word “viniyoga”. The deeper message? Genes trump knowledge? This is sure to backfire when the genes begin to deviate.
5. In the Shadow of the Fathers
I’ve thought for a while that the global attraction to a place like KYM/KHYF is in part an attraction to the same paternalism that now factors heavily in its troubles. Perhaps our drive to follow the son of the father of modern yoga, and then the son of the son, reflects our chronic need for a protective “authentic connection” to the “source”. Perhaps KYM/KHYF is a popular self-transformation destination in part because it serves up yoga with a sheen of that paternal certainty for which postmoderns are unconsciously nostalgic. See the tintype portraits in the hallways. Dream of being adopted into this venerable caste. Dream of approval, of being at the centre of things, of the benediction-pat on the head.
But seriously: who believes that father-son dynasties are altogether healthy? I look at those pictures of T.K.V. sweating through asanas under the “eagle eyes” of his father and wonder: Did you really choose this? And your son – did he choose it too? Or are we seeing in you guys a chain of demands, and the anxiety of influence? I remember the story of Krishnamacharya snapping both of young Bellur Iyengar’s hamstrings to force him into hanumanasana to show off for visiting dignitaries. How imperious might he have been with his own son? It is clear that Mr. Iyengar has gone on to injure some if not many of his own students. Aadil Palkhivala stood in front of a room I was in a decade ago and smiled as he regaled us with the story of how B.K.S. humiliated him by commanding him to perform handstand for an hour in front of the group. “I couldn’t lift my arms for six months afterwards!” he laughed, which is what men do when they don’t know how else to process the absurd violence committed upon them. (They also laugh in deference when they are still scared.)
Elder male/younger male – not to mention father-son – dynamics are complex enough without adding in the spectacle of a public family business built upon spiritual exceptionalism. Anyone with a shred of basic psychoanalysis on board can see that T.K.V. stepped into a long shadow when he donned his father’s dhoti. And I imagine that if we scratch the surface of any of these first families of modern yoga we will see – as we do in every family and every culture – strong evidence of transgenerational cycles of violence and repression. Or do we think it’s somehow all simpler and more benign because it’s Indian?
6. Infantile-Aggressive Sexuality
One of the strangest themes in the allegations against Kausthub is his apparent aggressive sexual infantilism: enshrouded in magical thinking, enraged frustration, intense guilt and slut-shaming. These are accounts of a child-man playing sadistic doctor: pressing marma points with enough force to send one woman into convulsions, slapping buttocks and poking breasts, creating public scenes of icky innuendo, and assaulting female students with full-tongue kisses and potty-mouthed epithets. This is not John Friend’s schmaltz of multiple smooth-talking seductions and sophisticated lying that kept women waiting for him in supta baddha konasana in every port-of-call. Although it seems like Friend’s neo-Tantric sexuality couldn’t just be sex either – it had to be “therapy”, involving the very well-known and double-blind-tested procedure of “urethral-pouch massage”, for example. Or it had to “raise energy” for the coming global Shreevolution. It could be anything except intimate.
If the allegations against Kausthub are true, we’re seeing something much darker in Chennai. I’ll read it, hypothetically, through Freud:
Kausthub seems to present a sexuality arrested at a pre-Oedipal stage in which the child-man has been wrenched from the maternal sphere to be disciplined into the patriarchal path, and is now turning to women to beg for attention and validation as he tries to overcome his father’s power. But he unconsciously hates women, projecting onto every one he meets the image of the mother who seemed to abandon him. He digs deep into the misogyny of patriarchy, and runs with it: women are troubled, they are sick and degraded, they are possessed – and the fact that they do not yield to him proves their pathology. He pokes them, prods them, punishes them and slaps them like an overgrown toddler. This is straight-up limbic brain sexuality, murky and aggressing. It fears castration. It’s neither procreative, nor self-confident, nor joy-seeking. It is overwhelmed with a BPD-like terror of abandonment. It attempts to impersonate the power of his patrilineage: he told one woman that having sex with him would heal her, because he would let her hold Krishnamacharya’s ring during intercourse. It is the gross amplification of the sick and fearful tremor that many boys feel on the terrible threshold of autonomy and sexual action, and which he has not been allowed to resolve.
The tremor will deepen to the extent that a boy has been force-fed the psychological splitting of a sex-shaming and body-digusted tradition. Should we really be surprised at the shadow-explosions of a man like Kausthub, given his spiritual heritage? Given that T.V.K. and KYM/KHYF have taken their neo-ascetic reading of Patanjali as their root scripture, which says “By purification arises disgust for one’s own body and for contact with other bodies” (2.40, translation by Sacchidananda)? Or given that all Krishnamacharya would say about the sexual practices of the 3rd chapter of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika was that they were “dirty”, and “improper”? Or given that A.G. Mohan, Krishnamacharya’s other senior student beside T.V.K., is still giving Victorian-era tsk-tsk-ing lectures on how “Spirituality and Sexuality are Diametrically Opposed”? What are we to expect, amidst this much repression? A man-child with urges that disgust him throwing himself at women who both disgust him and whom he must objectify, all in the shadow of a father who unconsciously humiliates him with his virtue, fame, and sublimated virility.
7. Boycotting Guru Culture
I say: let’s help KYM/KHYF close up shop for a few years and do their family/communal therapy in private. When they re-open, it should be with a revamped Board of Directors in which less than a third of the members are direct students of T.K.V. Desikachar. Administration and devotion shouldn’t mix. When they do, decisions benefit internal delusions more than the common good.
Let us encourage senior KYM/KHYF teachers to make full disclosure of what they knew about Kausthub’s behaviour, when they knew it, what they did to address it, and what they saw others do to enable it. How can they remain qualified as teachers of yoga therapy without this step?
Let’s request that KYM/KHYF refund 100% of the course fees of any current trainings with Kausthub that have been suspended because of the legal action — including for portions of courses that have already been completed. Interim KHYF director Anupama Das has already tried to head off this obviously-ethical move at the pass by declaring that in one current but unfinished programme, “intangible knowledge has already been transferred”, and that discussion of refunding would acknowledge guilt. I would argue that the best-faith gesture KHYF could make would be to refund immediately to show willingness to restore confidence amongst the student body. They should also suspend their tasteless request for membership renewal monies. It is precisely this kind of bureaucratic arrogance that amplifies the interpersonal arrogance of which Kausthub is accused.
Let’s go further, and request that if any former students of Kausthub now feel that their certifications are invalid, that their fees be reimbursed.
Let’s request that KYM/KHYF offer to hire independent, qualified therapists/counselors to meet with anyone who has been in a programme with Kausthub if they apply. These counselors should be fluent in therapeutic languages outside of the language of yoga therapy, which I’m sure has been gutted of integrity for many of these students. The last thing they need is someone “correctly” massaging their granthis or re-tuning their cakras.
These are ethical no-brainers as far as KYM/KHYF is concerned. But the global yoga community can do even better than this, and take this terrible opportunity to show that we can actively take care of our own, while carving out new models of relationship.
Let’s take up a collection – maybe launch a Kickstarter campaign? – to help the victims with their legal costs and to finance those students who desire to complete their training, covering their travel expenses, etc. This recovery-training should take place with another organization, i.e., one that has not lost their trust. Perhaps another yoga therapy institute would consider organizing a special training period for those who wish to continue. Perhaps the students might ask Mr. Kraftsow if he is available. Let us also ask the associate-teachers of KYM/KHYF — especially those who distanced themselves from the organization based on suspicions they were not able to confirm at the time — to provide active support and mentorship for those who are now trying to “exit”.
And in the meantime, the rest of us can stop fetishizing the perfect and the exotic. Sriram’s letter calls for a boycott of Kausthub’s activities in order to sever him from the fathership. I say: let’s boycott guru culture altogether, because it’s not working. While we’re at it, let’s stop being bamboozled by charisma, and let’s give up on the tyranny of the “authentic”, because it should be clear by now that everyone is creating something. Yoga culture is growing because we’re making stuff up, for better or for worse. Adventurous teachers are creating dance-asana hybrids. Hatha and mindfulness are cross-pollinating. The Desikachars have created a family dynasty out of a name and a disparate array of practices. John Friend created Shringri-la. Creativity isn’t the issue. Motivation is. Transparency is. Developmental maturity is. (I don’t care who your guru is — if he hasn’t gone through some kind of psychotherapy because he’s too special or famous, he’s probably got a pile of unexamined shit in his closet, and he’ll look for any opportunity to dump it onto you.)
Things might be simpler if we just ditched the language of lineage altogether. Honestly: there are no real “lineages” in modern yoga. There are movements, art forms, brands, celebrities, and memes. Ideas float, combine, change, and disappear. Irony: Krishnamacharya himself was a syncretist, a bricoleur – sewing together a tapestry of Vedic, Tantric, and Hatha influences, collecting techniques from Lanka to the Himalayas. Who was around in his day to crown him “authentic”? He did then what we’re doing now – weaving together the tools that make sense to us in our own time, regardless of where they come from. He opened a bunch of old boxes and put a bunch of stuff together in a creative way. Assuming he nailed the whole thing down and passed it on completely to his son is like thinking John Lennon mastered music and then mind-melded all his talent into Sean. In what other sphere would we imagine that a son had osmotically absorbed the grace of his father, other than one so rife with magical thinking and totemism?
At the nitty gritty level, boycotting guru culture means looking at the ways in which we’re seduced by an over-determined notion of “teacher”. A regular and useful teacher of yoga is just somebody with good manners and a few good tools for self-inquiry they can show you in an encouraging way. You learn with them until you more or less get what they have to offer. But in the process you’ll make it into your own thing, because what’s worked for them can’t ever completely work for you. When you’re bored you’ll move on to someone who has a different focus. No teacher can give us everything we need: expecting them to is a psychologically immature refusal to accept the always-incomplete nature of the growth process.
8. Where the Real Teachers Are
It’s taken me a bunch of years to wipe the star-dust out of my eyes, but now I have a good sense of where the real teaching is. If you live in a city of a million or so, I guarantee you there are at least a dozen teachers who have been instructing asana and breathwork and meditation in relative obscurity for fifteen years or more. They began in the mid-nineties or before, when YTT programmes were few and far between. Maybe they took one, maybe they didn’t. They learned what they could from whomever they met, and did a lot of work at home. They stopped spending their money on the big conferences a decade ago. Some have traveled to India for ashram retreats, and some have road-tripped through the mid-sized towns visiting the older teachers who also work in low-overhead, quiet studios: mentors like Francois Raoult in Rochester, or Kim Schwartz in Albuquerque, Erich Schiffman in Ojai, or Angela Farmer wherever she shows up. They’ve practiced consistently and read and digested many of the key books. They’ve been teaching and learning and serving, largely on their own, mostly unrecognized.
But most importantly, our best not-famous teachers been living their normal lives: giving birth, raising children, paying taxes, voting, getting injured and recovering, working out sexual issues, staying put most of the time, sitting on PTA boards, getting married, getting divorced, celebrating anniversaries, getting foreclosed on, feeling tired, getting cancer, opening something new, undergoing chemo, doubting what they do, going into remission, and loving what they do, relapsing, crying in the dressing room after class. Their yoga is practical and bling-free, it’s not jacked up on power dynamics or heavy paternal pressures. Or if it was, they got over it. They know just enough to show you just enough for you to find your path. They are good-enough. You don’t have to take out a second mortgage or learn Hindi to learn from them. They are just like you, only a little older. You can see into their lives plainly. You’ll never amplify their flaws into social crises, because you reflect each other’s commonness too closely.
O precious teacher! Precious, precious teacher – humble and good, kind and normal – however shall we find you? I’ll tell you how. It’s dead easy.
Go to any class at any yoga studio. Approach the teacher after rolling up your mat. Ask them “Who are your favourite well-rounded senior teachers in this town?” They will give you three-odd names. If they all work at that same studio, press for two more names. If they’re all under 40, press for two more. Make a commitment to yourself to go to each of the named teacher’s classes in the following months. You will definitely find somebody you resonate with. Someone who is good enough to simply start you on your own path of inquiry, which is all you really need. They won’t be perfect, and they know it, and that’s good. They can’t give you everything. Some day you’ll move on.
Forget heart-openers on the beach in Costa Rica. Forget prostrations in Chennai.
We need to learn from someone like ourselves, right where we stand.
What we need is as close as we are to each other. We’re here to learn together.
Idols stand between us because we prop them up.
Falling, they will become human again, and seek healing and integrity with the rest of us.
_______Marc Costello, a friend to all who met him passed away yesterday. He impacted the lives of anyone he came in contact with...over the phone, twitter, and the most memorable was in person. He was filled with life, and made all around him feel genuinely cared for. He made The Secret Stash not only a destination, but an experience. He knew everyone, and welcomed everyone with laughter.
We want to help his wife Lori pay for any costs for the service and help her in any possible way to honor Marc. He would be so grateful to know that she had help. He would truly appreciate it and it would honor him and his nature.
Marc was a one of a kind guy...truly. He remembered names, details and truly cared about people. He actually gave a shit and was a true, kind hearted person. He had a way about him...charming mother fucker, with quick wit and could hang with the best of them.
This ones for you Marco, kiddo, a stand up guy. You will never be forgotten and we were so lucky to have you around.
Your friend,
Shanny
Help spread the word! Share Tweet 984 shares on Facebook shares on FacebookApart from partial or total joint replacement, no surgical procedure is currently available to treat large and deep cartilage defects associated with advanced diseases such as osteoarthritis. In this work, we developed a perfusion bioreactor system to engineer human cartilage grafts in a size with clinical relevance for unicompartmental resurfacing of human knee joints (50 mm diameter × 3 mm thick). Computational fluid dynamics models were developed to optimize the flow profile when designing the perfusion chamber. Using the developed system, human chondrocytes could be seeded throughout large 50 mm diameter scaffolds with a uniform distribution. Following two weeks culture, tissues grown in the bioreactor were viable and homogeneously cartilaginous, with biomechanical properties approaching those of native cartilage. In contrast, tissues generated by conventional manual production procedures were highly inhomogeneous and contained large necrotic regions. The unprecedented engineering of human cartilage tissues in this large-scale opens the practical perspective of grafting functional biological substitutes for the clinical treatment for extensive cartilage defects, possibly in combination with surgical or pharmacological therapies to support durability of the implant. Ongoing efforts are aimed at integrating the up-scaled bioreactor based processes within a fully automated and closed manufacturing system for safe, standardized, and GMP compliant production of large-scale cartilage grafts.
Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Ahmed, a Rohingya refugee man cries as he holds his 40-day-old son, who died as a boat capsized in the shore of Shah Porir Dwip while crossing Bangladesh-Myanmar border, in Teknaf, Bangladesh. Reuters/file photo
The Philippines on Thursday voted against a United Nations General Assembly committee draft resolution on the human rights situation in Myanmar.
It was among 10 nations that opposed the draft text which calls for full and unhindered humanitarian aid access and for Myanmar to grant full citizenship rights to Rohingya Muslims, who are treated by Buddhists as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
A total of 135 countries voted in favor of the resolution while 26 abstained, paving the way for the revival of the text which was dropped last year due to the country's progress on human rights under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi.
#UNGA Resolution L.48 on the situation of #humanrights in #Myanmar adopted with 135 votes in favour, 26 abstention and 10 against. #EU4humanrights pic.twitter.com/VOBaFtuMIL — EU Delegation to UN (@EUatUN) November 16, 2017
More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh due to military operations against Rohingya militants, who attacked 30 security posts and an army base in Rakhine state on Aug. 25.
This prompted the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to put forward a new draft U.N. resolution, which will now be formally adopted by the 193-member General Assembly next month. The resolution deepens international pressure, but has no legal consequences.
It also urges U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to appoint a special envoy on Myanmar.
Myanmar is refusing entry to a U.N. panel that was tasked with investigating allegations of abuses after a smaller military counteroffensive launched in October 2016.
Myanmar's army released a report on Monday denying all allegations of rapes and killings by security forces, days after replacing the general in charge of the military operation in Rakhine state.
The 15-member U.N. Security Council last week urged the Myanmar government to "ensure no further excessive use of military force in Rakhine state." It asked Guterres to report back in 30 days.
Human Rights Watch has accused Myanmar security forces on Thursday of committing widespread rape against women and girls, echoing an allegation by Pramila Patten, the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, earlier this week. Patten said sexual violence was "being commanded, orchestrated and perpetrated by the Armed Forces of Myanmar."
In the recently concluded ASEAN Summit in Manila, Southeast Asian leaders kept silent over accusations of ethnic cleansing carried out by Myanmar's army, instead expressing support for the country's efforts to bring peace and harmony to northern Rakhine state.
The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs earlier expressed concern over recent developments in the Northern Rakhine State of Myanmar.
It also condemned the attacks against Myanmar security forces on last August 25 and "all acts of violence which resulted in loss of civilian lives, destruction of homes and displacement of large numbers of people." --with a report from ReutersIt turns out the "galaxy far, far away" is closer than we thought.
While researching for his new book, Medieval Monsters, historian Damien Kempf came across a creature that will appear very familiar to any Star Wars fans. There, in the margins of a page written centuries ago, was the spitting image of Master Yoda.
"When I came across this monster, I actually couldn't believe it. It's a manuscript that was produced 700 years ago," Kempf told BBC Radio's The Verb.
Although the drawing is actually an interpretation of the biblical story of Samson, we won't blame you for still choosing to think Yoda had something to do with its creation.
Looking through more of the monsters in Kempf's new book, we spotted a few more creatures that bear striking resemblance to pop culture figures. Take a look at the historical art and drag the slider tool to reveal the monster's modern-day counterpart.
Yoda
The Ogre Emoji
A Ferengi from Star TrekShocking scenes as 150 Jewish men go on rampage in Paris streets and clash with pro-Palestinian demonstrators
About 150 men took to the streets armed with metal bars and sticks
None were arrested despite going on the rampage in front of police
Six pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested over synagogue break in
A group of 150 Jewish men were seen brandishing iron bars and cans of pepper spray as they clashed with Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Paris.
Video footage of the clashes show the group chanting racist slogans as they roamed the streets.
It came as President Francois Hollande warned that he did not want to see ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict imported into France’.
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A still taken from the video shows dozens of men in Paris walking down the streets armed with chairs and other weapons, before clashing with pro-Palestinian demonstrators
Around 150 mainly young men were seen carrying weapons, like chairs, and chanting racist slogans as they went on the rampage
French Jewish groups have complained about an increase in anti-Semitism in recent months, with many accusing Muslim youths of targeting them.
But a video shot close to the Place de la Bastille on Sunday, and verified by police before being posted on YouTube, appears to show pro-Israel groups are also actively involved in clashes.
In Paris, CRS riot police did not arrest any of the group, thought to be linked to the Jewish Defence League, despite them openly fighting in broad daylight.
In the video, those amongst the group can be heard chanting ‘**** you Palestine’ as they smash up chairs and metal tables to be used as missiles.
CRS riot police did not arrest any members of the rampaging group, thought to be linked to the extremist Jewish Defence League, despite them openly fighting in broad daylight
The group were carrying gas canisters, pepper spray, metal bars and wooden sticks, and some wore crash helmets while others simply covered their faces
The men are armed with gas canisters, pepper spray, metal bars and wooden sticks and some wear crash helmets.
The video shows the men running towards pro-Palestinian demonstrators, before skirmishes break out.
Six pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested on Sunday, accused of trying to break into two Paris synagogues. Two Jewish men were reportedly injured.
A protester wearing a gas mask holds a fake rocket during protests in Paris over the weekend
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators were said to have tried to break into two Paris synagogues on Sunday which resulted in six arrests and two Jewish men being injured
In the wake of the clashes Mr Hollande said the country will'redouble vigilance'.
He was due to meet the head of Jewish umbrella group CRIF today.
Alexis Bachelay, a Paris MP for the ruling Socialist party, said: ‘There has evidently been a media manipulation about who really got assaulted.
‘These are extremely serious facts that need to be investigated thoroughly by the police. It is not the first time that young French people of Muslim origin are stigmatised by the media.Manchester United are weighing up a move to bring Burnley defender Michael Keane back to Old Trafford, sources close to the player have told ESPN FC.
Keane, 23, has excelled in the Premier League this season and his form has seen him win a call-up to the England senior team, with the defender in the squad for the upcoming games against Scotland and Spain.
He made just five first-team appearances for United during his time at Old Trafford, spending spells out on loan at Leicester, Derby and Blackburn before joining Burnley in January 2015 on a permanent basis after a successful loan spell at Turf Moor.
Former England under-21 international Keane was instrumental in helping Burnley win promotion to the Premier League last season, missing just one game in the Championship, and he has continued that fine form into the Premier League this term.
Keane was impressive in Burnley's recent 0-0 draw with Manchester United at Old Trafford and his performances have caught the attention of United boss Jose Mourinho as he looks to bolster his defensive options.
Michael Keane remains close to former Manchester United teammate Jesse Lingard.
Mourinho has been looking to bring in a new central defender since last summer, and there are no doubts over Chris Smalling's future after the manager appeared to question his bravery when he sat out Saturday's 3-1 win over Swansea City.
Burnley are reluctant to lose Keane and they turned down several offers from Premier League champions Leicester City for the centre-back in the summer transfer window, while Chelsea are also tracking Keane as they look to bring a new centre-back to Stamford Bridge.
Speaking in September, Keane said he had no regrets over his failed move to Leicester and that he was happy he made the decision to leave United for Burnley but suggested he remained hopeful of playing for top-level team in the future.
He said he was still in touch with Paul Pogba and Jesse Lingard, adding: "It's good that a lot of that team have kept in touch -- it was a top team, with a great spirit, and every now and again when we can we get together.
"They were good times, coming through the academy together, but it seems a lifetime ago now and we've done a lot since. I'm a United fan and always will be."
Peter O'Rourke is ESPN FC's transfer news correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @SportsPeteO.For decades, N.F.L. players have taken drinks from orange Gatorade jugs, the contents of which are often dumped on the winning coach. Coaches wore Motorola headsets before Bose won that spot this season. Nike, Riddell and others have provided athletic gear.
Microsoft’s relationship with the N.F.L. is more complex because it is not just trying to sell tablets to consumers and football coaches. It is also trying to increase the profile of its Xbox game consoles.
Since November, millions of users have been able to use their Xbox Ones as set-top boxes to receive updates on their fantasy football teams, invitations to play the Madden video game and access to RedZone and video highlights from the N.F.L. — all while watching live games.
The multifaceted sponsorship was not cheap, and it is one reason the N.F.L. took in $1.1 billion in sponsorship revenue last year. Microsoft will reportedly pay the N.F.L. $400 million over the five-year life of the deal, figures that the company and the league would not confirm.
Image “By far, the N.F.L. is the crown jewel of entertainment,” said Yusuf Mehdi, who oversees marketing and strategy for Microsoft’s Devices and Studios. “It has that fan passion, and we have that with the Xbox. Credit Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
Whatever the number, Yusuf Mehdi, who oversees marketing and strategy for Microsoft’s devices and studios, which includes the Xbox and the Surface, said it was money well spent.
“By far, the N.F.L. is the crown jewel of entertainment,” he said while showing off the Xbox at the company’s headquarters, east of Seattle. “It has that fan passion, and we have that with the Xbox. And on the sideline, it really showcases what Microsoft can do when it brings its full muscle to bear.”
The question of how to create the “sideline of the future” arose a couple of years ago, said Brian Rolapp, the executive vice president for media at the N.F.L. As Motorola’s deal with the league was coming to a close, league officials thought about things they wanted to improve. One was the black-and-white photos of every play of every game, he said. For years, assistants grabbed the photos off printers on the sideline, stuffed them into three-ring binders and gave them to coaches and players to review. But the photos were grainy and cumbersome to collate and could not be annotated.Pin It
Ever find a great deal at the store that you are so excited about you want to tell everyone? {Because when I find a great deal I tell everyone!} Well, that is sort of like these crepes. They are AMAZING!!!! I promise. Crepes are delicious, I have nothing against a regular crepe. But, wait until you try these. It is like eating a thin piece of red velvet cake and filling it with sweet raspberry jam, cream cheese and then drizzling dark chocolate all over the top. These will really make your day. Good food really does make me happy.
They are not difficult, but it does take a little of time to make each crepe, since we are only cooking one at a time. In the recipe I used an 8 inch skillet. You may use a larger one and have fewer but bigger crepes. {Just be sure to use more or less batter depending on the size of pan you are using.} Smaller is okay too! {Then you can eat more of them!!}
These are really fun and yummy to make anytime, but Valentine’s Day is coming up and how perfect are these for that special person or persons in your life? I’m just saying….
Red Velvet Crepes
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons sugar
2 cups buttermilk
1 1/4 cup milk
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 tablespoons cocoa powder, sifted
1 tablespoon red food coloring
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Cream Cheese Filling:
8 oz cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Raspberry Jam (optional)
Chocolate Ganache:
1/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips
Directions:
For the Cream Cheese Filling:
Using a mixer, mix cream cheese, 1/2 cup sugar, and vanilla until soft and fluffy. Refrigerate until ready to use.
For Chocolate Ganache Sauce
Place chocolate in a heat proof bowl. Heat cream, butter and sugar in a small saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil. (Watch out, it boils over quickly). Pour the boiling cream over chocolate. Allow to stand 3-4 minutes, until chocolate melts. Stir until smooth. Set aside until ready to use. {If the chocolate thickens too much; reheat 30 seconds in microwave and stir.}
Red Velvet Crepes
In a medium mixing bowl stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda and cocoa powder. Set aside.
In a separate larger bowl, whisk together the but |
called into Capital XTRA to reveal:
“I heard that I won the raffle last night and was told to turn up at the Adidas Store this morning at 9am. Me and a few others were sitting there when Kanye came out carrying boxes of Yeezy Boosts. He gave everyone a pair and had a chat with us! He said he was in the studio with Skepta at the moment and he also said the first single from the album is going to be ‘All Day’ and it’s going to feature Theophilus London and Allan Kingdom. And it’s going to have a piece from Paul McCartney on the end.”
Obviously we’ve already heard the full version of ‘All Day’ by now, complete with McCartney’s whistling. But the Skepta collab is certainly something to be excited about, and with both artists warming up for imminent album releases, the question is, will it surface on Konnichiwa or So Help Me God?
Listen to ‘All Day’ here.
ICYMI: Read Monday Download 042: The Skepta Edition here.
[GRMDaily]Photo
Iran’s president fanned the flames of confrontation with Israel on Friday, calling the Israeli government “an insult to humankind” in a speech on the annual Iranian holiday that calls for the Palestinian reclamation of Jerusalem from Israel’s control.
The speech by the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has become known for his baldly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic remarks, came as tensions had been intensifying with Israel, which regards Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat.
Speculation has raged in the Israeli press about whether the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to order a military strike on uranium enrichment sites in Iran that Israel suspects are part of a clandestine effort to build nuclear weapons. Iran contends that its uranium enrichment is peaceful.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speech, as reported by the official Islamic Republic News Agency, added some new and incendiary flourishes to a theme he had pushed for his entire presidency.
Photo
“The very existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to humankind and an affront to all world nations,” the news agency’s English-language report on the speech quoted him as saying. “Confronting Zionists will also pave the way for saving the whole humankind from exploitation, depravity and misery.”
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In another passage, Mr. Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying that Jerusalem Day, which the Iranians call Quds Day after the city’s Arabic name, was “an occasion for all human communities to wipe out this scarlet letter, meaning the Zionist regime, from the forehead of humanity.”Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
As part of an ongoing investigation involving the cooperation of 20 countries, the FBI announced this morning that Darkode, described as "the most sophisticated English-speaking forum for criminal computer hackers in the world," has been shut down and dismantled.
Twelve indictments have been issued by U.S. so far today, but the FBI's release on the arrests claims that the investigation will charge, arrest, or search at least 70 Darkode members worldwide.
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“Through this operation, we have dismantled a cyber hornets’ nest of criminal hackers which was believed by many, including the hackers themselves, to be impenetrable," said U.S. Attorney David Hickton in a release.
The monumental bust and dismantling comes in the midst of reports that over 22 million U.S. residents have likely had their personal information stolen, due to a hack at the Federal Office of Personnel Management. "To be frank, our federal cybersecurity is not where it needs to be," Department of Homeland Security director Jeh Johnson said of the hack, which led to the OPM director issuing her resignation on Monday.
In a 2013 blog post, online security expert Brian Krebs wrote that the Darkode served as "a bazaar for all manner of cybercriminal wares, including exploit kits, spam services, ransomware programs, and stealthy botnets."
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Selected indictments that have been made public detail the alleged exploits of the hacker group. Johan Anders Gudmunds of Sweden, one of the main defendants, is charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, among other charges. He is described as having controlled a botnet that infected over 60,000 computers in 2009. Those computers had "stolen data from the users of those computers approximately 200,000,000 times, allowing Gudmunds and his customers to gather unique credentials that gave them access to bank accounts and other information," reads the indictment.
After that success, Gudmunds began selling similar software to others on Darkode, including at least one time where he offered the software to an undercover FBI agent.
The creator of the Darkode forum, Daniel Placek (aka Loki/ Nocen/ Juggernaut) has also been issued an indictment for charges of criminal information with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, but it has not yet been made public. However, a document that has been released shows that yesterday the federal government issued a forfeiture notice on him and his properties. He is charged in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, where he currently resides.
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In total, the governments that were involved with the investigation were: Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Israel, Latvia, Macedonia, Nigeria, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“Hackers and those who profit from stolen information use underground Internet forums to evade law enforcement and target innocent people around the world,” said Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell. “This operation is a great example of what international law enforcement can accomplish when we work closely together to neutralize a global cybercrime marketplace.”
Daniel Rivero is a producer/reporter for Fusion who focuses on police and justice issues. He also skateboards, does a bunch of arts related things on his off time, and likes Cuban coffee.OBJECTIVES:
To evaluate the suitablity of commercially available moisture retention eyewear for treating evaporative dry eye.
METHODS:
Eleven patients with evaporative dry eyes were prescibed moisture retention eyewear for 3 months in addition to regular lubricant eye drops. Frequency and severity of dry eye symptoms, corneal fluorescein staining and tear break up time (TBUT) were evaluated at baseline and 3-month post-treatment. Main outcome measure was global symptom score (based on severity and frequency of dry eye symptoms on a visual analog scale) and secondary outcomes were changes in sectoral corneal fluorescein staining and tear break up time (TBUT) from pre-treatment level.
RESULTS:
There was a significant improvement in dry eye symptoms after using moisture retention eyewear for 3 months (p < 0.05). Corneal fluorescein staining in all five zones of the cornea in both eyes improved significantly (p < 0.05). There was no significant improvement in TBUT. Patients used ocular lubricants less frequently (p < 0.05) compared to the commencement of the study. Patients found moisture retention eyewear to be useful in relieving dry eye symptoms in windy, air-conditioned environments or when doing vision-related daily tasks.
CONCLUSIONS:
This study shows that moisture retention eyewear might be a valuable adjunct in management of evaporative dry eye and this new design of commercially available eyewear could have a good acceptability rate.France is offering migrants €2,500 to voluntarily return home. The offer, which is only valid till December 31, is meant to “significantly increase the number of aided voluntary departures” following the demolition of the notorious ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais.
The government has temporarily decided to “raise to €2,500 the maximum amount of return aid” to foreigners (excepting those from the European Union or visa-exempt countries) who agree to voluntarily return to their home country, said Didier Leschi, the head of France’s immigration office, as cited by AFP.
In addition to having their air fare paid for, migrants will also be eligible to receive “up to €10,000” in financial aid to help them get set up on arriving home.
“Depending on the country, it can help them start up a small business,” Leschi noted.
The basic €650 allowance has been significantly raised in recent months – after being increased by €350 in October, it got a lavish €1,850 boost in November.
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This exceptional offer comes after the 'Jungle' camp, a makeshift shelter in Calais housing thousands of African and the Middle Eastern migrants, was demolished last month, forcing the evacuation of some 7,000 asylum seekers that then had to be accommodated at refugee centers throughout the country.
All in all, the immigration office aided some 3,051 returns this year, and “we are going to make it around 4,500 by the end of the year, that is to say almost as much as last year,” Leschi said, adding that Afghans migrants are “probably the most interested.” Since the beginning of the year, 400 have voluntarily returned home, as compared to 19 over the same period in 2015, he said.
Thousands of migrants looking to cross the English Channel to find asylum in the UK were holed up in the camp in the northern French port town of Calais for months. However, Britain only agreed to take in around 1,000 migrant children, and only those who already had relatives in the UK.
The number of homeless asylum-seekers in Paris has noticeably jumped since the Jungle camp was shut down. According to RT France, up to 3,000 migrants are currently seeking-shelter on the streets of the French capital, many of whom have recently arrived from the Calais.A video cut of model Kim Jinkyung from her appearance on "My Little Television" is shared on community site instiz and k-netizens are talking about her reaction upon hearing that she looks like 2NE1's CL.When the man told her, "You're pretty." Kim Jinkyung humbly replied. "No." and shyly smiled but when he added, "They said you look like CL.." the model irritatedly dropped her pen and reacted, "Ah really! why are you like this.." but she quickly realized the complication and immediately covered her mouth and said, "No. I mean, I actually really like CL. But I really like her," and continued on what they were doing.Netizens comment, "By the way she reacted, she really didn't like it.","Kim Jinkyung you're so funny." "She's so blunt." "But it's not the full video." "I would be happier if I look like CL." "Her reaction is so candid."What do you think of her reaction?For other people with the same name, see Jonathan Katz (disambiguation)
Jonathan David Katz (born 1958) is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer. He is currently the director of the doctoral program in Visual culture studies at State University of New York at Buffalo.[1] He is also the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University.[2][3] He is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States.[2][3] Katz was an associate professor in the Art History Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also taught queer studies.[3] He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1996.
Katz is the founder of the Harvey Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association.[3]
Katz co-founded Queer Nation San Francisco.[3] He has made scholarly contributions to queer studies the focus of his professional career.[3] He was the first artistic director of the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco and has published widely in the United States and Europe.[3]
His forthcoming book, The Homosexualization of American Art: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet, will be published by the University of Chicago Press.[3] An internationally recognized expert in queer postwar American art, Katz has recently published "Jasper Johns' Alley Oop: On Comic Strips and Camouflage" in Schwule Bildwelten im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Thomas Roeske, and "The Silent Camp: Queer Resistance and the Rise of Pop Art," in Plop! Goes the World, edited by Serge Guilbaut.[3] In 1995, Katz was kicked out of Rauschenberg conference at the Guggenheim for mentioning Rauschenberg's relationship with Johns.[4]
Katz was co-curator with David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel of the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. This was the first major museum exploration of the impact of same-sex desire in the creation of modern American portraiture. David Wojnarowicz's video "A Fire in My Belly" was removed from the exhibition on November 30, 2010, causing controversy.[5] Katz was not consulted before the work's removal.[6]
Works [ edit ]
"Re-viewing the Field: Queer Studies in Art History", Art History, 1999
, 1999 "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse", GLQ, Duke University Press, April, 1999. Reprinted in Here Comes Everybody: The Music Poetry and Art of John Cage, ed. David Bernstein, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 [3]
, Duke University Press, April, 1999. Reprinted in, ed. David Bernstein, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 "Performative Silence and the Politics of Passivity," in Making a Scene, ed. Henry Rogers, Birmingham University Press, 1999 [3]
, ed. Henry Rogers, Birmingham University Press, 1999 "Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the Body Politic", Performing the Body/Performing the Text, eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, New York: Routledge Press, 1999
, eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, New York: Routledge Press, 1999 Difference/Indifference: Musings on Duchamp and Cage, coauthored with Moira Roth, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1998 [3]
, coauthored with Moira Roth, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1998 "Lovers and Divers: Picturing a Partnership in Rauschenberg and Johns", Frauen/Kunst/Wissenschaft, Berlin, June 1998
, Berlin, June 1998 "Rauschenberg and the Guggenheim", Out Magazine, April 1998
, April 1998 "Rauschenberg's Honeymoon", Art & Text, no. 16 (May–July), 1998Share. Why it's just not worth it. Why it's just not worth it.
[Update: Maxis has apologized and offered a free EA game to SimCity players.]
It has been out for three days, and SimCity is broken. Seriously, unplayably broken. As a long-time fan who's been looking forward to this week for many years, this is a huge, frustrating disappointment. The worst part? The main issue isn't with the game itself, but an entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable always-online Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that's keeping millions of fans from playing the game they paid for, when they were told they'd be able to play it. If there is one good thing that comes of this disaster, let it be yet another lesson to publishers like EA and Activision/Blizzard, and platform owners Microsoft and Sony, who may be considering always-on DRM in next-gen consoles or PC games: don't even think about it. It's a pipe dream, and to attempt it is to invite an enthusiasm-draining catastrophe with every single game launch.
Exit Theatre Mode
Here's what the past 10 years of online DRM has taught anybody who's paid the slightest bit of attention: it never works right, at least at first. And while it might be largely successful in stopping piracy (as Diablo III effectively has), it exacts a terrible price: the trust and enthusiasm of the most loyal and enthusiastic gamers. These are the people who are dying to get their hands on new games, the ones who eagerly spend on pricey collectors' editions and DLC – all of it sight-unseen. If treated well, their word of mouth buzz can generate more game sales than a site like IGN ever could. They are also the ones who will always be affected most by the inevitable screwups that always-online DRM will bring.
I'm no network engineer, but it's obvious even to me that the infrastructure required to allow millions of gamers to play at once without issue is extremely complex. That means there are simply too many points along the line where it can break down, and it only takes one to make a game that's dependent on servers completely unplayable. It's also a system that invites technical disaster and locks out gamers who travel frequently or serve in the military. Failure is virtually assured.
You, the publishers, might think that it'll be different when you try it – that you'll get it right where others failed, and the fancy new proprietary always-online DRM technology you've invested in is foolproof. Here's the reality, reinforced by this week's events: you will almost certainly fail, and the payoff of zero piracy isn't worth the cost. In PC gaming, publishing giants Ubisoft, Blizzard (and by extension Activision), and now EA have all attempted it, and all have completely botched the launches of some of their most highly anticipated games. While you might eventually stabilize your servers after the initial spike in demand and get things humming along, constant login queues and downtime have turned many of your greatest allies into your worst enemies. You'll have hamstrung your own momentum.
Yes, MMORPGs and most free-to-play games will always have this problem, because being online is an integral part of their design. It's what the O in MMO stands for, in fact. But games like Diablo III and SimCity are not MMOs. They don't need to be connected to be enjoyed – I know, as I've played both primarily in single-player thus far. In SimCity's case it's especially ridiculous, as you're not even playing with others in real-time. Despite Maxis' insistence that it was built from the ground up to be a multiplayer game, its designers' best efforts couldn't shoehorn essential multiplayer into a game that is inherently single-player. Certainly nothing that's worth not being able to play at all because a server's down. Not to us.
We don't need to add the unfortunate downsides of MMORPGs to games that don't have or need the upsides which come with that necessary evil. Piracy is awful, and most gamers can only imagine how it feels to have to watch as your expensively produced product is stolen with impunity. But this is an overreaction that runs a very serious risk of doing far more harm than good.
But forget about money for a moment. There's also the question of preserving gaming history. As we saw with THQ last month, publishers aren't immortal. They can die, and had THQ implemented always-online DRM in Darksiders II, all copies of that game might've died with it when the rights to the series weren't bought up by another publisher. As bad as it must feel when thousands – or even millions – of people are playing your game without paying for it, surely the idea of everyone who did pay for it losing access to a piece of your work that they love is even more appalling.
I feel terrible for Maxis, who I'm almost certain didn't come up with the idea to make SimCity require an online connection. That development team put in years of their lives on a game that, when it works, is astonishing in a lot of really interesting ways, and watching it sabotaged by DRM has to be absolutely crushing for them. And I feel awful for gamers out there who waited 10 years for a modern successor to a classic PC game, only to find a frustrating technical mess.
Just remember this, publishers and developers: if you choose to go down this road, and there comes a time when you're frantically scrambling to fix your overloaded and failing servers, with hordes of angry customers howling for refunds and swearing off all your future games forever (as Maxis is this very moment, and Blizzard was last year)... it didn't have to be like this.
In closing – and a more positive note – here's Greg Miller talking about some of the cool stuff that's possible when SimCity's servers actually work. Hopefully more people will get to try it soon.Thank God global warming is a hoax
I mean, right? You know? Because gosh Jesus in angry apocalyptic heaven, wouldn't it be just terrible if it were all true?
Wouldn't it be horrible if all this stunning, insanely mounting, irrefutable evidence -- death, floods, fires, heat waves, the worst this and the most violent that in 1,000 years -- were some sort of surefire, cumulative sign that we have, if not directly caused, then wildly accelerated and amplified the imminent implosion of this planet?
But we didn't! And we haven't! And we aren't! I mean, whew.
I am delighted to remember that hardcore science has lied, misguided, misnomered and whatever else weird science does to confuse the world about the real impact humanity has had on global ecosystems. All those thousands of highly trained scientists educated at the finest universities, learning the most difficult and fraught information of our age, all in universal agreement that humankind's actions directly affect climate change, and they are all totally full of it because they are clearly in cahoots with Nazi Liberal Jesus, the solar panel manufacturers and the hippies who want me to compost my KFC Double Down wrapper.
I am delighted to be reassured by the fringe right wing that the piles of dead bodies, millions of lost homes, and even the very sun itself are part of a vast conspiracy, a plot to form an evil one-world government, a lefty liberal charade even in places that don't understand or care what the hell a liberal is. See? Do you understand how powerful the lie? Amazing.
Because otherwise, wow, what sort of hell is this? Pakistan, Russia, China, Greenland, Niger and on and on it goes. Unprecedented heat waves, scorched crops, giant icebergs, savage droughts, dire emergencies, thousands dead here and 10,000 more over there and nothing like these events in the history of the world, ever.
Even the U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, is in on it, coming back from Pakistan stunned and shaken by the epic flooding he witnessed there. "The magnitude of the problem; the world has never seen such a disaster. It's much beyond anybody's imagination," he said, putting out the urgent call for more international aid. I mean, sure global warming is happening -- even some of the more ignorant climate change deniers have had to reverse course on that -- but humanity had nothing to do with it, OK? We don't need to change our behavior one iota. If God wants another Ice Age or whatever, who are we to argue?
Heathen book-learners and their ridiculous studies, that's who! Scientists are saying that all these severe weather patterns fit in exactly with what they've been predicting all along. Not only that, but they say it's increasingly likely that we've waited too long to change our behaviors, cut emissions, reduce consumption and other such liberal gibberish, and now it might be too late to do anything about it. Increasingly extreme, violent weather will now be the norm, and the devastation, disease and death will only increase.
Good news! If I blink a few times while clicking the mouse, it all goes away. Hey look, Lindsay Lohan's mom is all up in it! Snooki is so wasted! All is as it should be. Thank you, Interweb.
But dammit, their godless eco-agenda just won't stop. 2010, they say, is not being very nice, is setting all sorts of unpleasant records. Already, the most national extreme heat records in a single year (17). Already, the hottest half-year on record in planetary history. Already, the five warmest months in tropical Atlantic history, possibly resulting in more hurricanes. Already, millions of people sensing, deep down, that Something Is Very Wrong Indeed. Good thing their calmly intuitive souls are full of crap.
I mean, please. Isn't it like this every year? Always with the floods and fires. Always with the hurricanes, earthquakes and numbing body counts. Is this year, this decade really that different? I'm sorry, I can't hear you, I just turned up this Glenn Beck podcast. Here is your big lesson: Do not listen to people who actually know things. Only listen to people who react, negatively and whiningly, to people who actually know things. It's the American way.
Have you seen the photos from the Gulf of Mexico, all shiny and clear thanks to toxic chemical dispersants, the miracle of ocean currents and armies of PR people who smell like hate? What happened to all the oil? It's all gone, even though it's really not! Absorbed into the planetary bloodstream like magic! Even the president is there, splashing around in waters that, not a month ago, had hundreds of million of gallons of crude oil and chemicals floating in it.
Just more proof that God's favorite creatures can cause no lasting harm. We're innocent as pie. And guns. And Corexit 9500. I'm dumping some used motor oil into this city sewer right now, in celebration.
I just read the flooding in Pakistan has already caused more devastation than the 2004 tsunami in Asia, worse than the Haiti earthquake. One quarter of the country is underwater. They say Pakistan also just broke a record for the single highest temperature ever recorded on the Asian continent, at 128 degrees (16 other nations also met or broke heat records this year, too). That record was set in a city. Where people live. But not for very much longer, because they do not have giant air conditioners and pallets of Fiji water from Costco like we do, so they probably won't survive.
Yes, it's tragic. It's unprecedented. It's never happened like this before. Heck, even here in the eco-terrorist homeland of San Francisco, they say the change in ocean temperatures will soon mean Fog City will be entirely fog bound, edge to edge, nearly year round. But I repeat: It's not our fault. Seven billion rapacious, industrialized bipeds have the impact of a feather. All this destruction and death? It's just God's will -- except for those places that don't believe in a Christian God. Serves them right, doesn't it?
By the way, there's an obvious solution to many of these horrors -- to the Russian heat waves, the violent droughts in Niger, the dead bodies floating in Pakistan, the floods in China: Do not go there. Do not go to these terrible, hot, messy places. It's so easy!
I mean, so what if giant icebergs four times the size of Manhattan are suddenly breaking off in Greenland? That's happening way, way up there. I'm overconsuming energy and blocking out inconvenient truths way, way down here. There is no cause/effect, no connection whatsoever, never mind that dark, nagging sense of self-wrought doom, deep in my bones. I know that's just a liberal lie, an implant, completely futile -- just like those failed climate talks in Copenhagen, and the soon-to-be-failed ones coming up shortly in Mexico. I mean, whew.
Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.
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This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.President Obama appears with his family at an election night rally at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago.
Nov. 6, 2012 President Obama appears with his family at an election night rally at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago. Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post
A sharply divided America gave President Obama another term Tuesday, choosing him over Republican Mitt Romney to lead the repair of the economy, still the country’s biggest concern by far.
Barack Obama was elected to a second presidential term Tuesday, defeating Republican Mitt Romney by reassembling the political coalition that boosted him to victory four years ago, and by remaking himself from a hopeful uniter into a determined fighter for middle-class interests.
Obama, the nation’s first African American president, scored a decisive victory by stringing together a series of narrow ones. Of the election’s seven major battlegrounds, he won at least six.
“While our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up,” Obama told a cheering crowd of supporters in his home town of Chicago early Wednesday morning. “We have fought our way back. And we know in our hearts that, for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.”
He said he intends to sit down with Romney in the weeks ahead to talk about how the two can work together.
Obama also made an oblique reference to the hard, negative edge of his campaign, saying that even this bitter election was something to be envied in nations around the world that enjoy fewer freedoms: “These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty.”
His election capped a night of gains for the once beaten-down American left. Democrats Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts won Senate races, as the party kept control of that chamber. Liberal causes also won in several states: Maryland and Maine became the first to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. Colorado and Washington passed laws that legalized some marijuana use.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, had built his campaign around the single contention that the U.S. economy is battered and adrift because of Obama’s failures, and that his business experience uniquely qualified him to fix it.
In the end, that wasn’t enough, in part because the economy undermined his argument by showing signs of improvement. Just weeks before Election Day, the national unemployment rate dropped below 8 percent for the first time since Obama took office.
Voters also did not warm to Romney. Even after many months and millions of dollars put toward trying to make him look good, exit polls showed that just as many voters trusted Obama to handle the economy as trusted Romney.
“This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation,” a slightly hoarse Romney told his supporters in Boston early Wednesday morning. He said he and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), had left “everything on the field,” adding: “I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes.”
As of early Wednesday, Florida was too close to call — but also irrelevant, as Obama had passed the threshold of 270 electoral votes.
Romney was beaten by a different Obama than the one who defeated Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) four years ago. Back then, Obama had run as a symbol of limitless hope.
This year, he ran as a symbol of hope’s limitations.
The president no longer pledged to sweep away Washington’s old partisan politics. He had tried that and was unable to do so. Now, he was pledging to plunge into those old politics and fight — battling Republicans whom Obama said favored the rich and waged a “war on women.”
As the election results came in, they showed that Obama’s promises had won over the groups for which he had promised to fight the hardest. He lost among white men by a large margin, as expected. But he performed strongly among African Americans, won by double digits among women, and routed Romney among a key and expanding demographic, taking 69 percent of the Latino vote in early exit polls.
Early returns also indicated that Capitol Hill’s balance of power would not change. Democrats would keep control of the Senate, after winning key races in Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri and Virginia. Republicans were expected to keep the House, with virtually the same number of seats.
So now, ironically, the bruised Obama of 2012 has the job that the hopeful Obama of 2008 said he wanted: to conjure “change” out of a capital that is split and paralyzed by partisan battling.
For Romney, 65, Tuesday’s loss ends a personal marathon that began in June. But, in a broader sense, it started with his first presidential run, nearly six years ago. A longtime executive and investor, Romney ran a campaign that promised to bring a businessman’s clear-eyed conservatism to the problems of the U.S. economy.
He was helped immensely by a new breed of political action group, the free-spending super PACs that the Supreme Court legalized in 2010. Outside groups, including super PACs, poured an estimated $350 million into the race on his behalf, with pro-Obama groups spending an estimated $100 million.
For Romney’s family, it was the third unsuccessful attempt to capture the White House: Romney's father, George, a Republican governor of Michigan, ran in 1968.
But the upward course of the son’s campaign was a cold kind of victory.
He had spent years fighting a perception that he was too moderate, too malleable, for the swashbuckling, tea-partying modern GOP. But in this campaign’s final days, he became a bona-fide Republican hero.
At recent rallies, as many as 30,000 people roared his name. On Tuesday, during a last-minute trip to Pennsylvania, Romney stepped off his campaign plane in Pittsburgh and was surprised to see supporters cheering him from a parking garage.
Romney appeared moved and waved back without speaking. “That’s when you know you’re going to win,” he told a reporter as he walked to his motorcade.
Romney’s close loss was also a milestone for his religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons had once been persecuted to the desert edge of American civilization. Now, with 15 of the church’s members in Congress, a devout Mormon had fallen just short of the White House.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, it seemed that three of Obama’s actions as commander in chief had played significant roles in his reelection.
One was his decision to bail out the U.S. auto industry. In Ohio, a battleground where that industry is a major presence, 59 percent of voters in early exit polls favored the bailout. Obama did better than usual there among a group he usually loses by a lot: white men without a college education.
Another key decision was Obama’s choice to offer some young illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children the temporary right to live and work in this country legally without the fear of being deported. In Florida, Obama won 60 percent of Latino voters, up three percentage points from four years ago, exit polls showed.
A third was Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy, which earned him plaudits from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), a major Romney backer. In early exit polls, 42 percent of voters said the hurricane was an important factor in their vote: More than 60 percent of them voted for the president.
Now, Tuesday’s victory illuminates the next arc of Obama’s career. In the past decade, he was transformed from an unknown Illinois state senator, to a U.S. senator, to a political cause, and then into a president who struggled to deliver on his promises of far-reaching hope and change.
Obama’s victory seems to guarantee that the landmarks of his first term — the Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the health-care law — will remain in effect. Romney said he wanted to repeal both.
It was difficult, even after months of campaigning, to say what Obama’s next big idea would be. He did not lay out a broad new agenda in the campaign. Instead, his vague slogan, “Forward,” was a sign that the election was about voters trusting him, rather than a set of specific ideas.
Already, Obama’s chief antagonists — the House’s leaders — have signaled that they do not intend to change. Whatever mandate Obama gained Tuesday, Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said, the GOP got an equal mandate to oppose him.
“For two years, our majority in the House has been the primary line of defense for the American people against a government that spends too much, taxes too much and borrows too much when left unchecked,” Boehner said at a Republican event Tuesday night.
On Election Day, Boehner said, “they’ve responded by renewing our majority.”
On Tuesday, several states experienced problems with voting. Some voters in Pennsylvania reported that they were required to show identification, despite a judge’s ruling barring that practice in this election.
In New York and New Jersey, voting was disrupted by the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy. New Yorkers waited in long lines at polling places that were consolidated because of storm damage. And some displaced New Jerseyans said the government was not following through on a promise to let them vote by e-mail.
This information-age Election Day — where “micro-targeted” e-mails replaced fliers, texted donations replaced checks and Twitter sometimes seemed to replace thought itself — began with a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
The first votes were cast just after midnight, by two tiny New Hampshire burgs. Hart’s Location went for Obama, 23 votes to nine. Dixville Notch was tied, five to five.
As the rest of the country awoke Tuesday, the scenes at many polling places were altered by a trend toward early voting: Instead of lines, there were trickles. In Colorado, where more than 80 percent of the 2008 total had already voted, Lydia Leon showed up for tradition’s sake.
She always votes on Election Day. And, in the past, Leon and her husband, Leonard, canceled each other out — blue plus red making nothing. Last time, she was for Obama and he was for McCain. Not this year.
Leon blamed the president for an increase in the family’s insurance premium, and for the poor economy that has her sons working multiple jobs.
“This year, I had to agree with my husband,” she said. “Things didn’t work out the way I wanted.”
But, if Obama lost that one vote in the key battleground of Colorado, he kept another: In the Denver suburbs, Liz Smalley voted for George W. Bush in 2004, then Obama in 2008. In this election, she was bombarded by both sides |
model for the peopling of the Americas—which may have included additional routes besides the Bering Strait crossing—was recently proposed anew following the analysis of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes. [73]
Lastly, an important contribution to the field of anthropological genetics has been the publication in 2010 of the first-draft sequence of a Neanderthal genome. [74] This truly remarkable achievement was also noted in an entry under the title of “Neanderthals and Lamanites: New Science Impacts Book of Mormon DNA Studies” found on the Signature Books website, [75] in which the author praised the new technological advancement in the field of autosomal DNA testing, which now allows the sequencing of large amounts of SNP data obtained from both modern and ancient specimens. Consistent with the data reported, the Signature Books author emphasized that now “we have learned that humans and Neanderthals bred with each other 30,000 years ago.” However, what he/she may have missed is a subtle yet very important detail, which is quite relevant to what has been discussed in the present essay. The original article about the Neanderthal’s DNA includes the following passage:
We detect gene flow from Neandertals into modern humans but no reciprocal gene flow from modern humans into Neandertals. Although gene flow between different populations need not be bidirectional, it has been shown that when a colonizing population (such as anatomically modern humans) encounters a resident population (such as Neandertals), even a small number of breeding events along the wave front of expansion into new territory can result in substantial introduction of genes into the colonizing population (emphasis added).
As the authors point out, natural selection plays a determinant role in the successful propagation of genes to future generations. In this case, Homo sapiens was successful in physically removing all the competitors, or else the stronger genetic adaptation and fitness of the resident population would have eventually won the “genetic battle” against the new comers, as witnessed by the small percentage of Neanderthal DNA that surivived in modern humans. This effect is very common among migrating human populations, as it is for other species. It is highly unlikely that a small group of people arriving to an already-occupied territory and inbreeding with the local population, would be successful in perpetuating a genetic legacy that would have survived to modern times. Just as DNA from Neanderthals is found in anatomically modern humans (and not vice versa), it is no surprise that the DNA of all the modern-day Native Americans carries the genetic signal of their ancestral resident population (which shared an ancient Asian origin), instead of pre-Columbian Old World DNA brought by Lehi and his group.
Conclusions
The Book of Mormon is not a volume about the history and origins of all American Indians. A careful reading of the text clearly indicates that the people described in the Book of Mormon were limited in the recording of their history to events that had religious relevance and that occurred in relatively close proximity to the keepers of the annals.
The fact that the DNA of Lehi and his party has not been detected in modern Native American populations does not demonstrate that this group of people never existed or that the Book of Mormon cannot be historical in nature. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. [76] Further, the very idea of locating the genetic signature of Lehi’s family in modern populations constitutes a truly untestable hypothesis since it is not possible to know the nature of their genetic profiles. Without our knowing the genetic signature to be located, any attempt at researching it will unavoidably result in further assumptions and untestable hypotheses. What were the characteristics of Lehi’s DNA and the DNA of those who went along with him? What haplogroup(s) did they belong to? We will never know. Yet this key point seems lost on those who insist on using genetic evidence as a means to validate or reject the Book of Mormon as a historical narrative. Attempting to make such conclusions is a miscarriage of logic comparable to collecting and analyzing the DNA of thousands of people living in the area surrounding a hypothetical crime scene from which no DNA could be retrieved from the individual who committed the crime, thus creating a comprehensive database of all these people. Will the database include the DNA signature of the criminal? If so, how could the perpetrator be identified among the thousands of others? Similarly, would a database composed of thousands of Native American DNA samples provide the necessary evidence to validate the existence of a small group (perhaps as few as two mtDNA haplotypes) that migrated from the Old World and settled somewhere in the Americas? Conversely, could haplogroup X be undoubtedly inferred as the ultimate proof of the genetic legacy this group left, without ever knowing their actual original DNA signature? Mitochondrial DNA is a powerful tool in reconstructing the history of our race, as demonstrated by the numerous publications that have been produced over the past two-and-a-half decades. However, as has been amply demonstrated, knowing a great deal about the genetic composition of modern-day Native American populations does not give conclusive evidence of the validity or the implausibility of the Book of Mormon’s historicity.
An additional caveat is the lack of professional training in population genetics by those promoting a supposed discrepancy between the genetic evidence and the Book of Mormon account. Some of them claim that their conclusions are strongly supported by trained experts who have been consulted for unbiased opinions about this particular matter. [77] This should raise some concerns, though, since it is fairly obvious that most people outside of the circle of Mormonism have very limited knowledge of the Book of Mormon and its contents. As a further counterpoint to the critics’ arguments, these experts seem to be in agreement that DNA lineages from a small Old World group migrating to an already heavily populated American continent would disappear. [78] Moreover, it is also noteworthy that what these scientists know about what Latter-day Saints believe has been provided mainly as one-sided background information from the critics themselves. To offer a personal anecdote, my scientist colleagues have asked me about DNA evidence and the Book of Mormon on several occasions. I respond with a simple summary in which I explain that the DNA lineages of Lehi’s colony could have been lost due to genetic drift since the number of people involved was probably fairly small compared to the size of the resident Amerindian population. I also explain that it is not possible to distinguish those lineages from post-Columbian admixture, simply because 2,600 years is not enough time for Book of Mormon mtDNA to differentiate Lehi’s descendants from their Eurasian counterparts. My colleagues typically reply that they are not convinced that I have accurately represented what Latter-day Saints believe—namely, that Lehi’s posterity comprises all Native Americans. These personal experiences give context for evaluating “genuine experts’ opinions,” based as they are on what the critics may have shared as background information regarding the Book of Mormon and Latter-day Saint beliefs. Ultimately, the critics’ arguments hold up only when they prescribe what it is that Latter-day Saints believe. Since neither the Book of Mormon nor Church doctrine indicates that all Native Americans descend from the Book of Mormon people, the critics’ arguments are on a weak footing at the outset.
In light of the information provided in this essay, it should be evident that the work of reconstructing the history of Native American populations using molecular data is still under way. Some questions can be answered, but many more remain, and spur further research. The genetic evidence of the peopling of the Americas is not fully understood, and it has evolved substantially over the past two decades. DNA research, and particularly mtDNA data, has been produced in great abundance during this time period and has provided an initial glimpse into the history and prehistory of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. This is truly an exciting time to study the genetic history of Native Americans, for there is much yet to be understood. For example, how is the high frequency of haplogroup B in Southeast Asia and western South America reconciled with its rarity in the native populations of north Siberia and Alaska? The scarcity of archaeological evidence for human settlements on either side of the Bering Strait provides a degree of intrigue, considering that mainstream scientists currently accept Beringia as the likely refugium for Paleo-Indians during the last ice age, leaving open the possibility for alternative routes into the Americas. [79]
Mitochondrial DNA is doubtless a powerful tool that can reveal details about the expansion processes leading to the colonization of the world, including America’s double continent. However, it is not well suited as the ultimate tool to assess the historicity of religious documents like the Book of Mormon and the Bible. If the DNA of Lehi and his family cannot be confidently detected in the modern Amerindian population, does it mean that they never existed? The principles underlying this question can be further extrapolated to other religious scenarios. Can we use DNA to decisively prove that the great biblical patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—ever existed? What were their own and their descendants’ mtDNA haplotypes? What about the other great Old Testament figures, such as Joseph of Egypt, Moses, and Isaiah? Can we use DNA analysis to prove that Jesus Christ lived? The New Testament mentions that Jesus had brothers and sisters (Matthew 13:55–56; Mark 6:3) through whom Mary’s mtDNA could have been transmitted to future generations (and if not through Mary, perhaps through some of her female relatives). Where is their DNA in today’s population? Would it be acceptable to conclude that these are fictional historical figures and the biblical text a hoax because of the lack of genetic evidence?
As I already commented on another occasion, “I find no difficulties in reconciling my scientific passion about Native American history with my religious beliefs. I am not looking for a personal testimony of the Book of Mormon in the double helix. The scientific method and the test of faith are two strongly connected dimensions of my existence, working synergistically in providing greater understanding, knowledge, and from time to time even a glimpse into God’s eternal mysteries.” [80]Anyone using DNA to ascertain the accuracy of historical events of a religious nature—which require instead a component of faith—will be sorely disappointed. DNA studies will continue to assist in reconstructing the history of Native American and other populations, but it is through faith that we are asked to search for truth in holy writings (Moroni 10:3–5). [81]
Notes
This chapter is an updated version of an article published in FARMS Review 22, no. 1 (2010): 191–227. I am grateful to the following individuals for commenting on this manuscript: Dr. Alessandro Achilli (University of Perugia, Italy), Jayne E. Ekins, Diahan Southard, and Dr. Scott R. Woodward (Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, USA), Professor Antonio Torroni (University of Pavia, Italy), Dr. Amy Williams (Harvard Medical School, USA), and Dr. Gregory L. Smith (University of Calgary, Canada).
[1] Dennis H. O’Rourke, “Human Migrations: The Two Roads Taken,”Current Biology19, no. 5 (2009): R204.
[2] Michael Crawford,The Origins of Native Americans: Evidence from Anthropological Genetics(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2.
[3] Geraldine Barnes,Viking America: The First Millennium(Suffolk, England: St. Edmundsbury Press, 2001). Note that no genetic contribution from Vikings has been detected to date in the modern Native American population. Either they kept to themselves and were not welcomed by native groups, or their DNA has not yet been identified in contemporary Amerindians. John L. Sorenson, “Ancient Voyages Across the Ocean to America: From ‘Impossible’ to ‘Certain,’”Journal of Book of Mormon Studies14, no.1 (2005): 6, notes that the Viking presence in North America has been considered to be of no historical importance and goes on to present “decisive” empirical evidence of transoceanic distribution of flora and fauna in pre-Columbian times. See also Martin H. Raish and John L. Sorenson,Pre-Columbian Contacts with the Americas across the Oceans: An Annotated Bibliography, 2 vols. (Provo, UT: Research Press, 1996).
[4] Antonio Torroni and others, “Asian Affinities and Continental Radiation of the Four Founding Native American mtDNAs,”American Journal of Human Genetics53, no. 3 (1993): 563–90; and Alessandro Achilli and others, “The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implication for Evolutionary and Disease Studies,”PloS ONE3, no. 3 (2008): e1764.
[5] For a summary of the principal theories of Book of Mormon New World geography, see http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Geography/New_World.
[6] Carrie A. Moore, “Debate renewed with change in Book of Mormon introduction,”Deseret Morning News, www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695226008,00.html.
[7] In Conference Report, April 1929, 15–16.
[8] See, for example, John L. Sorenson, “When Lehi’s Party Arrived in the Land, Did They Find Others There?”, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies1 (1992): 1–34; John L. Sorenson and Matthew Roper, “Before DNA,”Journal of Book of Mormon Studies12 (2003): 6–23; and Blake T. Ostler, “DNA Strands in the Book of Mormon,”Sunstone, May 2005, 63–71.
[9] This issue has been dealt with competently in Daniel C. Peterson, ed.,The Book of Mormon and DNA Research(Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2008). Examples of Book of Mormon criticisms based on alleged DNA evidence are found in Simon G. Southerton,Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004); Thomas W. Murphy, “Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics,” inAmerican Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon, ed. Dan Vogel and Brent L. Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 47–77; and Brent L. Metcalfe, “Reinventing Lamanite Identity,”Sunstone, March 2004, 20–25. A seriously flawed attempt by a nonspecialist to adduce DNA evidence in favor of Book of Mormon historicity is Rod L. Meldrum,Rediscovering the Book of Mormon Remnant through DNA(Honeoye Falls, NY: Digital Legend Press, 2009).
[10] See, for example, Ugo A. Perego, Jayne E. Ekins, and Scott R. Woodward, “Mountain Meadows Survivor? A Mitochondrial DNA Examination,”Journal of Mormon History32, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 45–53.
[11] Stephen Anderson and others, “Sequence and Organization of the Human Mitochondrial Genome,”Nature290 (1981): 457–65.
[12] Richard M. Andrews and others, “Reanalysis and Revision of the Cambridge Reference Sequence for Human Mitochondrial DNA,”Nature Genetics23, no. 2 (1999): 147.
[13] Also called the hypervariable or D-loop region.
[14] Sometimes referred to as HVR1, HVR2, and HVR3.
[15] For example, Antonio Torroni and others, “Native American Mitochondrial DNA Analysis Indicates That the Amerind and the Nadene Populations Were Founded by Two Independent Migrations,”Genetics130 (1992): 153–62; Antonio Torroni and others, “mtDNA and Y-Chromosome Polymorphisms in Four Native American Populations from Southern Mexico,”American Journal of Human Genetics54, no. 2 (1994): 303–18; Antonio Torroni and others, “Mitochondrial DNA ‘Clock’ for the Amerinds and Its Implications for Timing Their Entry into North America,”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences91, no. 3 (1994): 1158–62; and Peter Forster and others, “Origin and Evolution of Native American mtDNA Variation: A Reappraisal,”American Journal of Human Genetics59 (1996): 935–45.
[16] Antonio Torroni and others, “Do the Four Clades of the mtDNA Haplogroup L2 Evolve at Different Rates?”American Journal of Human Genetics69, no. 6 (2001): 1348–56.
[17] Luísa Pereira and others, “The Diversity Present in 5140 Human Mitochondrial Genomes,”American Journal of Human Genetics84 (2009): 628–40; and Mannis van Oven and Manfred Kayser, “Updated Comprehensive Phylogenetic Tree of Global Human Mitochondrial DNA Variation,”Human Mutation30, no. 2 (2009): E386–94, www.phylotree.org. As of March 1, 2011, the publicly accessible GenBank database contains 8,731 complete mtDNA sequences, but known Native American haplogroups still suffer from significant underrepresentation. See also www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore.
[18] Alessandro Achilli and Ugo A. Perego, “Mitochondrial DNA: A Female Perspective in Recent Human Origin and Evolution,” inOrigins as a Paradigm in the Sciencesand in the Humanities, ed. Paola Spinozzi and Alessandro Zironi (Goettingen: V&R unipress, 2010), 41–58.
[19] Torroni, “Asian Affinities.”
[20] Agnar Helgason and others, “A Populationwide Coalescent Analysis of Icelandic Matrilineal and Patrilineal Genealogies: Evidence for a Faster Evolutionary Rate of mtDNA Lineages than Y Chromosomes,”American Journal of Human Genetics72, no. 6 (2003): 1370–88.
[21] Simon Southerton, “Answers to Apologetic Claims about DNA and the Book of Mormon,” www.irr.org/MIT/southerton-response.html.
[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift.
[23] Crawford,Origins of Native Americans, 49–51, 239–41, 260–61.
[24] Beth A. S. Shook and David G. Smith, “Using Ancient mtDNA to Reconstruct the Population History of Northeastern North America,”American Journal of Physical Anthropology137 (2008): 14.
[25] Amy Harmon, “DNA Gatherers Hit Snag: Tribes Don’t Trust Them,”New York Times, December 10, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/us/10dna.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all.
[26] Alan Cooper and Hendrik N. Poinar, “Ancient DNA: Do It Right, or Not at All,”Science289, no. 5482 (2000): 1139.
[27] Adrian W. Briggs and others, “Targeted Retrieval and Analysis of Five Neandertal mtDNA Genomes,”Science325 (2009): 318–21; and Luca Ermini and others, “Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequence of the Tyrolean Iceman,”Current Biology18 (2008): 1687–93.
[28] Brian M. Kemp and others, “Genetic Analysis of Early Holocene Skeletal Remains from Alaska and Its Implications for the Settlement of the Americas,”American Journal of Physical Anthropology132 (2007): 605–21.
[29] Ugo A. Perego and others, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration Routes from Beringia Marked by Two Rare MtDNA Haplogroups,”Current Biology19, no. 1 (2009): 1–8. A single haplotype sharing part of the D4h3 motif was also identified in the province of Shandong, China, out of more than 10,000 Asian mtDNAs.
[30] Although some information is available about the ancestry of Lehi and Ishmael, we know nothing about the origins of Sariah and Ishmael’s wife, who were responsible for passing their mtDNA to future generations.
[31] Erika Tamm and others, “Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders,”PloS ONE2, no. 9 (2007): e829.
[32] Forster, “Origin and Evolution of Native American mtDNA Variation.”
[33] Michael D. Brown and others, “MtDNA Haplogroup X: An Ancient Link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?”,American Journal of Human Genetics63, no. 6 (1998): 1852–61; and David G. Smith and others, “Distribution of MtDNA Haplogroup X Among Native North Americans,”American Journal of Physical Anthropology110, no. 3 (1999): 271–84.
[34] Rosaria Scozzari and others, “MtDNA and Y Chromosome-Specific Polymorphisms in Modern Ojibwa: Implications about the Origin of Their Gene Pool,”American Journal of Human Genetics60, no. 1 (1997): 241–44; and Perego, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration.”
[35] Achilli, “The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups”; and Perego, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration.”
[36] Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, “Ocean Trails and Prairie Paths? Thoughts about Clovis Origins,” inThe First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World, ed. Nina G. Jablonski (San Francisco: Academy of Science, 2002), 255–71; and Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford, “The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor: a possible palaeolithic route to the New World,”World Archaeology36, no. 4 (2004): 459–78.
[37] Miroslava V. Derenko and others, “The Presence of Mitochondrial Haplogroup X in Altaians from South Siberia,”American Journal of Human Genetics69, no. 1 (2001): 237–41.
[38] Maere Reidla and others, “Origin and Diffusion of mtDNA Haplogroup X,”American Journal of Human Genetics 73, no. 5 (2003): 1178–90.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Shlush and others, “The Druze: A Population Genetic Refugium of the Near East,”PloS ONE3, no. 5 (2008): e2105; and Doron M. Behar and others, “Counting the Founders: The Matrilineal Genetic Ancestry of the Jewish Diaspora,”PloS ONE3, no. 4 (2008): e2062.
[42] Martina Kujanová and others, “Near Eastern Neolithic Genetic Input in a Small Oasis of the Egyptian Western Desert,”American Journal of Physical Anthropology140, no.2 (2009): 336–46.
[43] Perego, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration.”
[44] For details about the five age-estimate models based on complete mtDNA sequences, see Dan Mishmar and others, “Natural selection shaped regional mtDNA variation in humans,”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences100, no. 1 (2001): 171–76; Toomas Kivisild and others, “The Role of Selection in the Evolution of Human Mitochondrial Genomes,”Genetics172, no. 1 (2006): 373–87; Perego, “Paleo-Indian Migration”; Pedro Soares and others, “Correcting for Purifying Selection: An Improved Human Mitochondrial Molecular Clock,”American Journal of Human Genetics84, no. 6 (2009): 740–59; and Eva-Liis Loogväli and others, “Explaining the Imperfection of the Molecular Clock of Hominid Mitochondria,”PloS ONE4, no. 12 (2009): e8260.
[45] Soares, “Correcting for Purifying Selection.”
[46] Perego, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration.”
[47] Supporters of X haplogroup as evidence for Book of Mormon historicity and its geographic setting in northern North America rely on the unpopular molecular clock proposed by a forensic team in 1997. This clock was based on control region data only. See Thomas J. Parsons and others, “A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region,”Nature Genetics15 (1997): 363–68.
[48] William W. Hauswirth and others, “Inter- and Intrapopulation Studies of Ancient Humans,”Experientia50, no. 6 (1994): 585–91; Anne C. Stone and Mark Stoneking, “MtDNA Analysis of a Prehistoric Oneota Population: Implications for the Peopling of the New World,”American Journal of Human Genetics62, no. 5 (1998): 1153–70; and Ripan S. Malhi and David G. Smith, “Brief Communication: Haplogroup X Confirmed in Prehistoric North America,”American Journal of Physical Anthropology119 (2002): 84–86.
[49] Soares, “Correcting for Purifying Selection.” A similar outcome was observed when querying the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation mtDNA database (www.SMGF.org). Out of more than 76,000 samples, C16278T was observed in 8,501 cases in several haplogroups, including all the Pan-American lineages.
[50] Hauswirth, “Inter- and Intrapopulation Studies of Ancient Humans.”
[51] Malhi and Smith, “Haplogroup X Confirmed.”
[52] Malhi and Smith, “Haplogroup X Confirmed.”
[53] Perego, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migration.”
[54] Theodore G. Schurr, “The Peopling of the New World: Perspectives from Molecular Anthropology,”Annual Review of Anthropology33 (2004): 556.
[55] Olga Rickards and others, “MtDNA History of the Cayapa Amerinds of Ecuador: Detection of Additional Founding Lineages for the Native American Populations,”American Journal of Human Genetics65, no. 2 (1999): 519–30.
[56] Schurr, “Peopling of the New World.”
[57] Kemp, “Holocene Skeletal Remains.”
[58] Ugo A. Perego and others, “The Initial Peopling of the Americas: A Growing Number of Founding Mitochondrial Genomes from Beringia,”Genome Research20 (2010): 1174–79.
[59] Miroslava Derenko and others, “Origin and Post-Glacial Dispersal of Mitochondrial DNA Haplogroups C and D in Northern Asia,” PLoS One 5 (2010): e15214.
[60] Sigríður Sunna Ebenesaersdóttir and others, “A New Subclade of MtDNA Haplogroup C1 Found in Icelanders: Evidence of Pre-Columbian Contact?” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 144 (2011): 92–99.
[61] Perego, “The Initial Peopling.”
[62] Ripan S. Malhi and others, “Brief Communication: Mitochondrial Haplotype C4c Confirmed As a Founding Genome in the Americas,”American Journal of Physical Anthropology141 (2010): 494–97.
[63] Stanford and Bradley, “Ocean Trails and Prairie Paths?”; and Bradley and Stanford, “The North Atlantic ice-edge corridor.”
[64] Ebenesaersdóttir, “A New Subclade of MtDNA Haplogroup C1.”
[65] Perego, “Distinctive Paleo-Indian Migrations.”
[66] Ebenesaersdóttir, “A New Subclade of MtDNA Haplogroup C1.”
[67] Alessandro Achilli and others, “The Mitochondrial DNA Landscape of Modern Mexico,” American Society of Human Genetics, 58th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, November 11–15, 2008; and Alessandro Achilli and others, “Decrypting the MtDNA Gene Pool of Modern Panamanians,” American Society of Human Genetics, 59th Annual Meeting, Honolulu, October 20–24, 2009. Approximately 80 percent of the samples tested for the Mexican (n = approx. 2,000) and the Panamanian (n = approx. 500) mixed populations belonged to one of the four Pan-American haplogroups.
[68] Kari B. Schroeder and others, “Haplotypic Background of a Private Allele at High Frequency in the Americas,” Molecular Biology and Evolution26 (2009): 995-1016.
[69] “A Quantum Leap in DNA Studies,” www.signaturebooks.com/news.htm (accessed January 2010). This article has since been removed from Signature Books’ website.
[70] Morten Rasmussen and others, “Ancient Human Genome Sequence of an Extinct Palaeo-Eskimo,”Nature463 (2010): 757–62.
[71] Cassandra Brooks, “First Ancient Human Sequenced,” www.thescientist.com/blog/display/57140.
[72] Cassandra Brooks, “First Ancient Human Sequenced.” The second quotation is Brooks’s paraphrase of Feldman. See Michael H. Crawford,The Origins of Native Americans, 4. In his lengthy review of data supporting the Asian origins of the Amerindians, he stated that “this evidence does not preclude the possibility of some small-scale cultural contacts between specific Amerindian societies and Asian or Oceanic seafarers.”
[73] Antonio Arnaiz-Villena and others, “The Origin of Amerindians and the Peopling of the Americas According to HLA Genes: Admixture with Asian and Pacific People,”Current Genomics11, no. 2 (2010): 103–14.
[74] Richard E. Green and others, “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328 (2010): 710–22.
[75] Signature Books, “Neanderthals and Lamanites: New Science Impact Book of Mormon DNA Studies,” http://signaturebooks.com/2010/06/new-science-impacts-book-of-mormon-dna-studies.
[76] Critics of the Book of Mormon regard this statement as a typical Mormon apologists’ favorite cop out to justify the lack of evidence of Israelite DNA in the Americas. In 2010, this argument was brought up again in a forum discussing Mesoamericans and their DNA lineages. One of the contributors wrote that the “absence of evidence IS evidence of absence if one could reasonably expect there to be evidence where there is none.” Richard Packham, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of…”?? Posted on August 15, 2010 at http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon601.htm. He then proceeded by giving two examples to support his conclusions. Example 1 - “X claims he has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. There are no records of his ever having attended there. The records are accurate and complete. Is the absence of evidence evidence that he does not have a Ph.D. from the U. of C.? Of course it is.” Example 2 - “Dr. Y suspects I have cancer. He finds no symptoms, tests are all negative. Is absence of evidence of cancer evidence that I do not have cancer? Of course.” (emphasis added). In the first example, the contributor relies on the fact that records at the university are accurate and complete. Could the same be said about the history of the America’s indigenous people? Do we have accurate and complete genetic records in the modern population to know exactly what happened in the Western Hemisphere during the past few millennia? Scientists studying the history and origins of these people would strongly disagree. In the second example, the doctor is looking for known symptoms for cancer in a patient. He knows what he is looking for and if they are not there, then there is no cancer. Do we know what the DNA of Lehi and his party is so that it can be looked for in the Americas? We don’t and therefore we cannot say it is not there. In fact, we could be looking right at it without being able to recognize it as such for the simple reason that we don’t have their haplotypes to use as a standard for comparison. Packham is guilty of two false analogies, suggesting that he does not understand the DNA evidence about which he is opining.
[77] See, for example, the introduction to Southerton,Losing a Lost Tribe (Sourceflix, 2003), DVD;or Living Hope Ministries,DNA vs. the Book of Mormon(Sourceflix, 2003), DVD.
[78] “What Happens Genetically When a Small Population Is Introduced into a Larger One?” www.signaturebooks.com/excerpts/DNAAmericas.htm (accessed November 2009). This article has since been removed from Signature Books’ website. The exact question asked was, “If a group of, say, fifty Phoenicians (men and women) arrived in the Americas some 2,600 years ago and intermarried with indigenous people, and assuming their descendants fared as well as the larger population through the vicissitudes of disease, famine, and war, would you expect to find genetic evidence of their Phoenician ancestors in the current Native American population? In addition, would their descendants be presumed to have an equal or unequal number of Middle Eastern as Native American haplotypes?”
[79] Dennis H. O’Rourke and Jennifer A. Raff, “The Human Genetic History of the Americas: The Final Frontier,”Current Biology20, no. 4 (2010): R202–7.
[80] Ugo A. Perego, “Current Biology, SMGF, and Lamanites,” www.fairblog.org/2009/02/06/current-biology-smgf-and-lamanites.
[81] Jeffrey R. Holland, “Safety for the Soul,”Ensign, November 2009, 88–90, http://lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23–1–1117–28,00.html.I have students read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” every spring. Bush was a scientific bureaucrat who helped organize the work of the Manhattan Project. In 1945, just before the fruits of that project were used to destroy two Japanese cities, he published his thoughts about what scientists would do in peacetime, focusing in particular on the problem of managing a proliferation of information. He envisioned a desk-sized machine called the Memex that scientists could use to index, consult, and annotate scientific literature using a variety of developing technologies such as microfilm. On a more visionary note, he predicted computing, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and hypertext. He didn’t take into account how copyright and the way we fund scientific publishing restricts sharing and reuse, but hey, he couldn’t guess everything right.
The part of the essay that always grabs me, though, is where he describes the mechanical mean of storing and retrieving information and how it cannot replace the way people actually think – through connections grasped on the fly. “Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing,” he wrote. “The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.” He imagined that we could improve upon the mechanized indexing of information by allowing scientists to create, record, and share trails of association, given automated access to the record.
In many ways, citations serve as hand-coded trails of association that we create and share, but we persist in presenting them traditionally – in text at the bottom of a page, or in an alphabetical list of references. The links are the opposite of hyper; learning how to read a citation and go from it to a source remains a huge challenge for undergraduates once they realize that fine print is actually good for something other than a kind of plagiarism liability insurance. Yet the web of citations (and the automated linking of citations through Google Scholar and Web of Science) are about as close as we come to Bush’s “trails of association.” Hypertext is closer, but it hasn’t replaced hand-coded references in the worlds of science and scholarship.
We’ve seen so much change in libraries, yet it’s so hard to let go of the old ways.
Remember when we used to explain databases by saying “it’s like the Reader’s Guide, but on the computer”? Maybe you're not old enough. It’s been more than a quarter of a century since students were likely to have actually seen the Reader’s Guide, much less used it. Yet our databases are largely still structured like an old-school printed index, and we expect people to search much as they did when flipping pages of a printed index. We’re now adding a discovery layer of software to make searching collections of databases more like searching Google, though that doesn’t solve the problem of being overwhelmed with an abundance of choices before you’re even sure you know what you’re looking for. There are no trails to follow there.
Library catalogs have been online since the 1980s, but they still use a record format designed to automate the printing of catalog cards. All this is set to change, but deciding what exactly we can let go of when creating new cataloging practices is incredibly hard. Meanwhile, my students are completely unimpressed by the way Google girded their lawyers and digitized the contents of tens of millions of library books. They don’t remember a world when it was impossible to search inside books from the comfort of your desktop. It’s not the amazing “moon shot” it once was.
This week, when looking at our dwindling collection of paper-based periodicals and newspapers, most of them rarely used, my colleagues and I talked about showing students the difference between popular publications like New Scientist and science journals, or between |
risk alleles (minor allele frequency ≥1%).Composite polygenic risk scores, derived from these risk alleles, are now considered useful indices of genetic liability and provide biologically valid indicators of disease risk for research.Moreover, emerging evidence suggests that schizophrenia polygenic risk scores predict cognitive ability and postpubertal psychopathology including negative symptoms, but not psychotic-like symptoms, in the general population.Thus, before the typical age of illness onset, schizophrenia's genetic liability might manifest as symptoms that do not resemble psychosis. Identification of the effect of risk alleles for schizophrenia on prepubertal developmental characteristics in population-based samples might help to identify and understand the early origins of this disorder and the initial manifestations of genetic liability.
Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Identification of risk loci with shared effects on five major psychiatric disorders: a genome-wide analysis.
Many mental disorders have prepubertal origins.Although schizophrenia typically onsets after puberty,studies in individuals at high risk, longitudinal studies, and retrospective studies have shown that the fully developed disorder is often preceded by impairments that manifest earlier in development.Childhood neurodevelopmental impairments involving cognition and learning, social and communication difficulties, emotion and mood dysregulation, and behavioural problems are known to predate the onset of schizophrenia,but it is not yet known whether these childhood antecedents index genetic liability for the disorder.
The funder of the study had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. LR and AT had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
We considered the possibility of potential confounders (ie, child sex and social class); the sample is ancestrally homogeneous ( appendix ).
Initial univariate regression analyses involved one predictor (polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia) and multiple dimensional outcomes (12 phenotypic measures within the four domains). We used a false discovery rateto correct for multiple testing in our primary analyses with R (version 3.0.0). Given that our phenotypic measures are correlated, traditional methods of correcting for multiple testing, such as the Bonferroni method, would be too conservative.Analyses were done in Mplus (version 7) with a robust maximum likelihood parameter estimator and full information maximum likelihood estimation.We also generated odds ratios for dichotomised versions of the outcome indicators (≥ one symptom for DAWBA and bottom 10% for reading, IQ, and social and communication variables, in line with previous work appendix ).
DAWBA data were not collected before age 7 years but related questionnaire measures were available for children at age 4 years. The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaireis a brief, widely used questionnaire designed to assess different domains of children's mental health. It was completed by parents when children were aged 4 years. Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire data were also available at age 7 years and are shown in the appendix to allow comparison across ages with the same measure. The subscales (each comprising five items, individual items range none to two) included prosocial behaviour (eg, considerate of other people's feelings), emotional problems (eg, many worries), and conduct (behaviour) problems (eg, often lies or cheats). The conduct problems subscale includes an irritability item (temper tantrums), which was analysed separately because this item has been found to be an indicator of emotion or mood dysregulation.All descriptive information and associations with primary measures are available in the appendix
For behaviour, measures were headstrong behaviour, aggression, and activity and impulsiveness, all measured by DAWBA items. Headstrong items included arguing with adults, ignoring rules or refusing to do as told, doing things to annoy other people on purpose and blaming others for his or her own mistakes or bad behaviour.Aggression included starting fights and bullying or threatening people. Activity and impulsiveness were measured by nine attention deficit hyperactivity disorder items.
Emotion and mood regulation included irritability and anxiety, which were assessed with the DAWBA. Irritability included temper tantrums, being touchy or easily annoyed, and being angry and resentful,while anxiety was composed by summing six generalised anxiety items.
The social and communication variables were social understanding, language intelligibility and fluency, and pragmatic language. Social understanding was measured by four items from the Social and Communication Disorders Checklist(possible range none to eight; reverse scored—higher scores indicate greater social understanding). Measures of intelligibility and fluency, and pragmatic language were derived from the Children's Communication Checklist,and comprised 11 and 38 items respectively (possible ranges 16–38 and 86–162).
Primary outcome variables were assessed at ages 7–9 years. Descriptive information, including correlations between variables, is included in the appendix. The cognition and learning variables were inattention, reading ability, verbal intelligence quotient (IQ), and performance IQ. Inattention was assessed with nine ADHD items from the parent-rated Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA),a structured diagnostic assessment widely used in child mental health surveys (individual items ranged from none to two). Reading ability was measured with the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimensionsand verbal and performance IQ with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children;these were standardised with a Z-score transformation.
Development and Well-being Assessment: description and initial validation of an integrated assessment of child and adolescent psychopathology.
Genotyping details, as well as full methods for generating the polygenic risk scores, are given in the appendix. In brief, polygenic risk scores were generated as the weighted mean number of disorder risk alleles in approximate linkage equilibrium (R<0·25), defined in previously published genome-wide association studies, with standard procedures.In ALSPAC, these were derived from dosage data of 1 813 169 imputed autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms ( appendix ). Risk alleles were identified as those associated with case-status in the Psychiatric Genetic Consortium analyses (35 476 patients and 46 839 controls)at a threshold of p<0·05, as this threshold maximally captures phenotypic variance for this disorder.Associations across a range of p value thresholds are shown in the appendix
Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia are associated with higher levels of neurodevelopmental and mental health problems in the general population from early childhood to adult life. The genetic liability for schizophrenia might manifest as symptoms that do not resemble psychosis.
This study suggests that the genetic liability to schizophrenia, indexed by genetic risk scores that were generated from a sample of adults with the disorder, affects childhood neurodevelopment, emotional problems, and behaviour in the general population as early as age 4 years.
We searched PubMed for articles published from Aug 24, 2011 to Aug 24, 2016 for the terms ([“schizophrenia” OR “psychosis” OR “psychotic”] AND [“child” or “adolescent”] AND [“antecedents” OR “genetic” OR “polygenic risk scores”] AND [“review”]); no language restrictions were imposed. We identified two reviews of childhood antecedents to adult mental health, including schizophrenia. Follow-up studies in participants at high risk, retrospective studies, and population studies have reported that although schizophrenia onset typically occurs after puberty, illness is often preceded by observable childhood neurodevelopmental impairments that can also be viewed as traits in the general population. The genetic liability of schizophrenia, as indexed by polygenic risk scores, contributes to postpubertal mental health problems.
The ALSPAC is a well-established prospective, longitudinal birth cohort study. The enrolled core sample consisted of 14 541 mothers living in Avon, UK, who had expected delivery dates of between April 1, 1991 and Dec 31, 1992. Of these pregnancies 13 988 children were alive at 1 year. When the oldest children were approximately 7 years of age, an attempt was made to bolster the initial sample with eligible cases who had not joined the study originally, resulting in an additional 713 children being enrolled. The resulting total sample size of children who were alive at 1 year was 14 701. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the ALSPAC Ethics and Law Committee and the Local Research Ethics Committees. After quality control, genotype data were available for 8365 children. Phenotype data were available for between 5100 and 6952 individuals depending on the measures. Full details of the study, measures, and samples can be found elsewhere. appendix ).
Cohort profile: the ‘children of the 90s’—the index offspring of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children.
Effect sizes were in keeping with previous findings for polygenic risk scores in epidemiological research;adopting the approach used by Kendler,we estimated that individuals in the top 2·5% for schizophrenia polygenic risk scores would have a roughly 12–26% increased risk of high versus low scores for the different phenotypes.
The schizophrenia polygenic risk score: to what does it predispose in adolescence?.
When we controlled for social class and sex, associations with schizophrenia polygenic risk scores remained for performance IQ, intelligibility and fluency, and headstrong behaviour, but not for social understanding or irritability ( appendix ).
Univariate associations for phenotypes at ages 7–9 years are shown in table 1. In the cognition and learning domain, we observed an association of polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia with lower performance IQ, but not with inattention, reading, or verbal IQ. Within the social and communication domain, we observed associations with poorer social understanding and lower language intelligibility and fluency, but not with pragmatic language. Within the emotion and mood regulation domain, we observed an association between schizophrenia polygenic risk scores and irritability, but not with anxiety. Within the behaviour domain, we noted an association specifically with headstrong behaviour, but not with aggression or activity and impulsivity. These associations with schizophrenia polygenic risk scores were significant after correcting for multiple testing and false discovery rate adjusted p values ( table 1 ).
One or more than one symptom for DAWBA, bottom 10% of distribution for reading, IQ, and social and communication variables.
One or more than one symptom for DAWBA, bottom 10% of distribution for reading, IQ, and social and communication variables.
Discussion
This study showed that schizophrenia polygenic risk scores is associated with prepubertal performance IQ, social and communication difficulties, emotion and mood dysregulation, and behaviour problems in a population-based sample of children.
1 Rutter M
Kim-Cohen J
Maughan B Continuities and discontinuities in psychopathology between childhood and adult life., 3 Fryers T
Brugha T Childhood determinants of adult psychiatric disorder. 1 Rutter M
Kim-Cohen J
Maughan B Continuities and discontinuities in psychopathology between childhood and adult life. Cognitive, language, and social impairments as well as emotional and behavioural difficulties have been documented in children who developed schizophrenia in high-risk follow-up, case-control, and retrospective studies.However, most children who show such deficits do not later develop schizophrenia, and whether these factors are indicators of genetic liability has been questioned.Our work suggests that prepubertal lower performance IQ, poorer social understanding, language intelligibility and fluency, irritability, and headstrong behaviour, might be early manifestations of schizophrenia genetic liability. These findings require further testing. Our results highlight that schizophrenia polygenic risk scores contribute to traits that are observable in the general population from a very early age, many years before the onset of any adult forms of psychopathology. Given that the prevalence of schizophrenia in the general population is low, the findings suggest that these prepubertal features represent indices of liability rather than an illness prodrome.
25 Hubbard L
Tansey KE
Rai D
et al. Evidence of common genetic overlap between schizophrenia and cognition. 23 Martin J
Hamshere ML
Stergiakouli E
O'Donovan MC
Thapar A Neurocognitive abilities in the general population and composite genetic risk scores for attention–deficit hyperactivity disorder. Regarding the specific developmental domains, we found evidence of association with schizophrenia genetic risk scores for performance IQ. Earlier measures of cognitive ability were not available, although genetic overlap between schizophrenia and prepubertal performance IQ specifically has been identified by previous work.Our work extends these findings by suggesting that links are not generalised to other aspects of cognition and learning including inattention, reading, and verbal IQ (that are predicted by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder polygenic risk scores despite genetic discovery samples of this disorder being much smaller and thus less well powered than those for schizophrenia).
7 Jones HJ
Stergiakouli E
Tansey KE
et al. Phenotypic manifestation of genetic risk for schizophrenia during adolescence in the general population. Schizophrenia genetic risk was also associated with social and communication difficulties as early as age 4 years. Social impairments and communication skills have received less attention in the published literature than cognitive features as possible early antecedents of mental disorders. Interestingly, some of these social and communication difficulties could be regarded as similar to negative symptoms of schizophrenia that show postpubertal associations with schizophrenia polygenic risk scores.Our findings suggest that these domains of development that affect early socialisation, such as prosocial behaviour, might also be manifestations of genetic liability to schizophrenia.
26 Laurens KR
Luo L
Matheson SL
et al. Common or distinct pathways to psychosis? A systematic review of evidence from prospective studies for developmental risk factors and antecedents of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders and affective psychoses. 7 Jones HJ
Stergiakouli E
Tansey KE
et al. Phenotypic manifestation of genetic risk for schizophrenia during adolescence in the general population. While emotional problems in childhood are most commonly considered precursors to mood disorders, a recent reviewsuggests that schizophrenia spectrum disorders are preceded by emotional problems in middle childhood (ages 6–12 years) and recent evidence suggests an association between the schizophrenia genetic risk score and postpubertal anxiety disorder at age 16 years in the general population.Our findings were mixed for emotional problems; associations were observed for irritability but not for our diagnostic measure of generalised anxiety symptoms.
27 Thapar A
Rutter M Neurodevelopmental disorders. Associations between schizophrenia polygenic risk scores and behavioural problems were also noted as early as age 4 years. While behavioural problems are often considered largely environmentally driven, our findings are consistent with a neurodevelopmental component to early-onset behavioural problems,which for some might index genetic liability to adult-onset mental disorders.
1 Rutter M
Kim-Cohen J
Maughan B Continuities and discontinuities in psychopathology between childhood and adult life., 2 Pine DS
Fox NA Childhood antecedents and risk for adult mental disorders., 3 Fryers T
Brugha T Childhood determinants of adult psychiatric disorder. 28 Anttila V
Bulik-Sullivan B
Finucane HK
et al. Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain. Our study has some limitations. First, although our four developmental domains were conceptually selected a priori on the basis of the scientific literature,our analysis involved multiple testing. We attempted to adjust for these tests, but we cannot rule out false-positive findings and replication is advisable for any genetic finding. Additionally, our outcome variables are intercorrelated and the genetic correlation between the different childhood traits we have identified as associated with schizophrenia polygenic risk scores should be tested.
Another limitation is that DAWBA, cognition, and language data were not available for children before the age of 7 years. Correlations between primary and secondary (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire) measures in ALSPAC were modest, and the extent to which these reflect the same underlying construct is unclear. Thus, the questionnaire findings do not represent a replication. Furthermore, after correction for multiple testing, although the associations between social understanding, intelligibility and fluency, irritability and headstrong behaviour, and the polygenic risk score for schizophrenia were statistically significant, they represent only weak evidence of an association with the outcome.
1 Rutter M
Kim-Cohen J
Maughan B Continuities and discontinuities in psychopathology between childhood and adult life., 2 Pine DS
Fox NA Childhood antecedents and risk for adult mental disorders., 3 Fryers T
Brugha T Childhood determinants of adult psychiatric disorder. However, we provide novel evidence that some prepubertal features implicated as antecedents to schizophrenia index genetic liability and highlight the importance of research into these features at a very early age in high-risk longitudinal samples.
24 Kendler KS The schizophrenia polygenic risk score: to what does it predispose in adolescence?. 7 Jones HJ
Stergiakouli E
Tansey KE
et al. Phenotypic manifestation of genetic risk for schizophrenia during adolescence in the general population., 23 Martin J
Hamshere ML
Stergiakouli E
O'Donovan MC
Thapar A Neurocognitive abilities in the general population and composite genetic risk scores for attention–deficit hyperactivity disorder. Another limitation is that our target sample is a longitudinal birth cohort study, which inevitably is associated with issues of non-random attrition. This bias probably resulted in a retained sample with a lower schizophrenic polygenic risk score and fewer developmental impairments, which might have resulted in underestimated associations between polygenic risk scores and prepubertal characteristics. Finally, although polygenic risk scores provide a useful indicator of genetic liability,they are not a recommended method for an explanation of a substantial amount of phenotypic variance of population traits that might be only weakly correlated with a risk of the disorder. Indeed, the polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia explain only a small amount of the variance in childhood neurodevelopment in our analyses. Some associations did not remain when controlling for social class and sex, although schizophrenia polygenic risk scores were not associated with social class ( appendix ). The effect sizes of our associations are small but typical for this kind of work with polygenic risk scores.Radha Rani Amber Indigo Ananda Mitchell (born 12 November 1973) is an Australian actress. She started her career acting in various Australian television series and films, and later appeared in Hollywood films such as High Art (1998), Pitch Black (2000), Phone Booth (2002), Man on Fire (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Melinda and Melinda (2004), Silent Hill (2006) and The Crazies (2010).
Early life [ edit ]
Mitchell was born in Melbourne. Her mother is a model-turned-fashion-designer and her father is a filmmaker; the couple divorced when she was young.[1][2] Her first name Radha (Sanskrit राधा ) stems from the Hare Krishna faith. The other parts of her name Rani (रानी - queen) and Ananda (आनन्द - joy) also come from similar origins. She credits her name as being 'a creative byproduct' of her mother’s experiences In India during the 1970s.[3] She attended St Michael's Grammar School in St Kilda and graduated in 1992.
Career [ edit ]
Mitchell began her career starring on ABC TV's Sugar and Spice in 1988.[4] She played a guest role in Neighbours in 1994, and later returned to play the regular role of Catherine O'Brien from 1996 to 1997.[5]
In 1997 she starred in two films, High Art and Everything Put Together, both Independent Spirit Award winners. Other films—including Pitch Black opposite Vin Diesel, Phone Booth opposite Colin Farrell, and Man on Fire opposite Denzel Washington—soon followed.
Mitchell gained recognition for her performance in the Academy Award–winning Finding Neverland, which co-starred Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. This performance earned the cast a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.
Mitchell then took the title roles in Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda (2004), alongside Chloë Sevigny, followed by a part with Josh Hartnett in Mozart and the Whale. She then starred in the film adaptation of the video game Silent Hill (2006), opposite Laurie Holden and Sean Bean. Though the horror film received mixed reviews from critics, it opened at number one at the box office, with over $20 million in sales.[6] In 2008, Mitchell starred in Rogue with Michael Vartan, as well as Henry Poole Is Here opposite Luke Wilson and The Children of Huang Shi opposite Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.
For her role in Claire McCarthy's The Waiting City, Mitchell won Best Actress in October 2010 at the Antipodes Film Festival, in St. Tropez, France.[7]
In 2013, Mitchell played the lead role on the ABC drama series Red Widow,[8] and appeared, opposite Gerard Butler, in the action-thriller film Olympus Has Fallen.[9]
Filmography [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]As we slowly inch closer to the Arrested Development revival it’s becoming more and more a point of pride to exhibit your fandom with obscure quotes, judgment over those who have never heard of a cornballer, and coming up with new and different ways to enthusiastically and impractically show off how much you love the show. And is there any place on the internet that caters to enthusiasm and impracticality better than Etsy? I think not.
As you can see with our first item, a paper doll set also available in Motherboy, Cornballer, and Tobias dress up (WANT THEM ALL) the creativity and time on these craftsman’s hands seemingly knows no bounds, and every self-respecting AD easter egg aficionado should own at least one item from the Etsy shop, which includes…
Tobias for all occasions.
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The perfect gift for the standardized-test-taking comedy nerd in your life.
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Guaranteed to make a statement during speed dating.
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Take your AD drinking games next level.
Buy here
Hopefully the longer iPhone 5 version will more effectively hide its thunder.
Buy here!
Never feel like an a-hole at Whole Foods again.
Buy here!
Perfect for dead dove warnings.
Buy here!
I may start writing thank you notes instead of sending thank you texts.
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And finally…
Buy here! Also available in “Has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken?” (kitchen), Gob bless this house (living room), and “I’ve made a huge mistake” (my room). The above is of course for your room.Arctic Monkeys have never quite made it big in America – until now. With latest album AM topping charts, the band just sold out their first US arena show. Alex Turner and Matt Helders talk aliens, Oprah Winfrey’s hair and music with Amanda Holpuch
While Arctic Monkeys are a household name in the UK, they’ve never quite made it big in America. Since releasing the UK’s fastest-selling debut album in 2006 – and representing their country on the world stage at the London Olympics opening ceremony in 2012 – mentions of their name in the US more often received a response of: “Who?” Hardly recognition, let alone fandom.
But now, in the US and other countries outside Britain, Arctic Monkeys’ latest album, AM, is topping radio charts for the first time and is prevalent in 2013 album of the year lists. This fervor helped the band reach a milestone in American music culture: selling out an arena show for the first time in the US at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
“For anyone, no matter what stage of your career you’re at, it’s still an amazing place to play,” drummer Matt Helders told the Guardian on Saturday before the band’s MSG show. He was drinking coffee with lead singer Alex Turner at the Manhattan hotel at which they had arrived a few hours earlier, with just enough time to get a few hours of sleep before the big gig.
Helders and Turner weren’t entirely sure why they are now getting this attention in the US, nearly a decade after they debuted. “We’ve played here an awful lot. Most of our time in the last seven years or whatever has been spent touring the US, so I think that’s built up this fanbase that’s been bubbling, and I guess it’s starting to spill over with this record,” said Turner.
“It’s not like there was a different approach to this album. I suppose there was in specifics technically or whatever, but it essentially was: we thought of an idea for an album and wrote the songs for it,” Turner said. “It didn’t seem like this sort of overhaul to the approach to making music.”
The hip hop and R&B inspired AM was released in September, and is the band’s highest-charting album in the US. The album’s second single Do I Wanna Know? has been No 1 on the US alternative chart for four weeks in a row, and it is their first time at No 1 in the US.
“Even back home there’s a feeling this record is more popular than the last few. It’s a bit better, really,” Turner said. “There’s something fresh about it.”
The band aren’t sure why they are now getting this attention in the US, nearly a decade after they debuted. Photographs: Erin McCann/Guardian
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lead singer Alex Turner
For years, Arctic Monkeys have quietly built up a cult following in the US. At the Garden concert, a woman in the front row carried a sign telling of how this was her 67th Arctic Monkeys show.
The concert was a celebration for these American fans who have been proselytizing about the band for years. One of those people was Blake Puente, a 28-year-old paralegal who was at his 50th Arctic Monkeys concert. Puente is a mini-celebrity in the Arctic Monkeys fan community for creating the band’s online forum in 2009 – which has since been picked up by the band’s official site – then creating a Tumblr in 2010 that now has 35,000 followers.
“A lot of the people I’ve been yelling at about Arctic Monkeys for six years, who’ve never felt any sort of, who never liked them, suddenly everybody I know is telling me: ‘I listened to Arctic Monkeys’ new record’. I love it” Puente said.
Puente was excited they were finally getting some of the attention he thinks they deserve, but didn’t know why AM is the album that did it. “I didn’t listen to it and think: ‘Oh my gosh, this is the one that’s really just going to crack America,” Puente said.
The album and single also performed well on one of the newest indicators of success – Tumblr – where in the past thirty days, 57,000 people wrote posts including the words “Arctic Monkeys.”
“This is bigger than Lady Gaga on Tumblr right now,” said Tumblr’s music evangelist Nate Auerbach, who first noticed the Arctic Monkeys’ Tumblr dominance after the illustrated visuals for AM and the Do I Wanna Know video were released in the summer and subsequently spread across the site.
Auerbach is working on a case study for Tumblr about Arctic Monkeys because of their unprecedented success on the site. He thinks that British bands do well on Tumblr because it’s their first point of access for American fans. “The internet is the new Ed Sullivan show,” Auerbach said, referencing the venue for The Beatles’ first televised US performance.
The MSG show happened to coincide with the anniversary of The Beatles performance, which occurred about 24 blocks from the Garden, 50 years earlier. “Apparently one in three Americans watched that performance, and if we’re lucky, maybe, one or three Americans will see this performance on YouTube,” Turner told the audience during the concert, before the band covered All My Loving.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arctic Monkeys play the Beatles’ All My Loving before a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden on Saturday
While the show was a celebration for the band and its fans, the band performed there for the first time in March 2012 as the supporting act for The Black Keys on a North American arena tour. It is the only time they toured as a supporting act. Turner and Helders happily reminisced about touring with a band they love, though those shows were performed in half-filled auditoriums consisting mainly of restless concertgoers anxiously waiting for another band.
“Looking at it purely cold, business-wise, it meant we got to reach a lot of people who wouldn’t have heard otherwise, turned a few heads,” said Turner. The Olympics performance afforded a similar opportunity and helped get their debut single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor on iTunes’ top 100 list, again, after debuting at No 1 in the UK in 2005.
That international exposure, the album and some weird internet stuff seem to have helped fill 14,262 seats on Saturday night. The set ended with the first single off AM, R U Mine? There, a tradition for this tour continued, as the crowd displayed the most fervor for songs off the newest album, banging their heads through the thumping chorus.
“There’s some gratification that comes with that, somehow, that you’ve still got it or something.” said Turner, who seemed to walk extra slowly off stage at the end of Saturday’s concert. “It seems like some sort of victory. I don’t know why.”
Turner starts the show on Saturday night. Photograph: Erin McCann/Guardian
What is the weirdest moment you’ve had on this tour?
Matt Helders (MH): “I don’t know what’s the weirdest thing that’s happened on this tour.”
The Guardian: “It’s all been normal?”
MH: “Or it’s all been weird.”
Matt, what do you think of Alex’s dance moves? Alex, where do you get your dance moves from?
MH: “I think they’re great, ‘cos he got them from me.”
If you woke up and realized you’d become someone from the band, who would you want to be, and what is the first thing you would do?
MH: “I’d be Jamie Cook and I’d cut my hair. No, I wouldn’t. The reason I want to be Jamie Cook is purely based on our arena tour we just did in England – I haven’t told anybody this. During Arabella, because I’m facing that way, I can always see big screens, and there’s always a great bit of him during that song, where they do a split-screen mirror. The way he moved it looked like 70s rock, I looked at it and thought that looks great.”
Alex Turner (AT): “And I’d be Nick and the first thing I’d do is keep my beard.”
Do you believe in aliens?
AT: Yes.
MH: Yes.
AT: You’d be naive not to.
How does American food compare to UK food?
MT: There’s more of it.
Would you rather get your thumbs eaten by a piranha or walk around London naked?
AT: London.
MH: London. We need them [thumbs].
Will there be a The Last Shadow Puppets reunion?
AT: Possibly.
If you had to swap hairstyles with another famous person, who would it be?
MH: Oprah Winfrey. Only because I want her to have mine, because that’s part of the deal.
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The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. More information.My santa contacted me a few weeks back, wanting to get more information: he had found my twitter, saw some pictures and wanted to get me exactly the right gift. This morning I received a huge package, it had completely slipped my mind that my Secret Santa gift was on its way. Then I saw the Fedex stamp... I ripped the package open and what do I see? a beautiful, custom made skateboard, engraved with my Twitter name, stained with my favorite color (that I stated on my profile, and last but not least, engraved with Ron Swanson's face and his best (to me) quotation.
My Santa also enclosed a beautiful handwritten note, which made me all teary-eyed. It was my first time Secret-Santaing and I am amazed!Wolves somehow escaped with a point at dominant Sheffield Wednesday to make it two draws since Dean Saunders took charge.
But Dave Jones's Owls will be wondering how they failed to win a game they pretty much controlled for all but the opening 20 minutes.
Keeper Carl Ikeme was a clear man of the match for the visitors after he foiled Michail Antonio with a superb block, a shot from Jermaine Johnson and he held a header from Reda Johnson on the line all before half-time, as well as a string of crosses and setpieces.
Jeremy Helan crashed a shot into the sidenetting as Wednesday continued to hold forte after the break.
Wolves, who have now gone six games without a win in all competitions, drew for the first time on their travels this season and achieved their first clean sheet in eight matches.
But there was little else to cheer for Wolves on a day when they had just one worthwhile shot – from Kevin Doyle, after 86 minutes, which flew just over.
Saunders seemed determined to be hard to beat and hang on for a draw as he reverted to a 4-5-1 formation for the second half as he switched Doyle to wide right, leaving Sylvan Ebanks-Blake isolated on his own.
Saunders made one change to the side that drew 1-1 against Blackburn in his first game in charge eight days ago.
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Sylvan Ebanks-Blake replaced Jake Cassidy up front after the 19-year-old made his full Wolves debut against Rovers.
That meant that, as Saunders predicted on Thursday, Jamie O'Hara had to wait for his first start under the new manager.
And his influence was sorely missed during a first half when the visitors created not a single effort on goal and they came under the cosh for long periods.
Wolves had the first chance of the game in the 12th minute when a lofted header forwards by David Davis fell invitingly for Doyle in the penalty area.
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But the Ireland international delayed his shot and was crowded out before he fell under challenge.
Pretty much the rest of the half belonged to the Owls, who looked better than their position of fourth bottom suggested.
Jermaine Johnson lobbed wide of an open goal after Ikeme had been forced to come out of his area to chest the ball clear on 22 minutes.
Two minutes later, Michail Antonio easily outmuscled Christophe Berra to leave himself with a clear opening on goal, but from the corner of the six-yard box, Ikeme made a superb block.
Wolves continued to struggle to get out of their own half or create anything themselves.
And so Wednesday remained the dominant team, Jermaine Johnson testing Ikeme with a low shot that forced a falling save after the striker turned Davis.
Helan created the chance from which Wednesday went desperately close to scoring in the 34th minute.
The on-loan Manchester City winger's cross was headed back into the danger area by Miguel Llera for Reda Johnson to see his header held by Ikeme on the line.
Wednesday had three more shooting chances before the break without Ikeme being called into action.
Antonio rolled an effort inches wide after a wayward clearance by Stephen Ward rebounded kindly off Jermaine Johnson for the former Reading man.
Then Giles Coke blazed well over before Kieran Lee sidefooted fractionally off target as the Owls ended the half well on top.
If Wolves fans thought the first half was hard going, the second half got worse as their team was pinned inside their own half for long periods.
Indeed, it looked as if Saunders was playing for a point as he pushed Doyle out to wide right in a 4-5-1 formation.
Llera saw a 30-yard free kick bobble wide before Wolves brought on O'Hara on the hour to introduce some belated creativity, then Slawomir Peszko later on.
But the Owls remained in charge and Antonio missed another chance when he screwed his shot well over with Wolves players protesting in vain for a free kick as Berra lay sprawling on the turf.
Antonio then turned provider as Wednesday burst forward from a Wolves corner.
The former Reading man ran 60 yards before finding Helan to his left for a shot that crashed into the sidenetting.
Then, with seven minutes to go, Antonio missed a sitter from a yard out after Roger Johnson failed to cut out Helan's cross.
Wolves finally produced a shot of their own when Doyle cut inside and fired inches over from 25 yards for the first real attempt on goal in the 86th minute.
Wolves managed to hang on for a point as Saunders remained unbeaten.
But the fans will be looking for more form the team than this when Blackpool come to Molineux next Saturday.Drought package: $320 million in funding for NSW and Queensland farmers Prime Minister Tony Abbott has left the way open to give drought-hit farmers more assistance, on top of the $320 million package just announced by the government, if the drought worsens.
Voices from the drought What is it like to deal with a natural disaster that has no set end point? Use our interactive to find out.
Panorama photos reveal NSW drought conditions Explore our interactive panorama images to get an insight into the drought ravaging NSW and Queensland.
Timeline: Drought in Australia Explore a history of drought and drought policy in Australia.
Drought hurts in the classroom, too It's been claimed the drought is having an impact on children's schooling as remote families struggle to cope with the extra financial and emotional strain.
Drought package welcomed, but 'not enough cash' Drought-stricken farmers are relieved the Federal Government has delivered drought aid, but they want it go further.In April 2012 I joined 10,000 soggy cyclists in the rain to call for a big change to our streets, so whoever won the imminent Mayoral elections would ensure our streets would be safe and pleasant for cycling.
In response to months of fantastic campaigning, and not wanting all the cycling votes going to the Green Party, Boris Johnson duly signed up, telling cyclists: “I am fully committed to meeting the three key tests of LCC’s ‘Love London, Go Dutch’ campaign”.
Eight months later, TfL began to consult on the plans for Cycle Superhighway 5, from New Cross Gate to Victoria via Peckham, Camberwell and Oval. Here was a golden opportunity for Boris to “make sure all planned developments on are completed to Go Dutch standards, especially junctions”, one of those three key tests he signed up to.
Months of consultation and roadworks later, this is what we got:
Does that look fun to you? Does Boris really think lots of people are going to rush to buy a bicycle to enjoy that?
This road has a 30mph speed limit. TfL refused requests from |
left), 20 μm (a, right), 5 μm (b). *P<0.05; **P<0.01; ***P<0.001; Student’s t-test. Full size image
Altogether, these data indicate that, similarly to PPFIA1 (Fig. 4), PI4KB, AP-1A and PTPRF control the recycling of active α5β1 integrin as well as the polymerization of a FN fibrillar network underneath cultured ECs. Furthermore, the data show that the internalized active α5β1 integrins exploit the same PI4KB/AP-1A-dependent trafficking pathway for recycling.
Rab11B drives FN secretion and active α5β1 recycling
The results above indicated how in ECs, the same molecular and cellular mechanisms control active α5β1 integrin recycling as well as the basolateral secretion and polymerization of ED-A FN. Rab11 small GTPases, which localize at recycling endosomes, TGN and PGCs48, regulate the slow recycling of active β1 integrins13,39. Next, we investigated if in ECs Rab11 proteins may simultaneously orchestrate active α5β1 integrin recycling together with ED-A FN secretion and fibrillogenesis. We found that ECs express both Rab11A and Rab11B proteins (Supplementary Fig. 7). In polarized epithelial cells, Rab11A resides in a vesicular compartment distinct from that of Rab11B49 and, Rab11A, but not Rab11B, controls the apical delivery of post-Golgi cargoes50. When compared with siCTL ECs, Rab11B (siRab11B), but not Rab11A (siRab11A) knockdown halved the amount of recycled active α5β1 integrin in ECs (Fig. 8a). Similarly, on incubation on living confluent ECs, SNAKA51 mAb largely localized in α5β1-containing fibrillar adhesions of siCTL and siRab11A, but not siRab11B ECs (Fig. 8b). In addition, quantitative confocal xz sectioning analysis on confluent ECs revealed that although SNAKA51+/active α5β1 integrins localize along the basolateral side of siCTL and siRab11A ECs, they redistributed randomly around the surface of siRab11B ECs (Fig. 8c). In addition, while siCTL and siRab11A ECs polymerized ED-A FN into an extracellular fibrillar network, siRab11B ECs accumulated FN in a perinuclear compartment, consisting of TGN46+ TGN cisternae (Fig. 8d). Moreover, in siRab11B ECs SNAKA51+/active α5β1 integrins accumulated in perinuclear TGN46+ PGCs (Fig. 8d). Finally, quantitative biochemical apico-basal secretion assays revealed that Rab11B silencing preferentially impaired basolateral ED-A FN secretion in the medium of confluent cultured ECs (Fig. 8e). We hence infer that in ECs the Rab11B small GTPase orchestrates the recycling of endocytosed active α5β1 integrins together with the basolaterally-polarized secretion and polymerization of endogenous ED-A FN.
Figure 8: RAB11B controls the recycling of endocytosed active α5β1 integrins and polarized ED-A FN secretion in ECs. (a) Time-course analysis of recycled active α5β1 integrin in siCTL ECs versus siRAB11A ECs or siRAB11B ECs. RAB11B, but not RAB11A, silencing significantly impairs active α5β1 integrin recycling. Data are mean±s.e.m., n=3 independent experiments (two technical replicates for each experiment). (b) Confocal microscopy analysis of anti-active α5β1 integrin mAb SNAKA51 localization (red) in living confluent ECs (20 min of incubation). SNAKA51+ active α5β1 integrin localizes in fibrillar adhesion in siCTL and in siRAB11A, but not in siRAB11B ECs in which it accumulates in perinuclear punctae. The number of active α5β1 integrin-containing adhesions per 100 μm2 of cell area was quantified in siCTL, siRAB11A and siRAB11B ECs. Data are mean values±s.e.m., n=20 cells per condition pooled from two independent experiments. (c) Confocal xz sectioning microscopy analysis of anti-active α5β1 integrin mAb SNAKA51 localization (red) in living confluent ECs (20 min of incubation). Quantitative analysis of apico-basal mean intensity ratio reveals that SNAKA51+ active α5β1 integrin localizes on the basolateral surface of siCTL and siRAB11A, but not of siRAB11B ECs, where it redistributes all around the cell surface. Data are mean values±s.e.m., n=20 cells per condition pooled from two independent experiments. (d) Confocal microscopy analysis of IST9 mAb+ endogenous cellular ED-A FN (green) in confluent ECs. ED-A FN polymerizes into a fibrillar network in siCTL and siRAB11A, but not in siRAB11B ECs, where it accumulates in a perinuclear compartment. Relative amount of fibrillary ED-A FN area was calculated in siCTL, siRAB11A and siRAB11B ECs. Data are mean values±s.e.m., n=20 cells per condition pooled from 2 independent experiments. (e) Western blot analysis of soluble ED-A FN released by confluent ECs seeded on Transwell inserts. An equal percentage of apical and basolateral volumes of medium were collected after 72 h of culture from different wells of siCTL or siRAB11B ECs. Equal amounts of rabbit IgG were exogenously added to samples (spike normalization) for loading control purposes. Quantification of the ratio between apical or basolateral amount of ED-A FN released by siCTL over siRAB11B ECs. RAB11B silencing much more severely impairs basolateral than apical ED-A FN secretion. Data are mean±s.e.m., n=6 wells per condition pooled from three independent experiments. Scale bar, 50 μm (d), 20 μm (b), 5μm (c). **P<0.01; ***P<0.001; Student’s t-test. Full size image
α5β1 controls FN secretion and polymerization
Altogether, the above results led us to postulate that α5β1 integrin may play a key direct role in the control of ED-A FN secretion. To verify this hypothesis, we investigated whether interfering with α5β1 integrin function in ECs may indeed hamper the secretion of ED-A FN from the TGN and its assembly into a basolateral fibrillar network. Therefore, to hinder directly α5β1 integrin function, we silenced the α5 integrin subunit (siITGA5) in ECs (Fig. 9a). Of note, in addition to the expected severe impairment of FN fibrillogenesis, the silencing of α5 integrin subunit also promoted a clear accumulation of endogenous ED-A FN in the TGN of ECs (Fig. 9b). Furthermore, quantitative biochemical apico-basal secretion assays unveiled that α5 integrin subunit silencing significantly decreases the basolateral, but not apical secretion of ED-A FN in the medium of confluent cultured ECs (Fig. 9c). Thus, blocking α5β1 integrin function in ECs inhibits the basolateral secretion of endogenous ED-A FN from the TGN.
Figure 9: α5β1 regulates ED-A FN secretion and polymerization. (a) Western blot analysis of lysates of ECs control (siCTL) and α5 integrin subunit (siITGA5) silenced ECs. Cells were lysed 24 hours after the second siRNA oligofection and proteins were separated by SDS–PAGE and probed for α5 integrin subunit or actin (for control purposes). (b) Confocal microscopy analysis of IST9 mAb-labelled endogenous ED-A FN (green) in confluent ECs. ED-A FN polymerizes into a fibrillar network in siCTL, but not in siITGA5 ECs in which it accumulates in the TGN46+ (red) TGN cisternae. The relative amount of fibrillar ED-A FN area was calculated in siCTL and siITGA5 ECs. Data are mean±s.e.m., n=20 cells per condition pooled from two independent experiments. ***P<0.001; Student’s t-test. (c) Western blot analysis of soluble ED-A FN released by confluent ECs seeded on Transwell inserts. An equal percentage of apical and basolateral volumes of medium were collected after 72 h of culture, from different wells of siCTL or siITGA5 ECs. Equal amounts of exogenous rabbit IgG were added to samples (spike normalization) for loading control purposes. Quantification of the ratio between apical or basolateral amount of ED-A FN released by siCTL over siITGA5 ECs. α5 integrin subunit silencing impairs basolateral, but not apical ED-A FN secretion. Data are mean±s.e.m., n=8 wells per condition pooled from four independent experiments. **P<0.01; Student’s t-test. Scale bar, 50 μm (b). Full size image
PPFIA1 drives vascular morphogenesis in vitro and in vivo
Polarized FN secretion and matrix polymerization are required for vascular morphogenesis in vitro7 and for vessels formation in vivo in the developing mouse embryo1. First, we directly tested the influence of PPFIA1 on vascular morphogenesis in vitro by means of EC capillary formation assays in growth factor-reduced Matrigel. After 8 h incubation at 37 °C, pLVX siCTL ECs formed capillary networks surrounded by a dense meshwork of polymerized cellular ED-A FN. By contrast, pLVX siPPFIA1 ECs failed to form a fibrillar FN network and remained immobile on the Matrigel surface without forming cell-to-cell contacts and a capillary network. Importantly, pLVX-mediated PPFIA1r re-expression rescued FN network formation, EC mobility and the formation of capillary networks (Supplementary Fig. 8).
Next, we assessed the effects of PPFIA1 inactivation in vivo. Antisense morpholino oligonucleotides (MOs) were used to knockdown Ppfia1 protein expression in the transgenic zebrafish line Tg(kdrl:EGFP) expressing EGFP in ECs. To this end, a translation blocking MOs (experimental group; MO-ppfia1) and the corresponding five-base mismatch MOs (control group; MO-CTL) were independently microinjected into fertilized zebrafish eggs at the single-cell stage. At 48 h post-injection (hpi), the gross appearance of ppfia1 morphant embryos was normal. However, approximately 35% of them exhibited cardiovascular defects, such as an enlarged heart chamber phenotype due to atrium dilation associated with pericardial oedema, blood stasis (Fig. 10a), and reduced blood flow despite the presence of cardiac activity (Supplementary Movies 3 and 4). In contrast, control-injected embryos appeared phenotypically normal. Furthermore, sporadic haemorrhages in the subintestinal vascular plexus, malformations in the intersegmental vessels (Se) and irregular shapes (margin) of the dorsal aorta (DA) and the posterior cardinal vein (PCV) were also present in defective ppfia1 morphants (Fig. 10a). At 72 hpi, all these phenotypic cardiovascular alterations persisted, but did not further exacerbate.
Figure 10: PPFIA1 silencing affects vascular morphogenesis in developing zebrafish embryo. (a) Lateral view at conventional light and confocal fluorescence microscopy of Tg(kdrl:EGFP) zebrafish embryos carrying EC-specific EGFP expression and derived from fertilized zebrafish eggs that were injected with 83 μM of a ppfia1 translation blocking morpholino (MO-ppfia1), 5-base mismatch (MO-CTL), or ppfia1 translation blocking morpholino and 40 pg PPFIA1 mRNA at the single-cell stage. Starting from 48 hpi, ∼35% of the ppfia1 morphants displayed: (i) an enlarged heart chamber phenotype (red arrows) due to atrium dilation associated with pericardial oedema, blood stasis and reduced blood flow despite the presence of cardiac activity; (ii) malformations in the intersegmental vessels (Se, yellow arrow); (iii) an irregular shape (margin) in the DA and the PCV (white arrows). Human PPFIA1 mRNA co-injection successfully rescued the cardiovascular defects in the vast majority (∼84%) of ppfia1 morphants that appeared morphologically normal (b). Western blot analysis of MO-ppfia1, MO-CTL and MO-ppfia1+PPFIA1 mRNA morphants, at 48 hpi, revealed that the band corresponding to zebrafish ppfia1 present in MO-CTL, completely disappear in MO-ppfia1 and it is partially restored in MO-ppfia1+PPFIA1 mRNA morphants. Actin was used as loading control. (c) Relative percentage of the embryos having normal or altered phenotype in two independent experiments is reported in the graph and both absolute numbers with relative percentage of the embryos for each experimental group are reported in Supplementary Tables 1 and 2. (d) Confocal fluorescence microscopy analysis of MO-CTL, MO-ppfia1 and MO-ppfia1+ PPFIA1 mRNA Tg(Kdrl:EGFP) zebrafish embryos trunk cross-sections at 72 hpi stained with DAPI and Fn1a. Right panels are magnifications of boxed areas of the left panels. While MO-CTL morphants show normal Fn1a expression around the PCV, DA, gut and in the whole trunk cross-section (upper panels); MO-ppfia1 morphants display a decreased Fn1a expression in the overall trunk region (middle panels). Co-injection of human PPFIA1 mRNA in MO-ppfia1 morphants rescued Fn1a deposition defects albeit not completely in the overall trunk cross-section. Relative amount of Fn1a expression in MO-CTL, MO-ppfia1 and MO-ppfia1+ PPFIA1 mRNA Tg(Kdrl:EGFP) zebrafish whole trunk cross-sections or around PVC and DA, at 72 hpi. Data are mean values±s.d. from 4 (MO-CTL) or 9 (MO-ppfia1 and MO-ppfia1+ PPFIA1 mRNA) embryos from two independent experiments, and 5th/95th percentile.*P<0.05; **P<0.01; ***P<0.001; ANOVA followed by the Tukey range test. Scale bar, 100 μm (d, left panels), 25 μm (d, right panels). Full size image
To exclude the possibility that cardiovascular aberrations of ppfia1 morphants might be due to MO off-target effects, we assessed whether co-injecting human PPFIA1 mRNA, which was not targeted by either ppfia1 MOs, could rescue the observed phenotypes51. We analyzed wild type embryos, ppfia1 morphants and ppfia1 morphants co-injected with human PPFIA1 mRNA, confirming its effective translation into the corresponding PPFIA1 protein by western blot, although at lower levels than that of endogenous Ppfia1 in wild type embryos (Fig. 10b). As previously observed, about 35% of 48 hpi ppfia1 morphants exhibited the described cardiovascular defects, while control-injected embryos were unaffected. Human PPFIA1 mRNA co-injection successfully rescued the cardiovascular defects in the large majority (∼84%) of ppfia1 morphants that appeared morphologically normal (Fig. 10a,c), while a minor fraction of them (∼16%) still exhibited cardiovascular abnormalities.
Next, we directly evaluated whether the lack of Ppfia1 may affect the deposition of FN in the living zebrafish. To this end, we performed quantitative fluorescence confocal microscopy analyses of FN-immunostained trunk sections of 72 hpi wild type embryos, ppfia1 morphants and ppfia1 morphants co-injected with human PPFIA1 mRNA. As shown in Fig. 10d, ppfia1 morphants exhibited a sizeable reduction in FN deposition both around DA and PCV and in overall trunk sections (Fig. 10d). Co-injection of human PPFIA1 mRNA in ppfia1 morphants rescued FN deposition defects albeit not completely (Fig. 10d), suggesting a dose-dependent threshold for the different phenotypic alterations observed in ppfia1 morphants (Fig. 10b).
In summary, PPFIA1 depletion inhibits endothelial FN secretion and polymerization, and impairs vascular morphogenesis in cultured ECs and in the developing zebrafish embryo.Sculptures to be displayed at Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, thought to be the only surviving bronzes by the Renaissance artist
Two handsome, virile naked men riding triumphantly on ferocious panthers will on Monday be unveiled as, probably, the only surviving bronze sculptures by the Renaissance giant Michelangelo.
In art history terms, the attribution is sensational. Academics in Cambridge will suggest that a pair of mysterious metre-high sculptures known as the Rothschild Bronzes are by the master himself, made just after he completed David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
If correct, they are the only surviving Michelangelo bronzes in the world.
The new Michelangelo sculptures are a sensation, but are they any good? | Jonathan Jones Read more
They will go on public display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from Tuesday. Victoria Avery, keeper of applied arts at the museum, said the attribution project, involving an international team of experts from different fields, had been like “a Renaissance whodunnit”. She said: “It has been a huge privilege to be involved, very exciting and great fun.”
Crucial to the attribution of the bronzes, which belong to a private British owner, has been a tiny detail from a drawing by an apprentice of Michelangelo, now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France. The drawing shows in one corner a muscular youth riding a panther in a similar pose.
Last autumn, Paul Joannides, professor of art history at Cambridge University, connected the sculptures to the drawing.
Further research included a neutron scan at a research institute in Switzerland, which placed the bronzes in the first decade of the 16th century. Investigations by clinical anatomist Professor Peter Abrahams, from the University of Warwick, suggested every detail in the bronzes was textbook perfect Michelangelo – from the six packs to the belly buttons, which are as artist portrayed them on his marble statue of David.
“Even a peroneal tendon is visible, as is the transverse arch of the foot,” Abrahams writes in the book that accompanies the discovery.
Michelangelo bronzes discovered – in pictures Read more
Avery said: “Whoever made them clearly had a profound interest in the male body … the anatomy is perfect.”
The pictorial evidence is also compelling, with Michelangelo’s nudes on the Sistine Chapel being clearly similar to the Rothschild Bronzes.
The bronzes were initially attributed to Michelangelo, but the link was discredited in the late 19th century. Since then they have been ascribed to various great sculptors and their circles, including Tiziano Aspetti, Jacopo Sansovino and Benvenuto Cellini – all of them great artists.
“They are clearly masterpieces,” said Avery. “The modelling is superb, they are so powerful and so compelling, so whoever made them had to be superb.”
She said they had deliberately proceeded with caution during the attribution project.
“You have to be pretty brave to even contemplate that they could be work by an artist of the magnificence and fame and importance of Michelangelo. We decided to be rather cautious, to be very careful and methodical … nobody wants to be shot down and to look like an idiot.”
We decided to be rather cautious, to be very careful and methodical … nobody wants to look like an idiot Victoria Avery, Fitzwilliam Museum
They are now as convinced as they can be that the bronzes were made by Michelangelo between 1506 and 1508, when he was in his early 30s, hungry for success.
The history of the sculptures is as fascinating as they are beautiful. They are named after their first recorded owner, Baron Adolphe de Rothschild, a grandson of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who founded the banking dynasty. It is possible that Rothschild bought them from one of the Bourbon kings of Naples and if so they may have come from the Villa Reale at Caserta where the Bourbon art treasures were displayed. After Rothschild’s death in 1900 the bronzes were inherited by Maurice de Rothschild. When he died in 1957 they went into a private French collection and were effectively forgotten about until they came to auction in 2002 and were bought by the current unnamed British owner.
They were sold at Sotheby’s where experts loosely associated them with the Florentine sculptor Cellini.
They began to interest academics once more and featured in an exhibition on Willem van Tetrode at the Frick Collection and then at the Royal Academy’s big Bronze show in 2012, where they were attributed to the circle of Michelangelo and dated towards the middle of the 16th century. Experts who saw them at the RA recognised them as Michelangelesque but were reluctant to assign them directly to the man himself.
The attribution is particular exciting because no other Michelangelo bronzes survive. A two-thirds size bronze David, known to have been made for a French grandee’s chateau, was lost during the French Revolution and a spectacular statue of Pope Julius II was melted down for artillery by rebellious Bolognese.
The bronzes will be on display at the Fitzwilliam from 3 February to 9 August, with a book of the discovery, and more findings and research will be presented at an international conference on 6 July.
Avery said she was keen for as many people as possible to see them and join the debate which she hoped would not just be for academics. “I really hope people will engage with this, that they will read the arguments – maybe sit down in a cafe for half an hour with the book – and then come and look at the bronzes and make their own mind up.”[GSL] Liquid`Jinro Ro4 Foreigner Special Text by Lovedrop
GSL Code S Ro4 Foreigner Special: Liquid`Jinro
By Lovedrop
Images courtesy of playxp
Liquid`Jinro = Red | MarineKingPrime.WE = Blue
T2 Game 1 - Game 1 - Scrap Station T12
+ Show Spoiler [Show Recap] +
Single file? This isn't elementary school.
A banshee glides in after the hellions to continue the damage while Jinro simultaneously expands. Jinro's first two banshees rack up over 20 kills, but his subsequent banshees do not put up the same amount of success. MK loads up two medivacs full of marines and heads towards Jinro's natural, but the drop is spotted and is quickly nullified. Jinro gets ready to push across the middle passageway with tanks and marines, setting up right outside MK's ramp. MK loads up a large amount of units in six medivacs and doom drops Jinro's main. The turret rings take out a few loaded medivacs, but the units that survived wreak havoc on Jinro's production facilities. Jinro denies MK the expansion at 5 o'clock and cleans up the natural before pulling back. MK once again loads up a huge amount of units to drop on Jinro's high ground ledge, but a marine at the watchtower caught a glimpse of the medivac fleet and Jinro had no problem defending.
Jinro floats a CC to the island while grabbing the 10 o'clock third, and once again denies MK the gold. As MK floats his main CC to another expansion, a cloaked banshee is tearing his army apart, and an engagement at the watchtower leaves MK with very little units. MK makes a cute move trying to shut down Jinro's expansion, but with triple the amount of food, Jinro calmly finished off the game to take the important first game. [28:42]
Doom drop.
MK builds his barracks on the low ground foregoing gas, while Jinro's starting build is a lot more standard with gas at 13. MK only starts his gas after he has enough minerals for his command center, and slowly walls up the path between his main and natural. Jinro's factory/starport is hidden at the right of his base, while setting up for a blue flame hellion drop. Jinro drops the hellions off in the main base, while reuniting his medivac with his marines out front. The hellions grab a few SCV kills, and MK does a sloppy job defending, trapping his units in a narrow passage. Jinro also harasses the expansion, but does not deal as much damage as stim kicks in to clean up the drop.A banshee glides in after the hellions to continue the damage while Jinro simultaneously expands. Jinro's first two banshees rack up over 20 kills, but his subsequent banshees do not put up the same amount of success. MK loads up two medivacs full of marines and heads towards Jinro's natural, but the drop is spotted and is quickly nullified. Jinro gets ready to push across the middle passageway with tanks and marines, setting up right outside MK's ramp. MK loads up a large amount of units in six medivacs and doom drops Jinro's main. The turret rings take out a few loaded medivacs, but the units that survived wreak havoc on Jinro's production facilities. Jinro denies MK the expansion at 5 o'clock and cleans up the natural before pulling back. MK once again loads up a huge amount of units to drop on Jinro's high ground ledge, but a marine at the watchtower caught a glimpse of the medivac fleet and Jinro had no problem defending.Jinro floats a CC to the island while grabbing the 10 o'clock third, and once again denies MK the gold. As MK floats his main CC to another expansion, a cloaked banshee is tearing his army apart, and an engagement at the watchtower leaves MK with very little units. MK makes a cute move trying to shut down Jinro's expansion, but with triple the amount of food, Jinro calmly finished off the game to take the important first game. [28:42]
T1 Game 2 - Game 2 - Steppes of War T7
+ Show Spoiler [Show Recap] +
The tanks had sieged and blocked the ramp, thus the marines were stuck behind.
MK floats his CC to the gold, and sneaks a banshee into Jinro's base. Jinro's viking is halfway across the map, and has to track back to the main. MK drags a handful of SCVs to bust down the ramp, losing a few units but easily breaking down Jinro's contain. Jinro's expansion has not started yet. MK checks the other gold to make sure he isn't being fooled himself, and contains Jinro outside of his own natural. Jinro attempts to crawl his way back into the game by sniping medivacs with his viking superiority. Still unaware of the gold expansion, Jinro begins banshee production, given he already has air superiority. Seconds later, MK spreads out his units for a wider arc, and simply overran the little amount of units of Jinro and ties up the game. [17:47]
That's a lot of units.
Both players open similarly to game 1, with MK going fast CC and a more standard opening for Jinro. Jinro attaches a tech lab to his factory and a reactor to his barracks, prompting a tank/marine push with a hovering barracks to scout. MK's bunker wall is shattered and he is now making a banshee. Jinro slow pushes up the ramp with his tanks, forcing MK back. As Jinro walks up the ramp however, his marines lagged behind and as his tanks took the brunt of the damage, Jinro is forced back down.MK floats his CC to the gold, and sneaks a banshee into Jinro's base. Jinro's viking is halfway across the map, and has to track back to the main. MK drags a handful of SCVs to bust down the ramp, losing a few units but easily breaking down Jinro's contain. Jinro's expansion has not started yet. MK checks the other gold to make sure he isn't being fooled himself, and contains Jinro outside of his own natural. Jinro attempts to crawl his way back into the game by sniping medivacs with his viking superiority. Still unaware of the gold expansion, Jinro begins banshee production, given he already has air superiority. Seconds later, MK spreads out his units for a wider arc, and simply overran the little amount of units of Jinro and ties up the game. [17:47]
T5 Game 3 - Game 3 - Jungle Basin T11
+ Show Spoiler [Show Recap] +
Hero banshee.
Back at his own base, MK has already started his expansion. SCV count is 25 for MK and 19 for Jinro. Jinro stabilizes and gets his expansion going, and now MK breaks down the backdoor rocks with an army consisting of tanks and marines. Jinro is forced to bring SCVs, further reducing his worker count. Jinro's own banshee and siege mode finally gets rid of the threat, but now MK is leading by 15 workers, and a total of 27 food. MK once again tries to punish Jinro's lack of units, but this time did minimal damage before he is forced to retreat. Jinro's hero banshee continues to help him get back into this game, scoring 9 SCV kills at the other end before he is chased down. MK takes the center expansion, and gears up for a huge push to the front of Jinro's base. MK's marines overwhelm the bunker and with Jinro's tanks set up at the natural, MK stims in for a 2-1 lead in the series. [16:44]
Storm the front!
MarineKing starts his barracks behind his center expo, confusing Jinro's scout as he sees absolutely nothing inside MK's base. Jinro spots the second gas going up, and spreads his marines across the map to check for any proxy buildings. Unbeknown to Jinro, MK begins a starport right outside the rocks of Jinro's back door expansion. Jinro looks to be aggressive with his three marines, and does surprisingly well as he picks off 2 marines, 2 SCVs, a hellion and a supply depot. MK has banshees and cloak underway, and the first banshee takes less than 5 seconds to begin working on the SCVs at Jinro's natural. Jinro could not get the turret to go up before losing all his SCVs at the natural, scoring the banshees 15 kills, with marines included. Another banshee joins the fray, and cloaked banshees just hover around Jinro's base, picking off as many SCVs as they can.Back at his own base, MK has already started his expansion. SCV count is 25 for MK and 19 for Jinro. Jinro stabilizes and gets his expansion going, and now MK breaks down the backdoor rocks with an army consisting of tanks and marines. Jinro is forced to bring SCVs, further reducing his worker count. Jinro's own banshee and siege mode finally gets rid of the threat, but now MK is leading by 15 workers, and a total of 27 food. MK once again tries to punish Jinro's lack of units, but this time did minimal damage before he is forced to retreat. Jinro's hero banshee continues to help him get back into this game, scoring 9 SCV kills at the other end before he is chased down. MK takes the center expansion, and gears up for a huge push to the front of Jinro's base. MK's marines overwhelm the bunker and with Jinro's tanks set up at the natural, MK stims in for a 2-1 lead in the series. [16:44]
T7 Game 4 - Game 4 - Xel'Naga Caverns T1
+ Show Spoiler [Show Recap] +
Surprise!
Jinro begins cloaked banshees and picks off 8 SCVs between MK's natural and main. Jinro's 2nd banshee finally scouts the gold base, and once reaching a sizable amount of tanks, pushes up along the left side to force MK to lift his gold orbital. MK circles around the right side, hoping to counterattack, but is met by bunkers and a few leftover tanks. MK is now maxed on MMM army and gets ready to break Jinro's advancing siege push. MK suicides all the SCVs that had abandoned the gold from the north while stimming in with his army from the right! MK suffers disastrous casualties but is able to clean up every single unit of Jinros. However, since he sacrificed so many SCVs, the food count is now in favor of Jinro.
Many SCVs were harmed in the process of this screenshot.
Jinro takes out the rocks at his own gold, getting ready to grab his third, while MK fails at his attempt to use the bottom tunnel to deal damage. After faking a retreat, MK dashes in again and this time deals a sufficient blow, forcing Jinro to pull back for a second time. After Jinro has moved out with his siege tanks, MK snipes Jinro's planetary fortress at the gold, dealing a severe blow to Jinro's economy. A successful flank at the left watchtower decimated Jinro's army, while MK's ability to dance his army around the map makes it extremely difficult for Jinro to have an advantageous engagement.
Successful flank.
MK catches Jinro out of position once again to pick off the CC in construction. With no real economy at his disposal, Jinro marches out for one last push. Jinro takes out MK's expansion at 11 o'clock, and MK dispatches a small counterattack force to clean up Jinro's base. With Jinro sieged at his natural, MK buffers his army with more sacrificial peons and overwhelms Jinro, triumphantly making his return to the finals. [25:17]
Last Stand.
Both players go for the fast expand, with Jinro grabbing two gas and 1/1/1 behind it, while MK with his traditional mass marines 3 barracks. MK surprises everyone by taking down the rocks and expands to the gold. The quick combat shield enables MK to take both watchtowers after playing cat and mouse with Jinro's marines.Jinro begins cloaked banshees and picks off 8 SCVs between MK's natural and main. Jinro's 2nd banshee finally scouts the gold base, and once reaching a sizable amount of tanks, pushes up along the left side to force MK to lift his gold orbital. MK circles around the right side, hoping to counterattack, but is met by bunkers and a few leftover tanks. MK is now maxed on MMM army and gets ready to break Jinro's advancing siege push. MK suicides all the SCVs that had abandoned the gold from the north while stimming in with his army from the right! MK suffers disastrous casualties but is able to clean up every single unit of Jinros. However, since he sacrificed so many SCVs, the food count is now in favor of Jinro.Jinro takes out the rocks at his own gold, getting ready to grab his third, while MK fails at his attempt to use the bottom tunnel to deal damage. After faking a retreat, MK dashes in again and this time deals a sufficient blow, forcing Jinro to pull back for a second time. After Jinro has moved out with his siege tanks, MK snipes Jinro's planetary fortress at the gold, dealing a severe blow to Jinro's economy. A successful flank at the left watchtower decimated Jinro's army, while MK's ability to dance his army around the map makes it extremely difficult for Jinro to have an advantageous engagement.MK catches Jinro out of position once again to pick off the CC in construction. With no real economy at his disposal, Jinro marches out for one last push. Jinro takes out MK's expansion at 11 o'clock, and MK dispatches a small counterattack force to clean up Jinro's base. With Jinro sieged at his natural, MK buffers his army with more sacrificial peons and overwhelms Jinro, triumphantly making his return to the finals. [25:17]
TLAF-Liquid`Jinro Post Semifinals Interview
Tough loss. What's your take on what happened vs. MarineKing?
Hm, well I was definitely outplayed in the last game, in the Jungle Basin game I just messed up really hard because I got overenthusiastic when my marines were killing his depot :D. In the Steppes game, I got a bit overeager to end it too, and then his good defense bit me in the ass. Game 1 went according to plan, except for him getting siege tanks - didn't expect that.
MarineKing plays a very unique style. How did you do against it |
Do you prefer single-player to multiplayer? Analysts Diplomats Sentinels Explorers 71.44% 28.56% 65.74% 34.26% 66.93% 33.07% 59.43% 40.57%
The Explorers’ preference for either stealth or quick paced action is also clearly reflected in their character choices. They are the most likely group to pick an archer or a warrior as their main character. One can easily imagine an Explorer playing as a nimble, fast yet deadly Demon Hunter in Diablo 3, for example – or vice versa, whirlwinding as a mighty Barbarian through the demon hordes. They can do either, but one should not expect to see an Explorer dusting off an old tome to study ancient enchantments or potion recipes.
In a role-playing game, which of these characters would you most likely pick? Analysts Diplomats Sentinels Explorers An archer (stealth and long-distance fights) 38.25% 35.39% 39.76% 44.19% A mage (mastery of spells and environment) 43.88% 45.53% 37.75% 27.33% A warrior (pure strength and close-range fights) 17.86% 19.08% 22.49% 28.49%
Despite their name, Explorers are not particularly keen to explore all the possibilities and quests that modern games offer. The least likely group to finish single-player campaigns (although a significant majority of Explorers still do), and the most likely one to jump from game to game looking for something new, Explorers see games as something really fun and exciting, but they are unlikely to become loyal, hardcore fans.
Do you normally finish single-player campaigns? Analysts Diplomats Sentinels Explorers 79.69% 20.31% 76.39% 23.61% 74.09% 25.91% 67.82% 32.18%
Do you tend to lose interest quickly and jump from game to game? Analysts Diplomats Sentinels Explorers 50.82% 49.18% 50.60% 49.40% 40.32% 59.68% 52.91% 47.09%
Virtuosos (ISTP, -A/-T)
Virtuosos can at times seem paradoxical to outside observers, combining tough rationality with a childlike sense of wonder, and the ability to become completely absorbed in a project, only to abandon it the moment their interest begins to wane. In many ways, though, this type epitomizes “classic” video games, the type that originated in arcades before making their way into the homes of millions.
Video games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Asteroids were built around seemingly simple mechanics, but this simplicity was often deceptive, allowing a neophyte to breeze through a few stages before the difficulty became exponentially greater with the tweaking of only a few variables, such as the number, speed, or attack patterns of the enemies one faced. Mastering the skills needed to succeed in such fast-paced environments may be exactly the type of challenge that a Virtuoso craves, whether they stick to the classics or play more contemporary variations like platformer Super Meat Boy or “bullet hell” shoot-em-up Ikaruga.
Judging from our survey, Virtuosos are the personality type that spends the highest number of hours per week playing games – a stunning 70% of respondents said that they do that for more than 3 hours per week, with half of them going over 10 hours. It does indeed seem that the explosion of choices for games has been a real boon for Virtuosos, giving them an opportunity to apply their skills and abilities in virtual worlds.
How much time do you spend playing computer games, per week? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Less than an hour 12.96% 30.91% 38.46% 22.50% 24.57% Between 1 and 3 hours 16.67% 16.36% 7.69% 35% 21.91% Between 3 and 10 hours 33.33% 34.55% 30.77% 27.50% 31.98% More than 10 hours 37.04% 18.18% 23.08% 15% 21.55%
It also seems that PC is the platform of choice for Virtuoso gamers, with 62.96% of them picking this option, the second highest score among all personality types. It may be that the power and customization options offered by desktop gaming rigs are the main reasons behind such a preference. Whether the Virtuoso is trying to overclock their CPU, or programming the extra buttons on their mouse, it is clear that many people with this personality type are anything but casuals when it comes to gaming.
What platform do you normally use? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Smartphone 20.37% 10.91% 19.23% 22.50% 22.02% Console 14.81% 20% 23.08% 20% 19.91% PC 62.96% 63.64% 57.69% 50% 54.19% Other 1.85% 5.45% 0% 7.5% 3.88%
Unlike other Explorers, Virtuosos are not particularly interested in first-person shooters or even sports and racing games. Rather, they flock to role-playing options. Perhaps thanks to their quiet, Introverted nature, Virtuosos may be more likely to choose games that reward individual exploration and prowess as opposed to focus on teamplay and coordination are more or less a requirement for many games in the other two genres.
What games do you enjoy most? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Sports and racing games 5.56% 5.45% 15.38% 7.50% 5.24% First-person shooters 5.56% 10.91% 30.77% 17.50% 12.02% Role-playing games 38.89% 32.73% 15.38% 15% 34.04% Strategy games 29.63% 21.82% 23.08% 32.50% 28.67% Stealth-based games 0% 9.09% 11.54% 7.50% 4.25% Card games 3.70% 5.45% 3.85% 2.50% 3.81% Other 16.67% 14.55% 0% 17.50% 11.98%
As a personality type that thrives on stressful situations, Virtuosos may see a screen filled with relentless deathtraps or enemies as an opportunity to prove their prowess more than something to be dreaded. Where some might be turned away by the dozens – or hundreds – of retries that some games demand, Virtuosos may remain resolute, viewing every loss as an opportunity to learn something new that will put them a step closer to victory. That said, it is worth pointing out that out of all Explorers, Virtuosos are the most likely type to pick defensive characters – although this role is the last one on their list, they are nevertheless more willing to give it a try compared to other Explorer types. It is difficult to guess why that is the case, although one could assume that some Virtuosos may appreciate the lower visibility of this role and the focus on various mechanisms and traps many defensive characters have in their arsenal.
Generally speaking, which of these roles would you be most comfortable with in a multiplayer game?” Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Attacking 48.15% 35.19% 60% 45% 47.26% Defending 24.07% 16.67% 16% 17.50% 19.18% Supporting 27.78% 48.15% 24% 37.50% 33.56%
Adventurers (ISFP, -A/-T)
Although “adventure” would seem to be an integral part of the gaming experience, the borders of many games are all too easy to encounter for the Adventurer. Whether hemmed in by linear narratives or restrictive environments, Adventurers have little desire to simply replicate the movements that a designer has dictated for them to follow.
For Adventurers, the “sandbox” style of games have been an absolute boon, although they may prefer those that emphasize spontaneity and cosmetic customization rather than long-range planning and tweaks made on a more molecular level. Perhaps first popularized by the Grand Theft Auto series, open world action games are now practically a genre unto themselves, from Saint’s Row to Just Cause to many more titles with greater or lesser degrees of flexibility in play.
It is no surprise then that in our survey, Adventurers were the most likely personality type to pick PC as their favorite gaming platform, with 63.64% of respondents saying so. PC gamers do indeed have a plethora of options to choose from when it comes to “sandbox” style gaming. Adventurers also scored above the overall average when asked whether they enjoyed open-world games, reaffirming our statements above.
What platform do you normally use? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Smartphone 20.37% 10.91% 19.23% 22.50% 22.02% Console 14.81% 20% 23.08% 20% 19.91% PC 62.96% 63.64% 57.69% 50% 54.19% Other 1.85% 5.45% 0% 7.5% 3.88%
Do you enjoy open-world games that focus on exploration rather than clear-cut missions and goals (e.g. the Elder Scrolls series)? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average 68.52% 31.48% 70.37% 29.63% 80% 20% 67.50% 32.50% 68.85% 31.15%
Adventurers see themselves as artists, but they are not performance artists – an audience only inhibits their creativity. Open world gaming offers them a private canvas, allowing them to pursue any whim they please without worrying about how their choices will be perceived. In our survey, Adventurers were the most likely personality type among all Explorers to choose single-player games over multiplayer ones.
Do you prefer single-player to multiplayer? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average 68.52% 31.48% 69.09% 30.91% 42.31% 57.69% 45% 55% 63.63% 36.38%
Adventurers’ preference for independence and flexibility is also reflected in their character choices. When asked about them, they overwhelmingly picked archer, the symbol of stealth and long-distance fights, sharing the first place for this preference with the Defender type. As this is usually the fastest and the most exploration-oriented class in any game, it is easy to see why the free-spirited Adventurers could be drawn to it. Furthermore, both in games and in real life, people with this personality type prefer to stay away from direct conflict and playing a long-distance character gives them a chance to do just that. In our survey, Adventurers also made it very clear by picking the supporting role as their firm favorite.
In a role-playing game, which of these characters would you most likely pick? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average An archer (stealth and long-distance fights) 42.59% 48.15% 48% 38.46% 38.46% A mage (mastery of spells and environment) 33.33% 27.78% 12% 28.21% 36.90% A warrior (pure strength and close-range fights) 24.07% 24.07% 40% 33.33% 24.64%
Generally speaking, which of these roles would you be most comfortable with in a multiplayer game? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Attacking 48.15% 35.19% 60% 45% 47.26% Defending 24.07% 16.67% 16% 17.50% 19.18% Supporting 27.78% 48.15% 24% 37.50% 33.56%
Entrepreneurs (ESTP, -A/-T)
Thrill-seekers and daredevils who win followers through their quick thinking and sheer gutsiness, Entrepreneurs can be a tough crowd for many games, often growing bored before the menu screen has had time to finish loading. The games that hold their attention usually must be both intensely fast-paced, yet accessible enough not to demand dozens of hours to achieve a baseline competence.
Multiplayer shooters, such as the Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Halo game series, are perfect for Entrepreneurs, who may drop into a game for a couple of hours of frenetic action with little setup time, and drop out again the moment their focus beings to waver. The most competitive of Explorer types – and among the most competitive of all the personality types – Entrepreneurs may not grieve over their losses for long, but during a game, few can hope to match their intensity.
It is not a surprise then that Entrepreneurs have the third highest score for console gaming and they are also unmatched proponents of both first-person shooters and sports and racing games, scoring more than twice as high as the overall average in both categories. While there may be a rare Entrepreneur willing to pour days into an epic Civilization V game, an hour with the latest Call of Duty or Need for Speed release is more likely to attract someone with this personality type.
What platform do you normally use? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Smartphone 20.37% 10.91% 19.23% 22.50% 22.02% Console 14.81% 20% 23.08% 20% 19.91% PC 62.96% 63.64% 57.69% 50% 54.19% Other 1.85% 5.45% 0% 7.5% 3.88%
What games do you enjoy most? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Sports and racing games 5.56% 5.45% 15.38% 7.50% 5.24% First-person shooters 5.56% 10.91% 30.77% 17.50% 12.02% Role-playing games 38.89% 32.73% 15.38% 15% 34.04% Strategy games 29.63% 21.82% 23.08% 32.50% 28.67% Stealth-based games 0% 9.09% 11.54% 7.50% 4.25% Card games 3.70% 5.45% 3.85% 2.50% 3.81% Other 16.67% 14.55% 0% 17.50% 11.98%
While Entrepreneurs may lack the discipline or desire to compete on anything approaching a professional level, they can be ferocious opponents when playing with other amateurs. The same “killer instinct” that can serve them well in the business world may prove equally formidable in games that reward their snap decision-making, even if their dearth of foresight can lead to trouble in more deliberative genres. As the most multiplayer oriented of all personality types, Entrepreneurs see little point in wandering around lost ruins or beating AI opponents, no matter how challenging. They want the thrill of an online match with worthy enemies, the exhilarating victories and explosive 1v5 clutches that single-player gaming just cannot provide.
Do you prefer single-player to multiplayer? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average 68.52% 31.48% 69.09% 30.91% 42.31% 57.69% 45% 55% 63.63% 36.38%
Entrepreneurs already have all this in mind even when they are just picking their characters. In our survey, they were the most likely personality type to pick the warrior class – even though the archer one still won out by a small margin, an impressive 40% of Entrepreneurs went for the warrior, scoring well above any other type. Similarly, they were the least likely among all types to pick the mage. Why spend time wondering whether this particular enemy type is more vulnerable to fire or lightning, if a battleaxe works just fine?
In a role-playing game, which of these characters would you most likely pick? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average An archer (stealth and long-distance fights) 42.59% 48.15% 48% 38.46% 38.46% A mage (mastery of spells and environment) 33.33% 27.78% 12% 28.21% 36.90% A warrior (pure strength and close-range fights) 24.07% 24.07% 40% 33.33% 24.64%
Finally, Entrepreneurs are the true Machiavellians when it comes to their behavior in the virtual world. Whether it is switching alliances at a convenient time, or convincing a naïve newbie that a rusty sword is actually a cursed legendary item worth paying thousands of gold pieces for, Entrepreneurs do not shy away from doing what they believe is necessary to achieve the end goal. Scoring more than 30% above the overall average for the following question, Entrepreneurs can certainly be invaluable allies – but ones worth keeping an eye on.
When playing a game, do you engage in behaviors that would be frowned upon in real life, e.g. stealing, tricking other players, breaking alliances etc.? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average 44.44% 55.56% 47.27% 52.73% 76% 24% 37.50% 62.50% 44.67% 55.33%
Entertainers (ESFP, -A/-T)
“Single player only” is a phrase that is not in an Entertainer’s gaming vocabulary, and even many multiplayer games may not have what it takes to arouse their interest. For example, the team-oriented play of squad-level shooters or online role-playing games may not allow for enough opportunities for their star to shine. In our survey, Entertainers landed firmly on the multiplayer side, nearly 20 percentage points above overall average and second among all personality types.
Do you prefer single-player to multiplayer? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average 68.52% 31.48% 69.09% 30.91% 42.31% 57.69% 45% 55% 63.63% 36.38%
Party games, on the other hand, may be tailor-made for Entertainers, who may derive more enjoyment from the reactions of fellow players and other onlookers than they do from the game itself. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero series may be particular favorites for Entertainers, allowing them to live out their fantasies of being rock stars even if they haven’t picked up an instrument in years – or ever. Similarly, the Dance Dance Revolution series serves as an easy excuse for Entertainers to show off their moves without having to hit the club.
Entertainers tend to prefer physical challenges to mental ones, making video games that require the participants to be on their feet and moving more enjoyable than even the most intense experiences one can have while seated comfortably with a controller. It is perhaps for this reason that Entertainers had the highest score of all personality types in the “Other” category when asked about their favorite gaming platform. The survey did not offer free-text options, but if it did, it may well be that Entertainers would have offered quite a few interesting alternatives.
What platform do you normally use?” Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Smartphone 20.37% 10.91% 19.23% 22.50% 22.02% Console 14.81% 20% 23.08% 20% 19.91% PC 62.96% 63.64% 57.69% 50% 54.19% Other 1.85% 5.45% 0% 7.5% 3.88%
Generally speaking, though, Entertainers are unlikely to be interested in spending too much time in the virtual world. In our survey, they had the second highest score in the group that spends less than 3 hours a week playing computer games. It is quite clear that people with this personality type prefer more physical, tangible forms of entertainment when given a choice.
How much time do you spend playing computer games, per week? Virtuosos Adventurers Entrepreneurs Entertainers Overall Average Less than an hour 12.96% 30.91% 38.46% 22.50% 24.57% Between 1 and 3 hours 16.67% 16.36% 7.69% 35% 21.91% Between 3 and 10 hours 33.33% 34.55% 30.77% 27.50% 31.98% More than 10 hours 37.04% 18.18% 23.08% 15% 21.55%
What about Strategies?
While there were significant differences between roles in our survey, strategy groups were somewhat less interesting. That is to be expected, given that gaming is more of a mental activity rather than something influenced by our environment-oriented Mind and Identity traits. Still, there are some valuable insights to be gleaned from our survey data as far as strategies are concerned.
Confident Individualism
Personality types belonging to this strategy group are known for their independence and determination – with this in mind, it is not particularly surprising that they also proved to be the most passionate gamers in our survey. With 62.45% of respondents from this group stating they spend more than 3 hours per week playing games, one may say that even though gaming still comes with a bit of a social stigma, Confident Individualists could not care less about it. They enjoy games, and they are happy to acknowledge that.
How much time do you spend playing computer games, per week? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Less than an hour 17.21% 20.10% 24.57% 28.20% Between 1 and 3 hours 20.34% 22.43% 21.97% 22.62% Between 3 and 10 hours 35.28% 32.39% 32.08% 31.48% More than 10 hours 27.17% 25.08% 21.39% 17.70%
People in this group mostly prefer role-playing games, as is the case with most strategies, although they do not score particularly high or low in any category, suggesting that they are perhaps more willing to explore different genres than others. The only exception is card games, where Confident Individualists score well below the overall average.
What games do you enjoy most? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Sports and racing games 3.27% 2% 5.22% 5.94% First-person shooters 10.09% 7.58% 13.04% 13.20% Role-playing games 38.92% 44.08% 30.72% 35.97% Strategy games 30.26% 26% 33.62% 28.38% Stealth-based games 4.26% 3.08% 4.93% 1.98% Card games 1.85% 3.08% 4.64% 1.98% Other 11.36% 14.17% 7.83% 12.54%
Types with the Confident Individualism strategy seem to favor open-world games, being the most likely group to pick exploration over clear-cut missions. They are also the most likely group to finish single-player campaigns, and to stick to one game for a long time instead of jumping from one game to another.
Do you enjoy open-world games that focus on exploration rather than clear-cut missions and goals (e.g. the Elder Scrolls series)? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement 79.40% 20.60% 74.39% 25.61% 70.88% 29.12% 69.87% 30.13%
Do you normally finish single-player campaigns? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement 82.16% 17.84% 74.77% 25.23% 77.45% 22.55% 72.70% 27.30%
Do you tend to lose interest quickly and jump from game to game? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement 42% 58% 53.23% 46.77% 46.33% 53.67% 58.61% 41.39%
Constant Improvement
One thing that stands out right away when looking at answers from this strategy group is that they dislike sports, racing or strategy games, as well as first-person shooters, getting lowest scores in all these categories. However, Constant Improvers seem to really enjoy role-playing games. One of the possible reasons for such a preference could be that from the perspective of these perfectionistic, growth-oriented personality types, role-playing games are an excellent way to explore many different directions and playing styles without committing to the single “best” character build or approach. The entire concept behind leveling up and slowly improving your gear is also very much in line with personality traits associated with this particular strategy.
What games do you enjoy most? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Sports and racing games 3.27% 2% 5.22% 5.94% First-person shooters 10.09% 7.58% 13.04% 13.20% Role-playing games 38.92% 44.08% 30.72% 35.97% Strategy games 30.26% 26% 33.62% 28.38% Stealth-based games 4.26% 3.08% 4.93% 1.98% Card games 1.85% 3.08% 4.64% 1.98% Other 11.36% 14.17% 7.83% 12.54%
Constant Improvers clearly prefer single-player games to multiplayer ones, getting the top score in this category. It is easy to see why the individual experience offered by the former group is seen as more attractive by these inherently private personality types.
Do you prefer single-player to multiplayer? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement 69.91% 30.09% 71.43% 28.57% 58.65% 41.35% 58.42% 41.58%
This strategy also gets highest scores for mage characters – again, the testament to these types’ curiosity and desire to always look for improvement. In most role-playing games, magic tends to be more complicated compared to melee or ranged weapons – and it may take a Constant Improver to fully unlock a path full of complex and interconnected spells.
In a role-playing game, which of these characters would you most likely pick? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement An archer (stealth and long-distance fights) 39.97% 36.88% 36.26% 36.30% A mage (mastery of spells and environment) 42.84% 46.10% 33.33% 40.92% A warrior (pure strength and close-range fights) 17.19% 17.02% 30.41% 22.77%
Finally, as far as character roles are concerned, Constant Improvers are definitely leaning toward supporting characters, with 45.39% of them picking this group. Choosing to stay in the background with their healing spells and protective wards, people with these personality types may not be as visible as their attacking or defending colleagues, but anyone who has participated in a World of Warcraft raid can testify to how critically important a good healer can be.
Generally speaking, which of these roles would you be most comfortable with in a multiplayer game? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Attacking 45.85% 36.41% 63.05% 48.03% Defending 20.34% 18.20% 17.01% 17.11% Supporting 33.81% 45.39% 19.94% 34.87%
People Mastery
One may expect to only see social and energetic People Masters “out there”, enjoying the real world – but while they are certainly less likely to spend a lot of time gaming compared to the two Introverted strategies, this group still enjoys a good gaming session every now and then. It is, however, safe to assume that the social component is critical if a game producer wants to attract this particular group.
In terms of genre preferences, People Masters are the last likely strategy group to enjoy role-playing games – perhaps because many of the games in this genre focus on single-player experience, or perhaps because types embracing this strategy are not particularly interested in redefining themselves through their game characters. They are, however, more likely than types with other strategies to embrace strategy and card games.
What games do you enjoy most? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Sports and racing games 3.27% 2% 5.22% 5.94% First-person shooters 10.09% 7.58% 13.04% 13.20% Role-playing games 38.92% 44.08% 30.72% 35.97% Strategy games 30.26% 26% 33.62% 28.38% Stealth-based games 4.26% 3.08% 4.93% 1.98% Card games 1.85% 3.08% 4.64% 1.98% Other 11.36% 14.17% 7.83% 12.54%
Do you prefer single-player to multiplayer? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement 69.91% 30.09% 71.43% 28.57% 58.65% 41.35% 58.42% 41.58%
People Mastery is by far the most likely strategy to attract warrior characters, with 30.41% of people in this group stating that this was their favorite choice. While all three classes (archers, mages and warriors) attracted similar proportions of People Masters – which may also indicate that they are not particularly fussy when it comes to these decisions – their score for warriors is well above any other group and overall average. Furthermore, personality types favoring this strategy are undoubtedly the most attack-oriented at all, with a remarkable 63.05% of them picking attacking roles over defending or supporting ones.
In a role-playing game, which of these characters would you most likely pick? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement An archer (stealth and long-distance fights) 39.97% 36.88% 36.26% 36.30% A mage (mastery of spells and environment) 42.84% 46.10% 33.33% 40.92% A warrior (pure strength and close-range fights) 17.19% 17.02% 30.41% 22.77%
Generally speaking, which of these roles would you be most comfortable with in a multiplayer game? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Attacking 45.85% 36.41% 63.05% 48.03% Defending 20.34% 18.20% 17.01% 17.11% Supporting 33.81% 45.39% 19.94% 34.87%
Social Engagement
The final strategy unites Extraverted and Turbulent types. These social and status-conscious individuals are unsurprisingly most likely to reject gaming as an attractive hobby, with only 49.18% of them stating that they spend more than three hours per week playing games, the lowest score of all strategies. And even when Social Engagers do play games, they are more likely than other strategies to use their smartphones or devices other than their PCs or consoles.
How much time do you spend playing computer games, per week? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Less than an hour 17.21% 20.10% 24.57% 28.20% Between 1 and 3 hours 20.34% 22.43% 21.97% 22.62% Between 3 and 10 hours 35.28% 32.39% 32.08% 31.48% More than 10 hours 27.17% 25.08% 21.39% 17.70%
What platform do you normally use? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Smartphone 13.78% 20.67% 26.01% 27.54% Console 20.88% 18.92% 20.81% 17.05% PC 61.65% 55.42% 50.29% 50.49% Other 3.69% 5% 2.89% 4.92%
Our research shows that personality types favoring the Social Engagement strategy are the most likely group to prefer physical challenges and competitions over mental ones. This carries over to their gaming preferences as well – compared to other types, Social Engagers are more eager to embrace sports and racing games as well as first-person shooters. Not only many of these games have a significant social aspect, one could also say that they mimic real-world activities more than role-playing or strategy games do. These characteristics may appeal to Social Engagement types.
What games do you enjoy most? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement Sports and racing games 3.27% 2% 5.22% 5.94% First-person shooters 10.09% 7.58% 13.04% 13.20% Role-playing games 38.92% 44.08% 30.72% 35.97% Strategy games 30.26% 26% 33.62% 28.38% Stealth-based games 4.26% 3.08% 4.93% 1.98% Card games 1.85% 3.08% 4.64% 1.98% Other 11.36% 14.17% 7.83% 12.54%
Social Engagers got average scores in most other categories, so we will not cover them in greater detail. The only interesting exception is their preferences regarding characters in role-playing games. Compared to the other Extraverted strategy, People Mastery, this group decisively shifted away from warrior characters and toward mages. It may be that the pressure and danger associated with close-range fights may be too much for fairly sensitive Social Engagers, pushing them closer to magic characters that generally stay further away from the fray.
In a role-playing game, which of these characters would you most likely pick? Confident Individualism Constant Improvement People Mastery Social Engagement An archer (stealth and long-distance fights) 39.97% 36.88% 36.26% 36.30% A mage (mastery of spells and environment) 42.84% 46.10% 33.33% 40.92% A warrior (pure strength and close-range fights) 17.19% 17.02% 30.41% 22.77%
Some Final Words
Just as two different people who share the same personality type may nevertheless be strikingly dissimilar in certain aspects, whether due to cultural values, differences in upbringing, or some other X factor, two games from the same genre may have vastly different appeals as well. Moreover, a game that has achieved widespread popularity may have done so in part because it has found a way to have something for everyone, and for every personality type.
The strong narratives and rich characters that once populated adventure and role-playing games largely to the exclusion of other genres have now made their way into more action-oriented fare, perhaps bringing in some personality types or their entire groups who would otherwise have stayed away. Similarly, the first person perspective and real-time combat of shooters has now been hybridized with certain role-playing elements, giving certain personalities the adrenaline rush needed for them to spend time in what were once much more staid surroundings.
So while particular genres may still have more to offer for some personality types than others, it must be remembered that these categories are more fluid than fixed. Game players and game designers alike would do well to remember that, in the end, games are a constellation of features, and it is often difficult to pinpoint what exactly makes us want to pick up a controller or download an app, or to make a game go from a passing distraction to a lasting obsession.
What is it about a game that makes you want to stick around? What is it that makes you want to throw your controller, mouse, or phone against the wall? Let us know in the comments!Republican presidential hopeful
"Instead of basing our national budget off of payroll taxes for Social Security... it means the base of funding is much broader," said Huckabee, whose shoestring campaign has surged nationally and in Iowa, which holds caucuses five days before New Hampshire's Jan. 8 primary.
"That's important because we have a declining number of people who actually live by their wages," |
to do.
What You Can Do
Several things. While it was Raleigh Police Department that threw us out of the park and threatened to arrest us, we realize they are acting under orders. Ultimately, they serve the interests of the Mayor and the City Council. In the words of the officer in charge today, "You need to take it up with the City Council."
And if history has taught us anything, it is, as Frederick Douglass said, that "power concedes nothing without demand."
1. Below are the email addresses and phone numbers of the Mayor and of the City Council members. We encourage you to continue to call and voice your concern. We spoke with the Mayor yesterday, and while she did say that no one will be arrested for feeding hungry people in the park, it's important to continue to make your voice heard. The status quo is not acceptable.
Keeping in mind that we win over no one with anger or rudeness. Anger does not cast out fear -- only love can do that.
* Out of town folks, call any and all of the City Council members. * Raleigh residents, call the City Council member representing your district. You can find your district by entering your address here. City Council At Large Mary-Ann Baldwin - 919-996-3050 City Council At Large/Mayor Pro Tem Russ Stephenson - 919-996-3050 District A Randall Stagner - 919-996-3050 District B John Odom - 919-996-3050 District C Eugene Weeks - 919-996-3050 District D Thomas Crowder - 919-996-3050 District E Bonner Gaylord - 919-996-3050 Mayor Nancy McFarlane - 919-996-3050
2. Post the link to this post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or any other social media outlets you have access to. Again, we have done nothing wrong, and have no desire to hide.
3. If you have contacts with people of influence (media, celebrities, etc.), please pass this story along to them or give them my email address -- hugh@lovewins.info.
4. Stay up to date. The most current information will be on our Facebook page, which you can like to receive those updates automatically.
5. If you're local, attend the public City Council meeting (when it is announced) that will directly address this issue.
6. Pray for our friends who are hungry, and now have nowhere to eat. And pray for us, so that we do not lose our tempers and along with it, our soul. And pray for the officers and people in power, who are working against our goals.
Pray for all of us, in fact, because we all need it, and our liberation is bound up in each other.
What's Happening Now
In the last 48 hours our blog post about the incident has gone viral -- if you count over 250,000 views as such. The comments pour in faster than we can moderate them. The pressure created by concerned readers has reached the offices of Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane and the City Council.
I spoke with Mayor McFarlane yesterday afternoon. She said that she wasn't aware of the Raleigh Police Department's decision to arrest people sharing food. She confirmed that no one would be arrested for sharing food at Moore Square. I also had a conversation with Mayor Pro Tem Russ Stephenson, who assured me that pending further communication, the City would maintain the status quo of allowing us to serve food on the sidewalk immediately outside the park.
These are positive first steps as we forward with the City of Raleigh, including an anticipated public City Council meeting later this week.
I want to be clear that Love Wins is not satisfied with the status quo. We should not need to pay $800 to feed hungry people in a park that belongs to everyone. A society is judged not by how it treats its most wealthy citizens, but by how it treats its most vulnerable.George Albert Cairns VC (12 December 1913 – 19 March 1944) was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.
Early life [ edit ]
George Albert Cairns was born in London on 12 December 1913. He spend the early 1940s in Sidcup, Kent, working at a bank. He met his future wife, Ena, at the same bank. They were married in 1941; a year later he went to war.[1]
Details [ edit ]
Cairns was a lieutenant in The Somerset Light Infantry (Prince Albert's), British Army, attached to the South Staffordshire Regiment in Burma during the Second World War. The South Staffordshire Regiment was a Chindit battalion, part of 77th Indian Infantry Brigade under the command of Brigadier Michael Calvert. He was 30 years old when he performed the deed for which he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
On the evening of 16 March 1944, the South Staffords dug in near what would become a main hinge of the Chindit operation, the block at Henu and Mawlu, known as the White City. A nearby hill crowned with a Pagoda dominated the horizon. It was not occupied by the British or, so far as those present could tell, by the Japanese. The following morning a number of unsuspecting Japanese soldiers were discovered in the area. It was plain that the South Staffords had dug in their positions adjacent to a small Japanese force without either learning of the other's presence. At about 11:00am, the hill erupted with enemy fire.[2]
Calvert, who led the attack in person, wrote "On the top of Pagoda Hill, not much bigger than two tennis courts, an amazing scene developed. The small white Pagoda was in the centre of the hill. Between that and the slopes which came up was a mêlée of South Staffords and Japanese bayonetting, fighting with each other, with some Japanese just throwing grenades from the flanks into the mêlée."[3] Calvert added, "there, at the top of the hill, about fifty yards square, an extraordinary mêlée took place, everyone shooting, bayoneting, kicking at everyone else, rather like an officers’ guest night."[4]
During the attack Cairns was attacked by a Japanese officer who with his sword hacked off the lieutenant's left arm. Cairns killed the officer and retrieved the fallen sword before wounding several other Japanese. He subsequently collapsed and perished the following day.[5][6] Calvert wrote, "[i]n front I saw Lieut. Cairns have his harm hacked off by a Jap, whom he shot. He picked up the sword and carried on. Finally we drive them back behind the Pagoda.”[7]
Lieutenant Norman Durant, commanding one of South Staffordshire Regiment’s machine gun platoons, was involved in the action on Pagoda Hill. He described the action in a long letter to his family:
The first thing I saw on reaching the path was horrible hand-to-hand struggle going on further up the hill. George Cairns and a Jap were struggling and choking on the ground, and as I picked up a Jap rifle and climbed up towards them I saw George break free and, picking up a rifle bayonet, stab the Jap again and again like a madman. It was only when I got near that I saw he himself had already been bayoneted twice through the side and that his left arm was hanging on by a few strips of muscle. How he had found the strength to fight was a miracle, but the effort had been too much and he died the next morning.[8]
After a brief "intermission," Calvert’s forces broke the Japanese resistance, driving them from the area:
The fighting had been not unlike that depicted un scenes from ancient battles in the closeness of the hand-to-hand grappling before the Japs finally broke. In spite of our casualties, we hard all that elation of the winners of a good battle, especially of a bayonet charge…I spoke to Lieut. Cairns before he died. ‘Have we won sir? Was it all right? Did we do our stuff? Don't worry about me.’ Five years later His Majesty graciously awarded Lieut. Cairns the Victoria Cross…We counted forty-two Jap dead, including four officers. More were shot and killed or wounded by our machine guns as they struggled across the open paddy, with the Japs giving them some covering fire from Mawlu, 800 yards across the paddy on to Pagoda Hill.[9]
Cairns's batman, Private N. Coales wrote "He died a hero."[10]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Memorial stone in Brighstone churchyard.
Cairns was buried at Taukkyan War Cemetery in Burma. His grave is located at Plot 6, Row A, Grave 4.[11] A stone memorial similar to a headstone commemorates Cairns at St Mary the Virgin Church, Brighstone, Isle of Wight.[12]
Cairns' VC was the last to be gazetted for the Second World War as the original recommendation was with General Wingate when he was killed in an air crash. The recommendation was revived following a BBC broadcast of Cairns’ actions in December 1948.[13] According to an article published in the Times Saturday 21 May 1949:
The original recommendation for the award of the V.C. to Lieutenant Cairns was submitted to the late General Wingate after the usual evidence of three witnesses had been checked. The aircraft carrying General Wingate and the records crashed, the general being killed and all the records destroyed. Later, when the proposal was retrieved, it was found that two of the three witnesses had been killed and this led to further delay. Some six weeks ago the former Brigade Commander of the 77th Brigade (now Major Calvert) had the case reopened. Meanwhile, after listening to a broadcast in which her husband's bravery was mentioned, Mrs. Cairns, who lives at Sidcup, approached her M.P., Mr. G. D. Wallace, who made representations to the War Office on her behalf.[14]
Wallace told the Daily Telegraph that he "hoped [approaching the war office] would mean recognition not only for her husband but for herself and the grand fight she had put up."[15] Cairns's wife, Ena Cairns, continued to work in the bank where she had first met her husband.[16] The Victoria Cross citation, published in the London Gazette reads:
The KING has been graciously pleased to approve the posthumous award of the VICTORIA CROSS to:— Lieutenant George Albert CAIRNS (198186), The Somerset Light Infantry, attd. South Staffordshire Regiment. On 5 March 1944, 77 Independent Infantry Brigade, of which the 1st South Staffordshire Regiment formed a part, landed by glider at Broadway (Burma). On 12 March 1944, columns from the South Staffordshire Regiment and 3/6 Gurkha Rifles established a road and rail block across the Japanese lines of communication at Henu Block. The Japanese counter-attacked this position heavily in the early morning of 13 March 1944, and the South Staffordshire Regiment was ordered to attack a hill-top which formed the basis of the Japanese attack. During this action, in which Lieutenant CAIRNS took a foremost part, he was attacked by a Japanese officer, who, with his sword, hacked off Lieutenant CAIRNS [sic] left arm. Lieutenant CAIRNS killed this Officer; picked up the sword and continued to lead his men in the attack and slashing left and right with the captured sword killed and wounded several Japanese before he himself fell to the ground. Lieutenant CAIRNS subsequently died from his wounds. His action so inspired all his comrades that, later the Japanese were completely routed, a very rare occurrence at that time.[17]
Cairns's Victoria Cross is displayed at the Museum of the Staffordshire Regiment in Whittington, Staffordshire.
Notes [ edit ]Throughout the history of Scouting, there have been many explanations of the meaning of the points from the Scout Law. For today’s post, I have collected from various sources my favorite definitions. The points on Kindness and Thriftiness came from the ninth edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, 1986. The point on “Brave” came from the first edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, 1911. The rest came from the Boy’s Life magazine: July, 1942.
For those who regularly read this blog, I would like to apologize for not posting as regularly as I would like to. For the past two weeks, I’ve been on a writing marathon for my upcoming book that this blog is based on: “Scouting Rediscovered”! This is my first book, so I am learning a lot along the way. I am almost finished with the first draft, and I hope to be able to get it published soon.
I would like to thank everyone who reads this blog, subscribed, or ‘liked’ the blog on Facebook. I could not have gotten this far without your encouragement. I hope to soon offer this book as a resource and inspiration to all of those who are Scouts at heart!
If you liked this post, you can subscribe by email or follow on Facebook and Twitter using the resources on the right. What is your favorite description of one of the Scout Laws? Comment below!
Scout On!7 years ago
Atlanta (CNN) - Mitt Romney has insisted that he will only release two years of his personal income taxes. But while candidates running for president are not legally obligated to release their taxes, there is a long tradition of doing so, in addition to public financial disclosure laws candidates must follow.
On Friday, Romney stated that his 2010 and, when complete, his 2011 taxes will be all that he makes public. He already released a 2011 estimate of taxes when he filed an extension with the Internal Revenue Service. He told CNN in an interview that the two years are "what we're going to put out…those are the two years that people are going to have."
- Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker
- Check out the CNN Electoral Map and Calculator and game out your own strategy for November.
Experts, however, say the attempt at privacy may be futile. Joseph Thorndike, Director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, said in today's political environment "these guys don't have any privacy in any sphere" and that "getting hung up in tax privacy seems a little anachronistic".
Thorndike traced the roots of presidential candidates releasing tax returns back to President Nixon's famed "Checkers" speech in 1952, where in an attempt to clear his name over controversy surrounding his finances, he spoke about his Cocker Spaniel "Checkers." As the vice presidential candidate for Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon baited the candidates running against him, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson and runningmate Sen. John Sparkman, to release their financial information by saying Americans wanted a president who had the "confidence" of all people.
Ironically, Stevenson and Sparkman complied, releasing several years of returns while Nixon never followed through with releasing his own. He and Eisenhower went on to win the election, and Nixon released four years of tax returns later while in office after facing additional questions over his finances.
Presidential candidates began releasing their returns consistently starting in the early 1970's according to Thorndike, and in 1978, all presidential and vice presidential candidates were required to release certain financial documents as a result of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which mandates all candidates running for office of President of the United States to file a Public Financial Disclosure Report with the Federal Election Commission.
How does Romney measure up to financial transparency exercised by candidates in years past? According to Rob Kelner, the chair of the Election and Political Law Practice Group for Covington and Burling LLP, "there's no hard and fast rule on how they're released," but the idea of releasing even a summary of a tax return is traditionally expected.
The Tax History Project has compiled a list of many sitting presidents and candidates tax returns, and noted an eye-popping 25 years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's tax returns were made public. However this came after FDR left office, when his family elected to release them.
The Los Angeles Times noted in 1964 that eventual Vice President Hubert Humphrey reported a net worth of $171,396 and was the "least wealthy" of the four top candidates in the running. His running mate President Lyndon Johnson was the wealthiest. Johnson was the only one out of four candidates who provided no net worth, only partial financials.
Romney's father, George Romney, who made a failed bid for president as a Republican candidate in 1968, released 12 years of tax returns.
Senator George McGovern, the Democrat candidate who lost to incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon in 1972, had a net worth of approximately $300,000 according to the New York Times, but the article, written in August 1972, noted that neither McGovern nor Nixon had provided a "detailed audited statement such as one made by former President Johnson", though both had released "general financial statements to the public".
As a Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter released just one year of returns for the year 1975, while sitting President Gerald Ford had released summaries of the previous 10 years, according to the Washington Post. Nine years of Ford's tax returns now live on the Gerald R. Ford Library website, and one partial year.
In 1980, former President Ronald Reagan released one year of records. Former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry released 20 years of tax returns when he ran against George W. Bush in 2004, however his independently wealthy wife Teresa Heinz Kerry only released a portion of her 2003 returns after mounting pressure.
Sen. John McCain released two years when he ran for office in 2008, but his wife Cindy, who files separately, released partial returns. President Barack Obama has released 12 years of tax returns.
Kelner says financial and ethical disclosure requirements for candidates have "become so excessive, it really is discouraging good people from running for office." The candidates not only face the pressure as individuals, they are now forced to think about their families and others, which Kelner says is "very intrusive, something they all have to weigh."
- CNN's Devon Sayers and Caitlin Stark contributed to this report.If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a journalist drives to Hotel Kilkenny for the 2017 FAI AGM and they're not allowed ask questions of the CEO or any of the delegates in attendance, were they really there?
The tree in the forest raises all sorts of questions concerning metaphysics, observation and perception, and the answer can be complicated.
The same complications can apply to the journalist at the FAI AGM, however, through the advent of Twitter we know unfortunately that they really did attend, and that they were greeted to the same customary reception that they've always been welcomed with.
"Security at the entrance & dotted around the hotel. One with a walkie-talkie barking instructions on press movement. It must be FAI AGM day," tweeted Irish Independent football correspondent Daniel McDonnell.
The lengths that the FAI descends to in a bid to control the narrative surrounding their 'Festival of Football' is really quite extraordinary.
A dedicated security team, monitoring and patrolling the confides of an Irish hotel to prevent members of the press from talking to just about anyone not named Fran Gavin, the FAI's Director of Competitions.
But even when the assembled media gets a brief opportunity to speak to Mr. Gavin on Saturday, they are told that the FAI could not have predicted the financial difficulties that Bray Wanderers have recently encountered, where Bray players were told earlier this month that their wages would only be covered for one more week, never mind the end of the season.
The player's wages have subsequently been covered every week since, after former club chairman Denis O'Connor secured some short-term funding prior to his resignation, but two years prior to this notice, former Bray manager Trevor Croly resigned from his position at the club after his players released a statement via the Professional Footballers Association of Ireland expressing their disappointment that a number of players' wages hadn't been paid.
Furthermore, in 2016, Bray's gate receipts totalled just €94,000 while the overall senior team costs were €560,000, with the club then deciding to increase their spending for the 2017 season on the assumption that better results would lead to better attendances and support.
Their financial meltdown was a matter of when, not if, and when news of their troubles broke earlier this month, Gavin and company stood there caught in the storm after failing to take notice of the grey clouds that had been steadily gathering for the last three seasons.
The Seagulls are still in the process of trying to convince their players, the Independent Licensing Committee and the FAI that they have the funds in place to get them through the rest of 2017, while Gavin, FAI CEO John Delaney and the rest of the FAI's board are still trying to convince the rest of us that they can competently steer Irish football through the next stage of its development.
Questions linger.
Confidence stems from competence, and if Martin O'Neill's senior side can follow up their performance at Euro 2016 by securing qualification to the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, then on a periphery level, Irish football will be perceived to be in a good state.
But even if Ireland manage to qualify for their first World Cup since the 2002 finals in Japan & South Korea, the problems on the domestic front are more pertinent than ever.
What is Bray's future beyond next season and how much of a concern is it to the association given the Premier Division's imminent switch to a 10-team league?
How has a situation like this happened again after similar issues arose with Shelbourne and Drogheda United? Do the FAI support how they handled the Athlone Town FC match-fixing investigation?
How are they monitoring the potential takeover of Galway United in light of the Athlone situation?
What is the timeline for St Kevin's Boys' partnership with Bohemians FC for the new national U15 league? And what are the consequences if the two sides do not reach a formal partnership? Why are St Kevin's Boys the exemption from any other club who has had to partner with a LOI affiliate?
The FAI's Player Development Plan is a pillar of the association's 2016-2020 Strategic Plan, yet only five players from the 19-man squad named for the most recent U21 Euro qualifier came through the club underage structures in the Republic, and even at that, the U21 squad has never qualified for a UEFA European Under-21 Championship. How is this being addressed?
There's a lot of pressing questions that fall on deaf ears, and for the fourth straight year, CEO John Delaney didn't host a press conference or take any questions from the floor at the AGM.
Delaney said in his speech to the 'football family' that: "We will start a national under 13 league in March 2019 and we need the collective to be strong and unified. To make the next step, all the stakeholders need to work in tandem. We should be proud of where our game sits right now. We will continue to change and improve."
Pride would not be at the top of my mind in a year where one club has been at the centre of a match fixing investigation, another has been asked whether or not they were able to pay their players for the second time in three seasons, and the national women's team, who were forced to publicly ask for the most basic of necessities in April, such as the ability to hold on to their own tracksuits, threatened strike action.
To change and improve, at least in the eyes of the public, you need to take accountability for these issues, you can't avoid answering questions on them and countless other matters for four straight years.
The FAI's delegates may offer a standing ovation at tightly guarded, rigorously structured AGMs, but a lot of the game's supporters want genuine answers and solutions to mounting issues.
But that's under the assumption Delaney and the FAI actually intend to change and improve? Why not keep things the same?
Since the last time Delaney spoke to the media after an AGM in 2013, the latest FAI accounts showed a record turnover of €50m.
The association has reduced its debt by €11 million following the successful conclusion of a debt refinance programme.
The national men's senior side, the FAI's golden child and primary meal ticket, are in a strong position to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, in which the association could pocket at least €11m from qualification with FIFA confirming the final prize fund six months before the finals.
Delaney and the FAI have weathered worse storms with a 'bunker' mentality before, why tackle confronting issues publicly now?
Transparency, mending relationships with loyal fans and public accountability would be the most obvious reasons, but even when a top official does speak, and he comes out with "the FAI could not have predicted the financial difficulties that Bray Wanderers have encountered", for a situation that not only should have been predicted, but prevented months ago, it's easy to see how they deal with just about everything in-house.
Delaney doesn't have to speak to the media, in fact, his election to the Executive Committee of Uefa has demonstrated that he's doing just fine without speaking to the press corps.
But if the FAI want serious change and improvement, accountability is not a bad starting point. Take the next step, or even the first step, but don't walk away from it.
Online EditorsVice President Joe Biden Joseph (Joe) Robinette BidenBannon: 'Zero' doubt Trump will run for reelection Bernie is back with a bang — but can he hold on to his supporters? Klobuchar backs legalizing marijuana MORE is slamming Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s now-infamous taco tweet, saying the presumptive GOP nominee needs to get serious about what he would do if elected president.
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“He is a smarter guy that this,” Biden told Fox 5 DC on Friday.
“I hope he reaches the point where he figures out that it’s not a game show, and that he begins to talk in earnest about where he would take the country were he to win because that’s the kind of debate the public deserves," Biden added.
"I know Hillary [Clinton] or Bernie [Sanders], if he is the nominee, will do that. But the American public deserves genuine debate at this moment in our history on the direction of the country — whether we continue the direction we are on and moving forward or are we making a significant change. I’m not sure he knows.”
Trump created a social media stir when he tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl Thursday with a caption that read “Happy Cinco de Mayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”
President Obama on Friday declined to comment on Trump’s tweet.
“I have no thoughts on Mr. Trump’s tweets,” Obama said, with a laugh. “As a general rule, I don’t pay attention to Mr. Trump’s tweets. That will be true for the next six months, so you can just file that one.”Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Aug. 11, 2015, 11:54 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 12, 2015, 1:03 AM GMT By Erik Ortiz and Ron Allen
The group walking around openly armed with assault rifles and roaming the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, overnight Monday in a confusing display were within the bounds of state law in their actions — and told NBC News they are doing what all Americans should: exercising their rights.
The handful of members of the right-wing citizen militia group known as the "Oath Keepers" told reporters that they have licenses to carry firearms.
It wasn't immediately clear whether they planned to return to the St. Louis suburb on Tuesday night — following a flare up of violence on the one-year anniversary of the fatal police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown.
St. Louis County authorities declared a state of emergency and more than 100 people were arrested Monday during a second night of protests.
The Oath Keepers, who were also in Ferguson during last year's unrest, said they returned to protect businesses and certain reporters.
If the Oath Keepers decide to hit the streets again, a voter-backed amendment passed last year makes it legal to open carry a firearm with a permit — and goes as far as invalidating municipal bans against it, said Anders Walker, a constitutional law professor at St. Louis University. The city of St. Louis was among the municipalities that had such a prohibition.
The revised statute says anyone permitted to carry a gun can "briefly and openly display the firearm to the ordinary sight of another person, unless the firearm is intentionally displayed in an angry or threatening manner, not in necessary self defense."
What the Oath Keepers are doing is as "straightforward legally as this gets," said Greg Magarian, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. "This is a state with extremely permissive gun carry laws."
The county being in a state of emergency doesn't have an effect on the law either, added Allen Rostron, a University of Missouri-Kansas City constitutional law scholar and professor.
When asked whether they confronted the Oath Keepers, the St. Louis County Police Department again told NBC News that it was consulting with the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorneys Office about the issue.
County Police Chief Jon Belmar stated that the group's presence has been both "unnecessary and inflammatory."
The Oath Keepers' St. Louis Facebook page describes itself as a nonpartisan association of "current and formerly serving military, police, and citizens who pledge to fulfill the oath to defend the Constitution."
But the fact that the few Oath Keepers in Ferguson overnight were all white men and were permitted to roam heavily armed in a mostly black community has worried some about perceptions of racial inequality.
"They were able to hold their guns out in public because it's an open carry state, but if you're African American in the state of Missouri and you have a rifle in an open carry state, you're gonna be shot,” Democratic State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal told NBC News. “And so there is one rule for white gun owners and another rule for black gun owners."
Magarian questioned what would happen in a test case where black men were open carrying in a white suburb.
"Would they be treated the same way?" he asked.
Larry Kirk, an Oath Keepers member and a police chief of a rural Missouri community, told NBC News that even if people aren't happy with the group's presence in Ferguson, they are there to ensure police and government aren't overreaching citizens' rights.
"Whether we are comfortable with somebody exercising their right, we still have to be able to have them exercise that right so we don't lose it," Kirk said.Reza Kahlili – World Net Daily August 22, 2012
Six American military bases in Israel will be destroyed by Iranian missiles should Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities, the Islamic regime is warning the United States.
“America has several secret military bases in different areas of the occupied Palestinian territory (Israel) at which it houses ammunition, smart bombs, missiles and other military armaments,” Basij News, the official outlet of the Iranian Basij forces, reported Tuesday, quoting an Iranian diplomat in an interview with the Arabian media outlet Al Moheet.
“Also, a 500-bed hospital is located in one of these bases. … Should Israel attack Iran, then surely those bases will become the targets for Iranian missiles.”
The unnamed diplomat said one of the bases is in the western part of the city of Herzliya, another is within Ben Gurion Airport, and other bases are inside the Israeli Air Force bases of Ovda and Nevatim. The diplomat said the value of the U.S. military armaments at these bases exceeds $1 billion.
“American military bases in the occupied territories are considered secret and most of them are underground,” the diplomat said. “These bases are known by codes ‘Base 51,’ which houses ammunition, ‘Base 53,’ which is located in an Israeli Air Force base, ‘Base 54′ is a hospital close to Tel Aviv used in emergency situations, and bases ’55′ and ’56′ are used as ammunition and armaments reserves,” he said.
The diplomat said another base is in the West Bank, built by a German company to house American armaments.
The Basij report said Israel provides security and military support for the estimated 150 American military supervisors at the bases.
As reported by the Washington Times last December, the Revolutionary Guards had warned that any U.S. involvement in an attack on Iran would result in a missile attack on all U.S. bases in the region and terrorist attacks on U.S. interests worldwide, including in America. However, the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had earlier announced that should America stay out of any conflict with Iran, it will be safe.
The Basij report, however, directly warns America that even should it not militarily support an attack by Israel, its military bases within the Jewish state will be targeted.
Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi described Israel’s Jewish community as “vulnerable.” Fars News Agency quoted the special adviser to the supreme leader as saying, “The Zionists are living in such international conditions that if they intend to launch an attack against Iran, one million Jews will flee Israel in the first one or two weeks. Jews are very vulnerable there.”
Safavi, the former chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards, last week had said, “All signs in the region point to the disintegration of the superfluous fake Zionist regime and its removal from the face of the geography of the region,” according to Sepah News, the Guards media outlet.
In analyzing the Arab Spring, Safavi said, “Without a doubt, the north African region and southwestern Asia are in a historic political path that will affect geopolitics – meaning that the governments of dictators and monarchs dependent on big powers are being changed where people are empowered and in control of their own political destiny.”
Safavi said the United States spent billions of dollars on the nine-year Iraq war and suffered 5,000 deaths and many more injured but failed to put in place in Baghdad an anti-Iran government it liked.
In Afghanistan, he said, after a decade of fighting, America and its allies face the same fate as the Soviet Union’s Red Army in the 1980s and will be forced to flee.
“America’s support of Israel will increase the hatred by the Islamic nations and it will be costly for the Americans,” Safavi said. “The path of Allah promises Muslims victory over the infidel Zionists.”
Disclose.tv – the coming is near-iran propaganda Video
Reza Kahlili served in CIA Directorate of Operations, as a spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, counterterrorism expert; currently serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board authorized by Congress. He is the author of the award winning book “A Time to Betray” and regularly appears in national and international media as an expert on Iran and counterterrorism in the Middle East.
Source“Are you having sex?” asks the undercover Russian spy of her sullen teenage daughter, as they stand in their closed suburban garage. The spy is holding a duct-taped throw pillow so the teenager can sullenly hammer at it with her fists. The unspoken answer is, Not yet, but this TV show is on FX, so it’s inevitable; the further subtext to this family-bonding-as-Rocky-training-montage workout is that the sullen teenager will also probably beat the crap out of someone real soon. Possibly in the same scene! And she definitely won’t enjoy it. Neither, dear viewer, will you.
Or at least, you won’t get the same prurient dopamine rush supplied by most other shows like this. As its fifth season premieres tonight, The Americans has trained its devoted fans to fear the prospect of absolutely anything happening, to anyone, at any time. This is a show about sexy, badass spies whose demeanors are so grim you feel bad for cheering when anything sexy and/or badass occurs; they are usually also wearing ridiculous wigs, but they look so forlorn that you feel bad for laughing. That’s what makes this show so utterly bizarre, and so indispensable.
The Americans’ time has come, due to a proprietary mixture of slow-burn deliberate excellence — critics loved it immediately, and last year the Emmys started to figure it out — and dumb luck. Extremely dumb luck. You are perhaps aware that Russia now regularly dominates the American news cycle, in a surreal, nightmarish Cold War reboot in which our old, vanquished foe suddenly seems to have the upper hand. It’s a “ripped from the headlines” situation in reverse. Previously, part of the exquisite tragedy here in watching Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Russian sleeper agents posing as a mundane nuclear family in early-’80s Washington, D.C., was the knowledge that their grim badasserie was futile, that their side loses, pretty spectacularly. You assumed, from the onset, that their characters, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, would meet a dire end, and likely they will, with exactly two seasons left to go. But the fate of their teenage daughter, Paige — who knows at least some of her parents’ secrets and is still grappling, sullenly, with where her loyalties lie — is undecided. You can guess what’s going to happen to most of these people, but not her, not yet. Like it or not, she’s the only major character on this show whose fate matters.
You roll the dice with preteen actors on long-running prestige TV shows: If you’re lucky, you get Mad Men’s Sally Draper, who blossomed over the course of seven seasons into the only character you didn’t hate yourself for loving. If you’re unlucky, you get A.J. Soprano. Canadian actress Holly Taylor was 15 years old when The Americans premiered in January 2013, and for the first couple of seasons, her Paige didn’t have much to do but ask a few impertinent questions and roll her eyes when she didn’t get any real answers. But in Season 3, she finally cajoled the truth out of her parents, though she took a little convincing. “Speak Russian,” she commanded, and, reluctantly, they did. (Though FYI, this is not the right translation.)
Some of my distinguished colleagues here at The Ringer are anti-Paige. They are forgiven |
-pay pension of £800 per year.[25]
William Franklin sent a letter to his father, dated 22 July 1784, in an attempt at reconciliation. His father never accepted his position, but responded in a letter dated 16 August 1784, in which he states "[We] will endeavor, as you propose mutually to forget what has happened relating to it, as well we can."[26] William saw his father one last time in 1785, when Benjamin stopped in Britain on his return journey to the U.S. after his time in France. The meeting was brief and involved tying up outstanding legal matters. In a reconciliation attempt, Benjamin also proposed that his son give land that he owned in New York and New Jersey to William's son Temple, who had served as Ben's secretary during the war and for whom the elder Franklin had great affection, in order to repay a debt William owed his father; in the event, William only ever transferred the New York portion of the land.[27] In his 1788 will, Benjamin left William virtually none of his wealth, except some nearly worthless territory in Nova Scotia and some property already in William's possession. He said that had Britain won the war, he would have had no wealth to leave his son.[28]
William died in 1813, and was buried in London's St Pancras Old Church churchyard. The grave is lost.
Legacy and honors [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]Start with a box, then paint a sign…
…add a handle on the door and a stovepipe vent…
…throw in a few flies (because flies like stink)…
…and ya got the best Halloween costume ever!
What are you going to be for Halloween??
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Postscript: The incredibly creative and talented Eric and Margherita, parents of one of my daughter’s best friends, made this costume. The kids all pitched in to help. Their daughter is a Plumber for Halloween.
At the school carnival, reactions to the Porta Potty costume were varied. Many people pointed and laughed. A few plugged their noses. Some looked baffled and offended, apparently by the idea that we’d dress our daughter as an outhouse. But hands down, this was the most surprising, most original costume of the day.
Many thanks to Eric and Margherita for making it happen!! You guys are Halloween geniuses (and next time you ever make it to southern California, I have just the person you have to meet).
Seriously, folks, check out Heather from Anuvue’s Alien Invasion — The Queen of Halloween has just been promoted to Halloween Leader of the Free World and Dictator for Life! _______________________________________________________________________________________
-Related to posts Halloween Short List: (#2) Build Your Own Casket and halloween haiku(Image: Credit)
Seemingly habitable exoplanets may be missing their magnetic shielding, leaving them exposed to damaging radiation.
To support life as we know it, planets need thick, water-rich atmospheres and liquid surface water. These conditions have so far only been hinted at, based mostly on a planet’s distance from its star.
But water can get blasted away by stellar winds unless the planet has a strong magnetic field, point out Jorge Zuluaga at the University of Antioquia in Colombia and colleagues. Mars and Venus do not have magnetic fields, and it is thought that stellar winds stripped away the bulk of Mars’s atmosphere, while Venus’s was left with mostly carbon dioxide, making it toxic.
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A magnetic field would also protect a planet’s surface inhabitants from dangerous stellar radiation.
Cooling period
A churning molten core helps to generate a magnetic field, so the team calculated how long it would take a rocky planet to cool so much that this magnetic dynamo stopped working.
They then checked three well-known exoplanets thought to be potentially habitable: Gliese 581d, HD 40307g and GJ 667Cc. The first two might have magnetic fields just barely strong enough, they found, but the third is doomed.
Zuluaga therefore stresses the importance of considering magnetic fields when thinking about whether a planet would be a good place to live. “If we want to evaluate as well as possible the habitability of a planet, we need that information, not only the distance to the star.”
Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1304.2909In the wee hours of every morning, more than 30,000 sweepers quietly pour out across Mumbai.
Conservancy workers—as they are formally called—are employed by the city’s Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to clear the gutters, collect and transport the waste to dumping pits, and sweep the streets.
Their work is essential. India’s bustling and ever-expanding commercial capital is now home to more than 12 million people, who produce more than 6,500 tonnes of garbage every day.
Typically, these sweepers are Dalits—the lowest and the most underprivileged of India’s oppressive caste system—and live in deplorable conditions, deprived of basic necessities, including proper clothing, sanitation and education.
“They are ignored by all of us,” Mumbai-based documentary photographer Sudharak Olwe told Quartz. Over the past year, Olwe has chronicled their lives in an attempt to put pressure on the corporation to “make their working and living conditions more humane and just,” he wrote on his website.
Titled In Search of Dignity and Justice, Olwe’s photographs capture the city’s underbelly, where darkness reigns and hope is scarce.
“When men go on wars, they are given gallantry awards,” 49-year-old Olwe explained. “These men are fighting a war every day—with diseases, garbage, inhuman conditions, but nothing comes of it.”
Sudharak Olwe Once inside, the worker is completely cut off from the world above.
Sudharak Olwe The work requires no special skills, just a pair of arms and legs and the courage to descend into hell.
Sudharak Olwe Among the dangers of working inside the hole: passing out from inhaling toxic gas, slipping in the slime and losing consciousness, or being carried away in the rush of water and waste.
Sudharak Olwe The city’s western suburbs have 65 kilometres of big gutters, 56 kilometres of small gutters, and 52 kilometres of box drains.
Sudharak Olwe Clearing garbage is back-breaking work, and the tools of the trade are primitive.
Sudharak Olwe The dump sites generally have a small canteen where the workers can change their clothes or sit during a break.
Sudharak Olwe The mother of three (top right) works as a domestic servant, and lives with her family on just a portion of a staircase.
Sudharak Olwe Huge amounts of garbage can lead to the outbreak of many diseases, including cholera, dysentery, typhoid, infective hepatitis and the plague.
Sudharak Olwe Twenty hard strokes of his heavy wooden broom are what it takes the sweeper to clean one step of this overhead bridge.
Sudharak Olwe Workers tirelessly do their job, despite the mounting pressure of waste generation.
Sudharak Olwe The garbage that the workers rake out includes animal carcasses, food remains, steel wires, hospital waste, jagged pieces of wood, pipes, stone, broken glass, blades.
Sudharak Olwe As trucks keep coming to the dumping grounds, they have to be unloaded whether it’s in the mid-day sun or in the pouring rain.
We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.I was called by an Irish radio station in Dublin to respond to President Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. What did I think was going on inside the US President’s mind, I was asked? And I replied immediately: “I don’t have the key to the lunatic asylum.” What might once have seemed an outrageously over-the-top remark was simply accepted as a normal journalistic reaction to the leader of the world’s greatest superpower. And re-listening to the speech that Trump made in the White House, I realised I should have been far less restrained. The very text of the document is insane, preposterous, shameful.
Goodbye Palestine. Goodbye the two-state solution. Goodbye the Palestinians. For this new Israeli “capital” is not for them. Trump did not even use the word “Palestine”. He talked about “Israel and the Palestinians” – in other words, of a state and of those who do not deserve – and can no longer aspire to – a state. No wonder I received a call in Beirut last night from a Palestinian woman who had just listened to the Trump destruction of the “peace process”. “Remember Kingdom of Heaven?” she asked me, referring to Ridley Scott’s great movie of the 1187 fall of Jerusalem. “Well it’s now the Kingdom of Hell.”
It’s not the Kingdom of Hell, of course. The Palestinians have been living in a kind of hell for a 100 years, ever since the Balfour Declaration declared Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, when a single sentence – in which our beloved Theresa May takes such “pride” – became a textbook for refugeedom and the future dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs from their lands. As usual, the Arab response this week was sickening, warning of the “dangers” of Trump’s decision, which was “unjustified and irresponsible” – this piece of fluff produced by King Salman of Saudi Arabia, the so-called protector of Islam’s two holiest places (the third being Jerusalem, although he didn’t quite manage to point that out) – and we can be sure that in the coming days many an “emergency committee” will be formed by Arab and Muslim institutions to deal with this “danger”. They will, as we all know, be worthless.
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But it was the linguistic analysis of Noam Chomsky when I was at university – he later became a good friend – which I applied to the Trump speech. The first thing I spotted was, as I mentioned above, the absence of “Palestine”. I always put the word in quotation marks because I don’t believe it will ever exist as a state. Go and look at the Jewish colonies in the West Bank and it’s clear that Israel has no intention that it should exist in the future. But that’s no excuse for Trump. In the spirit of the Balfour Declaration – which referred to Jews but to the Arabs as “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” – Trump downgrades the Arabs of Palestine to “Palestinians”.
Yet even at the start, the chicanery begins. Trump talks about “very fresh thinking” and “new approaches”. But there is nothing new about Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, since the Israelis have been banging on about this for decades. What is “new” is that – for the benefit of his party, Christian Evangelicals and those who claim to be American supporters of Israel – Trump has simply turned away from any notion of fairness in peace negotiations and run with Israel’s ball. Past presidents have issued waivers against the 1995 Jerusalem Congress Act, not because “delaying the recognition of Jerusalem would advance the cause of peace” but because that recognition should be given to the city as a capital for two peoples and two states – not one.
Then Trump tells us that his decision “is in the best interests” of the US. But he can’t explain how – by effectively taking America out of future “peace” negotiations and destroying any claim (admittedly dubious by now) that the US is an “honest broker” in these talks – this will benefit Washington. It clearly won’t – though it might help Trump’s party funding – since it further lowers American power, prestige and standing across the Middle East. Then he claims that “like every other sovereign nation”, Israel has the right to determine its own capital. Up to a point, Lord Copper. For when another people – the Arabs rather than just the Jews – also want to claim that city as a capital (or at least the east of it), then that right is suspended until a final peace comes into existence.
Shape Created with Sketch. Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital Show all 22 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Protests erupt after Trump recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital 1/22 Supporters of Difa-e-Pakistan Council a coalition of right wing Islamic parties, burn an effigy of US President Donald Trump, during a protest in Quetta, Pakistan EPA 2/22 Israeli police scuffle with a Palestinian protester outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City Getty 3/22 Palestinian protesters burn pictures of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu following Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images 4/22 Israeli forces disperse Palestinian protesters outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City on 7 December 2017 AFP/Getty Images 5/22 Supporters of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC), an Islamic organization, chant slogans as they burn Israeli and US flags during a protest against Donald Trump in Peshawar REUTERS 6/22 Palestinians paint an 'X' over the face of a picture of US president Donald J. Trump which was painted on the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem EPA 7/22 Palestinian protestors burn the Israeli flag and a poster of US President Donald Trump in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images 8/22 Supporters of a Pakistani religious party rally against Donald Trump in Lahore AP 9/22 Palestinian protesters burn the US and Israeli flags in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images 10/22 A poster depicting U.S. President Donald Trump is burnt during a protest against Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah REUTERS 11/22 Israeli forces detain a Palestinian protester during clashes that followed protests against US President Donald Trump recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Hebron AFP/Getty Images 12/22 Palestinian protesters burn an effigy of U.S. President Donald Trump AP 13/22 Palestinian protesters shout slogans against Donald Trump EPA 14/22 A Palestinian protester wears a Guy Fawkes mask used by the anonymous movement during clashes with Israeli troops in Hebron AFP/Getty Images 15/22 Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops during protests AFP/Getty Images 16/22 Supporters of a Pakistani religious party chant anti-American slogans during a rally in Islamabad, Pakistan AP 17/22 Pakistanis burn a representation of the U.S. flag during a protest rally in Hyderabad AP 18/22 Young Palestinian women look on as smoke billows from burning tyres as fellow Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops AFP/Getty 19/22 Protesters burn a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump at a protest in Islamabad REUTERS 20/22 Protestors shouts slogans against US President Donald Trump as they hold Palestinian and Turkish flags during a protest near the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey EPA 21/22 Palestinian protestors put their feet over a picture of US president Donald Trump during a protest in the West Bank City of Nablus EPA 22/22 Pakistani protesters burn tires at an anti-Donald Trump rally in Multan AP 1/22 Supporters of Difa-e-Pakistan Council a coalition of right wing Islamic parties, burn an effigy of US President Donald Trump, during a protest in Quetta, Pakistan EPA 2/22 Israeli police scuffle with a Palestinian protester outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City Getty 3/22 Palestinian protesters burn pictures of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu following Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images 4/22 Israeli forces disperse Palestinian protesters outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City on 7 December 2017 AFP/Getty Images 5/22 Supporters of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC), an Islamic organization, chant slogans as they burn Israeli and US flags during a protest against Donald Trump in Peshawar REUTERS 6/22 Palestinians paint an 'X' over the face of a picture of US president Donald J. Trump which was painted on the Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem EPA 7/22 Palestinian protestors burn the Israeli flag and a poster of US President Donald Trump in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images 8/22 Supporters of a Pakistani religious party rally against Donald Trump in Lahore AP 9/22 Palestinian protesters burn the US and Israeli flags in Gaza City AFP/Getty Images 10/22 A poster depicting U.S. President Donald Trump is burnt during a protest against Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah REUTERS 11/22 Israeli forces detain a Palestinian protester during clashes that followed protests against US President Donald Trump recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Hebron AFP/Getty Images 12/22 Palestinian protesters burn an effigy of U.S. President Donald Trump AP 13/22 Palestinian protesters shout slogans against Donald Trump EPA 14/22 A Palestinian protester wears a Guy Fawkes mask used by the anonymous movement during clashes with Israeli troops in Hebron AFP/Getty Images 15/22 Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops during protests AFP/Getty Images 16/22 Supporters of a Pakistani religious party chant anti-American slogans during a rally in Islamabad, Pakistan AP 17/22 Pakistanis burn a representation of the U.S. flag during a protest rally in Hyderabad AP 18/22 Young Palestinian women look on as smoke billows from burning tyres as fellow Palestinian demonstrators clash with Isralei troops AFP/Getty 19/22 Protesters burn a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump at a protest in Islamabad REUTERS 20/22 Protestors shouts slogans against US President Donald Trump as they hold Palestinian and Turkish flags during a protest near the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey EPA 21/22 Palestinian protestors put their feet over a picture of US president Donald Trump during a protest in the West Bank City of Nablus EPA 22/22 Pakistani protesters burn tires at an anti-Donald Trump rally in Multan AP
Israel may claim all of Jerusalem as its eternal and undivided capital – as Netanyahu also claims that Israel is the “Jewish state”, despite the fact that more than 20 per cent of the people of Israel are Muslim Arabs who live inside its borders – but America’s recognition of this claim means that Jerusalem can never be the capital of another nation. And here’s the rub. We don’t have the slightest idea of the real borders of this “capital”. Trump actually acknowledged this, in a line that went largely unreported, when he said that “we are not taking a position on … the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem”. In other words, he recognised the sovereignty of a country over all of Jerusalem without knowing exactly where that city’s borders lie.
In fact, we don’t have the slightest idea of just where Israel’s eastern border is. Does it lie along the old front line that divided Jerusalem? Does it lie a mile or so to the east of east Jerusalem? Or does it lie along the Jordan river? In which case, goodbye Palestine. Trump has awarded Israel the right to a whole city as its capital but hasn’t the slightest idea where the eastern border of this country is, let alone the frontier of Jerusalem.
The world was happy to accept Tel Aviv as a temporary capital – as it was to pretend that Jericho or Ramallah was the “capital” of the Palestine Authority after Arafat arrived there. But Jerusalem was not to be recognised as the Israeli capital even though Israel claimed it was. Then we have Trump stating that in this “most successful” democracy, “people of all faiths are free to live and worship according to their conscience”. I trust he won’t be telling that to the more than two and a half million Palestinians in the West Bank who are not free to worship in Jerusalem without a special pass, or the population of besieged Gaza who cannot hope to reach the city. Yet Trump claims his decision is merely “a recognition of reality”. I suppose his ambassador in Tel Aviv – soon, presumably, in Jerusalem (if only, so far, in a hotel room) – believes this tosh; for it was he who claimed that Israel only occupied “2 per cent” of the West Bank.
And this new embassy, when it is eventually completed, will become “a magnificent tribute to peace”, according to Trump. Given the bunkers into which most US embassies in the Middle East have turned, it’s going to be a place with armoured gates and pre-stressed concrete walls and lots of inner bunkers for its diplomatic staff. But by then, I suppose, Trump will be gone. Or will he?
As usual, we had the Trump waffle. He wants “a great deal” for the Israelis and Palestinians, a peace agreement that is “acceptable to both sides” – even though this is not possible when he’s recognised all of Jerusalem as Israeli before the so-called “final status” talks, which the world still fondly expects to take place between “both sides”. But if Jerusalem is “one of the most sensitive issues” in these talks, if there was going to be “disagreement and dissent” about his announcement – all of which he said – then why on earth did he make the decision at all?
Only when he descended into Blair-like verbosity – that the future of the region was held back by “bloodshed, ignorance and terror” – did it really become too much to stomach any more of these lies. If people are supposed to respond to “disagreement” with “reasoned debate, not violence”, what is the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital supposed to produce? A “debate”, for heaven’s sake? Is that what to “rethink old assumptions” means?
Enough of this twaddle. What more folly can this wretched man dream up and lie about? So what was going on in his befuddled mind when he made this decision? Sure, he wants to follow up on his campaign promises. But how come he decided to honour this promise but could not bring himself to say last April that the mass murder of a million and a half Armenians in 1915 constituted an act of genocide? He was obviously frightened of upsetting the Turks, who deny the first industrial holocaust of the 20th century. Well, he’s sure upset the Turks now. I’d like to think he’d taken that into account. But forget it. The guy is crackers. And it will take many years for his country to recover from this latest act of folly.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Subscribe nowFURTHER SUBMISSIONS AND RESPONSES BY
THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS
TO QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE
COMMISSION FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION 12 MAY 1997
Contents
Nature of the South African Conflict
a submission concentrating on questions concerning ANC policies, structures of accountability within the ANC, other relevant institutions and procedures, and actions taken by the leadership to halt deviations from policy. Our responses to questions from the TRC relating to the activities of the former apartheid regime are also included in this document.
two operational reports which aim to provide the TRC with a clearer understanding of the mandates and activities of MK and NAT.
2.1 ANC POLICY REGARDING "JUSTIFIED TARGETS"
Operation Mayibuye
Planning for People's War
Rand Daily Mail
"The growing challenge to the South African state must inevitably push matters to the point where further military mobilisation will seriously damage the economy with its endemic shortage of skilled labour. Yet manpower constraint is not the only factor. (...) Equally important is the public relations aspect. For propaganda purposes the state clearly needs growing numbers of non-whites in the Defence Force to project the view that the military build-up is not part of a racial and class struggle, but rather a case of all South Africans preparing to fight shoulder to shoulder against the forces of "communism and chaos." A third reason for Coloured and Indian conscription concerns the National Party constituency. All along, the Nationalist leadership has made it clear to its followers that the extended rights and privileges the Coloureds and Indians will receive in the new dispensation will carry with them increased responsibilities of "full citizenship". That means, quite simply, also sharing the burden of defence." 1
"It was in this context, rather than in straightforward political campaigning, that physical attacks on councillors and on their property were launched by angry crowds of residents. Attacks on policemen's homes became commonplace at a much later stage of the...resistance, after fatal clashes between police and residents had become commonplace and mass arrests and detentions had become the order of the day. Political reservations about community councils and the councillors would not have touched ordinary residents had not the worsening economic situation in South Africa forced residents into direct conflict with the community councils...Allegations of corruption levelled at community councillors have been numerous and widespread. 2
"It is thus not surprising that in September 1984, civil unrest commenced with a protest march against the rent increases imposed by the community council at Sebokeng. As a result, several people, including two community councillors, were killed on that fateful third (day of) September. Unrest spread from the PWV-Free State area to the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape. In nearly all these areas, the increasing role of community councillors (and police) in administering these deprived areas, and the material benefits they enjoyed as a consequence, were identified as one of the problems and pressure of various kinds was placed on them to resign."3
"(The Apostle) Paul has said that not all of us should be leaders, as leaders are more punished than anybody else. So, referring that to our situation, no man should just agree to be a leader if he has no true qualities of leadership, and no-one should feel easy on the throne he has been nominated to occupy, if he has not been freely elected by the public. This I say because, if you keep on ruling defiant hearts, the time they revolt against you not one piece of your belongings together with your life will remain yours. If people are dissatisfied with you, it is better for you to resign before the terrible dark clouds overwhelm you in your wilderness; if you defy their needs, then you ask for a brutal retribution.
"This I say to the remaining councillors: that they should never regard their own opinions as more weighty than those of the people they rule; and that the well-being of the community should not be ignored, or the response will be more horrible than the conflagration that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah." 4
Vrye Weekblad
Sechaba
"You know for a long time South Africa, being a colonialist power of a special type, has depended on the continued repression of our people through active collaboration by puppets. We know that even in the classic colonial situation in countries like India, Kenya, the old Tanganyika and elsewhere, the colonialist has always depended on the African askari. Similarly, in our country, we know ourselves that the colonialist, the racist regime if you like, has always depended on the active collaboration of the oppressed on the recruitment of the Black policeman, the Black special branch. Because the Black policeman the Black special branch and the Black agent stay in the same township as we do, they have been the conduit through which information about our activities, about our plans has been passed to the enemy. This has made the process of organisation and mobilisation very difficult.
"So the necklace was a weapon devised by the oppressed themselves to remove this cancer from our society, the cancer of collaboration of the puppets. It is not a weapon of the ANC. It is a weapon of the masses themselves to cleanse the townships from the very disruptive and even lethal activities of the puppets and collaborators. We do understand our people when they use the necklace because it is an attempt to render our townships, to render our areas and country ungovernable, to make the enemy's access to information very difficult. But we are saying here our people must be careful, in the sense that the enemy would employ provocateurs to use the necklace, even against activists. We have our own revolutionary methods of dealing with collaborators, the methods of the ANC. But I refuse to condemn our people when they mete out their own traditional forms of justice to those who collaborate. I understand their anger. Why should they be cool as icebergs, when they are being killed every day?
"As far as I am concerned, the question of the necklace and how it should be used belongs to all of us, to the ANC, to the democratic movement. We should sit down and discuss amongst ourselves how we should mete out justice. What is revolutionary justice? One fact is that, where agents and collaborators are concerned, we should establish, where it is possible, our own revolutionary courts where justice should be meted out. And in those courts we should involve some of our best cadres so that our forms of justice do not degenerate into kangaroo justice. We would like to maintain revolutionary forms of justice. But South Africa is not a normal society; the situation is very very abnormal. People are angry because we are fighting fascism in that country.
"The ANC will never abandon its leading role. We are saying to our people, whatever method you devise, there should be democratic participation, there should be democratic discussion, and whatever method we use, that method should conform to the norms of the revolutionary movement. As I say we understand why the necklace has been used. We know even the negative and positive aspects of the necklace. There is a lot of discussion now going on the question of the necklace. But it is not this silly co nclusion that it is Black on Black violence. The necklace has been used against those who have been actively collaborating with the enemy. We say the movement should be vigilant to ensure that whatever sentence is passed on anybody, it is a result o f participation by the revolutionary elements of our struggle." ( Sechaba, December 1986.)
The Sunday Tribune
2.2 ARMED OPERATIONS AND CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
"I will summarise the position taken by the Conference in these terms: that the struggle must be intensified at all costs. Over the past nine to ten months at least - at the very least - there have been many soft targets hit by the enemy. Nearly five hundred people have now died in that period...massacred, shot down killed secretly. All those were very, very soft targets. They belong to the sphere of the intensification of the struggle. What we have seen in places like the Eastern Cape is what escalation means for everybody. The distinction between "hard" and "soft" targets is going to disappear in an intensified conflict, in an escalating conflict. (...)
"I am not saying that our Conference used the word "soft targets". I am saying that Conference recognised that we are in it. It is happening every day. It happened two days before we started our Conference - a massacre in Gaborone. We did not complain that soft targets were being hit, because they have been hitting them, as I say, all the time. What we did was to re-commit ourselves to intensify the armed struggle (...) until the system which makes massacres and conflicts necessary, is abolished..."
"We are saying comrades (...) that our country is in a state of civil war. It is true that so far the brunt of suffering has been borne by our people. Our people are attending funerals, our people are mourning for their dead, but comrades. Umkhonto we Sizwe, instructed by the leadership of the ANC, is gearing itself to step up activity in white areas so that the entire country should be ungovernable.
I want to elaborate on this question of extending the struggle to the white areas. We don't want to be misunderstood. Unlike Botha. Le Grange, Malan and Chris Heunis, who go out of their way to butcher children, defenceless and unarmed children, old people, black civilians, Umkhonto we Sizwe is a revolutionary army and is not going to embark on mayhem against white civilians, against children, but we are going to step up our attacks against enemy personnel. We are referring to the members of the police force, to the members of the SADF, to those in the administration terrorising and harassing our people, to those farmers and other civilians who are part of the defence force of this country, the military, paramilitary and reserves. The theatre of these actions is going to be in the white residential areas, and it is inevitable that white civilians will die." (BBC Monitoring Report)
Mayibuye
Sechaba
3.1 LINES OF COMMAND AND ACCOUNTABILITY
3.2. ANGOLA, 1977 - 1984; DISCIPLINE IN MK
10a) (...) the armed struggle must be based on, and grow out of, mass political support...All military activities must, at every stage, be guided and determined by the need to generate political mobilisation, organisation and resistance..."
b) The forms of political and military activities, and the way these activities relate to one another go through different phases as the situation changes. It is therefore vital to have under continuous survey the changing tactical relationships between these two inter-dependent factors in our struggle...The concrete political realities must determine whether, at any given stage and in any given region, the main emphasis should be on political or on military action."
"The Commission believes that the conditions in the camps, the total isolation from the outside world, the desperation and frustration of not being deployed, make it practically impossible for cadres to survive (politically, morally, and psychologically) in the camps for several years."
some of these cadres had themselves been subjected to very brutal treatment by the apartheid security police before leaving the country for training;
the need to obtain information quickly was at times a factor which led to the beating of unco-operative captives, such as Keith McKenzie, who had placed a car bomb somewhere in Botswana: in this case the urgency to obtain information was fuelled by the desire to prevent deaths by locating the bomb in time; 7
there was anger against some of these prisoners, who have tended to be all uncritically portrayed as innocent victims: several had committed vicious, cold-blooded acts of murder, usually in the service of the apartheid regime, against anti-apartheid activists inside and outside the country.
3.3. MEASURES TO HALT EXCESSES AND CONTINUING PROBLEM AREAS, 1985 - 1990
that the accused be released; in these cases, the person concerned would be handed over to the Office of Justice, which would ensure that s/he was taken to the place of her/his choice; for example, some would prefer to leave Angola and be re-established in Zambia or Tanzania in the ANC civilian community. In some cases those who decided they wanted to leave the ANC would be handed over to the Chief Representative in the relevant country, who would assist the person concerned to apply for asylum in a host country.
that the suspect be expelled from the Movement; in these cases, the suspect would be handed over to the host government by the Office of the Chief Representative, and the host government would hand the person on to the UNHCR.
in cases where the accused was found guilty s/he could be sentenced to a period of imprisonment at the Rehabilitation Centre
in cases where the accused was found guilty of a capital offence, the death sentence could be recommended.
" Concerns (of MK cadres in Angola) were voiced but not properly addressed by the leadership, which resulted in mutinies."
"Quatro was conceived without proper deliberation. It was located in Angola, a country at war, and was staffed by inadequately trained youths of insufficient experience. The first camp commander was only 19 years old. The failure to train adequately and supervise the staff, the lack of clear authority between Mbokodo and MK, and the breakdown in communications between the prison and the Officer of Justice resulted in many abuses of human rights."
The leadership did implement mechanisms to address these problems, mainly the Code of Conduct and the Office of Justice; this "system of justice represented by the structures in the Code of Conduct was unique among liberation movements in Southern Africa", comments the report elsewhere, and "represented a large step forward in respect of human rights protection within the ANC"; however, "the leadership did not follow these measures through sufficiently." "The absence of clear lines of demarcation between the powers and responsibilities of Umkhonto we Sizwe and Mbokodo resulted in a lack of accountability for the excesses that occurred at Quatro (...) The failure to incorporate Mbokodo properly into the structures of the ANC created a degree of independence and unaccountability for the Security apparatus which was detrimental to the overall interests of the Organisation."
3.5. ADDITIONAL NOTES RELEVANTTO SPECIFIC QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE TRC
Challenge
.
5.1. THE NCM (FORMERLY THE NSMS)
5.2. ADULT EDUCATION CONSULTANT SAND OPERATION KATZEN
5.3. STEVE BIKO
5.4. COVERT OPERATIVES INFILTRATED INTO ANC/MK STRUCTURES, SDUs, AND COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANISATIONS
1 The Rand Daily Mail, 03/12/83; quoted by W.J. Pomeroy in Apartheid, Imperialism, and African Freedom ; International Publishers, New York, 1986. (Banned for possession in South Africa in December 19988)
2 Mabangalala: The Rise of Right-Wing Vigilantes in South Africa ; Nicholas Haysom; Occasional Paper No 10, Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand; 1985; page 5
3 Ibid; page 16
4 The Third Day of September ; an eye witness account of the Sebokeng Rebellion of 1984; page 5. Johannes Rantete. Ravan Press, 1984
APPENDIX ONE
ANC STRUCTURES AND PERSONNEL, 1960 - 1994
Please note: In this document we have concentrated mainly on those structures which are of direct relevance to the mandate of the TRC. There has been no attempt to cover our diplomatic structures, or departments which fell under the offices of the Secretary-General or the Treasurer-General over the years.
Most of the information contained in this appendix is drawn from memories. There may be minor mistakes and omissions.
1. ANC STRUCTURES AND PERSONNEL: PRE - MOROGORO (1969)
Following the banning of the ANC in 1960, OR Tambo was sent out of the country to represent the ANC abroad; Yusuf Dadoo was deployed to represent the SACP. After the arrests of most members of MK's National High |
of Russian lawmakers and the world, and claims he has a whole new generation of advanced nuclear weaponry which is invincible. He just may have it. While Obama was letting our military languish for eight years, Russia was developing 22nd Century technology. Let’s review some of these weapons. Putin made his remarks at … Continue reading →
Erdogan is the Antichrist! March 31, 2018 · March 31, 2018 · 0 Comments I can see the headlines in England and around the world: David Meade identifies the Antichrist! Actually, I believe I have, by process of elimination, and in my book THE END OF DAYS on Amazon, and by the superb research done by Craig White, a fellow researcher. I’ve received permission from my friend, Craig White, to duplicate one of his … Continue reading →
The attributes of the Antichrist March 28, 2018 · March 28, 2018 · 0 Comments This man of perdition is arrogant and proud. He does not have a sense of equity or justice for the poor. He doesn’t hesitate to attack and insult people who disagree with him. According to the Book of Daniel, he will have a severe and steely look or countenance. At the same time he is a celebrity–with a lot of … Continue reading →
World War 3 is approaching March 19, 2018 · March 19, 2018 · 0 Comments Most Americans believe that there was a conspiracy in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. The only “lone nuts” involved were members of the Warren Commission. Robert McNamara finally admitted 30 years later that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a “false flag” and a prelude to the Vietnam War or invasion. Would anything like this ever occur in … Continue reading →
The Antichrist is among us March 16, 2018 · March 16, 2018 · 0 Comments People ask me all kinds of questions. I tell them first to read the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel, and they’ll understand everything. The man of perdition is perfectly described in these two books. He has a cult-like following. Now not everyone loves him. Only Hollywood has set up that kind of an image. He grows in … Continue reading →
Vladimir Putin and the ‘Dead Hand’ March 9, 2018 · March 9, 2018 · 0 Comments The movie The Mosquito Coast starring Harrison Ford may well be a description of where so-called civilization is heading. Vladimir Putin recently described Russia’s conglomeration of super-nuclear weapons, which includes a “Dead Hand” type of ballistic underwater submarine, remotely controlled, with huge nuclear capability. Russia has one enemy: the United States. Well, you say, all is well–just look at the economy. … Continue reading →
The Antichrist: ‘Mr. 666’ (Part 3) March 2, 2018 · March 2, 2018 · 0 Comments Is Billy Graham God’s Methuselah? William Franklin Graham, Jr. has passed away at the age of 99. Several well-known students of Bible prophecy have in the past prophesied that in the year in which he would be taken, that same year would see the disappearance of billions of Christians, the onset of the Great Tribulation, the visitation of Planet X … Continue reading →OTTAWA — Former Liberal leader and foreign affairs minister Stephane Dion says he has agreed to be Canada’s ambassador to to the European Union.
Dion made the announcement while saying goodbye to his colleagues in the House of Commons, following a similar tribute from former immigration minister John McCallum.
Dion, who represents a Montreal riding, was shuffled out of cabinet earlier this month in favour of Chrystia Freeland, a move widely seen as part of the Liberal government’s response to the ascendance of Donald Trump.
Dion did not initially accept the “senior position” he was offered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a sign that he was not happy about the decision to relive him of his portfolio.
McCallum, the Markham-area MP who was also shuffled out of cabinet earlier this month, has already agreed to serve as Canada’s ambassador to China.With the recent Snapchat data breach (and the company’s subsequently poor handling of the situation) and given the ongoing NSA snooping scare, little wonder some folks would think twice before downloading a messaging app to their iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices.
Storing your chat transcripts in the cloud introduces an attack vector so that’s a big no-no, right?
And you definitely at all cost want to avoid the contents of your communication kept on the device itself, no? So how about a 100 percent off-the-record messaging software, one that would bypass the cloud while allowing for Snapchat-like disappearing text messages?
That’s Confide for you…
Created by local Jon Brod, who co-founded local news site Patch, and marketing startup Yext CEO Howard Lerman, Confide’s pitch is simple and effective:
Spoken words disappear after they’re heard. But what you say online remains forever. We think this is crazy. Confide lets you take your messages off the record.
The program packs quite a punch in terms of keeping your conversations private, like screenshot protection, read receipts, encryption, self-destructing messages and more.
Confide is best described as the Snapchat for messages.
Messages are encrypted end-to-end and destroyed forever immediately after they’re read, on both ends, so they can’t be retrieved later.
Perhaps crucially, the app never stores message scraps, individual messages or whole message archives on your devices or servers.
Such forward-thinking extends to incoming messages.
Messages must first be swiped with your finger to actually reveal the words. They’re calling it swipe-to-reveal and it’s designed to discourage screenshooting to an extent that the message is concealed until swiped over and the app alerts the sender if a screenshot is attempted.
What’s missing is a true screenshot protection by way of iOS 7 APIs to ensure that the recipient can never use the system screenshoting function (hit the Home + power/sleep button simultaneously) to save conversations as images to the Camera Roll.
Another cool feature: sending messages to any email address.
GigaOM does a better job explaining this one than myself:
Confide is different from Snapchat and other disappear apps in that it connects potential users through their email addresses, not by searching their phone contacts. This means that if someone sends a message to a person who doesn’t have the app, they will receive an email that informs them there is a message from the first person waiting for them in the app.
Privacy advocates and security-minded users should jump with joy as Confide is Godsent for both personal and professional confidential conversations.
I’m sure normals will find a lot of good uses for it, too.
I’m imagining this would include circumstances when leaving a digital written trail of message exchanges could get you in legal trouble or any other scenarios where you’d be wise to avoid leaving a permanent trace on the web.
And the Internet’s permanence should worry you: a whopping 639,800 gigabytes of data is stored and cached forever on the web, every single minute.
Learn more at the Confide website and download the app for free in the App Store.
The download comes at 5.7MB and iOS 7.0 or later is a requirement.A mother has told how she questioned her own sanity as she begged social workers and police for years to help stop her daughter from being repeatedly sexually abused.
In the end she feared the girl was at as big a risk from social workers as she was from the gang who groomed her.
The woman would often spend her nights searching the streets of Oxford for her missing daughter because the police and social services would not.
Den of horror: A room in an Oxford guest house where underage victims of the gang were abused
But the victim, who was groomed, drugged and sold into abuse more than 150 times, says social workers saw her as a nuisance and treated her like a piece of meat rather than a child being abused.
Her mother, now in her 60s, adopted her from a life of physical and sexual abuse when the girl was 11. But she struggled to get on at secondary school and was expelled at 12.
She soon fell into the grip of the grooming gang and would regularly go missing.
Yet her mother said social workers were unwilling to acknowledge the problem and help.
She said: ‘It was an absolute nightmare. It got me doubting my own sanity. The whole world was turned upside down. Everything that I thought should be happening was not.
‘All of the way along [social workers] were more of a hindrance and a problem than a help. At the time I didn’t know whether she was more at risk with the men or social services.’
The woman, who cannot be named, said she first asked for help in 2004 but social services refused to act because her daughter was not originally from the Oxford area.
Abuse: An estimated 373 girls, mainly from Oxford, pictured, were groomed, raped and sometimes forced into'sex slavery' by gangs over the last 15 years, a damning report revealed
Her pleas for help were met with no empathy from ‘robot’ social workers, she said.
‘She was going missing more and more. When they did decide to get involved all they did was take her into care and send her to outside the county.’
Her daughter was sent to a Devon children’s home, away from her family and friends, where she was trafficked to London to meet strangers for sex.
They couldn't have cared less
The mother said: ‘Nobody was there looking after her. The home was utterly clueless.’
But social services told the girl they would take her away from her mother or take her to a secure unit if she did not stop misbehaving, she said.
‘They just couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t feel like we were dealing with human beings. They were cold, they were not interested.
‘They had no skills in communicating with young people.
‘They could not begin to understand what was going on with these girls.
‘Along the way we didn’t meet many evil people, just a lot of ignorance, arrogance and complacency.’ Her daughter admitted she was a difficult teenager but social workers had no idea how to deal with her.
The victim said: ‘I felt like a piece of meat when it came to social services. They said I had an anger problem but it was because they said I was worthless and should be left it care.
‘They were vile. I was nothing. They didn’t want me in their county. I was a problem.
‘They said I should never have been adopted when I actually hadn’t done anything wrong – I was the one being let down.
‘They told me I was a nuisance. If they had seen me as a person who was obviously hurting, things would have been a lot different.
‘I was nothing to anyone apart from my mum and a few police officers. Then I saw myself like that. They set me up to fail.
‘All I wanted was for people to prove I was not nothing. They did not want even to remotely try to understand. Not at all.’
'I TURNED UP AT THE POLICE STATION, BLOOD ALL OVER ME. THEY DISMISSED IT AS ME BEING 'NAUGHTY'': VICTIMS DESCRIBE THE ABUSE IN THEIR OWN WORDS AND HOW THE AUTHORITIES IGNORED THEM Today's report contains testimony from some of the hundreds of girls who were abused by paedophiles in Oxford. These are excerpts from their evidence: I was found in the presence of the men constantly. Why were they not pulled in?
If a perpetrator can spot the vulnerable children, why can't professionals?
Social workers asked me questions which showed they knew
Why would a 13-year-old make it up? They didn't stop to think 'why?'
The social worker just wanted to hear what [the worker] wanted to hear so there was no need to do anything
No one believes me, no one cares. They knew where I was, they didn't care when I came back I couldn't sleep or eat
The Police never asked me why – they just took me home
I made a complaint about a man who trafficked me from a children's home. He was arrested, released and trafficked me again
If someone had taken the trouble to ask me I would have told them. Oxford and another council argued about me to try and avoid doing anything. It wasn't my fault I was abused
I turned up at the police station at 2/3am, blood all over me, soaked through my trousers to the crotch. They dismissed it as me being naughty, a nuisance. I was bruised and bloody
Social services washed their hands – 'it's your choice' I was told
A WPC found me drunk with men. I said I was ok and she went away and left me with them. I was abused that night
She did speak to the police. It meant I was whacked around the head with a crowbar
I thought if I told the police what was really happening they would not believe me
They threatened to blow up my house with my mum in it
I was expected to do things - if I didn't they said they would come to my house and burn me alive. I had a baby brother
I wouldn’t ever have said no – they’d have beaten the s*** out of me
Social Services knew what was going on – they always asked questions that showed that they knew
They left you in a house with Asian men and didn't even ask my age
I made a complaint about a man who trafficked me from a children’s home. He was arrested, released and trafficked me again
They knew where I was, they didn't care when I came back
She said social workers did not seem interested in helping her.
‘They should have done their jobs and they weren’t doing their jobs. Even if it was one single sexual assault they should have dealt with that. As soon as a child said no I am fine they just left it.’
The victim also insisted that there were at least another 15 men she could think of who escaped prosecution – along with hundreds of their customers.
She said: ‘If I went to Oxford now I would see hundreds of people that were involved. That’s why I wouldn’t go.’
How could police and care staff tolerate girls aged 12 having sex with abusers? Oxford inquiry slams system that handed out contraception to victims of groomers
Young girls being abused by a paedophile gang were given contraceptives on the NHS as police and social workers ignored their plight, a damning report revealed yesterday.
Professional tolerance of underage sex left hundreds of victims to be abused on ‘an industrial scale’ under the authorities’ noses, it said.
Instead of being protected the girls, some as young as 12, were dismissed as a ‘nuisance’ and ‘wilful’. The Serious Case Review found that up to 373 children may have been targeted by gangs of paedophiles in Oxfordshire.
Jailed: Brothers Akhtar Dogar (left) and Anjum Dogar (right) were each given a life sentence with a minimum of 17 years at the Old Bailey in 2013 for their role in the Oxford abuse
It came after seven men, mainly of Pakistani origin, were jailed in 2013 for abusing six white girls in Oxford between 2004 and 2012.
The review found that:
Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council made scores of errors and could have acted sooner.
Police were guilty of ‘tunnel vision’ and failed to prosecute a man for having sex with a 13-year-old girl because she looked older.
There was a widespread misunderstanding of the law on sexual consent, which states that no one under 16 can agree to sex.
One victim was dismissed as ‘nuisance’ when she went to a police station covered in blood in the early hours of the morning.
However, concerns that police and officials failed to investigate because they were scared of being branded racist were dismissed.
David Cameron said the report must act as a ‘wake-up call’ but one victim told the Mail it had provided her with nothing of what she was hoping for.
Attackers: Kamar Jamil (left), 27, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 12 years while Assad Hussain (right), 32, was sentenced to seven years in prison
Abusers: Mohammed Karrar (left), 38, was given life with a minimum of 20 years for the 'dreadful offences' he committed against the girls. His brother Bassam Karrar (right), 34, was also handed a life sentence with a minimum of 15 years
Critics say the chief executive of Oxfordshire County Council Joanna Simons, who has been offered a £600,000 pay-off, and the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Sara Thornton, who is leaving for a more senior police job, should be brought to account for the appalling failings among their staff.
But last night a senior child protection official insisted there was no evidence of ‘wilful professional misconduct’.
Opportunities were missed
Maggie Blyth, independent chair of the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board, blamed the scandal on ‘systemic failings’ and said delays in tackling the issue of child sexual exploitation ‘allowed offenders to get away with their crimes’.
She described the number of known perpetrators as ‘the tip of an iceberg’ and said there are likely to be more children at risk.
Oxford East MP Andrew Smith called for an independent inquiry, adding: ‘The public will be shocked that no one is taking responsibility for these awful failures to protect children, and no one has been disciplined.’
Catherine Bearder, a local MEP, said: ‘It is now clear there have been failures within both the social services and the police, by the very people who should have been protecting these vulnerable young girls. Both Joanna Simons and Sara Thornton should consider their positions.’
The report said the child sexual exploitation (CSE) could have been identified or prevented earlier. It criticised health workers for failings which left girls at the mercy of the paedophiles.
Victims who attended sexual health clinics were given contraception because ‘the law around consent was not properly understood’. It added: ‘A professional tolerance to knowing young teenagers were having sex with adults seems to have developed.’
The report said the girls ‘lived within a culture of acceptance of very early sexual activity’ and in some cases this was ‘accepted and condoned by their parents’.
KEY FAILURES OUTLINED IN THE 'BRUTAL' 114-PAGE REPORT ON OXFORD Brutal: Key failings were outlined in the 114-page report on Oxford Failures in the official response outlined in the 114-page report include: The issue of child sexual exploitation (CSE) was not understood and national guidance was not followed;
The 'terrible' nature of victims' experiences was not recognised because of a view that they were consenting or bringing problems on themselves;
Girls were treated without common courtesy and subjected to'snide remarks';
There was an insufficient understanding of the law around consent and a tolerance of sexual activity with children.
There was a lack of curiosity about what was happening to the girls;
There was insufficient attention to investigating and disrupting the activities of perpetrators compared with efforts used to 'contain' behaviour of the 'difficult' girls;
The organisational response was 'weak and lacked any management oversight'.
Information about worrying cases was not 'escalated' to those at the top of organisations.
In response to the question 'Could CSE have been identified or prevented earlier?', the report said: 'The simple answer is yes.'
The police and council in Oxfordshire were condemned for repeatedly missing opportunities to prevent the abuse years earlier.
There were discussions about a paedophile ring operating in the area in 2006 but it was not until late 2010 that senior police and council leaders were alerted.
The investigation resulted in the seven men being jailed.
The Serious Case Review highlighted incidents where officials were repeatedly warned about what was going on but no action was taken.
It detailed how in 2006 two girls aged 14 to 15 told officials of the address where abuse was happening, admitted having sex with a group of Asian males and described being raped by two of the men later convicted.
Jailed: The gang, five of Pakistani origin and two of north African origin, believed they 'owned Oxford' during their years of abusing children
The report said there should have been enough information for authorities to realise CSE was occurring. It says: ‘Opportunities were indeed missed.’
Girls would often go missing from care repeatedly, but the reasons were not investigated. Warnings that girls could be victims of organised prostitution or an abuse ring were ignored, as were concerns about connections between girls in care and adult men from the Asian community.
Thames Valley’s police and crime commissioner said the abuse could have been a hate crime with an element of racial motivation.
Anthony Stansfeld backed the review’s call to look into why so many Pakistanis or Muslims had been convicted of CSE. Police and council chiefs apologised for the failings saying improvements had since been made.
Will council boss get £600,000 payoff?
Under fire: Oxfordshire County Council chief executive Joanna Simons
Two bosses under fire over the Oxford grooming scandal are leaving their jobs – but one is being promoted and the other is poised to receive a massive payout.
Council chief Joanna Simons, who resisted calls to resign when the child sex abuse controversy broke two years ago, is in line for a pay-off worth nearly £600,000 after being made redundant.
Meanwhile Thames Valley Chief Constable Sara Thornton is to become chairman of the National Police Chiefs Council despite her force’s shocking failures in the scandal.
Last month the Mail revealed how the bumper deal for Miss Simons was rubber-stamped at a meeting of Oxfordshire County Council. However, following a backlash in the aftermath of the revelations, the move is being reviewed.
Council leader Ian Hudspeth said the decision to make her post redundant had to be reconsidered because ‘I accept I may have acted hastily and I am sorry this happened’.
Under the original plans, which are still expected to be approved, Miss Simons is due to leave her £186,000-a-year job in June with a £151,000 severance payment and a pension package worth £423,000.
Miss Simons, 55, has been chief executive of Oxfordshire County Council since 2005.
She was awarded a CBE for services to local government in the 2011 Queen’s Birthday Honours. It seems certain that had the Cabinet Office known of the Oxford child sex ring scandal then, she would not have received the accolade.
Critics believe Miss Simons should now be stripped of her honour and forced out of her job without a pay-off.
Thames Valley Chief Constable Miss Thornton is widely regarded as David Cameron’s favourite police leader.
However, the Prime Minister, whose Witney constituency is in her force’s area, is not the blonde 52-year-old’s only influential supporter in Westminster.
Thames Valley Chief Constable Sara Thornton is widely regarded as David Cameron’s favourite police leader
Others include Home Secretary Theresa May and London Mayor Boris Johnson. Miss Thornton spent the first 15 years of her police career in the Met. In 2000 she was appointed assistant chief constable at Thames Valley, rising to the top job seven years later and being awarded a CBE.
Her time in the Thames Valley force has not been without controversy.
Six years ago, at the height of the furore over MPs’ expenses, it emerged that she had billed taxpayers for the £135 cost of hiring a suit for her partner for a state banquet at Windsor Castle.
When the post of Scotland Yard chief became vacant four years ago, one of Miss Thornton’s rivals for the job told the Mail: ‘It’s Sara’s job if she wants it.’Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand wants Parliament to overhaul Canada’s elections law to prevent deceptive telephone calls by adding stiffer penalties and giving new powers to investigators.
In a recommendation aimed directly at the calls received in Guelph, Ont., on the 2011 election day, Mayrand says Parliament should close a loophole in the Criminal Code and make it illegal to impersonate an Elections Canada official. He advises maximum penalties on conviction of violators of $250,000 in fines and five years in jail.
In a report tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, Mayrand suggests that political parties develop “codes of conduct” aimed at preventing the kind of misleading phone calls reported by more than 1,400 Canadians in 247 ridings in the last election.
The report, entitled “Preventing Deceptive Communications with Electors,” also recommends that Elections Canada investigators be given a new power to apply to a judge for an order compelling witnesses to provide information during an investigation.
Mayrand’s agency has hinted in the past that comparatively weak penalties and limits on investigative powers in the current elections law have made it harder to track down who was responsible for the “Pierre Poutine” robocalls in Guelph, Ont., and misleading calls in other ridings.
“While political parties and candidates must continue to be able to communicate with electors effectively, measures are required to provide basic privacy protections and help prevent deceptive communications,” Mayrand writes.
Mayrand wants a new law, based on a provincial law in Ontario, which would make it an offence of anyone to falsely present themselves as an employee of Elections Canada or as a representative of a candidate or political party.
The government said Wednesday that it will have a look at Mayrand’s report.
“As previously indicated, we are looking at reforms to Canada’s election laws,” said an emailed statement from Tim Uppal, the minister of state for democratic reform. “We will consider these suggestions as we prepare to put forward a comprehensive elections reform proposal.”
Investigators have previously struggled to apply the Elections Act to calls that appear to be designed to mislead voters.
In the Guelph case, the “Pierre Poutine” suspect sent out 7,676 voters pre-recorded calls that falsely claimed to be from Elections Canada, telling them their polling locations had been changed.
“The inability to compel testimony has been one of the most significant obstacles to effective enforcement of the act.”
While personation is already an offence under the Criminal Code, Mayrand’s report says the provision would not apply to “a call or caller represented as ‘Elections Canada,’ nor to a fictitious character such as Pierre Poutine.”
Mayrand also proposes giving Elections Canada investigators the power to compel testimony from witnesses, a power that other regulatory agencies enjoy, although the evidence witnesses give could not be used against them.
Investigators are now hamstrung by the inability to compel witnesses to speak, he writes.
“In the case of the Guelph investigation into misleading robocalls, the publicly available court records show that at least three individuals believed to have key information refused to speak with investigators,” he writes. “The inability to compel testimony has been one of the most significant obstacles to effective enforcement of the act.”
The agency wants parties, candidates and riding associations to report to Elections Canada on “telemarketing services on a timely basis,” providing the texts of any messages, the dates they were sent and, if requested, the list of numbers to which they were sent.
The agency also wants the power to require telecommunications companies to preserve records while investigators prepare a court order, and require political parties to produce documents about their contractual arrangements with voter contact firms.
As it stands, parties do not have to disclose who they hire to do voter contact work, although individual campaigns do have to file such reports.
Mayrand says that investigations into calls have been complicated by new technologies such as disposable credit cards, Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services, and proxy servers that hide users’ Internet addresses.
He recommended that the revised Elections Act require that the name and phone number of the sponsoring political party be identified on the call display of all calls, and the name of party be stated at the beginning of the message.
He also said there should be limitations on the time of day that political calls can be made, similar to those restrictions on telemarketing calls policed by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission — even outside election periods.
The report also says that Elections Canada will strive to “warn electors about misleading calls and inform them of available remedies,” and collaborate with the CRTC to better explain applicable rules to political parties.
It also calls for political parties to develop voluntary codes of conduct, with the assistance of Elections Canada if necessary.
The report adds that privacy provisions should be enshrined in the Elections Act to ensure political parties will properly handle sensitive donor and voter information in their databases, which have become key election tools.
The report did not provide new information about the investigation into the deceptive calls in Guelph or elsewhere.
Along with the report, the agency also released a poll, from Phoenix Strategic Perspectives, which polled 1,000 Canadians.
The poll found that 90 per cent have confidence in Elections Canada, but Mayrand warns “this level of confidence will decrease if significant delays in investigations (let alone lack of results) occur following repeated perceived egregious violations of the Canada Elections Act.”
The poll also asked Canadians about the phone calls they received during the election. Ten per cent of respondents said they received a call from Elections Canada telling them that their polling station had moved.
“Considering that Elections Canada does not make any calls on a proactive basis, these results could provide some indication of electors having received calls from persons impersonating Elections Canada,” the pollsters write. “It is possible, however, that some respondents may have been confused about the source of the call. That said, if these self-reported claims do not stem from confusion, then these results could be interpreted as a sign of possible misusage of Elections Canada’s name and identity.”
Six per cent of those polled also reported receiving a call from a party or candidate telling them their voting location had changed.
It also asked the Institute for Research on Public Policy to convene a roundtable to further study robocalls and other new communications technology and consulted with political parties.
Mayrand promised the report one year ago, at the height of the robocalls scandal, amid revelations that Elections Canada was investigating deceptive phone calls in Guelph and more than 200 other ridings in the 2011 election.
The Commissioner of Canada Elections Yves Cote recently referred the results of his office’s investigation to federal prosecutors, recommending that charges be laid.
It will now be up to the director of public prosecutions Brian Saunders to decide whether to lay charges under the Elections Act or, possibly, the Criminal Code.
The Elections Canada investigation of calls outside of Guelph is continuing as investigators attempt to build a database of complaints and the origin of harassing or misleading live and pre-recorded calls they said they received leading up to the May 2 vote.
On March 12, 2012, when the robocall scandal was dominating headlines, the NDP moved a motion calling for the government to table legislation to control political calls within six months. The Conservative MPs voted for it and the motion passed unanimously, but the government has yet to release any legislation, saying only that it will do so “in due course.”
Meanwhile, the Federal Court of Canada is still considering applications brought by a left-of-centre advocacy group to set aside the result of the last election in six ridings and trigger by-elections.
The Council of Canadians claimed that misleading phone calls helped Conservative candidates win the ridings. The Conservatives actively defended the litigation. A judgment in the case is expected before the summer.The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Overview
Over the past few years, I’ve worked in various capacity adapting media from one form to another. Whether it’s storyboarding Halo: Nightfall, providing artwork for How to Train Your Dragon comics, or game designing Magic Mike: The Moves, adapting the Channing Tatum male stripper movie into a mobile game (yes, that’s real and available on app stores in UK and Ireland).
Throughout these projects, I have developed two core principles that help a project feel true to the source material: Character Consistency and Continuity of Design.
As a case study, I’m writing about these principles in relation to my current game design project; adapting Jennifer Wilde, the award-winning comic book series, into a Point & Click adventure game. For more details on the project, you can watch the trailer and play the demo on our kickstarter page.
Character Consistency
With script duties handled by the original writer, Jennifer's dialogue is true to her character.
Challenge: Keeping true to the original characters. This applies to both opinion of both the licensor, and original fanbase.
Solution: Our first priority was to involve the original creative team, so our adaptation would be consistent with their vision. From an art standpoint this wasn’t difficult, as I had experience drawing the original comicbook, and had a specific, approved, visual sense of the characters.
From a character perspective, we were luckily enough to have original comic writer, Maura McHugh join the team, to provide the script for the game. For us, Maura was essential in capturing the spirit of the characters, and a great sounding board for story-based game design.
Rob Curley, publisher of the comic, is involved as a producer and will make sure we don’t stray too far from his creation.
What worked: We were able to accurately capture the feel of the characters. Maura’s script was consistent with the voices the fanbase had come to know, and her understanding of the characters meant there were no missteps in the approval process.
What didn’t: Workflow took some adjustment, as character and game design often cross over quite significantly in the adventure game format. We eventually settled into a process where I would design a scene with very badly written dialogue, and Maura would come in to rescript, and provide feedback on character motives and interactions, tweaking as necessary.
Continuity of Design
Our comic-styled artwork, not only stays true to the source material, but has already won an award.
Challenge: Provide a consistent aesthetic, recognisable to the comic audience, and approved by the licensor.
Solution: Rather than adapt the characters into a standard 3D art style, or a familiar 2d game style like pixel art, we chose a stylised art direction that would translate the style of the comic as accurately as possible to the screen.
Although I had worked on the comic, my game design role kept me from directly producing many art assets for the game. I recruited artist and animator John McFarlane, based on his comic book work, and knew his style would be perfect for the project.
The comic was printed in a glorious black & White format, with inked linework and a greytone wash. We used this same style on screen, and fans of the comic have commented on how recognisable the characters and scenes are from the comic. Although the original comic was drawn on paper, we are able to reproduce the artstyle by hand-drawing the characters and backgrounds using comic drawing software Manga Studio, primarily a comic drawing software.
What worked: The game is instantly recognisable to fans of the comic, and has already won an Excellence in Art Award.
What Didn’t: Such detailed, layered artwork and animation is more time consuming that a simpler, cartoonier style would be. With time intensive labour, we’ve turned to Kickstarter to raise funds to complete the game.
Conclusion
Solving mysteries with the ghost of Oscar Wilde. What more could you ask for in a game?
Including the original creative team and using a comic-inspired art style resulted in positive feedback from fans of the original comic fans. They noted how familiar the characters and settings feel.
Likewise, players unfamiliar with the series indicated they feel the game works as a standalone game, and response to the comic-inspired artwork has been extremely positive, with players noting in looks unique in a crowded market.
Jennifer Wilde is a project the entire team is really excited about. If you’ve like the look of the project, I feel obliged to mention we are currently running a Kickstarter to complete the game.AT&T Gives Own TV Service Preferential Treatment, Then Denies It
Consumer groups say AT&T is using its latest data-cap exemptions to prop up its satellite-TV business and put competitors at a distinct disadvantage. AT&T announced its plan to "zero rate" the company's own content from wireless usage caps yesterday, likely hoping the Apple and Sony press conferences would distract most tech journalists from the news (that unsurprisingly appears to have worked). Under the proposal, users that subscribe to both AT&T wireless and DirecTV service can stream DirecTV content without it counting against their shared data plan allotments.
AT&T acquired DirecTV in a $69 billion deal last year. Consumer advocacy group Free Press was quick to point out that AT&T's plan puts streaming competitors at a distinct disadvantage.
"This isn’t really free data," Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said of AT&T's latest effort. "It’s a way for AT&T to keep you paying for two services instead of one, and a roadblock designed to prevent you from using your data on any content AT&T doesn’t own."
“The anti-competitive implications for the video market are clear as a bell," said Wood. "Locking internet users into old-fashioned pay-TV subscriptions, or even steering them toward those subscriptions and toward the broadband providers’ own video content, may be great business for AT&T. But it’s a bad deal for internet users and competing content creators.”
The FCC has taken heat for not following a laundry list of other countries and banning such practices outright when crafting net neutrality rules. And while the FCC said it would take a look at the anti-competitive impact of companies favoring their own content in this fashion on a case by case basis, so far they've done absolutely nothing to deter the behavior. As a result Verizon, AT&T and Comcast now all exempt their own content from usage caps, and Sprint and T-Mobile have launched confusing plans that charge users a premium to avoid the throttling of games, videos and music.
"We are not treating our services differently from any other data."
-AT&T, after launching a program that gives its own services cap-exempt status while automatically penalizing services like Netflix
And this is likely only AT&T testing the water ahead of a much broader implementation of the same idea. Later this year the company plans to launch three new DirecTV branded streaming services to compete with Netflix that are also expected to not count against AT&T wireless usage allotments.
However according to AT&T, the company isn't violating net neutrality, or treating its own service any differently.
"We are not treating our services differently from any other data," AT&T claims, despite the very obvious fact that they are. "This feature is simply our way of saying thanks to customers that purchase both video and mobility services from AT&T."
Despite being technically the same corporate entity, AT&T has been telling media outlets that DirecTV pays AT&T to have cap-exempt status, and that any other company can also pay AT&T for the same preferential treatment if they sign up for AT&T's "sponsored data" program.
While the FCC launched an "informal inquiry" back in January to examine the anti-competitive impact of such behavior, there has been no word since on any notable policy decisions from the agency, so we asked for an update.
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3.3bn on defense every year, but only £2bn in Scotland. That leaves you with a surplus of £1.3bn PER YEAR. Over a decade, which is about how long it takes to research and build a new aircraft carrier, that’s £13bn. That’s an absolutely absurd amount of money, and you’ll just have that sitting around under the current budget.
I know that you folks probably don’t want a carrier, and you especially don’t want one of the nuclear-powered international airports at sea that we build. You’re probably going to be fiscally responsible, build yourselves a modest navy for search and rescue in the North Sea, and spend the rest of your money on actually-important things like schools, hospitals, new industry, wind farms and the like.
And who could blame you for that? I just wanted to make the point that you’re fantastically wealthy, even though you’re told you aren’t. Anyone who looks at your budget and says otherwise isn’t being honest with you.Online Piano
Welcome to the GuitarSix.com Virtual Piano where you can use your keyboard or mouse to play piano online and view thousands of piano chord charts and scale charts for free. FLASH player is not required. For best results with sound, use a Desktop computer and a modern web browser with JavaScript enabled.
Learn Piano
You can use the Virtual Piano to view and memorize chords and scales on the keyboard. Select from the options below to view custom chord and scale charts.
Piano Chords
This section allows you to view the tones that make up many types of piano chords and arpeggios. The root note of each chord will be displayed as a red dot on top of the piano keys. Chord fingering is not set in stone and usually boils down to what is most comfortable to you. See this and scale fingering below.
Instructions: Select a piano chord type then a letter name.
Select a chord type Basic chords Major
Minor
Augmented
Diminished
Suspended 2
Suspended 4
Major Flat 5
Minor Sharp 5
Minor Double Flat 5
Suspended 4 Sharp 5
Suspended 2 Flat 5
Suspended 2 Sharp 5
Powerchord
Major Add 9
Suspended 2 Suspended 4
6th chords 6
Minor 6
6 Flat 5
6 Add 9
Minor 6 Add 9
7th chords 7
Minor 7
Major 7
Minor Major 7
Diminished 7
Augmented 7
Augmented Major 7
7 Flat 5
Major 7 Flat 5
Minor 7 Flat 5
Minor Major 7 Flat 5
Minor Major 7 Double Flat 5
Minor 7 Sharp 5
Minor Major 7 Sharp 5
7 Flat 9
9th chords 9
Major 9
Minor 9
Minor Major 9
9 Flat 5
Augmented 9
9 Suspended 4
7 Sharp 9
7 Sharp 9 Flat 5
Augmented Major 9
11 chords 11
Minor 11
Major 11
Minor Major 11
Major Sharp 11
Augmented 11
13 chords 13
Minor 13
Major 13
Minor Major 13
7 Sus chords 7 Suspended 2
Major 7 Suspended 2
7 Suspended 4
Major 7 Suspended 4
7 Suspended 2 Sharp 5
7 Suspended 4 Sharp 5
Major 7 Suspended 4 Sharp 5
7 Suspended 2 Suspended 4
Major 7 Suspended 2 Suspended 4
Select a chord Key Major chords A
Ab
A#
Bb
B
B#
C#
Cb
C
D#
D
Db
Eb
E
E#
F#
Fb
F
Gb
G#
G
Piano Scales
Choose a piano scale from the list below by selecting a key letter name under each of the scale names. The root note of the scale in each key will show as a red dot with a letter on the piano keys.
Major Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Cb Minor Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Harmonic Minor Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Melodic Minor Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Harmonic Major Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Pentatonic Scales - Major C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Cb Pentatonic Scales - Minor A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Blues Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Wholetone Scales B C Diminished Scales D Eb Db Augmented Scales C D Hungarian Minor Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Enigmatic Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Neapolitan Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Ab Neapolitan minor Scales A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Neapolitan Major Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Cb Bebop Scales - Major C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Cb Bebop Scales - Minor C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Cb Bebop Scales - Harmonic Minor A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Bebop Scales - Melodic Minor A E B F# C# G# D# A# D G C F Bb Eb Bebop Scales - Dominant C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Bebop Scales - Half Diminished C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Prometheus Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Japanese Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Japanese Taishikicho Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Japanese Ichikosucho Scales C G D A E B F# C# F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb
How To Play The Piano
Virtual Piano is best used on PC based (non Apple) laptops and desktop computers in Chrome or Firefox web browsers. Ideally you would want to use Chrome and connect a MIDI USB keyboard. Connecting a USB keyboard makes playing the Virtual Piano more like a real keyboard experience. You can get a USB midi controller keyboard HERE Which is an affiliate link (that means if you buy through this link I might make a small profit which definitely helps me pay for running this site and keeping it free).
Control the keyboard using a mouse, finger tap, QWERTY keyboard, USB Midi keyboard.
When using a mouse you can mark keys by first clicking then dragging off of the key.
Tapping the keyboard on devices that support multi touch screens allows you to play notes simultaneously which is great for playing chords!
Changing keyboard sounds
To change the way the keyboard sounds, press the voice select icon to and choose a voice patch. In order to use new voice sound patches, you must have cookies enabled in your browser (most people do).
Piano notes and keys
The musical notes on the piano keyboard are easy to find because the layout of the keys tells you where they are. The keyboard layout has a repeating pattern that consists of two black keys followed by a group of two white keys and then a group of 3 black keys. All the white keys are natural notes and the black keys are the sharps and flats. A C note is always the first white key just behind the two black keys.
How to read piano scale fingering
The following is how to read fingerings for scales that show commonly suggested fingerings.
The fingers of the left and right hands are numbered like:
On either hand 1= thumb | 2 = index finger | 3 middle finger | 4 = ring finger | 5 = pinky finger
So when you see a fingering like RH 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5, the first number at the very left means start with that finger at the root (red) note of the scale.
Finger movement tips for scales
Right hand - When ascending in a scale (moving up / to the right) with the right hand, the thumb moves into position under the rest of the fingers. When descending (going from right to left) the fingers move over the thumb.
Left hand - The movement in the left hand is the opposite of the right hand. When ascending in a scale (moving up / to the right) with the left hand, the fingers pass over the the thumb and when descending (going from right to left) the thumb moves under the fingers.
Thumbs rarely play black notes.
Piano Resources
Who invented the piano?
Have you ever wondered who invented the piano? Well, Bartolomeo Cristofori is credited as being the inventor of the piano. Researching the things that this guy did in order to build a piano inspired me to make this. Virtual Piano - a free piano accessible to anyyone with a computer!
Piano Notes - this diagram shows the relationship between piano notes, the guitar fretboard and music staff.
Piano scales - scale diagrams for piano, more added regularly.
Piano Chords - free printable piano chord charts.
About the piano
On mobile, this app is more of a novelty / toy than anything else. The sound will probably only work with Android devices using Chrome or Firefox browsers.
Why don't sounds work in my browser?
The piano was programmed to use the open web. Unfortunately some web browsers do not support the open web and disallow the simultaneous loading of the multiple sounds needed to play by the piano. This is usually the case with mobile browsers. The solution is to use a Desktop or laptop computer running Windows or Linux with an up to date modern browser.
More to come
It is my hope that Virtual Piano will actually help you learn how to play piano. So in the near future I will be adding many more features some of which are:
* Scale fingerings - I'll be adding in fingerings for the most common scales.
* 4 voice polyphonic robot player
* Learning songs/lesson demos from the piano robot player
There is more to come so be sure to tell your friends and check back often for new features and surprises.Michael Barbieri Cast In ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’
(EXCLUSIVE) Up and coming actor Michael Barbieri’s career is on fire, all before he enters Laguardia High School this fall. The 14 year old New Yorker first got noticed as the co-lead in Ira Sachs’ Little Men, which premiered at Sundance and is due for release this summer. From that, Barbieri got his first big studio in the role of Timmy in the Idris Elba– and Matthew McConaughey-led adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling series Dark Tower.
According to sources, Michael Barbieri just bagged his first gig in a superhero movie and is joining Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming. I’m told Barbieri is playing “one of Peter Parker’s friends” and is supposed to report to Pinewood Atlanta this month for a summer shoot. Did you know Barbieri originally auditioned for the role of Peter Parker? The youngster made quite an impression and they called him back for his current new role in the movie.
Got updated information on Barbieri’s character, according to the good folks at comicbook.com
Comicbook.com sources tell us Barbieri’s character will be a new one, though he’ll be based off the Ultimate Spider-Man character Ganke. In that comicbook from Marvel Comics, Ganke is the trusted best friend of the other Spider-Man, Miles Morales. His affinity for Superheroes and unwavering optimism and support of his friend are his standout characteristics, which can be expected to be found in Barbieri’s new character.
Not bad for a high school freshman. Not bad at all, kid.
Spider-Man: Homecoming, is a 2017 superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man and is Sony’s reboot of its Spider-Man franchise, which it has partnered with Marvel to produce. Amy Pascal and Marvel’s Kevin Feige are producing the film. Jon Watts is directing. Spider-Man: Homecoming is the sixteenth installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while also being the fourth installment of Phase Three. After being bitten by a genetically-altered spider and receiving spider-like abilities, teenage Peter Parker fights crime in the streets of New York as the masked superhero known as Spider-Man. The cast includes Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Marisa Tomei as May Parker,Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man, Michael Keaton as villain The Vulture, Zendaya as Michelle, Laura Harrier as to-be-revealed character, and Tony Revolori as Manuel.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is set for release in theaters on July 7, 2017.A girl’s going to need an opthamologist
Game of Thrones trafficks in misery. Death and torture, agony and despair, estrangement and abandonment. It’s hard-core bummertown 99 percent of the time. (The other one percent is establishing shots.) Last night’s season-five finale didn’t change course — carnage and woe, as always — but it did feel a little different from previous instances of destruction. It felt like the beginning of the end.
GOT’s creators have said they’d like the show to go seven seasons, though HBO executives have indicated they’d love for it to go longer. There are still two more installments on George R.R. Martin’s to-do list, but at this point, the show has deviated substantially from the books — and unless GRRM surprises everyone and drops both volumes in the next few weeks, the show will have to continue covering un-booked territory. We assumed this day would come, when the show lapped the books, but prolonging that era doesn’t seem wise.
GOT’s biggest vice is that the story only sometimes feels like it’s moving forward; more often feels like it’s just moving outward. More, more, more, more, more: more people, more locales, more beefs, more baggage. There was so much to get to this season that a number of characters sat the entire ten episodes out. But “Mother’s Mercy” indicated a shift in direction. With Stannis’s apparent death, and the death of his whole camp, there’s no one there left there to revisit. Even Melisandre has fled. If Jon Snow dies, plus Sam is gone, who’s left for us among the Night’s Watch? Many (including me) think Jon is just mostly dead, and that either through Melisandre’s magic, or maybe through White Walker–led zombification, he’ll live to fight another day, but even so: We’re already back from beyond the Wall. Jon has gone (physically) as far as he’s going to go. Same goes for his occasional mirror Daenerys: She finished last night’s episode back where she (more or less) started, among the Dothraki.
On some level, we know the series is headed toward another massive battle, and that involves proximity. Everyone’s eventually going to die or be marching toward each other. Exactly who will be fighting against whom remains unclear: all of humanity against all supernatural beings? All blondes against all brunettes? Daenerys and her followers against all comers? Whatever the fight card, the drumbeats are getting louder.
Season one mostly set the table, precisely but precariously, and then, with Ned’s execution, the dominoes started falling: Seasons two and three were about ripples and sprawl and distance covered. Season four still had plenty of scattering momentum, and then in season five, things slowly started to fold back in on themselves. The season opened with a flashback, a reminder of the gravitational pull of “destiny” in the series. Cersei decided to bring Myrcella home. Jorah and Dany were reunited. We heard Arya’s list over and over. A sense of repetition developed: another marriage, another massacre, another advance and retreat. We’ve seen the mighty fall and the dead rise. How much more “out” can there be? We’ve reached the physical ends of the world, and now it’s time to hasten the end of the world.General Motors has talked up its 4G LTE plans for the past year. This week, we found out just what they will cost, as GM unveiled pricing and features for its OnStar services, including 4G.
4G LTE connectivity will launch first with the 2015 Chevy Malibu in June, arriving on more than 30 GM, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac models by the end of the year. And you won’t have to pay up for a luxury car to get the faster connectivity: OnStar 4G LTE equipment will come standard on everything from the economical Chevy Spark to luxurious Cadillacs.
Although the 2015 Audi A3 is the first car to come equipped with 4G LTE, GM says it's the first company to have a broad rollout of the high-speed connectivity. “We want everyone to have access to the 4G LTE services on-the-go,” said Stuart Fowle, spokesman for Global Connected Customer and OnStar.
There’s a reason fort that: GM has found that young drivers expect cars to be as technologically savvy as they are. Take this winter’s polar vortex, Fowle says. Around 20,000 GM car owners were using the OnStar RemoteLink app start feature, every hour. The most popular model for remote starting was the youth-oriented Chevy Cruze.
OnStar 4G LTE connectivity is coming to these Chevy, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac models by the end of 2014.
Pricing starts at $5 per month for 200MB of 4G LTE for OnStar subscribers. New car owners with OnStar 4G LTE hardware get a free trial of 4G LTE service for three months or 3GB of data use, whichever comes first.
The 4G LTE service will include Wi-Fi hotspots for up to seven devices, with improved 4G LTE connectivity from an antenna which GM touts as stronger than your typical smartphone antenna.
The range of the built-in Wi-Fi hotspot extends beyond the car: Assuming 4G service is available where you are, you could use the Wi-Fi from your Chevy Malibu at the beach with the kids, tailgating at the back of the Silverado truck, or sitting at an outdoor coffee house near a GMC Terrain.
OnStar You don’t necessarily have to be inside your car to take advantage of the 4G LTE connectivity available through OnStar.
Pricing depends on whether you subscribe to OnStar’s advisor-based service for the first 3GB of data. After that, pricing is the same for subscribers and nonsubscribers alike.
200 MB : $5 per month (OnStar subscribers); $10 per month (non-subscribers)
: $5 per month (OnStar subscribers); $10 per month (non-subscribers) 1GB : $15 per month (OnStar subscribers); $20 per month (nonsubscribers)
: $15 per month (OnStar subscribers); $20 per month (nonsubscribers) 3GB : $30 per month
: $30 per month 5GB: $50 per month
One-day use by anyone (OnStar subscriber or not) costs $5 a day for 250MB. A 12 month, 10GB “bucket” of 4G LTE service will cost $150 for OnStar subscribers or $200 for nonsubscribers. Existing AT&T customers can add GM vehicles to their Mobile Share plan for $10 a month.
As an added bonus, OnStar data plan subscribers will get family-friendly content, including a year of Famigo, which offers educational apps with parental controls, and a free 30-day trial of TumblebooksTV, a library of read-along video-animation storybooks aimed at young kids.
GM has been gearing up 4G LTE for a while. At Mobile World Congress in 2013, the company announced it would offer 4G LTE connectivity on most 2015 models. At CES 2014, it outlined plans to add 4G LTE connectivity to most Chevrolet models. The car maker also says that most 2015 Buick models will come with 4G LTE connectivity.
On Tuesday, GM also announced that most new 2015 Buick, GMC and Cadillac vehicles with OnStar hardware will also come with five years of the new OnStar Basic Plan and six months of an OnStar Directions & Connections plan. The Basic plan includes RemoteLink Key Fob Services to start an engine, turn on lights or honk the car’s horn from a smartphone app; OnStar vehicle diagnostics, and maintenance notifications.
This story, "GM announces pricing for its 4G LTE service, to debut in 2015 Chevrolet Malibu " was originally published by TechHive.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
Making them the ideal specimens to keep in tiny aquariums.
Other masterworks of cranial tinkering in fish include the gamma ray-enhanced supervillain look of the oranda:
Lawrencekhoo/Wiki Commons
"That's Doctor Oranda to you, pitiful peasant!"
They're believed to be the first goldfish bred to have a "wen" or "hood," which is a very charitable way to describe the red/orange growth on their heads. The bulb does not appear until the fish is 2 or 3 years old and, according to experts, "should not cover the eyes, nose, or mouth of the fish." Not because breeders care about the well-being of their pets but because orandas with growths covering their whole heads would technically be "lionhead" fish.
leisuretime70/iStock/Getty Images
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In related news, fish owners have never seen a real lion.
And speaking of horribly misleading euphemisms, let us introduce you to the flowerhorn cichlid, a bizarre Malaysian fish with a balloon forehead, also known as a "nuchal hump," that makes it look like the result of drunken sex between a Goomba and a Cheep Cheep.
Inkpassion/Wiki Commons
DISREGARD PREVIOUS STATEMENT. ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOFISH.
E. Reid Ross also explains why you should never eat spiders over at Man Cave Daily. Feel free to follow him on Twitter here.
Because we toy with Mother Nature, she shall no doubt destroy us soon. See what we mean in 7 Reasons Ants Will Inherit The Earth and 5 Nightmare-Inducing Animal Swarms That Came Out Of Nowhere.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see why camping is just one more opportunity for animals to assassinate you in 4 Tiny Creatures That Prove Camping Isn't Worth It, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!
Also follow us on Facebook, because the outside world is a terrifying place.
It's Labor Day weekend which everyone knows is the best time to buy as many T shirts as possible. We can help with that AND save you money while you're doing it! Head over to the Cracked Dispensary and use the promo code LAZYLABORDAY to start looking rico suave today.By Express News Service
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to Tamil Nadu government on the issue of farmer suicide and terming it as humanitarian crisis and is painful to hear that farmers are committing suicide and the state government is remaining silent on the issue.
The court was hearing a PIL on the issue of farmer's suicide.
The court gave state government two weeks time to report on the steps taken by them to address the issue and appointed counsel Gopal Sankaranayanan as amicus curiae in the case.
During a brief hearing, the court also observed that, "It is the duty of the state to take care of its citizens and the situation of farmers are worrisome."
Farmers from Tamil Nadu have been on protest in the national capital for over a month demanding drought relief from the Centre.
The petitioners had earlier approached the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, where the court had demanded an affidavit from the government on the steps taken by them to prevent farmer suicides.
The court, however, refused to issue notice to Centre on the petition for now and said that first state needs to apprise it about the steps taken by it to stop farmers suicide in the state.
The bench also directed the state government not to consider the petition as one among others and utmost importance should be given to it.Indiana's historic HIV outbreak continues to grow.
Thursday, state officials announced 150 Hoosiers are now infected with HIV, linked to an epidemic in Scott County. However, health officials are hopeful now that the sharp rise in cases is slowing down.
Thursday morning, state and local health officials gave a very optimistic picture, saying the HIV outbreak in Scott County is slowing and they think they may finally be gaining the upper hand.
Some 150 residents in and around Scott County have now been diagnosed with HIV. The epidemic is linked to IV drug users sharing needles and it is the largest HIV outbreak in state history.
The good news: there have only been a few new cases diagnosed in the past week and state health officials say in the coming days, those who tested positive will all be getting healthcare, important services and even in-patient treatment.
In response to this outbreak, the state set up a controversial needle exchange program in Austin to give drug users clean needles and to reduce the risk of spreading the disease.
Today we got the numbers for that program: it has taken in 6,951 used needles from drug users and given out 10,484 clean needles. Local health officials say the program is working out on the streets.
"It took a while to gain the trust and for people to recognize us and what we were doing, and I think that's happening because now we just drive through the street and people wave us down. We don't have to hunt them down anymore. And we're getting a lot of return customers actually to tell their friends which was our goal to get them in the program, too, which was our goal," said Brittany Combs, Scott County public health nurse.
The other big announcement Thursday was that Scott County plans to extend the needle exchange program for a full year. It was a temporary program set to expire later this month, but earlier this week, the governor signed a bill that would allow for more long-term needle exchange programs in communities dealing with an emergency. This certainly is an emergency here in Scott County, but one that health officials feel they may finally have under control.
A wide range of services are being provided daily at the Austin Community Outreach Center, 2277 W. Frontage Road, Austin, Ind. A free shuttle service is being provided by Grace Covenant Church. Participants in need of transportation service to and from the Community Outreach Center from Austin can call (317) 617-2223. Additional testing is being provided at the ABC Health Clinic each Tuesday at Foundations Family Medicine and at the Scott County Health Department.One-Stop Shop Update at the Community Outreach Center ISDH opened a One-Stop Shop at the Austin Community Outreach Center on Monday, March 30, in coordination with local partners and other state agencies. Services provided include: access to state-issued ID cards, birth certificates, job counseling and local training, enrollment in HIP 2.0 insurance, HIV testing, HIV care coordination, substance abuse referrals, and vaccinations against tetanus, Hepatitis A and B.The Center is open Mon., Wed., Thurs. and Sat. 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Tues. and Fri. from 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; and Sun. from noon-6 p.m. Residents can contact the One-Stop Shop at (317) 605-1480. Note: The Community Outreach Center will be closed on Sunday, May 10, in observance of Mother's Day. It will reopen for normal business hours on Monday.A £1,000 transferable marriage tax allowance for lower rate taxpayers will be introduced by the government from April 2015 – one month before the general election – David Cameron announced on Friday night.
On the eve of the Tory conference in Manchester, the prime minister said the government would recognise the "special" status of marriage by offering a tax break which goes further than the £750 proposed in the Tory manifesto in 2010.
The scheme will mean four million married couples and those in civil partnerships who are lower rate taxpayers will be able to transfer £1,000 of their personal tax allowance to their spouse or civil partner. The scheme will be worth up to £200 a year.
In a Daily Mail article, Cameron wrote of the importance of marriage when he said nothing he has achieved since his marriage in 1996 would have been possible without the support of his wife, Samantha.
He wrote: "There is something special about marriage: it's a declaration of commitment, responsibility and stability that helps to bind families. The values of marriage are give and take, support and sacrifice – values we need more of in this country. Of course this will be true if you're gay or straight – and in a civil partnership or a marriage. This summer I was proud to make equal marriage the law. Love is love, commitment is commitment."
The announcement came as the father of the Tory modernisation project threw his weight behind Cameron's plan, describing marriage as a glue in society that should be recognised in the tax system. In a Guardian interview ahead of the conference, which opens on Sunday in Manchester, the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: "We want a strong society. Marriage is one of the institutions that creates glue in society and it makes sense to recognise that."
But Julianne Marriott of Don't Judge My Family said: "It's about promoting a fantasy 1950s family and won't go to many of the families who need support the most. In these tough times government should be helping families, not judging them."
The announcement by the PM has been the subject of intense negotiations within the coalition after the Liberal Democrats demanded the introduction of universal free school lunches for infants in return for agreeing to the timing of the marriage tax allowance proposal.
Nick Clegg infuriated No 10 when he contrasted the £600m-a-year cost of his scheme with the similar price tag for recognising marriage in the tax system.
Labour dismissed the Tory plan. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "David Cameron's so-called marriage tax break won't even help two-thirds of married couples, let alone millions of people who are separated, widowed or divorced. He's so out of touch he thinks people will get married for £3.85 a week."
The Tories will meet for their penultimate conference before the 2015 general election cheered by the return of economic growth and signs that their party is closing Labour's poll lead.
But there was some irritation on Friday night when Matthew d'Ancona, a journalist with strong links to the Cameron camp, reported in a new book serialised in the Daily Telegraph that Cameron has held informal discussions with Clegg about forming a second coalition in 2015.
A No 10 spokesman said: "There are not, nor have there been any plans or talks to form a new coalition post 2015. The prime minister is entirely focused on running the country."
Some Tories have been unnerved by the Labour conference after Ed Miliband appeared to tap into popular discontent with the "big six" energy companies by pledging to freeze household fuel bills for his first 20 months in office.
Maude was highly critical of Miliband's announcement, which he claimed had quickly unravelled. He said: "It could have been a speech written by Len McCluskey [the Unite general secretary]."
The Tory leadership is bracing itself for the "blond moment" on Monday when Boris Johnson, who has fuelled speculation about his leadership ambitions by saying how he is missing parliament, arrives in Manchester. In an FT interview, the mayor of London compared himself to the founder of the Roman empire and said he wished he had been in parliament for the vote on Syria.
Cameron unveiled the first conference announcement when he said the government would provide £400m for the Cancer Drugs Fund. The move will give thousands more patients access to drugs and boost the fund's project to sequence 100,000 genomes (individual DNA codes).Kankakee police responded Wednesday after students at a junior high were Tasered during a demonstration."This Taser demonstration was not authorized by the Kankakee Police Department nor was it authorized by Kankakee School District 111," a statement said. "Misuse or abuse of the Taser by any police officer is strictly prohibited by the rules and regulations of the Kankakee Police Department And is subject to discipline. The officer in question was immediately placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation."
School officials are investigating. And one mother is talking about how her son was Tasered.
The mother wanted to stress that her son and the other students in the classroom were not being reprimanded for misbehaving but that the officer was just goofing off. She understands school is a place for an education, but she says this is one lesson her son won't soon forget.
"A cop came in and then he pulled out his Taser, and was like, 'I'm giving out free runs for the Taser to try it out.' And then everybody was like, 'I want to try it.' And I said, 'I'll try it in my finger.' And he was like, 'Let me get you in your thigh,'" said Miles Maiden.
Miles, 12, says the off-duty Kankakee police officer entered the classroom at Kankakee Junior High School and shouted, "Who wants a Taser?"
Miles says the officer then went around the room and Tasered at least three boys, one in the buttocks.
Miles says the officer is friends with the teacher, and last week the same officer came to the classroom and Tasered some of the students in their fingers.
"I'm upset, and at the same time, I'm puzzled 'cause you have this type of grown adult around children and that's not a game that you play with children. That's dangerous. I'm blessed it didn't turn out another way, but at the same time, I'm also upset because it should never happen," said Alta Young.
Young says her son, who suffers from a heart murmur and asthma, began to complain of the pain in his leg, so she took him to the emergency room where he was treated and released.
Colleen Legge, superintendent for Kankakee School District 111, released a statement that says in part, "We are conducting a full investigation of the alleged incident and reviewing protocol regarding police in our schools."
In the meantime, Young is hoping the officer doesn't return to the school.
"At the end of the day, I don't want that man around my child. I don't want anyone of that stature that's doing things like that around my child," said Young.
Young says she is going to follow up with the family's personal physician to make sure the Taser didn't affect her son's heartbeat.SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco Board of Supervisors President London Breed says that Mayor Edwin Lee has died. He was 65.
Breed said early Tuesday that Lee passed away just after 1 a.m. at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
A statement from the mayor’s office said: “It is with profound sadness and terrible grief that we confirm that Mayor Edwin M. Lee passed away on Tuesday ….”
The statement says family, friends and colleagues were at Lee’s side.
Lee was not known to be ill. No other details have been released.
Lee was appointed as mayor in 2011, replacing Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected the state’s lieutenant governor. He went on to win the 2011 election and was re-elected in 2015.
He was known for his work against homelessness.
Breed assumes the role of acting San Francisco mayor.SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The owner of a diner whose menu includes a "Dictator Obama" egg special that comes with a grossly inflated tax has admitted he defrauded the government of more than $23,000 in welfare benefits.
Michael P. Tassone, owner of the American Diner in suburban Liverpool, was sentenced May 5 to a one year conditional discharge after he pleaded guilty to offering a false instrument for filing, a misdemeanor.
Tassone paid $23,354 in restitution to the Onondaga County Department of Social Services as part of the disposition of the five-year-old case, Senior Assistant District Attorney Michael Kasmarek said.
Tassone and his diner were featured in a Fox News story in March because of the unique menu it offers customers.
At the American Diner, you can order a "Dictator Obama/NYS Special (King Cuomo)" plate of eggs and toast for $3.59 plus tax. But the tax on it is $27.99, according to the menu.
Tassone's menu also includes "The Anti-Michelle Obama Don't Tell Me What To Eat Or Feed My Kids Burger."
Tassone's restaurant offers a decidedly Conservative brand of politics along with its breakfast and lunch platters.
The outside of Tassone's restaurant is decorated with "Repeal the SAFE Act" signs, referring to the tough gun control law that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed through, and "Don't Tread on Me" and American flags. Inside, the decor includes an Uncle Sam statue, Three Stooges photos, and a "Chia Obama" box depicting Obama as a chia plant.
Tassone's menu says "We encourage legal carry on premises" and "We encourage prayer/grace."
"Guys like me are a target. Because I speak the truth," Tassone told syracuse.com on March 9 while explaining his reluctance to be photographed or interviewed.
Tassone was not at his restaurant at 214 Oswego St. Thursday morning when a reporter visited seeking his comment. He did not respond to a message left with the diner staff.
As part of the resolution of the criminal case, the On |
companies -- Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune, Australian drug maker CSL, and Sanofi-Pasteur -- will likely make a great deal of money.
Drug companies have sold $1.5 billion worth of swine flu shots, in addition to the $1 billion for seasonal flu they booked earlier this year.
These inoculations are part of a much wider and rapidly growing $20 billion global vaccine market.
"The vaccine market is booming," says Bruce Carlson, spokesperson at market research firm Kalorama, which publishes an annual survey of the vaccine industry. "It's an enormous growth area for pharmaceuticals at a time when other areas are not doing so well," he says, noting that the pipeline for more traditional blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor and Nexium has thinned.
As always with pandemic flus, taxpayers are footing the $1.5 billion check for the 250 million swine flu vaccines that the government has ordered so far and will be distributing free to doctors, pharmacies and schools. In addition, Congress has set aside more than $10 billion this year to research flu viruses, monitor H1N1's progress and educate the public about prevention.
Drugmakers pocket most of the revenues from flu sales, with Sanofi-Pasteur, Glaxo Smith Kline and Novartis cornering most of the market.
But some say it's not just drugmakers who stand to benefit. Doctors collect copayments for special office visits to inject shots, and there have been assertions that these doctors actually profit handsomely from these vaccinations.This sucks:
An estimated 200 North Korean nationals are in Libya and previously worked as doctors, nurses and construction workers, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. They had been dispatched to the country in order to earn the hard currency that Pyongyang requires to fund its missile and nuclear weapons programmes.
North Korean media has so far failed to report that Gaddafi is dead and the government has made no moves to officially recognise Libya’s National Transitional Council as the legitimate governing authority of the country.
Yonhap reported that the North Korean nationals have been left in limbo, joining their compatriots who are stuck in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries with orders not to return home.
The decision to ban its own nationals from returning indicates just how concerned the North Korean regime is of the news leaking out to its subjugated people.
While being banned from North Korea certainly has its upsides, recall that many of these individuals will have a lot of trouble finding work, shelter, etc. where they’ve been stranded. Also, they’ve been allowed to work outside of North Korea because they’re not considered defection risks, which in practical terms probably means that they have families to support.
This move seems very old school, and not in a good way. I suspect that the North Korean state is being far too optimistic about its ability to control information; North Koreans in non-Arab countries will probably also have heard of the Arab Spring, and I find it extremely unlikely that the North Korean populace is as in-the-dark about developments as the authorities seem to hope. Doesn’t mean that there’ll be a popular anti-government movement in the DPRK anytime soon, of course.How to Create a Login Script for Load Testing
Scalability-wise, authentication is one of the most critical functions in a web application. Why? For most non-trivial web applications, the majority of their functionality requires prior authentication. The implication here is that the scalability of the system’s authentication provides a hard-ceiling on your website’s scalability. If your users can’t login, they can’t get to your website’s other functionality.
What is an authentication script in the load/performance testing world? Very simply, it is a targeted script that logs in and logs out of your web application. The authentication script is used to simulate a portion of the load the application experiences during normal usage.
Testing a website’s authentication performance correctly can be challenging. What are the key considerations in an authentication script?
Isolation
To isolate authentication functionality, a login script should touch as few other pages as possible. If any extraneous pages are included, they should be chosen to be the least impactful from a resource perspective. It is common for web applications to redirect to the last page a user was on before they logged in. In this case, the page should be a fairly simple page, with as little on-page business logic or database calls as possible.
On the same token, scripts other than the login script should touch the login functionality as seldomly as possible, and should not be logging in and out with each iteration. Scripts that login and out on each iteration overweight and overstress the authentication components.
Isolating the authentication functionality achieves several things
The scalability of the authentication components can be tested and tuned directly.
The proportional load on the components can be tuned proportionately for real-world scenarios.
False negatives due to overstressing authentication components can be avoided.
For many sites, the login script (in pseudocode) is simply
visit /login
post credentials to /login,
verify landing page is in authenticated state
visit /logout
verify page is in unauthenticated state
Verification
An authentication script should verify that the landing page post-login is in an authenticated state–as opposed to displaying an error, or remaining unauthenticated. The easiest way to accomplish this for most sites is to check the rendered HTML for the username if it is displayed. This isn’t always possible, but provides a quick and easy check. Alternately, check for content that is only present when a user is authenticated.
Additionally, after logging out, the post-logout page should be checked to confirm the username is absent.
Databanking and Caching
At the application-level, applications often cache recent users. Because of this, to make an authentication script’s load characteristics realistic, it needs to authenticate with many different users. So when creating a login/logout script, it must be databanked (aka data-driven) with enough records to simulate normal usage and prevent the application from surviving off cached records, which would skew your results with an overly positive performance result.Tuesday night was Evening in America, if you consider yourself a supporter of progress or an opponent of letting our fears dictate who we elect to represent us. Republicans, ever the masters of conjuring the dark side of the moon, painted an electoral picture of ISIS-reared, undocumented children slipping across the border to live in our spare bedroom if we didn’t vote GOP. During a midterm election with a larger share of anxious, older, whiter voters, that was enough.
But while they could demonize party and personality, they couldn’t do the same to Americans’ values, which were clearly represented in a number of smashing victories for progressive ballot initiatives across the country. On a night when those still squatting in the reality-based community lost almost everything else, the overwhelming passage of these measures, to quote a past statement by our vice president, was a “big fucking deal.”
In Washington State, where the growing gun-safety movement placed a strong universal background check measure (I-594) on the ballot after the state legislature failed to pass legislation twice in the past two years closing the private-sale loophole, the people acted, with 60 percent of voters supporting the measure. If this is not frightening to the National Rifle Association, affiliated gun fundamentalists, and various other right-wing loony tunes organizations, it should be.
Washington is not just any state, or even a blue state. Sure, it regularly supports Democrats for President, but it also just reelected is Republican state senate and has a nearly evenly divided congressional delegation. There’s a strong hint of purple to it, anchored by the eastern part of the state that’s more Cliven Bundy ranch than Starbucks mochaccino.
Additionally, it has a place in NRA lore, as the spot where the NRA—singlehandedly, of course, like the Green Lantern, but with guns—took out Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley in 1994. Washington also has a strong gun ownership tradition, and the NRA spent more on political activity there in 2013 than any other state in the country, by a country mile. Yet, even with all of these factors, a strong majority of voters, just as polls said they would, supported this common sense measure. It turns out you can give all the campaign contributions you want to state legislators, but that won’t buy off the public.
Nearly half of U.S. states have ballot initiatives, and an additional few that lack this particular direct democratic mechanism have referenda, which allows the people to overturn an act of their state legislature. So you could call this strategy portable (already there are signatures being gathered in Nevada, where state legislators passed a bill only to see it vetoed by their governor). Even in deep red, rural states, universal background checks enjoy overwhelming support. Perhaps this is why an NRA spokesperson told The Olympian newspaper in Washington, while apparently in the mood to over-share, “…we will have ballot initiatives like this one across the country… That is why we are so concerned.”
They should also be unsettled that just by sticking their heads up out of their holes and opposing something so popular as background checks, their numbers have plummeted. According to a new poll released by the Gun Truth Project, the NRA now only has a 38 percent approval rating nationally, and has seen a 20-point drop in favorability since just after Newtown, when Wayne LaPierre was going on live TV talking about arming just about anything organic. Nicely played, boys.
Gun regulation, of course, was not the only successful initiative, not by a long shot. Minimum-wage ballot measures passed with ease where they were on the ballot, and we aren’t talking Hawaii and Massachusetts here. Try Nebraska, South Dakota, Alaska, and Arkansas; what you might call a crimson tide. In Arkansas it passed with 65 percent of the vote, and in Alaska, 7 in 10 voters supported it.
Meanwhile marijuana was legalized in Oregon and Alaska, with the District of Columbia decriminalizing it (Florida only failed to meet the 60 percent threshold needed for a medical marijuana amendment to pass, but it still received a rather healthy 58 percent support). Paid sick leave, personhood, you name it, all of them went in the progressive direction, most of them by overwhelmingly margins. What this means is that if Mitch McConnell’s tortoise shell of obstruction should appear once again, as well as similar maneuvers in state legislatures, there is a game plan to get around this in much of the country.
There’s also one other group that should have a big bout of indigestion over this. The center-right hedge fund clique known as Third Way, and associated Blue Dogs and hangers on. Because when economically populist measures pass by huge margins and “radical centrist” Senator Mark Warner of the cut-Social-Security-and-kowtow-to-the-NRA crowd almost loses a sure-thing Senate seat, it is pretty clear where the country stands; not with him (PDF).
When Blue Dogs—or conservative Democratic House members—of the John Barrow, cocking-my-guns-and-cutting-budgets variety try and claim a mandate for their shopworn policies, these ballot initiatives will be right there to remind Americans that there’s a consensus for the un-Barrow. If you think these are just two examples, plug in Third Way Honorary Co-Chairs Mark Udall and Kay Hagan, Blue Dogs Nick Rahall and Pete Gallego, or the most conservative Democratic Senator, Mark Pryor, into this equation instead (Pryor was going down to an ignominious double-digit defeat while the minimum wage was crushing it in his home state). It’s pretty easy to follow: Third Way Kills.
Progressives, during our last Gilded Age, championed these measures for exactly the role they played Tuesday—to go around bought-off legislators and unpopular-yet-powerful, right-wing corporate interests like the NRA. So the people would still have at least some say in their fate. While our system remains broken, this is a roadmap for the near future. And yeah, it’s a big fucking deal.Getty Images
St. Louis Rams defensive end Michael Sam flashed a nice speed rush to run around Cleveland Browns right tackle Martin Wallace to sack quarterback Johnny Manziel and force a punt in the fourth quarter of Saturday night’s preseason matchup.
After Sam dropped Manziel on the play, he jumped to his feet and began celebrating by using Manziel’s “show me the money” celebration, raising both hands to the air and rubbing his fingers together.
Manziel had previously used the gesture himself earlier in the half after scoring on a 7-yard scramble for a touchdown.
The sack was Sam’s second of the preseason, having also picked up a sack last week against the Green Bay Packers. Sam had said he believes he can play in this league and he’s looked fully capable of holding his own and performing in stretches this preseason.
With Sam in a battle for one of few remaining roster spots along the Rams defensive line, he continues to show flashes of ability that could help him earn his way onto the 53-man roster.Junos is a very powerful networking operating system, and by harnessing it we can perform more unusual tasks than we could with other alternatives. Today I will discuss a more unusual scenario to utilize conditional router advertisements and NAT to provide access to services. When the network is unavailable then the SRX will automatically disable its advertised routes.
Conditional Route Advertising allows a network engineer to put in criteria on route advertisements before they are installed in the route table or advertised to peers/neighbors. More information on this can be found here. In the example below I will configure conditional route advertisement on an SRX.
In the scenario above the SRX must advertise the route 1.1.1.0/24 to AS1111 if the route 192.168.1.0/24 exists on the SRX which is advertised from the iBGP neighbor. Moreover the SRX will NAT 1.1.1.1 to 192.168.1.1 to make a Web Application available publicly. Below is the basic configuration for interfaces, zones, and BGP:
interfaces { ge-0/0/4 { description Untrust; unit 0 { family inet { address 200.200.200.2/30; } } } ge-0/0/8 { description Trust; unit 0 { family inet { address 172.16.0.1/24; } } } } protocols { bgp { group partner { export conditional_route; peer-as 1111; neighbor 200.200.200.1; } group wan { peer-as 65100; neighbor 172.16.0.2; } } } routing-options { autonomous-system 65100; } security { zones { security-zone untrust { interfaces { ge-0/0/4.0 { host-inbound-traffic { protocols { bgp; } } } } } security-zone trust { interfaces { ge-0/0/8.0 { host-inbound-traffic { protocols { bgp; } } } } } } }
Let us take a look at the export policy conditional_route:
policy-options { policy-statement conditional_route { term 1 { from { route-filter 1.1.1.0/24 exact; condition check_route; } then accept; } then reject; } }
As you can see above the SRX will advertise 1.1.1.0/24 based on the condition labeled check_route. Let us take a look into the condition:
policy-options { condition check_route { if-route-exists { 192.168.1.0/24; table inet.0; } } }
From here, we need to add 1.1.1.0/24 into the route table somehow. In this case I used a discard route to install it in the routing table:
routing-options { static { route 1.1.1.0/24 discard; } }
The condition will look for the route 192.168.1.0/24 exists in the table inet.0, and if it exists then the condition is true. Since the condition is true the route will be advertised:
root@SRX-1> show route protocol bgp 192.168.1.0/24 inet.0: 17 destinations, 17 routes (17 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden) + = Active Route, - = Last Active, * = Both 192.168.1.0/24 *[BGP/170] 11w1d 04:31:28, MED 1376000, localpref 100 AS path:? > to 172.16.0.2 via ge-0/0/8.0 root@SRX-1> show route advertising-protocol bgp 200.200.200.1 inet.0: 17 destinations, 17 routes (17 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden) Prefix Nexthop MED Lclpref AS path * 1.1.1.0/24 Self I
If we stop receiving the 192.168.1.0/24 route for whatever reason, then advertised route to AS1111 will disappear:
root@SRX-1> edit Entering configuration mode [edit] root@SRX-1# set interfaces ge-0/0/8 disable [edit] root@SRX-1# commit configuration check succeeds commit complete [edit] root@SRX-1# exit Exiting configuration mode root@SRX-1> show route protocol bgp 192.168.1.0/24 root@SRX-1> show route advertising-protocol bgp 200.200.200.1
When I roll back the configuration the route reappears:
root@SRX-1> edit Entering configuration mode [edit] root@SRX-1# rollback 1 load complete [edit] root@SRX-1# commit configuration check succeeds commit complete [edit] root@SRX-1# exit Exiting configuration mode root@SRX-1> show route protocol bgp 192.168.1.0/24 inet.0: 17 destinations, 17 routes (17 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden) + = Active Route, - = Last Active, * = Both 192.168.1.0/24 *[BGP/170] 11w1d 04:31:28, MED 1376000, localpref 100 AS path:? > to 172.16.0.2 via ge-0/0/8.0 root@SRX-1> show route advertising-protocol bgp 200.200.200.1 inet.0: 17 destinations, 17 routes (17 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden) Prefix Nexthop MED Lclpref AS path * 1.1.1.0/24 Self I
From here, let’s configure the NAT and policies:
security { nat { static { rule-set untrust { from zone untrust; rule app { match { destination-address 1.1.1.1/32; } then { static-nat { prefix { 192.168.1.1/32; } } } } } } proxy-arp { interface ge-0/0/4.0 { address { 1.1.1.1/32; } } } } policies { from-zone untrust to-zone trust { policy allow-app { match { source-address any; destination-address server-192.168.1.1/32; application any; } then { permit; } } } } zones { security-zone trust { address-book { address server-192.168.1.1/32 192.168.99.1/32; } } } }
In a typical Junos-based router, usually setting the discard route would drop all traffic in the 1.1.1.0/24 network. So why does it work on the SRX? The key point here is to review when flow-based Junos performs the route lookup:
Route lookups are performed after the Static NAT is applied. In this case the SRX will first NAT to the destination address of 192.168.1.1, and then perform the route lookup! Because of this the packet is treated as routable, and the SRX will forward the packet.
Please feel free to leave comments and questions below.Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved
COLUMBUS (WCMH) - Among the popular festivals this weekend, one has been cancelled because no police officers signed up to work special duty security shifts.
Juneteenth was scheduled for this weekend at Genoa Park, but Columbus Public Safety confirmed Thursday the event was cancelled. The website for the event says Juneteenth 2016 is being rescheduled for June 2017.
NBC4 obtained correspondence between the public safety director and the event organizer, Mustafaa Shabazz, in which the director noted that officers who worked Juneteenth last year were never compensated.
"Would you go to your job if they stopped paying you?" said Keith Ferrell, the executive vice president of Lodge 9 of the Fraternal Order of Police. "At some point, I don't know why anybody would sign up for that job. I wouldn't."
In a letter dated June 6, the director said no officers had signed up for the voluntary special duty shifts and that he had to advise Shabazz his event should not go forward.
"I don't think I've ever seen that happen," Ferrell said. "We always step up, as long as the employer holds their end of the bargain up. We always step up to make sure these events are safe for everybody and provide a great environment for everybody."
This weekend, Columbus police are stepping up security for other big events after the shooting attacks at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
"We've been doing this for over 25 years now," Columbus Police Sergeant Rich Weiner said. "We've become very proficient with Red, White and Boom, OSU football games, any other large events that have been city-sponsored."
Weiner said an increase in officers at events such as Pride would not mean a shortage of officers elsewhere in the city. He said the department would be bringing in additional officers on overtime.
"A lot of people ask how many officers are going to be at these different events," Weiner said. We don't give those numbers out because those are tactical information. [...] If anyone is planning something, we don't want them to know how many resources we have and where they're going to be."
Weiner emphasized that there are no credible threats.
Mustafaa Shabazz, the event organizer for Juneteenth, did not return a phone call or email Thursday.When Torrance Gibson signed his National Letter of Intent to attend Ohio State, only one thing was on his mind.
Blessed with outstanding athleticism and a strong arm, Gibson intended to enter an already loaded quarterback room in Columbus. It was all he knew how to do and do well, but it didn't take long before he came to a realization and approached head coach Urban Meyer.
"He has skills that most human beings should not have. His size and speed is very, very unique. And he can throw the heck out of the ball."– Zach Smith on Torrance Gibson
"I told him I want to get on the field. I feel like if I sat on the bench I wouldn't be helping this team, I'd be selfish," Gibson said Sunday at Ohio State Media Day. "That's not the type of guy I am."
Gibson, the magnificently gifted 6-foot-5, 205-pound true freshman with a rocket left arm, terrorized opposing high school defenses in South Florida. He loved being the guy who called the shots, ran the offense and directed his troops.
Friday, though, he decided the needs of his team outweighed his need to line up in Ohio State's quarterback derby. He didn't want to waste a year behind Cardale Jones, J.T. Barrett and Stephen Collier all while competing with fellow true freshman Joe Burrow.
"I thought about it, talked to my family. And they just said, 'Just get on the field. Don't be selfish. It's not all about you, it's about the team,'" Gibson said. "That's what I'm trying to do, help them win games."
That prompted Gibson's decision to approach Meyer and wide receivers coach Zach Smith to play on the outside and join the "Zone 6" club of skilled athletes who make plays for the Buckeyes on the edge.
"He said, 'I want to play.' I said, 'Well, here's your options,'" Meyer recalled Sunday. "'Wildcat quarterback, we'll see what your skill set is at receiver, catching the ball a little bit.' He's a very good athlete."
Smith went as far as to call what Gibson can do on the field "phenomenal."
"He has skills that most human beings should not have," Smith said Sunday. "His size and speed is very, very unique. And he can throw the heck out of the ball."
Because of how easy and smooth Gibson's throwing motion is, the move is not permanent. At least not for now.
"I think he'll fulfill a role for us this year and then move back to quarterback after the year," Smith said. "Torrance came in as a quarterback, we recruited him as a quarterback and everyone wants to publicly say we lied to him. The kid doesn't want to redshirt — period. He's a great athlete, he loves to compete, loves to play and he wants to get on the field."
Smith added that if Gibson excels at wide receiver in 2015 he might choose to stay there for the rest of his career, but "it's up to him."
"I think he can be one of the best quarterbacks in the country. That's a pretty important position," Smith said. "So if that's true, I don't know how you don't do that. But I know this: From what I've seen he can be a ridiculous receiver."
Gibson donned a black non-contact jersey for Friday's practice, despite working with the wideouts the entire time. That has changed, though, and he's swapped it out for the traditional red of the offensive players.
"Zone 6. The whole thing," Gibson said. "That's it."
That's the plan for 2015, at least. Gibson said he's fulling taking snaps at just wide receiver now during practice, but smiled from ear to ear when told Meyer mentioned his possibility as a wildcat quarterback who could potentially throw the ball down the field.
"That'll be interesting, going back to QB and throwing the rock a little bit," Gibson said. "But we haven't even put that in, so I don't know what's going to happen."
All he knows is he wants to contribute for Ohio State in 2015, no matter what it takes.
"If I didn't approach them, I wouldn't feel right about myself just sitting out a year," Gibson said. "Not helping the team, being selfish. It's not always about me. It's about the team. I just want to come out here and help the team win games any way I can so that's what I did."Morality is modified in the lab
How complex is our sense of morality? Scientists have shown they can change people's moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses. They identified a region of the brain just above and behind the right ear which appears to control morality. And by using magnetic pulses to block cell activity they impaired volunteers' notion of right and wrong. The small Massachusetts Institute of Technology study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing
Dr Liane Young
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lead researcher Dr Liane Young said: "You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. "To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing." The key area of the brain is a knot of nerve cells known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). The researchers subjected 20 volunteers to a number of tests designed to assess their notions of right and wrong. In one scenario participants were asked how acceptable it was for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knew to be unsafe. After receiving a 500 millisecond magnetic pulse to the scalp, the volunteers delivered verdicts based on outcome rather than moral principle. If the girlfriend made it across the bridge safely, her boyfriend was not seen as having done anything wrong. In effect, they were unable to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions. Previous work has shown the RTPJ to be highly active when people think about the thoughts and beliefs of others. Electric currents The MIT team pinpointed the region in volunteers using a sophisticated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scan. They then targeted the area using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to create weak electric currents that temporarily stop brain cells working normally. In one test, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before reading stories involving morally questionable characters, and being asked to judge their actions. In a second experiment, volunteers were subjected to a much shorter 500 millisecond TMS burst while being asked to make a moral judgement. In both cases, the researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm - not whether they were morally wrong in themselves. Morally dubious acts with a "happy" ending were often deemed acceptable. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a brain expert at University College London, said the findings were insightful. "The study suggests that this region - the RTPJ - is necessary for moral reasoning. "What is interesting is that this is a region that is very late developing - into adolescence and beyond right into the 20s. "The next step would be to look at how or whether moral development changes through childhood into adulthood."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionI sometimes think that every museum label should carry a disclaimer: “Warning. The title you are about to read may tell you more about the historical reception of the painting than it does about the painting itself.”
Google “Rembrandt” and “philosopher,” for instance, and the first thing you will see on your screen is the image of a painting that now hangs in the Louvre. The painting, which is titled Philosophe en méditation (philosopher in meditation) and dated 1632, shows an old bearded man seated in an interior, with a large open book on the table beside him. Golden light from a window illuminates his figure, while the rest of the interior is plunged in shadows. To his right is a winding stair that disappears into a dark recess and the bent form of an old woman tending a fire. Though you won’t be able to see it on the screen, the indistinct form of another woman is also disappearing up the stair.
Ever since this painting arrived at the Louvre at the end of the eighteenth century, commentators have been tempted to associate its “philosophe” with the contemplative artist who created him. One nineteenth-century French poet simply decided that Rembrandt was the philosopher. Another saw “the very genius of Rembrandt” in the figure and attributed the picture as a whole to the artist’s wish for “an interior in which to house his mysterious thought.” In the mid-twentieth century, the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley described the painting’s “symbolical subject matter” as “nothing more nor less than the human mind” itself.
Rembrandt, however, had nothing to do with naming his picture. Like many paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, this one owes its title to a reproductive printmaker, who engraved the image for popular consumption more than a century after the artist painted it. This particular printmaker may in turn have taken his cue from a French owner of the painting, who was already calling it and a companion piece (then also attributed to Rembrandt) his “deux philosophes” several years before both pictures were engraved in 1753-54. Once the print began to circulate, the title stuck to the painting too. But the philosopher these men thought they saw in Rembrandt’s picture is almost certainly their invention—a product of their own Enlightenment era, when “philosophes” flourished, rather than the creation of the artist.
Among other reasons for doubting the title, I am sorry to report, is that woman bending over the fire: there is apparently no iconographical tradition of philosophers accompanied by women! Though her presence has prompted one knowledgeable commentator to associate the picture with the relatively obscure biblical story of Tobit and his wife Anna, the exact subject of Rembrandt’s painting remains a mystery. Meanwhile, it continues to be known—and therefore generally understood—as his Philosopher in Meditation.
We are probably indebted to the printmakers for the idea that a picture should have a title in the first place. Among the most successful of these reproductive artists was a German engraver based in Paris named Jean Georges Wille (1715-1808), whose magnificent prints circulated throughout Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wille earned particular fame for his reproductions of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings—those pictures of everyday life that still draw crowds to modern museums—and perhaps his most celebrated image was a print after Gerard ter Borch that he called L’instruction paternelle (1765) or The Paternal Admonition, as it is usually translated in English. (We know that this title was Wille’s rather than the painter’s from a diary kept by the printmaker.) So famous did this particular print become that a half-century later Goethe was still inquiring rhetorically, “Who does not know Wille’s magnificent copper engraving of this painting?”
Ter Borch’s picture shows three figures in an interior: a young woman dressed in white satin and standing with her back to us; a seated man who raises his hand in a gesture that Wille apparently took as a sign of warning or correction; and an older woman, also seated, who faces the viewer as she sips from a wine glass.
The picture was painted around 1654-55; Wille engraved and titled it more than a century later. And so suggestive did that title prove that Goethe could spin an entire small narrative from its cues.
In one of his own most important works, the 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Goethe’s characters act out a tableau vivant based on Wille’s print:
A noble knight sits, with crossed feet, evidently severely lecturing his daughter, who faces him… [S]he can only be seen from the back, but her whole posture seems to indicate that she is controlling herself. The expression and gesture of the father tells us, however, that his reproof is not too violent or humiliating; and the mother seems to hide a slight embarrassment while she gazes into the glass of wine she is about to sip.
This little story had its own afterlife. When the future novelist George Eliot toured the Berlin museum in 1854, she recorded in her journal how “pleased” she was to “recognize among the pictures” the one Goethe had described in his novel: “It is the daughter being reproved by her father, while the mother is emptying her wine glass.” She was looking at the Berlin original, but her memory for its titular narrative was evidently stronger than her recall of the painter himself, since the same journal entry attributes the picture in question to another Dutch artist, Jan Steen.
The trouble, of course, is that we have no way of knowing whether ter Borch had anything like Wille’s instructive scenario in mind. The painting exists in two versions—the one in Berlin and another at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. By the middle of the twentieth century, the scholarly consensus had shifted the scene from a domestic interior to an upscale brothel, as the standing figure morphed into a courtesan, while her erstwhile parents turned, respectively, into a would-be client and his wine-sipping procuress.
This more salacious reading appeared to receive further reinforcement when the cleaning of the Berlin picture revealed to some eyes the traces of a coin in the gentleman’s hand. Rather than a gesture of admonition, the hand was apparently engaged in offering payment for sexual services about to be rendered. So much, it would seem, for Wille’s edifying image of family life in the Dutch Golden Age!
Unhappily for the brothel theory, however, that coin has since been pronounced a phantom.
Recent commentators on the painting generally agree that the original meaning of the scene remains elusive, but museums and catalogs still require a title. When I last checked, the Rijksmuseum had chosen to call its version The Gallant Conversation, followed in parentheses by the phrase, “known as The Paternal Admonition.” At Berlin, the picture continued to go by the name Wille gave it.
By the nineteenth century, most viewers seem to have taken for granted both that paintings had titles and that artists supplied them. Yet then as now, many painters continued to leave the naming of their work to others. We still don’t know whether any of Paul Cézanne’s titles, for example, originated with the artist.
His influential dealer, Ambroise Vollard, tells an amusing story of one early picture, a landscape with some female nudes and “a person who from his getup could be taken for a shepherd.” In the course of arranging for a show, he accidentally placed the canvas in a frame that still bore the legend from a previous picture. Cézanne’s painting was thus inadvertently baptized Diana and Acteon—and interpreted accordingly. One critic even praised “the nobility of the goddess’s attitude and the modest air of the virgins who surrounded her,” as the chaste company indignantly repelled the spying Acteon.
Sometime later, the same dealer was asked to lend a Temptation of Saint Anthony by Cézanne to another exhibit. Unfortunately for the exhibiters, the painting Vollard had promised them had been sold in the interim. But he still had custody of the other picture, which he mischievously sent on instead.
This time there were no words on the frame, but since the exhibiters were expecting a Temptation of Saint Anthony, that’s how it was listed in the catalog. Where one critic had seen the chaste Diana, another now spotted “the smile, at once bewitching and perfidious, of a daughter of Satan”; the indignant gesture of the goddess’s attendant now turned into “a seductive invitation,” while “the pseudo- Acteon” became a “moving Saint Anthony.”
A collector who had previously refused the supposed Diana and Acteon because he already owned a painting of the subject by another artist now triumphantly announced his purchase of the rejected canvas under its new name. “It has a striking realism!” he boasted. Cézanne himself, on the other hand, denied that his painting had any subject at all. “I merely tried to render |
different areas.
Battlerites
Cold Wind Fading Snare duration increased from 0.25s to 0.3s
Cyclone Stun Duration reduced from 1.2s to 0.8s
Tracking Duration extension increased from 0.5s to 0.8s
Thorn
Thorn has shown himself to be powerful in lower levels of play. This is in large part due to him landing the third hit of Root Claw more frequently and players attacking enemies protected by Barbed Husk more often. As such we are toning down Root Grip along with Barbed Husk, and redistributing some of his power to make him more manageable at a lower level while retaining his strengths at a higher level. Picking the Branch Out Battlerite allows Thorn to deal the same amount of damage with Root Grip as before if you are confident in hitting with it. At the same time we’ve moved power from one of his most popular Battlerites, Neurotoxin, to Hamstring Briars, one of the least picked ones.
Root Claw (M1) Damage changed from 12/14/18 to 13/13/16 Healing from third hit reduced from 8 to 6
Barbed Husk (R) Volley damage reduced from 12 to 10
BattleritesProtesting Israeli policies, The Yes Men have withdrawn their highly acclaimed new film from the Jerusalem Film Festival where it was scheduled to be shown. They sent us their explanation, below.
"For Once, the Yes Men Say No"
by Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno
July 1, 2009.
Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,
We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, "The Yes Men Fix the World," from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (http://www.bdsmovement.net/).
This decision does not come easily, as we realize that the festival opposes the policies of the State of Israel, and we have no wish to punish progressives who deplore the state-sponsored violence committed in their name.
This decision does not come easily, as we feel a strong affinity with many people in Israel, sharing with them our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died. Andy lived in Jerusalem for a year long ago, can still get by in Hebrew, and counts several friends there. And Mike has always wanted to connect with the roots of his culture.
But despite all our feelings, we cannot abandon our mission as activists. In the 1980s, there was a call from the people of South Africa to artists and others to boycott that regime, and it helped end apartheid there. Today, there is a clear call for a boycott from Palestinian civil society. Obeying it is our only hope, as filmmakers and activists, of helping put pressure on the Israeli government to comply with international law.
It is painful to do this. But it is even more painful to hear Israeli policies described as "fascist" - not just from the ill-informed and the clueless, not just from the usual anti-semitic morons, but from well-informed Jewish activists within Israel. They know what they're talking about, and it's painful to think that they could be right.
As we're sure you know and deplore, the Israeli government has recently authorized the construction of new units in an illegal West Bank outpost - one that is illegal even according to Israeli law. On Monday, nine Palestinians were injured as Israeli authorities demolished their East Jerusalem home. Tuesday, the Israeli navy stopped a ship from delivering medicine, toys, and other humanitarian relief to Gaza, and detained over twenty foreign peace activists, including a Nobel Peace laureate. Meanwhile, a UN commission was in Gaza investigating much worse abuses committed early this year.
Whatever words are applied to such actions, our film mustn't help lend an aura of normalcy to a state that makes these decisions. For us, that's the bottom line.
There is certainly another way to do things in Israel/Palestine, and that is what we must fight for, however feeble our means. As for our film, there is another way for it to be seen in Israel... and in Palestine, so that the people most in need of comic relief, who would never have been able to see it at the Jerusalem Film Festival anyhow, will be able to see it too. Within the next few months, we will make this happen.
To those who want to see our film, savlanut and sabir (patience)! And for all the rest of us, a little LESS patience, please.
L'shanah haba'ah beyerushalayim,
Andy and Mike
The Yes Men
www.theyesmen.org
Background info on The Yes Men:
"It shines with raw wit and originality." - Newsweek
"Comedic vigilante justice... Media-savvy pie-to-the-face." - USA Today
"This movie is a hoot, and a pertinent one at that.... There's something tonic about the impudent laughter this engaging documentary provokes." - Hollywood Reporter
"One of the funniest movies I've ever seen, and two of the ballsiest guys I've ever met. Thank God for the Yes Men." - Morgan Spurlock, director of Supersize Me
"Finally the high priests of the free market get a massive dose of the disrespect they deserve. Hilarious, therapeutic, inspiring. The Yes Men are geniuses." - Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo
"The Yes Men use ridicule of the most subversive sort to expose the way in which corporations dishonor human life." - Village Voice
"The Yes Men Fix The World could be this season's choice." - Screen Daily
THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD premiered at this year's Sundance to sold-out crowds and standing ovations, and has won the audience award at several film festivals so far, including the Berlin International Film Festival.
THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD (dir. Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Kurt Engfehr, 2009) is a screwball true story that follows a couple of gonzo political activists as they infiltrate the world of big business and pull off outrageous pranks that highlight the ways that corporate greed is destroying the planet. Along the way the duo discover the culprits behind the cult of greed, and in a wildly uplifting ending, they find a way for everyone to defeat the cult and save civilization from its own worst excesses.
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can't take "no" for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, they lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate nemeses in ever more extreme ways - basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.
After years of doing their thing, the Yes Men pull off a stunt that opens their eyes to exactly how much danger we all face. Andy, purporting to be a Dow Chemical spokesperson, gets on the biggest TV news program in the world and announces that after 20 years of denial, Dow will finally clean up the site of the Bhopal Catastrophe, the largest industrial accident in history. The result: as people worldwide celebrate, Dow's stock value loses two billion dollars. People want Dow to do the right thing, but the market decides that it can't. The reality hits Andy and Mike like a ton of bricks: we have created a market system that makes doing the right thing impossible, and the people who appear to be leading are actually following its pathological dictates. If we keep putting the market in the driver's seat, it could happily drive the whole planet off a cliff.
At conference after conference, the Yes Men try to wake up their corporate audiences to this frightening prospect, in the process taking on some of the world's biggest and baddest corporations. Just one example: as Exxon, Andy and Mike demonstrate a new biofuel made from climate-change victims. It's a gut-busting laugh riot - one of several in the film - to see the unsuspecting audience learn that the lit candles they hold are made out of dead people.
On their journey, the Yes Men act as gonzo journalists, delving deep into the question of why we have given the market more power than any other institution to determine our direction as a society. They visit the twisted (and accidentally hilarious) underworld of the free-market think tanks, where they figure out a way to defeat the logic that's destroying our planet. And as they appear on the BBC before 300 million viewers, or before 1000 New Orleans contractors alongside Mayor Ray Nagin, the layers of lies are peeled back to reveal the raw heart of truth - a truth that brings with it hope.
Hope explodes at the end of this film with a power that may take audiences straight out of the theater and into the barricades. A word of warning to theater owners: make sure your seats are securely screwed down.
Bonus: this film has one of the very few underwater ballet scenes you will ever see in a political documentary.
This film is dedicated to the ongoing struggle of the people of Bhopal to achieve a crucial global precedent. Please visit www.bhopal.net and contribute whatever you can - your money, your talents, your time.
WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano
CO-DIRECTOR
Kurt Engfehr
SPECIAL APPEARANCE
Reggie Watts
EDITOR
April Merl
ANIMATION
Patrick Lichty
ORIGINAL MUSIC
Neel Murgai
Noisola
PRESENTED BY:
Arte France
Renegade Pictures UK
Article Z
Charny-Bachrach Entertainment
The Channel 4 Britdoc Foundation
COMMISSIONING EDITOR FOR ARTE FRANCE
Pierrette Ominetti
PRODUCED BY
Doro Bachrach
Ruth Charny
Laura Nix
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Patrice Barrat
Alan Hayling
Jess Search
Juliette Timsit
CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Amy Sommer
BIO: The Yes Men impersonate captains of industry, agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, and then smuggle out stories that provide a hilarious glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business. They were the subject of a feature film (The Yes Men, 2004) and have recently pulled off some of their most ambitious and audacious acts, which are the subject of their current feature, The Yes Men Fix the World. (Film stills, director stills, funny interview.)PORTLAND, Ore. – There are more aesthetically pleasing vehicles for LeBron James to choose for delivering a message than his 11 points on 12 shots in a 19-point loss on Tuesday night.
But the message James wanted to send to at least two players -- Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters -- was not intended to be pretty.
James spoke at length following the Cleveland Cavaliers' 101-82 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers about what's wrong with his team. Really, though, what James said afterward was a rehashing of the statement he made by how he played.
James scored nine in an active first quarter and made his first shot in the second. He took just six shots the rest of the night (to be fair to Irving and Waiters, James missed them all) and his last points came at 6:39 of the second quarter. He added seven rebounds and seven assists.
What else was going on at the time? Well, Portland rattled off 31 in the first quarter to Cleveland's 34. Irving and Waiters finished a combined 6-of-28 shooting.
By the third quarter, James was running the offense instead of Irving, occasionally getting into the lane and dishing to teammates. Otherwise, he'd pass from the perimeter. Shooting was option C.
When Damian Lillard, the guy Irving was guarding, went right down the middle of the lane for a dunk to start the second half, James looked at Irving and then at the Cavaliers' bench in disgust. It wasn't the last time.
Lillard scored 27 points. Waiters' man, Portland's Wesley Matthews, scored 21.
"There's a lot of bad habits, a lot of bad habits been built up the past couple years," James said. "When you play that style of basketball, it takes a lot to get it up out of you."
And there it was – the message James delivered on the floor through his actions that he articulated after it was all over. The ball-stagnating, momentum-sapping, me-first offense and occasional defense of the past few Cavaliers teams isn't going to fly now. And James is willing to sacrifice numbers - and even wins, early on – to get that point across.
"I'm trying to do other things, to try to instill what it takes to win," James said. "My mission is not a one-game thing. We have to do multiple things to win.
"I think a lot of people get it misconstrued on what it takes to win, you know just scoring or just going out and trying to will it yourself," he added.
To be sure, this was a lowlight for James' career in terms of scoring. It was his lowest regular-season point total since he scored 11 as a Cavalier back on Dec. 5, 2008. It was just the second time in 12 seasons he was shut out in the second half. He shot one free throw.
After he scored 17 in a season-opening loss to the Knicks last week, both James and coach David Blatt said he needed to be more aggressive. No one was saying that after this one.
"I don't hold him responsible," Blatt said.
Though he didn't associate any names with the "bad habits," deductive reasoning leaves Irving and Waiters as the most likely, or at least the primary, recipients.
The Cavaliers are largely a new team. Blatt is new. James, Kevin Love, Shawn Marion and Mike Miller are new. Love is the only player without a championship in that group and historically struggles on defense, but he scored an efficient 22 points on 14 shots and grabbed 10 rebounds against Portland.
Anderson Varejao has been here forever, but was on the playoff-tested Cleveland teams James led before departing for Miami.
Matthew Dellavedova is a holdover, but he's a back-up guard who doesn't look to shoot.
Tristan Thompson was 4-of-12 shooting, but he does most of his work in the paint with bodies flying at him.
Irving was the best player on Cleveland teams that won 21, 24, and 33 games the past three years; Waiters, the second-best on the last two of those teams. They were a large part of the culture James wants to change.
"A lot of guys that's gonna help us win ultimately haven't played a lot of meaningful basketball games in our league," James said.
Marion agreed with James, saying "we're losing individually right now." He said the "ball is sticking too much" on offense and better defense was needed, too.
James has preached patience in the face of high expectations for the Cavaliers since returning in July. He said what was on display Tuesday in Portland, and through much of this 1-2 start, is indicative of the challenges the Cavaliers face.
A car enthusiast, James likened the process to the time he rebuilt a 1972 Chevy Caprice from scratch. It's frustrating. It takes a while, but, "you'll enjoy it when you see the finished product."
The Cavaliers' three-game, four-night Western swing doesn't get much easier, continuing Wednesday against Utah.
The team might not look like James' shiny, baby blue Caprice by the time it gets back to Cleveland. But someday.
"Hopefully not too long," James said. "It could go on a couple months until we're all on the same page."If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member. If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.
Freed from a legal restriction officials said limited its ability to compete for future U.S. military satellite launches, United Launch Alliance has ordered 20 new RD-180 engines from Russia that will keep the Atlas 5 rocket flying into the early 2020s.
The new purchase of 20 RD-180 engines will serve ULA’s existing and potential civil and commercial launch customers while the company supports development of a new U.S.-built engine to replace the Russian powerplant, which is used on the first stage of the company’s workhorse Atlas 5 rocket, ULA said in a Dec. 23 statement.
ULA placed the order with RD AMROSS, a Florida-based company that imports the RD-180 engines manufactured by NPO Energomash, a Moscow firm that makes engines for most Russian launch vehicles.
“While ULA strongly believes now is the right time to move to an American engine solution for the future, it is also critical to ensure a smooth transition to that engine and to preserve healthy competition in the launch industry,” ULA said in a statement.
The agreement for 20 more RD-180 engines comes after ULA’s purchase of 29 engines before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in early 2014.
United Launch Alliance was the sole company eligible to compete for contracts to launch the Pentagon’s most expensive space missions since the company’s formation in 2006 with the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s Delta and Atlas rocket programs.
That changed last year with the Air Force’s certification of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to haul national security satellites into orbit. ULA remains the only contractor capable of delivering the military’s heaviest spacecraft into orbit, until SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket goes through its own certification program, a milestone officials do not expect to be complete until 2017, assuming the triple-core rocket achieves three successful missions in time.
Language inserted into the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act limited ULA’s use of RD-180 engines for future U.S. military launch competitions with SpaceX, outlawing engines that were paid for after Feb. 1, 2014.
Officials from ULA and the Air Force argued the limitation would unfairly inhibit the Atlas 5 rocket from competing head-to-head with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for lucrative military launch deals. ULA and Pentagon leaders wrangled with lawmakers for a year, attempting to carve out exemptions for at least some RD-180 engines to give the Atlas 5 access to the military contracts.
A clause in a U.S. government spending bill signed into law earlier this month effectively removed the RD-180 engine ban, stating that the Air Force could award launch contracts to any company certified to fly the Pentagon’s satellites, regardless of the country of origin of the rocket’s engines.
The lifting of the engine restriction was backed by Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama, where ULA’s rocket factory is located.
The policy reversal did not come in time for ULA to submit a bid for the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite in November. ULA says it did not give a proposal to the Air Force because it did not have an RD-180 engine eligible to use for the mission, blaming legal restrictions in the defense authorization act.
ULA chief executive Tory Bruno announced earlier this year his intention to retire the single-core medium-lift version of the Delta 4 rocket by 2018. While the Delta 4 uses U.S. engines, ULA admits it is more expensive than the Atlas 5 and not competitive the lower-priced Falcon 9.
With the Falcon 9’s certification, and the availability of the Atlas 5 now more clear, the Air Force has two rockets capable of launching many — but not all — of the military’s satellites, keeping the Pentagon’s long-standing policy of assured access to space.
ULA said its purchase of more RD-180 engines does not affect its commitment to developing a new U.S. engine to take the place of the Russian powerplant in the future.
“We are moving smartly with our engine partners, Blue Origin and our backup Aerojet Rocketdyne, but this type of development program is difficult and takes years to complete,” ULA said in a statement. “Until then, this bridge contract will allow ULA to provide the reliable, affordable launch services our civil and commercial customers depend on from us while the new, American engine is being developed.”
Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne are working on the BE-4 and AR-1 engines, each generating about 500,000 pounds of thrust. Two of the engines would power the first stage of ULA’s next-generation Vulcan launcher.
Lawmakers appropriated $227 million in 2016 to speed up development of a new U.S. propulsion system, to be doled out in a series of research and development contracts. Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne say private funding has financed their BE-4 and AR-1 engine work to date.
ULA says the Vulcan rocket should be ready for its first flight by the end of 2019, but it could take three more years to amass enough launches to be certified to carry U.S. military satellites.
Email the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.Three children were inside the home of a murder-suicide Sunday night that left a husband and wife dead, according to the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department.
The fatal shooting happened inside of a home on the 400 block of Q Street in Rio Linda. The department says the couple got into a verbal argument before the husband shot his wife with a handgun, he then turned the gun on himself.
Deputies were called to the scene a little after 8:30 p.m. and located three children inside, ranging in ages from 3 to 15. The suspect, identified as Xor Xiong, and the victim, identified as Mau Lee Vue, were both age 34.
Identities of the deceased will be made public by the Sacramento County Coroner's Office after family is notified.
If you know someone dealing with domestic violence in the Sacramento County, contact My Sister's House Multi-lingual help line at (916)-428-3271. For the same inquiries you can reach WEAVE's support line at (916)-920-2952.
For more information, click here.
Copyright 2017 KXTVWendy Davis heartlessly boasts that she has all 10 fingers.
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
The headline is a must-click: “The Vile Voice of Wendy Davis’ Supporters Ridiculing a Paraplegic.” The substance is a post from Erick Erickson, who has become a one-man wrecking crew against the Wendy Davis campaign, and a link to a video from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. O’Keefe’s crew has been infiltrating/reporting on meetings of Battleground Texas, the independent group created by Obama veterans that is pretty obviously trying to elect Democrats with a voter registration campaign. Here, we are told, is evidence of the Davis network making fun of likely GOP gubernatorial nominee Greg Abbott for using a wheelchair. (He was crippled when a tree branch fell on him decades ago.)
The video’s actually a bit of mishmash—more than half of it consists of Battleground volunteers acting partisan, and the rest advances the “mocking a paraplegic hook.” I don’t think it delivers. The money quote, the one Erickson makes a meme out of, is: “He’s in a wheelchair and we want to stand with Wendy.” But that’s not actually a quote from the video. The quote, from one unidentified volunteer, is:
I’m wondering how this is going to work out, because he’s in a wheelchair and most of the slogans are “Stand With Wendy.”
There’s rueful laughter after the volunteer says that, but is it “ridicule”? This is a conversation that anyone strategizing to elect Davis was going to have, just as the Abbott campaign was going to strategize (hopefully without cameras in the room) about how to run against a woman without making gaffes. “Stand With [name of candidate]” is a common frame, used by Marco Rubio—only natural, isn’t it, to wonder if it looks cruel when the opponent can’t walk?
Two more wheelchair comments fill out the video. This one:
What I think is interesting is he’s in a wheelchair but he has no sympathy for anyone or any way. He may have a personality disorder.
And this one:
He doesn’t speak well, he isn’t good looking, he doesn’t have a good personality, and he’s in a wheelchair.
Both are played without context, though the second quote is taken from the same angle as a video clip in which someone notes that people have called Davis “too stupid” to be governor. In private, Davis supporters are talking about the candidates’ perceived strengths and weaknesses.
We can agree, I think, that the person citing the wheelchair is being an ass—the wheelchair, obviously, is no political problem at all. Just yesterday, National Review slammed Davis for saying that Abbott had never “walked a day in my shoes.” That cliché wouldn’t be interesting at all if Abbott could walk. Because he can’t, it’s supposed to be scandal. There’ll be more of this, surely, as Republicans work to portray Davis as a cruel dummy.
UPDATE: Can’t hurt that Charles C. Johnson, the reporter who thought a Daily Princetonian satire was real, also thinks that the fake “ad” Erickson created for this story is real.
If Battleground Texas language is “abhorrent,” why does Wendy Davis and co. put it in campaign literature?http://t.co/UcImVoEzl2 — Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) January 23, 2014Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in Nashville on April 12, 2016. (Samuel M. Simpkins /The Tennessean via AP)
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam on Thursday vetoed a bill that would have made the Bible the state’s official book.
“In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text,” Haslam (R) wrote in a letter to the speaker of the statehouse.
“If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance,” continued Haslam. “If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.”
[Symbols of Tennessee, by law: salamanders, tomatoes, a sniper gun and…the Bible?]
The controversial measure made it through the state senate earlier this month after it died in that chamber during last year’s legislative session.
In April 2015, Republican Tennessee state legislator Jerry Sexton introduced a bill in the House to make the Bible the official state book. At the time, the former pastor told the house chamber doing so would recognize the Bible for "its value and worth." (Tennessee General Assembly)
Lawmakers can still override Haslam’s veto by a simple majority, according to the Tennessean.
Backers of the measure have emphasized the historical, religious and economic importance of the Bible for the state; the bill asserts “printing the Bible is a multimillion dollar industry for the state with many top Bible publishers headquartered in Nashville.”
[Thomas Jefferson and the fascinating history of Founding Fathers defending Muslim rights]
Earlier this month, the bill’s sponsor — Republican Sen. Steve Southerland, an ordained minister — responded to questions on whether he considered the Bible a historical or religious book.
“It’s about a lot of different things,” Southerland said, according to the Associated Press. “But what we’re doing here is recognizing it for its historical and cultural contribution to the state of Tennessee.”
Sen. Steve Southerland, R-Morristown, speaks in favor of his bill to make the Holy Bible the official book of Tennessee on Monday, April 4, 2016, in Nashville, Tenn. (Mark Humphrey/AP)
Haslam and State Attorney General Herbert Slatery had previously expressed reservations about the constitutionality of declaring the Bible as the state’s official book.
Some opponents also argued that the measure was tantamount to endorsing Christianity over other religions.
“Lawmakers’ thinly veiled effort to promote one religion over other religions clearly violates both the United States and Tennessee Constitutions, as our state attorney general has already pointed out,” ACLU-Tennessee Executive Director Hedy Weinberg said after the bill passed the Senate.
On Thursday, Haslam explained he “strongly” disagrees “with those who are trying to drive religion out of the public square.”
“Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate,” Haslam wrote. “However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our Constitution prohibits.”
Tennessee would have been the first state to have the Bible as its official state book, had the measure been signed into law, the Tennessean reported.President Donald Trump on Tuesday hurled the United States into a complex and escalating dispute between the state of Qatar and several of its Middle Eastern neighbors. Trump tweeted his support for the decision by Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf nations to cut ties with Qatar, accusing the longtime U.S. ally and host to an instrumental U.S. military base of funding extremists.
“Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!” Trump said.
Trump’s brazen comments Tuesday were the latest in a series of diplomatic moves that have antagonized foreign governments and thrown into question some of the U.S.’ longest and strongest alliances.
“Fundamentally, Trump in the last 4½ months has demonstrated that he doesn’t understand or doesn’t care how America has engaged the world for the last 70 years,” former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder told HuffPost.
Trump’s attack on Qatar came just a day after the president embroiled himself in a diplomatic spat with Britain by lashing out at London Mayor Sadiq Khan in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the city. While leaders from around the world rushed to express their condolences and support, Trump instead repeatedly slammed Khan for urging Londoners to remain calm. Trump also used the terrorist attack to argue for the need of his court-halted executive order to temporarily bar citizens of six Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S.
Trump’s rhetoric forced British Prime Minister Theresa May, who has faced repeated criticism for being too tolerant of the U.S. leader, to come to Khan’s defense. Other British politicians also publicly supported the London mayor, who has argued that the British government should cancel Trump’s upcoming state visit to the U.K.
Peter Nicholls / Reuters Mayor of London Sadiq Khan visits the scene of the attack on London Bridge and Borough Market that left seven people dead. Khan assured Londoners after the attack that there was "no cause for alarm" as the police presence increased, a statement Trump criticized as a dismissal of the terrorist threat.
Although Trump and Khan’s public animosity was one of the most visible examples of the president conflicting with traditional friends, behind-the-scenes reports about Trump’s recent visit to Europe highlight just how many allies have found themselves at odds with the U.S. president.
According to meeting notes seen by German news outlet Der Spiegel, leaders from G7 countries, including France, Germany and Canada, all privately implored Trump during the meetings in Europe to recognize how instrumental the Paris climate accord was to international cooperation. Trump remained unmoved, resulting in an exasperated French President Emmanuel Macron declaring, “Now China leads.”
During that same visit, Trump baffled NATO allies by refusing to reaffirm his commitment to Article 5 of the alliance ― which stipulates that member states have to come to the aid of allies under attack (Article 5 has been invoked only once ― by the U.S.). Trump also publicly chastised other member states for what he sees as their failure to contribute sufficient amounts of their gross domestic product (GDP) to the defense alliance.
Trump’s refusal to reaffirm Article 5 and monomaniacal focus on GDP contributions highlight that he has the potential to undermine decades-long cooperation that has been vital to U.S. and European interests, according to Daalder.
“We have built up through our global engagement a set of institutions that have been built on trust, fundamentally on trust, where allies had trust in the United States to do the right thing when it really came down to it,” Daalder said.
“That trust is broken, and it’s broken because of the kinds of things he has done and not done, said and not said.”
MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly urged Trump to reconsider withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
There had been hints of how Trump was willing to create conflict with U.S. allies early on in his term. Just weeks after being sworn in, the president picked a fight with Australia Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto during what were supposed to be cursory post-inauguration phone calls.
Many hoped that Trump wouldn’t make the same mistakes with a foreign policy team in place. However, five months into his terms it appears that the president is willing to disregard the advice of the experts surrounding him, including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
In the case of this week’s diplomatic flare-up in the Middle East, Mattis and Tillerson had both expressed hope the tension between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates would be resolved soon. According to Politico, Trump’s national security team was also blindsided by his belligerent NATO speech.
Trump’s volatility when it comes to international alliances and agreements has already had far-reaching implications.
In the past weeks, the leaders of some of America’s most powerful traditional allies have signaled they perceive a fundamental change in the United States’ role in the world and are willing to change their policies accordingly.
“[Trump] seems to be fine being alone, and it may have benefits in the short term. But in the long term it’s going to cost us,” Daalder said. “In acting as if you can’t trust anybody else in the world, no one will trust the United States.”
Hours before Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, European leaders put out a joint statement with China to reaffirm their commitment to its goals. “Now is the time to further strengthen these ties to keep the wheels turning for ambitious global climate action,” said Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Union’s commissioner on climate action and energy.
In a speech days after Trump’s NATO address, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also told supporters that Europe must become more self-reliant as the U.S. policy shifts.
“The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel said, hinting at her experiences at the NATO summit. “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.”
Canada’s foreign affairs minister echoed that assessment Tuesday, vowing her country will make a “substantial investment” in its own military as the U.S. gives up its international leadership role
“The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts in sharper focus for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” Chrystia Freeland told the House of Commons on Tuesday. “To say this is not controversial: It is a fact”Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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True North is also expected to receive an estimated $5.49 million worth of revenue from 140 gaming machines at Shark Club. Privacy legislation prevents Manitoba Liquor and Lotteries from disclosing the precise amount of the gaming revenue that will be shared with True North, said Andrea Kowal, a spokeswoman for the Crown corporation.
The largest government-enabled source of cash for the Winnipeg Jets is a $6.192-million projected rebate of the 10 per cent city tax levied on events held at the MTS Centre. True North is also in line to receive a city business-tax refund worth $258,300 and an $888,647 break on city and municipal property taxes. Provincial legislation allows the city and province to treat the MTS Centre as a public space, as opposed to commercial land.
The city and province are projected to provide True North Sports & Entertainment with $12.8 million worth of subsidies in 2014, according to city budget documents and a review of the revenue-sharing deal struck between |
remember the Affordable Care Act. Those and many other inspired legislative acts seemed revolutionary enough at the time. But none really was. None overturned entrenched and valued contractual and legislative arrangements. None reshuffled trillions—or in less inflated days, billions—of dollars devoted to the same general purpose as the new legislation. All either extended services previously available to only a few, or created wholly new arrangements.
To understand the difference between those past achievements and the idea of replacing current health insurance arrangements with a single-payer system, compare the Affordable Care Act with Sanders’ single-payer proposal.
Criticized by some for alleged radicalism, the ACA is actually stunningly incremental. Most of the ACA’s expanded coverage comes through extension of Medicaid, an existing public program that serves more than 60 million people. The rest comes through purchase of private insurance in “exchanges,” which embody the conservative ideal of a market that promotes competition among private venders, or through regulations that extended the ability of adult offspring to remain covered under parental plans. The ACA minimally altered insurance coverage for the 170 million people covered through employment-based health insurance. The ACA added a few small benefits to Medicare but left it otherwise untouched. It left unaltered the tax breaks that support group insurance coverage for most working age Americans and their families. It also left alone the military health programs serving 14 million people. Private nonprofit and for-profit hospitals, other vendors, and privately employed professionals continue to deliver most care.
In contrast, Senator Sanders’ plan, like the earlier proposal sponsored by Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) which Sanders co-sponsored, would scrap all of those arrangements. Instead, people would simply go to the medical care provider of their choice and bills would be paid from a national trust fund. That sounds simple and attractive, but it raises vexatious questions.
How much would it cost the federal government? Where would the money to cover the costs come from?
What would happen to the $700 billion that employers now spend on health insurance?
How would the $600 billion a year reductions in total health spending that Sanders says his plan would generate come from?
What would happen to special facilities for veterans and families of members of the armed services?
Sanders has answers for some of these questions, but not for others. Both the answers and non-answers show why single payer is unlike past major social legislation.
The answer to the question of how much single payer would cost the federal government is simple: $4.1 trillion a year, or $1.4 trillion more than the federal government now spends on programs that the Sanders plan would replace. The money would come from new taxes. Half the added revenue would come from doubling the payroll tax that employers now pay for Social Security. This tax approximates what employers now collectively spend on health insurance for their employees…if they provide health insurance. But many don’t. Some employers would face large tax increases. Others would reap windfall gains.
The cost question is particularly knotty, as Sanders assumes a 20 percent cut in spending averaged over ten years, even as roughly 30 million currently uninsured people would gain coverage. Those savings, even if actually realized, would start slowly, which means cuts of 30 percent or more by Year 10. Where would they come from? Savings from reduced red-tape associated with individual insurance would cover a small fraction of this target. The major source would have to be fewer services or reduced prices. Who would determine which of the services physicians regard as desirable — and patients have come to expect — are no longer ‘needed’? How would those be achieved without massive bankruptcies among hospitals, as columnist Ezra Klein has suggested, and would follow such spending cuts? What would be the reaction to the prospect of drastic cuts in salaries of health care personnel – would we have a shortage of doctors and nurses? Would patients tolerate a reduction in services? If people thought that services under the Sanders plan were inadequate, would they be allowed to ‘top up’ with private insurance? If so, what happens to simplicity? If not, why not?
Let me be clear: we know that high quality health care can be delivered at much lower cost than is the U.S. norm. We know because other countries do it. In fact, some of them have plans not unlike the one Senator Sanders is proposing. We know that single-payer mechanisms work in some countries. But those systems evolved over decades, based on gradual and incremental change from what existed before. That is the way that public policy is made in democracies. Radical change may occur after a catastrophic economic collapse or a major war. But in normal times, democracies do not tolerate radical discontinuity. If you doubt me, consider the tumult precipitated by the really quite conservative Affordable Care Act.
Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in Newsweek.Hop on Pop ( ISBN 978-0-394-80029-5) is a 1963 children's picture book by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel). It was published as part of the Random House Beginner Books series, and is subtitled "The Simplest Seuss for Youngest Use". It contains several short poems about a variety of characters, and is designed to introduce basic phonics concepts to children.
History [ edit ]
One of Geisel's manuscript drafts for the book contained the lines, "When I read I am smart / I always cut whole words apart. / Con Stan Tin O Ple, Tim Buk Too / Con Tra Cep Tive, Kan Ga Roo."[1] Geisel had included the contraceptive reference to ensure that publisher Bennett Cerf was reading the manuscript. Cerf did notice the line,[2] and the poem was changed to the following: "My father / can read / big words, too. / Like... / Constantinople / and / Timbuktu."[1]
Reception [ edit ]
A popular choice of elementary school teachers and children's librarians, Hop on Pop ranked sixteenth on Publishers Weekly's 2001 list of the all-time best-selling hardcover books for children.[3] Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children."[4]
One of the book's most notable advocates is former United States First Lady Laura Bush, who listed it as her favorite book in a 2006 Wall Street Journal article. "It features Dr. Seuss's typically wonderful illustrations and rhymes, of course, but the main thing for me is the family memory—the loving memory—that the book evokes of George lying on the floor and reading it to our daughters, Barbara and Jenna. They were little bitty things, and they took Hop on Pop literally, and jumped on him—we have the pictures to prove it," she wrote.[5]
In 2013, an official complaint was made to the Toronto Public Library that the book "encourages children to use violence against their fathers." The library decided against removing the book, finding it "is a humorous and well-loved children’s book designed to engage children while teaching them reading skills."[6]
Inspiration for others [ edit ]
Like many Dr. Seuss books, Hop on Pop has inspired other writers. Big Brother Mouse, a publishing project in Laos, drew on Hop on Pop to develop The Polar Bear Visits Laos, which matches short sentences that include an internal rhyme with cartoon images.
See also [ edit ]As we all know, no true djent EP is complete without an album cover with a shape on it. Here, we’re going to go through the best shapes you can use, since having a good cover lets you put your best foot forward.
5. Sierpinski Triangle
Wow! See, this is advanced, and here’s why — most djent bands just use one triangle. This is a bunch of triangles, inside bigger triangles. Who would’ve thought such a thing existed?
4. Dodecahedron
Twelve sides? That fits in perfectly with your signature use of the 12/8 time signature! It’s practically a concept album at this point, and it’s also the perfect shape to symbolize just how edgy you’ve become.
3. Icosahedron
An icosahedron has 20 different faces. Use this shape to show your listeners that your music is multifaceted and has many different sides to it. Once they see that on the cover, they’ll know it’s not like any other djent EP they’ve ever heard.
2. Straight Line
Sometimes, the best way to go is minimalism. This shape perfectly represents the minimal effort you put into your music.
1. Silly Straw Shape
Let your listeners know that just like silly straws take chocolate milk on a winding journey to your mouth, this album will take your listeners on a dark path through your twisted mind.
-SH
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RedditOSC Fundraiser Legacy of the Void Mod Invitational Sun Dec 14
Hey Guys,
I will be throwing a Showmatch Tournament to help raise funds for the OSC Grand Finals, the Tournament will be played on the LOTV fan-made mod.
Time + Format
14 December 2014 7:00 PM AEDT
Date: Sunday, 14th of December, 2014
Time: 7pm AEDT
Location: SEA Battle.net (Can change server if both players agree)
Battle.net Chat Channel: OSC LOTV
Single Elimination.
- All Series Bo3
- Grand Final Bo3/Bo5 (Dependant of Time)
Casters: Insano + Maynarde
Stream: www.twitch.tv/syfgamingtv
Prizes :
1st $30
2nd $20
3rd/4th $5
Players
Map Pool
#RealDreamPool
Frost
Whirlwind
Waystation
Calm Before the Storm
Star Station
Fruitland
Arkanoid
Feeling Generous? Fire a Donation through the link below, proceeds go towards the OSC Grand Final Prize Pool!
Fundraiser Thread : http://www.sc2sea.com/showthread.php?t=8856
So I hope to see you guys there this Sunday and support the OSC Grand Finals for 2014 while watching what will be a fun lot of matches!
Hey Guys,I will be throwing a Showmatch Tournament to help raise funds for the OSC Grand Finals, the Tournament will be played on the LOTV fan-made mod.Sunday, 14th of December, 20147pm AEDTSEA Battle.net (Can change server if both players agree)OSC LOTV- All Series Bo3- Grand Final Bo3/Bo5 (Dependant of Time)Insano + Maynarde$30$20$5#RealDreamPoolFrostWhirlwindWaystationCalm Before the StormStar StationFruitlandArkanoidFeeling Generous? Fire a Donation through the link below, proceeds go towards the OSC Grand Final Prize Pool!So I hope to see you guys there this Sunday and support the OSC Grand Finals for 2014 while watching what will be a fun lot of matches! Last edited by syfInsano; Sun, 14th-Dec-2014 at 2:07 AM. Reason: Prize Pool updatedNASA'S LCROSS Captures All Phases of Centaur Impact
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. – NASA’s Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) was a smashing success, returning tantalizing data about the Centaur impact before the spacecraft itself impacted the surface of the moon.Last week, plunging headlong into Cabeus crater, the nine LCROSS instruments successfully captured each phase of the impact sequence: the impact flash, the ejecta plume, and the creation of the Centaur crater."We are blown away by the data returned," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist. "The team is working hard on the analysis and the data appear to be of very high quality.”Within the ultraviolet/visible and near infra-red spectrometer and camera data was a faint, but distinct, debris plume created by the Centaur's impact."There is a clear indication of a plume of vapor and fine debris," said Colaprete. “Within the range of model predictions we made, the ejecta brightness appears to be at the low end of our predictions and this may be a clue to the properties of the material the Centaur impacted.”The magnitude, form, and visibility of the debris plume add additional information about the concentrations and state of the material at the impact site.The LCROSS spacecraft also captured the Centaur impact flash in both mid-infrared (MIR) thermal cameras over a couple of seconds. The temperature of the flash provides valuable information about the composition of the material at the impact site. LCROSS also captured emissions and absorption spectra across the flash using an ultraviolet/visible spectrometer. Different materials release or absorb energy at specific wavelengths that are measurable by the spectrometers.With the spacecraft returning data until virtually the last second, the thermal and near-infrared cameras returned excellent images of the Centaur impact crater at a resolution of less than 6.5 feet (2 m). The images indicate that the crater was about 92 feet (28 m) wide."The images of the floor of Cabeus are exciting," said Colaprete. "Being able to image the Centaur crater helps us reconstruct the impact process, which in turn helps us understand the observations of the flash and ejecta plume."In the coming weeks, the LCROSS team and other observation assets will continue to analyze and verify data collected from the LCROSS impacts. Any new information will undergo the normal scientific review process and will be released as soon as it is available.To view the latest images from the LCROSS impacts, visit:UPDATE: It is real.
***
I’m not a journalist and I’m not used to getting leaks.
So all I can tell you is, I received the text below and it may be accurate or it may not.
If it is accurate, it is the most expansive RTE has been in trying to justify their decision making on this.
If it isn’t accurate I’ll clarify that in an update and we can leave this post as a monument to my folly.
***
Colleagues,
Over the last week a number of people have approached me questioning RTÉ’s apology to John Waters and members of the Iona Institute following the receipt of six legal complaints and you will, no doubt, have seen the ongoing debate on this subject.
I want to reassure you that RTÉ explored every option available to it, including right of reply. Legal advice was sought and all avenues were explored, including an offer to make a donation to a neutral charity.
However, based on the facts of what was broadcast, and having regard for broadcasting compliance issues, the seriousness of the legal complaints, and the decision by the complainants not to accept RTÉ’s proposed remedies, we decided that a settlement was the most prudent course of action. Senior counsel was consulted and confirmed that the legal position was far from clear.
As a dual-funded public body, RTÉ should not knowingly progress to defend an action when it is advised, internally and externally, that such a defence is unlikely to succeed before a jury.
RTÉ has not engaged in censorship, but has rather fallen foul of Ireland’s defamation laws. The topic reopened over the weekend and RTÉ will continue to cover this and related issues, as evidenced by last week’s Late Debate, coverage of the protest in Dublin city centre on Sunday, today’s item on Today with Sean O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1 and last weekend’s debate on the subject on The Saturday Night Show.
Glen Killane
MDTVAnd you thought Dick Costolo had a rough time trying to build a “free speech first” media company into a super-fast growing ad business.
Ellen Pao is entering her second week of getting the absolute shit kicked out of her at Reddit.
For those who haven’t been following the story, the Christian Science monitor has a good TL;DR here…
The online community Reddit revolted over the weekend, following the dismissal of an employee who was particularly important to users, reports say. By Monday morning, a petition for the removal of controversial interim CEO Ellen Pao had garnered more than 160,000 signatures. Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of talent and communications, was let go Thursday, and as a result, hundreds of “subreddits” went dark as moderators shut down their threads in protest.
Yesterday, Pao apologized to the community… Again.
We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we haven’t always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit. Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me.
Pao’s position had already been near-impossible: Many Reddit power users had apparently already decided they didn’t like her, for reasons largely unrelated to her actual performance in the job. Just look at the horrifying barrage of Reddit threads in recent days describing her as a Chinese communist, a “Nazi,” and a “cunt.”
Beyond that, even non-Redditors struggle to reconcile the idea of Ellen Pao as CEO of the famously cesspool-y Reddit with the woman who brought a sexual discrimination suit against Kleiner. It takes one hell of a commitment to free speech to file a suit against the “micro-indignities” of women working in the tech industry and then go back to running a site filled with creepshots and naked celebrity phone hacks.
But even if Pao had the thickest skin in the world and was more committed to unbridled free speech than anyone, her biggest problem was that she lost the support of Reddit’s core community, who accuse her of not knowing how to use the site correctly and fundamentally misunderstanding what motivates its users.
And that’s why she had to issue such a grovelling apology. Reddit might have millions of users but, without the work of a relatively small number of moderators and super-fans, the site simply wouldn’t function. It’s hard to argue the same thing about Ellen Pao, or any other Reddit exec.
I am not a Reddit power user. Or even a moderate Reddit user. What I do know is this: Reddit is a weird beast. A weirder beast than Twitter, and that’s saying something. It should have been left the fuck alone.
Reddit was a crazy comeback story which directly benefited from the implosion of Digg as the latter sought to become a mainstream advertising business. Digg always struggled with the dilemma of whether or not it should cave to a vocal minority or not. I’ve argued in the past that they did it too much, while Mark Zuckerberg early on set a precedent that he wasn’t gonna cave to user criticism of the News feed just because some people found it “creepy.”
Reddit doesn’t have the luxury of making any of those decisions on behalf of users. You can’t change communities midstream because you now want to build a scalable ad business with no hate speech.
The problem is not how you scale community generally. It’s how you scale your community. And some just can’t be “scaled.” Sure, they might scale in how they grow users. But “scaling” in the venture sense of growing revenue and valuation is another matter.
Pao admits the users have “lost trust in [her.]” That hasn’t been helped today by her total reversal in policy, even restoring shuttered sub-Reddits filled with appalling content. Anyone with a toddler knows how well giving in goes the next time there’s a tantrum.
That loss of trust -- and of authority -- is irreparably damaging for Pao in a way it isn’t at most startups. When executives lose trust in a CEO at any other startup, that CEO is replaced by the board or sometimes by investors. It’s the one socially acceptable time for VCs to turn anti-founder. In the case of Reddit, it’s the users who have to be thought of as management. They are the ones who made Reddit such a valuable property in the years before it took $50 million in venture capital. They are the ones who made it such an alluring bet-- even given the obvious issues with content that no advertiser would ever want to be put next to.
When a CEO cannot hire and fire employees as she sees fit; when she cannot control whether parts of the site are up or not; when she doesn’t know how to communicate with users because her posts keep getting voted down; when the only thing to stem a weeklong outcry is a no-holds-barred apology, after her first apology wasn’t enough... I just don’t see how she comes back from this.
In these situations, the community is either king or it’s a subordinate. At Facebook, it’s a subordinate. Boycotts come and go in the Facebook community, but the company rarely changes its policy. At most it may tweak it, as it has with the movement from “real” names to “authentic” names.
In the last week it’s been made clear that at Reddit the community is king. And today, that memo was explicitly delivered by Pao. Stakeholders, management, advertisers, and anyone else looking to get something out of the very unique thing that Reddit is needs to acknowledge that, decide if they are cool with it, and act accordingly. Because Reddit isn’t changing. Management and investors will have to change to accommodate Reddit. And even now, Pao can’t start to do damage control because she still doesn’t get the company-- by her own admission.
Pao wrote in her apology:
I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us. I don’t have all the answers, and it will take time for us to deliver concrete results… “I mean it when I say we screwed up, and we want to have a meaningful ongoing discussion. I know we’ve drifted out of touch with the community as we’ve grown and added more people, and we want to connect more.
This would have been a great spiritual quest before she took the job. Now it’s simply too late.
Here’s the thing: And it’s a rare time I’ll defend a lot of the vileness on Reddit. Reddit shouldn’t change. Reddit was doing just fine before a bunch of VCs decided to invest $50 million into it to make it “more commercial.” Simply put: Not everything large on the Internet should be commercial.
We see this over and over again, so let’s look at a few examples: Craigslist, Wikipedia, BitTorrent, and CouchSurfing. The first two had leaders who knew they didn’t want to raise money, become a large company, become more commercial, or in any way capitalize on their size for financial gain. Wall Street personalities, VCs-- and in the case of Craigslist, arch-rivals over at eBay-- have gone apoplectic trying to figure out how companies could leave so much cash on the table. And while parts of Craigslist have certainly been disintermediated by rental sites, ride sharing sites, job boards, and other verticals, Craigslist is still around and a core utility for a lot of cities.
Ditto Wikipedia. Media mogul after media mogul has written blog post after blog post about why Jimmy Wales should take advertising money instead of pleading for donations on every page. He hasn’t. He’s surely left capital on the table. But Wikipedia has continued to grow and for the most part, hasn’t gotten replaced.
Craigslist looks like a place where design and functionality go to die. And Wikipedia looks like it’s been in a time capsule. But both websites are clearly functional cornerstones of the Web, and both are still around.
Compare that to -- admittedly smaller -- community phenomenons that did raise money. BitTorrent raised $40 million in the early days of Web 2.0, off the back of YouTube mania.
Here’s what my then-colleague Heather Green at BusinessWeek wrote about the move:
The idea? Gather movies, music, games, and software from Hollywood studios and indie producers alike and distribute them to consumers. BitTorrent would generate revenue either by selling ads within the content or charging a fee for the files. That's a pretty dramatic turn for a technology that up to now has been so closely associated with illegal file sharing. BitTorrent was developed and released in 2002 by independent programmer Bram Cohen as a way to efficiently distribute the free Linux operating system that competes with Microsoft's (MSFT) software. But it was quickly commandeered by file sharers for illegal swapping of copyrighted movies and TV shows.
That strategy pretty much came and went along with rounds of senior execs. The last round was in 2008. It’s hard to argue the company is better for the dilution, distraction, and detour.
See also: Couchsurfing. It made a huge shift from non-profit to “startup” when it raised $22 million from six VCs including a lead from Matt Cohler at Benchmark. Couchsurfing never had the heft of Reddit, and when its non-profit status was called into question it had to do something. So it’s not a perfect analogy. But it certainly had a strong community that was eroded by the change. CEOs came and went and the company had many missteps.
From an indepth GigaOm piece by Pando alum Carmel D’Amicis:
Before and after its venture funding, Couchsurfing cycled through CEOs, acquiring and discarding them like ill-fitting t-shirts. Each one tried hammering the organization into some semblance of professionalism, efficiency, and money-making and each encountered intense push back from the community. Couchsurfing was founded on the ethos of cooperation, not capitalism, and its most involved users were intensely suspicious of the ulterior motives of the service’s overlords. “Imagine if you’ve been contributing to Wikipedia for years and one day the founders say they are selling it for a large personal profit but you’re still free to use it. Yup, it’s like that,” one former Couchsurfing ambassador explained on Medium in 2013. Users made meme videos poking fun at the corruption of the organization’s leaders and published cartoons to represent them. The community that had once volunteered hours to run Couchsurfing could not bring itself to trust leaders overseen by a venture capital firm.
Sound familiar? It went from bad to worse. In 2013, latest Couchsurfing CEO Tony Espinoza was out, and 40% of the staff was cut. The company hasn’t raised money since 2012.
We saw the same phenomena over and over again in the early 2000s as open source mania swept the Web, and VCs scoured European countries for popular open source apps that could be “startup-ified.” It mostly didn’t work. The only $1 billion exit that came from that entire frenzy of deal making was MySQL.
The common denominator in these examples -- both the holdouts who didn’t go the mega-growth route and those who tried and stumbled-- is a popular product that was content to be beloved and sustainable… until a startup version of it appeared doing something similar but with a total Silicon Valley mega-growth mindset.
BitTorrent got dollars in its eyes when it saw YouTube. Couchsurfing did when it saw Airbnb. Craigslist refused, even when eBay tried to take it on with Kijiji and appropriated Craigslist trade secrets to bolster it. It was called crazy by everyone with a capitalist pulse and a sense of design.
In the case of Reddit, it was the surge of free-speech, news-driven, user-generated content which fueled everything from Facebook to Twitter. There’s been a belief for the last 15 years of the Web that eyeballs represent dollars, and if you can route around millions of eyeballs then you’re a gatekeeper of the dollars. Surely that’s worth even more dollars right?
Not really.
The very core of Reddit’s unpredictable resurgence and staying power is in that bizarro community of volunteers and moderators that keep a 170-million-monthly-uniques site running despite a paid staff of just 80 employees.
The reason this kind of thing keeps happening is no one charged with making the decision is incentivized to do otherwise.
For the VCs, it was well worth the gamble. It’s their job to risk millions on ideas or nascent properties that may never catch fire and develop a passionate engaged community of more than 100 million people. So funding an existing massive property where the “only” risk is making it into a company? Easy bet.
For the founder, who frequently gets to cash out some shares in these situations? It may be a thorny bet in terms of legacy and emotion to take money that ultimately destroys a valuable asset, but, in terms of personal security, at least founders can take some money off the table and enjoy some spoils of their hard work.
The trouble is it’s not such an easy bet for employees and even less so for a site’s loyal community, who view their labor as more than a simple financial risk/reward. Unlike a VC, they can’t just write this off as an experiment if it destroys a beloved asset. And unlike the board and founder, they don’t get a vote.The effects of stress on health, well-being, and even creativity were the focus of the Forum at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) this week.
In collaboration with the Huffington Post, the March 6 webcast event addressed the American Psychological Association’s latest Stress in America survey, which found that the majority of Americans report experiencing higher stress levels than they believe are healthy. One in three Americans reports living with extreme stress.
Chronic stress has been linked to health problems ranging from heart disease to asthma to ulcers, and the cardiovascular health risk it poses is not dissimilar to the risk conferred by cigarette smoking, said panelist Laura Kubzansky, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at HSPH. (See the full list of panelists here.)
Representing a diverse array of approaches to stress and health, from psychology to nutrition science, the expert panelists explored the underlying causes and consequences of stress — particularly the “physiological wear and tear” incurred by repeated periods of stress. They singled out the role that mindfulness plays in combating stress and choosing healthy behaviors.
“We eat less thoughtfully when we are stressed,” said David Eisenberg, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, and “when we are in a good place emotionally we make better choices.”
Lilian Cheung, editorial director of The Nutrition Source at HSPH and an expert on mindfulness, shared her “three steps to bliss”: “mindful breathing, mindful eating, and mindful movements.”
Addressing stress from a public-health orientation is key to setting up systems that will better prepare people to cope with stress, according to the panelists. Stress is pervasive in American lives — and yet no systematic medical approach exists to prevent and treat it. Among the panelists’ recommendations: Doctors need to be trained to better recognize and respond to stress in their patients and to help patients practice healthy habits, and to look carefully at childhood development, creating structures that allow children to develop the adaptive tools they need to more effectively manage stress.
Read the live Tweet coverage here.The transformation of Little Portugal has always revealed itself in the bars lining Dundas St. W. Sometimes 10 to a block between Ossington and Lansdowne Aves., there are whiskey and wine bars, gay bars and bars stocked with old-fashioned arcade games, bars in basements and bars with no name. Late-night drinkers can go door-to-door on a winter’s night, barely needing to don their coats. It’s fitting, then, that this stretch of road should have served as the cradle for a new kind of watering hole, perhaps more incongruous and stranger than all the others: the hipster sports bar.
The Contender, largest of the "hipster sports bars" on Dundas St. W., boasts a beer selection more enticing than most sports bars. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star )
The strip now boasts no fewer than four such establishments, complete with kitschy memorabilia, artisanal variations on wings and nachos, and Raptors fans dressed like lumberjacks. At first blush, a hipster sports bar seems like an oxymoron: on the one hand, a cultural subgroup dedicated to all things ironic and underground; on the other, a venue for watching the game with your bros. But at this late date in the history of hipsterdom, just such a hybrid has emerged. The genre seems to have been born in American meccas of cool like Brooklyn (Mulholland’s) and Portland (Spirit of 77). Fashion-forward former New York Ranger Sean Avery opened Warren 77, which was described at the time as a “hipster sports bar,” in Tribeca a full five years ago.
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The trend has migrated to Toronto only in the last year or so. Three Dundas sports bars have opened since November 2013: The Contender, just west of Ossington Ave., The Dock Ellis, just west of Dovercourt Rd., and The Derby, just west of Dufferin St. The fourth, Opera Bob’s — just east of Ossington Ave. — will celebrate six years in February. But the horn-rimmed glasses crowd only began showing up recently, said manager Tommy Harlocker, a high-spirited man with tattoos covering his forearms. “Before this bar was hipster anything, this was just a place to come and watch sports,” he said recently, while a Raptors game played. Opera Bob’s is also the official bar of Toronto’s Manchester City FC fan club, as the rows of powder blue scarves and cleats lining a high shelf at the back of the bar can attest. English soccer rowdies may not be the most genteel clientele, but regular patron Matt K. said Opera Bob’s is far more low-key than your typical sports bar.
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A look at the strip
Tablet users, tap here to see a map of the strip on Dundas St. W. Down the street at The Derby, a group of old university buddies from Western University had gathered to watch a late game between the Raptors and the Portland Trailblazers. (The Dock Ellis was full, they said.) Old football posters hung on one wall, showing a leather-helmeted running back stiff-arming an imaginary defender under the words, “Welcome Visitors.” Brent Bogucki, who lives nearby, said he was relieved to have a familiar place to watch basketball. The Derby is small and cosy and, apart from the Muhammad Ali photo hanging on one wall, it looks like a regular cocktail lounge. The same cannot be said for The Contender, the largest and most representative of the new hipster sports bars. A great cavernous beer hall, it’s densely packed with retro paraphernalia, specializing in posters of neglected fan favourites such as former Raptors Matt (The Red Rocket) Bonnerand Jerome (Junkyard Dog) Williams. Erin and Pam, two friends on a girls’ night out, were puzzled by the Iraqi soccer scarf displayed above a row of seats. “These are hipster jocks,” said Pam, looking around her at the men in topknots and flannel shirts, tattoos festooning their skin. “Are these hipster jocks?” “Do you think any of these dudes have played basketball in the last five years?” said Erin. Pam noticed the dessert poutine on the chalkboard menu and said the beer selection here seemed better than at most sports bars. Erin agreed. “If they have Molson, it’s ironically.” The Dock Ellis does not have Molson. Named after the late Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher of the late ’60s and early ’70s, who claims to have thrown a no-hitter while tripping on acid, the bar prides itself on serving independent Ontario brewers. It opened in November 2013 and, in many ways, The Contender and The Derby have modelled themselves in its image. “[Hipsters] like sports, too,” said co-owner Alain Pitout on a recent night in the bar’s basement, which hosts a recreational darts league when it isn’t used as an escape valve for the perpetually packed main room upstairs. “They just wanted somewhere comfortable to hang out where they didn’t feel awkward and uncomfortable and unwelcome.” Pitout and his fellow owners — Andrew Kaiser and Callum Woods, bar industry veterans — consciously cultivated a hipster esthetic, lining the walls with vintage baseball pennants and a shuffleboard table, along with more typical Toronto sports bric-a-brac (a signed picture of Brett Lawrie and a framed Nazem Kadri jersey take pride of place). The menu, by chef Trish Gill, changes every month “We wanted to veer away from the cookie cutter,” said Pitout. “We were jokingly going to call it ‘Hipster Sports Bar.’ ”Friends and family members of a Colorado man who went missing last month while rafting in the Arkansas River say he was searching for a treasure allegedly hidden by New Mexico author and antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn.
Eric Ashby, 31, had been rafting with three friends on June 28 when their raft flipped. While the three friends were able to make it out of the water safely, they told authorities they saw Ashby being swept away by the currents, the Fremont County Sheriff's Department in Colorado said in a statement.
The Sheriff's Department announced Friday that a body had been found in the Arkansas River. The department's Sgt. Megan Richards told ABC News that officers are still working to identify the remains and probably won't know for about a week if they are Ashby's.
Police chief pleads with author who hid treasure to 'call off the hunt' after 2 die searching for riches
Man Who Went Missing in Search of Treasure Chest in New Mexico Found Dead
The news comes a little over a month after New Mexico Police recovered the body of Colorado pastor Paris Wallace, who went missing after telling his family members that he was searching for the gold and gems allegedly hidden by Fenn, and a year after authorities found the remains of Randy Bilyeu, who also went missing while searching for Fenn's treasure.
Fenn claims he hid a treasure -- estimated to be worth $2 million -- somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and included a poem with clues as to where to find the treasure in his self-published 2011 memoir, "The Thrill of the Chase." Part of the poem reads, "Begin it where warm waters halt / and take it in the canyon down / not far, but too far to walk / put in below the home of Brown."
Lisa Albritton, Ashby's sister, described her brother in a statement to ABC News as an "outdoorsman" and "a real adventurer." She said that he loved to solve riddles, "so when he heard about Forrest Fenn's treasure, of course, he was intrigued."
Albritton said her brother went to Colorado in April 2016 to search for the treasure. She said that now her parents are waiting on authorities to "identify the body that was discovered nearly a month after Eric went into the Arkansas River in Fremont County, Colorado," and that her family is hoping for "closure in these difficult times."
Dave Gambrell, |
to know where were the churches and schools, so they could protect them,” said the Rev. Joseph Nzala, a priest in Tapili.
Eastern Congo has been a dumping ground for various armed groups for years, so it is not surprising that the villagers might have been confused. But as soon as they gathered, the roughly two dozen fighters roped them up at gunpoint and took them away. The band repeated the ruse in village after village, steadily expanding but eliminating hundreds along the way.
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There were no peacekeepers or real government soldiers around, and when the killing started Dec. 14, all the people could do was run. Several men who escaped said the fighters must have had their own secretive selection process because there was no way of knowing who was about to die.
“Was it someone walking slow or someone old? No,” said Charles Emabe, who managed to slip away one night.
Today, all along the paths that the L.R.A. traveled, in the shadows of freakishly tall palm trees and gigantic tangles of bamboo, lie the heaped-dirt graves of the men, women and children who were pulled out of line.
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Thousands of displaced villagers are now camping in Niangara, the one town in this area, itself a study in decay. During the Belgian colonial days, Niangara was a major hub for cotton and coffee trade. Today, all that is left are faint outlines of cobblestone roads barely perceptible under the red dirt paths and brick mansions sinking into the weeds.
Even before the news of this attack emerged, American officials had been increasingly concerned about the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has not had a discernible political agenda for years and has become infamous for its brutality. The Senate recently passed a bill calling for a more coherent strategy against it, and American officials in Uganda have been pushing for more support for the Ugandan military, seen as the most capable and disciplined in this area.
“As long as the L.R.A are out there, this is exactly what they will do — kill a lot of people,” one American military official said.
According to American and Ugandan Army officers, the rebels are still split among small groups. Mr. Kony and a band of hard-core fighters have crossed into the Central African Republic and possibly to Darfur in Sudan.
But many analysts say the desert is not for them. They need a jungle to hide in, and people to prey on. The villages outside Niangara, in hindsight, were an obvious target. There was a lot of food, a lot of people and no soldiers.
The last time Cecilia Nendu saw her three sons, they were bound with rope and being marched off toward a wall of green.
“I think they are dead,” she said.The St. Louis Blues and their leading goal and point scorer, Alex Steen, have agreed on a 3-year contract extension worth $17.4 million. The cap hit on the deal will be $5.8 million per year. Steen’s current contract has a cap hit of $3.362 million. Elliot Friedman of CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada (@FriedgeHNIC) is reporting that the deal includes a no-trade clause.
The 29-year old Steen is in the midst of a career season, and was scheduled to be an unrestricted free agent in July. In 33 games he has 22 goals, 14 assists, and 36 points for the Blues. Since being placed on a line with David Backes and T.J. Oshie, his offence has exploded. Only Alex Ovechkin (28) has scored more goals than Steen this season.
Bringing more than just offence though, Steen is a reliable defensive winger as well. It is this strong two-way game that has always made Steen a valuable contributor in St. Louis as he has never scored at the rate he is now. Steen only has two other 20 goal seasons in his career and his career high of 24 goals was achieved in the 2009-10 season.
Originally drafted in the first round of the 2002 NHL Entry Draft (24th Overall) by the Toronto Maple Leafs, Steen was acquired by the Blues in a deal that also sent Carlo Coliacovo to St. Louis, while Lee Stempniak went to Toronto.
Steen is the son of former Winnipeg Jet Thomas Steen. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba but represents Sweden internationally and is likely to be a member of the Swedish Olympic Team in Sochi 2014.
In his 9-year NHL career Steen has 145 goals, 194 assists, and 339 points in 570 career games.
Thanks for reading. Please give our Hockey Department a follow on Twitter – @lastwordBKerr, @lastwordrick, @MitchRTierney, @LastWordBigMick, @crimsonskorpion, @CMS_74_, @TwoTurtleDuffs, @d_rocchi, @dasimonetta, @LWOSDanRussell, @ddmatthews, @CanuckPuckHead, @NKonarowski2, @LarryScotti, @PurpleRocktober, @jaynichols11, @meaghannn_, @LastWordOnNHL, and @darrinharmy and follow the site @lastwordonsport and like our Facebook Page.
Interested in writing for LastWordOnSports? If so, check out our “Join Our Team” page to find out how.Hello all! It's been a while since I've had time to write here. If you have just landed here for the first time, welcome! If you scroll back through posts, you will find most of the history of the first three years or so of life off grid in my tiny house here. And I am still very much happily living here, in my fifth year now!
But more of my time these days is going to videos rather than blog posts about life here. Since, a bit sadly to me, most folks seem to prefer to watch rather than read. So head on over to http://youtube.com/fynyth for most of the latest updates. There's usually a new video every few days. Or find me on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/Minds/Gab/Steemit/GooglePlus as Fy Nyth if you'd like to follow posts there.
We're having a pretty average winter so far. Which means it's looking pretty white around here as the new year begins.
Over time, there has been a few changes to the interior such a whitewash on the walls and the addition of upper kitchen cabinets.
Summer was full of lots of adventures with friends and family including an 80+ mile backpacking trip in the Sawtooth range with a good friend.
I continued to garden and grow as much food as possible here in the very short summer.
Plants, flowers, food, and growing things remain some of my favorite things to spend time with.
One morning there was a just after sunrise rainbow over the house!
My life here has been joined by Burley, a beautiful young English Shepherd who has rapidly become a wonderful companion.
All aspects of life off grid continue as well. I'm settled in with a good supply of firewood for the year.
And like I said, for all the detailed updates on all those things over the past months, head on over to http://youtube.com/fynyth where there are currently almost 400 videos detailing most aspects of off grid life here in my tiny house along with just some fun and adventures. Thanks for following along!BOCA RATON, Fla. -- The Browns remain interested in quarterback Robert Griffin III after meeting with him Friday and Saturday, a source told cleveland.com, and coach Hue Jackson raved about him Sunday upon arriving here for NFL Annual meeting.
"It was a great meeting. I think he's obviously a tremendous talent and a great young man," Jackson told NFL Media's Steve Wyche. "He had a lot of success early in Washington and then things just didn't work out. Those things happen in the National Football League.'
Jackson stressed that the Browns are continuing to do their due diligence on Griffin III, who lost hist job last season to Kirk Cousins and didn't take a snap.
"We are going through our process,'' Jackson said. "We're going to be very diligent in what we are doing -- trying to make sure that we put the right quarterbacks on our football team and in that quarterback room. And that's one of my biggest responsibilities and also one of our organization's biggest responsibilities."
As for trade talks for 49ers Colin Kaepernick, which are at a standstill, Jackson said, "I can't comment on players on other teams. But it is where it is and eventually I think all those things will show itself."
The visit, which took place on Friday and Saturday, went well enough that the Browns are moving forward with the courtship. They're interested in signing him, but have to make sure it's the right fit.
In addition to kicking the tires on the veteran quarterbacks, the Browns are also strongly considering drafting either Jared Goff or Carson Wentz at No. 2.
If the Browns plan to sign Griffin III, the annual meeting would be the perfect place to do it. The Browns' top brass are all here, owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam, Executive Vice President of Football Operations Sashi Brown, Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta and coach Hue Jackson.
Jackson had his sights set on Kaeperick, whom he's coveted since 2011, but the 49ers are reportedly willing to hang onto him and let him battle it out with Blaine Gabbert for the starting job despite the fact he wants out. The 49ers reportedly want a second-round pick for Kaepernick, and reportedly have no plans to cut him before his $11.9 million contract is guaranteed on April 1st.
The Broncos and Browns have both taken a wait-and-see approach on Kaepernick, possibly thinking the 49ers will release him even though reports say they won't.
The advantages of Griffin III, who lost his job to Kirk Cousins and didn't take a snap last year, over Kaepernick are the fact that the Browns would not have to give up a draft pick and they could start from scratch on the contract. Kaepernick is currently averaging $19 million a year, although he can be cut any year before April 1st and not be owed anything.
Apparently, Jackson values the dual-threat quarterback and wants to work with one. But in the case of both Griffin III and Kaepernick, he'd likely have to run the read-option if the quarterbacks are to revive their careers.
Robert Griffin III visited the Browns Friday and Saturday
Griffin excelled in the scheme under former Browns offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan in 2012 before tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in the playoff loss to the Seahawks. Griffin was never the same after going 9-7 that season -- and after losing Shanahan as his offensive coordinator. He's gone 5-15 since then.
Like Kaepernick, Griffin III would be reclamation project, but Jackson seems to be up for the challenge.On most nights, the moths that eat street illusionist Obidi Seven’s tattered clothes have fuller stomachs than he. This will all change once he rescues Nora Leaf, wife of enigmatic billionaire Icarus Leaf, from her captivity by the monstrous Baron Stugart.
To do so, Obidi will have to put all his skills to the test and infiltrate the Baron’s castle, which is playing host to the Parliament of Magicians–a powerful inner circle responsible for the advancement of the mystic arts.
Obidi soon learns that nothing is what it seems as his rescue attempt turns into a blood-soaked conspiracy that will change the way he sees magic forever.
Magic and Monsters is a free science fiction and fantasy novella for a limited time only. If you enjoy Star Wars, Harry Potter, Saga, and breathing, give it a try!Glow-in-the-dark technology could soon be used to light the road ahead. At least if you're in Mexico.
Mexican civil engineer and college professor Jose Carlos Rubio has invented “phosphorescent cement,” which he says can be used to pave highways and build other luminescent infrastructure. According to Rubio, the material contains electrons that recharge like batteries by absorbing ultraviolet rays during daytime that can then glow for 8 to 12 hours at night.
He claims the material can also be charged from artificial light sources, and even works in rain or foggy conditions.
Rubio said he came up with the idea when working for a Mexican company that produces road signs, which are coated with organic paint that quickly deteriorates. Rubio needed to find longer-lasting materials that could still work as retroreflectors, or surfaces that illuminate upon contact with a vehicle's headlights. So he started studying the plastic industry and how it uses photoluminescence (absorption and emission of energy) to create electronics and toys such as glow-in-the-dark stickers and vampire fangs.
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“It more or less works like glow stick technology, but we are applying it to something that can last long and is of better quality,” Rubio told Fusion. “When a glow stick bar is broken, there’s an internal chemical reaction. Instead of that, we use photoluminescence, which requires outside light.”
He says the new material was created by transforming the tiny crystals found in common concrete into a type of gel that allows light to penetrate the surface.
The Mexican engineer says it took him about three years to apply photoluminescence technology to concrete. He was eventually awarded a patent in 2014. Now he's working on several prototypes and says he’s received interest from potential investors around the world.
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“The technology has not yet been produced, but we are working on commercializing it,” he said. “We are getting invitations to test the material and we have some options in Europe, where they have asked us to illuminate docks and coast lines.”
Rubio claims his material can be applied to almost anything, from highways and buildings to pools and patios. He says the product is not only eco-friendly and sustainable, but looks cool. The light emitted at night has a greenish-blue color. Rubio says he’s working on reproducing it red and purple as well.
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The glow-in-the-dark concrete is not cheap, however. Rubio says one square meter of normal concrete costs approximately $7 in Mexico, while his glowing material could cost more than three times that—or $25 per square meter.
But the Mexican engineer says his product could be a cost-saver in the long-run since it's solar-powered, but hasn't estimated how much it would cost to produce in the quantities needed to build or maintain large infrastructure projects.
Money aside, the glowing concrete is something that, if proven to work on a large scale, could shed new light on Mexico’s construction industry.When First Lady Melania Trump makes a public appearance, there’s about a 50 percent chance that something will go wrong: She’ll mimic several lines from a Michelle Obama speech, or she’ll don a pair of stilettos on her way to a flood zone, or she’ll get caught on camera studiously avoiding her husband, Donald Trump. On Monday, however, Melania’s speech to a room full of middle-schoolers in Detroit wasn't overtly awkward—instead, it was uncomfortable thanks to a painfully obvious elephant in the room.
The First Lady flew to Michigan on Monday to kick off her much-discussed anti-bullying campaign, which she first announced in the run-up to the election. At the time, her intentions were met with bemused incredulity; her husband, after all, fueled his presidential campaign by cyberbullying his opponents into submission and still cannot seem to resist attacking his political enemies (and allies) online, to the point of potentially instigating a nuclear war via Twitter. In the last day alone, Trump has described critical news outlets as “fake,” claimed that football players protesting racial injustice are “showing total disrespect,” and accused a grieving military widow of lying about his condolence call to her. But Stephanie Grisham, Melania's press secretary, insisted that there was no irony in the First Lady’s trip. “Mrs. Trump is independent and acts independently from her husband,” Grisham told CNN. “She does what she feels is right and knows that she has a real opportunity through her role as First Lady to have a positive impact on the lives of children. Her only focus is to effect change within our next generation.”
Even without taking her husband's behavior into account, Melania’s campaign has taken some time to get off the ground. Questions surrounding her commitment were brewing as recently as May, when several prominent anti-bullying advocates told USA Today that the First Lady’s office had yet to contact them. (At the time, Grisham said the office was working on it.) Melania made her advocacy debut months later at the United Nations, where she delivered a speech promising to focus on combatting child-on-child cyberbullying. “Nothing can be more urgent nor worthy a cause than preparing future generations for adulthood with true moral clarity and responsibility,” she said. “Therefore, we must teach each child the values of empathy and communication that are at the core of kindness, mindfulness, integrity, and leadership, which can only be taught by example.”
That the First Lady has chosen to address such a specific niche of online bullying would seem to show a modicum of self-awareness on her part—or at least on the part of one of her staffers. As Stephen Balkam, the C.E. O. of the Family Online Safety Institute, told USA Today in May, child-on-child bullying might be the one area in which Melania can carry out her work without running up against finger-pointing when it comes to the president. If she sticks to that niche, “it’s possible nothing [Donald Trump] does undermines what she tries to do,” Balkam said. “But let’s wait and see.” Fortunately, the wait was brief.Andrea displaying the results of her latest cosmetic surgeries(Picture: Facebook)
A jobless mother and grandmother has spend £20,000 worth of child benefits money on various plastic surgery procedures.
Andrea Dalzell, 48, has been saving child benefits (which amount to £15 a week) since 2003 to pay for her many operations.
Most recently she travelled to Budapest in Hungary where doctors offer cosmetic surgery at lower prices, spending £3,500 on the trip.
Andrea, from Cumbria, has four children, however she puts her ability to save money down to her thrifty lifestyle.
She says she only eats one meal a day and doesn’t drink, yet telling the Sun her ‘kids have never wanted for anything’.
MORE: Mum appeals for lifesaving treatment as leukaemia leaves white spots on son’s skin
Andrea with her daughters Sophie (centre) and Martyne (Picture: Facebook)
MORE: World’s laziest cat makes everyone step over him
Andrea said of her operations: ‘I have always known I would have surgery, having wrinkles and bags and going grey just isn’t me.’
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The £3,500 spent in Budapest included flights and accommodation – whereas the surgeries alone would have set her back and estimated £10,000 in the UK.
However Andrea’s spending has been met with criticism from the The Taxpayers’ Alliance.
Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the organisation which campaigns for reformed taxes and protecting taxpayers said: ‘Taxpayers will be livid at what looks like a total abuse of the system.
‘Benefit payments are supposed to be used as a safety net for the most vulnerable, not as a fund for cosmetic surgery.
‘With finances so tight, benefits must only go to those who really need them.’
One of Andrea’s daughters, 22-year-old Sophie, came to attention last year when it was reported that she missed probation meeting because she was having breast implants.Editor's Note: This high school football official in Louisiana contacted Outsports several weeks ago after Cyd Zeigler created a Facebook post about LGBT inclusion in his Los Angeles football officials unit. Outsports encouraged the official to share his unique perspective and has agreed to allow it anonymously, given the likelihood of retaliation from other officials and possibly his assignor. Outsports has privately confirmed the official's identity.
The language included in this story is graphic.
By an Anonymous Gay High School Football Official in Louisiana
For as long as I can remember I had always wanted to be a referee. I have no idea why, I just did. When I turned 13, I started refereeing league basketball games. At 15 I started umpiring baseball. I loved it, making money and having fun. When I graduated high school I was finally able to start officiating high school games, and have been doing so for the last 12 years.
I started officiating football just as I was starting college. Being able to officiate a game then head over to Hooters with my fellow officials afterward is just a fun time to get away from regular life. When we get to Hooters the guys tease me because I am usually the youngest, so I am expected to try to get the waitress' number. I always laugh it off, not because I have a girlfriend, but because I am gay. It's a secret I've been careful to keep from everyone at that table.
Being gay in the Bible Belt has been rough for me, even more so since I'm as deep in the South as you can get. Rural southern Louisiana is somewhere you don't want to be known as being gay. You will be treated like a third-class citizen because people think there is something wrong with being gay. So it came as no shock to me when I started officiating that I would hear gay slurs from fans and other officials, even though no one knew my secret.
One of my first years as an official I was on a football playoff crew headed to northwest Louisiana for a game, a four-hour drive away. Somehow the conversation in the van turned to gay rights. I had to listen to the guys rant and rave about how it is an abomination.
"Fags are what's wrong with this country."
"I don't see what's so desirable about a man's ass."
"How can a real man not want to be with a beautiful babe?"
"There is something wrong with them, probably was abused growing up."
I bit my tongue sooooo hard that I could put a tongue ring in it just from listening to these guys. They are supposed to be the people I trust on the field, yet here they were unknowingly degrading me just because they weren't born gay. It just pushed me even further in the closet.
It's hit me over the years that just the perception of being gay can be career-ending for a football official in my area. It seems no one wants to associate with a gay guy or be anywhere around one. Because there aren't any laws in place barring employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, there is nothing stopping it, especially for independent contractors like high school football officials.
During the fall I work a Saturday youth football league. There was a Saturday a few years back that I will never forget. I was talking with a friend of mine at halftime about an official whom parents had complained about. One parent supposedly saw the guy kissing another guy as he got out of his car, so she got all the parents in the stands in a fit because there was a "pedophile" on the field that was going to "touch the little boys so he could get off to them at night." The commissioner asked the assignor not to bring him back.
Not long after that someone showed up at one of the youth games handing out bumper stickers that said, "Fags = sex offenders." When he offered one to me I declined. He mumbled something about political correctness and I went on my way.
Usually you can go to the association's board of directors or to the assignment secretary when there's a problem. In my cases it would be utterly futile because even the board and assignment secretary use gay slurs openly. That's just how some people down here have been raised. They think of gays as weak individuals who are perverted and messed up in the head.
A few years back, there was an official in our association who had a very high-pitched voice, so naturally (according to most of the guys) he had to be gay. One night at halftime during a game my partners were discussing him and how no one wanted to work with him.
"I sure as hell don't want to work with that fag," one of them said. "Hell I don't even want to be around him. All that gay shit, I don't want any of that rubbing off on me, and I sure as hell don't want to be seen around him. Be all I need, people thinking I like the Hershey road too just because I was working a game with him."
It was not just that one guy's opinion. He spoke for the rest of the crew.
One night we met up with the crew the high-pitched guy had been working with, and his head referee was extremely livid.
"That cocksucker will never work with me again," the white hat said. "His fucking gay ass did nothing but give us problems. That little cocksucker even had the audacity to tell me that I missed a call! I told him that he could go fuck himself, because I'm sure he has his own dildo to do it with."
Men are not the only officials who are the subject of these slurs. Female officials are as well, because of the stereotype that all women who aren't with a guy, or who look more masculine, are lesbians. Even though I have not worked with a female official in football, I have in other sports and have heard other officials speculating about their sexuality.
With female officials in basketball, I have seen them both get games and lose games because of their perceived sexuality. If it is expected to be a rough game, they may send someone they think is a lesbian or looks butch to work it because of their perceived "manliness." I have actually seen a female official who was perceived to be a lesbian swapped out from a game in a tournament. The coach claimed she cost them a game earlier in the season, but I learned later in the hospitality room that they didn't want her officiating their game because some of the parents perceived her to be a lesbian.
"Being a Christian school, we don't agree with that lifestyle," the coach told me.
I wish I could say I haven't had any "close calls," because I have. A few years back I was working a game, and as my crew was leaving someone called out my name. I looked over and saw a guy I had met at a gay club waving at me from the stands. I was frozen with horror. I waved back and rushed my crew partners to the car. I lied and said I had graduated high school with him.
After that happened I didn't go out to clubs or meet guys for a few months because I was afraid someone else would see me.
If I didn't have such a strong passion for officiating I would have quit years ago. It has become a passion, something I always look forward to every fall. I learned a long time ago, a very important part of officiating is having the ability to block out negative comments. So I did, until I realized other gay officials might not be able to block these comments out like I have. So I decided to come forward here with the hope that my story may help to bring attention to this problem that no one wants to talk about.
My hope is that the Louisiana High School Athletic Association would add training on the impact of homophobia in sports to the mandatory rules clinic that officials and coaches have to attend every year. Being a native Louisianan, I know how hard it is going to be for some to accept, but it is a good way to start.
I have thought about leaving Louisiana many times, but various things have kept me here, from family to work. It always seems as if I'm just not meant to leave. Now that we have marriage equality, I know things will continue to change. I know people will become more accepting. I've even started coming out to close friends and family members.
I know when I do come out completely I won't have to spend my time trying to hide my sexuality. I can instead use that energy to help make myself a better official. But until this homophobia is dealt with out in the open, Louisiana high school officiating will never get better.Image caption Continuous sleep is important for memory formation
Broken sleep affects the ability to build memories, a study of mice suggests.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science findings could help explain memory problems linked to conditions including Alzheimer's and sleep apnoea.
The Stanford University research found disrupting sleep made it harder for the animals to recognise familiar objects.
A UK sleep expert said the brain used deep sleep to evaluate the day's events and decide what to keep.
This study looked at sleep that was fragmented, but not shorter or less intense than normal for the mice.
It used a technique called optogenetics, where specific cells are genetically engineered so they can be controlled by light.
They targeted a type of brain cell that plays a key role in switching between the states of being asleep and being awake.
Mouse memory test
The researchers then sent light pulses directly into the brains of mice while they slept.
"There are some things that we need to 'lock down' as a permanent hard memory Dr Neil Stanley, Sleep expert
This meant they could disrupt their sleep without affecting total sleep time or the quality or composition of sleep.
The animals were then placed in a box with two objects, one of which they had encountered before.
Mice would naturally spend more time examining the newer object, and those who had been allowed uninterrupted sleep did just that.
But those whose sleep had been disrupted were equally interested in both objects, suggesting their memories had been affected.
Writing in the journal, the researchers, led by Dr Luis de Lecea, said: "Sleep continuity is one of the main factors affected in various pathological conditions that impact memory, including Alzheimer's and other age-related cognitive deficits."
Broken sleep also affects people addicted to alcohol, and those with sleep apnoea - a condition in which the throat repeatedly narrows or closes during sleep, restricting oxygen and causing the patient to wake up.
The researchers add there is no evidence of a causal link between sleep disruption and any of these conditions.
But they added: "We conclude that regardless of the total amount of sleep or sleep intensity, a minimal unit of uninterrupted sleep is crucial for memory consolidation."
Independent sleep expert Dr Neil Stanley, a former chairman of the British Sleep Society, said: "During the day, we accumulate all these memories.
"At some point we have to sort through what's happened during the day.
"There are some things that we need to 'lock down' as a permanent hard memory.
"That process occurs in deep sleep. So anything that affects sleep will have an effect on that process to a greater or a lesser extent."
Dr Stanley said there was particularly striking evidence that people with sleep apnoea had particular problems "locking down" memories.
And he added that people with Alzheimer's often had trouble sleeping, but said: "There is something there. But whether it's the degeneration of the brain that causes poor sleep, or poor sleep that aids the degeneration of the brain has not been determined."
Miranda Watson, director of communications at the British Lung Foundation, said: "For patients with the dangerous sleep disorder, obstructive sleep apnoea, this study will come as no surprise.
"Patients regularly stop breathing during the night when their airways become blocked depriving them of a full night's rest.
"This interrupted sleep can cause extreme day time tiredness and memory loss."By Lyte
TLDR: Our player behavior philosophies include punishment, reform and positive reinforcement. With rewards, we have to be careful to design systems that don’t simply incentivize positive behavior for a small duration, but provide reasons to stay positive all the time.
Hello again!
Last time, I mentioned that Drevarius would go into a deeper dive on punishment in this blog, but with the surprise Mystery Gift for positive behavior going out to 95% of players in 2014, we wanted to take the opportunity to jump ahead and explore our philosophies around rewards and positive reinforcement.
One of our core philosophies is that there's no silver bullet to improving player behavior in online games, and you always need a mix including punishment, reform, and positive reinforcement.
End of Snowdown Mystery Gift
In 2014, we focused on the community and self-reflection. We ran a few experiments, including an exercise where players reflected on their last 10 games and we all came to the conclusion that the one negative experience that happens occasionally should not define our community. With Snowdown’s celebration of everyone coming together to be a part of the Legend of the Poro King, it was a great opportunity to deliver a positive behavior surprise.
One of the keys of positive reinforcement is the idea of “schedules,” or the expected frequency of a reinforcing event. Introducing surprise rewards unrelated to specific activities or durations is one of the most effective ways to encourage positive player behavior. The surprise element is crucial: imagine an achievement system where, if you are sportsmanlike for your next 10 games, you unlock a free skin. Players could simply behave for 10 games, unlock their gift and go back to playing the same way they were before (whether that’s positive, negative or neutral). So, instead, we’ll continue to surprise players once in awhile for their positive behavior. Because players aren't sure what the next reward is (or when it is), players will strive to be sportsmanlike in a larger range of games to try to get all the surprises.
For positive players in the game, this won't really affect them and they'll just get surprises every so often for being awesome. For neutral players, this effort might convince some of them to put in that extra effort in a few more games to get the next surprise. For negatively behaved players, this effort might also encourage a few to change their ways although we expect the biggest impact to be with the neutral players.
It's All in the Surprise!
In future roll-outs it’ll be possible for players to earn the next surprise so long as they've been positive since the last surprise was awarded. So, if you were chat restricted and missed a surprise, you could still be eligible if you were positive in the time range between that one and the next.
Also, keep in mind that not every surprise will be a mystery gift. Every surprise will differ in magnitude, and be tailored to different players. For example, the last surprise before the end of Snowdown gift was an IP Boost, mainly beneficial for newer players still building out their champion pools. Other surprises may include collectibles like unique summoner icons (which some players will remember we’ve tried before with the Santa Baron icon).
In the last blog in this series, we’ll be back to discuss punishment as a deterrent for negative behavior and our philosophy around it. Thanks as always, and we’ll see you in game!
- LyteMCC full disc images are actually obtained in perspective geometry. These images have been rectified using geometric correction steps to align to the Mars global map including a map projection step. Each one of the full disc images covers partial portion of the Mars disc but not complete. While mosaicing the images, relative geometric differences were removed by additional image registration procedure. A seamless Mars full disc canvas was prepared, adjusting the colour differences between images.
Subsequently, the Mars Global mosaic was rendered by a 3D Planet engine with the parameters specific to Mars enabling to take any view of the planet according to the viewer position and altitude.
Eight full disc images from Dec2015 and Jan 2016 MCC were used. The Pixel Resolution was uniformly scaled to 4 km pixels.0 Shares
The first half of 2011 has seen record attacks at the state level on women’s reproductive rights, according to a new report by the Guttmacher Institute:
In the first six months of 2011, states enacted 162 new provisions related to reproductive health and rights. Fully 49% of these new laws seek to restrict access to abortion services, a sharp increase from 2010, when 26% of new laws restricted abortion. The 80 abortion restrictions enacted this year are more than double the previous record of 34 abortion restrictions enacted in 2005—and more than triple the 23 enacted in 2010. All of these new provisions were enacted in just 19 states.
Click here to read about the 162 new provisions in more detail. To put the above data in perspective, take a look at this graph:
CFI’s Office of Public Policy will continue to track this issue and keep you informed about the latest news as it happens.حضرت آیت العظمی امام سید علی خامنهای
رهبر معظم انقلاب اسلامی ایران
بشارالاسد
رئیسجمهور عربی سوریه
«بشار اسد» رئیسجمهور سوریه با ارسال نامهای به رهبر معظم انقلاب اسلامی ایران و رئیسجمهور کشورمان، درگذشت حجاج ایرانی در فاجعه منا را به ایشان، ملت ایران و خانوادههای داغدار حجاج تسلیت گفت.به گزارش فارس در دمشق، بشار اسد رئیسجمهور عربی سوریه با ارسال نامهای به رهبر معظم انقلاب اسلامی ایران، حادثه جانباختگان حجاج ایرانی در فاجعه منا را به ایشان، ملت ایران و خانوادههای داغدار این حجاج تسلیت گفت.متن کامل این پیام به شرح زیر است:السلام علیکم و رحمةالله و برکات، با اندوه و حزن فراوان و دلهای سرشار از اعتقاد و ایمان به مشیت الهی خبر جانباختن بیش از 130 تن و مجروج شدن بیش از 375 نفر دیگر در حادثه غمبار هنگام انجام مناسک حج را دریافت نمودم.اینجانب به نام خود و به نام مردمی عربی سوریه صادقانهترین مراتب تسلیت و همدردی برادرانه خود را به حضرتعالی و مردم برادر ایران ابراز داشته و از خداوند قادر سبحان غفران و رحمة واسعه، قبولی طاعات، علو درجات و محشور شدن با صدیقین و نیکوکاران در بالاترین درجات بهشت را برای شهدا و شفای عاجل را برای مجروحین خواستارم.این نامه در تاریخ چهارم مهرماه 1394 از سوی رئیسجمهوری عربی سوریه نگاشته شده است.همچنین بشار اسد رئیس جمهور سوریه در نامهای جداگانه به حسن روحانی رئیس جمهور ایران مراتب همدردی برادرانه خود و مردم عربی سوریه را نسبت به این حادثه ابراز کرده است.Last night, July 9th, 2013, Rachel Maddow opened her eponymously-named MSNBC show with a segment about how Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is a RACIST. I do not endeavor to engage in a debate/dialogue about the veracity of that assertion. I’m not a Rand Paul fan-boy. I don’t plan to vote for Rand Paul in 2016..or anyone for that matter. I honestly don’t know if Rand Paul is racist. |
, TBD (TBS)*
*if necessary
* * *Will Trader Bill strike again?
That's where this week's Patriots mailbag begins, as we inch closer to the NFL draft and consider the possibility of the team actually sticking with the No. 29 overall pick. If history is any indication, the Patriots are more likely to trade than stay in their assigned slot.
The perception of the club has been that it is more likely to trade down, but as 2012 reminded us, they also move up when the opportunity presents itself. That was the year the team traded up twice in the first round -- for defensive end Chandler Jones and linebacker Dont'a Hightower.
So what dynamics are in play this year for the team?
Q. Mike, I think you need to start preparing your readers for the Patriots to trade down. The most likely trade partner, I believe, is San Francisco. They could put together a package similar to Green Bay's for Clay Matthews or Minnesota for Cordarelle Patterson while still keeping a pick in each round. I think the Patriots focus on TE/LB and RB/KR. -- Anonymous
A. Bill Belichick loves to wheel and deal on draft day, so I don't think anyone would be surprised at a trade. Two thoughts to ponder when it comes to draft strategy: 1) If all the top quarterbacks are picked before No. 29, and there is the run on wide receivers that many predict because of a deep class, it could push better players down the board at areas the Patriots would target, potentially making it more enticing to keep the pick (similar to 2004 with Vince Wilfork at No. 21 overall); 2) Because it's considered a deep draft, and more teams are perceived to be willing to trade down, does that make it tougher to strike a deal? Overall, I'd project higher odds at a trade down than up. It's more of a rarity that the Patriots pick in their assigned slot in the first round, with the last time coming in 2011 with left tackle Nate Solder (No. 17).
Running back Bishop Sankey would be a solid pick for the Pats, but it's doubtful he'll be available. Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Q. Now that the Pats seem to have addressed the secondary, in your opinion what position do they need to beef up next? -- Glenn J. (Boston)
A. Glenn, the cornerback position looks particularly deep while no one would be surprised if they possibly add another safety. Overall, I have defensive end, defensive tackle, tight end and linebacker atop the list. When looking at team needs, sometimes it's smart to think two years ahead, with 2015 in mind. Here's a complete snapshot of team needs from this view.
Q. Hi Mike, do you think the NFL made a mistake in moving it into May? Also, what do you think of Roger Goodell's desire to move it out of New York at least some of the time? -- David (North Attleborough, Mass.)
A. David, last year's draft was held April 25-27. This year it's May 8-10. So we're looking at essentially a two-week delay. I'd personally prefer it earlier, but I don't think it's a big deal. It just makes it a little tougher on the rookies to catch up and make an impact in their first year because it condenses the offseason camps. As for moving the draft out of New York, I don't have a strong opinion on that one. I've covered it every year from Patriots team headquarters, so the actual location of the draft isn't a huge consideration.
Q. A darkhorse pick would be C/G Marcus Martin of Southern Cal. It is a real need of the Pats and I think with Nate Solder about to make a good amount of dough by the end of his rookie deal following the 2015 season (assuming the fifth-year option is picked up), it is time for the Pats to invest in some cheap interior line labor. Maybe even target G/T Brandon Thomas of Clemson (torn ACL) as a great value third-day pick (he was a late first/early second before the injury). Think of investing in the interior. -- Eric (Braintree, Mass.)
A. Eric, I don't think many would argue with you on that possibility, assuming the Patriots view Martin in the same light as analysts who rank him as the top available center. In 2006, the New York Jets picked center Nick Mangold 29th overall and that's a pick that is still paying dividends to them today. If the Patriots thought Martin, who at 6-foot-3 3/8 and 320 pounds would add size and physicality at center, would have a Mangold-type impact, it would be a solid way to go. As for Thomas, it reminds me a bit of when the Patriots selected Marcus Cannon in the fifth round of the 2011 draft. At what point does it become so good of a value that you have to pounce? Maybe that's where the fourth-round compensatory pick comes in handy.
Q. Hi Mike. I agree with your analysis as to how the CB situation will be approached given the four-game suspension of Brandon Browner to open the season. However, I expect Logan Ryan will also be groomed/tested to play safety during minicamp/training camp and in the preseason. Given what he demonstrated in 2013, it makes him too valuable to be left sitting on the bench. Having Ryan and Duron Harmon sharing the safety position would seem ideal for both of them and the Patriots alongside Devin McCourty. Your thoughts? -- Jake M. (Vancouver, BC)
A. Jake, I like Ryan better at corner, but similar to when Marquice Cole worked at safety last spring in offseason camps, it wouldn't be surprising if Ryan sees some time there as part of building his versatility. One thing I'd say is for those hoping that the Patriots get bigger at safety, as Rodney Harrison suggested, a McCourty/Ryan combination would be among the smallest in the NFL.
Q. With the recent acquisitions of Darrelle Revis, Brandon Browner, and Patrick Chung in the secondary, the Patriots seem to have the talent and open up the defensive playbook. Revis and Browner are exceptional at playing at the line of scrimmage and jamming their receivers. However, I'm not convinced that it'll result in sending extra pass rushers. Bill Belichick has never been one to have his defense pin their ears back and go after the quarterback. I don't think having Revis and Browner will change his philosophy. This isn't to say that these acquisitions won't result in more sacks, but rather their skills will allow the front four to be more consistent in pressuring the quarterback. Do you expect the Patriots to start blitzing more in 2014 or will it be more of the norm with better results? -- Alvin (Amherst, Mass.)
A. Alvin, the percentages of blitzes will obviously vary on a weekly basis, but I don't expect the Patriots to suddenly become a blitz-first defense. When we think back to the Super Bowl and how the Seahawks beat the Broncos, it wasn't a blitz-heavy plan. They were able to play tight coverage and marry that with a standard four-man rush and it worked. That's ideal.
Q. Mike, there's been a lot of talk about the Patriots shifting their draft philosophy to adapt to new schemes or the "passing" league. Have you noticed evidence of that in the past drafts and if so, what are some of the "giveaways" that it's occurring? One friend of mine doesn't believe the narrative. -- grandjordanian (San Diego)One man is punching his way through "Fallout 4." Yes, you read that correctly: punching.
This is One-Punch Man. Bethesda Game Studios
Usually, people play through "Fallout" games with a weapon of some sort (other than furious fists): perhaps a laser gun, or a shotgun, or, ya know, some type of gun. But not One-Punch Man.
Do you know what "One-Punch Man" is? I didn't until this morning. It's an anime, apparently! It looks like this:
This is the REAL One-Punch Man. One Punch Man
Similar look, no? Here's a clearer picture of the re-creation in "Fallout 4":
Bethesda Game Studios
Just your standard bald dude, right? WRONG.
Here he is exploding a door with his explosive fist. Bethesda Game Studios
And here he is casually walking through that exploded door. Bethesda Game Studios
In the above images, he's employing the "furious power fist" — a ridiculous-looking weapon that makes your character's punch attack far stronger than normal. It looks like this:
Bethesda Game Studios
One-Punch Man's adventures in "Fallout 4" are pretty incredible so far, even for a game that's bursting with incredible moments. The character's creator is documenting his journey on the blog Saitama's Wasteland Adventures. Here he is leaping from building-to-building in beautiful post-apocalypse Boston:
Bethesda Game Studios
And here he is suplexing a raider, which is something you can apparently do in "Fallout 4":
Watch out, pooch! Bethesda Game Studios
Sometimes, he needs to take a break from punching and suplexing and leaping. Here he is taking a casual portrait with a long-dead person:
Bethesda Game Studios
And here he is trying to feel pretty:
Even after the apocalypse people want to feel beautiful. Bethesda Game Studios
But don't get it twisted: this man is here to punch faces.
Bethesda Game Studios
Bethesda Game Studios
Bethesda Game Studios
Bethesda Game Studios
Such is the life of One-Punch Man.SANTO DOMINGO: The man providing legal advice to American church workers charged with trying to take children out of Haiti may have a string of legal charges against him in the US and has emerged as the key suspect in a child prostitution ring in El Salvador.
The mother and stepfather of Jorge Anibal Torres Puello told The Miami Herald on Saturday that the fugitive wanted by Salvadorean police was their son, who has been advising the church volunteers.
Jorge Anibal Torres Puello. Credit:AP
''That's him,'' Ana Puello said from her modest home in the outskirts of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. ''But those things they say about him, I doubt they're true … He told me, 'Mami, I swear I didn't.' He would never hurt a child.''
Though his wife was convicted in the case, Mr Torres Puello left the country - wanted by Salvadorean police - before ending up in Haiti. A self-styled lawyer with no law degree, he has had other brushes with the law, including a charge in Miami in 1999 for possessing fake documents, records show. His bond was later revoked and a warrant issued for his arrest.Bebeto Matthews / AP The US Airways jet in the Hudson River
A former executive producer at ABC's Good Morning America and a senior broadcast producer at NBC Nightly News, Ben Sherwood has written a new book, The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life, that discusses, among other things, what you can do to survive a plane crash. Sherwood talked to TIME shortly after a US Airways flight made a crash landing in the Hudson River. (See pictures of the Hudson River plane crash.)
It seems that all the people got off this flight safely. That's sort of shocking, isn't it?
I write in The Survivors Club about the "myth of hopelessness." People think that all plane crashes are fatal. That's because of TWA 800 and Egypt Air and ValuJet and Pan Am 103 and all these other flight names and numbers that are emblazoned in our mind because everybody died. But in fact, if you look at the last two major incidents involving passenger jets in the United States, in Denver and now this one I'm assuming from the CNN reporting that they think everyone is safe but in both of the major incidents, the plane that went off the runway in Denver and this incident, you've got very, very high survival rates: 100% in Denver with some injuries, obviously and what looks like 100% here. People generally believe that no one survives a plane crash. But according to government data, 95.7% of the passengers involved in airplane crashes categorized as accidents actually survive. Then, if you look at the most serious plane crashes, that's a smaller number; the survival rate in the most serious kinds of accidents is 76.6%. So the point there is, when the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] analyzed all the airplane accidents between 1983 and 2000, 53,000 people were involved in those accidents, and 51,000 survived. That's an incredibly high survival rate.
Are you surprised that all the passengers seem to have gotten off the plane so quickly?
The other myth that you see in this is the myth of panic. People assume, in an airplane crash, that there's pandemonium and people panic. But in fact, according to research done after earthquakes and natural disasters and airplane crashes, panic behavior rarely happens. In fact, as passengers are describing right now, people were scared, but they got very quiet, silent; they awaited instructions; a few people took command, got everybody in line and got everybody off the plane. So there are people crying and people that are afraid and people giving voice to their concerns, but if you're trying to get off a plane that's in the water and you know you're sinking, and you're pushing to the exits and using your loud voice that's not panic. That's completely purposeful, understandable behavior. (Read "How to Get Out Alive.")
You write in your book about attending an FAA workshop on surviving plane crashes. What were some of the most important tips that you can recall from that session?
I learned several things. There's the five-row rule. When a professor in England, Ed Galea, analyzed the seating charts of more than 100 plane crashes and interviewed 1,900 survivors and 155 cabin-crew members, he discovered that survivors usually move an average of five rows before they can get off a burning aircraft. That's the cutoff. In his view and he's done a lot of statistical analysis the people who are most likely to survive a plane crash are people who are sitting right next to the exit row or one row away. Not a particular exit row but any exit row. That's the person most likely to survive. Beyond a five-row cutoff from the exit, your chances, in his view, are greatly reduced. So the first thing I think about when I get on a plane or when I'm making my flight plans is, "Where am I sitting?" (Read "How to Survive A Disaster.")
I also pay careful attention to the safety card and the safety briefing, because every plane is different. That information is part of developing a plan, and because I know that plane crashes are survivable, I want to know what the exits are, what the equipment is. I want to know what's under my seat. I actually reach under the seat with my hands and touch to make sure that my life jacket is actually there. So the safety briefings are very important. The FAA has done research on safety briefings, and they find that the least informed people, those that don't pay attention to the safety briefings, are frequent fliers. They think they know all about flying and all about planes, so they get on a flight and pick up their Wall Street Journal and start e-mailing on their BlackBerrys.
I do not take my shoes off. I leave them on in the event that I need to run through a burning plane. I wear lace-up shoes. In the event of an impact, people's shoes have been known to fly off them, particularly flip-flops and other "convenient" shoes. Typically, people have a couple of pops at the bar, put on earphones; they put on blindfolds, they take off their shoes, and they go to sleep. But research has shown that the first three minutes of a plane flight and the last eight this is called the rule of plus three/minus eight are when about 80% of airplane accidents take place. In that time, you should not be blindfolded; you should not be drunk or have earphones on. You should really be paying attention, because you actually can survive a plane crash.
See how to escape down an airplane slide.
Read the 1982 TIME article about the Potomac River plane crash.Calgary may not be known for its attention to architecture in the past, but it looks like that might be starting to change.
Azure magazine, one of North America's leading architecture magazines, has named two Calgary projects in their 'Top 10 Projects of 2012.'
Both the Bow Tower and the Peace Bridge were named to the Toronto-based periodical's list. Calgary was the only Canadian city to be named to the list and the only city to make the list twice.
Story continues after the slideshow...
Photo gallery Azure's Top 10 Architectural Projects of 2012 See Gallery Calgary Architecture: Bow Tower, Peace Bridge Named To Azure Magazine's 'Top 10 Projects Of 2012' List 1 / 10
Azure's Top 10 Architectural Projects of 2012 1 / 10
According to Azure, the Peace Bridge made the #3 cut:
In March, Calgary cut the ribbon on a spectacular new pedestrian and cycling bridge by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The steel structure spans 130 metres and connects the downtown core with residential areas on the other side of the Bow River. Painted a brilliant red on the exterior and white internally, the long, lean structure has a glass roof and integrated linear lighting for night-time illumination. A dedicated bike lane runs down the centre with foot traffic travelling along elevated sidewalks on either side. Calgarians may have grumbled about the project’s high cost and delayed schedule, but a reported 6,000 people are now using the bridge daily, a much higher number than expected.
Azure selected the Bow Tower as their #10 project :
Along with the new Peace Bridge by Calatrava, Calgary also inaugurated its tallest skyscraper this year, designed by Foster + Partners. The 58-storey glass and steel structure, headquarters for EnCana and Cenovus, is packed with sustainable attributes; top among them is the building’s curved form that’s designed to use sunlight to heat the interior. The Bow may not be a major project for the famous U.K. firm that’s engineered some of the most sophisticated structures in the world – including Virgin’s new space-travel terminal in the New Mexican desert – but it is an important symbol for the oil-rich city that’s just beginning to pay attention to the look of its downtown core and to the quality of its buildings.
Other projects named to Azure's list include Book Mountain in Rotterdam, the CCTV building in Beijing and London's Olympic Park.
Calgary also made Azure's '10 Projects We’re Following in 2013' list, with the construction of the National Music Centre of Canada.On a Wednesday, between the rains, a family took their long-awaited baby girl to the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray in the world.
They waited years for this baby — their first, this sweet girl, three months old.
Can you imagine their joy? This beloved baby in their arms lifted up, up, up to touch the ancient stone? Can you imagine their joy? This beloved baby, a link to the future of the Jewish people?
And then…
On the way home, a man plowed into a crowd of people waiting at a light rail station — a crowd of people just wanting to go home, or get coffee, or pick up groceries before the Shabbat rush. A man that Israel says has ties to Hamas, he stepped on the gas, his foot hard on the accelerator, straight for the crowd of people, old and young.
This family was part of that crowd.
Can you imagine their horror? The grandfather clutching the baby, surely it can’t be happening, — WAKE UP WAKE UP, surely it’s only a dream — surely this car will stop before it …….
It didn’t stop.
Can you imagine their horror? The screams and then the silence…
A baby girl is dead.
Her family is shattered.
Meanwhile, international media reports that “Israeli police shot an E. Jerusalem man.” (AP may have changed the headline, but the url exists forever and ever.)
I kind of hate the world right now.
Let’s all light a candle. It’s really dark here.Solberg was one of Loeb's main challengers during the Frenchman's WRC career, denying him a maiden title in 2003 by one point and then finishing runner-up to the future nine-time champion in 2004 and 2005.
In February, Loeb announced he will spend the upcoming season driving for Team Peugeot-Hansen in World Rallycross for the category's third season - with the previous two campaigns both won by Solberg.
"It’s fantastic for the FIA World RX Championship that Loeb takes on this challenge," Solberg told Motorsport.com.
"He is a major star and an incredible driver. It has been a dream of mine for several years to compete against Loeb again, and I have asked him to come over many times. Now it's finally happened!"
Solberg added that he expects Loeb to already be a threat in his debut season, but stressed that the Frenchman's new teammate - 2015 runner-up Timmy Hansen - is likewise a force to be reckoned with.
"I believe that Peugeot once again will be a major factor in the 2016 championship, and Loeb is one of two serious contenders in that team," Solberg said.
"[He] will be a championship contender, I think. Maybe he will need a few races to learn the 'game', but the fight for the title will be extremely hard for everyone, myself included."
Asked if he had any advice to give the Frenchman, Solberg said said: "Loeb knows six times more than myself how to win a [world] championship, so I'm not in a position to give him advice.
"But I can give him the one: 'You need to beat me.' "
Interview by Alex SergeevA.torrent file is a binary file. Once you download such a file to your system, how do you know from which tracker it is announced, or which files it will download? How about validating the.torrent file or checking how many are downloading the torrent?The cmdline utility dumptorrent might come in handy.
Features
Brief, verbose and raw modes for checking information
Shows size, file names, announce[-list], comment, publisher and info_hash among other info
Get downloader count from the tracker
Installation
You need to compile and use dumptorrent from source on Ubuntu. Download the package from the project homepage on SourceForge and run the following commands:
$ tar -xvf dumptorrent-version.tar.gz $ cd dumptorrent-version $ make
Usage
dumptorrent supports several switches. Use the --help switch to read more.
$./dumptorrent --help Usage:./dumptorrent [-t|-f field|-b|-v|-d|-s] [-w timeout] [-] files.torrent..../dumptorrent [-w timeout] -scrape url infohash Options: -t: validate torrent files. only print the invalid files. returns 0 if all files are valid. -f : output a single field. one file a line. empty line on error. handy for scripting. field can be: name, TODO... -b: brief dump -v: full dump -d: raw hierarchical dump -s: show scrape info -w: network timeout -scrape: scrape a hash value aginst a tracker e.g.:./dumptorrent -scrape http://torrent.linux.duke.edu:6969/announce 61fbd245b29636cfa8c49cb2dabe7262f6db1e66
Most common use case example:
$./dumptorrent -v../ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent../ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent: Name: ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso Size: 1150844928 (1.07G) Announce: http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce Info Hash: 60827d6691f7cff3a45bc8ea52cc3cb48d3f3034 Piece Length: 524288 (512K) Creation Date: Thu Apr 23 16:20:37 2015 Comment: Ubuntu CD releases.ubuntu.com Files: ubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso 1150844928 (1.07G) Announce List: http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announce http://ipv6.torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/announceLots of chatter about the news that GOP Rep. Steve Stockman, who threatened Obama with impeachment over guns, has invited Ted Nugent to the State of the Union address. Nugent has accepted:
“I am excited to have a patriot like Ted Nugent joining me in the House Chamber to hear from President Obama,” Stockman said in a press release. “After the Address I’m sure Ted will have plenty to say.”
That’s a good bet; apparently Stockman is encouraging reporters to interview Nugent after the speech. Nugent, of course, is best known for making this claim, which was investigated by the Secret Service:
“If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Nugent said, according to a video that the NRA posted on YouTube. “If you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration, I don’t even know what you’re made out of.”
That’s bad, but if I were the GOP leadership, the prospect of further comments from Nugent after the speech would have me a bit worried. After all, there’s little doubt that reporters will seek him out, and there’s really no telling what Nugent will say. The GOP leadership has not commented on the news.
But really, this episode is significant for reasons that go well beyond Nugent. The key actor here who matters is Steve Stockman. The problem lies in all the over-the-top stuff GOP lawmakers say regularly that isn’t quite crazy enough to earn widespread condemnation, as Nugent’s quotes have, but are still whacked out enough to encourage an atmosphere that helps keep millions of GOP base voters sealed off from reality. The problem is the perpetual winking and nodding to The Crazy that is deemed marginally acceptable — the hints about creeping socialism, the claim that modest Obama executive actions amount to tyranny, the suggestions that Obama’s values are vaguely un-American and that Obama is transforming the country and the economy into something no longer recognizably American, and so on — more so than the glaringly awful stuff that gets the media refs to throw their flags.
As Jonathan Bernstein put it the other day, Republican lawmakers who flirt with this type of talk regularly are helping create an environment in which moderate Republicans are forever on the defensive and in fear of the base. If moderate Republicans want to change this, they will have to dial this stuff back:
They have to stop educating their rank-and-file voters to accept crazy stuff. That means cutting out the teleprompter jokes, the winks to birthers, the claims that Democrats are anti-American — all of it. It means that if a backbench member of the House yells out “you lie” during a presidential speech, he gets censured instead of praised. That’s going to mean some short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. It may be hard to go in front of a conservative crowd and resist an applause line calling Barack Obama a socialist. […] Can Republicans shut it all down? Of course not. But they could choose to minimize it. That means politicians steering clear of it; it means those party actors who care about winning elections doing what they can to discourage it from those party actors who have different incentives (such as those hawking that merchandise or who can make a very good living selling to a group which is a large market but a small portion of the electorate).
The problem isn’t so much Ted Nugent as it is the Steve Stockmans of the world telling their constituents that Obama’s sensible gun reforms rise to the level of impeachment.I am a machinist by trade, and in this glorious career of mine, we make parts according to blueprints. The blueprints are drawn according to a “perfect world” scenario. All the pieces fit together perfectly, nothing is out of place. However, to compensate for the imperfect world we live in, (actually making the part/pieces to the whole puzzle), we have these numbers that are called “tolerances”. Tolerances basically communicate to everyone involved in the design, machining, fabricating, inspecting, and assembling departments, how far off a dimension can be from “perfection” and still have the whole thing work. Some tolerances are more “intolerant” than others, one dimension could only be a few thousandths of an inch away from perfection while others have more freedom and could be a foot away from perfection but still work together. This tells us what to pay attention to, what parts we need to work on with special attention, often times working slower, with much more caution. Tolerance communicates the importance of an issue. What’s important to you? In your individual life, in your family, communities and business, seek out and come to agreement on what’s important, what can be tolerated more than other things? In other words, pick your battles, not everything is of equal importance. But to those issues that are of much importance, the things that, if not held to a close tolerance, and not approached with care, would ultimately collapse an entire project, make an effort to communicate these things with absolute clarity and urgency, and perhaps everything else will fall into place.
AdvertisementsAdam Jed, Andrew Weissman and Kyle Freeny, prosecutors working for Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller, depart U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday. | Josh Gerstein/POLITICO Another prosecutor joins Trump-Russia probe Kyle Freeny jumps to Mueller staff from money laundering unit.
An attorney working on the Justice Department's highest-profile money-laundering case recently transferred off that assignment in order to join the staff of the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia, POLITICO has learned.
Attorney Kyle Freeny was among the prosecutors on hand Friday as Jason Maloni, a spokesman for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, testified before a grand jury at federal court in Washington.
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Freeny, whose assignment to special counsel Robert Mueller's staff has not been previously reported, is the 16th lawyer known to be working with the former FBI chief on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. She departed from the courthouse Friday with two other members of Mueller's squad: former Criminal Division chief and Enron prosecutor Andrew Weissman and Civil Division appellate attorney Adam Jed, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
Before being detailed to Mueller's team, Freeny was shepherding the Justice Department's headline-grabbing effort to seize the profits from the film "The Wolf of Wall Street" on grounds that the film was financed with assets looted from the Malaysian government.
Freeny withdrew from the "Wolf of Wall Street" case on June 26, court records show, shortly before many of Mueller's attorneys joined his team in early July.
Lawyers for the production company behind the film, Red Granite Pictures, said in a court filing in Los Angeles on Friday that they've reached a settlement with prosecutors. A Justice Department spokesperson said he was aware of the filing, but declined to comment.
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Freeny's work on the movie-related case and the Manafort aspect of the Trump-Russia probe appear to have some commonalities.
The Justice Department billed the "Wolf of Wall Street" case as a product of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, an effort to pursue the proceeds of foreign corruption and return such monies to the public in the affected countries.
Justice Department officials including former Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the same kleptocracy project is probing the transfer of assets overseas by Ukrainian officials, including former President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort served as a consultant to Yanukovych and his Party of Regions — work that has triggered suspicions about the former Trump campaign chief because of Yanukovych's warm relationship with Moscow.
A Manafort firm belatedly filed a report in June with U.S. authorities disclosing about $17 million in payments from the Party of Regions between 2012 and 2014.
Manafort has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime. However, in July, FBI agents executed an early-morning search warrant at his Alexandria, Virginia, condominium.
A spokesman for Mueller's office confirmed Freeny is part of the staff, but he declined to elaborate on her role or what took place at the courthouse Friday.
Before joining Justice's Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section last year, Freeny drew scrutiny and criticism for her role as one of the federal government's key lawyers defending a lawsuit in which Texas and 25 other states challenged President Barack Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration.
U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen blasted the government's attorneys, including Freeny, for misleading him at the outset of the litigation by indicating that none of the changes Obama ordered had taken effect. In fact, one major shift, to issue longer work permits, had already begun.
“The misconduct in this case was intentional, serious and material,” Hanen wrote in May 2016. “In fact, it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.”
The Justice Department apologized for any misunderstanding, but insisted it was unintentional. Justice lawyers also argued that the judge had a memo in the court file at the time showing that one aspect of Obama's directive was already underway.
Hanen was so exercised about the episode that he sought to order three hours of ethics training for all Washington-based Justice Department attorneys who appear in courts in the 26 states involved in the immigration-related case. Justice countered by adding an additional hour of annual ethics training for its Civil Division lawyers.
In January, Hanen backed down, saying he accepted that the comments he regarded as misleading were "unintentional." The lawyers involved "acted with no intent to deceive the other parties or the Court," the Brownsville, Texas-based, George W. Bush appointee wrote, as he dropped his plans to impose sanctions on the government and on individual lawyers not specified in public court filings.
Freeny began work at the Justice Department in 2007. She also did a stint in Obama's White House in 2011, vetting potential appointees.
Campaign finance records show $750 in federal political donations she made: $250 increments to both of Obama's presidential campaigns and $250 to Hillary Clinton's presidential bid last year. President Donald Trump and allies have criticized Mueller for building a team that they say is heavy with Democratic partisans. Justice Department officials say they're forbidden by law to take political giving into account when hiring staff.
Freeny, a Maryland native, is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School. An Arabic speaker, she taught kindergarten for a time in Egypt before getting her law degree.
One lawyer who was on Mueller's staff shortly after his May appointment, Lisa Page, returned to her permanent position at the FBI General Counsel's office a couple of months ago, a spokesman said.The Third Rule of Trumpodynamics states that if you work for this president long enough, you will eventually find yourself under the bus. The latest to learn that lesson personally is one John Dowd, an outside lawyer for the president who is now claiming he was the one who wrote Trump's boneheaded tweet about Michael Flynn, who on Friday pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017
It seems unlikely Dowd would have said "pled," rather than the correct "pleaded," seeing as he's a veteran, high-powered lawyer. For the same reason, it seems unlikely he would instruct the president to say something this dumb and self-incriminating. (Some experts have also suggested it doesn't matter who "wrote" the tweet. By tweeting it, Trump adopted it as his own speech and viewpoint.) But Dowd is nonetheless taking the fall, as someone who is not Trump always must do. The lawyer appeared on the Sunday shows yesterday, and continued his routine in an interview with Axios Monday.
The "President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution's Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case," Dowd claims.
There were first questions about whether Trump obstructed justice back in May, when he fired FBI Director James Comey. Comey testified in June that Trump dismissed a group of administration officials—including Comey's boss, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—from an Oval Office meeting so he could talk to Comey one-on-one about "letting" the Flynn part of the FBI investigation "go." Comey refused, and eventually Trump fired him.
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At the time, the White House claimed it was on recommendation from Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who slapped their signatures on a laughable letter backing Comey's dismissal on the grounds he had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. Trump praised Comey's handling of that investigation during the campaign, and moreover, the idea he was concerned with Clinton's treatment at any point does not pass the smell test.
There's good reason for that. Shortly after, in a nationally televised interview with NBC's Lester Holt, Trump admitted he was considering "the Russia thing" when he decided to fire Comey. He also said he would have sacked Comey regardless of the recommendation from his superiors at the Justice Department.
This was also when Trump derided Comey as a "showboat" and a "grandstander," which are not traditional grounds for firing a law enforcement officer. Even before this week's new tweet, Politifact spoke to a number of legal experts in May who saw a compelling case for obstruction of justice. While much of the law is new ground here—not many presidents have faced obstruction allegations—if we assume the president is not above the law, Trump may well have broken it. Here's the |
for the chance to bang a senator, in return for a nice dinner, a little jewelry, or maybe just the ear of a powerful person… (Yes, power is the most effective aphrodisiac known to man.) Yet you would rather grope someone who has made it clear that you aren’t their type, while at the same time, sitting in judgement over someone you haven’t the slightest idea about. Clean your house!
As for the “news, and entertainment” industry, I know you’ve been doing this from the start, it’s in your nature, I get that. Don’t try to come off all holier than thou though, when you’re doing the same thing as you are accusing your victims of.
OK, that’s all I’ve got for this week, gang. But do this old sailor a favor, try to live up to the standards you hold other people to? And remember, if you can’t live up to those standards, they deserve a little bit of a break too.
Yours in service
William LehmanSpread the love
Chicago, IL — Chicago Police are again the subject of controversy, in yet another shooting where the police department’s explanation and the evidence don’t add up. In the early morning hours of June 20, 2015, twenty-two-year-old Alfontish “Nunu” Cockerham was shot by police who were investigating a call about men with guns standing in the area of 71st and Merrill on Chicago’s south side. Days later, he succumbed to his injuries and died in the hospital.
According to police accounts of the incident, Cockerham pointed a gun at officers, forcing Officer Anthony Babicz to shoot. Footage from a nearby payday lending store, obtained by the Guardian, seems to dispute this claim. Even though the CCTV footage is certainly grainy — it is clear that Cockerham does not have a weapon in hand, much less one pointed at police, when Babicz shot him.
What the video does show is the sudden appearance of an object on the ground near the location from which Babicz fired at Cockerham — which was corroborated by eyewitness Natasha Mclemore. After the shooting, Babicz and other officers run toward Cockerham and handcuff him, while Babicz shines a flashlight in the direction of the weapon on the ground.
It takes a full five minutes and forty seconds for medical assistance to arrive.
While it’s certainly possible Cockerham had been carrying that weapon, or had even pointed it at police at some point prior to entering the camera’s view, the video clearly proves Babicz’s account of shooting the man in response to his aiming a gun at police to be false.
Mclemore witnessed the incident from across the street, in her apartment building’s lobby, and says Babicz fired four times at Cockerham, who was situated between two parked cars. Immediately after the shooting, she approached Babicz, and the two had a brief, heated exchange. “I said, ‘You shot him! You killed him!'” she stated. “The officer yelled back, ‘Did you see what the fuck he did? He had a fucking gun!'”
In the weeks after witnessing the shooting, Mclemore claims she was “harassed” six times by police, who even showed up at her residence on multiple occasions. “They kept coming to my house, ringing my doorbell. I got harassed to the point I didn’t even want to go outside,” she explained. When asked if perhaps police were simply attempting to procure her account of the incident, she said, “I already gave my statement. It wasn’t just asking they was doing, it was intimidating.
“They said, ‘You might not have saw what you think you saw.’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, do I need a lawyer? I already told you what happened.’ I knew what I saw and I’m not going to change my story for nobody... Somebody got to tell the truth. Somebody got to speak for Nunu because he can’t speak for himself.”
According to initial reports, when police arrived at the location of the call, Cockerham took off running and headed east. Police said he rounded the corner at Merrill, where officers say he had gun, which they told him to drop. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, police at the time said, “Cockerham then turned, raised the gun at the officer and the officer shot him.”
While he lay in a hospital bed, struggling for his life, Cockerham was charged with aggravated assault and the court set his bail at $100,000.
The release of an autopsy last week did not shed light on events of that evening. According to the medical examiner, the first gunshot entered Cockerham’s upper leg from behind, but the exact direction from which the second shot entered his other leg was unable to be determined.
“Once circumstances are such that a suspect no longer poses a clear and imminent threat to police, then it is incumbent on the police to take him in so he can have his day in court,” Cockerham’s family lawyer, Nenye Uche, told the Guardian. Uche believes the indeterminate autopsy poses the possibility the second shot occurred while Cockerham was already on the ground, with his hands up — which also lends suspicions to a possible cover-up by police. “They should at the very least be investigated just for that,” he stated.
Police continue to deny any misconduct in the incident, but obvious discrepancies in the video and police reports have left the family no choice but to release the footage to the public.
“No police officer should be writing sworn police reports that don’t match up with what is captured in the video evidence,” Uche asserted. “The use of deadly force could not possibly be found to be reasonable and necessary under such circumstances.”
As we’ve seen in recent weeks, the Chicago police are anything but honest when it comes to officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths. In only a short period, not one, but two videos were released showing Chicago cops gun down men as they ran away – contradicting their original stories of having a gun pointed at them.
It is entirely possible, nay likely, that Alfontish “Nunu” Cockerham’s death is the result of the same trigger-happy and corrupt mindset of the Chicago police department.A new poll suggests that while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to name a gender-balanced cabinet is popular among Canadians, there's one group that remains resistant to the idea — Conservative men.
The numbers from Abacus Data, released to The Huffington Post Canada Friday, show 75 per cent of respondents support Trudeau's much-discussed move to name an equal number of men and women to his inner circle.
Fifty-one per cent think a 50/50 gender split in cabinet sends a positive message about politics, while 10 per cent say the impact is negative. Thirty-nine per cent believe the split makes little difference.
Trudeau's appointment of 15 women to cabinet in November fulfilled a campaign pledge, but the quota also sparked debate after several pundits argued that merit, not gender, should be the only consideration when doling out ministerial portfolios.
Shortly after he was sworn in as prime minister, a reporter asked Trudeau why it was so important to have a gender-balanced cabinet. His quick response — "because it's 2015" — made international headlines.
And it seems most men and women agree with the PM. Eighty-two per cent of women and 68 per cent of men say the policy is good for the quality of the cabinet and work it can accomplish.
Young people are the most enthusiastic, with 85 per cent of women and 83 per cent of men in the 18 to 29 age demographic backing the policy.
But while women of every age group are broadly in favour, men in older demographics are less so.
Seventy-five per cent of men aged 30 to 44 think Trudeau had the right idea, while 65 per cent of men aged 45 to 59 and 59 per cent of men aged 60 or over feel the same.
Conservative supporters split
And it appears the move has divided Tory supporters. A majority of Conservative women — 65 per cent — think the idea for a gender-balanced cabinet was a good one, while 35 per cent say it was a misstep. Sixty per cent of Tory men, however, say it was a bad idea, compared to 40 per cent who are in favour.
Liberals are — unsurprisingly — supportive. Men and women who voted NDP also like the policy.
The poll was conducted online among 1,500 Canadians aged 18 and over between Jan. 8 to 12. Abacus says a random sample of panelists were invited to complete the survey from a larger pool of more than 400,000 Canadians. The margin of error for a similar poll is 2.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
Abacus chair: No upside for Tory politician to challenge precedent
Abacus chairman Bruce Anderson told HuffPost that older, male, and conservative voters have long tended to show more resistance on a variety of gender issues. But in time, those voters often shift toward the opinions of younger, female, and centrist voters.
"It would surprise me if that isn't what happens in this instance," Anderson wrote in an email.
"Clearly a Conservative politician would be taking a risk, with no evident upside, in campaigning against the precedent that Mr. Trudeau has established."
And because male and female Conservatives don't see eye-to-eye on this issue, Anderson predicts there won't be any Tory leadership aspirants pledging to "turn back the clock."
"That's not to suggest that explicit commitments to gender parity will become the new normal," he said. "But clearly a Conservative politician would be taking a risk, with no evident upside, in campaigning against the precedent that Mr. Trudeau has established."
One of Anderson's daughters currently works for the prime minister.
Ambrose: Trudeau's stance offended some women
In a wide-ranging interview with HuffPost in December, interim Tory leader Rona Ambrose conceded her party has work to do to win over young Canadians and women.
Ambrose said while she thinks it's "important" to have gender parity in cabinet, she did not like how Trudeau announced the move in advance.
"It makes some of the women feel like that's the only reason they got the job," she said. "Because it's 2015, you should just get the job because you're good. And, you're a woman."
Ambrose, a cabinet minister under former prime minister Stephen Harper, said Trudeau's position offended some women who want to compete to land jobs they deserve.
"We don't want to be told: the reason, the No. 1 reason you're there is because Justin Trudeau needs parity in his cabinet," she said.
Ambrose appointed a number of women to key roles in her shadow cabinet, including Ontario MP Lisa Raitt as finance critic and Alberta MP Michelle Rempel as critic for immigration.
"When you create an environment where women can succeed, then you don't need quotas," she said.
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Also on HuffPostThe euphonium is a large, conical-bore, baritone-voiced brass instrument that derives its name from the Ancient Greek word εὔφωνος euphōnos,[1] meaning "well-sounding" or "sweet-voiced" (εὖ eu means "well" or "good" and φωνή phōnē means "sound", hence "of good sound"). The euphonium is a valved instrument. Nearly all current models have piston valves, though some models with rotary valves do exist.
The euphonium may be played in bass clef as a non-transposing instrument or in treble clef as a transposing instrument. In British brass bands, it is typically treated as a treble-clef instrument, while in American band music, parts may be written in either treble clef or bass clef, or both.
Name [ edit ]
The euphonium is in the family of brass instruments, more particularly low-brass instruments with many relatives. It is extremely similar to a baritone horn. The difference is that the bore size of the baritone horn is typically smaller than that of the euphonium, and the baritone is primarily cylindrical bore, whereas the euphonium is predominantly conical bore[1]. It is controversial whether this is sufficient to make them two different instruments. In the trombone family large and small bore trombones are both called trombones, while the cylindrical trumpet and the conical flugelhorn are given different names. As with the trumpet and flugelhorn, the two instruments are easily doubled by one player, with some modification of breath and embouchure, since the two have identical range and essentially identical fingering.[2] The cylindrical baritone offers a brighter sound and the conical euphonium offers a more mellow sound.
The American baritone, featuring three valves on the front of the instrument and a curved, forward-pointing bell, was dominant in American school bands throughout most of the 20th century, its weight, shape, and configuration conforming to the needs of the marching band. While this instrument is a conical-cylindrical bore hybrid, somewhere between the classic baritone horn and euphonium, it was almost universally labeled a "baritone" by both band directors and composers, thus contributing to the confusion of terminology in the United States.
Several late 19th century music catalogs (such as Pepper and Lyon & Healy) sold a euphonium-like instrument called the "B♭ bass" (to distinguish it from the E♭ and BB♭ bass).[3][4] In these catalog drawings, the B♭ Bass had thicker tubing than the baritone; both had three valves. Along the same lines, drum and bugle corps introduced the "Bass-baritone", and distinguished it from the baritone. The thicker tubing of the three-valve B♭ bass allowed for production of strong false-tones, providing chromatic access to the pedal register.
Ferdinand Sommer's original name for the instrument was the euphonion.[5] It is sometimes called the tenor tuba in B♭, although this can also refer to other varieties of tuba. Names in other languages, as included in scores, can be ambiguous as well. They include French basse, saxhorn basse, and tuba basse; German Baryton, Tenorbass, and Tenorbasshorn; Italian baritono, bombardino, eufonio, and flicorno basso.[5] The most common German name, Baryton, may have influenced Americans to adopt the name "baritone" for the instrument, due to the influx of German musicians to the United States in the nineteenth century.[5]
History and development [ edit ]
The serpent, the oldest ancestor of all low brass instruments
As a baritone-voiced brass instrument, the euphonium traces its ancestry to the ophicleide and ultimately back to the serpent. The search for a satisfactory foundational wind instrument that could support massed sound above its pitch took many years. While the serpent was used for over two centuries dating back to the late Renaissance, it was notoriously difficult to control its pitch and tone quality due to its disproportionately small open finger holes. The ophicleide, which was used in bands and orchestras for a few decades in the early to mid-19th century, used a system of keys and was an improvement over the serpent but was still unreliable, especially in the high register.
With the invention of the piston valve system c. 1818, the construction of brass instruments with an even sound and facility of playing in all registers became possible. The euphonium is said to have been invented, as a "wide-bore, valved bugle of baritone range", by Ferdinand Sommer of Weimar in 1843, though Carl Moritz in 1838 and Adolphe Sax in 1843 have also been credited. While Sax's family of saxhorns were invented at about the same time and the bass saxhorn is very similar to a euphonium, there are also differences[citation needed].
The "British-style" compensating euphonium was developed by David Blaikley in 1874, and has been in use in Britain with the basic construction little changed since then.
Modern day euphonium makers have been working to further enhance the construction of the euphonium. Companies such as Adams and Besson have been leading the way in perfecting the instrument. Adams euphoniums have developed an adjustable lead pipe receiver which allows players to change the timbre of the instrument to whatever they player finds preferable. Besson has also been credited with the adjustable main tuning slide trigger, which allows players more flexibility with intonation.
Construction and general characteristics [ edit ]
The euphonium, like the tenor trombone, is pitched in concert B♭. For a valved brass instrument like the euphonium, this means that when no valves are in use the instrument will produce partials of the B♭ harmonic series. It is generally orchestrated as a non-transposing instrument like the trombone, written at concert pitch in the bass clef with higher passages in the tenor clef. Treble clef euphonium parts transposing down a major ninth are included in much concert band music:[note 1] in the British-style brass band tradition, euphonium music is always written this way. In continental European band music, parts for the euphonium may be written in the bass clef as a B♭ transposing instrument sounding a major second lower than written.
Professional models have three top-action valves, played with the first three fingers of the right hand, plus a "compensating" fourth valve, generally found midway down the right side of the instrument, played with the left index finger; such an instrument is shown at the top of this page. Beginner models often have only the three top-action valves, while some intermediate "student" models may have a fourth top-action valve, played with the fourth finger of the right hand. Compensating systems are expensive to build, and there is in general a substantial difference in price between compensating and non-compensating models. For a thorough discussion of the valves and the compensation system, see the article on brass instruments.
A euphonium (left) and tuba (right), the two lowest conical-bore instruments
The euphonium has an extensive range, comfortably from C 2 to about B♭ 4 for intermediate players[citation needed] (using scientific pitch notation). In professional hands this may extend from B 0 to as high as B♭ 5. The lowest notes obtainable depend on the valve set-up of the instrument. All instruments are chromatic down to E 2, but four-valved instruments extend that down to at least C 2. Non-compensating four-valved instruments suffer from intonation problems from E♭ 2 down to C 2 and cannot produce the low B 1 ; compensating instruments do not have such intonation problems and can play the low B 1.[note 2] From B♭ 1 down lies the "pedal range", i.e., the fundamentals of the instrument's harmonic series. They are easily produced on the euphonium as compared to other brass instruments, and the extent of the range depends on the make of the instrument in exactly the same way as just described. Thus, on a compensating four-valved instrument, the lowest note possible is B 0, sometimes called double pedal B, which is six ledger lines below the bass clef.
As with the other conical-bore instruments, the cornet, flugelhorn, horn, and tuba, the euphonium's tubing (excepting the tubing in the valve section, which is necessarily cylindrical) gradually increases in diameter throughout its length, resulting in a softer, gentler tone compared to cylindrical-bore instruments such as the trumpet, trombone, sudrophone, and baritone horn. While a truly characteristic euphonium sound is rather hard to define precisely, most players would agree that an ideal sound is dark, rich, warm, and velvety, with virtually no hardness to it. This also has to do with the different models preferred by British and American players.[6]
Though the euphonium's fingerings are no different from those of the trumpet or tuba, beginning euphoniumists will likely experience significant problems with intonation, response, and range compared to other beginning brass players[citation needed]. In addition, it is very difficult for students, even of high-school age, to develop the rich sound characteristic of the euphonium, due partly to the instrument models used in schools and partly to the lack of awareness of good euphonium sound models.[citation needed]
Types [ edit ]
Compensating [ edit ]
The compensating euphonium is common among professionals. It utilizes a three-plus-one-valve system with three upright valves and one side valve. The compensating valve system uses extra tubing, usually coming off of the back of the three upright valves, in order to achieve proper intonation in the lower range of the instrument. This range being from E 2 down to B♭ 1. Not all four-valve and three-plus-one-valve euphoniums are compensating. Only those designed with extra tubing are compensating. There were, at one time, three-valve compensating euphoniums available. This configuration utilized extra tubing, just as the three-plus-one compensating models did, in order to bring the notes C 2 and B 1 in tune. This three-valve compensating configuration is still available in British style baritone horns, usually on professional models.
A creation unique to the United States was the double-bell euphonium, featuring a second smaller bell in addition to the main one; the player could switch bells for certain passages or even for individual notes by use of an additional valve, operated with the left hand. Ostensibly, the smaller bell was intended to emulate the sound of a trombone (it was cylindrical-bore) and was possibly intended for performance situations in which trombones were not available. The extent to which the difference in sound and timbre was apparent to the listener, however, is up for debate. Harry Whittier of the Patrick S. Gilmore band introduced the instrument in 1888, and it was used widely in both school and service bands for several decades. Harold Brasch (see "List of important players" below) brought the British-style compensating euphonium to the United States c. 1939, but the double-belled euphonium may have remained in common use even into the 1950s and 1960s. In any case, they have become rare (they were last in Conn's advertisements in the 1940s, and King's catalog in the 1960s),[7] and are generally unknown to younger players. They are chiefly known now through their mention in the song "Seventy-Six Trombones" from the musical The Music Man by Meredith Willson.
Marching [ edit ]
A marching version of the euphonium may be found in a marching band, though it is often replaced by its smaller, easier-to-carry cousin, the marching baritone (which has a similar bell and valve configuration to a trumpet). Marching euphoniums are used by marching bands in schools, and in Drum and Bugle Corps, and some corps (such as the Blue Devils and Phantom Regiment) march all-euphonium sections rather than only marching Baritone or a mix of both. Depending on the manufacturer, the weight of these instruments can be straining to the average marcher and require great strength to hold during practices and performances, leading to nerve problems in the right pinky, a callus on the left hand, and possibly back and arm problems.
Another form of the marching euphonium is the convertible euphonium. Recently widely produced, the horn resembles a convertible tuba, being able to change from a concert upright to a marching forward bell on either the left or right shoulder. These are mainly produced by Jupiter or Yamaha, but other less expensive versions can be found.
Five valves [ edit ]
The five-valve euphonium (noncompensating) is an extremely rare variation of the euphonium manufactured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Britain's Besson musical instrument company and Highams of Manchester Musical Instrument Company. Besson and Highams's Clearbore five-valve vintage euphoniums are among the rarest and most valuable in existence.[citation needed]
The Besson five-valve euphonium featured the standard three piston valves horizontally on top, but had an additional two piston valves off to the side. The standard euphonium has eight possible fingering and non-fingering positions by which sound is produced. The Besson and the Highams "clearbore" model rare fourth and fifth extra "side" valves change the possible fingering and non-fingering positions from eight to thirty-two.[citation needed]
The term 'five-valve euphonium' does not refer to variations of the double bell euphonium made by various brass instrument companies during the same time period.[weasel words] Some of the double-bell euphoniums had five valves, with the fifth valve either on top with the other four, or by itself off to the side, but the double-bell fifth valve was used for switching the sound to the second smaller trombone-sized bell, and not for changing the fingering pitch of the instrument. Also, Cerveny [cs] Musical Instruments manufactures several euphoniums with five vertical rotary valves today, but this is an unrelated recent development.[citation needed]
The euphonium in ensembles and professional job opportunities [ edit ]
The euphonium has historically been exclusively a band instrument (rather than an orchestra or jazz instrument), whether of the wind or brass variety, where it is frequently featured as a solo instrument. Because of this, the euphonium has been called the "king of band instruments", or the "cello of the band", because of its similarity in timbre and ensemble role to the stringed instrument. Euphoniums typically have extremely important parts in many marches (such as those by John Philip Sousa), and in brass band music of the British tradition.
Other ensembles including euphonium are the tuba-euphonium quartet or larger tuba-euphonium ensemble; the brass quintet, where it can supply the tenor voice, though the trombone is much more common in this role; and other mixed brass ensemble. Such ensembles are almost non-existent: they are more likely to be semi-professional or amateur in nature. Most of the United States Armed Forces service bands include a tuba-euphonium quartet made up of players from the band that occasionally performs in its own right.
The euphonium is not traditionally an orchestral instrument and has not been common in symphony orchestras. However, there are a few works from the late Romantic period, in which composers wrote a part for tenor tuba, all of which are played on the euphonium: most notably Gustav Holst's Planets Suite and Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss. In addition, the euphonium is sometimes used in older orchestral works as a replacement for its predecessors, such as the ophicleide, or, less correctly, the bass trumpet or the Wagner tuba, both of which are significantly different instruments, and still in use today.
Finally, while the euphonium was not historically part of the standard jazz big band or combo, the instrument's technical facility and large range make it well-suited to a jazz solo role, and a jazz euphonium niche has been carved out over the last 40 or so years, largely starting with the pioneer Rich Matteson (see "List of important players" below). The euphonium can also double on a trombone part in a jazz combo. Jazz euphoniums are most likely to be found in tuba-euphonium groups, though modern funk or rock bands occasionally feature a brass player doubling on euphonium, and this trend is growing.
Due to this dearth of performance opportunities, aspiring euphonium players in the United States are in a rather inconvenient position when seeking future employment. Often, college players must either obtain a graduate degree and go on to teach at the college level, or audition for one of the major or regional military service bands. Because these bands are relatively few in number and the number of euphonium positions in the bands is small (2–4 in most service bands), job openings do not occur very often and when they do are highly competitive; before the current slate of openings in four separate bands, the last opening for a euphonium player in an American service band was in May 2004. A career strictly as a solo performer, unaffiliated with any university or performing ensemble, is a very rare sight, but some performers, such as Riki McDonnell, have managed to do it.
In Britain, Australia and New Zealand the strongest euphonium players are most likely to find a position in a brass band, but even though they often play at world-class levels, the members of the top brass bands are in most cases unpaid amateurs.[citation needed] There are hundreds, if not thousands, of brass bands in Britain (and the Commonwealth) ranging in standard from world class to local bands. Even The Salvation Army has strong ties to the brass band world, as this was a common and practical musical genre in the 1800s. Almost all brass bands in Britain perform regularly, particularly during the summer months. A large number of bands also enter contests against other brass bands of a similar standard. Each band requires two euphoniums (principal and second) and consequently there are considerable opportunities for euphonium players.
Due to limited vocational opportunities, there are a considerable number of relatively serious, quasi-professional avocational euphonium players participating in many higher-caliber unpaid ensembles.[citation needed]
College use in the United States [ edit ]
Unlike a generation or two ago, many colleges with music programs now offer students the opportunity to major in euphonium. However, due to the small number of euphonium students at most schools (2–4 is common[citation needed]), it is possible, and even likely, that they will study with a professor whose major instrument is not the euphonium. Most often tubas and euphoniums will be combined into a studio taught by one professor, and at small schools they may be grouped with trombones and/or French horns as well, taught by one low brass professor. Universities will usually require professors in this situation to have a high level of proficiency on all the instruments they teach, and some of the best college euphonium studios are taught by non-euphonium players.
Notable euphonists [ edit ]
The euphonium world is and has become more crowded than is commonly thought, and there have been many noteworthy players throughout the instrument's history. Traditionally, three main national schools of euphonium playing have been discernible: American, British, and Japanese. Now, euphoniumists are able to learn this specific art in many other countries around the world today.
German Ferdinand Sommer, if one discounts the claims of Moritz and Sax each of whose horns also approached a euphonium in nature, in addition to being credited with inventing the euphonium as the Sommerhorn in 1843, as a soloist on the horn, qualifies as the first euphonium player to significantly advance and alter the understanding of the instrument.[8][9] Below are a select few of the players most famous and influential in their respective countries, and whose contributions to the euphonium world are undeniable, in terms of recordings, commissions, pedagogy, and increased recognition of the instrument.
United Kingdom [ edit ]
United States [ edit ]
Japan [ edit ]
Toru Miura, professor of euphonium at the Kunitachi College of Music; soloist and clinician who was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the International Tuba Euphonium Association (formerly TUBA) for his role in promoting the instrument.[21]
Repertoire [ edit ]
The euphonium repertoire consists of solo literature and orchestral, or, more commonly, concert band parts written for the euphonium. Since its invention in 1843, the euphonium has always had an important role in ensembles, but solo literature was slow to appear, consisting of only a handful of lighter solos until the 1960s. Since then, however, the breadth and depth of the solo euphonium repertoire has increased dramatically.
In the current age, there has been a huge number of new commissions and repertoire development and promotion through Steven Mead's World of the Euphonium Series and the Beyond the Horizon series from Euphonium.com. There has also been a vast number of new commissions by more and more players and a proliferation of large scale Consortium Commissions that are occurring including current ones in 2008 and 2009 organized by Brian Meixner (Libby Larson), Adam Frey (The Euphonium Foundation Consortium), and Jason Ham (David Gillingham).
Upon its invention, it was clear that the euphonium had, compared to its predecessors the serpent and ophicleide, a wide range and had a consistently rich, pleasing sound throughout that range. It was flexible both in tone quality and intonation and could blend well with a variety of ensembles, gaining it immediate popularity with composers and conductors as the principal tenor-voices solo instrument in brass band settings, especially in Britain. It is no surprise, then, that when British composers – some of the same ones who were writing for brass bands – began to write serious, original music for the concert band in the early 20th century, they used the euphonium in a very similar role.
When American composers also began writing for the concert band as its own artistic medium in the 1930s and 1940s, they continued the British brass and concert band tradition of using the euphonium as the principal tenor-voiced solo. This is not to say that composers, then and now, valued the euphonium only for its lyrical capabilities. Indeed, examination of a large body of concert band literature reveals that the euphonium functions as a "jack of all trades."
Though the euphonium was, as previously noted, embraced from its earliest days by composers and arrangers in band settings, orchestral composers have, by and large, not taken advantage of this capability. There are, nevertheless, several orchestral works, a few of which are standard repertoire, in which composers have called for instruments, such as the Wagner tuba, for which euphonium is commonly substituted in the present.
In contrast to the long-standing practice of extensive euphonium use in wind bands and orchestras, there was, until approximately forty years ago, literally no body of solo literature written specifically for the euphonium, and euphoniumists were forced to borrow the literature of other instruments. Fortunately, given the instrument's multifaceted capabilities discussed above, solos for many different instruments are easily adaptable to performance on the euphonium.
The earliest surviving solo composition written specifically for euphonium or one of its saxhorn cousins is the Concerto per Flicorno Basso (1872) by Amilcare Ponchielli. For almost a century after this, the euphonium solo repertoire consisted of only a dozen or so virtuosic pieces, mostly light in character. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, American composers began to write the first of the "new school" of serious, artistic solo works specifically for euphonium. Since then, there has been a virtual explosion of solo repertoire for the euphonium. In a mere four decades, the solo literature has expanded from virtually zero to thousands of pieces. More and more composers have become aware of the tremendous soloistic capabilities of the euphonium, and have constantly "pushed the envelope" with new literature in terms of tessitura, endurance, technical demands, and extended techniques.
Finally, the euphonium has, thanks to a handful of enterprising individuals, begun to make inroads in jazz, pop and other non-concert performance settings.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Explanatory notes [ edit ]
^ The major-ninth is transposition for the sake of trumpet players doubling on euphonium. ^ Thus, only on four-valved, compensating instruments is a full chromatic scale from the pedal range up possible.
Citations [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]Editor’s note: This article is also available in Spanish.
Guys, has a woman ever distracted you while you were busy? Distracted you to address some petty concern that you don’t give a damn about? The phenomenon is known as “vaginterruption” (verb: “to vaginterrupt”) and I am sick of it.
So, I was standing in the checkout line of a Walmart Neighborhood Market, staring off into space and lost in thought: I was mentally rotating n-dimensional objects though an n-1 dimensional space in an effort to nail down a deterministic algorithm to generically solve the otherwise intractable mathematics problem known as the Travelling Salesman, when a woman I’d never seen before grabbed my arm.
My mathematical musings fell apart like the fantastical details of Jackie Coakley’s Rolling Stone rape hoax.
“Can you tell me if that brand of butter is good quality?” she yelled, pointing at the two-pound 2-pack of Land O Lakes® salted sweet cream butter waiting to be scanned with the rest of my fortnightly grocery haul.
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Land O Lakes® butter is a domestic American brand of consistent quality; a mildly flavored butter that ranked mid-range in one taste test. The 2-pack was on sale for well under $5 for 2 pounds, which made it an incredible value even for an aggressive discounter like Walmart.
I considered just walking away without answering, much like that sullen chick with flabby arms did in the infamous (almost 40 million views) YouTube video entitled “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” that demonized men of color to the delight of both white racists and feminists everywhere. The problem was that I was both trapped in line and low on food (beer) at home; I didn’t relish the thought of having to return to the store later to redo all my shopping.
I also considered a number of rude rejoinders that would not have worked out well for me – a dozen other shoppers were gawking at the woman’s outburst, waiting to see if I would surrender to her butter lust or fight back. In the end I gave in to the inevitable brain-rape and I told the entitled harpy the reasons why my choice of that butter was a good one.
I felt so |
such as half a cup of cauliflower or five fluid ounces of orange juice. Coffee and some herbal teas can inhibit iron absorption, as can spices that contain tannins such as turmeric, coriander, chiles, and tamarind.[242]
Omega-3 fatty acids, iodine
Alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid, is found in walnuts, seeds, and vegetable oils, such as canola and flaxseed oil.[244] EPA and DHA, the other primary omega-3 fatty acids, are found only in animal products and algae.[245] Iodine supplementation may be necessary for vegans in countries where salt is not typically iodized, where it is iodized at low levels, or where, as in Britain and Ireland, dairy products are relied upon for iodine delivery because of low levels in the soil.[246] Iodine can be obtained from most vegan multivitamins or regular consumption of seaweeds, such as kelp.[247]
Health research
As of 2014, few studies were rigorous in their comparison of omnivore, vegetarian, and vegan diets, making it difficult to discern whether health benefits attributed to veganism might also apply to vegetarian diets or diets that include moderate meat intake.[23]
In preliminary clinical research, vegan diets lowered the risk of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and ischemic heart disease.[23][248][249][250][251] A 2016 systematic review from observational studies of vegetarians showed reduced body mass index, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and glucose levels, possibly indicating lower risk of ischemic heart disease and cancer, but having no effect on mortality, cardiovascular diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, and mortality from cancer.[252]
Eliminating all animal products may increase the risk of deficiencies of vitamins B 12 and D, calcium, and omega-3 fatty acids.[28] Vitamin B 12 deficiency occurs in up to 80% of vegans that do not supplement with vitamin B 12.[253] Vegans might be at risk of low bone mineral density without supplements.[28] Lack of B 12 inhibits normal function of the nervous system.[254][255]
Many vegans overestimate the health benefits of a vegan diet, which has resulted in victim blaming when vegans fall ill.[256]
Professional and government associations
The American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Dietitians of Canada state that properly planned vegan diets are appropriate for all life stages, including pregnancy and lactation.[257] They indicate that vegetarian diets may be more common among adolescents with eating disorders, but that its adoption may serve to camouflage a disorder rather than cause one. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council similarly recognizes a well-planned vegan diet as viable for any age.[258][259][260] The British National Health Service's Eatwell Plate allows for an entirely plant-based diet,[261] as does the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) MyPlate.[262][263] The USDA allows tofu to replace meat in the National School Lunch Program.[199] The German Society for Nutrition does not recommend a vegan diet for babies, children and adolescents, or for women pregnant or breastfeeding.[27]
Pregnancy, infants and children
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Dietitians of Canada consider well-planned vegetarian and vegan diets "appropriate for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes".[264] The German Society for Nutrition cautioned against a vegan diet for pregnant women, babies, and children as of 2011.[27] The position of the Canadian Pediatric Society is that "well-planned vegetarian and vegan diets with appropriate attention to specific nutrient components can provide a healthy alternative lifestyle at all stages of fetal, infant, child and adolescent growth. Attention should be given to nutrient intake, particularly protein, vitamins B 12 and D, essential fatty acids, iron, zinc, and calcium.[265]
According to a 2015 systematic review, there is little evidence available about vegetarian and vegan diets during pregnancy, and a lack of randomized studies meant that the effects of diet could not be distinguished from confounding factors.[266] It concluded: "Within these limits, vegan-vegetarian diets may be considered safe in pregnancy, provided that attention is paid to vitamin and trace element requirements."[266] A daily source of vitamin B 12 is important for pregnant and lactating vegans, as is vitamin D if there are concerns about low sun exposure.[u] A different review found that pregnant vegetarians consumed less zinc than pregnant non-vegetarians, with both groups' intake below recommended levels; however, the review found no significant difference between groups in actual zinc levels in bodily tissues, nor any effect on gestation period or birth weight.[268]
Researchers have reported cases of vitamin B 12 deficiency in lactating vegetarian mothers that were linked to deficiencies and neurological disorders in their children.[269][270] A doctor or registered dietitian should be consulted about taking supplements during pregnancy.[271][272]
Vegan diets have attracted negative attention from the media because of cases of nutritional deficiencies that have come to the attention of the courts, including the death of a baby in New Zealand in 2002 due to hypocobalaminemia, i.e. vitamin B 12 deficiency.[29]
Personal items
Vegans replace personal care products and household cleaners containing animal products with products that are vegan, such as vegan dental floss made of bamboo fiber. Animal ingredients are ubiquitous because they are relatively inexpensive. After animals are slaughtered for meat, the leftovers are put through a rendering process and some of that material, particularly the fat, is used in toiletries.
Common animal-derived ingredients include: tallow in soap; collagen-derived glycerine, which used as a lubricant and humectant in many haircare products, moisturizers, shaving foams, soaps and toothpastes;[273] lanolin from sheep's wool is often found in lip balm and moisturizers; stearic acid is a common ingredient in face creams, shaving foam and shampoos, (as with glycerine, it can be plant-based, but is usually animal-derived); Lactic acid, an alpha-hydroxy acid derived from animal milk, is used in moisturizers; allantoin— from the comfrey plant or cows' urine —is found in shampoos, moisturizers and toothpaste;[273] and carmine from scale insects, such as the female cochineal, is used in food and cosmetics to produce red and pink shades;[274][275]
Logos Vegan Society sunflower:
certified vegan, no animal testing
certified vegan, no animal testing PETA bunny:
certified vegan, no animal testing
Leaping bunny:
no animal testing, might not be vegan no animal testing, might not be vegan
Animal Ingredients A to Z (2004) and Veganissimo A to Z (2013) list which ingredients might be animal-derived. The British Vegan Society's sunflower logo and PETA's bunny logo mean the product is certified vegan, which includes no animal testing. The Leaping Bunny logo signals no animal testing, but it might not be vegan.[276][277] The Vegan Society criteria for vegan certification are that the product contain no animal products, and that neither the finished item nor its ingredients have been tested on animals by, or on behalf of, the manufacturer or by anyone over whom the manufacturer has control. Its website contains a list of certified products,[148][278] as does Australia's Choose Cruelty Free (CCF).[279]
Beauty Without Cruelty, founded as a charity in 1959, was one of the earliest manufacturers and certifiers of animal-free personal care products.[280] Several international companies produce animal-free products, including clothes, shoes, fashion items, and candles.[281]
Vegans avoid clothing that incorporates silk, wool (including lambswool, shearling, cashmere, angora, mohair, and a number of other fine wools), fur, feathers, pearls, animal-derived dyes, leather, snakeskin, and any other kind of skin or animal product. Most leather clothing is made from cow skins. Vegans regard the purchase of leather, particularly from cows, as financial support for the meat industry.[282]:115 Vegans may wear clothing items and accessories made of non-animal-derived materials such as hemp, linen, cotton, canvas, polyester, artificial leather (pleather), rubber, and vinyl.[282]:16 Leather alternatives can come from materials such as cork, piña (from pineapples), and mushroom leather.[283][284]
Philosophy
Ethical veganism
Pigs, as well as chicken and cattle, often have their movement restricted
Ethical veganism is based on opposition to speciesism, the assignment of value to individuals on the basis of species membership alone. Divisions within animal rights theory include the utilitarian, protectionist approach, which pursues improved conditions for animals. It also pertains to the rights-based abolitionism, which seeks to end human ownership of non-humans. Abolitionists argue that protectionism serves only to make the public feel that animal use can be morally unproblematic (the "happy meat" position).[20]:62–63[285]
Law professor Gary Francione, an abolitionist, argues that all sentient beings should have the right not to be treated as property, and that adopting veganism must be the baseline for anyone who believes that non-humans have intrinsic moral value.[v][20]:62 Philosopher Tom Regan, also a rights theorist, argues that animals possess value as "subjects-of-a-life", because they have beliefs, desires, memory and the ability to initiate action in pursuit of goals. The right of subjects-of-a-life not to be harmed can be overridden by other moral principles, but Regan argues that pleasure, convenience and the economic interests of farmers are not weighty enough.[287] Philosopher Peter Singer, a protectionist and utilitarian, argues that there is no moral or logical justification for failing to count animal suffering as a consequence when making decisions, and that killing animals should be rejected unless necessary for survival.[288] Despite this, he writes that "ethical thinking can be sensitive to circumstances", and that he is "not too concerned about trivial infractions".[289]
An argument proposed by Bruce Friedrich, also a protectionist, holds that strict adherence to veganism harms animals, because it focuses on personal purity, rather than encouraging people to give up whatever animal products they can.[290] For Francione, this is similar to arguing that, because human-rights abuses can never be eliminated, we should not defend human rights in situations we control. By failing to ask a server whether something contains animal products, we reinforce that the moral rights of animals are a matter of convenience, he argues. He concludes from this that the protectionist position fails on its own consequentialist terms.[20]:72–73
Philosopher Val Plumwood maintained that ethical veganism is "subtly human-centred", an example of what she called "human/nature dualism" because it views humanity as separate from the rest of nature. Ethical vegans want to admit non-humans into the category that deserves special protection, rather than recognize the "ecological embeddedness" of all.[291] Plumwood wrote that animal food may be an "unnecessary evil" from the perspective of the consumer who "draws on the whole planet for nutritional needs"—and she strongly opposed factory farming—but for anyone relying on a much smaller ecosystem, it is very difficult or impossible to be vegan.[292]
Bioethicist Ben Mepham,[293] in his review of Francione and Garner's book The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation?, concludes that "if the aim of ethics is to choose the right, or best, course of action in specific circumstances 'all things considered', it is arguable that adherence to such an absolutist agenda is simplistic and open to serious self-contradictions. Or, as Farlie puts it, with characteristic panache: 'to conclude that veganism is the "only ethical response" is to take a big leap into a very muddy pond'."[294] He cites as examples the adverse effects on animal wildlife derived from the agricultural practices necessary to sustain most vegan diets and the ethical contradiction of favoring the welfare of domesticated animals but not that of wild animals; the imbalance between the resources that are used to promote the welfare of animals as opposed to those destined to alleviate the suffering of the approximately one billion human beings who undergo malnutrition, abuse, and exploitation; the focus on attitudes and conditions in western developed countries, leaving out the rights and interests of societies whose economy, culture and, in some cases, survival rely on a symbiotic relationship with animals.[294]
David Pearce, a transhumanist philosopher, has argued that humanity has a "hedonistic imperative" to not merely avoid cruelty to animals or abolish the ownership of non-human animals, but also to redesign the global ecosystem such that wild animal suffering ceases to exist.[295][296][297] In the pursuit of abolishing suffering itself, Pearce promotes predation elimination among animals and the "cross-species global analogue of the welfare state".[298][297][299] Fertility regulation could maintain herbivore populations at sustainable levels, "a more civilised and compassionate policy option than famine, predation, and disease".[300] The increasing number of vegans and vegetarians in the transhumanism movement has been attributed in part to Pearce's influence.[301]
A growing political philosophy that incorporates veganism as part of its revolutionary praxis is veganarchism, which seeks "total abolition" or "total liberation" for all animals, including humans. Veganarchists identify the state as unnecessary and harmful to animals, both human and non-human, and advocate for the adoption of a vegan lifestyle within a stateless society. The term was popularized in 1995 with Brian A. Dominick's pamphlet Animal Liberation and Social Revolution, described as "a vegan perspective on anarchism or an anarchist perspective on veganism".[302] Direct action is a common practice among veganarchists (and anarchists generally) with groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Revolutionary Cells – Animal Liberation Brigade (RCALB) often engaging in such activities, sometimes criminally, to further their goals.
Some extreme sects of vegans also embrace the philosophy of anti-natalism, as they see the two as complementary in terms of "harm reduction" to animals and the environment.[303]
Environmental veganism
Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
Environmental vegans focus on conservation, rejecting the use of animal products on the premise that fishing, hunting, trapping and farming, particularly factory farming, are environmentally unsustainable. In 2010, Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society called pigs and chicken "major aquatic predators", because livestock eat 40 percent of the fish that are caught.[22] Since 2002, all Sea Shepherd ships have been vegan for environmental reasons. This specific form of veganism focuses its way of living on how to have a sustainable way of life without consuming animals.[304]
According to a 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report, Livestock's Long Shadow, 222 million tonnes of meat were produced globally in 1999.[305] The report posits that around 26 percent of the planet's terrestrial surface is devoted to livestock grazing.[306] In the United States ten billion land animals are killed every year for human consumption, and in 2005 48 billion birds were killed globally.[307][308]
The UN report also concluded that livestock farming (mostly of cows, chickens and pigs) affects the air, land, soil, water, biodiversity and climate change.[309] Livestock consumed 1,174 million tonnes of food in 2002—including 7.6 million tonnes of fishmeal and 670 million tonnes of cereals, one-third of the global cereal harvest—and in 2001 consumed 45 million tonnes of roots and vegetables and 17 million tonnes of pulses.[310] As of 2006, the livestock industry accounted for nine percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, 37 percent of methane, 65 percent of nitrous oxide, and 68 percent of ammonia. Livestock waste emitted 30 million tonnes of ammonia a year, which is involved in the production of acid rain.[311][312] A 2017 study published in the journal Carbon Balance and Management found animal agriculture's global methane emissions are 11% higher than previous estimates based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[313] A June 2018 study published in Science asserted that the adoption of plant-based diets in the United States alone could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 61% to 73%, and the global adoption of a vegan diet would reduce the use of agricultural land by 75%.[314]
A 2010 UN report, Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production, argued that animal products "in general require more resources and cause higher emissions than plant-based alternatives".[315]:80 It proposed a move away from animal products to reduce environmental damage.[w][316] A 2007 Cornell University study concluded that vegetarian diets use the least land per capita, but require higher quality land than is needed to feed animals.[317] A 2015 study published in Science of the Total Environment determined that significant biodiversity loss can be attributed to the growing demand for meat, which is a significant driver of deforestation and habitat destruction, with species-rich habitats being converted to agriculture for livestock production.[318] A 2017 study by the World Wildlife Fund found that 60% of biodiversity loss can be attributed to the vast scale of feed crop cultivation needed to rear tens of billions of farm animals, which puts an enormous strain on natural resources resulting in an extensive loss of lands and species.[319] Livestock make up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%). As for birds, 70% are domesticated, such as poultry, whereas only 30% are wild.[320][321] In November 2017, 15,364 world scientists signed a warning to humanity calling for, among other things, "promoting dietary shifts towards mostly plant-based foods".[322] According to a July 2018 study in Science, meat consumption is set to increase as the result of human population growth and rising affluence, which will increase greenhouse gas emissions and further reduce biodiversity.[323]
A 2018 report published in PNAS asserted that farmers in the United States could sustain more than twice as many people than they do currently if they abandoned rearing farm animals for human consumption and instead focused on growing plants.[324]
Feminist veganism
Pioneers
One of the leading activists and scholars of feminist animal rights is Carol J. Adams. Her premier work, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990), sparked what was to become a movement in animal rights as she noted the relationship between feminism and meat consumption. Since the release of The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams has published several other works including essays, books, and keynote addresses. In one of her speeches, "Why feminist-vegan now?"[325]—adapted from her original address at the "Minding Animals" conference in Newcastle, Australia (2009)—Adams states that "the idea that there was a connection between feminism and vegetarianism came to [her] in October 1974", illustrating that the concept of feminist veganism has been around for nearly half a century. Other authors have also paralleled Adams' ideas while expanding on them. Angella Duvnjak states in "Joining the Dots: Some Reflections on Feminist-Vegan Political Practice and Choice" that she was met with opposition to the connection of feminist and veganism ideals, although the connection seemed more than obvious to her and other scholars (2011).[326] Other scholars elaborate on the connections between feminism, such as Carrie Hamilton who makes the connection to sex workers and animal reproductive rights.[327] Many other scholars of feminist vegan philosophy continue to add to the arguments that Adams, Duvnjak, and Hamilton have brought forth.
Animal and human abuse parallels
Some of the main concepts of feminist veganism is that is the connection between the violence and oppression of animals. For example, Marjorie Spiegal compares the consumption or servitude of animals for human gain to slavery.[326] Animals are purchased from a breeder, used for personal gain—either for further breeding or manual labor—and then discarded, most frequently as food. This capitalist use of animals for personal gain has held strong, despite the work of animal rights activists and ecofriendly feminists.
Similar notions that suggest animals—like fish, for example—feel less pain are brought forth today as a justification for animal cruelty.[326] The feminist side of the argument, however, suggests that there is no rationalization for treating animal lives with lesser reverence than human lives, even if the theory that animals are less capable of pain is verifiable.[citation needed]
Another connection between feminism and veganism is the parallel of violence against women or other minority members and the violence against animals. Animal rights activists closely relates animal cruelty to feminist issues. This connection is even further mirrored as animals that are used for breeding practices are compared to human trafficking victims and migrant sex workers.[327] Hamilton points out that violent "rapists sometimes exhibit behavior that seems to be patterned on the mutilation of animals" suggesting there is a trend between the violence towards rape victims and animal cruelty previously exhibited by the rapist.[327]
The violence connection is not limited to sexual acts, however. It is a common fact the prevalence of violence against animals are more defined in those with psychopathic disorders. This mirroring of violence against animals and violence against weaker animals lead the pioneers of feminist veganism to suggest that there is a correspondence between violence against humans and animals, supporting feminist veganism.
Capitalism and feminist veganism
Another way that feminist veganism relates to feminist thoughts is through the capitalist means of the production itself. Carol J. Adams mentions Barbara Noske talking about "meat eating as the ultimate capitalist product, because it takes so much to make the product, it uses up so many resources".[328] The capitalization of resources for meat production is argued to be better used for production of other food products that have a less detrimental impact on the environment.
Symbols
Multiple symbols have been developed to represent veganism. Several are used on consumer packaging, including the Vegan Society trademark[148] and Vegan Action logo,[276] to indicate products without animal-derived ingredients.[329][330] Various symbols may also be used by members of the vegan community to represent their identity and in the course of animal rights activism,[citation needed] such as a vegan flag.[331]
See also
NotesDESTROYING the old to make way for the new is the essence of market economies. Karl Marx thought it one of the nastier qualities of capitalism whereas Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, cast “creative destruction” in more positive light, as the only route to sustained growth. In the 1990s Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, gave the notion a modern sheen with his theory of “disruptive innovation”. The term is now everywhere. Uber is said to be disrupting the taxi business, Cronuts are disrupting breakfast and Twitter is disrupting communication.
A disruptive innovation, in Mr Christensen’s work, is a very specific thing: a new technology that is inferior in certain respects to existing ones, but has other desirable attributes. He cites eight-inch floppy disks, which could store more data than smaller ones, but were nonetheless supplanted because they were too big and expensive for desktop computers. By the same token, publishers of music and newspapers were wrong-footed by the advent of online distribution, which was initially of lower quality. So was digital photography, but it nonetheless ended up displacing film.
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Most studies that examine the size of a firm and its capacity to innovate fail to detect a relationship between the two. Yet that in itself is odd. Established firms ought to enjoy big advantages over would-be disrupters: skilled employees, infrastructure at the ready and the opportunity to share costs among products. At worst, incumbents should be as capable as new entrants of succeeding in nascent markets. Yet research by Rebecca Henderson of Harvard Business School finds that the money old firms in fast-evolving industries devote to research brings much lower returns than the research budgets of their younger rivals.*
Divining the reason for this poor performance is a challenge. Firms with straitened finances might be unable to invest adequately in a new business without cannibalising the old. That, in turn, might lead them either to decide not to invest in the new market, or to invest less than they should in both the old and the new. Yet the adjustment is often most difficult for firms that are wildly profitable in their established lines of business.
Profitable firms might underinvest in a competing technology for fear of hastening the end of their existing, successful business. Rational managers should be able to see that cannibalising their own sales and surviving is preferable to sticking to their knitting and falling prey to competitors. But bosses may not think much about the long term, or may be reluctant to write off sunk costs.
Yet even short-sighted or embarrassed managers should react when the threat from upstart technologies becomes clear. They do not, economists reckon, because of organisational rigidities. Ms Henderson suggests firms can be seen as giant information-processing organisations that evolve a structure and personnel to fit their respective business. Information on sales or production is efficiently filtered to decision-makers, who can then direct new research. When new technologies are no more than tweaks to old ones, this set-up is a competitive advantage. When innovations are more radical, however, the old networks are a hindrance.
In other research with Sarah Kaplan of the Wharton School of Business, Ms Henderson considers why older firms struggle to pursue new technologies. Many of them have systems in place to detect and respond to changing market conditions or new technologies. But they have also built up a system of incentives to ensure employees meet existing goals. Systems designed to encourage consistency and efficiency in the production of established goods or services might be a powerful deterrent to experimentation or creative thinking about new markets, regardless of what the corporate memos say.
One still might expect more adaptability given a serious enough threat, argues Ms Henderson in another paper along with Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University and Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University. Established firms, they point out, can always set up loosely affiliated “entrepreneurial” divisions with the freedom to build a new business from the ground up. Yet even this will often prove difficult, they argue, thanks to assets like a firm’s reputation that cannot help but be shared between the old business and its internal rival.
IBM, for example, was initially a mainframe computing company that set up an internal unit devoted to developing personal computers. The PC business did well at first, thanks in part to IBM’s longtime reputation for quality. Yet this became a problem when the mainframe buyers became big consumers of PCs—an embryonic business in which kinks were still being ironed out. Customers began to interpret quality problems in the PC business as quality problems within IBM as a whole, undermining the existing mainframe business. When IBM resolved internal tensions by reabsorbing the PC unit, it in effect conceded the PC market to others.
Innovate or buy
Disruption need not be a death sentence, however. IBM remains a big, profitable firm. Work by Matt Marx of MIT, Joshua Gans of the University of Toronto and David Hsu of the Wharton School suggests that survival often comes down to what they call “co-operative commercialisation”. Once it becomes clear that start-ups have an edge in a new technology, incumbents can respond by striking deals with or purchasing their new rivals. The authors focus on the business of speech-recognition, but there are lots of other examples: Facebook, for instance, has gobbled up one competitor after another. To most, “If you can’t beat them, join them” has a more appealing ring than “Innovate or die”.
Sources
"Dynamic Commercialization Strategies for Disruptive Technologies: Evidence from the Speech Recognition Industry", by Matt Marx, Joshua S. Gans and David H. Hsu. NBER Working Paper Series, December 2013
"Underinvestment and Incompetence as Responses to Radical Innovation: Evidence from the Photographic Alignment Equipment Industry", by Rebecca Henderson. The RAND Journal of Economics, Summer 1993
"Inertia and Incentives: Bridging Organizational Economics and Organizational Theory", by Rebecca Henderson and Sarah Kaplan. NBER Working Paper Series, December 2005
"Schumpeterian competition and diseconomies of scope; illustrations from the histories of Microsoft and IBM", by Timothy Bresnahan, Shane Greenstein, Rebecca Henderson. Harvard Business School Working Paper
"Dynamic Commercialization Strategies For Disruptive Technologies: Evidence From The Speech Recognition Industry", by Matt Marx, Joshua S. Gans and David H. Hsu. NBER Working Paper Series, December 2013Brewing Kombucha (using a continuous brew Kombucha system!)
You would have to be living under a rock to have not heard about Kombucha (pronounced kom-boo-chuh) by now. It seems to be everywhere! This 2,000 year old fermented tea has definitely been gaining serious attention recently due to its heath-benefits, not to mention the delicious tangy taste! This guide will answer all of your first-timer (or even pro!) questions about starting a continuous brew kombucha system.
Just in case you missed any of the other steps in the guide, be sure to check out:
So… What is Kombucha?
The earliest recorded use of Kombucha dates back to China in 221 BC during the Tsin Dynasty, referred to as the “Tea of Immortality”. It has spread the globe ever since! Used in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Japan, slowly making its way to the hipsters of America.
Kombucha is a refreshing and bubbly living probiotic drink made by fermenting tea and sugar with a Kombucha culture (also called a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast)). During the fermentation process, the SCOBY consumes the sugar and turns it into probiotics (and a tiny amount of alcohol, less than.5%)!
Don’t worry about the sugar, either! The longer you ferment, the less will be present in the final product. I definitely prefer a tangier, less sweet Kombucha, but it is completely up to the brewer!
Along with the tangy, carbonated goodness in each bottle, Raw Kombucha is rich in:
B-Vitamins
Vitamin C
Digestive Enzymes
Probiotics
Polyphenols
Anti-Oxidants and Organic Acids Including: EGCG, Glucuronic Acid, and Acetic Acid
This means the incredibly tasty drink also happens to be extremely beneficial for your body! Talk about a win-win! Kombucha is great with:
Detoxification, being able to counteract liver-cell toxicity
Digestion, due to enzymes and probiotics
Energy production, due to bio-available B-Vitamins
Immune heath, due to the powerful anti-oxidants, Vitamin C, and probiotics
Even helping to treat Cancer and AIDS, although more human trials are needed
The downside of drinking Kombucha
I have been drinking Kombucha on a regular-basis for almost 4 years now, and it would be wrong to tell you there aren’t drawbacks. My acne has subsided, stomach woes disappeared, energy production increased, but my wallet hurts. Coming in at almost $5 a bottle, Kombucha is not a cheap habit to keep up! I have completed two large batch brews at home, but the process was so difficult and time-consuming, I went right back to store-bought!
Not anymore!
I have been researching Continuous Brew Kombucha Systems for a while now, it was time I took the plunge! Traditionally, Kombucha is fermented for a couple of weeks, completely drained, bottled, and the entire system broken down to start over for the next batch. The difference with a continuous brew kombucha is the spigot on bottom of the jar, allowing for drainage without disturbing the SCOBY floating on top. Leave about 2 cups of liquid when bottling the ‘booch, simply add more sweet-tea, and keep it going! This results in a healthier, stronger SCOBY (and a LOT less work!)
Secrets to Brewing Perfect Kombucha
As with anything, quality Kombucha comes from the very best ingredients and equipment. More specifically, certain metals and ingredients can actually kill your Mother SCOBY, so don’t make substitutions!
Start with a 1+ gallon glass container. Mine happens to be 1.3 gallons, so no fear of spilling over! I found mine at a Restaurant Supply Store for $15, so look around! They’re not all $50. If starting a continuous brew Kombucha system, make sure the spigot doesn’t contain metal! Gently wash with white vinegar before using, Kombucha SCOBYs don’t like soap residue!
container. Mine happens to be 1.3 gallons, so no fear of spilling over! Next you will need a quality SCOBY to ferment your tea. If you know someone with an extra one lying around, hop on it! Otherwise, you can follow this guide to grow your own from store-bought. It takes less than a month, so don’t get discouraged!
I will only use high-quality filtered water for the tea. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the chlorine in tap water will kill a SCOBY in no time. Regular water filters (think your fridge, or a Brita) don’t remove Fluoride either, which has its own list of terrifying side-effects. I use Reverse Osmosis water from my local health food store. At the very least, boil tap water for 20 minutes and let sit out, uncovered, for 24 hours. Most of the chlorine will evaporate.
Organic loose-leaf or bagged tea is perfect. I chose green because it’s what I have on hand, but feel free to experiment! Each variety of tea will produce a slightly different Kombucha. Most recommend starting with an organic black tea, but you can even mix and match!
Organic and unrefined granulated sugar. Honey and stevia will starve and kill your kombucha, do not substitute! If worried about the sugar content, simply ferment longer. The SCOBY will consume most of the sugar in a month’s time.
Finally unbleached (if possible) cheesecloth and a rubber-band to cover the top. The SCOBY needs to breathe!
Nick @ ServingRealness.com Serves 6, 16-oz Bottles of Kombucha 0 Starting a Continuous Brew Kombucha System Light and tangy Kombucha is within reach! Follow this easy guide to jumpstart your Continuous Brew system. Save Recipe Save Recipe Print Recipe My Recipes My Lists My Calendar Ingredients 13 cups filtered water
1 cup organic, unrefined sugar (do not substitute, this is the SCOBY's food!)
2 tablespoons loose leaf tea OR 8 bags (I used gunpowder green)
2 cups starter Kombucha (either from previous brew (or store-bought)) Instructions Boil 7 cups of the water Pour the boiled water and sugar into brew container, stir to dissolve Steep tea for 2-5 minutes (depending on type of tea). Pour the rest of the room-temp water in to quickly cool the hot tea down After water has completely cooled (very important! Heat will kill the SCOBY), pour starter Kombucha and SCOBY into brewing jar Fit with cheesecloth, and set in a safe, dark, warm spot away from produce or other fermenting foods In a couple of days, you’ll notice a translucent film forming over the top. This is the newest Kombucha SCOBY forming, a great sign! (If you don’t notice a SCOBY within 3 weeks, discard batch and start over) After the SCOBY has grown to 1/4-inch thick, taste the tea, being careful of contamination. Keep fermenting until desired tartness has formed Once this happens, you can drink it immediately, bottle and refridgerate it, or complete a second (1-2 day) ferment. This will result in a bubblier, carbonated drink For instructions, check out my Guide to Flavoring, Bottling, and Second Fermenting Kombucha Notes If, at any point, you see fuzzy mold, discard the entire batch and thoroughly sanitize the system. SCOBYs are weird-looking, and sometimes oddly colored, but a fuzzy texture is a clear indication of mold. Mold growing means that the acidity didn’t reach the necessary levels to ward off mold, otherwise it isn’t ever a problem. This rarely happens, so don’t lose hope! Perhaps start with an older SCOBY mother, or more starter tea. 7.8.1.2 43 Nick AbellThe Statistical Case for a Wallabies Attack Coach
The lack of tries scored by the Wallabies in their 2012 campaign has been a sore nerve issue in Australian rugby for a while now. We all know they weren’t scoring, but I don’t think enough people have asked why – “Deans is crap” simply isn’t good enough for me.
With the Lions tour coming up and the Wallabies looking towards an intensive three-week camp to prepare I feel now is a more than an appropriate time to dissect our tries scored statistic over Deans’ tenure as Head Coach. We all know the Wallabies couldn’t score tries in 2012, do the stats maybe indicate why?
We will begin with a comparison of the average number of tries scored per match by the Wallabies from 2008 through 2012. For the sake of this article all tests played against second and third-tier nations were excluded. This amounts to one test against Fiji in 2010 as well as the pool matches against the United States and Russia at the 2011 RWC. I included the 2011 Samoa test in the data here. Samoa has not been a second-tier squad for a few years now and the fact that the IRB still has them officially labeled as second-tier after the EOYT this year is both fallacious and an insult to the Samoan team. Those boys can play.
The Wallabies attack has clearly fallen off very sharply from 2010. Less tries were scored per match in 2012 than were scored in Deans’ first year as head coach. Let’s go back year-by-year and see if we can uncover any connection between the Wallabies coaching setup and the amount of tries scored per match.
2008
In 2008 the Wallabies average 2.36 tries per match, at the tune of 33 tries across 14 tests. Nations played were as follows: Ireland, France (3x), South Africa (3x), New Zealand (4x), Italy, England, Wales. This year Scott Johnson was removed as Attack Coach |
the Galaxy will make its way into the Universe of Energy Pavilion. The pavilion would be be gutted on the inside for the new ride.
The Leave A Legacy stones will be moved to a new location
The Wonders of Life pavilion is slated for a possible Guardians of the Galaxy phase 2 attraction
Innoventions would get a lot of work with new things to do
It was confirmed that Sum of All Thrills and Stormstruck will close in September. It seems Epcot plans might be finally moving forward once that happens.
Disney’s Hollywood Studios
Hollywood Studios is where the major work is currently happening. Lights, Motors, Action is almost completely gone and land is cleared for Toy Story Land construction to begin. Right now Toy Story is rumored for a 2018 opening and Star Wars Land is rumored for a late 2019 opening. Streets of America is also almost completely gone.
PizzeRizzo was confirmed for Muppets Courtyard and will open later this year.
However, the latest and biggest rumor to just drop is that The Great Movie Ride will close in 2017 to make way for a brand new attraction. The rumors say the facade of the Chinese Theater will stay but the inside of the building will be completely gutted. The theme of this ride is going to be none other than the big cheese Mickey Mouse! This new “E” ticket attraction will be trackless and is said to open in 2019. We can expect screens and animatronics to be throughout this new attraction.
Animal Kingdom
Rivers of Light is said to open before the end of the year with most rumors pointing to September. I have heard many issues they had with the show have been resolved for now. You can expect that Disney won’t announce an opening date until they are absolutely sure. It was also announced that Jungle Book: Alive with Magic will officially end September 5th, 2016, though it might not be until October or November until we see Rivers of Light officially open.
Disneyland
Disneyland has a lot of closings currently going on. Disney did announce that the Rivers of America and the Disneyland Railroad would open back up in summer 2017. That is also when Fantasmic upgrades should debut. Disney also just announced that Disneyland Forever, Paint the Night, and World of Color Celebrate would end September 5th. With that Paint the Night will become a seasonal parade throughout the end of the year. Disneyland Forever and World of Color Celebrate are gone for good.
Speaking of fireworks at Disneyland, a new rumor says that come 2017 both Disneyland Paris’ Walt Disney Studios park and Disneyland Park will be getting an all new Star Wars fireworks show. This show will be similar to Hollywood Studios Star Wars Galactic Spectacular.
Also something to note, Bob Chapek, head of Disney Parks and Resorts, recently got a big time budget approved for major Disneyland work. This would lead me to believe the Fantasyland expansion rumors are going to happen as well as the Marvel Land in California Adventure.
That is it for this installment of Disney Rumor Round Up!On June 17, 2015, the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee considered the fiscal year (FY) 2016 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill. The Administration supports investments in health care, public health, job training, and improving educational outcomes for students at all levels. However, we have a number of serious concerns about this legislation, which would underfund these important investments and includes highly problematic ideologically-motivated provisions. In advance of Full Committee consideration of the Subcommittee bill, I would like to take this opportunity to share some of these concerns with you.
The bill drastically underfunds the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), providing almost $500 million, or 42 percent, less than the FY 2016 Budget. The bill would fund approximately 50,000 AmeriCorps members, meaning that 40,000 fewer members than under the President’s plan would be able to serve their communities while earning money to cover college costs or repay student loans. AmeriCorps members serve in more than 25,000 locations across the country–including thousands of public schools, communities hit by disaster, organizations helping veterans, tribal nations, and faith-based groups.
Under this bill, AmeriCorps would have to drop many of these service areas and projects. The bill also defunds AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), closing campuses in California, Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, and Mississippi that support 2,000 young adults each year who do critical disaster relief and other work.
The bill also eliminates funding for the Social Innovation Fund, a public-private partnership that has generated more than $500 million in non-Federal funding to replicate evidence-based programs, and drops the Pay for Success authority that ties public funding to programs that are producing clear results for taxpayers and beneficiaries. In addition, the bill’s deep cuts in CNCS’s administrative budget and elimination of State Commission support would essentially eliminate the agency’s ability to administer any of its programs.
Read the letter to the House Appropriations Committee from Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun DonovanIn my previous post, I created Breakout in my custom assembly language, Consolite Assembly. Writing a game in assembly was a fun challenge, but I am used to writing code at a higher level of abstraction. To make it easier on myself, I created a compiler that takes source code in a C-like language and converts it to Consolite Assembly. The source of the Consolite Compiler, written in C++, can be found here. A rough specification for the language, which I will refer to as Consolite C, can be found here.
Link to Tetris demo
What Is a Compiler?
A compiler is a program that takes in source code in one language and outputs target code in another language. In this case, the source code is written in Consolite C, and the target code is Consolite Assembly. To give a contrived example, the compiler takes in code like this:
uint16 apples = 3; uint16 oranges = 5; uint16 fruit = apples + oranges;
And turns it into code like this:
MOVI E 0x0003 ; apples = 3 MOVI F 0x0005 ; oranges = 5 MOV G E ; fruit = apples ADD G F ; fruit = fruit + oranges
One of the primary advantages of the former is that everything is more human-readable. You can have descriptive variable names, complex mathematical expressions, if-else statements, loops, and many other features that would otherwise need to be tediously hand-coded in assembly. For a full list of language features, take a look at the spec.
How Does It Work?
The Consolite Compiler works in two stages. In the first stage, it parses the source code into a syntax tree, checking for errors along the way. For example, suppose the compiler is parsing a function like the following, which sums the values in an array:
uint16 sum(uint16 array, uint16 length) { uint16 i; uint16 s = 0; for (i = 0; i < length; i = i + 1) { s = s + array[i]; } return s; }
The parser knows that this is a function because the first three tokens it finds are: "uint16", a type; "sum", a name; and "(", an open parenthesis that distinguishes a function from a global variable declaration. It saves the return type and function name, then parses the comma-separated parameters until it reaches a closing parenthesis. Next it consumes the opening brace "{" and begins parsing statements in the function body, until it reaches a closing brace "}".
Statements within a function body can take many forms. In the example above, there are two local variable declarations, one of which has an initial value. Next, there is a for-loop, which is of the form:
for (initial_expression; condition; loop_expression) body_statement
The parser goes through the following steps to parse the for-loop:
Recognize that what follows is a for-loop by the "for" keyword. Consume the "(" token, or give an error if not found. Go into expression parsing mode to get the initial expression. Consume the ";" token, or give an error if not found. Go into expression parsing mode to get the conditional expression. Consume the ";" token, or give an error if not found. Go into expression parsing mode to get the loop expression. Consume the ")" token, or give an error if not found. Go into statement parsing mode and get the loop body. The loop body could be a compound statement between "{" and "}", another for-loop, an assignment, etc. Statement parsing mode works the same as parsing the next statement in a function body.
The resulting syntax tree for the for-loop in the example above would look like the following:
After the syntax tree has been constructed, if there were no errors the compiler proceeds to the second stage. In the second stage, it traverses the syntax tree and outputs the linear assembly code equivalent for each function, statement, expression, etc. Since there are no explicit loop constructs in assembly, linearizing the above for-loop would result in something like the following in Consolite C:
// Initial expression i = 0; loop_start: // Check condition if (i < length) { goto loop_end; } // Body statement s = s + array[i]; // Loop expression i = i + 1; goto loop_start; loop_end:
When we actually run the original for-loop through the compiler, we get the following assembly (annotated for clarity):
; i is in register E, s is in register F, ; array is in register A, length is in register B MOVI N 0x0000 MOV E N ; i = 0 MOV L N ; Compiler artifact, does nothing. sum_for_start: ; Labels are prefixed with the ; function name. MOV N B MOV M E CMP M N ; Compare i and length. JB label ; If i is below length, jumps to ; code for setting the result of ; the expression "i < length" to 1. MOVI M 0x0 ; Reached if i >= length, sets ; the result of the expression ; "i < length" to 0. JMPI label1 ; Skip the next line since ; i >= length. label: MOVI M 0x1 ; Sets the result of the expression ; "i < length" to 1. label1: MOV L M TST L L ; Test if the result of the ; expression "i < length" was 0. ; If so, break out of the loop. JEQ sum_for_break ; Start of the loop body. MOV N E ; N = i MOV M A ; M = address of first element ; of array MOVI L 0x0002 MUL N L ; Each element is 2 bytes, so ; multiply i by 2. ADD M N ; Add i * 2 to the address of ; the first element of the array ; to get the current element. MOV N M LOAD N N ; Load the value at that address ; into N, now N = array[i]. MOV M F ; M = s ADD M N ; M = s + array[i] MOV N M MOV F N ; Put the result of s + array[i] ; back into the register for s. MOV L N sum_for_continue: ; Label to jump to if we had used ; the "continue" keyword anywhere. MOVI N 0x0001 MOV M E ; M = i ADD M N ; M = i + 1 MOV N M MOV E N ; i = i + 1 MOV L N JMPI sum_for_start ; Jump to right before we ; check the condition. sum_for_break: ; Label to jump if the condition is ; false, or if we had used the ; "break" keyword anywhere.
Register Conventions
Consolite has 16 registers, and groups of these registers are reserved for specific purposes by the compiler. The register SP is special because it is the stack pointer, so it is modified by PUSH, POP, CALL, and RET instructions. The register FP is the frame pointer, and this stores what the value of the stack pointer was at the beginning of the current function. This is used for getting parameters and local variables that are not stored in registers, because they are at a certain offset from the frame pointer.
Registers A through D are used to pass values of the first four parameters to a function call. If there are more than four parameters, they are stored on the stack prior the return address.
Registers E through K are used to store the values of local variables. If there are more variables than can fit in these registers, they are stored on the stack after the return address. Array contents are always stored on the stack.
Registers L, M, and N are scratch registers, used for storing intermediate calculations in mathematical expressions. Additionally, register L is used to store the return value of a function.
How Optimized Is the Output?
Good question! The answer is: not very. Hand-written assembly code is pretty much guaranteed to run faster than the output of this compiler, with far fewer memory accesses.
One optimization I have made is that whenever the compiler would have output a PUSH instruction directly followed by a POP instruction, it instead outputs a single MOV instruction or nothing at all. For example:
PUSH M ; These lines can be omitted POP M PUSH M ; These lines can be replaced POP N ; by the single MOV below MOV N M ; Moves values without using main memory
Language Shortcomings
In order to simplify the coding of the compiler, I cut a few corners in the design of the language. As of this writing, the following is an (incomplete) list of the shortcomings of the language:
The compiler will not warn you if you have a non-void function that doesn't return a value along some code paths. For example, you could compile the function uint16 getValue() { }, but its return value will be garbage.
, but its return value will be garbage. The boolean operators || and && don't short-circuit. Meaning, if you have code like func1() && func2(), both func1() and func2() will be called, regardless of the output of func1(). This is different from C, in which func2() will only be called if the output from func1() evaluated to true.
and don't short-circuit. Meaning, if you have code like, both and will be called, regardless of the output of. This is different from C, in which will only be called if the output from evaluated to true. There is only one data type, uint16. This is an unsigned 16-bit integer that can hold values from 0 to 65,535, inclusive. I had hoped to at least include a signed 16-bit integer to make working with negative numbers easier, but then every expression would need to have either a signed or unsigned attribute and this would have complicated the code. I hope to add more data types in the future.
. This is an unsigned 16-bit integer that can hold values from 0 to 65,535, inclusive. I had hoped to at least include a signed 16-bit integer to make working with negative numbers easier, but then every expression would need to have either a signed or unsigned attribute and this would have complicated the code. I hope to add more data types in the future. Array sizes are evaluated at compile-time, and if they include global variables then the initial value of the global variable is used. It would be nice to have a const keyword so that constant local variables could be used in array sizes, and also so that non-constant globals would not be permitted in array sizes.
keyword so that constant local variables could be used in array sizes, and also so that non-constant globals would not be permitted in array sizes. There are no shorthand assignment operators like +=. In order to do something like a += b;, you would instead write a = a + b;.
. In order to do something like, you would instead write. There are no increment and decrement operators, so increasing a variable by 1 looks like i = i + 1; instead of i++;.
instead of. There is no preprocessor. This means no #includes, so all code must be written in one file. Additionally, this means no #defines, so in order to avoid magic numbers global variables must be used in their place, which incurs a performance overhead for the memory access.
There is no option to have a forward declaration of a function. This forces you to write your functions in a certain order. For example, you cannot have code like the following:
void func1(); void func2() { func1(); } void func1() { }
Tetris Demo
Click the emulator screen below to run the emulator. Click off the screen to pause the emulator. Source code for this example can be found here.
Controls
Spacebar – start the game / drop piece to bottom.
Up arrow – rotate piece.
Left arrow – move piece left.
Right arrow – move piece right.
Down arrow – move piece down.
Mobile users: touch controls are not supported. Sorry!
Future Plans
Now that I have written the emulator, assembler, and compiler, I would like to begin work on the hardware side of the console. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I purchased a Mimas V2 FPGA board over the summer. That $50 board should have enough resources to support the microprocessor and display controller for a hardware version of Consolite. However, I may take a hiatus from this project to work on a few of my other ideas, so my next post may be about something entirely different. Stay tuned!Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
A Grand Theft Auto 5 PC modder has claimed publisher Take-Two Interactive used private investigators to discourage him from continuing work on FiveM, an alternative GTA 5 online mode where players could use mods without being banned.
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Posting on Reddit, the modder--using the alias ntauthy--said two private investigators came to his home and claimed to have been sent by Take-Two, parent company of GTA 5 developer Rockstar Games.
"So I just got a pair of PIs at my door claiming to be sent by Take-Two, handing me a phone with a person somewhere in the UK or US or whatever to 'discuss how to cease activities with regard to Grand Theft Auto,' [and] that 'they know what happened before with Activision and want to not get the lawyers involved this time,'" he said.
"However, they 'have tested their legal standing already and are quite certain of their point' and 'aren't willing to accept any solution other than ceasing my activities,'" he explained further.
Ntauthy added the Take-Two representatives he claims to have spoken to wouldn't disclose details on any conversations the company is having with other mod developers and "didn't want to talk about general modification policy as 'it was just about my case.'"
Ntauthy did not say what his response was, his plans regarding the development of the mod, or further actions Take-Two may have indicated it will take. At the time of going to press, the accuracy of his story cannot be independently verified.
A group of modders attached to the development of FiveM were previously banned from the game in August 2015. Although it claimed to offer an "advanced multiplayer environment for people to play on dedicated servers with user-made game modes," Rockstar said it believed the project was designed to facilitate piracy.
"The FiveM project is an unauthorised alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy," a Rockstar representative said in a statement.
"Our policy on such violations of our terms of service are clear, and the individuals involved in its creation have had their Social Club accounts suspended."
GTA: Multiplayer, a separate mod project aimed at offering an alternative online mode, issued a statement saying it would cease development and shut down, something that was "not an easy decision to make" as it had "worked more than two years on" it.
"[Take-Two] have contacted us and they asked us to stop GTA: Multiplayer, because from Take-Two’s point of view GTA:MP is a rival of their business," it said.
"We, as developers, respect other developer’s intellectual property and their legitimate interests. Rockstar’s developers have invested so much time to create this beautiful game. We have repeatedly stated our position: We are not going to cross this line, we won’t damage them."
It continued: "We clearly see that this may not only result in problems for us, the mod creators, it even may result in a Social Club ban for you, and this is something we do not want to be responsible for. We always respected the copyright of others, and we will not stop doing so."
The creators of GTA: Multiplayer claim to have been in contact with Rockstar and "got feedback" from the studio, but noted that its approval didn't necessarily reflect the attitude of its parent company Take-Two.
From the statement, it seems the issue of potentially enabling piracy was a core factor in the cease and desist request.
"We have never endorsed piracy," the GTA Multiplayer statement continued, "in fact we encouraged the buying of the game and never touched Rockstar Social Club as other modifications did or still do."
GameSpot has contacted Rockstar Games and Take-Two for comment.
In November 2015, Take-Two Interactive said microtransaction sales from GTA Online showed "strong growth" since launch and the mode had reached 8 million players per week.Search Terms: Highlight Matches
Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed.
WartHog76
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User ID: 73256754
United States
10/30/2016 06:12 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I have inside sources and can confirm privately to a mod my credentials.
there are at least 6 members of Congress, several top leadership from federal agencies, and others all implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. This was being directly ran with the Clinton Foundation as a front.
Hillary, Bill, all of them knew/know and were active participants. DC and the FBI, DOJ fear a complete loss of public support for the federal government.
This will be breaking on the next few days. leaks are also coming.
Both parties, all levels of government. Its about to come apart.
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 69289915
United States
10/30/2016 06:17 PM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I have inside sources and can confirm privately to a mod my credentials.
there are at least 6 members of Congress, several top leadership from federal agencies, and others all implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. This was being directly ran with the Clinton Foundation as a front.
Hillary, Bill, all of them knew/know and were active participants. DC and the FBI, DOJ fear a complete loss of public support for the federal government.
This will be breaking on the next few days. leaks are also coming.
Both parties, all levels of government. Its about to come apart.
Quoting: WartHog76
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 73297423
Canada
10/30/2016 06:19 PM
Report Abusive Post
Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I have inside sources and can confirm privately to a mod my credentials.
there are at least 6 members of Congress, several top leadership from federal agencies, and others all implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. This was being directly ran with the Clinton Foundation as a front.
Hillary, Bill, all of them knew/know and were active participants. DC and the FBI, DOJ fear a complete loss of public support for the federal government.
This will be breaking on the next few days. leaks are also coming.
Both parties, all levels of government. Its about to come apart.
Quoting: WartHog76
jeffrey epstein, weiner...
clintons..
[link to www.dailywire.com] jeffrey epstein, weiner...clintons..
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 73304345
United States
10/31/2016 10:47 AM
Report Abusive Post
Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I have inside sources and can confirm privately to a mod my credentials.
there are at least 6 members of Congress, several top leadership from federal agencies, and others all implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. This was being directly ran with the Clinton Foundation as a front.
Hillary, Bill, all of them knew/know and were active participants. DC and the FBI, DOJ fear a complete loss of public support for the federal government.
This will be breaking on the next few days. leaks are also coming.
Both parties, all levels of government. Its about to come apart.
Quoting: WartHog76
Read this now
[link to imgur.com]
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 73304335
United States
10/31/2016 10:52 AM
Report Abusive Post
Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I have inside sources and can confirm privately to a mod my credentials.
there are at least 6 members of Congress, several top leadership from federal agencies, and others all implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. This was being directly ran with the Clinton Foundation as a front.
Hillary, Bill, all of them knew/know and were active participants. DC and the FBI, DOJ fear a complete loss of public support for the federal government.
This will be breaking on the next few days. leaks are also coming.
Both parties, all levels of government. Its about to come apart.
Quoting: WartHog76
Because I can claim the same and just follow Twitter info coming out of NYC.
A lot of insiders in NYC know what is about to drop Because I can claim the same and just follow Twitter info coming out of NYC.A lot of insiders in NYC know what is about to drop
Sungaze_At_Dawn
User ID: 73221749
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10/31/2016 11:00 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed.
I have a feeling that the Obama's, Bush's, Bill's, Soros's, Rockerfeller's, Rothschild's, and a host of other in elite positions would gladly throw this little group to masses, to keep us away from them.
They have to go down! It has to end.
Laurel Valley shit has to end as well.
Last Edited by Sungaze_At_Dawn on 10/31/2016 11:00 AM This is what needs to come out. The Satan/Saturn Pedophile massive abuses.I have a feeling that the Obama's, Bush's, Bill's, Soros's, Rockerfeller's, Rothschild's, and a host of other in elite positions would gladly throw this little group to masses, to keep us away from them.They have to go down! It has to end.Laurel Valley shit has to end as well.
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 73304481
United States
10/31/2016 11:06 AM
Report Abusive Post
Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I have inside sources and can confirm privately to a mod my credentials.
there are at least 6 members of Congress, several top leadership from federal agencies, and others all implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring. This was being directly ran with the Clinton Foundation as a front.
Hillary, Bill, all of them knew/know and were active participants. DC and the FBI, DOJ fear a complete loss of public support for the federal government.
This will be breaking on the next few days. leaks are also coming.
Both parties, all levels of government. Its about to come apart.
Quoting: WartHog76
Read this now
[link to imgur.com]
Quoting: Anonymous Coward 73304345
Best election in American History by far. Hands down. Best election in American History by far. Hands down.
Sikhed
Cat herder
User ID: 5898996
United States
10/31/2016 11:07 AM
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Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed.
Throw out some wild claims, have them proven false, and their real crimes will be dismissed as false.
Could this be a Clinton shift in strategy?Throw out some wild claims, have them proven false, and theircrimes will be dismissed as false.
Anonymous Coward
User ID: 73265432
United States
10/31/2016 11:09 AM
Report Abusive Post
Report Copyright Violation Re: Breaking: Its worse then classified emails. Political Pedophile Sex Ring exposed. I want to look up the astrology of this - not sure but is Pluto's transit of Capricorn coming to an end?
Quoting: Deplorable Vision Thing
IDK but we are in a "new moon" (in Scorpio) cycle and things are manifesting like crazy.
I think we're gonna see all these crooks get drained down the swamp very soon. This cannot be covered up. IDK but we are in a "new moon" (in Scorpio) cycle and things are manifesting like crazy.I think we're gonna see all these crooks get drained down the swamp very soon. This cannot be covered up.Fox is pushing a Romney campaign falsehood that President Obama rather than Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) plans to gut Medicare as we know it.
Ryan has received strong criticism for his plan to transform Medicare into a voucher system. Trying to deflect the attacks on Ryan's plan, Fox contributor Angela McGlowan claimed that Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare.
In fact, the savings the ACA makes to the Medicare program would not cause a decline in quality of care under Medicare, and Ryan has proposed identical savings. But Ryan's plan goes much further, ending Medicare as we know it by transforming it into a voucher plan.
From Fox & Friends Sunday:
McGLOWAN: Obama cut $700 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. With the Ryan plan, it keeps people who are 55 and over on their plan now, so they don't have to worry about that. So this ad saying he would hurt the elderly -- his plan would actually keep it in place.
McGlowan's claim that the ACA cuts Medicare is false. An August 12 ABC News post explained that the supposed "cuts" to Medicare was the slowing of the growth of the program by ACA. Even Fox News Sunday guest host John Roberts explained that over a ten year period the ACA "would slow the growth of Medicare, I want to be very clear about that, not cut Medicare, but slow the growth by $500 billion."
Gail Wilensky, a former administrator of the Medicare program under George H. W. Bush, made clear in a June 28 Bloomberg article, "there are no reductions in the Medicare benefits promised in the law." In a June 28 post FactCheck.org similarly concluded that the ACA "stipulates that guaranteed Medicare benefits won't be reduced."A South Korean inventor has made every drinking man’s dream come true. Working with his wife, Park Eun Chan created the world’s first robot drinking buddy – amicably named Robot Drinky. The level of mimicking a companion is unparalleled, apparently.
The robot is a real bag of tricks. It will clink glasses with you, down his drink and really create the feeling of drinking with a real companion.
The only real maintenance you have to carry out is emptying the alcohol jar that makes up the lower half of Robot Drinky’s body.
The video, first posted to Facebook, has taken the internet by storm, which may be an indicator that there’s a few men feeling really down in the dumps this New Year’s Eve.
READ MORE: Sex off: Owners of first humanoid robot sign agreement not to have sex with itSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE is facing more questions from fellow Republicans about his decisions after the collapse of the ObamaCare repeal effort, even if his job as the GOP leader is safe.
Many in the GOP conference credit the Kentucky Republican with doing as good a job as could be expected, given the difficult circumstances.
McConnell had some doubts about whether an ObamaCare reform bill could be muscled through the Senate, given divisions within his party.
Yet without the surprise no vote from Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.), the leader would at least have been able to proceed to a conference with the House.
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One Republican senator — who requested anonymity to assess McConnell’s performance — said the leader “needed to pitch a perfect game” to pass the healthcare bill.
“Unfortunately, he pitched a two-hitter,” the lawmaker said, extending the baseball metaphor.
At the same time, there have been complaints about how the negotiations unfolded.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski Lisa Ann MurkowskiHouse to push back at Trump on border GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration Pence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration MORE (R-Alaska), one of three Republican senators to vote against the bill last week, lamented that she often had been left in the dark and didn’t know what was in the bill until it was unveiled.
“There were so many different iterations and at the end, where were we?” she asked.
“It’s 10 o’clock and we’re going to vote on it in two hours, what do you think, gang?” Murkowski recalled, paraphrasing the difficult situation.
McCain regularly criticized McConnell’s decision to skip committee hearings and markups, and tersely told colleagues on the floor before his pivotal vote that he didn’t want such an important bill “decided by only a few people,” according to a GOP source familiar with the conversations.
Sen. Ron Johnson Ronald (Ron) Harold JohnsonWhite House, GOP defend Trump emergency declaration GOP senator says Republicans didn't control Senate when they held majority GOP senator voices concern about Trump order, hasn't decided whether he'll back it MORE (R-Wis.) was angered last month by talk that McConnell had assured moderates that a stricter formula indexing Medicaid to inflation starting in 2025 would likely never become implemented.
He accused McConnell of a “pretty significant breach of trust,” implying that he was telling different factions of the conference different things to get the bill across the finish line.
Sen. Jerry Moran Gerald (Jerry) MoranThe Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times The 10 GOP senators who may break with Trump on emergency MORE (R-Kan.) complained that McConnell’s “closed-door process” produced a flawed bill that failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address rising healthcare costs.
Sen. 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) grumbled in a video posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a chance to see the comprehensive ObamaCare repeal-and-replace bill before it was unveiled, even though he was a member of the 13-person working group that was supposed to craft it.
Colleagues say McConnell needs to change his tactics ahead of the healthcare debate by allowing more members to have hands-on ability to shape legislative language, instead of passively receiving updates in lunch meetings of the entire conference.
“There need to be more member-to-member discussions,” said the senator who earlier compared McConnell’s performance to a well-pitched baseball game that fell just short.
Murkowski said the lesson heading into the tax reform debate is to rely more on open committee hearings and markups.
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“I like process, I think process is good for all of us. I think it makes us a better institution and it allows the public to have greater confidence in us,” she said.
Other lawmakers are urging McConnell to take a broader view of legislating.
On Monday, in an op-ed published in Politico, Sen. Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign MORE (R-Ariz.), an independent-minded conservative, asked if the party under McConnell’s leadership had become too focused on tactics and winning political victories at the expense of its principles.
Although he didn’t mention him by name, Flake noted that McConnell stated his No. 1 priority after Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE’s election in 2008 was to limit him to being a one-term president — and not to set out a conservative agenda.
Even McConnell’s attempt on Friday to close the door on the healthcare debate and move on to other pressing issues such as tax reform was second-guessed.
“I believe we’ll come back after all the victory laps by the Democrats on healthcare, all the media exultations, I believe we’ll come back and honor our promise,” Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE (R-Texas) told reporters moments after the vote early Friday |
extoll the Dick for the same reason they embrace their own "asshole" moniker: to celebrate Ayn Rand's essential Us-vs.-the-Losers combativeness. For ARAs, being dickish is the point.
the speech. To understand what an Ayn Rand Asshole is, you have to study that sixty-page Speech Rand stuffed in John Galt's mouth at the end of Atlas. She spent two years writing it. Her publisher asked for cuts. "Would you cut the Bible?" she snapped. Thing is, Rand was right. (And not just because a Library of Congress/Book-of-the-Month Club survey conducted thirty-four years after its publication ranked Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book ever written after, you guessed it, the Bible.) She viewed the Speech as the keystone to…everything. And to a degree that still confounds mainstream academic philosophers (most of whom find Rand's work laughable), that is how it has been taken. Which means there are three things that all Americans must know about it.
The first is that the Speech serves as both the foundation and finished edifice of Objectivism, Rand's utopian vision of an entrepreneurial elite freed at last from any obligation, financial or moral, to the hangers-on of the world; free from religious hokum and from having to feign concern for the wee; free to ercise the "virtue of selfishness" in pursuit of money and glory. (The novel ends with Galt atop a mountain, raising a hand to trace the sacred sign of the dollar over the desolate earth that he and his A-Team are at last ready to return to and revive.) Is greed good, you ask? My friend, in the Objectivist world of Ayn Rand, whose funeral featured a six-foot dollar sign made out of flowers next to the open casket, greed is God.
The second thing is that it is helpful to conjure Keanu Reeves in his What would you DO? proclamatory mode when reading it (silently or aloud):
Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain…and > pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race, since pleasure cannot be moral.
The third thing you must understand about the Speech is that it's extreme stuff—but it's not fringe. Not anymore. Randroids abound. They run influential libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute in D.C., and that's one thing. But they also tend to be people who—unlike all those semiotics majors who'd written off Rand as Nietzsche in a bra even before they'd graduated—impact our lives in direct ways. Randians run some of America's biggest companies (Ralph Lauren, John Mackey of Whole Foods), hedge funds (Victor Niederhoffer, Peter Thiel), and banks. Clarence Thomas makes his clerks watch the 1949 Gary Cooper film version of _The Fountainhead. _Mark Cuban requires no explanation.
And as if the publication of a major new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne Heller, weren't enough, there's this: In the first quarter of this year, as rightists shrilled about the president's "socialism," Atlas Shrugged (re)cracked Amazon's top fifty; early estimates place its 2009 sales at 400,000 copies—about double its 2008 total.
Ayn Rand Assholes, they're not just teeming—they're breeding.3
pop quiz: Which individual has most influenced the lives of Americans in the past twenty-five years? He's an Ayn Rand Asshole, yes, but old-school. Married one of Rand's friends. Rand herself called him the Undertaker. A good moniker, with its whiff of luchador, but she should have dubbed him the Deregulator.
3. There's even an Ayn Rand dating Web site, for Christ's sake: the Atlasphere. Which presents two related questions: Do Objectivists look to the novels for amorous, as well as economic, instruction? If so, is a given Objectivist coupling what it was in The Fountainhead—"an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement…[by] a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession"? For which I have answers: Yes, and yes. I cite my junior year of college, during which I frequently experienced precipitations of plaster dust onto my face while lying in bed, thanks to the ARA who lived above me, and his girlfriend. I could never determine whether it was their Richter-scale copulations that shook the dust loose or the 120-decibel stereo blastings of the Ayn Rand-inspired band Rush that they used to soundtrack and enhance them. (No, his mind is not for rent / To any god or government!) I only know that whenever I trudged upstairs to ask him to dial down the fucking and the Rush (lest the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building crash through the ceiling and impale me where I lay), the answer was always, merely, unsmilingly: "No."
Right: Greenspan. Man was there at the creation. A member of the so-called Collective that in the early 1950s gathered on Saturday nights in the sanctum sanctorum—Rand's New York apartment—as the master held forth on the evils of tas and altruism and read from her Manuscript. According to My Years with Ayn Rand by the woman's acolyte/lover, Nathaniel Branden, Greenspan was prone to such utterances as, "Upon reading this one tends to feel exhilarated." After the Times panned Atlas upon its publication, Greenspan sent an oddly strenuous letter that the paper published:
To the editor:>
"Atlas Shrugged" is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.>
Alan Greenspan
It's a remarkable letter for two reasons. The first, of course, is that Greenspan wrote it; a line can be drawn from that letter to the wholesale deregulation of the American economy, to the invention of hydra-headed derivatives and credit-default swaps, and finally to the collapse of the financial and housing markets. He may not be the Ultimate Ayn Rand Asshole,4, but no ARA has ever tucked the Objectivist football and taken it to the hole like Alan Greenspan.
The letter's second remarkable quality is its quintessentially Randian temper: absolute, proclamatory, severe. Rand writes at great length about the "joy" that results when "men of talent" are left to their own devices—but invariably in the most sneering tone imaginable. A reader wonders: Is it joy for which she and her followers salivate? Or is it the perishing of those parasites?
"Yes, Rand's writing is strident, but she's not concerned with aesthetics, and it's a mistake to judge Atlas by 'normal novel' standards," says Todd Seavey, a 40-year-old libertarian blogger whose politics were "substantially" altered after he read Rand as a college sophomore. "It should be read as if it's an extended philosophy word problem. You may want characters who are full-fledged psychological portraits unto themselves, but one of her arguments is that there are no moral grays, and that 'aesthetics' should be about romanticism rather than neuroses and flawed characters. She knows what she's doing. I mean, would you have gone to Nietzsche and said, 'You're not writing calm, balanced essays. You're writing like a crazed man'?"
I like to think I would have, yes. Because when it comes to ARAs, that dictatorial tone isn't just the how but the what. You can't spend more than five minutes on a Rand-related chat room without seeing a teacher (or social worker, or environmentalist) declaimed as a "risk avoider/merit denouncer." This affect, it should be added, is the trademark symptom of a collegiate Randian infection. Where, say, undergraduate Marxists share a certain narcoleptic insouciance, freshly afflicted Randians evince a showier disregard for those who can't or won't see the light. Showy—but serene, in a way that's cultish and weird. And unintentionally funny, since the only other young people possessed of such grim serenity are those homeschooled Christian fundamentalists who have the ability to transmit—with nothing more than a silent, pitying look—that they know (1) the Rapture is imminent, (2) they'll be taken up, and (3) you'll be spending eternity steeping in a liquid-shit Jacuzzi.
Not surprisingly, Christopher Hitchens isn't the only cultural critic who links the Rand and Rapture fascinations. _GQ'_s own Critic columnist, Tom Carson, puts it best: "Her books are capitalism's version of middlebrow religious novels like Ben-Hur and the Left Behind series." Even Todd Seavey sees a parallel: "Hard-core Randians tend to regurgitate Randian observations in a way that's not mindless but very redundant. Unless you're fully signed on, they assume you're not getting it. Which is exactly the way some Christians are when they can't get somebody to accept Jesus Christ as their savior."
In the end, it's not the books but the smug, evangelical certainty of Ayn Rand Assholes that causes me to loathe Ayn Rand in a personal way. The thing I liked most about college was being around so many young people who were as earnest as they were dauntingly smart. People who didn't (yet) feel the need to own every room they walked into. People who knew how to ask questions. That was it. All that elevated question-asking, and the pliancy of temperament it entailed.
We were children. Then came Rand, "the Rosa Klebb of letters," as entertainment journalist Gary Susman calls her, to body-snatch some of the best of them. Rhetorical question: Is there anything more irritating than a 20-year-old incapable of uttering the words "I don't know"?
Actually, there is: an 82-year-old Alan Greenspan admitting in October 2008—at least ten years too late—that he'd found "a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."
_4. That would be the abovementioned Nathaniel, the twentysomething grad student who, after joining Rand's inner circle, changed his surname from Blumenthal to Branden—Rand folded within ben, the Hebrew word for "son of." (A coincidence, he claimed.) The protégé and his fiftysomething mentor eventually called their respective spouses to a meeting where it was announced that for self-evidently "rational" reasons, the master/apprentice relationship would henceforth be sexual, with twice-a-week scheduled trysts.
_
No, wait, forget Greenspan, who avoided both purpose and reason when he declined to comment for this story.5 When it comes to irritation, the capo di tutti capi is an Ayn Rand Asshole who responds to the headlines of the past fifteen months by…doubling down. Who claims that there should have been less regulation of the markets. Who admits that, yeah, Alan Greenspan was the one who put this country in an economic hole—but only because he wasn't nearly Randian enough.
"There is no question in my mind that it's government policy that created [the financial meltdown]," says BBT's John Allison. "It began with Alan Greenspan's mismanagement of the Federal Reserve, which controls monetary policy. Look at his early writings! He strongly recommended getting rid of the Federal Reserve and going to the gold standard. Once he got in power, he never moved at all in that direction."
How to respond to this kind of resolve, this kind of faith? There are no words—you're better off trying to convince a birther that our forty-fourth president was born in our fiftieth state—save those I've been sitting on for more than twenty years.
Fuck you, Ayn Rand.
Fuck you for turning some of the most open and interesting people I ever met into utopian dickheads.
Fuck you for injecting them with a sneering sense of superiority, and with the tautological belief that anyone who didn't "get it" was a jealous know-nothing—which, ipso facto, only proved that superiority.
And fuck you for prose so bad that the only way to measure it is with a meat scale.
There. I feel better.
But wait—Ayn, you know that letter I just got informing me that my equity line of credit is being frozen despite my perfect credit history, and despite the fact that I bought a house I could actually afford?
Yeah, fuck you for that, too.
5. He will perish as he should.What: Sanctioned Mixed and Men's Ultimate TournamentWhen: August 13/14Where: Fayetteville, ARWho: 8 Mixed and 8 Men'sPrice: $350
The Fayetteville Disc Association is happy to announce the first annual Hootie on the Hill tournament. Hootie on the HIll is a sanctioned tournament featuring 8 Mixed teams and 8 Men's team. With just two weeks before sectionals, Hootie on the Hill could be your team's last chance to iron out kinks before we head into the post season!
After games on Saturday, we invite all players to join us at Northwest Arkansas' premiere craft brewery, Fossil Cove Brewing Company, for great beer and great tunes played by Fayetteville's own DJ E-Yo
Contact us if you want us to try and find you free housing, but no promises!
Amenities:
-Lined Fields
-Usual Field Food (Bagels, Fruit, Spreads)
-Athletic Trainer On-Site
-Cold Water All DaySage Advice is a monthly column that gives official clarifications of D&D rules. Sometimes it also provides reference documents to help your D&D game run smoothly.
If you have a D&D rules question, please reach me on Twitter (@JeremyECrawford), where I answer questions every week (please send the question to sageadvice@wizards.com if it’s too long for a tweet). In this column, I give rules answers that require more space than a tweet allows.
My rulings here and on Twitter don’t override the decisions of a Dungeon Master. The answers and information I provide are meant to assist a DM in adjudicating the game.
MM & DMG Errata
Last year, we released corrections for the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. In the latest printings of those books—the sixth printing for each—we’ve made a few more tweaks. The changes are documented in the updated errata documents for the books:
The latest changes in those PDFs are each tagged with a “6th printing” notation. Search for that notation, and you’ll find each of the changes.
You already have a book that includes all the corrections if its credits page bears the following text toward the bottom of that page: “This printing includes corrections.” The book contains all but the sixth-printing changes if that page instead says, “This printing includes corrections to the first printing.”
As I said last year, we make changes and let you know about them for the sake of clarity and thoroughness, not because we think DMs should fret about every little tweak. If you’ve been enjoying these D&D books for a year or more, we recommend paying attention only to the changes that you think will enhance your enjoyment of the game.
Adventure Errata
Adventures for fifth edition D&D have been so popular that we have reprinted them multiple times, and we’ve started to make corrections to the latest printings. The first two of the adventures to be corrected are Hoard of the Dragon Queen in its sixth printing and Princes of the Apocalypse in its fourth printing. The changes are documented in the following errata documents for the books:
To coincide with some changes to Princes of the Apocalypse, we have updated the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion PDF. The content changes in it are minor: the erupting earth and whirlwind spells received their corrections, and the Svirfneblin Magic feat now matches the version in Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (wording changes only, not substantive changes).
Sage Advice Compendium
The Sage Advice Compendium gathers every installment of Sage Advice in one PDF. It's been updated to include references to this month’s errata.
Other Resources
Here are other D&D reference documents we’ve posted on this website.
About the Author
Jeremy Crawford is the co-lead designer of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. He was the lead designer of the fifth edition Player’s Handbook and one of the leads on the Dungeon Master’s Guide. He has worked on many other D&D books since coming to Wizards of the Coast in 2007. You can reach him on Twitter (@JeremyECrawford).President Trump on Sunday suggested late-summer reading for his 37 million Twitter followers in a tweet that could get anyone else in his office fired.
The book, “Cop Under Fire,” was written by Milwaukee County Sheriff and Trump campaign supporter David Clarke, Jr., who had pinned a link to the book’s Amazon page on his Twitter profile in February.
Trump shared the Amazon link during a weekend of Hurricane Harvey-related tweets.
A great book by a great guy, highly recommended! https://t.co/3jbDDN8YmJ — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017
Under federal ethics regulations, executive branch employees are prohibited from using their position “to endorse any product, service or enterprise …” The president and vice president are exempt, however.
While technically legal, the tweet was criticized by government ethics groups as the latest in a string of rule-bending behavior by the Trump administration.
In February, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wrote a letter to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) accusing Kellyanne Conway of violating federal ethics laws after she promoted Ivanka Trump’s fashion line on Fox News. OGE advised action against Conway, but the request was rebuffed by the Office of the White House Counsel.
“This is only the latest unfortunate example of President Trump disregarding the ethical norms that help ensure that public officials are working for the public rather than for private interests,” Brendan Fischer, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, wrote in an email.
“And when coupled with some of the president’s other recent acts — the pardon of Joe Arpaio, for example — there is a sense that one of the administration’s top priorities is to use the power of government to reward those individuals and special interests who’ve ingratiated themselves with the president.”
During the 2016 campaign, Clarke was part of a cross-country bus tour campaigning for Trump. The tour was sponsored by the Great America PAC, the leading PAC supporting Trump on the campaign. Clarke was also briefly in the running for a job as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security.
Clarke’s Twitter profile features multiple photos of Trump flashing a thumb’s up.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics criticized Trump’s endorsement as well, accusing the president of using his official account “for an advertisement to benefit a major campaign supporter.”
Clarke’s book isn’t the only one on Trump’s recommended list. He’s also promoted two by conservative author Nick Adams.
Nick Adams, “Retaking America” “Best things of this presidency aren’t reported about. Convinced this will be perhaps best presidency ever.” — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2017
Nick Adams new book, Green Card Warrior, is a must read. The merit-based system is the way to go. Canada, Australia! @foxandfriends — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017
For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: [email protected]Gnosis in Cyberspace?
Body, Mind and Progress in Posthumanism Oliver Krueger
Department of Religion,University of Heidlberg Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 14 Issue 2 - August 2005 - version 1.1 - pgs 55-67
http://jetpress.org/volume14/krueger.html PDF Version
Abstract Religion and transhumanism are often regarded as competing or even opposing sense establishing systems. But especially European media philosophers tend to identify common elements of both systems that mainly depend on the metaphysical reception of ideas related to the body and cyberspace. The posthuman aim of a virtual and immortal existence inside the storage of a computer seems to be a continuation or a revivification of the ancient Gnostic philosophy. Focusing the physical aspects of posthumanist utopias the article shows that posthumanism can hardly be interpreted as Gnosis but rather as a mere utilitarian philosophy. 1. The Body in Cyberspace The question of immortality is considered to be quite essential for religion and for transhumanism. Thus, religion and transhumanism are often regarded as competing or even opposing sense establishing systems. But especially European media philosophers tend to identify common elements of both systems that mainly depend on the metaphysical reception of ideas related to the body and cyberspace. The transhuman or posthuman aim of a virtual and immortal existence inside the storage of a computer seems to be a continuation or a revivification of the ancient Gnostic philosophy. But apparently, we have forgotten our bodies. It might be one of the most palpable peculiarities of post-modern philosophy to assess the disappearance of the body and the end of bodily senses. Jean Baudrillard (1994), Dietmar Kamper and Christof Wulf (1984), and many others have done a lot of remarkable observations and analysis on the development of our bodies in the age of medial reproduction. The diffused reality of the body is mooted, because referring to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek “we live in a society with coffee without caffeine, with chocolate without sugar and with virtuality as reality without reality” (Zizek & Negt 2001). When Florian Roetzer edited the two volumes of the Art Forum International in 1996 on the future of the body, the utopias of the posthuman body were discussed by a wide range of art and media theorists and philosophers. Their different contributions centred potential and utopian transformations of the body in context of genetic engineering and prosthesis technology (Deitch 1996; Roetzer 1996; Steels 1996; Stelarc 1996). In a most extreme example the American robotics researcher Hans Moravec presented his vision of an absolute virtual, human existence as the promising goal of evolution. The human personality – the human “mind” – should be scanned as a perfect simulation and should continue to exist thenceforward as an immortal being inside the storage of a computer (Moravec 1996). By this small article in the Art Forum International Moravec became the most prominent reference point for many European philosophers and cultural theorists, who dealt with the so called posthumanism. Unfortunately most of theses publications only mentioned Moravec’s name but did not take into account his concepts (Boehme 1996; Hayles 1999:35; Zons 2001:16). The release of the human personality from its “carnal corporation” as Moravec had described it, was identified as a gnostic or even platonic motif in the post-modern cultural debate – cybergnosis and cyberplatonism became a saw (List 1996). Its prophets such as Marvin Minsky or Hans Moravec are Gnostics, because they intend to overcome the world of matter and corporality, in order to create a “pure” sphere of mind... The scrap heap earth and the grub sack of the human body are the sacrifice, that can be done light-hearted in favor of the exit of the bio evolution, since earth and body are stamped by perdition. (Boehme 1996:259) But do we have to interpret every utopia of a separation of the human body and mind as a kind of Gnosis? Or does the reception by post-modern exegetes dominate the proper structures of posthumanist reasoning? Is it plausible to determine the posthuman utopias of a disembodied existence in cyberspace as Gnosis or as a new variety of Platonism? Here, we will discuss these questions. Hence, it is necessary to introduce some further differentiations in the extensive discourse of medial utopias of bodies. At the same time we have epistemologically to become aware of our well beloved gnostic or platonic glasses, with which we prefer to, perceive every kind of overcoming the human body. Since at this point the explicit bodily utopias of posthumanism shall be analyzed we first have to determine the very centre of posthumanist thought in comparison with transhumanism. Afterwards the gnostic interpretation of posthumanism will be outlined and compared in different aspects with the philosophical concepts of Gnosis. 2. Posthumanism and Transhumanism After Thomas Blount had defined the word posthuman in his Glossographia (1656) as something in the future (“following or to come, that shall be”), the American culture theorist Ihab Hassan (1977) was to my knowledge the first who used the term posthumanist for the philosophical ideas of overcoming the human race as well as humanism (Blount 1656; Hassan 1977; Simpson & Weiner 1989:197; Krueger 2004:107-112). In his novel Schismatrix, the science fiction author Bruce Sterling (1979) signifies a future species as post-human that is demerged in the two sub-species of Shapers and Mechanics. After the robotic researcher Hans Moravec had proclaimed the vision of a post-biological and supernatural future of humankind in his constitutional work Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), the term “post-biological” was increasingly replaced by the notion of “posthuman” in succeeding publications of the 1990s (Dery 1996:371; Hayles 1999:343; Regis 1990:7, 144). But what is posthumanism? In the scientific literature there is a variety of inconsistent definitions, which mostly identify posthumanism with transhumanism. Katherine Hayles for example characterizes posthumanism by the fundamental philosophical assumption that human beings are determined by their pattern of information and not by their devaluated prosthesis-body, so that human beings can be understood as a kind of machine (Hayles 1999:2 et seq.). Jens Schroeter defines posthumanism completely differently as a conglomerate of technological visions of human transformation from genetic engineering to diverse cyborg utopias (Schroeter 2002:84 et seq.; Richard 2000:72). Leading thinkers of the pragmatic transhumanism underline some other aspects defining the term posthuman: A posthuman is a human descendant who has been augmented to such a degree as to be no longer a human. Many transhumanists want to become posthuman. As a posthuman, your mental and physical abilities would far surpass those of any unaugmented human. You would be smarter than any human genius and be able to remember things much more easily... Posthumans could be completely synthetic (based on artificial intelligence) or they could be the result of making many partial augmentations of a biological human or a transhuman. Some posthumans may even find it advantageous to get rid of their bodies and live as information patterns on large super-fast computer networks. Referring to our basic question of Gnosis and posthumanism it seems to be all the more appropriate to clarify the difference between posthumanism and transhumanism. Although these two terms are used interchangeable in some common discourses we can identify two diverse groups of texts within the transhuman and posthuman discourse. Mainly there are two circumstances that require a differentiation: first, transhumanism and posthumanism have different origins and second, their goals and the structure of their arguments differ. The beginning of transhumanism in the 1970s can be localized particularly in California, dominated by the visions of the futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (FM2030), the commitment of the psychedelic movement’s mastermind Timothy Leary and the ideas of cryonics as Robert Ettinger has worked them out. Above all they focus the enhancement of human beings’ mental and physical powers by technology or psychoactive substances (Esfandiary 1973; Ettinger 1972; Leary & Sirius 1997). In contrast to these transhumanist thinkers, the physicist Frank Tipler, the AI researcher Marvin Minsky, the robotic researcher Hans Moravec and the IT entrepreneur Raymond Kurzweil, which in my view belong to posthumanism, center themselves among cybernetic visions of the simulation of human beings – in no way do they refer to the early transhumanists such as Esfandiary, Leary and Ettinger. The immortal existence in virtuality is the human aim for such posthumanist thinkers, and such a goal will be achieved by the end of 21st century even according to their most pessimistic estimations. Transhumanists devote themselves to more pragmatic questions of life extension and mind enhancement technologies, such as life-prolonging diets, smart drugs and prosthesis technology or even the prospects of cryonics while these applications are almost never mentioned in posthumanist writings. Although the edge is fuzzy, one could point out that posthumanism shapes the aim and transhumanism expresses the way to overcome the present biological human being. The disregard for the present and practical matters in posthumanism reflects the distinctive differences with respect to transhumanism. While in transhumanism human beings and their descendants are the subject of evolution, artificial intelligence and robots are the future agents of evolution and progress in posthumanist reasoning. Here, human immortality in a virtual habitat is only a concomitant phenomenon of the autonomous progress of artificial intelligent, posthuman beings. While posthumanism is focused on the idea of an artificial “progeny” of humankind, transhumanism remains anthropocentric. For posthumanist reasoning and for the question of an existence in cyberspace, the idea of the technological immortalization has insofar a fundamental and constitutive significance as only by this means the continuity of humankind can be guaranteed. A posthumanist philosophy, created by human beings, that proclaims the total annihilation of biological evolution and life in favor of machine’s evolution, would be unthinkable without this very charity of an immortal existence. Thence, the idea of uploading human beings into an absolute virtual existence inside the storage of a computer takes the center stage of the posthumanist philosophy – and this is the context of the question of Gnosis in cyberspace. 3. Posthumanism There are four most relevant authors that I would like to assign to posthumanism—Frank Tipler, Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec and Raymond Kurzweil—who share the vision of human life simulations in cyberspace. Frank Tipler (*1947) is professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University. Together with the English cosmo-physicist John D. Barrow he published his chief scientific work, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle in 1986 (Barrow & Tipler 1986), which included a teleological interpretation of the history of the universe. However, Tipler shot to fame with his book The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, published in 1994. In his cosmological perspective Tipler assumes that the universe is closed and that it will end in the point Omega. Till then intelligent life – that is humankind and its artificial progeny – must gain the total control of the whole universe, while at the same time the amount of information, that is produced by living beings, will converge towards infinity. When the sun collapses in about five billion years, the only chance to survive, according to Tipler, lies in a pure virtual existence of humankind in gigantic computers. Tipler identifies the aiming point of cosmological history, the point Omega, with god (Tipler 1995). The book was criticised mainly because of the ”hostile takeover” of religion by physics and even the internationally well known theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg contributed a differentiated commentary on Tipler’s theory. (Birtel 1995; Ellis 1994; Pannenberg 1995). In opposition to Tipler the posthumanist visions of American cyberneticist Marvin Minsky are characterized by a blatant criticism of religion. His influence on posthumanist philosophy can hardly be overestimated, since the co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab was the mentor of several of today’s posthumanist and transhumanist thinkers. Minsky’s significance for posthumanism is most notably based on the formation of the cybernetic idea of human beings. Thus, human beings are defined as a pattern of information which could be simulated by a computer (Minsky 1982; 1988; 1994). He combines his excellent reputation as AI researcher with his engagement for transhumanist organizations. Hans Moravec (*1948) is director of the largest American robotics institute, the Mobile Robot Laboratory of the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 1988 his controversial work Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence appeared and is regarded as the proper foundation of posthumanism for many adherents. Yet, the foreword of the book sounds like a preamble of posthumanism: Engaged for billions of years in a relentless, spiralling arms race with one another, our genes have finally outsmarted themselves... What awaits us is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words “postbiological” or even “supernatural”. It is a world in which the human race has been swept away by the tide of cultural change, usurped by its own artificial progeny... within the next century they will mature into entities as complex as ourselves, and eventually into something transcending everything we know – in whom we can take pride when they refer to themselves as our descendants... (Moravec 1988:1) Moravec assumes that these posthuman artificial intelligences have the same relation to humankind as children have to their parents. Moravec has repeated this message for one and a half decades, now, and also his second monograph Robot: Mere Machines to Transcendent Mind sparked large interest in the USA (Moravec 1999). Moravec’s significance for the posthumanist philosophy is due to the fact that he was the first to conceive a technological possibility of immortalization as a scientist in 1988. Precisely he depicts the technical way of this so called “transmigration”, that will according to Moravec be available in 2018: You’ve just been wheeled into the operating room. A robot brain surgeon is in attendance. By your side is a computer waiting to become a human equivalent, lacking only a program to run... The robot surgeon opens your brain case and places a hand on the brain’s surface... Instruments in the hand scan the first few millimeters of brain surface... These measurements, added to a comprehensive understanding of human neural architecture, allow the surgeon to write a program that models the behavior of the uppermost layer of scanned brain tissue. This program is installed in a small portion of the waiting computer and activated... The process is repeated for the next layer... In a final disorientating step the surgeon lifts out his hand. Your suddenly abandoned body goes into spasms and dies. For a moment you experience only quite and dark. Then, once again, you can open your eyes... Your metamorphosis is complete. (Moravec 1988:109 et seq.) While humankind will slowly die off in the real world, Moravec’s vision promises a never-ending virtual existence in the storage of a computer. This particular point of Moravec’s Mind Children marks the specific technical operation of immortalization for subsequent posthumanist authors: the human brain is the template for a scanning process, which leads to the immortal existence in cyberspace. The successful IT entrepreneur Raymond Kurzweil (*1948) brought his newest book The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence to market, coming along with a professional publicity campaign in several countries (Kurzweil 1999). He was even nominated as the leading thinker of posthumanism by many feature authors, who criticized his technocentric prophecies (Borchers 1999; Guillaume 2000; Tenbrock 1999). In his 1999 book, Kurzweil introduces the beginning of humankind’s end: in 2099 human beings and machines will have merged and humankind will have overcome its biological conditionality. 4. The Gnostic Interpretation Several media philosophers and postmodern thinkers construe this virtual utopia of posthumanism as an expression of Gnostic philosophy. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the Californian author Erik Davis conclude that posthumanist and technocentric visions which argue for overcoming the human body in favor of an existence in virtuality imply a Gnostic dimension of cyberspace – here, Davis uses the striking term techgnosis (Davis 1998: 123 et seq.). While Žižek identifies the overcoming of the human body as overcoming of human sexuality (Žižek 2000), Davis recognizes the virtual existence inside a computer based on binary logic, information theory and mathematics as an scientific expression of the antique platonic assumption, that behind the world of matter there is a higher reality of mathematics and geometric structures (Davis 1998:124 et seq.). In addition, the German sociologists Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf identified Gnostic motives in the ongoing technological euphoria: Civilization as transformation of the body into mind was and still is on the other hand an abstraction of the body. Its spiritualization, which was favored by enlightenment sympathizers, comes along with pure light; matter is black and dark. Thus, it was self-evident that it would surpass the senses, above all the senses of distance. There was a direct path from the strategy of improvement to the substitution of physical abilities. (Kamper & Wulf 1984b:12) In his treatise on the future and reality of cybersex, the Finnish author Hannu Eerikäinen even interprets the whole cyber-discourse as a total overcoming of the body: The grand message of the cyber discourse is that we are living in a cyber-culture empowering us to transcend into cyberspace where we can surf as cybernauts set free from all the constraints of corporeality and matter, in the primal state of the matrix, in pure virtuality. (E |
kind of tool-making that chimpanzees do, he adds, such as shaping sticks to probe for termites in their underground mounds.
Scientists who study stone tools say it's premature to say that these tools led to the evolution of the first humans, commonly known as Homo habilis, or "handy man" as they are sometimes called. The gap between these tools and the previous oldest known is so long — 700,000 years — suggests that whoever made these newly discovered tools could have died with the knowledge, and stone tools were "reinvented" again hundreds of thousands of years later.
The discovery was announced at a meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco this week. It was first described in the journal Science.An Aedes aegypti mosquito is seen through a microscope at an exhibition on Dengue fever on January 28, 2016 in Recife, Brazil. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — The Zika virus has prompted doctors across the country to warn against travel to parts of the Caribbean and South America for pregnant women, but there are new warnings about travel within the U.S. as conditions during the summer months could be ripe for an outbreak in some states.
The mosquitoes are already here. Travelers are coming back from countries that have the disease, and that’s why the National Center for Atmospheric Research recently published their projection that the conditions are ripe for a Zika virus outbreak in some southern states—some time over the peak summer months.
“Unfortunately, it is probably likely that we will, as the summer comes, see many local outbreaks particularly in the South Eastern part, Gulf coast states, Texas, Florida et cetera,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Given the prevalence of birth defects in babies born from mothers with the Zika virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending pregnant women, and those planning to have babies restrict travel to some 38 countries and territories where the Zika virus has been found. But, given the new projections, should doctors go a step further and warn women away from traveling to Miami or Houston?
“I have patients asking me ‘what about this wedding for my second cousin in Texas?’ and my question to them is, ‘is this travel really necessary?’” Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf of the University of Washington said.
Also Read: Zika Virus Transmitted Sexually In U.S.
Dr. Adams Waldorf said there may be some lag time between Zika virus test results and the CDC’s recommendations, so she believes she has an obligation to tell her patients to reconsider travel to certain southern cities.
“It will be a while before we actually know what’s happening in these areas and we need to just be aware of what’s coming and think about unnecessary travel and how to protect our patients,” she said.The wraparound jacket band on the sixth compiled book volume of artist Kudan Naduka and author Makoto Sanada's Angels of Death ( Satsuriku no Tenshi ) manga revealed on Wednesday that J.C. Staff (Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma, Children of the Whales) will animate the game and manga franchise's anime adaptation for a 2018 premiere.
The franchise's official Twitter account announced the adaptation in July. The announcement image for the anime at right reads "Please. Kill me."
Yen Press licensed the manga and released the first volume on November 14. The company describes the manga:
Most girls waking up without any memory and meeting a serial killer would panic, but not Ray. In fact, far from being her biggest problem, killer Zack might just prove a convenient resource when it comes to finding a way out of the building in which they're both trapped!
The manga currently runs in Kadokawa's Comic Gene magazine, and the series' compiled volumes have more than 1 million copies in print. Kadokawa released the manga's fifth compiled volume and the first volume of Sanada and Naduka's Satsuriku no Tenshi Episode.0 manga on July 27. negiyan also draws a four-panel spinoff manga in Comic Gene titled Satsuten!.Barely two weeks after a New York Times article called out ex-Apple CEO Steve Jobs for falling short in his philanthropic commitments compared to his peers, new Apple CEO Tim Cook has decided to grab the issue of Apple philanthropy by the horns.
According to a memo sent by Cook to all of Apple, reported by Fortune's Brian Caulfield, Apple will now begin matching employees' charitable contributions. The limit per employee sits at $10,000 annually, and the contributions must (obviously) be directed toward an official 501(c)(3) organization.
"I am very happy to announce that we are kicking off a matching gift program for charitable donations," reads Cook's memo, sent this past Thursday. "We are all really inspired by the generosity of our co-workers who give back to the community and this program is going to help that individual giving go even farther."
Apple plans to start the program for its full-time Apple employees in the U.S. first, and intends to roll out matching contributions for the company's international workers over time.
As for Jobs, he faced a bit of mild criticism from Andrew Ross Sorkin's August 29 piece in the Times, in which the self-professed "admirer" of Apple's departed CEO questioned why there was no public record of Jobs' charitable commitments despite his $8.3 billion fortune, Sorkin noted.
"But the lack of public philanthropy by Mr. Jobs long whispered about, but rarely said aloud raises some important questions about the way the public views business and business people at a time when some "millionaires and billionaires" are criticized for not giving back enough while others like Mr. Jobs are lionized," Sorkin wrote.
While neither Apple nor Jobs offered comment for Sorkin's article, longtime friend and U2 frontman Paul Hewson, or "Bono," came to Jobs' defense in a letter to the editor September 1.
"I'm proud to know him; he's a poetic fellow, an artist and a businessman. Just because he's been extremely busy, that doesn't mean that he and his wife, Laurene, have not been thinking about these things," Bono said. "You don't have to be a friend of his to know what a private person he is or that he doesn't do things by halves."
For more from David, follow him on Twitter @TheDavidMurphy.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.Map created by reddit user evening_raga
Kiribati is one of those countries you never hear anything about yet has some very unique and interesting geographic anomalies. These 3 maps created by reddit user evening_raga show a few facts about this overlooked part of the world.
The map above shows the most interesting fact about Kiribati: It’s the only nation in all 4 hemispheres of the world (North, South, East and West).
Map created by reddit user evening_raga
The country is also the furthest ahead of Greenwich meantime at GMT +14, making it the first country in the world to ring-in the New Year. This was done to keep the working week the same for entire country and not have it split over the international date line.
Map created by reddit user evening_raga
While the country’s land area is a mere 811 km2 (313 sq mi) it has an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of 3,441,810 km2 (1,328,890 sq mi) making it 4,243X larger!
Thus, while the country is only the 187th largest in the world, its EEZ is slightly larger than all of India!
Here are 10 more interesting facts (source Wikipedia):
Located in the central Pacific Ocean, Kiribati is made up of 33 atolls and reef islands, only 21 of which are inhabited. It has only 103,500 people making it the 197th most populous country on earth. Over 90% of the population lives on the Gilbert Islands, with nearly 50% living on Tarawa. The country includes Christmas Island which is written as Kiritimati in the Kiribati language but pronounced the same as Christmas. Kiritimati is the largest coral atoll in the world and makes up about half of Kiribati’s land area. Tarawa Atoll and others Gilbert islands were invaded by the Japanese in December 1941 and liberated by the Americans 2 years later in November 1943 in the Battle of Tarawa. The country only gained its full independence from the United Kingdom on July 12th, 1979. Most of the islands and atolls are only 1-2 meters (3-6 feet) above sea level, with the highest point just 81 m; (266 ft) above sea level. Two small uninhabited islets, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared below the sea in 1999. To counter the very real risk of the entire country disappearing beneath the waves within the next 50 years, Kiribati is in talks to buy 5,000 acres from Fiji where they can start relocating people.
So you might want to book a hotel and visit Kiribati soon, before it disappears forever.
You can learn more about Kiribati from the following books:
Enjoy these maps and facts about Kiribati? Then please share the love:Bitcoin's tremendous rally in 2017 has left analysts racing to revise their predictions. Mike Novogratz feels that Bitcoin's rally is not done yet and that it is poised to cross $10,000 by year end.
$10K by April 2018? Nah...sooner
Mike Novogratz, who was ranked a billionaire by Forbes in 2007 and 2008, has been a long-term Bitcoin bull. In an interview to CNN a month back, he stated that he would not be surprised if Bitcoin reaches $10,000 by April 2018. Bitcoin's strong rally in the last month has made him revise his prediction. He now expects Bitcoin to cross $10k by the end of 2017.
Speaking to Bloomberg TV, Mike Novogratz said:
I think literally we end the year at $10,000 in Bitcoin. I think that is a decent move from here. I think we end the year at close to $500 in Ethereum.
While Bitcoin might have stolen the thunder in 2017, Mike believes that Ethereum could now be poised to make rapid gains:
Just in the last few days, Ethereum has started to move. I actually think it's gonna put a new high soon. There are a lot of positive things happening in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Deeply invested
Mike Novogratz, who was a partner in Goldman Sachs and hedge fund manager at Fortress Investment Group, is deeply invested in Bitcoin. He was an early investor in Bitcoin, purchasing Bitcoins for $50 each in 2013. He also invested in Ether at the IPO, picking it up for about thirty cents. He has stated that he has invested 10% of his life savings in Bitcoin and Ether. Given the massive increase in prices of Bitcoin and Ether over the past year, that proportion is likely to have increased. Novogratz is currently looking to raise up to $500 mln to set up a hedge fund in the cryptocurrency space.
From strength to strength
Bitcoin has moved from strength to strength, shrugging off the $30 mln hack of tether on Monday. According to Novogratz, while security and safe custody of cryptocurrencies is a concern, the market has not reacted badly since $30 mln is small compared to the overall crypto marketcap of $250 bln. In 2017, nothing seems to affect Bitcoin - whether it is Jamie Dimon's negativity or China's crackdown. With the huge momentum behind Bitcoin, it wouldn't be a surprise if Novogratz is forced to revise his projection once more before 2017 ends.The Central Council of German Sinti and Roma recently approached German President Joachim Gauck, asking him to intervene and temper the current debate about immigration from Bulgaria and Romania.
Discussions were becoming aggressive and aimed against Roma and Sinti, in particular. The talk was of welfare fraud, abuse of the asylum system and criminality. Romani Rose, head of the council, wrote that he identified a new form of populism that was being driven by politicians.
The jury praised Bogdal's "impressively poignant and explosive" study
Roma have lived in Europe for around 600 years. And for almost as long, they've been excluded, persecuted and insulted - being cruelly stereotyped as uncivilized thieves and liars.
How that became possible is explained by literature professor Klaus-Michael Bogdal in his book "Europa erfindet die Zigeuner. Eine Geschichte von Faszination und Verachtung" ("Europe's Invention of the Gypsies: A History of Cultural Violence").
For this work, Bogdal has been awarded one of the most important literary prizes in Germany, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. In the context of a new wave of anti-Roma and Sinti sentiment in Europe, Bogdal's epic study is impressively poignant and explosive, the jury said.
The struggle for modernity
They came in the 15th century and were called "gypsies" in English, "gitanos" in Spanish, and referred to as "gens Ciganorum" in early German documents. They were unidentified foreigners whose ancestors, as we now know, came from India.
The new arrivals were perceived as threatening because they were different. There was much speculation as to their origins and, on account of their nomadic lifestyle, they were categorized as desert or steppe people and associated with invasion, land-grabbing and backwardness.
It was a time in Europe when the transition between the medieval and modern eras was accompanied by violent upheavals. Roma and Sinti, as Bogdal wrote, were seen as the "washed-up remains of a by-gone era on the shores of modernity."
Society, Bogdal proposes, distinguished itself from these people in order to prove its own modernity. That aim proved all the easier since Roma and Sinti did not possess their own literary tradition and were at the mercy of the flood of external projections and clichés.
Klaus-Michael Bogdal's book explores literary and artsitic representations of Roma and Sinti
Klaus-Michael Bogdal's special contribution is that he shows "how Europe measured the degree of its own cultivation through the denigration of the Roma in an area of conflict between hate, self-defense and romanticized gypsy folklore," the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding jury explained.
Looking in the mirror
The literature professor's book is not a cultural history of the Roma and Sinti. Rather, Bogdal explores various representations of Roman and Sinti in European literature and art throughout the centuries.
His work spans from early chronicles about the idealization of the Romantics in the 19th century, to post-World War II literature and recollections of the Holocaust by Roma and Sinti. "This book provides a look in the mirror, even when it is about the invention of a counterpart to European peoples," Bodgal wrote in the prologue.
The reader predominantly learns about the thoughts and feelings of the European majority, about supremacist fantasies and the arrogance of a civilization.
And still this long history of ethnic discrimination does not belong exclusively to the past. To this day, through the centuries and beyond all geographical borders, Roma and Sinti are still persecuted and discriminated against.
The Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding will be presented on March 13 at the Leipzig Book Fair and author Feridun Zaimoglu is to deliver a speech in honor of the winner.
Klaus-Michael Bogdal's "Europa erfindet die Zigeuner. Eine Geschichte von Faszination und Verachtung" (2011) is published in German by Suhrkamp.For a lot of people – and that includes fans and media – Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf's media presence leaves something to be desired.
It always has, if you go back to their days in Boston and Calgary. It probably always will.
There's no way around it: The two highest paid and most recognizable faces of the Toronto Maple Leafs are not scrum dynamos. They're not Joffrey Lupul, their personable, outgoing teammate.
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Kessel, when he is available, is somewhat awkward and withdrawn in front of the camera.
Phaneuf, for all his efforts – and he's made many since he was named Leafs captain – sounds wooden and cold.
And none of that should matter when we talk about them as hockey players.
First of all, part of the problem is that who players are in front of the camera is not actually who they are. Some are uncomfortable in that situation – just as many in the general public would be – and some simply don't want to be themselves for the whole world to see.
That isn't uncommon in the NHL. But it gets put in the spotlight in Toronto, day after relentless day.
"I don't think people are going to get to know Dion in a hurry," former Leafs GM Brian Burke once said of Phaneuf. "I think he's a lot like me. I don't care if people understand me as a person or if they know about my private life – I try to keep that private.
"And I think that's going to be Dion. I think you're going to see the exterior part that he needs to do to be an effective captain and that's all you're going to see."
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Kessel and Phaneuf do not appear to have many allies in the media, after more than five years as Leafs. They are rarely defended and often take the blame when the team loses.
They're lightning rods, more than most, and it helps that people want to read and hear about them.
Make no mistake, they're fair game. In this mess of a season, everyone deserves criticism, and that obviously includes the highest paid and highest profile players.
But the reality here is that – as a frustrated Kessel blurted out on Tuesday in his rant defending his friend and captain – Dion Phaneuf didn't build this team. He didn't put himself – a good but flawed defenceman who had slid down Calgary's depth chart when he was moved – into the No. 1 role, where he's averaged an almost-NHL-leading 25 minutes a game in his time with the Leafs.
He has played as much as Zdeno Chara, and he's not Zdeno Chara.
But in the context of how bad this team has been, Phaneuf has performed reasonably well. With Phaneuf on the ice, the Leafs have been outscored by only 13 goals at 5-on-5 in his entire tenure with the team (354 games).
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When he hasn't been on the ice, that number is 52 goals.
(Yes, plus-minus is typically a flawed statistic but can be illustrative with one team and in large sample sizes such as this.)
The Leafs have been much better with Phaneuf on the ice than off it, despite the fact he has been partnered with Keith Aulie, Korbinian Holzer or Mike Kostka at various times, and despite the fact he always gets the most difficult assignments every night.
Phaneuf's not a perfect player by any means, but he is what he was when the Leafs acquired him from the Flames, both on and off the ice. He hasn't badly underperformed, and his results in the role he's been given have been predictable.
There's even an argument to be made he's played better than expected.
The relentless criticism, then, appears to stem at least in part from elsewhere – perhaps even from the fact he hasn't become a warm and fuzzy type with the press.
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That, too, was predictable after what happened in Calgary – where the media turned on Phaneuf – but you can certainly see why players like Kessel view the situation as unfair.
He sees a talented teammate playing as well as he can. He also sees the human side of Dion Phaneuf, the part the cameras don't catch.
And he doesn't agree with the pile on.
"The way the media treats Dion Phaneuf in this city is embarrassing," Kessel said. "I think a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves."
"The job description that we gave him does not include that he has to be interesting for [the media]," Burke said back in 2010, when asked about Phaneuf being put into a media-heavy role. "He's not hosting a day-time talk show."
No he's not. But he's being judged by some who want him to.After posting an Instagram video from her dressing room, Kim Kardashian was forced to defend herself after eagle-eyed fans noticed what appeared to be two lines of white powder behind her. Turns out the lines were part of the natural design of a marble table. However, the real question is why was she wearing a Morbid Angel sweater?
We're wondering if Kim was firing back at Loudwire just mere days after we ran an opinion column in which we addressed this blight upon the metal scene where pop culture personalities have taken to wearing band shirts from a genre routinely demonized by the mainstream. She and her half-sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner have been among the most notable offenders, sporting Slayer and Metallica shirts in public, while the latter two recently released a line of clothing that depicted their faces over iconic rock images (they quickly removed the items from retail after a massive backlash). It's not a stretch to believe they've at least heard of bands like Metallica... but Morbid Angel?! Nuh-uh.
Even with the elite status Morbid Angel carries in death metal, they're still largely an underground group meaning someone is doing Kim's dirty work for her, rounding up these additions to her wardrobe, or that she is — gulp — an actual metal fan. If she is, chances are she reads Loudwire and if that's the case, we've got some Morbid Angel questions we'd just love for you to answer, Kim.
Most would argue that Altars of Madness is Morbid Angel's crowning achievement. Agree or disagree? Are you an "I prefer the demos" elitist who thinks Abominations of Desolation is really their best? What are your thoughts on Trey Azagthoth's unconventional techniques like mic'ing up a box fan when playing live and using a separate rig just for guitar solos? What computer game was an obsession of Azagthoth? What do you know about The Ancient Ones? David Vincent or Steve Tucker? Which song has the better opening riff? "Maze of Torment" or "Immortal Rites?" What'd you think of Illud Divinum Insanus? What would you change about our ranking of Morbid Angel's albums? (seen below) You've never listened to Morbid Angel, have you?
Failing to address any of these questions will lead us to deem you, in Morbid Angel's words, "Lord of all Fevers and Plagues." The ball is in your court Kim and we eagerly await your response.
When will this madness end? If you're just as sick of this Metal as a Fashion Statement nonsense as we are, call it out whenever you see it. Repost any instance of poser celebrities wearing metal band shirts or occurrences you encounter in everyday life using the hashtag #metalisnotafashionstatement and keep fighting the good fight, headbangers!
Morbid Angel Albums RankedThree baseball umpires are talking about how they play the game. The first says, “I call ’em as they are.” The second, “I call ’em as I see ’em.” And the third says, “They ain’t nothin’ till I call ’em.”
Most of the time all of us are like the first umpire, thinking that we’re seeing the world the way it really is and “calling ’em as they are.” That umpire is what philosophers and social psychologists call a “naive realist.”1 He believes that the senses provide us with a direct, unmediated understanding of the world. But in fact, our construal of the nature and meaning of events is massively dependent on stored schemas and the inferential processes they initiate and guide.
We do partially recognize this fact in everyday life and realize that, like the second umpire, we really just “call ’em as we see ’em.” At least we see that’s true for other people. We tend to think, “I’m seeing the world as it is, and your different view is due to poor eyesight, muddled thinking, or self-interested motives!”
The third umpire thinks, “They ain’t nothin’ till I call ’em.” All “reality” is merely an arbitrary construal of the world. This view has a long history. Right now its advocates tend to call themselves “postmodernists” or “deconstructionists.” Many people answering to these labels endorse the idea that the world is a “text” and no reading of it can be held to be any more accurate than any other.
Among the three umpires, the second is closest to the truth.
We aren’t too distressed when we discover that lots of unconscious processes allow us to correctly interpret the physical world. We live in a three-dimensional world and we don’t have to worry about the fact that the mind makes mistakes when it’s forced to deal with an unnatural, two-dimensional world. It’s more unsettling to learn that our understanding of the non-material world, including our beliefs about the characteristics of other people, is also utterly dependent on stored knowledge and hidden reasoning processes.
Meet “Donald,” a fictitious person experimenters have presented to participants. One study describes him as follows:
Donald spent a great amount of his time in search of what he liked to call excitement. He had already climbed Mt. McKinley, shot the Colorado rapids in a kayak, driven in a demolition derby, and piloted a jet-powered boat—without knowing very much about boats. He had risked injury, and even death, a number of times. Now he was in search of new excitement. He was thinking, perhaps, he would do some skydiving or maybe cross the Atlantic in a sailboat. By the way he acted one could readily guess that Donald was well aware of his ability to do many things well. Other than business engagements, Donald’s contacts with people were rather limited. He felt he didn’t really need to rely on anyone. Once Donald made up his mind to do something it was as good as done no matter how long it might take or how difficult the going might be. Only rarely did he change his mind even when it might well have been better if he had.2
Before reading the paragraph about Donald, participants first took part in a bogus “perception experiment” in which they were shown a number of trait words. Half of the participants saw the words “self-confident,” “independent,” “adventurous,” and “persistent” embedded among 10 trait words. The other half saw the words “reckless,” “conceited,” “aloof,” and “stubborn.” Then the participants moved on to the “next study,” in which they read the paragraph about Donald and rated him on a number of traits. The Donald paragraph was intentionally written to be ambiguous as to whether Donald is an attractive, adventurous sort of person or an unappealing, reckless person. The perception experiment removed the ambiguity and shaped readers’ judgments of Donald. Seeing the words “self-confident,” “persistent,” and so on resulted in a generally favorable opinion of Donald. Those words conjure up a schema of an active, exciting, interesting person. Seeing the words “reckless,” “stubborn,” and so on trigger a schema of an unpleasant person concerned only with his own pleasures and stimulation.
Since the 1920s, psychologists have made much use of the schema concept. The term refers to cognitive frameworks, templates, or rule systems that we apply to the world to make sense of it. The progenitor of the modern concept of schema is the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. For example, Piaget described the child’s schema for the “conservation of matter”—the rule that the amount of matter is the same regardless of the size and shape of the container that holds it. If you pour water from a tall, narrow container into a short, wide one and ask a young child whether the amount of water is more, less, or the same, the child is likely to say either “more” or “less.” An older child will recognize that the amount of water is the same. Piaget also identified more abstract rule systems such as the child’s schema for probability.
We have schemas for virtually every kind of thing we encounter. There are schemas for “house,” “family,” “civil war,” “insect,” “fast food restaurant” (lots of plastic, bright primary colors, many children, so-so food), and “fancy restaurant” (quiet, elegant decor, expensive, high likelihood the food will be quite good). We depend on schemas for construal of the objects we encounter and the nature of the situation we’re in.
Schemas affect our behavior as well as our judgments. The social psychologist John Bargh and his coworkers had college students make grammatical sentences out of a scramble of words, for example, “They her send she usually.”3 For some participants, a number of the words—“Florida,” “old,” “gray,” “wise”—were intended to call up the stereotype of an elderly person. Other participants made sentences from words that didn’t play into the stereotype of the elderly. After completing the unscrambling task, the experimenters dismissed the participants. The experimenters measured how rapidly the participants walked away from the lab. Participants who had been exposed to the words suggestive of elderly people walked more slowly toward the elevator than unprimed participants.
If you’re going to interact with an old person—the schema for which one version of the sentence-unscrambling task calls up—it’s best not to run around and act too animated. (That is, if you have positive attitudes toward the elderly. Students who are not favorably disposed toward the elderly actually walk faster after the elderly prime!)4
Words, sights, sounds, feelings, and even smells can influence our understanding of objects and direct our behavior toward them.
Without our schemas, life would be, in William James’ famous words, “a blooming, buzzing confusion.” If we lacked schemas for weddings, funerals, or visits to the doctor—with their tacit rules for how to behave in each of these situations—we would constantly be making a mess of things.
This generalization also applies to our stereotypes, or schemas about particular types of people. Stereotypes include “introvert,” “party animal,” “police officer,” “Ivy Leaguer,” “physician,” “cowboy,” “priest.” Such stereotypes come with rules about the customary way that we behave, or should behave, toward people who are characterized by the stereotypes.
In common parlance, the word “stereotype” is a derogatory term, but we would get into trouble if we treated physicians the same as police officers, or introverts the same as good-time Charlies. There are, however, two problems with stereotypes: They can be mistaken in some or all respects, and they can exert undue influence on our judgments about people.
Psychologists at Princeton had students watch a videotape of a fourth-grader they called “Hannah.”5 One version of the video reported that Hannah’s parents were professional people. It showed her playing in an obviously upper-middle-class environment. Another version reported that Hannah’s parents were working class and showed her playing in a run-down environment.
The next part of the video showed Hannah answering 25 academic achievement questions dealing with math, science, and reading. Hannah’s performance was ambiguous: She answered some difficult questions well but sometimes seemed distracted and flubbed easy questions. The researchers asked the students how well they thought Hannah would perform in relation to her classmates. The students who saw an upper-middle-class Hannah estimated that she would perform better than average, while those who saw the working-class Hannah assumed she would perform worse than average.
It’s sad but true that you’re actually more likely to get a correct read on Hannah if you know her social class than if you don’t. In general, it’s the case that upper-middle-class children perform better in school than working-class children. Whenever the direct evidence about a person or object is ambiguous, background knowledge in the form of a schema or stereotype can increase accuracy of judgments to the extent that the stereotype has some genuine basis in reality. The much sadder fact is that working-class Hannah starts life with two strikes against her. People will expect and demand less of her, and will perceive her performance as being worse than if she were upper middle class.
A serious problem with our reliance on schemas and stereotypes is that they can get triggered by incidental facts that are irrelevant or misleading. Any stimulus we encounter will trigger spreading activation to related mental concepts. The stimulus radiates from the initially activated concept to the concepts that are linked to it in memory. If you hear the word “dog,” the concept of “bark,” the schema for “collie,” and a mental representation of your neighbor’s dog “Rex” are simultaneously activated.
We know about spreading activation effects because cognitive psychologists find that encountering a given word or concept makes us quicker to recognize related words and concepts. For example, if you say the word “nurse” to people a minute or so before you ask them to say “true” or “false” to statements such as “hospitals are for sick people,” they will say “true” more rapidly than if they hadn’t just heard the word “nurse.”6
Incidental stimuli that drift into the cognitive stream can affect what we think and what we do, including even stimuli that are completely unrelated to the cognitive task at hand. Words, sights, sounds, feelings, and even smells can influence our understanding of objects and direct our behavior toward them. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending.
Which hurricane is likely to kill more people? One named Hazel or one named Horace? Certainly seems it could make no difference. What’s in a name? Especially one selected at random by a computer. In fact, however, Hazel is likely to kill lots more people.7 Female-named hurricanes don’t seem as dangerous as male-named ones, so people take fewer precautions.
Want to make your employees be more creative? Expose them to the Apple logo.8 And avoid exposing them to the IBM logo.
It’s also helpful for creativity to put your employees in a green or blue environment (and avoid red at all costs).9-11 Want to get lots of hits on a dating website? In your profile photo, wear a red shirt, or at least put a red border around the picture. Want to get taxpayers to support education bond issues? Lobby to make schools the primary voting location.12 Want to get the voters to outlaw late-term abortion? Try to make churches the main voting venue.
Want to get people to put a donation for coffee in the honest box? On a shelf above the coffee urn, place a coconut that looks like this one. That would be likely to cause people to behave more honestly. A coconut with a different pattern of dots would likely net you nothing. The coconut pictured here is reminiscent of a human face (coco is Spanish for head) and people subconsciously sense their behavior is being monitored. (Tacitly, of course—people who literally think they’re looking at a human face would be in dire need of an optometrist or psychiatrist, possibly both.)
Actually, it’s sufficient to just have a picture of three dots in the orientation of this coconut to get more contributions.13
Want to persuade someone to believe something by giving them an editorial to read? Make sure the font type is clear and attractive. Messy-looking messages are much less persuasive.14 But if the person reads the editorial in a seafood store or on a wharf, its argument may be rejected.15 If the person is from a culture that uses the expression “fishy” to mean “dubious,” that is. If not, the fishy smell won’t sway the person one way or the other.
Bodily states also find their way into the cognitive stream. Want to be paroled from prison? Try to get a hearing right after lunch. Investigators found that if Israeli judges had just finished a meal, there was a 66 percent chance that they would vote for parole.16 A case that came up just before lunch had precisely zero chance for parole.
Want someone you’re just about to meet to find you to be warm and cuddly? Hand them a cup of coffee to hold. And don’t by any means make that an iced coffee.17
My grandfather was bankrupted by his reliance on the representativeness heuristic to judge probabilities. As a consequence, I’m a psychologist rather than a wheat baron.
You may recall the scene in the movie Speed where, immediately after a harrowing escape from death on a careening bus, two previously unacquainted people (played by Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock) engage in a passionate kiss. It could happen. A man who answers a questionnaire administered by a woman while the two are standing on a swaying suspension bridge high above a river is much more eager to date her than if the interview takes place on terra firma.18 The study that found this effect is one of literally dozens that show that people can misattribute physiological arousal produced by one event to another, altogether different one.
If you’re beginning to suspect that psychologists have a million of these, you wouldn’t be far wrong. The most obvious implication of all the evidence about the importance of incidental stimuli is that you want to rig environments so that they include stimuli that will make you or your product or your policy goals attractive. It’s obvious when stated that way. Less obvious are two facts: (1) The effect of incidental stimuli can be huge, and (2) you want to know as much as you possibly can about what kinds of stimuli produce what kinds of effects. A book by Adam Alter called Drunk Tank Pink is a good compendium of many of the effects we know about to date. (Alter chose the title because of the belief of many prison officials and some researchers that pink walls make inebriated men tossed into a crowded holding cell less prone to violence.)
A less obvious implication of our susceptibility to “incidental” stimuli is the importance of encountering objects—and especially people—in a number of different settings if a judgment about them is to be of any consequence. That way, incidental stimuli associated with given encounters will tend to cancel one another out, resulting in a more accurate impression. Abraham Lincoln once said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” To Lincoln’s adage, I’d add: Vary the circumstances of the encounters as much as possible.
We often arrive at judgments or solve problems by use of heuristics—rules of thumb that suggest a solution to |
8 Polish law), Israeli politician Yair Lapid justified the expression "Polish death camps" with the argument that "hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier".[32]
Criticism of the expression [ edit ]
Opponents of the use of these expressions argue that they are inaccurate, as they may suggest that the camps were a responsibility of the Poles, when in fact they were designed, constructed, and operated by the Germans and were used to exterminate both non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews, as well as Jews transported to the camps by the Germans from across Europe.[33][34] Historian Geneviève Zubrzycki and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have called the expression a misnomer.[1][2] It has also been described as "misleading" by the Washington Post editorial board,[35] The New York Times,[36] the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council,[30] and Nazi hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff.[22] Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem described it as a "historical misrepresentation",[37] and White House spokesman Tommy Vietor referred to its use a "misstatement".[38]
Abraham Foxman of the ADL described the strict geographical defence of the terms as "sloppiness of language", and "dead wrong, highly unfair to Poland".[21] Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Adam Daniel Rotfeld said in 2005 that "Under the pretext that 'it's only a geographic reference', attempts are made to distort history".[39]
Public use of the expression [ edit ]
As early as 1944, the expression "Polish death camp" appeared as the title of a Collier's magazine article, "Polish Death Camp", an excerpt from the 1944 memoir by the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State (reprinted in 2010 as Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World). Karski himself, in both the article and the book, used the expression "Jewish death camp", not "Polish death camp".[40][41] As shown by Jacek Gancarson and Natalja Zajtseva, the original title of Jan Karski's typescript, "In the Belzec Death Camp", was changed by the Collier's magazine editor to "Polish Death Camp".[42]
Other early-postwar, 1945 uses of the expression "Polish death camp" occurred in the periodicals Contemporary Jewish Record,[43] The Jewish Veteran [44] and The Palestine Yearbook and Israeli Annual,[45] as well as in a 1947 book, Beyond the Last Path, by Hungarian-born Jew and Belgian resistance fighter Eugene Weinstock[46] and in Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska's 1947 book Medallions.[47]
A 2016 article by Matt Lebovic stated that West Germany's Agency 114, which during the Cold War recruited former Nazis to West Germany's intelligence service, worked to popularize the term "Polish death camps" in order to minimize German responsibility for, and implicate Poles in, the atrocities.[48]
Mass media [ edit ]
On 30 April 2004 a Canadian Television (CTV) Network News report referred to "the Polish camp in Treblinka". The Polish embassy in Canada lodged a complaint with CTV. Robert Hurst of CTV, however, argued that the term "Polish" was used throughout North America in a geographical sense, and declined to issue a correction.[49] The Polish Ambassador to Ottawa then complained to the National Specialty Services Panel of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. The Council rejected Hurst's argument, ruling that the word "'Polish'—similarly to such adjectives as 'English', 'French' and 'German'—had connotations that clearly extended beyond geographic context. Its use with reference to Nazi extermination camps was misleading and improper."[30]
In 2009 Zbigniew Osewski, grandson of a Stutthof concentration camp prisoner, announced that he was suing Axel Springer AG for calling Majdanek concentration camp a "former Polish concentration camp" in a November 2008 article in the German newspaper Die Welt.[50] The case started in 2012.[51]
On 23 December 2009, British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian: "Watching a German television news report on the trial of John Demjanjuk a few weeks ago, I was amazed to hear the announcer describe him as a guard in 'the Polish extermination camp Sobibor'. What times are these, when one of the main German TV channels thinks it can describe Nazi camps as 'Polish'? In my experience, the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and antisemitism – and thence a slide to guilt by association with the Holocaust – is still widespread. This collective stereotyping does no justice to the historical record."[52]
In 2010 the Polish-American Kosciuszko Foundation launched a petition demanding that four major U.S. news organizations endorse use of the expression "German concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland".[53][54]
Canada's Globe and Mail reported on 23 September 2011 about "Polish concentration camps". Canadian Member of Parliament Ted Opitz and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney supported Polish protests.[55]
In 2013 Karol Tendera, who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau and is secretary of an association of former prisoners of German concentration camps, sued the German television network ZDF, demanding a formal apology and 50,000 zlotys, to be donated to charitable causes, for ZDF's use of the expression "Polish concentration camps".[56] ZDF was ordered by the court to make a public apology.[57] Some Poles felt the apology to be inadequate and protested with a truck bearing a banner that read "Death camps were Nazi German - ZDF apologize!" They planned to take their protest against the expression "Polish concentration camps" 1,600 kilometers across Europe, from Wrocław in Poland to Cambridge, England, via Belgium and Germany, with a stop in front of ZDF headquarters in Mainz.[58]
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage recommends against using the expression,[59][60] as does the AP Stylebook,[61] and that of The Washington Post.[35] However, the 2018 Polish bill has been condemned by the editorial boards of The Washington Post[35] and The New York Times.[36]
Politicians [ edit ]
In May 2012 U.S. President Barack Obama referred to a "Polish death camp" while posthumously awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski. After complaints from Poles, including Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and Alex Storozynski, President of the Kosciuszko Foundation, an Obama administration spokesperson said the President had misspoken when "referring to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland."[62][63] On 31 May 2012 President Obama wrote a letter[64] to Polish President Komorowski in which he explained that he used this phrase inadvertently in reference to "a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland" and further stated: "I regret the error and agree that this moment is an opportunity to ensure that this and future generations know the truth."
Polish government action [ edit ]
Media [ edit ]
The Polish government and Polish diaspora organizations have denounced the use of such expressions that include the words "Poland" or "Polish". The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs monitors the use of such expressions and seeks corrections and apologies if they are used.[65] In 2005, Poland's Jewish[66] Foreign Minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld remarked upon instances of "bad will, saying that under the pretext that 'it's only a geographic reference', attempts are made to distort history and conceal the truth."[39][67] He has stated that use of the adjective "Polish" in reference to concentration camps or ghettos, or to the Holocaust, can suggest that Poles perpetrated or participated in German atrocities, and emphasised that Poland was the victim of the Nazis' crimes.[39][67]
In 2017 the NGO Freedom House assessed Poland's media as "Partly Free", downgraded from "Free" the previous year, on account of the PiS government's policies. It stated that "the PiS government sought to undermine voices in the media that challenged its preferred historical narrative, which largely omits the involvement of Polish people in World War II–era atrocities."[68]
In 2016 historian Jan Grabowski published a paper criticising what he called "the history policy of the Polish state". He wrote that "the state-sponsored version of history seeks to undo the findings of the last few decades and to forcibly introduce a sanitized, feel-good narrative".[69] Some journalists have written of their experience of pressure from the Polish government after using one of these terms.[70]
Monuments [ edit ]
In 2008, the chairman of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (the IPN) wrote to local administrations, calling for the addition of the word "German" before "Nazi" to all monuments and tablets commemorating Germany's victims, stating that "Nazis" is not always understood to relate specifically to Germans. Several scenes of atrocities conducted by Germany were duly updated with commemorative plaques clearly indicating the nationality of the perpetrators. The IPN also requested better documentation and commemoration of crimes that had been perpetrated by the Soviet Union.[71]
Similar concerns prompted the Polish government to ask UNESCO to officially change the name "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau", to clarify that the camp had been built and operated by Nazi Germany.[72][73][74][75] At its 28 June 2007 meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee changed the camp's name to "Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940–1945)."[76][77] Previously some German media, including Der Spiegel, had called the camp "Polish".[78][79]
2018 Polish law and Israel-Polish consensus [ edit ]
On 6 February 2018 Poland's President Andrzej Duda signed into law an amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, criminalizing statements that ascribe collective responsibility in Holocaust-related crimes to the Polish nation,[5] It was generally understood that the law would criminalize use of the expressions "Polish death camp" and "Polish concentration camp".[6][7][8] Israeli officials and Jewish organizations criticized the legislation as an attempt to restrict discussion of anti-semitism in Poland and of the culpability of some Poles in the Holocaust.[80][81][82][needs update] Israel and Poland worked together on a re-phrasing of the law, and in a joint statement condemning both antisemitism and anti-Polish sentiment.[9]
The original 1998 Act had already specifically criminalized "public denial, against the facts, of Nazi crimes, communist crimes, and other offenses constituting crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes, committed against persons of Polish nationality or against Polish citizens of other nationalities, between 1 September 1939 and 31 July 1990"—such denial being punishable by fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.[83]
Polish reactions [ edit ]
The 2018 Polish law, and what many Poles have considered an international over-reaction to it, have engendered strong feelings in Poland.
In January 2018, Israeli and Jewish comments about the Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance bill led, in Poland, to a spate of anti-Israel and antisemitic ripostes. State TV ran antisemitic crawls on a talk show; state-radio commentator Piotr Nisztor suggested that Poles who supported the official Israeli position might consider relinquishing their Polish citizenships; and TVP2 director Marcin Wolski remarked that the Auschwitz death camp might be called a "Jewish death camp", as Jewish Sonderkommando inmates had run its crematoria.[84][85][86]
On 29 January 2018 Polish President Andrzej Duda responded to official Israeli objections to the Polish bill, saying that Poland had been a victim of Nazi Germany and had not taken part in the Holocaust.[87] "I can never accept the slandering and libeling of us Poles as a nation or of Poland as a country through the distortion of historical truth and through false accusations." On 31 January 2018, before the Polish Senate vote on the bill, Deputy Prime Minister Beata Szydło said: "We Poles were victims, as were the Jews... It is a duty of every Pole to defend the good name of Poland."[88]
On 8 February 2018 the Polish government opened a media campaign, in support of the Amendment, targeted to Poland, Israel, and the United States. Hashtags such as "#GermanDeathCamps" and "#PolishRighteousness" were spread by Polish government accounts, and a government-sponsored video went viral on Google, Facebook, and Twitter.[89][90][91]
On 14 March 2018 the Polish Bishops' Conference noted a rise in anti-Semitism stimulated by the controversy over the Amendment and declared anti-Semitism to be "contrary to the Christian tenet of loving one's neighbor."[92]
Israeli reactions [ edit ]
Some Israelis accused the Polish government of engaging in Holocaust denial. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the legislation, saying:[80] "One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied."
Knesset member and former journalist Yair Lapid has claimed that "[t]here were Polish death camps".[93] Other Israeli officials such as Education and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett have termed the expression a "misrepresentation", although Bennett said of the proposed law "This is a shameful disregard of the truth. It is a historic fact that many Poles aided in the murder of Jews, handed them in, abused them, and even killed Jews during and after the Holocaust."[94]
After Poland's legislature began steps to outlaw use of the expression "Polish death camps", some Israeli officials expressed concern that Poland might try to whitewash its wartime history. "Those who see themselves as defenders of Poland's good name are often quick to point out that in Poland there was no Quisling regime comparable to that which existed in other countries occupied by Germany — and that the Polish underground fought the Germans tooth and nail," the director of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, Laurence Weinbaum, wrote in The Washington Post in 2015. "The truth is that local authorities were often left intact in occupied Poland, and many officials exploited their power in ways that proved fatal to their Jewish constituents."[95][96]
However, Weinbaum was also highly critical of what he termed "the wild assertions of some of the Israelis who have weighed in with sweeping charges of Polish culpability for the Holocaust, and erroneous, disparaging declarations about the provenance of Auschwitz."[97] In a 1998 article he wrote that "Part of the hostility to Poland [in Jewish circles] is based on the entirely false impression that Germany chose occupied Poland as the venue for their death camps because they could count on Polish cooperation in carrying out the Final Solution. Although there is no historical evidence to support that contention, it has gained wide currency and credence... Careless reference to 'Polish extermination camps', rather than German or Nazi camps, has also played a part in fostering this perception."[98]
Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, has opined: "There is no doubt that the term 'Polish death camps' is a historical misrepresentation [...] However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion."[37][99]
On 29 January 2018, Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon tweeted, "Of course they were not Polish. Those were German death camps. The issue is the legitimate and essential freedom to talk about the involvement of Poles in the murder of Jews without fear or threat of penalisation. Simple."[100]
Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri said young Israelis unintentionally associate the Holocaust with Poland, sometimes far more than with Nazi Germany. Writing in Haaretz, he called for a reappraisal of Israeli Holocaust education policy, to more greatly emphasize German culpability and Polish resistance during the March of the Living.[101]
Israeli president Reuven Rivlin said in Auschwitz that historians should be able to study the Holocaust without restrictions. He also stated "There is no doubt that many Poles fought against the Nazi regime, but we cannot deny the fact that Poland and Poles lent a hand to the annihilation".[102]
In protest at what she saw as the censorship and "borderline Holocaust denial" provided by the 2018 bill, Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov repeatedly tweeted the phrase "Polish death camps".[103][70][85]
On February 2 2019 the prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu said in Warsaw at the international conference on security issues in the Middle East that "Poles collaborated with the Nazis". Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki’s office released a statement calling Netanyahu’s comments “surprising”. Morawiecki also tweeted that there was "no Polish regime" during the Nazi occupation, emphasizing that both Jews and Poles suffered under German rule.[104]
Polish-American reactions [ edit ]
The 2018 law is supported by the president of the Polish American Congress.[105] It is opposed as counterproductive by the former president of the Kosciuszko Foundation, who launched a successful campaign to remove the expression "Polish death camps" from U.S. news publications.[106]
Jacek K. Matysiak, writing in the Polish-American newspaper Gwiazda Polarna, blames the current controversy on Benjamin Netanyahu's internal political struggles in Israel, and also sees it as related to Jewish claims against Poland for property lost by Polish Jews during World War II.[107]
Polish-Jewish reactions [ edit ]
In 2018 the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland said the legislation has led to a "growing wave of intolerance, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism", making many community members fearful for their safety.[108][109]
In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the founding of Israel, the Jewish-Polish historian Janusz Sujecki received from the Israeli ambassador to Poland, Yigal Antebi, a prize recognizing Sujecki's "contributions to the preservation of Jewish culture in Poland". Twenty years later, in 2018, Sujecki returned the prize to the current Israeli ambassador to Poland, Anna Azari, in a "symbolic protest" against recent waves of "slander and libel" against Poland. Sujecki pointed out that, during the Holocaust, Poland had done all in her power to try to get the western Allies to stop the German mass murders of Jews, Poles, and other nationalities in German-occupied Poland. Jan Karski's report at a 1943 personal meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt brought no action, and Karski's personal report to Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise and other American and Jewish leaders brought only incredulity or indifference. Nor did Poland's western Allies react to appeals from the Polish government-in-exile in London, in 1944, to bomb the rail lines leading to the German concentration camps in occupied Poland.[110]
On 15 March 2018, a group of Polish rabbis thanked the Polish Bishops' conference for condemning a rise in anti-Semitism in the controversy, and said they would "continue to speak out against analogous attitudes among Jews."[92]
Other reactions [ edit ]
While the American Jewish Committee (AJC) has stated that it "has been for decades critical of such harmful terms as 'Polish concentration camps' and 'Polish death camps,' recognizing that these sites were erected and managed by Nazi Germany during its occupation of Poland", AJC has also said that, "while we remember the brave Poles who saved Jews, the role of some Poles in murdering Jews cannot be ignored", and that the AJC is "firmly opposed to legislation that would penalize claims that Poland or Polish citizens bear responsibility for any Holocaust crimes".[111][112]
According to Dr. Efraim Zuroff, use of the expression "Polish death camp" is misleading. He said "the Polish state was not complicit in the Holocaust, but many Poles were."[22][113]
On 3 February 2018 German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel tweeted: "I have been organizing youth travel to Auschwitz and Majdanek for 15 years as a group leader. That these camps were German - there can be no doubt! The use of the term "Polish death camp" is wrong."[114][115]
In February 2018 the Ruderman Family Foundation launched a campaign for the US government to sever its ties with Poland. The campaign included a YouTube video in which a group on-screen repeated the phrase "Polish Holocaust"; the video was removed after widespread criticism.[116][117]
Also in February 2018 a Washington Post opinion piece by Anne Applebaum emphasized the law's "stupidity and unenforceability", invoking the Streisand effect, but also argued that the Israeli government is using "this nasty little controversy for its own purposes."[118]
See also [ edit ]Doorman, a startup delivering packages when you schedule them will be no more after October 6th, 2017.
The startup sent a letter over the weekend letting customers know it would no longer be in business in two weeks, saying it was “joining forces with a larger team.”
We’re not sure if this joining of forces means Doorman has been acquired or if it’s some other structure. We’ve reached out to Doorman for more details but have so far not heard back.
The startup popped up in 2015 and even enjoyed an appearance on ABC’s “Shark Tank” to tout its plan to drop off your online shopping items when you wanted them, not when the delivery person decided to drop them off. It was a model that resonated with those who couldn’t wait around all day for a package delivery, myself included.
But, Doorman admitted nearly one year ago the model was so popular it was losing money and had to change tack.
“We didn’t expect that Doorman would completely change peoples’ shopping behavior,” the company’s founder and CEO, Zander Adell, told TechCrunch at the time. “We now know that Doorman customers shop online twice as much within 6 months of signing up. Unfortunately, that means our original $19 and $29 per month plans stopped making sense, and we’re in effect losing a lot of money on some of our customers.”
The monthly delivery price jumped to a whopping $89 for the premium subscription, with an additional fee per package.
We don’t know if the price jump caused a mass cancellation but anecdotally I’ve heard from a handful of people who stopped using the service after that.
Unfortunately, it seems the price jump also wasn’t enough to save the company. Doorman says it will no longer accept incoming shipments after September 29th and that those who use their Doorman address for online shipments should update their information.
“We deeply apologize for all the inconvenience this causes you,” the letter says. “It has been an honor to work with you in helping us build and improve the Doorman experience and it has been a privilege to serve you.”Before each game, coaches meet separately with the referee to discuss any possible issues that might arise. On Sunday, Ken Whisenhunt likely will bring up the controversial shift the 49ers have employed this season.
Two weeks ago, the 49ers were called for a false start when tight end Justin Peelle made a quick movement that referee Gene Steratore and crew decided was designed to draw the Redskins into a neutral-zone infraction.
It just so happened to come on a fourth-and-short play, and the penalty made coach Jim Harbaugh angry. He called it a normal shift, one the 49ers execute on other downs. He sought clarification from the NFL.
Last week, the 49ers used a similar shift against the Giants. It was third and 2, and tight end Delanie Walker abruptly got out of his three-point stance. The Giants moved, and referee Tony Corrente and crew called the penalty on the Giants, giving the 49ers a first down.
Giants coach Tom Coughlin wasn't happy with the call, saying the 49ers' intent was to deceive.
Cardinals defensive coordinator Ray Horton and staff have tried to prepare their players for it.
"It's a cute play," Horton said, "and the league has said it's a cute play also, a legal cute play. So kudos to them for having cute plays in."
Cardinals players are coached to watch the ball, "So if they do what we say, it's not a big deal," Horton said. "I understand it's third and 1, fourth and 1, crunch game and all of a sudden a big man moves... cute."
Going long
Receiver Larry Fitzgerald is averaging fewer catches a game than usual this season, but he's doing more with the ones he's making.
Fitzgerald is on pace for 80 receptions, which would be his lowest total since 2006, when he missed three games with injury and had 69 catches. But Fitzgerald is averaging 17.6 yards a reception, about 4 yards more than his career average.
This season, Fitzgerald has nine receptions of more than 30 yards, including gains of 42, 47, 66 and 72 yards. He had four all of last season, and the longest was 41 yards.
"I think we've done a better job of getting him the ball in those situations this year," Whisenhunt said. "And he's made a couple of those plays where he's made spectacular catches, too. I think it's just more opportunities this year, too."
Flipping the field
The Cardinals' offensive struggles this season have contributed to their poor field position in many of their games. In the second half last week in Philadelphia, Cardinals possessions started at the 18-, 14-, 17-, 11-, 13-, 13- and 16-yard lines.
Improving upon that will be necessary to beat the 49ers, who have a strong defense and one of the league's better punters, Andy Lee.
"It is something that is going to be a struggle but we've got to continue to fight through it," Whisenhunt said. "Some of it's because we haven't done a good job of getting it out of the tight area, and we haven't done a good enough job defensively. And you know what? We've faced some pretty good punters. They've hit some bombs."
Injury update
Quarterback Kevin Kolb (toe) is listed as questionable, but Whisenhunt didn't sound optimistic about Kolb's chances of playing on Sunday. Outside linebacker Joey Porter (knee) and safety Kerry Rhodes (foot) are out.
Tight ends Todd Heap (hamstring) and Rob Housler (groin) are questionable.KINGSTON, Jamaica – When the young woman was preparing to open a business in Jamaica selling pipes, vaporizers and other smoking paraphernalia, some acquaintances suggested she would have difficulty succeeding in a niche trade dominated by men.
Now, about a year-and-a-half after its launch at a hotel complex in Jamaica’s capital, Ravn Rae’s smoking supplies store is growing and she’s proving doubters wrong in a Caribbean country where women have made such big advances in professions once dominated by men that a new U.N. study says it has the world’s highest proportion of female bosses.
“Women are the ones who are the main breadwinners. We push harder to earn,” says Rae at her smoke shop, which she hopes to soon expand into a medical marijuana dispensary if lawmakers pass a decriminalization bill and allow a regulated cannabis industry. For now, she manages one saleswoman.
According to data analyzed by the International Labor Organization, nearly 60 per cent of managers in Jamaica are women, including those who work for large companies and those, like Rae, who own their own businesses. That’s the globe’s highest percentage and way ahead of developed countries. Colombia, at 53 per cent, and St. Lucia, at 52 per cent, are the only other nations in the world where women are more likely than men to be the boss, according to the ILO’s global list. The highest ranking first world nation is the United States, with almost 43 per cent, and the lowest is Japan, at 11 per cent.
Overall, women in the Caribbean and parts of Latin America make up the managerial ranks to a greater extent than in the developed world. Experts say the gain is due in part to improvements in the level of female education, but also because men have failed to keep pace and have in some cases gone backward.
The Caribbean and Latin America have seen such big improvements in the economic and social status of women that gender gaps in education, labour force participation, access to health systems and political engagement “have narrowed, closed and sometimes even reversed direction,” according to a World Bank study that analyzed women’s economic empowerment in the region. More women are receiving advanced degrees even as a number also juggle household and child-rearing responsibilities.
But while government officials and educators celebrate that fact they also have serious worries about stagnating men, who have lower levels of academic achievement and are at increased risk of falling into criminality, trends that undermine the gains by females.
Wayne Campbell, a Jamaican high school teacher who blogs about the problem of male underachievement, believes toxic notions about masculinity permeate entire communities, reinforced by a popular music culture that often celebrates law-breaking. Boys who display school smarts are often ridiculed as effeminate by peers and even adults in areas where academic excellence by males is typically devalued, he says.
“It’s almost as if manhood and masculinity have been hijacked by a thug culture far removed from education,” he said.
From the southern country of Trinidad & Tobago to the northern archipelago of the Bahamas, Caribbean education ministries have focused attention for years trying to solve the worrying reality of male underachievement and the social problems it leaves in its wake. Grace McLean, Jamaica’s chief education officer, says “it is evident that boys’ underachievement in the education system is weighing heavily on national socio-economic development.”
Regional educators say the scale of academic underachievement by boys, a trend which is mirrored in other parts of the world including the U.S., points to the need for systemic changes in the way that lessons are planned and delivered. Many schools in the Caribbean have experimented with approaches large and small to better engage boys, but results have typically been mixed when they haven’t been considered outright failures.
In 2010, Trinidad and Tobago transformed about a fifth of its co-educational secondary schools into single-sex institutions to address underperformance. But the pilot program was scrapped after officials found students did not improve in single-sex classrooms.
But educators in Jamaica say the research they have conducted has shown that boys in single-sex schools do better than those in co-educational ones. In one co-ed Kingston primary school, the principal is now experimenting with single-sex classrooms and she says the results are promising.
“We’re finding that reading levels are improving and the boys are more focused and engaged when they learn by themselves,” said principal Candi Lee Crooks-Smith at Allman Town Primary, where exuberant 8-year-old boys in one classroom learned math lessons on a recent morning by taking turns juggling a soccer ball with a male trainee teacher.
Not everyone is convinced regional women are close to pulling ahead of men in Caribbean societies. Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar, an associate professor of sociology at Canada’s Ryerson University who researches Caribbean cultures, said the majority of top positions are still dominated by men, even if countries like Jamaica and Trinidad have female heads of state. She says women in the Caribbean still “have to contend with old-boy networks, male privilege, and males dominating in the justice, social, political and religious systems.”
But with far more women pursuing higher education compared to men, the gender gap could grow lopsided. For years, there’s been a steady 70-30 ratio in favour of women at the University of the West Indies, a public university system serving 18 Caribbean countries and territories.
“Caribbean culture has a laid-back, slow-paced vibe. But generally, Caribbean men are a lot more relaxed than the women,” Rae says, checking inventory at her smoke shop.
___
David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmcfaddMarvel Entertainment has released the official snyposis for the 16th episode of season two of ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is titled "Afterlife."
Coulson must protect his Agents against an impending and powerful threat, and Skye encounters another Inhuman.
“Afterlife” – As Robert Gonzalez makes his move, Coulson must do whatever it takes to protect the future of S.H.I.E.L.D. Meanwhile Skye’s journey to control her powers takes a surprising turn when she meets the enigmatic Inhuman named Lincoln. “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” stars Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson, Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Grant Ward, Chloe Bennet as Skye, Iain De Caestecker as Agent Leo Fitz, Elizabeth Henstridge as Agent Jemma Simmons, Nick Blood as Lance Hunter, and Adrianne Palicki.
Guest starring are Henry Simmons as Alphonso “Mack” Mackenzie, Ruth Negga as Raina, Kyle MacLachlan as Cal, Edward James Olmos as Robert Gonzales, Jamie Harris as Gordon, DichenLachman as Jiaying, Luke Mitchell as Lincoln Campbell, Craig Johnson as S.H.I.E.L.D. Leader, Stoney Westmoreland as Honest Eddie, and John Forest as Robbie. ”Afterlife” was written by Craig Titley and directed by Kevin Hooks.Story highlights David Miranda was detained for hours at Heathrow without interpreter, lawyer, he says
Miranda says he was never asked about anything related to terrorism
His partner, journalist Glenn Greenwald, calls it a ploy to intimidate journalists
The British government defends the questioning as legal
In nearly nine hours in detention at London's Heathrow Airport, David Miranda -- the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald -- said he didn't trust the British authorities questioning him, fearing they'd follow through on threats to throw him in jail, if not worse.
"I have seen many stories that people are picked up in different countries... and they are vanished, nobody sees them," Miranda said Tuesday in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper. "In that moment, I was really afraid what would happen to me."
The Brazilian national said he didn't know what he might have done wrong, why the UK government's anti-terrorism laws applied to him, or why he couldn't have a lawyer of his choosing present.
But he did understand why his partner might be a target. Greenwald has been at the forefront of high-profile reports exposing secrets in U.S. intelligence programs, stories that have made him a thorn in the side of Washington and some of its allies. Greenwald, with the cooperation of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, broke the story of the existence of a U.S. National Security Agency program that is thought to have collected large amounts of phone and Internet data.
Miranda's detention ended only after a lawyer from Greenwald's news organization, the British-based Guardian, got the chance to talk to him after about eight hours.
After that, the 28-year-old was released, without materials he'd been carrying on behalf of Greenwald, to pass onto a filmmaker in Berlin. He said officials also confiscated his laptop, phone and USB sticks. Miranda ultimately returned to Brazil, where he lives with Greenwald.
Sitting alongside his partner, Greenwald said the detention gave the British government "a huge black eye in the world, (made) them look thuggish and authoritarian (for) interfering in the journalism process (and created) international incidents with the government of Brazil, which is indignant about this."
The action has prompted a lawsuit asking British courts to declare what happened to Miranda illegal because his detention was unrelated to terrorism, Greenwald said. The journalist added the lawsuit also demands that all the items taken from Miranda be returned to him, and that the British government can't first use or share them with anyone else.
"To start detaining people who they think they are reporting on what they're doing under terrorism laws, that is as dangerous and oppressive as it gets," Greenwald said.
JUST WATCHED Greenwald: UK will regret what it did Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Greenwald: UK will regret what it did 02:08
JUST WATCHED Glenn Greenwald's partner detained Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Glenn Greenwald's partner detained 00:40
JUST WATCHED Toobin: Greenwald handling crisis wrong Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Toobin: Greenwald handling crisis wrong 03:51
Britain's Home Office on Tuesday defended Miranda's questioning, saying the government and police "have a duty to protect the public and our national security."
"If the police believe that an individual is in possession of highly sensitive stolen information that would help terrorism, then they should act and the law provides them with a framework to do that," it said.
"Those who oppose this sort of action need to think about what they are condoning."
Questioning was under Terrorism Act 2000
The British government and Miranda say he was questioned on Sunday under Schedule 7 of Terrorism Act 2000, which gives authorities more powers to investigate and combat terrorism, though not without some controversy.
In a statement that didn't name Miranda but referred to his detention, London's Metropolitan Police called what happened "legally and procedurally sound" and said it came after "a detailed decision-making process."
The statement describes the law under which Miranda was detained as "a key part of our national security capability which is used regularly and carefully by the Metropolitan Police Service to help keep the public safe."
But that's not how Miranda and Greenwald view the law, or at least how it was applied in this case.
Said Miranda, for whom English is a second language and who didn't have an interpreter on hand throughout the ordeal: "They didn't ask me anything about terrorism, not one question."
"They were just telling me: 'If you don't answer this, you are going to jail,' " he added.
Greenwald said he learned three hours into the incident that his partner was being detained, and he added that concerned Brazilian diplomats and Guardian lawyers were shut out of the process for hours.
Greenwald: UK authorities trying to intimidate journalists
The entire episode, Greenwald speculated, was designed to intimidate him and other investigative journalists from using classified information and digging into stories critical of the British and allied governments.
|
not quite.
Unlike Huber, I see progress all over Philadelphia where it comes to race relations. Maybe it’s because I’m new here, or maybe because Mt. Airy is an oasis of alternative lifestyles, or maybe because I look for the positive instead of cowering behind fear. I don’t know. Make no mistake, I’m not blind to some of the problems Huber alludes to — I guess I’m just not so naïve as to blame black people for all of them. The multitude of problems Philly faces requires a nuanced examination of class, corrupt politicians, the economy and zoning laws, just to name a few.
I’m not saying that Philadelphia Magazine shouldn’t have tried to tackle a good story about race relations. But this wasn’t a story about race relations. It was a story about fear. But white people have been afraid of black people since they dragged us here against our will. And they’ve been justifying that fear by demonizing black people for hundreds of years. This isn’t news. This is a rerun of history.
Philly Mag, for the sake of your readers who actually want to learn something new, please try again. And in the meantime, perhaps you could find at least one black editor in this city full of black people. I’m just saying.Two cheers for democracy in the Netherlands
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the VVD Liberal party appears before his supporters in The Hague, Netherlands, 15 March 2017. © REUTERS/Yves Herman
The Dutch election result may not be quite the unalloyed victory against the far-right that some have made it out to be, says Dinyar Godrej.
‘This was an evening when... the Netherlands said “Stop” to the wrong kind of populism,’ said a beaming Mark Rutte last night to a crowd of supporters, as it became clear that his centre-right party the VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) would remain the largest in Dutch Politics and he would continue for another term as prime minister.
Much international attention had focused on the Dutch elections post-Trump, as there had been for a while the chance that an Islam-hating autocrat in the flamboyantly-coiffed form of Geert Wilders might pull off a surprise victory.
We could now breathe a sigh of relief that the far-right had been kept at bay and, predictably, approbation from European leaders followed for the Dutch populace which had rejected extremism by flinging this particular viper from its bosom.
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However, what is being seen as a victory for the middle ground and good sense is a bit more complicated.
That these elections were important was underlined by the strong 80 per cent turnout, with polling hours extended in some cities to allow people to cast their votes.
The campaigning had got dominated by the three Is – Islam, Immigration and Identity. These are issues that are not usually at the top of people’s concerns when choosing which politicians they want to represent them; those tend to be more grounded matters such as social provision and job security. But obsessing on identity creates an emotional charge and the campaigning circus duly went for it.
This highjacking of the issues was a victory for Wilders whose divisive discourse of cultural panic seeped further into the mainstream. Rutte himself pulled a pre-election stunt that many interpreted as an offering to Wilders’ audience of angries by publishing an open letter that ran as full page advertisements in all the major newspapers asking immigrants to ‘behave normally or go away’.
Of course it was couched in high-minded pieties of working together to build society but the constant appeal was to ‘our values’, a pre-decided given of imagined decency that all Dutch people supposedly share which the new Dutch of immigrant origin supposedly don’t.
And what are the kinds of things that the later, according to the letter, get up to? These range from dumping rubbish on the street, hanging around in threatening groups to harassing gay people and women in short skirts and accusing the ordinary Dutch person of being racist. These people need to fit in and not reject Dutch values.
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If Wilders was accused of creating ‘us versus them’ division, here was an oh-so-decent form of it. The us here were the presumed indigenous white Dutch populace who have a monopoly on decency and behave normally at all times (which sometimes extends to abusing women wearing headscarves but let’s not mention that).
The them were these foreigners (incidentally also citizens) who just refuse to assimilate and get up to all kinds of illiberal behaviour. It seemed to escape Rutte, the sitting prime minister, that unacceptable behaviour of all kinds needed condemnation and, where applicable, the enforcement of existing laws against it, not this kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink ‘we know who the decent people are’ kind of approach. But maybe this is what Rutte considers the right kind of populism where a dominant social majority lays claim to the high ground of values.
That this discourse also works against the desired social integration by reinforcing a ‘we know best’ mentality in the dominant social group should be apparent to Rutte. A far cry from the embrace of diversity needed for truly open societies. Minority groups, particularly Muslims, already suffer from well-documented discrimination in one of the areas where it hurts most – the jobs market.
But the ploy of creating a sense of victimhood within a group that has social power is an old one to try and get the more economically disadvantaged members of it onside, and thus disrupt any class solidarity that could break social boundaries.
So now we have another coalition with a predominantly centre-right make up waiting to be formed. The previous one delivered a series of cuts to public provision which is likely one of the reasons that the Dutch labour party (PvdA) got decimated in this election for being part of it. In the run up to the election Rutte suddenly pulled a bunny out of a hat by announcing that his party would allot two billion euro for care homes on the basis of the country’s economic growth. So after presiding over the filleting of care, here was a promise to graft some meat back on in the future.
Still, populism got defeated, right?
Sure, in terms of Wilders not being in the lead in a political landscape with proportional representation where many parties are in contention not just two. Yet it still says something that his party is now the second largest in the country, gaining five extra seats since the last election. And his continued role as provocateur is assured.
Rutte’s VVD actually lost more seats which could be seen as being fairly typical of a party already in power. And they actually got a late boost by a diplomatic spat with Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s dictator in the making.
If there is a ray of unalloyed hope, it’s in the Greens (GroenLinks) registering the largest gains of any political party, a sign that the debate is not just about spurious identity politics. Though what kind of part they could play in a mainly rightwing coalition if they were in it remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, a real challenge both politically and socially will be to start washing off some of the contagion that has spread through the mainstreaming of Wilders’ hateful messages during this election.
Look out for our April edition on the theme of Populism.
Before you go… It’s a critical time to build media that brings people together – not drives them apart. That means journalism that creates an inclusive global community, and emphasizes that the struggles of people are often in opposition to the same elite-driven globalization and share the same aspiration to a global, common good. At New Internationalist, we have never had a rich benefactor or a media tycoon bankrolling what we do. So it makes sense for us to turn to our readers to help shape the kind of journalism that makes the case for something better. On 1 March, we launched an ambitious Community Share Offer, opening up ownership of New Internationalist to ordinary people all over the world. If you are interested in joining us, visit factsandheart.org.Efficiency in the Urgent Care
Mike Weinstock MD, Kirk Hummer NP and Jenny Messick MD
THE STAFF
● Physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) all work together and all play to each other’s strengths. For example, the Emergency Medicine trained provider may have more procedural experience, while the NP may be more up-to-date on current primary care practices.
● There is no need for a well-defined hierarchy. Put the patient first and it all falls into place. Use everyone to their fullest abilities.
● Non-provider professional staff. Registered Nurses (RNs) and Registered Radiographic Technologists (RRTs) can be cross-trained to do basic patient care. They both can room a patient, get vital signs, assist with procedures and discharge patients. They remain differentiated only by those activities that are legally defined: the RNs give medications and the RRTs use ionizing radiation. This allows patients to move quickly through without waiting for different providers to perform a narrow, specified skill.
● Communicate these expectations to people upon hiring. Over the last 7-8 years, Urgent Care Medicine is becoming a specialty and the jobs are highly desired. This allows for great selectivity in the hiring process.
● The front desk person is critical. Every patient passes through this individual, who controls the lobby and needs to have some small sense of medical judgment. It is well worth the effort to put time into training this person, paying appropriately and offering benefits that allow good people to stay in the position. It is worth it because this person is the face of the company.
● If there are multiple Urgent Care Centers (UCCs) within an organization, different staff can rotate to different locations. However, there is a value in “anchoring” staff to specific centers because it fosters teamwork and ownership.
THE FACILITIES
● The best centers are designed so that the provider has a direct line-of-sight to all the staff and all the exam rooms. A lot of information is gained by watching a patient walk into the exam room.
● Develop Universal Rooms. Design and stock every room with the capacity to perform a pelvic exam, incision and drainage, and wound, throat and flu culture swabs. Set up every room, at every center, the same way. Not only is there a flu swab in every room, but it is in the same drawer in every room. This makes it easier to stock, and gives providers a sense of comfort as they rotate between the different centers.
● It is extremely important that you stick to your posted hours because the public expects you to be open when you say you are, and they will show up seeking help.
Remember, most of the profit at a UCC is made on the last few patients of every day. Most of the patients seen throughout the day support the existence of the center, the cost of the staff, the supplies, etc.
PROTOCOLS
● It is possible to get every patient in and out within 30 minutes. This can be and is achieved on a regular basis, but is only possible when there is a true team effort.
● A good, experienced team means that every member does not have to wait for the provider’s order. If a patient comes in with a crush injury to the hand, the RRT can perform an x-ray and the RN can prepare the tetanus shot and start cleaning the wound at the same time that the provider is taking the history.
● Urinalysis. Train the staff to obtain and test urine immediately in any woman of childbearing age, and in any patient presenting with an abdominal, pelvic or genital complaint. This can save 15 minutes every visit, when it is done proactively every time.
● X-rays. Orient the RNs and RRTs on the appropriate films to get, from the fingers to the elbows and the toes to the knees. Films involving radiation to the trunk should still be ordered by, or at least discussed with, the provider in advance.
Give a hard copy of the image on a disc to every patient to ensure appropriate follow-up with a primary doctor or orthopedist if necessary.
This is an excellent PR move - if a patient walks out with something in his/her hand, that patient feels like something was done for him/her.
● Pelvic Exams. Train your professional support staff to anticipate when patients may need a pelvic exam, and to set everything up, including the gown and top-sheet, equipment and culture mediums before the provider enters the room.
● Know the patient population that comes to your UCC and the antibiotic resistance within the community. What percentage of your cultures come back positive for MRSA? Anticipate test results and act accordingly.Above watch: The family of a missing Calgary mother have confirmed to Global News that a body found near Balzac is Jessica Newman. Nancy Hixt reports.
CALGARY – The family of a 24-year-old woman missing since March has confirmed her body was found in a ditch north of Calgary on Monday.
A crew working at a rural location near the hamlet of Balzac made the grisly discovery just before 4 p.m.
Jessica Rae Newman was last seen after working a shift at the Water Grill on March 10. Her coworkers and regulars at the southeast establishment are devastated by the news.
“I just don’t believe someone could do that like that to her…I hope the police are going to get that person very soon,” said Water Grill owner Sam Tat.
Although police won’t confirm whether or not they believe the remains are hers, her family told Global News on Tuesday that they successfully identified the remains.
Her body has been taken to the Calgary Medical Examiner’s office where an autopsy will be completed to determine the cause of death.
Jessica’s mother says she is extremely distraught and sad that the remains turned out to be her daughter.
“I am looking forward to finding out who’s done this to her,” said a tearful Rhonda Stewart.
“If it’s somebody that she knew and trusted… I’ll be even more hurt.”
Stewart says a detective working on the case called her on Monday night to warn her that the body could be Jessica’s.
“Then I got a phone call from our local police,” said Stewart, who lives in B.C. “They came over just to tell me in person.”
“I thought after her being gone almost eight weeks that I was kind of prepared, until I found out… and then I wasn’t as prepared as I thought.”
Stewart says the hardest part has been telling Jessica’s children about their mother’s death.
“That was horrible… I told the children [Tuesday] morning and they’re taking it pretty well. I kept them home from school and we’ll just spend the day together.”
“My husband has brain cancer, so I have to look after him as well.”
Stewart says the whole situation is terrible, and that she feels bad for everyone involved.
“You feel bad for the poor guy who found her, you feel bad for the young policeman that had to come tell me last night, and then all of her family and friends.”
A GoFundMe page has been set up to help support Newman’s family, and organizers are hoping to secure a venue for a fundraising event at the end of May. More details will be posted on the GoFundMe page here.
With files from Nancy HixtIn a bid to ease tensions over limited on-street parking, Portland may implement a new residential permit program — one that gives more control to neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods feeling squeezed for spaces would vote on whether to issue parking permits for residents. Neighborhoods would set their own rates, and keep excess revenue to make local improvements, like installing crosswalks or flashing beacons.
The proposal was developed by a stakeholder advisory committee assembled by the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT). For the past year, PBOT has been reevaluating how the city manages both on- and off-street parking as a continuous system, particularly in neighborhoods experiencing growth, says Grant Morehead, a PBOT planner who oversaw the stakeholder process.
Thirty business and neighborhood association representatives, cycling and pedestrian advocates, and citizens at large met throughout 2015 to develop recommendations. Portland City Council will vote on them this spring.
Of all the ideas, the permit proposal is reviving a debate in Portland over who should pay for parking in residential neighborhoods: developers of new buildings, and by extension, their residents? Or should everyone be charged for the limited, but deceptively “free” resource of on-street parking?
“A lot of people here, they have always had a spot right in front of their house, all of the time,” says Kristin Eberhard, a senior researcher for the Sightline Institute who wrote about the proposal. She lives in Southeast Portland, where a boom of multiunit construction has new residents competing for space with neighbors in single-family homes.
“A change to that is very, very frustrating [for them] and it has become a thing that is driving NIMBY-ism and driving resistance to density,” she says.
As Portland’s popularity has increased, the city has mandated relatively few off-street parking spots for new construction compared to other U.S. cities. For nearly 20 years, new buildings close to frequent public transportation were not required to build parking at all.
But when residents of those new buildings did bring cars, and availed themselves of on-street spots, longtime residents protested, prompting Portland City Council to reinstate parking minimums in 2013.
Opt-in permit programs already exist in 13 Portland neighborhoods, but the committee’s proposal makes several significant changes.
The current system is designed to manage daytime commuter parking: people from outside the neighborhood driving in, parking on the street and then completing their commute by another mode. The permits regulate working hours.
But in Portland’s growing mixed-used residential and commercial areas, demand peaks not during the day but in the evening. Residents of single-family homes, multiunit apartment buildings, and “happy hour crowds” traveling to neighborhoods for restaurants and bars all compete for finite spaces.
Current city code also prohibits PBOT from limiting the number of permits issued. In Northwest Portland and the Central East Side, two neighborhoods experiencing tight parking thanks to drive-in commuters and increased nighttime demand, PBOT issues about twice as many permits as there are spots.
“Right now in some of our permit areas that have experienced growth we refer to the permits as ‘hunting licenses,’” says Morehead, “because it gives you the right to look for parking, but you’re not at all guaranteed to find a spot.”
Eberhard says that charging for on-street parking is a sensible way to manage a limited resource, but it may not be popular at first.
“The general feeling is [the lack of parking] is the developers fault,” she says. Why should long-term residents start paying for parking now, the thinking goes, when developers could just build more off-street parking?
Eberhard says this view obscures the reality that neighborhood on-street parking always had a cost; residents just weren’t paying it. Many would argue that pushing all of the cost of parking onto one group of people — in other words, residents in new buildings — is unfair and inefficient, and parking minimums can also discourage development and raise rents.
Eberhard sees permits as a tangible reminder that nothing is “free” because they “reinforce for people that this is a public asset that’s owned, maintained by the city, and should serve a common good, not just a private good of you privately having a space to park your car.”
At the same time, she hopes permits don’t swap one sense of entitlement for another: “Just because you pay for a permit doesn’t mean you own the public right-of-way.”
Eberhard’s neighborhood was highly involved in the stakeholder process. She thinks it will opt in to a new permit system if adopted, and use any revenue to install a flashing beacon at a nearby major commercial corridor.
Reviewing residential parking is just one way PBOT is reevaluating on- and off-street parking as a complete ecosystem. Using permits to set the “right price” for on-street parking will both ensure spots for residents and could discourage visitors from driving to neighborhoods. The excess revenue from permits will be used to improve the bicycle and pedestrian environment, “so that it becomes easier not to have a car,” says Morehead.
PBOT also hopes to move toward performance-based pricing in the Central City district. The brainchild of noted parking guru Donald Shoup, performance-based pricing sets meter prices just high enough to encourage frequent turnover, ideally ensuring only 85 percent of spots are filled at any given time.
City council will need to grant PBOT the authority to engage in performance-based pricing. In the meantime, Central City will see its first street parking rate increase since 2009 next week: from $1.60 an hour to $2 an hour.For the second time in a month Theo Walcott has been linked with a £25m move to West Ham.
The 27 year has apparently ‘grown frustrated’ with his lack of first team opportunities at Arsenal, and with the signing of Jamie Vardy imminent, the club are willing to listen to offers for Walcott.
Last month the story was carried in The Sun, and today’s report from James Olley in the Evening Standard adds more fuel to this particular fire. As a journalist very much on the Arsenal beat his information is usually spot on.
Walcott and Vardy share the same agents, so there’s undoubtedly some behind the scenes knowledge of how the arrival of the Leicester man might impact on Walcott’s playing time next season or, indeed, Arsene Wenger’s plans for him.
His departure this summer would be unsurprising anyway, having become very much a bit-part player in the second half of the season, and scoring just 9 goals in 44 appearances in the duration of the campaign.
West Ham are flush with cash and have a brand new higher capacity stadium having left Upton Park for the Olympic stadium. Their board have spoken openly about big spending this summer, and it’s a deal which makes sense for both them and the player.
We’re giving this one a three on the Poo-o-Meter.ADVERTISEMENT
In the past, presidents have told big lies mostly for one of two reasons. In the midst of scandal or failure, they told lies to protect themselves and deny that they had done wrong: I am not a crook, we did not trade arms for hostages, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Or they lied to convince the public to go along with a policy initiative, whether a war or a tax cut or a new program, when the truth was insufficiently persuasive.
Unlike his predecessors, President Trump lies for any reason at all.
I imagine the sinking feeling his aides get when he blurts out another whopper. "Now I'm going to have to go out and defend this," they say with a sigh, then huddle together to arrive at the least laughable spin they can come up with, so they can rationalize the lie — which Trump will of course be unwilling to retreat from.
White House staff have little choice but to reinforce, justify, and repeat their boss' lies, though I suppose they could retain some shred of dignity and integrity by quitting. But what about Trump's fellow Republicans, particularly the ones in Congress? They're in an uncomfortable position, knowing that he's still popular with the GOP base and so not having his back could have electoral costs. Being a "maverick" might sound appealing, but not when it's going to cost you lots of votes or hinder your ability to work with the rest of the party on your legislative priorities.
So with just a few exceptions, Republicans have chosen to get in line when Trump goes off on one of his near-daily flights of fantasy. Or at the very least, they try to avoid the subject and run from reporters who might bring it up. But they can't escape the taint of this presidency, and the longer it goes, the more likely each one of them is to get dirty.
Consider this remarkable interview Trump did with Time, in which he argued that it was fine for him to claim that Barack Obama tapped his phones, because: "When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know today it is different than wiretapping. It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes." Before we go on, let's acknowledge that even this idiotic explanation is false; I refer you to this tweet, free of any quotation marks or vague references that might be interpreted to refer broadly to surveillance:
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Nevertheless, this is one of Trump's common explanations for his lies, that he didn't actually lie if he got the lie from somebody else ("Well, I'm not, well, I think, I'm not saying, I'm quoting, Michael, I'm quoting highly respected people and sources from major television networks"). When asked whether the country will be able to believe him when he asks for their trust during a future crisis, he responded, "The country believes me. Hey. I went to Kentucky two nights ago, we had 25,000 people in a massive basketball arena." In other words: People can trust that I tell the truth because my fans still come out to see me.
This is not exactly a compelling defense. So every time Trump says something ridiculous, Republicans have to ask themselves: Do I help him on this or not? Some lies he tells are exaggerated versions of the lies they themselves tell, like the idea that three million people voted illegally. Republicans have all invested in the lie that says there is massive voter fraud; most just are careful enough not to put any numbers on it.
Other lies, though, are purely personal to Trump, like the idea that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history. They don't justify a policy or serve some other collective purpose; they're just about Trump feeling good. Defending him on that does nothing to help you with anyone but Trump himself.
Then there are questions that aren't about policy, but threaten the administration to a profound enough degree that Republicans may feel they have no choice but to rally to Trump's defense. The ever-widening Russia scandal falls into that category, which is why we've seen only a few Republicans admit that there's something troubling about a hostile foreign dictator manipulating our election, or that a report that the president's campaign manager had a $10 million per year contract with a Russian oligarch to advance Vladimir Putin's political interests might raise some alarming questions.
If Republicans are tempted to distance themselves from Trump over the Russia scandal, they'll probably be stopped by the realization that any serious threat to his presidency quickly becomes an equally serious threat to their agenda. A president crippled by a major scandal will be far less able to deliver on tax cuts for the wealthy or deregulation for corporations.
And that was the reason almost every Republican lined up behind Trump in the first place: They may have had their reservations about him, but he'd help them do all the things they'd been yearning to do for eight years. Yet now they can't escape the devil's bargain they made.
There are some Republicans more enthusiastic about Trump than others and some that are more sycophantic toward him. But sooner or later, almost all of them will wind up defending him, whether it's about particular lies he's told or scandals he's embroiled in. The stain of cooperating with Donald Trump will be on all of them, and it will never wear off.Amazon, Intersect Illinois and the Illinois Department of Commerce announced Tuesday that Amazon plans to open two fulfillment centers in Aurora, adding more than 1,000 full-time jobs with benefits to the local economy.
The company presently has fulfillment centers operating in Edwardsville, Joliet and Romeoville with another fulfillment center under construction in Monee.
“In just over two years, Illinois has proven itself to be an ideal location from which Amazon can continue offering customers our vast selection and superfast shipping speeds,” said Akash Chauhan, Amazon’s vice president of North American operations. “We’re excited to be growing and creating even more full-time jobs that offer comprehensive benefits on day one as well as generous maternity and parental leave benefits.”
“Intersect Illinois has worked closely with Amazon for months to grow and maximize Amazon’s footprint in Illinois,” said Intersect Illinois CEO Jim Schultz. “Team members like Frank Cho recognized early on that Illinois and Amazon could be tremendous partners and that hard work is paying off. Illinois can offer Amazon exactly what it needs.”
“With a talented workforce, central location in the Unites States and the North American market, and a world-class transportation hub, Illinois is proving it has assets no other state can offer,” Schultz added.
During the past two years, Amazon has announced eight fulfillment centers in Illinois. Once the latest investments complete construction, Amazon will have created more than 7,000 full-time jobs for Illinoisans. Full-time employees at Amazon receive competitive hourly wages and a comprehensive benefits package, including healthcare, 401(k) and company stock awards starting on day one, as well as generous maternity and parental leave benefits.
Amazon also has a longstanding commitment of hiring military veterans and spouses for careers across the company, including at its fulfillment centers. The company recently announced a commitment to hire 25,000 military veterans and spouses in the U.S. during the next five years and train 10,000 in cloud computing.
“Today’s announcement further strengthens Illinois’ position as one of the nation’s top states for logistics and distribution,” said DCEO Director Sean McCarthy. “This has been a team effort, with DCEO and Intersect Illinois working together to make possible Amazon’s continued growth in Illinois. We are excited to see Amazon expand and create thousands of good-paying jobs.”
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
At the nearly 1 million-square-foot facility in Aurora employees will pick, pack and ship small items to customers such as books, electronics and consumer goods. The other facility, spanning 400,000-square-feet, will specialize in handling larger items like big-screen televisions.
“The city of Warrenville is looking forward to welcoming Amazon as its newest corporate neighbor along Route 59 in the city of Aurora,” said City of Warrenville Mayor David Brummel. “This project is yet another great example of municipalities and private entities working together to improve underdeveloped areas, create jobs, and grow the local economy in a responsible and sustainable manner. Warrenville is truly excited to be part of the public/private team that will make the Amazon facilities a reality.”
Illinois competed with several other states for this project, and the Department of Commerce worked tirelessly to bring these new jobs to Illinois. The EDGE program is the State’s primary mechanism to help encourage job creation and capital investment in Illinois.
“Amazon’s investment in Aurora is a testament to our growing economy, streamlined business process and dedicated workforce,” said Aurora Mayor Robert J. O’Connor. “To bring 1,000 new jobs to Aurora at one location is unprecedented and to do so via Amazon, one of the most recognized brands in the world, is monumental. It’s just as exciting to know Amazon’s commitment and care for the communities where they have offices and the potential partnerships that will be developed throughout our city. We are absolutely thrilled with Amazon’s decision to choose Aurora for its newest venture.”
In addition to competitive wages and comprehensive benefits, Amazon also offers employees innovative programs like Career Choice, where it will pre-pay 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program’s launch four years ago, more than 7,000 employees in 10 countries have pursued degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few.
To learn more about working at an Amazon fulfillment center, visit www.amazondelivers.jobs.
SOURCE: State of Illinois news release
About INTERSECT ILLINOIS
Intersect Illinois works in collaboration with the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Focusing on the state of Illinois’ economic development efforts, Intersect Illinois was established as a private entity with greater flexibility to actively pursue prospects, and market this great state.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/aboutThe Trump administration will downsize an upcoming conference of historically black colleges and universities, making the event a "more intimate" gathering, the White House announced Friday.
"Responding to suggestions and feedback from many key stakeholders, the White House initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will modify its planned conference to best meet the current needs of HBCUs, their students and the broader HBCU community," the administration said in its announcement, reports The Hill.
Instead, the event will now feature a series of meetings so students and leaders can share perspectives about "the opportunities and challenges facing the HBCU community."
The move came after college leaders and some members of Congress had called for the event to be delayed in the wake of President Donald Trump's response to violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, reports Politico.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders last month said there was still a "pretty lengthy waiting list" by HBCU officials to attend the annual White House Conference, so the call to cancel it would not be heeded.
On Friday, in its statement announcing the changes, the Trump administration did not detail if any participants had cancelled their plans to attend.
Instead, the statement noted that the Trump administration will focus on how it can work best with HBCU schools and students. Further, officials will discuss how to structure a larger, "highly beneficial" HBCU conference at a later date.
The Trump administration has already come under criticism for its relationship with the HBCU community, highlighted when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in February tried to draw a parallel between the colleges and school choice.
Her comments drew ire from critics who said the HBCUs were formed not to offer choice, but because they were founded at a time when African-American students did not have other options for their higher education.Dom Dwyer’s exuberant, marketable, record-setting tenure with Sporting Kansas City came to an abrupt end Tuesday.
Sporting KC traded Dwyer, its all-star striker and second-leading scorer in team history, to Orlando City SC in exchange for $1.6 million in allocation money, $700,000 of which must be earned through incentives. A league source told The Star that most of the incentives are easily attainable, one of them as simple as Dwyer appearing in a single match with Orlando.
The exchange of money is the largest such transaction in MLS history. If Dwyer reaches all of the incentives, the return sum to Sporting KC will be more than double the previous largest financial fee any team has received in an MLS trade.
The roots of Tuesday’s trade sprouted after contract talks between Sporting KC and Dwyer’s camp gained little traction over the previous months. Dwyer’s current deal concludes with a club option after the 2018 season.
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“I have to look at the short- and long-term aspects of the organization,” Sporting KC coach and technical director Peter Vermes said. “Sometimes you can’t keep everybody just based on the financial constraints that are imposed upon you based on that salary cap. In this situation, it was probably going to end up being very, very difficult.”
SHARE COPY LINK On Tuesday, Sporting Kansas City's all-star striker and second-leading scorer in team history, was traded to Orlando City SC for allocation money. Take a look at Dwyer's records and time in Kansas City.
Multiple teams contacted Sporting KC about Dwyer when the summer transfer window opened earlier this month after learning of the slow pace of his contract negotiations. Vermes said Sporting KC received offers from several teams, including two that approached Orlando’s record-setting presentation.
The reasoning: Dwyer, who turns 27 this week, scored 57 goals in MLS play in Kansas City, including 55 over the past four seasons. The latter is tied for second most in the league. He led Sporting KC in scoring in 2016, 2015 and 2014, including a franchise-record 22 goals in 2014.
“Dom’s had a lot of contributions to this team on and off the field in his time here,” Vermes said. “But at the same time, this team has never been built around one player.”
Late Tuesday, Dwyer penned a farewell message to Kansas City and its fans and posted it to his social media accounts.
“Deep down, I knew this day would come, and no matter where this journey of football takes me, KC will always be where it began,” he wrote, also adding, “I hope I made a footprint in your hearts like you did mine.”
Under Vermes’ directorship, Sporting KC has never shied away from trading or transferring its top talent. But a Sporting KC club that sits in second place in the Western Conference will be left to replace an MLS All-Star who has scored 67 goals across all competitions in Kansas City, the second most in franchise history.
But a Sporting KC club that sits in second place in the Western Conference will be left to replace an MLS All-Star who has scored 67 goals across all competitions in Kansas City, the second most in franchise history.
In this case, the long-term benefits are obvious. The allocation funds are sufficient to aide Sporting KC in a multitude of ways.
The short-term repercussions will depend on the next, yet-to-be-seen move. Even in a down year during which he has scored only five goals, Dwyer was still Sporting Kansas City’s top striker. Sporting KC has been tracking strikers, both foreign and domestic, all season, sources told The Star.
More recently, the club narrowed that focus toward one of its own former players, Krisztian Nemeth, who scored 10 goals in 28 MLS matches in 2015 for Sporting KC before transferring to Qatar. Vermes acknowledged interest in Nemeth on Tuesday, but there are several moving parts to overcome to make Nemeth’s return a reality.
Because Sporting KC received a transfer fee when Nemeth departed Kansas City, he would have to go through the MLS allocation order if he returns to the league. Columbus owns the No. 1 spot in the allocation order and therefore the first right of refusal for Nemeth if he joins MLS, but the league allows that spot to be traded.
After picking up $1.6 million in allocation money Tuesday, Sporting KC has more than enough funds to make a deal happen if it so chooses — and it nearly did so earlier this week — but Vermes insisted the club is setting its sights on numerous options, not just Nemeth.
Any acquisition — Nemeth or otherwise — would need to be completed before Aug. 9, when the summer transfer window closes.
“That player and many others — all the above — are in play,” Vermes said. “The question is going to be whether or not we’re going to get a deal done with another player in the short term, or is |
globally by 2030. Yet even net zero global emissions is insufficient, says Silk. Beyond this, there is a need to work on reversing the process of climate change rather than simply maintaining the current global temperatures, which are already dangerously high. While Silk acknowledges that many have dismissed this timeline as pie in the sky, the demands aren't necessarily as crazy as they sound.
Recently, a study put out by a major energy think tank in the UK outlined how it was feasible to completely overhaul our national energy regimes within a decade, a timeline which former Vice President Al Gore has been demanding for years. A number of other climate change leaders have also issued calls for "wartime-like mobilization" in an open letter to Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, and in various other venues.
"This is an existential emergency," said Silk. "There is a serious lack of leadership across society, including within the environmental movement. Ordinary people need to start seeing this as their responsibility because the leadership is just not happening right now. This is a matter of life and death, and it will become exponentially more so in the coming years."Coming out on top? Kendra Wilkinson has been meeting with divorce lawyers following her husband Hank Baskett's cheating scandal, multiple sources tell Us Weekly.
PHOTOS: Biggest cheating scandals
"Kendra has seen a divorce lawyer," a source close to the Kendra on Top star tells Us. "She’s definitely serious about filing, but is also reviewing her options before she makes a final decision," the insider adds.
Hugh Hefner's ex certainly has a lot to think about following her husband's shocking affair with transgender model Ava Sabrina London. For one, the 29-year-old just recently welcomed her second child with the former NFL pro, a baby girl named Alijah.
PHOTOS: Kendra and Hank in happier times
As for Baskett, who continues to step out wearing his wedding ring, the source tells Us he's "embarrassed about his actions and wants nothing more than to get Kendra back."
However, the blonde mom of two needs a lot more convincing. "Kendra isn't buying it," the pal tells Us. "She's heartbroken and feels completely betrayed."
PHOTOS: Kendra as a mom
Despite the mess, the reality star is keeping her priorities straight. Another source previously told Us: "Her kids are her number one priority. She's doing what she needs to do. She's a tough girl."What will happen to property investors when the economy rolls over? Just look west, it isn't pretty
Updated
Want to know what happens to the property market when the economy eventually rolls over?
Key points: Reversing a long term trend, investor defaults are outpacing-owner occupier defaults in WA
Investors hit by tumbling rents and property values, while costs are rising
Almost one quarter of Perth and half of regional WA investment properties sold at a loss in Q1 2017
Look west, and for property investors it is not a pretty picture, according to the global credit ratings agency Moody's.
Moody's has studied the rising tide of defaults in Western Australia and found problems with investment mortgages are growing at a far greater rate than owner-occupier loans.
It reverses both the WA and Australia-wide trend where historically the default rate for housing investment loans is substantially lower than the owner-occupier market.
The defaults have been rising steadily in the west since 2013 as the slowdown in the resources sector dragged down the rest of the state.
Over that period the rate of investment loan defaults has more than trebled, compared to a doubling in owner-occupier mortgages.
"Our analysis shows that the default rate for housing investment loans in Western Australia has increased significantly over the past four years and is now higher than the default rate for owner-occupier mortgages, which reverses the situation prior to the economic downturn in the state," the Moody's report co-authored by senior analysts John Paul Truijens and Georgij Ludmirskij said.
APRA's tightening has made investments riskier
The Moody's team found investors' reliance on rental income and rising house prices made them more vulnerable in a downturn.
On top of that, while the tougher regulations imposed by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority have slowed growth in investment loans, it has made existing stock riskier.
"Such measures also limit access to credit, which means there are fewer refinancing options for the existing stock of housing investment loans," the report reads.
Typically, during economic downturns interest rates are cut, but in Australia they are already mired at historic lows and the only movement seems to be investor-targeted hikes.
Investment loans have been hiked aggressively by around 60 basis points making repayments far more onerous.
Moody's found while loan repayment and property costs are rising in WA, rental returns are tumbling, leading to significant cash flow losses.
From a negative gearing point of view, that would be less of a problem as long house prices are rising. In WA they are falling.
Rents for a typical three-bedroom home in Perth have tumbled more than 20 per cent from 2013 peak.
"In contrast to housing investors, owner-occupiers do not rely on rental income to meet loan repayments and are therefore not exposed to a downturn in the rental market," the report reads.
"Furthermore, owner-occupiers are less reliant on house price appreciation, given that the property serves foremost as their residence and not as an investment where prices need to rise to offset cashflow losses."
And there's little good news for investors under duress about cutting their losses and heading for the exits in a downturn.
Judging by results from the west in the first three months of the year, if you're thinking of bailing out it may already be too late.
Percentage of properties sold at a loss - Q1 2017
Market Owner-occupier Investment Australia 7pc 12pc Perth 20pc 26pc Regional WA 27pc 45pc
Source: CoreLogic/Moody's
Topics: consumer-finance, economic-trends, building-and-construction, housing-industry, banking, australia
First postedMike Weatherley says he had to seek refuge as 'violent thugs' ambushed him, injuring two members of his staff
A Conservative MP has said he had rocks and tomatoes hurled at him after he was ambushed by around 50 "violent thugs" before a talk on squatting.
Mike Weatherley, MP for Hove in East Sussex, had to seek refuge in a room on Wednesday as shouting protesters gathered outside at the University of Sussex near Brighton.
He had been invited to talk about his involvement in changing the law to criminalise squatting. Just before the debate was to start, a large mob of non-students surrounded him and threatened him, he said. Security officials barricaded him and his staff in a room until the police arrived and took him away in a van.
Weatherley said: "It's absolutely outrageous that a peaceful event such as this should be hijacked by a group of violent thugs. As soon as I walked into the lecture theatre someone attempted to punch me.
"The event was immediately abandoned, but as we tried to leave, rocks were hurled, and two female members of my staff were injured. My staff and I were barricaded into a room, until the police arrived."
Weatherley has been campaigning for squatting to be criminalised since his election to parliament in 2010.
Sussex police said: "Just before 1.50pm on Wednesday 14 November, police were called to the Silverstone Building in Arts Road on the University of Sussex campus at Falmer, after a report of a disturbance.
"A group of people were outside the building where Mike Weatherley MP was present. Officers took Mr Weatherley to safety in a police van. It is understood that there are no reports of injury at this time."
One member of Weatherley's staff had her arm crushed in a door while another had a rock thrown at her neck, it was claimed. Weatherley said they were "very fortunate" to have found a room to lock themselves in, away from the crowd.
He voiced his thanks to the security guards and the police whom he has made a statement to about the incident, which follows opposition from pro-squatting campaigners against the introduction of new laws.
Powers which came into effect on 1 September allow local authorities to call in the police to arrest squatters, rather than pursuing lengthy civil eviction proceedings through the courts.
Under the powers, contained in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, councils can remove squatters by simply complaining to the police who, if satisfied that the claim is genuine, can arrest the illegal tenants.
Weatherley said: "The squatters have regularly attempted to stop free speech from taking place for the precise reason that they cannot justify their criminal behaviour.
"I have made a statement to Sussex police, and to Sussex University security, about the most violent members of the mob.
"Once the trouble started, both police and security did their jobs incredibly well. I am grateful to them."
The university said: "We are appalled to hear that Mike Weatherley was prevented from speaking on campus by a group of protesters. [They are] not our students."Welcome to AstroBoot - the home of real astronomy bargains!
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To reduce the numbers of items displayed try the selection wizard below. Search for: Everything... 0.965" fit 1.25" fit 2" fit Filters SCT Meade ETX LX90 LX200 Sky Watcher Equatorial mounts Celestron Astro Engineering Camera filters Camera CCD Webcam M3 thread M5 thread M6 thread M8 thread M10 thread Losmandy 6 Volt 12V volt Cables Nikon Canon 1/4" 3/8" 1/2" Finders Mounting rings Refracting telescopes Coronado Microscope accessories Binoculars Telescopes 2" fit filters M12 threaded
Telescope and astronomy stuff Abbreviations: SW = Sky Watcher MI = Meade Instruments CE = Celestron LO = Losmandy AP = Astro Physics AE = Astro Engineering GEM = German Equatorial Mount EP = Eyepiece NP = Nose-piece HBX = Handbox
£10.80 Buy Hot shoe Red dot finder
£20.00 Buy Bresser EQZ RA motor
£20.80 Buy GSO 1.25" 3x ED Barlow
£4.20 Buy 5m USB 2 ext cable
£10.00 Buy Smartphone holder for tripods
£4.20 Buy RDF timer CB with fly leads
£1.30 Buy A5 PL 48mm filter
£5.00 Buy SW Flextube detemp ball
£50.00 Buy SBIG STL-STX desiccant plug
£91.70 Buy SBIG CLA-7 Nikon Lens Mount
£2.10 Buy AE M6 19x104mm knob
£3.30 Buy Dust Air Blaster
£6.50 Buy Lens Pen L 15mm/9mm
£5.80 Buy Lens Pen M 10mm/7mm
£7.70 Buy 30mm HD bino brkt
£23.00 Buy B Univ Smartphone Adap.
£10.00 Buy A6 EQ2 GEM parts
£62.50 Buy SW AZ GoTo head & tripod
£90.00 Buy Blow-out 8x42 Helios Ultrasport
£20.00 Buy WO 1.25" 2x Barlow NP
£6.00 Buy 2x 50mm bolt bottles - long
£6.50 Buy 3x 35mm ID bolt bottles - Sml
£7.50 Buy 3x 40mm ID bolt bottles - Long
£5.00 Buy 2x 50mm ID bolt bottles - Med
£7.00 Buy 3x bolt bottle set
£7.50 Buy SW 6x30mm finder
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£8.30 Buy 37mm camera adap
£7.50 Buy 50mm EP camera adap
£25.00 Buy Vix Wide photo adap universal
£25.00 Buy Vix Wide photo adap Canon & 4/3
£20.00 Buy SW 60mm x 700mm fl refractor
£50.00 Buy Losmandy HGM/GM pier top
£15.00 Buy 6x30 finder with QR bkt
£45.00 Buy MI 14" LX200 mount bar
£2.50 Buy 2x eclipse specs
£4.20 Buy MI LX rail strip
£30.00 Buy 14" SCT piggy back bkt
£19.00 Buy CE 1.25" 2x Barlow
£15.00 Buy MI 12 to 18V DC adap
£15.00 Buy MI DSI fan
£25.00 Buy A35 WO FLT152 adap ring
£29.20 Buy WOFLT98 adap ring
£20.00 Buy LO G11 drive motor
£20.00 Buy A4 SW EQ2 GEM
£3.30 Buy 2x ali fucus knobs
£2.10 Buy 3x Tripod leg bolts
£20.00 Buy Meade DSI fan
£20.80 Buy SW Heritage 130P parts
£20.80 Buy CE 1.25" 2x Barlow
£10.80 Buy 3x tripod legs
£7.50 Buy 1.25" 20mm PL EP
£7.50 Buy 1.25" 20mm SPL EP
£1.50 Buy 2" Male Dust Cap
£8.30 Buy A6 SW AZGT Mount
£1.70 Buy eclipse viewing glasses
£2.10 Buy Minolta MD T ring
£8.30 Buy MA EP set 25 & 10mm
£4.20 Buy 6pc cleaning kit in case
£6.00 Buy 1.25" 10 & 20mm MA EP set
£5.00 Buy 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£12.00 Buy MA 1.25" 10 & 25mm EP
£5.00 Buy SW 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£15.00 Buy 3 Way tripod head
£7.50 Buy AE 2" guide scope adap
£25.00 Buy ME 24.5mm to 1.25" 45 deg
£25.00 Buy GSO 1.25" 5x Barlow
£21.70 Buy A4 SW EQ1 mount
£14.20 Buy SW 6x30 finder with brkt
£28.30 Buy AE AC394 Pier tray
£9.80 Buy 1.25" 10 & 25mm MA EP
£24.60 Buy SW Tripod for AZ Goto
£15.80 Buy AE AC555 MagniMax
£7.70 Buy SW 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£7.70 Buy SW 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£13.00 Buy 1.25" 10mm & 25mm EP Set
£7.70 Buy SW 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£6.20 Buy SW 1.25" 10mm MA EP
£6.90 Buy C/balance weight 11mm bore
£7.90 Buy Q/release finder brkt 30mm
£2.70 Buy Universal finder mount
£3.50 Buy SW QR finder base
£19.20 Buy SW 60mm 700mm fl refractor
£5.00 Buy SW Crayford micro bearing
£6.90 Buy 2x 50mm bino objectives
£4.40 Buy 50mm bino lens
£21.70 Buy SW Tripod for EQ-1
£25.00 Buy 0.965 to 1.25" Hybrid 45 deg
£5.60 Buy Pack 10x soft bino cases
£6.70 Buy AE SW focal reducer adap
£5.00 Buy 2" to webcam adap
£9.60 Buy AC555 Magnimax Barlow
£12.30 Buy A5 SW EQ2 mount
£22.50 Buy A4 SW EQ2 equatorial mount
£15.00 Buy SW 6x30 finder on QR brkt
£8.30 Buy 37 to 50mm filter adap
£4.00 Buy 62mm T ext tube
£5.40 Buy 1.25" 20mm EP A4
£6.70 Buy 1.25" 20mm Plossl eyepiece
£0.80 Buy M2 x10 nylon screws
£20.80 Buy 5x 3 element Barlow
£9.20 Buy SW 1.25" 10mm Plossl EP
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£15.00 Buy Convex mr for artificial star?
£1.30 Buy 2x Velour soft pouch
£11.30 Buy AE 2" guide scope adap
£8.30 Buy 76mm Newt mirror in cell
£1.30 Buy 48mm retaining ring
£5.00 Buy Rubber eyecup for 38mm
£1.50 Buy 48mm Rotating filter ring
£18.30 Buy MI 45 deg erect prism 0.965" fit
£6.70 Buy T to T ext tube barral
£14.60 Buy A4 70mm x 700mm refractor
£11.30 Buy 326mm metal dust cap
£16.70 Buy Flat mirror 55mm x 45mm
£22.50 Buy Flat mirror 55mm x 45mm
£6.70 Buy AC624 Webcam nosepiece
£22.50 Buy SW AZGOTO mount
£15.80 Buy AC515 LX200 micro focus knob
£1.90 Buy 48mm filter retaining ring
£16.70 Buy EQ1 GEM head
£15.00 Buy SW 130mm front cell inc mirror
£33.30 Buy AE 14" LX SCT 3D rail mount
£5.60 Buy Nikon SLR T ring
£3.30 Buy AC553 40.5mm to T adap
£3.30 Buy AC553 40.5mm to T adap
£4.60 Buy 6pc deluxe cleaning kit
£11.30 Buy 76mm P/bolic mirror set
£2.10 Buy Large steel washer
£11.90 Buy LX Wedge latitude adjust.
£5.00 Buy Quick release T/pod mount
£9.00 Buy 130mm 2nd mirror & cell
£9.00 Buy SW 30mm finder brkt
£1.90 Buy 19x104mm knurled alu handle
£2.30 Buy SP EP fit ring
£3.00 Buy A5 1/2" x 6" & 3/4" stud knob
£28.30 Buy Smart phone 61mm EP mount
£3.30 Buy EP ring & 3 screws
£2.30 Buy 25x25mm poly cases
£16.70 Buy SW 1.25" 2x T Barlow
£1.90 Buy 10x25 rubber eyecup
£1.90 Buy 48mm (2") filter holders x2
£7.90 Buy SW 30mm finder brkt
£20.00 Buy DCH T camera adap
£1.90 Buy Phono to BNC adap
£1.50 Buy 48mm (2") filter holder
£1.70 Buy Rotating 48mm filter holder
£7.90 Buy MS 23mm to T NP
£28.30 Buy SW EQ2 mount head
£9.00 Buy 6x25 erect image finder
£11.30 Buy Lum Meade 2" diag adapt
£3.30 Buy AC556 49mm to T adap
£2.50 Buy AC526 58mm to T adap
£5.60 Buy AE Azimuth index for wedge
£6.00 Buy MI Azimuth index for EQ wedge
£7.90 Buy 6x25 erect finder
£6.70 Buy DSLR 1.25" to T adapt
£12.50 Buy Bresser Messier tripod bolt
£7.90 Buy SW 50mm QR Finder brkt
£5.60 Buy Metal 196.5mm dust cap
£3.30 Buy Olympus - OM T ring
£5.00 Buy Praktica 200B T ring
£4.20 Buy Minolta Maxxum T ring
£5.00 Buy Pentax K T ring
£3.30 Buy Pentax screw T ring
£6.70 Buy Olympus Micro 4/3 T ring
£16.70 Buy Sight tube collimator
£11.30 Buy MI 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£5.60 Buy T thread & 2" to webcam
£5.00 Buy 7 pc Optics cleaning & tool kit
£2.30 Buy 4 line jack to 4 line jack
£4.40 Buy 8x21 golf scope
£22.50 Buy 16" LX200 light bar
£16.70 Buy Guide scope converter
£28.30 Buy SW EQ2 head only
£5.00 Buy Fourthirds T ring
£4.20 Buy T ring for Sony
£2.30 Buy MI 1m 2.5mm ext
£3.30 Buy MI 5m 2.5 to 2.5 ext
£4.60 Buy Large Porro prisms
£21.70 Buy SW 60mm x 700mm refractor
£4.00 Buy Olympus OM T ring
£2.30 Buy 2x Phono plugs
£2.30 Buy 2x Phono sockets
£6.00 Buy Azimuth index LX200 wedge
£7.90 Buy 52mm Petal lens hood
£39.20 Buy LO G11 pier top
£4.00 Buy 1.25" 10mm MA EP
£4.60 Buy GSO 1.25" No11 filter
£18.30 Buy Focus Master for 12" SCT
£20.00 Buy Focus Master for 14" SCT
£34.20 Buy 130mm mirror set
£11.30 Buy 5" dual rail ring
£9.00 Buy MI 25mm MA EP
£9.00 Buy Guide scope convertion barrel
£1.90 Buy Metal 2 hole finder bracket
£12.10 Buy 3 weights = 1.14 kg
£1.90 Buy SW Tool Kit - 4pc
£7.30 Buy SW 1.25" 2x Barlow
£5.60 Buy AC026 ETX acc plate
£3.30 Buy SW 1.25" 20mm MA EP
£5.60 Buy AC550 30mm (Sony) to T
£4.80 Buy AC551 30.5mm Canon to T
£3.30 Buy AC560 62mm to T
£3.00 Buy AC721 adap ring
£2.30 Buy 2x 58mm x 25mm poly case
£2.90 Buy M6 fit plastic caps
£9.00 Buy MI 1.25" 20mm MA EP
£12.30 Buy SW red dot finder on QR
£5.40 Buy 600mm scope tripod
£11.30 Buy MI 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£31.00 Buy 70mm x 700mm refr
£11.30 Buy 70mm x 700 refractor lens
£5.60 Buy 1.25" to T NP 62mm ext
£12.30 Buy A6 SW EQ2 GEM
£4.20 Buy SW 8x20 finder
£28.30 Buy SW EQ2 GEM
£3.30 Buy 2x BaK4 Porro prisms
£16.70 Buy A6 SW AZ GOTO
£5.60 Buy Red dot finder flat base
£2.30 Buy Mini screwdriver set
£4.60 Buy AE Camera mount
£2.30 Buy Lip stick brush
£5.00 Buy 1.25" No 25 red filter
£22.50 Buy AE Tandem mount for PST
£7.90 Buy SW 1.25" 20mm MA
£6.70 Buy AC378 Webcam NP
£3.30 Buy 1.25" posh EP plug (Blue)
£4.60 Buy MI 1.25" 20mm MA EP
£4.60 Buy Metal foot for QR shoe
£2.30 Buy 2.5mm to 2.1mm Jack adap
£4.60 Buy 6x20 2 hole finder
£6.70 Buy SW 6x20 Astrolux finder
£4.60 Buy A4 SW 1.25" 25mm MA
£7.30 Buy Red Dot finder flat base
£3.30 Buy Pentax KM T mount
£3.30 Buy RD finder to QR pedestal
£11.30 Buy AC156 ETX to LX wedge
£22.50 Buy 14" SCT Piggy back brkt
£3.30 Buy M12 ratchet lever
£5.00 Buy Dew heater ext cable
£4.00 Buy 2x finder bases
£2.90 Buy SW Finder rubber 'O' ring
£9.00 Buy Guide scope ext tube
£4.60 Buy Mount ring tripod plate
£2.90 Buy Small tube with rack
£5.60 Buy Helios 10x25 bino
£1.90 Buy FR bolt bottle
£4.40 Buy 60mm x 700mm object lens
£4.40 Buy 60mm x900mm object lens
£9.00 Buy 1.25" SW 20mm MA EP
£5.60 Buy QR to 2 hole adap
£4.10 Buy Collimation knobs for 8" SCT
£4.10 Buy Collimation knobs for 12" SCT
£4.10 Buy Collimation knobs for 10" SCT
£2.30 Buy SW EQ1 tray screws
£3.30 Buy 1.25" and.965" EP tray
£9.00 Buy 76mm mirror in cell
£1.90 Buy Female T mount core
£2.30 Buy Universal RDF bracket
£8.80 Buy Meade 1.25" 20mm MA EP
£9.00 Buy Midi camera case
£11.30 Buy camera case & tripod
£1.90 Buy 63 x 63 plastic case
£11.30 Buy 76mm mirror set
£3.30 Buy A6 Adler 8x26 binocular
£6.30 Buy 1.25" to T nosepiece
£3.50 Buy 3 pc cleaning kit in bottle
£1.90 Buy Star Charts PC software
£9.00 Buy 60mm x 900mm FL lens
£6.50 Buy 80mm 387g weight
£4.00 Buy AC524 Olympus adap
£4.60 Buy AC523 Nikon adap
£13.50 Buy 1.25" 10mm & 25mm EP
£4.20 Buy 15a 1.25" yellow filter GSO
£2.30 Buy 1.25" plastic 35mm ext tube
£7.90 Buy Microscope disecting kit
£23.30 Buy Meade 2x Barlow lens
£5.60 Buy SW 6 to 8 line jack cable
£5.60 Buy 80mm 400g weight
£35.00 Buy SW 300P focus shift kit
£3.30 Buy 100 x 30mm plate
£1.50 Buy 100 glass cover slips
£3.30 Buy Pentax screw T mount
£3.10 Buy Olympus OM T ring
£2.30 Buy Olympus OM - T ring
£4.60 Buy Set 4 porro prisms
£11.30 Buy ETX tripod top
£4.60 Buy 10mm T mount ext tube
£6.70 Buy DIY 8x50 finder parts
£4.60 Buy Black 6x20 finder
£2.90 Buy M8 85mm bolts & W/nuts
£28.30 Buy 76mm Newt OTA
£22.50 Buy SW Autotrack tripod
£5.60 Buy A6 x50 prism box
£5.60 Buy 50mm bino objective
£13.50 Buy Set of 3 weights
£6.30 Buy Red dot finder
£16.70 Buy Sml EQ head & tripod
£5.60 Buy Counter bal shaft M12
£11.30 Buy Yoke for 60mm refractor
£4.80 Buy 62mm T ext tube
£2.30 Buy Planetarium PC software
£1.90 Buy 3 piece cleaning kit
£2.30 Buy Tripod EP tray
£2.30 Buy Metal bino tripod brkt
£4.00 Buy 6x20 2 hole base finder
£1.70 Buy 30mm to 28mm Step ring
£2.90 Buy 10x50 bino case
£6.70 Buy 30mm HD bino brkt
£4.00 Buy Canon EOS T mount
£2.70 Buy Canon EOS T mount
£1.90 Buy Female T ring core
£6.70 Buy ETX 70 flexi focus
£6.70 Buy ETX 90 flexi focus
£5.60 Buy Flexi focus for ETX70
£11.30 Buy 1.25" 25mm MA EP
£11.30 Buy 1.25" 20mm MA EP
£11.30 Buy 120mm Anti dew tape
£3.30 Buy Olympus Camedia T adapt
£4.60 Buy Collimation knobs for 12" SCT
£4.60 Buy Collimation knobs for 10" SCT
£11.30 Buy ETX on SCT wedge plate
£1.00 Buy 63 x 63 x 30mm plastic box
£4.60 Buy AC531 Fuji T adaptor
£22.50 Buy Focus Master for 10" SCT
£3.30 Buy GSO 1.25" No 12 yellow filter
£5.00 Buy Male T to T ring
£9.00 Buy AC522 for Nikon cameras
£1.70 Buy Amici prism unit
£1.00 Buy Plastic case 37mm sq
£3.50 Buy GSO 1.25" 29 red filter
£2.30 Buy 50mm dia compass
£1.90 Buy Bottle for 8 to 24 zoom
£4.00 Buy Collimate knobs for 8" SCT
£1.70 Buy Short fat bolt bottle
£1.90 Buy Mini folding tripod
£1.90 Buy Large bolt bottle
£2.20 Buy Canon FD T adaptor
£5.60 Buy SW 1.25 to 2 inch adapThis month, Americans should pause a moment to reflect: It has been 16 years since the devastating and tragic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in the 16 years since, there has not been another successful major terrorist attack on our homeland.
This significant accomplishment was made possible because of the 41 bipartisan recommendations passed into law, the service of countless men and women in our military, intelligence officials who personally sacrificed to make our country safer and the dedicated work of the families of that fateful day. These reforms were passed after nearly two years of work, when the 10 members of the 9/11 Commission set aside politics to strengthen American democracy and our national security.
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As a result, we are no longer as vulnerable as we were on the morning of 9/11. Still, we face a plethora of difficult issues, including a rapidly spreading ISIS, cyberattacks, North Korean nuclear proliferation, Russian interference in Western elections and the invasion of Ukraine, an increasingly aggressive China, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly, national security threats continue to challenge us.
Yet these outside threats are not the only dangers facing the United States. One of the greatest threats to our experiment in self-government is the growing division within our own country and the dysfunctional Congress. The so-called “enemy” in this scenario is the opposing party, and there are billions of dollars supporting this domestic arms race in our elections.
Cronyism and the influence of special interests in both our politics and policymaking contaminates our government. A majority of members of Congress spend too much time fundraising and not enough on their legislative responsibilities. Leadership roles on the most powerful congressional committees, which oversee critical areas of our economy like health care, energy and the financial sector, are awarded too often simply based on ideology and fundraising ability, not merit or expertise.
Access to the legislative process has a price tag that makes it accessible mostly to the richest citizens in our country. Every election cycle, special interests use legal loopholes to hide their political spending. The result, as Sen. Angus King Angus Stanley KingSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Cybersecurity threats to US infrastructure warrant'moonshot' response Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators MORE, an Independent from Maine, said is that, “Campaigns are no longer fought out between the candidates, they are battles between outside money groups on both sides.” He added, “The candidates are almost a second thought.”
Polls show that Americans feel left out of the legislative process and say that their views are ignored. They believe lobbyists and special interests dominate our democracy and they are right. Too many elected leaders are putting fundraising, partisanship and re-election ahead of their country. Countless citizens and voters want more transparency, accountability, and reform in our government, not less. Perhaps no one has put this better than U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis James Norman MattisOvernight Defense: Trump to hold one-on-one with Kim | What to watch as summit kicks off | Top general dodges on Trump emergency declaration Retired officers express 'grave concern' with Trump's defense of transgender military policy Trump backs off total Syria withdrawal MORE during a hearing on Capitol Hill, when he said, “Congress as a whole has met the present challenge with lassitude, not leadership.”
The damage is real: The United States is ceding power and influence abroad to other countries due to political gridlock at home. In the budget and procurement process, this translates into the Pentagon being unable to buy the most advanced technology to combat our enemies abroad because the House and Senate cannot agree on a budget or long-term appropriations bills, for example.
We have confronted and conquered greater challenges in our country since our founding over 230 years ago, ranging from two world wars, the battle for women’s suffrage, civil rights and a severe global economic crisis. Those in office in our country must step forward and directly address this crisis. More than 180 former elected leaders like us — former ambassadors, governors, Cabinet secretaries — have joined together to find constitutional, bipartisan and pragmatic solutions to this dysfunction.
We adhere to the principles of increasing disclosure of campaign spending, enforcing current laws on the books, holding bad actors accountable and increasing participation in our democracy. We agree that raising money for re-election is an essential part of public office, but find it embarrassing that the Federal Election Commission, which is in charge of enforcing our laws, is permanently gridlocked.
We are united by a singular purpose to return government to the American people, not the deep-pocketed donors who have perfected a pay-to-play system. Now is the time to look to historical successes like the 9/11 Commission, when we achieved change together. After the September 2001 attacks, we flew flags, donated blood and volunteered in communities around the country. The American people stepped up to the challenge and improved our national security. That is what it will require to restore our trust in our great republic and treasured democracy.
Thomas Kean served as the 48th governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990. He was appointed chairman of the 9/11 Commission by President George W. Bush.
Timothy Roemer served as U.S. ambassador to India under President Obama. He was previously a congressman from Indiana and member of the 9/11 Commission.Deep Space Industries Deep Space Industries, a newly formed company, announced plans today, Jan. 22, to launch the world's first fleet of asteroid-hunting spacecraft to search for space rocks that can be harvested for precious metals and other resources.
The one-way prospecting trips will begin in 2015, CEO David Grump said at a press conference today. Three laptop-size spacecraft called FireFlies, each weighing about 55 pounds, will take pictures and samples from selected Near-Earth asteroids.
Beginning in 2016, larger spacecraft known as DragonFlies will be sent on three- to four-year round trip missions to pluck samples from asteroids and return them to Earth. The DragonFlies weigh about 70 pounds.
The samples will be studied and tested to make sure they can be made into valuable materials.
By 2020, Deep Space hopes to get into commercial operation and begin producing materials to be used first in space.
For example, water harvested from asteroids can be broken down to make rocket fuel to power communication satellites. Low-cost asteroid-derived fuel will extend the working lifetime of these technologies. For each satellite, one extra month is worth $5 million to $8 million, Gump said.
Eventually they will bring platinum group metals back home.
Deep Space will also rely on a 3D printer called the Microgravity Foundry to help manufacture metal parts in space from pure asteroid. The machine can print high-strength nickel parts on demand, even in zero gravity.
What's cool about the printer is that it can can take its own parts, |
a four-time (so far) All-Star and the face of the franchise. Tillman, meanwhile, has been one of the team's most reliable starting pitchers in recent seasons. Even Sherrill managed an All-Star appearance for the Birds before has was traded for more prospects.
3. Trading a relief ace
Koji Uehara was only a sometimes closer when MacPhail traded him to the Rangers during the 2011 season. The Phillies' Jonathan Papelbon, on the other hand, is one of the best closers of his generation. So if MacPhail landed Chris Davis and Tommy Hunter for Uehara's expiring contract, what might he get for Papelbon?
Davis has been inconsistent, for sure, but he was a key part of the Orioles' 2012 wild-card team and put up a monster year the next season. He has been a reliable source of power for a team that relies on the long ball more than most. Hunter has been a decent bullpen arm for several seasons.
4. Maximizing an early draft pick
The Phillies will have a high draft pick next season, likely the No. 1 selection. When the Orioles had the No. 3 pick in the 2010 draft under MacPhail, they selected a high school shortstop named Manny Machado. Machado was in the big leagues just two years later and was an All-Star by 2013. This year, the third baseman has emerged as one the best players in baseball, an elite defender who also can hit and steal bases. He's 22 and under team control until 2019.
5. Winning under-the-radar trades
In addition to acquiring Jones, Tillman, Davis and Hunter through key trades, MacPhail also landed J.J. Hardy, one of the more consistent shortstops in the AL. After the 2010 season, the O's traded Brett Jacobson and Jim Hoey for Hardy and another player. With his combination of power and solid defense, Hardy registered a WAR of at least 3.2 each of his first four seasons in Baltimore. Jacobson, meanwhile, never made it to the big leagues while Hoey pitched all of 26 games for the Twins.Bose and Sony have just released higher-end Bluetooth wireless headphones. Bose’s QuietComfort 35 II are the upgrade from Bose’s first noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones from 2016. Many complained that even though the noise cancellation worked very well, the original QC35s didn’t have the option to turn noise cancellation lower or even off when walking or exercising outdoors. The new QC35s have fixed that issue.
Sony just upgraded their highly-acclaimed MDR-1000X wireless headphones that an Inquisitr review said were the best overall over-the-ear headphones in 2016. The WH-1000MX2 headphones adds even better noise cancellation and slightly more sculpted sound. Are they better than the Bose QC35 II headphones? Let’s find out.
Design
The new QC35 headphones have the same exact build as the previous version — one that is simple, light, and plush. The faux leather soothes your ears, but the plastic build could make the headphones quite creaky after several hours of use.
Sony’s headphones are also mostly made of plastic, but there is more thought put into them as the ear cups now have a grainy finish that makes it easier to operate motion controls with your finger. The synthetic leather can get quite hot (and drippy from sweat) if you use these during intense workouts. Although the WH-1000MX2 can start to make creaking sounds after several days use, it’s not as bad as it is on the Bose QC35 II headphones.
Noise Cancellation
Both of these headphones offer top-of-the-notch cancellation. Bose has always been the leader in noise cancellation technology, and the QC35 II cans offer the same level of scary (you could miss a car heading towards you outdoors) cancellation as their 2016 headphones. However, this time you can choose low noise cancellation or completely turn it off if you need to hear traffic or other necessary things when you are exercising.
Sony’s headphones offer slightly (barely noticeable) better noise cancellation than Bose’s new cans, but one can feel pressure between the ears more. Sometimes, there is also a little hissing. Bose’s noise cancellation feels more natural. Still, Sony’s is still excellent and some may not care about the pressure that exists when the noise cancellation is fully activated.
Sony also allows you to control the amount of ambient noise heard when noise cancellation is activated. There is also an Adaptive Sound Control mode that supposedly adjusts the amount of ambient noise depending on what you are doing. It’s more of a gimmick than a helpful feature.
Sound
Sony's latest headphones beat Bose in sound quality. [Image by Daryl Deino]
Bose has always been good at providing a smooth sound quality, and these new cans continue on that tradition. There is prominent bass, but it’s not tight. The treble is good when it needs to be. If you like Bose’s signature sound, you’ll love these. But Sony easily wins in the sound department here.
The WH-1000MX2 has the same sound stage as all of Sony’s recent headphones — heavy (but not too domineering) bass, emphasized highs, and present mids. The only time I heard any slight distortion (in the lows) was when listening to “Candy Shop” by 50 Cent. Still, listening to the the song was an ear-kicking delight.
Phone Quality
One certainly doesn’t buy expensive over-the-ear headphones solely for the purpose of making phone calls, but it’s important that one can at least make or receive a phone call while using the headphones. Bose knows this. The phone quality on the QC35 II cans is quite good, even as good as talking on the phone speaker itself. In fact, listeners won’t realize you are using over-the-ear headphones to talk to them.
Sony’s WH-1000MX2 headphones are above average when it comes to making calls. They are certainly much better than Sony’s previous over-the-ear-cans, which didn’t cancel enough outside noise when making calls. The only time Sony’s new cans failed at testing was when making a call in a very loud Starbucks, where the listener told this author that his voice kept going in and out. This is an extreme situation in which one would probably just go outside to make a call.
Conclusion
The Bose QC35 IIs and the Sony WH-1000WMX2 headphones both retail at $349. However, only the latter are really worth the price. If you are stuck in the Bose ecosystem, you will definitely appreciate the QC35 II cans. But if you want the best combination of comfort, sound quality, design, and features, Sony’s latest wireless headphones should be the obvious choice.
[Featured Image by Daryl Deino]Invicta FC president Shannon Knapp is set to launch “Invicta Boxing Championships” in 2017.
Josh Gross, who works for Guardian and B/R broke the news on Twitter:
“Just spoke with @ shanknapp and she told me she’s launching a female boxing league the 1st quarter of 2017: the Invicta Boxing Championships”.
This is brilliant news for female boxing and will really open the doors and help bring women’s boxing into the mainstream. There isn’t too many further details revealed as of yet, however be sure to follow the new boxing league on Twitter to be kept up to date with all the news – Click HERE.
Are you excited for this news? Who would you like to see compete in the new boxing league? Let us know in the comments below.Ontario, the most important political battleground in the federal election, could be shaping into a tight fight primarily between the Conservatives and Liberals, a new poll for Postmedia suggests.
The survey by Mainstreet Research finds Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are running first, with the support of 38 per cent of voters who have made up their mind or are leaning toward one party.
The Liberals under Justin Trudeau are just four points behind, with 34 per cent of the decided and leaning vote.
Tom Mulcair’s NDP is well behind, at 22 per cent of the decided and leaning vote.
Election results in the province, with 121 of 338 seats in the next Parliament, could determine the outcome of the Oct. 19 election.
“These results may signal a break in the three-way stalemate that has dominated the vast majority of the campaign,” said Mainstreet Research president Quito Maggi.
Maggi said the NDP may be losing support because some voters are unhappy with its strategy to move from the left to more centrist positions on issues such as a balanced budget.
“This should be very concerning for the NDP campaign and encouraging for the Conservative campaign,” he said.
Maggi said the NDP’s strategy of “tacking right” is “driving people in both directions.”
In Ontario, “the people who agree with Harper, they don’t want Harper-lite. They want full-strength Harper. For the people who don’t want to see Harper re-elected, the NDP is pushing those people to the Liberals.”
Meanwhile, he said, it appears the Conservatives are showing some resiliency, thanks in part to how their candidates are campaigning door-to-door against some policies of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne.
The unpopularity of some of her policies – the sale of Hydro Ontario, a revised sex education curriculum, and a labour dispute with teachers, for instance – could be giving a lift to federal Conservatives and harming Wynne’s federal political cousins, said Maggi.
Mainstreet surveyed a random sample of 4,610 Ontarians on Sept. 21. A mixture of landlines and cellphones was surveyed using interactive voice response (IVR) technology.
Results were weighted by age and gender based on the 2011 Canadian census. The provincial margin of error is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Respondents to the survey were asked: “If the federal election were today, which party would you support?”
Regional breakdowns of all voters, including the undecided, also provided the following data:
– In Toronto’s 416 area code, the Liberals are running first (34 per cent) followed by the Conservatives (28 per cent) and NDP (21 per cent).
– In the suburban ridings surrounding Toronto, the Conservatives are ahead (33 per cent), followed by the Liberals (29 per cent) and NDP (16 per cent).
– In Eastern Ontario, the Conservatives are first (32 per cent), followed closely by the Liberals (31 per cent), then the NDP (16 per cent).
– In southwest Ontario, the Conservatives are first (39 per cent), followed by the Liberals (24 per cent) and NDP (16 per cent).
Mainstreet said regional margins of error were plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
A full report of the survey can be found online at http://www.mainstreetresearch.ca/
mkennedy@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/Mark_Kennedy_President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Tse-tung were well aware that they were making history.
Both understood that Nixon’s February 1972 visit to China was important for its symbolism. It was the first visit of an American president to that country—an end to the long standoff where neither nation had recognized the other.
The first night of the visit, Prime Minister Chou En-lai invited Nixon to a banquet at the Great Hall of the People, a monstrous Stalinist structure that ran along one side of Tiananmen Square.
At the Great Hall, the Americans—from the President and Mrs. Nixon to the crew of their aircraft—walked into an enormous lobby, where Chou En-lai and his colleagues waited to greet them. Chairman Mao did not come out to such occasions.
Guests made their way up a grand staircase for photographs, then were ushered into a somber hall filled with round tables and decorated with Chinese and American flags. A Chinese military band started a medley of American folk songs. In imperial China, officials had always believed in using music to soothe visiting barbarians.
Mao had apparently approved the guests on the Chinese side. While there were representatives from the Beijing revolutionary committee—one of the organs created during the Cultural Revolution—none of the leading radicals was present. Even Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was absent. She later told the Nixons she had been ill.
The band played the Chinese and US national anthems, and the banquet began. The Nixons and top-ranking Americans sat with Chou En-lai at a table for 20; everyone else was at tables of ten. Each person had an ivory place card embossed in gold English and Chinese characters and chopsticks engraved with his or her name.
The Americans had been briefed on how to behave at Chinese banquets. Everyone had been issued chopsticks and urged to practice ahead of time. Nixon had become reasonably adept, but national-security adviser Henry Kissinger remained hopelessly clumsy. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite shot an olive into the air.
As the band played “Oh! Susanna,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and that Cultural Revolution favorite “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,” waiters brought dish after dish. Nixon—who had once ordered a White House banquet timed by stopwatch and had been delighted when it came in under an hour—had no complaints as the two former enemies celebrated a new relationship and the American networks covered it live for four hours.
The lazy Susans spun, laden with duck slices with pineapple, three-colored eggs, carp, chicken, prawns, shark fin, dumplings, sweet rice cake, fried rice, and in a nod toward Western tastes, bread and butter.
Some of the Americans—including John Holdridge, at the time a member of the National Security Council’s East Asia staff—spoke Chinese, and a few of the Chinese spoke English. Otherwise, conversation was through interpreters. Nixon and Chou En-lai exchanged desultory remarks through Mao’s favorite interpreter. Secretary of State William Rogers told long stories about his hero, golfer Sam Snead, to the Chinese foreign minister, a tough old revolutionary who had no idea what golf was. Mrs. Nixon asked her Chinese hosts such questions as how many children they had.
Chou En-lai, who was smoking Chinese cigarettes, turned to Mrs. Nixon and gestured to the picture of two pandas on the package. “We will give you two,” he said.
According to Chinese sources, Mrs. Nixon screamed with joy.
Although the Americans had dropped hints, the Chinese had been noncommittal on the pandas. The exchange of presents has always been important in diplomacy, and giving the right gifts—not too lavish, not too simple—has been an art the Chinese excelled at.
In imperial China, the emperors sent gifts—silks, brocades, porcelain—to other rulers as a mark of favor and to keep them quiescent. Communist China continued to send such gifts abroad—but now, as an indication of its revolutionary nature, to peoples, not rulers. In special cases, it also sent pandas, just as its predecessors had. Placid bears that spend most of their time eating or sleeping, pandas were perhaps meant to signal a peaceful relationship.
Empress Wu sent a pair to the emperor of Japan in the seventh century, and Chiang Kai-shek gave a pair to the United States during the Second World War. After 1949, the Communist Party sent pandas to the Soviet Union and North Korea as marks of friendship. Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing were now destined for the National Zoo in Washington.
The presents issue had caused anxiety in the White House, regarding both what to expect from the Chinese and what to give them. On Kissinger’s secret trip, in July 1971, he had taken along a piece of rock brought back from the moon by American astronauts. The Chinese had received it much as the Qianlong emperor had received British woolens brought by Lord Macartney—with a certain amount of disdain.
This time, the idea of giving medals in Lucite was considered and dropped. Finally, ceramic models of American birds were made for senior Chinese officials, while more junior ones got silver bowls, cigarette lighters, or cuff links with the presidential seal. Nixon also presented a pair of musk oxen and two large redwood trees from California.
Each person at the banquet had three glasses: one for water or orange juice, one for wine, one for China’s famous mao-tai—“white lightning” to American journalists or, as CBS’s Dan Rather put it, “liquid razor blades.”
At their table, Chou En-lai said proudly to Nixon that mao-tai, with its alcohol level of more than 50 percent, had been famous since the San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915. Chou took a match to his cup, saying, “Mr. Nixon, please take a look. It can indeed catch fire.”
Nixon said he understood that Red Army soldiers had once drained dry the town where mao-tai was produced.
“During the Long March, mao-tai was used by us to cure all kinds of diseases and wounds,” Chou answered.
“Let me make a toast with this panacea,” Nixon said.
Kissinger aide Alexander Haig, who had tried mao-tai on his advance trip to Beijing in January, had worried about its effect on Nixon. Under no repeat no circumstances, Haig had cabled, should the president actually drink from his glass in response to banquet toasts. “At banquets,” the White House had warned, “the wine and mao-tai are for toasting only. These glasses should not be raised without toasting one of your Chinese friends.”
With Chinese sitting at each table, the toasting started early. White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, a teetotaler, tried to explain to his incredulous hosts that he couldn’t drink alcohol. John Holdridge found himself playing an old drinking game of counting fingers with the minister of electric power. The loser had to drain his glass to a shout of “Ganbei!”
“Aided only in part by the mao-tai,” Holdridge remembered, “the atmosphere in the Great Hall was electric. Surely everyone there, and every TV watcher, must have sensed that something new and great was being created in the US–China relationship.”
From their tables at the far end of the hall, the journalists—mostly American—stood on chairs and used field glasses to see the historic scene. Nixon had wanted them there, just as he had wanted live television coverage, because he understood their power. He read the daily summaries of press coverage and filled the margins with comments and orders. He wanted the journalists’ attention but not too much; as he told Haldeman, his image should be “more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious.”
Nixon despised most journalists as “clowns” who were liberal in their bias. He was convinced they hated him “because I have beaten them so often.” Early in his presidency, Nixon ordered senior staff to prepare lists of friends and foes among the press; the list of foes was much longer.
He intended to circumvent what he saw as the liberal establishment in the media and reach out directly to Middle America. With the powers of the presidency he could make news, whether by creating photo opportunities or going on the networks with major policy statements. He could also—and did—place wiretaps on reporters to see where they were getting their stories.
The camera, Nixon believed, was more effective for him than print. As Kissinger said unkindly, “Television in front of the President is like alcohol in front of an alcoholic.”
Though Chou En-lai had suggested to Kissinger, in their discussions on the President’s visit, that ten journalists might be the right number to accompany Nixon, the Americans had negotiated the number upward until they got permission to bring about 90. When some 2,000 applications came in, the White House announced criteria for selection. Nixon himself picked the journalists, making sure the television networks got more spaces than print journalists. He took pleasure in refusing places to papers like the New York Times. On his first trip to China, Kissinger had managed to warn Chou En-lai obliquely about talking to James Reston from the Times, who was about to arrive in Beijing.
A reporter from Newsday—who had just written a series investigating the complicated financial relations between Nixon and his banker friend Bebe Rebozo and who apparently met the criteria for going—was told “no room.” Several of the top network brass managed to get themselves accredited as technical staff, to the annoyance of the print journalists. Few of them, apart from writer Theodore White, had ever been to China.
Nixon, for all his distrust of the press, understood how important it was that his visit receive favorable coverage. With public opinion for so long hostile to Communist China, Americans still had to be convinced that their president was doing the right thing. Nixon was also conscious of his place in history.
When Kissinger made his second trip to China, in fall 1971, part of his mission was to discuss press coverage. White House staff reviewed the schedule for Nixon’s trip and checked out photo opportunities.
At the beginning of 1972, Alexander Haig spent a week in China working on the final arrangements with a party of technical experts. On February 1, an advance party of nearly 100 arrived in China to prepare for Nixon’s visit.
The Chinese expected to work with the advance team, but they were amazed by the planning. At the Beijing airport, the Americans worked out the best place for Nixon’s plane to land so that it would stop at the right distance and angle for good shots of his descent toward the reception party. The runway was measured and marked up with paint.
The Chinese had never seen a Xerox copier and were fascinated by the one the advance party brought. When the Americans realized that the Chinese were copying all their documents out by hand, they arranged to leave their copier behind.
China didn’t have the facilities to transmit to satellites or ways to ship film quickly out of the country. Nor were the Chinese media expected to get stories out fast. The senior Chinese journalist who was assigned to cover the Nixon visit remembered being struck by how quickly American journalists worked, how they used news flashes for a breaking story, and how one would write a lead paragraph and others finish up a story.
“We will have to compete in speed,” she told herself. “We will have to make some reforms in the way we do things.”
Back in the United States, the administration continued to try to add names to the list of journalists who would be arriving with the President. Some received special briefings. Beijing was cold in the winter, they were warned; many journalists rushed off to buy fur coats and long underwear. They should look after their health; if they went into a Chinese hospital, they might never come out.
Two chartered planes carried the reporters, camera crews, and their support staff, along with their briefing books and equipment, to China just ahead of Nixon. The journalists—including television stars such as Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, author James Michener, and William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative the White House was wooing—traveled on one plane. Barbara Walters—then with the Today show and one of only three women in the group—was annoyed to be relegated to what was nicknamed the Zoo Plane, which carried photographers and technicians.
On the way to China, the journalists practiced using chopsticks. They played cards for the Chinese currency they had been issued. According to reporter Helen Thomas, some of her colleagues gave up drinking and immersed themselves in books and papers on China. As she said—in what was a common metaphor used by Americans from Nixon on down—visiting China was like going to the moon.
In Beijing, the press corps was housed near Tiananmen Square, in the cavernous Soviet-style Minzu Hotel. In the rooms—plainer than what most of the journalists were used to—candy, fruit, tea, and stamps had been laid out. In the bathrooms, wooden toilet seats had been freshly lacquered; unfortunately, the extract of sumac in the lacquer caused painful boils on those who were allergic to it. The advance party had already encountered what they’d nicknamed “baboon bottom.”
Partway through the banquet, Chou En-lai stepped onto the stage. Speaking through his interpreter, he welcomed President and Mrs. Nixon on behalf of Chairman Mao and the Chinese government. The President, Chou went on, was visiting China “at the invitation of the Chinese government.” This innocuous phrase had caused much difficulty on Kissinger’s first trip; the Chinese had wanted to make it look as though Nixon had asked to come to China.
The banquet, like Nixon’s trip, was about symbols, about handshakes and the exchange of toasts between leaders whose countries had for decades treated each other with suspicion. It was about status, about fears of being snubbed—as John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of State, had once snubbed Chou—and about losing or maintaining prestige in the eyes of the world.
It also carried echoes of the long and sometimes difficult relationship between the Chinese and foreigners. Chinese governments through the centuries had used rituals implying that their emperor had been chosen by heaven to rule the world and that all other rulers were his inferiors. Presents sent to the Chinese emperor and trade with China both were described as tribute.
It may not have been a realistic view of the actual relationships between China and foreign nations, but it was a powerful one. Inferior rulers—in other words, all those outside China—had to ask for permission to enter the emperor’s lands; they were not invited by the emperor, because that would have implied a relationship of equals.
Continuing his toast, Chou En-lai sounded a more modern note. In a reflection of the Chinese Communist view that the masses of the world would one day unite, he said that the Chinese people sent cordial greetings to the American people. Both peoples wanted a normalization of their relationship: “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”
Chou concluded: “We hope that, through a frank exchange of views between our two sides to gain a clearer notion of our differences and make efforts to find common ground, a new start can be made in the relations between our two countries.”
He lifted his glass to the Americans and Chinese in the room and to friendship between the two peoples. Coming down from the stage, Chou circled the tables of the official party, toasting each person in turn. One of the Americans noticed that he only touched his lips to his glass each time.
After a few more courses, it was Nixon’s turn. He wanted his toast to appear spontaneous even though he had been working on it for weeks. This had led to an awkward scene with Charles Freeman, his young interpreter from the State Department, just before the banquet.
Freeman, a cultivated and witty man from an old New England family, spoke fluent Mandarin. Although both Nixon and Kissinger disliked using State Department interpreters for fear they might leak information, Freeman was told earlier that evening that he would be interpreting for Nixon.
When Freeman asked for the prepared text of Nixon’s toast, Dwight Chapin, the appointments secretary, said there wasn’t one. Freeman pointed out that he had worked on earlier drafts and that he knew Nixon was planning to quote some of Chairman Mao’s poetry: “And if you think I’m going to get up in front of the entire Chinese Politburo and ad lib Chairman Mao’s poetry back into Chinese, you’re nuts.”
Ji Chaozhu, who was Chou En-lai’s interpreter, agreed to fill in, and Mao’s poetry was translated back into Chinese correctly. Nixon glowered at Freeman throughout the dinner, making him so nervous that he took up smoking again.
Two days later, after Freeman had shown his usefulness in interpreting, Nixon offered him a tearful apology and said to Chou En-lai that Freeman might well be the first American ambassador to China.
Chou muttered something that sounded to Freeman like “That’ll be the day.”
Nixon’s toast to Chou started with compliments to his hosts for their hospitality. The food was “magnificent,” as was the army band: “Never have I heard American music played better in a foreign land.” Like Chou, he admitted that there were many differences between China and the United States. Nevertheless, together both peoples could build a peaceful world, in which the young, like his own daughters, could be free from the fear of war.
“So, let us, in these next five days, start a long march together, not in lockstep, but on different roads leading to the same goal, the goal of building a world structure of peace and justice in which all may stand together with equal dignity and in which each nation, large or small, has a right to determine its own form of government, free of outside interference or domination.”
Coming to the passage that Freeman had dreaded, he quoted Mao: “Chairman Mao has written, ‘So many deeds cry out to be done, and always urgently. The world rolls on. Time passes. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day, seize the hour.’ ”
Nixon raised his glass to the absent Mao, to Chou En-lai, to the friendship of the Chinese and American peoples. The band struck up “America the Beautiful.” To the sound of music, the President did his round of toasts at the important tables.
“It was really quite spectacular,” Haldeman thought, watching Nixon. “He moved very forcefully, took a firm stand in front of the individual, looked him squarely in the eye, raised his glass and clinked the other person’s, took a quick sip, then he raised his glass again and gave a little staccato bow to the individual, and then he turned, marched to the next individual, and repeated the performance.”
Not everyone shared Haldeman’s pleasure. “The effect,” William F. Buckley wrote, “was as if Sir Hartley Shawcross had suddenly risen from the prosecutor’s stand at Nuremberg and descended to embrace Goering and Goebbels and Doenitz and Hess, begging them to join with him in the making of a better world.”
According to Chinese custom, the banquet ended abruptly with the last course. Guests hurried to the cars, and journalists rushed to file their stories. A famous American television reporter ran after a bewildered Qiao Guanhua, the vice foreign minister, trying to get an exclusive interview.
“I’m Eric Sevareid,” he announced to a man who had probably never heard of him.
John Burns, a Canadian journalist, took Nixon’s chopsticks as a souvenir. Although a New York dealer sent a cable with an offer of $10,000, Burns kept them.
Back at his guesthouse, a euphoric Nixon called Haldeman and Kissinger into his bedroom to go over the events of the first day in China, from the arrival to his meeting with Mao and finally the banquet. To Nixon’s pleasure, Haldeman reported that the press coverage so far had been good.
The President, Haldeman wrote in his diary, “finally decided to fold up for the day after we reviewed the schedule for the week again, and that’s the end of a very memorable day in American history.”Background
Project MX-800 is a nine month study and research program calling for “investigations in connection with the development of a supersonic air-to-air pilotless aircraft for use as a guided missile for the destruction of high performance hostile aircraft.” The study and research are to provide recommendations for the continued development work required for the completion of suitable designs for all necessary components, and will include proposals for the additional engineering studies, development tests, and construction necessary for complete development of this pilot-less aircraft.
The missile is to have a tactical range of 6000 yards, a speed of the order of 1500 miles per hour, and is to be used against 750-miles per hour aircraft.
Document Archive
Air to Air Supersonic Pilotless Aircraft Army Air Forces Project MX-800 Progress Report No. 4, March 13, 1947 [104 Pages, 4.8MB]
Comments
commentsResearch reveals almost 80% of Reddit threads mention Hitler
This is slightly worrying.
Reddit, the popular entertainment and discussion site, seems to have quite a dark common theme across many of its threads.
According to data scientist and blogger Curious Gnu, who analysed 4.6 million comments across Reddit to find this particularly fascinating result, 78% of active subreddits with 1000 comments or more mentioned Nazis or Hitler.
Think about that for a second. 78%.
For some context though, it’s important to consider that many of the discussions on Reddit are focused on political and historical themes. For example, subreddits such as Askhistorians, Europeans and Italy yield the highest number of mentions of the dictator.
That said, a quick search of Reddit Ireland shows that even the most unrelated threads are confirming the statistic.
Like this one for example, about Irish greetings.
Or this one, about retail.
Reddit is a strange place...Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Time-lapse footage shows the Canada France Hawaii Telescope covered in snow
Parts of the US state of Hawaii have received a winter weather warning, with up to three feet (90cm) of snow over the past few days.
Weather experts say that it is not unusual for snow to fall in tropical Hawaii, but rarely has it fallen so heavily at such low altitudes.
The snow is heaviest around two of the island's highest peaks, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
Other parts of Hawaii were hit by flash floods, US media reported.
More snow is also forecast for Sunday.
Meteorologist Matt Foster told the Los Angeles Times that while Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa - both of which are nearly 14,000ft (4,260m) - are sometimes hit by snowfall five or six times a year, two to three feet of snow in "a few short days is at the higher end of what we'd typically get".
Image copyright AP Image caption It is not unusual for snowfall on higher ground in Hawaii, weather experts say
Mr Foster said there are occasionally winters when both mountains receive little or no snow, including 2015.
The winter storm snowfall is expected to keep the access road to the two peaks closed until Monday, when ski and snowboard enthusiasts are expected to take to the slopes.
Much of the rest of Hawaii is being hit by heavy rainfall, with temperatures of around 20C (68F) - far warmer than on the higher ground.
The US National Weather Service says that the unsettled weather pattern will continue over the next few days because of low pressure and "deep tropical moisture".
It says that while localised heavy rainfall can be expected at times, there will also be breaks in the weather with some sunshine possible.Nine faith schools which teach the fundamentalist Accelerated Christian Education curriculum have been downgraded, following Ofsted inspections ordered by the Department for Education.
Ten schools were inspected in total by Ofsted, after an investigation into Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) schools by the Independent.
ACE schools have taught that homosexuality is unnatural, and they promote Creationism. The schools have faced significant criticism from former pupils, and historic allegations of exorcisms and "ritual corporal punishment".
The Independent obtained an ACE teaching manual published in the 1990s which demonstrated how to "Administer correction" by hitting children if they sinned.
Former ACE pupil James Ridgers, who now campaigns to expose fundamentalism in Accelerated Christian Education schools, said their curriculum was "possibly the worst and most dangerous educative curriculum I could imagine" and that schools "indoctrinated" pupils with "complete and utter nonsense".
Mr Ridgers said that during his time in an ACE school in Oxfordshire pupils were told "evolution is false".
The Greater Grace School of Christian Education, which was recently downgraded from'satisfactory' to 'inadequate', tells pupils that evolution is a "commonly held" "belief" in society, but it teaches its own pupils Creationism. "Pupils' context for all of their learning is the teachings of the Bible," the inspectors said in their recent inspection report of the school.
Mr Ridgers said that Ofsted inspectors were raising concerns about things that "have been happening for decades. For years, Ofsted and the Government have turned a blind eye to miseducation and abuse in religious schools.
"I would like to understand why this has been allowed to go on for so long. I would welcome a specific inquiry into this. In my view, some of the reports do not go far enough. In future, Ofsted inspectors should be briefed on the specific known problem areas in the curriculum, including political bias and sexism, and on the shortcomings of the schools that survivors have been campaigning about for years.
He told the Independent: "It is very gratifying to be taken seriously. I just wish more had been in done in 1984, when the first public reports of abuse in ACE schools in England surfaced. That would have saved a generation of children from a damaging schooling."
The Oxford Christian School was previously rated 'good' but is now deemed to be inadequate in all criteria, and inspectors said there were "insufficient opportunities for pupils to learn about religions other than their own" and that pupils were presented with unbalanced views. The inspection report added that pupils were not prepared "well enough for life in modern Britain". Pupils did not feel safe and teachers lacked knowledge to deliver proper education, the inspectors said.
Another ACE school, the Luton Pentecostal Church Christian Academy, was rated as 'good' in its previous inspection but is now deemed to be inadequate. Inspectors said school leaders "do not actively promote" respect for different minorities protected by equality law.
NSS campaigns director Stephen Evans said: "Religious dogma has been allowed to distort young people's education in these types of school for many years. It has taken far too long for action to be taken, but these reports do offer some sign that the Government has started taking children's educational rights more seriously.
"We welcome that the tougher standards are identifying problem schools so that action can be taken now, as it should have been much sooner."
Ofsted told the Independent, "We recently inspected a number of independent schools that use the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum at the request of the Department for Education and found some of them to be failing to meet the Government's standards in a number of areas, including safeguarding, leadership and governance, and the quality of the curriculum. In addition, a number of these schools were not promoting British values effectively enough.
"It is common practice for Ofsted to carry out focused inspections of a group of schools that, for example, are in the same local authority area or academy trust or, which follow the same type of curriculum.
"We will, through commission by the DfE, continue to monitor schools that have not met the Independent Schools Standards."
The Government said that ACE schools must "improve or close" if they have failed to meet the "new, tougher" Independent School Standards.
*Correction* an earlier version of this article misattrubated Mr Ridgers' quotes to education activist and expert on ACE Jonny Scaramanga.by Maria LaHood of the |
, 1972 Easton Lehigh 14–6 109 November 17, 1973 Bethlehem Lehigh 45–13 110 November 23, 1974 Easton Lehigh 57–7 111 November 22, 1975 Bethlehem Lehigh 40–14 112 November 20, 1976 Easton Lafayette 21–17 113 November 19, 1977 Bethlehem Lehigh 35–17 114 November 18, 1978 Easton Lehigh 23–15 115 November 17, 1979 Bethlehem Lehigh 24–3 116 November 22, 1980 Easton Lehigh 32–0 117 November 21, 1981 Bethlehem Lafayette 10–3 118 November 20, 1982 Easton Lafayette 34–6 119 November 19, 1983 Bethlehem Lehigh 22–14 120 November 17, 1984 Easton Lafayette 28–7 121 November 23, 1985 Bethlehem Lehigh 24–19 122 November 22, 1986 Easton Lafayette 28–23 123 November 21, 1987 Bethlehem Lehigh 17–10 124 November 19, 1988 Easton Lafayette 52–45 125 November 18, 1989 Bethlehem Lafayette 36–21 126 November 17, 1990 Easton Lehigh 35–14 127 November 23, 1991 Bethlehem Lehigh 36–18 128 November 21, 1992 Easton Lafayette 32–29 129 November 20, 1993 Bethlehem Lehigh 39–14 130 November 19, 1994 Easton Lafayette 54–20 131 November 18, 1995 Bethlehem Lehigh 37–30 132 November 23, 1996 Easton Lehigh 23–19 133 November 22, 1997 Bethlehem Lehigh 43–31 134 November 21, 1998 Easton Lehigh 31–7 135 November 20, 1999 Bethlehem Lehigh 14–12 136 November 18, 2000 Easton Lehigh 31–17 137 November 17, 2001 Bethlehem Lehigh 41–6 138 November 23, 2002 Easton Lafayette 14–7 139 November 22, 2003 Bethlehem Lehigh 30–10 140 November 20, 2004 Easton Lafayette 24–10 141 November 19, 2005 Bethlehem Lafayette 23–19 142 November 18, 2006 Easton Lafayette 49–27 143 November 17, 2007 Bethlehem Lafayette 21–17 144 November 22, 2008 Easton Lehigh 31–15 145 November 21, 2009 Bethlehem Lehigh 27–21 146 November 20, 2010 Easton Lehigh 20–13 147 November 19, 2011 Bethlehem Lehigh 37–13 148 November 17, 2012 Easton Lehigh 38–21 149 November 23, 2013 Bethlehem Lafayette 50–28 150 November 22, 2014 The Bronx, NY Lafayette 27–7 151 November 21, 2015 Bethlehem Lehigh 49–35 152 November 19, 2016 Easton Lehigh 45–21 153 November 18, 2017 Bethlehem Lehigh 38–31 154 November 17, 2018 Easton Lehigh 34–3 Series: Lafayette leads 78–71–5
All Sports Trophy [ edit ]
The Rivalry was further cemented by the creation of the "All Sports Trophy" in 1968. The trophy is held by the school which wins the most varsity sports meetings during a school year. One point is awarded per victory. At the year end, points are totaled to determine the overall champion.
All Sports Trophy record [ edit ]
Men's sports
Years won by Lehigh – 34
Years won by Lafayette – 2
Ties – 6
Women's sports
Years won by Lafayette – 12
Years won by Lehigh – 10
Ties – 0
See also [ edit ]We've been documenting one Polygon staffer's (it's me, hello) shameful addiction to FMV games, most all of which have been shelved in the dark corners of gaming history just behind the dust-covered Game.Com systems. But if one FMV game has persisted in the zeitgeist, it is Night Trap, the campy quest to save Dana Plato and a houseful of co-eds from the relentless advances of the vampiric Augers.
Now, the game's original creators have launched a $330,000 Kickstarter to remaster the game from the original source and present it in high definition on consoles and PC. If this trial is successful, the newly-formed Night Trap LLC says it wants to bring other gems from the Digital Pictures library (which includes Corpse Killer, Sewer Shark and Supreme Warrior) back to the market.
According the Night Trap ReVamped Kickstarter page, "We are also considering the creation of Night Trap II, although hopefully we will come up with a more clever title."
The project has 29 days to meet its goal, the fulfillment of which would conclusively prove the existence of a benevolent higher power that wants us, their creations, to live in a constant state of peace and joy.BY: Follow @@Cam_Cawthorne
MSNBC host Brian Williams on Monday pushed hard for gun control laws in response to that day's mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nev.
At least 58 people were killed, and more than 500 injured, on Sunday night when gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire on country music festival attendees from his 32nd floor room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, according to local authorities.
"Why don't we act? What is the problem? What was it about first graders losing their lives [in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary] that wasn't sad enough to result in changes?" Williams asked.
Williams' guest, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), immediately blamed the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other special interests, saying that their "stranglehold" on the Congressional process undermined efforts to pass gun control legislation. He said that he believes Americans can honor the victims by arriving at a tipping point and changing America.
Williams then asked Blumenthal what he thought about the legislative effort to legalize silencers on guns, prompting Blumenthal to call it a "nonstarter." Williams praised former New York Police Department commissioner Bill Bratton earlier in the day for his misleading remarks about silencers effectively silencing firearms, a claim the Washington Post has debunked.
"Making the purchase or use of silencers easier is supposed to be good for the ears of the folks who are shooting," Blumenthal said. "What a travesty when you think that the reason that those folks ran from those gun shots is they could hear them. This legislation ought to be a nonstarter."
"We ought to have an agenda of common sense steps to stop gun violence, including a ban on assault weapons and the high-capacity magazines that are used for these mass killings," Blumenthal said. "Assault weapons have no purpose but to maim and kill human beings. They're weapons of war and, of course, background checks for everyone who buys a gun, especially to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people."
Williams asked Blumenthal when he thought Americans would push back against "the edges of the Second Amendment argument" enough to call for limits on the amendment.
"I believe in the Second Amendment because it's the law of the land, but those common sense measures would in no way infringe on any Constitutional right and the majority, the vast majority, more than 80 or 90 percent, believe that we ought to have background checks to keep these weapons out of the hands of dangerous people," Blumenthal said.
This is not the first time that Williams has pushed for gun control shortly after a mass shooting. He interviewed Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) in the wake of the Orlando nightclub massacre last June, the Washington Free Beacon reported.Welcome to Lund University autumn 2019! There is great competition for getting student housing, but we do our best to help the new students (novisch) in Lund.
If you have been accepted to at least half-time studies (15 credits) at Lund University for the first time and have been registered outside commuting distance (Skåne) since at least one year back, then you meet our requirements for novisch priority. This priority gives you the right to book approximately 700 student housing (corridor rooms and one room apartments) reserved for new students (novisch), with a move-in date of 1 August and 1 September. From 15 July and onward we will publish novisch housing on our website. This is what you need to do:
1. Wait for your letter of acceptance
All conditions can be found in the housing list and rental conditions. To rent a student housing, you must have received a letter of acceptance. The letter of acceptance must verify that you are:
accepted for the first time or have been put on an acceptance waiting list for studies at Lund University
accepted to at least half-time studies (15 credits)
Note that international students admitted to degree programs refer to their notification of selection results from earlier this year in place for letter of acceptance. Accepted exchange students will in early July receive an email directly from Lund University including their personal code, in the form of yyyymmdd - P123.
Only personal codes with the letter P, R, S, T or U are accepted in AF Bostäder's housing queue system. Please note that the letter F is not accepted. If you have not yet received a personal code or if it has a different letter, please contact your coordinator at Lund University. Also note that the housing queue will open for all new students on 11 July regardless of when you received your letter of acceptance or notification of selection results.
2. Make a housing application, 11-14 July
The queue times given to new students (novisch) are randomly distributed by a lottery. Registration for the novisch lottery is done by making a housing application during the lottery period. Your queue time is not affected by which day you make your housing application.
Before the lottery has been carried out, the status on Your page will be “Lottery under way”. The lottery itself will take place on 15 July. The queue time that you have been given through the lottery (consisting of a date and time) will be posted on Your page the same day.
If you do not qualify for novisch status, you will immediately receive a queue time upon registration. You can then directly start booking student housing that are not prioritized for new students (novisch).
Note! When making a housing application, you must state a Swedish social security number. If you don't have a Swedish social security number, tick the box "Missing Swedish social security number" and enter your birthdate and Personal Code instead.
3. Put on the waiting list? (if not – proceed to step 4)
You can register for the lottery even if you are put on the admission waiting list to Lund University. You must however be admitted before you can start booking any student housing.
Bookings made before you have been admitted is invalid which means that you will lose your queue time and contract proposal. Once you are admitted, please proceed to step 4.
4. Become a member of Studentlund
As a housing applicant or tenant, you must be a member of Studentlund. The membership will be checked by AF Bostäder. You can register at studentlund.se as soon as you have received the letter of admission.
5. Book housing on afbostader.se
New students who have participated in the lottery (and have been admitted) can book available novisch housing from 15 July and onward, when the lottery has been completed.
Note!Two e-mails from two Clinton supporters pass along this CNN brief about the company that employed a state dept. functionary who snuck a peak at Barack Obama's passport application.
Turns out that the owner of one of the companies is John Brennan, one of Barack Obama's chief advisers on intelligence policy. (The others are Lee Hamilton and Tony Lake.)
Conspiracy?
Actually, no.
It's more interesting that that. Let's broaden this out.
Brennan is one of many former intelligence community heavyweights to have started his own consulting firm after leaving the government. These firms employ hundreds of thousands of Americans in jobs requiring access to sensitive, Secret, Top Secret, or even Top Secret Codeword information.
There's a big debate in the community right now about contracting: how much oversight is enough? Should the contractors be subject to the same rules as federal employees? Are their jobs that contractors shouldn't do? Should the IC admit that it has outsourced many of our nation's most critical jobs to non-government employees?
Also: what's the quickest, safest and most efficient way to vet these employees.
In this case, the employee was subjected to a "national agency check," which is essentially what the Secret Service performs on folks whose friends get them those extra-special White House tours. That is, their names are run through federal databases to see if anything untoward pops out. Most "Secret" clearances are processed with a national agency check and only a little bit more investigation.
Most folks in the intelligence community want contractors to have easier access to raw intelligence products and have urged reform of the security clearance process. That's where another Brenann connection comes in. He's the chairman of INSA, the Intelligence and Security Alliance, a very well-regarded think tank consortium funded in part by companies who have IC business.
One wonders whether a President Obama would be more likely, or less likely, to support a more rational security clearance system after these indiscretions.
NB: Brennan was most recently in the news for breaking with Obama over telecom immunity. Brennan supports it; Obama does not.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.The Democratic Party is feeling the sting of rejection.
Last week, the Democratic National Committee backed a resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, which aims to end racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Then, on Sunday, the official Black Lives Matter Network, which consists of 26 chapters nationwide, said it appreciates the gesture but won't return the favor.
"We do not now, nor have we ever, endorsed or affiliated with the Democratic Party, or with any party," the group said in a statement. "The Democratic Party, like the Republican and all political parties, have historically attempted to control or contain Black people’s efforts to liberate ourselves. True change requires real struggle, and that struggle will be in the streets and led by the people, not by a political party."
Ouch.
This may come off as harsh. But the statement is in line with recent clashes between Black Lives Matter activists and Democratic presidential candidates at public events. And there's a good reason for this type of response: Both Republicans and Democrats supported tough-on-crime policies that disproportionately impacted black communities. It's going to take a lot more than a resolution to mend these deep-seated issues.
Democrats are just as much to blame for "the new Jim Crow"
Democrats were big supporters — and even drivers — of tough-on-crime policies that drove mass incarceration and the war on drugs. But both of these policies have disproportionately hurt black Americans, becoming the subject of much scorn for the Black Lives Matter movement — even earning the label "the new Jim Crow" from civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander.
As a senator, for instance, Vice President Joe Biden was a sponsor and co-author of several of the tough-on-crime laws in the 1980s and '90s. And Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, along with Biden, supported the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which imposed tougher prison sentences, increased funding for prisons, put more police on the streets, and awarded police with grant money for drug-related arrests that many black communities now see as a cause for police harassment.
These laws helped cause, for example, the explosive growth of the prison population from the 1980s to 2000s:
And a disproportionate percentage of the growing prison population was black:
At the time, Democrats supported these policies because the general public wanted them. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, crime was unusually high. The country was still coming off what was perceived as a crack cocaine epidemic, in which the drug ran rampant across urban streets and fueled deadly gang violence. So Americans, by and large, demanded their lawmakers do something — and politicians from both parties reacted with mass incarceration and other tough-on-crime policies.
Since then, criminal justice experts have come to agree that these laws were overly punitive. Although mass incarceration and more police contributed to some of the crime drop since the 1990s, many experts say that very early on, incarceration reached the point of diminishing returns — there are only so many serious criminals out there, and after a certain point the people getting put in prison aren't people who'd be committing crime after crime on the street. As a result, there are a lot of people in prison who don't need to be for the sake of public safety — and a disproportionate number of those people are black.
Some Democrats have admitted that they made the problem worse. Earlier this year, Bill Clinton stated, "I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it." Hillary Clinton has made similar comments. And Biden spent his last few years in the Senate trying to repeal some of the laws he helped pass.
But advocates by and large feel the damage is done. So for them, it's not enough for Democrats to acknowledge their mistakes. Democrats also have to show that they learned from their mistakes — and back the kinds of policies that Black Lives Matter activists now demand. A party resolution falls far short of that.The head of the Senate Judiciary Committee is increasingly bullish that criminal justice reform will become law this year.
Sen. Charles Grassley Charles (Chuck) Ernest GrassleyOvernight Health Care: Senators grill drug execs over high prices | Progressive Dems unveil Medicare for all bill | House Dems to subpoena Trump officials over family separations Senate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system MORE (R-Iowa) on Tuesday said revisions to a bipartisan bill passed by his panel last year would be unveiled "soon." He predicted the amended package would attract enough support to reach President Obama's desk.
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"We feel that we're very, very close," Grassley said during a criminal justice conference at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. "I'm confident that with these changes, my colleagues will realize that this bill is … reasonable and responsible."
Grassley devoted a good deal of his 13-minute speech to the bipartisan cooperation on sentencing reform — and there's little mystery why.
The Judiciary chairman is at the center of the bare-knuckle brawl over Obama's bid to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. He has sided squarely with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Senate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration MORE (R-Ky.) in stating that the Senate should stage no hearings — let alone a floor vote — for the president’s pick.
The Democrats have pounced, accusing Republican leaders of neglecting to uphold their constitutional duties.
The charges have put GOP leaders on the defensive in a year when Democrats are eying a Senate takeover. Indeed, the Democrats' campaign arm is running ads in the states of vulnerable Republicans that highlight the GOP's refusal to consider Scalia's replacement.
Among those targets is Grassley, who is up for reelection this year in Iowa — a state Obama won in 2008 and 2012.
Democrats believe Grassley’s seat could be in play this fall and have found a strong recruit — former Iowa Lt. Gov. Patty Judge — to take him on. Judge visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with Senate Democrats at their weekly luncheon.
While Grassley on Tuesday did not mention the Supreme Court fight directly, he alluded to it several times in referencing the criminal justice bill as evidence that GOP leaders are ready to roll up their sleeves in search of bipartisan compromise.
"This is how the Senate works best," Grassley said. "Unlike some other issues that are now at the forefront of our political conversations, this is an issue that can bring senators from both sides of the aisle together, and from different perspectives.
"We should focus our energy on bills just like this, where we can work together," he added.
Among Obama's top domestic priorities in his final year in office, criminal justice reform is seen as one of the few issues with enough bipartisan support to pass Congress in the polarized election year.
The Judiciary Committee passed a reform bill in October on a 15-5 vote that included every Democrat on the panel. But the measure met with fierce opposition from some conservatives — including Sens. Tom Cotton Thomas (Tom) Bryant CottonHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington MORE (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzCornyn less popular than Cruz in Texas: poll Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington MORE (R-Texas), a presidential candidate — who contended the changes would send a flood of violent criminals into the streets.
Supporters of the legislation in both parties reject that assessment out of hand, and Grassley on Tuesday had some sharp words for the conservative opponents, calling their criticism "very, very unfair."
"Some have invoked the specter of a Willie Horton and claim that our bill is a get-out-of-jail-free card for violent criminals. This, of course, is not true," Grassley said, noting that local judges and prosecutors — "not Washington bureaucrats" — would make the decisions about the sentencing relief at the heart of the bill.
"In talking to some of these people, and-or their staffs, you come to the conclusion they didn't even read the bill before they made their statements."
Still, Grassley has agreed to tweak several of the bill’s provisions in hopes of attracting broader support and, perhaps, preempting a bit of high-profile Republican infighting. 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-Idaho) and Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinKids confront Feinstein over Green New Deal Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Overnight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run MORE (D-Ill.) are a part of those negotiations, Grassley said.
"We cannot always agree on every issue, but Republicans and Democrats can come together, even on divisive issues, and find areas of consensus and agreement," he said. "We can show the American people that the United States Senate can, and does, work."
McConnell, for his part, has declined to weigh in on either the merits of the legislation or a potential timeline for consideration on the floor. In January, he indicated GOP leaders were waiting for Judiciary leaders to finalize a bill and bring the conference "up to speed on this very important issue."
"We're going to do that before any decision is made about floor time," McConnell said.
Grassley expressed optimism that Senate leaders in both parties would ultimately rally behind the package.
"I'm confident that with the changes that we're making in the bill, that we'll get even more support. … And with more support, I'm confident that we'll be able to go to the leaders in the Senate and persuade them that this bill is exactly what the American people need to see happen in the United States Senate this year," Grassley said.
"And I have a promise from the President of the United States that he will help us in any way he can."
Tuesday's conference at Georgetown Law was sponsored by the Aleph Institute, a Florida-based Jewish group that advocates for the incarcerated.Question: If your elected officials fail basic taxonomy, promote anti-science curriculum, and consistently attempt to undermine the fundamental underpinning of all biology, what happens when they start trying to legislate from this flawed view of reality?
The answer is this poorly-worded miasma of a law recently passed in Florida, which presumably was designed to prevent bestiality and promote animal welfare, but which has actually made it illegal, effective October 1, 2011, for anyone to have sex in Florida.
An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date. source
I have constructed this helpful little graphic for the Florida Legislature to examine:
So if you’re living in Florida on October 1, 2011 and would like to have sexual intercourse with a consenting adult, please check with your veterinarian or local livestock breeder first to make sure you abide by “accepted animal husbandry practices, conformation judging practices, or accepted veterinary medical practices.”
[Readers may be interested in a slightly less humorous but technically correct interpretation of the new law. ~Ed.]
Like this post? Check out some of our more substantive analyses of peer reviewed research, our recent review of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill that didn’t happen, and the role of the local guy in management processes.
Site moving too slow? Check out our friends at Deep Sea News for you daily dose of marine science awesome.On October 5th of last year, a 67-year-old Polish man named Aleksander Doba set out from Lisbon, Portugal in a 21-foot kayak, in hopes of crossing the Atlantic Ocean and reaching Florida.
Aleksander Doba’s 6,000 mile journey ended in a glorious success earlier this month when he landed at New Smyrna Beach, Florida on April 17th. Doba arrived looking like Tom Hanks from Cast Away with weathered skin and long sun bleached beard and hair.
Doba’s journey is believed to be the longest open-water kayak crossing in history.
Previously, Aleksander Doba had paddled 3,345 miles from Senegal, Africa, to Brazil. This journey, which he completed in 2011, spanned 99 days.
Accomplishing this task took great preparation. Doba had to carefully plan his meals and inventories as well as navigate winds, streams, and weather. One minor mistake could have taken Aleksander way off course or left him in the middle of the ocean without food.
Aleksander Doba kissed the ground when he arrived, truly grateful of his achievement. Check out pictures below of Doba and his kayak, and check out more on the story here.The Bexar County Sheriff’s Department, the same department responsible for the recent shooting of a man holding his hands up, is now in full attack mode against the media, reporter and especially KSAT 12, the news station which released the video of the shooting of Gilbert Flores.
The video of the shooting clearly shows Flores standing calmly in his front yard with his hands up and the two deputies pointing guns at him and eventually shooting him (the actual moment of the shooting was cut out).
In a Facebook post made last evening, the department made it very clear that they do not take responsibility for the shooting and in fact they blame the TV station for the public outrage over the shooting of an unarmed man who was holding his hands up in the air and was not posing a threat to the two deputies confronting him, Greg Vasquez and Robert Sanchez.
Incredibly, the post even encouraged the community to actively contact the news station and complain about the released of the video! It stated:
Today, members of our local media chose to broadcast online unedited video of a man’s death. KSAT 12 paid a neighbor who filmed the tragedy $100 for the exclusive rights to the video. As a result, people from outside our community have bombarded us with inappropriate comments, and today, physical threats toward our deputies. These deputies have not been charged with a crime and a family lost their loved one. This is unethical and sad. Call KSAT and let them know what you think – (210) 351-1277. If you agree, let the local media know this sort of sensational behavior doesn’t fly in Bexar County.
The department continued to defend the post on Facebook by implying that the released of the video is jeopardizing the investigation into the shooting and attempted to send the media on a guilt trip regarding the family of the deceased man:
Would you want your loved ones to see your death? What about the investigation being jeopardized by a video that doesn’t share the whole story? It’s about doing the right thing. This is only one piece of evidence.
It is typical of police departments to hold onto video evidence of shootings or wrongdoing until public sentiment calms down and negative comments from the public tone down, but this is an instance where they were unable to control the timing of the release of the video, giving us an interesting insight into how police department see the media: as a tool to be used to manipulate the general public and turn sentiment in their favor.
When they are unable to control the media, they throw a temper tantrum and demand that their blind supporters go on the attack against the reporters they cannot control.Gerald Parks Jr.
FLINT, MI - Prosecutors have decided to drop the criminal case against a former Genesee County Jail deputy accused of assaulting an inmate.
Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton confirmed his office has filed to withdraw its appeal - and ultimately end its prosecution - in the felony criminal case against Sgt. Gerald Parks.
"I just think that the case should come to an end," Leyton said, adding the dismissal was in the interest of court efficiency and tax dollars at stake.
Parks was charged criminally with misconduct in office, misuse of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery after he was accused of attacking an inmate inside the county jail in 2012.
Leyton charged Parks in October 2014 after officials with the sheriff's office claimed they uncovered surveillance video of the incident.
Despite the video and testimony regarding the incident, Genesee District Judge M. Cathy Dowd has twice dismissed the charges for lack of probable cause.
"I said very early, I'd let my talking be done in the courtroom," said Parks' attorney, Jay Clothier. "Dismissal is total victory."
Clothier added he and Parks were thankful for the support they received through the case.
Leyton's office was in the process of appealing Dowd's ruling for the second time to Genesee Circuit Judge Joseph J. Farah, but filed Oct. 11 to withdraw the appeal.
The withdrawal means Dowd's ruling will stand and the charges are dismissed against Parks.
Prosecutor wants inmate assault case reinstated against jail deputy "We felt there's probable cause that the crimes charged were committed."
Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell could not be reached for comment.
The case against Parks has been contentious, with his attorneys alleging the charges were retaliation for a lawsuit he filed against Pickell's office.
Pickell has denied the allegations.
Parks filed the federal lawsuit against the sheriff's office in November 2013 on claims he was retaliated against, and eventually forced to retire after more than 30 years of service, for testimony he gave during an April 2012 union collective bargaining-related arbitration hearing. His testimony was critical of sheriff's office administration.
He recently agreed to settle his case against the sheriff's department for $90,000, according to an agreement obtained by MLive-The Flint Journal through the Freedom of Information Act.
Leyton, who serves as chief legal counsel to the county's Board of Commissioners, denied the settlement had any effect on his decision to drop the case against Parks.
Embattled deputy settles retaliation lawsuit against sheriff's office A settlement has been reached for a second sheriff's deputy who claims he was retaliated against after he gave testimony that was critical of the sheriff's office administration.
A former inmate at the jail testified he was in a safety cell when he began knocking on the window to get the attention of the deputies. Three deputies, including Parks, approached the inmate who had retreated back to a concrete bench in the room.
The inmate claimed he attempted to hand the deputies his paperwork, but prosecutors say Parks crumpled up the paper and threw it the toilet.
As the inmate sat on the bench with his hands up, the video showed Parks shoot two bursts of pepper spray into the victim's face, according to prosecutors.
After decontaminating the inmate, prosecutors claim multiple deputies could be seen on the video trying to put the struggling inmate into a restraint chair. Prosecutors argue Parks could then be seen making a punching motion directed toward the inmate's midsection as he sat in the chair.
The inmate testified he was sprayed and punched, but he was unable to identify the deputy responsible.
Leyton's office, in its appeal, claimed Dowd abused her discretion by relying on a standard of proof higher than probable cause, which is all that is necessary to bind the case over to circuit court for trial.
"Despite (the inmate's) testimony that he had been punched by a deputy that he could not identify and (Undersheriff) Swanson's testimony identifying the defendant drawing his hand back in a punching manner, coupled with testimony that this was an unjustified use of force, the Court still declined to acknowledge that there was probable cause that any assault took place," Leyton's office argued in its appeal.
"Instead, the Court reasoned that because it could not been seen where the Defendant's hand was landing on the video - if it was striking the chair, the victim, or something else - it had not been shown to a probable cause standard that the Defendant had assaulted the victim under circumstances that did not justify assault."
This isn't the first time Leyton's office has challenged an attempt from Dowd to dismiss the case.
Dowd previously dismissed the charges against Parks in June 2015 after the man Parks was accused of assaulting in the jail was unable to identify him as the deputy who attacked him. The incident was caught on jail surveillance cameras, but Dowd refused to allow a second sheriff's deputy to identify Parks on the video.
The judge claimed it was inappropriate to allow a third-party identification based on the video since the alleged victim was able to testify. She dismissed the case before prosecutors finished presenting witness testimony.
Prosecutors appealed Dowd's decision to Farah, arguing they should have been allowed to introduce a DVD copy of the surveillance video and let the second deputy use it to identify Parks as the perpetrator of the alleged assault.
Farah ruled Dowd abused her discretion by failing to admit the surveillance video as evidence and stated she misinterpreted legal precedent when she did not allow the second deputy to identify Parks in the video.A new study led by scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) shows that an HIV-1 vaccine regimen, involving a viral vector boosted with a purified envelope protein, provided complete protection in half of the vaccinated non-human primates (NHPs) against a series of six repeated challenges with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a virus similar to HIV that infects NHPs. These findings are published online today in Science.
Based on these pre-clinical data, the HIV-1 version of this vaccine regimen is now being evaluated in an ongoing Phase 1/2a international clinical study sponsored by Crucell Holland B.V., one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.
"We previously showed that adenovirus vector-based HIV-1 vaccine candidates offered partial protection against SIV when given alone," said lead author Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at BIDMC and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. The paper describes two new studies in which investigators evaluated the protective efficacy of an adenovirus serotype 26 (Ad26) vectored vaccine boosted with a purified envelope protein.
The results demonstrate that viral vector priming plus protein boosting resulted in complete protection in half of the vaccinated animals. "This shows improvement over our previous results," said Barouch, who is also a steering committee member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. "Moreover, protection correlated with the magnitude and polyfunctionality of antibody responses. The data show the potential utility of envelope protein boosting following Ad26 priming."
"Bringing the global HIV epidemic under control requires new tools, bold strategies and collaboration among a number of stakeholders," said Hanneke Schuitemaker, one of the study authors and vice president, Viral Vaccines Discovery and Translational Medicine, Janssen. "In line with our company's commitment to address global health needs, we are committed to working with leading experts to develop a preventative HIV vaccine and our team is excited to advance this program into human clinical studies."A majority of U.S. military officers have an unfavorable view of President Trump, according to a survey released this week by the Military Times.
According to the poll, 53 percent of respondents said they hold an unfavorable opinion of the commander in chief, while about 31 percent said they view him favorably. Sixteen percent said they were neutral on the matter.
The findings come amid the controversy surrounding Trump's disputed call to the widow of a U.S. Army soldier killed in Niger earlier this month.
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Rep. Frederica Wilson Frederica Patricia WilsonJuan Williams: Racial shifts spark fury in Trump and his base Dem behind impeachment push to boycott State of the Union Democrats seek to take on Trump at State of the Union MORE (D-Fla.), who was with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson at the time of the call, alleged that Trump was insensitive in the conversation. The White House has denied that claim and has accused the congresswoman of politicizing the soldier's death.
Johnson was one of four soldiers killed in an ambush in Niger on Oct. 4 while U.S. troops accompanied Nigerien soldiers on a routine patrol. The Pentagon has since launched an investigation into the attack and the circumstances surrounding it — particularly how Johnson became separated from the rest of the unit.
According to the Military Times poll, Trump's favorability is higher among enlisted military personnel, at about 47 percent. Just under 37 percent of those polled view him unfavorably.
Trump sees his highest enlisted favorability ratings in the Marine Corps — 58.9 percent — and the Army — 46.3 percent. The Air Force and the Navy have the highest rate of unfavorable opinions about the president, at 38.1 percent and |
users. Again, we are hackers ourselves, and we have a belief set that would be completely compromised if we returned funds to people double spending… Essentially, you use our tool at your own peril,” wrote the Glass Hunt team.A Sharon man tells Hermitage Police he shot a co-worker at Walmart who the suspect says made negative comments about his decision to undergo a transgender transformation.
Bond is set at $500,000 for Zachary T. McClimans, 22, who is charged with shooting a co-worker four times shortly before 10:30 at the Hermitage Walmart Thursday night.
According to a criminal complaint, McClimans said he recently told his co-workers at the store that he was beginning the process of changing gender from male to female.
McClimans says that Jayson Hall, a co-worker, expressed his displeasure with the decision and had made a comment to McClimans at work on Thursday.
According to the complaint, McClimans left work, but returned to Walmart Thursday night with the object of stopping Hall from threatening or hurting him.
Police say that McClimans shot Hall four times, then went to his car in the parking lot where police found him with a.38 caliber pistol.
McClimans told police he reported the perceived threats earlier to store management, which had opened an investigation into the matter.
McClimans was brought before a district magistrate on Friday for arraignment on charges of first degree criminal attempt to commit murder, second degree criminal attempt to commit murder, aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person, theft and a firearms violation.
Hall was flown by medical helicopter to St. Elizabeth Medical Center where he is listed in stable condition.
Chief Jewell commended officers for what he called a timely response, quick tactical thinking, coolness under extreme stress and tremendous courage.
Several police departments from the Shenango Valley and other communities assisted with containment and search of the store and interviewing witnesses and potential witnesses.
The store was closed until 4 a.m.
McClimans remains in the Mercer County Jail awaiting his next court hearing set for November 15.Attorney Todd Kincannon - (Screenshot - WLTX)
A South Carolina attorney who was briefly the executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party has had his license to practice law suspended by the state Supreme Court, WLTX is reporting.
Columbia attorney Todd Kincannon, who saw his Twitter account suspended in 2013 for his threatening and over-the-top tweets, was put on what is known as “incapacity active status” by the state’s highest court, although no reason was given.
Kincannon was recently detained by police after threatening his wife in a Chick-fil-A parking lot, refusing to let her out of the car and saying he would kill himself if she left. After being taken in for observation, Kincannon blamed his outburst on cough medicine saying it made him “erratic,” although his wife said he had a previous history of domestic abuse that she never reported.
The South Carolina Republican only lasted three months as Executive Director of the state party, stepping down after being pressured over his offensive Twitter posts. The now-suspended attorney has called for the internment of transgender men and women, advocated killing an Iraq war veteran turned anti-war activist Michael Prysner, and said of shooting victim Trayvon Martin: “This Super Bowl sucks more dick than adult Trayvon Martin would have for drug money.”
A representative for state GOP also accused Kincannon of “generously editing” his resume prior to getting the position.
Attorney Peyre Thomas Lumpkin was assigned by the court to assume the responsibility and casework at Kincannon’s private firm.
Watch video from WLTX below:WASHINGTON — House Speaker Paul Ryan assured nervous Republican senators on a conference call Thursday night that he would send their “skinny repeal” of Obamacare to a conference instead of passing it into law.
As a vote neared Thursday night or early Friday morning on a proposed “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, three key Republican senators said they would only vote for it if they are assured it won’t actually become law.
The three — Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis.— said they needed Ryan’s word that he would not take up their legislation, pass it and send it to the president’s desk. They instead want the bill to be fixed in a House-Senate conference.
Ryan later released an ambiguous statement saying he was “willing” to go to conference if that’s the only way to move forward. “The reality, however, is that repealing and replacing Obamacare still ultimately requires the Senate to produce 51 votes for an actual plan,” Ryan said. He added that the House would expect the Senate to vote first on whatever the conference committee produces.
At around 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Graham, Johnson and a few other senators held a conference call with Ryan during which he personally assured them that he would send the bill to a House-Senate conference instead of immediately passing it. It is unclear, however, if Ryan also promised he would not pass the legislation later down the road, if that conference does not produce legislation.
“I just wanted to hear it right from Paul, we all [did],” Johnson told reporters. Those in the room are now on board with the legislation, he said.
While McCain was not in the room, he spoke to the Speaker separately, according to Johnson. He did not answer reporters questions about where he stood late Thursday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is expected to kick off a late-night “vote-a-rama,” which would roll back a handful of key provisions of Obamacare but leave other portions of it intact, ahead of a vote on the skinny repeal bill. McConnell released the text of the skinny bill late Thursday night.
Just hours earlier, several Republican senators admitted that the current version of the bill would drive up premiums and does not improve the healthcare system, but they argued it is a first step of a process that will later produce a better bill.
“The skinny bill as policy is a disaster. The skinny bill as a replacement for Obamacare is a fraud,” Graham told reporters Thursday.
He said it would be “the dumbest thing in history” for Republicans to pass it into law and then own the price increases in Obamacare insurance exchanges from then on.
Republican senators are considering passing a stripped-down, partial repeal of Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates that many of them acknowledge would cause premiums in the individual markets to spike. The Senate leadership is pitching this move as simply the next step in a longer process that would result in a better health care system.
Senators want to make sure the House won’t simply take up that skinny repeal and send it directly to the president, avoiding what’s sure to be a contentious conference committee to work out differences between the chambers’ two bills. The House passed a more comprehensive repeal-and-replace bill in May. (The request to go to a conference committee must, for technical reasons, originate in the House.)
In a conference committee, provisions would be added to make the skinny repeal a fleshed-out repeal-and-replace bill, they say. The Senate is using a special budget reconciliation process that requires only 50 votes to pass and constrains what can be included in the legislation.
Senate Republicans have said their bill is just a “vehicle,” and its myriad issues must be fixed later.
“It’s a means to an end to keep this conversation going, engage the House and get this to conference,” said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., Thursday. “The ‘skinny’ bill in my opinion is almost like a motion to proceed, it’s a vehicle to keep it going forward.”
As of Thursday evening it was unclear if McConnell had the votes to pass the measure. McCain, has not said if he’s on board. Two key senators, including Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Sen. Lisa Murkowksi, R-Alaska, said they had decided how they would vote but would not announce it yet.
—Yahoo News reporter Andrew Bahl contributed to this report.
Read more from Yahoo News:Ken Holland
Ken Holland
(AP file)
GRAND RAPIDS - They are the cries Ken Holland has heard more frequently in recent years as the Detroit Red Wings have slipped from perennially elite to simply playoff hopeful:
Get rid of the old guys! Play the young guys!
The longtime general manager hears it, acknowledges it and, based on his resume that includes three Stanley Cup trophies, is steadfast in his process to assemble another championship-caliber team through solid drafts, prudent signings, patience and some luck.
In a series of comments Tuesday before an audience of some 400 at Van Andel Arena, Holland shared insight into his thinking about the Red Wings as they hover near.500 (currently 19-19-6). They are six points out of a playoff spot heading into Wednesday's game against Boston.
His response to roster shedding? Let's wait another 16 games, or closer to the March 1 trade deadline.
"At that point you have to ask if you're going to be a buyer, a seller or stand pat," he said during an on-stage interview that also included the general managers from the Tigers and Pistons.
What GMs from Detroit's big 3 sports say about their Grand Rapids affiliates General managers together for on-stage interview as part of 20th anniversary celebration of Van Andel Arena.
"As a manager, my ultimate goal is to win a Stanley Cup," Holland said. "You got to know when to go in (as a trade deadline buyer or seller) and when not to go in. Certainly the standings tell you that."
Even if the Red Wings fall further behind, Holland won't just dump players, in part because it would leave a void. Young players, such as forwards Anthony Mantha and Andreas Athanasiou, he said, should not be exposed to the pressures of carrying a club. Those expectations, he noted, didn't fall to Henrik Zetterberg or, defensively, to Niklas Kronwall until their mid-20s. For Zetterberg it was after the retirement of Steve Yzerman, while Kronwall's leadership grew after Nicklas Lidstrom retired after 2012.
Now, with Zetterberg and Kronwall age 36, the Red Wings must wait for their young players to emerge as talents, Holland said, and have the chance to grasp the mantle of leaders.
"That's why it's so important to have a Henrik Zetterberg sitting beside an Anthony Mantha or a (Thomas) Vanek and Franz Nielsen playing on a line with Athanasiou, and a Jonathan Ericssen playing (defense) with Xavier Ouellet," Holland said. "... That's where the culture is that can make a difference.
He added:
"The culture won't make the difference if you're not good enough. The culture is not going to make the difference if you're just going to be a superstar. The culture can make a difference on those players that need a little time, a little guidance and a little more maturity. That's where the organization and Grand Rapids can make a difference for where we're trying to get to, and that's to be a Cup contender."
Holland believes there are "five, six or seven players" on the Griffins who will be playing in Detroit "in two to three years."
"We're going to continue to try and be competitive, we're going to continue to try and make the playoffs and our ultimate goal is to eventually be a Cup contender."
He also disliked the idea of rebuilding, preferring "rebuilding on the fly."
"To me, rebuild means eight to 10 years, and there are teams that have made the playoffs one year in 10 while rebuilding," he said. "I don't know of anyone that wants to sign up for that program. We're trying to win every year. What's winning? Winning is making the playoffs and you're in the top half of the league.
"It's hard to make the playoffs in our sport now. It's totally different, even from five years ago because of parity (and hard salary caps). Nobody's one trade away... maybe if you drafted a generational player with a No. 1 overall pick. But with these franchises, you got to get better with every move and hope that some of your young people get better."SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Randy Moss is ready to show the world he can still be that dynamic deep threat who once dominated NFL defensive backs.
Even after a year away. Even at age 35. Even with a reputation he says isn't all it's made out to be.
Moss is getting another chance in the NFL, signing a one-year contract with the San Francisco 49ers Monday only hours after he worked out for the team and with former NFL quarterback and current coach Jim Harbaugh.
Moss' deal with San Francisco is worth $2.5 million, and he has incentives that could bring its value to more than $4 million, league sources told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter.
"I'm not a free agent. I'm a guy straight off the couch, straight off the street," Moss said. "One thing I want the sports world to understand is the love and passion I have for football."
Moss will fill a big void for the reigning NFC West champions in Harbaugh's version of the West Coast offense.
While he didn't go as far as to promise not to pout when times are tough, he did say all of the right things, and that he plans to be a positive presence in a locker room known for its blue-collar, unselfish approach.
Moss has no interest in reflecting on his past, either.
This is a fresh start.
"The thing about me being here is they've done their research on me. When it comes to the worldwide sports media, I've gotten a bad rap," Moss said. "They've done their homework on me or they wouldn't have brought me in here.... (The questions were) more of me not being a team player and things like that. I don't want to get into that."
Moss got a good vibe about the organization from the moment he was picked up at the airport Sunday night, calling it a "no-brainer" to sign.
Moss said the organization quickly decided to "pull the trigger" -- and it's a low-risk, high-reward move for San Francisco.
"Harbaugh is a young, enthusiastic coach. I love enthusiasm," Moss said. "A lot of things stood out to me."
It seems Harbaugh's throws were on target, too.
"Jim Harbaugh makes #49ers veteran emergency board: Best coach's workout in NFL history (especially while wearing khakis & a sweatshirt)," Niners CEO Jed York tweeted.(The Real Agenda) “It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I accept full responsibility,” said Clinton on a television interview. Unfortunately, her apology is too little and comes too late.
Clinton has said the words which she hopes perhaps clear the way for her embarassing presidential candidacy.
“I’m sorry”, said the former Secretary of State regarding the use of a private server for her emails, which was housed at her home in Chappaqua, New York, during her time as head of the State Department.
“It was a mistake,” Clinton concluded during an ABC interview on Tuesday night.
To date, Clinton, who used to be the favorite for the Democratic nomination, had avoided uttering a direct apology.
“Without a doubt I would have made a different decision,” Clinton said last week during an interview with NBC, in which she said that the controversy had made people feel confused.
“I feel this case of the emails has raised many questions, but no answers to all questions,” she said on Friday in another TV interview. “I take responsibility.”
But her supposedly sincere apologies come only a day after the former senator told The Associated Press that she did not need to apologize because what she did was permissible.
According to her, when she abandoned the official email address, ending in @ state.gov, to use a personal account connected to a server installed in her residence in upstate New York, she did it convinced that she would not violate any laws.
Clinton was convinced about something else. As polls show, the matter of the emails was and still is weighing on her popularity in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2016. The weight was so heavy, that several of her advisers recommended that she issued a public apology in clearer terms.
Apologies not accepted
Clinton’s public apology does not seem to have had any positive effect, at least not immediately. Most polls still show a trend that has been growing steadily since she announced her candidacy. More and more voters dislike and distrust Clinton.
While in some polls Clinton appears to be on top of other candidates, in other polls she appears to be behind in key states around the country. In battleground states, Clinton is second to socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders and to the leading Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
Not surprisingly, most voters see Clinton as a dishonest person that lacks sincerity and transparency. Some of the most common adjectives used by voters, when asked to describe Clinton include liar, dishonest, elitist, untrustworthy and criminal.
As of today, Clinton’s biggest challenge is not competing with Bernie Sanders or responding to Donald Trumps policy statements, but convincing voters that she is being completely open about her involvement in the email issue.
Hillary will also have to explain her role in the Benghazi debacle. “Her sordid past perhaps caught up with her. Polls show Joe Biden is most favored against Republicans – maybe enough to convince him to declare his candidacy,” writes Stephen J. Lendman on his article titled “Rebooting Hillary”.
The mainstream presstitute media has wasted no time to aid the Clinton campaign launch a new, more human image that Clinton will use from now on. Apparently, Clinton has decided to reboot and reinvent herself as a “kinder, gentler” candidate.
“She’ll find it hard to erase her sordid past or change her image in voter minds once fixed,” explains Lendman. “In a field of deplorable presidential aspirants without a worthy one in the bunch, she stands out as especially loathsome and dangerous – a war goddess most likely to confront Russia and perhaps China belligerently, a prescription for WW III. Smiles and feigned affability can’t disguise pure evil.”
Luis R. Miranda is an award-winning journalist and the founder and editor-in-chief at The Real Agenda. His career spans over 18 years and almost every form of news media. His articles include subjects such as environmentalism, Agenda 21, climate change, geopolitics, globalisation, health, vaccines, food safety, corporate control of governments, immigration and banking cartels, among others. Luis has worked as a news reporter, on-air personality for Live and Live-to-tape news programs. He has also worked as a script writer, producer and co-producer on broadcast news. Read more about Luis.The Spokane county sheriff has been making public presentations about his concerns with extremist groups. And he isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to one state lawmaker he blames for spreading misinformation.
Sheriff Ozzie Knezovitch has been going out public speaking events to alert people to threats facing law enforcement, and even the country.
Knezovitch has come under fire for militarization of his department, after an armored vehicle was set up for public display. The controversy erupted when a sheriff’s deputy defended the need for the vehicle because of increased violence against police, and specifically a threat posed by “constitutionalists”.
“He wasn’t talking about you and I, the American people that love the constitution, he talking about people that do bad things, that hate their government enough to take up arms and kill people”, says Knezovitch.
The Sheriff says the controversy over that statement has led to death threats to members of his department.
Knezovitch cites a litany of extremist actions that have permeated our region for decades, actions by the group known as the Order that included bombings and bank robberies, as well as the presence of racist groups, like Aryan Nations in North Idaho, and the attempted bombing of the martin Luther King day parade in Spokane.
And he cites the mood in the country displayed by some Tea Party groups, or the actions at the Bundy branch in Nevada, where armed protesters held Federal officials at bay. To Knezovitch, Cliven Bundy is a criminal who owes a millions dollars for failure to pay grazing fees.
And that has also prompted the sheriff to blast Republican state representative Matt Shea.
Knezovitch says Shea has perpetrated rumors of holding citizens in FEMA camps against their will, and of tiny drones that will attach to a person’s body to take DNA samples. He says Shea was at the Bundy ranch for the armed showdown, as well as other events, where the media was not allowed in:
“What kind of representative has to eliminate the media in order for them to talk? That’s not open government. That is in my opinion chilling. What is my representative saying down in these places?”
Sheriff Knezovitch, who says he himself is a member of the Republican party, says the extremists are dividing party members.
The Sheriff says he realizes such talk has made him a target for the so called Liberty groups. But he says their narrow interpretation of the Constitution is the real issue, and their tendency to interpret the current political situation as one that needs to be changed by force:
“We don’t like the direction of the country, we can change it. They gave us a peaceful way to do that. If you want to be a fringe group, and don’t agree with the majority, well then, be treated like the traitors you are”
We tried to reach Representative Matt Shea to comment on this story, but our calls were not returned.
The Sheriff also issued a challenge to Shea, saying he would be willing to discuss any issues in a public forum.
You can hear Sheriff Ozzie Knezovitchs presentation online on Youtube, it is called the Threats we face versus the myth of Police Militarization.Rebel without a bra: Jane Fonda said her biggest regret was not sleeping with Che Guevara... but that was to please her husband
One day, at the height of her fame in the mid-Seventies, Jane Fonda turned up on the doorstep of her ex-husband, Roger Vadim. She was lugging a bulging sack.
Vadim’s glamorous new girlfriend let her in, thrilled to meet the movie icon at last. But her excitement soon turned to disbelief. The star of Julia, Klute and The China Syndrome had come to do her laundry.
Why? Because her second husband, Tom Hayden, a Left-wing activist with a bulbous nose and acne-scarred cheeks, had forbidden her to have either a washing machine or dishwasher. Far too bourgeois.
Jane Fonda had a turbulent marriage to her second husband
Not only that, but he’d made her sell her comfortable house in Los Angeles and buy a shabby two-bedroom shack in Santa Monica that smelled of mildew, where the couple shared a mattress on the floor. She couldn’t even wear her Cartier wristwatch any more, because Hayden disliked any show of possessions. So she’d replaced it with a cheaper Timex.
Many of Jane Fonda’s friends looked on in disbelief as she once again subjugated herself to a man. Instead of procuring women for threesomes — as she had in her marriage to Vadim — she was now working herself to a frazzle to raise millions for her husband’s political campaigns.
Hayden had a grandiose fantasy of becoming President of the United States — and Jane was determined to make him famous. To that end, stories about ‘Tom and Jane’ would appear in the Press — it was never ‘Jane and Tom’ because Hayden insisted on his name coming first.
Once, when she did something that displeased him — she was receiving too much attention — he encouraged her to discuss her short-comings in front of him and other friends. And Jane meekly obliged.
To the despair of her brother Peter and daughter Vanessa, who both loathed Hayden, she allowed herself to be belittled for years. ‘I simply didn’t think my ideas or feelings were as important or credible as his,’ she confessed later.
So why did Jane Fonda abase herself to a man whom so many of those close to her despised?
The key lay in Hayden’s sterling Left-wing credentials, which she’d failed to acquire herself. Indeed, as a fledgling revolutionary, she’d made one ghastly blunder after another.
After deciding to leave Vadim, she’d cast around for a worthy cause. It was Marlon Brando who pointed her towards the American Native Indians, who were complaining of discrimination. He also told her to check out the Black Panthers, who believed in combating police persecution with violence and revolutionary fervour.
Jane was immediately eager to speak out for both. Fired with zeal, she flew to San Francisco to support the takeover of Alcatraz, a former federal prison that the American Native Indians wanted to turn into a cultural centre.
Squatting in a corner of the prison yard, she smoked pot with some Sioux Indian leaders, who were frankly bewildered at having a movie star in their midst.
Later, she joined another Indian protest that involved scaling the fences of a fort. The soldiers stopped to ogle the star — braless under her T-shirt — before firing tear gas into the demonstrators.
The next day, Jane staged a Press conference. Unfortunately, this caused a good deal of resentment among the Indian leaders, who couldn’t get a word in edgeways.
Turbulent: Tom Hayden did a number of things during his relationship with Jane Fonda but she stayed with him because of left-wing credentials
Far from helping, Fonda was creating problems; furthermore, they didn’t want to be identified with a star who seemed out to get publicity for herself. Finally, an Indian leader quietly informed her that she couldn’t be their spokesman — she simply didn’t know enough about the long history of white oppression.
It was hardly a promising start to Jane’s rebirth as a radical. Still, there was always the Black Panthers.
For them, she opened her chequebook, paying a $2,000 phone bill, lending them her credit card and posting bail for Panthers who’d been arrested. The Panthers promptly charged a car to her Visa card — then lost both the car and the card. One of them skipped town after she’d stumped up $50,000 bail money. When she heard the Panthers were calling her a ‘white honky bitch’ behind her back and spreading false rumours that she was sleeping with their leader, she called it a day.
What next? Convinced she’d found a new mentor, Jane started pursuing a married political activist who was working with soldiers against the Vietnam war. Within weeks, Frank Gardner, 27, was her lover and giving her a crash course in the issues.
In March 1970, she embarked on a lengthy tour of army bases and Indian reservations with a French friend, Elisabeth Vailland, in a rented station wagon. Jane’s 18-month-old daughter, Vanessa, was deposited with her father, Roger Vadim.
Abandoned in favour of a cause that would consume her mother for years, Vanessa never forgave her. ‘She’ll be angry about it until I die,’ Jane admitted later. Vanessa ended up calling her father ‘Maman’ — French for ‘Mother’. Later, she’d say: ‘Vadim was my mother — even he said that.’
As for Jane, she was constantly being arrested for trespassing on army bases. By mid-1970, she was nearly broke, having spent thousands financing her trips and her many causes. ‘It’s sort of relaxing to be poor,’ she told friends.
It was chiefly to replenish her coffers that she agreed to star as the call girl Bree Daniels in the 1971 film Klute, which won her an Oscar. She also started sleeping with her co-star Donald Sutherland, who fell madly in love with her.
Together, they took a political vaudeville show called FTA — slang for ‘f*** the army’ — across the country. By then, both were under surveillance, so they often talked in code.
FBI agents opened her post, tapped her phone and even planted a false story that she wanted to kill the President. Her FBI files later extended to 22,000 pages.
Of course, Jane didn’t help her case by declaring publicly that what Vietnam really needed was a ‘victory for the Vietcong’ — the Communist army fighting the U.S. government over South Vietnam.
Protest: Fonda often went braless to distract soldiers but her protests actually created problems and at one stage she was told by Indians she could not be their spokesman
Another of her ideas was to dress protesters as dead Vietcong fighters — in white make-up and black leotards — to demonstrate on the lawn of comedian Bob Hope, who had been entertaining U.S. troops.
Eventually, Jane split from Sutherland, saying she was moving into a different phase of her life and she couldn’t share it with one man. There were soon rumours that she was having liaisons with various activists.
She supposedly confided during a feminist consciousness-raising session, ‘My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.’
By mid 1971, her tour of Left-wing politics, with its endless marches and violent arguments, had left her drained. At this point, Tom Hayden — in baggy trousers, his hair in long plaits — entered her life. Already a hero of the Left, he’d participated in a violent student strike at Columbia University in 1968 and helped plan the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that summer.
When he came backstage after she’d delivered an anti-war speech, she felt an ‘electric charge’. She raced home and told a friend she’d met the man with whom she was going to spend the rest of her life.
A week later, hayden drove to Jane’s house to show her a slide show he’d put together in Indochina. As he screened pictures of Asian prostitutes who’d had plastic surgery to look ‘Americanised’, he lambasted the ‘superficial’ sexiness that Jane had once exemplified in the film Barbarella, directed by Vadim.
Agreeing with him, she began to cry. Within days, they were lovers.
The couple named their son Troi after a Vietcong martyr who attempted to assassinate U.S. Defence Sectretary Robert McNamara - before wisely changing it to Troy
From the start, she was consumed with anxiety that he might think her elitist — not least because she had a swimming pool. Later, he admitted that he saw her as ‘a rich person out of touch with reality’.
For Jane, the idea of doing something meaningful with Hayden gave her a sense of renewed purpose.
‘She sat at Tom’s feet, literally,’ remembers fellow pacifist David Dellinger. ‘She looked up to him like he was some sort of god.’
With Hayden’s support, she decided to travel alone to North Vietnam in July 1972 to collect evidence that the U.S. was deliberately bombing the river dykes. Horrified by the devastation, she asked her Vietnamese hosts if she could go on radio to make an appeal to U.S. bomber pilots.
She was next taken to visit an air defence installation on the outskirts of Hanoi. There, she was asked to climb onto the seat of an anti-aircraft gun — which she did without thinking. As soon as she’d hopped off, she exclaimed: ‘Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes!’
It was too late: the picture went round the world. When she arrived back in the U.S. — in coolie hat and Vietnamese pyjamas — she was greeted with cries of ‘Hanoi Jane’ and accused of being a traitor.
‘What is a traitor? What is a patriot?’ was her angry retort. ‘I cried every day when I was in Vietnam. I cried for the Vietnamese and I cried for the Americans, too.’
William Manchester, editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper, called for her to be tried for sedition and shot. A Congressman suggested her tongue be cut off. Jane decided the trip to North Vietnam had changed her life.
One night, she stood naked in their bedroom and told Hayden she wanted to have a child. She said that in North Vietnam she’d met women who’d been in labour during the air strikes. As the bombs fell, they’d cry: ‘Nixon, we fight you with all the joys of a woman in childbirth!’
Jane thought if she and Hayden had a child, it would express solidarity with Vietnam. First, however, they decided to get married. The smell of pot was heavy in their living room as they exchanged vows. Outside, Hell’s Angels — friends of her brother — encircled the house because Jane had been receiving death threats.
Their little house was often under siege. Jane had to put wire over the windows because people threw things at them, especially rotten eggs. When the pressures got too great, she’d smoke a joint in the attic — because Hayden wouldn’t allow smoking in the house.
When their son was born in 1973 they named him Troi, after Nguyen Van Troi, a Vietcong ‘martyr’ who tried to assassinate U.S. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara. Later, they wisely changed it to Troy.
After the birth, Jane had an increasingly difficult time with Hayden. Not only was he drinking heavily, but — as Jane’s friend, the actor Peter Boyle, comments: ‘He was f***ing jealous of how famous she was.’ Anxious to please Hayden, she gave him $500,000 to fund his campaign to become a Senator in 1975 — but he lost.
Max Palevsky, who co-produced her movie Fun With Dick And Jane, says: ‘Tom was using Jane shamelessly. I couldn’t understand how she could be so stupid. Hayden was often publicly contemptuous of her.’ In Hayden’s presence, she’d act like an obedient little girl. Away from him, though, she was making some of her best movies, including Coming Home, a love story about a paralysed Vietnam veteran, which won three Academy Awards.
Vietnam visit: Fonda travelled to the country in 1972 and made a huge mistake when she sat on an anti-aircraft gun but realised too late
When Hayden saw it, however, he snarled ‘nice try’ to Jane and stalked out of the viewing room. She was devastated.
Knowing he needed vast sums for his next electoral campaign, Jane looked for a way to earn more money. She launched an exercise studio called Workout in 1982 that spawned a $20 million fitness empire. More than $1 million of her profits went into his ‘war-chest’, and she poured $17 million into his Campaign for Economic Democracy, which he’d founded to promote progressive causes.
Yet Hayden was dour and negative around Jane, and it was rumoured he was sleeping around.
Deeply unhappy, Jane had an affair. ‘I never spoke of this to Tom, nor did I know that he himself was seeking solace elsewhere,’ she says. ‘We simply continued in our unusual, seemingly successful partnership. I’d say: “I think we should see a therapist,” and he’d say no, and I’d fall silent.’
Even when he won a seat in the Californian state assembly, nothing changed. ‘Tom hated, loathed, despised the Workout,’ says Jane’s step-daughter Nathalie. ‘Now Jane was not only a movie star — she was a one-woman conglomerate, an icon. Tom couldn’t take it.
‘He started drinking more and continued to play around. Jane closed her eyes to it.’
While he was reportedly seeing actresses Margot Kidder and Morgan Fairchild, his wife had another affair — this time with Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer. It didn’t last.
In the mid-Eighties, she was at her lowest ebb. Hayden had ridiculed her at a big benefit dinner and told people he resented being called Mr Jane Fonda. He was also spending a lot of time with Vicky Rideout, a sexy political speechwriter 20 years Jane’s junior.
On the night his wife turned 51, Hayden told her he was in love with another woman. A friend who was staying with them says Jane threw him out after discovering he’d brought Rideout back to their own bedroom. Gathering all of his belongings into large plastic bags, she tossed them out of a window.
Deeply depressed, she pedalled on her exercise bike for five hours. ‘The physical pain is nothing compared to what I am feeling emotionally. I’m breaking apart,’ she said at the time.
In fact, Hanoi Jane was soon to undergo her third radical makeover — as a trophy wife. Yet again, she would subjugate herself to a man, but this time he was a Right-wing billionaire who would lavish on her every luxury she’d once rejected.There was another premium event the 11th, this time in Sendai. It’s not like they changed the demo, but they changed the way they do it:
Source People played from the start of the game for 1h30 or so, then the staff would load a save and the player would play for around 10m in the art gallery dungeon. (from my deductions it’s the same save used for the 10 minutes demo)
Source Then the staff makes you fill a questionnaire, and give you a souvenir.
Source Lastly, they ask the player to please refrain from leaking spoilers so everyone can fully enjoy the game when it’s out.
(Well too late. It’s been like 3 years since I’m waiting for Persona 5. Usually I wouldn’t spoil myself a game this much, and it’s just the first 2 hours anyway. I just want to know as much as possible, as if I went to a premium event myself.)
This new batch of impressions has a lot of new things. So might as well post here what I read anyway, instead of keeping it for myself. I won’t repeat things that we already know. Also keep in mind that those are people’s impressions, so there may be people who remember details wrongly.
Also, Persona Central reposted the summary I wrote last time and fixed a few points I wasn’t sure about or got wrong so you should read their summary now instead.
Lastly, my Japanese is far from perfect, so if there’s a sentence I’m not 100% sure about, I’ll mention it under parenthesis.
Edit on august12th: Just noticed I accidentally wrote Shinjuku station instead of Shibuya station at some point. I corrected it. Also added a photo of Sojiro with the suit+hat and fanart of MC getting lost in Shibuya station.
Edit: source one more report got published on August 12 (I didn’t reinclude stuff I already wrote about later below)
It seems you’ll be able to change clothes in dungeons, to put on DLC clothes for example.
The day passes when you sleep, so as long as you don’t go to sleep you can take various actions at night.
We could actually see Sojiro with the suit+hat attire on one of the screens during the nico live of the take the treasure event.
Morgana calls itself human but at the same time say it doesn’t know what it is |
to enjoy! Seeing both Sony and Microsoft covering a wide range of consumers like that is a positive sign. I personally would be grabbing Watch Dogs with whatever console I end up deciding on as my first game. Things are finally falling into place and at this point we are all just playing the waiting game. The end of the year can’t get here soon enough.An arm wrestle with Python’s garbage collector
Most of Oyster.com is powered by Python and web.py, but — perhaps surprisingly — this is the first time we’ve had to think about garbage collection. Actually, I think the fact that we’ve only run into this issue after several years on the platform is pretty good. So here’s the saga…
Observing a system alters its state
It started when we noticed a handful of “upstream connection refused” lines in our nginx error logs. Every so often, our Python-based web servers were not responding in a timely fashion, causing timeouts or errors for about 0.2% of requests.
Thankfully I was able to reproduce it on my development machine — always good to have a nice, well-behaved bug. I had just narrowed it down to our template rendering, and was about to blame the Cheetah rendering engine, when all of a sudden the bug moved to some other place in the code. Drat, a Heisenbug!
But not at all random
It wasn’t related to rendering at all, of course, and after pursuing plenty of red herrings, I noticed it was happening not just randomly across 0.2% of requests, but (when hitting only our homepage) exactly every 445 requests. On such requests, it’d take 4.5 seconds to render the page instead of the usual 15 milliseconds.
But it can’t be garbage collection, I said to myself, because Python uses simple, predictable reference counting for its garbage handling. Well, that’s true, but it also has a “real” garbage collector to supplement the reference counting by detecting reference cycles. For example, if object A refers to object B, which directly or indirectly refers back to object A, the reference counts won’t hit zero and the objects will never be freed — that’s where the collector kicks in.
Sure enough, when I disabled the supplemental GC the problem magically went away.
A RAM-hungry architecture
Stepping back a little, I’ll note that we run a slightly unusual architecture. We cache the entire website and all our page metadata in local Python objects (giant dict objects and other data structures), which means each server process uses about 6GB of RAM and allocates about 10 million Python objects. This is loaded into RAM on startup — and yes, allocating and creating 10M objects takes a while. You’re thinking there are almost certainly better ways to do that, and you’re probably right. However, we made a speed-vs-memory tradeoff when we designed this, and on the whole it’s worked very well for us.
But when the garbage collector does decide to do a full collection, which happened to be every 445 requests with our allocation pattern, it has to linearly scan through all the objects and do its GC magic on them. Even if visiting each object takes only a couple hundred nanoseconds, with 10 million objects that adds up to multiple seconds pretty quickly.
Our solution
So what’s the solution? We couldn’t just disable the GC, as we do have some reference cycles that need to be freed, and we can’t have that memory just leaking. But it’s a relatively small number of objects, so our short-term fix was to simply to bump up the collection thresholds by a factor of 1000, reducing the number of full collections so they happen only once in a blue moon.
The longer-term, “correct” fix (assuming we decide to implement it) will be to wait till the GC counts near the thresholds, then temporarily stop the process receiving requests and do a manual collection, and then start serving again. Because we have many server processes, nginx will automatically move to the next process if one of them’s not listening due to this full garbage collection.
One other thing we discovered along the way is that we can disable the GC when our server process starts up. Because we allocate and create so many objects on startup, the GC was actually doing many (pointless) full collections during the startup sequence. We now disable the collector while loading the caches on startup, then re-enable it once that’s done — this cut our startup time to about a third of what it had been.
To sum up
In short, when you have millions of Python objects on a long-running server, tune the garbage collector thresholds, or do a manual gc.collect() with the server out of the upstream loop.We're shopping for a used car right now. We've been looking into buying a mid size SUV with all wheel drive for my wife for some time now. She wants the all wheel drive because of the harsh Minnesota winters, and we both wanted something with a little more space than her little Honda Civic. We just had a son last year, and plan on having at least one more child at some point – so we'll be needing more space for our growing family, and growing number of things we need to take with us everywhere we go.
Shopping for a used car can be an intimidating experience, more-so when you only do it every 5-10 years like we do. Used car salesman have a bit of a reputation as always being out to gouge you for hidden profits, to take you for a ride and leave you with your head reeling – not knowing what hit you.
While I think those ideas of salesmen are somewhat overblown – and there are both good and bad car dealers, the point is that car dealers are still in the business to make a profit. They're not there to help you find a good deal, they're there to make themselves a commission or a sale.
So what are some things you need to do to better prepare yourself when looking for a used car?
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Used Car Shopping Tips
Shopping for a used car means you'll need to be doing a lot of research, brushing up on your negotiating skills, and checking your emotions at the door. Here are some things to remember when shopping for your next used car.
Shop around a variety of used car stores online first : In the Internet age there is no excuse for not shopping around for a variety of good used car options. Don't get sucked into loving one particular car or one particular dealership. Keep your options open.
: In the Internet age there is no excuse for not shopping around for a variety of good used car options. Don't get sucked into loving one particular car or one particular dealership. Keep your options open. Don't be a monthly payment buyer or a cash buyer : One of the first questions you might hear at a lot of these dealerships is “are you going to finance“? Make sure to tell them that you haven't decided yet. If you answer in the affirmative, it means that you've become a monthly payment buyer in which price has become secondary, as long as they can creatively finance you into a certain monthly payment. If you say you're paying cash they may try to gouge you on the front end since they know they won't make any money on you in the finance office – one of their biggest profit centers. Leave some mystery as to how you're going to pay until after you've come to a firm price.
: One of the first questions you might hear at a lot of these dealerships is “are you going to finance“? Make sure to tell them that you haven't decided yet. If you answer in the affirmative, it means that you've become a monthly payment buyer in which price has become secondary, as long as they can creatively finance you into a certain monthly payment. If you say you're paying cash they may try to gouge you on the front end since they know they won't make any money on you in the finance office – one of their biggest profit centers. Leave some mystery as to how you're going to pay until after you've come to a firm price. Get a used car history report: Make sure to get a used vehicle history report from one of the well known companies like Carfax or Autocheck. It can help to quickly identify a car you may want to avoid if it's had flood damage, accidents or other negative marks on it's history. Most car dealerships will offer these for free nowadays, but if you're also looking at private party vehicles you can buy unlimited reports from Autocheck for $44.99, well worth it in my opinion.
Make sure to get a used vehicle history report from one of the well known companies like Carfax or Autocheck. It can help to quickly identify a car you may want to avoid if it's had flood damage, accidents or other negative marks on it's history. Most car dealerships will offer these for free nowadays, but if you're also looking at private party vehicles you can buy unlimited reports from Autocheck for $44.99, well worth it in my opinion. Make sure to test drive and check out the vehicle : Far too many people don't check out a car very thoroughly when buying, they take it for a spin around the block and that's about it. Instead, do the following. Drive the car slowly at first. Feel, and count, the shift changes. Any slipping? Any hesitation? Any vibrations? Drive the car long enough so that it warms up enough and wait to see if any warning lights come on (many warning lights won't come on until the car is warm). Then make sure to do a highway test drive where you listen for any excessive road or engine noise, hesitations when accelerating, strange noises, or problems when braking. Make sure to put it through it's paces.
: Far too many people don't check out a car very thoroughly when buying, they take it for a spin around the block and that's about it. Instead,. Drive the car long enough so that it warms up enough and wait to see if any warning lights come on (many warning lights won't come on until the car is warm). Then make sure to do a highway test drive where you listen for any excessive road or engine noise, hesitations when accelerating, strange noises, or problems when braking. Make sure to put it through it's paces. Step away from the aftermarket products : Don't allow yourself to get suckered into buying a bunch of aftermarket products that you don't need. Buy the vehicle at the dealership, not the accessories.
: Don't allow yourself to get suckered into buying a bunch of aftermarket products that you don't need. Buy the vehicle at the dealership, not the accessories. Research pricing on specific makes/models/mileages : Know what the vehicle you're looking at is worth, and what you're willing to pay before you go to the dealership. I usually check Edmunds.com, NADA Guides and Kelley Blue Book for market pricing on the vehicles I'm looking at. Also try searching for that make, model and mileage on local used car sites to see real world pricing on other vehicles. Even print out a few like vehicles with lower prices for leverage later on.
: Know what the vehicle you're looking at is worth, and what you're willing to pay before you go to the dealership. I usually check Edmunds.com, NADA Guides and Kelley Blue Book for market pricing on the vehicles I'm looking at. Also try searching for that make, model and mileage on local used car sites to see real world pricing on other vehicles. Even print out a few like vehicles with lower prices for leverage later on. Negotiate a price : Negotiating a price on your vehicle once you've decided that you would like to purchase it is one of the most important steps. Since you've done your pricing research in the previous step, you should have a good idea of what you want to pay, so don't go over the number that you've come to. Read up on how the process normally works, but usually you can expect to be sitting with a salesman who will go back to his sales manager with your offer, and there will be some back and forth. The dealer WILL test you to see how much profit they can get out of you. You, on the other hand, can test the dealer by keeping your power to walk out on the deal. Always keep the walkaway power. The dealer knows if you walk out the door they'll most likely never see you again – so walking away will tell you if they'll do better.
: Negotiating a price on your vehicle once you've decided that you would like to purchase it is one of the most important steps. Since you've done your pricing research in the previous step, you should have a good idea of what you want to pay, so don't go over the number that you've come to. Read up on how the process normally works, but usually you can expect to be sitting with a salesman who will go back to his sales manager with your offer, and there will be some back and forth. The dealer WILL test you to see how much profit they can get out of you. You, on the other hand, can test the dealer by keeping your power to walk out on the deal. Always keep the walkaway power. The dealer knows if you walk out the door they'll most likely never see you again – so walking away will tell you if they'll do better. Make sure extras and other things are written into the deal : If there is a dent on the car you want fixed – and they have said they would, make sure it is written into the deal. If the dealer will be providing an extra set of keys for no charge, make sure that's written in as well. Any promises made by the dealer don't exist unless you get it in writing.
: If there is a dent on the car you want fixed – and they have said they would, make sure it is written into the deal. If the dealer will be providing an extra set of keys for no charge, make sure that's written in as well. Any promises made by the dealer don't exist unless you get it in writing. Get the vehicle inspected after a firm price is agreed to: When buying used you can't always know for sure where the car has been before. Consider getting the vehicle inspected if you're serious about buying it – to get an expert eye on the vehicle and make sure it hasn't had any accident damage or mechanical issues. Most local repair shops will do a full inspection for anywhere from $100-300. Once an inspection is done you may have some further wiggle room on price if any issues are found.
When buying used you can't always know for sure where the car has been before. Consider getting the vehicle inspected if you're serious about buying it – to get an expert eye on the vehicle and make sure it hasn't had any accident damage or mechanical issues. Most local repair shops will do a full inspection for anywhere from $100-300. Once an inspection is done you may have some further wiggle room on price if any issues are found. Shop around if you're not satisfied with anything : If you're not happy with anything to do with the deal, don't feel bad walking out of the dealership without buying anything.
: If you're not happy with anything to do with the deal, don't feel bad walking out of the dealership without buying anything. Check your emotions at the door: Don't fall in love with a car because of an imagined status you'll get with the car, or the adventures you'll take in that vehicle. Try to keep your emotions in check and realize that this is a expensive transaction that you'll overpay for if you let your emotions get in the way.
So there you have it, some quick tips for finding and buying the right used car for you. Do your research, don't fall in love with a car before you buy it, and be willing to walk away if you don't get the deal you want.
Do you have any of your own tips or best practices for buying a used car? Give us your tips in the comments.Canines are in a rare category when it comes to cancer: They and Tasmanian devils are the only two animals that can transmit it from one individual to another.
A new genetic study reveals that the dog form of the cancer, which causes genital tumors, is 11,000 years old—making it the oldest continuously living cancer.
Canines can also develop cancers that are akin to human cancers, but their transmissible cancer spreads when cells from one dog's tumor rub off during sexual contact and grow into a new tumor on the other animal. The study notes that the cancer originated in an ancient dog closest to the modern-day breeds of Alaskan malamutes and huskies.
We spoke with Elizabeth Murchison, the study's first author. She's a cancer geneticist at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K.
What made you decide to study canine cancer?
I knew about this disease for some time because I'm actually Tasmanian, so I was very familiar with the Tasmanian devil cancer. In my studies I learned about this dog cancer and found it fascinating. I was keen to use genetics and genomics to find out more—to help us help the devils as well as the dogs.
Is this dog cancer related to the Tasmanian devil cancer?
It's a different disease. The [cancers] arose separately, but they're the only two known naturally occurring transmissible cancers, spread by the transmission of cancer cells themselves. The Tasmanian devil cancer is very aggressive, spread by biting, and it threatens the devils with extinction. The canine cancer is widespread but actually quite treatable; [it] can be cured with chemotherapy.
And there's no human cancer that spreads this way? What about the role of HPV [human papillomavirus] in cervical cancer?
HPV is strongly associated with human cervical cancer, but rather than spreading the cancer itself, it's a virus [that increases] the risk of getting the cancer. The closest thing I can think of with human cancers is the HeLa [line of] cells, which came from one original patient who lived several decades ago. They're dependent on lab scientists to help them to survive. But the concept—of the cancer surviving beyond the death of its original host and taking on life of its own and proliferating and spreading—is similar.
The age of the cancer is getting a lot of attention. But I'm equally intrigued by the idea that the canine—and Tasmanian devil—cancers are transmissible.
These cancers break so many rules we thought we understood. For instance, they're able to spread between hosts, and to exist and live in different hosts, despite the immune system, which is supposed to detect non-self tissues and reject them.
These cancers somehow trick the immune system into not seeing them as foreign—or perhaps not seeing them at all. The study of these cancers may lead us to greater insights into how cancers in general interact with the immune system.
Could that be helpful in treating cancer in humans?
I think we need to be equipped and prepared in case a cancer like this occurs in a different species, or even in humans. It just takes one cancer to become transmissible; then you have a new infectious disease on your hands.
Does the canine cancer pose any risk to humans?
At the beginning of the 20th century, [there were] a lot of studies to see if this tumor could go to other species, including rodents and other canids. It couldn't grow in rodents or cats, so I'm sure it would not grow in humans. But it can grow in other canid species, including coyotes and jackals.
Eleven thousand years is a long time ago. Is this the earliest known cancer as well?
There's actually evidence of cancer stretching back millions of years—of metastatic brain cancers in dinosaurs. Cancer's been around for a long time. But this is the oldest cancer that is continuing to thrive, [that] is still alive today.“Microsoft loves Linux.” That’s the current message from Satya Nadella’s Microsoft, and it’s somewhat true. If you’re a Linux application developer, Microsoft wants you to use Visual Studio and run your Linux softwareon its Azure cloud computing service. It just tied the knot with Red Hat, too.
At Microsoft Connect 2015, Microsoft announced more good news for Linux software developers. Visual Studio can now be used to remotely debug Linux applications using the GDB debugger. The Visual Studio Code editor that Microsoft released for Linux earlier this year was also open-sourced.
Visual Studio can now debug and compile Linux apps
Visual Studio 2015 added a big new feature that would once be unheard of—the ability to compile applications for Linux. Microsoft is now taking this further, releasing the preview of a Visual Studio extension that will allow you to debug a Linux application right inside Visual Studio. It uses GDB, the GNU Project Debugger.
As the full version of Visual Studio doesn’t run on Linux, this just works remotely. Connect to a remote Linux system using SSH—Microsoft is also building SSH support into Windows so you don’t have to install third-party software for this—and you’ll be able to debug Linux applications in Visual Studio. Microsoft’s announcement outlining the new VS GDB Debugger extension has more information.
Want to stay up to date on Linux, BSD, Chrome OS, and the rest of the World Beyond Windows? Bookmark the World Beyond Windows column page or follow our RSS feed.
Visual Studio Code is now open-source
Microsoft made headlines earlier this year when it released Visual Studio Code. This lightweight editor for building and debugging “modern web and cloud applications” is based on Google’s Chromium code—the same code that underlies Chrome. Microsoft released this for free, and it released it for desktop Linux and Mac.
Visual Studio Code is now open-source, so not only can you download and use it—you can download the code and modify it. This means Linux distributions will be free to package it up and distribute it in their package managers, too. Microsoft open-sourced much of the.NET server code earlier this year, too.
This isn’t the only desktop Linux application Microsoft makes—both Skype and Minecraft offer desktop Linux clients, too.
Microsoft’s Linux “love” is only for developers, so don’t count on seeing Microsoft Office for Linux any time soon—although you can run the Office Online apps in a web browser on Linux. Windows won’t be open-source any time soon, either. But, just as Microsoft is chasing users on Android and iOS, it’s now chasing developers who use and write code for Linux.The real Up! Scientists recreate floating house from Pixar movie... and prove it really CAN fly
It was another one of those Disney moments of magic.
When 78-year-old retiree Carl Frederickson's house takes off into the air aided by the help of hundreds of helium balloons in Up!, viewers saw it is a heart-warming moment of pure fiction.
But for some people, it became more than that.
Scroll down for video report
Magic: The Up! house which will be part of a new National Geographic TV series called How Hard Can It Be? was 10 stories high, including the balloons. It reached 10,000 feet and flew for about one hour Record: Dozens of volunteers worked around the clock in the Californain desert to get the custom-built house airborne with the aid of 300 eight-foot-high helium balloons
Film: Carl Fredricksen attached the balloons to his house to fulfil his life-long dream of discovering the wild in South America
The team from National Geographic have built a house inspired by the Pixar movie Up! that can really fly.
Using 300 helium-filled weather balloons, a team of scientists, engineers, two balloon pilots and dozens of volunteers, they managed to get the small house 10,000 feet into the air.
Of course it was not a real house, but a custom-built light weight one.
Executive producer Ben Bowie said: 'We found that it is actually close to impossible to fly a real house.'
Producer Ian White added: 'But what we can do is kind of fly a light-weight house and fly it safely with people on board.'
Flying high: Each of the balloons were eight-feet high and filled with a whole tank of helium
Up!: National Geographic's house, left, and the Pixar one from the Disney film Up! about an old man's journey to see the great wilds of South America which he travels to in his own house which flies with helium balloons Up! The house was life-sized and together with the balloons was ten storeys high
Away!: The house and two pilots soared 10,000 feet into the air for more than an hour over the desert
Record-breaking: 'We found that it is actually close to impossible to fly a real house,' said producer Ben Bowie
Each of the balloons were eight-feet high and filled with a whole tank of helium.
As well as getting the house to fly, they set a world record for largest cluster balloon flight ever attempted.
The experiment was done as part of a new National Geographic TV series How Hard Can it Be?
The 4.8m x 4.8m x 5.5m house flew across California's High Desert for about an hour with two people inside, just like the Disney Pixar film.
The new series will premier in the autumn.
How hard can it be?: The house hovers above the private airfield east of Los AngelesBy Kei Hiruta
The latest music video by the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne has been accused of racism and cultural appropriation.[i] Bearing the name of the world-famous Sanrio character, ‘Hello Kitty’ shows the pop star singing and dancing in what appears to be a girl’s room in Tokyo. She also explores the city, shopping at a candy store, eating sushi, drinking shochu, and waving at her fans as she strolls in the fashionable Shibuya area. Throughout, she is accompanied by four young Japanese women, acting as backup dancers inside the room and following her outside.
Racism
It is above all Lavigne’s use of the four dancers that has turned out to be controversial (e.g. here, here and here). They have the same hairstyle and wear identical costumes, apparently reinforcing the stereotype of robotic, expressionless, submissive and childlike Japanese people in general and Japanese women in particular. Contrast to this is the cheerful and outgoing blonde pop star, as if to say that one must be of a particular race if one is to have a fulfilling, genuinely human life. The marginalised Asian women, a Huffpost article says, ‘do not seem to have any agency, emotions or purpose beyond playing Lavigne’s backdrop and representing a watered-down version of Japanese culture, palatable for a white American audience’.
A few objections immediately come to mind. First, it is backup dancers’ job to remain in the margin. They are not supposed to outshine the lead performer. It would indeed be odd if the four women fully expressed their individuality to distract the viewer’s attention from Lavigne. ‘Hello Kitty’ is her show.
Second, there is little evidence to indicate that the backup dancers represent the Canadian singer’s understanding of Japanese women, of Japanese people, or of Asians in general. Here, it is notable that the video in fact shows not only the dancers but also Lavigne’s fans in Japan. The latter are dressed in various colourful clothes. They look cheerful and lively, talking to each other as they follow their favourite pop star. Why, then, should we think that the boundary separating ‘them’ form ‘us’ should lie between Lavigne and the rest? Why is it less plausible to draw a line between the fans and the audience on the one hand and Lavigne and her dancers on the other?
Moreover, Lavigne is neither the only nor the first one to use robot-like backup dancers in a music video. Of particular relevance here is the Japanese singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. In her video ‘Ninjari Bang Bang’, for example, backup dancers not only dance like robots but are in fact CG robots. In her ‘Invader, Invader’, dancers wear not only identical costumes but also identical masks, complete with a half-robot DJ. As some of Lavigne’s fans are reported to have guessed, it is quite possible that the Canadian singer simply incorporated aspects of these and similar videos into her recent work. If the guess proves correct, that could make ‘Hello Kitty’ unoriginal, but this scarcely amounts to racism.
Cultural Appropriation
Even if ‘Hello Kitty’ is not racist, some critics argue, it is still morally wrong because it indulges in cultural appropriation (e.g. here, here, here and here). In their view, Lavigne is blameworthy because she has no genuine interest in or appreciation of Japanese culture but selectively uses some of its ingredients to promote herself. The real issue, then, is not her (purported) lack of originality but the manner in which she makes up for it.
As has been widely reported, Lavigne herself challenged this allegation, expressing her sincere ‘love [of] Japanese culture’. ‘Hello Kitty’, she argued, had been filmed ‘WITH my Japanese label, Japanese choreographers AND a Japanese director IN Japan’. Her critics are not impressed. To cite one particularly eloquent writer, Lavigne is guilty of ‘[p]icking and choosing pieces of a culture and wearing them for kicks like a hilarious Halloween costume, then discarding them when it’s no longer fun and going back to a comfortable white celebrity life’. Lavigne’s incorporation of Japanese words into the lyrics rubs salt into the wound, to some people’s eyes. A Japanese-Canadian writer feels ‘deeply offended’ to ‘witness a 29-year-old Canadian woman with the audacity to sing in the language of my ancestors, a beautiful, noble language’.
In reply, one may argue that casual cultural appropriation is simply an indispensable part of entertainment industry. To stay under the spotlight requires responsiveness to the shifting cultural trend. If a musician hopes to remain in the profession, he or she must show both style and integrity, navigating between the Scylla of opportunism and the Charybdis of repetitiveness. In this regard, musicians scarcely differ from democratic politicians, who must adjust themselves to popular demands as much as they wish to inspire the public. One could of course be a critic of ‘moronizing’ mass culture à la Herbert Marcuse, but one should not single out and attack Avril Lavigne for conforming to the norms of her industry.
This response is unlikely to satisfy Lavigne’s critics, whose concern is not exactly with the casual and selective use of cultural ingredients per se. Rather, they are opposed to the appropriation by the powerful of the culture of the powerless. It is one thing for a noble savage in a land of abundance to appropriate the fruits of the earth; it is quite another for a feudal lord to appropriate the fruits of serfs’ labour. On the critics’ understanding, Lavigne is a modern-day cultural lord, who has no moral entitlement to exploit Asian cultural assets. No wonder why the language of power is pervasive in the critical comments on ‘Hello Kitty’.
It must be noted at this point that the music video has offended few Japanese people, who are presumably the primary victim group of Lavigne’s alleged cultural appropriation. I found no negative comments in the Japanese media when the controversy initially broke out in its Anglophone counterpart. I now find many posts and articles (e.g. here, here and here), but the main issue there concerns why ‘Hello Kitty’ has been perceived to be discriminatory abroad. Similarly, the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. is reported to have said that they ‘would be happy if the discussions surrounding her song and music video results in more people discovering the beautiful and rich culture of Japan’.[ii]
A survey of the relevant Japanese websites indeed suggests that the majority do not see ‘Hello Kitty’ as an instance of Western appropriation of Japanese culture. On the contrary, a considerable number of people regard it as a testimony to the nation’s soft power, or its capacity to exercise international influence by attracting others. This might be a wishful thinking on the part of the declining nation, hoping to remain to be a global power player in the face of China’s unstoppable growth. Politics aside, however, I genuinely cannot see why cultural influence must be one-way traffic. Practically all J-pop musicians are influenced by their Western counterparts; why can they not influence a Canadian musician in the same way?
Furthermore, ‘Hello Kitty’ may also be seen as a reasonably successful outcome of the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ policy. This is designed to export Japanese goods and services, including fashion, music and entertainment. The controversial music video may not be what the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry would have liked or expected, but it seems to be in accord with the spirit of the METI policy. Ironically, some of Lavigne’s harshest critics end up in portraying Japan as a submissive and childlike nation that needs their protection, ignoring its official and unofficial efforts to culturally and economically assert itself.
These considerations call into question the simplistic dichotomy between the hegemonic ‘White Westerners’ and the powerless ‘Asian Easterners’ that so many critics have taken for granted. For one thing, the dichotomy is a bit dated to make sense of today’s global power structure. Clichéd though it may sound, ours is a time when a Korean pop song tops charts across the world, and musical talents with various ethnic backgrounds fiercely compete for a Carnegie Hall performance (‘the Orientalisation of classical music’, to borrow Niall Ferguson’s expression). Moreover, it is worth asking on whose behalf Lavigne’s critics accuse her of cultural appropriation. Most Japanese people do not feel offended. Culture itself cannot feel offended. Who are the victims?
A Cultural Icon
Let us not lose sight of something obvious amid the furore: ‘Hello Kitty’ is a music video and by itself tells little about what the commentators have been discussing. As we try to decode the meaning of ‘Hello Kitty’, we find ourselves attributing various meanings to it. This perhaps explains the frustration among the critics, who in effect address various issues they care about, while professing to review the three-minute music video. In this sense Lavigne’s latest work may be said to mirror the world in which we live; the trouble is that the world itself is filled with discord. Meanwhile, the pop star emerges triumphant, as her work gets associated with a wider and wider range of contemporary issues, making her appear to embody the disharmonious soul of the age. For this she must be congratulated. Indeed, she may claim to remain what she became more than a decade ago with her debut album Let Go: a cultural icon.Flip Saunders: "I don’t think anybody has questions about attitude being affected when you are not playing well as a team and also individually."
Here is the second part of my interview with Minnesota Timberwolves head coach and President of Basketball Operations Flip Saunders, which took place in his office at Target Center last Thursday afternoon.
If part one of our interview was more or less a review of the season thus far, this second chunk focuses more on the short- and long-term future of the franchise.
Minnpost: How are you approaching the next 40 games with respect to Pek, Rubio and Martin? [All have been injured for more than 30 of team’s first 42 games.]
Flip Saunders: Integrate them in. It is an evaluation of everybody. What is the blend of this team going to be going forward? What are the lineups that are going to be able to play together? What is going to be their effectiveness? But we probably aren’t going to really begin to know that until probably March, how they will all be playing together.
MP: Do you think Rubio will be ready by March?
FS: I sure as hell hope so.
MP: But what you said about his condition the other day sounded pretty serious.
FS: Well it is. But based on the progress of what he has done, I mean, I have said this all along but I am hoping in two weeks he is playing.
MP: And Martin the same?
FS: We looked at Martin and we thought he was really close. We thought he might be able to play two games ago but he has a knot on his hand now, it is looking like a golf ball. So we don’t know what it is and until we really know, we can’t say.
MP: The only guy of those three you really know about, and based on just one game [now three] is Pek. If he can give you 20 minutes a night is that much more helpful?
FS: Yeah I think it is. If Pek can play the next 41 games [now 39] and give us 20 minutes, he is going to be able to come back next year and give you 25 to 30. And then you are going to have a two-headed sword with Gorgui [Dieng]. And there are going to be times when we play those guys together, see if they can play together. So it is going to be 41 games of interesting lineups and just kind of seeing where everyone is going to play out.
MP: But at 25 or 30 minutes a game as an optimistic scenario for somebody making $12 million per year, that’s a tough thing for you, isn’t it?
FS: Yeah, but how many minutes a game is [San Antonio’s Tim] Duncan playing?
MP: Well sure, if Pek can play like Duncan …
FS: I am just saying: Ideally, when we drafted Gorgui, not really knowing where Pek was at, our idea was that Pek was going to be able to play 30 minutes and Gorgui was going to be able to play 18 to 20. So if we can get [Pek] to play 30 solid minutes — 30 minutes a night, if you can play that, you are probably in the top 40 in the league. So idealistically — if he is playing 30 minutes a night and they are quality minutes, he is earning that money. There is no question from that perspective.
MP: Okay. If you had to guess right now, will you guys be active in the next month leading up to the trading deadline?
FS: I believe we will always be active. One reason we will be active is that we have two trade exceptions …
MP: When do they expire?
FS: Not until next year. But we have two trade exceptions that we would be able to take a player back without having to give up somebody. So [Wolves will deal with] people who are either trying to free up cap space, or to bring in another player or whatever. Based on what we have, we have guys people are looking at [to trade for]. They are thinking, “[The Wolves] are in a rebuild. And they have some guys who might be able to help a team.”
MP: Can you be more specific. K-Mart? [Kevin Martin]
FS: No, I don’t want to trade K-Mart.
MP: Just because you like the spacing?
FS: I like the spacing and I think he is a guy who can bring something to this team.
[At this point, Saunders asked to be off the record and essentially said he didn’t want to get into specific players being on or off the trade market.]
MP: Let’s talk about some of the guys on the roster we haven’t mentioned thus far. Chase Budinger, I mentioned to you about a month ago that he just doesn’t seem to have the same lift |
. How did you feel when you got the message you had won World Press Photo?
A. When I got the message that I won the World Press Photo Award in the category "Sports" I was in Chamonix, France for FIS Alpine World cup races. As I was in the mountains I had no internet connection and so one of my colleagues was the first who called me before I could read the mail from World Press Photo Association. In the first moment I could not really believe, that I really won. But when I realized, that it is really true I was more than happy and absolutely proud and satisfied.
Q. What reaction have you had from your fellow photographers?
A. The reactions where really positive. I think everybody was absolutely happy with me.
Q. What are the most important non-camera equipment you take with you on a shoot?
A. There are some very important non-camera equipment items I take with me. In winter I always have additional gloves, hand-warmers and in case crampons with me. In summer I never forget a sun-blocker. And a bottle of water is always with me.
Q. How do you decide how to approach a project? Do you prepare extensively or shoot more reactively when you arrive at a location?
A. I always try to have a plan before I go to a shoot. But when you shoot outdoor there are so much factors you can not plan. So I would say I try to prepare extensively and I'm ready to react on any factor which has influence on my shoot.
Q. Who or what is your biggest inspiration?
A. It is hard to say what is my biggest inspiration. There are so much really good photographers all over the world who inspired me. I always try to keep my eyes open and let me inspire from pictures and photographers which impress me.
Q. What was the best piece of advise you have been given as a photographer?
A. The best advice that I ever got was, that I should always go my own way. It is important to be inspired by others, but never try to copy somebodies work.
Q. What piece of advice would you give your younger self?
A. The same advice I would give to my younger self. And keep on trying to get some special shots.
Q. Can you share a memorable experience of working that has stuck in your mind?
A. There are lots of memorable experiences in my mind. For example a few years ago I was at a FIS World Cup race in Beaver Creek, CO, USA. We had about -28 degrees celsius and I had no additional gloves with me. On that day I learned, that it is not bad to carry additional gloves and hand-warmers with me.
Q. What’s next for you, what projects are you working on in the next few months?
A. My next steps are the FIS World Cup Finals in Sankt Moritz, Switzerland at the end of March. In June I go to France for the UEFA European Championships. And my highlight this year are the Olympic Games in Rio in August.
I know that Christian has managed to get his handed on the latest Canon EOS-1DX Mark II so you should check out his facebook page to see how he gets on with this new camera in the wild. You can check out more about Christian on his Facebook page.
You can check out the GEPA website here.Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is a 2010 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov and produced by Herzog.[2] The film depicts the life of the people in the village of Bakhtia ( ) along the Yenisei River in the Siberian taiga. In particular, it focuses on the trappers who hunt for fur animals, such as sable. It also briefly detours to a look at the life of native Ket people. The footage in the documentary was edited from a previous television work by Vasuykov, with original production and voiceovers by Herzog.[3]
The film premiered in Germany in November 2010, had its United States premiere at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival, and the U.S. West Coast premiere on 6 March 2011 at the San Francisco Green Film Festival.[4]
References [ edit ]Minutes before Michigan Governor Snyder signed the 'Right-To-Work' bill into law...
MICHIGAN GOVERNOR SNYDER SIGNS BAN ON MANDATORY UNION DUES
... Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa appeared on CNN, as seen in the clip below, warning that:
"This is just the first round of a battle that's going to divide this state. We're going to have a civil war,"
as the bill to weaken unions' power is passed. If Hoffa is right, look for Michigan GDP to soar: after all it is one of the more Keynesian states in the union.
Via AP: Michigan Gov. Snyder signs right-to-work bills
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has signed right-to-work legislation, dealing a devastating and once-unthinkable defeat to organized labor in a state that has been a cradle of the movement for generations. He put his signatures on the bills Tuesday, hours after the state House passed the measures as the chants of thousands of angry pro-union protesters filled the Capitol. Snyder says a failed ballot proposal to enshrine collective bargaining rights in the constitution triggered the discussion that led to the passage and signing of right-to-work. During a news conference, he called the protests "an exercise in democracy."
Jim Hoffa, of the International brotherhood of Teamsters explains his perspective:
Via CNN:SAN ANTONIO -- A woman was killed early Friday morning outside her northwest San Antonio apartment while trying to shield a friend from domestic violence, San Antonio police said.
Officers said the victim and her friend were headed home from their workplace to her apartment in the 4000 block of Medical Drive. Her friend's boyfriend was waiting with the victim's fiancé at the apartment.
Officers said the suspect thought the two women took too long to return after work. He confronted his girlfriend. The victim, in her 20s, shielded her friend from the physical attack. Investigators said the situation became so intense that the victim pulled out a licensed handgun.
Police said the suspect somehow got his hands on the victim's handgun and fired it twice. The victim fell on her friend's body, still shielding her.
The suspect yanked his girlfriend from under the victim's body as she fought to stay alive. He and the woman left with the murder weapon through a nearby fence.
In the meantime, the victim died outside her apartment. Police said her fiancé witnessed the fatal shooting. SAPD responded to a 911 call for the shooting just after 4 a.m. Friday.
The suspect faces a charge of murder. Police have not yet publicly identified him.
The victim's identity has not been released.Center for a secure Retirement just released the results of a new survey titled, “Middle Income Boomers, Financial Security and the New Retirement” and the results while interesting don’t really seem all that shocking. According to the study the key findings are (and my thoughts),
Two-thirds (67%) of middle-income Boomers say their retirement will be different from that of previous generations; the ideas of being taken care of by family, slowing down and moving to a retirement community (associated with the retirement of previous generations) are being replaced with an active lifestyle and work.
My question would be when has retirement ever been the same for the previous generation? I am sure those retiring in the 70’s didn’t think their retirement was going to be like those people who retired in the 50’s? Also was there ever anything called “retirement” prior to the 1900’s?
More than half (55%) of middle-income Boomers are looking forward to retiring.However, one in four (28%) are still uncertain.
I’d have to guess that the 45% that aren’t looking forward to retirement has to do with being unprepared, not the lack of work. Otherwise they just wouldn’t retire!
Three out of four (73%) middle-income Americans age 47 to 65 say that their financial situation, not age, is now the key indicator for when to retire.
Ummm, when would this have been different? At any time in history…if you don’t have enough money you don’t retire!
Pensions and guaranteed income are what sixty percent (60%) of middle-income Boomers envy most about the retirement of previous generations.
This is a huge loss for the boomers and my generation, but I believe pensions would still be around if they were actuarial sound. I always say the problem is that those who retired in the 70’s by all standards at the time should have been dead by now, but they aren’t…they are alive and still suckling off the pension teet.
Three out of four (75%) middle-income Boomers expect to work in retirement; more than half (57%) of those expect they will have to work for financial reasons.
I think this may be the big change for the Boomers vs previous generations. The idea of sitting around is boring lol. However, the 57% is not shocking.
Two-thirds (67%) of middle-income Boomers feel they are behind where they expected to be at this point in their lives in terms of financial readiness for retirement.
Again, the boomers were raised to think everyone should have a $1,000,000 in their retirement fund. Mathematically, they all can’t!
Half (52%) of middle-income Boomers are not confident that they have saved enough to live comfortably in retirement, and thirty-eight percent (38%) are only somewhat confident. Only one in ten (10%) feel confident about the adequacy of their retirement savings.
I wonder if any generation felt comfortable? Again, I don’t think this is a Boomer thing.
One-seventh (14%) of middle-income Americans age 47 to 65 do not have a pension, 401(k), IRA or any other type of retirement savings account.
Woah, 14% don’t even have an IRA?! That is really terrible.
More than half of middle-income Boomers (55%) have saved less than $100,000 for retirement. One-fifth (19%) have saved less than $10,000.
I don’t know if I see this is as separate as the previous stat that some will just have to work post-67.
Uncovered healthcare expenses (80%), inflation (79%) and living longer than their money lasts (71%) are the top three financial concerns that middle-income Boomers have about retirement.
Who doesn’t have these concerns? I do and I am 30 lol
Two out of three (68%) middle-income Americans age 47 to 65 have experienced a decline in the value of their retirement accounts since 2008; one-third (30%) of those have not seen any rebound in value as of March 2011.
Again, who hasn’t seen a decline in the value of their equity retirement account? To be fair there was a run up after this article was published.
Overall Thoughts from the Retirement Study
I think a lot of these studies are only there to make people feel better and provide absolutely no real information. Who didn’t have a decline in the value of their accounts? Who isn’t worried about health care costs and inflation? There is a good percentage of the population that haven’t saved…and thus can not retire at the magical age of 67.
Or am I just being cranky?European Drug Report: Dark Net Rising in Use, Making Drugs Safer
The Internet has provided a new portal for narcotics customers and suppliers to gain access to illicit drugs, says the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). According to a research report by the organization, Dark Net Market (DNM) usage is rising in popularity.
Also read: Dark Net Markets Are Booming From Better Quality & Safety
Dark Net Markets Are Growing Exponentially and Overcoming Intervention
The Deep web has become a breeding ground for illicit activity and unusual content, says the EMCDDA’s recent research paper. According to the group, a lot of the attention given to this hidden section of the Internet has been directed at online marketplaces that play an important role in criminal activity, “particularly with respect to sales of new psychoactive substances.”
EMCDDA explains that the markets are rapidly developing, and it’s possible these DNM’s may be diminishing some middle levels in the drug supply chain. The organization details that continued monitoring may determine whether a drug market “divide” will continue.
Certain tools are helping facilitate the exponential growth of these markets, says the EMCDDA. This includes technologies such as the Onion Router (Tor) for anonymization purposes, and the use of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.
The European think-tank highlights that these techniques continue to evolve. Even with law enforcement hot on the tails of these drug havens, the EMCDDA explains these markets are continuing to adapt regularly as time progresses.
The report details:
These markets have proven to be very adaptable, and it appears that the effects of such interventions on the online anonymous ecosystem are short term and those operating such sites develop new ways to evade detection, for example by improving encryption and anonymization. It is suggested that a likely future development will be completely decentralized marketplaces that exploit aspects of game theory to side-step current weaknesses — perhaps a ‘dark cloud’ on the horizon.
European Origins and Safer Environments
The EMCDDA says that MDMA, Cannabis and LSD are the three most popular choices of narcotics found on DNMs. Most suppliers of these illicit drugs come from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. According to the report, the EU has been a significant origin point of these drugs, based on results from studying Silk Road and Silk Road 2.0.
“Although it is not clear how complete and representative such data are,” the EMCDDA explains, “the findings suggest that Europe may be a significant player in global online drug marketplaces.”
Even though DNM’s have been “growing and serving an increasing customer base,” there have been some positives, according to the researchers.
Data has shown that drug quality has increased, as well as a “higher level of security” for customers — who would other wise have to deal with street dealers. Additionally, online reputation systems have bettered the marketplaces with forums, chat rooms, and vendor ratings that praise good customer service and warn of bad products.
These features promote safer drug use, according to the report, as people can inform themselves of the “effects arising from use, modes of use and appropriate dosage.”
EU Officials Will Still Try to Hinder the Growth of the Online Drug Trade
Even though the DNM’s provide a safer environment, European officials are poised towards tackling these illicit marketplaces with the help from law enforcement. This monitoring is an essential element in the European policy cycle against “organized and serious international crime.” The EMCDDA explains that the organization, along with authorities, will continue to monitor the activities of the DNMs.
The research paper notes that DNMs will most likely continue to grow, and that production and drug trafficking are “key issues in the EU’s renewed internal security strategy.”
What do you think about the EMCDDA report concerning the Deep Web drug trade? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via the EMCDDA website, and Pixabay.
There are no bigger believers in bitcoin than the team at Bitcoin.com. That’s why this site is a one-stop-shop for everything you need to get into bitcoin life. Bitcoin store? Check. Earning bitcoin? Check. Forum discussions? Check. A casino? … yep, we have that too. Information? All here.Send me an email! Are you looking for a Go programmer to implement your latest idea?
Writing Go in Emacs
Using the right tools plays a big role in getting your job done efficiently. In the case of programming Go, most of your time will be spent in an editor. It is therefore key that your editor doesn’t get in your way and, optimally, assists you wherever it can.
In this article, I will talk about go-mode for Emacs, its history and features, as well as useful extensions to it.
Even though this article is targeted at Emacs users, parts of it, mainly the feature list, might be of interest to users of other editors as well, to see what’s possible and to adopt some of the ideas. You will want to skip the History and Obtaining it sections though.
History of go-mode
Go has been including a mode for Emacs for a long time now. Until recently, however, it was rather fragile. It regularly messed up indentation or syntax highlighting, for quite some time it could completely lock up your editor and it didn’t feel really integrated in Emacs, lacking support for functions like beginning-of-defun. It also didn’t include a lot of extra features.
All in all, it was better than having to use nano, but not by much.
All that changed around February this year, when I rewrote the mode from scratch. I took special care to build it on top of a solid foundation, making use of Emacs’s parsing facilities, as opposed to the previous version of the mode, which implemented its own parser. Apart from generally bug-free behavior, this also allowed building a lot of functions on top of it.
Obtaining it
There are two ways of obtaining go-mode and both are very similar. The first way is using the one that comes with the Go distribution itself, the second way is to get it from GitHub, where I push all new changes before they find their way into the Go repository.
When using the one that comes bundled with Go, be sure to use the one that comes with tip, the development version of Go. The current release, 1.0.3, includes the old, outdated version of go-mode.
Installation
If using go-mode from Go tip, put both go-mode.el and go-mode-load.el into a directory of your choice, add it to Emacs’s load paths via
(add-to-list 'load-path "/place/where/you/put/it")
and require it via
(require 'go-mode-load)
This will install autoload entries and associate *.go files with go-mode.
If using go-mode from the git repository, the procedure is similar, but requires an additional step to generate the go-mode-load.el file. From within Emacs, run M-x update-file-autoloads, point it at the go-mode.el file and tell it to generate a go-mode-load.el file. From that point on the procedure is the same as before.
Features
For Emacs, a programming mode is often about more than just indentation and syntax highlighting. Integration with the tools of the language is often key, easy navigation of code, even crossing package boundaries, is appreciated and some people even rely on on-the-fly syntax checking.
go-mode, either directly or by using the work of others, offers all of this and more.
We’ll discover how to read documentation, format and navigate code, how to use Go’s own pastebin, how to get syntax checking, autocompletion and snippets.
Reading documentation
Using the godoc function, you can invoke the identically named Go tool from within Emacs and read package documentation in a view-mode buffer. Additional feature: You can tab complete import paths.
Formatting code
Maybe one of the most important tools of Go is gofmt, which automatically formats your code to the one true coding style, used by every Go developer.
In Emacs, there are two ways to use gofmt. One way is to invoke gofmt manually with the identically named function gofmt, which will patch the current buffer according to gofmt. The other way is to use a before-save-hook to run gofmt every time you save a Go buffer. Enabling that hook is as easy as doing
(add-hook 'before-save-hook 'gofmt-before-save)
If you have used this hook before and complained about your cursor jumping around, don’t worry: This has been fixed in the new go-mode. At the very most, your cursor will be placed on the beginning of the current line, if it had to be reformatted.
Managing imports
On a first glance, managing imports in Go doesn’t seem like much of a deal. You either add import statements at the top of your file or you remove them. But when rapidly developing a new application, this can cause a lot of jumping around. Did you just realize that you forgot to import the fmt package? Previously, this meant going to the beginning of the buffer, advancing to the block of import statements (if it existed yet), going to its end and adding your new import. And when you realized you didn’t need it after all, you had to repeat the same procedure to remove it again.
The new go-mode has three functions for working with imports: go-import-add, go-remove-unused-imports and go-goto-imports.
go-import-add
go-import-add, bound to C-c C-a by default, will prompt you for an import path (again supporting tab completion) and insert it in the import block, creating it if necessary. If an import already existed but was commented, it will be uncommented.
If prefixed with C-u, it will ask you for an alias, too. An annoying procedure of moving around and mental context switching has just been reduced to a keystroke.
go-remove-unused-imports
Instead of offering a function for removing a single import, go-mode will detect all unused imports and delete them (or comment them) once you run go-remove-unused-imports. It is not bound to a key by default, but you can bind it yourself if you want to. Personally I have bound it to C-c C-r :
(add-hook 'go-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key (kbd "C-c C-r") 'go-remove-unused-imports)))
go-goto-imports
If you decide you want to look at your imports or edit them manually, go-goto-imports will take you to them automatically, placing your cursor after the last import. It isn’t bound to a key, either, mainly because I couldn’t come up with a good default that didn’t violate Emacs guidelines. But you can bind it manually, just like before:
(add-hook 'go-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key (kbd "C-c i") 'go-goto-imports)))
Navigating code
Also important for efficient programming is quick navigation of code. go-goto-imports was only the tip of the iceberg.
go-mode supports beginning-of-defun ( C-M-a ) and end-of-defun ( C-M-e ), two core Emacs functions for navigating between functions. Additionally, functions such as narrow-to-defun and mark-defun rely on these two functions.
If that isn’t enough, you can also use Imenu to jump to specific function or type declarations.
Even if you long for a feature that’s usually only provided by IDEs, or by making use of etags, namely jumping to the declaration of a symbol under your cursor, go-mode got you covered.
go-mode integrates with godef, an amazing little tool written by Roger Peppe. godef is able to parse your code, and the code of other packages, and the code of the Go standard library, and can tell you what exactly the symbol you’re looking at means and where it has been defined.
go-mode makes use of this to provide the two functions godef-describe and godef-jump. godef-describe will tell you what you’re looking at, while godef-jump will take you to its definition. And yes, this works across files, packages and into the standard library, without needing any tags. And it has almost no measurable delay.
godef-describe is bound to C-c C-d and godef-jump is bound to C-c C-j. If you want to, you can bind godef-jump to M-., which is the default key for find-tag, something you might already be using for other programming languages:
(add-hook 'go-mode-hook (lambda () (local-set-key (kbd \"M-.\") 'godef-jump)))
There are two important notes:
Update (2013-03-19): The godef features in go-mode are now part of the Go repository. As of writing this article, the godef functions haven’t reached the Go repository yet. They are only available in the git version. This will hopefully change in the next couple of days. You will obviously need to install godef, which is as easy as doing go get code.google.com/p/rog-go/exp/cmd/godef.
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Interacting with the Playground
Go has its own pastebin, called the Playground. When asking for help with code, or sharing solutions to those who need help, it is often expected to use the Playground, especially because it can execute code.
It makes sense that go-mode integrates with the Playground. It offers go-play-buffer and go-play-region to send the current buffer or region to the Playground and store a link in your kill ring.
It can also directly download a paste from the Playground into Emacs, by using go-download-play.
On-the-fly syntax checking
FlyMake is Emacs’s solution to on-the-fly syntax checking. Many programming modes offer support for it (some more easily than others).
In the case of Go, Doug MacEachern wrote goflymake, which consists of a small Go binary and some elisp to integrate it with Emacs. Because Go compiles blazingly fast, using goflymake doesn’t cause any performance penalties. Personally I am letting FlyMake compile my Go buffers every time I insert a newline. More conservative settings would compile after a certain amount of idle time, or when saving the buffer.
Autocompletion
gocode, written by nsf, provides the kind of autocompletion that you might know from IDEs. It provides context-sensitive autocompletion and works across a variety of editors, including Emacs. The project’s README includes detailed installation instructions.
Note: it suggests using auto-complete-mode and mentions company-mode as an alternative. Personally I recommend trying company-mode first. auto-complete-mode isn’t as lightweight and can be harder to configure.
Snippets
Some people like them, some think they’re useless: Snippets. Short words that, upon pressing TAB, turn into longer words, sentences or code constructs. One of the more popular implementations of snippets for Emacs is YASnippet, and it is YASnippet that I wrote a small number of Go snippets for.
Finding unchecked errors with go-errcheck
Last but not least, there’s go-errcheck, offering Emacs integration for errcheck. errcheck is a tool written by Kamil Kisiel for finding and reporting unchecked errors in your Go code.
go-errcheck offers the go-errcheck function, which will run errcheck on the current package and report errors in a compilation buffer. Additionally, it supports setting errcheck flags on a default and per-package basis.
Conclusion
I hope I was able to give you a good overview of the features that you can enjoy while writing Go code in Emacs. If I forgot any cool packages, or if you have suggestions or comments, please leave me a message. Check the contact page to find ways of contacting me.After long film career, Mickey Rooney’s estate valued at 18K
AP
LOS ANGELES — Mickey Rooney signed his last will just weeks before death, leaving a modest estate to a stepson who had been his caretaker, but the actor had no intention of ending his Hollywood career anytime soon, his attorney said Tuesday.
Rooney's death Sunday occurred after the actor began to have difficulty breathing during an afternoon nap, attorney Michael Augustine said. The actor had been in good spirits and was looking forward to continuing to appear in movies after filming a scene for the upcoming installment of the "Night at the Museum" franchise.
Augustine said Rooney, 93, passed a physical required before he could start filming and his death was due to natural causes, including complications related to diabetes.
Police and coroner's officials were informed of Rooney's death but said no investigation of it was necessary.
Rooney's will was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday. It was signed by Rooney on March 11 and called for his stepson Mark Rooney and his wife to be the sole beneficiaries of the actor's estate, which is valued at only $18,000.
The actor designated Augustine to serve as the executor of his estate, stating that he did not want any relative handling his final affairs.
Despite a show business career spanning more than 80 years, Rooney said he had lost most of his fortune because of elder abuse and financial mismanagement by another one of his stepsons. Augustine said despite an agreement for millions to be repaid to the actor, it was unlikely the estate could ever collect on the judgment.
Rooney's will disinherited the actor's eight surviving children, as well as his estranged wife. Jan Rooney will receive her husband's Social Security benefits and some of his pension earnings as a result of a previous agreement; Augustine said Rooney felt that provided adequate care for her. He said Rooney's children were in better financial situations than the actor, so he felt it was appropriate to leave Mark Rooney all he had left.
The star of the "Andy Hardy" films and Hollywood's highest paid actor in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Rooney was a product of the industry's old studio system and was not entitled to hefty royalty payments, Augustine said.
Plans are still being made for Rooney's burial and a possible tribute, Augustine said. An agreement was reached Tuesday not to move the actor's body from a mortuary until a court hearing Friday that may help determine where he is laid to rest.
Augustine said that while Rooney has a burial plot in Westlake Village, northwest of Los Angeles, the actor had said recently he wanted to be buried in Hollywood or a veteran's cemetery.
"We were going to buy plots," Augustine said, but the actor "didn't have any money."
He said the family would like to have a small private service, but hopes that a larger celebration of Rooney's life and career can be arranged with help from film companies.So, if you are one of the lucky people who doesn’t follow the twitter-sphere, here’s the story so far. The Hugo Awards, SFFs most influential honors, announced their list of nominees on Saturday. A group of writers on the conservative side of the political spectrum had campaigned for a slate of nominees, the Sad Puppies, and were very successful in getting their picks onto the ballot, completely taking over some of the categories. Many people were very upset by this, which was probably the point. I’ve been participating in multiple simultaneous discussions, so I thought I’d write up some thoughts here where I can conveniently link them.
Why This Happened
Various people have accused the SPs of cheating, which is almost certainly not the case. On the SP side, people have been crowing that this shows they’re really in the majority, which is also almost certainly not the case. Given the way the Hugo nomination process is structured, organized slate voting is a dominant strategy, and a minority being able to completely dominate the ballot should be an expected result.
If you’re not familiar with it, the process is pretty simple. In each of the various categories (Best Novel, Best Novella, and so on) each voter can nominate up to five works. The votes are all added up, and the top five in each category become the nominees, to be voted on at WorldCon to determine the winner. The SP strategy was to pick five works for each category and encourage their voters to choose those five.
Let’s consider a hypothetical election between Green and Purple voters. There are 800 Greens in the voting pool, and 200 Purples. The Greens mostly prefer Green works, of which there are, say, 10 in serious contention — we’ll call those G1, G2, etc. The Purples similarly prefer Purple works, P1, P2, etc.
The Greens have no organization. Each Green picks the five works out of the ten that he or she personally likes best. Assuming each work has its fans, this will lead to a vote distribution that is reasonably even — say 95 for G3, 93 for G5, 89 for G8, down to 56 for G1.
[EDIT — It has been pointed out that I suck at math here. The actual vote totals would be closer to 400 for each (since each person gets five votes), so in order to make this example work, we need more Green works to spread across, and similarly for Purple. The numbers are just illustrative anyway, although this actually suggests an important point — the SPs had less success in the Best Novel category, where there were some clear front-runners, then in a category like Best Short Story where the vote was more widely scattered.]
If the Purples voted similarly, they would get a similar distribution: 34 for P2, 30 for P10, and so on. In this case, the ballot would be all Green, since the fifth-most popular Green work is more popular than all the Purples.
Instead, Purple Leader says, “Hey, lets all vote for P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5.” The Purples all go along with this. So those five works receive 200 votes each, and the others zero. Now the final ballot will be entirely Purple! The minority, by being more organized, runs the table. The Purples don’t cheat; neither have they suddenly become a majority. They simply have a more effective strategy, considered solely in terms of getting Purple on the ballot.
Why This Is A Problem
Back in the real world, why should we be concerned about this? John Scalzi suggests we should not be. The final Hugo voting includes a “No Award” option, for almost exactly this reason, and the voters can make use of it if they are sufficiently pissed off. Justin Landon broke down last year’s Hugo voting, in which there was a similar, if less successful, SP campaign. The upshot is that the SP candidates were completely defeated in the final voting, which uses a very different voting system — ranking, with instant runoffs, mean there’s no vote-splitting “spoiler” effect. Again, not an unexpected result, and I predict we’ll see something similar this year. (No Award will almost certainly win a few categories.)
But, for me, that’s not good enough. It’s a bit like saying it’s okay someone came over and kicked down your sandcastle, because they weren’t able to build their own. The problem is not that a bunch of conservative-leaning writers got on the ballot; as Scalzi says, that’s not a big deal. The problem is that it is now blindingly obvious that “slate” voting, if widely used, will dominate the nominations.
Suppose next year, when Sad Puppies IV is announced, a liberal-leaning writer counter-organizes a Happy Puppies slate. He or she would probably get a lot of support. Given the composition of the voting pool, Happy Puppies would probably win; let’s say they shut out the Sad Puppies completely. Is that better? Now we have an award in which the organizers of the two slates decide who gets to be on the ballot, independent of what works people really think are worthy. In the above example, note who loses out — Purple works 6 through 10, who didn’t get picked for the slate and were thus completely removed from consideration. In real life, too, there’s crossover between the Green and Purple sides, but slate voting eliminates that entirely. Someone who might attract Green votes, but gets picked for the Purple slate, is going to be screwed.
It’s tricky to talk about the “true spirit of the Hugo awards”, because they mean different things to different people. But I like to think that the scenario where each person chooses the works that they personally found to be best is closest to the ideal. If that scenario is unachievable (and it is) then we can at least try to get as close as possible.
Can We Fix It?
Voting systems are hard. They are the realm of unintended consequences and unforeseen strategies. A whole branch of academic game theory studies them, and there is no system that is clearly best in all circumstances, even give ideal voters; once you add human foibles into the mix, things get even more complicated. So beware of anyone saying, “Oh, it’s easy, we just have to X.”
Here are some things that will probably not work:
Just ban slate voting and campaigning. Impossible to enforce. You can never prove that a voter didn’t independently happen to choose the same works that are on the slate, and it would put the judging authorities in an impossible position, ripe with possibilities for abuse.
Expand the electorate. A good idea in general, but not a silver bullet here. The Hugo electorate is small (~2,000 voters, members of WorldCon) but that isn’t actually the problem. The SPs didn’t win by signing up enough of their people to be a majority (usually what you worry about with small voting pools) they won with a minority by being better organized.
What we need, ideally, is a change in the voting rules that aligns the result we want (everyone picking what they think is best) with the optimal strategy, as much as is possible. We also need the rules to not be excessively complicated and cumbersome, or else no one will vote.
A Modest Proposal: Anti-Votes
I’ve heard several proposals that might work. The most obvious is to change the number of votes allowed so it’s smaller than the number of final nominations, making it much harder to coordinate a slate takeover. (That is, everyone gets to pick 3, and the final 6 top are chosen, or similar.) This might help, but I don’t know that it gets to the root of the problem — it would be harder to coordinate a slate, but far from impossible. I’m interested in thinking about it, though! Here is my suggestion, which seemed a bit odd to me at first, but which I think gets closer to addressing the underlying issue.
The ballot stays as is, except that each category gets a section for five anti-votes. Each voter can both vote and anti-vote, for a total of ten choices. Anti-votes are subtracted in the final voting tally, and the top five results get on the ballot, even if their vote totals are negative or zero.
Why would this help? Because it turns the structural advantage of an organized slate into a disadvantage. Imagine what would happen to the Sad Puppies under this system. People who don’t like them, or who don’t approve of slate voting, can anti-vote their whole slate, just as easily as their supporters can vote for it. The more widely known the slate is, the more anti-votes it will attract.
Of course, the SPs would get anti-votes too, and could easily publish an anti-vote slate. But as long as their opposition isn’t pushing an organized slate of their own, the anti-votes will be split among many possible candidates, just as the Green votes are above. Organization and campaigning would become a liability instead of an asset.
With any voting system, we have to think about possible consequences. Who would be unfairly hurt by this system? The obvious answer is “people who the slate voters very much dislike”. It’s quite possible that, for example, John Scalzi would attract a disproportionate share |
basketball.
Mark Whitehead, recently named Coordinator of Men's Basketball Officials in the SEC, will serve in the same position for The American and the ASUN and will oversee all operations of the consortium.
"We are pleased to be collaborating with The American and the ASUN to continue the enhancement of men's basketball officiating," said SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. "We are focused on improving the quality of men's basketball officiating and this consortium, with the leadership provided by Mark Whitehead, provides officials with coordinated assigning between our three conferences, offers opportunity for efficient evaluation and training of officials, and continues the SEC's efforts to strengthen its commitment to men's basketball."
"I want to thank Greg Sankey for inviting us to join this officiating consortium which includes the SEC and ASUN," said The American Commissioner Mike Aresco. "This partnership will ensure that we have the highest quality basketball officiating. We look forward to working closely with Coordinator of Men's Basketball Officials Mark Whitehead and our colleagues at the SEC and the ASUN."
"Partnering with elite conferences in the SEC and The American continues to showcase our commitment to enhancing the level of officiating within our league," said ASUN Commissioner Ted Gumbart. "We look forward to the men's basketball officiating consortium providing top-level training as well as systematic assigning and evaluations for our officials. This collaboration will create great benefits for all three conferences."There is nothing better than a bowl of steaming hot veggie soup on cold fall or winter days. And to be honest, this fall has been feeling more like a winter (at least I have been wearing my winter coat since october). I hope you’ll like this collection 5 vegan, heart-warming & belly-hugging, dairy-free, plant-based soups. Some of them are creamy soups and some a clear ones but they’re all delicious. So give them a try and let me know when you do.
Don’t forget to bookmark or pin this page, so you’ll always have a nice collection of plant-based soup recipes at hand! And please let me know your favorite soups in the comments below! :)
You know what’s also great for cold days? Curries!! Have a look at these 15 amazing vegan curry recipes.
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!Rhea Litre is among a very select number of drag queens who have not yet appeared on RuPaul‘s Drag Race but who is still a “name” queen that works all over the country. In addition, Rhea is friends with pretty much every famous drag queen I’ve ever heard of. She credits her notoriety to her 2012 recording of “Let’s Have a KaiKai” with Willam Belli. “It’s the song that changed my life,” she said.
[quote]Some people send in that Drag Race application and then they just sit at home and wait. You have to make things happen for yourself. And you can be a working drag queen without having been on Drag Race. You just have to get out there.”[/quote]
While it’s true that the song is catchy and having William’s name and talent attached doesn’t hurt her rep, Rhea should also thank herself. To me Rhea, who has a background in PR, is the social media queen of the drag world. She appears at least two or three times a day in my various social media feeds. She posts often, but not so often that it becomes annoying. I follow a lot of queens – it’s part of the job here. One thing that makes Rhea unique and endearing is that she shows up as often in other people’s posts as she does in her own. She promotes her own gigs but she also throws love and support to her friends and fans – and they back to her.
The Los Angeles-based Rhea recently returned from a week-long trip to New York during NYC Pride. “I worked the whole time,” she said. It turns out Rhea and I were at the same Logo Pride event in New York. How did I find out? Not by rubbing shoulders in a VIP area! No, I saw her Instagram picture she posted with Courtney Act from backstage! Connected, right? It’s not just a show biz friendship though. Rhea calls Courtney “the main driving uplifting force in my life” and says she loves her “sister.”
Rhea got her start in drag ten years ago when she saw Raven perform a ballad. A few years before that Rhea had auditioned for Season Two of ‘American Idol.’ She made it to the top 60 contestants and then was cut. “There were two rooms – one where everyone stayed, and one where everyone went home. I was in the room where we got sent home,” she explained. “Some people were really bummed because they had to go back to places like Utah.” Rhea already lived in L.A. so she just took a short ride home and got on with her life, but not performing – at least for a while.
Rhea found Raven’s drag performance so moving that it inspired her to get back into performing and into drag herself. With typical high aspirations, Rhea sought out the most fierce drag mama she could find – Mayhem Miller. With her characteristic fortitude, and flat out boldness, Rhea made the trek to Mayhem’s performances three weeks in a row, each time asking Mayhem to be her drag mother. The first two she was turned down but she kept coming back. Finally Mayhem, no doubt recognizing Rhea’s determination and fierceness, accepted her under her wing.
“The first time I got into drag I had to perform,” Rhea explained. “There was this amateur competition. I had to enter and I won the whole fucking thing.” It was at that same competition that she gained, yes, her second drag mother – none other than fierce fashion queen Raja, who would later go on to win Drag Race season three. Raja thought Rhea’s newbie drag shoes made her look like a booger. “He said ‘Girl you are a runway model. You can’t go out there in those shoes.’” Raja took off her own shoes and lent them to Rhea, and another drag birth was complete.
A few years later Rhea took her high profile networking even farther when she became a member of the legendary drag band Transkuntinental. Rhea says there was originally a revolving door cast of performers in the band but they eventually settled on five regulars: Willam, Detox, Vicky Vox, Kelly Mantle and Rhea. It was through her TransK association with Willam that Rhea felt confident enough to approach her about recording “Let’s Have a KaiKai” together. Rhea offers this as another example of making things happen in her career. “I didn’t have to write that song and I didn’t have to ask Willam.” But she did and Willam added her own flavor of crazy cleverness and the mix worked. To date the video has received almost 1.4 million views on You Tube and Rhea is at least, if not more, well-known as many Ru girls out there.
Related: RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 7 Cast Rumors and Speculations
Rhea was recently selected by Dragaholic staff as a strong contender for RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 7. Rhea says she can’t comment on the casting process but through my clever questioning I could see she was definitely familiar with all of the steps involved in casting a Ru girl. It’s not clear whether she knows this from personal experience or by word of mouth from friends who have already been on the show. We shall have to wait until the Season 7 cast is announced to know for sure.
Rhea definitely recognizes the value of a Drag Race credit on her resume:
[quote]”Drag Race is an amazing platform for those that consider drag an art form and are serious about making a career out of it. I love drag, the windows that it has opened, and how Ru has changed the world. Being on Drag Race would be a dream come true! I will say that I will keep reaching for the stars whether I am on the show or not.
“Before I did drag I had a great job as the account manager at a PR Firm for amazing entertainers like, Blue Man Group, Lea Salonga, The Ten Tenors, David Copperfield and more. I loved my job, and I was pretty good at it. I had the best mentor in the world, Phil Lobel who really taught me work ethic and how to raise the bar. I suppose if I didn’t leave my job to pursue Drag Entertainment, I would be a publicist.
“I think every drag performer has their own “it” factor. I think of myself as pretty well-rounded when it comes to entertainment, especially since my background is in PR. I am familiar with many aspects of entertainment, like being able to both manage and being the entertainer.”[/quote]
Rhea can definitely handle her own P.R. but would love to take on a professional manager to look after the little details. “Sometimes I get so busy I forget to go buy eyelashes,” she said.
Rhea said on Drag Race they cast “beginners, intermediates and ‘fierce fucking queens.’ We certainly hope to see this fierce fucking queen – with mad hashtagging skills – on Season 7!
Check out all of Rhea’s upcoming appearances and connect with Rhea on Social Media:
Facebook: RheaLitre
Twitter: @RheaLitre
Instagram: @rhealitre
You Tube: Rhea Litre
Watch: Rhea Litre and Willam Belli in “Let’s Have a KaiKai”
Purchase “Let’s Have a KaiKai” on iTunes.Amid the now regularly breaking news that some hockey analytics blogger or another has been snapped up by a hockey team or the mainstream media, a friend of mine brought up the following question: "Is it a good or bad thing that all these previously independent analytics folks are being hired by MSM, NHL teams, Hockey Canada, etc? Your team gets better, but the level of general discourse available to the public gets worse?"
I'll admit that I've been wondering (and worried) about that very thing. A lot of the writers that put out the most informative and innovative content are now (presumably) bound by confidentiality clauses courtesy of the teams that employ them, leaving us with a rapidly diminishing number of analytics writers to turn to when we want to learn or discuss these things.
"The biggest problem with sportswriting these days isn't the writers, it's the readers."
That doesn't necessarily mean the level of general discourse has to drop along with it. It all depends on how we look at it. Intelligent hockey writing has definitely taken a hit with the loss of these particular voices, but this also represents a huge opportunity for a lot of writers to step up and fill it. Whether we're talking new analytics writers nobody has heard of, the few remaining analytics writers who are still allowed to write for the masses, or established writers that are evolving in their work to keep up with the level of hockey discussion, this opportunity is open to almost everyone.
It doesn't have to be restricted to analytics writing, either. There are plenty of writers out there who write about on-ice systems, or hockey history, or the business side of hockey, or social issues within the context of hockey, or profiles, if you're into that, but who haven't yet built the audience their work deserves. There is something out there for everyone, and all of it contributes to an elevated level of discourse.
It's up to us readers to keep that up, though, and we count more than we think. Last week, the impeccable Sean McIndoe wrote a set of new NHL season's resolutions for all of us at Grantland, and one of them was to stop rewarding bad sportswriting:
"The next time you read something that's dumb, don't rush off to post a link so that everyone else can rage about it. Instead, go find some good writing, and post that link instead.
[...]
If everyone did that, we'd all wind up reading better content. The incentive to write lazy hot takes would eventually drop. And maybe a few of those no-names would start down the long road to building enough of an audience to push the worst of the hacks out of a job someday. It probably wouldn't work. But it might be worth a try."
"We deserve a higher level of hockey discourse, but we're not going to get it unless we demand it."
He's right. It probably wouldn't work... unless we all got on board. If we all decided we were going to be committed to improving the level of discourse available to us, and we all decided to stop clicking on or engaging with, or talking about lazy, unintelligent sports pieces, and we all decided to only click on writing worth our time and our clicks, we could make it happen. The biggest problem with sportswriting these days isn't the writers, it's the readers. We're the ones that keep clicking on, sharing, and engaging with crap, and in today's world, clicks, shares, and engagement measure success. We can't always help ourselves, but we owe it to ourselves to do better from now on.
Remember that it's 2014, and if a sportswriter is not capable of creating content worth clicking on, he or she should not be in the content creating business. We're the clicks, we get to decide. Aren't you sick of stories about how Phil Kessel is fat and/or lazy and about how Alex Ovechkin isn't committed to winning? Don't you want your hockey games contextualized with information and analysis that actually matters? Don't you want to be entertained and not be enraged or bored? It's not just the game that's changing, it's the way we watch it. We're in a position to know more about the teams, players, and games than we ever would have imagined ten, five, or even three years ago. We get to talk about it with thousands of strangers and have our opinions heard. We can now spend so much more time and money on hockey than before and have more of it at our disposal. We deserve a higher level of hockey discourse, but we're not going to get it unless we demand it. And reward it and only it.Google Saying Good Bye To Netscape Plugin API Support in Chrome, Starting With Blocking Most Plugins In January 2014
The name “Netscape Plug-in API” (NPAPI) jingles like an artifact from another age of web browsers, but major browsers like Chrome and Mozilla still provision this architecture for building web browser plug-ins nowadays. But its time is rapidly approaching to an end. Mozilla is going to block NPAPI plugins by the end of this year and Google yesterday declared that Chrome will initiate blocking webpage-instantiated NPAPI plugins by default in January 2014. The Chrome team has already planned to entirely drop NPAPI support from its web browser by the end of 2014.
From today onwards, Google is not going to approve any new extension or application extensions that comprise NPAPI-based plug-ins in its Chrome Web Store.
Google has observed at unspecified Chrome practice statistics and approximations that just 6 of the all NPAPI plug-ins were used by more than 5 percent of users in the last month. To “escape interruption” (read: attempt to minimize the confusion) for users, Google for the time being will white-list the most prevalent NPAPI plugins:
Silverlight (launched by 15 percent of Chrome users last month).
Unity (9.1 percent).
Google Earth (9.1 percent).
Java (8.9 percent, but already blocked for security reasons).
Google Talk (8.7 percent).
Facebook Video (6.0 percent).
Users and company admins will be competent to white-list precise plug-ins but this is just for the short-term. Google wishes to totally take away NPAPI support from Chrome “before this year ends, but the exact timing will rest on practice and users opinion.”
As Google transcripts, audio and video supports to browsers were made possible with the help of NPAPI plug-ins. But Today’s web, the corporation debates, doesn’t want this 90s structural design- NPAPI. The search giant also says that NPAPI is not supported on mobile devices, and that is where the world is going.
Google says, “has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity.” Moving forward, Google security engineer Justin Schuh writes in today’s announcement, the company’s “goal is to evolve the standards-based web platform to cover the use cases once served by NPAPI.”
Developers who presently have extensions or applications that make use of NPAPI can still update them till May 2014. After that, they will be detached from the Chrome Store and in September 2014, they will be put out. For those developers who desire to have a substitute to NPAPI, Google suggests using Legacy Browser Support, Native Messaging API and NaCl.A series of message within the September 2015 State Department dump of Hillary Clinton e-mails show the Secretary of State of the United States received direct orders over U.S. foreign policy from none other than Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.
Soros – who for years has been suspected of pulling the strings behind Clinton as well as dozens of foreign policy and open borders groups – appears to have sent a message through his “special advisor” Jonas Rolett.
Rolett, who is listed as “Special Advisor to the Chair” on Soros’s Open Society Foundations website, sent a message to then-State Department official Richard Verma.
Mr. Verma duly passed the message along to an e-mail chain including Hillary’s top foreign affairs advisor Jacob Sullivan, her Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Gordon, as well as a recipient “William J” – believed to be William Joseph Burns who was then Deputy Secretary of State.
The e-mails, dated January 24 2011, begin with Verma forwarding a message from Rolett with the note: “Below message is from George Soros for the Secretary. Understand his organization was sending through other channels as well”.
Rolett’s message continues beneath, stating: “Rich, Here’s the text of the message. I’m available to talk at any time. Thanks, Jonas”.
Then follows what can only be construed as instructions for the Secretary of State from Democratic Party donor Soros, who has so far given her over $7 million this election cycle:
Dear Hillary, A serious situation has arisen in Albania which needs urgent attention at senior levels of the US government. You may know that an opposition demonstration in Tirana on Friday resulted in the deaths of three people and the destruction of property. There are serious concerns about further unrest connected to a counter-demonstration to be organized by the governing party on Wednesday and a follow-up event by the opposition two days later to memorialize the victims. The prospect of tens of thousands of people entering the streets in an already inflamed political environment bodes ill for the return of public order and the country’s fragile democratic process. I believe two things need to be done urgently: 1. Bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha and opposition leader Edi Rama to forestall further public demonstrations and to tone down public pronouncements. 2. Appoint a senior European official as a mediator. While I am concerned about the rhetoric being used by both sides, I am particularly worried about the actions of the Prime Minister. There is videotape of National Guard members firing on demonstrators from the roof of the Prime Ministry. The Prosecutor (appointed by the Democratic Party) has issued arrest warrants for the individuals in question. The Prime Minister had previously accused the opposition of intentionally murdering these activists as a provocation. After the tape came out deputies from his party accused the Prosecutor of planning a coup d’etat in collaboration with the opposition, a charge Mr. Berisha repeated today. No arrests have been made as of this writing. The demonstration resulted from opposition protests over the conduct of parliamentary elections in 2009. The political environment has deteriorated ever since and is now approaching levels of 1997, when similar issues caused the country to slide into anarchy and violence. There are signs that Edi Rama’s control of his own people is slipping, which may lead to further violence. The US and the EU must work in complete harmony over this, but given Albania’s European aspirations the EU must take the lead. That is why I suggest appointing a mediator such as Carl Bildt, Martti Ahtisaari or Miroslav Lajcak, all of whom have strong connections to the Balkans. My foundation in Tirana is monitoring the situation closely and can provide independent analysis of the crisis. Thank you, George Soros
Indeed just days after the message was sent, Mr. Lajcak, named by Mr. Soros in the e-mail, was sent to the Albanian capital in order to attempt to negotiate the situation. At the time Mr Lajcak said it was up to Albania’s leaders “to do what we ask them to do”.
Mr. Soros is known for using and indeed manipulating major world events for both his ideological and financial interests. He became known in the United Kingdom as the man who “broke the Bank of England” during one of the worst financial episodes in the country’s recent history. On ‘Black Wednesday’, when Britain withdrew from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Mr. Soros made over $1bn in one day.
His organisations have also recently been responsible for agitating against the new, populist Polish government, as well as in his home country of Hungary, where President Viktor Orban has repeatedly blamed him for the migrant crisis, claiming his staff are “drawing a living” from the problem.
In May, Breitbart London exclusively revealed the words of Tomasz Piotr Poreba – a former Adviser to the Committees on Foreign Affairs and Regional Development in the European Parliament – who said: “Not so long ago relations between the Clintons and billionaire Soros were revealed… Soros supports Clintons and Clinton followed his order. That is no secret.”
At the same time Mr. Orban declared: “…here, in Central Europe a shadow power exists, which is linked to George Soros, he is one of the most important sponsors of the Democratic Party, so I have to say that although the mouth belongs to Clinton, the voice belongs to George Soros”.
Mr. Soros recently called for the overturning of the Brexit vote to leave the European Union, and the Wall Street Journal revealed the multi-billionaire, while backing Mrs. Clinton to the tune of millions, is betting against U.S. stocks.Ex-welterweight champion Johny Hendricks said he’s over trying to figure out the UFC’s title plans after getting snubbed for another shot at champ Robbie Lawler’s belt.
“It is what it is,” he told MMAjunkie. “As long as my body’s healthy, I’m going to fight.
“It’s not even so much the UFC’s fault. It’s also the fans; whenever they do a polling of the fans, they might want something different.”
But, the No. 2 ranked fighter in the NOS Energy Drink MMA welterweight rankings added, it might also be the fault of Lawler that he isn’t getting a rubber match with the champ, with whom he’s split a pair of bouts.
“It just sucks, because I get injured (after winning the title at UFC 171), I come back, (Lawler) fights (Jake Ellenberger and Matt Brown), and you’re the No. 1 guy – c’mon,” Hendricks said. “I fight, I think I win. I lose, for some crazy reason, right?
“Then all of a sudden I fight somebody, he goes and fights somebody, and instead of him sitting there and saying, ‘You’re the No. 1 contender,’ the fear of losing the belt is what’s keeping him from fighting me.”
Whether it was the promotion, Lawler, or the fans, Hendricks (17-3 MMA, 12-3 UFC) ultimately has a fight at UFC 192 with former wrestling rival and No. 4 ranked Tyron Woodley (15-3 MMA, 5-2 UFC), while Lawler is booked for UFC 195 opposite onetime interim title champ Carlos Condit. A unanimous decision over Matt Brown in March did not open the door to a third fight as expected.
After a close decision over Hendricks this past December and a “Fight of the Year” rematch in July against Rory MacDonald, Lawler is moving on to a new opponent.
Hendricks must live with that fact and fight Woodley as though he were as important as any other opponent. Their bout serves on the pay-per-view main card of the Oct. 3 event at Toyota Center in Houston.
Hendricks shrugged at the idea of getting title shots in writing, as women’s bantamweight Miesha Tate said after getting passed over for a third fight with champ Ronda Rousey.
Instead, his plan is to force the UFC to give him another shot at the belt.
“I don’t care that I fight (Lawler) again, because realistically, how do you outstrike somebody 2-1 after the fourth round and lose the fight? It’s the same scenario as (Georges St-Pierre).
Hendricks was denied the title against now-former champ St-Pierre at UFC 167 despite widespread opinion that he’d been shortchanged on scorecards. But he got another shot at the title when St-Pierre vacated his title, setting up a fight with Lawler. He won and celebrated the biggest win of his career.
After returning from a long injury layoff, that triumph turned to more disbelief with a decision loss to Lawler.
Now, after two tussles with the current champ, Hendricks is only aiming at the title. To get invested in any particular path is to court disappointment.
For more on UFC 192, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.Microsoft is celebrating its 40th anniversary on April 4, 2015. That happens to fall on a Saturday, though, meaning today is the last day the company can rally the troops. And who better to do that than cofounder Bill Gates?
Gates sent an email titled “Microsoft’s 40th anniversary” to all of the company’s 100,000+ employees today. With such a large number, someone was bound to post it, and Darrell Prichard did just that. While the tweet has since been deleted, we’ve transcribed it for you below:
Tomorrow is a special day: Microsoft’s 40th anniversary. Early on, Paul Allen and I set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home. It was a bold idea and a lot of people thought we were out of our minds to imagine it was possible. It is amazing to think about how far computing has come since then, and we can all be proud of the role Microsoft played in that revolution. Today though, I am thinking much more about Microsoft’s future than its past. I believe computing will evolve faster in the next 10 years than it ever has before. We already live in a multi-platform world, and computing will become even more pervasive. We are nearing the point where computers and robots will be able to see, move, and interact naturally, unlocking many new applications and empowering people even more. Under Satya’s leadership, Microsoft is better positioned than ever to lead these advances. We have the resources and drive to solve tough problems. We are engaged in every facet of modern computing and have the deepest commitment to research in the industry. In my role as technical advisor to Satya, I get to join product reviews and am impressed by the vision and talent I see. The result is evident in products like Cortana, Skype Translator, and HoloLens — and those are just a few of the many innovations that are on the way. In the coming years, Microsoft has the opportunity to reach even more people and organizations around the world. Technology is still out of reach for many people, because it is complex or expensive, or they simply do not have access. So I hope you will think about what you can do to make the power of technology accessible to everyone, to connect people to each other, and make personal computing available everywhere even as the very notion of what a PC delivers makes its way into all devices. We have accomplished a lot together during our first 40 years and empowered countless businesses and people to realize their full potential. But what matters most now is what we do next. Thank you for helping make Microsoft a fantastic company now and for decades to come.
Gates starts by talking about the past, but then quickly puts the focus on the future. He underlines CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership and highlights three new Microsoft products: Cortana (released but still on its way to PCs), Skype Translator (currently in preview), and HoloLens (not yet ready).
The next decade will indeed be a very exciting one for Microsoft. If the company plays its cards right, it may even be around for another 40 years.In this post, I look at one of the stranger concepts in Objective-C — the meta-class. Every class in Objective-C has its own associated meta-class but since you rarely ever use a meta-class directly, they can remain enigmatic. I'll start by looking at how to create a class at runtime. By examining the "class pair" that this creates, I'll explain what the meta-class is and also cover the more general topic of what it means for data to be an object or a class in Objective-C.
Creating a class at runtime
The following code creates a new subclass of NSError at runtime and adds one method to it:
Class newClass = objc_allocateClassPair ([ NSError class ], "RuntimeErrorSubclass", 0 ); class_addMethod ( newClass, @selector ( report ), ( IMP ) ReportFunction, "v@:" ); objc_registerClassPair ( newClass );
The method added uses the function named ReportFunction as its implementation, which is defined as follows:
void ReportFunction ( id self, SEL _cmd ) { NSLog ( @"This object is %p.", self ); NSLog ( @"Class is %@, and super is %@.", [ self class ], [ self superclass ]); Class currentClass = [ self class ]; for ( int i = 1 ; i < 5 ; i ++ ) { NSLog ( @"Following the isa pointer %d times gives %p", i, currentClass ); currentClass = object_getClass ( currentClass ); } NSLog ( @"NSObject's class is %p", [ NSObject class ]); NSLog ( @"NSObject's meta class is %p", object_getClass ([ NSObject class ])); }
On the surface, this is all pretty simple. Creating a class at runtime is just three easy steps:
Allocate storage for the "class pair" (using objc_allocateClassPair ). Add methods and ivars to the class as needed (I've added one method using class_addMethod ). Register the class so that it can be used (using objc_registerClassPair ).
However, the immediate question is: what is a "class pair"? The function objc_allocateClassPair only returns one value: the class. Where is the other half of the pair?
I'm sure you've guessed that the other half of the pair is the meta-class (it's the title of this post) but to explain what that is and why you need it, I'm going to give some background on objects and classes in Objective-C.
What is needed for a data structure to be an object?
Every object has a class. This is a fundamental object-oriented concept but in Objective-C, it is also a fundamental part of the data. Any data structure which has a pointer to a class in the right location can be treated as an object.
In Objective-C, an object's class is determined by its isa pointer. The isa pointer points to the object's Class.
In fact, the basic definition of an object in Objective-C looks like this:
typedef struct objc_object { Class isa ; } * id ;
What this says is: any structure which starts with a pointer to a Class structure can be treated as an objc_object.
The most important feature of objects in Objective-C is that you can send messages to them:
[ @"stringValue" writeToFile : @"/file.txt" atomically : YES encoding : NSUTF8StringEncoding error : NULL ];
This works because when you send a message to an Objective-C object (like the NSCFString here), the runtime follows object's isa pointer to get to the object's Class (the NSCFString class in this case). The Class then contains a list of the Method s which apply to all objects of that Class and a pointer to the superclass to look up inherited methods. The runtime looks through the list of Method s on the Class and superclasses to find one that matches the message selector (in the above case, writeToFile:atomically:encoding:error on NSString ). The runtime then invokes the function ( IMP ) for that method.
The important point is that the Class defines the messages that you can send to an object.
What is a meta-class?
Now, as you probably already know, a Class in Objective-C is also an object. This means that you can send messages to a Class.
NSStringEncoding defaultStringEncoding = [ NSString defaultStringEncoding ];
In this case, defaultStringEncoding is sent to the NSString class.
This works because every Class in Objective-C is an object itself. This means that the Class structure must start with an isa pointer so that it is binary compatible with the objc_object structure I showed above and the next field in the structure must be a pointer to the superclass (or nil for base classes).
As I showed last week, there are a couple different ways that a Class can be defined, depending on the version of the runtime you are running, but yes, they all start with an isa field followed by a superclass field.
typedef struct objc_class * Class ; struct objc_class { Class isa ; Class super_class ; /* followed by runtime specific details... */ };
However, in order to let us invoke a method on a Class, the isa pointer of the Class must itself point to a Class structure and that Class structure must contain the list of Method s that we can invoke on the Class.
This leads to the definition of a meta-class: the meta-class is the class for a Class object.
Simply put:
When you send a message to an object, that message is looked up in the method list on the object's class.
When you send a message to a class, that message is looked up in the method list on the class' meta-class.
The meta-class is essential because it stores the class methods for a Class. There must be a unique meta-class for every Class because every Class has a potentially unique list of class methods.
What is the class of the meta-class?
The meta-class, like the Class before it, is also an object. This means that you can invoke methods on it too. Naturally, this means that it must also have a class.
All meta-classes use the base class' meta-class (the meta-class of the top Class in their inheritance hierarchy) as their class. This means that for all classes that descend from NSObject (most classes), the meta-class has the NSObject meta-class as its class.
Following the rule that all meta-classes use the base class' meta-class as their class, any base meta-classes will be its own class (their isa pointer points to themselves). This means that the isa pointer on the NSObject meta-class points to itself (it is an instance of itself).
Inheritance for classes and meta-classes
In the same way that the Class points to the superclass with its super_class pointer, the meta-class points to the meta-class of the Class'super_class using its own super_class pointer.
As a further quirk, the base class' meta-class sets its super_class to the base class itself.
The result of this inheritance hierarchy is that all instances, classes and meta-classes in the hierarchy inherit from the hierarchy's base class.
For all instances, classes and meta-classes in the NSObject hierarchy, this means that all NSObject instance methods are valid. For the classes and meta-classes, all NSObject class methods are also valid.
All this is pretty confusing in text. Greg Parker has put together an excellent diagram of instances, classes, meta-classes and their super classes and how they all fit together.
Experimental confirmation of this
To confirm all of this, let's look at the output of the ReportFunction I gave at the start of this post. The purpose of this function is to follow the isa pointers and log what it finds.
To run the ReportFunction, we need to create an instance of the dynamically created class and invoke the report method on it.
id instanceOfNewClass = [[ newClass alloc ] initWithDomain : @"someDomain" code : 0 userInfo : nil ]; [ instanceOfNewClass performSelector : @selector ( report )]; [ instanceOfNewClass release ];
Since there is no declaration of the report method, I invoke it using performSelector: so the compiler doesn't give a warning.
The ReportFunction will now traverse through the isa pointers and tell us what objects are used as the class, meta-class and class of the meta-class.
Getting the class of an object: the ReportFunction uses object_getClass to follow the isa pointers because the isa pointer is a protected member of the class (you can't directly access other object's isa pointers). The ReportFunction does not use the class method to do this because invoking the class method on a Class object does not return the meta-class, it instead returns the Class again (so [NSString class] will return the NSString class instead of the NSString meta-class).
This is the output (minus NSLog prefixes) when the program runs:
This object is 0x10010c810. Class is RuntimeErrorSubclass, and super is NSError. Following the isa pointer 1 times gives 0x10010c600 Following the isa pointer 2 times gives 0x10010c630 Following the isa pointer 3 times gives 0x7fff71038480 Following the isa pointer 4 times gives 0x7fff71038480 NSObject's class is 0x7fff710384a8 NSObject's meta class is 0x7fff71038480
Looking at the addresses reached by following the isa value repeatedly:
the object is address 0x10010c810.
. the class is address 0x10010c600.
. the meta-class is address 0x10010c630.
. the meta-class's class (i.e. the NSObject meta-class) is address 0x7fff71038480.
meta-class) is address. the NSObject meta-class' class is itself.
The value of the addresses is not really important except that it shows the progress from class to meta-class to NSObject meta-class as discussed.
Conclusion
The meta-class is the class for a Class object. Every Class has its own unique meta-class (since every Class can have its own unique list of methods). This means that all Class objects are not themselves all of the same class.
The meta-class will always ensure that the Class object has all the instance and class methods of the base class in the hierarchy, plus all of the class methods in-between. For classes descended |
in the 64GB model of the OnePlus, as it costs less than half the price of the 64GB iPhone 6 Plus, provided you can buy it in the first place.
Apple finally introduced NFC with their devices, even if the use is limited to just Apple Pay for now. Also worth noting is the return of the fingerprint scanner, which is convenient to use as an extra layer of security. Plus, starting with iOS 8, the fingerprint scanner can be used by third-party applications, opening the road for more interesting uses in the future.
Both phones feature non-removable batteries, but the OnePlus has a slight edge in capacity, thanks to its 3,100 mAh unit, compared to 2,915 mAh on the iPhone. We didn’t have time for proper battery tests, so the real world difference in longevity remains to be discussed.
Camera
The iPhone 6 Plus keeps the 8 MP rear shooter from its predecessors, though it comes with a new sensor, an f /2.2 aperture lens, faster autofocus, and optical image stabilization (which isn’t available on the iPhone 6). Video gets a boost too, especially with the ability to capture slow motion video at 240 fps in 720p resolution.
The 13MP Sony Exmor RS sensor of the OnePlus is combined with a 6 parts lens with an f/2.0 aperture, dual LED flash, and a great software package with many useful features, that allows for a great camera experience. On the front, you get a 5MP camera with a wide lens that enables an 80 degrees field of view, which is great for all selfie lovers out there.
Software
On the iPhone 6 Plus, the iOS8 UI remains largely the same with iOS7 in terms of appearance. But there are many new features, such as support for third-party keyboards, widgets in the notification dropdown, and the new Health app. Probably the most exciting new feature is Continuity, which will allow the iPhone to work in tandem with Macs or iPads, so you can start a task on one device and continue on the other.
You also get the new “Reachability” feature, that lets you bring down the entire interface of the device with a double tap on the home screen. The same feature is available on the smaller iPhone 6, but it doesn’t make as much sense there due to the smaller size.
The OnePlus One runs CyanogenMod 11S, a release built specifically for the One to take advantage of all its hardware and features, and is based on Android 4.4 KitKat. You get a clean, minimalistic stock-like experience, with various customization options available easily from the device’s theme engine and store. Useful software features include voice commands that work even when the device is sleeping and the ability to launch favorite apps by drawing pre-set gestures on a sleeping screen.
Wrap up
While price isn’t usually a factor in flagship comparisons, because they tend to fall in the same price range, that certainly isn’t the case here. In their basic configurations, the OnePlus One can be bought for less than half the price of the iPhone 6 Plus.
Put another way, you could enjoy an experience that is largely comparable to the 6 Plus and still have money left for another device, say, for your significant other. That’s probably the ultimate selling point for the OnePlus.
Even when price isn’t an issue, these two devices are very close in terms of features, though obviously their different software platforms will make for distinct experiences.
What’s your take? OnePlus One or iPhone 6 Plus?On HBO's "Last Week Tonight," John Oliver dedicated his entire season finale to discussing the result of the presidential election.
"A Klan-backed, misogynist Internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address," he said about President-Elect Trump. "Keep reminding yourself, 'This is not normal."
The host, famous for noting the current year, capped off the episode with an extended montage about how terrible 2016 has been.
***
Back in 2015 when he was guest-hosting 'The Daily Show,' Oliver begged Donald Trump to run because he thought it would be funny:
"Do it. Do it. Look at me. Do it. I will personally write you a campaign check right now, on behalf of this country, which doesn't want you to be president, but desperately wants you to run," he said.
***
Later in the campaign, he begged Trump to drop out:
“Drop out and tell America this entire thing was a stunt, a satire to expose the flaws in the system," he begged Trump.Yesterday’s announcement of Gran Turismo’s partnership with the FIA has made shockwaves around the Internet and right here at home on GTPlanet, and now we have a few early details about the FIA Online Championship – the first virtual race event to be organized and sanctioned by the world’s governing body of motorsport.
As revealed during Kazunori Yamauchi’s joint presentation with FIA president Jean Todt at the ADAC headquarters in Munich, the competition will consist of three “championships”: the “National Championship”, “Regional Championship”, and an “International Championship”.
Other details include:
To be made accessible to all age groups.
A wide variety of racing categories.
Winner celebrated at FIA Prize Giving ceremony.
Delivery of a message emphasizing safety.
Final race to be supervised by FIA officials.
These details emphasize the high-profile nature of the competition – the “FIA Prize Giving Ceremony” is one of the most glamorous off-track events in motorsport. Typically held in Monaco or Paris, it’s where the Formula One, WRC, WTCC, WEC, and all other FIA-sanctioned world championship trophies are awarded, and next year a Gran Turismo player will be right there with them.
Check out the PitStop blog for more photos from the FIA announcement event.
More Posts On...Tamashii Nations has a new Movie Hero Feature Exhibition currently going on in Japan. the exhibition looks to showcase new “Hero” related figures from Disney, Marvel and DC. With a few new pics popping up online, it appears they have two new Spider-Man: Homecoming S.H. Figuarts on display (though these could be from a different event). These photos come courtesy of ToyznHobby.
The exhibition gives us a look at both the Spider-Man Homemade Suit Figure and the new Iron Man Mark 47 Figure. Unfortunately, there are no additional details at this time, but expect them to include the usual accessories, such as interchangeable hands and effects pieces. As more information is released, we will be sure to share it with our readers.
You can see both figures after the jump.Vernon Philander has been passed fit for South Africa's opening Test against England at Lord's. Philander sat out the warm-up match in Worcester last week as he recovered from an ankle injury, sustained while on a county stint with Sussex, but has made a full recovery.
That means South Africa will have a full-strength attack including Philander, Kagiso Rabada and Morne Morkel, while back-up allrounders Chris Morris and Andile Phehlukwayo will likely have to wait their turns.
South Africa are still waiting to confirm Faf du Plessis' availability for the match after he returned home of the birth of his first child. A difficult birth may keep the captain from joining the camp immediately. A decision is expected to be taken on Monday.
Should du Plessis miss the match, Dean Elgar will stand in as captain with one of Theunis de Bruyn or Aiden Markram coming in in du Plessis' place.favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite
O.K. when I was fronting our band at my 8th grade prom which I will freely admit was NOT anything like the Dead rolling thru LOVELIGHT we got the power cut off on us.
My lyrics were
"Down with Charity, Down with Laws,
Down with Everything, But up up yours"
which the nuns SUGGESTED become
"Everyone needs charity
Everyone needs law"
which i ignored
but it wasn't the nuns who killed the power
it was our own Merry prankster of the 8th grade.
Anyway the Dead get the plug pulled and the drummers just keep drumming for awhile.
I forgave my buddy
because truthfully we pretty much sucked
---but the management at the Avalon had to be right up there with the fire trolls in Germany for worst buzz kill ever.
- January 24, 2016Turn OFF your Lovelight0 Man suing city after doughnut icing tests positive for meth during Florida traffic stop
ORLANDO, Fla. - Icing from a Krispy Kreme doughnut landed Dan Rushing in jail after Orlando police mistook it for methamphetamine, and as a result, Rushing is suing the city.
>> Read more trending stories
“They showed me four little pieces, smaller than your fingernail, of icing from a Krispy Kreme doughnut I'd eaten previously,” Rushing said.
The lawsuit Rushing filed on Friday is not only against the city of Orlando, it’s against Safariland, the company behind the test.
The arrest happened in July. Orlando police pulled Rushing over for speeding and searched his car.
When officers found dried icing in his car, they thought it was meth and arrested him.
“I get one glazed every other Wednesday,” said Rushing.
Orlando police said the icing tested positive twice for meth.
“I said 'That's icing from a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut,' and they went, ‘No. That's drugs,’” said Rushing.
Rushing said that he insisted the substance was sugar.
“They took me to jail. I was there about 11 hours. (They) strip-searched me,” said Rushing.
Rushing said the amount of icing could barely fit on the nail of a pinky finger. He was surprised officers saw it, especially since it was in pieces scattered on the floor of his car.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement later tested the icing and found that it contained “no controlled substances.”
Prosecutors didn't pursue the drug charge.
The lawsuit claims the officer was not properly trained to use the test, and the product was defective or unreliable.
“It's an incredible feeling to get arrested when you haven't done anything wrong,” Rushing said.
WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said that Rushing might have an uphill battle in court because the officers still had cause to arrest him, even if the test was later proven wrong.
But Rushing hopes to force more scrutiny over the field tests.
He said he will still eat the doughnuts, but “just don't eat them in the car anymore.”
The city declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Safariland has not replied to WFTV's request for comment.
© 2019 Cox Media Group.A young woman who alleges she was raped by footballer Ched Evans in a hotel room gave evidence on the second day of his retrial today.
The woman, then 19, was allegedly attacked by the 27-year-old striker at a Premier Inn near Rhyl, North Wales, in May 2011.
She told the court today that when she woke up "I just felt dead confused. I didn’t know where I was. I felt dazed.”
But defence barrister Judith Khan QC suggested the woman “took the lead” when having consensual sex with two other men - one shortly before the alleged rape and the other shortly afterwards.
The woman said she did not agree.
The former Manchester City and Sheffield United star, who has made 13 appearances for Wales, denies the charge against him.
Evans appeared in court for the first day of his retrial yesterday and appeared again today, supported by his fiancée and the mother of his young son, Natasha Massey.
The jury of seven women and five men were told how he had previously been convicted of raping the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons.
However, his conviction was later quashed by the Court of Appeal.
The footballer's retrial at Cardiff Crown Court is expected to last two weeks and is being presided over by Mrs Justice Nicola Davies.
The trial has been adjourned until 10.30am tomorrow.The Green Bay Packers won't be solving their tailback glut by stashing DuJuan Harris on the reserved/physically unable to perform list to start the season.
Less than a week after coach Mike McCarthy revealed that he still views Harris as the starter, the Packers activated Harris from the training-camp PUP list.
Finally over a minor knee injury that put him on the shelf for three weeks, Harris immediately began seeing first-team reps in Monday's practice, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"DuJuan Harris, the way we ended the season, I would classify him as a starter on our football team," McCarthy reiterated with emphasis Monday. "I have that confidence in him."
Although second-round draft pick Eddie Lacy appeared to be gaining a toehold on the early down role a week ago, the rookie still is rehabbing a hamstring injury. For now at least, McCarthy is rewarding Harris for averaging roughly 0.8 more yards per carry than the rest of the Packers' disappointing running backs last season.
Other Packers news:
» Wide receiver Randall Cobb returned to practice Monday, albeit with his upper right arm wrapped. Cobb sat out the preseason opener after injuring his biceps in practice last week.
» McCarthy indicated that first-round pick Datone Jones will remain out a couple more days with an ankle injury. The defensive end's status is in question for Saturday's game versus the St. Louis Rams.
The Around The League Podcast is now available on iTunes! Click here to listen and subscribe.AFX, The Aphex Twin, Caustic Window, Bradley Strider, Dice Man… Richard D James is an elusive creature, as uniquely adept at hiding from hype as he is as creating it. But none of his endlessly mischievous media ducking and diving would be worth a tinker’s toss – and he wouldn’t still be here exciting speculation, in fact – if it weren’t for the fact that once the bullshit has subsided his music stands the test of time.
And while his winning of a Grammy might be pleasing to his accountant, and might give us a bit of fun as we watch EDM fans trying to puzzle out who and what he actually is, it’s been his recent haemorrhage of unreleased early music that’s been the real news event for Aphex lovers. As “user48736353001”, RDJ has now dropped a total of 155 tracks and counting, with running time longer than his entire “official” discography as Aphex Twin.
It’s a dizzying rabbit hole to jump down, but what’s most dizzying is that the quality is consistent – and it contains gems that are up there with his very best. People are already compiling their own albums from the glut, organising listening parties, and otherwise finding ways of navigating through it. And to help with that, we asked around a few people who have been inspired by early Aphex, including several who were there when these tracks were actually made. They told us plenty about how his music moved them, and one – Mike Paradinas – even saw fit to send us an exclusive track which he’d made way back when as a direct result of exposure to RDJ’s music.
MANUEL SEPULVEDA (Optigram design, Citinite label, Nitetrax show on NTS)
Richard, along with his DJ partner PK (Piers Kirwan), used to do a fortnightly techno and acid night at a club called The Bowgie in Crantock, Cornwall, and he would occasionally play his own tracks off cassette. I remember the first time we heard Richard play “Human Rotation”, it was his last tune of the night and we all went nuts. At the end we rushed over to the DJ booth to ask him what it was. He was really chuffed to see our reactions and I still remember his beaming face as he told us.
“Human Rotation” and tracks like “Analogue Bubblebath”, “Polygon Window” and the recently uploaded “Parking Lot” were on the first tape that he ever made for me and Tom Middleton (me and Tom along with Aphex illustrator Dan Parks went on to do the alternate fortnightly night at The Bowgie after Paul Guntrip of The Wag retired, and then Aphex’s night become monthly to allow for Grant of Rephlex’s new house night) and for many of us those early tracks are at the heart of our memories of living in Cornwall — going to raves, driving through country lanes, or just chilling at home with friends. I feel truly blessed and lucky to have been a part of that.
“They were unlike anything anyone else was doing… apart from me I guess!”
PANGAEA (Hessle Audio)
Getting beautiful SAWII vibes from this. I love the honesty of the working process in all of these, it’s pretty inspiring and motivational. The “Slo” version of “Red Calx” really could be a cut from Selected Ambient Works 2, it’s so lovely. Also my favourite film as a kid was Short Circuit, so it makes me happy hearing that “nova robotics” sample!
ADAM GOODHAND (Numbers)
Smoothly furious and un-relenting acid ear worm. The changes in pace and energy throughout this track are incredible. Only AFX can pull off so many different ideas in one track and still make it sound coherent and exciting. Come on you cunts lets have some aphex acid!
MIKE PARADINAS (Planet Mu supremo, and recording artist as µ-Ziq, Jake Slazenger, Tusken Raiders etc etc etc)
I never had any unreleased Aphex tracks, not early on. I heard what he released (2 EPs at that point) then Tom Middleton played me the tracks when I signed to Evolution. There was a definite sense that they were magical and AFX had a big aura around him from the very start. They were unlike anything anyone else was doing… apart from me I guess, but I started copying him once I heard “Isopropophlex” haha. He was definitely my first inspiration: I heard “Human Rotation” round Tom’s house, for instance, and made this track “Mucky Puppy” as a kind of response, a couple of weeks later.
The ambient stuff was maybe less well regarded by some techno heads because it was less unique, but Tom played me tracks from the Xylem Tube EP and Selected Ambient Works 85-92 before either came out and I felt lucky to have heard them – fully inspirational. Then between the ambient tunes and the hard ones were tracks like “BellBrk” had an alien feeling, a ghostliness, that I just loved. Later on after all this, I finally met Rich (late ’92, I think). Rich himself was always very proud of his new creations and would play whatever he’d recently made when you went round – I recognise several of these later (post-’92) tracks from what he’s uploaded. I remember loads more which I wish he would, although the rate he’s going, they’ll probably be up there soon too.
I think at one point Melodies from Mars [which was leaked a couple of years ago, and formed part of a phase of melodic, “funny” Aphex tracks along with Pardinas & RDJ’s Mike & Rich album] was going to be called Mr. Men, and each track was describing each character’s personality – and he kept tickling me while playing ‘Mr. Tickle’. In the end, Mr Tickle wasn’t on the leaked Melodies from Mars either – I’d not heard it since that time.
KONX-OM-PAX (Planet Mu, Display Copy)
This track is really beautiful. Ticks all the boxes. The melodies make me smile a lot. So many sound like demos to me, and I like that – I really like the live roughness of the older stuff. He just turns on the boxes and records live to cassette by the sound of it.
KING BRITT (Fhloston Paradigm, Sylk130, Scuba, Obafunke, The Nova Dream Sequence)
Bro… he was one of my heroes. I was record buyer for Tower Records in Philly in late eighties, early nineties, and I got the test press of “Didgeridoo”. Me and Josh Wink were blown away – we used to play it at all our parties, it was foundational. But then we heard “Analogue Bubblebath”, which is by far the best ever! I’m really feeling the Luke Vibert remix out of all this stuff he’s leaking now. I’m loving all of this stuff, because it demonstrates perfectly that he’s been so ahead of the curve that it’s all perfect for now. It’s like the blueprint. And what’s perfect about it is that it’s NOT perfect: it’s sometimes uneven, sometimes broken, and that’s important, because there’s too much precision in today’s electronic music.
TOM MIDDLETON (Jedi Knights, Global Communication, Cosmos and a million other guises)
The Bowgie Inn, West Pentire, near Newquay, Cornwall. The ‘one more tune’ Rich dropped around 12.22 am, late 1989 I think. He was known as PBOD (Phonic Boy On Dope) in those pre Aphex days. Spinning Detroit techno, Chicago acid, New York garage, UK rave, proto-jungle and electronica, Belgian techno and new beat. It was a sweaty old place, with a classic Turbo soundsystem.
“standing trembling in our Osh Kosh dungarees, Wallabees & Troops smoking from busting out the running man”
Who was there? An interesting bunch if you check their current credentials! Me, Grant Wilson-Claridge (pre Rephlex), Manuel Sepulveda (aka Optigram; sleeve designer for Hyperdub/Warp), Luke Vibert, Marcus Scott (label manager at Hyperdub). And what happened? After an ear bleeding analogue Roland drum machine and Synth assault of obscure white label imports, Rich closed the night with this insane twisted acid tech funk track that spun us right out from the start.
Imagine the collective shock as the track opens with birdsong and what sounds like a film soundtrack score (Sound Of Music – WTF!!!) then this nasty, evil squidgy acid sound backed by relentless 808 hand claps piles in, dropping into a heavy 808 electro-techno beat. The acid gets even nastier as the EQ and Filters are tweaked well beyond the factory preset allowances into sub and supersonic dog disrupting territory. Rich pumps the smoke machine and cranks the strobe into epilepsy induction mode. We’re going loopy on the floor.
Then shock number two, the track breaks to the hyper flanged voice of Julie Andrews explaining how to make songs using Do Re Mi… ahhh! ‘Mindphuqed’ by Rich! Back into an even more intense acid squelch breakdown, then slamming booty beats, then the track ends abruptly… House lights on – and he’s left us for dead standing trembling in our Osh Kosh dungarees, Wallabees & Troops smoking from busting out the running man, hair curtains soaked, eyes sore from the strawberry smoke. Completely floored, we approach the booth, Rich pulls out a TDK C90 tape from the deck, trademark manic grin on his face, and we realise it was his own production, made a few miles away in his bedroom.
He was road-testing the track. “PHUQ!”
We get chatting, discover we share the same birth date, he invites me to his place, and over the course of the next year or so he shares his productions on homemade C90 tapes with an elect circle of friends. I recall hearing “Analogue Bubblebath” for the first time, instant goosebumps, had it on rewind for about an hour. Rich shows me the tricks of the trade at his place, and engineers / sequences my first three tracks. I introduce him to Mark Darby at Mighty Force Record shop in Exeter, a new friend I’d played Rich’s tapes to. Mighty Force Records sign the Analogue Bubblebath EP. I design the stickers, we stamp and sticker the white labels. I lug boxes of MIGHTY001 up to London, dropping them around Soho for sale or return… they sell out in days. The rest is… well… the rest!Characteristics of disorder
In seeking insight into the behaviour of individuals during an episode of rioting, we consider both existing theoretical research into such incidents36 (and criminal activity in general) and specific observations from the London disorder. The latter takes the form of analysis of data provided by the Metropolitan Police, which contains the details of all individuals arrested in relation to the riots and matches the home addresses and offence locations of suspects. Since it is typically argued that individuals act rationally during a riot (i.e. that their decisions are based on some cost/benefit analysis)16,17,18 these observations can be used to inform a model of the actions of rioters.
A fundamental observation is the predominant targeting of retail sites, reflecting the acquisitive nature of much offending. Crimes against commercial premises, including both acquisitive crime and criminal damage, accounted for 51% of all offences in the UK as a whole37, and offences clustered in areas such as Clapham Junction, Croydon, Ealing and Brixton. This can be immediately reconciled with crime pattern theory23; the richness of opportunity at retail premises is likely to be common knowledge amongst riot participants, and they therefore act as crime attractors. In line with this, for our model we adopt a system of retail centres as the sites of disorder.
We also consider the origins of offenders, i.e. the locations of their residences, and, therefore, the distances they travelled to the sites where they offended. As seen in Figure 1a, the flows of offenders follow a clear distance-decay relationship. Although statistical tests38 find that the distribution does not correspond to most common forms, the best fit is provided by an exponential distribution with parameter 0.274. An offender's perception of distance does not necessarily aggregate to an exponential distance decay, since other factors, some of which are temporally-varying, are likely to contribute, and we nevertheless incorporate an exponential distance decay within in our model. Distributions such as these are reminiscent of those seen in the analysis of flows in retail systems39,40, and so, noting also the central role of commercial centres, we model the behaviour of rioters partly by analogy with this.
Figure 1: Observations from arrest data. (a) Log-linear plot of the complementary cumulative distribution function of D, the distance between residential and offence locations. The straight line shows a hypothetical exponential distribution with parameter 0.274 (±0.01 for a 95% confidence interval), for which the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance statistic is 0.0246 (which compares with 0.332 for the equivalent fitted power-law). (b) Lorenz curve for the distribution of riot locations amongst Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs; UK census units with average population approximately 1,500) ranked according to deprivation (where 1 is most deprived). The dashed line represents perfect equality. (c) Relationship between area-level deprivation and the proportion of residents involved in disorder, where the horizontal axis represents a score derived from IMD so that all values lie in [0, 1] and so that London's most deprived area is given a value of 1. d) Temporal distribution of recorded crime. Full size image
Analysing the riot locations further, we explore the relationship between deprivation and offending. Figure 1b shows that a disproportionately high number of offences occurred in more deprived areas (approximately 50% within the 20% most deprived), using the UK's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) to rank census units. Looking instead at suspects' residences, Figure 1c shows the average proportion of riot suspects for groups of LSOAs ordered by deprivation, where in this case, anticipating its incorporation as a variable in the model, we use a deprivation score based on IMD ranking. A relationship between offending and deprivation has also been found elsewhere37, and youth unemployment and child poverty have also been identified41. That the most deprived areas acted disproportionately as both origins and destinations will clearly influence the distance distribution, and vice versa, but work elsewhere shows that both effects persist when controlling for the other21.
With this notion in mind, we incorporate the deprivation score discussed above as a feature within our model, allowing for a higher probability of offending in deprived areas.
We also note distinctive temporal patterns in the riot data, as seen in Figure 1d. From the small initial disturbance, incidents escalated in volume and intensity on each successive day, with police response growing in line with this, from 3,480 on Saturday evening to 16,000 by Tuesday5. This may also be seen at the scale of individual days, where the majority of criminality took place at night and built to a peak in the early hours. Whilst various explanations for this have been put forward, a particularly compelling one suggests that awareness of disorder provided a self-reinforcing stimulus to rioter involvement6, and a contagion-based model is therefore appealing.
Model
We develop a mathematical model with the aim of exploring the spatial and temporal patterns of the events in London. Recognising that non-linearities inherent in the system imply a significant dependence on initial conditions (which are unknown), and that numerous factors not considered here are likely to play a material role, we do not seek to replicate exactly the London events. Rather, we aim to produce a ‘generative’ type model which can give rise to realistic patterns and macro-level behaviour that insight might plausibly be gained through analysis of the underlying dynamics.
Our model draws on elements of several existing ones; our contribution is in their combination and adaptation to produce an integrated spatial model of disorder, and in the analysis of varying police strategies. The model can be divided into three components: an epidemiological model for riot participation, a spatial interaction model (SIM)42 for the spatial allocation of rioters and police, and a model for interaction between rioters and police previously applied in the context of civil violence26.
General concepts
The model is defined across a discrete system of two entities: residential areas and retail centres. These are indexed by i and j respectively and embedded in space, and we use LSOAs and defined ‘retail cores’ when considering London. Participating individuals are notionally tracked through the system via a logical sequence which involves a decision to participate taking place at their home, a choice of site at which to offend, and possible removal due to arrest by police officers. These officers are active at all times but may move and be located according to different principles.
To model rioters' decisions, some concept of the attractiveness of a riot site is required. This is formulated using a ‘cost/benefit’ structure, as is normal for SIMs, where benefit represents the potential reward at a site and cost embodies both travel cost and the deterrent effect of police.
We assume that the benefit for site j is given by the logarithm of Z j, a non-dimensional measure of its relative value (e.g. the ratio of j's floorspace to the mean across the system), as is a standard assumption in retail models of this type43,44, reflecting diminishing returns to scale. For b ij, the benefit of site j as perceived by an individual in i, we therefore have Turning to deterrence, we suggest that the primary gauge by which an individual assesses whether the situation at a site is conducive to riot is the probability of arrest, determined by the relative numbers of rioters and police: low perceived chance of capture encourages participation. Several such expressions for probability of arrest have been proposed; in this case we take an adapted version of the formulation of Epstein26 as our starting point: where Q j is the number of police officers in j, D j the number of rioters in j, and a the number of police officers required, on average, to ‘contain’ one rioter. The use of the floor function has empirical motivation; the Metropolitan Police review of the London disorder11 explicitly states that “decisions were made not to arrest due to the prioritisation of competing demands…specifically, the need to protect emergency services, prevent the spread of further disorder and hold ground until the arrival of more police resources”. Accordingly, when the police are ‘outnumbered’ at a site (i.e. Q j < aD j ), the situation is considered to be out of control and the police are unable to make any arrests without the addition of ‘backup’ (and thus the probability is 0). On the basis that increased probability corresponds to increased deterrence, we therefore express deterrence thus: We also incorporate a linear function of the distance between residential areas and riot sites, as is typical for analogous retail systems. Taking this as proportional to d ij, the distance between the centroids of i and j, we can then combine with (2) and (3) to obtain the full expression for benefit - cost: where the w n are constants. The associated attractiveness term W ij which appears in the terms of the spatial interaction model can, as described elsewhere44, then be written as follows: where α r, β r and γ r (which itself absorbs a) are parameters to be obtained in calibration with real-world data (the subscript r denoting reference to riot participants). It is through the form of (5) that an exponential distance decay, discussed in the previous section, features in the model.
Riot participation
Motivated by the hypothesis, consistent with the temporal progression of the riots, that exposure to nearby disorder had the effect of inciting participation, we propose a Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model45; that is, a mechanism akin to infection by which individuals transfer to an active rioting state according to their level of exposure. Recalling the correlation between propensity to riot and deprivation, we also incorporate this, and the function we propose is therefore: where ρ i is a measure of the deprivation in i (which we take to be based upon the IMD) and μ an exponent to be calibrated. A logistic function is used here to represent the existence of a threshold at which rioting becomes appealing; any transition is likely to be localised rather than gradual. Intuitively, this probability will be small when the overall attractiveness of potential riot areas is low, whereas, when the ‘ambient’ level of rioting is high, the probability of offending tends towards. From another perspective, where two areas were equally exposed to disorder, greater participation would arise in the more deprived of the two.
Translating this to the macro-level for a residential area i, we therefore find an expression for N i (t), the rate at which individuals choose to participate at time t. Under the assumption that decisions are independent between individuals, this is given by the product of population size and decision probability, where η is an infection rate and I i (t) the number of inactive individuals resident in area i. We can now formulate expressions for I i (t) and R i (t), the number of rioters whose residence is in a given zone i, as well as their change in a time period [t, t + δt). These, along with their initial conditions (I i (0) is the residential population of i and R i (0) a seed of participants, to be chosen) determine the numbers of individuals of each type, in each residential area, at all times. The choice to structure the model in this way is motivated by our focus on the residential origins of rioters, since it enables us to understand the composition of rioting groups in these terms. At this stage we also include an extra term C i (t), to be fully defined later, for the rate at which participants from i are arrested at time t:
Spatial assignment
We assign active rioters to sites of disorder using an entropy-maximising SIM; the purpose of these models is to estimate the most probable flows in a spatial system such as ours, given certain constraints42.
Rather than incorporating the attractiveness function, W ij, directly into the spatial interaction equations, we use its moving average over a number of previous time steps, for several reasons: to account for factors such as travel time on the part of rioters, to represent ‘lag’ in the spread of information through the system, and to dampen the effect of sudden fluctuations in attractiveness. The values used to determine the assignments at a given time, referred to as effective attractiveness and denoted, are therefore the average values of W ij over the L r most recent time steps in our discretised temporal scheme (which has intervals δt; when t < (L r – 1)δt, we ‘pad’ with the t = 0 value): Following the standard entropy maximising derivation of a SIM44, it can be shown that S ij, an estimate of the number of rioters from i who are participating in disorder in j at time t is given by: An identical expression for S ij may be formulated using an alternative derivation: by considering (4) as a utility term in a conditional logit model46. In either case, summing over residential areas i yields the total number of rioters D j in j: It should be noted here that each time unit is therefore implicitly defined as the mean time taken for each participant to travel from a home location to a chosen riot site.
The assignment of police resources to areas of disorder is also realised via a SIM, as for riot participants; there are, however, noteworthy differences. First, police units have no ‘home’ location and are active and situated at potential sites of disorder at all times. The response lag L p is also different to that for rioters (and intended to be higher); reflecting the delay in learning of the plans and movements of rioters, and conferring upon the rioters a degree of ‘first-mover advantage’.
The main difference for police, however, is in the attractiveness function, analogous here to the requirement for officers at a given site. Following a similar argument to that of the rioters seen in (4), we assume the benefit - cost of police follows: This expression (13) includes no spatial decay term, reflecting the fact that the police do not prioritise incidents on the basis of proximity10 and can travel to incidents rapidly. In addition, the second term is a function of rioter numbers only: given that their aim is to eliminate all disorder, the number of police already at a site is likely to be immaterial to the police. As in (5) and described elsewhere44, the attractiveness function V j representing police requirement, is therefore: where α p and γ p are, as before, parameters to be calibrated which encode the relative importance of the two factors. Following the identical process seen with (5) above, we may first calculate effective requirement to take into account time lags in the system, and, in conjunction with a SIM, as in (11) and (12), can derive an expression for the total number of police officers in location j at time t: where P is the total number of police officers in the system.
Interaction between police and rioters
To model the interaction of police and rioters, we return to the mechanism of arrest and its associated probability described previously. This gives the probability |
that with the ongoing effects of climate change, there are still many unanswered questions about how this change will affect marine life. The rapid uptake of heat energy and CO2 by the ocean results in a series of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, including reductions in pH and it’s carbonate saturation state. Currently surface waters are supersaturated with respect to all forms of calcium carbonate, however with increasing ocean acidification the ocean pH falls and reduces the carbonate ion concentration, making the calcium carbonate structures of organisms vulnerable to dissolution¹. For example, mussels and oysters have shown to exhibit a 55% decrease in shell and body growth at pH 7.3 ², with net calcification decreasing by 25% at 2 times the pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels as predicted for the year 2050. Coccolithophores, planktonic algae which produce blooms so large they are visible from space, produce calcitic liths or plates. Experiments indicate that some species (e.g. Emiliania huxleyi and Gephyrocapsa oceanica) may experience decreased rates of calcification by 16% at 2 times current CO2 levels and 30% at 3 times CO2 levels ³. It has also been suggested that to compensate for this struggle to maintain calcification, some organisms may be forced to reallocate resources away from productive endpoints such as growth4. Overall, different species and groups of marine animals vary in their ability to cope with, and compensate for, hypercapnia (elevated CO2 levels) and lowered pH 5 with implications for marine trophic interactions.
Over the past 20 years, measurements have shown that surface ocean pH has reduced by 0.1 pH unit relative to pre-industrial levels, which equates to a 26% increase in ocean acidity and by the end of the twenty-first century, reductions of 0.4 – 0.5 pH are predicted to occur 6. With the rate at which ocean acidification is accelerating, scientists, resource managers, and policymakers recognise the urgent need to strengthen the science as a basis for taking action to prevent further damage to our oceans.
Photo credit: Leyre Villota Nieva (BAS)
Article Source: Peck, L. S., Clark, M. S., Power, D., Reis, J., Batista, F. M. and Harper, E. M. (2015), Acidification effects on biofouling communities: winners and losers. Global Change Biology. doi: 10.1111/gcb.12841
Additional Sources:
Orr, James C.; et al. (2005). “Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the twenty-first century and its impact on calcifying organisms”. Nature 437 (7059): 681–686.Bibcode:2005Natur.437..681O. doi:10.1038/nature04095.PMID 16193043. Archived from the original on 2008-06-25. Michaelidis, B., Ouzounis, C., Paleras, A. and Pörtner, H.O. (2005) Effects of longterm moderate hypercapnia on acid–base balance and growth rate in marine mussels Mytilus galloprovincialis. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 293, 109–
118. Riebesell, U., Zondervan, I., Rost, B., Tortell, P. D., Zeebe, R. E., Morel, F. M. M. (2000) Reduced calcification of marine plankton in response to increased atmospheric CO2. Nature, 407, 364–367. Hannah L. Wood, John I. Spicer and Stephen Widdicombe (2008). “Ocean acidification may increase calcification rates, but at a cost”. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275 (1644): 1767–1773.doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.0343. PMC 2587798.PMID 18460426. Pörtner H.O, Langenbuch M, Reipschläger A. Biological impact of elevated ocean CO2 concentrations: lessons from animal physiology and earth history. J. Oceanogr. 2004; 60 :705–718.doi:10.1007/s10872-004-5763-0 Doney SC. 2010 The growing human footprint on coastal and open-ocean biogeochemistry. Science 328, 1512– 1516. (doi:10.1126/science.1185198)ST. PETERSBURG — When Straight Outta Compton hits theaters today, Tampa Bay moviegoers can see it from Sarasota to Clearwater to Plant City.
But not in St. Petersburg.
The city's lone multiplex, Muvico Sundial 19, doesn't have the Universal Pictures release on its schedule despite industry analysts pegging it to be No. 1 at the weekend box office, projected to earn $32 million.
It's unclear why the rags-to-riches biopic about five young, black gangsta rap pioneers wasn't booked in St. Petersburg.
Carmike Cinemas, which manages Sundial 19, is showing Straight Outta Compton at other theaters it operates in Palm Harbor, Ybor City and Tampa.
Theater staff confirmed the film isn't showing in St. Petersburg and referred all inquiries to the chain's Columbus, Ga., headquarters. Representatives from Carmike and the Edwards Group, which owns Sundial, did not return multiple telephone requests for comment.
Local leaders, however, are questioning why the movie is available everywhere in Tampa Bay except St. Petersburg.
"St. Petersburg is a diverse community," said City Council member Karl Nurse, who represents one of St. Petersburg's two mostly black districts. "You would hope that the movie theater in town would show a broad spectrum of movies and not black out a movie for reasons I don't understand.
"A third of the city is not white, and you are the only theater in town. Why would you turn that (movie) away?"
Council member Wengay Newton, whose constituency also is chiefly African-American, was concerned by the omission of Straight Outta Compton from the 19-screen theater's lineup. When he learned of the situation, Newton called Carmike's corporate offices for an explanation. His message was not returned as of press time.
"They've always been a good corporate partner, providing jobs for our youth," he said. "This is kind of unusual."
The movie also isn't scheduled to play at Carmike's Royal Palm 20 in Bradenton.
Straight Outta Compton profiles the group N.W.A., which made a name in the 1980s with lyrics reflecting inner-city frustration and anger created by police brutality. Some songs objectified women and romanticized gang culture. One hit track titled F- - - Tha Police raised hackles from Tipper Gore and the FBI.
Because of the volatile subject matter of the movie, the current state of unrest after various unarmed black men have been killed by police and shootings in movie theaters, Universal has offered to reimburse theaters for the cost of extra security for opening weekend if they feel the need to have it, according to the Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Sundial has strong security in place at all times, Nurse said, and has avoided attracting the crowds of restless teenagers that plagued its predecessor, BayWalk. In the 2000s, the shopping plaza's reputation was stained by brawls, gunfire, clashes with police and protesters of all ages.
"It's not a color thing," Nurse said, referring to the younger people who regularly crowded the courtyard. "You've got raging hormones and a lot of energy. If you have a couple thousand kids hanging out late at night, eventually, somebody is going to have some trouble."
The Edwards Group has worked to avoid any such recurrences by bolstering security and razing the building that once enclosed the retail center's courtyard. The Edwards Group does not own the movie theater at the rear of the plaza.
Straight Outta Compton has a strong local connection. One of the movie's executive producers is St. Petersburg native Will Packer, a 1991 St. Petersburg High School graduate. Packer, who is considered one of Hollywood's more successful producers, could not be reached for comment.
Contact Katherine Snow Smith at [email protected] Follow @snowsmith. Contact Steve Persall at [email protected] Follow @StevePersall.The family of Derek Boogaard has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the National Hockey League.
It contends that the N.H.L. is responsible for the physical trauma and brain damage that Boogaard sustained during six seasons as one of the league’s top enforcers, and for the addiction to prescription painkillers that marked his final two years.
Boogaard was under contract to the Rangers when he was found dead of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers and alcohol on May 13, 2011. He was 28. He was posthumously found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.
“To distill this to one sentence,” said William Gibbs, a lawyer for the Boogaards, “you take a young man, you subject him to trauma, you give him pills for that trauma, he becomes addicted to those pills, you promise to treat him for that addiction, and you fail.”
The N.H.L., through a spokesman, declined to comment Sunday.
In 55 pages of detailed accusations, the suit does not seek specific damages to be awarded to Boogaard’s parents and four siblings. It asks that a trial jury determine “a sum in excess of the minimum jurisdictional limit” for each of eight counts in the suit.The battle for Mr. Singer’s support — which included months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by aides and appearances by candidates over the last year at dinners and breakfasts convened by Mr. Singer — underscores the growing clout of big donors in presidential elections, particularly this year, when “super PACs,” and the wealthy donors who finance them, have moved to the center of the race.
But Mr. Singer provides something that some other coveted Republican donors do not. Unlike Sheldon Adelson, a fellow Republican billionaire and Israel supporter, Mr. Singer is an assiduous and effective “bundler” for candidates: In the 2012 campaign, he raised more than $3 million to try to help elect Mitt Romney, the eventual Republican nominee. Many other donors, particular in the New York financial world, turn to Mr. Singer’s political advisers for strategic guidance on their own donations.
And Mr. Rubio, who struggled to raise campaign cash over the summer and has relied heavily on outside groups to pay for advertisements promoting him, needs their help.
Both Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush eagerly sought Mr. Singer’s backing, as did Mr. Christie, and all three have ties to the wealthy hedge fund manager.
Mr. Rubio has aggressively embraced the cause of wealthy pro-Israel donors like Mr. Adelson, whom the senator is said to call frequently, and Mr. Singer, who both serve on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, an umbrella group for Republican Jewish donors and officials. Mr. Bush has been less attentive, in the view of some of these donors: Last spring, he refused to freeze out his longtime family friend James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, after Mr. Baker spoke at the conference of a liberal Jewish group.
The lobbying of Mr. Singer intensified in recent weeks as Mr. Bush’s debate stumbles and declining poll numbers drove many donors to consider Mr. Rubio anew. Last week, Mr. Bush’s campaign manager, Danny Diaz, and senior adviser, Sally Bradshaw, flew to New York to make personal appeals on Mr. Bush’s behalf, in the hopes of heading off an endorsement of Mr. Rubio, according to two people close to the former governor’s campaign.
But Mr. Singer had been leaning toward Mr. Rubio, and there was no single moment that convinced him, these people said. It was time to make his support known. Mr. Singer, according to people familiar with his thinking leading up to the endorsement, takes his time weighing an endorsement in presidential races, after making an early commitment to Rudolph W. Giuliani in the 2008 race and seeing his candidate falter.(Reuters) - U.S. states have sued Novartis over accusations the Swiss drugmaker paid kickbacks to a New York pharmacy company to promote its Exjade drug to treat excessive iron in the blood, the New York Attorney General said.
The logo of Swiss drugmaker Novartis is seen at its headquarters in Basel October 22, 2013. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
The complaint, unsealed on Wednesday, says Novartis paid New York-based specialty pharmacy company BioScrip to keep patients on Exjade at a time when the Swiss company feared patients were discontinuing its use because of harmful side effects.
The drug was approved in 2005 and the charges allege that the kickbacks started two years later.
Novartis disputed the claims and said it would defend itself against the litigation.
The complaint against Novartis was filed under the New York False Claims Act and other statutes in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
New York filed a joint complaint with eight other states in the case, which was initiated by a whistleblower, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a news release.
BioScrip has agreed to pay $895,000 to resolve claims against it in the case, Schneiderman said. Of that, $489,000 will go to reimburse federal taxpayer dollars paid by New York’s Medicaid program and $405,000 will go to repay state Medicaid funds. A portion of the total will also go to the whistleblower who made the initial allegations.
“This arrangement between Novartis and BioScrip was dangerous for patients and is against the law,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “Our lawsuit against Novartis and our agreement with BioScrip send a clear message: Drug companies cannot pay pharmacies to promote drugs directly to patients.”
Novartis said its interactions with BioScrip were part of its efforts to assure patients were properly managing a serious disease through the use of Exjade, which is prescribed for patients who suffer dangerous iron overload in the blood following transfusions.
“The company disputes the allegations made by the Attorney General for the State of New York related to Novartis Pharmaceutical Company’s (NPC) interactions with specialty pharmacy BioScrip and intends to defend itself in this litigation,” André Wyss, NPC President, said in an emailed statement.
NPC is the U.S. based unit of Swiss-based Novartis AG.Conservative televangelist Joel Osteen on Thursday asserted that homosexuality was a sin and not “God’s best” — but at the same time, he said had not chosen to be straight.
During an interview on CNN, host Soledad O’Brien asked Osteen how he could claim to be uplifting LGBT people while also telling them they were sinners.
“It seems like in Christianity, sometimes we categorize sin,” Osteen explained. “I mean pride is a sin, being critical is a sin, being negative is a sin.”
“Those are all things you can change,” O’Brien noted.
“I don’t think it’s God’s best,” the evangelist insited.
“You would say, the scripture says homosexuality is a sin,” the CNN host noted.
“Exactly,” Osteen agreed.
“When you’re talking to your 45,000 people in your service and some of them are gay, you’re saying to them, ‘You’re a sinner,'” O’Brien pressed.
“That’s what I believe, that the scripture condemns it,” Osteen replied. “It says it’s a sin, but it also says, you know, lying is and that being prideful is.”
O’Brien once again pointed out that liars made a choice to be “sinners,” but LGBT people did not.
“I know I have not chosen to be straight, I feel like that’s who I am,” Osteen admitted. “I don’t understand all those issues so, you know, I try to stick on the issues I do understand. I know this: I’m for everybody, I’m not for pushing people down. … I don’t know were the fine line is, but I do try to stay in my lane.”
Speaking to Fox News earlier this year, Osteen said that he thought there should be some rights for gay men and lesbians, but stopped short when it came to marriage equality.
“I’m not for gay marriage, but I’m not for discriminating against people,” he told host Chris Wallace.
Watch this video from CNN’s Starting Point, broadcast Sept. 20, 2012.Set 1
Sugaree, Me & My Uncle-> Big River, Peggy-O, Cassidy, Friend Of The Devil, Minglewood Blues, From The Heart Of Me, Ramble On Rose, Jack Straw*-> Deal
Set 2
I Need A Miracle, Ship of Fools, Estimated Prophet-> He's Gone-> Drums-> Truckin'-> The Other One-> Stella Blue-> Good Lovin', E: Casey Jones
*Bobby reportedly sings "We used to play for acid, now we play for Clive"
Notes:
-- All disc changes are seamless
-- The pitch is not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was
-- Thanks to David Young and Rich Rothenberg for the tapes
-- Thanks to Joe B. Jones for his help with the pitch correction
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comment Reviews
Reviewer: nsp - - November 12, 2013
Subject: Now we play for Clive.... is a reference to Clive Davis(Arista records), with whom the Dead were under contract with at the time. - November 12, 2013Now we play for Clive....
Reviewer: GermanShepherd - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - November 12, 2013
Subject: Jack Straw Anyone else notice Bob sing "We used to play for acid, now we play for life." Love those subtle lyric changes. I don't know who or what Clive is, so I'm sticking with what I heard. And listen to that Stella...is there any more passion this guy could give us? Love ya & miss ya, Jer. - November 12, 2013Jack Straw
Reviewer: Dylan M - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - September 19, 2013
Subject: Jack Straw Is absolutely stunning. Perhaps an all time best solo by Jerry. Some stellar 79' shows tend to be overlooked as it was a transitional year for the band in many ways, but his playing at this show and particularly on Straw makes up for some tape hiss or clunky Keith chops.
Love this show, the Springfield Civic Show and of course the Oakland swan-song for Keith and Donna. - September 19, 2013Jack Straw
Reviewer: weironamissionfrombob - favorite favorite favorite - September 19, 2013
Subject: good show This is a solid show, this source is better than the other sbd, but I think the audience is the way to go for this one...no hiss - September 19, 2013good show
Reviewer: chris phillips - favorite favorite favorite - January 30, 2013
Subject: Fumes We are lucky to have even this quality based on what I have heard previously. One highlight is Jack Straw which coincidentally contains one of the more egregious examples of Bob stepping on a Jerry solo (utterly unforgivable). This show features a true version of Stella Blue. Casey Jones was totally apropos given the situation. Keep in mind that the two previous shows were amazing. - January 30, 2013Fumes
Reviewer: erik65 - favorite favorite - January 11, 2012
Subject: The hiss is HUGE and it's not just between songs. - January 11, 2012The hiss is HUGE
Reviewer: Tourhead55 - favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 11, 2012
Subject: Nice The sound quality is better then sub-par. only notice the hiss when the bands not playing. there are a lot worst quality shows out there i happily listen to.
This is the first show under Arista Records - January 11, 2012NiceStorm of Sigmar update 1
These must be the first ‘modern’ Games Workshop models I’ve painted. Certainly I could tell the difference from painting the Bones or Historical models I’ve painted over the past couple of years.
In contrast these were… not fiddly exactly, but the detail required a level of focus to bring out. I could not imagine painting an army of those Khorne footsoldiers, but a squad will go nicely in the Silver Tower somewhere.
Here’s the full group:
Here is the Slaughterpriest by himself. He’s a large model, and very nicely sculpted. As plastic heroes go in modern miniatures, this guy is a the top of the ladder.
Here is the group minus the Slaughterpriest
Overall I’m happy with how they came out, and the muted blue on the loincloths was a nice contrast to the red. I also opened by pot of Brazen Brass for the first time in a decade and it was still usable, so that’s nice.
Next I’ll tackle the three armoured Khorne soldiers. Don’t ask me to remember what they are called. Blood- something, no doubt.
AdvertisementsRaymond Johnson, a 26-year-old construction worker fromCharleston, S.C., was recently denied Medicaid coverage for breast cancer treatment because he is a man.
Johnson has said he was surprised to learn his diagnosis, which doctors discovered after he experienced chest pain over the July 4th weekend. But every couple of years, a case of a man getting the disease puts men with breast cancer in the news. In 2002, former Sen. Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass.) fought the disease, which he discovered when his wife felt a lump under his right nipple. According to this report from the New York Times, Brooke had suffered chest pain for some time but never thought it might be breast cancer.
More recently, it was Kiss drummer Peter Criss' turn to put men and breast cancer in the spotlight. He discovered he had the disease in 2008, and has been an outspoken advocate of early treatment.
The American Cancer society's pages on breast cancer in men lay out the facts. About 2,000 men are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, which makes it rare: about 100 times more women get the disease. Men -- just like women -- are more likely to develop cancer if they have certain mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Family history and age contribute to a man's likelihood of developing the disease as well. Heavy drinking and exposure to radiation are believed to be risk factors, as is obesity. A recent breast cancer cluster among men who had been exposed to contaminated drinking water at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune had patients wondering if there was also a link between chemical exposure and the disease.
Johnson will undergo chemotherapy and surgery to remove his cancer. He still doesn't know how he'll pay the bills.Alec Baldwin might be the most famous President Donald Trump impersonator on the planet, but that doesn’t intimidate Ed Sheeran.
In a new promo for this weekend’s Saturday Night Live, musical guest Sheeran shows off his Trump impression in front of Baldwin, who is hosting for a record 17th time.
“You do a really good Trump impression,” says SNL cast member Cecily Strong, who joins the guys for the promo.
“Thanks so much,” says a smiling Baldwin, who is clearly accustomed to similar praise.
“Oh no, I’m sorry — I was talking to Ed,” says Strong, correcting a surprised Baldwin. “He was cracking everybody up. Ed, do it.”
Without skipping a beat, the “Shape of You” crooner busts out his take on POTUS: “Terrific!” says Sheeran, lowering his voice while acing Trump’s signature hand moves.
RELATED: Hear more of the latest TV news from this week
“So good!” says Strong, laughing. Baldwin, meanwhile, doesn’t look so impressed.
Watch the promo in the video above. Baldwin, Sheeran, and Strong will take center stage again when SNL airs Saturday at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC.I figured it was fitting since both are voice by Jessica DiCicco. I've been itching to post this online for a while.
This one took a while. I had to plan out how the pic would look, measure everything looked at reference pics for all the characters here, then design the outfits and make it look like the kids are doing cosplay, trace my design to transfer onto the finalized picture, redo it again because I accidentally erased my work, then go into detail with the backgrounds. The background in the second box especially killed a lot of time.
I know Lucy doesn't like pink. However, we've seen her take a break from the darkness once in a while and something tells me she has a soft spot for creepy yet romantic (or yandere in this case) characters.
It took a while but I like how it turned out. Hope you guys like it.Most Americans think the U.S. should participate in the Paris Agreement
In December 2015, officials from 197 countries (nearly every country in the world) met in Paris at the United Nations Climate Change Conference and negotiated a global agreement to limit global warming. On Earth Day, April 2016, the U.S. and 174 other countries signed the agreement, with most of the others following suit since then.
What do American voters in the U.S. and in every state think about U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement? And what do Trump voters think?
Using methods developed for the Yale Climate Opinion Maps, we find that a majority of Americans in every state say that the United States should participate in the Paris Climate Agreement. (For more details about this map, see Methods below.)
Using methods developed for the Yale Climate Opinion Maps, we find that a majority of Americans in every state say that the United States should participate in the Paris Climate Agreement.
2. By a more than 5 to 1 margin, voters say the U.S. should participate in the Paris Agreement.
In a nationally representative survey conducted after the election, we found that seven in ten registered voters (69%) say the U.S. should participate in the COP21 agreement, compared with only 13% who say the U.S. should not. Majorities of Democrats (86%) and Independents (61%), and half of Republicans (51%) say the U.S. should participate (including 73% of moderate/liberal Republicans). Only conservative Republicans are split, with marginally more saying the U.S. should participate (40%) than saying we should not participate (34%).
3. About half of Trump voters say the U.S. should participate in the Paris Agreement.
Almost half of Trump’s voters (47%) say the U.S. should participate in the Paris agreement, compared with only 28% who say the U.S. should not.
Methods
Two questions about the Paris climate agreement in two different surveys were posed to survey participants (the percentage of Americans who chose each response is in parentheses):
1. In your opinion, how important is it that the world reach an agreement this year in Paris to limit global warming? (n=1330; October 2015)
“Not at all important” (14%)
“A little bit important” (9%)
“Moderately important” (24%)
“Extremely important” (21%)
“Not sure” (14%)
“Refused” (1%)
2. Do you think the U.S. should participate in this agreement, or not participate? (n=1226; November, 2016)
“Should participate” (67%)
“Should not participate” (14%)
“Don’t know” (19%)
“Refused” (0%)
To estimate support among Americans in each state, responses to the two questions above were grouped into two categories — support or oppose — as follows:
Support = Q1: “A little bit important”, “Moderately important”, “Extremely important”, or Q2: “Should participate”
Oppose = Q1: “Not at all important”, or Q2: “Should not participate”
Margins of error for the state data are +/-10%, which includes potential error from the original surveys as well as from the modeling.My company’s cornerstone principles is manage yourself. As long as you get stuff done, no-one will mind when you’re in the office. Remote work seemed like a logical next step for self management. We wanted to accommodate each of our 40+ team members’ working styles.
Since my company grew organically, without outside investment, and has less than 10% annual turnover for people who pass probation, I’m pretty sure we got something right.
Remote work wasn’t one of them.
Below are my reflections as a CEO on what we did, why we did it, and what actually happened. As a small development agency, we were able to implemented remote work after a quick discussion — basically an experiment after an implied hypothesis of how we thought people wanted to work. What we underestimated was the effort that the entire company would have to make remote work work.
Remote Work 0.1
Image by NASA via Unsplash
The reason we (Roy, Rick, and myself) set up our first office was for us to come back to the office occasionally and hang out. In the end, everyone came everyday so… it became an actual office.
As fresh graduates at the time, we used going to the office as a motivation to get out of bed. Also, many people in Hong Kong live with family, so there’s lots of distraction at home. Maybe it’s a timing thing, as I’ve read people with families value the time they spend with their kids.
Remote Work 0.2
Image by Francois Hoang via Unsplash
A more recent case came when we brought a Taipei developer, Johnny, on board. At first, Johnny wanted to work remotely as a change from his previous job in a large company. But after three days at coffee shops, your neck starts to hurt. Three days at home and you feel like a loner.
After going between home, cafes and co-working spaces, he really wanted to have a proper office. Having stable internet, adjusted monitors, your own keyboard, and a place to leave work behind became more important.
Because Taiwan is culturally close to Hong Kong and has engineering talents, we took the opportunity to setup our first satellite office in Taipei. Johnny is much happier now with colleagues to go for lunch with like we do in Hong Kong.
So it didn’t quite work out after all — but why?
Work boundaries sometimes break down when you stay at home. While I am proud of my team’s work ethic, it leads to burn out (and I am probably the worst example, still).
While I am proud of my team’s work ethic, it leads to burn out (and I am probably the worst example, still). People who didn’t come to the office missed out on things like ad hoc team lunches and dinners, discussions on the latest tech when a delivery arrives, tastings (wine, whisky, coffee, snacks, and a lot more).
, discussions on the latest tech when a delivery arrives, tastings (wine, whisky, coffee, snacks, and a lot more). Face-to-face meetings are most efficient (examples include Reddit & Yahoo banning remote work). Our team members prefer just walking over to a colleague’s desk to address whatever is on their mind.
(examples include Reddit & Yahoo banning remote work). Our team members prefer just walking over to a colleague’s desk to address whatever is on their mind. Ideas happen in person — over lunch or when someone is walking by a colleague’s desk and looks over their shoulder. The company hires T-shape people, so we encourage anyone to contribute to projects outside their official role.
— over lunch or when someone is walking by a colleague’s desk and looks over their shoulder. The company hires T-shape people, so we encourage anyone to contribute to projects outside their official role. Technology is always iffy. In meetings, it boils down to Wi-Fi speeds, audio quality, and lags.
In meetings, it boils down to Wi-Fi speeds, audio quality, and lags. Efficiency suffers. Trying to chase down files or coordinate working schedules for handing off is always a challenge. In addition, remote work doesn’t allow for quick adaptation or response to ad hoc issues. We trust our team members who some times work from home, but there can be lags in responses that wouldn’t happen in the office.
Trying to chase down files or coordinate working schedules for handing off is always a challenge. In addition, remote work doesn’t allow for quick adaptation or response to ad hoc issues. We trust our team members who some times work from home, but there can be lags in responses that wouldn’t happen in the office. Differences in working styles become more acute. For example, our project managers have different management styles and expectations of their developers. Some PMs are understanding of time zone differences and ad hoc travel reschedules while others prefer fixing meeting times and office hours.
For example, our project managers have different management styles and expectations of their developers. Some PMs are understanding of time zone differences and ad hoc travel reschedules while others prefer fixing meeting times and office hours. Assumptions and lack of documentation became obvious. Balls are dropped or people reinvent the wheel because they are unaware another team member has taken action already. We hate reinventing the wheel, but people are slow to adopt habits such as checking in.
Even though my company had the mindset that made everyone open to remote work (i.e. flexible hours, finish things however it works for you) our company hasn’t set up the infrastructure and habits that support remote work.
Can these problems be fixed? Yes.
People who really want to make it work can check out Buffer’s tools for remote work.
The problems with remote work highlighted other things we took for granted about our office.
Why people kept coming to the office anyway…
Coffee, one of the four office cats aka programming cheerleaders.
The office is a fun place to be (people, cats, games room).
The internet is faster.
Various other perks, like the free beer, and free meals such as breakfasts and Friday evening take-out.
And… even with distractions, it’s easier to get stuff done.
The above has made me realize that we have no ambitions to become a distributed team. And that’s okay, too.
Today, we embrace remote working as an option just as much as we did 9+ years ago.
A view of Mt. Fuji from Tokyo, Japan. Taken by one of our remote team members, Athena.
We still value giving our team members flexibility to work efficiently. Currently, two team members are remote working while traveling / living in different countries. Within the framework of self-management and flexibility, these “exceptional” situations aren’t seen as unfair by colleagues, but a different lifestyle choice.
However, we don’t need to over-engineer a system for remote work, or say “yes” to every new hire who wants to work remotely before proving themselves.Big Boss Man, Jack Straw, Row Jimmy, It's All Over Now, Loser, Cassidy, Far From Me, Box Of Rain Uncle John's Band-> Estimated Prophet-> He's Gone-> Jam-> Drums-> Jam-> The Wheel-> Gimme Some Lovin'-> Stella Blue-> Throwing Stones-> Not Fade Away, E:Not Fade Away-> E:Touch Of Gray-> E: Knockin' On Heaven's Door
S:?>D>CD via Chris Larson
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Reviewer: prustygunn - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 27, 2017
Subject: My 28th Show This whole run is really, really solid. The boys showed they were in a great mood. From Big Boss Man to the double encore - you don't see that every day. I especially like Loser and Cassidy from the 1st set. Jerry's solos are quintessential Jerry. I also like that they followed up with Far From Me and Box - getting everyone into the act. Jerry's really pushing the envelope in the outro of He's Gone - maybe something to do with the OD at the campground that weekend. Gimme Some Lovin' is strong, as is Not Fade Away. Jerry's solo after the second verse in NFA - again, quintessential Jerry, just perfect. A great ending to my 21st birthday weekend, and my first (only) Red Rocks shows. - January 27, 2017My 28th Show
Reviewer: njpg - favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 14, 2016
Subject: - Mostly good; the SBD is a bit flat. - August 14, 2016
Reviewer: aadelma@yahoo.com - favorite favorite favorite favorite - April 5, 2011
Subject: We're gonna kick ass!! Of all things, "Gimme Some Lovin" is the highlight of this show. Brent and Phil belted out the vocals on it and really did kick ass as promised! I saw all the Red Rocks shows in the 80's and this was one of the better ones. aadelma@yahoo.com -- April 5, 2011We're gonna kick ass!!
Reviewer: Been here so long... - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 1, 2011
Subject: Last Show On The Rocks The home of my first show in '84 and like a home away from home for all of the mid-late '80's. This run did have a special place in time as it precluded the Telluride 'Harmonic Convergance' weekend! What a great week of music, friends, and fun:) So many incredible memories! - February 1, 2011Last Show On The Rocks
Reviewer: morethanonce - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - February 1, 2011
Subject: I remember Kurt I have so many great memories of these nights, and yes, I remember Littlewing 'cause he was camped in the adjacent site to ours at Chief Hosa - I remember coming back from the gig to our entire area roped off with police tape and the feeling in my gut when I heard the story of his compadres who laid him against a tree as he died 'cause they didn't know what else to do - the tragedy of this day shaped how I viewed the Dead scene thereafter - So many dear friends were lost to drugs in those days...I am sincerely glad to have placed my priority on the music rather than the scene; to still be here today to listen to these amazing recordings and to relive the good and the bad times and feel special because I was there at all - Blessings on all those who seek and journey - February 1, 2011I remember Kurt
Reviewer: BIG_R - favorite favorite favorite favorite - August 14, 2010
Subject: 8-13-87 Nice show. Good matrix recording. - August 14, 20108-13 |
me to…if I’m frustrated and I’m dealing with something, to vent and say what I’m going through so I can hear from an actual clinical person, ‘this is how you should react,’ or ‘it’s good to feel this way because feelings, emotions, and energy are supposed to come and go. It’s not supposed to stay there, you’re not supposed to keep it inside, because it’ll bottle up and you’ll become a monster.'"
The 25-year-old noted that he's not in a position to pass judgement, but he's simply speaking from his own experience.
"For me, dealing with my anger issues and understanding myself and the life I’ve been through, where I’m headed and where I want to be has helped me focus on what’s really important and not F up," he explained. "For anybody who's going through that situation or anybody who's dealing with it -- it’s all about the choices. Every situation is different but it's all about the choices you make and how you control your anger."
"To Ray, or anybody else -- because I’m not better than the next man -- I can just say I’ve been down that road. I deal with situations and I've made my mistakes too, but it's all about how you push forward and how you control yourself."Juniper Park Civic Association President Bob Holden wasn’t the only candidate for office at his group’s meeting last Thursday.
Former Brooklyn Councilman Sal Albanese, running against Mayor de Blasio in September’s Democratic primary, also stopped by to say why he should be the next resident of Gracie Mansion.
“I’m running against de Blasio because I believe major issues are not being addressed by this administration,” Albanese said, “major issues that are important to this city’s future.”
In his approximately 10-minute long speech to the civic, the former school teacher hammered de Blasio on issues ranging from the city’s recent public transportation woes to homeless shelters, a popular topic among those in southwest Queens.
In discussing the transit trials and tribulations straphangers have experienced almost daily in recent months on both the subway and commuter rail systems, Albanese said de Blasio needs to display more leadership in his role as mayor.
He spoke five days before an A train derailment in Manhattan injured 34 riders.
“I ride the train a lot, and I can tell you that the system is melting down because of neglect,” he said. “But the mayor of the City of New York has taken the position that it’s not his job. You can’t take a position that, ‘It’s not my job.’”
While his speech was short on specifics, Albanese said traffic congestion and solving public transportation issues would be his top priorities, if elected.
“When I become the mayor, the first thing I’m going to do is get the best traffic engineers in the city — we have some great minds — and figure out how to move people around the city,” he said. “The environment suffers. Business suffers. We can do a whole lot better.”
Housing was also one of Albanese’s big topics, as he proposed building Mitchell-Lama-style developments of affordable rental housing as an alternative to Mayor de Blasio’s pledge of 90 new homeless shelters to address the city’s climbing undomiciled population.
“The city needs a hands-on mayor who is going to focus on the major problems facing the city,” he said. “You can’t build 90 shelters in this city. It’s never going to happen. You’ve got to build housing that’s affordable.”
In order to pay for such development, Albanese proposed adding a new tax onto the purchase of homes, condos and other dwellings by foreign companies and real estate investors.
In some cases, those homes purchased by foreign citizens remain empty for years after they are bought.
That practice is not unusual in Manhattan, and is becoming more prevalent in Brooklyn.
When it comes to his status as an extreme underdog, Albanese said he believes he is a much stronger candidate than people make him out to be.
“If you read the papers, you would think de Blasio is unbeatable,” the former councilman said. “But most people can’t stand him. We can beat him with help from groups like yours.”
Holden, himself an incredibly vocal critic of Mayor de Blasio, didn’t give Albanese a full-throated endorsement of his candidacy, but did imply that he would be pulling for him in Sept. 12’s primary.
“Any opponent of Bill de Blasio is a friend of ours,” Holden said. “We wish you the best.”Turned Away In Hungary, Migrants Seek Passage Through Croatia
Enlarge this image toggle caption Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty Images
With Hungary's southern border now sealed, many refugees and other migrants are looking for other ways to reach refuge in northern Europe — and they hope to find an answer in a tricky route through Croatia.
Update at 1 p.m. ET: Tear Gas And Water Cannons At Hungary's Border
With thousands of migrants now bottled up in Serbia after Hungary sealed its border, a tense scene played out after frustrations boiled over Wednesday.
From the border, Lauren Frayer reports for our Newscast unit:
"It started with hundreds of migrants and refugees pressed up against a fence on the Serbian side of the border. They tossed plastic bottles at police out of frustration that Hungary has closed this frontier. People can only request asylum at official gates now.
"Women and children edged to the front of the crowd, some holding up babies in an appeal for mercy. "Then some young men broke through the razor wire. Hungarian police responded with tear gas and water cannons, fired over the border into Serbia — triggering a panicked stampede. Hundreds of people retreated farther back into Serbia, rubbing their eyes from pepper spray."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Google Maps Google Maps
Our original post continues:
Hundreds of people who were caught on the Serbian side of Hungary's border when the border was sealed Tuesday are sleeping out in the open, on highways and elsewhere. Many of those who get past Hungary's border fence are being arrested. And now some are heading to Croatia, which has said it's willing to grant them passage to neighboring countries.
From Szeged, on the Hungarian side of the border, Lauren Frayer reports for our Newscast unit:
"Police block journalists from talking to refugees arrested at the side of the road in Hungary. They could go to prison for 3 years, for hopping over a barbed-wire fence from Serbia. "These officers are with Frontex, the European Union's border control agency, here to assist Hungary in sealing its border. "Migrants and refugees who can no longer enter the EU here are looking for alternate routes — through Romania or Croatia. But Hungary has said it'll build another fence on its Romanian border. And there are land mines — left over from the Balkan wars — on Serbia's frontier with Croatia."
More than half of the more than 400,000 migrants who have entered the European Union this year are refugees who are fleeing Syria's civil war, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
They're aiming to reach the Schengen zone, Europe's border-free area, where they hope to find safety and stability after enduring months of violence at home and uncertainty on the road to Europe.
On Wednesday, the first group of "about 150" migrants reached Croatia, the BBC reports.
From Vienna, Kerry Skyring reports on the new route:
"After Croatia, their next destination will be Slovenia which is part of the Schengen zone. "This new route is a challenging one. The Danube River forms much of the border between Serbia and Croatia — part of it still dangerous with land mines from the Yugoslav war. Added to this, high mountain ranges will have to be crossed in Slovenia."
The large influx of migrants across borders has led some countries to adjust their policies. To the west of Hungary, Austria announced emergency actions that take effect Wednesday, seeking to place more formal controls on its border with Hungary. The country also said the tightened rules could be installed elsewhere, if needed.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 4, 2017, 3:52 PM GMT / Updated June 4, 2017, 6:30 PM GMT By Dante Chinni
In a politically unsettled nation, military communities have long been a rock for the Republican Party, solid and true. But new polling data suggest those places have developed some concerns about President Donald Trump.
An analysis of Gallup polling data comparing the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency to the month of May shows that Trump’s job approval in military counties dropped sharply in the last month — from an average 51 percent approval and 41 percent disapproval in the first 100 days to 43 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval for May.
Taken together that is a 16-point swing, from a net 7 percentage points on the positive side in the first 100 days to a net 9 points on the negative side in May. That’s far greater than the overall change in the Gallup data and it may be a sign of an important shift in those places.
The military communities weren’t the only big movers in the Gallup data. Trump’s job approval in exurban communities — wealthy conservative places largely on the edges of urban centers — slid 12 points and dropped into negative territory. But the decline in military communities would be especially noteworthy if it holds in future polls.
Those military communities, defined as Military Post counties in the American Communities Project at George Washington University, have voted for Republican candidates in every presidential election since 2000 by double digits. And they were among Trump’s biggest supporters in November. He won those counties by more than 17 points.
A number of factors may have driven the May decline. Among them, the Russia/Trump campaign investigation news that dominated the month, from the firing of former FBI Director James Comey to the naming of a special counsel, and the president’s often-antagonistic relationship with intelligence services may have played a role. And the president’s proposed budget calls for another round of base closures — something likely to be unpopular with the communities that serve the military.
The biggest question in the military slide, however, may be what it means politically.
Democrats quietly say they see a place to make inroads in 2018. The party has made it clear that it is targeting veterans as candidates for midterm races and there may be some reason to think military voters could be good targets for the party. Along with the poll data, members of racial and ethnic minorities, who are generally Democratic voters, now make up about 40 percent of the active U.S. military — up from 25 percent in 1990, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
But remember, these communities have long been Republican and demographically speaking they still look like Republicans.
They are slightly less diverse than the nation as a whole, 66 percent non-Hispanic white (versus 63 percent nationally). And they have lower levels of educational attainment — 27 percent have a bachelor’s degree or more (versus 30 percent nationally), according to Census data.
Gallup numbers suggest they are more culturally conservative. People living in the military communities are more likely to say religion is important to them than the national average, 66 percent versus 63 percent nationally. In the most Democratic communities, the figure is under 60 percent.
Even if it won't be easy for Democrats to break through in these military communities, however, Trump’s drop in these places is still noteworthy for what it may mean within the GOP.
The nation’s military communities have long been Republican, but the poll drop in May suggests they are less “Trump Republican” now than they were when the president took office.
The numbers look like a softening of support in an important part of the GOP base. And for a president who is having trouble finding support for his agenda, that softening could signal more problems in the months ahead.Most people who saw a video of Donald Trump making lewd sexual comments said in our most recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll that they had a less favorable impression of the GOP nominee. But exactly how bad did people feel during the video? Click on the clips below to watch voters’ opinion drop into negative territory and keep going when it comes to the infamous Trump video and the apology video statement he released in response.
RELATED: Republican Voters Remain Loyal To Trump In First National Poll After Video Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult’s Chief Research Officer, said the 2005 Access Hollywood video stands out as one of the most negative clips he has ever dial-tested. “I’ve tested hundreds of political videos and advertisements, and this is the lowest I have ever seen a dial-test score. For a score to be this low there has to be negative reactions among all Republicans, Democrats and independent viewers,” Dropp said. Respondents were asked to watch the videos and use their mouse or arrow keys to register how positively or negatively they felt about the video, moment to moment. If they didn’t move at all, the score registered as zero. Negative scores go as low as -100, positive scores go up to 100.
LEAKED VIDEO OF TRUMP LEWD COMMENTS
The leaked video of Trump making lewd comments about assaulting women immediately garnered negative views from voters, and continued dropping through the entire clip. Our poll found that 61 percent of voters said the video gave them a less favorable view of Trump, including 48 percent of Republicans.
TRUMP APOLOGY VIDEOThe FBI says it is investigating the possibility that an explosion on Tuesday outside of the Colorado Springs, Colorado, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People may have been an act of domestic terrorism.
"Certainly domestic terrorism is one possibility, among many others," Amy Sanders, media coordinator for FBI's Denver office, told The Huffington Post. "We are investigating all potential motives at this time."
A homemade explosive was detonated Tuesday morning against an exterior wall of a building that houses the NAACP Colorado Springs chapter as well as Mr. G's Hair Design Studios, a local barbershop. There were no deaths or injuries from the explosion and only minimal surface damage was done to the wall where the explosion occurred, but chapter president Henry Allen Jr. said the blast was strong enough to knock objects off the wall.
It remains unclear whether the civil rights organization was specifically targeted. Allen told the Gazette, a Colorado Springs-based newspaper, that he was hesitant to call the explosion a hate crime without more information from the investigation. Sondra Young, president of the NAACP's Denver chapter, said the incident "certainly raises questions of a potential hate crime."
"One thing is clear -- this is an act of domestic terrorism," Young told HuffPost. "In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, 'Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.' This cowardly attempt at a criminal act that is both intolerable and morally reprehensible."
A man described as white, balding and approximately 40 years old has been named by the FBI as a person of interest in the investigation. The bureau said he may be driving a white pickup truck, from the year 2000 or earlier, with paneling, a dark bed liner, an open tailgate and a missing or covered license plate.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force was leading the investigation into the explosion, but the Colorado Springs Police and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have also been involved.
Longtime civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) tweeted on Wednesday that he was "deeply troubled by the bombing in Colorado."
"It reminds me of another period," Lewis added. "These stories cannot be swept under the rug."
For decades, the NAACP has stood up to violence, frequently brought on it from white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Bombings of NAACP offices were common during the 1960s in some southern U.S states. In Alabama, the city of Birmingham was sometimes called "Bombingham" due to a wave of bombings that targeted black homes and churches, including the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four African-American girls.If you have set up Windows 10 on a new machine or upgraded to the new operating system from a previous one, you may be surprised that one of the system's core restoration features, System Restore, may not be running.
System Restore is a handy feature that creates snapshots of certain files and information before critical operations such as updates or software installations takes place.
This enables users of the system to go back to a previous state if things went wrong along the way.
With System Restore disabled on at least some machines, it falls to the user to make sure backups are created regularly so that the system can be restored if the need arises.
If you run Windows 10, you should check the System Restore preference to find out whether it is enabled or not.
Use the shortcut Windows-Pause to open the System control panel applet quickly. Locate the "advanced system settings" link on the left and click on it. Switch to the "system protection" tab on the next screen. There you find listed all drives connected to the system and their protection state. A state of "on" means that System Restore is enabled for the drive. If that is not the case, select the drive and click on the configure button afterwards. Switch to "turn on system protection" and select the maximum storage space that you want system restore to use on the device. A value between 5 to 10 Gigabyte is usually a good option. Click apply and then ok to complete the process. Repeat the process for other drives if necessary.
The system protection tab provides you with options to create a restore point, and to restore a data point that was created earlier.
This may be handy to know as you may sometimes need to restore points manually.
System Restore is not a catch-all solution on the other hand. While it works well usually when it comes to updates or software installations, it may not work at all if other changes are made to the system, for instance by malicious software or data corruption.
System Restore does not replace proper data backup. Check out our free drive backup guide if you need help finding a solution.
Now You: If you run Windows 10, was System Restore enabled or disabled?
Summary Article Name Check if System Restore is enabled on Windows 10 Description Find out the state of System Restore on your computer running Windows 10, and how to enable it if it is not running. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo
AdvertisementThe controversy over the ‘right to be forgotten‘ by Google has often seemed destined to run forever, Google arguing that it was being asked to make “difficult and debatable judgements” based on “very vague and subjective tests,” while European courts said that the company wasn’t fully complying with the law.
Google said that it was complying with court orders by removing “outdated or irrelevant” sensitive information about individuals from its European sites, while leaving the.com site untouched. European courts want Google to remove results from google.com also.
A piece in the WSJ suggests that a compromise may be reached, however, as Google revealed examples of what it described as easy and difficult cases …
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The compromise suggested by Johannes Caspar, the head of the data-protection regulator in Germany, is for Google to use geolocation information to remove results from the.com site when the search request originates from a European Union country. Google already has the technology in place to do this, he suggests, as the company uses this approach to deliver locally-targeted advertising.
Google last year established an advisory council to decide which removal requests would be honoured. It has since shared some statistics on the number of links removed, but has so far said little about how decisions are made.
Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, has now given a rare insight into the process at a privacy conference in Berlin, reports the WSJ.
An easy case: A photo taken of a woman sunbathing topless while on vacation, published without her permission. Others include news stories from years ago about people arrested for petty theft. “We have a lot of easy cases,” Mr. Fleischer said. “The little shoplifting thing, the little this or that. They just come down, forget it, move on.”
Some cases are much harder to decide, he said.
A German national was convicted in the U.S. of a sex crime that occurred when he was 16 years old. The victim was two years younger than him. In the U.S., his name was published. Under German law, his name wouldn’t have been published because he was a minor.
Google eventually decided to remove the link.
Photo: Paul McErlane/BloombergLabour and SNP politicians question why the Queen is gettting so much more money at a time of austerity
The Queen has been awarded a 66% pay rise to fund a £369m 10-year refit of Buckingham Palace, after the prime minister and chancellor agreed that an increase in the sovereign grant was the best way to fund urgent repairs.
Officials warned there was a risk of a potential “catastrophic building failure” if the repairs were not carried out, but backbench Labour and Scottish National party politicians questioned why the monarch was getting so much more money at a time of austerity.
Queen asked for poverty grant to heat palaces Read more
The refurbishment, the biggest undertaken on the property since the second world war, will renew the palace’s 33-year-old boilers, 100 miles of electrical cable, some of it 60 years old, and 20 miles of lead and cast iron pipework.
The Queen will not move out; it had been previously thought she would.
Labour’s MP for Stockton North, Alex Cunningham, said the plans highlighted the disparity in public funding between the south of England and the north-east. “I have always respected the fact that we have a royal family, but I know they also have vast wealth and I don’t know what sort of contributions they will be making towards this project,” he said.
SNP MP Paul Monaghan said it was incredible that the government was ready to spend such large sums on Buckingham Palace while seeking to cut the number of Scotland’s MPs from 59 to 53 in part to save money.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buckingham Palace’s 28-year-old trade yard electrical panel, which staff say is proving increasingly difficult to find replacement parts for. Photograph: Buckingham Palace/PA
Another SNP MP Hannah Bardell said: “The irony is just today the Tory government was debating whether to cut the number of elected representatives in a cost-saving measure. While steps should be taken to maintain and restore such buildings, I’m sure many will find it hard to grasp the millions available to restore Buckingham Palace when Tory cuts are leaving the poorest in our society to suffer.
“The Tories should have brought this matter to the House so the details can be properly scrutinised and debated, rather than making it to the press”.
Once the most urgent work has been completed, further work will be undertaken on a wing-by-wing basis, beginning with the familiar east wing, which faces the Mall.
By phasing the work over 10 years from April 2017, events such as the garden parties, investitures, state visits and changing the guard will be unaffected.
The announcement comes at a time when MPs are considering a £4bn plan for renovations and repairs at the Palace of Westminster.
If the Queen can’t pay the bills, why not sell a palace or two? | David McClure Read more
Royal officials said the refurbishment would “future-proof” Buckingham Palace. Tony Johnstone-Burt, master of the Queen’s household, said: “On completion of the work, we’ll have a palace fit for purpose until 2067.”
David Gauke, the chief secretary to the Treasury, said ministers would hold the royal household to account to ensure “every penny spent achieves the greatest value for money”.
The sovereign grant is the funding formula under which the Queen normally receives 15% of the annual profit from the crown estate. The trustees recommend she receive 25% for the 10 years the work is taking place and the grant should be returned to 15% when building work is finished in 2027.
Conscious of the possibility of adverse public reaction to the enormous cost in times of austerity, one source indicated it was hoped it would appeal to peoples’s “sense of nationhood”.
Though the palace is the venue for glittering state occasions, royal officials have long complained of the crumbling building and the need for it to be updated. Examples include a chunk of masonry falling from the front facade several years ago and narrowly missing the Princess Royal’s car and staff reportedly resorting to catching rainwater in buckets to save art works. Last year, when a workman tried to carry out repairs to the Queen’s private chain-pull toilet, the whole structure reportedly came away from the wall.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some of the ground drainage – a mixture of lead and cast iron pipework. Photograph: Handout/Buckingham Palace via Getty Imag
The Queen spends one third of her working year at Buckingham Palace, which is effectively her administrative headquarters, even though it is her least favourite royal residence. Dating back to the 17th century, the palace has 775 rooms, including 19 state rooms, 52 royal and guest bedrooms, 188 staff bedrooms, 92 offices and 78 bathrooms. First used as a palace by Queen Victoria, it has not been redecorated since 1952.
About 300 staff work in the palace and up to 125 will move into temporary accommodation in the garden during the refurbishment. Among fixtures and fittings to be replaced will be 5,000 light fittings and 2,500 radiators.
The occupied royal palaces are held in trust for the nation and are not owned by the Queen, with the cost of maintaining them borne by the taxpayer. The royal household has been criticised in the past by MPs on the public accounts committee for “not looking after nationally important heritage properties adequately”.
Helen Goodman, Labour MP and member of the Treasury committee, said the timing of the announcement was bad. “The government has stopped providing grants for the building of social housing to rent and yet can give a straightforward grant to Buckingham Palace,” she said.
Graham Smith, of anti-monarchy campaign Republic, described the cost as an absolute disgrace. “The obvious question is why have the royals let it get into this state? Why haven’t they raised revenue through opening up all year round? If the royals can’t look after the buildings and raise their own revenue to fund maintenance it’s time to give them up.Imagine a World Cup in an honest, welcoming, sports-mad country, whose emerging football league would be transformed by local stadia hosting global superstars. Imagine a World Cup where organisers are motivated primarily by a desire to put on a great party for the world. Imagine a World Cup in Australia.
Australia bid for the right to host 2022 but were outmuscled by Qatar, who won by a bizarre landslide, ahead of the United States, South Korea and (separately) Japan at the Dec 2, 2010 vote in Zurich. It was laughable that such a serious bid as Australia should finish last. It summed up Fifa's tainted voting system that the most legitimate bid went out in the first round. It is no surprise that half of the 22 ExCo members involved have since stepped down, some of them totally discredited. This was the vote that probity forgot.
Let us take the alternatives to 2022. The US, for all its magnificent arenas and powerful media, have staged the competition before as have South Korea and Japan. The competition should be pioneering, pushing back the boundaries. Qatar could not be taken seriously from a footballing perspective; there could be no serious footballing legacy from holding the event in such an artificial environment. No integrity.
Fifa argued that the competition should go to a nation where it would nourish football's roots. Australia crave "soccer" games. The enormous crowds that Manchester United and Liverpool pulled in last summer respectively in Sydney (83,127) and Melbourne (95,446) highlights the passion.
The obvious contender was Australia. It accrued one vote. One vote! Imagine if Fifa had done the right thing and acknowledged Australia's rightful claim. Fifa would not be in the mess it is now, drowning in petro-dollars. Renewed allegations linking Qatar with financial inducements are of little surprise. The miscreants named in the story, Mohamed Bin Hammam and the particularly despicable Jack Warner, are now beyond football's jurisdiction, having no role in the game, but Fifa could remove the tournament from Qatar.
It's a pipe-dream of course because the pipe is full of gas and oil. Qatar 2022 will make Fifa fortunes. What Fifa has to combat is the perception that Qatar 2022 has already made people fortunes. Zurich must also address the accusation that Qatar and Fifa are perfect partners: autocratic and money-driven.
Fifa's Teflon man, Sepp Blatter, will again emerge unscathed as he voted for the United States. Fifa needs to act but won't. It is committed to Qatar. Fifa is already taking on European leagues by proposing the desert event takes place in winter, so that players will not keel over in the heat or fans melt on the way to the stadia (and globally-warmed heaven knows what all that stadium air-conditioning does to the environment).
Imagine if 2022 were in Australia. There would be broadcasting issues, frustrations in Europe over kick-off times, but that does not lessen the excitement English cricket fans feel for the Ashes when staged at the MCG etc. Anyway, sporting competitions should not be based solely on the viewing habits of Euro-man. Inevitable changes to working patterns over the next decade, blurring night and day shifts, make time-zones even less of an issue.
Imagine the weather in Australia in June and July, their winter, perfect for a football competition. Imagine the nightlife for fans, the days out on beaches, the trips to incredible places like the Great Barrier Reef or marvelling at the view from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Some of the most iconic stadia names would be used: MCG, Stadium Australia of Olympics fame and the Adelaide Oval. Imagine Australia 2022.
Sadly it won't happen. Qatar will host the World Cup and visiting fans will just have to pinch their noses at the stench.SAN DIEGO (CBS NEWS) - A video streaming tax is already a reality in some cities across the country, but a "Netflix tax" could soon be a reality for some California cities.
According to CBS News, streaming video services are being referred to as an utility so it can be taxed like water and electricity.
For example, the City Council of Pasadena announced a 9.4 percent tax on streaming video, but Pasadena residents' backlash was quick and harsh.
Pasadena City Councilman Tyron Hampton told CBS News the surprise tax was designed to make up for lost tax revenue from people getting rid of cable TV and home phones.
"My constituents do not want this tax. Even if it is just a couple of dollars. It is being taxed twice," he told CBS News.
In 2008, Pasadena voters modernized a law to tax cell phones like landlines, never anticipating it could be applied to video streaming. Forty California cities now have similar laws, according to CBS News.
Internet Association Director Robert Callahan believes cities could be violating federal law, because the government doesn't allow tax on the internet.
"People are going to wake up and see tax line items on their Netflix and Hulu bill and they are not going to be happy," Robert Callahan said.
CBS News reported that Chicago is currently being sued for charging a 9 percent tax on video streaming. And Pennsylvania's charging a 6 percent sales tax on everything, from apps to downloads, to help close a $1.3 billion budget gap.
Cities in California still haven't started collecting the controversial and unpopular video streaming tax -- but when they do, it will very likely end up in court.Spartacus alumna Lucy Lawless is returning to Starz with a co-starring role opposite Bruce Campbell in the premium channel’s 10-episode half-hour original series Ash vs Evil Dead, sequel to the cult horror film franchise The Evil Dead. The series, executive produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Talpert, is set to film on location in Lawless’ native New Zealand this spring and premiere in late 2015. Lawless will play Ruby, a mysterious figure who is myopic in her quest to hunt down the source of the recent Evil outbreaks. The only problem: She believes that Ash (Campbell) is the cause of it all.
This marks Lawless’ third series with her husband, Tapert, and Raimi, who also executive produced Spartacus and the series that made Lawless a star, Xena: Warrior Princess. She also appeared in Raimi’s feature Spider-Man and Tapert’s Boogeyman. She’s repped by APA.
Raimi will direct the first episode of Ash vs Evil Dead, which he wrote with Ivan Raimi, Craig DiGregorio and Tom Spezialy. Raimi, Tapert and Campbell executive produce along with Craig DiGregorio, who will serve as showrunner. Ivan Raimi will co-executive produce, and Aaron Lam will serve as producer. Lawless joins previously cast Campbell, Ray Santiago, Dana DeLorenzo and Jill Marie Jones.t is about 10 o'clock in the morning of 16 May 2014, as I write this piece after my badminton game. Before starting I turned on the television to hear the election trends. 16 May 2014 will go down as a momentous Victory Day in India's history. The day the nation broke its shackles and attained deliverance from the corrupt, communal and colonial UPA government headed by the Italian branch of the Nehru-Gandhi family, which has bled our country by several thousands of crores during the last decade. This has been the mother of all victories, stunning the Congress into a deathly silence. With their miserable tally of 44 seats, they cannot even aspire to lead the Opposition.
The UPA ensured the unity of their coalition through their adharma of corruption. By allocating spheres of corruption to each constituent, they ensured their continuity, confident also that religious division and vote banks that they engineered would blot out their plunder at the next election. They couldn't have been more misguided. The entire nation rejoices and salutes India's new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who after a tireless and gruelling campaign of almost two years has received an unprecedented, historic mandate from the people of India to lead our country.
I must also congratulate every columnist of The Sunday Guardian for giving a near accurate assessment of the election result. The Sunday Guardian, right from the start has consistently supported Narendra Modi for Prime Ministership. And it has happened just as we forecast and hoped, and Narendra Modi will be Prime Minister of the country, despite the hatred, calumny and lies that was disseminated about him in the most diabolical and calculated manner. But he fought them all and won. Additionally, I congratulate M.J. Akbar, Editorial Director of The Sunday Guardian for joining the BJP, and as a spokesman now, leading the path for other secular enlightened Muslims of India.
As for me personally, I was both overjoyed and proud. Overjoyed, because the person whom I had been fighting for as most qualified and deserving for Prime Ministership of India, was miles ahead of his non-existent competitors. And proud, because my prediction made many months ago, based on my rudimentary knowledge of astrology corroborated by intuition, that Narendra Modi would be a glorious Prime Minister proved to be accurate.
Let me, however, assure my readers that I have no plans to change my profession of law for one of a soothsayer. Nor is it my intention to seek some grateful reward from Narendra Modi. But today, I feel totally free to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, unrestrained by any adverse impact it might have on the electoral prospects of the BJP or any of its candidates, including Arun Jaitley. Everyone including Narendra Modi knows that I ceaselessly campaigned for him and the BJP, despite my expulsion from the party, chiefly manipulated by the notorious members of the 160 Club. My assistance during the election campaign was offered without distinction or discrimination, but about Arun Jaitley, I had written to Narendra Modi a long time ago, that his defeat was more or less certain, even without my campaigning for or against him. Apart from his humiliating electoral defeat, now that the 160 Club has also come a cropper, his attempts to flood important decision making platforms of Narendra Modi's government with his associates is not going to do him or the new government much good, except perhaps inviting his own quarantine in the party.
I believe it was Narendra Modi alone, and none of the other distinguished Party leaders, who was responsible for including the issue of recovery of black money stashed away in foreign banks, in the BJP election manifesto. Narendra Modi is aware of my five years of legal battle in the Supreme Court to have a Special Investigation Team supervised by two ex-judges of the Supreme Court to carry out the task of recovering our stolen money. The Manmohan Singh government, under orders of Sonia Gandhi and her son managed to frustrate the Supreme Court judgement of July 2011 constituting an SIT for this purpose. This corrupt action was rejected as vexatious by the new three-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Dattu on 26 March 2014. But what is most shameful is that even as election results were coming in on 16 May, Additional Solicitor General Siddharth Luthra moved the Supreme Court for relief in the shape of stay of the constitution of the SIT, which P. Chidambaram badly wants. The Hon'ble Judges summarily rejected the frivolous and dishonest request. What emerges crystal clear is the desperation that even as their party was being pulverised at the polls, the infamous looter trio of Sonia, Rahul and Chidambaram were trying their utmost to stall the Supreme Court directions.
In this context, I would like to ask the mother and son one question: the nation should be informed of which foreign country Rahul was sent to by his mother, even as she was dining out the Prime Minister, and what the purpose of this unusual visit was. Incidentally, I have repeatedly stated in public and to the press that Sonia and her family are the chief beneficiaries of the plunder of US $1,500 billion, equivalent to Rs 90 lakh crore.
I look forward to informing Narendra Modi, after he settles down as Prime Minister, about a few significant events that have taken place regarding disclosure about the black money holders, during March this year when I visited Germany. The German authorities required a request with signatures from the political opposition asking for disclosure of the names. On my return, I informed L.K. Advani and requested him to initiate action regarding obtaining the necessary signatures to a three-line letter (also provided to him by me), addressed to the German authorities requesting disclosure. Well, Advani did nothing; when reminded, he referred me to another BJP leader and lastly to my own son.
It would clearly appear that any aspirant for office, whether from the 160 Club or Parliamentary Board who does not act in accordance with the commitment of repatriating black money must be viewed as |
Pinhoti.Click here for part 2 of the Prospect's interview with the former assistant secretary of education.
Diane Ravitch is famous* for two things: championing the education-reform movement, then leading the opposition to it. The movement, which broadly supports an agenda that emphasizes student assessment (a.k.a. testing) and school choice (a.k.a. charter schools), has come to dominate American education policy. For the most part, both Democrats and Republicans now push to make school systems resemble economic markets. They want fewer teacher protections, more testing, and more charter schools for parents to choose from. President Barack Obama's Department of Education, headed by education reformer Arne Duncan, shares many policy goals with those of George W. Bush's administration. Ravitch herself was once part of the movement, promoting student assessments and helping to create voluntary academic standards. After serving as assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, she held positions at the pro-school-reform movement Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and was a member of the Koret Task Force at Stanford's Hoover Institution, which focuses on school choice and "accountability." But in 2009, Ravitch left both positions and wrote a book announcing her move to the other side of the debate.
After seeing "how these ideas were working out in reality," Ravitch writes in The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she began to change her views. She now opposes charter schools and high-stakes testing. She writes and speaks frequently about the dangerous role that for-profit businesses have assumed in shaping education policy, and about the simultaneous risk that wealthy non-profit foundations like the Gates Foundation have too much clout in policymaking. Along with actor Matt Damon, she helped organize of 2011's Save Our Schools, a national rally opposing high-stakes testing and budget cuts to schools.
On a recent visit to Austin, Texas, Ravitch attracted big crowds at both a convention for school boards and administrators and at a public conversation held in a local high school. Then she sat down with me to talk about the Chicago teacher's strike, the politics of education reform, and the myth of a crisis in public education.
This is part one of our interview. Tomorrow, I'll offer more of Ravitch's views on charter schools, virtual schools, and the role of nonprofit foundations.
Do you think there is a crisis in American education?
No. I think the crisis in American education is that there is a concerted effort to destroy it. That is a crisis—that’s a genuine crisis. Is there a crisis of academic achievement? No.
First of all, the test scores are the highest they’ve ever been in history on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a no-stakes test. The scores of white kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, and Asian kids are the highest ever in history. What you hear from Bill Gates and [former chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools] Michelle Rhee and all the others is we’re in a period of decline, all the schools are obsolete, the test scores are flat. Nonsense. They have been going up steadily for 40 years, and they are the highest they’ve been in history.
Number two, the graduation rates today are the highest in history. Number three, the dropout rates are the lowest in history.
Is there a crisis in American education? Yes: We have all these Wall Street-funded foundation people running around saying we have to get rid of public education and saying all these phony things about our schools.
But it's not just Wall Street, right? Both Democrats and Republicans have advocated more testing and more charter schools as key methods of improving public schools. In fact, education seems like one of the few areas where political party isn't a useful indicator of a politician's position. How do you see the political landscape for public schools?
The agenda of reform today is actually the traditional Republican agenda. The Republicans have been saying now since probably the 1960s that what’s needed is testing, accountability, choice, and competition. That is the conventional, traditional GOP agenda.
Democrats have said since the 1960s that what’s needed is resources, equality of opportunity, and equity. The Democratic agenda got lost. The Democrats are now embracing a Republican agenda. So when you say that there’s not a partisan divide, it’s because Obama and Duncan have embraced the GOP agenda. The GOP agenda is exactly the same as it was 40 years ago.
Is that reflected in the presidential race?
Romney’s totally on board with privatization. Everything that I write and speak against, he’s for. He was the governor of Massachusetts, and they had a very successful program—they invested millions in early childhood education. But he doesn’t claim credit for it. He wants to ditch all of that and put everything into privatization: He’s for vouchers, he’s for charters, he’s for online education. Everything that Jeb Bush wants, he wants. So I don’t have any hope there.
Obama’s only marginally better. Because unfortunately, as I said earlier, the Democrats, or at least Obama and Duncan, have signed on to the Republican agenda except for vouchers.
Barack Obama says all the right things and does all the wrong things. He says he’s against teaching to the test, but every part of Race to the Top [a major initiative from the U.S. Department of Education that allowed states to compete for funds by assigning points for which parts a reform agenda they already had in place or would implement] relies on teaching to the test. He says we want to reward the best teachers. How do you know who the best teachers are? They’re the ones whose students get the highest test scores. You’re encouraging people to teach to the test, and you're encouraging narrowing of the curriculum and you’re encouraging cheating.
Everything he’s doing is in opposition to what he’s saying. On my blog, I wrote a speech for him to give. He hasn’t given it yet. I’m not hopeful that he will change anything that he’s doing.
Texas, which has long been at the forefront of school reform, has seen a huge pushback against its new testing regime—from parents and school boards as well as teachers. A majority of school districts in the Lone Star State have passed resolutions criticizing or condemning the testing system. You spoke to the state conference for school administrators and school board members this morning. What did you tell them?
We have so overdosed on testing that it’s warping education. What I said to the superintendents and the school board members this morning was I quoted Robert Scott, your last school commissioner, that testing has become a vampire. [Scott referred to the state's testing system as "the heart of the vampire."] Texas has to be the place where a stake is driven through the heart of the vampire. And I was very, very encouraged, in fact I was very proud to be a Texan, because of all the anti-testing resolutions.
Here’s what I said to them this morning, for better or worse. I had a revolutionary moment and spontaneously, off my script, said that if I could recommend one thing to them, it would be that entire districts say, “We’re not giving the tests. We’re not giving the tests.”
The tests are flawed, they have all kinds of errors: They have statistical errors, random errors, measurement errors. Some of the questions are really stupid. And they are being used in ways they are not designed to be used. The first rule in the testing world is tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed. They are being misused. They were not designed to measure teachers or to measure schools or to fire teachers or to close schools. So we need to stop all these punitive uses and to stop the labeling of children, which I think is the worst message of testing.
The fundamental thing to understand about testing is that all these tests are normed on a bell curve. And the bell curve by its very nature has a bottom half and a top half. You can never close the gap between the bottom half and the top half. It is impossible. The top half is populated overwhelmingly by children from affluent homes. The bottom half is populated overwhelmingly by children of poverty. So you have chosen to use the one instrument that reinforces inequity and made that the state policy. So the way to drive the stake through the heart of the vampire is for a district to say, as an entire district, "We’re not giving the test this year." And if 100 districts say this, if 200 districts say it, that sends a pretty powerful message to the legislature. That we’re trying to find a better way to be held accountable, be accountable to our parents, be accountable to our students, and to figure out a better way to educate kids so they actually have an education instead of a test score.
What about the Common Core, a national set of standards that all but a handful of states are in the process of implementing? The effort to have a national set of goals has largely been spearheaded by the reform groups you push against. (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding for the project, and the Obama administration made Race to the Top funding partially contingent on adopting the standards.) While we haven't seen the policy in action, it seems like an initiative that focuses more on the substance of what’s being taught in classrooms. Is there any potential there?
I have said I’m agnostic about Common Core, because it's never been tried anywhere [before]. I'd like to see it field-tested. My concern about Common Core is that it could actually expand the achievement gap. But I don’t know if that’s true, because no one’s ever tried it. I was invited to meet with people in the White House in the spring of 2010. I met with Melody Barnes, head of the domestic policy council; Roberto Rodriguez, who was the president’s education adviser; and Rahm Emanuel, who’s since gone to another job. And I said, try it out somewhere before you impose it on the whole nation. And they said, we don’t have time.
There’s this kind of pretense that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it; the governors did it. Not true. If you wanted to get Race to the Top funding, you had to have adopted the Common Core. The administration was pushing it very hard, and they didn’t want to test it.
If you said to me, “The Federal Drug Administration has a cure for some disease, but they don’t have time to test it," I would say, "I’m not going to try it."
We don’t know how it will work. I hate the fact that most schools interpret it to mean they have to cut back on literature and that kids need more nonfiction and less fiction—I think that’s absurd. There will be much more testing than there is today. Everything will be tested. They’ll be tested in every subject, pre-tested and post-tested. The testing will probably double.
What are the alternatives? If you were running for office, what would your education platform look like? What would be the two or three things to build a campaign around?
It would be to recognize, first of all, that public education is an essential institution in our democracy and that if you privatize public education, you’re stabbing democracy in the heart. That’s number one: Protect public education. And then if you’re concerned about closing the achievement gap, you do something serious about reducing poverty. Because poverty is the single biggest cause of the achievement gaps. If you’re looking to raise test scores, you would be focused on making health clinics available to children in poor neighborhoods. And you would have prenatal care for every woman who becomes pregnant. Those are the things that would increase test scores.
If you want to fix public education, then you have to do something about the lives that children lead. There are a lot of children coming from very desperate circumstances, and if you don’t attend to what their needs are, you’re not going to fix their problems. I think the health of children is crucial. You can't say, "I don’t want to talk about poverty, I don’t want to talk about families, I don’t want to talk about any of those community issues, I just want to talk about what can we do about the schools."
We also shouldn't have crazy unrealistic expectations. No Child Left Behind [the Bush-era law that expanded testing and made schools show how students of different races achieved] has been a disaster because of setting a goal of 100 percent proficiency. No state in the nation is anywhere close to 100 percent proficiency. I think Massachusetts is over the line at 50-plus percent, and no other state comes close to Massachusetts. So NCLB created a disaster. NCLB is a disaster. Once you establish these unrealistic expectations, you end up labeling schools everywhere as failed schools.
This is a way to destroy public education and set the schools up for privatization. And that’s a disaster for democracy. So if I were just looking at schools, I’d say don’t establish unrealistic expectations. Support the people that are working in schools and give them the respect and encouragement that they deserve because of the hard work they’re doing. And make sure that every school has a wonderful arts program. How hard is that? Make sure that every school is teaching history and geography and foreign languages and civics and mathematics and science—has a full program for all the kids.
The Chicago teacher’s strike, which just ended last week, focused heavily on some of those issues, like the need for more arts and music teachers. Did the strike help to change the national conversation around education?
The strike was a very important moment in current history. At least to the people who were paying attention, they realized this was not really a strike about money. Because the money issues had been resolved before the strike. It was not really an issue about a longer school day, because that had been resolved before the strike too. It was the teachers saying enough is enough. They’ve had almost 20 years of nonstop reform, and Chicago schools are still in trouble. They have schools that have no librarian, they have schools that have no arts teachers.
One of the things they resolved in the strike was to have textbooks on the first day of school. Now how hard is that?
I’m not a member of a labor union, but the value of the labor unions is that they provide a seat at the table when the legislature and the governor want to cut the budget. And when you take them away from the table, there’s nobody there to say, "Stop, you cannot take $5.4 billion out of the public schools" [as Texas lawmakers did in 2011]. Texas has effectively gotten rid of that voice. Wisconsin has gotten rid of that voice. Ohio is doing it’s best to get rid of that voice. In state after state, you have Republican governors killing the unions so that they don’t have to negotiate with anybody—they can just cut the budget.
In your view, is there any cause for hope right now in public schools? As someone fighting for a different agenda, do you see any chances for victory?
At a certain point, there has to be some kind of an awakening where people say this doesn’t work. Because it doesn’t work. Nothing they’re recommending works anywhere. What are their models of success? They’ll point to New York City, but no one in New York City would agree with that except the mayor. They’ll point to New Orleans, but New Orleans is actually a low-performing district in a low-performing state. Out of 70 districts in Louisiana, New Orleans ranks 69th. So that’s hardly a national model. Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee’s district, has the largest achievement gap in the entire country.
Where’s their model for success? I don’t see it. We’ve had [Teach for America] for 20 years—where’s the district that’s been turned around by TFA?
So here you have all these solutions that have solved nothing, and at some point there’s going to be an awakening.
I’m 74 years old. I will not be here to see the change. But I want to keep people aware of what good education is and keep them aware that they have to have a larger vision—what’s education about? It’s about knowledge, it’s about learning, it’s about character. It’s about non-cognitive skills. It’s about developing citizens. Why do we pay for public education in America? It’s not because we want to give job skills or prepare people for college. It’s because we want to have citizens who are going to sustain our democracy into the future.
Some questions were rephrased to provide context and clarity.
*Ravitch took issue with my characterization of her being famous for "championing the education reform movement, then leading the opposition to it." On her blog, she wrote: "The so-called reform movement of today didn’t exist until about five years ago, and by then I was on my way out the door. I don’t know if I was famous, but I’d like to think I got to be known among educators for the histories that I wrote, like The Great School Wars (a history of the NYC schools) in 1974; The Troubled Crusade (1983); Left Back (2000); and The Language Police (2003). Those books survive, and none is about testing/accountability/choice/competition."POSTED July 25, 2013
Nine-year-old Song Hyun has traveled further in his short life time than most of his fellow North Koreans. It’s hard to imagine what the journey was like for someone his age, but he’s fortunate to have escaped North Korea and found his family, who he was temporarily separated from, once entering in to China.
When talking to Song Hyun, he seems like any other kid his age. As soon as LiNK staff introduced him to ʺAngry Birds,” he was hooked, and he enjoys playing outside with toy animals. Once, he made believe that they were fighting each other and one by one, they went flying in different directions. It must have been hard for him to not be able to go outside freely while living in China and during the escape to freedom, where he had to keep quiet though not fully comprehending the significance of his journey. Now he lives in South Korea and is able to play freely!
Thanks Bethany Mandel and the LiNK Rescue Team in Manhattan for supplying the funding for Song Hyun’s rescue mission. Your efforts have changed Song Hyun’s life and has provided the opportunity for him to enjoy this new liberty.
Help make more rescues possible by supporting our mission.Talking about values can be a tricky affair. After all, who’s to say what values can we say anyone else has to live? There are certainly times when we do get to answer this for everyone. For instance, our collective value for the sanctity of human life demands punishment for murder in all modern cultures.
At the same time, our value for life collectively takes a nosedive when it comes to humans who cannot speak for themselves, such as we find in abortion.
In countries where we render swift and decisive punishment for killing a baby two weeks after it is born, we will look the other way, citing the rights of the mother, when killing it two weeks before it is born.
More disparity is found in other places. Canada, for instance, passed an infanticide law in 1948 that reclassified the taking of an infant’s life by its mother. From that point on, the crime was no longer considered murder. It is instead infanticide, a significantly less serious crime that usually carries a maximum of a year in jail with most mothers who kill serving no time at all. Instead, they get referrals to counseling and other support services.
We see even more evidence of this in systems of western jurisprudence where it concerns women who murder their husbands. The so-called “battered wife syndrome” is used to acquit women of murder and other charges who claim they have been the victims of abuse. That includes women who could have simply left the home but instead chose in a premeditated fashion to kill their husbands while they slept.
In the United Kingdom, women have beaten murder charges, and many of them have had murder charges reduced to manslaughter using premenstrual syndrome as a defense.
In a society that supposedly has the value of equal and fair treatment under the law, we see the undermining of due process in alleged sexual assault cases on college campuses. The same thing happens in the criminal justice system with rape shield laws and men convicted of sexual crimes in the absence of any forensic evidence.
We are increasingly seeing the emergence of women only train cars, parking spaces and even time at commercial gymnasiums being reserved exclusively for one sex over the other.
The list goes on, from VAWA to child custody decisions to the way child support laws are so unevenly levied and enforced in the favor of women. It even extends to which sex we sexually mutilate at birth.
What does this say about our values as a culture?
The answer is simple. Gynocentrism is a cultural value that has a tendency to trump all other values. It trumps the sanctity of human life. It trumps our constitutional rights. It even trumps our basic sense of human decency. And however goes the culture, so goes our lives as individual men. The greatest threat to a modern man’s personal values is not the temptation of greed. It is not the allure of success or the pressure to perform among other men.
The greatest threat to the modern man’s personal values is the modern woman. And that is a threat which men have historically failed to face — to their peril.
How many men, do you suppose, have allowed themselves to sacrifice good and trusted friendships because the women in their lives were jealous of the time and loyalty required by those friendships? How many beloved hobbies and interests have men abandoned because their women wanted them to occupy their time with things that were geared to produce for her? How many Steve Shives’ are in the world without YouTube Channels?
For those of you who don’t know who Steve Shives is, please view this video by Sargon of Akkad, in which he dissects a conversation between Steve, a radical feminist, and his wife, also a radical feminist. In the video, they both conclude that Steve is, at least, a latent sexist because he prefers the TV show Angel over the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And because his music collection is apparently male-dominated.
Aside from the fact that both Angel and Buffy were TV fare for kids and the intellectually unemployed, the lack of self-assurance and rote deference to his wife are plastered all over Shive’s face. Do You want to take bets on whether his friends have to pass her litmus test before he can associate with them?
Sargon nails it with the conclusion that this can’t possibly be a healthy relationship, and perhaps correctly lays this at the feet of feminist ideology but it goes much further than this.
This isn’t just feminism at work. In fact, in interpersonal relationships, feminism isn’t anything more than a guise for the more fundamental reality that in almost all relationships it is her values, her desires, and her beliefs that constantly pressure conformance in the man. Relationships based on romantic chivalry are a graveyard, not only for men’s desires and dreams but their values, their sense of right and wrong. All of it is co-opted by the force of gynocentrism.
That is not to give men a pass. The last thing men can afford is to hide behind the protective shield of victimhood. To put it in its most fundamental terms, most men will pair bond. And unless they are hopeless gynocentrists, they better figure out that relationships are first and foremost, a battlefield. If men are not prepared to fight, and to have lines in the sand that will trigger the nuclear option, they are doomed to fail.
To help with the fine tuning, it is better to understand that long term relationships are a bloody fight even without gynocentrism. You have two individuals, from two different family backgrounds, with two different sets of rules and two different ways of viewing the world.
After the honeymoon period, when couples have sex every time the door is closed, when they only see the best in each other, when neither of them can imagine that the other’s shit actually stinks, reality sets in. That is when the two very different worlds collide, and the battle begins to see whose rules are going to dominate.
It involves things as simple as whether you open presents on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve to whether you deal directly and honestly with problems or just bully each other till someone cries uncle.
It is a process involving countless complexities, and one that lasts many, many times longer than the honeymoon, often stretching into decades depending on the relative mental health of the people involved.
I have heard, and I totally believe it, that it may take twenty years or more for a couple to reach a healthy, mature love for each other. All of this happens without considering the gynocentrism involved.
Relationships are difficult because infatuation is transient, and because blending lives, which essentially means two people are having to live by an altered, unfamiliar narrative, is difficult on its own.
The problem in modern culture, especially with relationships that start on a foundation of romantic chivalry, is that gynocentrism is a trump card that constantly puts the man at a disadvantage. Like I said, if we can issue a pussy pass for murder, what are the chances for your fishing trips to survive? How about your Saturday night poker games or your video games?
And this is where men die. They die in spirit. They die in individuality, as does their ownership of their lives and happiness.
To be blunter, those things aren’t murdered. They are the victims of suicide. They are killed by the male’s gynocentrism and his weakness in the face of a woman’s demands. The pussy pass is issued by men, most often by the guy who has it played against him.
For every woman who walks on a murder charge, there are a million men who obsequiously bow and scrape like Steve Shives.
The solution to this is tough, and it isn’t for everyone. Some men are just not strong enough to allow their values and a woman live under the same roof. So they check out, often hiding behind bitterness and resentment. They convince themselves that all women, and not their failure to be strong, is the problem. They don’t trust themselves and don’t have the aptitude to develop skills to weed out problem women and to shut women down when they become irrational and unreasonably demanding. Their shame drives them to resent men who have those strengths and aptitudes and prevents them taking on the task of change.
My father once told me, and I quote, “If you can leave your values at the door, you never really had them to begin with.”
Of course, at 16 or 17, that did not elicit much more than a yawn from me. I guess my old man, like many fathers, got a lot smarter as I aged because today his words ring rich with wisdom.
I never saw a man who got destroyed in a relationship who steadfastly clung to his values from day one. And I am in a position to say that I have talked to a lot more men who were destroyed in relationships than the average person. The good news is that where it concerns values, men have the advantage. Most men are wired for accountability, honesty and integrity. Men, as a rule, have the capacity own their shit.
They are perhaps less consistent at it where it concerns women, but they have that capacity to overcome that unless they buy into an ideology that tells them not to.
So that is the thrust here. Do you have values? Keep them.
A simple example. Is loyalty to friends a value of yours? Then don’t blame a woman if you give it up. Be willing to look her in the eye and tell her that if she is unprincipled enough to force you to make the unnecessary choice between her and your friend, that you will side, not with your friend, but with your values. Hint: that is not good news for the woman-child giving you the ultimatum. But it is fantastic news for you.
Another example. Do you value yourself? And by that I mean are your interests in life, your hobbies, and pastimes important enough that you will make time and money for them? Well, if you do value those things, you won’t give them up because she tries to emotionally or sexually blackmail you to the point that you surrender them. There are no victims, just volunteers.
My Pops was right. If your values are disposable, for anything, so is your dignity.
Blaming anyone for that but yourself is a mistake that will likely cost you a lot more than a round of golf or an afternoon at your favorite fishing hole. Your values, whatever they are, define you. So the next time you hear some heartbroken man saying “I gave up everything for her, and she still screwed me over,” take a moment reword that statement in your head. “I gave up everything for her, leaving her no reason to respect me, and me no reason to respect myself. So, of course, I got screwed over.”
For those of you who think I am too hard on men who get shafted in relationships, I understand. Still, until men quit entering relationships in a bent over position, this will keep happening.Something extraordinary has happened in a corner of north-east Syria. It is a little-known story that defies the usual narratives about Syria or Assad, civil war or ISIS. It is nothing less than a political revolution, which bears important lessons for the rest of the world. In this revolution, women are in the vanguard, both politically and militarily, often leading the fight on the frontline and sacrificing their lives against the most atavistic and anti-woman enemy there is: the so-called Islamic State – or Daesh, as it is more derogatorily known.
This place is called Rojava, the Kurdish name for western Kurdistan, located in north-eastern Syria. After the collapse of the Assad regime in 2012, Kurdish parties began an extraordinary project of self-government and equality for all races, religions and women and men. I visited Rojava, in a personal capacity, in the summer of 2015 to try to understand what's going on there for a documentary film about anarchism, which you can watch on iPlayer.
Few journalists visit this swath of land along the Turkish border, which is about half the size of Belgium. It's difficult to reach and thus expensive, requiring a long journey from northern Iraq and a crossing of the Tigris by small boat onto Syrian soil. The Kurdish Regional Government of northern Iraq (KRG) is not sympathetic to the Kurds of Rojava, and makes access very difficult and sometimes impossible.
The few journalists who make it there tend to focus on the fight with ISIS, assuming that this is what most concerns western audiences. Rojava is safer than the main combat zones of Syria, but still suffers horrific suicide bombings, and western visitors would of course make a fine catch for Daesh kidnappers.
As a result, very little has been reported about the remarkable political experiment of Rojava.
What little commentary appears is often secondhand. It therefore frequently repeats earlier misconceptions or hostile propaganda put about, above all, by Turkey, which opposes the leading political party of the Rojava Kurds – the PYD – and the armed forces of Rojava, the People's Self-Defence Units, which comprise the mostly male YPG and all-female YPJ. Nor does the political character of the Rojava revolution fit familiar pigeonholes; it is neither a nationalist Kurdish project for an independent state, nor is it Marxist or communist, nor driven by religious or ethnic motives.
Perhaps most remarkably – and, sadly, uniquely – this is perhaps the most explicitly feminist revolution the world has witnessed, at least in recent history. Previously, this area was home to traditional peasant norms, including child marriage and keeping women at home. These traditions have been overturned: child marriage, for instance, is now illegal. There are parallel women's organisations in every field, ranging from the separate women's militia, the YPJ, to parallel women's communes and cooperatives. Self-defence is a principle of the Rojava revolution, which is why women are so active in the armed struggle – but the concept extends towards the right of self-defence against all anti-woman practices and ideas, including those of traditional society, not just the extreme violence of Daesh.
"From what I saw, this political transformation enjoyed widespread support from all: Kurds, Arabs, women and men, young and old. Why wouldn't it? The whole point is to give everyone a say in their own government."
In addition to ensuring complete equal rights for women, the feminist politics of Rojava aims to break down domination and hierarchy in every aspect of life, recasting social relations between all people regardless of age, ethnicity or gender, with the aim of achieving an ecologically and socially harmonious society. In terms of historical comparison, this project resembles most closely the short period of anarchism witnessed by George Orwell in Republican Spain during the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s. But the representatives of Rojava also reject the label of anarchism, even if much of the inspiration for this revolution came originally from an anarchist thinker from New York City, Murray Bookchin.
The political heart of the Rojava project is in the local communal assemblies, in which local people take decisions for themselves about everything that concerns them: healthcare, jobs, pollution... boys riding their bikes too fast around the village, as one woman complained about at an assembly I visited. Women and men are scrupulously given an equal voice. Women co-chair every meeting and every assembly. Non-Kurdish minorities, mostly Arabs but also Syriacs, Turkmen and Assyrians, are also given priority on the speaking list; at meetings I witnessed, interpreters were provided. This is self-government, where decisions for the village are taken by the village or region. If decisions cannot be made solely at the local level, representatives attend town or regional assemblies, but these representatives remain accountable to the communal level and may only offer views that are approved locally. It is a very deliberate attempt to keep decision-making as local as possible – a rejection of the top-down authority of the state.
Ironically, however, the inspiration for the revolution was very much top-down. Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK (the Kurdish guerrilla movement in Turkey), read Murray Bookchin's works while in a Turkish jail on an island in the Sea of Marmara (where he remains). Once a Marxist-Leninist and a ruthless military leader, Öcalan became convinced that self-government without the state was the way forward for the Kurdish people. He moulded Bookchin's philosophy for the Kurdish context, calling it "democratic confederalism". The Syrian Kurdish PYD is closely associated with the PKK. Following Öcalan, its cadres adopted democratic confederalism and implemented it in Syria.
Some have accused the PYD of domineering tactics, particularly at the start of this democratic revolution. Such conduct has given room for critics unreasonably to dismiss the whole project. From what I saw, this political transformation enjoyed widespread support from all: Kurds, Arabs, women and men, young and old. Why wouldn't it? The whole point is to give everyone a say in their own government – a radical innovation anywhere, let alone in Syria, a country long accustomed to dictatorship and repression. I spoke to many people at random. They were uniformly positive, and many argued that the Rojava model, of highly decentralised government, should be adopted in the whole of Syria and indeed beyond. But it's also a work in progress. In some of the assemblies I attended, women and men sat separately, a mark of the journey from traditional practice that this revolution is still navigating.
The revolution has suffered considerable assault. Turkey opposes Rojava and has prevented all supplies, trade and humanitarian aid from crossing its border into the region. Today, Turkish forces are attacking the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which subsumes the YPG/YPJ and Arab militias into a common anti-ISIS front. The SDF has been the most effective force in fighting ISIS and has driven it back across hundreds of miles of territory, at the cost of thousands of lives. Now, the SDF – led by a woman commander, Rojda Felat – has started the attack on ISIS's "capital", Raqqa. The SDF currently enjoys US and allied military support, primarily from the air but also from American and allied special forces on the ground.
Therefore, US and indeed western governments are involved in a grotesque contradiction in which they permit NATO "partner" Turkey to attack the SDF – their most important ally in the fight against ISIS – while also proclaiming unyielding commitment to defeating ISIS. Thanks to an almost total absence of press coverage, this absurdity attracts no controversy in western capitals. Kurds worry, with reason, that once Raqqa falls the US will abandon the Kurds to Turkish aggression. Indeed, with Turkish attacks against the SDF intensifying in northern Syria in a canton called Afrin, some argue that this betrayal has already begun.
The hypocrisies of international geopolitical manoeuvring, however, should not obscure the importance of the Rojava democratic revolution. Thanks to its horrific tactics, ISIS attracts the attention, but in fact it is Rojava that carries the more important message for those who care about democracy. Rojava offers an alternative and practical example where the people are in charge, and it works. Rather than replicate the disastrous centralised governments of Iraq and Assad's Syria, Rojava's self-governing institutions have proposed their model for the whole of Syria once the Assad dictatorship comes to an end – and indeed, Rojava has renamed itself the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria in order to emphasise its multi-ethnic character and its acceptance of Syria's existing borders, another divergence from the lazy western presumption that "the Kurds" want their own separate state.
But thanks to Turkish hostility, representatives of the Democratic Federation are excluded from the UN talks about the future of Syria – an injustice in which the US, UK and others acquiesce. The UN continues to pretend that "the Kurds" are represented by a party that is in fact a proxy of the KRG in Iraq. It is telling that international officials – mostly men who have never visited the area – still prefer outdated ethnic stereotypes to the more accurate cosmopolitan and feminist character of this project.
Meanwhile, the Rojava model is no less relevant in the west, where few can claim that democracy is in good health, with disillusionment and right-wing reactionary extremism – and, indeed, overt hostility to women (expressed not only by Donald Trump) – both ascendant. There are scores of westerners who, like the International Brigade of the Republican forces in Spain, have gone to join YPG and YPJ ranks. Several have lost their lives, including in recent days a former Occupy Wall Street activist from New York City. Some of these brave men and women have been prosecuted on their return home, punished for their commitment to democracy and equality. All suffer from the misrepresentation of their struggle in much of the international press. In reporting the death of the young Occupy activist, the Washington Post described the Rojava revolution as "pseudo-Marxist", when it is the very opposite. In this democracy, there is no place |
, between 95 and 299 million amphibians, and between 258 and 822 million reptiles.
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It is undeniable, then, that cats are a menace to animal society, particularly those cats that are allowed to roam free outdoors. We have known this for almost a century. In 1929, the ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush commented that “the widespread dissemination of cats in the woods and in the open or farming country, and the destruction of birds by them, is a much more important matter than most people suspect, and is not to be lightly put aside, as it has an important bearing on the welfare of the human race.” Forbush, having tallied up an impressive anecdotal record of death and destruction, concluded that the cat “has disturbed the biological balance and has become a destructive force among native birds and mammals.” The cat doesn’t much care if its prey is threatened with extinction. Any small mammal, bird, or reptile is fair game, regardless of its rarity.
In one of Cat Wars’s more enlightening analogies, Marra and Santella compare housecats to the pesticide DDT. The cat, they argue, is one of the earliest known invasive species, and invasive species, they argue, are “simply another form of an environmental contaminant; like DDT, they can cause great harm and, once introduced, can be exceptionally difficult to remove from the environment.” Both started out as human technologies used to rid the landscape of unwanted pests, and both came with unintended side effects and unwanted additional destruction in the wild. Given the amount of energy we have devoted to banning DDT and ridding the environment of its consequences, it’s noteworthy that we seem so uninterested in a similar remedy for the scourge of cats, which, by most metrics, are far more destructive. The authors note that, while cats have been implicated in the decline and extinction of some 175 different species, “there are no confirmed bird extinctions from the pesticide DDT.”
The news that housecats are laying waste to wide swaths of biodiversity has not, like revelations about climate change or other ecological evils, led to some kind of scientific consensus about what was to be done. It’s led, instead, to the establishment of two warring camps: the cat people and the bird people. The bird people think that the wholesale slaughter of the world’s bird population is a problem requiring human intervention, namely the banning of feral and outdoor cats, forced sterilization, and euthanization. The cat people are aghast at these solutions, and argue instead that cats, being innate predators, should be allowed to fulfill their natural directive. When University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Temple published a report noting the high number of birds being killed by cats, he was besieged with death threats. “Many Wisconsites (at least those who wrote letters to the editor and hate mail to Temple),” Marra and Santella write, “were much more concerned that cats were being blamed for songbird deaths than with the fact that millions of songbirds were being killed. And some were more troubled about the possibility of cats being killed than they were about the life of a researcher.”
In the ensuing stalemate, legislation has been halfheartedly introduced, allowed to languish in committee, and finally scuttled altogether. Half-measures have been introduced that do no good. Invective has been hurled from both sides with increasing ferocity. And, meanwhile, cats continue to kill all manner of creature of field and stream.
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Cat Wars raises an interesting ethical question: is it justifiable to kill one animal because that animal kills other animals in disproportionate numbers? The authors cite Bill Lynn, an ethicist who has supported the culling of one species as a means to protect another, calling such work a “sad good.” But Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at University of Colorado, Boulder, contends the opposite: that the life of each individual animal must be weighed separate from a concern for species and for diversity. This kind of dilemma — is it morally acceptable to sacrifice the one to save the many, or the many for the one? — has long vexed philosophers of human ethics, and it is fascinating to see it here played out with regards to interspecies warfare.
Rather than explore this difficulty further, though, Cat Wars remains mostly about the war between cat people and bird people. Marra and Santella are clearly bird people. (Marra, after all, is the head of the Smithsonian’s migratory bird center.) The pro-bird, anti-cat thrust of their book is not subtle. “Allowing owned cats to roam freely outside,” they write, is an example of “irresponsible pet ownership,” a message they drive home with increasing emphasis. (Full disclosure: I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m a dog person.)
Cat Wars is one of those strange books, reading which one can feel generally comfortable with the authors’ conclusions while growing increasingly frustrated with their bad faith arguments, rhetorical sleights-of-hand, and other abuses of the reader’s trust. A chapter that focuses on cats as disease vectors is the worst offender. They point out, correctly, that housecats can be carriers of bubonic plague (an Arizona man died in 1992 after catching plague from a cat) as well as rabies, and that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in cat feces, has been linked to behavioral changes in humans. It’s true, of course, that cats can transmit plague and other diseases, but this trait is not unique to them, nor are toxoplasma cysts restricted to outdoor cats. The haphazardness of these arguments makes the book seem indiscriminate in its anti-cat bias. Repeatedly, Marra and Santella offer rhetorically strong arguments that fall apart under scrutiny. They claim, for example, that “[w]ild birds and mammals […] have rights that do not seem to receive as much attention as the claimed rights of cats to wander freely outdoors.” It’s true that threatened and endangered species are protected under law, as are pets (mostly in the form of animal cruelty laws). But what can it mean to say that other, non-protected birds and mammals have “rights”? What kind of rights? Moral rights? Rights under some unstated but presumed “natural law”? Is this a call to extend legal protection to all American animals? Are all animals created equal? Does the equally invasive black rat lack rights that more charismatic native songbirds have?
Cat Wars also bends over backward to paint cat-owners, particularly those who advocate for outdoor lifestyles, as unstable and poorly educated. As Marra and Santella become increasingly polemical, they resort to refuting a straw-man “leading outdoor-cat advocate’s website” bullet-point-style:
CAT ADVOCATE CLAIMS: Cats have lived outdoors for more than 10,000 years — they are a natural part of the landscape
SCIENCE SAYS: Domestic cats are an invasive species throughout their current range, including North America
This point-counterpoint continues for much of a page, never getting any more thoughtful than this. Such language — including the gallingly general “science says” — enlightens no one, and serves only to quell dissension and shut down meaningful debate.
The authors also tend to overstate the unique role cats play in species destruction. The Hawaiian crow, for example, is among those whose “extinctions are attributed to cats,” according to the authors, but the list of dangers to the Hawaiian crow are long: coffee and fruit farmers (who began shooting the crows in the 1890s), mongooses and rats, deforestation, and the Hawaiian hawk (itself a threatened species). It is one thing to say that free-range cats are part of a complicated, interconnected set of ecological problems; it’s another altogether to afford them an outsized, murderous agency. By repeatedly overstating the case against cats, Marra and Santella turn what should have been a thoughtful and necessary discussion into rabid anti-feline propaganda.
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Cats, Marra and Santella want us to know, are an invasive species, no different from lion fish in the Caribbean or the eucalyptus in California. They are foreign-born (from an American perspective, anyway; their likely ancestor is the Near Eastern wildcat, native to North Africa and the Middle East). Once they move in, they quickly begin overtaking the local citizenry, upsetting the equilibrium of well-established biomes, sucking up resources that don’t belong to them, overstaying their visas and their welcomes. These sinister immigrants, once they put down roots, can be incredibly difficult to evict. They bring their foreign-born culture to their new homes, changing the landscape beyond recognition, diluting its purity and making it harder for native-born species to compete.
“How should we deal,” they ask, “with the animals that people have domesticated and enjoyed as beloved companions for thousands of years, but that when allowed to become feral or to freely range are capable of tearing away at the tapestry of life that has evolved since time immemorial?” It’s unclear to me why anyone with a background in biology and evolution would use a phrase like “time immemorial,” as though life evolved perfectly to a static equilibrium at some moment just before the arrival of humans. Language such as this, along with the very term “invasive species,” presumes a pristine, Edenic landscape that existed in some cloud-shrouded past. The invasive species itself has no agency here: it’s only further proof of humanity’s reckless, ecology-destroying hubris. We are the villains; cats are only our henchmen.
But we should remember that, while the Stephens Island wren died off due to human/feline interaction, almost all the other flightless songbirds went extinct thousands of years earlier, with no help from us or our pets. Nature, it seems, is no more precious with its creations than cats are. The problem here, as so often in these kinds of polemics, lies in the authors’ overreliance on the concept of the “natural.” Marra and Santella would have you believe that songbirds are natural, whereas invasive species like cats, imported from other ecosystems, are not. Cat lovers, on the other hand, would have you believe that the cat’s predatory instincts are equally “natural” and must also be respected. Each side appeals to this transcendental, undefined concept, arguing that it makes their position a priori correct. But what does it mean to be natural? (Everyone agrees that humans are most definitely unnatural, but that’s about it.)
A better question, and one for which there is no easy answer, is: Where, exactly, do cats belong? Are they animals, at home in the wild, where they must hash it out against other species, killing birds and being killed by coyotes and raccoons, dying of starvation or disease? Or are they social parasites, bred and evolved to light up the endorphins in our brain, providing comfort and emotional care in exchange for food and shelter? Currently, they are both, and we have no easy language for such a creature. The problem with the housecat is that it calls into question the very notion of a clean divide between human and nature. Every time they exit our houses or apartments through a pet flap or an open window they show us how easy it is to slip past the boundaries between our artificial world and the wilderness all around. If we want to make headway with this seemingly intractable debate, we’ll have to think harder about what “nature” really means — for the cats, for the birds, and for us.
Until then, the cat, along with all of its delicate prey, will just have to hang in there.
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Colin Dickey is the author, most recently, of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places.MONTREAL – A pro-gun lobby held a rally at a sugar shack west of Quebec City on Saturday after it was forced to backtrack on a plan to have the event at a memorial site for the 14 women who were killed at Ecole polytechnique in 1989.
The group posted on its Facebook page Saturday afternoon to say the event was was running smoothly.
Originally, the group had wanted to stage the event at Montreal’s Place du 6 decembre.
That idea was quickly and roundly blasted by politicians of all stripes, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante.
Guy Morin, president of the pro-gun lobby, has said that the group did not realize the plan would generate such widespread denunciation.
Wednesday will be the 28th anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre.A new window into the nature of the universe may be possible with a device proposed by scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno and Stanford University that would detect elusive gravity waves from the other end of the cosmos. Their paper describing the device and process was published in the prestigious physics journal Physical Review Letters.
"Gravitational waves represent one of the missing pieces of Einstein's theory of general relativity," Andrew Geraci, University of Nevada, Reno physics assistant professor, said. "While there is a global effort already out there to find gravitational waves, our proposed method is an alternate approach with greater sensitivity in a significantly smaller device.
"Our detector is complementary to existing gravitational wave detectors, in that it is more sensitive to sources in a higher frequency band, so we could see signals that other detectors might potentially miss."
Geraci and his colleague Asimina Arvanitaki, a post-doctoral fellow in the physics department at Stanford University, propose using a small, laser-cooled, tunable sensor that "floats" in an optical cavity so it is not affected by friction. Geraci is seeking funding to begin building a small prototype in the next year.
"Gravity waves propagate from the remote corners of our universe, they stretch and squeeze the fabric of space-time," Geraci said. "A passing gravity wave changes the physically measured distance between two test masses - small discs or spheres. In our approach, such a mass experiences minimal friction and therefore is very sensitive to small forces."
While indirect evidence for gravity waves was obtained by studying the changing orbital period of a neutron star binary, resulting in the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, gravity waves have yet to be directly observed.
"Directly detecting gravitational waves from astrophysical sources enables a new type of astronomy, which can give us "pictures" of the sky analogous to what we have by using telescopes," Geraci said. "In this way the invention of a gravitational wave detector, which lets us "see" the universe through gravity waves, is analogous to the invention of the telescope, which let us see the universe using light. Having such detectors will allow us to learn more about astrophysical objects in our universe, such as black holes."
The approach the authors describe can exceed the sensitivity of next-generation gravitational wave observatories by up to an order of magnitude in the frequency range of 50 to 300 kilohertz.
Their paper, "Detecting high-frequency gravitational waves with optically levitated sensors," appeared in Physical Review Letters, a publication of the physics organization American Physical Society.
Geraci also presented his research at the annual American Physical Society Meeting in Denver in April. The meeting is attended by particle physicists, nuclear physicists and astrophysicists to share new research results and insights.
Physical Review Letters is the world's foremost physics letters journal, providing rapid publication of short reports of significant fundamental research in all fields of physics. The international journal provides its diverse readership with weekly coverage of major advances in physics and cross disciplinary developments.Rmembing the expedition 12.04.1992 year. (To 40-th anniversary of tragical flight and the 9-anniversary of expedition it's devoted). The Dzhezkazgan region of Kazakhstan is sparsely populated and seemingly unrelated to the space effort. The exception is that it is a safe landing area for spacecraft returning to earth far from human habitation and devoid of physical hazards in its vast expanse. In one instance, a radio broadcast from a spacecraft identified its location as 150 km (90 miles) northeast of the city of Dzhezkazgan." Special Search and Recover personnel staged from the city of Karaganda to secure the Lander and its personnel as soon as possible. The Transport Division had a van or used air force tactical transport aircraft depending on the distance to the space craft. I was a crewmember on a four turbo-jet engined Antonov AN-12, the military version of the AN-10 civilian airliner. A twin-engine, turbo-prop Antonov AN-26 was an alternative if an AN-12 was not available for such use. The time between such recovery expeditions was spent in class. Aviation and Astronautics were taught there and dominated casual conversation in the smoking rooms. The importance was amplified when I became the director of DOSAAF. Radio and sports activities were emphasized in the annual plan. Participation in the radio club "Fifth Ocean", newly formed, was enthusiastic. Kazakhstan had a similar club, Aviation and Cosmonautics, named for Kazakhstan's first cosmonaut, Takhtar Aubakirov. (I met him once at one of the Congress of DOSAAF of the Republic meetings. I was elected as a delegatere to the congress twice.) Nearly every year, on 12 April, the Federation of Dzhezkazgan assigned radio call signs in honor of Yuri Gagarin's role as the first man in space: R7RG - Radio Gagarin and UL1RWR - first astronaut. I want to recall the tragedy of Soyuz-11 and our memorial DXpedition in its honor. After careful planning, the expedition was timed to arrive at the memorial stelle on 12 April, the Day of Cosmonautics in 1992. This would be the first of a kind event conducted by the Fed and the Priozersk area radio club. The expedition included hams with official representatives of military and civil aviation: Victor Borodin (UL7RE, RV3YR), Alexander Romanov (UN7RCN), Valery Gamaev (UN7RK), Yuri Koltyrin (ex: UL7RX, now DJ6BQ), Victor Teplyakov (UL7RL), Nicholas Nekrasov (UL7RR), Alexander Belyakov (UL7RAN), Alexander Kravtsov (UL7RBL) and others. Soyuz-11 crashed to earth on 30 June 1971 killing the astronauts aboard it: Hero Sovetskog George T. Dobrowolski Union, twice Hero of the Soviet Union Volkov Vladislav, and Hero of the Soviet Union Viktor Patsayev. The crash site is thirty kilometers from the village of Shalginsk. The stele erected there has bas-reliefs of the astronauts. Commemorative plaques identify the monument as the landing site of Soyuz -11 and was constructed by a resolution of the Council of Ministers. The original stele was cast from one and half tons of high grade copper alloy 9999. Shortly after it was erected, unknow thieves stole it and sold the metal as scrap. Each year, relatives and friends among the astronaut corps come to lay flowers and pay tribute to their heroism. There was no problem reaching the village. At this time, snow is gone from the steppes. However, the lack of roads and directions to the monument site made it necessary to trust the local people who arranged the transport. Nikolai Nekrasov (UL7RR) lived in Shalginske and opened his home to members of this expedition. We shared pictures of of the moments at the site. Today, seeing them, we wish there were more. However, there are no records concerning the details of the trip. These reside only in the memories of the participants. A mobile station, used by Angara, came to Shalginsk and Alexander Kravtsov (UL7RBL). Sasha often traveled by private car with it. This radio station proved useful to us. At the monument, we stretched a long line antenna over the top of it and went on the air as UP0R/A. We toasted this success with nine-filled glasses. "For those pilots - the astronauts, who are not dead, and to those who did not spare their most expensive possession--their lives." Cosmonauts, we held a memorial for Cosmonauts and pilots that did not return from their last flight. Calls were received from pilots, veterans and young aviators sent greetings from Baikonur Commodore, Star City and other places related to space exploration. Many young people spoke to us. The expedition counted four thousand contacts with radio amateurs around the world. All issues involved, Nikolai Nekrasov (UL7RR), who lived in the Shalginske. In his home and placed members of the expedition. Proving was brought to him, which was not unimportant. Today, looking at these pictures a little regret that they were not so much. The footage turned out to be the most important moments, but the details of the trip were only in the memory of its participants. This is - as traveled as at an intermediate point we met a group of young people and fed lunch (this meeting in the photo below), as prescribed positions in the team and no one wanted to be a cook, so as not to miss the main thing, for what drove here. How quickly repaired in the village and there was no transponder boundaries of gratitude from the locals got the opportunity again to watch television in the province. Constructed as a base station and a complete group of the monument. All this is well remembered all. And the first dinner together, and the air has already heard the call sign UP0R, which many expected, not only from the region (for a long time in the round table discussed the expedition), by the next morning, got ready to go. As a mobile station used by the "Angara", which took him to Shalginsk Alexander Kravtsov (UL7RBL). Sasha often traveled by private car and his "baby" a lot of time getting him on the road. We can say that he never parted with it. And this time, the radio station very useful to us and also other parts of the hams, which were also informed. I guess the fifth time we have been able to throw on top of the stele stretch antenna and within a few minutes in the air resounded call UP0R / A. And then raised nine-filled glasses and heard the words: "For those pilots - the astronauts, who are now dead, who did not spare the most expensive-my life." Five days without a break sounded in the air the special call sign radio expedition. And on April 12 Day of Cosmonauts, the air held the memorial for died Cosmonauts, as well as all the pilots who did not return from his "last flight". The frequency of the memorial came up pilots veterans and young aviators, sounded greetings collective radio stations from the Baikonur Commodore, Star City and other places related to outer space. For microphones were many young people. Participants in the memorial honored the dead airmen moment of silence. During the expedition took place about 4 thousand contacts with radio amateurs around the world.. Departure was planned at the spot where the 30 June 1971 there was a tragic landing of spacecraft "Soyuz -11", during which the pilots were killed - the astronauts: Hero Sovetskog George T. Dobrowolski Union, twice Hero of the Soviet Union Volkov Vladislav, and Hero of the Soviet Union Viktor Patsayev. There is a city of Dzhezkazgan Karazhal, and with him the village. Shalginsk. So, the tragic landing occurred 30 kilometers from this village. At this point, was later installed a stele with bas-reliefs of the three astronauts on the wings, and a number of commemorative plates with the words: "The memorial sign at the landing site, the spacecraft "Soyuz-11" June 30, 1971. Constructed by the Resolution of the Council of Ministers. "They say that every year here earlier in the day of death, came the relatives and friends of the astronauts on the force, to lay flowers and paid tribute to their heroism. Stella was made of about 1.5 tons high-grade copper 9999. "Was" because a little later, the stele was kidnapped and handed over to the scrap metal unknown criminals. (Note the author). But then she really was, and had plans to visit the village Shalginsk, had heard from a special call and get to the landing site and work on it. As it turned out, the problems get to the village was not, and that's up to the monument traveled in two cars with high traffic and very worried that somewhere zasyadem. In the steppes at the time the snow is gone and it was capital "porridge" and not public roads. About an hour's journey seemed stele, although problems with the road accompanied by feelings that do not find it. But the local guys who organized the transport and not once been to this place did not disappoint, for which many thanks to them. Dzhezkazgan area, as well as all of Kazakhstan, is literally filled with extraordinary places, in any way related to outer space. Perhaps each of you will remember that when you return the spacecraft to the ground, on the radio sounded the message: "The ship landed 150 km north-east of the For service in Priozersk, I not once had to participate in the crew An-12 Antonov An-26, or in efforts to search for Lander. Although for these purposes in the city of Karaganda was a special search party, "Van" of our transport division almost every time (and occasionally aircraft) involved in these interesting and important events. And if such flights were carried out suddenly, the long time and then discussed in class and smoking rooms. That is why so much importance was given to topics of aviation and astronautics at the time of service and after, when I was appointed head of DOSAAF in this city. It is no secret that radio sports and activities, called the subjects took a more favorable place in the annual plan. In addition, active work in the radio-club pilots "Fifth Ocean", which had just been formed. And in Kazakhstan, appeared similar to the club "Aviation and Cosmonautics," named after the first cosmonaut of Kazakhstan Takhtar Aubakirova. With him I was able to meet and get acquainted at the Congress of (DOSAAF) of the Republic, of which I was elected a delegate twice. One of the main topics at the organization of the Federation of Dzhezkazgan events on radio - was the theme of space exploration. Almost every year on April 12 broadcast call signs sounded dedicated to this date: And today, many years later, I want to tell you about one of these events - the tragic expedition to the place of landing of spacecraft "Soyuz-11". The expedition was timed to the Day of Cosmonautics - April 12, 1992. Preparing for it long and carefully [This would be the first event of this kind to be conducted by the (Fed) and the Priozersk area radio club. The expedition included amateur radio operators, and representatives of military and civil aviation. Among Victor Borodin (UL7RE, RV3YR); Alexand Romanov (UN7RCN); Valery Gama (UN7RK); Yuri Koltyrin (ex: UL7RX, now DJ6BQ); Victor Teplyakov (UL7RL); Nicholas Nekrasov (UL7RR); Alexander Belyakov (UL7RAN); and Alexander Kravtsov (UL7RBL) among others.] Five days without a break sounded in the air the special call sign radio expedition. And on April 12 Day of Cosmonauts, the air held the memorial for died Cosmonauts, as well as all the pilots who did not return from his "last flight". The frequency of the memorial came up pilots veterans and young aviators, sounded greetings collective radio stations from the Baikonur Commodore, Star City and other places related to outer space. For microphones were many young people. Participants in the memorial honored the dead airmen moment of silence. During the expedition took place about 4 thousand contacts with radio amateurs around the world In intermediate point of us local guys warmly have met, with them we were photographed for memory. And the first photo in settlement Shalginsk - cost{stand} (from left to right): UL7RX, UL7RL, UL7RE, UL7RK, UL7RCN, The local resident; sit: UL7RBL, UL7RCO. Yuri Koltyrin (ex: UL7RX, DJ6BQ now) adn Victor Borodin (ex: UN7R, RV3YR now) have QSO on 20-meters band. On air call UP0R. For the first time in area Jury has left in ether RTTY-mode and on this expedition radio communications have been lead by the given kind. Valery Gamaev (UN7RK now), Which is and today the permanent head HAM in the city of Zhezkazgan, has replaced behind board UP0R of the colleagues. UP0R Team has arrived to a monument on a place of landing "SOYUZ - 11", before the beginning of a work - photo for memory. And this aviation flag has been lifted as a flag of expedition. UP0R Team at an obelisk, constructed on a place of tragical destruction of crew of the ship "Soyuz - 11". All have amicably undertaken a construction " antenna facilities". In the foreground Alexander (UL7RBL and Valery Gamaev UL7RK. First QSO's near monument on place of tragical landing of the ship "SOYUZ-11" On 40 meters band Alex Beljakov (ex: UL7RСO and RV6YF now). Military guy at that time, and on base carried out duties of the permanent cook. Alex Kravtsov (ex UL7RBL) has not time to give the RS-report to correspondents. With the "Angara" transceiver he certainly "on you". We were met warmly by friends and so local "owners" did'n want to release. We leaved, and they continued the businnes. Many thanks for the best translation this WEB-page to my good friend Gabriel VE3BDE, his wife Irina, Susi White WA6DKS and her husband, did all work he is a write. The request the remarks and wishes write to author of these lines: Victor Borodin RV3YR, E-mail [email protected]. Participants of expedition, certainly, to respond with the remarks and amendments. And it's possible and with additional photos of those days. I hope you like it history.By Damon Cali
Posted on February 23, 2012 at 09:50 PM
This article continues the series on my new long range prone rifle build, which began with the selection of 6mm XC as the cartridge of choice followed with a first look at the Warner #2 rear sight that I will be using.
A couple days ago I received a phone call form the local gun shop that my Barnard Model P action had arrived. Hours of my life was then wasted dealing with the DMV and other local entities getting my paperwork in order. It sounds more tolerable to say "paperwork" than the alternative vernacular. In any case, I happily picked up the action and brought it home.
Overview
The Barnard Model P is a single shot bolt action designed and manufactured in New Zealand for long range rifle competition. It is a hefty action with a simple, heavy-duty design. Unlike the near ubiquitous Remington 700 (which has two bolt lugs), the Barnard has three blot lugs, equally spaced - 120 degrees apart. Practically, this means that the bolt lift angle is reduced (compared to a two-lug bolt) and the force required to lift it is increased. I think it's a good compromise, but to each his own.
Incidentally, one might suspect that a three-lug design would vibrate differently than a two lug design. In a two-lug action, the lugs are facing up and down when the rifle is locked up and ready to fire. Those two points are the main load path for the bolt thrust - which can be on the order of 10,000 pounds and a significant driver of barrel vibration. In a three-lug action, the bolt thrust is taken by the receiver through three points instead of two. What that means in practical terms is beyond my knowledge, but I'd bet there is a difference in the way the barrel vibrations are driven. Perhaps someone should look into that some time... (If you're having trouble following me here, there is a fascinating discussion on the topic in Harold Vaughn's Rifle Accuracy Facts. (Update: Vaughn's book is unfortunately out of print. Pick one up if you see a copy).
But back to the action. I chose to have a Remington style plunger ejector included to match the standard Sako-style extractor. I also chose a right-bolt, right-port configuration. One of the nice things about the Barnard is that they offer it in just about any imaginable configuration - you can order to suit your needs.
Another attractive feature of the Model P is that it comes with a very nice two stage trigger with either a "normal" or "light" weight spring. I chose the light spring, as I prefer a light trigger for prone competition.
Recoil and Lugs
The Model P has not one, but three different options when it comes to its recoil lug (none of which are included with the action).
A Remington style recoil lug
A rectangular slot milled into the bottom of the receiver
A recoil shear boss that threads into one of the screw holes on the bottom of the receiver
The most traditional of the three is the Remington-style lug, which gets attached by your gunsmith between the action and the barrel. You then bed the action in a traditional manner with the lug bearing against a recess in the stock. It's how the vast majority of bolt action rifles are done.
A more involved option is to have your gunsmith make a rectangular aluminum or steel block that fits into the Barnards slot. That block can be bedded into your stock. I'm not sure what the advantage is over a traditional Remington style lug, but some folks prefer this method. All I can think of is that the attachment and removal of the barrel is slightly simplified, as you don't have to mess with the lug. Not a terribly big deal, especially for me, since I don't do my own gunsmithing!
The third option is a cylindrical shear boss that screws into the bottom of the action. This boss then fits into a recess in an aluminum v-block which is bedded in the stock. Reportedly, this allows the stock to be removed and replaced without degrading accuracy. That, of course, is the holy grail of bedding - if it can really be done.
One concern I have about the shear boss method is that there is very little of the action bearing on the shear boss - the recess in the action is only about 0.015" deep. You don't want to have threads taking recoil forces - you want it to be taken directly by the boss. I haven't yet seen the actual boss piece (only photos), but this makes me nervous. If the shear is not transferred directly from the boss to the action, and instead goes through the threaded interface, you could get some inconsistency.
Now, everyone I've checked with says the shear boss setup works well. My suspicion is that this is due in large part to the action screws providing a firm grip on the aluminum bedding block. In other words, the recoil is reacted primarily by the friction between the action and the v bock. Again, this makes me nervous. It works when it works, but it is good practice to avoid relying on friction to absorb shear forces like this. (This may be the aerospace engineer in me speaking - this was not a debatable topic when I was working in the space business).
So long story short, I had intended to use the boss method before I saw the action, but will be rethinking that plan. As of now, I'm leaning towards the separate lug used under the receiver.
Trigger Details
A nice touch is that the Barnard comes with a very nice adjustable two stage trigger. As mentioned above, you can request a lighter trigger spring allowing pull weights down to around 1 pound or so. The action comes with a set of instructions for adjusting the trigger (and even a nice 1.5mm hex head driver). Nothing unusual here - you just turn the screws in or out, in the proper order, to adjust the trigger's weight (rearmost screw), overtravel (middle screw), and sear engagement (front screw). Also adjustable are the first stage weight (screw in rear of actual trigger), and fist stage length (screw in front of actual trigger.) A nice touch is that the Barnard comes with a very nice adjustable two stage trigger. As mentioned above, you can request a lighter trigger spring allowing pull weights down to around 1 pound or so. The action comes with a set of instructions for adjusting the trigger (and even a nice 1.5mm hex head driver). Nothing unusual here - you just turn the screws in or out, in the proper order, to adjust the trigger's weight (rearmost screw), overtravel (middle screw), and sear engagement (front screw). Also adjustable are the first stage weight (screw in rear of actual trigger), and fist stage length (screw in front of actual trigger.)
Overall Impressions
The Barnard is a high-end action. The fit and finish are superb, the mechanicals are strong and simple, and the trigger is acceptable right out of the box (a rare occurrence these days). I hate to call it a "custom" action because I feel that the Barnard has been around long enough (Since 1993) and been produced in large enough volumes to be considered a factory action. It's a very high quality factory action comparable in quality to custom actions, but part of the appeal is that it's being built by a business with some staying power and you can count on it being around for a while.
Damon Cali is the creator of the Bison Ballistics website and a high power rifle shooter currently living in Nebraska.These scraps of Somerset dialect could be a foreign tongue, but they are the language of my youth, dialect which survives in the school playground, in the bars of village pubs and the homes of farming communities. Most of us, as we mature, lose our dialect. It is our way of dealing with a shrinking world. We hold telephone conversations with people hundreds of miles away and watch countless hours of 'well-spoken' television. Our dialect fades. But I have never lost that love of well-spoken dialect and have the same passion for its discovery as I do for any foreign language. And that is dialect. It is not English spoken with a funny accent, legitimised by adding lots of "ooh |
Carvalho said the contract the club originally made with Doyen was invalid, because it gave the investment fund the right to “manipulate” the club’s decisions. He claimed that Sporting did not want to sell Rojo, who played for Argentina in the World Cup final, but Doyen offered the player for sale over the club’s head, “to Manchester United and all the world”.
“One of the rules is that the funds cannot be engaging with the management and not manipulating the management, and they did it,” De Carvalho said. “That contract means manipulation. It means engagement with the management. It’s not a contract – it’s null.”
Asked if Rojo himself had not wanted to leave, De Carvalho said he had no issue with the player: “He was very happy to be in Sporting but he felt the opportunity to come to Manchester was very good.”
Speaking more generally of Doyen and other funds which buy stakes in players for a share of their future transfer fees, De Carvalho described the funds as “a menace to sports and for football”. He listed the dangers as a lack of transparency because the funds are mostly based in offshore tax havens with undeclared owners, a blight on the finances of clubs because they do not receive all the money for selling players, and argued that they add to the risk of match-fixing because funds could own stakes in players competing for different clubs against each other in the same match.
He said that when he was elected the president at Sporting, who are 51% owned by their supporters, he arrived to find the club’s finances were “a disaster”, they were €500m in debt, and the majority of the players were owned by funds, some having bought 95%, 90% or 80% of the players’ rights.
“I am against funds where we don’t know where the money is coming from, and who try to manipulate football,” De Carvalho said. “Many times there is similar owners from the funds and gambling companies, so match-fixing is the worst fear now for football. Everybody’s seeing the problem.”
Now under his presidency, he said, Sporting will not sell players’ economic rights, and he called for regulation by the governing bodies, arguing that the practice is so widespread that it is impractical for Fifa or Uefa to ban it. “I think now it is a monster,” he said. “A monster that is living in almost all the clubs, so now I cannot see how [it can be banned]; only regulate it is the solution. We need to have a discussion very serious with everybody very quick.”
Uefa has in fact pledged to ban third-party ownership, with the president, Michel Platini, viscerally against the practice of players being “owned” by offshore investment funds. Fifa has a working party examining the issue, which met last week, but Uefa may proceed to ban the practice in Europe if Fifa does not act soon enough.
Doyen Sports responded by arguing that it provides clubs with “much-needed” money, linked to the future value of players, which enables them to hold on to players and compete, citing Atlético Madrid as “a perfect example”, doing well “in part [due] to Doyen’s support”.
Regarding the dispute with Sporting over the 75% stake claimed in Rojo’s transfer, a Doyen spokesman insisted the contract was valid: “We categorically do not manage or influence the player and we ensure that is written into every contract we have with the club. This is the first ever issue we have had and it is with a specific president who now wants to renege on a bona fide contract that his club has signed. We welcome taking the matter to court.”HOUSTON -- Houston Texans middle linebacker DeMeco Ryans has assumed a pivotal dual role for his team as the NFL lockout stretches into its fourth month.
Ryans is one of the Texans' player representatives, along with right tackle Eric Winston, responsible for keeping his teammates abreast of developments in the ongoing labor dispute.
And since coaches aren't allowed to have contact with players for now, Ryans has undertaken the job of teaching new coordinator Wade Phillips' 3-4 scheme to the defense -- which ranked as one of the league's worst in 2010.
"I'm just doing my part, man," Ryans said with a smile.
Many of his teammates have come to Houston to do the same, with 35 players participating in a voluntary practice for about 80 minutes on Monday morning at Rice University.
Quarterback Matt Schaub, defensive end Mario Williams and linebacker Brian Cushing were among the starters who joined Ryans at the workout, the first of three this week. Draft picks Shiloh Keo, Brooks Reed and T.J. Yates also practiced.
Schaub led the players through a series of warm-up drills before the group split up, according to their positions. They mostly scrimmaged, without pads, for most of the last half of the practice.
"For us to be out here as a team, a group of guys choosing to be here, in the long-term will serve us good," Schaub said.
Ryans is still recovering from a ruptured Achilles tendon that sidelined him for the last 10 games of last season. He referred to a playbook during the practice, and repeated calls to ensure that the players understood.
"It's important for us to get out here and get the guys some looks at our different offensive sets, and try to do our adjusting," Ryans said. "I think we are getting more comfortable with the terminology that we're using. The more reps you get, the better you get it."
But as much benefit as the team workouts provide, Schaub concedes that every NFL team will need extended training camp with coaches to properly prepare for the season.
Ryans says he's "encouraged" about what he believes are constructive meetings. But he offered no timeline for when he thought a new deal might be struck, only that he believes progress is being made toward ending the lockout that began March 12.
"It's not about getting a deal done as quickly as possible," Ryans said, "it's about getting a fair deal done. Whenever that time comes, when a fair deal is on the table, that's when it will get done. We're not in a big panic to get something done, just for the sake of getting it done."
Keo, a safety picked in the fifth round, says he's trying to put the lockout out of his mind. He's more concerned with learning the defense from Ryans and impressing his new teammates.
"I want to be updated on it every day, but I want to keep my head out of it," Keo said. "When I come out here, I want to be focused on the drills, meeting the guys, getting to know them, and performing. I'm not here to just wait for the lockout to end. I'm here to get work done early."
The Texans' defense, particularly the secondary, needs as much practice as it can get, with or without coaches. Houston ranked last in pass defense last season (268 yards per game) and produced only 13 interceptions.
Kareem Jackson, often the scapegoat for Houston's secondary issues last year, and fellow cornerback Glover Quin were both at Monday's workout.
Quin will move to safety in Phillips' defensive alignment. He said the team practices are crucial in helping the Texans learn the system.
"You kind of have to look at a playbook and say, 'OK, I think this is what they (the coaches) kind of want us to do," Quin said. "But it will also help us out, because when we do go in, when they make a call, we'll kind of know exactly what we have to do. We just need to figure out the technique they want us to play in.
"But if they give us a normal call, it's not like it's a foreign language anymore," Quin said. "We've had to teach ourselves. When you teach yourself, you pick up on it, you find ways that you can understand it, and when the coaches teach it, it just makes even more sense."As birtherism resurfaces in the GOP presidential primary, Haley Barbour is the latest to fret the party's damaging its image
Top Republicans are increasingly worried the party is shooting itself in the foot.
The latest is Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who told reporters Tuesday that it's "not good for the Republicans" when presidential candidates bring up issues like President Obama's birth certificate.
"Look, if this election is about Barack Obama's policies and the results of those policies, Barack Obama's going to lose," Barbour said. "Any other issue that gets injected into the campaign is not good for the Republicans."
Barbour was responding to a question about Texas Gov. Rick Perry's decision to stoke the issue of Obama's birthplace. In an interview published over the weekend, Perry said he didn't "have a definitive answer" about where the president's was really born, and on Tuesday he told The New York Times he got a kick out of keeping the issue alive: "It's fun to poke him a little bit."
But Barbour, answering questions after speaking at the National Press Club, said the candidates are hurting their chances if they veer into sideshow territory.
"Republicans should want this election to be what American presidential elections have always been: a referendum on the incumbent's record," he said. "Barack Obama cannot win a second term running on his record -- zero chance. So for anybody to talk about anything else is off subject."There's something exceedingly foul about how poultry are slaughtered in the United States.
First some background: In 1958, Congress passed The Humane Slaughter Act, to require animal welfare improvements in our nation's slaughterhouses. However, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) exempts poultry from its enforcement of the law, even though birds represent more than 8.8 billion of the 9 billion animals slaughtered annually in the United States.
That's right: The agency charged with enforcing the Humane Slaughter Act refuses to enforce it for more than 98 percent of slaughtered animals.
Because USDA refuses to protect them, most birds are subjected to abuses that would warrant cruelty convictions under federal law if cows or pigs were the victims. You really have to see poultry slaughter to believe it, but as just one example, USDA records indicate that almost a million chickens are boiled alive every year when they miss the neck-slicer and go, fully conscious, into the water bath that is used for feather removal (see Washington Post story here).
Although no plant has yet gotten in trouble for boiling birds alive, USDA has repeatedly recognized its own obligation to stop this horrible cruelty, because the abuse of birds leads to adulterated meat. In 2005, it published a notice in the Federal Register proclaiming that bird welfare is a "high priority" for its inspectors and detailing multiple ways in which ill treatment causes adulteration. And in 2009, an agency directive noted that "humane methods of handling and slaughtering... increase the likelihood of producing an unadulterated product."
The USDA is legally obligated to ensure that cruelty-based adulteration is prevented, just like it works to ensure that other forms of adulteration are addressed. But it has not, almost a decade after proclaiming its commitment to bird welfare, produced a single regulation focused on that aim.
USDA does encourage its inspectors to look out for abuse. For example, in its 2009 directive, the agency asks inspectors to observe whether, for example, employees are "breaking the legs of birds to hold the birds in the shackle" or "driving over live birds with equipment or trucks," and also whether birds are "frozen inside the cages or frozen to the cages themselves." Sadly, though, it does not give inspectors power to stop these abuses, and it has not codified such abuses as explicit violations of law.
Of course, looking out for abuse is markedly different from stopping it.
USDA's failure to create regulatory humane requirements has led, predictably, to a lack of concern among inspectors. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, my organization received complete poultry inspection records for an 18-month period, and we found that inspectors at more than half of plants were doing nothing at all on the issue.
That's why we have joined with the Animal Welfare Institute to file a legal petition with USDA (read it on USDA's site, here), calling on the agency to fulfill its statutory mandate by creating humane regulations for poultry slaughter, as required by the Poultry Products Inspection Act.
In a wildly popular online PETA video, Paul McCartney states that "chickens and turkeys are arguably the most abused animals on the face of the planet."
Sadly, Sir Paul is not being hyperbolic, and it is past time for USDA to do something about it (you can take action here).Getty Images
We already know that the Panthers, Cardinals and Patriots will make the playoffs. By Sunday night, we may know the identity of five more playoff teams, as the Bengals, Broncos, Packers, Seahawks and Vikings all have playoff-clinching scenarios for Week 15.
Here are all of this week’s playoff scenarios:
Patriots: New England has already clinched the AFC East and can clinch a first-round bye with a win and either a Broncos loss or a Bengals loss.
Bengals: Cincinnati clinches the AFC North with a Steelers loss. Cincinnati also clinches a playoff spot with a win, or a Jets loss, or a Chiefs loss.
Broncos: Denver clinches the AFC West with a win and a Chiefs loss. Denver also clinches a playoff berth with a win, or with a Jets loss.
Panthers: Carolina has already clinched a first-round bye and will clinch home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs with a win and a Cardinals loss.
Cardinals: Arizona clinches the NFC west with a win or a Seahawks loss. There’s also a scenario in which Arizona clinches the NFC West even if the Cardinals lose and the Seahawks win, which would require the Bengals and Saints to win while the Cowboys and Steelers lose. The Cardinals clinch a first-round bye if they win and the Packers lose.
Packers: Green Bay clinches a playoff berth with a win. Green Bay can also clinch a playoff berth with a loss, if the Buccaneers lose and either Washington or the Giants lose.
Seahawks: Seattle clinches a playoff spot with a win and a Buccaneers loss, plus either a Giants loss or a Washington loss, or a Falcons loss and a Vikings loss and a Packers loss.
Vikings: Minnesota clinches a playoff spot with a win and a Buccaneers loss, plus a loss by either Washington or the Giants, and a loss by either the Falcons or Seahawks.The petroleum industry supports the revision, but BP and DuPont want to preserve the status quo. (TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS)
As Congress considers scaling back or abolishing U.S. rules that mandate the use of renewable fuels, it has the full-throated support of the petroleum industry — with one major exception.
BP, one of the world’s biggest oil companies by revenue, is part of a joint venture with DuPont that is set to start producing a new alternative fuel by the end of the year. In order to preserve a market for that fuel, its officials are busy in Washington trying to persuade lawmakers that the current system doesn’t need an overhaul.
“They don’t need to change the law,” Paul Beckwith, chief executive of the venture, Butamax Advanced Biofuels of Wilmington, Del., said in an interview. The program “as it’s currently configured is working, and there are good opportunities for increasing renewable levels beyond where they are today.”
The Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, dates in its current form to 2007, when concerns about dependence on overseas oil and a desire to curb the use of fossil fuels induced Congress to set quotas for the use of alternatives to gasoline or diesel, such as ethanol and biodiesel.
Under the law, refiners such as Exxon Mobil must blend a certain amount of renewable fuels into their gasoline each year, with their contribution determined by their share of the fuel market. The Environmental Protection Agency and renewable-fuel producers say the mandate spurs production of U.S.-made fuels, helps corn farmers and cuts carbon emissions by replacing gasoline.
The efforts of BP and Wilmington, Del.-based DuPont, which together spent $13.8 million on lobbying in 2012, show the fissures in the business community over the future of the rules, and the difficult path any overhaul must tread. A panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is set to hold a hearing on the program, as Republicans such as Rep. Bob Goodlatte (Va.) push to scrap it.
Critics, ranging from motorcyclists to chicken farmers, focus on two issues.
Food retailers and food charities complain that use of corn to make ethanol is pushing up the cost of food.
Local chain restaurant owners pestered their advocacy group, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, to find out why their commodity costs were spiking, according to Robert Green, executive director of the Washington-based group. After hiring an outside research firm to conduct a study, “it was very clear that the RFS was a cause of it,” he said. The group, whose members include White Castle and Wendy’s, is launching a campaign in Washington it calls the Feed Food Fairness to repeal the RFS.
Lobbyists representing refiners such as Exxon, based in Irving, Tex., and Tesoro of Waltham, Mass., have a different objection. They say falling U.S. fuel demand means that requirements for ethanol may force its use higher than the 10 percent that the government says is safe for all engines, exceeding what the industry calls “the blendwall.”
“With each passing day or month, we’re going to see more movement” for repeal, Charles Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represents refiners such as Exxon and Tesoro, said.
Now the small collection of renewable-fuel producers are pushing back against those efforts, arguing that they will soon be making the kinds of next-generation fuels necessary to fill the growing government quotas while avoiding the damage to engines that worries the refiners.
Butamax plans to convert an existing ethanol plant to make biobutanol, a related fuel also made from corn that has lower greenhouse-gas emissions and doesn’t present the same kind of refining issues as ethanol, according to the company.
“It completely overcomes the issues with the blendwall,” Beckwith said before meeting this month with congressional staff members to discuss the issue.
London-based BP, which in the United States has the capacity to refine 725,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is taking a slightly different position than the industry trade groups. It is advocating for regulatory mending by the EPA, not a legislated end.
“BP supports the goals of the RFS program to stimulate the development and deployment of biofuels technologies, and we believe that technologies like Butamax’s will be an important part of our liquid transportation fuel mix,” Matt Hartwig, a company spokesman, said. Still, “safely moving past the ethanol blendwall will require time and investment.”
Butamax is not alone in pushing to preserve the program. Iowa’s corn growers have flooded Washington to make their case, and to take aim at what they say are unfair subsidies that the oil industry gets.
Separately, ethanol producer Poet of Sioux Falls, S.D., and Royal DSM NV, a Heerlen, Netherlands-based biotechnology company, are pushing ahead on a plant that will use crop residue such as corn cobs and husks to produce 20 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel a year. It plans to start full commercial production in early 2014.
“The RFS is doing great things, and will continue to do so for the next 15 years,’’ Hugh Welsh, DSM’s president for North America, said in an e- mail. “When presented with the facts and the results, our elected officials recognize this.’’BOSTON -- One day after Geoffrey Mutai won the Boston Marathon in 2 hours, 3 minutes, 2 seconds -- the fastest time ever for the 26.2-mile distance -- race officials said they will ask track's international governing body to certify his time as a world record even though the course is technically ineligible.
"Sure," Tom Grilk, the executive director of the Boston Athletic Association, said Tuesday. "Why wouldn't we?"
With temperatures in the 50s and a steady, significant tailwind -- perfect marathon weather -- Mutai ran almost a minute faster than the official world record of 2:03:59 set by Haile Gebrselassie in Berlin in 2008. But Mutai's mark is doomed to be recognized only as a "world best," not a "world record," because the Boston course is too downhill and too much of a straight line to meet IAAF standards.
Fourth-place finisher Ryan Hall's 2:04:58 was the fastest ever for a U.S. runner; it is likewise ineligible to be recognized as the American record because the national governing body has similar rules to the international one, according to Jim Estes, the manager of long-distance running programs for USA Track and Field.
Hall didn't seem to care about being ineligible for an American record, but he didn't feel like his time was tainted, either.
"There's no disappointment for me," he said on Tuesday. "I was sitting there last night and I'm saying, 'I'm a 2:04 marathoner.' I don't care if it's the course, or the wind, or anything. I'm a 2:04 marathoner."
Still, Boston officials said they would apply to have the records certified, which would force the governing bodies to reject an unprecedented performance on the world's most prestigious marathon course. Runners are lining up behind Mutai and insisting that any rule that excludes Boston, a race that predates the IAAF itself, is itself flawed.
"The IAAF must come and see Boston, and look, from start to finish, and see," Mutai said Tuesday. "It is 42 kilometers, up and down the whole way. This is 42 kilometers; the other, that Gebrselassie ran, is 42 kilometers. It is not easy."
In fact, no one is saying that Boston is easy -- certainly not anyone who's run the grueling hills from Hopkinton to Copley Square. But IAAF rules that encourage flat, loop courses were created to weed out marathons designed to produce artificially fast times with downhill courses or favorable weather.
Ironically, they wound up excluding Boston, the world's oldest and most traditional marathon course -- with the possible exception of the path the Greek messenger Pheidippides took from Marathon to Athens to start it all 2,500 years ago.
"This is the most time-tested course in the world," 1986 Boston winner Rob de Castella said Tuesday. "Just about every great marathoner in history has run on this course. Boston was around when Pheidippides was a boy. You can't take away from this amazing performance. It's a record performance, beyond a shadow of a doubt."
De Castella and other marathoners also noted on Monday that the governing bodies will recognize a record -- including Gebreselassie's Berlin run -- that has been set with the help of professional runners hired to maintain a steady pace. Runners say having pacesetters can be a far bigger boost than Boston's 459-foot drop in elevation, or a tailwind.
"For these guys to do what they've done without pacesetters on a tough, hilly course is phenomenal," de Castella said. "It's a shame if there's any hesitation to acknowledge the outstanding athletic feat that we saw yesterday."
The B.A.A. said on Monday that the race would pay Mutai the $75,000 in bonuses he earned for breaking the course record and achieving a world best. On Tuesday, the Kenyan was presented with a ceremonial check; because it had been printed in advance, the first prize of $150,000 was crossed out and $225,000 was written in.
Grilk said that the 115-year-old race isn't going to change just to meet the IAAF criteria. No matter what the record book says, runners will know.
"If somebody wants to put up a dome and chase Swifty, the rabbit from Wonderland [dog track] around, God bless them," Grilk said. "We'll keep doing what we've been doing for 100 years: Firing off a gun and saying, 'Go.'"
A total of 23,930 out of the 24,390 who started Monday's race finished. There were 1,288 people treated by the medical staff; 73 of them were transported to the hospital; nine stayed overnight, but they are all OK, race director Dave McGillivray said.
But those aren't the numbers everyone is talking about.
In addition to the world best in the men's race, Wakako Tsuchida set a course record in the women's wheelchair race with a time of 1:34:06, beating Jean Driscoll's 1994 time by 16 seconds. It was her fifth straight victory; men's wheelchair winner Masazumi Soejima is also from Japan, where training has been difficult since the March earthquake.
"I'm going to take this energy back to Japan," she said through a translator. "Hopefully, it will help raise them up in a time of need."
The women's race finished with a back-and-forth duel on Boylston Street before Caroline Kilel won in 2:22:36. Desiree Davila came in 2 seconds later for the fastest Boston time for an American woman -- 5 seconds faster than Joan Benoit when she won the race in 1983.
Four men broke the previous course record of 2:05:52, set just last year by Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot. One of them was Hall, who beat the previous course record by almost a minute and Khalid Khannouchi's U.S. mark by 40 seconds.
Hall might not get the official American record, but he has his mind on next year.
"I'll be back in Boston," Hall said. "I just have to take another four minutes off my time and see if I can win."It looks like every aspect of Foo Fighters’ short-lived hiatus is over. Not only are the prolific rockers scheduled to return to the stage to headline BottleRock Napa Valley Festival in May, but they’ve also got plans to work on a brand new album, their first since 2014’s Sonic Highways.
News of the album was revealed by Dave Graham, CEO of Latitude 38, the entertainment company behind BottleRock. “The Foo Fighters are in the studio all next year recording a new album and BottleRock may be their only show in 2017 in North America,” he recently told writer David Kerns of the Napa Valley Register, in an interview discussing the steps Latitude 38 took to nab the much-coveted, Grammy-winning outfit. (Kerns confirmed to Consequence of Sound that “next year” means 2017.)
The forthcoming full-length would mark the Foos’ ninth overall and follows their two 2015 EPs, Songs from the Laundry Room and Saint Cecilia. In November, drummer Taylor Hawkins put out his debut solo album, KOTA.
The three-day BottleRock Festival goes down May 26th – 28th in Napa Valley, California. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Modest Mouse, The Roots, and Mavis Staples are also expected to perform.
Below, revisit Sonic Highways single “Something From Nothing”:How a jerk scams a free quadruple espresso at Starbucks 365 days a year
A Starbucks barista named Brad describes a guy who bought 365 Starbucks gift cards and registered each of them with a different birthday so he can get a free drink every day. That's already a dick move, but the guy makes it worse by being a real jerk to the barista. When he comes in to the store he asks for a Venti cup and a marker and writes instructions on the cup before handing it back:
He draws lines and arrows and writes all over the cup while telling me: “Two pumps of white mocha here, then add five pumps of vanilla. That should take us to this line here where you’re gonna add cold heavy cream up to this ridge here...it should be halfway between this line and this line. Make sure to add the heavy whipping cream before the espresso, it changes the taste if you do it out of order. Then add your four shots, three regular and one long shot. That long shot is important, since you guys reformulated your machines, it’s been Hell trying to get my drink right. That long shot helps balance it. Then stir it for me, Mister Brad. Now do me a favor and add ice to the top there and it’ll be easy as pie. I’m not picky so don’t worry about shaking it or anything like that.”
A drink like this is normally $6.50, which would make it ineligible for the free birthday coffee, so he instructs the barista to ring it up as a "one quad espresso, add white mocha, sub vanilla, sub heavy cream."
Read other "Stories of Horrible Restaurant Customers" at Kitchenette.In recent years, there has been a growing perception surrounding the Orioles regarding their reluctance to retain the club's high-priced free-agent talent.
Just last offseason, Baltimore drew criticism for failing to re-sign homegrown outfielder Nick Markakis, slugger Nelson Cruz and left-handed setup man Andrew Miller from its 2014 American League East division-winning squad. After failing to find adequate replacements for their services, the Birds took a step back and stumbled to a third-place finish in the division with an 81-81 record.
This offseason, however, the O's have shown they are willing to spend the money to appease their fans and avoid a similar fate. Baltimore has already reached deals with catcher Matt Wieters (one-year, $15.8 million), right-handed setup man Darren O'Day (four years, $31 million -- pending a physical) and are reportedly making a push to bring back slugger Chris Davis.
"Teams may not be the Yankees or the Red Sox or the Dodgers -- that's going to be an excuse. We've got plenty of money," manager Buck Showalter said Dec. 8 on Glenn Clark Radio. "Our owner [Peter Angelos] is unbelievably supportive from that standpoint. We have the highest payroll, I think, in Oriole history, so let's keep that in mind."
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox
Showalter is right. Excluding O'Day's new pact, the Orioles currently rank 14th out of the league's 30 teams with a payroll slightly less than $116 million, according to ESPN, ahead of big-market teams like the New York Mets.
That number could jump significantly higher if the Orioles and Davis come to terms on a deal that is expected to shatter the team-record six-year, $85.5 million contract center fielder Adam Jones inked in 2012.
While Showalter would like nothing more than to have Davis back in the fold, he understands the challenges the Birds face in signing a player who is said to be seeking anywhere from $150-200 million.
"We're still doing some things with Chris Davis," Showalter said. "He's going to make a decision about how much [money] is enough … and I know Chris would like to come back. But we will move on at some point."
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox
In the event Davis does indeed depart, the three-time AL Manager of the Year award winner won't be short on replacements. Showalter was high on several alternatives that could step in and fill the noticeable void left by the 2013 AL Silver Slugger award winner.
"We do have [minor league first basemen] Trey Mancini and Christian Walker, and we do have some people that we will move on to," Showalter said. "We're not going to sit around and waddle around in self-pity. This game will survive without all of us."
If there is one player the Orioles will have to survive next season without, it's left-handed starter Wei-Yin Chen. With almost no possibility of Chen returning next season, Showalter has already begun to explore in-house candidates to replace the four-year veteran in the rotation.
Although Showalter mentioned lefty reliever Brian Matusz as one of the possible solutions, he seemed more content with the production the one-time starter has given the club since moving to the bullpen in 2012.
"Every spring, we stretch him out and see what that is," Showalter said of Matusz. "There's that possibility. I'm not going to commit to any of that. We're going to see how the trees shake out and what's available. Brian has done a good job in the bullpen for us, and we know he has a strong pedigree of starting."
No matter how the rest of the Orioles' offseason plays out, Showalter has no doubts the Orioles will have formed their identity once the 2016 season begins.
"One of things I wanted to find when I got here is who are we, and how are we going to do?" Showalter said. "Let's [not] confuse the fans. Let's be consistent about how we're going about our business."
For more from Showalter, including his take on the College Football Playoff system and his itch for spring training to begin, listen to the full interview here:
See Also:Earlier this morning, I got a chance to catch up with Dr. Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola (s MOT), soon after his company reported earnings (they met Wall Street’s modest expectations) to talk about everything from the state of the mobile market to prospects for Motorola. I will write all that up in a longer post, but there was one part of the conversation that stuck with me as it was very telling about the momentum around Google’s Android and the detrimental impact it’s having on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
As part of our conversation, Dr. Jha stressed that handset makers need to pick a single smartphone OS and devote resources to it in order to win. He pointed to Nokia and Symbian, Apple and its iPhone OS and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. He used that logic to justify why his company was betting the farm on Google’s Android. Why? Because it’s the best option for the company right now.
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“I didn’t have any other compelling option,” he said. “The other OS got pushed.” I asked him if he was talking about Microsoft’s Windows Mobile or the LiMo operating systems, but Dr. Jha proved to be too polite to name names and reveal more details. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 had been scheduled to make it out of the chutes by May, but won’t hit the market till October.
From what we’ve heard, there aren’t any Windows Mobile-based devices in Motorola’s line-up for 2010, so it’s reasonable to say that Windows Mobile has lost favor at Motorola. Back in February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Motorola was going to cut its ties with Windows Mobile. At the time, the handset maker denied any such moves. A month earlier, however, I hinted at Motorola backing away from Microsoft-based handsets.
Like upstart HTC, a long-time Windows Mobile loyalist, Motorola is focusing its development resources behind Google’s Android OS. Both HTC and Motorola are developing their own user interfaces for Android, which indicates their seriousness about Google’s mobile platform. I wonder if this is going to be a trend that’s going to spread. From what I’ve heard, everyone from Lenovo and Huawei to Dell to Samsung are betting on Android. These companies would have been partners of Microsoft in the past.
I feel Microsoft wasted away many years while it held the top position in the mobile handset business. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently told analysts that, “It was a tough year on succeeding with phones, mostly our own issues, frankly.” (via The Washington Post). Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices business, was more candid, and admitted to problems with Microsoft’s mobile strategy in a meeting with financial analysts and investors. Bach reported that Microsoft’s share of the mobile phone operating system market had declined despite the fact that volumes were up a tad. Microsoft claimed that 20 million Window Mobile phones were sold in 2008.
“To date, we haven’t done as good a job as I would like building relationships and getting the right integration with our hardware partners…You’re going to see dramatic improvement in integration.” “It is our view that one model, one phone is not going to build volume,” he said. “People are going to want different configurations on their phones. We need to work very closely with Samsung, Sony Ericsson and others to build a broad selection of phones that provide a choice of different pricepoints and different capabilities.”
Funny there wasn’t any mention of Motorola! I wonder if it will be too late for the company to make a comeback, similar to Zune struggling to play catch-up with the iPod. So while there is a lot of focus on Apple vs. Google, the real battle is actually between Microsoft Windows Mobile and Google Android. It looks like Google has drawn its first blood.
(Dr. Jha will deliver a keynote speech and discuss Motorola’s bet on Mobile Internet in our mobile Internet-focused conference, Mobilize 09, that will be held in San Francisco on Sept. 10.)Dakari Johnson isn’t used to being the star of the show.
Although he was an All-American in high school, Johnson played alongside many other top prospects at Montverde Academy in Florida, including future No. 1 draft pick Ben Simmons. Then in his two years at the University of Kentucky, he averaged just 15 minutes per game while playing behind the likes of Julius Randle, Willie Cauley-Stein, Trey Lyles and Karl-Anthony Towns.
Johnson would’ve been the go-to guy at just about any other school in the nation. Now in his second year as a pro, he’s getting that chance with the NBA D-League’s Oklahoma City Blue.
After a rookie season in which his team finished 19-31, Johnson is the standout performer on a much-improved Oklahoma City squad. The 7-footer made the D-League All-Rookie Team last year, but his performance has dramatically improved in all phases of the game. He’s averaging 19.9 points, 8.7 rebounds, 2.2 blocks (fourth in the league) and 3.3 assists per game while shooting 58.2 percent from the floor and 70.9 percent at the foul line.
Compare that to last season, when Johnson shot 53 percent from the field and just 58.1 percent at the charity stripe, and posted 12.3 points, 8.1 rebounds, 1.2 blocks and 2.0 assists per game in a similar amount of playing time.
Still just 21 years old, Johnson is proving he can shine when given the opportunity.
The young center has already been recognized for his stellar play this season, earning |
be published by Namco Bandai Games on January 23, 2014, Europe on January 24, 2014, and North America on January 28, 2014.Gerber Lil’ Crunchies Veggie Dip Toddler Snack Full of Insecticidal GMO
BACKGROUND
Babies are more vulnerable than adults because of their growing and still developing bodies. Babies consume more food per pound of body weight than adults, which exposes their tiny bodies to relatively higher levels of food borne toxins. In November 2012, The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement recommending that children’s exposure to pesticides be reduced. The AAP policy states:
“Children encounter pesticides daily and have unique susceptibilities to their potential toxicity. Epidemiologic evidence demonstrates associations between early life exposure to pesticides and pediatric cancers, decreased cognitive function, and behavioral problems.” (1)
In 2015, a statement signed by over 300 industry-independent scientific researchers and scholars, titled “No scientific consensus on GMO safety”, was published in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe. These researchers found that there are as many research groups still raising serious concerns about the safety of a number of varieties of GM products (mainly corn and soybeans) as there are groups that cite GM crops as safe and nutritious as the respective conventional non-GM plant. The review also found that most studies concluding that GM foods were as safe and nutritious as those obtained by conventional breeding were ‘performed by biotechnology companies or associates, which are also responsible for commercializing these GM plants’. (2)
We think parents are entitled to know if they are feeding their children GMOs and pesticides so we sent Gerber Lil’ Crunchies Veggie Dip toddler snack for testing.
TEST RESULTS: GMO
We sent a package of Gerber Graduates Lil’ Crunchies Veggie Dip Baked Whole Grain Corn Snack to a certified lab to test for the presence of GMO material. The quantitative PCR test verified, by DNA analysis, that 100% of the corn in the Lil’ Crunchies Veggie Dip was GMO. All of the corn has been genetically engineered to be herbicide tolerant (Roundup Ready) and the corn contained DNA sequences known to be present in Bt insecticide-producing GMO corn.
Herbicide tolerant GMO corn has been linked, in industry-independent peer reviewed studies, to kidney and liver damage in laboratory animals. (3)(4)
Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) corn produces insecticidal toxins from inside every cell of the plant that can’t be washed off. The corn is registered with and regulated by the EPA. The FDA, EPA, and USDA allowed the insecticidal GMO corn discovered in Lil’ Crunchies Veggie Dip to be commercialized without ever conducting human safety tests.
An in-vitro study found that the insecticides in this corn may be toxic to human cells (5). Feeding studies conducted on mammals found adverse effects, including immune system disturbances (6), blood biochemistry disturbances (7), male reproductive organ damage (8), disturbances in the functioning of the digestive system (8), damage to mucosal barrier of the stomach (11), hyperlipidaemia and higher blood glucose levels (12) and signs of organ toxicity (3)(4)(8)(13). Industry claims that these insecticidal proteins are broken down in the digestive tract, yet a study found the proteins circulating in the blood of pregnant and non-pregnant women and the blood supply to fetuses (9). The research team conducting this study concluded, “Given the potential toxicity of these environmental pollutants and the fragility of the foetus, more studies are needed.” To date there has been no follow up study.
“As a physician in Hawaii I remain gravely concerned about the impact pesticides and pesticide dependent crops have on our children’s development,” said Josh Green M.D., Hawaii State Senator.
TEST RESULTS: GLYPHOSATE
Glyphosate is the active chemical ingredient in Roundup herbicide as well as many other name brand glyphosate-based herbicides. These herbicides are the most widely used in the world and their use has increased exponentially with the introduction of GM crops. In response to agrichemical industry requests, the EPA has increased the allowable tolerance levels of glyphosate residues in crops without any scientific basis. And so, we sent a package of Gerber Graduates Veggie Dip Baked Whole Grain Corn Snack to a certified lab to test for the presence of glyphosate.
The glyphosate residue test was conducted by an accredited lab using the Specific LC/MS/MS testing method (the most sensitive test available) with a minimum detectable level of 0.02 ppm. No glyphosate residue was detected. Following is an explanation of why these results are inconclusive.
Some important factors must be considered when interpreting this test result:
First: We did not test a large enough sample to be able to conclude, based on statistics, that the test result is representative of the contents of every package of the toddler food.
Second: The varieties of GMO corn documented by the genetic testing were 100% Roundup tolerant. Farmers normally purchase these varieties so they can control weeds by spraying the crop with glyphosate-based products.
Based on the results of the test performed and the above relevant factors, we are unable to draw any meaningful or reliable conclusions as to the presence, or lack thereof, of glyphosate in Gerber Lil’ Crunchies Veggie Dip toddler snacks.
CONCLUSION
The Gerber Company has been an American icon since 1928. Gerber was acquired by and has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Nestlé since 2007.
In 2012, according to Food Navigator, Hans Jöhr, corporate head of sustainable agriculture at Nestlé stated, “There are a lot of new breeding technologies today that don’t use GM food. You can do a lot of things without GM. GM per se is not a golden bullet but may be an interesting tool in the box. We have a very simple way of looking at GM: listen to what the consumer wants. If they don’t want it in products, you don’t put them in.”
In 2013, as a result of awareness generated by the nonprofit African Centre for Biosafety and consumer demands, Nestlé discontinued the use of genetically engineered ingredients (GMOs) in the baby foods and formulas they sell in South Africa. Nestlé does not use GMOs in the baby foods and formulas they sell in the E.U. and in countries that have laws mandating the labeling of GMOs.
Yet, in the United States, Nestlé contributed $2.4 million to defeat campaigns for mandatory GMO labeling in California and Washington in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and their Gerber brand has ignored consumers’ call to remove GMO ingredients.
GMOs benefit the bottom line of the agrichemical industry, while the risks are entirely shouldered by consumers and our environment. Feeding vulnerable babies GM foods is irresponsible and recklessly puts an entire generation at risk. Through product testing, we bring transparency. With transparency comes accountability.
Call Gerber (800-962-1413) and demand that they remove GMOs from all of their products and get Non-GMO Project verified. Make a pledge to BOYCOTT GERBER and ask your family and friends to do the same.
Our food testing program is funded by donations from supporters like you. Even small amounts make a huge difference. Your recurring donation, as little as $2 a month, will help us build the foundation needed to bring you food transparency and food justice. Please DONATE to help us continue our work.
References:
(1) AAP Makes Recommendations to Reduce Children’s Exposure to Pesticides https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/AAP-Makes-Recommendations-to-Reduce-Children%27s-Exposure-to-Pesticides.aspx
(2) Angelika Hilbeck, Rosa Binimelis, Nicolas Defarge, Ricarda Steinbrecher, András Székács, Fern Wickson, Michael Antoniou, Philip L Bereano, Ethel Ann Clark, Michael Hansen, Eva Novotny, Jack Heinemann, Hartmut Meyer, Vandana Shiva and Brian Wynne. (2015) No scientific consensus on GMO safety. Environmental Sciences Europe 27:4 http://www.enveurope.com/content/pdf/s12302-014-0034-1.pdf
(3) Séralini GE, Cellier D, Spiroux de Vendomois J. New analysis of a rat feeding study with a genetically modified maize reveals signs of hepatorenal toxicity. Arch Environ Contam Toxicol. 2007;52:596–602. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17356802
(4) De Vendomois JS, Roullier F, Cellier D, Séralini GE. A comparison of the effects of three GM corn varieties on mammalian health. Int J Biol Sci. 2009;5:706–26. http://www.ijbs.com/v05p0706.htm
(5) Mesnage R, Clair E, Gress S, Then C, Székács A, Séralini G-E. Cytotoxicity on human cells of Cry1Ab and Cry1Ac Bt insecticidal toxins alone or with a glyphosate-based herbicide. J Appl Toxicol. 2011. http://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pubmed/22337346
(6) Finamore A, Roselli M, Britti S, et al. Intestinal and peripheral immune response to MON810 maize ingestion in weaning and old mice. J Agric Food Chem. 2008;56:11533–39. doi:10.1021/jf802059w. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19007233
(7) Gab-Alla AA, El-Shamei ZS, Shatta AA, Moussa EA, Rayan AM. Morphological and biochemical changes in male rats fed on genetically modified corn (Ajeeb YG). J Am Sci. 2012;8(9):1117–1123. http://www.academia.edu/3405390/Morphological_and_Biochemical_Changes_in_Male_Rats_Fed_on_Genetically_Modified_Corn_Ajeeb_YG_
(8) El-Shamei ZS, Gab-Alla AA, Shatta AA, Moussa EA, Rayan AM. Histopathological changes in some organs of male rats fed on genetically modified corn (Ajeeb YG). J Am Sci. 2012;8(10):684–696. http://www.academia.edu/3405345/Histopathological_Changes_in_Some_Organs_of_Male_Rats_Fed_on_Genetically_Modified_Corn_Ajeeb_YG_
(9) Aris A, Leblanc S. Maternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods in Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. Reprod Toxicol. 2011;31. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21338670
(10) Irena M Zdziarski, John W Edwards, Judy Carman, Adrian Jones, Marni Spillanie, Ysabella Van Sebille, Julie I Haynes (2012) GM feed and its effect on the stomach mucosa of rat. 6th Australian Health and Medical Research Congress 2012 http://ahmrc-2012.p.asnevents.com.au/schedule/abstract/3114
(11) Hasan Kiliçgün, Cebrail Gürsul, Mukadder Sunar, Gülden Gökşen (2013) The Comparative Effects of Genetically Modified Maize and Conventional Maize on Rats J Clin Anal Med ;4(2): 136-9 http://www.jcam.com.tr/files/KATD-983.pdf
(12) E. Abdo, O. Barbary and O. Shaltout, “Feeding Study with Bt Corn (MON810: Ajeeb YG) on Rats: Biochemical Analysis and Liver Histopathology,” Food and Nutrition Sciences, Vol. 5 No. 2, 2014, pp. 185-195. http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=42183#.Uy8XQIVVitMBENGALURU: A Union government-backed survey has revealed a disturbing trend: in the six years since the Right to Education Act, around 60 lakh children between ages six and 13 years remain unschooled in the country.While children from Scheduled Castes and Tribes form 49% (29.73 lakh) of the deprived kids, those from Other Backward Classes constitute 36%, which shows RTE has brought little change in the lives of marginal groups. At 77%, a majority of out-of-school (OOS) children are in rural areas. Besides, 15.57 lakh Muslim children too are out of school, comprising 25% of unschooled children.Speaking to TOI from Delhi, Rakesh Senger, director, Victim Assistance and Campaign at Bachpan Bachao Andolan, said: “It’s not necessary that even this number is accurate as a recent study by us shows that many children who continue to work as labourers in Delhi are being marked present in schools. That is just dubious. There is a long way to go in this regard.”Activists argue that families from backward communities fail to send their children to school largely because doing so reduces the family’s earnings. It means even with subsidized education for these children, families believe their earnings suffer if their kids go to school, thus neutralizing the government’s efforts to incentivize children’s education.The only silver lining lies in gender parity: at 29 lakh, girls constitute about 48% of unschooled children. It means fewer girls are out of school than boys.The number of OOS children has always been the bone of contention. A July 2015 Unesco report saying India “has made impressive progress provision of primary education it notes," is based on the 2012 figures provided by India according to which 1.7 million (17 lakh) children are out of school. The number was borrowed from various agencies.The Unesco report clubs India with some of the worst performing nations. “At least 1 million children were denied the right to education in each of the following countries: India, Indonesia, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan and the United Republic of Tanzania," it notes.Bringing a law is easy, but following it up with concrete action to fulfill its spirit is more important. Instead of focusing on children in rural areas and wooing them to government schools, now most discussions on RTE seem to revolve around the role of private institutions, which are mainly in urban areas. Instead of playing the blame game, authorities must take urgent steps to not only enroll poor children in schools, but also ensure that they continue to attend classes so that the country will have a brighter future.Did you attend the Redskins game last night? Were you sitting in the upper deck of the open-air jail that is FedEx Field? Were you stabbed with a beer bottle fashioned into a shiv? No? Well, consider yourself lucky. From reader Jon...
So I just saw a friend's Facebook where he called security during the MNF game when a Skins fan turned half of his 10-dollar beer aluminum bottle into a legit "this-could-maim-someone" shank.
Of course this was in the upper deck. The person was removed (and hopefully arrested/charged), but someone could have really hurt. How long until someone at an NFL game isn't stopped and actually stabs someone in a situation like this?
Just another reason I'm happy to stay at home and watch Red Zone on Sunday.Kyle Bennett's brace made sure of all three points for Pompey.
Portsmouth made an impressive start to their season as they outclassed Dagenham & Redbridge at Fratton Park.
Dagenham frustrated their hosts in the first half, but could not live with the home side after the break.
Gareth Evans gave Pompey the lead when he headed in from a Kyle Bennett corner, before Bennett doubled the lead with a crashing drive in off the bar.
Bennett sealed the game when he unleashed a brilliant effort from 25 yards to cap a fine performance.
Portsmouth manager Paul Cook told BBC Radio Solent:
Media playback is not supported on this device Cook on Portsmouth v Dagenham
"I'm just happy for everyone at the club, so much work went into today's game.
"I'm happy now that game's gone. I think it's important to get that one out the way and I can focus now on a long season, a tough season, hopefully managing this club to a bit of success.
"I thought the lads showed good patience. All in all it's a really good day for us."
On Kyle Bennett's brace: "They were quality so fingers crossed he can keep it going. He's a good player and there's a little bit of expectancy on him to perform and do well."BABYMETAL tickets
Am 1. April, dem „Fox Day“ hat das Warten für alle BABYMETAL Fans endlich ein Ende. Nur einen Tag bevor die Band am 2. April ihre grösste Show außerhalb Japans in der Londoner Wembley Arena spielen wird, erscheint das lang ersehnte zweite Album „Metal Resistance“!
Seit der Veröffentlichung ihres Debut-Albums im Februar 2014 tourten Su-Metal, MoaMetal und YuiMetal im Rahmen ihrer Welttour non-stop um den Globus und statteten dabei auch Deutschland schon einige Besuche ab. Wer zu den Glücklichen gehörte ein Ticket für die umjubelten Auftritte in Köln, Berlin und Frankfurt zu ergattern, konnte bereits die Magie erleben, die während eines BABYMETAL Konzertes entsteht.
Im Sommer ist es dann auch wieder so weit: BABYMETAL kommen für zwei exklusive Konzerte nach Deutschland! Köln am 07.06. und Stuttgart am 08.06. stehen diesmal im Tourplan, und man kann sich schon jetzt auf energiegeladene und schweißtreibende Auftritte freuen.
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Eventalarm für BABYMETAL Jetzt Email Adresse eintragen und nie mehr Events, Termine und Neuigkeiten verpassen von: BABYMETAL. Jetzt Abonnieren!Kohima Ridge.
The Battle of the Tennis Court was part of the Battle of Kohima in North East India from April 4 – June 22, 1944 during the Burma Campaign of the Second World War. The Japanese advance into India was halted at Kohima in April 1944 and Garrison Hill, on a long wooded ridge on a high ridge west of the village, was the scene of perhaps the most bitter fighting of the whole Burma campaign when a small Commonwealth force held out against repeated attacks by a Japanese Division. The fiercest hand-to-hand fighting took place in the garden of the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow, around the Tennis Court.
Prelude [ edit ]
Kohima Ridge was about a mile long and about 400 yards wide, with a series of hills and gullies that ran alongside the road from Imphal to Dimapur. The steep slopes along the road made the ridge a formidable target for attackers, but it was a narrow space from which to repel an enemy attacking in strength. By April 6 the British, Nepalese and Indian soldiers of Kohima Garrison had been surrounded on the Kohima ridge. As the siege began the Kohima Ridge was defended to the south (facing Imphal) by the 1st Assam Regiment on Jail Hill. The centre ground of the ridge was mainly defended by 4th Battalion, Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment. The North West of the Ridge, known as Hospital Spur, was defended by the 3rd Assam Rifles who were facing the road to Dimapur. The North East of the Ridge on a sharp corner in the road was where the Deputy Commissioner (DC) Charles Pawsey's Bungalow and Tennis Court was situated. This was initially guarded by a composite group of soldiers, thought to be British and Gurkha troops from the local Reinforcement Depot.
Battle [ edit ]
The Japanese launched a series of attacks into the north-east region of the defences on April 8, including two attacks on the DC's Bungalow area. The Japanese suffered massive losses, but poured in reinforcements to prepare for another attack. Some Allied soldiers manned a Bren gun to cover the withdrawal from the DC's Bungalow to the other side of the asphalt tennis court 12m higher up the hill. They held on to the last round but were then overrun, bayoneted and shot. At this stage the Battle of the Tennis Court could be said to have begun with the area being rapidly reinforced by A Company of the 4th Battalion, Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment.
During April 9 and before dawn on April 10 the Japanese 58 Regiment attacked the Allied defenders of the Tennis Court area almost every 30 minutes. Major Tom Kenyon, Officer Commanding (OC) A Company of the 4th Royal West Kents, commanded the British, Indian and Gurkha defenders who had now dug weapon pits and trenches on the western edge of the tennis court. During April 10 these defences and the overhead cover saved many lives as artillery shells landed on the Allied positions. The forward trenches ran out of ammunition on several occasions but were repeatedly resupplied by Sergeant Williams who was awarded a Military Medal for his bravery.
The decision was made on April 12 to relieve the defenders of the Tennis Court with B Company of the 4th Royal West Kents commanded by Major John Winstanley. During B Company's first night defending the Tennis Court, the Japanese forces attacked silently wearing plimsoll shoes instead of boots. They nearly overran the British forward positions with one of the platoon commanders, Lieutenant Tom Hogg, surviving a bayonet attack before firing all 25 rounds from his weapon (probably a Bren light machine gun) killing his assailant.
On April 13, the troops defending near the DC's bungalow and the tennis court came under increasingly heavy artillery and mortar fire, and had to repel frequent infantry assaults. This area was the scene of some of the hardest, closest and grimmest fighting, with grenades being hurled across the tennis court at point-blank range. But on April 14 the Japanese did not launch an attack and on the 15th the British and Indian troops on Kohima ridge heard that the British 2nd Infantry Division was attacking along the Dimapur-Kohima road and had broken through Japanese roadblocks.
On April 17, the Japanese tried one last time to take the ridge. They successfully captured Field Supply Depot (FSD) Hill and Kuki Piquet. But on the morning of April 18, British artillery opened up from the west against the Japanese positions, which stopped the Japanese attacks. Elements of the British 2nd Division, the 161st Indian Brigade and tanks from XXXIII Corps pushed into the area north-west of Garrison Hill and forced the Japanese from their positions. The road between Dimapur and Kohima had been opened, and the siege was lifted.
Part of the Allied force relieving the siege was the 1/1st Punjab Regiment of the 161st Indian Brigade. By the evening of April 18, D Company of 1/1st Punjab Regiment, commanded by Major Gavin Dunnett, were facing the Japanese forces in the Tennis Court area. They were attacked almost immediately by the Japanese 58 Regiment, a battle in which a South East Asia Command Public Relations officer later reported "a grenade match was played across the bungalow's tennis courts". The 1/1st Punjab Regiment took 22 casualties and lost ground, only to retake it again the following day (April 19) during which Jemadar Mohammed Rafiq was awarded the Military Cross for leading his platoon against Japanese bunkers. The 1/1st Punjab Regiment seem to have moved rearwards on April 21, having suffered 120 casualties, to be replaced by C Company of the 1st Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, part of the 6th Brigade of the British 2nd Division, who were themselves relieved by D Company of the same battalion on April 23.
The Japanese who had been fighting to capture Kohima did not retreat at once, many of them stayed in the positions which they had captured and fought tenaciously for several more weeks. It is not entirely clear when the battle for the Tennis Court was won, however it seems that tanks operating from the road supported an infantry attack that captured the Tennis Court area on 10 May 1944. By the morning of May 13, most of the positions on the Kohima ridge had been re-taken by the British and Indian forces. On that day the DC's bungalow was finally recaptured by the 2nd Battalion, Dorset Regiment supported by Grant tanks firing from the Tennis Court. The lead tank was driven by Sergeant Waterhouse of 149th Regiment Royal Armoured Corps (149 RAC), firing his 75mm main armament into Japanese bunkers at no more than 20 yards range. This tank was supported by two platoons of the Dorsets commanded by Sergeants Given and Cook. This Allied breakthrough that ended the Battle of the Tennis Court is depicted in a 1982 painting by Terence Cuneo which is displayed in the Kohima Museum in Imphal Barracks, York.
The fighting within the 6th Brigade's area was documented by Major Boshell, who commanded 'B' Company of the 1st Royal Berkshires, in the 6th Infantry Brigade, British 2nd Division:
“ To begin with I took over an area overlooking the Tennis Court... The lie of the land made impossible to move by day because of Japanese snipers. We were in Kohima for three weeks. We were attacked every single night... They came in waves, it was like a pigeon shoot. Most nights they overran part of the battalion position, so we had to mount counter-attacks... Water was short and restricted to about one pint per man per day. So we stopped shaving. Air supply was the key, but the steep terrain and narrow ridges meant that some of the drops went to the Japs. My company went into Kohima over 100 strong and came out at about 60. ”
Aftermath [ edit ]
Around May 15 the Japanese 31st Division began to withdraw and the fresh British and Indian troops from XXXIII Corps began to reinforce and relieve members of the 2nd Division and 33rd and 161st Indian Brigades. The Battle of the Tennis Court was over and troops of the British Fourteenth Army began an advance, with the relief of Imphal, which would continue until Burma had been recaptured.
This battle was ultimately to prove to be the turning point of the Battle of Kohima which was the turning point of the Burma Campaign. Earl Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in the theatre, described Kohima as
“ probably one of the greatest battles in history... in effect the Battle of Burma... naked unparalleled heroism... the British/Indian Thermopylae. ”
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]* Africa now home to many fast-growing economies
* China trade with Africa up more 1,400 percent since 2000
* US business feels left out of planning on African trade
By Doug Palmer
WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama’s administration, criticized for not doing enough to boost trade with Africa in the face of rising competition from China, has taken steps in recent months to address those concerns and plans to do more.
After decades of poor performance, Africa is now home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies and China has been signing contracts to lock in long-term access to the continent’s huge resources.
“Trade and investment is a critical component of the president’s vision for the next five years of U.S. policy towards sub-Saharan Africa,” Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis told Reuters in an interview.
Obama, in a tough race for re-election against Republican Mitt Romney, in June laid out a “U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa,” which touted the continent’s potential “to be the world’s next major economic success story” and promised to work with the region to free up trade and investment.
But Stephen Hayes, president of the Corporate Council on Africa, a U.S. business group, said Obama has not done enough to involve the private sector in planning on Africa.
The strategy paper was a positive step, but it contained few new ideas and business was barely consulted, Hayes said.
The U.S. government must do more to help large U.S. companies compete against big Chinese state-owned companies and other foreign firms, he said.
Two-way trade between China and Africa totaled just $8.9 billion in 2000, but grew more than 1,400 percent over the next decade to $127.3 billion in 2011, according to a U.S. Congressional Research Service report.
Trade between the United States and the more than 40 countries that make up sub-Saharan Africa hit a record $104.1 billion in 2008, but fell sharply during the financial crisis and totaled $94.3 billion last year.
New U.S. investment in the region ran about $3.2 billion in 2010, compared to about $36 billion flowing in from China and the rest of the world, the CRS report said.
INVESTMENT UNCERTAINTY
U.S. trade policy toward Africa has been guided since 2000 by the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which expires in 2015. AGOA waives import duties on a long list of goods made in eligible sub-Saharan African countries.
Congress recently renewed an AGOA clothing provision, just two months before it was set to expire and as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was arriving in Africa for a seven-nation tour.
The action allows AGOA countries to continue using fabric from “third countries” such as China and Vietnam to make clothes to sell in the United States duty-free. But the delay in renewing the provision cost African producers many orders since importers book shipments months in advance.
That experience illustrates why Congress should not wait until 2015 to renew the entire AGOA, said Marantis, the deputy U.S. trade representative.
“The closer you get to expiration, the more uncertainty there is for investors and you really do run the risk of investment drying up,” Marantis said. “I think we need to start very soon in terms of crafting the next AGOA bill.”
Alarmed at the inroads being made by China, some lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed at increasing U.S. exports to Africa by 200 percent over the next ten years.
“Increasingly I am hearing: ‘The U.S. has given up on Africa as a market,’” Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said. “While we’re building institutions (in Africa), China and others are building markets and we’re being left behind.”
REGIONAL INTEGRATION
Clinton’s recent trip included a stop in South Africa where she was joined by executives from big U.S. companies like Boeing, Wal-Mart, Federal Express and General Electric, the first time that has happened on a high-profile Obama administration visit to the region.
But the effort, coming late in Obama’s first term, seemed symbolic and so does an expected visit in coming months by acting U.S. Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank, Hayes said.
Still, one idea that business did welcome in Obama’s strategy was a focus on promoting regional integration in Africa by tearing down trade barriers between neighbors. That would create larger markets and boost incentives for investment, Hayes said.
Along those lines, the United States is beginning talks with the five countries in the East African Community - Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi - on an investment pact.
It is also close to concluding an investment treaty with Mauritius and considering a similar pact with Ghana.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank announced recently it will help finance as much as $2 billion in U.S. energy exports to South Africa over the next seven or eight years.
South Africa plans to invest around $300 billion in renewable and other energy projects over the next 20 years and “we wanted to respond that we were clearly foursquare in support of that agenda,” Ex-Im Bank President Fred Hochberg said.
The bank’s portfolio of loans in the sub-Saharan region now tops $5 billion, including a record $1.5 billion so far in the current budget year, he said.
Given the stiff competition from China, the Ex-Im Bank could play an important role in boosting U.S. trade and investment in Africa, Hayes said. But constraints imposed by Congress on the bank limit its use for riskier projects, he said.6K Shares
SAN DIEGO, CA – In a rare, unexpected occurrence, the pathology duty pager went off at 11 p.m. last night, disturbing the quiet slumber of a third-year pathology resident. “I had no idea what was happening,” says Dr. Andrew Bates, the pathology resident on call. “I was in my bed, sleeping off a particularly grueling seven-hour day, when the thing lit up, made a loud beeping noise, and started buzzing. It lasted about ten seconds, but then it stopped, so I just went back to sleep.”
When it happened again five minutes later, Dr. Bates decided to investigate. “I picked it up, and there was some sort of display showing a series of ten numbers, like a code. I didn’t understand what they meant, but when I Googled them, they matched an phone extension at the hospital I work at during the day.” To his surprise, someone was waiting for his call at that number. “It was like a miracle,” he said.
Dr. Gregory Hanson, the surgery intern who paged Dr. Bates, says it was a shot in the dark. “We were taking a patient to the operating room who we thought might have necrotizing fasciitis. I thought to myself, maybe there’s a way for a pathologist to somehow prepare a tissue sample to look at under the microscope, while the patient is still in surgery.” After searching the hospital’s pager directory, he found a number listed for Duty Pathology. “It was worth a shot,” said Dr. Hanson.
According to Dr. Bates, he was unaware that carrying the pager had any responsibility associated with it. “I thought we just took turns holding it, like when we had to carry an egg around in middle school to simulate parenthood. Who knew the hospital was even open at night?”
He was willing to help, but wasn’t sure what he could do. “Even if they somehow got the specimen to my house, it’s not like I have a cryostat or a microscope in my bedroom.” Still, he was willing to come in early the next day, if they were able to delay the surgery until the morning. “That kind of dedication is a rare quality,” says Dr. Hanson. “Unfortunately, our patient died that night. But the fact that he was willing to come in as early as 7 a.m. the next morning is truly inspiring.”Nearly 30 vehicles have been burglarized in far north suburban Gurnee this month and police believe the thieves may be targeting holiday shoppers. Christian Farr reports. (Published Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2015)
Nearly 30 vehicles have been burglarized in far north suburban Gurnee this month and police believe the thieves may be targeting holiday shoppers.
Police said 26 car burglaries have been reported around the village since Dec. 1, 18 of which took place in parking lots near the Grand Hunt shopping area, including the popular Gurnee Mills Mall.
“A vast majority of them have been items of value left out in the open,” said Deputy Chief Willie Meyer. “People leaving purses, back packs, Christmas gifts, shopping bags in plain view in the car.”
Photo credit: Gurnee Police Department
Authorities say the suspects, believed to be young men, work in pairs and either break windows or bust door locks to get inside a vehicle. The suspects’ cars include a mid-2000 four-door silver Chrysler and a four-door black Lexus, both of which have been captured by security cameras following at least two of the burglaries.
Police have warned area shoppers and to be on alert, especially with holiday shopping in full force.
“Take your things with you, lock your car, hide belongings, don’t leave anything out in the open,” Meyer said. “Don’t make yourself a victim.”
Anyone with information on the thefts is asked to call (847) 599-7000.If you ask climate modelers how humanity can avoid severe global warming — say, 2°C or more — most will say we need to do two big things. First, we'll need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by the end of the century. Second, since we've been so tardy in making those cuts, we'll also need to figure out how to pull some carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.
And that's... a problem. We at least have some notion of how to cut emissions. But sucking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere? At the massive scale likely needed? No one really has a clue how to do that. It's a huge, embarrassing blind spot in climate policy.
The IPCC has estimated that, to stay below 2°C of warming, we'll need to zero out our emissions and start removing between 2 and 10 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050. For perspective, all of the world's forests and soils put together currently remove just 3.3 gigatons of CO2 each year. So imagine doubling or tripling that. Planting more trees could help, but we'll need sweeping new carbon-removal techniques on top of that.
Right now, we have only crude ideas of what that might entail. Perhaps we could harvest trees sustainably, burn them for energy, and bury the resulting emissions underground — a technology known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) that, in theory, is carbon-negative. Or we could try to boost the carbon-absorbing capacity of soil. Or we could deploy giant machines to suck CO2 out of the air (known as "direct air capture"). But we don't yet know if these ideas are feasible. And surprisingly few people are even working on this.
That's where Noah Deich comes in. A former clean tech consultant, he noticed that hardly any industry groups or policymakers seemed to be focused on developing techniques that scientists have deemed crucial for saving the planet. So he recently launched the Center for Carbon Removal, with the aim of bringing together scientists, industry, and policymakers and figuring out whether there's a viable path for removing lots of CO2 from the air.
I called Deich to talk a bit more about carbon removal. He |
to 20,000 students hunched over their laptops in their lonely garrets. Come to think of it, by off-shoring teaching, the universities could get rid of all their teachers and become “All-Administrative Universities” after the (wait for it) American model. A fringe benefit would be to clear students off the campuses where they only get left-wing ideas, anyway. That would leave the scene open to a truly brilliant move: replace all the foul-mouthed, drunken and obstreperous Australian students with polite, diligent and cowed Asians on student visas that can be revoked by the stroke of an administrator’s pen. And then the universities could be privatized, meaning sold off cheap to international vultures, employing lots of retired politicians as advisors. For an excellent rebuttal of the concepts behind the moves, see this article by an Australian academic working in a US university.
Keeping the Poor in Line
The Federal Budget, which was delivered a week ago, has provoked a storm of hostility. The Liberal government has declared something of a national emergency requiring swingeing cuts to benefits health, education and other services to bring the economy back into surplus. It seems everybody hates it, but some people don’t have much to complain about: “While those families in the bottom quintile (or 20 percent) of income earners see an average 5 percent reduction in disposable incomes, those in the top quintile barely register a decline, down just 0.3 percent.” The Prime Minister, Mr. Abbott, says he wants to “change the culture and mindset of young people.” This could be an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, when people who can sort of struggle by on $255 a week suddenly find they have to survive on $207 a week, or 18.3 percent less.
A single parent with a 6-year-old child will be 10.1 percent worse off, but the surprising part is that the nation’s new-found financial crisis only extends to the poor: according to independent calculations, “A high-income childless couple earning $360,000 a year will lose nothing whatsoever” (an excellent article, it shows the extent of Liberal Party duplicity in favoring the rich over the poor). For Treasurer Joe Hockey, the Budget is “about the sort of country that we want to be in the years and decades ahead. It’s about the values we impart.” Those values, he says, are “enterprise, hard work, self-reliance and equality of opportunity….” In fact, there is every reason to suppose that the values the Liberal Party endorses are about something completely different.
Bring on the Dancing Wallets
There is one traditional value doing the rounds that we could do without: buying politicians.
We see a resurgence of talk about “traditional values,” which means more or less whatever the speaker wants it to mean. One traditional value that has popped up again, without any fanfare, was the reimposition of the former Imperial Honors system. So, once again, we have knights and dames gracing our social pages, a case of “forward to the past.” However, there is one traditional value doing the rounds that we could do without: buying politicians. Yes, we know this is all the rage in the US at present, as your ever-helpful Supreme Court steadily dismantles all the checks and balances that hobbled Big Money, but we don’t actually have that tradition. Well, we thought we didn’t. Seems political corruption has been rife here. The New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has been chopping off heads recently, as it gleefully follows the trails of illegal payments between businesses and politicians. Another enquiry, into trade union corruption, was treated to some fascinating drama as the ex-partner of former PM Julia Gillard, started breathing hotly on a cameraman’s lenses.
First head out of the tumbrils belonged to Eddie Obeid, a minister in the New South Wales (NSW) former Labor government, but the clunk of falling noggins has become a drumming lately as the ICAC scythed into the Liberal Party. Federal Assistant Treasurer Arthur Sinodinos, a close friend of the prime minister, took a nose-dive while NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell fell on his sword a few weeks ago, quickly followed by a gaggle of his subordinates, then the NSW police minister and so it goes. And tonight, Queenslanders have been treated to the astounding spectacle of a gruesome murder on the Gold Coast (where else?), which has splashed gore on the person of none other than the godfather himself, former Prime Minister John Howard, patron of the current prime minister and most of the Liberal Party: if Little Johnny Howard doesn’t like you, you can kiss your seat goodbye. See this bizarre article (scroll down to the third picture: my granny used to say, “You can tell a man by the company he keeps”). When the nation’s most senior politicians hang around with convicted drug dealers, there’s something very fishy going on.
But it doesn’t stop there. The current treasurer, who holds the second most senior position in the government, is under fire for apparently selling tickets to businessmen for confidential meetings. For up to $225,000, the well-heeled and well-connected could sit down to a cosy tête-à-tête in the treasurer’s suite although nobody else could know who was there: “The Treasurer’s diary is confidential,” said his private secretary. What went on? Oh, just a chat among friends, as reported in an article entitled “Treasurer for Sale”: “Members get an opportunity to sit down and chat with Joe [Hockey, the treasurer]. We’ve had other ministers, state and federal, participate as well,” one participant was quoted. “It’s genuinely an exchange of information,” another said. “Joe just goes around the table and talks about issues.” The article continues: “[A participant] said money raised by the forum was often distributed to Liberal Party marginal seats. However, the forum does not lodge its own disclosures to the NSW Election Funding Authority” (as everybody else must).
A prominent Liberal fundraiser: “What’s wrong with giving a Member of Parliament a cheque?”
In NSW itself, hundreds of thousands of dollars have changed hands illegally, and lots of Beautiful People must now be wondering whether they will get to choose their cellmates (well, we can always hope, can’t we?). Bizarrely, the politicians and businessmen involved don’t see anything wrong with this: during an ICAC hearing, when it was clear to all that his goose was well and truly sizzling, a prominent Liberal fundraiserMr. Caputo complained plaintively: “What’s wrong with giving a Member of Parliament a cheque?” (I would never trust a man whose necktie goes over his belt). Others just don’t seem to be able to know when they’re in deep manure: see this lady member of parliament attempting to use her miniature schnauzer’s illness to explain her many lapses of memory. Memory was also Mr. O’Farrell’s downfall: if all these politicians have such poor memory, what are they doing in running the nation’s affairs? I have argued that we have the technology already to help their failing memories: NSA-type total surveillance of all politicians, at all times.
Buying a Sinister Franchise
So Australia has turned a dark corner. Once, this was a nice place to live, easygoing, friendly, where everybody was more concerned with the Melbourne Cup and the beach than the antics in Parliament – but no longer. In a series of insidious moves, we are being herded in the direction of the Tea Party, driven by odious people who can’t keep their fingers out of the till and who apparently don’t have the brains to avoid getting their photos taken with notorious criminals. What is their goal? That hasn’t been revealed in ICAC yet, but it isn’t what we thought we were voting for (don’t worry, I vote Green). I believe the Liberal Party wants to dismantle the welfare state, impoverishing workers while setting up a state where a very small group of haves totally dominate a very large group of have nots, for the purpose of enriching themselves and their serpentine mates. That is, they have adopted large chunks of the ALEC program, as financed by the Koch brothers and fed to the perfervid Tea Party. It seems the extreme right wing has lunged for, and grabbed, the controls of a major political party here. One day, we may wake up to find ourselves the 51st state.
*Yellow Peril: a racist phrase from the 1930s that summed up the prevailing Australian attitude toward our Northern neighbors.‘Sword Coast Legends’ is the next Dungeons & Dragons game, directed by Dan Tudge, the director of Dragon Age: Origins. The collaborative developers are n-Space and Digital Extremes with partnership with Wizards of the Coast. Part of the creating team include developers from Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. The game is set for release later this year.
Like the tabletop D&D game, Sword Coast Legends will feature a typical 4v1 multiplayer experience, where the Dungeon Master (DM) can control the challenges and stories. The DM will also get rewards for constructing and controlling an alluring adventure. n-Space President Dan Tudge claimed that “DMs are able to adjust encounters, place, promote, manage and even control monsters, set traps, reward and punish party members – all in real time.“
A single-player campaign will also be featured in the game which allows Dungeon Masters to be able to create larger campaigns.
Don’t forget, SenshudoTV has a live broadcast of Dungeons and Dragons every Monday from 7pm (GMT).
‘Sword Coast Legends’ is the next Dungeons & Dragons game, directed by Dan Tudge, the director of Dragon Age: Origins. The collaborative developers are n-Space and Digital Extremes with partnershi“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” – 1 Corinthians 1:18
I preach Jesus to anyone and everyone, but why? Why do I think that Jesus is who He says He is? What nutcase would believe that a virgin gave birth to someone that would die for my sins, but then rise and live again so that I too could live forever in Heaven? It all sounds so crazy, but it’s true. Let me tell you some of the reasons why I believe in Jesus Christ.
First off, Jesus was a real man who lived around 2000 years ago. That is solid fact that has been documented by all sides at the time. Whether it was Christians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, or otherwise, Jesus and His following was well written about. Of course you have the scriptures, but look up any of the writings of extra biblical sources: Josephus was a Jewish historian, Pliny was a Greek historian, Tacitus is a Roman historian. All of them wrote at length about Jesus and the happenings of the time. They said that Jesus was charismatic, gathered many people around Himself, and preached about a better way of life. Just as we have writings and accounts of Gandhi, the Dali Lama, or Abraham Lincoln, this was no different about Jesus, the supposed son of God Almighty. There are literally more writings speaking of Jesus and His existence than there are for people like Shakespeare or Cleopatra.
For that matter, one thing that also strikes me is that nobody ever disputed Jesus’ miracles, they only disputed where His power came from. Naysayers said He got His powers from the devil or somewhere else, but not that the miracles didn’t happen. This was partly because at the time, anyone could go speak face to face with people who were actually part of those miracles. From healing people of blindness and leprosy to feeding a crowd of well over 5000 people, there were witnesses all over that could attest to first hand knowledge of Jesus and what He did.
And what about Jesus’ disciples? Maybe they were covering up the resurrection and making it all up? That’s a tough one to sell, because they went to their various early graves still preaching Christ. I don’t know a person ever who would willingly be tortured and killed for something they knew was a lie. Not gonna happen. When the end draws near, you will look for solid ground to stand on, so to speak. Jesus Christ was their answer all the way to the end.
Speaking of first hand knowledge, during some of His sermons, Jesus made some pretty bold statements that went unchallenged. You’d figure there would have been someone, at least one or two people, who grew up with Jesus and questioned that whole “sinless life” deal. Maybe somebody could have asked why He missed going to the synagogue at least a couple times in His life, but no. No questions, no “what about the time…”, just agreement. That’s an amazing feat just by itself, and one that not even the best of us could say in a crowd.
So the history of Jesus is solid, but so what? What does that really mean, you might ask. The fact is that if Jesus really existed, you then need to confront the issue of was Jesus really who He said He was? Jesus said He was the Son of God. He said that those who have seen Jesus have seen God. Jesus came as Immanuel: God with us. If He isn’t the Savior and Living God, then either Jesus was a bold-faced liar or He was completely insane. There’s no getting around that statement. Yes He’s God or no He’s not, plain and simple.
To close this rather deep dive into Christ’s legacy, I can say that it’s not just His history that makes me believe, but it’s also what Jesus has done and continues to do for me and my family. I have many preachers and even a bonafide healer in my family tree who were all led by Jesus Christ. They felt the power of God Almighty in their lives enough to proclaim the gospel and so do I. I personally have experienced miracles and been a part of the supernatural favor that only comes from Jesus. My children and their ordeals and experiences alone could make for an interesting best seller.
What I’m saying is that Jesus not only was a great man, but He continues His good works in me and He can do the same for you if you accept His finished work on the cross. It’s hard to release your heart to love someone, but who is more qualified to hold your heart than the creator? God knows you, all of your good and bad sides, and He loves you anyway. Let His healing be your healing and His peace be your peace. I promise you, it will be the best decision you will ever make.
God’s blessings to you.
DHIn her first in-depth interview since her suspension from the Upper House last fall, suspended Senator Pam Wallin says she now regrets paying back the full amount Senate auditors determined that she had charged in questionable travel expenses.
"I considered myself part of a team, and I thought I would do the right thing — 'I'll pay this money back, and write this cheque,'" she told NewsTalk 1010 radio host Ryan Doyle, who is anchoring the show while regular host John Tory is on the Toronto municipal election hustings.
It was a decision she said she made "against advice from many people" — and one she now regrets.
"It's been used against me."
If she could do it all over again, she said, "I would pay back what I think I owed, but not the large sum of the charges that were rung up because of retroactively imposed new rules... I just think it's given some people an excuse to say 'oh, well, you must be guilty because you paid it back."
In November 2012, Wallin initially paid back just under $40,000. A subsequent Senate audit found nearly $150,000 in potentially problematic expenses.
Wallin spent three hours in the Toronto radio station's guest host chair, where she found herself discussing everything from the pros and cons of walking kids to school to traffic congestion to her own ongoing trials and tribulations.
She told Doyle she's still not sure that she did anything wrong, although she acknowledged that "mistakes were made, no question about that — but not many."
"We have rule of law and due process and you should be given the chance to state your case," she said, but added that she felt that didn't happen.
"I walked into a meeting with board of internal economy and [my lawyer] wasn't allowed to speak. I couldn't make a case. The endless amount of information we presented was not considered."
She also stressed that the rules themselves were "subjective."
"What I can do on Tuesday, the guy down the hall can't do on Wednesday. Some of the rules are so vague — it's about interpretation."
The former TV news anchor — who told Doyle she felt like she was getting back to her journalistic roots — was also candid about the public reaction to the controversy.
"It's frustrating, particularly for someone who has spent most of her life in the information business," she said.
"But I found when I took the time to answer the email — and we got lots of hate email — that I would sit down and I would answer 10 or 15 emails, and say, perhaps you don't know how the system works and I'd like to give you some facts. I'd get emails back saying, oh right."
"There were literally thousands of Canadians who were very supportive, and said we know who you are, and we've heard you on this," she recalled.
"I found a lot people who were ready to give me the benefit of the doubt."
Wallin's file is currently one of several being reviewed by the RCMP, but she said she hasn't heard anything about the progress of that investigation.
Last week, the RCMP announced that it wouldn't lay charges against former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright over the $90,000 payment he made to Senator Mike Duffy.
Retired former Liberal Senator Mac Harb and one-time Conservative turned Independent Senator Patrick Brazeau were charged with fraud and breach of trust in February.Speaking today on the nearly month-long war against Yemen, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that the US will continue to endorse the Saudi war so long as the Shi’ite Houthis continue to resist them.
The US has been endorsing the Saudi war against Yemen from the start, and has participated in a support role, refueling Saudi warplanes and helping them select targets in a war that has killed over 550 civilians so far.
Kerry’s position mirrors that of the pro-Saudi factions in Yemen, which is that the Houthis have to cede all cities to them, and totally disarm before any peace talks will be permitted.
At that point, of course, there will likely be no incentive for the installed Saudi-backed regime to negotiate at all, since the Houthis will have totally given them everything they wanted without giving up anything in return.
The Houthis, by contrast, have conditioned their participation in peace talks on the Saudis ending their strikes, something the Saudis have ruled out doing.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzGETTY The French government is struggling to tackle the migrant crisis
There are currently 147 reception centres across France, but these are in massive demand as desperate refugees continue to flee the Middle East. Housing minister Emmanuelle Cosse has pledged to built a further 50 centres before the end of next month in a desperate bid to ease the crisis. But she has also called on French people to open up their homes to migrants in need. Several organisations have already promised to help.
We match people according to where they live Alice Barbe
The group Singa has helped 300 migrants find a temporary home since it launched its 'Calm' scheme last June. Singa co-director Alice Barbe said: "We match people according to where they live, their job, their hobbies, and the languages they speak. "If things work out, the migrant will remain in the person's home for a minimum of two weeks, and for up to nine months."
GETTY Housing minister Emmanuelle Cosse unveiled the plan yesterday
Evicted Calais migrants sleep rough in Paris Wed, August 3, 2016 Hundreds of migrants evicted from the Calais Jungle camp sleep rough in Paris. Play slideshow Caters News Agency 1 of 191 Calais camp is dismantled as resident set fires and throw stones at Police
And speaking last year, fellow co-founder Guillaume Capelle said: "We can see that there are four million displaced people. "Countries like Lebanon are taking in one million people. Here in France, we're taking 24,000 refugees – evidently, that's fairly few in comparison. "What interests us, however, is ensuring that the people who do arrive here have enough of an opportunity to start a new life."
GETTY Thousands of desperate refugees have fled the Syrian civil war
Migrant Crisis: Mass exodus from the migrant camp continues Tue, October 25, 2016 Hundreds of migrants are continuing to arrive in Europe as they flee the scenes of chaos and brutality of the Islamic State in the Middle East. Play slideshow 1 of 224Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
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Oh those wacky college kids and their school spirit. Or spirits, in this case.
According to nbc4i.com, the NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio State linebacker Craig Fada was one of 24 people arrested and charged with underage consumption this past Saturday. Delaware County (Ohio) Sheriff’s Deputies were dispatched to a residence that was the scene of a “loud and wild” party that apparently featured “fireworks and yelling.”
The owners of the home, according to FOX28 in Columbus, just happened to be Fada’s parents, who weren’t home at the time.
Sheriff’s deputes also confiscated a baggie of what’s believed to be marijuana. Whose bag it was isn’t known.
Fada, who played his high school football in Columbus, walked on to the Buckeyes in 2012 and didn’t see any action that season. In 2013, Fada played almost exclusively on special teams and saw action in 12 games.
(Tip O’ the Cap: ArrestNation.com)Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn denied Mercedes’ punishment for conducting a three-day test ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix was lenient.
The team were given a reprimand and banned from participating in the forthcoming Young Drivers’ Test.
“I think [losing] the Young Driver Test is a penalty,” Brawn told Sky. “I think any perception it’s not significant is not correct. We had quite a comprehensive programme planned for the Young Driver Test so it will be a blow to the team and things that we were hoping to try or develop with the young drivers we will lose.”
“I wouldn’t say we’ve got off fairly lightly, we got off with a… I would say we’ve got a reasonable penalty that is proportional to the situation,” he added.
Mercedes ‘not the only one at fault’
Brawn believes the FIA’s International Tribunal verdict showed Mercedes were not exclusively at fault in the row: “I think the Tribunal looked into all the facts involved,” he said.
“We won’t pretend we were faultless on our side but I think they also acknowledged there were faults on other sides as well and they all accumulated to give us the situation we had. I think the fact that they established that we’ve acted in good faith, we’ve not attempted to get any performance advantage, and the fact that we believed we had permission on two levels to do the test, were all taken into consideration.”
He added the FIA’s agreement Mercedes did not act in “bad faith” was significant: “That was critical for Mercedes as a company and critical for me as a person.”
“Formula One is a very competitive business, we know that. But I think acting in good faith is a very important point. That’s why I was keen that we actually presented the facts in front of an independent tribunal in order to establish what had happened so that judgement could be made.”
Any benefit “unintentional and low-level”
Any benefit Mercedes gained from running the test was negligible, Brawn added: “On the question of advantage I think it would be wrong for me to say that you can run a car around a track and there not be some consequence of that. But as we explained in the Tribunal that was an unintentional and a low-level consequence.”
“We didn’t go to that test to improve the reliability of the car. We went to that test to contribute towards Pirelli’s development with the tyres. That was the prime objective of that test. Everything else was a consequence of doing that test.
“So I think it would be futile to deny that when you run a car around a test there’s a consequence: you can’t deny that. But it wasn’t the objective of going there.”
Brawn said the case showed there needs to be an established procedure for clarifying matters relating to the Sporting Regulations as there is for the Technical Regulations: “I think there’s a lesson learned for all of us that obviously what in the end became the issue was a judgement of the interpretation of the regulation, the law of the regulation.”
“And both ourselves and Charlie [Whiting] with the FIA and the FIA’s head of legal department had a view on that regulation which didn’t prove to be correct, at least in the eyes of the Tribunal. We’ve got to look at that procedure to make sure that ourselves, Pirelli or whoever’s involved doesn’t get caught out by that in the future.”
FIA tribunal “a very good step”
Yesterday’s hearing was the first for the new International Tribunal created by FIA president Jean Todt. Brawn said having the chance to explain their case before it was “very important”, and praised the new panel.
“I’ve been to these things before and I must say this is an occasion when I’ve felt the independence of a tribunal was clear to see,” he said. “I think that’s a very good step in terms of the way the FIA is moving to set up this independent tribunal.”
“Edwin Glasgow [the QC who chaired the hearing] is a man of impeccable reputation and character and I think having him as president of the tribunal gave us confidence it would be fair. It doesn’t mean it would come out in our favour but at least it would be fair.”
“And I think Formula One in particular, and anyone who’s involved in this sort of thing, can look at the Tribunal and say that it is independent and it will seek the facts and give an independent conclusion as to what happened. If that involves some criticism of the FIA as well as other parties then that’s what will happen.”
Mercedes and Ferrari Pirelli tyre test row
Images?�?� Daimler/Hoch ZweiThe era of Big Government expands daily and one area of gratis goodies is free food. First the kiddies got free breakfast, then lunches and snacks so any unfortunate stomach rumbles would be prevented. In some places, free food is dispensed through the schools during the summer vacation months
Now we learn that nearly a million kids got a free-to-them dinner or an after-school feeding last year.
Perish the thought that parents should be responsible for feeding the kiddies; the government can do that job so much better, particularly with the First Lady heading up the nutrition aspect of the nanny state.
In addition, what about the valuable tradition of families eating dinner together? A 2013 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of adults with children younger than 18 say their family eats dinner together at home six or seven nights a week. But the government wants to intrude further into family affairs.
Actual financial hardship has become less necessary to qualify for handouts because poor kids getting free food might experience damage to their self-esteem. So some schools hand out government meals to all kids regardless of need, as happened in Nashville last year:
Metro Schools to offer free breakfast, lunch to all students this fall, WSMV-TV, June 11, 2014 Metro Nashville Public Schools will be providing free meals for all of its students this fall. Starting in August, schools will be serving up breakfast and lunch free of charge to all students, regardless of their parents’ income. [...] The program is aimed at not only helping families’ budgets, but also students’ self-esteem. “I think now that it’s inclusive and provided to all, there will be no way to look at anyone differently,” said [school spokesman Joe] Bass. “We’ll all be equal.”
I don’t think Americans would object to feeding children who are actually going hungry, but this is social engineering gone loony.
Below, hundreds of diverse Ventura County California kiddies lined up with parents for food on the taxpayer’s tab.
For background about the growing phenomenon of government (aka taxpayer-funded) food handouts, see my 2011 VDARE.com article, Free Food Nation (Immigrants Welcome, of Course).
The news story below refers to the Los Angeles School Unified District, with the ethnic information for 2013-14 following:R3 Technologies is nearly ready to sell the CBD-1000, a semi-portable continuous wave radar that's reportedly accurate enough to detect the materials you typically see in suicide vests, whether or not they're metallic. If a terrorist loads up on glass or rocks to maximize damage, they may well be caught. It currently works best at relatively short ranges and with mostly stationary targets (you need 1.3 seconds to complete a scan at 9 feet), but there are plans for instant scans as far away as 100 feet. If it reaches that goal, it could change the face of security -- officers could spot and shoot bombers well before they reach their targets.
If all goes well, the plan is to offer the CBD-1000 this year for $50,000. It's too soon to say whether or not this will work in the chaotic, unpredictable circumstances of real life. R3 has some hard science to back up its claims, mind you. It partnered with Sandia National Laboratories scientists to refine the detector, so this is more than just a well-meaning idea.Snake Virgin Birth
A female yellow-bellied water snake at the Cape Girardeau, Mo., Conservation Nature Center has given birth without any help from a male member of the species, conservationists say. The offspring did not survive this summer, but they did in 2014. It is believed to be the first documented cases in the species of parthenogenesis, or asexual reproduction.
(Candice Davis/Missouri Department of Conservation via AP)
ST. LOUIS -- For the second time in two years, a captive snake in southeast Missouri has given birth without any interaction with a member of the opposite sex.
Officials at the Missouri Department of Conservation's Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center say a female yellow-bellied water snake reproduced on her own in 2014 and again this summer. The snake has been living in captivity, without a male companion, for nearly eight years. An intern who cares for the snake found the freshly laid membranes in July.
This year's offspring didn't survive, but the two born last summer are on display at the nature center, about 100 miles south of St. Louis.
Conservation Department herpetologist Jeff Briggler said virgin births are rare but can occur in some species through a process called parthenogenesis. It occurs in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, including some snakes, but not mammals.
Parthenogenesis is a type of asexual reproduction in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male. It's caused when cells known as polar bodies, which are produced with an animal's egg and usually die, behave like sperm and fuse with the egg, triggering cell division.
The conservation department said there are no other documented cases of parthenogenesis by a yellow-bellied water snake. Like other water snakes, this species gives birth to live young rather than eggs that hatch.
Robert Powell, a biology professor and snake expert at Avila University in Kansas City, said the Brahminy blind snake -- a small burrowing animal native to southeast Asia commonly known as the flowerpot snake -- has long been the only known snake that routinely reproduces without a male's contribution.
In the Missouri case, it's possible -- but unlikely -- that momma snake simply stored sperm from her time in the wild. But Michelle Randecker, a naturalist at the center, said eight years is too long. Powell agreed, saying a female snake usually can't store sperm for longer than a year, although there are accounts of successful storage as long as three years.
"Long-term storage is unusual. When you run into situations like this, you always wonder, 'Is that a possibility?'" he said. "If nothing else, it's an interesting phenomena. Whether this is long-term storage or parthenogenesis, it's cool. Just another sign that nature works in mysterious ways."
A.J. Hendershott, outreach and education regional supervisor for the conservation department, said there was some pride in having the first snake of its species reproduce through parthenogenesis.
"This is the way you make discoveries when you keep things in captivity," Hendershott said. "You learn things about what they're capable of."With Emmanuel Macron moving into the Élysée Palace, now is the time for Germany and France deliver a Europe that works, writes the president of Germany’s foreign trade federation.
France is Germany’s most important trading partner in Europe.
This election was about much more than the single market or the euro. Of course, economic interests also played a role. France is Germany's most important trading partner in Europe, with a trade volume of more than €167 billion ($182 billion), and our second-most important export market worldwide. Our economy operates in the world's largest joint free-trade area, which provides the basis for global success. But Europe is much more than that. It is a strong and absolutely competitive community of values.
Why did enthusiasm for Europe, which makes logical sense based on the advantages it provides, begin to wane? It isn't just the poorer classes and those who feel left behind who are afraid and who assign some of the blame to Europe itself. People from the center of society are also anxious. First, there is growing competition within countries, but also between them. Jobs are being exported, and people are anxious about their futures. And then there are the increasingly complicated, non-transparent regulations and the growing sluggishness of democratic decision-making structures.
Only France and Germany, in mutual respect, are both capable of and suitable for continuing to enhance Europe and bring it together. What kinds of answers do we have in the age of globalization?
Even more than shared values, Europe needs success. It needs success that is tangible for all member states and for all social classes.
We are forced to jointly manage certain things that individual nations cannot manage on their own. First, there is the confrontation with an increasingly aggressive Islam. And no country will be able to cope with the influx of refugees alone. Terrorists will not respect national borders. But other issues, such as growth, jobs, the energy supply, digitalization and telecommunications, can and must be resolved at the European level.
Europe also needs renewal, and it has always been work in progress. We will only make headway if some set an example on integration. These countries will then form the core of a free, strong Europe. We should be pragmatic now and tackle two or three of the urgent tasks that no member state can solve on its own: migration and cultural integration, external and internal security, preserving the common currency and economic integration.
Europe now needs to demonstrate efficiency in solving pressing problems to gain more approval from European citizens. This can be achieved in the fight against terrorism, for example, if intelligence services finally cooperate instead of holding onto their own information. It also makes sense to provide more latitude again for regional characteristics, in food labeling, for example. Only Europe offers competing economies the opportunities to utilize the common market and create new jobs, so that the underprivileged classes can also find work, as long as they are suitably educated and trained. This is why the British made the wrong decision. The belief that a country with a population of 58 million can compete with the rest of the world may have been possible in the past, in the British Empire.
Even more than shared values, Europe needs success. It needs success that is tangible for all member states and for all social classes. It is critical that new jobs are created for young people. If we look closely, we can see signs that this is already happening, albeit to a modest extent.
Emmanuel Macron's election victory is likely to reignite the debate over German export surpluses. But higher German consumption is not a viable solution, because there is nothing that can convince Germans to consume more. I also do not believe that a European fiscal equalization scheme would get us any further. The best way would be to focus on a shared European approach against China and the United States instead of national concepts – in the telecommunications infrastructure, for example. Then we will no longer be talking about investments of €100 billion but of €1 or €2 trillion, and Germany's export surpluses will then be pumped back into the economy.
In these unsettling times of change, our future is to be a part of Europe. It doesn’t work without everyone's commitment. The world needs us. I am firmly convinced that the European age is just beginning.
To reach the author: [email protected].Siham Byah, a 40-year-old Massachusetts woman with an eight-year-old son, was placed in ICE custody November 7 after she went to a check-in at the ICE office in Burlington, Mass. She is now on a hunger strike.
Byah’s check-ins were “usually on an annual basis,” according to her lawyer, Matt Cameron. This is not Byah’s first time facing deportation. Byah, who is Moroccan, has been living in the United States since 1999. According to ICE, she was “first ordered removed in 2006 for failing to appear in immigration court.” Her lawyer says stays were allotted. In 2012, she had another removal order, but it was dismissed after an appeal. As WCVB 5 reported, Byah completed her required ICE check-ins.
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Cameron said in a press release from activist group Movimento Cosecha that Tuesday’s “decision was not made by the New England Field Office, and that it had come directly from DC. We have still not been provided with any reason why they have chosen to treat Siham this way, and must assume that it is politically motivated.”
Byah resides in Nahant, Mass. While she is on a hunger strike, her son, who is a U.S. citizen, is with the Department of Families and Children.
A statement from ICE spokesperson Shawn Neudaeur says, “ICE deportation officers arrested Siham Byah… on an outstanding final order (deportation order), issued [by] an immigration judge... Ms. Byah has a criminal record that includes convictions for misdemeanor offenses.”
Cameron has disputed this claim, tweeting:
For second time in as many months, @ICEgov has lied to media and public |
described there, so go check it out if you’re interested. In general, the whitepaper is really extensive and well done.
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https://propy.com/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/propy/
I personally think REX is by far the most structured, well thought out and has the most ambition out of these 3 but I gave you the links to the other 2 so you can compare them yourself and choose the one you like the most.
Website of REX (don’t confuse with the platform / App )
http://rexmls.com/
Every good project needs a good website. REX has one of them.
Here are some quick facts:
the website is beautiful. Design is always a personal taste but I don’t think anyone can argue that the website is well done with a lot of attention to detail.
it contains all the information you need in English and Chinese.
Additionally the team has a very informative blog: https://blog.rexmls.com/ with 6 (!) blogposts in september.
Additionally the team has a very informative blog: https://blog.rexmls.com/ with 6 (!) blogposts in september. their goal and how they plan on achieving it is given in short coherent sentences simple and easy understandable
the most important team members are listed on there. Since the last website update they’ve added some people to the team. Those new employees will get added to the website soon according to Stephen King (for proof look at team section below) More to the team later.
they are well connected and have the means to be very present on social media
the website contains a 7:48 minute design mockup made in Invision (https://www.invisionapp.com/) of how the platform will look like once it’s finished. But there is already a real programmed alpha, which is as good as this mockup. And that takes us to the next section.
Platform / App Design and UX
Just take a look yourself: https://alpha.rexmls.com/#!/
The design of the platform is beautiful. It’s like everything else I’ve seen so far made with a lot of love. In this 7:48 minute video:
you can see a designmockup/prototype in InvisionApp https://www.invisionapp.com/. and how the user experience is going to be like.
Invisionapp is a tool, where you are able to put different screens together and create an easy prototype with static images. These prototypes do not have any functionallity. It isn’t programmed. BUT. As mentioned above they already have an alpha testnet for the REX-Platform. We will go more in depth in the next chapter.
Platform / App Frontend-Code
I did take a quick look at the Frontend-Code of this Plattform.
It is made with a modern SPA-Framework (Single-Page-Application-Framework), which is top notch technology nowadays. On the frontend you can see seamless page transitions, the pages load very fast, and a lot of stuff is already optimized. The visual result of the frontend programming at this stage is already very good.
Platform / App Backend and Github
Since I am not able to see the backend code of the website and also probably not able to judge the whole quality of it anyways I will add another screenshot from discord. It’s about the question: do they have code examples?
No, they don’t. Does it matter? No. Because they gave a reasonable explanation for this “problem”. Problem in quotes because this isn’t a problem at all. Most companies never release their source code.
Code is expensive and giving it away in an early development state only for it to be used by a competitor could cost them a lot.
Team
Here is a really good blog post about the REX Team : https://blog.rexmls.com/an-official-introduction-to-rex-team-members-700121e411f9
You should really read the blog post since I’ll just quote it anyways but here is a summary:
The REX team consists out of the Founders Stephen King and Russell McLernon.
Stephen King:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-king-08452515/ (not the writer by the way) seems to be an expert in everything concerning real estate.
Russell McLernon:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-mclernon-37656430/ on the other hand is responsible for the technical part of the company, he’s been working on blockchain since 2010 and has worked on the very first mobile wallet for Ripple, built the first interface for building custom applications atop the NXT protocol and has been working on Ethereum smart contracts since its inception in 2015.
The other team members consists of Brock Haugen, an expert in Software engineering, Alex Jacoby an operations director that is responsible for everything account and finance, HR and sales related.
And last but not least Duke Long https://www.linkedin.com/in/dukelong/
a veteran of commercial real estate with a quarter century of experience at the forefront of the industry.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/theREXmls/photos/a.986888131448342.1073741828.986881941448961/1012968062173682/?type=3&theater A picture of Russell and Stephen.
Source: REX Discord Developer will update the landing page with new team members listed.
Roadmap
The team is working on their alpha and on the phases outlined in the whitepaper. I asked the team whether they had an official roadmap planned and this was their reply:
General MLS sector
To be honest with you guys the MLS sector is a highly fought and highly regulated one. It will be really difficult for REX to participate in it. But if it works out, and the REX team that have several real estate experts on their team most certainly believe it is, it will be a game changer for the whole sector and could become really big really fast.
Exchanges
Etherdelta written guide(s): https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherDelta/comments/6hrxjw/etherdelta_guides_for_first_time_users/?st=j8esh1g1&sh=d1030500
Etherdelta video guide:
The guide is starting at 2:00 minutes
Coinexchange:
I’ve not read anything negative about them yet and works like any other exchange and I’ve never had any problem with them.
Other possible exchanges
That sounds really promising and adds the possibility of being added on other exchanges as soon as the volume increases.
Social Media
This company is on the following platforms:
Facebook, Medium, Twitter, Discord, Gitter, Youtube, LinkedIn
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theREXmls/
Regularly updated, full of posts about all the different events they visit and their blogposts. On top of that you can verify the team members there because various pictures of them are posted.
Medium: https://blog.rexmls.com/
They are very active on medium. You can get a lot of informations here.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rexmls
Rex has about 1500 followers on twitter and are very active there.
It’s mainly used as a sharing tool but you can find some unique information too.
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/BSe7j4C
Other companys are using telegram, they are using discord.
If you have a question just ask them on discord, I’ve been asking questions the last few days and have been getting every single one answered by either the community manager Ryan, Stephen King himself or other very helpful and nice people.
Gitter: https://gitter.im/rex-mls/rexchat
REX isn’t very active here. So better ask questions on discord.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNbMtTeAfZ2xF-mVtici9Qg
They do have a lot of awesome videos here. Check it out.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/11070246/
They do have a company page at LinkedIn.
Summary
This coin has a low marketcap and I really don’t believe it deserves it.
If the team manages to get their product out and it gets as big as they’re trying to make it, it’s going to shake up the global real estate market.
It’s a risky investment still but the upside potential is incredible. The quality of their products is very high, the communication is serious and it seems like they are heading in the right direction.
Positive:
great idea with a lot of potential
low marketcap and the potential marketcap is huge
extremely cheap, in fact still cheaper than cheapest ICO price (1 ETH = 1000 REX)
working alpha available
incredible website
very ambitous developers ready and able to answer every question
Team is deeply connected to the real estate community
the project is very active in general
Negative:
Volume is very low so price is going to fluctuate A LOT until more investors move in.
until more investors move in. Their screw up on their initial ICO, but that’s a mistake in the past and doesn’t change anything about the quality of their product.
Additional info, our social media and donations
You might’ve already noticed that most of the screenshots feature “stupid this is”, and that he asked a lot of questions. “stupid this is” isn’t me. He is helping me to collect informations, writing and editing the article to improve it even further. In other words we are now two people researching projects together. :)
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DISCLAIMER
The article references an opinion and is for information purposes only.
It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment adviceAs part of a recently created program, the Berkeley Free Clinic has exclusively set aside time outside of its normal hours of operation to offer free dental procedures to undocumented immigrants in the Bay Area who are without legal status or are seeking asylum.
According to campus senior Clay Carter, the program’s co-founder, the service offers free lifetime dental coverage for an array of typically expensive treatments, ranging from routine examinations to tooth extractions. Program participants cannot qualify for Medi-Cal or have refugee status in order to obtain these benefits.
The service has been operating on one to three Friday evenings per month since February, outside of the clinic’s normal business hours from Monday to Thursday.
“These are people who can’t qualify (for) any sort of government coverage,” Carter said. “In fact, even seeking health care for them is something that’s potentially dangerous, particularly now where people are getting rounded up … going to a mainstream medical place or hospital.”
Although the free treatments offered are the same treatments given to the clinic’s regular clientele, the clinic reformed its typical intake procedure — a lottery system — so that it would be more accessible. In a separate lottery system that gives Friday evening applicants special placement, Spanish-speaking volunteers help potential participants fill out applications, which are available in both English and Spanish.
Carter said the program has five volunteer providers: three dentists and two hygienists. Only nine undocumented community members are receiving lifetime dental coverage through the program because every dentist is assigned three patients — there is a waitlist of about 20 people.
Much of the program’s clientele is obtained through partnerships with outside organizations that work with undocumented immigrants seeking asylum.
The program’s other co-founder, campus alumnus Do Hyung Kwon, said he was inspired to create the service when he noticed a lack of Hispanic or Latino immigrants among the clinic’s regular clientele. Kwon said he first contacted the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, an organization next door to the clinic that offers inexpensive legal help for people seeking asylum.
“(The program) was really just forged by a couple people that wanted to do this service and we were like, ‘What resources do we have? OK, no one’s in here on Fridays. Let’s see if we can get people in here to use these resources that are all donated,’ ” Carter said.
Carter added that the clinic also reached out to Oakland Catholic Worker, a transitional shelter for recently arrived Latin American immigrants, for participants.
“In general, I would imagine people perceive dental care to be less of a necessity,” said Victoria Richey, a caseworker for Oakland Catholic Worker. “So ultimately, if we’re able to have these preventative services … I think that will prevent more costly and more detrimental problems in the future.”
Jessica Flores, an undocumented campus sophomore, said she hopes that more people will become aware of the clinic’s services.
“Dental care is something that is forgotten a lot in our community,” Flores said. “Healthcare is a privilege in this country for some reason. Not everyone has access to go to the doctor whenever they need to, and it’s an issue.”
Carter emphasized the confidentiality and quality that comes with the program.
Since the Berkeley Free Clinic does not receive funding from the federal government, there are no formal audits. Furthermore, the clinic is legally obligated to uphold the same standards as a typical private practice, according to Carter.
Carter added that the ultimate goal for the program is to recruit more volunteer dentists so that the clinic has enough resources to operate every Friday, allowing it to serve more undocumented immigrants.
“Prevention starts with having access to healthcare,” Flores said. “It’s a luxury in America, and I don’t think it should be.”
Fionce Siow covers student life. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @fioncesiow.Debian Constitution
Constitution for the Debian Project (v1.7)
Version 1.7 ratified on August 14th, 2016. Supersedes Version 1.6 ratified on December 13th, 2015, Version 1.5 ratified on January 9th, 2015, Version 1.4 ratified on October 7th, 2007, Version 1.3 ratified on September 24th, 2006, Version 1.2 ratified on October 29th, 2003 and Version 1.1 ratified on June 21st, 2003, which itself supersedes Version 1.0 ratified on December 2nd, 1998.
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.
This document describes the organisational structure for formal decision-making in the Project. It does not describe the goals of the Project or how it achieves them, or contain any policies except those directly related to the decision-making process.
Each decision in the Project is made by one or more of the following:
The Developers, by way of General Resolution or an election; The Project Leader; The Technical Committee and/or its Chair; The individual Developer working on a particular task; Delegates appointed by the Project Leader for specific tasks; The Project Secretary.
Most of the remainder of this document will outline the powers of these bodies, their composition and appointment, and the procedure for their decision-making. The powers of a person or body may be subject to review and/or limitation by others; in this case the reviewing body or person's entry will state this. In the list above, a person or body is usually listed before any people or bodies whose decisions they can overrule or who they (help) appoint - but not everyone listed earlier can overrule everyone listed later.
2.1. General rules
Nothing in this constitution imposes an obligation on anyone to do work for the Project. A person who does not want to do a task which has been delegated or assigned to them does not need to do it. However, they must not actively work against these rules and decisions properly made under them. A person may hold several posts, except that the Project Leader, Project Secretary and the Chair of the Technical Committee must be distinct, and that the Leader cannot appoint themselves as their own Delegate. A person may leave the Project or resign from a particular post they hold, at any time, by stating so publicly.
3.1. Powers
An individual Developer may
make any technical or nontechnical decision with regard to their own work; propose or sponsor draft General Resolutions; propose themselves as a Project Leader candidate in elections; vote on General Resolutions and in Leadership elections.
3.2. Composition and appointment
Developers are volunteers who agree to further the aims of the Project insofar as they participate in it, and who maintain package(s) for the Project or do other work which the Project Leader's Delegate(s) consider worthwhile. The Project Leader's Delegate(s) may choose not to admit new Developers, or expel existing Developers. If the Developers feel that the Delegates are abusing their authority they can of course override the decision by way of General Resolution - see §4.1(3), §4.2.
3.3. Procedure
Developers may make these decisions as they see fit.
4.1. Powers
Together, the Developers may:
Appoint or recall the Project Leader. Amend this constitution, provided they agree with a 3:1 majority. Make or override any decision authorised by the powers of the Project Leader or a Delegate. Make or override any decision authorised by the powers of the Technical Committee, provided they agree with a 2:1 majority. Issue, supersede and withdraw nontechnical policy documents and statements. These include documents describing the goals of the project, its relationship with other free software entities, and nontechnical policies such as the free software licence terms that Debian software must meet. They may also include position statements about issues of the day. A Foundation Document is a document or statement regarded as critical to the Project's mission and purposes. The Foundation Documents are the works entitled Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines. A Foundation Document requires a 3:1 majority for its supersession. New Foundation Documents are issued and existing ones withdrawn by amending the list of Foundation Documents in this constitution. Make decisions about property held in trust for purposes related to Debian. (See §9.). In case of a disagreement between the project leader and the incumbent secretary, appoint a new secretary.
4.2. Procedure
The Developers follow the Standard Resolution Procedure, below. A resolution or amendment is introduced if proposed by any Developer and sponsored by at least K other Developers, or if proposed by the Project Leader or the Technical Committee. Delaying a decision by the Project Leader or their Delegate: If the Project Leader or their Delegate, or the Technical Committee, has made a decision, then Developers can override them by passing a resolution to do so; see §4.1(3). If such a resolution is sponsored by at least 2K Developers, or if it is proposed by the Technical Committee, the resolution puts the decision immediately on hold (provided that resolution itself says so). If the original decision was to change a discussion period or a voting period, or the resolution is to override the Technical Committee, then only K Developers need to sponsor the resolution to be able to put the decision immediately on hold. If the decision is put on hold, an immediate vote is held to determine whether the decision will stand until the full vote on the decision is made or whether the implementation of the original decision will be delayed until then. There is no quorum for this immediate procedural vote. If the Project Leader (or the Delegate) withdraws the original decision, the vote becomes moot, and is no longer conducted. Votes are taken by the Project Secretary. Votes, tallies, and results are not revealed during the voting period; after the vote the Project Secretary lists all the votes cast. The voting period is 2 weeks, but may be varied by up to 1 week by the Project Leader. The minimum discussion period is 2 weeks, but may be varied by up to 1 week by the Project Leader. The Project Leader has a casting vote. There is a quorum of 3Q. Proposals, sponsors, amendments, calls for votes and other formal actions are made by announcement on a publicly-readable electronic mailing list designated by the Project Leader's Delegate(s); any Developer may post there. Votes are cast by email in a manner suitable to the Secretary. The Secretary determines for each poll whether voters can change their votes. Q is half of the square root of the number of current Developers. K is Q or 5, whichever is the smaller. Q and K need not be integers and are not rounded.
5.1. Powers
The Project Leader may:
Appoint Delegates or delegate decisions to the Technical Committee. The Leader may define an area of ongoing responsibility or a specific decision and hand it over to another Developer or to the Technical Committee. Once a particular decision has been delegated and made the Project Leader may not withdraw that delegation; however, they may withdraw an ongoing delegation of particular area of responsibility. Lend authority to other Developers. The Project Leader may make statements of support for points of view or for other members of the project, when asked or otherwise; these statements have force if and only if the Leader would be empowered to make the decision in question. Make any decision which requires urgent action. This does not apply to decisions which have only become gradually urgent through lack of relevant action, unless there is a fixed deadline. Make any decision for whom noone else has responsibility. Propose draft General Resolutions and amendments. Together with the Technical Committee, appoint new members to the Committee. (See §6.2.) Use a casting vote when Developers vote. The Project Leader also has a normal vote in such ballots. Vary the discussion period for Developers' votes (as above). Lead discussions amongst Developers. The Project Leader should attempt to participate in discussions amongst the Developers in a helpful way which seeks to bring the discussion to bear on the key issues at hand. The Project Leader should not use the Leadership position to promote their own personal views. In consultation with the developers, make decisions affecting property held in trust for purposes related to Debian. (See §9.). Such decisions are communicated to the members by the Project Leader or their Delegate(s). Major expenditures should be proposed and debated on the mailing list before funds are disbursed. Add or remove organizations from the list of trusted organizations (see §9.3) that are authorized to accept and hold assets for Debian. The evaluation and discussion leading up to such a decision occurs on an electronic mailing list designated by the Project Leader or their Delegate(s), on which any developer may post. There is a minimum discussion period of two weeks before an organization may be added to the list of trusted organizations.
5.2. Appointment
The Project Leader is elected by the Developers. The election begins six weeks before the leadership post becomes vacant, or (if it is too late already) immediately. For the first week any Developer may nominate themselves as a candidate Project Leader, and summarize their plans for their term. For three weeks after that no more candidates may be nominated; candidates should use this time for campaigning and discussion. If there are no candidates at the end of the nomination period then the nomination period is extended for an additional week, repeatedly if necessary. The next two weeks are the polling period during which Developers may cast their votes. Votes in leadership elections are kept secret, even after the election is finished. The options on the ballot will be those candidates who have nominated themselves and have not yet withdrawn, plus None Of The Above. If None Of The Above wins the election then the election procedure is repeated, many times if necessary. The decision will be made using the method specified in section §A.6 of the Standard Resolution Procedure. The quorum is the same as for a General Resolution (§4.2) and the default option is None Of The Above. The Project Leader serves for one year from their election.
5.3. Procedure
The Project Leader should attempt to make decisions which are consistent with the consensus of the opinions of the Developers.
Where practical the Project Leader should informally solicit the views of the Developers.
The Project Leader should avoid overemphasizing their own point of view when making decisions in their capacity as Leader.
6.1. Powers
The Technical Committee may:
Decide on any matter of technical policy. This includes the contents of the technical policy manuals, developers' reference materials, example packages and the behaviour of non-experimental package building tools. (In each case the usual maintainer of the relevant software or documentation makes decisions initially, however; see 6.3(5).) Decide any technical matter where Developers' jurisdictions overlap. In cases where Developers need to implement compatible technical policies or stances (for example, if they disagree about the priorities of conflicting packages, or about ownership of a command name, or about which package is responsible for a bug that both maintainers agree is a bug, or about who should be the maintainer for a package) the technical committee may decide the matter. Make a decision when asked to do so. Any person or body may delegate a decision of their own to the Technical Committee, or seek advice from it. Overrule a Developer (requires a 3:1 majority). The Technical Committee may ask a Developer to take a particular technical course of action even if the Developer does not wish to; this requires a 3:1 majority. For example, the Committee may determine that a complaint made by the submitter of a bug is justified and that the submitter's proposed solution should be implemented. Offer advice. The Technical Committee may make formal announcements about its views on any matter. Individual members may of course make informal statements about their views and about the likely views of the committee. Together with the Project Leader, appoint new members to itself or remove existing members. (See §6.2.) Appoint the Chair of the Technical Committee. The Chair is elected by the Committee from its members. All members of the committee are automatically nominated; the committee votes starting one week before the post will become vacant (or immediately, if it is already too late). The members may vote by public acclamation for any fellow committee member, including themselves; there is no default option. The vote finishes when all the members have voted, or when the voting period has ended. The result is determined using the method specified in section A.6 of the Standard Resolution Procedure. The Chair can stand in for the Leader, together with the Secretary As detailed in §7.1(2), the Chair of the Technical Committee and the Project Secretary may together stand in for the Leader if there is no Leader.
6.2. Composition
The Technical Committee consists of up to 8 Developers, and should usually have at least 4 members. When there are fewer than 8 members the Technical Committee may recommend new member(s) to the Project Leader, who may choose (individually) to appoint them or not. When there are 5 members or fewer the Technical Committee may appoint new member(s) until the number of members reaches 6. When there have been 5 members or fewer for at least one week the Project Leader may appoint new member(s) until the number of members reaches 6, at intervals of at least one week per appointment. A Developer is not eligible to be (re)appointed to the Technical Committee if they have been a member within the previous 12 months. If the Technical Committee and the Project Leader agree they may remove or replace an existing member of the Technical Committee. Term limit: On January 1st of each year the term of any Committee member who has served more than 42 months (3.5 years) and who is one of the two most senior members is set to expire on December 31st of that year. A member of the Technical Committee is said to be more senior than another if they were appointed earlier, or were appointed at the same time and have been a member of the Debian Project longer. In the event that a member has been appointed more than once, only the most recent appointment is relevant.
6.3. Procedure
The Technical Committee uses the Standard Resolution Procedure. A draft resolution or amendment may be proposed by any member of the Technical Committee. There is no minimum discussion period; the voting period lasts for up to one week, or until the outcome is no longer in doubt. Members may change their votes. There is a quorum of two. Details regarding voting The Chair has a casting vote. When the Technical Committee votes whether to override a Developer who also happens to be a member of the Committee, that member may not vote (unless they are the Chair, in which case they may use only their casting vote). Public discussion and decision-making. Discussion, draft resolutions and amendments, and votes by members of the committee, are made public on the Technical Committee public discussion list. There is no separate secretary for the Committee. Confidentiality of appointments. The Technical Committee may hold confidential discussions via private email or a private mailing list or other means to discuss appointments to the Committee. However, votes on appointments must be public. No detailed design work. The Technical Committee does not engage in design of new proposals and policies. Such design work should be carried out by individuals privately or together and discussed in ordinary technical policy and design forums. The Technical Committee restricts itself to choosing from or adopting compromises between solutions and decisions which have been proposed and reasonably thoroughly discussed elsewhere. Individual members of the technical committee may of course participate on their own behalf in any aspect of design and policy work. Technical Committee makes decisions only as last resort. The Technical Committee does not make a technical decision until efforts to resolve it via consensus have been tried and failed, unless it has been asked to make a decision by the person or body who would normally be responsible for it.
7.1. Powers
The Secretary:
Takes votes amongst the Developers, and determines the number and identity of Developers, whenever this is required by the constitution. Can stand in for the Leader, together with the Chair of the Technical Committee. If there is no Project Leader then the Chair of the Technical Committee and the Project Secretary may by joint agreement make decisions if they consider it imperative to do so. Adjudicates any disputes about interpretation of the constitution. May delegate part or all of their authority to someone else, or withdraw such a delegation at any time.
7.2. Appointment
The Project Secretary is appointed by the Project Leader and the current Project Secretary.
If the Project Leader and the current Project Secretary cannot agree on a new appointment, they must ask the Developers by way of General Resolution to appoint a Secretary.
If there is no Project Secretary or the current Secretary is unavailable and has not delegated authority for a decision then the decision may be made or delegated by the Chair of the Technical Committee, as Acting Secretary.
The Project Secretary's term of office is 1 year, at which point they or another Secretary must be (re)appointed.
7.3. Procedure
The Project Secretary should make decisions which are fair and reasonable, and preferably consistent with the consensus of the Developers.
When acting together to stand in for an absent Project Leader the Chair of the Technical Committee and the Project Secretary should make decisions only when absolutely necessary and only when consistent with the consensus of the Developers.
8.1. Powers
The Project Leader's Delegates:
have powers delegated to them by the Project Leader; may make certain decisions which the Leader may not make directly, including approving or expelling Developers or designating people as Developers who do not maintain packages. This is to avoid concentration of power, particularly over membership as a Developer, in the hands of the Project Leader.
8.2. Appointment
The Delegates are appointed by the Project Leader and may be replaced by the Leader at the Leader's discretion. The Project Leader may not make the position as a Delegate conditional on particular decisions by the Delegate, nor may they override a decision made by a Delegate once made.
8.3. Procedure
Delegates may make decisions as they see fit, but should attempt to implement good technical decisions and/or follow consensus opinion.
In most jurisdictions around the world, the Debian project is not in a position to directly hold funds or other property. Therefore, property has to be owned by any of a number of organisations as detailed in §9.2.
Traditionally, SPI was the sole organisation authorized to hold property and monies for the Debian Project. SPI was created in the U.S. to hold money in trust there.
SPI and Debian are separate organisations who share some goals. Debian is grateful for the legal support framework offered by SPI.
9.1. Relationship with Associated Organizations
Debian Developers do not become agents or employees of organisations holding assets in trust for Debian, or of each other, or of persons in authority in the Debian Project, solely by the virtue of being Debian Developers. A person acting as a Developer does so as an individual, on their own behalf. Such organisations may, of their own accord, establish relationships with individuals who are also Debian developers.
9.2. Authority
An organisation holding assets for Debian has no authority regarding Debian's technical or nontechnical decisions, except that no decision by Debian with respect to any property held by the organisation shall require it to act outside its legal authority. Debian claims no authority over an organisation that holds assets for Debian other than that over the use of property held in trust for Debian.
9.3. Trusted organisations
Any donations for the Debian Project must be made to any one of a set of organisations designated by the Project leader (or a delegate) to be authorized to handle assets to be used for the Debian Project.
Organisations holding assets in trust for Debian should undertake reasonable obligations for the handling of such assets.
Debian maintains a public List of Trusted Organisations that accept donations and hold assets in trust for Debian (including both tangible property and intellectual property) that includes the commitments those organisations have made as to how those assets will be handled.
These rules apply to communal decision-making by committees and plebiscites, where stated above.
A.0. Proposal
The formal procedure begins when a draft resolution is proposed and sponsored, as required.
A.1. Discussion and Amendment
Following the proposal, the resolution may be discussed. Amendments may be made formal by being proposed and sponsored according to the requirements for a new resolution, or directly by the proposer of the original resolution. A formal amendment may be accepted by the resolution's proposer, in which case the formal resolution draft is immediately changed to match. If a formal amendment is not accepted, or one of the sponsors of the resolution does not agree with the acceptance by the proposer of a formal amendment, the amendment remains as an amendment and will be voted on. If an amendment accepted by the original proposer is not to the liking of others, they may propose another amendment to reverse the earlier change (again, they must meet the requirements for proposer and sponsor(s).) The proposer of a resolution may suggest changes to the wordings of amendments; these take effect if the proposer of the amendment agrees and none of the sponsors object. In this case the changed amendments will be voted on instead of the originals. The proposer of a resolution may make changes to correct minor errors (for example, typographical errors or inconsistencies) or changes which do not alter the meaning, providing noone objects within 24 hours. In this case the minimum discussion period is not restarted.
A.2. Calling for a vote
The proposer or a sponsor of a motion or an amendment may call for a vote, providing that the minimum discussion period (if any) has elapsed. The proposer or any sponsor of a resolution may call for a vote on that resolution and all related amendments. The person who calls for a vote states what they believe the wordings of the resolution and any relevant amendments are, and consequently what form the ballot should take. However, the final decision on the form of ballot(s) is the Secretary's - see 7.1(1), 7.1(3) and A.3(4). The minimum discussion period is counted from the time the last formal amendment was accepted, or since the whole resolution was proposed if no amendments have been proposed and accepted.
A.3. Voting procedure
Each resolution and its related amendments is voted on in a single ballot that includes an option for the original resolution, each amendment, and the default option (where applicable). The default option must not have any supermajority requirements. Options which do not have an explicit supermajority requirement have a 1:1 majority requirement. The votes are counted according to the rules in A.6. The default option is Further Discussion, unless specified otherwise. In cases of doubt the Project Secretary shall decide on matters of procedure.
A.4. Withdrawing resolutions or unaccepted amendments
The proposer of a resolution or unaccepted amendment may withdraw it. In this case new proposers may come forward keep it alive, in which case the first person to do so becomes the new proposer and any others become sponsors if they aren't sponsors already.
A sponsor of a resolution or amendment (unless it has been accepted) may withdraw.
If the withdrawal of the proposer and/or sponsors means that a resolution has no proposer or not enough sponsors it will not be voted on unless this is rectified before the resolution expires.
A.5. Expiry
If a proposed resolution has not been discussed, amended, voted on or otherwise dealt with for 4 weeks the secretary may issue a statement that the issue is being withdrawn. If none of the sponsors of any of the proposals object within a week, the issue is withdrawn.
The secretary may also include suggestions on how to proceed, if appropriate.
A.6. Vote Counting
Each voter's ballot ranks the options being voted on. Not all options need be ranked. Ranked options are considered preferred to all unranked options. Voters may rank options equally. Unranked options are considered to be ranked equally with one another. Details of how ballots may be filled out will be included in the Call For Votes. If the ballot has a quorum requirement R any options other than the default option which do not receive at least R votes ranking that option above the default option are dropped from consideration. Any (non-default) option which does not defeat the default option by its required majority ratio is dropped from consideration. Given two options A and B, V(A,B) is the number of voters who prefer option A over option B. An option A defeats the default option D by a majority ratio N, if V(A,D) is greater or equal to N * V(D,A) and V(A,D) is strictly great If a supermajority of S:1 is required for A, its majority ratio is S; otherwise, its majority ratio is 1. From the list of undropped options, we generate a list of pairwise defeats. An option A defeats an option B, if V(A,B) is strictly greater than V(B,A). From the list of [undropped] pairwise defeats, we generate a set of transitive defeats. An option A transitively defeats an option C if A defeats C or if there is some other option B where A defeats B AND B transitively defeats C. We |
that is waged by the entire civilized world since September 11, 2001.
Caucasus Emirate and ‘Islamic State’
In the face of total absence of civil rights and violation of basic human rights in the Northern Caucuses’ republics by RF, the ideas of Emirate prompted strong response in the hearts of a large number of young people. Due to the overall hopelessness and arbitrary rule combined with high demand for justice, the CE was not really short of human resources, for every new case of unlawful acts on behalf of security forces send young men into the woods looking for justice.
It went on like that until the ISIS appeared in the Middle East. In the summer of 2014 the ‘Islamic State’ held a number of successive offensive operations in Northern Iraq and Syria. Development of real combat operations and victories of Mujahideen attracted more and more attention of Salafi youth in RF. Many people seriously considered the jihad in Syria with its expanses, real combat activities, clearly defined objectives i.e. everything the Caucasian mountains lack of.
Emirate ran into the staff scarcity, it was short of not just fresh recruits (which ISIS attracted to itself like a magnet) but experienced mujtahids as well, who had already gained combat skills in the Northern Caucasus and would join in jihad in Syria. The organization was getting weaker however the open conflict between CE and IS did not take place.
Everything got changed in November 21, 2014, when Suleyman Zailanabidov, one of the amirs (sharifs) of Dagestan Vilayat, swore an oath to ‘Islamic State’ caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Quite soon, some other amirs got out of CE control to join ISIS. Caucasus Emirate’s leaders broke their long lasting silence and appeared on the web with their video address in which the supreme amir of the Caucasus Emirate Ali Abu-Mukhammad (Aliaskhab Kebekov) accused his former companion in arms, who swore allegiance to ISIS, in the split-up and treason. The CE leader suggested the ‘dissenters’ to move to the territory under the ISIS control and appointed new amirs to replace them.
De facto, there are two parallel underground resistance operating on the territory of the Northern Caucasus: Caucasus Emirate and Caucasus province of ‘Islamic State’. The first one connected with ‘Al-Qaeda’, holding in its ranks veterans of Russian-Chechen wars and monitored by the people having theological education along with combat experience. According to experts, the Supreme amir of the Caucasus mujtahids Aliaskhab Kebekov had a reputation of ‘vegetarian’ in the underground: forbidding women bombers, banning attacks on civilian targets etc. However the IS followers in the Northern Caucasus territory did not declare not practiced such kind of particularity about warfare methods. Those mujtahids who have sworn the oath to the ISIS got the reputation of active and merciless militants. Kebekov’s ‘soft’ line did not satisfy ‘hot head youngsters’ and that became one of the reasons of personnel flow from CE to ISIS in the Caucasus itself.
Interests of Moscow
Simultaneously with the split in the ranks of the Caucasian Mujahideen the Kremlin outlined its position. Al Qaeda and its associated structures stopped being the ‘absolute evil’ and ceded its primacy to ‘Islamic State’. Now it has become possible for you to revealingly fight against the threat of Islamism if your opponent is ISIS. So, to bring the situation in the Caucasus in accordance with the desired media image, the power structures of the Russian Federation began to progressively reduce the Emirate’s organizational network.
The supreme Emir Ali Abu Muhammad (Aliaskhab Kebekov) was killed in a battle with the FSB special forces on April 19, 2015. His successor, Abu Usman Gimrynsky (Magomed Suleymanov), lasted less than a month, and died fighting the Russian military in the village of Gimry (Republic of Dagestan) on August 11, 2015.
Starting from June 1, 2015, the Russian security forces have killed 82 members of the Islamist underground. This includes 38 members of the Caucasus Emirate, 42 militants whose organizational affiliation has not been established, and 2 fighters of the ‘Islamic State’. The figures are based on the cross-checked data provided by ‘Kavkazsky Uzel‘ [Caucasian Knot] and ‘Kavkaz-Center‘ [Caucasus Center] sites. Those 42 fighters, whose organizational affiliation is not established, include also the victims of the so-called return fire by security forces who shot vehicles from which the alleged militants opened fire. It is very difficult to confirm or deny victims’ belonging to the underground.
Such disparity in losses is difficult to be explained by an accident, given that in the regions of the active Islamist underground activities (Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia) the number of the Mujahideen of the Caucasus Emirate is about the same as the Mujahideen of ‘Islamic State’. Moreover, the CE is facing a severe personnel crisis and has greatly weakened in recent years. At the same time, Moscow invests efforts in elimination of the leaders of the CE’s network: two leaders of this organization and a number of mid-level commanders of the underground were killed in a short period of time.
Some experts tend to believe that Moscow has also resorted to the elimination of the CE’s representatives abroad. For example, Abdulvahid Edelgiriev (an administrator of ‘Kavkaz-Center’ site, a high powered person in the CE’s network and Naib of Vilayat Nokhchicho’s foreign representative) was shot in his own car not far from his place of temporary residence in Istanbul on November 1, 2015.
Based on this information it can be clearly seen that the Russian security forces want to eliminate the CE’s underground. The most cynical in this is that Moscow not only consistently destroys competitors of ISIS in the North Caucasus, but also that the operations against the Caucasus Emirate are presented as ‘blows to the thugs’ of ‘Islamic State’. There was a fight between the Interior Ministry’s special forces with FSB and a group of Mujahideen in Gimry village in Dagestan on October 24, 2015. As a result, 36-year-old local resident Abdul Nustafaev was killed. The National Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAC) of the Russian Federation stated that the victim was a member of the ISIS. At the same time this information was denied even by the Russian experts Orhan Jemal and Mikhail Roshchin who are quite loyal to the Kremlin. The killed was an Emirate’s militant.
Thus, the destruction of competitors of ‘Islamic State’ is presented as ‘fight against the ISIS‘. It is difficult not to recall Syria, where the Russians ‘conduct strikes on IS’ in areas where are no ISIS’s militants.
To summarize, we can assume that Moscow has set itself the goal to permanently remove Caucasus Emirate from the ‘Caucasian Chessboard’. Because a longtime struggle with the local resistance movement, which openly condemns the methods and means of ‘Islamic State’ does not fit into Putin’s new ‘anti-Hitler coalition’ scheme.
Original article by Pavlo PodobedIn an interview with UploadVR, the VR Cover team revealed that the followup project to their recently successful Kickstarter campaign will be a VR fitness application.
The form factor and design of modern, high-end virtual reality headsets are – in many ways – works of art. One area where they are lacking, however, is hygiene. The foam borders that create the primary point-of-contact between the headset and the user’s face can get more than a little swampy after repeated use. This can make using a VR headset – and especially sharing one – a somewhat less than desirable experience.
Fortunately, a handful of small startups have cropped up since VR’s resurgence to meet this growing need. The most well-known of these is VR Cover. The company started out as a provider of cloth, leather, or foam headset covers to make your VR experience a bit more sanitary. Since then, VR Cover has expanded through a slew of successful Kickstarter campaigns. It now provides prescription lenses for visually impaired VR enthusiasts through its subsidiary: VR Lens Lab. VR Cover’s most recently funded campaign will allow the young company to create two new custom facial interfaces for the Oculus Rift. The first offers removable foam pads and the second expands the diameter of the headset’s seal to allow users with larger eyeglasses to enjoy VR without contacts.
Co-founder Jay Uhdinger revealed via email that the VR Lens Lab store is now officially open for business, which should be very exciting news to VR fans with weak eyes (such as yours truly – I feel your pain brothers). He also clued us in on the current size and scope of this rapidly growing company as well as a tease for what its next project is going to be.
“VR Cover is doing well,” he wrote. “We are continuously scaling the operation and increased the team size from 5 to 12…We have some new people helping with operations and design, but are also working on a fitness related VR experience that we hope to launch as an early access game in about 3 months.”
In addition to this mysterious fitness game, Uhdinger also indicated that VR Cover is far from finished when it comes to building and launching new VR facial interfaces.
“We worked and tested a few more hygiene solutions last year that we just didn’t roll out because the market was so small,” he wrote. “But we will release later this year.”
Sales are always a point of interest when talking to any early VR developer. VR is a completely new market, and one that still has a great deal of growing to do. Launching a product into these uncharted waters is therefore something of a risk for startups like VR Cover. According to Uhdinger, “sales reflect what is going on in the market with Oculus having more pre-orders but Vive catching up recently.” He also teased that VR Cover is working on a stealth project with a “new player on the VR market,” although he declined to say more.
Tagged with: face, face plate, fitness, vr cover, VR Lens LabMichigan Governor Rick Snyder votes for Michigan Roads Proposition 1 at his voting place in Superior Twp, Mich. on Tuesday, May 5, 2015. (Photo: Kimberly P. Mitchell/DFP)
Gov. Rick Snyder, our last line of defense against the religious minority that holds the majority in the Legislature, abdicated that responsibility on Thursday by signing a package of bills allowing faith-based agencies to turn away gay and lesbian couples seeking state-supported adoptions.
Although the governor had long promised a careful review of the legislation, it took but a day for the Battle Creek native to sign the bills after passage in the Senate and concurrence in the House.
The passage in both chambers went almost exclusively along party lines — Sen. Mike Nofs and Reps. David Maturen and John Bizon, all Republicans, supported the legislation.
In explaining his decision, the governor said he wanted to continue the state's progress in finding more "forever homes" for children.
"We are focused on ensuring that as many children are adopted to as many loving families as possible regardless of their makeup," said.
Warm and fuzzy language notwithstanding, the governor sidestepped the larger question of whether the law violates the U.S. Constitution, which it almost certainly does.
It's simply illegal to use tax dollars to aid in the establishment of religion, and no rationalization, however high-minded, changes the essential fact that this law amounts to state-sanctioned discrimination.
It seems unlikely Michigan's new law would survive a promised legal challenge, and even that would be rendered moot should the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming weeks invalidate all legislative or constitutional provisions that permit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
With the signing of this legislation into law, Michiganders again find their state on the wrong side of history, at odds with public opinion and any credible research on family-friendly public policy.
Even the American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in against this legislation, arguing that states shouldn't be putting religious limitations on otherwise qualified families who seek to adopt children.
It's a disgraceful, hurtful statute, and it is bitterly disappointing that our governor — an intelligent and capable executive who surely understands the futility of the GOP's cultural war — would go along with it.
The people of Michigan deserve better.
Read or Share this story: http://bcene.ws/1S94EpBBuy Photo Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio, center, is taken back to jail after she was found guilty of breaking the conditions of her DWI sentence during her hearing at the Hall of Justice in Rochester Thursday, June 8, 2017. (Photo: SHAWN DOWD/@sdowdphoto/, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)Buy Photo
An open letter to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct:
Dear Commissioners,
They say the wheels of justice turn slowly, but the crickets out of the 11 of you as to the fate of City Court Judge Leticia Astacio has all of Rochester wondering whether you’re turtles.
Astacio was charged with drunken driving in February 2016, convicted last summer, and on Thursday was found to have violated the conditions of her sentence for a second time.
The first time was eight months ago, when she admitted she tried to start her car after drinking. This time, she failed to take a court-ordered urine test in a timely fashion.
You have more than enough grist to conclude whether Astacio should ever take the bench again or is deserving or some other punishment or none at all.
In terms of discipline, the law gives you four options: slap her on the wrist with a letter of admonishment; slap her on both wrists with a censure; force her into a retirement citing physical or mental impairment preventing her from working, or kick her off the bench.
Pick one and move on because the people of Rochester have had enough of the train wreck. Ask Commissioner John Falk. He’s a partner at a local law firm and a town justice in the suburb of Brighton. He’ll tell you people here can’t stop shaking their heads.
What they can’t grasp, in addition to Astacio’s erratic behavior, is how she continues to receive her salary of $173,700.
By law, only the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, can strip a judge of her pay. That can only happen if the court has already suspended the judge from office, and the court can do that only if the judge is charged with a felony or crime of “moral turpitude.”
Since none of that has happened, right now Astacio is getting paid to sit in a jail cell. In fact, she’s been paid to do nothing for eight months, since her two supervising judges took away her cases and barred her from non-public areas of the courthouse.
They couldn’t trust her to be a judge. And why should they, when she can’t act like one?
A month ago, she took off to Thailand and hadn't planned to return until August before the judge overseeing her case issued a warrant for her arrest to find out why she didn't take the urine test he ordered.
She instructed her lawyer to tell inquiring minds that she was living with monks in the mountains as photos of her bopping around Bangkok were being posted to Instagram.
The people paid her to do that, too. Her salary might not seem like a lot to you. Judging by your biographies, you’re all jurists or attorneys with stakes in law firms with names like Mayflower, Washington, Adams and Jefferson PLLC.
But her salary is triple the metro Rochester median household income of $54,000.
Buy Photo Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio, seated right, talks with her attorney, Edward Fiandach, right, during her hearing at the Hall of Justice in Rochester Thursday, June 8, 2017. (Photo: SHAWN DOWD/@sdowdphoto/, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
You owe the people an explanation for your inaction, although they’d settle for action. No one wants you to rush to judgment. A simple trot will do.
We know the law prohibits you from even acknowledging an open investigation. But let’s not be coy. You’re investigating Astacio. She said so herself in court.
This column has explained that your investigations historically move at a glacial pace. Indeed, the five decisions you’ve rendered this year to date show the time between the judges’ wrongdoing and your determinations ranged from 18 months to seven years.
This column has also explained that you don’t remove drunken-driving judges lightly. Of the 27 judges your commission has ever disciplined for excessive use of alcohol, just two were disrobed.
That’s because you consider factors such as alcoholism, which appears to be at play in Astacio’s case, and try to give judges a chance to rehabilitate themselves. Those are good things.
But the difference between nearly every judge who was ever the subject of a commission probe and Astacio is that those other judges continued to function and fulfill their public duties while they were under investigation.
The most recent local example was state Supreme Court Justice James Piampiano, who was censured in March for his behavior during the 2015 murder trial of Charles Tan. In the interim, he handled matrimonial and civil cases.
Astacio is behind bars. Her bosses, who know her better than you, don’t want her standing in judgment of anyone. She’s being paid to do nothing. You can’t let this go on.
Unlike Astacio, you’re not getting paid. Being a commissioner is an unpaid appointment. But like her, you don’t appear to be doing much of anything, either.
Act.
Sincerely,
Everyone in Rochester
David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2sM76M4Everyone made a concerted effort to arrive on time and well before 6:00 we were diving into Garr’s ham and cheese casserole. Soon, we fired up the digital mapping projector and we were off and running.
We left off last session after the final member of the Dragon Cultists had been slain deep within the caverns of The Hatchery. Before our heroes lay the hot, acrid egg chamber. While the group was discussing what to do with the eggs, Brokk got to wondering about the potion he’d found on Cyanwrath. He decided to drink it. Feeling a touch more mobile, a touch more lively, he decided to run into the egg chamber and grab the first giant egg and retrieve it. He didn’t make it far before four ropey tendrils snapped around him and pulled him toward a giant toothy maw. Chomp!
The rest of the party began to prepare for battle, but Valeriya shouted out that even more food could be delivered if the thing would let the chomped barbarian free. Please let him free! “But, me very hungry!” And so on went the conversation until bodies of dead dragon cultists were delivered. Finally, Brokk was allowed free. There was a bit more back and forth about the eggs and how many bodies for each, but eventually, all the bodies went to the Roper and all three eggs went to our heroes – who then left the caverns.
With some of Frulam Mondath’s treasure, three large dragon eggs, Olishia the rescued rape victim, and Ralishuul, their cultist prisoner, our heroes trudged back to Greenest. Townspeople quickly gathered to follow our heroes into town, and around Ralishuul. Soon, it was a throng, and they were determinedly gathering stones to put an end to the prisoner. It took all their efforts to persuade the crowd to wait even a few moments. Luckily, Governor Nighthill appeared on the scene and agreed that Ralishuul should stand trial in the morning. After some fierce words, the crowd reluctantly agreed to wait – Ralishuul would be tried and then stoned to death on the ‘morrow.
Meanwhile, on fresh horses, our heroes headed off toward Elturel as arranged. They bore precious information about the direction and possible destination of the Dragon Cultists, as well as three giant dragon eggs.
Cold autumn rains and dark skies loomed overhead. Three days out, late in the afternoon, a line of nine orcs was spotted on the grassy plain ahead. Their heavy loping forms were spread out and moving as fast as possible from west to east. Wounded stragglers lagged behind. Some of the slowest still bore green feathered elven shafts. Our heroes wasted no time – they rolled initiative and attacked.
This wasn’t an ordinary band of orcs however. These were captains and leaders of an elite war band. The battle was quick and fierce. A few of the weaker orcs tried to run, as orcs will. They were no match for Himo’s speed, however. Himo caught and killed the weak. The others fell in a brutal, bloody last stand.
Two long days later, on the other side of a seemingly endless rolling grassy ridge, the river Chionthar spread out to the east and west before our travellers. On the far side, the dusty streets and rust-brown roofs of Elturel. They took the last ferry across just as the lanterns and lights of the evening flamed to life.
A few quick questions led our group to Leosin Erlanthar and Onthar Frume at the welcoming hearth of the Black Antlers Inn. The night was wrong for deep discussions however. Many prying ears were present and Onthar, particularly, needed a bit of time to make some arrangements. All would be ready tomorrow evening.
In the morning, our troop decided to stretch their legs a bit and take in a bit of the local color. This day happened to fall on the first day of Elturel’s autumn harvest festival. There were games and assorted entertainments. Brokk tried his hand at several events – sadly, he fared poorly in archery, arm wrestling, and wrestling. Terredon took home the championship for the archery contests – and captured the reward of half a dozen very special arrows. Himo won the running contest hands down despite an attempt at sabotage which was foiled by Terredon. For his part, Terredon exercised some restraint in not winning the race as he transformed into a war horse and easily outpaced the pack but, in the end, declined to cross the finish line.
For the people of Elturel, a small outpost in the middle of a grassland sea, running speed is a highly prized quality. Himo won the grand prize. He shared a private dinner with the Lady Melowna, aboard the private barge of her father, High Rider Lord Dhelt. The Lady being only 14, Himo managed to restrain himself.
Late that evening, our heroes were finally called into an upstairs room of the Black Antlers. Leosin and Onthar awaited with pitchers of wine, and ale, boards of meats, cheeses and bread. Drinking and eating, our heroes told the tale of their adventures in the Hatchery and relayed that the Dragon Cultists were making their way west, toward Beregost and then north along The Coast Way, toward Baldur’s Gate. Also relayed was the impression that the loot of Greenest was of particular importance to the cultists.
Onthar and Leosin explained that many interests are coalescing against the Dragon Cultists up and down the Sword Coast. What is needed, at this point, is solid information as to where the cultists are taking the loot. Further, it is still a mystery as to the intentions of the cult. What is their plan? Where are they going and why are they gathering such treasures?
To this end, there was some long discussion. Onthar revealed that he had already made arrangements for our heroes to take a boat to Baldur’s Gate via the River Chionthar in the morning. He suggested that our heroes significantly change their appearance to avoid being recognized. All agreed that the best plan was to await the arrival of the cultists and their loot at Baldur’s Gate. See where they take it. If the cultists continue to head north, Onthar gave the name of Ackyn Selebon, a friend of his in Blackgate. Traders and travelers group together on the northern road, the Trade Way, for protection. Ackyn can help our heroes obtain passage or even employment on the northern route if necessary.
About this time, Tan Meng, who was well into the pitchers of ale and wine had his own revelation. “What about if we find some old skiff or boat and float down the Chionthar to Baldur’s Gate?!” With a dramatic flourish, he announced his plan and smacked a map down on the table with triumphant exultation. “What do you think of that, bitches!”
Laughter all around, except for from Tan Meng who grinned a bit sheepishly realizing he wasn’t quite up to speed.
In the cool morning fog, Captain Yomadan pushed off the dock and all began to drift downstream. Each sported a remodeled appearance. Tom Haverford probably made out the best with some fancy halfling merchant attire including striped silk pantaloons (red and yellow), a new red velvet jacket, and a fancy foppish hat. The dragon egg cargo was kept beneath crates and warmed by lanterns. Despite their efforts, the two black eggs were smelling pretty sour as they drifted into the morning.
It was late by the time we all arrived in Baldur’s Gate. Under cover of darkness, the barge passed beneath Wyrm’s Crossing and beside Wyrm’s Rock. Yomadan brought the ship quietly into the docks. With a few brief words, our heroes parted with their cargo, and made their way to The Dagger and Hook. With the eggs settled in a storage shed, some took watch while others found their rooms, glad to be on dry land once again.
The next morning, Tom set about finding a buyer for the eggs, while Valeriya and Tan Meng set about finding a solution to Valeriya’s cobalt plates and the symbol of Tiamat branded into her chest by Cyanwrath’s minions. For six hundred gold, Brother Maris of the Temple of Chauntea was willing to perform the deed. Cleansed of those insults, Valeriya set out a free woman once again.
Tom found two potential buyers. An alchemist named Shoulhoris was interested, but another, a wizard named Habakuk seemed the better prospect so all made their way to his house boat. Dirty plates and cups were strewn about the cabin in keeping with the unkempt decks and untended woodwork outside. He’s bit of a quirky and unkempt old fellow – but when it came to price, Habakuk was focussed and solemn. 10,000 gold for the blue egg.
This is where Tan Meng decided that what was needed was a Zone of Truth – and he proceeded to set about casting such.
Meanwhile, Raynard The Mild was thinking about the opportunities the egg presented. What if one were to raise such a beast and gain its service in this struggle? Wouldn’t that be of potential great benefit? (Raynard’s powerful patron encouraged him to explore this option before parting with the opportunity).
There was dissension among the group, differing opinions collided. Some were pleading with Tan Meng to be more tactful, others were warning Raynard of his path…. and that is where we decided to call it an evening. This is moment to where we return at our next point of gathering.
Will Tan Meng proceed with casting a spell in the small cabin of Habakuk’s floating home? Will that result in fiery death for all? Will they sell the egg or will Raynard The Mild convince the party to at least explore the option of harnessing the potential power to their cause? When will the Dragon Cult show up with their loot? Where are they taking it and why?
(Many thanks to Courtney C. Campbell for his excellent supplemental works for the HotDQ campaign. I usually borrow material rapaciously when I run a game, but Courtney’s contributions over at Hack & Slash helped to elevate HotDQ toward being one of the best games I’ve ever run.)
AdvertisementsA shopper wearing eye tracking glasses peruses cereal options. Neuromarketers claim that through eye tracking, brain scans, and other tests, they can gain insight into people’s subconscious reactions to marketing campaigns and products. (Photo courtesy SMI Eye Tracking)
Neuromarketing in the Age of iPhones
Personal devices could help marketers peer deeper in our minds, but questions remain over credibility and ethics
Marketers are hoping to capitalize on biometric data that can reveal feelings we may not even know we have—or would rather not share.
The field of neuromarketing could be on the verge of a breakthrough with the latest smartphones and wearable tech. In the past, neuromarketers operated on the fringes of credibility, but that could change, along with the ethical issues the technology raises.
New Tech
Neuromarketing attempts to craft better marketing campaigns and products by measuring subconscious reactions.
That can involve conducting an electroencephalogram (EEG) or MRI brain scan on a test subject while exposing that person to a commercial or product, as was done in 2004 when volunteers took the Pepsi challenge inside a brain scanner. That test revealed how the brain responded differently once the drink was identified—neural evidence of brand recognition.
Neuromarketing is used by 10 percent of marketing buyers and accounts for 1 percent of global market research, according to a 2016 report by LCC, which predicts the market will double in five years.
We are already seeing the emergence of mobiles with in-built eye tracking and biometric measurement capability. — Gemma Calvert, professor, Nanyang Business School
Neuromarketers claim their wares can develop marketing that appeals to subconscious emotions, but critics say it is riddled with spin and poor science.
Just as lie detectors pick up tiny changes in skin conductivity, devices such as brain scans and EEGs can catch hidden tells, such as blood flow in the brain or electrical activity on the scalp.
Neuromarketers say reaction tests can pick up subconscious biases. For example, a political campaign could use neuromarketing techniques to identify the key words and phrases that trigger positive reactions in potential voters.
But neuromarketing now doesn’t need large machines in specific locations. It can be done online, remotely. Smartphones and watches already contain the tech for some neuromarketing studies.
Some companies claim they can identify values subconsciously associated with a brand just by observing test subjects using a computer. In one format, participants hit keys or touch pads in response to images or messages, their reaction time indicating “gut instincts.”
Online neuromarketing will be the industry standard for testing ad campaigns, prototypes, and packaging designs within five years, said Gemma Calvert, professor at Nanyang Business School in Singapore and a pioneer of neuromarketing.
“We are already seeing the emergence of mobiles with in-built eye tracking and biometric measurement capability,” she said in an email.
Games, apps, and ads will also be tweaked according to feedback from subconscious indicators, picked up in eye gaze, heart rate, and the response time in clicking the buttons, said Calvert.
In 2016, Apple bought Emotient, a startup that uses AI to analyze facial expressions and read emotions. Apple is also reportedly set to include a 3-D camera on the iPhone, which theoretically would be better able to read facial expressions.
But the potential uses for neuromarketing bring ethical concerns. In 2011, France responded to these by banning brain scans for marketing purposes.
A Question of Dignity
James Garvey, author of “The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry that Wants to Change Your Mind,” says he’s concerned our moral system hasn’t caught up with the implications of neuromarketing.
“There is a question of human dignity here. Are we treating people like people with hopes and desires? Or are we treating them as things that we can manipulate based on our understanding of how brains work?”
“Hundreds of years of research, and we are using it to sell sandwiches.”
Calvert and other proponents argue that neuromarketing allows consumers to get more of what they want by giving product developers better data.
Like some other neuroethicists, John Basl, assistant professor of philosophy at Northeastern University and an expert on neuroethics, isn’t particularly concerned with the current ethical threat. But he takes issue with the justification that neuromarketing would simply give us what we didn’t know we really wanted.
“Think about lying. Some lies, it seems, are wrong even when they promote well-being,” he said in an email. “One way to explain what is wrong with lying is that it subverts someone’s rational faculties, depriving them of important information that might influence how they decide to behave.”
The motives behind neuromarketing are also important, he said.
“Neuromarketing isn’t an attempt to reveal our desires and then fulfill them. It is an attempt to take advantage of certain mechanisms to shape or instill certain desires or behaviors.”
Some neuroscientists like Karen Rommelfanger, assistant professor of neuroscience and director of the neuroethics program at Emory University, say current practices simply aren’t developed enough to subvert free will.
The “neuro” label is a marketing device in and of itself, says Duncan Smith, managing director of neuromarketing company Mindlab International.
Even academics are seduced by brain scan images. Smith says studies show incorporating brain scan images in a research paper will increase perceptions of credibility.
Some marketing companies use the “neuro” label and brain scan images to look more credible, but many claims lack solid scientific backing, said Smith.
“A lot of the briefs we get asking for EEGs are actually PR dressed up as research,” he said.
Marketing companies want neuromarketing to help validate their own marketing products by proving their approach is superior, he said.
For those worried that neuromarketing could compromise consumers, there may be some comfort from Joe Devlin, head of experimental psychology at University College London.
He said that, in some limited areas, neuromarketing is based on sound research, but some neuromarketers don’t fully understand the limitations of the science they are using.
Science is far from unlocking the mysteries of the mind, Devlin said, dismissing concerns about manipulation.
“Not only can’t it be done, it never will.”Posted by
Ian Clarke,
July 15, 2014 Email
Ian Clarke
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@ClarkeRNO Read this on your iPhone/iPad or Android device
Toronto FC and the Vancouver Whitecaps continue their rivalry in what many hope to be another midweek thriller between the two clubs. Already more familiar with one another through the past several years of Voyageurs Cup encounters, it is another installment of one of their MLS battles that has produced some highly entertaining results. Both teams are in need of earning points as the Whitecaps are looking to bounce back from their weekend home loss to Chivas USA, while Toronto need to make the games they have in hand in the Eastern Conference count, and this is one that could propel them near the top of the table. There will be questions for both teams heading into this one. Vancouver and Toronto have weekend fixtures looming that are away in tough places to earn points and they may look at this game as the one that has the best chance at earning a win. However, the Whitecaps will be without Jordan Harvey, while TFC are also missing a defender in Steve Caldwell and hoping their stalwart midfielder Michael Bradley is fit enough to log minutes. The Reds have done well against Vancouver at home over the years and there should be a slight advantage, however, the 'Caps do have the players to cause TFC's defence problems to ensure it will likely be another close affair. Keep thinking
While the rivalry goes back before both sides were in MLS, right from the start and their inaugural match in the league, a 4-2 Whitecaps win, set the tone for some entertaining league matches between these two sides. Highlight reel goals have been one of the hallmarks, and it is fitting this is a midweek fixture as the 2012 contest saw Darren Mattocks score an incredible header to only be outdone by a Terry Dunfield late winner. At the point of this match, both sides have surprised but none more than Vancouver. Toronto certainly splashed the cash and on paper should be a contender, but Vancouver has taken a different route and have found impact players from South America who have made them a solid Western Conference side. Carl Robinson has done extremely well in his first head coaching role to put out a competitive team each week. The result has been a Vancouver side that, while yet to go on a hot or cold streak, has remained consistent in earning points. There is enough to see from both teams at this juncture to formulate strategies to get the most out of this game. Nigel Reo-Coker spoke with Har Journalist of RedNation Online coming into this match. "That's going to be a tough game. Everyone's talking about Toronto, the players that they have, those that they've added to their squad and how good a team they are and how well they're doing this year. Every game in this league is a tough game, there is no such thing as an easy game. I think people might have thought today's (Chivas USA) game would have been easy." That is something TFC has proven to be for most of Ryan Nelsen's tenure as head coach, and that is a tough team to beat. There is one detail to that now though, and it is a recent injury to captain Steven Caldwell who tore his quad chasing back to defend against Houston on the weekend. Bradley Orr will likely fill in that position, and while he has done well either in defence or midfield, there have been issues of late on the backline that Vancouver can take advantage of. With good pace up front, the Whitecaps would be wise to find ways to catch the Toronto defence in open field. The Reds have had difficulty marking players when attacked at angles as there has been confusion in responsibilities. Last weekend we saw Brad Davis slip in wide of Mark Bloom twice to send home a goal. If given time to set and assess, TFC should be able to manage without their Marshall on defence, but if Vancouver can find ways to disrupt positioning, it could lead to openings for the midfield such as Pedro Morales or Sebastien Fernandez. For Toronto, it will be a matter of avoiding the start they has on Saturday and dictating the match early. Vancouver's confidence might be a bit shaky, and with Jordan Harvey serving a red card suspension, there could be insecurities on the back line. Reo-Coker outlines again some things the 'Caps need to do coming out of their 3-1 loss to Chivas USA. "It's about us just making sure we stay focused and keep our concentration, we've |
, ask them to introduce you to other investors they respect. [ 7 ] The next best type of intro is from a founder of a company they've funded. You can also get intros from other people in the startup community, like lawyers and reporters.
There are now sites like AngelList, FundersClub, and WeFunder that can introduce you to investors. We recommend startups treat them as auxiliary sources of money. Raise money first from leads you get yourself. Those will on average be better investors. Plus you'll have an easier time raising money on these sites once you can say you've already raised some from well-known investors.
Hear no till you hear yes.
Treat investors as saying no till they unequivocally say yes, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies.
I mentioned earlier that investors prefer to wait if they can. What's particularly dangerous for founders is the way they wait. Essentially, they lead you on. They seem like they're about to invest right up till the moment they say no. If they even say no. Some of the worse ones never actually do say no; they just stop replying to your emails. They hope that way to get a free option on investing. If they decide later that they want to invest — usually because they've heard you're a hot deal — they can pretend they just got distracted and then restart the conversation as if they'd been about to. [ 8 ]
That's not the worst thing investors will do. Some will use language that makes it sound as if they're committing, but which doesn't actually commit them. And wishful thinking founders are happy to meet them half way. [ 9 ]
Fortunately, the next rule is a tactic for neutralizing this behavior. But to work it depends on you not being tricked by the no that sounds like yes. It's so common for founders to be misled/mistaken about this that we designed a protocol to fix the problem. If you believe an investor has committed, get them to confirm it. If you and they have different views of reality, whether the source of the discrepancy is their sketchiness or your wishful thinking, the prospect of confirming a commitment in writing will flush it out. And till they confirm, regard them as saying no.
Do breadth-first search weighted by expected value.
When you talk to investors your m.o. should be breadth-first search, weighted by expected value. You should always talk to investors in parallel rather than serially. You can't afford the time it takes to talk to investors serially, plus if you only talk to one investor at a time, they don't have the pressure of other investors to make them act. But you shouldn't pay the same attention to every investor, because some are more promising prospects than others. The optimal solution is to talk to all potential investors in parallel, but give higher priority to the more promising ones. [ 10 ]
Expected value = how likely an investor is to say yes, multiplied by how good it would be if they did. So for example, an eminent investor who would invest a lot, but will be hard to convince, might have the same expected value as an obscure angel who won't invest much, but will be easy to convince. Whereas an obscure angel who will only invest a small amount, and yet needs to meet multiple times before making up his mind, has very low expected value. Meet such investors last, if at all. [ 11 ]
Doing breadth-first search weighted by expected value will save you from investors who never explicitly say no but merely drift away, because you'll drift away from them at the same rate. It protects you from investors who flake in much the same way that a distributed algorithm protects you from processors that fail. If some investor isn't returning your emails, or wants to have lots of meetings but isn't progressing toward making you an offer, you automatically focus less on them. But you have to be disciplined about assigning probabilities. You can't let how much you want an investor influence your estimate of how much they want you.
Know where you stand.
How do you judge how well you're doing with an investor, when investors habitually seem more positive than they are? By looking at their actions rather than their words. Every investor has some track they need to move along from the first conversation to wiring the money, and you should always know what that track consists of, where you are on it, and how fast you're moving forward.
Never leave a meeting with an investor without asking what happens next. What more do they need in order to decide? Do they need another meeting with you? To talk about what? And how soon? Do they need to do something internally, like talk to their partners, or investigate some issue? How long do they expect it to take? Don't be too pushy, but know where you stand. If investors are vague or resist answering such questions, assume the worst; investors who are seriously interested in you will usually be happy to talk about what has to happen between now and wiring the money, because they're already running through that in their heads. [ 12 ]
If you're experienced at negotiations, you already know how to ask such questions. [ 13 ] If you're not, there's a trick you can use in this situation. Investors know you're inexperienced at raising money. Inexperience there doesn't make you unattractive. Being a noob at technology would, if you're starting a technology startup, but not being a noob at fundraising. Larry and Sergey were noobs at fundraising. So you can just confess that you're inexperienced at this and ask how their process works and where you are in it. [ 14 ]
Get the first commitment.
The biggest factor in most investors' opinions of you is the opinion of other investors. Once you start getting investors to commit, it becomes increasingly easy to get more to. But the other side of this coin is that it's often hard to get the first commitment.
Getting the first substantial offer can be half the total difficulty of fundraising. What counts as a substantial offer depends on who it's from and how much it is. Money from friends and family doesn't usually count, no matter how much. But if you get $50k from a well known VC firm or angel investor, that will usually be enough to set things rolling. [ 15 ]
Close committed money.
It's not a deal till the money's in the bank. I often hear inexperienced founders say things like "We've raised $800,000," only to discover that zero of it is in the bank so far. Remember the twin fears that torment investors? The fear of missing out that makes them jump early, and the fear of jumping onto a turd that results? This is a market where people are exceptionally prone to buyer's remorse. And it's also one that furnishes them plenty of excuses to gratify it. The public markets snap startup investing around like a whip. If the Chinese economy blows up tomorrow, all bets are off. But there are lots of surprises for individual startups too, and they tend to be concentrated around fundraising. Tomorrow a big competitor could appear, or you could get C&Ded, or your cofounder could quit. [ 16 ]
Even a day's delay can bring news that causes an investor to change their mind. So when someone commits, get the money. Knowing where you stand doesn't end when they say they'll invest. After they say yes, know what the timetable is for getting the money, and then babysit that process till it happens. Institutional investors have people in charge of wiring money, but you may have to hunt angels down in person to collect a check.
Inexperienced investors are the ones most likely to get buyer's remorse. Established ones have learned to treat saying yes as like diving off a diving board, and they also have more brand to preserve. But I've heard of cases of even top-tier VC firms welching on deals.
Avoid investors who don't "lead."
Since getting the first offer is most of the difficulty of fundraising, that should be part of your calculation of expected value when you start. You have to estimate not just the probability that an investor will say yes, but the probability that they'd be the first to say yes, and the latter is not simply a constant fraction of the former. Some investors are known for deciding quickly, and those are extra valuable early on.
Conversely, an investor who will only invest once other investors have is worthless initially. And while most investors are influenced by how interested other investors are in you, there are some who have an explicit policy of only investing after other investors have. You can recognize this contemptible subspecies of investor because they often talk about "leads." They say that they don't lead, or that they'll invest once you have a lead. Sometimes they even claim to be willing to lead themselves, by which they mean they won't invest till you get $x from other investors. (It's great if by "lead" they mean they'll invest unilaterally, and in addition will help you raise more. What's lame is when they use the term to mean they won't invest unless you can raise more elsewhere.) [ 17 ]
Where does this term "lead" come from? Up till a few years ago, startups raising money in phase 2 would usually raise equity rounds in which several investors invested at the same time using the same paperwork. You'd negotiate the terms with one "lead" investor, and then all the others would sign the same documents and all the money change hands at the closing.
Series A rounds still work that way, but things now work differently for most fundraising prior to the series A. Now there are rarely actual rounds before the A round, or leads for them. Now startups simply raise money from investors one at a time till they feel they have enough.
Since there are no longer leads, why do investors use that term? Because it's a more legitimate-sounding way of saying what they really mean. All they really mean is that their interest in you is a function of other investors' interest in you. I.e. the spectral signature of all mediocre investors. But when phrased in terms of leads, it sounds like there is something structural and therefore legitimate about their behavior.
When an investor tells you "I want to invest in you, but I don't lead," translate that in your mind to "No, except yes if you turn out to be a hot deal." And since that's the default opinion of any investor about any startup, they've essentially just told you nothing.
When you first start fundraising, the expected value of an investor who won't "lead" is zero, so talk to such investors last if at all.
Have multiple plans.
Many investors will ask how much you're planning to raise. This question makes founders feel they should be planning to raise a specific amount. But in fact you shouldn't. It's a mistake to have fixed plans in an undertaking as unpredictable as fundraising.
So why do investors ask how much you plan to raise? For much the same reasons a salesperson in a store will ask "How much were you planning to spend?" if you walk in looking for a gift for a friend. You probably didn't have a precise amount in mind; you just want to find something good, and if it's inexpensive, so much the better. The salesperson asks you this not because you're supposed to have a plan to spend a specific amount, but so they can show you only things that cost the most you'll pay.
Similarly, when investors ask how much you plan to raise, it's not because you're supposed to have a plan. It's to see whether you'd be a suitable recipient for the size of investment they like to make, and also to judge your ambition, reasonableness, and how far you are along with fundraising.
If you're a wizard at fundraising, you can say "We plan to raise a $7 million series A round, and we'll be accepting termsheets next tuesday." I've known a handful of founders who could pull that off without having VCs laugh in their faces. But if you're in the inexperienced but earnest majority, the solution is analogous to the solution I recommend for pitching your startup: do the right thing and then just tell investors what you're doing.
And the right strategy, in fundraising, is to have multiple plans depending on how much you can raise. Ideally you should be able to tell investors something like: we can make it to profitability without raising any more money, but if we raise a few hundred thousand we can hire one or two smart friends, and if we raise a couple million, we can hire a whole engineering team, etc.
Different plans match different investors. If you're talking to a VC firm that only does series A rounds (though there are few of those left), it would be a waste of time talking about any but your most expensive plan. Whereas if you're talking to an angel who invests $20k at a time and you haven't raised any money yet, you probably want to focus on your least expensive plan.
If you're so fortunate as to have to think about the upper limit on what you should raise, a good rule of thumb is to multiply the number of people you want to hire times $15k times 18 months. In most startups, nearly all the costs are a function of the number of people, and $15k per month is the conventional total cost (including benefits and even office space) per person. $15k per month is high, so don't actually spend that much. But it's ok to use a high estimate when fundraising to add a margin for error. If you have additional expenses, like manufacturing, add in those at the end. Assuming you have none and you think you might hire 20 people, the most you'd want to raise is 20 x $15k x 18 = $5.4 million. [ 18 ]
Underestimate how much you want.
Though you can focus on different plans when talking to different types of investors, you should on the whole err on the side of underestimating the amount you hope to raise.
For example, if you'd like to raise $500k, it's better to say initially that you're trying to raise $250k. Then when you reach $150k you're more than half done. That sends two useful signals to investors: that you're doing well, and that they have to decide quickly because you're running out of room. Whereas if you'd said you were raising $500k, you'd be less than a third done at $150k. If fundraising stalled there for an appreciable time, you'd start to read as a failure.
Saying initially that you're raising $250k doesn't limit you to raising that much. When you reach your initial target and you still have investor interest, you can just decide to raise more. Startups do that all the time. In fact, most startups that are very successful at fundraising end up raising more than they originally intended.
I'm not saying you should lie, but that you should lower your expectations initially. There is almost no downside in starting with a low number. It not only won't cap the amount you raise, but will on the whole tend to increase it.
A good metaphor here is angle of attack. If you try to fly at too steep an angle of attack, you just stall. If you say right out of the gate that you want to raise a $5 million series A round, unless you're in a very strong position, you not only won't get that but won't get anything. Better to start at a low angle of attack, build up speed, and then gradually increase the angle if you want.
Be profitable if you can.
You will be in a much stronger position if your collection of plans includes one for raising zero dollars — i.e. if you can make it to profitability without raising any additional money. Ideally you want to be able to say to investors "We'll succeed no matter what, but raising money will help us do it faster."
There are many analogies between fundraising and dating, and this is one of the strongest. No one wants you if you seem desperate. And the best way not to seem desperate is not to be desperate. That's one reason we urge startups during YC to keep expenses low and to try to make it to ramen profitability before Demo Day. Though it sounds slightly paradoxical, if you want to raise money, the best thing you can do is get yourself to the point where you don't need to.
There are almost two distinct modes of fundraising: one in which founders who need money knock on doors seeking it, knowing that otherwise the company will die or at the very least people will have to be fired, and one in which founders who don't need money take some to grow faster than they could merely on their own revenues. To emphasize the distinction I'm going to name them: type A fundraising is when you don't need money, and type B fundraising is when you do.
Inexperienced founders read about famous startups doing what was type A fundraising, and decide they should raise money too, since that seems to be how startups work. Except when they raise money they don't have a clear path to profitability and are thus doing type B fundraising. And they are then surprised how difficult and unpleasant it is.
Of course not all startups can make it to ramen profitability in a few months. And some that don't still manage to have the upper hand over investors, if they have some other advantage like extraordinary growth numbers or exceptionally formidable founders. But as time passes it gets increasingly difficult to fundraise from a position of strength without being profitable. [ 19 ]
Don't optimize for valuation.
When you raise money, what should your valuation be? The most important thing to understand about valuation is that it's not that important.
Founders who raise money at high valuations tend to be unduly proud of it. Founders are often competitive people, and since valuation is usually the only visible number attached to a startup, they end up competing to raise money at the highest valuation. This is stupid, because fundraising is not the test that matters. The real test is revenue. Fundraising is just a means to that end. Being proud of how well you did at fundraising is like being proud of your college grades.
Not only is fundraising not the test that matters, valuation is not even the thing to optimize about fundraising. The number one thing you want from phase 2 fundraising is to get the money you need, so you can get back to focusing on the real test, the success of your company. Number two is good investors. Valuation is at best third.
The empirical evidence shows just how unimportant it is. Dropbox and Airbnb are the most successful companies we've funded so far, and they raised money after Y Combinator at premoney valuations of $4 million and $2.6 million respectively. Prices are so much higher now that if you can raise money at all you'll probably raise it at higher valuations than Dropbox and Airbnb. So let that satisfy your competitiveness. You're doing better than Dropbox and Airbnb! At a test that doesn't matter.
When you start fundraising, your initial valuation (or valuation cap) will be set by the deal you make with the first investor who commits. You can increase the price for later investors, if you get a lot of interest, but by default the valuation you got from the first investor becomes your asking price.
So if you're raising money from multiple investors, as most companies do in phase 2, you have to be careful to avoid raising the first from an over-eager investor at a price you won't be able to sustain. You can of course lower your price if you need to (in which case you should give the same terms to investors who invested earlier at a higher price), but you may lose a bunch of leads in the process of realizing you need to do this.
What you can do if you have eager first investors is raise money from them on an uncapped convertible note with an MFN clause. This is essentially a way of saying that the valuation cap of the note will be determined by the next investors you raise money from.
It will be easier to raise money at a lower valuation. It shouldn't be, but it is. Since phase 2 prices vary at most 10x and the big successes generate returns of at least 100x, investors should pick startups entirely based on their estimate of the probability that the company will be a big success and hardly at all on price. But although it's a mistake for investors to care about price, a significant number do. A startup that investors seem to like but won't invest in at a cap of $x will have an easier time at $x/2. [ 20 ]
Yes/no before valuation.
Some investors want to know what your valuation is before they even talk to you about investing. If your valuation has already been set by a prior investment at a specific valuation or cap, you can tell them that number. But if it isn't set because you haven't closed anyone yet, and they try to push you to name a price, resist doing so. If this would be the first investor you've closed, then this could be the tipping point of fundraising. That means closing this investor is the first priority, and you need to get the conversation onto that instead of being dragged sideways into a discussion of price.
Fortunately there is a way to avoid naming a price in this situation. And it is not just a negotiating trick; it's how you (both) should be operating. Tell them that valuation is not the most important thing to you and that you haven't thought much about it, that you are looking for investors you want to partner with and who want to partner with you, and that you should talk first about whether they want to invest at all. Then if they decide they do want to invest, you can figure out a price. But first things first.
Since valuation isn't that important and getting fundraising rolling is, we usually tell founders to give the first investor who commits as low a price as they need to. This is a safe technique so long as you combine it with the next one. [ 21 ]
Beware "valuation sensitive" investors.
Occasionally you'll encounter investors who describe themselves as "valuation sensitive." What this means in practice is that they are compulsive negotiators who will suck up a lot of your time trying to push your price down. You should therefore never approach such investors first. While you shouldn't chase high valuations, you also don't want your valuation to be set artificially low because the first investor who committed happened to be a compulsive negotiator. Some such investors have value, but the time to approach them is near the end of fundraising, when you're in a position to say "this is the price everyone else has paid; take it or leave it" and not mind if they leave it. This way, you'll not only get market price, but it will also take less time.
Ideally you know which investors have a reputation for being "valuation sensitive" and can postpone dealing with them till last, but occasionally one you didn't know about will pop up early on. The rule of doing breadth first search weighted by expected value already tells you what to do in this case: slow down your interactions with them.
There are a handful of investors who will try to invest at a lower valuation even when your price has already been set. Lowering your price is a backup plan you resort to when you discover you've let the price get set too high to close all the money you need. So you'd only want to talk to this sort of investor if you were about to do that anyway. But since investor meetings have to be arranged at least a few days in advance and you can't predict when you'll need to resort to lowering your price, this means in practice that you should approach this type of investor last if at all.
If you're surprised by a lowball offer, treat it as a backup offer and delay responding to it. When someone makes an offer in good faith, you have a moral obligation to respond in a reasonable time. But lowballing you is a dick move that should be met with the corresponding countermove.
Accept offers greedily.
I'm a little leery of using the term "greedily" when writing about fundraising lest non-programmers misunderstand me, but a greedy algorithm is simply one that doesn't try to look into the future. A greedy algorithm takes the best of the options in front of it right now. And that is how startups should approach fundraising in phases 2 and later. Don't try to look into the future because (a) the future is unpredictable, and indeed in this business you're often being deliberately misled about it and (b) your first priority in fundraising should be to get it finished and get back to work anyway.
If someone makes you an acceptable offer, take it. If you have multiple incompatible offers, take the best. Don't reject an acceptable offer in the hope of getting a better one in the future.
These simple rules cover a wide variety of cases. If you're raising money from many investors, roll them up as they say yes. As you start to feel you've raised enough, the threshold for acceptable will start to get higher.
In practice offers exist for stretches of time, not points. So when you get an acceptable offer that would be incompatible with others (e.g. an offer to invest most of the money you need), you can tell the other investors you're talking to that you have an offer good enough to accept, and give them a few days to make their own. This could lose you some that might have made an offer if they had more time. But by definition you don't care; the initial offer was acceptable.
Some investors will try to prevent others from having time to decide by giving you an "exploding" offer, meaning one that's only valid for a few days. Offers from the very best investors explode less frequently and less rapidly — Fred Wilson never gives exploding offers, for example — because they're confident you'll pick them. But lower-tier investors sometimes give offers with very short fuses, because they believe no one who had other options would choose them. A deadline of three working days is acceptable. You shouldn't need more than that if you've been talking to investors in parallel. But a deadline any shorter is a sign you're dealing with a sketchy investor. You can usually call their bluff, and you may need to. [ 22 ]
It might seem that instead of accepting offers greedily, your goal should be to get the best investors as partners. That is certainly a good goal, but in phase 2 "get the best investors" only rarely conflicts with "accept offers greedily," because the best investors don't usually take any longer to decide than the others. The only case where the two strategies give conflicting advice is when you have to forgo an offer from an acceptable investor to see if you'll get an offer from a better one. If you talk to investors in parallel and push back on exploding offers with excessively short deadlines, that will almost never happen. But if it does, "get the best investors" is in the average case bad advice. The best investors are also the most selective, because they get their pick of all the startups. They reject nearly everyone they talk to, which means in the average case it's a bad trade to exchange a definite offer from an acceptable investor for a potential offer from a better one.
(The situation is different in phase 1. You can't apply to all the incubators in parallel, because some offset their schedules to prevent this. In phase 1, "accept offers greedily" and "get the best investors" do conflict, so if you want to apply to multiple incubators, you should do it in such a way that the ones you want most decide first.)
Sometimes when you're raising money from multiple investors, a series A will emerge out of those conversations, and these rules even cover what to do in that case. When an investor starts to talk to you about a series A, keep taking smaller investments till they actually give you a termsheet. There's no practical difficulty. If the smaller investments are on convertible notes, they'll just convert into the series A round. The series A investor won't like having all these other random investors as bedfellows, but if it bothers them so much they should get on with giving you a termsheet. Till they do, you don't know for sure they will, and the greedy algorithm tells you what to do. [ 23 ]
Don't sell more than 25% in phase 2.
If you do well, you will probably raise a series A round eventually. I say probably because things are changing with series A rounds. Startups may start to skip them. But only one company we've funded has so far, so tentatively assume the path to huge passes through an A round. [ 24 ]
Which means you should avoid doing things in earlier rounds that will mess up raising an A round. For example, if you've sold more than about 40% of your company total, it starts to get harder to raise an A round, because VCs worry there will not be enough stock left to keep the founders motivated.
Our rule of thumb is not to sell more than 25% in phase 2, on top of whatever you sold in phase 1, which should be less than 15%. If you're raising money on uncapped notes, you'll have to guess what the eventual equity round valuation might be. Guess conservatively.
(Since the goal of this rule is to avoid messing up the series A, there's obviously an exception if you end up raising a series A in phase 2, as a handful of startups do.)
Have one person handle fundraising.
If you have multiple founders, pick one to handle fundraising so the other(s) can keep working on the company. And since the danger of fundraising is not the time taken up by the actual meetings but that it becomes the top idea in your mind, the founder who handles fundraising should make a conscious effort to insulate the other founder(s) from the details of the process. [ 25 ]
(If the founders mistrust one another, this could cause some friction. But if the founders mistrust one another, you have worse problems to worry about than how to organize fundraising.)
The founder who handles fundraising should be the CEO, who should in turn be the most formidable of the founders. Even if the CEO is a programmer and another founder is a salesperson? Yes. If you happen to be that type of founding team, you're effectively a single founder when it comes to fundraising.
It's ok to bring all the founders to meet an investor who will invest a lot, and who needs this meeting as the final step before deciding. But wait till that point. Introducing an investor to your cofounder(s) should be like introducing a girl/boyfriend to your parents — something you do only when things reach a certain stage of seriousness.
Even if there are still one or more founders focusing on the company during fundraising, growth will slow. But try to get as much growth as you can, because fundraising is a segment of time, not a point, and what happens to the company during that time affects the outcome. If your numbers grow significantly between two investor meetings, investors will be hot to close, and if your numbers are flat or down they'll start to get cold feet.
You'll need an executive summary and (maybe) a deck.
Traditionally phase 2 fundraising consists of presenting a slide deck in person to investors. Sequoia describes what such a deck should contain, and since they're the customer you can take their word for it.
I say "traditionally" because I'm ambivalent about decks, and (though perhaps this is wishful thinking) they seem to be on the way out. A lot of the most successful startups we fund never make decks in phase 2. They just talk to investors and explain what they plan to do. Fundraising usually takes off fast for the startups that are most successful at it, and they're thus able to excuse themselves by saying that they haven't had time to make a deck.
You'll also want an executive summary, which should be no more than a page long and describe in the most matter of fact language what you plan to do, why it's a good idea, and what progress you've made so far. The point of the summary is to remind the investor (who may have met many startups that day) what you talked about.
Assume that if you give someone a copy of your deck or executive summary, it will be passed on to whoever you'd least like to have it. But don't refuse on that account to give copies to investors you meet. You just have to treat such leaks as a cost of doing business. In practice it's not that high a cost. Though founders are rightly indignant when their plans get leaked to competitors, I can't think of a startup whose outcome has been affected by it.
Sometimes an investor will ask you to send them your deck and/or executive summary before they decide whether to meet with you. I wouldn't do that. It's a sign they're not really interested.
Stop fundraising when it stops working.
When do you stop fundraising? Ideally when you've raised enough. But what if you haven't raised as much as you'd like? When do you give up?
It's hard to give general advice about this, because there have been cases of startups that kept trying to raise money even when it seemed hopeless, and miraculously succeeded. But what I usually tell founders is to stop fundraising when you start to get a lot of air in the straw. When you're drinking through a straw, you can tell when you get to the end of the liquid because you start to get a lot of air in the straw. When your fundraising options run out, they usually run out in the same way. Don't keep sucking on the straw if you're just getting air. It's not going to get better.
Don't get addicted to fundraising.
Fundraising is a chore for most founders, but some find it more interesting than working on their startup. The work at an early stage startup often consists of unglamorous schleps. Whereas fundraising, when it's going well, can be quite the opposite. Instead of sitting in your grubby apartment listening to users complain about bugs in your software, you're being offered millions of dollars by famous investors over lunch at a nice restaurant. [ 26 ]
The danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who are good at it. It's always fun to work on something you're good at. If you're one of these people, beware. Fundraising is not what will make your company successful. Listening to users complain about bugs in your software is what will make you successful. And the big danger of getting addicted to fundraising is not merely that you'll spend too long on it or raise too much money. It's that you'll start to think of yourself as being already successful, and lose your taste for the schleps you need to undertake to actually be successful. Startups can be destroyed by this.
When I see a startup with young founders that is fabulously successful at fundraising, I mentally decrease my estimate of the probability that they'll succeed. The press may be writing about them as if they'd been anointed as the next Google, but I'm thinking "this is going to end badly."
Don't raise too much.
Though only a handful of startups have to worry about this, it is possible to raise too much. The dangers of raising too much are subtle but insidious. One is that it will set impossibly high expectations. If you raise an excessive amount of money, it will be at a high valuation, and the danger of raising money at too high a valuation is that you won't be able to increase it sufficiently the next time you raise money.
A company's valuation is expected to rise each time it raises money. If not it's a sign of a company in trouble, which makes you unattractive to investors. So if you raise money in phase 2 at a post-money valuation of $30 million, the pre-money valuation of your next round, if you want to raise one, is going to have to be at least $50 million. And you have to be doing really, really well to raise money at $50 million.
It's very dangerous to let the competitiveness of your current round set the performance threshold you have to meet to raise your next one, because the two are only loosely coupled.
But the money itself may be more dangerous than the valuation. The more you raise, the more you spend, and spending a lot of money can be disastrous for an early stage startup. Spending a lot makes it harder to become profitable, and perhaps even worse, it makes you more rigid, because the main way to spend money is people, and the more people you have, the harder it is to change directions. So if you do raise a huge amount of money, don't spend it. (You will find that advice almost impossible to follow, so hot will be the money burning a hole in your pocket, but I feel obliged at least to try.)
Be nice.
Startups raising money occasionally alienate investors by seeming arrogant. Sometimes because they are arrogant, and sometimes because they're noobs clumsily attempting to mimic the toughness they've observed in experienced founders.
It's a mistake to behave arrogantly to investors. While there are certain situations in which certain investors like certain kinds of arrogance, investors vary greatly in this respect, and a flick of the whip that will bring one to heel will make another roar with indignation. The only safe strategy is never to seem arrogant at all.
That will require some diplomacy if you follow the advice I've given here, because the advice I've given is essentially how to play hardball back. When you refuse to meet an investor because you're not in fundraising mode, or slow down your interactions with an investor who moves too slow, or treat a contingent offer as the no it actually is and then, by accepting offers greedily, end up leaving that investor out, you're going to be doing things investors don't like. So you must cushion the blow with soft words. At YC we tell startups they can blame us. And now that I've written this, everyone else can blame me if they want. That plus the inexperience card should work in most situations: sorry, we think you're great, but PG said startups shouldn't ___, and since we're new to fundraising, we feel like we have to play it safe.
The danger of behaving arrogantly is greatest when you're doing well. When everyone wants you, it's hard not to let it go to your head. Especially if till recently no one wanted you. But restrain yourself. The startup world is a small place, and startups have lots of ups and downs. This is a domain where it's more true than usual that pride goeth before a fall. [ 27 ]
Be nice when investors reject you as well. The best investors are not wedded to their initial opinion of you. If they reject you in phase 2 and you end up doing well, they'll often invest in phase 3. In fact investors who reject you are some of your warmest leads for future fundraising. Any investor who spent significant time deciding probably came close to saying yes. Often you have some internal champion who only needs a little more evidence to convince the skeptics. So it's wise not merely to be nice to investors who reject you, but (unless they behaved badly) to treat it as the beginning of a relationship.
The bar will be higher next time.
Assume the money you raise in phase 2 will be the last you ever raise. You must make it to profitability on this money |
that the project would bring affordable housing, retail and small businesses to those sites.
He has raised $200-million for the project so far.
He told Maryland's News This Week that some of his project would incorporate existing revitalization plans, such as one being crafted for Park Heights.
Kahan Dhillon and the Baltimore Renaissance donated more than 2,000 books to Mayor Catherine Pugh's book drive in April at Gilmor Elementary School in West Baltimore. He has also met with some members of the city council.
Now Mayor Catherine Pugh's office did not return our request for comment on the project this week, but the Baltimore Renaissance will be the focus of a hearing by the Baltimore City Council's Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. The meeting is set for July 27. The chairman of that Committee, 9th District Councilman John Bullock says told me this week that he is intrigued with what Kahan Dhillon is proposing but says he wants to learn more about the specifics, and looks forward to learning those at the hearing on July 27th.Angoulême has really jumped the shark this year. Not content with showing a medieval level knowledge of art and comics history by claiming that there were no significant women in the history of comics, the Festival has outraged everyone with what, from Google translate and the flood of legit outrage on my social media, was a humiliating stunt worthy of high school bullies.
Apparently at the awards ceremony (now presented Saturday night), several winners were announced by comedian host Richard Gaitet leading some in the audience to tweet to the purported winners, only to have it turn out to be a joke. UPDATE: Here’s the actual transcript and half hearted “apology” for the mess.
Among the fake winners, the sublime Arsene Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen and published by L’Association. Sorry to present the bad Google translate of the article, but it makes it clear that this was some kind of awful hazing ritual:
The best series of awards had been presented [to] Saga(Urban Comics), great space opera. The best detective went to the manga Inspector Kurokochi, edited by Komikku. We congratulate the authors, the boards of BD are linked on the screen. And then everything changed immediately after announcing that the Golden Prize was handed to Arsene Schrauwen (the Association), Richard Gaitet, the master of ceremonies, said that it was all a farce, as the real prize will begin. “Nobody had been warned, explained Sam Souibgui, editorial director and false Komikku winner. We thought it was a rehearsal, they would still not dare to change names. “The result seems endless.” Killofer, head of the Association: “Olivier Schrauwen [the author of the bogus golden Fauve] and I did not understand at all. Some false prizes became real prizes, we wondered if we would really have the golden Fauve. Words like “full stupidity” [“stupidité intégrale”] today come to mind. ”
Almost forgotten in the kerfuffle: Richard McGuire’s Here won the ACTUAL Fauve d’Or. And G. Willow Wilson was the sole female winner of a major prize for Best Series, Ms. Marvel. However it should be noted that several of the prizes for younger cartoonists and students went to women.
Reviews for this year’s festival have been less then glowing, as this story in Liberation suggests that classics such as Hugo Pratt and Lucky Luke are being recycled without reflection. Also, the matter of the general poverty level of cartoonists and hwo to set up pensions for them (legally required in France) is a hot topic that may be informing some of this hubbub:
The States General of comics brought after an investigation several crucial information: the profession is feminized far as it precarious. The cartoonists actually constitute 27% of illustrators and not 12% as was long believed. Among the authors surveyed, 53% (67% for women) reported perceiving a gross annual income below the minimum wage and 36% of them living below the poverty line. Proposals for the pension plan should follow, at the Book Fair.
Angoulême is still a pinnacle of comics, but everything that happened this year — including the bafflingly unfunny Faux Favues — shows that the rest of the comics world is passing it quickly, in new audiences, diversity and being part of the world’s comics culture.
For instance, the actual Fauves were handed out nearly 24 hours ago as I write this, and only one news site of any kind has even bothered to cover them in English. This hardly seems like a prestigious international prize. (On the festival’s official page there is only this long piece that mentions the Faux Fauves.)
For the record the actual winners are (my translations in parentheses):
• FAUVE D’OR – PRIX DU MEILLEUR ALBUM (Golden Prize Best Album) Ici (Here) Richard McGuire / Gallimard
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX SPECIAL DU JURY (Special Jury Prize) Carnet de santé foireuse (Lousy Health Record) Pozla / Delcourt
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX DE LA SÉRIE (Best Series) Ms. Marvel, Tome 1 Gwendolyn Willow Wilson et Adrian Alphona / Panini
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX RÉVÉLATION, (Best debut book) parrainé par Europe 1 Une étoile tranquille – Portrait sentimental de Primo Levi Pietro Scarnera / Rackham
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX DU PATRIMOINE, (best reprint) parrainé par la Caisse d’Epargne Vater und sohn – Père et fils E.O. Plauen, Erich Ohser / Warum
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX DU PUBLIC CULTURA (Public Culture Prize) Cher pays de notre enfance – Enquête sur les années de plomb de la Ve République Etienne Davodeau et Benoît Collombat / Futuropolis
• FAUVE POLAR SNCF (best Thriller) Tungstène Marcello Quintanilha / Çà et là
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX JEUNESSE (Best bopok for younger readers) Le grand méchant renard Benjamin Renner / Delcourt
• FAUVE D’ANGOULEME – PRIX DE LA BANDE DESSINÉE ALTERNATIVE (Best Alternative comic) Laurence 666 Édité par Mauvaise Foi Editions
• PRIX JEUNES TALENTS, parrainé par la Caisse d’Epargne (Prize for young cartoonists in France)
3e Lauréate: Laurine Baille « Melting pot »
2e Lauréate : Elsa Abderhamani « Personne ne m’entend »
1ère Lauréate : Cheyenne Olivier « Fashion victim »
• PRIX JEUNES TALENTS REGION, parrainé par la région (best local talent)Poitou-Charentes
Camilo Vieco
• PRIX DU CONCOURS DE LA BD SCOLAIRE « A L’ECOLE DE LA BD », parrainé par la Caisse d’Epargne et le Ministère de l’Education Nationale –
Scholarships for entering comics school
Prix d’Angoulême de la BD Scolaire :
Marin Inbona –
Prix Graphisme du Concours de la BD Scolaire :
Claire Czajkowski –
Prix Scénario du Concours de la BD Scolaire :
Julien Auclair –
Prix Coup de Coeur du Concours de la BD Scolaire :
Noémie Chust
• PRIX DES ÉCOLES D’ANGOULÊME, en partenariat avec la Ville d’Angoulême et l’Inspection Académique de la Charente Hector manigances et coups tordus, (I am not sure what this prize is, but Goog translates it as “shennanigans and dirty tricks.)
Marc Dubuisson et Régis Donsimoni / Delcourt
• PRIX BD DES COLLÈGES POITOU-CHARENTES, avec le rectorat de Poitiers (a college level prize)
Les Enfants de la Résistance Tome 1 Premières Actions, Benoît Ers et Vincent Dugomier / Le Lombard
• PRIX DES LYCÉES POITOU-CHARENTES, avec le rectorat de Poitiers (Another local prize)
Pandora Beach, Eric Borg et Alex Talamba / Big Foot
• PRIX RÉVÉLATIONLINE, co-organisé par Vraoum (Best online comic)
Esquimaupeche (http://esquimaupeche.fr/) pour ses planches suédées d’Isaac le Pirate
• PRIX CHALLENGE DIGITAL (Despite what it sounds like, not for webcomics.)
3e Lauréat : Thibaut Rassat « Des combinaisons et tout le tintouin »
2e Lauréat : Nicolas Vaudour et Thomas Rouzière « Le dernier épisode des argonautes »
1ère Lauréate : Anna Griot « La forêt »
Correction: An earlier version of this stated that winners came to the stage and got fake prizes — that was my mistaken understanding of what people joked about, and bad Google translate. Still the actual incident was bad enough.
While Grand Prix winner Hermann and Best Book winner “Here” by Richard McGuire may have a spot in the
Heidi MacDonald is the founder and editor in chief of The Beat. In the past, she worked for Disney, DC Comics, Fox and Publishers Weekly. She can be heard regularly on the More To Come Podcast. She likes coffee, cats and noble struggle.
Like this: Like Loading...In an age when disruptive innovation has become the norm in the civilian sector, the U.S. Navy is handcuffed to processes that retard innovation afloat.
Introducing new technologies in Navy ships requires time-consuming coordination, costly engineering effort, and original design work—even if the technology being installed is mature and the modifications to the platform are minimal. This cautious approach is fatal to rapid innovation, particularly in the fast-changing worlds of command-and-control and data systems. Changing these processes across the fleet would require challenging established assumptions and rethinking fundamental aspects of the acquisition process. Until cross-cutting reforms can be achieved, the U.S. Navy needs to create a “sandbox” for afloat innovation.
Enter the Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7)-class frigates. Speaking recently at the U.S. Naval War College, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson said he is considering "every trick" to grow the fleet, including the potential reactivation of some of the seven Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates that are now in the inactive reserve fleet. This effort offers potential to create the afloat innovation space the service needs.
The essential elements are straightforward. First, two frigate hulls would need to be restored to their basic operating condition. The Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates were designed for minimum manning, albeit with 1970s technology, and their engineering plants are simple and straightforward. Second, the Navy would need a modest budget for innovation. Third, policy and legal relief would be required to reclassify these vessels as “fast frigate-innovation” or “FFIs,” allowing exceptions to current restrictions on modifying commissioned ships.
The FFI program would be a perfect opportunity for the Navy to partner with the Department of Defense’s (DoD's) Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx). DIUx is chartered to increase DoD’s access to innovative commercial technology. It aggressively exploits DoD’s contracting authority for "Other Transaction for Prototype Projects,” as well as its physical presence in centers of innovation across the United States.
DIUx—leveraging its commercial solutions openings process—would hold a disruptive design contest, offering unconventional partners the chance to conduct modernization experiments on board the frigates. In much the same way that Space-X’s faster development and launch processes forced reforms of entrenched procedures at NASA in 2010, the design contest could transform fleet modernization practices.
Fitting out the FFIs, DIUx vendors and partners could compete against each other and against the normal refit process led by the Navy’s systems commands. The goal would be to deliver a faster, more innovative, less expensive process, from design to deployment. Command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) and engineering control systems—and the business practices that support the development, deployment, and upgrading of those systems—would be the focus, but the entire ship would be fair game. Control systems for engineering, navigation, and weapon systems could capitalize on a central neural network, using nanotechnology, radio frequency identification, and artificial intelligence. Cyber defense of these systems could be “baked in” starting in the design phase. The goal would be to simplify and reduce the bulk of shipboard systems design processes, while making ship systems scalable, interoperable and easier to refresh.
FFIs also could drive human innovation as well. The two crews could be made up of volunteers, with officers and sailors applying for each billet on board each ship. Given latitude to pick the best qualified Navy professionals without regard to rate, rank, or career timing, the crews would become a case study in disruptive personnel practices, and, more important, partners in the innovation effort.
If the fleet must learn one thing in this age of disruptive businesses—from Apple to Amazon to Netflix—it is how to achieve a strategic end while challenging conventional thinking and processes. It would be easy to hand the frigate restoration project to Naval Sea Systems Command. The result would be reliable, predictable, and bureaucratically unimpeachable—and five years and half a billion dollars later, the fleet probably would receive four or five ships slightly better than those that left service years ago.
We can do better. It is time to move out of our comfort zone and give the Navy and the nation’s best innovators a chance to show what they can offer the fleet.
Captain Butera is the Prospective Commander, U.S. Strategic Command Joint Intelligence Operations Center.
Captain Rielage serves as Director for Intelligence and Information Operations for U.S. Pacific Fleet.
More from Proceedings and Proceedings Today:
Loss of Confidence: What I Learned... Captain John Cordle, U.S. Navy (Retired)
When Am I Committed to a Collision? … Lieutenant Jotham M. Myers, U.S. Navy Reserve
Collision at Sea (Naval History)... David W. Joy
Make Navy Selection Boards Transparent … Lieutenant Commander Collin Fox
End Piracy in the Gulf of Aden … Rear Admiral Terry McKnight, U.S. NavyCesc Fábregas has told Manchester City, who Arsenal face on Sunday, that they may be able to afford the best players but their riches cannot buy them instant team spirit.
The Arsenal captain believes it is the key element Roberto Mancini will struggle to create despite being able to reach into the coffers of City's owner, Sheikh Mansour. "Of course you cannot buy it in one year," said the Spaniard, who returned from a hamstring injury in the Champions League game against Shakhtar Donetsk last night, scoring the third in a 5-1 win.
"You need a few years to get everyone together to know everyone well, all the players. It's not easy. You don't do it in one season or two, I would say. Of course they are in a very good position – they have all the ingredients to become a great club. We have to fight hard against them."
City are second in the league, three points ahead of Arsène Wenger's team going into the meeting at Eastlands. Wenger's ethos has been to buy modestly, and nurture homegrown talent but Fábregas was reluctant to criticise Mancini's lavish summer spending, which has included Mario Balotelli (£24m), James Milner (£26m) and Yaya Touré (£24m). "Everyone chooses their own politics, everyone decides how to win," he said. "They have a lot of money, they are taking advantage of it and that's it. It's not our style, but we respect everyone's decision."
City represent the latest test of Arsenal's ability to win the league, six years after the Invincibles went unbeaten to claim their last championship. "They are improving, they have a lot of money, they are buying good players so you expect them to be at the top level," Fábregas said. "It has always been difficult since I've been here to go to Manchester City. I remember my first few years – it was difficult but now they have some of the very best players in England."
Three weeks ago Chelsea defeated Arsenal 2-0 at Stamford Bridge. Tomas Rosicky, who operated on the right against Shahktar, is clear that City must now be beaten to indicate Arsenal are serious challengers. "It's a massive game. We couldn't wish for a better result before this game and we want to do better than against Chelsea," he said. "I think this team will show it. It was the same old story [against Chelsea]. How we presented ourselves there, we were very disappointed.
"But you ask whether we will go out from this game [against Donetsk] with the feeling we can do it: all this stuff, is just words. We need to finally show it on the pitch. We cannot always say we are unlucky, it doesn't work like that. It's time to prove it."
Rosicky said that while Wenger has not formally talked about the requirement to have a ruthless mentality, everyone at the club is conscious of it. "I wouldn't say we are discussing it, or we had meetings about it. But I think everybody has realised how it is and I know that I will say it again but we finally need to show it on the pitch. We have a great opportunity to show it on Sunday and this [result] was a good boost before the game."With more than 200 million systems running Windows 10—many of them having upgraded from an earlier version for free—Microsoft has decided it’s time to monetize the lock screen.
Over the past few days, Windows 10 users have reported having their lock screens taken over by advertisements for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Microsoft started selling the game through the Windows Store last month, in what might be the start of a much bigger push into PC gaming.
Microsoft hasn’t hid its intentions to use the Windows 10 lock screen as a commercial billboard, having first discussed its plans during last year’s Build developers conference. Now, Microsoft appears to be making good on those promises, with How-To Geek’s Chris Stobing and at least one Reddit user having seen the Rise of the Tomb Raider ads themselves.
Fortunately, the ads are easy enough to disable. Just head to Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen and uncheck the box that reads “Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen.”
Keep in mind that the option to disable the ads only shows up if you have selected Picture or Slideshow under the Background section of lock screen settings. If you’re using Windows Spotlight, which routinely refreshes the lock screen with images from Bing, ads are presumably part of the deal.
Why this matters: The lock screen is one of several ways that Windows 10 isn’t exactly free. From Start menu promotions to subscription-based games to personalized ads in Bing and the Edge browser, Microsoft has plenty of money-making hooks built into its latest OS. Most of these can be avoided or disabled, including the new lock screen promos, but with hundreds of millions of users upgrading to Windows 10 (whether they intended to or not), Microsoft is banking on the notion that most people won’t be so proactive.Home
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Admittedly, most things around Ball State when it comes to searches and athletics have more holes in them than the Iraqi Navy, but the current vacancy for the director of athletics has been as tight-lipped as they come. Even your friendly neighborhood blogger has had a hard time tracking down enough viable and credible people who could at least give me the same answers as others have, complicated further by the fact that none were willing to go on the record largely because none of them were authorized to speak about the results of the search.
If our multiple unrelated sources are to be believed (and they usually are based on our/their track record) the new athletic director to be named Thursday in an 11am news conference in Muncie will be the current Director of Athletics at Eastern Kentucky University, Mark Sandy.
UPDATE: Another unconnected high-ranking university source has confirmed our earlier report that Mark Sandy will be named the next director of athletics at Ball State.
In his nine years at EKU, Sandy has had an impressive track record of success on the field/court/playing surface of your choosing for his teams and student athletes, most notably winning the Ohio Valley Conference’s Commissioner’s Cup, which symbolizes overall athletics excellence. His background also has a touch of MAC in it, as he was the former associate AD for marketing and major gifts at Miami University, and not for nothing, but those two areas are pretty important when it comes to BSU. Not for nothing, but Sandy also has served on the NCAA Football Issues Committee and NCAA Football Championship Committee for those who may have demanded that the new AD be a football guy. Surprisingly enough a very notable “football guy” was much closer than some would have thought before this whole thing started, but that is for another day.
Perhaps the best bullet points on Sandy’s resume are his infrastructure achievements and facility improvements. From new playing surfaces to fan amenities like video boards and audio systems are things he’s overseen, in addition to construction efforts like tennis complexes and locker room facilities and multipurpose construction on the football stadium. There’s also the academic side of things if you care to be bothered by the “student” in “student-athlete” where 10 of Sandy’s EKU teams scored perfect on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Report last year.
For all intents and purposes it appears like Sandy was custom-made for the Ball State job, as the initiatives he undertook at EKU are remarkably parallel to what former AD Bill Scholl did while he was running the show in Muncie. I can’t imagine the learning curve or next brass ring to grab for infrastructure would be beyond his reach as he’s been planning that on his own campus. He’s also a former student-athlete himself as a basketball and baseball player at Concord College in West Virginia so the empathy and connectivity that Scholl and interim AD Brian Hardin were known for, and what former AD Tom Collins was most definitely not, is something at which Sandy should excel.
They say that the most honest reviews are those from your peer group, and another OVC AD that I reached out to told me that Sandy is one of the best guys he knows in the business and it be a shame for EKU and the OVC to lose him. So that, to me, speaks volumes about the quality of the hire that BSU may have made.
Is this carved in stone? No. But, as I’ve said from time to time when we get things like Brady Hoke leaving, Pete Lembo being hired, or other goings on, we don’t run things we aren’t at least better than 50% comfortable with. So could these sources be trying to roger us? Sure, it’s possible, but there’s no particular reason why they would. We are pretty nice people and are moms think we are just the best.
This still isn’t carved in stone, but whomever the stone etcher in Muncie is is sharpening his chisel.
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Filed under: ADSearch14, Ball State |In the fourth installment of ‘Bipolar Planet,’ Gabi Coatsworth recounts a parent’s nightmare: finding a homeless shelter for her son.
Jason would have to leave his mental hospital soon, said the social worker assigned to his case. He would have to go to a homeless shelter—in a part of Hartford whose murder rate was one of the highest in Connecticut. And it was all my fault.
He was about to become one of the homeless people I’d read about. The people who panhandled at the traffic lights or on the sidewalk, who slept in doorways or who wandered around town with a shopping cart, talking to themselves. Now Jason would be one of them.
♦♦♦
He’d made an earlier attempt to get out of Cedarcrest hospital after he’d been there for a month, but both the doctors and I agreed that he still wasn’t right. Being bipolar isn’t something you can cure, but I was hoping he’d at least be functional before he was allowed to leave. At the moment he was making an enormous effort to appear cool and in control, but I sensed that the slightest setback might set him off again. I dreaded being the one who caused the setback. By law, they can’t force people to stay in mental hospitals unless they’re a danger to themselves or others. So Jason was hoping that, with my support, and the help of the pro bono lawyer he’d found, they’d let him out.
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As I drove up I-91 to Hartford on the chilly, overcast morning of the hearing, I was straining to keep my emotions in check. I knew he’d already been in there for a month, living in a locked ward, and I understood his frustration, but I simply couldn’t look after him at home. I had the rest of the family to think about. What would the judge ask me at the hearing? Would he expect me to take Jason home today?
My clammy hands gripped the steering wheel tighter as I thought about what might happen when I said I couldn’t look after Jason. My thoughts were interrupted by the piercing sound of a police siren; a glance in my rearview mirror told me I was the criminal they were after. I pulled over, wound down the window, and waited. The burly state trooper, looming beside the car, asked me the familiar question: “How fast do you think you were going?”
This was too much for me to handle today. I burst into tears as I tried to explain that I was going to see my son at Cedarcrest, because he was seriously ill.
“Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” he said, and handed me a speeding ticket for $287.00.
“You can appeal it if you want,” he added with the sort of intonation that indicated it really wouldn’t be worth it. I fumbled for a Kleenex and dabbed at my eyes. Then I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I looked like hell, but I would have to drive on or I’d be late for the hearing.
They sat, the judge and the doctor, the lawyer and Jason, facing each other across a beaten-up table in a dingy room whose brown and cream paint looked to be decades old. I didn’t know where to put myself. Whose side was I on?
As I apologized for my lateness, I took a chair at one end of the table, not joining either side. The lawyer presented Jason’s case.
“My client has a home to go to,” he said, “and should be allowed to leave.”
“I can stay with you, right?” said Jason. I couldn’t speak. A scared look came into his eyes. “Right, Mom?”
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “I don’t think so, Jason.”
“Why?” His voice rose. “Why the hell not?”
“Jason, there are the boys to consider,” I said. “We—Jay and I—don’t think it would be good for them to be in the same house with you right now.”
The boys were my sister’s sons. She had died in England six years before and they were now 11 and 14. Their father had been diagnosed as clinically depressed, possibly schizophrenic. They had already been through a lot, and didn’t need any more trauma. This was not the time to expose them to the scary uncertainty of Jason’s moods.
The doctor was trying to calm Jason down, and it wasn’t going well. Jason had been managing to appear quite rational until I’d refused his request. Then he suddenly lost control. He began banging his fist on the table, yelling threats at the judge and the doctor.
“You can’t do this to me. I’m going to get a better lawyer than this useless bastard and I’m going to sue. I could get millions. Then I won’t need any of you anymore.” He was flushed with rage.
The judge raised his eyebrows, but otherwise his face was expressionless. “I think it’s clear that Jason might still pose a threat to others,” said the judge. “He’s not ready to leave here yet.” He picked up his elegant fountain pen and signed off on his decision.
♦♦♦
Two months later, Jason was finally ready to leave, but the situation at home hadn’t changed. Before we could let Jason share our life, we had to know he could manage his own.
“We can’t find any halfway house that will take him,” said the social worker at Cedarcrest. “It will have to be a homeless shelter.” I shivered.
By now, Jay, Jason’s stepfather, had persuaded me that a homeless shelter wasn’t such a bad idea. Jason would have somewhere to sleep and a chance to get back on his feet.
“Can he, at least, come to one nearer to us?” I asked. We lived an hour away from Hartford, and having Jason closer would enable me to offer, at the very least, moral support.
The social worker said they could try. The next day, as I researched halfway houses, still hoping for a reprieve for Jason, they reported back. “Fairfield has a waiting list of 25,” they told me. “And Westport’s full, too.”
So Jason went to the Hartford shelter a day or two later, carrying a plastic bag containing a change of underwear, his toothbrush and comb, and a bottle of Diet Coke. I went to see him the next day. The location didn’t seem terrible, but as I approached the door, I could see that the doors were bolted shut and getting in was as hard as getting out. He couldn’t stay here, I decided. It was too much like a prison.
The social worker was done with him now, so it was up to me. I called the Fairfield shelter the same day, and they confirmed that their waiting list was long. The Westport shelter told me they had a waiting list and only 14 beds.
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“How does someone ever find a place?” I asked, beginning to despair.
“You have to call every day, and report that you’re still homeless,” a friendly voice answered. “If someone has left the shelter, we can offer you a place.”
Thank God, I thought. I’d come a long way since the days when I’d thought that going into a mental hospital meant being cured and coming home to resume a normal life. Now I had no idea what a normal life might be for someone like Jason.
“But phone between 11 and 12,” she said, “or there’ll be no one here.”
I picked up Jason a day later and brought him home, with Jay’s reluctant agreement. Jason slept in the basement and only emerged for meals, where I made sure he was taking his meds. He was quiet and seemed withdrawn, but that was so much better than the mania that I didn’t complain. Every day he asked if he could stay, and every day I stiffened my spine and made him phone the homeless shelter in Westport.
A week later, they told him he could come and be interviewed to see if he qualified. If he did, he would have a place. I drove him over to Westport, and found the tiny building behind Restoration Hardware. The contrast between the store’s luxurious interior and the bare-bones shelter with fluorescent lighting did not escape me. Sitting with the director in his cramped office, we listened while he explained the rules. Jason would have a curfew of 8 p.m., and would have to leave the shelter at 8 every morning before he could return at 5. He would have to attend house meetings and outpatient appointments. He would be expected to do chores to help pay for his keep.
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But he was in. For the time being, at least.
—Gabi Coatsworth
For previous “Bipolar Planet” installments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3Thursday at her weekly press briefing, when asked about President Donald Trump’s tweet saying we cannot keep FEMA, the military and the first responders in Puerto Rico “forever,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, (D-CA) declared the president lacked “knowledge.”
…We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2017
Pelosi said, “The president’s tweet this morning … is heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking, and it lacks knowledge, knowledge about what the role is of FEMA and the others in time of a natural disaster, what our responsibility is as the federal government to the people of our country, and I remind that the people of the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are American citizens.”
She added, “We are all Americans, and we owe them what they need. It’s not about a clock. It’s about what they need.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN× Blumenthal, Murphy co-sponsor bill to provide free college tuition by taxing Wall St. speculation
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are backing a bill to pay for make public colleges and universities tuition-free for working families and to significantly reduce student debt.
The legislation, proposed |
the 2009 Christmas Day bomb attempt in which a passenger from Africa almost managed to detonate a bomb aboard a Detroit-bound plane that he'd hidden in his underwear. Asiri was also behind the placing of bombs in printer cartridges aboard planes headed for the United States that were intercepted before they reached their targets.
He even designed a bomb to be carried on the body of his own brother, Abdullah al-Asiri, in attempt to kill Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism chief in 2009. The bomb killed his brother, but the Saudi minister survived.
A dangerous foe
"He's without question the most dangerous terrorist operative that the United States faces today," said CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank. "Intelligence suggests that he is developing a new generation of explosive devices including a new generation of underwear and shoe-bomb devices."
Zimmerman says Asiri is believed to have taught his skills to a cadre of bomb-makers.
"He has trained a series of individuals who are able to do what he does, which is bring imagination and innovation to an explosive device that could make it through U.S. or Western security," she said.
Batarfi is featured in a second threatening video. In it, he praises the July attack in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in which a gunman killed five American servicemen at a military installation, as "a blessed Jihadi operation." And he also praises two gunmen who tried to mount an attack in Garland, Texas, in May for their "sacrifice and heroism."
"Blood for blood," Batarfi says in a speech posted online.
He then encourages further lone-wolf attacks against America and the West. "To the warriors of Lone Jihad: may Allah bless and guide your efforts," he says.
A U.S. intelligence official said this video is believed to be genuine.
"Batarfi has become a main AQAP media figure since his escape from a Yemeni prison this spring," the official said.
While a number of AQAP leaders have been targeted by strikes this year, the fighting in Yemen between warring factions has deprived the United States of a partner on the ground to work with on tracking and targeting militants.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, recently told a conference in Aspen, Colorado, that "in terms of proximate threat, I would view... AQAP -- even though they're kind of consumed right now with what's going on in Yemen with the Houthis -- as probably our most concerning al Qaeda element in terms of threat to the homeland."The Triple J Hottest 100 is an institution. On Australia Day, most young Aussies gets together with some beers and a barbecue to listen to the 100 best songs of the last 12 months counted down on their radios. That institution was spoofed last year when some clever programmers realised they could predict the countdown based on everyone's social sharing, and managed to nail a high percentage of the tracks, including the number one position. Triple J cracked it at the programmers, and cracked down on social sharing to the point that the Warmest 100 is impossible this year. Nick Drewe of the Warmest 100 talks to Gizmodo about the cool-down.
"Unfortunately, It looks like the Warmest 100 will be a one-off," Nick tells me over email.
"Triple J have changed the social sharing features of their voting system this year so that voters can't easily share their votes out to Twitter or Facebook, which is where we collected a majority of the votes that we used for last year's Warmest 100 prediction," he adds
To predict the Triple J Hottest 100 last year, Nick Drewe, Tom Knox, Andy Thelander and Jack Murphy collected 35,000 votes shared on Twitter and Facebook from 3600 entries to create a view of what they thought the list would look like.
The team would go into the social network share sheet unique to each voter which provided a list of everything a person had voted for in the Hottest 100 and scrape the data to collect a picture on what was going on surrounding the countdown.
Despite collecting what turned out to be only 2.7 per cent of the vote, 92 of the 100 tracks were successfully predicted, making them the Nate Silvers of Australian indie music countdowns.
Nick said that it was exhilarating at first.
"Most people I spoke to loved the Warmest 100, but I got the feeling that the mood within Triple J was a bit different, they were perhaps the only people in the country that knew we had a fairly accurate prediction."
But Triple J saw it differently, and didn't want its premier countdown being spoiled again.
"Triple J were completely silent on the whole thing, until a few months after the countdown when I spoke to Triple J's Manager Chris Scaddan. Clearly they weren't too happy about the whole thing, and were keen on making it hard for a similar prediction to happen again," Nick added.
Instead of giving people an interactive ballot sheet to share with their friends, Triple J is keeping it secret.
I voted in @triplej's #Hottest100 and all I got was this lousy picture of The Jezabels. http://t.co/P4AnCYUaqT — David Quach (@QuachDavid) December 20, 2013
"Making sure the results couldn't be so accurately predicted in the future seemed like a pretty big priority for [Triple J's Chris Scaddan]," Nick said, but warned that people might be tempted to game the Hottest 100 in future following the gaming of the a recent TIME poll.
"In light of all the trolling of TIME's person of the year poll last year, I think it's only a matter of time until something similar happens with the Hottest 100. These sort of online polls are still fairly insecure, it's a bit of a cat and mouse game."
It's possible that the Warmest 100 could be replicated this year, Nick later added, saying that only a very small sample size is required to figure out what the top track will be, but instead he's just going to let the countdown play out this year.
"I haven't heard of anyone creating a similar prediction this year, but that doesn't meant it's not happening. Although last year was fun, I'm looking forward to kicking back and enjoying the countdown this year."In a Rare Use of Capabilities Elite USAF Rescue Team Jumps to Aid Burned Sailors.
In one of the most dramatic operational scenarios possible, seven elite New York Air National Guard Pararescue operators have executed a daring nighttime, open ocean parachute jump to board a burning ship at sea and rescue its crew.
The drama unfolded 1,200 miles off the east coast of the United States in the central Atlantic Ocean. At approximately 0700 hours local on Monday morning an explosion and fire ripped through the bulk cargo-carrying vessel Tamar. The Captain issued a distress call immediately. The vessel was too far out to sea for Coast Guard assets to effect rescue so the mission was handed over to the New York Air National Guard’s 106th Rescue Wing with the Canadian and Portuguese coast guards each providing support to the rescue.
The New York Air National Guard launched a four-engine turboprop HC-130 Hercules long-range search and rescue aircraft from the 102nd Rescue Squadron. The specially modified aircraft was carrying eight aircrew plus the Pararescue team and support personnel from the 106th Rescue Wing, based at Gabreski Air National Guard Base in Westhampton Beach, New York.
After the long flight to the objective over the open Atlantic the Pararescue team deployed a rigid inflatable boat by parachute to the ocean surface. The rescue team then parachuted into the sea around sunset. Pararescuemen swam to their rigid inflatable boat and immediately sailed to the nearby Tamar for boarding.
The first group of Pararescue operators landed in the ocean at 1950 Hr.s Eastern Time zone, just after sunset. By 2000 Hr.s ETZ all seven Pararescuemen had boarded the Tamar and were administering medical aid to the injured crewmen onboard, according to 106th Rescue Wing operations officials.
The Portuguese Air Force are planning to winch-hoist the survivors up to a rescue helicopter for transport to a hospital in Ponta Delagada, Azores once the Tamar is within range, according to 106th Rescue Wing operations. Unfortunately reports indicate two victims of the explosion have already died on board from their injuries. At least three more injured crewmembers are under the care of the Air Force Pararescue team.
The damaged Tamar is still nearly 30 hours sailing time away from Portuguese rescue helicopter range, according to sources at the 106th Rescue Wing.
“The 106th Rescue Wing is happy to support the Coast Guard in this rescue mission”, said Col. Nicholas Broccoli, the 106th Rescue Wing Vice Commander. “This is what we train for and our pararescuemen, pilots, crew members and the rest of our team are the best of the best.”
Top image credit: U.S. Air Force
Related articlesJAIPUR: Now Jaipur Railway Station is among the elite club of railway stations which is harnessing solar power for its operations. Jaipur railway station's rooftop installed solar panels produced 260 units of electricity on the maiden day on Friday, which was 35 units more than its daily capacity.The operation was inaugurated by the general manager of North Western Railways (NWR), Anil Singhal, who informed media persons during his inspection of Jaipur railway station on Friday that, "The energy harnessed from the solar panels will help Jaipur railway station save Rs 7.2 lakh on power bills, annually. Our projection is to produce 50 kilowatt power in a year. In future, we would like to double the capacity of green energy at Jaipur station."Talking about the NWR efforts to reduce the carbon footprint by replacing diesel and electricity consumption by green energy, Singhal said, "The NWR will set up small solar plants at small stations of capacity upto 25 kwp. Even at railway crossings we have made the provision to harness solar energy," informed Singhal.Officials said that within two years, Jaipur division will help in reducing 500 tonnes of carbon footprint and will move a step closer towards green corridor. The lifecycle of solar panels is between 20 and 25 years.He said that solar plants in Ajmer, Abu Road, Jaipur and Rewari are just the beginning of a larger plan to introduce solar plants across the NWR division. The windmill in Dangri village at Fatehgarh sub-division, Jaisalmer, will produce 25 megawatt electricity per year. "At present, the power is being transferred to the Central Railway at Jabalpur," said Tarun Jain, chief public relations officer, NWR. The NWR region is saving Rs 77 lakh on power bills and on fuel, and in the coming years they will end up saving Rs 4.5 crore.A fruity look at unrelated variables
NOTHING rankles data mavens more than analysing two things that ought not be compared. Cricket and baseball. Basho and Proust. Christmas and April Fools' Day. So The Economist cannot but embrace considering the paragon of such irresponsible associations, the classic apples and oranges. Doing so is surprisingly fruitful. Oranges were more popular for decades, but in recent years apples have squeezed ahead. Chinese expansion was the core reason for the deciduous drive. The government’s call for healthy living and serving the Russian and the Middle Eastern markets led to more apple production. In contrast, orange production has plateaued, due in part to a decline of orange juice consumption in America—around 40% less over the past 15 years. Close to the equator, oranges are more popular than apples, whereas farther north apples are more appealing, perhaps reflecting their ease of growth. To be sure, it is unfair to contrast both fruits. But it makes for juicy comparisons.Cooler Master announced availability of its Master Air Maker 8 high-end CPU cooler. Designed to offer cooling performance rivaling 240 mm AIO liquid-cooling solutions (according to the company), this cooler features a large central aluminium fin-stack, to which heat drawn from the CPU by a 3D Vapor-chamber plate, is conveyed by eight 6 mm thick copper heat pipes, two of which are an extension of the vapor-chamber plate itself.A pair of red LED-lit 140 mm fans in push-pull configuration ventilate the heatsink. These fans spin between 600-1,800 RPM, pushing up to 66 CFM of air, each. The typical noise output is rated a between 8-24 dBA per fan. Topping it off is a "monolithic" industrial design, including a tinted acrylic top for the heatsink. The cooler is game for all modern CPU socket types, including LGA2011v3, LGA115x, AM3+, FM2+, and upcoming AMD sockets. Measuring 145 mm x 135 mm x 172 mm (WxLxH), the cooler weighs 1.35 kg. The cooler is backed by a 5-year warranty.
24 Comments on Cooler Master Announces Master Air Maker 8 CPU Cooler
#1 Ferrum Master
oh a heat chamber... at least something more fresh. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 3:07 Reply
#2 RejZoR
Interesting CM is the only one actually investing in regular cooler innovation. They are the only ones to experiment with 3D vapor chambers. Noiseblocker had something similar years ago, but it never really took off. Since then, only CM. I wonder how this one will actually perform compared to AiO loops. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 3:07 Reply
#3 entropic
RejZoR said: Interesting CM is the only one actually investing in regular cooler innovation. They are the only ones to experiment with 3D vapor chambers. Noiseblocker had something similar years ago, but it never really took off. Since then, only CM. I wonder how this one will actually perform compared to AiO loops. actually sapphire had a vapor chamber cpu cooler too, but im eager to see reviews of the new cm offering since the price is very high i wonder how the performance stacks up against nh-d15s and aio closed loops actually sapphire had a vapor chamber cpu cooler too, but im eager to see reviews of the new cm offering since the price is very high i wonder how the performance stacks up against nh-d15s and aio closed loops Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 4:34 Reply
#4 Jack1n
Wow, 1.35kg, I would be very reluctant to use this cooler in a tower, maybe if I had it laying on its side. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 4:45 Reply
#5 RejZoR
ASUS Sabertooth reinforcement backplate coming to a rescue :D Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 5:10 Reply
#6 Ferrum Master
RejZoR said: ASUS Sabertooth reinforcement backplate coming to a rescue :D Maybe attaching some helium balloons would help also :D It would look funny too... threads sticking out the upper fan went and some balloons over the case... lulz :D Maybe attaching some helium balloons would help also :D It would look funny too... threads sticking out the upper fan went and some balloons over the case... lulz :D Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 6:11 Reply
#7 Ed_1
There are reviews out long time and is way over priced for its performance.
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7522/cooler-master-masterair-maker-8-cpu-review/index6.html How is this new.There are reviews out long time and is way over priced for its performance. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 7:38 Reply
#8 rtwjunkie
PC Gaming Enthusiast Jack1n said: Wow, 1.35kg, I would be very reluctant to use this cooler in a tower, maybe if I had it laying on its side. LOL, my first thoughts exactly as soon as I saw the picture and furiously looked for the weight. That is insane! LOL, my first thoughts exactly as soon as I saw the picture and furiously looked for the weight. That is insane! Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 8:30 Reply
#9 Vayra86
Ferrum Master said: Maybe attaching some helium balloons would help also :D It would look funny too... threads sticking out the upper fan went and some balloons ever the case... lulz :D I see a case modding project is in the making here... :D I see a case modding project is in the making here... :D Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 9:01 Reply
#10 BlueFalcon
rtwjunkie said: LOL, my first thoughts exactly as soon as I saw the picture and furiously looked for the weight. That is insane! What's the big deal? It's not insane at all. Many high-end air coolers weigh around that mark.
Raijintek Nemesis = 1342g
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/raijintek-nemesis.html
Noctua NH-D15 = 1320g
http://noctua.at/en/nh-d15/specification
Akasa Venom Medusa = 1300g
http://www.performance-pcs.com/akasa-ak-cc4010hp01-venom-medusa-universal-cpu-cooler.html#Specifications
Cryorig R1 Ultimate = 1282g
http://www.cryorig.com/r1-ultimate.php
Phanteks PH-TC14PE = 1250g
http://www.phanteks.com/ph-tc14pe.html
Thermaltake Frio Extreme = 1230g
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/thermaltake-frio-extreme_3.html#sect1
Prolimatech Genesis = 1030g without any fans. Add 2 fans and it would be 1300-1350g.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/prolimatech-genesis_4.html#sect0
There have been even heavier beasts:
Scythe Susanoo = 1565g
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/scythe-susanoo_4.html#sect0
Thermalright TRUE Copper Ultra-12 eXtreme = 1900g (without a fan)
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/coolers/display/thermalright-true-copper-u120x_6.html
Modern high quality motherboards can easily handle 1.5GB+ of weight off the socket as long as there is a backplate.
The issue with the CM cooler in question is its poor performance in the high-end space and too high of a price given the competition. What's the big deal? It's not insane at all. Many high-end air coolers weigh around that mark.Raijintek Nemesis = 1342gNoctua NH-D15 = 1320gAkasa Venom Medusa = 1300gCryorig R1 Ultimate = 1282gPhanteks PH-TC14PE = 1250gThermaltake Frio Extreme = 1230gProlimatech Genesis = 1030g without any fans. Add 2 fans and it would be 1300-1350g.There have been even heavier beasts:Scythe Susanoo = 1565gThermalright TRUE Copper Ultra-12 eXtreme = 1900g (without a fan)Modern high quality motherboards can easily handle 1.5GB+ of weight off the socket as long as there is a backplate.The issue with the CM cooler in question is its poor performance in the high-end space and too high of a price given the competition. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 11:26 Reply
#11 rtwjunkie
PC Gaming Enthusiast BlueFalcon said: Modern high quality motherboards can easily handle 1.5GB+ of weight off the socket as long as there is a backplate. And that is the issue. Even with a backplate, there is a lot of unnecessary stress on the PCB. Longterm it can have consequences on the integrity of a lot of things on the MB. And that is the issue. Even with a backplate, there is a lot of unnecessary stress on the PCB. Longterm it can have consequences on the integrity of a lot of things on the MB. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 11:32 Reply
#12 Farmer Boe
The cooler is only $170 where I live! What a good deal lol. I can buy two Noctua heatsinks for that much. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 11:34 Reply
#13 TheDeeGee
RejZoR said: Interesting CM is the only one actually investing in regular cooler innovation. They are the only ones to experiment with 3D vapor chambers. Noiseblocker had something similar years ago, but it never really took off. Since then, only CM. I wonder how this one will actually perform compared to AiO loops. As in Noctua is sitting on their hands or something? As in Noctua is sitting on their hands or something? Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 16:41 Reply
#14 RejZoR
Only thing Noctua is investing money into are ugliest color palettes and tons of meaningless buzzwords that look nice on paper but do nothing in real world. Tried 2 of their fans and both were whining buzzing farts. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 16:51 Reply
#15 Ferrum Master
RejZoR said: Only thing Noctua is investing money into are ugliest color palettes and tons of meaningless buzzwords that look nice on paper but do nothing in real world. Tried 2 of their fans and both were whining buzzing farts. Their fans are overrated, sure. But the coolers... they just work... and really good. Their fans are overrated, sure. But the coolers... they just work... and really good. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 16:55 Reply
#16 RejZoR
I hated their mounting system. It just felt so damn flimsy. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 17:25 Reply
#17 Ferrum Master
RejZoR said: I hated their mounting system. It just felt so damn flimsy. Comparing to some of arctic cooling plastic rubbish... it is okay. My fave is prolimatech... I still have my Megahalems, and it works like a champ. Comparing to some of arctic cooling plastic rubbish... it is okay. My fave is prolimatech... I still have my Megahalems, and it works like a champ. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 17:31 Reply
#18 SirMango
RejZoR said: I hated their mounting system. It just felt so damn flimsy. I find that surprising! Noctua is known for their excellent mounting system. I find that surprising! Noctua is known for their excellent mounting system. Posted on Jul 6th 2016, 21:58 Reply
#19 Tsukiyomi91
while some motherboards have reinforced armor kits to withstand these heavy air coolers, not many have the money to afford boards that are tough... would still go for AIO kit since the surface area & heat transfer is a little bit better, not to mention... lighter than most high performance air coolers. Posted on Jul 10th 2016, 4:11 Reply
#20 Tsukiyomi91
@RejZoR "whining buzzing farts" LOL. I too never liked Noctua's crayon like texture & colour choices. Kinda puts me off every time I see at the shelves in a PC shop I regularly go to... Posted on Jul 10th 2016, 4:16 Reply
#21 basco
perfect example for different tastes-i like noctua a lot-and very fair for giving you every new mounting kit even if your cooler is 5 years old.
and you know its noctua from far away because of the colors if ya like it or not - so i think they did good marketing. Posted on Jul 10th 2016, 5:11 Reply
#22 micropage7
thanks, but i have deepcool assassin sitting on the corner
no need to buy more :-P Posted on Jul 10th 2016, 6:07 Reply
#23 Filip Georgievski
1 more vote for Deep Cool
Running a Gammaxx 400 on my rig with a GS120 Upgraded fan, and it kicks ass for my I5 750 stabilizing it at 55C OCed to 3.5GHZ while testing.
Now im running it on stock speeds with temps below 50C when in turbo mode running at 3.2GHZ, and i gotta say im very satisfied.
Jays2Cents has a good review on this cooler, i suggest go check it out, it will shine some light onto this thread. Posted on Jul 10th 2016, 16:29 ReplyDo you want a Google Street View car snapping your home?
Householders are entitled to request their property is removed from the site, but only after the picture has appeared. Google spokesman
They were livid when they saw the black Opel snapping images of houses to beam onto the internet.So they stood in a line across the road blocking the camera’s shot.After police were called the car was forced to back off without taking snaps.Resident Paul Jacobs spotted the vehicle and dashed outside to confront the driver.He then alerted his neighbours, who gathered in the street and forced the car to make a U-turn.Paul, who works for a global entertainment company, said: “My immediate reaction was anger. How dare he photograph my home without my consent?“I ran to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime.”The residents have suffered three break-ins in the last six weeks and fear thieves will plan further raids if they are able to check out their homes on computers.“It’s a burglar's dream,” added Paul, 43. “It shows people how to get in and how to get out. We don’t want the area publicised in that manner.”Google’s campaign to capture the world in digital images had reached Milton Keynes this week as the Opel, pictured left, took thousands of pictures in the city.But the residents’ stand means their street, London Road in nearby Broughton, remains unmapped – for now.The villagers are planning a mass petition to keep their street off the site and are backed by Milton Keynes North East MP Mark Lancaster.But a Google spokesman said the driver was on public land and because Street View blurs out faces and car number plates, he was not breaking any laws.The spokesman said: “Householders are entitled to request their property is removed from the site, but only after the picture has appeared.“Street View is incredibly popular and now spans nine countries. It is just a further evolution of maps and a valuable aid to people wanting an insight into an area.”Pack the Court! Oral Argument in AETA Challenge!
from Support Kevin and Tyler
Please join CCR on Wednesday, September 21, at 9 am (CST) in Chicago for oral arguments in U.S. v. Johnson, an appeal from the federal prosecution of two animal rights activists under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) for liberating thousands of animals from fur farms.
In 2015 Kevin Johnson and Tyler Lang were convicted of Animal Enterprise Terrorism. CCR has appealed their convictions, arguing that the AETA is unconstitutional because it criminalizes protected advocacy, is overly vague, and violates due process by punishing as an act of “terrorism” a quintessentially nonviolent act: saving animals from the violence of being killed and turned into fur coats.
On September 21, CCR Senior Staff Attorney Rachel Meeropol will argue in the circuit court for the defendants, asking the Court to strike down the AETA as unconstitutional. Co-counsel on the appeal include The People’s Law Office and the Federal Defenders Office.
Please arrive at least 30 minutes early to go through security. You may need to bring ID.Date: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 9:00am
Location:
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Main Courtroom Room 2721
Chicago, IL 60604
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TumblrThe Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticalizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi "had a concept of time", despite it now being well established that they do.
The debate originated in the 1940s when American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that the Hopi conceptualized time differently from the Standard Average European speaker, and that this difference correlated with grammatical differences between the languages. Whorf argued that Hopi has "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'", and concluded that the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past". Whorf used the Hopi concept of time as a primary example of his concept of linguistic relativity, which posits that the way in which individual languages encode information about the world, influences and correlates with the cultural world view of the speakers. Whorf's relativist views fell out of favor in linguistics and anthropology in the 1960s, but Whorf's statement lived on in the popular literature often in the form of an urban myth that "the Hopi have no concept of time". In 1983 linguist Ekkehart Malotki published a 600-page study of the grammar of time in the Hopi language, concluding that he had finally refuted Whorf's claims about the language. Malotki's treatise gave hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal relations. Malotki's central claim was that the Hopi do indeed conceptualize time as structured in terms of an ego-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future. He also demonstrated that the Hopi language grammaticalizes tense using a distinction between future and non-future tenses, as opposed to the English tense system, which is usually analyzed as being based on a past/non-past distinction. Many took Malotki's work as a definitive refutation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Linguist and specialist in the linguistic typology of tense Bernard Comrie concluded that "Malotki's presentation and argumentation are devastating". Psychologist Steven Pinker, a well-known critic of Whorf and the concept of linguistic relativity, accepted Malotki's claims as having demonstrated Whorf's complete ineptitude as a linguist.
Subsequently, the study of linguistic relativity was revived using new approaches in the 1990s, and Malotki's study came under criticism from relativist linguists and anthropologists, who did not consider that the study invalidated Whorf's claims. The main issue of contention is the interpretation of Whorf's original claims about Hopi, and what exactly it was that he was claiming made Hopi different from what Whorf called "Standard Average European" languages. Some consider that the Hopi language may be best described as a tenseless language, and that the distinction between non-future and future posited by Malotki may be better understood as a distinction between realis and irrealis moods. Regardless of exactly how the Hopi concept of time is best analyzed, most specialists agree with Malotki that all humans conceptualize time by an analogy with space, although some recent studies have also questioned this.
The Hopi language [ edit ]
The Hopi language is a Native American language of the Uto-Aztecan language family, which is spoken by some 5,000 Hopi people in the Hopi Reservation in Northeastern Arizona, US.
In the large Hopi dictionary there is no word exactly corresponding to the English noun "time". Hopi employs different words to refer to "a duration of time" (pàasa' "for that long"), to a point in time (pàasat "at that time"), and time as measured by a clock (pahàntawa), as an occasion to do something (hisat or qeni), a turn or the appropriate time for doing something (qeniptsi (noun)), and to have time for something (aw nánaptsiwta (verb)).
Time reference can be marked on verbs using the suffix -ni
Momoyam piktota "The women are/were making piki" Women piki-make Momoyam piktota-ni "The women will be making piki" Women piki-make-NI
The -ni suffix is also used in the word naatoniqa which means "that which will happen yet" in reference to the future. This word is formed from the adverb naato "yet", the -ni suffix and the clitic -qa that forms a relative clause with the meaning "that which...".
The -ni suffix is also obligatory on the main verb in conditional clauses:
Kur nu' pam tuwa nu' wuuvata-ni "if I see him I'll run away" If I him see I run-NI
The suffix is also used in conditional clauses referring to a past context then often combined with the particle as that carries past tense or counterfactual meaning, or describes unachieved intent:
Pam nuy tuwáq nu' so'on as wayaani "If he had seen me I wouldn't have run" he me see I Neg Past/Counterfact. run-NI
Nu' saytini "I will smile" I smile-NI
Nu' as saytini "I tried to smile/I should smile/I wanted to smile/I was going to smile" I Past/Counterfact. smile
The suffix -ngwu describes actions taking place habitually or as a general rule.
Tömö' taawa tatkyaqw yámangwu "In the winter the sun rises in the southeast"
Benjamin Lee Whorf [ edit ]
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), a fire prevention engineer by profession, studied Native American linguistics from an early age. He corresponded with many of the greatest scholars of his time, such as Alfred Tozzer at Harvard and Herbert Spinden of the American Museum of Natural History. They were impressed with his work on the linguistics of the Nahuatl language and encouraged him to participate professionally and to undertake field research in Mexico. In 1931 Edward Sapir, the foremost expert on Native American languages, started teaching at Yale, close to where Whorf lived, and Whorf signed up for graduate-level classes with Sapir, becoming one of his most respected students. Whorf took a special interest in the Hopi language and started working with Ernest Naquayouma, a speaker of Hopi from Toreva village on the Second Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, who was living in the Manhattan borough of New York City. At this time it was common for linguists to base their descriptions of a language on data from a single speaker. Whorf credited Naquayouma as the source of most of his information on the Hopi language, although in 1938 he took a short field trip to the village of Mishongnovi on the Second Mesa, collecting some additional data.[22]
Whorf published several articles on Hopi grammar, focusing particularly on the ways in which the grammatical categories of Hopi encoded information about events and processes, and how this correlated with aspects of Hopi culture and behavior. After his death his full sketch of Hopi grammar was published by his friend the linguist Harry Hoijer, and some essays on Native American linguistics, many of which had been previously published in academic journals, were published in 1956 in the anthology Language, Thought, and Reality by his friend psychologist John Bissell Carroll.
Whorf on Hopi time [ edit ]
Whorf's most frequently cited statement regarding Hopi time is the strongly worded introduction of his 1936 paper "An American Indian model of the Universe", which was first published posthumously in Carroll's edited volume. Here he writes that
I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space as we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular he has no notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future into a present and into a past.... After a long and careful analysis the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time', or to past, present or future... Whorf (1956b:57)
Whorf argues that in Hopi units of time are not represented by nouns, but by adverbs or verbs. Whorf argues that all Hopi nouns include the notion of a boundary or outline, and that consequently the Hopi language does not refer to abstract concepts with nouns. This, Whorf argues, is encoded in Hopi grammar, which does not allow durations of time to be counted in the same way objects are. So instead of saying, for example, "three days", Hopi would say the equivalent of "on the third day", using ordinal numbers. Whorf argues that the Hopi do not consider the process of time passing to produce another new day, but merely as bringing back the daylight aspect of the world.
Hopi as a tenseless language [ edit ]
Whorf gives slightly different analyses of the grammatical encoding of time in Hopi in his different writings. His first published writing on Hopi grammar was the paper "The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi", published in 1936 in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Here Whorf analyzed Hopi as having a tense system with a distinction between three tenses: one used for past or present events ( |
itbart initially released only the video from Acorn's Baltimore bureau, which the group dismissed as an isolated incident. The next day, he posted a video of O'Keefe getting similar results in Washington, DC. Oops. Acorn stepped on the rake again, claiming the videos were doctored. Then Breitbart posted more — from New York City, San Diego, and Philadelphia. Congress started pulling Acorn's funding, and The New York Times flagellated itself for its "slow reflexes" in covering the story.
The traffic on Breitbart's sites exploded, and he knew he had found a star. Breitbart signed up O'Keefe to... well, to something. At one point, Breitbart said he and O'Keefe had a "first-look deal," similar to what a Hollywood producer might give a hot screenwriter. On another occasion, Breitbart talked about his purchase of O'Keefe's "life rights."
O'Keefe finally lopes into the Manhattan apartment, wearing a black newsboy cap and leather jacket. Only the stubble on his chin keeps him looking 25 instead of a skinny 14. He is as serious as Breitbart is goofy, as focused as Breitbart is scattered. All O'Keefe will say about his relationship with Breitbart is "He doesn't tell me what to shoot." Then he asks me to turn off my tape recorder, powers up his laptop, and talks us through his latest sting. I keep taking notes.
This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration's 10 percent tax credit to first-time home buyers. The law says that the credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. But at the Detroit office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rule seems open to interpretation. O'Keefe asks a staffer, What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?
"Flip it any way you want," the staffer replies.
What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?
"Yup, you can do that."
O'Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel ran the same sting at HUD's Chicago office and at several federally supported independent housing groups. Breitbart paces the parquet floor. The video is damning but not exactly Acorn-explosive.
Then O'Keefe stops the playback. "Oh yeah, I forgot," he says. "We went to the Detroit Free Press, to the managing editor. We told her the whole thing. She said she wasn't interested. Wanna see the tape?"
Breitbart starts to cackle. Of course he wants to see the tape. Sleazy HUD administrators are important, sure. But media covering up sleaze? That's entertainment. "Dude, that's the most important part!" he says. "I have seepage coming out of five parts of my body right now."
O'Keefe hits Play. A world-weary Freep editor listens to O'Keefe's kickback story and politely declines. There could be a thousand reasons why, but to O'Keefe and Breitbart, there's only one explanation: liberal bias. Breitbart slaps the walls like they were congo drums, grinning. "OK," he tells O'Keefe, "now I officially adore you."
In 1991, Breitbart was a bored twentysomething from Brentwood, a ritzy entertainment-industry enclave in west LA. A hyperactive news junkie, he read several newspapers and watched several newscasts a day. A low-level movie production job had left him disgusted by what he saw as Hollywood's culture of limousine liberalism. He was miserable. "Kurt Cobain without the record deal," he says. "Just give me the gun."
While waiting tables at a Venice bar and grill, he got to know one of the regulars, veteran TV actor Orson Bean. Bean had a wild reputation in Hollywood. He had written a book extolling the spiritual power of orgasm and, even more shocking, was a die-hard Nixon man. Breitbart admired him as an unpredictable rebel, a raconteur, an independent thinker — the kind of guy Breitbart wanted to be. He started dating Bean's daughter Susie and eventually married her. Bean served as Breitbart's first mentor, encouraging him to cut against what both men saw as LA's leftie grain.
Breitbart found his second mentor on a lark. He had become a fan of Matt Drudge's online newsletter, a weird, irresistible mix of right-wing politics, conspiracy theories, extreme weather, and pop culture. In 1995, Breitbart emailed Drudge to see if he could help out. Pretty soon, his bylines were appearing on the report alongside Drudge's. Breitbart had found his niche.
A link from the Drudge Report could bring hundreds of thousands of readers to a newspaper story — even if an editor had buried it on page C23. So reporters who wanted exposure for their work reached out to Drudge and Breitbart as soon as their pieces were published (or even before). Those tips gave the pair a back door into virtually every newsroom on the planet. In early 1998, the site was able to break not only the news that President Clinton had sex with an intern but also the fact that Newsweek spiked a story on the affair.
But scoops alone weren't what made the Drudge Report a must-read. The site had a new feeling of urgency, of velocity. Together, Drudge and Breitbart set the vicious, unceasing pace that is now the norm for Twitter-era journalism.
No one really knows how they did it. Neither Breitbart nor Drudge will discuss their partnership. "I've honored Drudge's wishes, spoken and unspoken" is all Breitbart will say. "He's a private guy."
At the turn of the century, Drudge receded from the spotlight, and journalists and politicos learned that the key to getting link-love from the Drudge Report was to IM Andrew Breitbart. Among those members of the Democrat-media complex: me, an ex-Clinton-Gore campaign staffer contributing to The New York Times. In 2008, I took Breitbart to Wired's 15th anniversary party in Manhattan. He took me to gatherings of pols and pundits at Yamashiro, a restaurant in the Hollywood Hills designed to look like a shogun palace. Yet Breitbart's relationship with the press is generally adversarial, and even though he has millions of readers, he describes himself as being part of the "undermedia." Breitbart believes in the conservative cause, but he also knows that casting himself as the Resistance in an information war gets him an audience. "We know the undermedia has power," Breitbart says. "And it comes from positioning it against the mainstream media."
One thing Breitbart will say about Drudge, though, is that his mentor introduced him to Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing pundit and Drudge confidant. Breitbart became her researcher and Web guru. By her side, he learned that the media could be more than scooped — it could be hacked. The first exploit was almost an accident: In September 1998, he suggested that Drudge and Huffington go to the embezzlement trial of former Clinton business associate Susan McDougal. The Los Angeles Times took note of their attendance the next day in a headline and a few sentences in the Metro section. Publicists have been pulling similar tricks since silent-movie days, sending celebrity clients to public events. But to Breitbart, the move was a revelation. "You can play the media. You can force them to cover things," he says. "This is not just stenography. There's a performance art to it."
Breitbart started looking for ways to attract the spotlight to himself. In 2004, he and journalist Mark Ebner wrote the book Hollywood, Interrupted, which excoriated the drug habits and vapid liberalism of many stars. Breitbart emerged as a conservative spokesperson with a passion for the culture wars not seen since the Lewinsky years. "They're an elitist pestilence," he says of his celebrity targets. "They tell us we can't have SUVs. They try to impose a one-child-per-family policy. But they can do whatever the hell they want because they're gallivanting around in the name of the greater good." He pauses while I try to figure out the "one-child" comment. "God, I fucking hate them."
Shortly after Hollywood, Interrupted came out, Huffington — by then a left-wing pundit — invited Breitbart to help her and Democratic fund-raiser Ken Lerer assemble what would become liberal Hollywood's favorite Web site, the Huffington Post. It was political apostasy, of course. But the paycheck was substantial for Breitbart, then a father of three. Also, he says, building something from scratch was a chance "to show that I was a presence and a player." Breitbart liked the idea of a new forum for ideological combat, separate from the traditional media's slanted playing field. "He was extremely interested in how to have a conversation online — how to bring together all these interesting voices," Huffington says. "Now it's, like, so obvious. But at the time, it had never been done."
The Huffington Post was consciously designed as the Left's answer to (and upgrade of) the Drudge Report. But instead of aggregating news and opinion, the HuffPo would host it. Newswires would appear right on the site; bloggers could battle it out in a giant group forum. The site launched in May 2005.
By June, Breitbart was out. Today, five years later, even his role in building the site is a matter of dispute. "I created the Huffington Post," he says simply. "I drafted the plan. They followed the plan." Huffington disagrees, saying that while he helped with strategy, the idea for the site was cooked up at a meeting in her living room after the 2004 elections. Breitbart, she says, "wasn't present."
Breitbart went back to Drudge, but he was still looking for ways to prove he was more than a behind-the-scenes guy. He wanted to make a name for himself, earn some money, and advance his cause. He realized he could build his own Web presence using all the lessons he'd learned. Even stories that seemed inconsequential could be framed to poke the mainstream media. Any reaction — or lack of reaction — could be bent to Breitbart's purpose. It's another media hack: Heads I win, tails you lose. One 2009 post featured a two-year-old video of Oscar the Grouch joking about "Pox News" on Sesame Street. When the PBS ombudsman apologized for the pun, Breitbart's Big Hollywood blog wrote up the apology as an admission of systemic bias. Another post lambasted the White House for displaying a painting it said was a Matisse rip-off. When a critic at The Washington Post defended the work, it proved — said Big Hollywood — the desire of the press corps to "shield" Obama.
The stories don't even have to be true to be useful. In December, Big Government's Michael Walsh put together a list of the top stories the mainstream media missed in 2009. Number four: Sarah Palin's claim that the health care bill included a "death panel" that would decide the fate of the infirm and disabled. Of course, Palin's claim — thoroughly discredited — was one of the most widely covered stories of the year. But for Walsh, none of that mattered. Death panels were "a marker for the entire Sarah Palin story," he says. "Sarah Palin makes the Left's heads explode. If only for that, it belongs on the list."
Today, the adversarial media world that Breitbart helped create is fodder for both sides of the political spectrum. The debate itself is the news. Every time Breitbart goes after Oscar the Grouch, the Left goes after Breitbart. Liberals get to feel superior to someone thuggish enough to attack Sesame Street, and Breitbart's message gets an extra push. Even the Obama administration plays the game, elevating opponents like Rush Limbaugh because they rally the Democratic base. "This stuff is gold for the White House. It's gold for the Right," says Republican consultant Goldfarb. "Everybody profits."
To build an alternative media empire, Breitbart had to find alternative sources of money and talent. That has led to ties with some pretty sketchy characters. His first solo Web site, Breitbart.com, got 2.6 million readers in its first month thanks in large part to links from the Drudge Report. But Breitbart needed to turn that traffic into ad revenue, and he wasn't much of a businessperson. A pair of conservative entrepreneurs volunteered to act as his sales agents. Brian Cartmell, a quiet programmer with money from his own antispam company, offered his coding expertise. Brad Hillstrom, the bearded, garrulous co-owner of a chain of medical clinics, brought contacts. Hillstrom flew Breitbart out to his lavish home on Lake Minnetonka for a weekend with Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Sandy Froman, president of the National Rifle Association. Breitbart was suitably impressed. He figured that his audience, combined with Cartmell's geekery and Hillstrom's Rolodex, would make millions.
On November 3, 2005, the three launched Gen Ads, a business that secured the exclusive rights to serve up banner ads on Breitbart.com. By the end of January, they were suing one another. Reuters was paying Breitbart a referral fee for every clickthrough from his site to Reuters.com, which Hillstrom and Cartmell said violated their exclusivity agreement. Breitbart countersued, pointing out that the pair had failed to run any site-specific ads on Breitbart.com and had concealed their own rather lurid pasts. Hillstrom's company had been investigated by the Department of Labor for paying physical therapists brought in from Poland as little as $500 a month and was forced to pay $460,000 in back wages. Cartmell had been sued by Hasbro in 1996 for turning candy-land.com into a porn site. The legal wrangling dragged into the summer and cost Breitbart "more money than I had," he says.
With the lawsuits behind him, Breitbart next became a champion of Pat Dollard, a former Hollywood agent turned gonzo war documentarian. Then it came to light that Dollard had doled out liquid Valium to marines in Iraq and robbed a pharmacy there while dressed in US military fatigues. A long Vanity Fair article detailing Dollard's excesses made him toxic to all but the most extreme of conservative activists.
For Breitbart, though, Dollard fit right in with his self-image. Despite his conservative views, Breitbart sees himself in some ways as an heir to 1960s radicals like the Yippies and Merry Pranksters, turning the absurd into political points. In the end, that's what he saw in O'Keefe, his star provocateur.
Now O'Keefe might become a liability as well. The FBI says that in January of this year, Joe Basel — O'Keefe's partner in the HUD stings — and another man put on fluorescent green vests and tool belts and walked into the New Orleans offices of Democratic senator Mary Landrieu, saying they were there to fix the phones. O'Keefe was in the lobby, recording the encounter on a cell phone. When Basel couldn't produce identification, US marshals arrested them all for entering federal property under false pretenses "with the purpose of committing a felony" — a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The cable networks, wire services, and political blogs called it a wiretapping plot. The head of the Democratic Party in Louisiana condemned the "Watergate-like break-in." Breitbart says he had no idea that O'Keefe was in Louisiana, let alone in the senator's office. But he knew that actions this criminal and clownish had the potential to hurt him. "I saw my life passing in front of my eyes," he says.
O'Keefe and Breitbart traded instant messages even before O'Keefe called his attorney. Then Breitbart went on the offensive, bashing the press on Big Government for overreaching. Despite the hysterical headlines, O'Keefe hadn't actually been charged with wiretapping. MSNBC reprimanded correspondent David Shuster for his attacks on O'Keefe, and The Washington Post issued a correction to its story about his "bugging." Those are the kind of things that count as "wins" on Breitbart's scorecard.
Then, Breitbart and his bloggers tried to swap the break-in narrative for a Byzantine conspiracy tale. O'Keefe may have used poor judgment, they said, but his arrest and subsequent treatment proved that the Democrat-media complex was working to ruin Breitbart and O'Keefe as payback for the Acorn sting.
After the story's first couple of waves come and go, I call Breitbart in Los Angeles. "I believe the Justice Department is doing to me what we did to them," he says. "They kept him in jail for 28 hours. During that period of time they were able to use the media to cast a false narrative of Watergate II, illegal wiretapping, breaking and entering, blah blah blah. It's a joke. It shows the complicity between this administration and the press to destroy political enemies."
He takes a breath. "They call us tea-baggers. They call us racist, sexist, homophobic, and we are finally punching back. It's over, dude. It's over. You think you're gonna be able to put the genie back in the bottle? It's over. And if you don't like my aggression, there are going to be millions more of me," Breitbart says, the cell phone connection skipping in and out. "Because the new media provides the tools and there are millions out there who are outraged. Now they realize, 'Wow, anybody can do that. We can hold these people accountable. We have the means. We have the technology.'" Then Breitbart hangs up. He has more interviews to conduct, a speech at the National Tea Party Convention to prep, and bloggers to talk to. The O'Keefe story might still turn out very bad for Breitbart. But there is no way he's going to let someone else tell it.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (stag-komodo.wired.com/dangerroom) wrote about the Afghan air war in issue 18.01.The $1 reason to keep buying one of the S&P’s hottest stocks: Netflix
Massive cuts to Social Security: This is the ‘wall’ Americans should worry about
Fraudulent public comments stacked deck for FCC repeal of net neutrality, according to a Pew study — and Patty Duke’s son
Was the big controversy in the contested repeal of net-neutrality rules actually in the stack of comments that flooded the Federal Communications Commission ahead of the narrow vote?
The flurry of interest from the John Smiths, the John Olivers and even the actress Patty Duke (dead nearly two years) would appear to suggest something was amiss as it got down to the wire for the planned rollback of the Obama-era regulation — an annulment that had the founders of the internet, including Vint Cerf, crying foul.
The FCC on Thursday, by a 3-2 vote along party lines, rolled back rules barring internet service providers from discriminating against any lawful content by blocking websites or apps, slowing the transmission of data based on the content itself, or creating an internet fast lane for premium-paying companies and consumers and a slow lane for those not paying a premium rate.
Opponents of Obama-era net-neutrality regulations argued that ISPs should have the right to prioritize traffic and charge for their services as they wish. Most Republicans and internet providers including Comcast CMCSA claimed a victory for freedom, arguing that regulating the internet as if it were a utility is overreach.
Read: Three stock winners, three losers in net neutrality ruling
And: Why the end of net neutrality isn’t the end of the internet
But a fair amount of criticism arose around the 22 million public comments — enough to get Pew Research Center to take a look and issue a report.
Pew associate director Aaron Smith said several things popped out within those comments, especially the ones in favor of rolling back the regulation, including that 94% of the comments “were submitted multiple times, and in some cases those comments were submitted many hundreds of thousands of times.”
In addition, fully 57% of comments used temporary or duplicate email addresses, and seven popular comments accounted for 38% of all submissions, Pew found.
Thousands of Fake Comments on Net Neutrality: A WSJ Investigation (4:48) On federal government web sites, public comments can influence the outcome of regulations affecting millions of people. A WSJ investigation has identified and analyzed thousands of fraudulent posts on issues such as FCC net neutrality rules and payday lending. Video/illustration: Heather Seidel/WSJ.
There’s nothing new about organized campaigns attempting to wield influence in this way, said Pew, but the tide of sketchy comments around the net-neutrality campaign took the practice to a new level.
Just ask Mackenzie Astin, a son of Patty Duke:
See original version of this storyUPDATE: Renesys now reports that the internet in Syria has been restored.
Internet in Syria restored at 19:07 UTC following blackout lasting over 7hrs. https://t.co/fOea6oUNtB — InternetIntelligence (@InternetIntel) March 20, 2014
ORIGINAL:
The Internet has once again gone dark in Syria, with almost all of the country experiencing an online blackout.
Many of the organizations that monitor global Internet traffic report that Syria's Internet connection has gone dark in the latest of a series of outages that have hit the nation, which is currently embroiled in civil war.
Beginning around 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, Renesys, one of those Internet monitors, reported that 95 percent of the country is currently offline.
Here's a graph of the outage from Renesys, which says that only an Internet connection between Turkey and Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is working:
Akamai, a network security firm that also keeps an eye on Internet traffic, spotted the outage too:
It is not clear at this time whether the outage is the result of a purposeful government action or a technical failure -- though if the past has any bearing, the government will likely blame technical issues regardless.
The Renesys report also notes that all of the failing network providers reached the Internet through the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, which is controlled and managed by the Syrian government.
When speaking about the issue to Mashable in August of last year, David Belson, the editor of Akamai's State of the Internet report, said, "If those providers are all funneling back into what is, in essence, a single government-controlled gateway to get out of the country, then these independent providers have very little control over the international connectivity."[Mark Gibson] sent us a load of details on his build, a WWVB atomic clock using a pinball machine marquee (PDF). This is the upright portion of an old machine that used electromechanical displays instead of digital electronics. It’s big, noisy, and seeing it running might make you a bit giddy. Luckily he included video that shows it working on both the outside and the inside.
It took a bit of probing to discover the connections for relays that control the display. From there he used optoisolation to drive them with an Arduino. With this hurdle behind him, [Mark] set out to add atomic clock accuracy. He picked up a WWVB module and added it to the mix.
Check out his build log in PDF form linked above. He went out of his way to explain how the original parts work, and the processes he used during prototyping. For more of those juicy details we’ve added a photo gallery and his video after the break.
Didn’t get enough pinball goodness from this project? Check out the this digital gas plasma display pulled and reused from a much more modern pinball machine. Oh, and there’s always Bill Paxton Pinball.Scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum have identified and named a new species of dinosaur in honour of renowned Canadian palaeontologist Dr. Philip J. Currie. Albertavenator curriei, meaning "Currie's Alberta hunter." It stalked Alberta, Canada, about 71 million years ago in what is now the famous Red Deer River Valley. The find recognizes Currie for his decades of work on predatory dinosaurs of Alberta. Research on the new species is published July 17 in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.
Palaeontologists initially thought that the bones of Albertavenator belonged to its close relative Troodon, which lived around 76 million years ago -- five million years before Albertavenator. Both dinosaurs walked on two legs, were covered in feathers, and were about the size of a person. New comparisons of bones forming the top of the head reveal that Albertavenator had a distinctively shorter and more robust skull than Troodon, its famously brainy relative.
"The delicate bones of these small feathered dinosaurs are very rare. We were lucky to have a critical piece of the skull that allowed us to distinguish Albertaventaor as a new species." said Dr. David Evans, Temerty Chair and Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, and leader of the project. "We hope to find a more complete skeleton of Albertavenator in the future, as this would tell us so much more about this fascinating animal."
Identifying new species from fragmentary fossils is a challenge. Complicating matters of this new find are the hundreds of isolated teeth that have been found in Alberta and previously attributed to Troodon. Teeth from a jaw that likely pertains to Albertavenator appears very similar to the teeth of Troodon, making them unusable for distinguishing between the two species.
"This discovery really highlights the importance of finding and examining skeletal material from these rare dinosaurs," concluded Derek Larson, co-author on the study and Assistant Curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum."
The identification of a new species of troodontid in the Late Cretaceous of North America indicates that small dinosaur diversity in the latest Cretaceous of North America is likely underestimated due to the difficulty of identifying species from fragmentary fossils.
"It was only through our detailed anatomical and statistical comparisons of the skull bones that we were able to distinguish between Albertavenator and Troodon," said Thomas Cullen, a Ph.D. student of Evans at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study.
The bones of Albertavenator were found in the badlands surrounding the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which Dr. Currie played a key role in establishing in the early 1980s. The rocks around the museum are the same age as some of the most fossiliferous rocks in the area of the newly erected Philip J. Currie Museum, also named in Dr. Currie's honour. Although Dr. Currie has also had a several dinosaurs named after him, this is only the second one from Alberta, where he has made his biggest impact.
The fossils of Albertavenator studied by Evans and his team are housed in the collections of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. This is another example of a new species of dinosaur being discovered by re-examining museum research collections, which continually add to our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth. This study suggests that more detailed studies of fragmentary fossils may reveal additional, currently unrecognized, species.With a growing number of Chinese and international players and no clear winner, competition is heating up in China’s luxury e-commerce market. On the Italian front, historic Florence-based fashion retailer LuisaViaRoma is joining peers such as Yoox to make a major push into the China market with its online shop. For the retailer’s recent biannual three-day Firenze4Ever event that brings together artists, musicians, and celebrities for a celebration in Florence, it adopted an Asia theme and invited a host of Chinese and K-pop stars that it promoted heavily in China. With an emphasis on art and a roster of both established and up-and-coming fashion labels (including Chinese designer Yang Li), the site is benefiting from Chinese consumers’ growing interest in a wider range of brands. To get more details on the company’s vision for the China market, we recently checked in with LuisaViaRoma Founder and CEO Andrea Panconesi for an interview. If you’ll be in Paris on March 6, you can also catch Panconesi at this year’s China Connect conference, where he’ll be speaking as part of a panel on luxury.
During Pitti Uomo in Florence, LuisaViaRoma hosted its 10th edition of “Firenze4Ever” with the theme “Oriental Obsession.” Can you sum up the idea and reception?
Firenze4Ever started in June 2010 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of LuisaViaRoma.com. Firenze4Ever is a biannual event at the beginning of each new fashion season that promotes and encourages interaction between brands and bloggers, offering both the opportunity to meet face-to-face and to raise their profile online. Its three pillars are fashion, music, and contemporary art—three international languages.
This season’s theme, “Oriental Obsession,” celebrates the fascination the West has had for the East since Marco Polo and the influence the East now has on the West; it’s the intersection of two civilizations with the presence of fashion bloggers and people, and oriental designers. The golden list of special guests included names like actress and singer BoA, known for her performance in Make Your Move and her multiple musical releases, as well as actress and model Chrissie Chau, who most recently starred in Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons. Also [participating were] Chinese songstress Momo Wu, known as the “Chinese Lady Gaga,” who rose to fame after participating in The Voice of China, and singer and actress Joyce Cheng from Hong Kong. [The] Far East became for the first time very close, thanks to the new media and new technologies, such as Tencent, which relayed the coverage on its QQ Fashion channel.
You entered the Chinese market in 2011. What’s next for LuisaViaRoma in China?
We entered the Chinese market with our website completely translated in Chinese. We started shipping before in China but the translation of the website boosted our traffic. China’s e-commerce represents a third of our worldwide business (with Europe and the United States/Canada each respectively having another third). The last two years saw good performances, and we forecast huge growth in China and Asia.
Our collection selection is incomparable; 90 percent is made in/designed in Italy. We have our own warehouse there (and have no plans to open one in China), and offer free and fast shipping via DHL or UPS in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Macau, and South Korea: we guarantee the same qualitative services to the Chinese people as to the Italians or any other buyer in the world.
Video and visual marketing are mandatory, especially in China, and online TV platforms are becoming places to shop: how does LuisaViaRoma intend to leverage this opportunity?
LuisaViaRoma.com is totally projected to all visuals: visual art, visual music, visual fashion. We invest to provide to our followers with the best content on video platforms such as Youku, iQiYi or QQ Video, and video sharing app like Meipai. We’ll look at the new opportunities to engage with our customers, but our priority is to build the LVR brand name as a leading European fashion player, develop its awareness, highlight top level content, and make LVR.com the luxury destination for Asian fashionistas.
Laure de Carayon (@laure2carayon) is the founder and organizer of China Connect (@ChinaConnectEU), the largest gathering of experts on Chinese consumer trends, marketing, digital and mobile in Europe.The Church of Scientology could have its Montreal building seized and sold by the city.
Radio-Canada has discovered that the Church owes about $90,000 in back taxes.
The church has owned the La Patrie building, which is a historic building on Ste-Catherine Street in downtown Montreal's Latin Quarter, since 2007.
The building, which was built in 1905 to house the newspaper La Patrie, is now abandoned. Church members had plans to renovate it, but no work has been carried out yet.
Last week, city officials sent the Church of Scientology a legal notice requesting it pay off debts from 2015 totalling $39,855. According to city spokesman,Gonzalo Nunez, if the amount is not paid off in the next few months, the building will be sold at auction in November.
The Church has paid $14,000 since receiving the notice.
According to municipal documents obtained by Radio-Canada, the Church of Scientology has not paid this year's property taxes either – $62,350 was due March 1.
That means that the Church owes just more than $88,000 to the City of Montreal.
In June, another bill of about $60,000 will be due.
Given that the building, evaluated at 3.4 million, is vacant, the organization cannot benefit from tax exemptions reserved for places of worship, such as churches and mosques.
This is not the first time the Church of Scientology has received a legal notice from the City of Montreal.
The same situation occurred in 2015, but the Church paid its back taxes at the end of the year thereby avoiding the sale of the building.
Radio-Canada contacted the Montreal Church of Scientology. Its spokesman, Jean Larivière, refused to comment.A man has just created the world's smallest 3D-printed working drill and it is perfect.
Lance Abernethy is a maintenance engineer from New Zealand who has an obsession with small things. It was this obsession that led him to create the tiny tool, according to 3D Print.
The maker of small things drew up the plans off his regular-sized drill using CAD software OnShape before using his personal 3D printer, on a very slow speed, to create the miniature design — which measures 17mm tall, 7.5mm wide and 13mm long.
“I wanted to make it as small as possible so I cramped all my parts as tight as possible,” Abernethy told 3D Print. “It took me 3 hours to solder and try and squeeze [the parts] in... The wires kept breaking off when I was trying to connect them and it was a nightmare trying to hold them in place and try to not short the battery."
The three-piece drill is made up of a hearing aid battery, a headphone cable, a 3D-printed chuck, a small button, a miniature motor and a 0.5mm drill piece. It is covered by two 3D-printed halves. Abernethy said the hardest part was not the printing, but the construction of the tiny delight.Clayton Carter (left) and George Jennings (Images: Left — Chester County District Attorney’s Office; right — family photo)
[Ed. – It’s come to this.]
An anti-Trump activist has been accused of executing his neighbor who was a prominent Republican supporter.
Clayton Carter allegedly shot George Jennings, both 51, twice in the head outside his home in Pennsylvania in the early hours of August 8.
The men had already been arguing the previous night and police were called after Carter pulled a gun, but managed to diffuse the situation.
Trending: You’d never guess from all her crowing, but AOC didn’t come up with the Green New Deal
However, officers were called back just a few hours later to reports of a fatal attack, ABC 6 News reports.
The pair had been feuding for some time, neighbors said, adding that they were afraid of Carter’s unpredictable nature.
ABC reports that his yard was covered with hand-painted anti-Trump signs and was often filled with cars.
Jennings, meanwhile, was a member of the Chester County Republican Committee, though it is not thought their beliefs were directly responsible for the shooting.
Investigators were first called to the address around 8pm on August 7 because the two men were fighting about cursing and video recording in a back yard.
Continue reading →
For your convenience, you may leave commments below using either the Spot.IM commenting system or the Facebook commenting system. If Spot.IM is not appearing for you, please disable AdBlock to leave a comment.Deficiency of water results in crop failure and water in excess of the capacity of stream results in flood causing widespread loss of life and property,” Ansari said, addressing the centenary celebration of Central Water and Power Research Station here. (PTI)
Vice President M Hamid Ansari today said India’s huge population has resulted in stress on water resources and that the plight of Yamuna reflects water mismanagement.
He said the country’s “proverbial poverty” is largely related to the results from hydro-meteorological conditions, inequitable spatial distribution, and non-utilisation and ill-planned utilisation of water resources.
“Deficiency of water results in crop failure and water in excess of the capacity of stream results in flood causing widespread loss of life and property,” Ansari said, addressing the centenary celebration of Central Water and Power Research Station here.
“India’s proverbial poverty amongst plenty is, to a large extent, related to results from the hydro-meteorological conditions, inequitable spatial distribution, non-utilisation and ill-planned utilisation of water resources,” he said.
Summarising the major cause of acute water crisis in the country, Ansari said, “First, India’s large population has led to a stress on available water resources. The total amount of usable water has been estimated to be between 700 to 1,200 billion cubic meters.”
“With a population of 1.2 billion, India has only 1,000 cubic meters of water per person, even using the higher estimates,” he said.
The second cause is poor quality of water resulting from inefficient and delayed investment in urban water treatment facilities, he said.
“Water in most rivers in India is largely not fit for drinking. Industrial effluent standards are not enforced for a variety of reasons,” he said.
“The plight of Yamuna, as it crosses Delhi, starkly reflects this mismanagement. For only 2 per cent of its river length that Delhi occupies, 75 per cent of its pollutants are added here,” he said.Information regarding my research interests and those of the Condensed Matter Theory Group (of which I am a member) can be found HERE
A list of my publications can be found HERE
Here is a poster detailing some results relating to indium tin oxide
Here is a poster detailing some results relating to enhanced total internal reflection
Here is a poster detailing some results relating to a dual prism/Bragg reflector structure
Some details of courses taught/previously taught can be found below:
Electromagnetism
( Material from a second year course which I no longer teach)
Dielectrics
( Material from a third year course which I no longer teach)
The Fizzy-c |
ATLANTA -- The NFL officially notified its players union on Tuesday that it will opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement, which could lead to a season without a salary cap in 2010 and a possible lockout in 2011.
Owners voted unanimously Tuesday morning to opt out of the deal, which was extended in March 2006. The NFL had until November to opt out, but decided to do it early instead of waiting for the deadline.
The league, however, emphasized that it will keep negotiating with the NFL Players Association and said games will be played "without threat of interruption for at least the next three seasons."
"We have guaranteed three more years of NFL football," commissioner Roger Goodell said after the owners used the opt-out clause built into the agreement signed more than two years ago. "We are not in dire straits. We've never said that. But the agreement isn't working, and we're looking to get a more fair and equitable deal."
The decision by the owners was anticipated, although not this early. The 2006 agreement allowed either side to negate the contract by Nov. 8. Goodell said the owners acted early "to get talks rolling."
NFLPA executive director Gene Upshaw had been anticipating the early termination of the agreement. He met with owners two weeks ago, and from that meeting he asked for audited financial reports from owners to document their economic problems.Lowes’ manager Roger Burnett confirmed on Friday that Aprilia moved to terminate the British rider’s contract a year early off the back of a disappointing first half of the season.
The move paves the way for Redding – who has lost his Pramac Ducati ride to Jack Miller for 2018 – to take Lowes’ place at Aprilia alongside Aleix Espargaro next season.
But Redding remains adamant he has yet to put pen to paper on a deal, even if he admitted he has been in touch with the Noale-based firm about joining the team.
“I have been in contact with them, but there is nothing on paper,” Redding told reporters on Friday. “It’s not done and I’m not sat with my feet in the air like ‘ok, job done’.
“I saw that this morning, everyone’s like ‘you signed,’ I said ‘what the f*** are you on about, I haven’t signed anything!’ I only heard this morning that Sam’s not staying at Aprilia.
“Now I have to make a decision. I do have contact with them, but nothing is agreed. I have to make the right decision and it’s really important for me to make the right decision.”
Marc VDS also an option
Redding said his other option to stay in MotoGP would be to rejoin Marc VDS, where he raced in 2015, and said that both the Belgian-owned team and Aprilia had their positives and negatives.
“Going back to Marc VDS, I know the team, the Honda is quite competitive - a bike that I struggled on in the past because of my size, but now different engine, different tyres,” he said.
“Aprilia is a new project, the bike is getting better and I believe, as a factory team, they will develop. The bike hasn’t stopped growing. That, for me, is something that’s important.
“I’ve always liked to develop bikes, in Moto2 when I fought for the championship - two years with that Kalex, [improving] a little bit here, a little bit there.
“I like that, it motivates me, not going testing and there’s jack s**t to test.
“It’s hard. Before I didn’t have a decision, and now I have a choice. I want to make results, and I need to find the bike that suits me to make those results.”
Additional reporting by Casper FerwerdaThe idea behind Thursday morning’s news conference by House Republican leaders was not to provide ammunition for Democrats.
But that may be what happened.
Drew Angerer/The New York Times
Even as Representative John Boehner, the Republican leader, was trumpeting the “Pledge for America,” he may have inadvertently played right into the hands of the White House and Democratic candidates.
In answer to a question from a reporter about the party’s position on social issues, and with the cameras running, Mr. Boehner said: “We are not going to be any different than what we’ve been.”
Those are the words President Obama and his allies have been trying to put in the Republicans’ mouths throughout the summer. The president is especially fond of saying that the Republicans running for Congress want “the next two years to look like the eight years before I took office.”
In speech after speech, Mr. Obama has tried to link the Republican party of today with the policies of the past. At a New York fundraiser at the Roosevelt Hotel this week, Mr. Obama said it again.
“It’d be one thing if the Republican candidates looked back at the last decade and they said, “You know what? Our policies didn’t work. We ended up in a terrible recession. Let’s try something new’,” he said. “If they were championing your issues. Right? And you said, well, you know, maybe — maybe we’ve got an option here.”
Mr. Boehner’s quote may have been about social issues, not the economy, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone to find it showing up in the president’s stump speeches anyway, or in a television ad for a Democratic candidate or two.
As Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director, wrote shortly after Mr. Boehner’s comment: “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”Relatively little violence in early stages of anxiously-awaited election day as PM's supporters insist on right to vote
Protesters trying to derail Thailand's national elections forced the closure of hundreds of polling stations in a highly contentious vote that has become the latest flashpoint in the country's deepening political crisis.
Around the country, the vast majority of voting stations were open and polling proceeded relatively peacefully, but the risk of violence remained high a day after gun battles in Bangkok left seven people wounded.
The national focus was riveted to the capital, where 488 of the capital's 6,600 polling stations were shut and several skirmishes broke out between protesters intent on disrupting the vote and frustrated would-be voters.
In some cases, protesters formed blockades to prevent voters from entering polling stations. Elsewhere, protesters blocked the delivery of ballots and other election materials, preventing voting stations from opening. The Election Commission said hundreds of polling stations in the south, an opposition stronghold, faced similar problems.
Whatever happens in Sunday's vote, the outcome will almost certainly be inconclusive. Because protesters blocked candidate registration in some districts, parliament will not have enough members to convene.
That means the beleaguered prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, will be unable to form a government or even pass a budget, and Thailand will be stuck in political limbo for months as byelections are run in constituencies that were unable to vote.
Fears of violence were high after an hour-long gun fight erupted on Saturday at a busy Bangkok intersection between government supporters and protesters trying to block delivery of ballots. Among the injured was a reporter for the local Daily News newspaper and an American photojournalist, James Nachtwey, who was grazed by a bullet in the leg.
Under heavy police security, Yingluck cast her vote at a polling station in north-eastern Bangkok, cheered on by supporters.
"Today is an important day," Yingluck told reporters. "I would like to invite Thai people to come out and vote to uphold democracy."
Voting was not as easy in other parts of Bangkok. At one of the more volatile districts of the capital, voters in Din Daeng scuffled with protesters and hurled bottles at each other under heavy police security. An Associated Press reporter saw a protester fire a gunshot after angry voters tried to push their way past a blockade. No injuries were reported.
Dozens of voters demanding their right to vote broke into the Din Daeng district office, which was unable to distribute ballots to the neighbourhood's voting stations.
"We want an election. We are Thais," said Narong Meephol, a 63-year-old Bangkok resident, waving his identification card. "We are here to exercise our rights."
Elsewhere, one of Thailand's more colourful politicians, Chuwit Kamolvisit, an independent candidate, got into a punching, knock-down brawl with a group of protesters.
"They tried to attack me while I was trying to go vote," said Chuwit, a tycoon who made a fortune operating massage parlours before turning to politics as an anti-corruption campaigner.
The conflict pits demonstrators who say they want to suspend the country's fragile democracy to institute anti-corruption reforms, against Yingluck's supporters.
The protesters are demanding the government be replaced by an unelected council that would rewrite political and electoral laws to combat what they say are deep-seated problems of corruption and money politics. Yingluck has refused to step down, arguing she is open to reform and that such a council would be unconstitutional.
Since protests began three months ago, at least 10 people have been killed and nearly 600 wounded.
The political standoff meant the campaign, at least in the capital, was done without the usual billboards, posters and sound trucks, with the pre-election buzz focused on violence instead of policies.
"How did we get to this point?" asked Chanida Pakdeebanchasak, a 28-year-old Bangkok resident who was determined to cast her ballot on Sunday.
Police said they would deploy 100,000 officers nationwide, while the army was putting 5,000 soldiers into Bangkok to boost security. More than 48 million people are registered to vote.This article is about the Greek goddess of discord. For the god of love, see Eros
"Discordia" redirects here. For other uses, see Discordia (disambiguation)
Eris (; Greek: Ἔρις, "Strife") is the Greek goddess of strife and discord. Her name is the equivalent of Latin Discordia, which means "discord". Eris' Greek opposite is Harmonia, whose Latin counterpart is Concordia. Homer equated her with the war-goddess Enyo, whose Roman counterpart is Bellona. The dwarf planet Eris is named after the goddess.
Etymology [ edit ]
Eris is of uncertain etymology; connections with the verb ὀρίνειν orinein, "to raise, stir, excite," and the proper name Ἐρινύες Erinyes have been suggested. R. S. P. Beekes rejects these derivations and suggested a Pre-Greek origin.[1]
Characteristics in Greek mythology [ edit ]
In Hesiod's Works and Days 11–24, two different goddesses named Eris are distinguished:
So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due.
But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night (Nyx), and the son of Cronus who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.
In Hesiod's Theogony (226–232), Strife, the daughter of Night, is less kindly spoken of as she brings forth other personifications as her children:
And hateful Eris bore painful Ponos ("Hardship"), Lethe ("Forgetfulness") and Limos ("Starvation") and the tearful Algea ("Pains"), Hysminai ("Battles"), Makhai ("Wars"), Phonoi ("Murders"), and Androktasiai ("Manslaughters"); Neikea ("Quarrels"), Pseudo-Logoi ("Lying Stories"), Amphillogiai ("Disputes") Dysnomia ("Anarchy") and Ate ("Ruin"), near one another, and Horkos ("Oath"), who most afflicts men on earth, Then willing swears a false oath.[2]
The other Strife is presumably she who appears in Homer's Iliad Book IV; equated with Enyo as sister of Ares and so presumably daughter of Zeus and Hera:
Strife whose wrath is relentless, she is the sister and companion of murderous Ares, she who is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven. She then hurled down bitterness equally between both sides as she walked through the onslaught making men's pain heavier. She also has a son whom she named Strife.
Enyo is mentioned in Book 5, and Zeus sends Strife to rouse the Achaeans in Book 11, of the same work.
The most famous tale of Eris recounts her initiating the Trojan War by causing the Judgement of Paris. The goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite had been invited along with the rest of Olympus to the forced wedding of Peleus and Thetis, who would become the parents of Achilles, but Eris had been snubbed because of her troublemaking inclinations.
She therefore (as mentioned at the Kypria according to Proclus as part of a plan hatched by Zeus and Themis) tossed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden apple inscribed Ancient Greek: τῇ καλλίστῃ, translit. tē(i) kallistē(i) – "For the most beautiful one", or "To the Fairest One" – provoking the goddesses to begin quarreling about the appropriate recipient. The hapless Paris, Prince of Troy, was appointed to select the fairest by Zeus. The goddesses stripped naked to try to win Paris' decision, and also attempted to bribe him. Hera offered political power; Athena promised infinite wisdom; and Aphrodite tempted him with the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta. While Greek culture placed a greater emphasis on prowess and power, Paris chose to award the apple to Aphrodite, thereby dooming his city, which was destroyed in the war that ensued.
In Nonnus' Dionysiaca, 2.356, when Typhon prepares to battle with Zeus:
Eris ("Strife") was Typhon's escort in the melée, Nike ("Victory") led Zeus to battle.
Another story of Eris includes Hera, and the love of Polytekhnos and Aedon. They claimed to love each other more than Hera and Zeus were in love. This angered Hera, so she sent Eris to rack discord upon them. Polytekhnos was finishing off a chariot board, and Aedon a web she had been weaving. Eris said to them, "Whosoever finishes thine task last shall have to present the other with a female servant!" Aedon won. But Polytekhnos was not happy by his defeat, so he came to Khelidon, Aedon's sister, and raped her. He then disguised her as a slave, presenting her to Aedon. When Aedon discovered this was indeed her sister, she chopped up Polytekhnos' son and fed him to Polytekhnos. The gods were not pleased, so they turned them all into birds.
Cultural influences [ edit ]
Discordianism [ edit ]
Eris has been adopted as the patron deity of the modern Discordian religion, which was begun in the late 1950s by Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley under the pen names of "Malaclypse the Younger" and "Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst". The Discordian version of Eris is considerably lighter in comparison to the rather malevolent Graeco-Roman original, wherein she is depicted as a positive (albeit mischievous) force of chaotic creation.
A quote from the Principia Discordia, the first holy book of Discordianism, attempts to clear up the matter:
One day Mal-2 consulted his Pineal Gland and asked Eris if She really created all of those terrible things. She told him that She had always liked the Old Greeks, but that they cannot be trusted with historic matters. "They were," She added, "victims of indigestion, you know." Suffice it to say that Eris is not hateful or malicious. But she is mischievous, and does get a little bitchy at times. [3]
The story of Eris being snubbed and indirectly starting the Trojan War is recorded in the Principia, and is referred to as the Original Snub. The Principia Discordia states that her parents may be as described in Greek legend, or that she may be the daughter of Void. She is the Goddess of Disorder and Being, whereas her sister Aneris (called the equivalent of Harmonia by the Mythics of Harmonia) is the goddess of Order and Non-Being. Their brother is Spirituality.[4]
Discordian Eris is looked upon as a foil to the preoccupation of western philosophy in attempting find order in the chaos of reality, in prescribing order to be synonymous with truth. Discordian Eris teaches us that the only truth is chaos, and that order and disorder are simply temporary filters applied to the lenses we view the chaos through. This is known as the Aneristic Illusion.[5]
In this telling, Eris becomes something of a patron saint of chaotic creation:
I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.[6]
The concept of Eris as developed by the Principia Discordia is used and expanded upon in the science fiction work The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (in which characters from Principia Discordia appear). In this work, Eris is a major character.[7]
Other [ edit ]
The classic fairy tale Sleeping Beauty is partly inspired by Eris' role in the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Like Eris, a malevolent fairy curses a princess after not being invited to the princess' christening.[8][9]
See also [ edit ]It happens to us all: you spend all day avoiding the cookie jar at work, but when you pass by it in the late afternoon, your hand reaches in and grabs a cookie. Before you know it, you’re wiping crumbs from your mouth. Or, on the way to the new job, you get distracted by a news story on the radio. When the story ends, you look up and you’re at your old job, wondering how you got there.
What’s going on? How can we perform complicated behaviors without even realizing what we’re doing? Neuroscience and psychology help answer this question. The first step is to think of the brain not as a single entity, but rather as several learning and control processes that can each control behavior. In other words, we are composed of several different “selves” (“I can’t believe I let myself eat that cookie!”) and those selves sometimes come into conflict.
We can better understand two of these processes, goal-directed (or “conscious”) and habitual (or “automatic”), by understanding how neuroscientists think of them. A series of elegant experiments conducted by Anthony Dickinson and colleagues in the early 1980s at the University of Cambridge in England clearly exposes the behavioral differences between goal-directed and habitual processes. Basically, in the training phase, a rat was trained to press a lever in order to receive some food. Then, in a second phase, the rat was placed in a different cage without a lever and was given the food, but it was made ill whenever it ate the food. This caused the rat to “devalue” the food, because it associated the food with being ill, without directly associating the action of pressing the lever with being ill. Finally, in the test phase, the rat was placed in the original cage with the lever. (To prevent additional learning, no food was delivered in the test phase.) Rats that had undergone an extensive training phase continued to press the lever in the test phase even though the food was devalued; their behavior was called habitual. Rats that had undergone a moderate training phase did not, and their behavior was called goal-directed.
Referring to Figure 1, goal-directed behavior is explained by the rat using an explicit prediction of the consequence, or outcome, of an action to select that action. If the rat wants the food, it presses the lever, because it predicts that pressing the lever will deliver the food. If the food has been devalued, the rat will not press the lever. Habitual behavior is explained by a strong association between an action and the situation from which the action was executed. The rat presses the lever when it sees the lever, not because of the predicted outcome.
More recent work by David Neal (while at the University of Southern California) and colleagues illustrate this same type of behavior in humans in a more palatable scenario: eating popcorn at the movies. Some participants were given freshly popped popcorn, while others were given stale popcorn. Most participants that were given fresh popcorn ate the fresh popcorn. Out of those that were given stale popcorn, those that usually ate popcorn at the movies ate the stale popcorn–they acted habitually. Those that usually did not eat popcorn at the movies ate less of the stale popcorn–they acted under goal-directed control.
The two separate processes are mediated by mostly-separate networks in the brain. Damage to the network involving goal-directed processes, which includes the prefrontal cortex and the dorsomedial striatum of the basal ganglia, results in habitual processes dominating behavior. This makes sense because the prefrontal cortex, which is located behind your forehead, has working memory capabilities that allow it to temporarily represent the desired outcome, such as the food reward or popcorn, which elicits the action. On the other hand, damage to the network involving habitual processes, which includes sensorimotor cortices and the dorsolateral striatum, results in goal-directed processes dominating behavior.
Goal-directed and habitual processes can each generate behavior. So, why do we have both of them? From a functional point of view, they have different advantages and disadvantages, and thus are useful for controlling behavior under different circumstances. Goal-directed processes use a model of the environment to predict the possible outcomes of each action. They are deliberative in that you use the model to mentally go through different actions and even sequences of actions, and then execute the one that you predict will deliver the desired outcome. This is like using a map of a city–where the map is the model of the environment–to navigate from point A to point B (see Figure 2). The advantages of goal-directed control are that it’s very flexible and it doesn’t require much experience: as long as your map is accurate, you can navigate from any point to any other, even in a city you’ve never visited. (This scheme is similar to the use of cognitive maps to control behavior as described by the American psychologist Edward Tolman in the late 1940s.)
Of course, the versatility afforded by goal-directed control comes with a price: it require cognitive effort–memory and computations–in order to represent the model of the environment and to search through the model to choose the best actions. Habitual control, on the other hand, is much simpler because it relies on just an association between the “state,” or environmental situation, you’re in and the action. The stronger that association is, the more likely it is that you’ll select that action from that state.
Habitual processes are trained by experience: if you frequently execute an action from the same state (like taking a left at the intersection of Pleasant Street and Main Street), and the outcome of that action is good (you reach your destination), the strength of the association between the state and action will increase (see Figure 2). (This training scheme is similar to the Law of Effect described by the American psychologist Edward Thorndike in the early 1900s.) Goal-directed processes can generate this experience until habitual processes are trained enough, but experience can also be generated by randomly trying out different actions.
If, after you execute the action, you wind up in another state in which there is a strong association with another action, and from there you wind up in yet another state in which there is a strong association with an action, habitual processes allow you to execute a sequence of actions without much cognitive effort. Thus, even complicated behavior, like taking a series of turns while driving to work, can continue under habitual control as long as things proceed as expected. However, if you wind up in an unexpected state, as may be the case if part of your usual route was closed due to construction, you may revert to goal-directed control.
We’re all familiar with acting with little conscious effort (when was the last time you thought about typing each character of your password?) and early psychologists noted the advantages of such control. In his seminal 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, the American psychologist and philosopher William James noted that, without habitual processes, “we could not accomplish everyday tasks as each little act, like tying our shoes or dressing ourselves, would require so much conscious effort that we will be exhausted. … The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” By using habitual processes to control routine behavior, we can use our goal-directed processes for other purposes, like reasoning about longer-term plans or executing other behaviors in parallel.
So, goal-directed processes are deliberative, flexible, and don’t require much training, but they require much cognitive effort. Habitual processes require little cognitive effort, but they are not as flexible and they require some training. The former is better when flexibility is needed, and when the unexpected happens, but the latter is better when behavior is routine and things proceed in a consistent manner. Assuming both processes are available, how does the brain arbitrate between them? This is an important question that remains largely unanswered, but theoretical studies offer possible explanations. Nathaniel Daw at New York University and colleagues suggest that a measure of certainty or confidence is associated with each process, and a separate arbitration process chooses the more certain of the two in any given situation. A study of mine suggests that the simplicity of the habitual processes causes them to elicit actions, if they are trained enough, faster than goal-directed processes. Dickinson and colleagues suggest that habitual processes dominate when the rate of outcome delivery (such as food) no longer increases as rate of behavior (such as lever pressing) increases. In all three cases, control is transferred from goal-directed processes to habitual processes as experience is accrued. Also, goal-directed processes can actively suppress habitual processes, though suppressing the habitual process as well as determining the appropriate action likely requires more cognitive effort than just determining the appropriate action.
Finally, some disorders in behavior can be explained by an imbalance between goal-directed and habitual processes. Some symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder or drug addiction may be due to overly-strong habitual processes, and even overly-strong habits of thought: you “know” that you don’t have to flip the light switch a third time or that you shouldn’t reach for the cigarette, but you do so anyway. In the other direction, a recent theory of Parkinson’s disease noted that damage to dopamine projections to the dorsolateral striatum, which mediates habitual processes, occurs earlier than projections to dorsomedial striatum, which mediates goal-directed processes. As the disease progresses, fewer behaviors would be control by habitual processes, and even routine behaviors would have to be executed with relatively slow, deliberative goal-directed processes.
Having a better understanding of the differences between goal-directed and habitual processes gives us a better understanding of our own behavior. You might think about changing your behavior in terms of goal-directed processes and leaving it at that: “I shouldn’t eat cookies, so I won’t put my hand in the cookie jar.” However, you might have a previously established habit of executing the action of reaching into the cookie jar whenever you’re in the state of seeing the cookie jar in the break room at work. So, knowing that it takes extra cognitive effort to suppress the habit, it makes sense to get enough rest so as to ensure that you can exert the required effort to suppress the habit. Or, even better, you should try to avoid the state of being in the break room altogether so that the habit won’t be triggered. Even a small change in state might suffice: David Neal and colleagues showed that when their participants were given the stale popcorn in a room other than the movie theater, even the habitual popcorn eaters didn’t eat as much. As another example, you may have recently changed jobs and now have to take a slightly different route to work. Your previously established habits of taking certain turns at particular intersections may be triggered if you’re distracted. It may make sense to allow goal-directed processes to dominate control by not listening to the radio during the first few days at the new job.
So, if you want to change your behavior, perhaps the question shouldn’t always be, “how do I convince myself” to act a certain way. Instead, a better question might be “which process do I want to control my behavior?”
Further reading:
Here are some nice review papers that focus on the neuroscience of goal-directed and habitual control:
Ray J. Dolan and Peter Dayan (2013). Goals and Habits in the Brain. Neuron, volume 80, pages 312–325.
Ann M. Graybiel (2008). Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain. Annual Reviews Neuroscience, volume 31, pages 359–387.
Peter Redgrave, Manuel Rodriguez, Yoland Smith, Maria C. Rodriguez-Oroz, Stephane Lehericy, Hahai Bergman, Yves Agid, Mahlon R. DeLong, and Jose A. Obeso (2010). Goal-directed and Habitual Control in the Basal Ganglia: Implications for Parkinson’s Disease. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, volume 11, pages 760–772.
Henry H. Yin and Barbara J. Knowlton (2006). The Role of the Basal Ganglia in Habit Formation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, volume 7, pages 464–476.
Here are citations for the specific studies I described:
Nathaniel D. Daw, Yael Niv, and Peter Dayan (2005). Uncertainty-based Competition Between Prefrontal and Dorsolateral Striatal Systems for Behavioral Control. Nature Neuroscience, volume 8, pages 1704–1711.
Anthony Dickinson (1985). Actions and Habits: The Development of Behavioural Autonomy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, volume 308, pages 67–78.
David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, Mengju Wu, and David Kurlander (2011). The Pull of the Past: When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict With Motives? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, volume 37, pages 1428–1437.
Ashvin Shah and Andrew G. Barto (2009). Effect on Movement Selection of an Evolving Sensory Representation: A Multiple Controller Model of Skill Acquisition. Brain Research, volume 1299, pages 55–73.For years, Joan Burke has had to battle the fact that homelessness, for most Americans, is an invisible scourge. Recently, however, invisibility hasn't exactly been the problem.
Ten minutes' walk from where she works, at the homelessness charity Loaves and Fishes, in Sacramento, California, lies an all-too-visible "tent city" - a shanty town, built on wasteground beside railway tracks, that has become one of the most prominent symbols of the recession.
Tent cities reminiscent of the "Hoovervilles" of the Great Depression have been springing up in cities across the United States - from Reno in Nevada to Tampa in Florida - as foreclosures and redundancies force middle-class families from their homes.
"Where the tent city is now is literally a toxic waste dump, it's unsafe, but these people are very resourceful," Burke said. "Some people are living in squalor, with just a tarp tied to a chainlink fence. But then you'll see someone with several tents: The tent they live in, plus some outbuilding tents. And they couldn't be more neat and more tidy. They're working hard to create a sense of home."
Many of the 200 residents of Sacramento's Tent City, as with those around the country, are not recent victims of the downturn: They are the chronically homeless, some of them mentally ill. But the encampment seized national attention after Oprah Winfrey featured it on her daytime television show, part of a series of reports she has been running on the "new faces" of homelessness.
Embarrassed by an influx of television crews, Arnold Schwarzenegger this week announced plans to house the tent-dwellers in a nearby convention centre until a $1m (£690,000) plan for more permanent shelter can be implemented.
The California governor told reporters he had "personally delivered a letter to President Barack Obama last week, to request that economic stimulus funds for the homeless be fast-tracked".
Obama grappled with the phenomenon on Tuesday, when a reporter at his primetime news conference asked him about the "tent cities sprouting up across the country". The president said he was "heartbroken that any child in America is homeless", adding: "The most important thing I can do on their behalf is to make sure their parents have a job."
In both the number and types of inhabitants, the new tent cities do not equate to the homelessness of the 1930s. But the symbolism is powerful, and may have significant political consequences. It was not all that far from Sacramento, or from Fresno - home to another Californian tent city - that the celebrated Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange took her haunting photos of families living in makeshift camps, forced west by the collapsed economy and the Dust Bowl further east.
"We all take care of each other," Michelle Holbrook, a 34-year-old resident of the Sacramento camp who lost her job as a carer, told the San Jose Mercury News. "I've become the camp mother: I do most of the cooking, and make hot water for coffee." A resident of Reno's tent city, Tammy, said: "We eat things that other people throw out, or whatever... It's really embarrassing to say, but that's the way it sometimes is out here." Another Reno tent-dweller, Jim, told one of Oprah's reporters it was "like learning how to live all over again".
Obama's stimulus package includes $1.5bn for emergency shelters, and, if passed, his budget should significantly expand funding for affordable housing. Philip Mangano, director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, has called the stimulus funds "manna from heaven", saying they would boost his two-pronged strategy of preventing homelessness while rapidly re-housing those who fall victim to it. Last year, the US government reported that homelessness in America had declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007.
Burke, whose organisation provides food and shower facilities for Sacramento's Tent City residents, has mixed feelings about the national media exposure. It may help build support for addressing the problem, she said, but also threatens to reinforce a distinction between the "deserving" victims of the recession and those who have been homeless for longer, and for other reasons.
"It's an oddity of human nature that we are more about people who have suffered for a short time, rather than people who have suffered for a long time," she said. "When we can identify with somebody's situation, obviously, our empathy is engaged quickly: You can look at someone and say, 'You know, goodness, they owned their own home, they look like I do.' But if someone's been homeless for a while, they no longer look like we think we look. If you're living in a tent, it doesn't take long before you're somewhat unkempt and dirty, because you're living in the dirt."
The changing economy has, accordingly, thrown very different kinds of people into close quarters with one another. In Fresno, freelance electricians and truck drivers, employed until months ago, rub shoulders with crack addicts and those with serious psychological problems. There have been reports of violence in one part of Fresno's encampment, known as New Jack City, but Burke said what really impressed her in Sacramento was the degree of cooperation.
"There is a sort of very pure democracy and self-governance at play. People are making up the rules of their cluster of tents, deciding what's permitted, just as in any sort of community," she said. "You don't want to romanticise this - it isn't camping - but there is a community, and there is a sense of helping others. We've had a series of storms here recently, and if there's somebody new who doesn't have a tent, people will take them in. It's that understanding that, you know, there's somebody worse off than I am."For the first time ever, scientists have identified clusters of genes in the brain that are believed to be linked to human intelligence.
The two clusters, called M1 and M3, are networks each consisting of hundreds of individual genes, and are thought to influence our cognitive functions, including memory, attention, processing speed, and reasoning.
Most provocatively, the researchers who identified M1 and M3 say that these clusters are probably under the control of master switches that regulate how the gene networks function. If this hypothesis is correct and scientists can indeed find these switches, we might even be able to manipulate our genetic intelligence and boost our cognitive capabilities.
"We know that genetics plays a major role in intelligence but until now haven't known which genes are relevant," said neurologist Michael Johnson, at Imperial College London in the UK. "This research highlights some of the genes involved in human intelligence, and how they interact with each other."
The researchers made their discovery by examining the brains of patients who had undergone neurosurgery for the treatment of epilepsy. They analysed thousands of genes expressed in the brain and combined the findings with two sets of data: genetic information from healthy people who had performed IQ tests, and from people with neurological disorders and intellectual disability.
Comparing the results, the researchers discovered that some of the genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people can also cause significant neurological problems if they end up mutating.
"Traits such as intelligence are governed by large groups of genes working together – like a football team made up of players in different positions," |
) legislation to end new federal fossil fuel leases and cancel non-producing federal fossil fuel leases. Days later President Obama canceled the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, saying, “Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.”
Download the September 2015 “Keep It in the Ground” letter to President Obama.
Download Grounded: The President’s Power to Fight Climate Change, Protect Public Lands by Keeping Publicly Owned Fossil Fuels in the Ground (this report details the legal authorities with which a president can halt new federal fossil fuel leases).
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
Download The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions of U.S. Federal Fossil Fuels (this report quantifies the volume and potential greenhouse gas emissions of remaining federal fossil fuels) and The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions fact sheet.
Download Over-leased: How Production Horizons of Already Leased Federal Fossil Fuels Outlast Global Carbon Budgets.
Download Critical Gulf: The Vital Importance of Ending Fossil Fuel Leasing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Download Public Lands, Private Profits about the corporations profiting from climate-destroying fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
Download the Center for Biological Diversity’s legal petition calling on the Obama administration to halt all new offshore fossil fuel leasing.
Download the Center for Biological Diversity’s legal petition with 264 other groups calling on the Obama administration to halt all new onshore fossil fuel leasing.
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Picture it: February 2015, Glendale, Arizona. Michael Goodell, the brother of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, is in town for the Super Bowl. Michael Goodell is gay. He has also garnered media attention in recent months by encouraging the NFL to accept and be welcoming of NFL prospect Michael Sam and all players regardless of their sexuality. Michael Goodell attempts to walk into a Glendale coffee shop for a snack on the day before the big game. The owner recognizes him from the recent press coverage, denies him service and tells him to leave. Michael Goodell, used to a red carpet and not a slap in the face, refuses. The owner calls the police and has the commissioner’s brother arrested because his very presence violates the owner’s religious principles and therefore the laws of Arizona. Ad Policy
This would be the fate of LGBT people throughout Arizona if Governor Jan Brewer signs Senate Bill 1062 this Friday. Not content with codifying the racial profiling of immigrants, the Arizona Senate wants to bring yet another twenty-first-century variant of Jim Crow segregation to their state. Brewer has given some early indication that she would not sign the bill, but we have heard precious little from an NFL who by threatening to move the Super Bowl, could cost the state millions in revenue and even more in prestige. So far, all we have heard from the league came from their spokesman Greg Aiello who stated, “Our policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness, and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or any other improper standard. We are following the issue in Arizona and will continue to do so should the bill be signed into law, but will decline further comment at this time.”
This is weak sauce. Roger Goodell should be threatening to pull the Big Game out of the state unless Brewer vetoes the law, not only because it’s the right thing to do but because it would be a show of support to Arizona’s own Super Bowl host committee, which said in a written statement, “We do not support this legislation.”
If Goodell threatened to pull the game, he would be following the precedent of his predecessor Paul Tagliabue who, in 1990, moved the 1993 Super Bowl out of Arizona because of the state’s refusal to recognize Martin Luther King Day. I spoke with Wade Davis, former NFL player and executive director of the You Can Play project. He recalled that previous show of courage under the previous commissioner, saying, “Similar to 1993 when the NFL moved the Super Bowl [out of Arizona] due to the state’s failed recognition of MLK Day, I firmly believe the NFL will stand in solidarity with human rights advocates who oppose the bill and move the 2015 Super Bowl.”
The Arizona Cardinals have not commented on pulling the Super Bowl, but they did e-mail us their displeasure with the bill. The team wrote, “What so many love about football is its ability to bring people together. We do not support anything that has the potential to divide, exclude and discriminate. As a prominent and highly-visible member of this community, we strive to bring positive attention to the state. We are concerned with anything that creates a negative perception of Arizona and those of us who are fortunate to call it home.”
While we all wait for Roger Goodell to say something about this bill, news emerged this week that the NFL is considering Arizona as the future site of the Pro Bowl. In other words, while the nation recoils at Jan Brewer’s pariah state, Roger Goodell—blinders firmly in place—lumbers forward, doing business with a place that should be seen as radioactive.
It is time for the commissioner to act even if it hurts the men who pay his obscene $44 million salary. Here we have a league that is trying to project itself as welcoming to players who want to be open and honest about their sexuality. They cannot do that and hold the Super Bowl or the Pro Bowl in a state that proudly projects itself as a bastion of intolerance. They cannot put NFL employees, players and family members in a situation where they would be unsafe. Roger Goodell has said all the right things in recent weeks about the league being an open and inclusive environment. He needs to be told that words, when not matched with deeds, are very cheap. For $44 million a year, one would think he could afford to do better.In September, Congress will debate yet another temporary budget, or "Continuing Resolution" to fund the federal government. Democrats want the CR to undo the president's sequester cuts, and chug ahead with ever-increasing spending levels. (Total federal outlays have doubled since 2000, yet any proposed slowdown or attempt at balance is demagogued as draconian austerity). Republican leadership has indicated they will use their CR leverage to defend the modest spending restraint measures already in place, and to seek additional reforms. Now a group of Senate conservatives has come forward with a new strategy: Block any short-term budget that continues to subsidize the president's unpopular and unwieldy healthcare law. Some Obamacare opponents are pushing back against the plan, setting up an intense internecine battle within the GOP. While the "defund it" contingent is casting the disagreement as a matter of principle, skeptics say their opposition arises from tactical concerns, not a diminished commitment to opposing the law. This dynamic played out on the Senate floor yesterday evening, when Tea Party-aligned Senators Mike Lee, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz engaged in a lengthy colloquy about their intent to defund Obamacare through the CR process. The clip below is a tad lengthy, so I'd recommend toggling ahead to the 32:00 mark, where Rubio compares Obamacare to "New Coke," then explains why he believes the September showdown is the appropriate moment to take this fight to the mat. "This is our last, best chance," he says. A few minutes later (38:15), Cruz rises to ask three questions of Lee, the purpose of which is to lay out the trio's messaging and rationale as they kick off their endeavor:
Lee rightly observes that conservatives aren't exactly threatening to shut down the government, nor do they want to. Their goal is to fully fund the government -- prioritizing key line items like paying the troops, sending out Social Security checks and servicing the debt -- while simply omitting the parcel of spending devoted to Obamacare. If Harry Reid and Barack Obama refuse to go along with this plan, these Senators argue, it would be Democrats who'd force any potential shutdown. After the floor exchange concluded, conservative Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma offered an extended rebuttal, applauding his colleagues for their passion in resisting a fatally flawed law, but questioning the efficacy of their game plan. Coburn, a medical doctor and fiscal hawk, notes that he's combated Obamacare ever since it was introduced in 2009. He also reminds Cruz & Co. that he's voted against every recent CR because he opposes them in principle, believing them to be an irresponsible form of piecemeal governance. But he submits that risking a shutdown showdown over a fraction of Obamacare funding (much of which falls in the "mandatory spending" category, and would be unaffected anyway) is misguided and counter-productive:
This fracture presents a dilemma for those of us who think the "Affordable Care Act" is a monstrosity that must be erased before it can inflict more damage upon families and businesses. Regular readers are aware that my opposition to Obamacare runs deep, so my heart is with the "defund" effort; but Coburn's admonitions and alternative path are sensible, and shouldn't be ignored. Another staunch Obamacare critic, healthcare wonk Jeffrey Anderson, opines in favor of a " delay, not defund " approach:
Taken together, all of these polls suggest that an effort that is framed as defunding Obamacare is likely a political loser, while efforts to delay two of Obamacare’s most central and least popular provisions—its individual mandate and its fraud-friendly exchanges—would likely be embraced by all but the far left of the political spectrum. If congressional Republicans decide to make approval of a continuing resolution or a debt-limit increase contingent upon anything relating to Obamacare, delay of these two central elements would seem to offer the best chance for rallying public support.
Black has just unveiled the No Subsidies Without Verification Act, or H.R. 2775, which does just what I suggested. “By not verifying eligibility for Obamacare, the administration will ensure that the government hands out billions of dollars in fraudulent payments – racking up more debt for current and future generations,” Black said in a statement. “It is simply indefensible for the administration to misuse its power and authority under the executive branch to encourage fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars in a pathetic attempt to boost enrollment in the Obamacare health insurance exchanges.” As I argued previously, Republicans should consider tying this to the fall budget battle. Adopting this measure would effectively stop Obamacare in its tracks, because HHS has already explained that, “the service described in the proposed rule is not feasible for implementation for the first year of operations.” And if Democrats refuse to accept this idea — most likely — let them squirm to explain to the American people why they’re willing to shut down the government to prevent the implementation of anti-fraud measures they once deemed necessary to make sure hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies are getting to the right people.
NYT: People questioned your legal and constitutional authority to do that unilaterally — to delay the employer mandate. Did you consult with your lawyer? MR. OBAMA: Jackie, if you heard me on stage today, what I said was that I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security – NYT: No, but specifically – MR. OBAMA: — but where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people. And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret. But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers...I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.
Poll: 80 percent of Independents and two thirds of Democrats favor delay/repeal of individual mandate. http://t.co/RIDT14Gxop — Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) July 31, 2013
On the other side of the ledger is fellow anti-Obamacare warrior Betsy McCaughey, who reasons that the administration's lawlessness leaves Congressional constitutionalists little choice but to exploit their purse-strings powers as a check on executive authority. Ben Domenech essentially splits the difference, arguing that the "defund" effort can be part of a larger strategy to tilt the terrain toward eventual repeal -- if it's executed wisely. At the end of the day, Coburn and Anderson are correct: The only way to eradicate Obamacare is to repeal it, which cannot and will not happen so long as Barack Obama is president. The law, which is faltering on its own, is viewed very dimly by the public -- but the same public is wary of outright defunding it straight away, and remainsskittish about a government shutdown. Polls show voters would blame Republicans for such a disruption, creating an opening for Democrats to muddy the waters on Obamacare, and undermine Republicans' heretofore effective critiques of the law. I'd be willing to take the plunge anyway if the plan had any chance of succeeding, but it doesn't. Senate Democrats and the White House absolutely will not budge on this. (Remember, Obama threatened to veto a House bill that codified hisof Obamacare's employer mandate). Though I share the impulse to stand on principle here, such an effort presents an extreme public relations risk with zero chance of paying off. Based on that cost-benefit analysis, I tend to conclude that Coburn is right about his colleagues' otherwise admirable idea. The most intriguing part of Coburn's speech was his suggestion that Senate Republicans could garner majority support for delaying the widely-hated individual mandate tax (in addition to the employer mandate), and could force Democrats into a very tough vote on withholding funding for Obamacare exchanges until the law's anti-fraud verification systems are established. Philip Klein has practically been begging Republicans to go this route since eligibility standards were watered down in early July:President Obama was asked by thewhether he has the authority to re-engineer the healthcare law on-the-fly. Theburied Obama's reply, which was jaw-dropping in its imperiousness:Allahpundit marvels at this answer, which amounts to, "I'm a constitutional lawyer, and I'm going to do whatever it takes. I have this authority because I say so." Incidentally, contra Obama, roughly half of Congress is comprised of lawyers -- including Rubio, Lee and Cruz; the latter two are accomplished Constitutional scholars. Meanwhile, the federal cost of Obamacare is increasing, as states announce that millions of consumers should brace for double- and triple-digit premium hikes. Conservatives' resolve to limit and eliminate Obamacare's destructive outcomes must not waver, but strategy and public perceptions matter a lot in politics. Regardless of where one comes down in this dispute, it's wise to heed the advice of both Rubio and Coburn, who urge allies to resist questioning one other's motives. "Team Cruz" and "Team Coburn" share the same objective -- their disagreement lies in identifying the smartest path to reach the same destination.Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Balad MK Haneen Zoabi accused Israeli security forces of unnecessarily shooting and killing the Israeli Arab man who perpetrated the shooting attack in Tel Aviv last week which killed two Israelis.
"The shooting and killing of Nashat Milhem is an execution. In spite of the fact that the security forces could have arrested him, they were directed to execute him, because the matter at hand is the reputation of the police state. The goal is to satisfy public opinion. We need to put on trial those who shot and killed him," Zoabi said Tuesday in an interview she gave to the Palestinian channel "Musawa."
Zoabi's comments came in the wake of the shooting and killing of suspected terrorist Milhem after a week-long manhunt. Milhem fled to his home town of Arara after opening fire on a Tel Aviv pub with a semi-automatic weapon, and later killing an Israeli Arab taxi driver. Israel Police said that security forces shot Milhem in self-defense after he had opened fire at them, a claim that Zoabi appeared to reject."What is important now is the Palestinian dialogue, that is to say that all of the Palestinians in Israel need to self-reflect. We are emphasizing again that we have explicitly chosen the political struggle, and that violence is not our way," highlighted Mk Zoabi. "Our way is political struggle. We do not need to provide testimonial of good character. All of the television news agencies in Israel are putting us on trial, and they are forcing us to provide a testimonial of good character, to the point of self-humiliation."Zoabi added that "we do not know the background of the attack that was carried out by Nashat Milhem. Maybe it was criminally motivated, maybe it was motivated by his mental state. Someone wants to close the file on this case. It is in our interest that this case be opened. Where is the security footage from the cameras near the cafe in Tel Aviv? I would have thought that the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) would have wanted to arrest him alive, after a week-long manhunt, in order to understand how he succeeded in evading the police and the Shin Bet who can usually apprehend anyone they want."The MK addressed efforts to repossess illegal arms, saying, "The Israel Police started to address the illegal arms concerns in the Arab sector only after a Jew was wounded and there was use of a weapon in Tel Aviv. Hundreds of times weapons have been used in the Arab sector, and in one of the villages in the northern cluster of Arab towns in Israel, commonly referred to as "The Triangle," 70 people were murdered in recent years, and only one perpetrator has faced a trial. Over all these years, the weapons problem and surging violence in the Arab sector has been met by apathy because it has forced us to deal with our own issues rather than fight for our rights. How many times has the Arab leadership requested that the police come into Arab towns and seize the illegal weapons, and nobody blamed them for their incompetence in dealing with crime in the Arab sector. It has become evident that it is not in Israel's interest to seize these weapons. Netanyahu speaks of two nations, and I am speaking about two interests: The concerns of the Jews and the concerns of the Arabs."
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>The weeks after Tax Day used to be time for a much deserved break for accounting firms.
No more. After tax season comes recruitment and retention time.
“The competition for these talented professionals is as great as ever, as great as I can remember. There are so many opportunities for these individuals to choose,” said Jeff Cotton, Minneapolis managing partner for accounting and consulting firm Deloitte.
Indeed, not only do accounting firms need to compete with one another for new candidates, they have to keep their own employees from jumping ship, some even to the clients.
Total demand for accounting graduates continues to increase, according to the 2015 trends report published by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. In 2014, CPA firms hired 43,252 new accounting graduates, a 7 percent jump from the year before, with a majority of the increase coming from master’s hires.
Accountant salary ranges are expected to climb an average 4.7 percent this year, as reported by Robert Half’s Salary Guide.
“In my 29 years I can’t remember a time where there has been such a strong demand for people as there is right now,” said Steve Kenney, regional vice president for the Robert Half staffing agency, in an interview. “There’s a home for every candidate.”
There are fewer people pursuing accounting and who want to undergo the 150 college credit hours needed to become a certified public accountant, Kenney said. The field also can be unappealing for those who don’t want to deal with the stress of 60-hour minimum work weeks during a monthslong span.
Companies are competing aggressively for hires, Kenney said. Especially as they face impending waves of retirements, they also are trying to change so they are more appealing to millennials.
At the local offices for Deloitte, which employs around 900 workers in the Twin Cities making it the area’s largest professional services office, the talent challenge is “one of our most pressing issues,” Cotton said.
“Some of our professionals may get through a busy season and think about, ‘Boy, are there other opportunities somewhere else that might be better for me personally or for my family?’ ” he said. “For us, this is the time of the year where we want to spend time with our people and we want to thank them for all the hard work and sacrifice that they put in.”
One large investment Deloitte made was in training. The company in 2011 opened the $300 million Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas.
During fiscal year 2015, close to 50,000 Deloitte professionals visited at the 700,000-square-foot campus.
“We think that we have something that other organizations don’t have,” Cotton said. “We really think it’s state of the art and leading edge.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) employs about 650 people in the Twin Cities, and the office here hires about 100 students on campuses each year. About 70 to 80 percent of employees are millennials, who crave flexibility among other priorities.
“It is a war for talent,” said Tom Montminy, managing partner of PwC’s Greater Minneapolis market. “Hire, train and retain. We don’t have a product; our product is our people.”
PwC recently launched the Talent Exchange, a digital portal to connect independent contractors to work projects. And starting in July, PwC will pay $100 a month for up to six years toward the college loans of its young workers as part of an incentive program open to any employee with less than six years on the job.
The Minneapolis PwC office also is moving its downtown office this summer to the PwC Plaza at 45 S. 7th St., another change that it hopes will appeal to a younger demographic of its employees. The space is being designed to allow for more collaboration and mobile workspaces complete with interactive cafes, a wall of whiteboards in almost every office, and roof decks including one on the 35th floor that will give a view of Target Field.
While large firms have advantages, small and midsize firms are stepping up their games as well.
Eden Prairie-based accounting and financial consulting firm Boulay stresses to potential employees the opportunities to learn in a more hands-on environment, said Julie Brown, a Boulay human resources representative.
“I like that we can offer a student coming out of college as an intern, as an associate, being able to actually have conversations with these business owners,” she said.
Boulay has about 160 employees and prides itself on a culture of camaraderie where staff attend family events and employee dinners, Brown said.
Often smaller firms give young workers the chance to get their hands dirty, said Scott Kadrlik, managing partner at Meuwissen, Flygare, Kadrlik and Associates.
“We don’t shelter these kids,” he said. “We don’t put them in a corner. We are giving them client contact.”
His small firm of fewer than 20 people owes its retention to flexibility, Kadrlik said. Employees can choose work schedules that work for them.
To cope with the increased competition, John A. Knutson and Co. in Falcon Heights started approaching and making offers to job candidates earlier in the school year and is doing more continued recruitment, said Kyla Hansen, a director who is on the hiring committee at the firm.
She said she thinks the industry gets “a bad rap” for burning people out, when in actuality during the off season workers can expect greater flexibility than in other jobs.
“I think the industry could do a better job of not making it sound like horror stories,” she said.
Twitter: @nicolenorfleetWhen assessing the most sexist moments from the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, perhaps the most shocking thing is that there weren't even more. That's not to say, of course, that there weren't far more sexist moments than any person, former Secretary of State or otherwise, should have to put up with — because there absolutely were. But in this hotly anticipated face-to-face meeting between one of the most accomplished women in America and a rude millionaire-cum-"politician" who added "blood coming out of her whatever" to our cultural lexicon, frankly, I was expecting much worse.
Which isn't to say Trump did a good job, or in any way exceeded expectations simply because he refrained from calling any woman a "pig" or "dog," or yet again implying that it was "disgusting" that Clinton (unlike other human beings, of course) uses the bathroom. As many sharper political minds than me have noted, the bar was set incredibly low for Trump Monday night, as it often is in general — throughout his campaign, he's had a knack for making expectations for him so low, that whenever he meets them, he's read as a success, while Clinton must meet levels of expectation that, well, make more sense for someone who we're considering electing president of the United States, rather of president of the eighth grade booger-eating society, which is the position that Trump often seems to be running for.
So I don't want to be complicit in the system that sets these uneven expectations — in a way, those low expectations for Trump's words and deeds were the most sexist part of this debate, and remain one of the most sexist parts of this entire election. But the seven most sexist moments from the first presidential debate still come pretty damn close. All words are drawn for the Washington Post transcript of the debate.
1. Trump Tells Clinton, "I Want You To Be Very Happy. It's Very Important To Me"
The first few minutes of the debate were, in many ways, a master class in usage of insincere niceness as a tool of aggression. Clinton's "Donald, It's good to be with you" was a sick burn for the ages that managed to be hilarious without really taking any potshots at any aspect of Trump's campaign or self (except, you know, the idea that anyone would enjoy being with him).
But Trump's passive-aggressive volley — “Secretary Clinton, is that OK? Good. I want you to be very happy. It’s very important to me” — took that emotional cold war to a new, and sexist, level.
The basic question about whether it was OK to refer to Clinton as "Secretary Clinton" was bizarre — of course it is, as she has held the office of Secretary of State and thus can be described using that honorific, in the same way that we could refer to Trump as "Person Who Was In Home Alone 2 Trump." But his follow-up — "Good. I want you to be very happy" — was an odd sexist piece of attempted snark. Is the implication that she's a child? That all women are children? We may never quite know — but we do know that it was among the first of many strange sexist moments Monday night.
2. Trump Mansplains Military Strategy
Clinton repeatedly referred to her website throughout the debate, because, well, it contains a lot of proposed policy information that should be relevant to you if you're trying to figure out how to cast your vote. And when Clinton noted that her website included this relevant information, Trump interrupted, proclaiming "She tells you how to fight ISIS on her website. I don't think Gen. Douglas MacArthur would like that too much." Then, when Clinton responded, "Well, at least I have a plan to fight ISIS," Trump responded, "See, you're telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you've been fighting — no wonder you've been fighting ISIS your entire adult life."
As I'm sure you already know, ISIS was formally named in 2013, which would make Clinton about 25 years old if she had had her entire adult life occupied by fighting the group. But Trump's assumption that he, a person who has never held political office in any capacity, knows more than a former secretary of state about how to plan military actions — or, indeed, what a dead military general might think about said military actions — smacked of incredible sexism.
3. Trump Talks About Clinton's "Stamina"
When it comes to coded terms used by politicians to invoke ideas beyond the words they are directly saying, Monday night's invocation of "stamina" was a gold star effort. After moderator Lester Holt asked Trump, "Earlier this month, you said [Clinton] doesn't have, quote, 'a presidential look.' She's standing here right now. What did you mean by that?" Trump attempted to force the conversation in a different direction, replying, "She doesn't have the look. She doesn't have the stamina. I said she doesn't have the stamina. And I don't believe she does have the stamina. To be president of this country, you need tremendous stamina."
So what does "stamina" mean, in this context? Could it mean, I don't know, just to make up an example, campaigning through a case of pneumonia? Nope; instead, Trump replied with this nugget of mystery: "You have to be able to negotiate our trade deals. You have to be able to negotiate, that's right, with Japan, with Saudi Arabia. I mean, can you imagine, we're defending Saudi Arabia? And with all of the money they have, we're defending them, and they're not paying? All you have to do is speak to them. Wait. You have so many different things you have to be able to do, and I don't believe that Hillary has the stamina."
So stamina is about... making other countries pay us to defend them? Does "stamina" here mean, oh, I don't know, "having a penis?"
I'll let Clinton's own reply to that one close this section out: "Well, as soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, an opening of new opportunities in nations around the world, or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina."
4. Trump Criticizes Clinton For Preparing For The Debate
Within a larger (and frankly extremely questionable) comment about African-American communities, Trump tried to diss Clinton for having curbed campaign trail appearances in recent weeks in order to prepare for the debate: "[Y]ou know, you've seen me, I've been all over the place. You decided to stay home, and that's OK. But I will tell you, I've been all over. "
The sexist invocation of Clinton as some kind of Hermoine-esque planner who is far too nerdy to be president is familiar at this point, which is why it was such a relief to hear Clinton proudly owning it in her reply: "I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And, yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president. And I think that's a good thing."
5. Trump Blames Clinton For Literally Every Problem In The World
When Clinton joked that, "I have a feeling that by, the end of this evening, I'm going to be blamed for everything that's ever happened," Trump jumped in with a "Why not?" that was honestly pretty illuminating about his entire campaign strategy. Why not scapegoat a woman, or an ethnic group, or a wide variety of ethnic groups, or literally anyone it's convenient to blame in that moment? That "Why not?" stood in for the entire Trump campaign.
6. Trump Chides Clinton For Not Being "Nice"
Let's set aside the fact that Trump himself is not known for saying particularly nice things on the campaign trail, and simply take in the raw sexism of a man chastising a woman running campaign ads FOR HER PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN and not being "nice" in them.
Trump said, "I was going to say something...extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, 'I can't do it. I just can't do it. It's inappropriate. It's not nice.' But she spent hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads on me, many of which are absolutely untrue. They're untrue. And they're misrepresentations. And I will tell you this, Lester: It's not nice. And I don't deserve that. But it's certainly not a nice thing that she's done."
Because, obviously, not bringing up rumors about about a rival's family (which he essentially still did, by drawing attention to them without explicitly naming them) is definitely comparable to running extremely standard campaign ads. Why can't female presidential candidates just be nicer, and not promote themselves, like real ladies?!?!
7. Trump Pats Himself On The Back For Not Mentioning Rumors About Clinton's Family (While Essentially Still Mentioning Rumors About Clinton's Family)
And while this didn't occur during the debates themselves, we'd be remiss if we didn't bring up what Trump told CNN, post-debate, that his proudest moment was not bringing up gossip about his rival's husband, which he did basically bring up during the debate while he was castigating her for being "not nice."
That anyone could think this is a legitimate way for a politician to behave in public is noxious sexism of the highest order; but the fact that public opinion seems to generally hold that Clinton "won" the debate is hopeful proof that America is too good to buy it.Strange feat, documented on video, goes to show that fishermen will do just about anything to stave off boredom
It’s easy to understand why fishermen sometimes become bored while sitting on a boat or resting on the shore, waiting for what seems an eternity for something to bite. The mind wanders, thoughts drift … and sometimes crazy ideas are hatched.
For example, YouTube user ImBFishin decided that he’d like to troll for muskies in his car, with fishing rod outstretched over a river, and with a mounted camera documenting his attempt at making what might be muskie history. (We’ve shortened the video but the entire version, which includes more commentary from the angler, can be viewed here.)
Has this ever been done before? We have no idea, but this could be the first time it was even tried.
Not only did ImBFishin manage to hook a respectable muskie, he scrambled out of the car and down the bank to reel in his prize, and back up the bank to pose with it in front of the camera. Ultimately, he let the fish go.
(We’re assuming this catch is legit. Note the gills moving as the fish is being displayed inside the car.)
“Definitely a first time for everything,” the angler says in the video. “Not a huge one, but out of a car window? I doubt many people have caught a muskie out of a car window while trolling.”
Like we said, we’re not sure anyone else has even thought to try.Several hundred people in House Speaker Paul Ryan's district voiced their concerns Sunday night to an empty chair.
A liberal activist group called Forward Kenosha organized a town hall to give people a chance to ask their congressman questions, but Ryan didn't attend
Ryan's press secretary said by email that Ryan was unable to attend the event. Nevertheless about 75 people stood up in a town hall style to "ask" the speaker questions.
Lee Hansen lives in Racine and says he has voted for Ryan once in the past.
He hoped to express his concerns Sunday over his grandchildren possibly getting drafted into a war.
"I worry about my children," he said. "I'm a veteran myself. I would hate to see my grandchildren go somewhere unnecessarily and risk their lives."
But Hansen and dozens of other people who live in Ryan's district didn't receive any answers to their questions.
"I think we're a forgotten bunch," said Hansen. "He's the Speaker of the House, he's a vice president candidate, he doesn't seem to be our congressman anymore."
The group hosting the event, Forward Kenosha, was formed after the November election.
One of the group's board members says they have protested outside of Ryan's office in the past but planned to hold a calm event with this town hall.
"We said you know...no shouting, no boo-ing, you can bring signs but make them respectful," said Charlie Breit, a Forward Kenosha board member. "The goal here isn't to sit here and create a mockery and call him out, the goal was really to have people of his district feel heard."
Those who spoke brought up topics like healthcare, refugees, planned parenthood and education.
"We just want to know what you're doing and how you're representing us," said Breit. "And we haven't felt like we got that. We get a lot of form letters back but we don't get a chance to |
less than 20% of revenue; often a lot less than 20%.
This can be a disadvantage, of course. The camera division gets whatever resources the company’s directors decide to send their way, and the camera division isn’t likely to have as much clout as several of the other divisions in the annual budget meetings.
On the other hand, some of these companies may decide to let the little camera division swing for the fences and be as innovative as they like. It’s not like they’re making a bucket of money anyway. A ‘go big or go home’ philosophy may be an exaggeration for even the most aggressive of them, but logic would suggest a well-healed company with a small camera division would be willing to take some risk. A company depending on the camera division’s revenues to keep the entire company afloat might want to protect the status quo a bit.
So Once Upon a Time...
Innovative smaller companies, being innovative, started this mirrorless thing. The Seven Dwarves were making some nice cameras, but weren’t making huge inroads in SLR market share. Sony made a splash with the Alpha cameras, but then seemed to get distracted, as Sony often seems to do. Then some of the smaller companies decided to shake things up a bit. Instead of the same-old-same-old, they were going to start a game of TEGWAR and change up the rules.
http://www.zazzle.co.uk/
The idea was simply brilliant: Just remove the phase detection autofocus system and the optical viewfinder. Do that and you can remove the entire mirror assembly. Now the backfocus distance (the distance from the back of the lens to the sensor) can be much shorter since you don’t have a swinging mirror to clear. You lose a couple of things (phase detection autofocus and the optical viewfinder) but you can use contrast detection autofocus and add an electrical viewfinder (EVF) or (ugh!) try to get by with the LCD.
All that stuff you eliminated was bulky and expensive, so cameras could become much smaller and less expensive. (Well, in theory they could become less expensive.) There weren’t a lot of lenses, but since the backfocus distance was short you could add an adapter to use legacy lenses for a while. It probably was the most brilliant idea since the Exacta introduced the world to SLR cameras back in the 1930s.
Cross-section of an Exacta SLR circa 1940. Red arrow shows the mirror and green arrow the rear of the lens, which has to be far enough away from the sensor (film actually) to allow the mirror to swing up. (image copyright Roger Cicala).
When I handled my first mirrorless, interchangeable lens camera, back in 2008, I was certain this would change everything. It was smaller. It would be less expensive. It needed a little more development and some lenses, but that would be just a matter of a couple of years. The lack of phase detection meant slower autofocus, but not that many people use entry level SLRs for action photography. Electronic viewfinders were getting good. How could it miss?
What has held back mirrorless?
A lot of you are going to get worked up about the ‘held back’ comment. After all, mirrorless is the fastest growing segment of the camera market. But remember, two years ago I said mirrorless would largely replace entry-level SLRs and that certainly hasn’t happened. So maybe “held back from fulfilling Roger’s optimistic prediction” would be more appropriate.
My prediction was off for a couple of reasons. It’s not because entry-level SLRs are so much better or less expensive than they were 3 years ago. Let’s see if I can break down what did happen.
Economic Factors
With all due respect to the Epson RD-1 and Leica M8, mirrorless cameras really began releasing in late 2008 and throughout 2009. This means they were being developed just before the Great Recession started and released in the depths of it. I can only speculate, but it seems reasonable that some manufacturers scaled back research and development during this time. Certainly a couple of companies found themselves in some financial distress. It may not have been a big factor, and nobody outside the companies knows exactly how much of a part it played, but it would be reasonable to think it had some effect in slowing development.
There was also the pricing factor, which was my first error back in 2009. If you’ve looked inside a regular SLR and a mirrorless camera, you cannot possibly doubt the mirrorless is far less expensive to produce. I made the assumption that the mirrorless cameras would be priced lower than the entry-level SLRs way before now.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Current generation mirrorless bodies run from $1799 down to $470. Prosumer and Consumer SLRs from $1700 (Nikon D300s) to $480. So the price differential between mirrorless and prosumer / consumer level SLRs didn’t really happen.
It probably would have been obvious if I had thought it through. Nikon and Canon have had entry-level SLRs at just under the $500 price point since around 2006, so they haven’t changed anything. I suspect those are break-even or loss leader price points. The mirrorless companies have to make a profit when they sell the camera, because they aren’t trying to lure entry-level photographers who will eventually climb up their equipment food chain.
Lack of Lenses
I was wrong here, too. I knew lenses would take a while, but didn’t realize it would be this long. For serious photographers, this has to be the biggest factor that prevented the adoption of mirrorless cameras. It has affected some companies (cough, Sony, cough) more than others, but lack of lenses has certainly held back mirrorless as much as any other factor.
It has become very obvious that several of the Seven Dwarves are really electronics companies. Camera companies make optics. Electronics companies make a camera body and get Leica or Zeiss to design a generic zoom lens to slap in front of it. That formula worked fine for fixed-lens point and shoots, but more serious photographers generally want lens options.
The real camera companies all tried, at least. I assume Olympus just didn’t have the resources to redesign their lenses for the shorter backfocus distance of mirrorless systems quickly, but they certainly are turning some superb ones out now. Nikon did release a reasonable set of lenses with the J1/V1 cameras. Fuji had several lenses ready with the X-Pro 1 release and a very clear timeline for more. Pentax designed their mirrorless (rightly or wrongly) to use their entire existing lens lineup, which means it had the largest native-mount lens selection of any mirrorless the day it was released.
Canon, surprisingly, may become the exception to that rule. They have only announced two lenses releasing with the EOS-M. They have, however, released several small lenses (40mm pancake and 24 and 28mm IS f/2.8) for SLRs. Perhaps we’ll see those ported over to EOS-M mount rather quickly. Or maybe not.
The ‘mostly electronic’ companies were a bit more varied. Panasonic might not have great in-house lens design abilities, but they did let Leica design a couple of superb prime lenses for their mirrorless systems. Samsung has 9 lenses available for their NX cameras, an excellent showing. (Although someone needs to tell their marketing department; the lenses are buried 3 deep under the camera page in the ‘accessories’ section.) Sony proceeded to make a series of breathtakingly small, feature-rich, excellent mirrorless cameras. But if you want to shoot native E mount lenses, well, much of that excellence is lost.
Diffraction Limits
Do any of you remember that Olympus announced, back in 2009, that the 4/3 group would not increase resolution past 12 megapixels? They changed their mind, obviously, but they didn’t change their lens designs. If you look at Micro 4/3 zoom lenses they have had a strong tendency to be aperture-impaired. Most zooms are f/5.6 or even f/6.3 at the long end. That’s not great on any camera, but it’s especially bad when you put them in front of 16 megapixel 4/3-sized sensors that become diffraction limited at f/8 or perhaps even f/5.6.
I realize that a small megazoom lens helps the ‘purseability’ of the mirrorless cameras; it’s attractive to the point-and-shoot-move-up customer. But it drives a lot of people right past mirrorless to that intro-level SLR that can mount an f/2.8 zoom or f/1.4 prime lens, or that isn’t diffraction limited with an f/5.6 lens.
They thought we would like huge lenses on adapters
It also seems apparent that several companies thought we would be happy putting a big adapter and an even larger lens on these tiny cameras. I hear it a lot from various fanboys when I trash a lens lineup (see Sony above); “You can shoot the wonderful Gazooma Lens on an adapter.” OK, so I buy this 14 ounce camera that I can take anywhere, and you suggest the best lens for it is 8 inches long, weighs two pounds, and I can go have a coffee while I wait for it to autofocus. If I’m taking the big-boy lens, then I might as well take the big-boy camera.
By their nature, adapters are problematic. Then there are the possibly accidental (yeah, I’m just as suspicious as everyone else) branded adapter incompatibility issues, particularly in the micro 4/3 world. Even when they work properly, any adapter adds two more lens-camera interfaces so that you never can be quite sure when you’ll start getting side-to-side or top-to-bottom tilt. Not to mention slow (or nonexistent) autofocus with high current drains. And, of course, some of the adapters are about as big as the cameras. I understood this as a stopgap measure. I just didn’t realize that the gap they were stopping would last for 3 years.
Short Backfocus Distance
I realized the mirrorless cameras all had this, of course (For those who don’t know the term, it basically means the back of the lens is much closer to the sensor.) I didn’t consider that short backfocus distance would change the angle of light rays impacting on the sensor, and that the sensor’s microlenses might not like this. I suspect this has something to do with why the lenses have taken longer to develop than I expected. It certainly has a lot to do with why some lenses on adapters behave differently on mirrorless cameras. Wide-angle Leica-mount lenses on NEX bodies are the best documented example, but there are certainly others that are more subtle.
“They aren’t the Same” Resistance
This one is something I never once considered; I thought it was self-evident. I wanted a small camera that I could carry anywhere conveniently that would take excellent pictures. A lot of people wanted a small camera they could take anywhere that would take exactly the same image as their SLR did. That isn’t happening.
The depth-of-field is different (I refuse to discuss how it’s different: that leads to 76-post-long forum discussions about how it can be the same if you use a different focal length, aperture, shooting distance and sacrifice a chicken at midnight. But, in general, it’s different.) The native resolution is different. The aspect ratio may be different. ISO performance may be different.
The bottom line is it’s a slightly different tool. I’ve learned that ‘different’ can be an advantage in some situations and a disadvantage in others. Medium format is different, too, with advantages and disadvantages. I don’t think this really affected my initial predictions about mirrorless, though. I didn’t expect many SLR shooters would give up their full-frame camera and move to Micro 4/3, for example. I thought they would use a mirrorless as a go-anywhere camera to compliment their SLR. But at least a few people have gone mirrorless full-time and dropped their SLRs.
So, Will I Eventually be More Correct than I Recently Was?
Yes, absolutely. More or less. I still think mirrorless takes over most of the better-than-cell-phone market from intro-level SLRs. The speed and servo functions of phase-detection AF will still pull parents of young athletes, birders, and others who need that advantage toward an SLR, so that segment will never die out entirely, of course. But for the many people, every year, who decide they just want better photographs than their cell-phone or point-and-shoot, I see mirrorless as the logical next move.
There are also old photographers like me, I mean, like I will be some day, who want a small, convenient camera with excellent image quality they can carry everywhere. I’ve always owned a top-end point and shoot but now I’ve dropped that for a mirrorless system. It’s my go everywhere camera now, although I still reach for an SLR and specific lenses for a specific purpose. But for the price of a new 70-200 f/2.8 I have an excellent, fairly complete small camera system that stays with me all the time.
I think the fun speculation, though, is what’s going to happen within the mirrorless segment, not what happens overall. That will come in part II.
Roger Cicala
August 2012
Lensrentals.com
Aside: Several people have asked lately where is this or that article, or why haven’t I posted in a couple of weeks. The answer is simple; I have long-term ADD. I tend to juggle two or three projects at once, getting bored with one and working on the other. Lately I’ve been writing this, doing the Nikon AF tests, and doing some work with third-party lens identification on Canon cameras. I’ve jumped back and forth enough that nothing has gotten finished, but they should all finish within the next week or so.More press releases
For Immediate Release, June 7, 2013 Contact: Noah Greenwald, (503) 484-7495 Obama Administration Strips Wolf Protections Across Most of Lower 48 States Plan Ends Prospects of Wolf Recovery in Southern Rockies, California, Northeast, Pacific Northwest WASHINGTON— In a move questioned by some of the world’s leading wolf researchers, the Obama administration announced plans today to prematurely strip Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves across most of the lower 48 states, abruptly ending one of America’s most important species recovery programs. The proposal concludes that wolf protection in the continental United States, in place since 1978, is no longer needed, even though there are fledgling populations in places like the Pacific Northwest whose survival hinges on continued federal protection. “This is like kicking a patient out of the hospital when they’re still attached to life support,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Wolves cling to a sliver of their historic habitat in the lower 48, and now the Obama administration wants to arbitrarily declare victory and move on. They need to finish the job that Americans expect, not walk away the first chance they get. This proposal is a national disgrace. Our wildlife deserve better.” Wolves today occupy just 5 percent of their historic habitat in the continental United States. Today’s proposal means that wolves will never fully reoccupy prime wolf habitat in the southern Rocky Mountains, California and Northeast, and will hinder ongoing recovery in the Pacific Northwest. The proposal will hand wolf management over to state wildlife agencies across most of the country – a step that has meant widespread killing in recent years. Following removal of protections for wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains and western Great Lakes in 2011, states in those regions quickly enacted aggressive hunting and trapping seasons designed to drastically reduce wolf populations. In the northern Rocky Mountains more than 1,100 wolves have been killed since protections were removed; this year populations declined by 7 percent. “By locking wolves out of prime habitat across most this country, this proposal perpetuates the global phenomena of eliminating predators that play hugely important roles in ecosystems,” said Greenwald. “Wolves are well documented to benefit a host of other wildlife from beavers and fish, to songbirds and pronghorn.” In response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, today’s proposal maintains protections for the Mexican gray wolf as a separate subspecies. Only 75 Mexican wolves roam a recovery area restricted to portions of Arizona and New Mexico. The population has not grown as expected because of a combination of illegal poaching and government mismanagement that requires wolves to be removed from the wild or killed when they leave the recovery area or depredate livestock. “It’s obvious that Mexican gray wolves continue to need protection and we’re glad they’re getting it,” said Greenwald. “But it is equally obvious that wolves in the Pacific Northwest, southern Rockies, California and Northeast also need continued protection.” The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 500,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.Monday, 6th February, 2012
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has made his pitch for Eden Hazard.
The Gunners boss is a big fan of the Lille forward and, with Hazard due to leave Rudi Garcia’s side in the summer for greener pastures, would dearly love to take him to the Emirates.
And Wenger has told the Belgian that he is ready to take the step up to a bigger club – such as Arsenal.
“I would be happy to take him as a centre back”, said Wenger to Belgian paper La Derniere Heure, with a wry smile.
"Joking aside though, I really like him – for several reasons, he added.
“His creativity, his skill at throwing opponents off balance, and his sublime ability when making the final pass make him an exciting player.”
The Frenchman then explained his belief that Hazard is ready to move to a side like Arsenal.
“Hazard has the profile which would allow him to progress at a top level club.
“Arsenal is such a top level club.”
The Gunners boss will be sure to face opposition for the Belgian’s signature however, as Hazard promises to be the most in-demand property of the summer market.
Latest Features:Over 200 Christians Arrested in India for Protesting Against Attacks on Churches
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Hundreds of Christians have reportedly been arrested in New Delhi, India, for protesting against a series of vandalism attacks against churches.
The police crackdown occurred on Thursday, when hundreds of demonstrators gathered around the Sacred Heart Cathedral, near the Indian parliament. Police barricaded the roads leading to the residence of Home Minister Rajnath Singh, and began arresting people for unlawful assembly.
"They had no permission to protest there," said Mukesh Kumar Meena, a senior police officer. The Wall Street Journal noted that as many as 350 people were initially detained.
Protesters have said that they were not planning on using any violence, however. Indian human-rights activist John Dayal said that he was one of 200 people who were arrested by police when they started the march on Singh's residence.
"Our protest demanded that the government inquire into the violence against Christians because we do not trust the police to investigate it properly," Dayal explained.
"Police told us we were disturbing the peace and threatening the police, but we are always peaceful, that is the point," he said.
Singh has said that an investigation will be launched to look into the attacks on Christian churches, but rejected accusations that the Indian government discriminates against religious minorities.
Despite promises from the government that religious freedom will be protected in India, Christians across the country have been targeted in a number of incidents in the past year.
The only Christian church in the village of Tadur in Telengana state was burned down by Hindu radicals earlier in January. Several churches have also been targeted in the Indian capital, with Archbishop Anil JT Couto noting:
"A clear pattern of orchestrated attacks is emerging as more and more churches are targetted, vandalised and set on fire," Couto said. "This is very disturbing and we request the authorities to take adequate measures to bring to book the miscreants who are threatening to weaken the social fabric of this great nation."
The International Christian Concern said that St. Sebastian's Church in East Delhi, for example, was intentionally burned down, pointing to evidence the police discovered of traces of kerosene.
"This string of church attacks in New Delhi is just a sampling of what Christians across India are facing. In India's rural areas, church burnings, beatings, social boycotts, and forced conversion attempts have become common place. India's national government has remained bizarrely silent on the issue of religious intolerance, despite the fact that it is affecting millions of its own citizens," said ICC's Regional Manager, William Stark.
"Prime Minister Modi has been called on multiple times to publicly speak on this issue, yet he has remained silent. This silence has let down India's religious minorities and only further emboldened India's Hindu radicals. ICC applauds the actions of New Delhi's Christians today as they attempt to encourage their government to protect the rights of all citizens, even if they are a religious minority."
Fides News Agency reported that the Home Minister rejected the charges of "complicity and indifference of the police," stressing that "the government does not discriminate on the basis of religion, caste or community."
Singh also met with a delegation of Christian leaders after the protests on Thursday, who told him that they had "lost confidence in the police," given that "the crimes of hatred and desecration of sacred places have so far gone unpunished."
The Christian leaders pointed out that the latest attack that shook the community in New Delhi was the desecration of the Eucharist at the church of St. Alphonsus. Although nothing was stolen, the yet unidentified vandals wanted to make "a gesture to hurt the feelings of the community," the Christians said.WNT
CHICAGO (May 5, 2014) – The U.S. Women’s National Team will face France in a pair of summer friendlies on June 14 at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, and June 19 at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, Connecticut.
Both matches kick off at 7:30 p.m. ET and will be broadcast live on ussoccer.com. Fans can also follow both games on Twitter @ussoccer_wnt.
Tickets for both games go on sale to the public Friday, May 9, at 10 a.m. ET through ussoccer.com. For the match in Tampa, tickets can also be purchased by phone at 1-800-745-3000 and at all Ticketmaster ticket centers throughout the Tampa Bay region (including Walmart).
For the event in Connecticut, tickets can also be purchased by phone at 1-877-522-8499 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET only) and at the XL Center ticket office starting Monday, May 12 (open Monday-Friday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.) [Note: Tickets are not sold at either Raymond James Stadium or Rentschler Field except on the day of the event.]
For both games, groups of 20 or more can obtain an order form at ussoccer.com or call 312-528-1290. Ultimate Fan Tickets (special VIP packages that include a premium ticket, a custom-made official U.S. National Team jersey with name and number, VIP access to the field before and after the game, and other unique benefits) are also available exclusively through ussoccer.com.
As a sponsor of U.S. Soccer, Visa is pleased to offer all Visa cardholders access to an advance ticket sale for both matches before the sale to the general public. This advance sale starts Thursday, May 8, at 10 a.m. ET and runs until Friday, May 9, at 8 a.m. at ussoccer.com. Visa will be the only payment method accepted through the Visa presale and is the preferred card of U.S. Soccer. Terms and conditions apply.
The U.S. and France have not met since the opening match of the 2012 Olympics, when the USA overcame a 2-0 deficit to win 4-2 on its way to winning the gold medal.
France, which is fourth in the latest FIFA Women’s World Rankings, is widely hailed as one of the most talented women’s soccer countries and features some of the world’s best players at their positions. The squad is made up primarily of players from two of top women’s clubs in Europe, Olympique Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain. France was expected to contend for the title at last summer’s UEFA Women’s Championships but was upset on penalty kicks in the quarterfinal round by Denmark despite dominating the match.
The U.S. Women do not have an extensive history against France, having played just 14 times and only twice since 2006. The two most recent encounters, however, were both epic matches in world championships. The USA defeated France 3-1 on July 13, 2011, in the FIFA Women’s World Cup semifinal in Monchengladbach, Germany. The U.S. also won the Olympic curtain raiser 4-2 on July 25, 2012, in Glasgow, Scotland, as Alex Morgan scored twice, while Abby Wambach and Carli Lloyd contributed a goal each.
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Do you live in Europe and are you tired from having to deal with several different chargers for your phone, camera, and tablet? Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) hear you loud and clear. On Thursday, they voted in favor of a regulation to force manufacturers to use only one type of charger.
The potential law wants to institute a universal charger, not only for smartphones, but for tablets, cameras, music players, and other mobile products. For MEP Barbara Weiler, this comes as a welcome relief. “The current incompatibility of chargers is a nightmare and a real inconvenience for consumers,” said Weiler. “This new directive ends this nightmare and is also good news for the environment as it will result in a reduction of electronic waste.”
The next stop for the potential law is Europe’s council of ministers, which must give final approval before it can be implemented. Even so, given their informal approval of the regulation, it is expected to get just that. If that happens, European member states must turn the regulation into national laws by 2016, with manufacturers having another 12 months to switch to the new design.
The most obvious choice would be to use Micro USB, which the large majority of mobile devices already use. This could cause headaches for Apple and other companies that issue proprietary connectors for their mobile products. While the potential law would benefit consumers, Apple would have to deal with something it wants to avoid: easier switching between different platforms.
Even though Apple was one of the original signees of the original agreement between Europe and manufacturers to make the chargers, it currently employs its Lightning connector across all of its mobile products. Whether Apple will replace Lightning with the universal charger or just offer it as a second option is up in the air.
Also up in the air is whether other markets, such as the United States, will employ similar laws. Our hunch is that everyone will be happier with one charging standard.One of the strength of the Rust ecosystem is its package manager Cargo and the package system crates.io. Pulling in some dependencies is as easy as adding it to your projects' Cargo.toml and running cargo build.
Releasing your own project is nearly as easy. Make sure you got everything working, add a version number in your Cargo.toml and run cargo publish. It will package the code and upload it.
Of course that's not the whole story. For a proper release that people will like to use you want to follow some good practices:
Have tests and make sure they are green. Most people already use Travis CI. The travis-cargo project makes it easy to test all channels (stable, beta, nightly, maybe a specific version), run documentation tests and upload coverage info and documentation. Keep a changelog. Your software is not done with the first release. It changes, bugs get fixed, new features get introduced. Keeping a changelog helps users to understand what changed from version to version. Pick a version number. This is not nearly as easy as it sounds. Your project's version number carries a lot of information. Often more than we'd like. The Rust ecosystem recommends to strictly follow semver, but even that has ambiguities and requires a lot of thinking to do the right thing. Release on the right platforms. Even though crates.io is the package system you want your project in, having a GitHub release is a nice to have. Maybe your project is an application and you want to distributed pre-compiled binaries.
At the moment a lot of people process each of these steps manually. Maybe they have a few scripts lying around that help in reducing the number of errors that can happen. All in all there's still to much manual work required. It does not have to be that way.
Stephan Bönnemann build semantic-release for the npm eco system a while ago. It allows for fully automated package publishing by relying on a few conventions and a lot of automatisation.
I wanted to have a similar thing for the Rust eco system. That's why Jan aka @neinasaservice and I sat down at last year's 32c3 and started hacking on a tool to achieve that.
It took us a while to get something working, but now I can present to you:
What is it?
semantic-rs gives you fully automatic crate publishing. It runs after your tests are finished, analyzes the latest commits, picks out a version number, creates a commit and git tag, creates a release on GitHub and publishes your crate on crates.io.
All you have to do is follow the Angular.js commit message conventions, which are really easy. Your commit message consists of a type, an optional scope, a subject and an optional body.
<type>(<scope>): <subject> <BLANK LINE> <body>
The type should be one of the following:
feat : A new feature
: A new feature fix : A bug fix
: A bug fix docs : Documentation only changes
: Documentation only changes style : White-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc
: White-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc refactor : A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature perf : A code change that improves performance
: A code change that improves performance test : Adding missing tests
: Adding missing tests chore: Changes to the build process or auxiliary tools/libraries/documentation
The next version number is decided depending on type of commits since the last release. A feat will trigger a minor version bump, a fix a patch version bump. The other types don't cause a release.
However, should you make a breaking change, you need to document this in the commit message as well. Include BREAKING CHANGE in the body of the commit message and add information what changed and how to change existing code to make it work again (if possible). This will then trigger a major version bump.
What works?
The Happy Path.
If everything is configured properly and the tests succeed, semantic-rs will correctly pick a version, add changes to a Changelog.md, create a release commit, tag it, create a GitHub release and publish on crates.io.
The test-project crate is published completely automatically now.
semantic-rs already has some safety features integrated. It will only run when the build is on the master branch (or the branch you configure), and it will make sure that it only runs once on the build leader (which is always the first job in your build matrix). It also waits for the other jobs to finish and succeed before trying to do a release.
What's missing?
In case of problems, semantic-rs will just bail out. That might leave you with changes pushed to GitHub, but not published on crates.io (at worst), or with no visible changes but no new release (at best). We're working hard on making this safer to use with better error reporting.
Installing semantic-rs from source each time your tests run adds significant overhead to the build time, as it must be compiled again and again. In the future we will provide binary releases that you can simpy drop into Travis and it will work.
It's not released on crates.io yet, because we're using a dependency from GitHub. That one should soon be fixed once they push out a release as well.
Now that we got that out of the way, let's see how to actually use it.
How to use it
Right now usage of semantic-rs is not as straight-forward as it can be, we're working on that. To run it on Travis you have to follow these manual steps.
The first job of your build matrix will be used to do the publish, so make sure it is a full build. Make it your stable build to be on the safe side. Your.travis.yml should contain this:
rust : - stable - beta - nightly
Next, install semantic-rs on Travis by adding this to your.travis.yml :
before_script : - | cargo install --git https://github.com/semantic-rs/semantic-rs --debug && export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH && git config --global user.name semantic-rs && git config --global user.email semantic@rs
(This installs semantic-rs in debug mode, which is quite a lot faster to compile without significant runtime impact at the moment)
This will also set a git user and mail address, which will be used to create the git tag. You can change this to your own name and email address.
Now add a personal access token from GitHub. It only needs the public_repo permission (unless of course your repository is private).
Add it to your.travis.yml encrypted:
$ travis encrypt GH_TOKEN=<your token here> --add env.global
To release on crates.io you need a token as well. Get it from your account settings and add it to your.travis.yml :
$ travis encrypt CARGO_TOKEN=<your token here> --add env.global
At last make sure semantic-rs runs after the tests succeeds. Add this to the.travis.yml :
after_success : - semantic-rs
Make sure to follow the AngularJS Git Commit Message Conventions. semantic-rs will use this convention to decide which should be the next release version.
See the full.travis.yml of our test project.
What's next?
We still have some plans for semantic-rs.
First we need to make it more safe and easy to integrate into a project's workflow.
We also want to look into how we can determine more information about a project to assist the developers. Ideas we have include running integration tests from the previous version to detect breaking changes and statically analyzing code changes to determine their impact. Rust's RFC 1105 already defines the impact certain changes should have. Maybe it is possible to automatically check some of these things.
We would be happy to hear from you. If semantic-rs breaks or otherwise does not fit into your workflow, let us know. Open an issue to discuss this. If you want to use it and have more ideas what is necessary or could be improved, talk to us!Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker and Sangam will be the last two movies to be shown at Delhi’s 85-year-old Regal cinema hall that is closing down on March 30.
One of the owners of the hall, Vishal Choudhary, said that he received many requests and fan mails requesting them to screen Raj Kapoor’s movies as the hall was his favourite. He is said to have visited the theatre regularly and hosted premieres of several films released under the banner of RK films, including Sangam that released in 1964 and Mera Naam Joker, first screened in 1970.
The hall that is currently playing Anushka Sharma-starrer Phillauri will show Mera Naam Joker in the evening at six and Sangam at 9pm on Thursday.
Regal Cinema in Connaught Place was the first theatre in the area opened in 1932 by Sir Sobha Singh.
Called the New Delhi Premier Theatre in its early days, Regal may return as a multiplex with four auditoria. According to the owners, they are trying to get permission from agencies concerned to build a multiplex at the same spot.
“The facade will not be changed as the building is a heritage structure but inside there will be major changes including a new design of the hall, better seats, new toilets and canteen,” said Choudhary.
The corridors and the staircase of the hall is lined with black and white photographs of actors Dev Anand, Meena Kumari, Nargis, and Raj Kapoor.
“Raj Kapoor and Nargis would spend time a lot of time here. Kapoor often sat through the premieres of his films. The theatre was decorated and rituals were performed before the start of every film. Every show then was house full in advance for at least a week,” said Roop Ghai, manager.
Choudhary said he has got 60% of the proposal to build a multiplex cleared. “We have got the no-objection certificate from fire department and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as it is a heritage site. Our designs have been approved by Delhi Urban Arts Commission,” he told Hindustan Times.
“It will, however, take at least a year before the work begins as we have to take permission from several other departments and it takes a long time to complete these things,” he said. Hindustan Times had reported on December 22 that the cinema was on the verge of closing due to severe cash crunch aggravated by demonetisation.
Choudhary said it was time to fold up Regal as they had not been making money for many years now. “Business has been down for a decade and last month’s collection of Badrinath Ki Dulhaniya film was also not very good.” He said the cinema hall has been unable to recover operating costs over the past two years. “Half the money we get from tickets goes to the distributor. It costs us over Rs 2 lakh a week to run a show.”
Choudhary also said that they didn’t want to take any chances after the collapse of some buildings in Connaught Place recently. The New Delhi Municipal Council has asked the owners of buildings in the area to prove structural capability. This is another reason why he decided to close the theatre and rebuild it.
The first and second floors of the Regal Building were sold to Madame Tussauds in 1996, so the famed wax museum could open its 22nd branch in Delhi. The ground floor remains with the owner.
First Published: Mar 28, 2017 11:38 ISTThe futures of Gylfi Sigurdsson and Philippe Coutinho are still unresolved even though the season has started
Proposals to close the Premier League and English Football League summer transfer windows before the start of the season next year are "a long way off", says a leading sports lawyer.
The current window, in line with many other European leagues, closes on 31 August |
up with Ted Nugent—who once told his rivals to “suck on my machine gun”—to hand out an AR-15 to one supporter (no donations necessary).
Colorado state Sen. Greg Brophy, 2014: Not to be outdone by Tancredo, his rival for the gubernatorial nomination is offering a Smith & Wesson M&P15—personally modified by the candidate, to one lucky member of his email list. “I tricked this baby out with all the MagPul stuff you can add!” he explains.
Steve French, 2014: The Alabama Republican state rep candidate offered a Remington 870 shotgun to a randomly selected supporter. Said French: “I hope the winner brings home a nice gobbler.”
Conrad Reynolds, 2014: Reynolds, a retired Army colonel who is a seeking a congressional seat in Arkansas, is giving supporters wooden nickels that enter them in a lottery to win an AR-15.
Timothy Delasandro, 2014: The Texas Republican candidate for state representative gave away a Sig Sauer SIGM400 AR-15.
Mike Boudreaux, 2014: A $20 raffle ticket gave supporters of Boudreaux, a candidate for sheriff in California’s Tulare County, a chance to win pistols and shotguns.
Chuck Maricle, 2014: This handgun instructor and GOP candidate for state rep gave an AR-15 to one rally attendee.
Alan Wilkins, 2014: This police sergeant’s campaign to be Platte County, Nebraska, sheriff hit a snag when his gun raffle was deemed illegal.
Chris Fiora, 2014: A Maryland sheriff candidate, Fiora gave away a DPMS/Panther Arms AR-10 at a fundraiser in which he also roasted a cow.
Maryland Del. Don Dwyer, 2013: He raffled off an AR-15 and an AK-47 at “Delegate Dwyer’s Gun Rights and Liberty BBQ Gun Raffle, Auction & Strategy Meeting.”
Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas), 2013: Stockman, who advocated using liberals’ tears as a gun lubricant, gave away an AR-15 on the Fourth of July to entice people to sign up for his email list.
Curtis Coleman, 2013: The Arkansas gubernatorial candidate offered up a Palmetto PA-15 from Don’s Weaponry in North Little Rock to a lucky supporter.
Missouri state Sen. Brian Nieves, 2013: He gave a Sig Sauer 516 Patrol to an attendee at a $100-a-ticket fundraiser to benefit his campaign committee.
Missouri state Rep. John McCaherty, 2012: During his reelection campaign, McCaherty raffled off an AR-15 provided by the National Rifle Association. He had just one simple request of his supporters: “Do not answer any questions about the event at all.”
Illinois state Rep. Josh Harms, 2012: Harms, who bragged to a local newspaper that he once shot a bear in Canada, sold $5 raffle tickets for a chance to win a revolver, shotgun, or rifle.
Dean Allen, 2009: The candidate for South Carolina adjutant general, which manages the state national guard, gave away an AK-47 at a “machine gun social” fundraiser. “I like to tell people I’m not the country club conservative,” Allen told the Greenville News. “I’m the machine gun one.”
Peter James, 2007: The Maryland GOP congressional candidate announced his intent to give away 100 pistols and a few machine guns. Reporters who showed up for the big event were disappointed to discover the weapons were in fact water guns.
Mike Curtiss, 2000: Supporters of the downstate Illinois congressional candidate who bought $5 raffle tickets got a chance to bring home an AR-50 dubbed the “Rod Blagojevich Special,” in honor of the then-Chicago congressman, who was pushing to have the gun outlawed. “I see the humor in this,” Blagojevich told the Chicago Sun-Times. “God love the guy. It’s OK. With all due respect to [Curtiss], he is nuts about guns.” Curtiss also gave away a $400 box of cigars.
Michael Concannon, 2000: The North Carolina state Senate candidate raffled off a gun to fund his campaign.
Mark Detro, 2000: This Oklahoma Republican congressional candidate scrapped plans to offer guns in exchange for campaign donations—and a planned raffle—after discovering it violated state gambling laws.
C. Ronald Franks, 1994: The Maryland Senate candidate sold $5 raffle tickets for a chance to win an AR-15.
Randy Linkmeyer, 1994: The California state Senate candidate held a “Family Firearm Safety Day” to give guns and ammunition to a select few supporters. Kids were welcome.It’s been a long time since Anthony Bourdain was known as a chef. Ever since Kitchen Confidential, his behind-the-scenes memoir about working in the New York culinary scene, Bourdain has been more known as a writer, a traveler, a television star, and a go-to guy for smack about other TV food-show hosts he believes are doing the culinary world a disservice. After four non-fiction books, four novels, and seven seasons of breaking bread all over the planet on his Travel Channel show No Reservations, Bourdain’s fans know exactly what to expect from him: unvarnished opinions, lots of smoking and swearing, and tales of hard living that enhance his travels rather than detracting from them.
Bourdain’s new Travel Channel show, The Layover, which debuts on November 21, follows more of a traditional travel-show format than his previous shows; he goes to a city like Singapore or Montreal for less than 48 hours, and takes an intense tour of the best places to eat, drink, and stay, based on his and his crew’s previous experiences. The show has the signature Bourdain touches, which include his cleverly written, caustic narratives accompanying lavishly shot visuals. Last week, Bourdain sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about the cognitive dissonance he experiences shooting the show, how his travels have changed him, and whether he’s still feeling the blowback from his not-so-kind remarks about Paula Deen and others this past August.
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The A.V. Club: The Layover is a more traditional travel-show format than No Reservations, with a faster pace. How did the idea come up to film your layovers?
Anthony Bourdain: A couple things. Over time, I’ve been to all of these places with my crew, and we’ve just amassed a lot of information. We’ve been to a lot of places both on-camera and off-, so we know a lot about these places. We’re pretty good at finding the right place to eat, even if it’s just for ourselves, when we’re not shooting scenes for No Reservations. So we have this vast pool of information and contacts in a lot of places. We started to talk about something fast and nasty that we could do between seasons of No Reservations, and then also, there was sort of an interesting technical challenge posed by the new Panavision lenses that we were able to borrow from Panavision, which basically allowed us to shoot through film-quality lenses with digital cameras. I don’t know that a lot of people have ever done this, certainly not vérité-style. But the challenge was “Can we use these incredibly expensive, amazing lenses while running backward at high speed through foreign cities in the heat?” The possibility that was held out to us was, if we use these lenses, we will be able to shoot with available light. So it seemed like a really interesting challenge to see whether we could do something that’s, on its surface, a pretty conventional format—could we do that in a subversive way that undermines the genre? Make it useful, stay true to ourselves, and technically pull it off?
AVC: You still wanted to have the same luxurious, well-thought-out look that No Reservations has?
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AB: We’re a handcrafted outfit, and nothing’s coming out of our shop that doesn’t look good. The photography will be beautiful and the editing will be outstanding. That’s the way we do.
AVC: How do you construct the day? In the first episode, shot in Singapore, were you truly on your way to a No Reservations shoot somewhere else?
AB: I was on my way to another Layover shoot. I mean, these things, the way we work it is two crews leapfrogging each other. One crew flies out to Singapore, starts shooting B-roll, I fly in after a few hours or a day, and for 48 hours, they run me like a rented mule. Twelve hours, 15, 16 hours a day they run me. After two days, I fly off to the next city, like Hong Kong, where another crew is waiting for me. Then I fly from there with maybe a day or two back in New York, then off to Montreal, where the first crew from Singapore has now arrived and is set up and ready for me. For all intents and purposes, it was indeed a layover. Because I was only in these cities 48 hours, max.
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AVC: You’re used to flying around, but this must have given you a especially acute sense of cognitive dissonance. Any good examples of that?
AB: Well when you’re shooting that fast end to end, you wake up in a hotel and you don’t know where you are. You’re dreaming of Singapore, you wake up in Hong Kong. Or you just lose track. [It’s] one of the reasons I’m staying in hotels that I know I’ve stayed in before, and they don’t look like other hotels. So when you wake up at the Chateau in L.A., you know where you are. It’s a lifesaving experience. I don’t get jet lag anymore. I’m really good at sleeping on planes. I mean, I smell jet fuel and I’m out; I’m asleep for takeoff.
AVC: Is that something you had to learn over the years from all your travel?
AB: Well I guess between Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, all the rest, I mean, it’s a lot of miles. I’ve spent a lot of time in the air. It’s not about learning it. Your body starts to naturally adapt, I think. My brain and body and nervous system, they see a plane ride, a long plane trip, as an opportunity to sleep with nothing coming in, nothing to do. I just go offline the minute I’m on the plane.
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AVC: You’re a pretty tall guy; do you fly coach, business class, or first class?
AB: After my first couple hundred thousand miles, I got down on my knees and begged for business class. There are a lot of flights where, I say one-third of the flights that I take, there’s no such thing as business class. You fly in a flying bus or these little puddle-jumpers. But yeah, whenever possible, my God, yes. You’re flying 20 hours to Asia—I’m 6’4”, you’re absolutely right. If I can find my inner diva, I’m at the pointy end of the plane, and I’m in business.
AVC: Because these are cities you know, how is that fundamental difference between this show and No Reservations reflected?
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AB: Well, you know, No Reservations’ focus changes all the time. They’re like mini-movies, and they’re often about what people aren’t eating. More often than not, they’re just about me trying to have a good time, or satisfy my curiosity about a place. Whether or not there’s a takeaway, whether anybody can actually recreate that experience if they choose to, was never a concern. They’re personal essays: “This is what I did when I went to that country.” It was never my intention to show people experiences that they could themselves enjoy. [The Layover] is an attempt to take a very traditional format and do something interesting with it. These are places, destinations, restaurants, hotels that, yeah, you could go to all of these places. You could do these things if you choose to, and secure in the knowledge, or disturbed by the knowledge, that these are places I either have been or would go to myself.
AVC: How do you think the show turns that travel format on its ear?
AB: Because I don’t really give a shit whether you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower. If you want to go to the Vatican, be my guest. Stand on line in the boring sun. I’m just telling you right up front, I would never in a million years do it. I’m happy to show you the giant Ferris wheel [in Singapore], but I sure as hell am not going up in it, and I think you’re an idiot if you do. I mean, there it is, it’s fine, feel free. But me, if I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me. So that point of view very much informs anything you see on the show.
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AVC: Is it a point of view from someone who was a chef, someone who loves food?
AB: I don’t know. It’s my point of view. It’s the only point of view I know. It’s a guy who’s been traveling a long time, and there’s some things I choose to do, or some things that in my experience are fun, others not. I think that’s the takeaway; you know, there are plenty of good reasons to go see the Louvre. It just would not be something I’d do on my first day in Paris. Well, maybe, actually. I don’t know. But for better or worse, these are things I would do myself.
AVC: Before the age of the cable or public-TV travel show, how would you find that out-of-the-way place the locals go to, that would serve great food even if it was a dump, rather than going to the touristy places with English menus?
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AB: You’d have to make friends, and you’d have to get to know somebody in the town. How do you do that? Drink. Drink recklessly. Make mistakes. Honestly, it’s the way we acquired this information on the show, through trial and error. This is the distilled wisdom of many wheels gone wrong, and many scenes gone wrong. But in fact, that little out-of-the-way place, that discovery is often the result of a happy mishap or an accident. You know, car breaks down, you get lost, you end up at some grotty little place that ends up being magical.
AVC: What’s a good example of that in your travels, even before the show?
AB: I often bring up the example of just riding along in the Caribbean, suddenly caught in a rainstorm, you know, you run for shelter in this terrible-looking barbecue shack with stray dogs wandering around, a bare light bulb, and some sinister-looking Rasta dude in a dirty T-shirt grilling chicken in a converted 55-gallon drum. You sit down, and suddenly your favorite song comes on the radio, and the chicken’s good, and the beer’s cold, and suddenly what was an inconvenience is a silly, very romantic experience.
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AVC: Do you think your show’s appeal is because you have that wide range of tastes, from street food to out-of-the-way dumps to fine dining?
AB: I mean, I just think it’s a willingness… You know, I’d seen almost nothing of the world until I was 44, and at 44, before Kitchen Confidential, I was quite sure I never would see it. So I’m still very enthusiastic about traveling. I know how lucky I am to be able to see the places I go. I think it’s a willingness to try anything with a smile, and whoever’s offering, to smile back at them and give it a shot, and also a willingness to make mistakes. Things go wrong. What’s the worst that can happen? That’s okay. I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it’s interesting.
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AVC: The big line of locals is always a big indicator.
AB: Locals and nobody else, no outsiders. I mean, if they don’t speak your language, there’s nobody like you, and it seems to be popular with the locals, you’re already on pretty solid ground, even if you don’t recognize the food. It’s gonna be good. You know, you’re getting something real. You’re getting something unique to that area. Isn’t that what travel’s all about? To see how other people live, where they live?
AVC: How do you see and talk about food and culture differently than Andrew Zimmern, or even Man V. Food, or some of the other Travel Channel shows?
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AB: Well I don’t know about the other guys, but I know Andrew pretty well. I know Andrew’s a guy like me who had a lot of problems with drugs earlier, and who feels very fortunate to be seeing the places and doing the things he’s doing. So I think we are grateful. We like it. We’re grateful when people around the world, who have no particular reason to be nice to us, are again and again nice to us. Again and again, we form relationships with people based entirely on our willingness to accept the food they’re offering with a smile. That’s life-changing. That changes your worldview, when you see the kind of connections you can make with people around the world, even in places you wouldn’t have imagined you could have, just based on a willingness to accept an offering of food, even if it doesn’t look particularly good.
AVC: What was your first example of that?
AB: Vietnam. At a Vietnamese rice farmer’s home way up in the delta, you know, I had to take one of those narrow boats basically up an irrigation-ditch canal with a bunch of former VC to a rice farmer’s home. He killed a duck and cooked it in clay, not particularly well, but all the neighbors came from miles around, curious to see what was going on. He got me and my crew really drunk on homemade rice whiskey, and he was happy to see us, and made sure we had a good time. The neighbors came, and people were singing, and the kids were playing with us. I mean, it was just this amazing, amazing experience in a country I never thought I’d see, under a bare light bulb, sitting on the floor with a bunch of former Vietcong singing war songs to me and patting me on the back, and making sure I had a good time. The world tilted for me at that point.
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AVC: So when you’re walking around at home in New York, how do you feel different now than you did 10, 12 years ago, before you started this job?
AB: I mean, I’m less likely to go to a fine-dining restaurant if I can avoid it, unless it’s something really extraordinary, or there’s a personal connection. I’d rather eat sitting on a low plastic stool most times. A bowl of noodles, or some cheap wine and a bowl of pasta, is just fine by me. But [it’s] alienating, in a slight way. You know, you don’t come back from that the same, when you’ve seen how people live around the world, and how hard they work, and how hard they struggle to put food on the table, and how much they can do with so little. I came back from Cambodia and found myself sitting, I think for an interview, waiting for an interviewer in the lobby of the Royalton Hotel, and they were playing lounge music, Portishead in the background, and there were girls in little black dresses, and waiters in uniforms, and I just couldn’t relate to it. It was suddenly much more alien to me than the place [from which] I’d just come. A lot of these [travel] experiences are, even when I film them and write about them, kind of unsharable. You know? Some things that happen on the road, some things you see, some sunsets, they’re just for you, you know?
AVC: You mean something that’s just very deeply personal?
AB: You realize after you travel enough that there’s some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it’s edited, there’s no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there’s no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice. You just gotta let it go and realize “Well, it happened. I saw it. That was pretty goddamned cool.”
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AVC: You don’t even think that you could put that into words, knowing that you have these books out, and you write scripts for your shows, and you write volumes and volumes of words?
AB: There are some things that just, you know, you realize as it’s happening, “This one is just…” Actually, it’s the best moments, where the cameras are off and it’s just the crew. You know, clamber up a dune, smoke some hash, and look out over the Sahara. You know, you can’t… It’s a relief actually in some ways when you realize, “I won’t be writing about this.”
AVC: Do you think at this point in your career, when people come to you for interviews, they’re geared up to ask you about different chefs so they can get the canned Tony Bourdain quote?
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AB: Sure. Yeah, I mean, you know, I’m guilty of being an easy quote-o-mat. If you poke me with a stick, chances are I’ll give you an honest answer. I’m constitutionally unable to do the diplomatic thing. I’d like to, but stuff I’m excited about, I’ll tell ya. Stuff that pisses me off, I’ll tell you that, too. And stuff that’s just screamingly obvious, that nobody else is saying, I mean, I have a hard time laying off.
AVC: When something happens like the reaction to your quotes about Paula Deen, do you just say “Fuck it, that’s the way it is”?
AB: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, listen, being misquoted is one thing. But you know, what are you going to do? You’re going to complain about it was taken out of context? It’s too late. The toothpaste’s out of the tube. Fuck it. I said it. Doesn’t matter how it was intended, or the context, or anything else. It came out of my mouth, it’s out there. In this case, I was away on vacation, and I expected… it just kept coming and coming and coming. To get shat on by the New York Times op-ed page and Fox News in the same news cycle—man! That’s scary. It was really the only time where I’ve genuinely been frightened by the blowback from something I’ve said. The substance of what I said, I meant. What am I going to say? Is anyone saying [Deen-style] food is good for you, or good for America? My travels around the world have only reinforced that. Don’t tell me that there’s anything blue-collar about deep-fried butter, or that this kind of food is the lot of the working poor. The working poor make delicious food everywhere in the world. There ain’t nothing funny or ironic or cute or anything else about it. You know? Fuck it.
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AVC: It seems like walking through a local market and showing that the food is high-quality, fresh, and healthy would convince people that you can eat that way without spending a ton of money.
AB: You know, I just—to be called an elitist by the Times, I felt was a little inappropriate, given what I spend most of my life advocating for, at least celebrating and eating. I want to say, after the Paula Deen incident, the only person who publicly stuck their head out over the barricades and spoke up for me and backed me up was Andrew Zimmern. Everybody else was like, “I’m leaving this field of fire for a while.”
AVC: If an interviewer starts by asking, “Hey, what do you think of Rachael Ray now, or Paula Deen, or Emeril?” do you take a step back at this point, and just say “Oh no, not again?”
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AB: I don’t want to be like Henny Youngman at this point. At this point, it’s perilously close to shtick. I was asked a direct question, and it was a reasonable question, though one I’ve been asked before, and I put my foot straight into it. But I mean, if you ask me about Rachael Ray, I’m quietly groaning, because I’ve been over that for years. She’s actually been really cool to me. She sent me a fruit basket. She’s shown nothing but good humor, after years of [my] making fun of her. People still bring stuff up, though I haven’t said anything about her in quite some time, just because I don’t have the heart for it. I’ve got nothing against her. I lay off because I appreciate it, honestly; I just don’t have the heart to beat up on her. Frankly, you know, it’s just not on my radar screen at all. I don’t feel it, so why should I say it for purposes of comedy?
You know, I think that the Paula Deen question was fresh off of a viewing of the Krispy Kreme burger sandwich. [Laughs.] It was right there on the tip of my tongue. It was the same with Sandra Lee. I don’t care; let them do their thing. They’re not pissing me off this week, and haven’t for a long time. It’s just not something I’m thinking about. You know, the Paula Deen thing, that’s fresh in memory. Frankly, I was pissed off at the [Frank] Bruni piece [in The New York Times]. I didn’t appreciate the… you know, [Deen’s] ground game was good, let’s put it that way. She positioned herself as the people’s champion, and I think, you know, worked that very well. [Her quote that] you can buy a $58 steak at Les Halles, you know, that’s a $58 steak for two people. I believe the steak at her restaurant’s 30 bucks for one.
AVC: That Krispy Kreme burger thing gives me chest pains just looking at it.
AB: Honestly, I have no ill will toward her personally. I respect anybody who’s had a trajectory like hers. But I don’t like the brand. If her shtick is food that’s going to rush you along your way to diabetes, then it’s not a brand I particularly like. I am the last person in the world to be advocating for any kind of healthy eating or lifestyle. The only distinction between us, actually, is that my show comes with a parental advisory and hers doesn’t.
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AVC: You appeared a couple years ago on Yo Gabba Gabba. Are you going to appear on any more of your daughter’s favorite shows anytime soon?
AB: Well, I mean, I’d love to. I don’t know how they could work me into Phineas And Ferb, but boy, that would be cool. I mean, I watch that show even when my daughter leaves the room. It’s like, she’ll have left and be playing in the other room, and my wife’s there, you know, “Tony, there’s a phone call for you,” and I’m like “No, no, no, wait a minute. Just hold on one minute. I’m waiting to see if Ferb’s machine works.”Acting Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost testified in a congressional appropriations hearing Tuesday that border wall construction will likely begin in March or April 2018.
The Trump administration’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2018 includes $1.6 billion to go towards border wall construction. This funds 60 miles of new border walling, and would replace 14 miles of existing fencing.
Provost told the House Committee on Appropriations that a priority for the Border Patrol is fixing insufficient fencing in San Diego that has been used by “transnational criminal organizations.” The federal government is currently in the prototype stage of building the southern border wall President Trump ordered to be constructed.
The four to eight prototypes will be constructed in the San Diego area, and Provost said the current timeframe for this to take place is sometime in “late summer.” She went on to say that if Customs and Border Protection receives the $1.6 billion it has requested, the goal is to start constructing border walls in the Rio Grande valley in March or April 2018.
The acting Border Patrol chief said that this area has been exploited by “bad actors,” and is “lacking infrastructure” to stop this. Provost also testified that border walling is not necessary along all 1,900 miles as natural barriers, such as the Big Bend National Park, exist.
The Trump administration has yet to build the border wall on which the president campaigned on constructing, and some immigration hawks such as conservative commentator Ann Coulter and Iowa Rep. Steve King aren’t pleased.
King told The Daily Caller recently that he is trying to get more funding for border wall construction in the Fiscal Year 2018 budget.Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects.
In a recent study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues placed pea seedlings in pots shaped like an upside-down Y. One arm of each pot was placed in either a tray of water or a coiled plastic tube through which water flowed; the other arm had dry soil. The roots grew toward the arm of the pipe with the fluid, regardless of whether it was easily accessible or hidden inside the tubing. “They just knew the water was there, even if the only thing to detect was the sound of it flowing inside the pipe,” Gagliano says. Yet when the seedlings were given a choice between the water tube and some moistened soil, their roots favored the latter. She hypothesizes that these plants use sound waves to detect water at a distance but follow moisture gradients to home in on their target when it is closer.
The research, reported earlier this year in Oecologia, is not the first to suggest flora can detect and interpret sounds. A 2014 study showed the rock cress Arabidopsis can distinguish between caterpillar chewing sounds and wind vibrations—the plant produced more chemical toxins after “hearing” a recording of feeding insects. “We tend to underestimate plants because their responses are usually less visible to us. But leaves turn out to be extremely sensitive vibration detectors,” says lead study author Heidi M. Appel, an environmental scientist now at the University of Toledo.
Another hint that plants can hear comes from the phenomenon of “buzz pollination,” in which a bee buzzing at a particular frequency has been shown to stimulate pollen release.
Michael Schöner, a biologist at University of Greifswald in Germany, who was not involved in the new research, believes that plants may have organs that can perceive noises. “Sound vibrations could trigger a response of the plant via mechanoreceptors—these could be very fine, hairy structures, anything that could work like a membrane,” he says.
This research raises questions about whether acoustic pollution affects plants as well as animals, Gagliano observes: “Noise could block information channels between plants, for example, when they need to warn each other of insects.” So next time you turn on a leaf blower or a hedge trimmer in your garden, consider the lilies.WikiLeaks has attracted plenty of haters over its controversial disclosures. But the site may be in a unique position to help tech vendors better secure their products.
That’s because WikiLeaks has published secret hacking tools allegedly taken from the CIA, which appear to target smartphones, smart TVs and PCs.
Companies including Apple and Cisco have been looking through the stolen documents to address any vulnerabilities the CIA may have exploited. However, WikiLeaks might be able to speed up and expand the whole process.
So far, the site hasn’t released the source code to any of the hacking tools. But on Wednesday, WikiLeaks raised the prospect that it might share the sensitive information with tech vendors as a way to quickly patch the vulnerabilities.
“Tech companies are saying they need more details of CIA attack techniques to fix them faster. Should WikiLeaks work directly with them?” the site tweeted out in a poll.
The day before, WikiLeaks said it was holding back from publicly sharing the source code, until a consensus emerges over how the hacking tools should be “analyzed, disarmed and published.”
The site wants to prevent CIA-made “cyberweapons” from proliferating, so working with tech vendors could be a way for WikiLeaks to essentially defuse them.
It’s also an offer that tech vendors probably can’t ignore.
“They might have to absolutely work with WikiLeaks,” said Jason Healey, a researcher at Columbia University who studies U.S. policy on vulnerability disclosure.
“How do you tell a shareholder or a user that there’s information on a hole out there, but you didn’t bother to speak with WikiLeaks about it?” he said.
The other danger is that malicious parties might know about the secret CIA hacking tools too.
WikiLeaks hasn’t identified the source behind the stolen documents. But it’s mentioned that former U.S. government hackers and contractors were circulating the confidential data, and that someone among them supplied a copied portion to WikiLeaks.
However, Healey pointed to WikiLeak’s suspected ties to Russian cyberspies as a major area of concern.
Assuming the stolen CIA hacking tools are real, Healey suggests that the U.S. government intervene and help vendors patch the vulnerabilities involved in this particular leak.
“Don’t let them (the tech vendors) go to WikiLeaks for the information,” he said. “Let them hear it from the U.S. and not maybe from the Russians.”
Other security experts said that while it's possible WikiLeaks could be holding on to other secret hacking tools, the document dumps so far haven't shown anything alarming.
Will Strafach, CEO of Sudo Security Group, said that WikiLeaks has actually been exaggerating the capabilities of the leaked CIA hacking tools.
For instance, the CIA-developed iOS exploits in the documents show that the hacking tools appear to be largely out-of-date and no longer work on iOS 10 or higher, he said.
“The products are already patched,” he said. “They (WikiLeaks) are definitely trying to mislead people here.”
On Wednesday, Google also said it reviewed the stolen documents and is confident that its Android OS can “already shield users from many of these alleged vulnerabilities.”
However, tech vendors didn’t immediately comment on whether they are reaching out to WikiLeaks.
The controversial disclosures apparently won’t win the site any fans from the CIA.
“Such disclosures not only jeopardize U.S. personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm,” the agency said in a statement.News in Science
Atom laser to keep spacecraft on track
A laser beam that emits a continuous stream of atoms may one day help ultra-precise navigation of space craft, say Australian experts.
Physicists Dr Nick Robins and colleagues from the Australian National University in Canberra report their progress on developing the first gyroscope of its kind, in the journal Nature Physics.
While atom lasers have been made before, research team member Associate Professor John Closesays the team has overcome a major barrier to developing a laser that pumps atoms continuously.
"It carries the promise of measuring at enormously increased precision," he says.
On-board gyroscopes are often used as part of a navigation system that can help determine location by keeping a record of in direction have been made since a particular starting point.
"There are many reasons why you would want a local measurement of what you're doing," says Close.
He says one application for this could be in a space craft that is too far away from earth to use a global positioning system.
Another application could be in a military submarine that doesn't want to give away its precise location.
Matter waves
Current gyroscopes often use light lasers to precisely measure rotation.
But Close says that atom lasers could provide much more accurate measurements by using "matter waves".
They plan to build two gyroscopes, which will be identical except that one will be made with a light laser and the other with an atom laser.
They will then test their precision in measuring the rotation of a range of objects.
Close says models predict that the atom laser will be 11 orders of magnitude more sensitive, offering 100 billion times more precise measurements.
This degree of precision could make a huge difference when it comes to navigating over the huge distances of space where small errors can have huge consequences, he says.
Other uses
Such a gyroscope could also be used to measure irregularities in the earth's rotation, says Close.
He says a pumped atom laser could also help measure changes in gravitational and magnetic fields - useful in remote sensing for mining for oil or iron ore.
And it could also be used to etch smaller circuits onto nanoscale devices.
Close says advances in measurement have been responsible for major changes in our society.
For example, Copernicus' measurement of the movement of planets with a telescope shifted our view of our location in the universe, he says.
And the measurement of longitude essential in modern navigation was only made possible by the invention of precise wind-up clocks.
The pumped atom laser research was funded by the Australian Research Council.Las Vegas TT Club is having a Meet-up and Drive to Blue Diamond with stop at the Red Rock Overlook for photos with their car and a quick run in the small town of Blue Diamond, Stopping at the Village market and then back to town.
This event is open to any Audi TT drivers or owners. Members and Non-members are invited.
Agenda:
9:30 a.m. Meet at Dunkin’ Donuts Parking lot for donuts & coffee (11710 W. Charleston Blvd.)
10:00 a.m. Leave Dunkin’ Donuts and drive to the Red Rock Overlook for Photos with Cars – 6.5 Miles
10:15 am* Photos at Redrock Overlook
10:35 |
30, made 58 receptions for 603 yards and one touchdown with Ottawa last season. He was traded to Saskatchewan, then signed a contract extension with the Roughriders.
Under league regulations, the trade stands. The Redblacks received the 45th and 54th selections in this year’s CFL college draft, while the Roughriders also received the 52nd pick.
gholder@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/HolderGord
RULE OF LAW
Major rules changes to be implemented for the 2016 Canadian Football League season:
Objectionable conduct: Defensive players will no longer be penalized if they give recovered or intercepted footballs to fans.
Illegal procedure: Offensive linemen in three-point stances can signal blocking assignments, etc., as long as they re-set for one second before the snap.
Peel-back blocks: Low blocks are now illegal for any offensive player heading toward his team’s goal-line.
Challenges: Infractions that can be challenged by coaches for video review now include offensive pass interference (defensive pass interference already was), illegal contact and illegal interference on pass plays; no yards; called illegal blocks on kick returns; contacting/roughing the kicker; roughing the passer; and illegal interference on short kickoffs. Team will still have two coach’s challenges, plus one more if they get the first two right.
Video official: The CFL command centre in Toronto will have a video official whose responsibilities include correcting obvious errors on calls that are not subject to coaches’ challenges. An example would be determining whether a defensive lineman moved offside first or whether an offensive lineman had first committed illegal procedure.The 1960s saw a wealth of changes in the US, from crime waves to shifts in political activism. But perhaps the most defining social trend in this era was a cultural revolution in which sex became more socially acceptable and “free love” became a mantra for young people across America.
One of the traditional explanations for the change in sexual behavior during this era was the development and increasing availability of the birth control pill; sex was less risky if it didn’t lead to pregnancy. But in the latest issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, economist Andrew Francis argues that it was actually the decline in a different risk—syphilis—that was most important.
In the early 20th century, syphilis was a dangerous sexually transmitted disease without a particularly effective treatment. As of the mid-1940s, more than 600,000 Americans had recently contracted the disease, and the probability that a random sexual partner would have syphilis was more than 1 in 100. But in 1943, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment for syphilis. Infection and death rates from the disease fell sharply, reaching a low in 1957.
Francis’ hypothesis is that the sharply decreasing "cost" of syphilis helped spur changes in sexual behavior in the US over the next decade. The author proposes that the economic principles related to demand can also be used to explain behavior; in this example, when the costs associated with sex decrease, demand increases.
To test this theory, Francis carried out a series of regressions that compared the incidence of syphilis during this era to the rise in what he termed “risky non-traditional sex,” or extramarital sex that could put people at risk for STDs. Francis used three measures to estimate the trajectory of this type of sexual behavior for both whites and non-whites: the rate of gonorrhea infection, the percent of births to teen mothers, and the ratio of births by unmarried women compared to those by married women.
Between 1957 and 1975, the gonorrhea infection rate rose 300 percent, the percentage of both white and non-white teen mothers increased nearly 50 percent, and the extramarital birth rate jumped more than 200 percent.
These measures of risky sexual behavior coincided precisely with the collapse of the syphilis epidemic. All measures but one—the percentage of births to white teen mothers—were inversely related to the syphilis death rate. The availability of a syphilis treatment thus appears to be tightly linked to increases in “risky” sex.
However, the findings of the study hinge heavily on correlation and, as we all know, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But the author did investigate alternative hypotheses and found that neither the advent of the birth control pill nor an increase in generally permissive attitudes coincided as precisely with changes in sexual behavior as did the change in syphilis rates.
Of course, many forces play a role in sexual behavior. Francis acknowledges that multiple factors—such as birth control, economic growth, and the inception of Playboy—probably contributed to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. However, the effective treatment of syphilis may have played a larger role in shaping modern sexual behavior than has previously been recognized.
Francis also notes that historical syphilis trends very closely mimic the AIDS epidemic of the last few decades. The rate of syphilis deaths in 1939 was nearly as high as the rate of AIDS deaths in 1995, and the two diseases accounted for roughly the same percentage of deaths in those years. Additionally, studies suggest that a similar increase in risky sexual behavior may have occurred after the development of an AIDS treatment plan, the “highly active antiretroviral therapy.”
The author's conclusion: using economic principles to understand how the costs of syphilis, AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases affect behavior may improve decisions about health policy during future epidemics.
Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2013. DOI: 10.1007/s10508-012-0018-4 (About DOIs).Every such victory makes it harder for citizens to prevail when they believe they have been mistreated by police officers. It also adds obstacles for the Justice Department’s own civil rights investigators when alleging police misconduct. That has led to some tense debates inside the department, current and former officials say, as the government’s civil rights and appellate lawyers discussed when the department should weigh in, and on which side. Those debates have led the Justice Department to take more nuanced positions than government lawyers might have otherwise, the officials said.
Image Teresa Sheehan sued after she was shot by San Francisco officers in 2008. The Justice Department backed the police. Credit Patricia C. Sheehan, via Associated Press
“Law enforcement officers are routinely called upon to face grave dangers and to make often-unheralded sacrifices, and the law must give them the room to make real-time judgments to protect public safety,” said Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokeswoman. “At the same time, building trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve and protecting human life and human dignity requires accountability for law enforcement officers. The department recognizes — and is committed to striking — that balance.”
Mr. Holder has called the civil rights division the crown jewel of the department, and it has rarely had such a high profile. Even before it garnered national attention with a scathing rebuke of the Ferguson Police Department after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white officer last summer, the division issued similar reports on other departments, including those in Seattle, Albuquerque, Newark and New Orleans.
Those efforts, along with deeply personal remarks from Mr. Holder about racial profiling, have drawn criticism from police officers who say he has not supported them. But Darrel W. Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said many officers probably did not know how often Mr. Holder’s Justice Department stood with them at the Supreme Court. “He’s sincere,” Mr. Stephens said. “He is supportive of the police.”
Private civil rights lawyers, though, have been frustrated that the Justice Department’s aggressive stance in civil rights reports does not extend to its positions before the Supreme Court. “A report can have an impact on a department for a time,” said Gary Smith, the lawyer for the driver in the Arkansas case. “But case law touches every officer in every department in the country.”
Eventually, he predicted, police departments facing civil rights investigations will challenge the Justice Department on its apparently contradictory positions. “You’re telling the Supreme Court it’s O.K., and you’re doing this to us?” Mr. Smith said.
When Justice Department lawyers argue before the Supreme Court, they typically draw fine distinctions and avoid outright contradictions. But such cases can send seemingly mixed messages. For example, the civil rights division said in December that police officers in Cleveland were too quick to use force against mentally ill people. For support, it cited the federal appeals court decision in the case of the mentally ill woman in San Francisco — the same decision that Justice Department lawyers would argue against a few months later.It is fairly common for George Gates to receive a middle-of-the-night phone call from a worker alerting him that there’s a small fire smoldering in the pit of one of several Gates Bar-B-Q locations sprinkled throughout the Kansas City area.
“They always tell me, ‘I have it under control,’” said Gates, the son of owner Ollie Gates. “So for me there was no need to worry.”
But the call Gates received early Tuesday was different and unsettling.
An early morning blaze ravaged the iconic restaurant with its signature red roof in western Independence.
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The quick-moving fire started about 1 a.m. in exhaust system duct work above a grill and quickly spread to the attic and roof of the building at 10440 E. U.S. 40. A worker inside called 911.
Gates received a call about the blaze about 1:15 a.m. and headed to the scene, where smoke billowed into the frigid night air as two aerial trucks poured water on the structure.
“This time, I hit Blue Ridge Boulevard, came across the hill and saw the flames,” he said. He knew this fire wasn’t under control.
Nearby fire hydrants did not have enough water pressure to support the aerial trucks, so crews connected hoses to hydrants in a nearby residential neighborhood in addition to using one hydrant in front of the restaurant.
“It’s an older part of town there and the water lines are just a certain-size diameter,” said Independence Fire Battalion Chief Brad Waterworth. “We were using copious amounts of water and we needed more water than we were able to get from that one hydrant, so they moved to another hydrant a block away just to supplement it.”
The building smoldered as the sun came up hours later, with Ollie Gates watching from the warmth of his automobile as fire crews continued to work. Daylight revealed that the well-known red roof seen on all Gates restaurants was completely gone. Remnants of the brick walls remained.
It was unclear Tuesday morning whether any of those walls could be salvaged for possible rebuilding at the site, George Gates said. Built in 1979, the restaurant was the fifth location opened by the Gates family in the Kansas City area.
Gates said he and his father were determined to rebuild at that location.
“We are going to do something new, better, more innovative, more efficient, something different that will make the people of Kansas City and Independence proud,” Gates said.
More important, Gates noted: “The barbecue pit is still there. So if we want to use it, all we would need to do is put bricks around it.”
Ollie Gates said this the first time fire had destroyed one of his restaurants. The location has been popular in part because of its proximity to the Truman Sports Complex. Gates said he wants to make sure the residents of Independence have a restaurant because of their years of support.
The celebrities and athletes who have eaten at the site are too numerous to list but include Royals owner David Glass and members of the Hunt family, George Gates said.
“They came here because of the atmosphere, they came because of the food, they came because of the service,” he said. “They came because of the tradition that we try to have for our family in Kansas City.”
Throughout Tuesday, customers stopped along the parking lot to take cellphone pictures. It almost felt like a funeral visitation, with people coming to pay their respects, Gates said.
“It’s pretty sad, very sad,” Debbie McCubbin of Independence said as she sat in her vehicle taking photos of the firefighters and the building, which had been a common destination for family dinners and entertaining guests.
One man said he was going to send a photo to his daughter in Denver.
“She is going to be heartbroken when she sees this,” he said before driving away.
Insurance company and construction representatives were assessing the damage.
Waterworth said department investigators are looking into the fire’s cause. They called the restaurant a “total loss” but didn’t have a dollar estimate.
One of the best-known barbecue chains in a metropolis known for barbecue, Gates arrived in Kansas City as a family-run business in the 1940s.
Customers at the six Gates locations are greeted almost as soon as they walk through the doors with “Hi! May I help you?” from order takers who then yell the order to cooks in the kitchen behind them.Four cars in the Indian president's convoy crashed as they approached a roundabout in the university city of Uppsala.
Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel were also making the journey but escaped unhurt, according to the Swedish Royal Court.
But several others were taken to hospital following the accident, which took place just after 4.30pm.
The number of people injured was originally reported as six, but police later amended the figure to nine.
"I have information saying nine people. Two of them are supposed to have been put in an ambulance, the rest were taken to hospital in police cars. No one is seriously injured. But this information could change," Christer Nordström, press officer at Uppsala police, told Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet.
By 8.30pm on Tuesday all except three who were still waiting to be X-rayed had left hospital. Swedish police are investigating the incident as a workplace accident.
The Swedish royals and President Pranab Mukherjee were making their way to Uppsala University, where India's head of state was due to give a speech as part of a three-day visit to the Nordic nation.
He continued his journey to the Swedish institution, where he was joined by the royal couple, and left the country as planned on Tuesday evening.
Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel bid farewell to #PresidentMukherjee at the airport in Stockholm pic.twitter.com/dVbmTX20lo — President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 3, 2015
President Pranab Mukherjee is the first Indian head of state in history to visit Sweden.
He arrived over the weekend at the invitation of King Carl XVI Gustaf and was welcomed at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport by Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel before being given a ride in a horse-drawn cortege through the streets of the Swedish capital.
He has also held meetings with business leaders and the Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven.In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature’s bounty except coal, oil, and natural gas. Reflecting its lack of civilization, they named this island “Basicland.”
The Europeans rapidly repopulated Basicland, creating a new nation. They installed a system of government like that of the early United States. There was much encouragement of trade, and no internal tariff or other impediment to such trade. Property rights were greatly respected and strongly enforced. The banking system was simple. It adapted to a national ethos that sought to provide a sound currency, efficient trade, and ample loans for credit-worthy businesses while strongly discouraging loans to the incompetent or for ordinary daily purchases.
Moreover, almost no debt was used to purchase or carry securities or other investments, including real estate and tangible personal property. The one exception was the widespread presence of secured, high-down-payment, fully amortizing, fixed-rate loans on sound houses, other real estate, vehicles, and appliances, to be used by industrious persons who lived within their means. Speculation in Basicland’s security and commodity markets was always rigorously discouraged and remained small. There was no trading in options on securities or in derivatives other than “plain vanilla” commodity contracts cleared through responsible exchanges under laws that greatly limited use of financial leverage.
In its first 150 years, the government of Basicland spent no more than 7 percent of its gross domestic product in providing its citizens with essential services such as fire protection, water, sewage and garbage removal, some education, defense forces, courts, and immigration control. A strong family-oriented culture emphasizing duty to relatives, plus considerable private charity, provided the only social safety net.
The tax system was also simple. In the early years, governmental revenues came almost entirely from import duties, and taxes received matched government expenditures. There was never much debt outstanding in the form of government bonds.
As Adam Smith would have expected, GDP per person grew steadily. Indeed, in the modern area it grew in real terms at 3 percent per year, decade after decade, until Basicland led the world in GDP per person. As this happened, taxes on sales, income, property, and payrolls were introduced. Eventually total taxes, matched by total government expenditures, amounted to 35 percent of GDP. The revenue from increased taxes was spent on more government-run education and a substantial government-run social safety net, including medical care and pensions.
A regular increase in such tax-financed government spending, under systems hard to “game” by the unworthy, was considered a moral imperative—a sort of egality-promoting national dividend—so long as growth of such spending was kept well below the growth rate of the country’s GDP per person.
Basicland also sought to avoid trouble through a policy that kept imports and exports in near balance, with each amounting to about 25 percent of GDP. Some citizens were initially nervous because 60 percent of imports consisted of absolutely essential coal and oil. But, as the years rolled by with no terrible consequences from this dependency, such worry melted away.
Basicland was exceptionally creditworthy, with no significant deficit ever allowed. And the present value of large “off-book” promises to provide future medical care and pensions appeared unlikely to cause problems, given Basicland’s steady 3 percent growth in GDP per person and restraint in making unfunded promises. Basicland seemed to have a system that would long assure its felicity and long induce other nations to follow its example—thus improving the welfare of all humanity.
But even a country as cautious, sound, and generous as Basicland could come to ruin if it failed to address the dangers that can be caused by the ordinary accidents of life. These dangers were significant by 2012, when the extreme prosperity of Basicland had created a peculiar outcome: As their affluence and leisure time grew, Basicland’s citizens more and more whiled away their time in the excitement of casino gambling. Most casino revenue now came from bets on security prices under a system used in the 1920s in the United States and called “the bucket shop system.”
The winnings of the casinos eventually amounted to 25 percent of Basicland’s GDP, while 22 percent of all employee earnings in Basicland were paid to persons employed by the casinos (many of whom were engineers needed elsewhere). So much time was spent at casinos that it amounted to an average of five hours per day for every citizen of Basicland, including newborn babies and the comatose elderly. Many of the gamblers were highly talented engineers attracted partly by casino poker but mostly by bets available in the bucket shop systems, with the bets now called “financial derivatives.”
Many people, particularly foreigners with savings to invest, regarded this situation as disgraceful. After all, they reasoned, it was just common sense for lenders to avoid gambling addicts. As a result, almost all foreigners avoided holding Basicland’s currency or owning its bonds. They feared big trouble if the gambling-addicted citizens of Basicland were suddenly faced with hardship.
And then came the twin shocks. Hydrocarbon prices rose to new highs. And in Basicland’s export markets there was a dramatic increase in low-cost competition from developing countries. It was soon obvious that the same exports that had formerly amounted to 25 percent of Basicland’s GDP would now only amount to 10 percent. Meanwhile, hydrocarbon imports would amount to 30 percent of GDP, instead of 15 percent. Suddenly Basicland had to come up with 30 percent of its GDP every year, in foreign currency, to pay its creditors.
How was Basicland to adjust to this brutal new reality? This problem so stumped Basicland’s politicians that they asked for advice from Benfranklin Leekwanyou Vokker, an old man who was considered so virtuous and wise that he was often called the “Good Father.” Such consultations were rare. Politicians usually ignored the Good Father because he made no campaign contributions.
Among the suggestions of the Good Father were the following. First, he suggested that Basicland change its laws. It should strongly discourage casino gambling, partly through a complete ban on the trading in financial derivatives, and it should encourage former casino employees—and former casino patrons—to produce and sell items that foreigners were willing to buy. Second, as this change was sure to be painful, he suggested that Basicland’s citizens cheerfully embrace their fate. After all, he observed, a man diagnosed with lung cancer is willing to quit smoking and undergo surgery because it is likely to prolong his life.
The views of the Good Father drew some approval, mostly from people who admired the fiscal virtue of the Romans during the Punic Wars. But others, including many of Basicland’s prominent economists, had strong objections. These economists had intense faith that any outcome at all in a free market—even wild growth in casino gambling—is constructive. Indeed, these economists were so committed to their basic faith that they looked forward to the day when Basicland would expand real securities trading, as a percentage of securities outstanding, by a factor of 100, so that it could match the speculation level present in the United States just before onslaught of the Great Recession that began in 2008.
The strong faith of these Basicland economists in the beneficence of hypergambling in both securities and financial derivatives stemmed from their utter rejection of the ideas of the great and long-dead economist who had known the most about hyperspeculation, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes had famously said, “When the capital development of a country is the byproduct of the operations of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.” It was easy for these economists to dismiss such a sentence because securities had been so long associated with respectable wealth, and financial derivatives seemed so similar to securities.
Basicland’s investment and commercial bankers were hostile to change. Like the objecting economists, the bankers wanted change exactly opposite to change wanted by the Good Father. Such bankers provided constructive services to Basicland. But they had only moderate earnings, which they deeply resented because Basicland’s casinos—which provided no such constructive services—reported immoderate earnings from their bucket-shop systems. Moreover, foreign investment bankers had also reported immoderate earnings after building their own bucket-shop systems—and carefully obscuring this fact with ingenious twaddle, including claims that rational risk-management systems were in place, supervised by perfect regulators. Naturally, the ambitious Basicland bankers desired to prosper like the foreign bankers. And so they came to believe that the Good Father lacked any understanding of important and eternal causes of human progress that the bankers were trying to serve by creating more bucket shops in Basicland.
Of course, the most effective political opposition to change came from the gambling casinos themselves. This was not surprising, as at least one casino was located in each legislative district. The casinos resented being compared with cancer when they saw themselves as part of a long-established industry that provided harmless pleasure while improving the thinking skills of its customers.
As it worked out, the politicians ignored the Good Father one more time, and the Basicland banks were allowed to open bucket shops and to finance the purchase and carry of real securities with extreme financial leverage. A couple of economic messes followed, during which every constituency tried to avoid hardship by deflecting it to others. Much counterproductive governmental action was taken, and the country’s credit was reduced to tatters. Basicland is now under new management, using a new governmental system. It also has a new nickname: Sorrowland.
Become a fan of Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.Last week the Uruguayan government decided to end its involvement in the secret negotiations of the Trade in Services Agreement TISA, signifying an important victory in the global fight against bad trade deals.
TISA is a radical new deal that aims to go far beyond current trade rules and force States to further open their markets to foreign corporations, privatize public services and reduce regulations. These measures often mean job losses, less environmental protection, and less accessible healthcare and education.
Uruguay has created a blueprint for how to stop this corporate-driven agreement. It is time for other countries to follow the lead and end TISA once and for all.
After months of intense pressure led by unions and other social movements—including a general strike on the issue—the Uruguayan President listened to public opinion and left the US-led trade agreement. The overwhelming majority of members of the ruling Frente Amplio party believe that the deal would undermine the government's national development strategy and therefore considered it “unadvisable to continue participating in the TISA negotiations”.
The little-known TISA negotiations involve 52 nations, who together comprise around two-thirds of the global economy: the United States, European Union and 23 other countries, including Turkey, Mexico, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan and Chile. It relates to the'services sector' of the economy, which in the EU makes up approximately 75% of the total economic activity.
The agreement being negotiated aims to do away with "domestic regulation" of services with a special focus on certain sectors where free exploitation by corporations would increase at the expense of public interest, such as: finance, telecommunications, internet and e-trade, government procurement, transportation, energy services, postal services and the so called "environmental services." For example, this means prohibiting countries from adopting privacy laws that limit cross-border data flows of sensitive information or require strong data protection.
Despite its wide ranging effects on every part of our economy, TISA is negotiated in complete secret. The public will not know the full details of the text for five years after the agreement comes into force or the negotiations are otherwise closed. It is travesty of democracy that our elected governments will not tell us the laws they are making. The only information available about the agreement has been leaked by Wikileaks.
TISA is driven by the US administration and big business who promote it as a way 'to boost growth and productivity.' Yet as Jane Kelsey of the University of Auckland explains, "the main goals of the negotiations are to increase the commodification of services usually performed by the State (such as education, health care, leisure, transportation, etc.), to put more pressure to privatize public utilities and to dismantle the State’s regulating capacity."
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The TISA negotiations, together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) act to further empower transnational corporations through special rights and provisions. It is also an attempt to counter the growing economic and geostrategic importance of the emerging BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
Yet these trojan horse trade deals are not inevitable.
By leaving the TISA negotiations, Uruguay has created a blueprint of how to beat these corporate-driven agreements. A strong coalition of trade unions, environmentalists and farmers working together on an effective public campaign were able to take on the interests of the world's biggest companies and win.
Information and clear communication was key to the campaign. The negotiation texts released by WikiLeaks and assessments by international experts helped to break the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. Then when Uruguay entered the TISA negotiations in February social movements were able to launch a public awareness campaign that gave rise to ongoing public debate in the media.
The Stop TISA campaign was able to successfully lobby and engage the government on the issue. It exposed the negative effects that Uruguay’s participation in the trade deal would have on key government policies in health and education, as well as the role of the State to address inequality.
For example, TISA attempts to transform healthcare into a tradable commodity would "raise health care costs in developing countries and lower quality in developed countries," according to Dr. Odile Frank of Public Services International.
Building a strong coalition of social movements and non-profits against TISA enabled a popular opposition to the agreement to grow rapidly across diverse sections of society, from doctors to train drivers. The Workers’ Trade Union Federation of Uruguay (PIT-CNT) played a crucial role in organizing mass mobilization. Thousands marching in the streets and a general strike against TISA increased pressure on the government and led it to walk away from the deal.
Stopping TISA in its tracks is a huge victory for the Uruguayan people and their fight for a more just and sustainable future. It is time for all other countries involved in the negotiation to do the same and end this bad trade deal.Posted June 13, 2016 at 1:01 am
I was going to draw Grace on the sofa with a controller, but then I'd have to sacrifice "tweet tweet click", and that wasn't an option.
I think this is the most "in-joke" video game joke I've ever done, so here's the scoop:
Bastion from Overwatch is a robot with a little adorable bird friend on the character select screen that makes various people say "awwww".
Bastion is ALSO considered by many to be overpowered transforming bots of tremendous DOOM.
As for my opinion of the game, I like it. I'm generally not motivated to make comics referencing games I don't like, but for the record, I do like it, and my favorite characters to play as are Symmetra and Mercy.CHOICE BENEFITS TERMS AND CONDITIONS
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,” Sandler said, calling Podesta “one the most intelligent, decent, thoughtful human beings I’d ever met.”
In March, as Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign against Bernie Sanders grew increasingly bitter, Sandler emailed Podesta just to check in.
“How are you?” Sandler wrote. “MIss you.”
Podesta responded: “I was going to call you last night but fell asleep … I'll call later.”
Bianca Padró Ocasio contributed to this report.My current working hypothesis is that the U.S. is a late-stage empire about to enter a more serious and dangerous period of collapse. In case you missed it, I outlined my broad brush view in the very popular recent post, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire. Here’s a brief excerpt:
I believe last night’s strike represents the beginning of the end for U.S. empire. Although the U.S. has been declining domestically for this entire century, America has still been calling all the shots on the international front. This makes sense in late-stage empire, as the focus of the fat and happy “elite” becomes singularly obsessed with domination and power, while the situation back home festers and rots. Trump won on an “America first” platform that promised to emphasize the well-being of American citizens over geopolitical adventurism. We now know for certain he’s been manipulated into the imperial mindset, and his recklessness will merely accelerate U.S. decline on the world stage, and in turn, back home.
When I came across reports yesterday that the U.S. Justice Department is trying to figure out a way to prosecute the world’s most courageous and effective news publisher, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, I immediately saw it to be further evidence of the incredible insecurity and desperation of the American establishment.
The CIA is particularly enraged at Assange as a result of last month’s initial Vault 7 release. Rather than apologize for allowing zero day exploits in large tech companies to remain open and therefore vulnerable to hacking from anyone with the skills to do so (see: CIA Hacking Tools Allow for an Unaccountable Intelligence Agency Dictatorship), CIA director Mike Pompeo decided to respond with an unhinged nervous breakdown during a recent speech to the Saudi funded Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Here are a few excerpts from his deranged, incoherent, and unconstitutional remarks courtesy of the CIA:
WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.
This is what’s called “projection.”
It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence—the GRU—had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. We know this because Assange and his ilk make common cause with dictators today. Yes, they try unsuccessfully to cloak themselves and their actions in the language of liberty and privacy; in reality, however, they champion nothing but their own celebrity. Their currency is clickbait; their moral compass, nonexistent. Their mission: personal self-aggrandizement through the destruction of Western values. They do not care about the causes and people they claim to represent. If they did, they would focus instead on the autocratic regimes in this world that actually suppress free speech and dissent. Instead, they choose to exploit the legitimate secrets of democratic governments—which has, so far, proven to be a much safer approach than provoking a tyrant.
More projection.
No, Julian Assange and his kind are not the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom. They have pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice. They may have believed that, but they are wrong. Assange is a narcissist who has created nothing of value. He relies on the dirty work of others to make himself famous. He is a fraud—a coward hiding behind a screen.
Really? Seems to me he’s created the most powerful and impactful media organization of the 21st century, which is precisely why you hate his guts.
And in Kansas, we know something about false Wizards. So we face a crucial question: What can we do about this? What can and should CIA, the United States, and our allies do about the unprecedented challenge posed by these hostile non-state intelligence agencies? While there is no quick fix—no foolproof cure—there are steps that we can take to undercut the danger. First, it is high time we called out those who grant a platform to these leakers and so-called transparency activists. We know the danger that Assange and his not-so-merry band of brothers pose to democracies around the world. Ignorance or misplaced idealism is no longer an acceptable excuse for lionizing these demons. Third, we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now. And finally—and perhaps most importantly—we need to deepen the trust between the Intelligence Community and the citizens we strive to protect.
Deepen the trust? There is no trust.
At CIA, I can assure you that we are committed to earning that trust every day. We know we can never take it for granted. We must continue to be as open as possible with the American people so that our society can reach informed judgments on striking the proper balance between individual privacy and national security.
The first thing to appreciate from the above excerpts is how uncollected and unhinged Mike Pompeo appears to be, and let’s also not forget that Donald Trump appointed Pompeo of his own volition. Much of his commentary centers around simple name calling, for instance referring to Assange as a “narcissist,” a “false wizard” and a “demon” in the span of just a few short paragraphs. His seemingly unstable emotional state certainly doesn’t give me a lot faith in the CIA, not that I had much to begin with.
Moving along, Pompeo’s entire rant is filled with projection. First let’s define Psychological Projection:
Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.
Pompeo exhibits this behavior repeatedly in his remarks. For instance, he accuses Assange of “seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.”
I mean, that’s basically the CIA’s mission statement, and its entire history is filled to the brim with “seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.”
Moving along, he states “Assange and his ilk make common cause with dictators today,” and also says about Wikileaks, “they do not care about the causes and people they claim to represent.”
Both of these statements summarize U.S. foreign policy to a tee. After all, one of America’s closest foreign allies, Saudi Arabia, is not only one of the world’s most repressive, undemocratic states, it is also one of the leading propagators of radical Islamic terrorism across the globe, including the attacks of 9/11 (for more see: Meet the Lawyer Who’s Suing Saudi Arabia for Financing the 9/11 Attacks).
Finally, Pompeo justifies his attack on the First Amendment by pushing a false “us versus them mentality.” He states:
Third, we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.
This implies that Assange and Wikileaks represent “the enemy,” while the CIA is somehow some shining white night. Unfortunately for Pompeo, this isn’t how many Americans see the situation.
Let’s recall the following tweet, and understand that John Harwood’s following isn’t exactly filled with anti-establishment types.
Who do you believe America? — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 6, 2017
You can say that’s not a scientific poll, and that’s fine, but I’d argue a large percentage of Americans think Wikileaks is more patriotic than the CIA, and that poses an enormous problem for the deep state.
In fact, Americans as a whole no longer trust most of the institutions charged with managing the U.S. empire, because those institutions have completely and utterly failed the people. The only way to regain trust is to actually start doing some decent things for the nation, but that’s not what happens in late-stage empire. In late-stage empire, the corrupt and foolish “ruling class” continues to double and triple down on their own stupidity and theft until the whole thing falls apart. This is precisely what I expect to happen, and the ongoing Assange witch-hunt simply further confirms my suspicions.
To further prove the point, take a look at the following excerpt from CNN’s article on the topic:
US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN. The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning. Prosecutors have struggled with whether the First Amendment precluded the prosecution of Assange, but now believe they have found a way to move forward.
Think about what you just read for a minute. The DOJ apparently spent 7 years trying to figure out how to void the First Amendment, yet it couldn’t jail a single bank executive during that entire time. What does this tell you about where the government’s priorities lie? Even more disturbingly, it doesn’t matter which Goldman Sachs/deep state puppet sits in the White House, the agenda moves forward. It is an imperial agenda to protect and secure the wealth and power of the few against the well being and liberty of the many.
The U.S. empire doesn’t work for the people, it works for a small handful of elitists and insiders who have completely gamed a corrupt system for their advantage. The America people are starting to figure this out, partly due to the journalism of Wikileaks, which is why the deep state hates Assange so passionately.
The American empire is becoming increasingly insecure and desperate, which also makes it increasingly dangerous. Empires don’t reform, and as we can see from Trump’s first 100 days, we certainly aren’t going to see a reversal of course from him.
We the people need to keep our eye on the prize and stop bickering with one another over relatively trivial issues. That is precisely what the status quo wants and actively encourages us to do. They can’t keep us oppressed if we stand together, so let’s not make their jobs easier by constantly fighting with one another. We need to stand tall and say enough is enough. That we are sick of your puppets, your wars and your Wall Street bailouts. America is tired of being controlled by a small group of unaccountable, incompetent, greedy, unethical crooks running around stealing everything in sight.
Enough is enough.
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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Follow me on Twitter.A House panel's invitation to the leader of an Iranian dissident group has caused a furious backlash from former State Department officials who refuse to testify along with her.
Former ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and ex-counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin told Al-Monitor that they did not want to give a platform to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that the United States considered a terrorist organization until three years ago. Ford said he would not testify at the same time as Maryam Rajavi, while Benjamin has pulled out altogether from Wednesday's terrorism subcommittee hearing on the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS).
"The committee handled this abysmally," Ford told Al-Monitor in a phone call late Monday. "What the fuck do the MEK know about the Islamic State?"
Ford said he got the committee to agree to host Rajavi on a second panel after other witnesses testify as a condition for his participation. She is set to appear via teleconference from Paris, where the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella group of Iranian opposition groups that includes the MEK, has its headquarters in exile.
Benjamin, who helped delist the MEK while serving as coordinator for counterterrorism in 2009-12 under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called the invitation from panel chairman Ted Poe, R-Texas, "disgraceful." The MEK is widely believed to have been added to the terrorism list under President Bill Clinton as a goodwill gesture to reinforce the relatively moderate presidency of Mohammad Khatami, and the NCRI has since spent millions of dollars lobbying to get it delisted and boost its standing on Capitol Hill.
Benjamin told committee staff that he "did not believe the MEK had anything to contribute to a discussion of [IS], and that this would be a distraction from an important issue," he told Al-Monitor. "I said the story of the day would be the rehabilitation of the MEK, and I did not want to be associated with that in any way."
Poe has defended his invitation to Rajavi, which Al-Monitor first reported last week, saying hundreds of MEK members who remain at Camp Liberty in Baghdad could be at risk of being massacred by IS militants. Proponents of regime change in Iran have applauded the invitation, calling Rajavi and the NCRI a viable, democratic alternative to both Sunni and Shiite Islamists.
"Is Maryam Rajavi the right person to testify?" asked Raymond Tanter, who served on the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan, at the conservative website Townhall.com. "She is the right person: As a pro-democracy woman with a moderate view of Islam, Rajavi represents the opposite of the misogynous Iranian regime’s rulers; they are authoritarian, suppress women and hold an extreme view of Islam."
The MEK did not respond to a request for comment.
Its defenders say the decades-old allegations against the group are misinformed and rely excessively on propaganda from Tehran.
"Now freed from the restrictions and stigma of [the terrorist] designation, the MEK's members and supporters will have the opportunity to contest not only the factual record but assessments dismissive of the group's political potential," Lincoln Bloomfield, a former State and Defense Department official, wrote in a 2013 book about the MEK. "Their first and obvious point will be that no one knows how Iranians would vote in a free and open election."
Bloomfield and other MEK defenders argue that MEK attacks against Iranian targets were a form of legitimate armed resistance against a religious dictatorship, and that the killings of a half-dozen American citizens inside Iran in the 1970s were carried out by factions with no connection to the current leadership. They point out that support for the MEK within Iran is impossible to gauge since advocating on its behalf is punishable by death.
The group's detractors, of which there are many among current and former State Department officials, think banking on the MEK is delusional. They say the MEK is little more than a Rajavi cult and that supporting it publicly undermines pro-democracy activists within Iran.
"Although I participated in and supported the decision to delist the MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — in part because of real humanitarian concerns about the plight of its members in Iraq — I continue to have serious concerns about the group," Benjamin told Al-Monitor in an email. "No one can seriously dispute that the MEK has plenty of American blood on its hands. In addition to killing US civilians and military personnel, participating in the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran and serving as a strike force for Saddam Hussein, the group treats its own member abysmally and coercively."
Barbara Slavin contributed to this reportIf future generations were to live and work on the moon or on a distant asteroid, they would probably want a broadband connection to communicate with home bases back on Earth. They may even want to watch their favorite Earth-based TV show. That may now be possible thanks to a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory who, working with NASA last fall, demonstrated for the first time that a data communication technology exists that can provide space dwellers with the connectivity we all enjoy here on Earth, enabling large data transfers and even high-definition video streaming.
At CLEO: 2014, being held June 8-13 in San Jose, California, USA, the team will present new details and the first comprehensive overview of the on-orbit performance of their record-shattering laser-based communication uplink between the moon and Earth, which beat the previous record transmission speed last fall by a factor of 4,800. Earlier reports have stated what the team accomplished, but have not provided the details of the implementation.
"This will be the first time that we present both the implementation overview and how well it actually worked," says Mark Stevens of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. "The on-orbit performance was excellent and close to what we'd predicted, giving us confidence that we have a good understanding of the underlying physics," Stevens says.
The team made history last year when their Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) transmitted data over the 384,633 kilometers between the moon and Earth at a download rate of 622 megabits per second, faster than any radio frequency (RF) system. They also transmitted data from Earth to the moon at 19.44 megabits per second, a factor of 4,800 times faster than the best RF uplink ever used.
"Communicating at high data rates from Earth to the moon with laser beams is challenging because of the 400,000-kilometer distance spreading out the light beam," Stevens says. "It's doubly difficult going through the atmosphere, because turbulence can bend light -- causing rapid fading or dropouts of the signal at the receiver."
To outmaneuver problems with fading of the signal over such a distance, the demonstration uses several techniques to achieve error-free performance over a wide range of optically challenging atmospheric conditions in both darkness and bright sunlight. A ground terminal at White Sands, New Mexico, uses four separate telescopes to send the uplink signal to the moon. Each telescope is about 6 inches in diameter and fed by a laser transmitter that sends information coded as pulses of invisible infrared light. The total transmitter power is the sum of the four separate transmitters, which results in 40 watts of power.
The reason for the four telescopes is that each one transmits light through a different column of air that experiences different bending effects from the atmosphere, Stevens says. This increases the chance that at least one of the laser beams will interact with the receiver, which is mounted on a satellite orbiting the moon. This receiver uses a slightly narrower telescope to collect the light, which is then focused into an optical fiber similar to fibers used in terrestrial fiber optic networks.
From there, the signal in the fiber is amplified about 30,000 times. A photodetector converts the pulses of light into electrical pulses that are in turn converted into data bit patterns that carry the transmitted message. Of the 40-watt signals sent by the transmitter, less than a billionth of a watt is received at the satellite -- but that's still about 10 times the signal necessary to achieve error-free communication, Stevens says.
Their CLEO: 2014 presentation will also describe how the large margins in received signal level can allow the system to operate through partly transparent thin clouds in Earth's atmosphere, which the team views as a big bonus.
"We demonstrated tolerance to medium-size cloud attenuations, as well as large atmospheric-turbulence-induced signal power variations, or fading, allowing error-free performance even with very small signal margins," Stevens says.
While the LLCD design is directly relevant for near-Earth missions and those out to Lagrange points -- areas where the forces between rotating celestial bodies are balanced, making them a popular destination for satellites -- the team predicts that it's also extendable to deep-space missions to Mars and the outer planets.
Presentation SM4J.1, titled "Overview and On-orbit Performance of the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration Uplink," will take place Monday, June 9.George Osborne was a worried man. It was May 2016 and the EU referendum was only a month away. The polls were tight, much too tight for comfort as far as the then chancellor was concerned.
This had not been for the lack of effort on Osborne’s part. He had published a Treasury paper looking at the long-term implications of Brexit and had orchestrated heavyweight overseas support for the remain side from the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But with voters seemingly impervious to the barrage of warnings, it was time to put the frighteners on them. The earlier Treasury paper had predicted what the economy might look like in 2030; the one published in May 2016 was about the immediate impact of leaving the EU. It predicted a year-long recession, an increase in unemployment of 500,000, turmoil in the financial markets and falling house prices – all of which turned out to be well wide of the mark. To put it mildly, this was not the Treasury’s finest hour.
In one respect, though, the Treasury was right. The vote to leave the EU resulted in a sharp fall in the value of sterling, which pushed up the cost of imports and reduced consumers’ spending power. The impact of the pound’s depreciation was clearly evident in the batch of official statistics released last week – most notably in the rise in the annual inflation rate since the referendum and the sluggishness of retail spending.
Clearly, the economy has not collapsed since the Brexit vote in the way that Osborne said it would. But nor is it in the best of health. Unemployment is falling rather than rising, but the UK’s productivity performance is woeful. The fall in the value of the pound should help to rebalance the economy by making exports cheaper and imports dearer, but the squeeze on consumers has come through much more quickly than the boost to the trade figures. The retail sales figures would look even more sickly were it not for the spending by overseas tourists, who are finding the UK a cheap place to shop.
Following a spurt of (largely) debt-financed spending in the second half of 2016, Britain has fallen back into a low-growth period of around 0.2-0.3% a quarter. Some modest acceleration can be expected in 2018, because by then inflation will have fallen back and real incomes will start rising again. But it will be the wrong sort of growth – the traditional UK model based on rising consumption rather than rising investment and exports. Quite simply, the UK lacks the productive capacity to take advantage of the boost to competitiveness provided by a falling currency, so when consumption is weak, growth overall is weak too.
The reasons for that are familiar enough. An overvalued currency attracted hot money into the City, but disadvantaged manufacturers. Britain’s management has been poor. There has been too little attention paid to skills and training. The further education system is not really fit for purpose. Britain has nothing like Germany’s KfW government-run development bank, which prefers to nurture businesses with patient long-term finance rather than gouging them with high interest rates.
Solving these deep structural problems will take time and effort, which UK governments have tended to lack. It has been far easier, sadly, to get a sugar rush by stimulating the housing market. A hollowed-out manufacturing sector and a chronic trade deficit are the inevitable results.
Understandably, there is currently a great deal of debate about the sort of trading arrangements Britain will have with the EU and with the rest of the world after Brexit. But in some ways this is putting the cart before the horse. For Britain to have a successful post-Brexit trade strategy it first needs to have a productivity strategy and an industrial strategy.
The lessons of Learndirect do not flatter the private sector
As it pondered the future of apprenticeship quango Learndirect in 2011, the coalition wanted two things: to raise cash and cut down the number of “Neets” (those not in education, employment or training). It thought it had found the answer: sell the quango. The result has not been a good advert for privatisation.
The proceeds were minor, raising £36m from the private equity arm of Lloyds Bank, which at the time was 40% owned by the government. But at first, the company appeared to do well. The number of trainees reached nearly 73,000, and over the years Learndirect’s owners reaped millions in dividends from mostly taxpayer-provided work training young people. There was enough money for the company to spend £504,000 sponsoring a Formula One team.
However, education watchdog Ofsted last week issued a withering report branding its training “inadequate” and pointing out that 70% of Learndirect’s apprentices did not meet the minimum standards. Standards were so low that the Department for Education said it would withdraw all funding from the company.
Learndirect knew that Ofsted’s report was going to be damning and was so fearful about the impact that it fought a court battle to prevent its publication. One of Learndirect’s concerns was that the report could have such a “catastrophic” impact that it might have to call in administrators.
It lost the battle and the report was published; the DfE pulled its contracts. But Learndirect has not gone under and has reassured trainees, staff and investors that it is financially stable.
Is this because Learndirect’s parent has set up an ostensibly mirror company – Learndirect Apprenticeships – which it tells us is a “separate legal entity” and therefore not removed from the government’s approved list?
Andy Palmer, Learndirect’s chief executive, and Ken Hills, its chairman, did not respond to questions. Neither did Learndirect Apprenticeships’ two directors listed at Companies House – Andy Palmer and Ken Hills.
Ryanair might regret denying passengers a third G&T
Michael O’Leary is rarely cast in the role of killjoy. But if he gets his way, passing the hours and minutes in departure lounges will be a considerably drier experience for holidaymakers. Ryanair, the budget carrier of which he is boss, has demanded a two-drink limit at airport bars, on the grounds that airlines have to deal with the consequences of drunk passengers – such as emergency landings at airports even more far-flung than the average Ryanair destination.
O’Leary is now a very powerful executive in European aviation and his words should not be shrugged off by airports. But there could be consequences. If airports cut back on booze sales, they will make less money, and could plug that gap with higher landing charges. This means: higher fares. So there might be fewer drunk passengers for O’Leary to deal with, but also fewer passengers in general.American politicians love to talk about "holding people accountable." Here in Washington, someone is always sternly holding someone else accountable.
The phrase should enter the political aphorism hall of fame, along with "frank exchange of views," "at an appropriate time," and of course the granddaddy of them all: "What the American people truly want is…"
The reality of accountability is often quite different. Remember "Too big to fail"?
That was the ugly political shorthand for companies, Wall Street banks especially, that had amassed so much power and money that letting them suffer the consequences of their own stupidity would cause such widespread damage that they must be rescued.
Rescued, of course, with taxes gathered from the people their stupidity and greed had seriously harmed.
Too big to fail quickly morphed into a Washington acronym — TBTF — in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.
The investment banks that triggered the collapse were almost all deemed TBTF.
The government gave them hundreds of billions of dollars, which the banks then immediately took to the gamed casino of the stock market, enriching themselves almost obscenely before piously repaying the original bailout money.
Where’s my bailout?
Meanwhile, thousands of TSTJR (too small to justify rescuing) companies were left to strangle.
Many, such as the U.S. computer chain Circuit City, dumped entire workforces.
U.S.Attorney General Eric Holder said last week the government is suing S&P for knowingly issuing inflated credit ratings. (Associated Press)
For a while, these workers demonstrated and marched and hoisted placards asking, "Where's my bailout, dude?"
Then they disappeared into the nasty sinkhole that Wall Street's so-called masters of the universe had opened up.
Today, another acronym is taking form. It's the corollary of too big to fail — TBTJ. Too big to jail.
Most recently, that includes Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency upon whose advice everyone from ordinary punters to huge institutional investors rely.
S&P, as it is known, was at the top of the heap — the ultimate enabler in one of the greatest economic debacles of modern times.
Here's the way it worked:
Home buyers of moderate means would decide to buy a house that they couldn't afford, and some of them — well, a lot of them — would lie about their incomes.
These arrangements even had a name: the "liar loan." Pay a few more points in interest, and there was no need to actually document your worth.
All of this would be facilitated by a mortgage broker, who would concoct a plan in which the buyer would pay only interest on the loan, if even that, for the first few years.
Often the broker would sweeten the deal by offering a buyer "cash on closing," even if that person had no down payment.
In order to do this, the broker would rely on a pliable appraiser, who would dutifully overvalue the property by, say, $50,000 or so, allowing the buyer to purchase a Lexus or a nice vacation before moving into the home and taking on a mortgage that the purchaser couldn't really justify.
Up the food chain
Throughout this process, the lending bank would wink at all this. And why not? It intended to sell the crappy loan on up the food chain to Wall Street anyway.
At that point, a Wall Street heavyweight like Goldman Sachs would stack up thousands of equally crappy loans and turn them into "mortgage-backed securities."
Then Goldman or some other bank would stack up thousands of mortgage-backed securities, creating an entity called a "collateralized debt obligation" (CDO), the collateral being these overvalued homes that their owners couldn't afford.
Then along would come a ratings agency like S&P, or Moody's, or Fitch's, which would assign an "AAA" rating to entire tranches of this garbage, applying the imprimatur that big investors like pension funds needed in order to justify their purchases.
Unfortunately, these supposedly independent ratings agencies were paid by the companies whose crappy products they were assessing, and were in competition with each other, meaning positive ratings were good for business.
Trillions worth of these CDOs were then sold worldwide.
Everybody was happy. And everybody grew rich along the way. Then one day it all collapsed, as all Ponzi schemes must.
But the collapse left American prosecutors with a conundrum.
Something ought to be done, somebody "had to be held accountable."
But so many Americans had lied and weaseled and skived that charging them all would require building hundreds of costly new jails — difficult to do in a financial crisis, with tax revenues drying up.
So, the government decided to do the American thing: It sued.
Since 2008, Washington has sued and settled with AIG, the seller of credit default swaps, as well as certain mortgage firms that knew they were selling loans to people who couldn't pay, and several of the big banks that oversaw it all.
These big corporate players coughed up a few billion, which for them was chump change compared to all the money they had made back in the good days.
On down the chain went the authorities. Last week, the Justice Department announced it would file a civil suit for $5 billion against Standard and Poor's, which helped put the stamp of legitimacy on the whole rotten mess.
How long can it be before Washington goes after Moody's and Fitch's, too?
After all, governments do need money nowadays.
But has anyone gone to jail for all this fraud? Please. This is the land of free enterprise.
High officials at the Justice Department have been trotted out to explain that proving criminal intent in such cases is often difficult, which says a lot about either the wiliness of the financiers or the competence of the prosecutors.
Besides, settlements profit the treasury. So, the big players are still really rich, if perhaps just a little less so as a result of "being held accountable."
As for the millions of consumers who took out "liar loans," well, they're still horribly in debt, so there's not much point suing them. And besides, they were just reaching for the American dream, weren't they?
Unfortunately, many of the companies that were adjudged TSTJR went under, millions of Americans were thrown out of work, and millions of others saw their life savings evaporate.
Or watched in horror as home after home on their own streets went into foreclosure, killing their own property values in the process.
The question on their placards five years ago — "Where's my bailout, dude?" — seems as valid today as it was then.
Basically, here's the government's answer: Sucks to be you, dude. But don’t worry, we’ll hold somebody accountable, sort of.Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist
"Gaddafi" redirects here. For other people with the same name, see Gaddafi (name)
Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi[b] (; c. 1942 – 20 October 2011), commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977, and then as the "Brotherly Leader" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism but later ruled according to his own Third International Theory.
Born near Sirte, Italian Libya to a poor Bedouin family, Gaddafi became an Arab nationalist while at school in Sabha, later enrolling in the Royal Military Academy, Benghazi. Within the military, he founded a revolutionary cell which deposed the Western-backed Senussi monarchy of Idris in a 1969 coup. Having taken power, Gaddafi converted Libya into a republic governed by his Revolutionary Command Council. Ruling by decree, he ejected both the Italian population and Western military bases from Libya while strengthening ties to Arab nationalist governments—particularly Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt—and unsuccessfully advocating Pan-Arab political union. An Islamic modernist, he introduced sharia as the basis for the legal system and promoted "Islamic socialism". He nationalized the oil industry and used the increasing state revenues to bolster the military, fund foreign revolutionaries, and implement social programs emphasizing house-building, healthcare and education projects. In 1973, he initiated a "Popular Revolution" with the formation of Basic People's Congresses, presented as a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. He outlined his Third International Theory that year, publishing these ideas in The Green Book.
Gaddafi transformed Libya into a new socialist state called a Jamahiriya ("state of the masses") in 1977. He officially adopted a symbolic role in governance but remained head of both the military and the Revolutionary Committees responsible for policing and suppressing dissent. During the 1970s and 1980s, Libya's unsuccessful border conflicts with Egypt and Chad, support for foreign militants, and alleged responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in Scotland left it increasingly isolated on the world stage. A particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, resulting in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. From 1999, Gaddafi shunned Arab socialism and encouraged economic privatization, rapprochement with Western nations, and Pan-Africanism; he was Chairperson of the African Union from 2009 to 2010. Amid the 2011 Arab Spring, protests against widespread corruption and unemployment broke out in eastern Libya. The situation descended into civil war, in which NATO intervened militarily on the side of the anti-Gaddafist National Transitional Council (NTC). The government was overthrown, and Gaddafi retreated to Sirte, only to be captured and killed by NTC militants.
A highly divisive figure, Gaddafi dominated Libya's politics for four decades and was the subject of a pervasive cult of personality. He was decorated with various awards and praised for his anti-imperialist stance, support for Arab—and then African—unity, and for significant improvements that his government brought to the Libyan people's quality of life. Conversely, Islamic fundamentalists strongly opposed his social and economic reforms, and he was posthumously accused of sexual abuse. He was condemned by many as a dictator whose authoritarian administration violated human rights and financed global terrorism.
Early life [ edit ]
Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi[12] was born near Qasr Abu Hadi, a rural area outside the town of Sirte in the deserts of Tripolitania, western Libya. His family came from a small, relatively uninfluential tribal group called the Qadhadhfa, who were Arabized Berber in heritage. His mother was named Aisha (died 1978), and his father, Mohammad Abdul Salam bin Hamed bin Mohammad, was known as Abu Meniar (died 1985); the latter earned a meagre subsistence as a goat and camel herder. Nomadic Bedouins were illiterate and kept no birth records. As such, Gaddafi's date of birth is not known with certainty, and sources have set it in 1942 or in the spring of 1943, although his biographers David Blundy and Andrew Lycett noted that it could have been pre-1940. His parents' only surviving son, he had three older sisters. Gaddafi's upbringing in Bedouin culture influenced his personal tastes for the rest of his life; he preferred the desert over the city and would retreat there to meditate.
From childhood, Gaddafi was aware of the involvement of European colonialists in Libya; his nation was occupied by Italy, and during the North African Campaign of World War II it witnessed conflict between Italian and British troops. According to later claims, Gaddafi's paternal grandfather, Abdessalam Bouminyar, was killed by the Italian Army during |
are too fat and non-sexual. But it can influence it too.'
She then goes on to attack Manchester's famous Gay Village.
'In Manchester there is a whole part of the city for gay people. Nobody told me about it, I have found it myself when I was walking around the town,' she wrote.
'There is even a place there saying 'Gay Village'. It is the most popular place for such couples, there are cafes and clubs there with small rainbow flags.
'Of course, a young man with a girl can also go into the gay club but they should know that if somebody approaches them, it maybe not just for a chat but for something more deep.'
Alisa Titko's jaundiced view is a striking example of intolerance to homosexuals in Russia
She claimed Manchester showed why people were wrong to call for Moscow to be'more tolerant to couples with non-traditional sexual orientation'.
'In the evenings gays and lesbians are having fun not only inside but also outside and they do not hide their feelings,' she continued.
'In one cafe, there was a wedding of two rather big girls.
'One of them was wearing a bridal veil, the second had a black-tie on. Their mothers and friends were sitting at the table with them.
'At the next table we saw a man in a skin mask who was sticking his tongue out of it when he wanted to lick the ear of his partner.
'We see explicit posters on the walls, for example the one of kissing Batman and Superman.'
Alisa Titko complained about this mural on a wall in Manchester, saying it was 'explicit'
One Russian visitor is quoted saying: 'Their women are so fat, they look disgusting to their men'. File photo of revellers in Manchester
She claimed gay people openly holding hands and kissing was 'disgusting'.
'It is such a pleasure that there are no such gay streets in Moscow,' she said.
Her jaundiced view is a striking example of intolerance to homosexuals in Russia and comes amid reports that gay men in Chechnya were rounded up into 'concentration camps' where they were were beaten and tortured, with some killed.
Relatives were also urged to carry out 'honour killings' on their homosexual family members because of shame.
Titko told her readers bizarrely that 'the fact that there are more and more people with non-traditional sexual orientation in Russia' was because 'their mothers did not beat them enough when they were kids. It is a measure of their immorality.'
She demanded: 'Let's remain Russian. Let's start normal families. Let's give birth in legal marriages. And don't lets mix love and debauchery'.
Reacting to the comments, student Heidi Green, 19, said: 'I think it's wrong and generally cities are full of slimmer people because people walk around more. It's not like in America. I think cities are full of more diverse people.
'The reason for our gay population is the fact we are an accepting city for gay people I don't think it has anything to do with what women look like.'
Mike, 25 a researcher from Manchester, who is also gay, said: 'The fact she had come to the village which is designed for LGBT people to come and have that reaction and turn it into a really negative thing is really horrible.
'Everyone I've spoken to has said that they are surprised that level of bigotry can exist.'
Josh, 26, added: 'It is Russia and there are a lot of homophobic issues there. It's very misguided and a very sweeping statement.'The supreme court justice presiding over Brazil’s biggest corruption case has died after the small plane he was travelling in crashed into the sea off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state, according to local authorities.
Brazil's anti-corruption prosecutor: graft is 'endemic. It has spread like cancer' Read more
Teori Zavascki was among four people on board the Hawker Beechcraft twin-prop aircraft when it went down on Thursday afternoon into waters close to Rasa Island on its way from São Paulo to the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Three bodies have been recovered. Zavascki’s son, Francisco, confirmed that his father was one of the victims.
The cause is under investigation. Navy vessels, fishing boats and personnel from the army and fire department were searching the area and trying to salvage the wreckage.
Zavascki has played a crucial role in the Lava Jato (Car Wash) judicial inquiry into a bribery and kickback scandal that has implicated scores of politicians – including the current and former presidents Michel Temer and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and several dozen other prominent politicians – and resulted in the jailing of the former head of the lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha.
In recent days, the judge had been reviewing evidence from senior executives at Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company, which could result in many more arrests of powerful figures in Congress and the business community.
There was no initial announcement of the cause of the crash, but the timing prompted speculation that the judge had fallen victim to foul play.
“Brazilian politics has been outdoing itself with strange cases involving authorities. It is natural to have suspicious but its too premature to say what happened,” said Edson Sardinha of the political watchdog Congresso em Foco.
“It does leave a question mark in relation to Lava Jato. Teori was responsible for over seven thousand cases, over a hundred related to Lava Jato, with confidential cases, plea bargains, and cases of politicians, ministers and executives. This reinforces the cynicism that our society already has in abundance. “
Temer, who expressed astonishment at the news, must now appoint a new justice, which could affect the progress of the investigation. He
Sergio Moro, the prosecutor who has led the Lava Jato investigation for nearly three years, said in a statement that he was “perplexed” by the death of Zavascki, whom he described as a “Brazilian hero”.
“Without him, there would be no Operation Car Wash,” Moro wrote. “I hope that his legacy, of serenity, seriousness and firmness in enforcing the law, regardless of the interests of those involved, even the powerful, will not be forgotten.”
The former president Dilma Rousseff, who nominated Zavascki for the supreme court, said: “Today we have lost a great Brazilian.” She said he performed his duties “with fearlessness, as a serious and upright man”.
The Lava Jato case has caused turmoil in Brazil’s political landscape. After Rousseff was impeached last year, it emerged that one of the motives of those who brought about her downfall was to try to halt the Lava Jato investigation.
As well as admirers, his work made him enemies. Last June, he confirmed that his family had been threatened, but he brushed off the dangers.174 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit
Yesterday, Apple was granted a patent for a Gear VR-like mobile headset which would use a portable device (like a smartphone) as the primary display. The patent strikes similarities between both Samsung’s Gear VR and a swath of VR smartphone adapters out there like Google Cardboard. Patent attorney Eric Greenbaum tells us that the patent could have “broad ramifications” for mobile VR headsets.
With countless VR smartphone adapters and Samsung’s impressive Gear VR mobile VR headset available on the market, the idea of using a smartphone for a VR experience seems obvious. Back in 2008 though, when Apple filed a patent for a “Head-mounted display apparatus for retaining a portable electronic device with display,”—among the many patents the company has filed that sat on the shelf—who could have confidently said whether or not it would even come into play?
See Also: At the End of 2014, Tech Giants Sony, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft All Have a Hand in VR
Of the many timelines history could have taken, we’re here now in 2015 when the virtual reality industry is growing at a blistering rate, and this patent, which appears to have been first noticed as granted by Patently Apple, is all too relevant.
Filed in 2008, published in 2010, and granted yesterday, the patent describes a device which sounds an awful lot like Gear VR and other VR smartphone adapters. Eric Greenbaum, patent attorney and founder of About Face VR, breaks down the core of the patent’s claim for Road to VR:
The language of claim 1 states (in my own words): A HMD [head mounted display] made up of a frame that is adapted to receive a mobile device such that the frame positions the mobile device in front of a user’s eyes and presents visual content to the user, and where the HMD has a detection mechanism that ‘tells’ the mobile device when it is mounted on the HMD. There is a final clause in the claim that involves an optical assembly that makes some adjustment to the image from the mobile device screen. I find the claim language a little bit vague and I’m not completely clear on what it means.
Greenbaum told me that “The apple patent may have broad ramifications for mobile-device based head mounted displays.” Which I take to mean, Apple could have a case on their hands if they wanted to challenge Gear VR or similar devices in court.
The timing of the patent issuance caught my attention. According to the communiqué between Apple and United States Patent Office, the company was given a Notice of Allowance—acceptance of the patent’s claims—on November 5th, 2014, just two months after Samsung revealed Gear VR, and a month before the device went on sale. While Greenbaum noted that “Apple had been pretty diligent about prosecuting this application for the last seven years,” he agreed it was possible that Gear VR may have put pressure on Apple to get the patent through the system.
“The patent process is a negotiation between the applicant and the patent office,” he said. “The applicant wants the broadest protection possible and the patent office wants to limit the breadth of the claims to only that which is new, useful and non-obvious over the prior art. It’s conceivable, and mind you I have no information or opinion on this matter, but it’s conceivable that Apple compromised on the language of their claims to accept language acceptable to the patent office so that the patent would issue. They may have seen the release of the Gear VR as a reason to compromise.”
Indeed, on June 2nd, 2014, Apple canceled a series of former claims, nearly halving the patent’s total claims to 12. June would be four months prior to Samsung’s September announcement of Gear VR, though rumors of the device were floating around as of July and may have been known to Apple earlier.
See Also: Looking for a Job in Virtual Reality? Apple’s Hiring
It’s possible that other devices helped put pressure on Apple’s patent processing instead. Google Cardboard was announced at the end of June, with a number of similar devices announced or available back in 2013.
Ultimately, Greenbaum figures differently, saying “The fact that it was just granted is probably not related to Gear VR’s release. Apple would likely have wanted this patent granted sooner.” He told me that seven years was long, but not unheard of for the patent process.
Alas, whichever is the case doesn’t matter much. The fact is that Apple has indeed been granted a patent which could give it a strong case against Gear VR and Cardboard-like VR smartphone adapters. Greenbaum assess the patent’s potential impact on the industry:
Apple’s relationship with the VR industry remains an open question. So far we’ve heard no word of their planning any VR products. However their patent filings indicate a strong interest in the field and I would expect them to be planning something. Their model is generally to wait and see how things develop and then come in with a clean, easy, and simple to use product. I expect that pattern will be maintained with VR. This Apple HMD patent is significant. I would say it introduces potential litigation risks for companies that have or are planning to release a mobile device HMD. There is no duty for Apple to make or sell an HMD. They can sit on this patent and use it strategically either by enforcing it against potential infringers, licensing it, or using it as leverage in forming strategic partnerships.
This is far from Apple’s first patent to touch on the virtual reality space. Among others, another patent filed in 2007 depicts a headset more reminiscent of the Oculus Rift and other standalone devices. Apple was granted this patent in December, 2013.Sorry, this content is currently not available in your country due to its copyright restriction. You can choose other content. Thanks for your understanding.
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The Oxford economists calculated that in 2007, Britons were better off than people in the United States, Germany, Japan, France and Italy when wealth per capita was measured in dollars.
During 2008, as the recession starts to bite, Britons have fallen to fourth place behind the Americans, the Germans and the French.
And worse is to come as Britain suffers the biggest economic contraction of any developed economy and the pound continues to slide.
Earlier this year £1 was worth $2, but investors fears about the UK's prospects and Gordon Brown's plans to borrow billions more to support the economy have sent sterling tumbling.
The pound is now trading below $1.50. It has also dropped sharply against the euro, with £1 now worth almost 1 euro. Two months ago, the pound was worth almost 1.30 euros.
Independent forecasters including the International Monetary Fund have suggested that Britain is set to suffer the deepest recession of any developed economy. The Centre for Economics and Business Research, another forecasting firm, last week said the UK economy will shrink by 2.9 per cent in real terms during 2009, the biggest drop in a single year since 1946
The strength of the pound and several years of healthy economic growth led by a booming financial services industry combined to make British people better off relative to their peers elsewhere.
Now, with both the pound and the economy waning, the UK's relative wealth is falling.
A report by Oxford Economics will this week say that UK GDP per capita in 2009 will be 24% lower than in America and more than 15% lower than in Japan, Germany and France.
Britons' relative wealth will even by 7 per cent lower than GDP per capita in Italy, whose economy has struggled for a decade and was
Adrian Cooper, managing director of Oxford Economics, said: "The UK was at the centre of the global financial boom and this led to a dramatic improvement in its apparent living standards relative to its peers. But the subsequent bust in financial markets has taken a heavy toll. Recession and falling sterling have relegated the UK to the bottom of the league table."
Mr Cooper said that Britons going abroad would feel the relative decline most keenly. "The fall in UK relative living standards at market exchange rates will hit hard those holidaying abroad. Britons will no longer be among the richest people on the beach."
Despite the bleak forecasts for Britain's relative economic performance, Gordon Brown insists that Britain will emerge from the recession stronger than other economies because of his plans to borrow and spend through the downturn.
In the New Year, the Prime Minister will launch a series of initiatives aimed at "preparing Britain for the upturn," investing more public money in environmental technology and alternatives to oil.
There will be moves to boost what Mr Brown has called "the digital economy."Left 4 Dead 2 Demo Impressions
Left 4 Dead 2 - Click to Enlarge
Left 4 Dead 2 - Click to Enlarge
, Xbox 360With its sequel,is becoming a lot like the old Roger Moore James Bond films – a world of guilty pleasures and endless gadgets. While the originalwas a fairly simple romp,expands in virtually every direction. Where the first game had only six weapons and two types of grenades, the sequel delivers a much vaster arsenal and a selection of new tools to put at your disposal – many of which can be seen in the recently released demo.In addition to guns, the only weapons in the original were molotov cocktails and pipe bombs; now there are bile jars, incendiary bullets, adrenaline shots and even a defibrillator. While these are all items that can turn the tide of a zombie war, when you first get a chance to play with these gadgets then it's hard not to feel a little bit overloaded by the weapons at your disposal.Valve's dynamic help system comes into play though and mercifully explains many of these new tools to you – the bile jar is useful for concentrating and distracting hordes, while the adrenaline is good for giving you a speed boost and the defibrillator can revive dead players. It's effortlessly explained, allowing you to focus on the core joys of the game – killing dynamically positioned zombies.Unfortunately, this is where Valve hits a very identifiable weak point in theformula, as some of the new weapons shift the balance of the game into more of a grind than we're entirely comfortable with (at least judging things by the demo). The fault lies specifically with the new array of melee weapons, which provide the benefit of near-certain kills at the sacrifice of range and speed. The problem simply is that many of them, such as the frying pan, machete and truncheon which all take the place of a pistol in your weapon selection, are too powerful.” said one friend we played through the demo with “Sure enough, most battles are made almost insultingly easy by the righteous application of a machete or frying pan and, since the weapons can still be complemented by an assault shotgun or rifle to help with tougher boss infected and since the weapons don't degrade, playing through the demo is practically a breeze.The selection of melee weapons on offer feels a bit suspect too, leaning uncomfortably towards either the foolish or failed-humorous in premise and ill-conceived in balancing. Since when did an electric guitar make for a suitable zombie weapon and since when was it possible to decapitate three enemies at once with a guitar as easily and swiftly as could be accomplished with a machete?Obviously, there's a certain flaw in expecting a semblance of realism from a game such as, but one of the most brilliant things that the original game did was to successfully capture the sensation of being inside a zombie horror film where the odds are always against you. By loading you up with new tools and providing unbalanced and out of place weapons, this feeling is, if not gone, then certainly receding into the distance.What's really strange about it all though is that you'd expect this feeling to come because of the switch to a daylight environment, but it doesn't. In fact, the cloudless sky and New Orleans sunlight doesn't make much of a difference at all – as the same friend also said, “It makes us feel a little guilty to start our impressions of such an anticipated game by slamming the melee weapons when there are a lot of cool new features to be talked about, but we can't help it. To a degree, this feels like the first game that Valve has developed which might have a specific and significant failing and, though we loved the new, larger levels and the variations worked into the gameplay, the first thing we thought when we came away from the demo was that we didn't like the melee system. It sounds great in theory, but in practice it's something we could definitely do without.Washington was able to determine Russia's involvement based on the "signature" of the attacks, which a government official told NBC News hackers may not have realized they left behind. The official used an analogy of a criminal investigation of a home invasion: the Russians might "shimmy down the chimney," the Chinese "would kick the door down" and the North Koreans "would build a tunnel and flood the chamber."
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., commended the decision to name Russia and called for a more coordination with European allies that "deters further meddling."
"All of us should be gravely concerned when a foreign power like Russia seeks to undermine our democratic institutions, and we must do everything in our power to guard against it," said Schiff, a ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the Russian hacking of the U.S. election system is "intolerable" and that the U.S. needs to develop a strong response.
Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., said the Obama administration's "strategic patience policy has failed" and that he plans to introduce a bill that would impose sanctions on Russia's cyber criminals. The bill would resemble similar provisions within the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act.
"Russia's interference with American democracy is a direct threat to our political process, and it may only be the tip of the iceberg. It is imperative that Russia's behavior is met with strength in the form of aggressive sanctions to show the world that its cybercrimes will not be tolerated," said Gardner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity.
Friday's news comes after thousands of internal emails between Democratic officials were dumped by WikiLeaks ahead of the party's national convention this summer.
Last month, Putin called the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails a public service, but denied accusations that his government was involved in the email hack.
"The important thing is the content that was given to the public," he said in an interview with Bloomberg.Marouane Fellaini could be on his way to Old Trafford (Picture: Getty)
Manchester United are believed to have had a £20m bid for Marouane Fellaini accepted by Everton, according to reports.
The deal is currently unconfirmed by either club, but is thought to be worth an initial fee of £20m, which will rise to £24m.
MORE: Wayne Rooney won’t ask Manchester United for Chelsea move
Former Everton boss David Moyes has been keen on both Fellaini and left-back Leighton Baines following him to Manchester United from Goodison Park all summer, but infuriated bosses at his old club with a joint bid of £28m last week.
The offer was labelled ‘derisory’ by the Merseyside club and it now appears Moyes has returned with a single offer for midfielder Fellaini.
Manchester United are also keen on Leighton Baines (Picture: Reuters)
United have already seen interest in Cesc Fabregas and Thiago Alcantara fail this summer, as he looks to bolster his squad for the defence of their Premier League title.
But it now seems the Scot is on the brink of his first major signing since being named as Sir Alex Ferguson’s successor earlier this summer, on the same day Chelsea’s pursuit of Wayne Rooney seemed to come to an end.ANKARA, Turkey -- A Kurdish militant group has claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack in the Turkish capital Ankara which killed 28 people Wednesday.
In a statement posted on its website, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons said Friday it carried out the attack to avenge Turkish military operations against Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey.
The Turkey-based group is an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.
Turkey terror attack: Death toll rises to 28 in car bombing
The rush hour car-bomb attack on Wednesday evening targeted buses carrying military personnel and injured dozens of people in addition to those killed.
Turkey had blamed a U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia group for the attack, saying they had acted in collaboration with the PKK.
They vowed strong retaliation against the perpetrators, threatening to further complicate the Syria conflict.
The attack came as Turkey grapples with an array of issues, including renewed fighting with the Kurdish rebels, the threat from Islamic State militants and the Syria refugee crisis. The blast was the second deadly bombing in Ankara in four months.
Turkey has been pressing the U.S. to cut off support to the Kurdish Syrian militias, which Turkey regards as terrorists because of their affiliation with the PKK.
The U.S. already lists the PKK as a terror group. But Washington relies heavily on the Syrian Democratic Union Party, or PYD, and its military wing, the People's Protection Units, or YPG, in the battle against the Islamic State group and has rejected Turkish pressure.
Turkey's military said after that its jets conducted cross-border raids against Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq hours after the attack and struck a group of about 60 to 70 PKK rebels. The Turkish jets attacked PKK positions in northern Iraq's Haftanin region, hitting the group of rebels which it said included a number of senior PKK leaders, the military said. The claim couldn't be verified.
On Thursday, six soldiers were killed in southeastern Turkey after PKK rebels detonated a bomb on a road linking the cities of Diyarbakir and Bingol as their military vehicle was passing by, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
Turkey's air force has been striking PKK positions in northern Iraq since a fragile two-and-a-half year-old peace process with the group collapsed in July, reigniting a fierce three-decade old conflict.
In October, suicide bombings blamed on ISIS targeted a peace rally outside the main train station in Ankara, killing 102 people in Turkey's deadliest attack in years.Recently, inspired by Ken Shirriff's and Bryce Neal's low level looks at the Bitcoin protocol, I set about constructing Bitcoin's much talked about multisignature transactions from scratch to understand their capabilities and limitations. Specifically, I used Bitcoin's Pay-to-ScriptHash (P2SH) transaction type to create a M-of-N multisignature transaction. The code to do it all in Go is available as go-bitcoin-multsig on GitHub and I'd like to go through how all of this works at the Bitcoin protocol level. We'll also step through creating and spending a multisig transaction to make it all clearer.
In many ways, this is a follow up to Ken's amazing explanation of the Bitcoin protocol and constructing a Pay-to-PubKeyHash (P2PKH) transaction, so I won't cover things covered there in any great detail. Please check out his post out first if you're completely new to the Bitcoin protocol.
I'll be using go-bitcoin-multisig to generate keys and transactions along the way, explaining each step. If you'd like to follow along and create a multisig transaction yourself, you'll need to follow the simple build instructions for go-bitcoin-multisig.
What is a Pay-to-ScriptHash (P2SH) transaction?
A typical Bitcoin address that looks like 15Cytz9sHqeqtKCw2vnpEyNQ8teKtrTPjp is actually a specific type of Bitcoin address known as a Pay-to-PubKeyHash (P2PKH) address. To spend Bitcoin funds sent to this type of address, the recipient must use the private key associated with the public key hash specified in that address to create a digital signature, which is put into the scriptSig of a spending transaction, unlocking the funds.
A Pay-to-ScriptHash (P2SH) Bitcoin address looks and works quite differently. A typical P2SH address looks like 347N1Thc213QqfYCz3PZkjoJpNv5b14kBd. A P2SH address always begins with a '3', instead of a '1' as in P2PKH addresses. This is because P2SH addresses have a version byte prefix of 0x05, instead of the 0x00 prefix in P2PKH addresses, and these come out as a '3' and '1' after base58check encoding.
So what information is encoded in a P2SH address? A specific unspent Bitcoin can actually have a whole range of different spending conditions attached to it, the most common being a typical P2PKH which just requires the recipient to provide a signature matching the public key hash. The Bitcoin core developers realized that people were looking at the capabilities of Bitcoin's Script language and seeing a whole array of possibilities about what spending conditions you could attach to a Bitcoin output, to create much more elaborate transactions than just P2PKH transactions. The core developers decided that instead of letting senders put in long scripts into their scriptPubKey (where spending conditions usually go), they would let each sender put in a hash of their spending conditions instead. These spending conditions are known as the redeem script, and a P2SH funding transaction simply contains a hash of this redeem script in the scriptPubKey of the funding transaction.The redeem script itself is only revealed, checked against the redeem script hash, and evaluated during the spending transaction.
Source: https://bitcoin.org
This puts the responsibility of providing the full redeem script on to the recipient of the P2SH funds. This has a number of advantages:
The sender can fund any arbitrary redeem script without knowing what those spending conditions are. This makes sense because a sender largely does not care about how their funds will be spent in the future -- this is an issue for the recipient who cares about the conditions of further spending. In the case of multisig transactions, the sender can send funds without knowing the required public keys (belonging to the recipient) of a multisignature address, which are revealed only when the recipient is spending the funds. This increases security for the recipient.
The sender can use a short, 34-character address like the one above, instead of a long, unwieldy one containing details of a full redeem script. This lets a recipient put up just a short address on their payment page or message, reducing the chance of human errors in transcription.
It lowers the transaction fees for the sender of funds. Transaction fees are proportional to the size of a transaction, and a fixed length hash lets the sender send funds to any arbitrary redeem script without worrying about paying higher fees. It is the responsibility of the recipient who creates the redeem script to determine how large their spending transaction will be and how much it will cost. This is a small issue at the moment since transaction costs are quite small, but they may be more important in the future as block rewards get smaller in Bitcoin.
All of this will hopefully make more sense as we go ahead and craft a multisignature P2SH transaction. If you'd like to learn more, the Bitcoin developer guide has a full explanation of P2SH transactions.
Creating a 2-of-3 multisig P2SH address
We will create a 2-of-3 multisignature address, where 2 digital signatures of 3 possible public keys are required to spend funds sent to this address.
First we need the hex representations of 3 public keys. There are lots of private/public key pair generators out there, but here we will use the one built into go-bitcoin-multisig. These keys are cryptographically secure to the limits of Go's crypto/rand package, which uses /dev/urandom/ on Unix-like systems and CryptGenRandom API on Windows:
go-bitcoin-multisig keys --count 3 --concise
Which outputs for us: (your generated keys will be different, of course)
-------------- KEY #1 Private key: 5JruagvxNLXTnkksyLMfgFgf3CagJ3Ekxu5oGxpTm5mPfTAPez3 Public key hex: 04a882d414e478039cd5b52a92ffb13dd5e6bd4515497439dffd691a0f12af9575fa349b5694ed3155b136f09e63975a1700c9f4d4df849323dac06cf3bd6458cd Public Bitcoin address: 1JzVFZSN1kxGLTHG41EVvY5gHxLAX7q1Rh -------------- -------------- KEY #2 Private key: 5JX3qAwDEEaapvLXRfbXRMSiyRgRSW9WjgxeyJQWwBugbudCwsk Public key hex: 046ce31db9bdd543e72fe3039a1f1c047dab87037c36a669ff90e28da1848f640de68c2fe913d363a51154a0c62d7adea1b822d05035077418267b1a1379790187 Public Bitcoin address: 14JfSvgEq8A8S7qcvxeaSCxhn1u1L71vo4 -------------- -------------- KEY #3 Private key: 5JjHVMwJdjPEPQhq34WMUhzLcEd4SD7HgZktEh8WHstWcCLRceV Public key hex: 0411ffd36c70776538d079fbae117dc38effafb33304af83ce4894589747aee1ef992f63280567f52f5ba870678b4ab4ff6c8ea600bd217870a8b4f1f09f3a8e83 Public Bitcoin address: 1Kyy7pxzSKG75L9HhahRZgYoer9FePZL4R --------------
So we have 3 public keys in hex ready to go:
Key A:
04a882d414e478039cd5b52a92ffb13dd5e6bd4515497439dffd691a0f12af9575fa349b5694ed3155b136f09e63975a1700c9f4d4df849323dac06cf3bd6458cd
Key B:
046ce31db9bdd543e72fe3039a1f1c047dab87037c36a669ff90e28da1848f640de68c2fe913d363a51154a0c62d7adea1b822d05035077418267b1a1379790187
Key C:
0411ffd36c70776538d079fbae117dc38effafb33304af83ce4894589747aee1ef992f63280567f52f5ba870678b4ab4ff6c8ea600bd217870a8b4f1f09f3a8e83
Now, we specify that we want a 2-of-3 address and provide our 3 public keys to generate our P2SH address:
go-bitcoin-multisig address --m 2 --n 3 --public-keys 04a882d414e478039cd5b52a92ffb13dd5e6bd4515497439dffd691a0f12af9575fa349b5694ed3155b136f09e63975a1700c9f4d4df849323dac06cf3bd6458cd,046ce31db9bdd543e72fe3039a1f1c047dab87037c36a669ff90e28da1848f640de68c2fe913d363a51154a0c62d7adea1b822d05035077418267b1a1379790187,0411ffd36c70776538d079fbae117dc38effafb33304af83ce4894589747aee1ef992f63280567f52f5ba870678b4ab4ff6c8ea600bd217870a8b4f1f09f3a8e83
Which outputs for us:
--------------------- Your *P2SH ADDRESS* is: 347N1Thc213QqfYCz3PZkjoJpNv5b14kBd Give this to sender funding multisig address with Bitcoin. --------------------- --------------------- Your *REDEEM SCRIPT* is: 524104a882d414e478039cd5b52a92ffb13dd5e6bd4515497439dffd691a0f12af9575fa349b5694ed3155b136f09e63975a1700c9f4d4df849323dac06cf3bd6458cd41046ce31db9bdd543e72fe3039a1f1c047dab87037c36a669ff90e28da1848f640de68c2fe913d363a51154a0c62d7adea1b822d05035077418267b1a1379790187410411ffd36c70776538d079fbae117dc38effafb33304af83ce4894589747aee1ef992f63280567f52f5ba870678b4ab4ff6c8ea600bd217870a8b4f1f09f3a8e8353ae Keep private and provide this to redeem multisig balance later. ---------------------
Let's breakdown that redeem script since that is where all the magic happens. A valid multisignature redeem script, according to the Bitcoin protocol, looks like:
<OP_2> <A pubkey> <B pubkey> <C pubkey> <OP_3> <OP_CHECKMULTISIG>
And this is what our particular redeem script contains:
Description redeemScript bytes OP_2 52 Push 65 bytes to stack 41 <pubKeyA> 04a882d414e478039cd5b52a92ffb13dd5e6bd4515497439dffd691a0f12af9575fa349b5694ed3155b136f09e63975a1700c9f4d4df849323dac06cf3bd6458cd Push 65 bytes to stack 41 <pubKeyB> 046ce31db9bdd543e72fe3039a1f1c047dab87037c36a669ff90e28da1848f640de68c2fe913d363a51154a0c62d7adea1b822d05035077418267b1a1379790187 Push 65 bytes to stack 41 <pubKeyC> 0411ffd36c70776538d079fbae117dc38effafb33304af83ce4894589747aee1ef992f63280567f52f5ba870678b4ab4ff6c8ea600bd217870a8b4f1 |
milkweed. The northern area is a mature woodland dominated by oaks, with scattered white ash and American elm trees. Among the numerous other species in this miniforest are oak, sassafras, sweetgum, and tulip trees, arrowwood and dogwood shrubs, bindweed and catbrier vines, and violets.
Time Landscape is on city-owned land, assigned to Transportation. It is maintained by Parks under Greenstreets, a program inaugurated in 1986 and reintroduced in 1994 to convert paved street properties, like triangles and malls, into green lawns. Funded through Parks & Recreation’s capital budget, Greenstreets plants trees and shrubs in the city’s barren street spaces. The assistance of volunteers keeps these areas clean and their plants healthy.ITHACA, NY—According to a Cornell University study released Wednesday, nearly three in four bedroom closets in U.S. family residences currently contain the wife’s naked, crouching boy toy. “After examining more than 20,000 closets nationwide, we found that a full 73 percent of them are presently occupied by a young pool boy, landscaper, or teenage neighbor who is peering through the door slats either fully nude or in hastily donned boxer shorts,” read the 40-page report, which confirmed that each one of the boy toys is, at this moment, hiding among the husband’s hanging dress shirts while attempting to remain completely motionless and control the volume of his breathing. “Also, in over 90 percent of these cases, we found that the cowering swain is looking on wide-eyed as the negligee-clad wife scrambles to assume a seated position on the bed and give the appearance that she’s just casually flipping through a magazine on her nightstand.” The study went on to note that the remaining 27 percent of the nation’s bedroom closets contain the husband’s boy toy.
AdvertisementThe WSJ reports that the Trump administration’s budget planning assumes very high economic growth over the next decade — between 3 and 3.5 percent annually. How was this number arrived at? Basically, they worked backwards, assuming the growth they needed to make their budget numbers add up. Credibility!
But the purpose of this post is mainly to explain why such a number is implausible — not impossible, but not something that should be anyone’s central forecast.
The claimed returns to Trumpnomics are close to the highest growth rates we’ve seen under any modern administration. Real GDP grew 3.4 percent annually under Reagan; it grew 3.7 percent annually under Clinton (shhh — don’t tell conservatives.) But there are fundamental reasons to believe that such growth is unlikely to happen now.
First, demography: Reagan took office with baby boomers — and women — still entering the work force; these days baby boomers are leaving. Here’s UN data on the 5-year growth rate of the population aged 20-64, a rough proxy for those likely to seek work:
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Just on demography alone, then, you’d expect growth to be around a percentage point lower than it was under Reagan.
Furthermore, while Trump did not, in fact, inherit a mess, both Reagan and Clinton did — in the narrow sense that both came into office amid depressed economies, with unemployment above 7 percent:
Photo
This meant a substantial amount of slack to be taken up when the economy returned to full employment. Rough calculation: 2 points of excess unemployment means 4 percent output gap under Okun’s Law, which means 0.5 percentage points of extra growth over an 8-year period.
So even if you (wrongly) give Reagan policies credit for the business cycle recovery after 1982, and believe (wrongly) that Trumponomics is going to do wonderful things for incentives a la Reagan, you should still be expecting growth of 2 percent or under.
Now, maybe something awesome will happen: either driverless or flying cars will transform everything, whatever. But you shouldn’t be counting on it.A 56-year-old Hesperia man convicted of repeatedly molesting his three nieces was sentenced Friday to 158 years and eight months to life in state prison.
Daniel Cortez Bernal was convicted in June of two counts of forcible oral copulation and seven counts of lewd act with a child for attacks on one niece; one count of continuous sexual abuse of a child in connection with another niece, and one count of lewd act with a child for fondling a third niece, according to a news release from the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.
Bernal sexually assaulted one niece two to three times a week from 2002 to 2007, when she was ages 6 to 11, while she lived with him in Garden Grove, the release stated. The family moved to Hesperia in 2007, and the sexual assaults continued until she was 13, in 2009, according to court testimony.
The victim told school officials about the molestation in 2011, prompting an investigation by San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies, the DA’s office stated.
When a patrol deputy tried to arrest Bernal he fled, leading authorities on a pursuit that ended when he ran off the road, according to trial testimony by Sgt. Jerry Davenport.
Bernal was eventually apprehended by another sheriff’s deputy as he tried to jump off an overpass, the release stated.
After his arrest, two other nieces came forward to disclose molestations that occurred in Orange County.
“The victims expressed to me they are very happy with the verdict and the sentence,” Deputy District Attorney David Foy said. “This case really tore the family apart. I’m glad this case is over for them, but I’m sure they will carry the emotional scars from the abuse for the rest of their lives.”Crosswalk signal on Rt 27.jpeg
A woman crosses Route 27 in Iselin at a pedestrian beacon. The lack of a green light has confused drivers about when they can legally proceed. (Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
When is a traffic light not quite a traffic light? When it is something called a pedestrian beacon, which stops traffic to allow a person to cross a busy street or highway.
The pedestrian beacon looks different than a standard traffic light, because it has two red lights, an amber light, but it doesn't have a green light. And that brought a question from a reader. Does a driver have to wait for all the red lights to shut off before they can legally proceed?
Here's how the beacon works. When a pedestrian pushes a button to cross the street, the amber lights on the beacon start to flash and then turn a solid amber to warn drivers to prepare to stop, said Dan Triana, a state Department of Transportation spokesman.
Then, two red lights on the top of the beacon go on, to allow the pedestrian to cross the street. Those red light lights will flash and then go off, he said.
And that's what is confusing drivers.
"My take is to go, when the pedestrian has left the crosswalk and no others are present or ready to cross," one reader wrote. "Some drivers sit and wait for all the red (lights) to go off."
Q: When is it legal for drivers to proceed? Do drivers have to wait for the red lights to stop flashing?
A: Under state law, vehicles must stop when drivers see that both lights are solid red, Triana said. The red lights will start flashing. But if a pedestrian has already crossed in front of the stopped vehicles and has reached the middle of the furthest lane from them, then drivers can go through the flashing red lights, he said.
What were N.J.'s deadliest roads in 2015?
Why didn't the DOT use a conventional traffic light that is universally understood?
Triana said the pedestrian beacon is more efficient and safer.
"Under a full signal, the red remains steady throughout the entire crossing. With the hybrid beacon, vehicles can continue on the flashing red, if safe to do so," he said.
The DOT has an online brochure that explains how the beacon works.
Have a question about something you've seen on the road or while riding mass transit? Ask us. We've answered previous questions about why some football fans can't get a direct train ride to MetLife stadium and when is a trailer too big for the Garden State Parkway. What's your question?
Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Analysis of satellite imagery released on the Internet by the Security Service of Ukraine on July 30, 2014
The Russian Defence Ministry has analyzed the satellite imagery released by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on July 30, 2014, which allegedly disproves the authenticity of the Russian satellite imagery showing the Buk-1 batteries in the Boeing 777 (MH17) crash site area on July 17 and confirms that Russian Armed Forces opened fire on Ukrainian territory.
First of all, one needs facts to level grave accusations or make conclusions. It is widely acknowledged that geo-reference and astronomical time are necessary for satellite images to count as factual evidence in order to pinpoint specific satellites in a constellation that was flying over the area at the time and take into consideration their technical characteristics and capacities. All satellites orbiting the Earth move in accordance with predetermined trajectories.
In connection to this, we can state that according to the Russian space surveillance system, Ukrainian satellites Sich-1 and Sich-2 were not flying over this territory from 10am to 1pm Moscow time (GMT+4; 9am-12pm GMT+3) on July 12, 16, 17 and 18, 2014.
At the time specified in the images, the American electro-optical reconnaissance satellite of the Key Hole series was flying over the crash site area, so the source of the images for Ukrainian Security Service is obvious.
As for the images, the analysis goes as follows.
The first two slides show almost identical images from the Ukrainian and Russian sides. The important detail is that the SBU’s image is dated several days later.
Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3
The images onrequire a more detailed review.
Here the specified time does not correlate with the image.
In the images released by SBU, the shadows point north-east. Thus, these images were not only made on a different day, but also in the afternoon, which means the specified time has been deliberately falsified.
That is an indisputable fact. The images released by the Russian Defense Ministry on July 21 are absolutely accurate in terms of the location and time.
Moreover, it is clearly visible that in the SBU’s image the circled tree belt has been deliberately distorted. The Russian satellite image does not have these distortions.
Additionally, according to all weather reports for Avdeyevka on July 17, the area had 70 to 80% cloud coverage and cloud base height of 2,500m. The information can be easily verified through a number of independent sources. Russian satellite image shows exactly that.
Please note that the SBU’s Slide 4 shows clear skies and sunny weather on the same day. No comments are necessary.
Slide 4
Slide 5
The resolution of the Russian satellite image onhas been deliberately lowered, which resulted in the outlines the terrain (i.e. field) looking smeared.
The Russian Defense Ministry presented a high-quality satellite image of this area (as follows), which has no alleged inconsistencies pointed out by the SBU.
High-quality image of area as presented by the Russian Defence Ministry
Slide 7
The Ukrainian image onis identical to the Russian one, except. It is unclear what the SBU was trying to prove with it.
Now let us look at the images presented by the SBU as evidence of Russia delivering arms and military equipment to Ukrainian territory, as well as sending mysterious sabotage groups and shelling populated areas.
In the 14 satellite images presented by the SBU one can make out some vehicles and their tracks with no latitude or longitude, or references to time and date.
Half of the images (Images 2 through 7) show some field roads that, according to the SBU, are located partly in Russia and partly in Ukraine.
Image 2For years, the advertising business has been driven by the Madison Avenue mythology of small independent shops coming up with the snappy catchphrase or memorable TV commercial that becomes part of everyday culture.
But the announcement on Sunday of the merger of two industry giants, Omnicom and Publicis, to create the largest ad company in the world, signals that advertising is now firmly in the business of Big Data: collecting and selling the personal information of millions of consumers.
That business is a competitive one, with technology companies like Google and Facebook using their huge repositories of user data to place ads. Between them, Omnicom and Publicis accounted for $22.7 billion in revenue last year, more than the next highest ad firm, WPP. But no ad company comes close to the $50 billion in revenue that Google made last year, largely on the strength of its advertising business.
The merger was announced in Paris. There, the chief executive of Publicis, Maurice Lévy, said the “billions of people” who are now online and providing data to companies offer an opportunity to use advertising technologies to crunch billions of pieces of data “in order to come with a message which is relevant to a very narrow audience.”Ian Macdonald and Dean Smith join Government backbenchers calling for broader GST
Updated
The growing number of Federal Government backbenchers calling for a broadening of the GST has prompted the Opposition to label it an "orchestrated campaign" for changes.
Queensland LNP senator Ian Macdonald and West Australian Liberal senator Dean Smith have joined their colleague Dan Teehan in speaking out in favour of expanding the base of the Goods and Services Tax.
Senator Macdonald said a GST that covered fresh food was the original policy put to voters by the Howard government but it had to be scaled back to win Senate support.
"We went to the election in 1998 on the basis of a broad-based consumption tax. I believe it was appropriate then. I think it's appropriate now," Senator Macdonald told ABC radio.
"It will provide more revenue for the states – it will also make the collection much simpler."
Senator Smith has advocated for changing the way the GST is distributed between the states to a per capita model.
He said that should be the Government's top priority, followed by broadening the base of the tax.
Senator Smith acknowledged concerns raised by farmers and welfare groups about applying the GST to fresh food but that it could be something that was covered in the Government's tax review.
"I do think that, after that examination, we will probably discover, if we haven't already discovered it, that having exclusions creates for an inefficient tax system," he said.
GST push an orchestrated campaign: Labor
Acting Opposition Leader Tony Burke said he suspected there was an "orchestrated campaign" to change the GST.
"When you get the third person coming out flying a kite about changes for the GST... this is not a few rogue members of Parliament acting alone," Mr Burke told reporters in Canberra.
"This is an orchestrated campaign that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet would be fully aware of."
But deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop reiterated the Prime Minister's pre-election commitment that there would not be changes to the GST in the Coalition's first term.
However she did endorse the right of MPs to speak out as the Government prepares to announce further details of its taxation review.
"I certainly support MPs putting forward ideas," she said.
"We should have a constructive and mature debate about our taxation system and that will include the GST."
Senator Smith suggested the GST could be gradually expanded to cover more items but he said he was firmly against increasing the rate from 10 per cent.
He wrote in the Australian Financial Review that a voter told him recently: "Every Australian knows that a GST rate rise is like crack: do it once and you guys are hooked."
"The suggestion was that looking at only the tax rate or changing the tax rate had an addictive quality about it for politicians," he later told ABC Radio.
"That is a view I think many Australian electors share."
Topics: tax, government-and-politics, federal-parliament, federal-government, federal---state-issues, australia
First postedIn our tweak guide for Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, we uncovered an issue with the Skin Shading graphics option where turning it on or off would also turn Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) on or off. Fatshark graphics programmer Axel Kinner has confirmed to us this is the case while also noting Skin Shading is still controlled by this setting -- it's just a very subtle effect.
Kinner says "a fix for this will hopefully be in the next patch". One would think that because both SSAO and Skin Shading are enabled as is, disabling them would net an even bigger FPS increase than normal, but this is not the case right now. As such, when the patch hits, it's unclear what effect disabling Skin Shading will have on performance, but we do know the visual impact will be minimal at best.U.S. health officials recommended cutting the amount of salt added to foods by about a third, according to proposed guidelines that are likely to have a wide-ranging impact on the processed food industry in the United States.
Increased sodium intake is linked to high blood pressure, which can lead to heart disease and stroke — two major causes of death in the United States and Canada.
The average sodium intake in the United States is about 3,400 mg per day. The guidelines set targets for the food
industry to help reduce sodium intake to 2,300 mg per day, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a statement.
Likewise, Canada's voluntary sodium reduction strategy introduced in 2010 also aims to reduce average sodium consumption to 2,300 milligrams per day by 2016.
Most adults in Canada consume a little more than 3,000 milligrams of sodium on average each day.
Our great hope is that this will initiate a very serious national dialogue. - Robert Califf
One teaspoon of salt contains about 2,300 milligrams of sodium, according to the American Heart Association.
The health agency said the voluntary guidelines would apply to major food manufacturers and restaurants.
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said that many people may not be conscious of how much sodium they are eating until they have a heart attack or stroke.
"Our great hope is that this will initiate a very serious national dialogue," he said.
About half of every food dollar goes to food consumed outside the home, according to the USDA's Economic Research
Service.
Many U.S. food companies, including Campbell Soup Co, General Mills Inc and Kraft Heinz Co, have already cut salt levels to some extent in anticipation of the guidelines, which have been in the works since 2011.
Health groups have argued for mandatory standards, but say voluntary guidelines are a good first step. Michael Jacobson, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says the government should assess how the voluntary standards work, and set mandatory targets if they don't.
The FDA said it encouraged feedback over a stipulated comment period that ranges from 90 days to 150 days.
The guidelines come days after the FDA said it plans a major overhaul of the way packaged foods are labeled to reflect the amount of added sugar and specific serving sizes.
Levels of sodium in both packaged foods and restaurant meals in Canada can vary widely.Gwenpool #0 is a reprint of previous Gwenpool tales that appeared in Howard The Duck. Well, it too has now gone to a second printing. And it joins Gwenpool #2 which has done the same….
4001AD #1, the new megacrossover series launch from Valiant has also sold out and has gone to second print.
As has the ongoing launch title for Over The Garden Wall from Boom!
Joined by a third printing for Steven Universe & The Crystal Gems #1
And Titan Comics launch of Penny Dreadful #1 also goes out for a second print.
We also previously mentioned second printings for Black Panther #2 and Punisher #1… well here are the covers in question.
About Rich Johnston Chief writer and founder of Bleeding Cool. Father of two. Comic book clairvoyant. Political cartoonist.
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None foundTour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during "Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response" project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
In Partnership with ARID: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology, a peer-reviewed bi-annual journal focusing on cross-disciplinary explorations of desert arts, design, culture, and the environment for both scholarly and new audiences.
Reprinted on the occasion of the day after the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 suicide bombings of the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and with the intention of hitting the U.S. Capitol Building too, but were thwarted on that account. On that morning, terrorist from the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger planes and, being full of fuel, turned them into highly explosive missiles by piloting them directly into the buildings. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks.
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In October of 2009, I had the opportunity to take a tour of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California in the Mojave Desert1. It was part of a UC-wide project called "Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response." I co-organized it with Dick Hebdige from University of California, Santa Barbara, who had hoped to start an artist-based research studies program at UC Riverside's Palm Desert campus2. However, the ensuing California budget crisis thwarted the plans. Nonetheless, the Marine mock city has continued to occupy my thoughts in the years that have followed the experience.
Built with shipping containers--the ones that we see on freighters docking in San Pedro or on trains taking those same containers and their goods out on the rail lines that feed the other states--the mock city that I saw was meant to mirror a typical Iraqi one at the time, since we were then at war with that country. Now, I assume that the mock city has since been rearranged, like Lego blocks, to suggest an Afghan one, or perhaps an Egyptian one, maybe even one in Syria. Whatever the city, I assume that it's one in the Arabian or Syrian Deserts.
Our guide said, "Future wars will be fought in cities." His example for other cities was not an Arabian one however. Instead, he said, "We could stack these containers to seem like a city block in Chicago."3
I know that he meant to exemplify the heights that the Marine's could reach with their stacking. But, whether he knew it or not, and if he did, perhaps he slipped in sharing his information, it was not to many years after my visit, that the Marines did have an opportunity to occupy Chicago with their mock-ishness.
Tour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during 'Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response' project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
On April 12, 2012, The Chicago Tribune reported that during the preparations for a NATO summit in the city that "as attention on security intensifies, the city announced Monday that a 'routine military training exercise' would be under way in and around Chicago from April 16 to 19 to help personnel preparing for overseas deployment learn to 'operate in urban environments.' A city spokeswoman said the training is done around the country and is not related to the NATO meeting."4
Under contract, Lockheed Martin has been building Urban Operations Training Systems all over the U.S. They are often city-size simulation facilities, like the one in Twentynine Palms, to help soldiers maintain their skills that they honed patrolling cities overseas and to prepare for the future.5
There are several districts that make up the one in Twentynine Palms, covering 274 acres in the desert. Fake markets, hotels and other businesses are populated with actors who create scenarios, ranging from humanitarian relief efforts to peacekeeping to police work and direct combat. The town can also be populated with up to 15,000 Marines for a training simulation.
Tour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during 'Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response' project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
The simulations involve not only what the Marines can see, but they are also be trained to find escape tunnels, weapons caches, watch for where the last man in a line could be taken hostage, deal with hidden bombs in what would appear to be abandoned vehicles. There are thousands of linear feet of underground tunnels so that the actors can appear most anywhere throughout the city to simulate a surprise attack. Occasionally, there are shrapnel-free, special-effect explosions to mimic incoming missiles or suicide bombers, perhaps. Either way, you can't trust a carpet seller, right?
Unfortunately, I cannot help but think that Marine's training in both mock cities and real cities, both abroad and domestically, is unsaid preparation for an extended martial law. My gut response is to think that this would be implemented during a financial crisis brought on by diminishing oil supplies. However, living here on the edge of the Mojave, and thinking about the many arid lands around the world, several of which have been the settings for war, it seems that another resource will be the reason for military occupation: water.
While staying abreast of the mock city construction and mock military exercises in U.S. cities in these past few months, it was during this time that author Ernest Callenbach died on April 16, 2012.
He wrote the novel Ecotopia, which he self-published in 19756. It became a cult success, telling the story of a utopian world in which Northern California, Oregon, and Washington had seceded from the United States in order to live in a "steady-state" with the environment, which we call "sustainability" today, or more radically, "permaculture." When he wrote the novel, he was well into his career as the editor of Film Quarterly, which he edited for 33 years.
The book was inspired from his desire to write a magazine article about the problem of waste in the consumer society that surrounded him in the early 1970s. Instead, he opted to write a speculative novel about a country that embraced recycling, among other changes in social values. In a sense, the novel became an extended magazine article, eschewing characterization for observations about this new society, told from the point of view of a reporter from the United States entering into Ecotopia for the first time in twenty years after secession.
Soon after reading Ecotopia, I wanted to imitate his action of using writing to bear witness. However, I wanted the setting of my book to encompass a particular location and passion where I live, the arid land of Southern California.
In a true moment of inspiration, the name, "Aridtopia," formed in my mind quickly.
I searched the web for any sign of its use. I found none, which was a surprise to me, as the name had become commonplace in my thoughts already in just a short amount of time. Immediately, I registered the web domain, www.aridtopia.com.
Here is the beginning of defining Aridtopia through fiction, but with the sensibility of a pamphleteer, ranter, and activist:
Aridtopia is a speculative, utopian community in the Mojave Desert. It was founded when parts of southern California and Nevada, along with all of Arizona and New Mexico seceded from the United States to create a "dry-water" ecosystem: a balance between human beings, water, and the desert. It is one of several new nations created after the U.S. federal government abdicated central control in light of economic, environmental, and educational collapses. Today, the U.S. is composed of its original thirteen states from centuries ago, and has been renamed The Thirteen United States (TUS). Now, decades later, after The Grand Secession, Aridtopia is publishing a short history that is for the benefit of its citizens, its neighbor nations, and The Thirteen United States. It's also for TUS adherents who live in the new nations, but hope to reunite the land from Pacific to Atlantic Oceans, as it was at one time in the near past.
Tour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during 'Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response' project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
History in Aridtopia is told from personal accounts only. Individuals are held accountable, not governments, corporations, families, tribes, or partners.
I will start with a description of where I live. One's environment and one's spirit are inseparable, although they may change over time, but in tandem.
I live on a former Marine Corps base in the Mojave Desert, about 140 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In the past, First Nations people would claim certain geographical sites as sacred, such as mountains, as the source of the birth of their people--upwelling from the depths of the planet. After The Grand Secession, Aridtopians decided to repurpose past structures as a way to repurpose them for a dry-water state but also to rehabilitate the land, to make it sacred again. Although, not in terms of being a site of mythical birth, but as a recognized partner in developing a new life.
I live in what was once a city, but not a city, a mock city for military combat training in urban settings. Constructed with stacked shipping containers that are bolted together, they resemble adobe pueblos of the past, as in the five storied, terraced ones in the San Juan country in northern New Mexico, like Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.
Tour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during 'Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response' project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
When this was an Iraqi mock-village, one side of the central plaza had narrow streets and dense housing to represent the poorer inhabitants, while the other arm that extended from the opposite side of the plaza had wider streets and less dense housing to represent the upper class. These variations allowed for simulations on how to maneuver a tank through varying street widths. We have not such distinctions in the reformed plan. Like kivas in the past, there is no privileged seat. There is no throne.
Aridtopians need to work together a lot. Since life is very communal for now, our homes tend to be small and simple. Instead, the big structures are the Gathering Spots. A couple of hundred years ago in desert towns, such a spot might have been the town saloon--boxes with giant false fronts to suggest grandeur. Inside, you see fancy, carved bars that could be either a place to sip a drink or perhaps a baroque altar. You can see the values of pioneers embodied in the architecture. It was largely men who came out with the shirts on their back to make stakes in mining or ranching. Hard work, hard life, hard drinking. But most of these towns are gone because wood is not native to the deserts, at least not the way it was used for stud and clapboard. Instead, we have centuries-old, adobe cliff dwellings, among other structures, still standing throughout the southwest.
Like the long history of desert architecture, whether ancient, United Statesean, or where I stand now, the main design features in Aridtopia are open plans, in which the interior and exterior flow into one another, but including barriers against the constant and intense sunlight. You see canopies, loggias, and perforated screens everywhere. In fact, most people sleep under them at night rather than within the container of their walls, especially during the summer months.
We Aridtopians look at the teacher-plants around us for inspiration. There's the Saguaro, with its vertical rods, like tendons that hold it upright for years. There's the Cholla with its lattice structure and the Ocotillo with its emergent, tail-like slender stalk, usually over ten feet long, waving in the air under tensile strength.
The steel shipping containers are slowly replaced with less and less rigid walls; flexible ones that have been formed in order to withstand heat, wind, and a lack of precipitation. Cacti and succulents are full of secrets. Or, not really secrets, but simply there waiting for humans to recognize the integrity and strength of their designs.
Tour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during 'Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response' project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
Tour of Mock Iraqi City at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California, during 'Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response' project, co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts ( UCIRA ), October 23, 2009. | Photo: Tyler Stallings.
In general, this approach to architecture is a part of what we call the Sun Agreement. For example, in one of our main squares, there is a giant canopy under which people gather. It is perforated to allow wind to pass through, so as not to tear the fabric, so as to provide shelter from the sun, but allow light to pass through as if through a tree's foliage, and finally to allow birds and insects to dart in and out freely. It is Sympathetic Architecture that works with the Sun, land, and low precipitation.
The world is based on relationships. Nothing happens that is not an outgrowth of relationships. From an Aridtopian viewpoint, the most radical things to do now are to grow your own food, to choose your relationships, to decide how you want to breathe, and to create clean water. It is the end of the Imperial Human.
+++
Next chapter: How someone chose to join Aridtopia? Who was willing to believe in producerism rather than consumerism? Who was willing to get rid of third person narrator and enjoy "I" and "We"? Who was willing to stop watching and start feeling? Who was willing to change their habits? Who felt that they could leave others behind?
+++
This is where my imagination lives now.
"May moisture find you."
Notes:
1 Watson, Julie, "$170 million mock city rises at Marine base," MSNBC News, January 26, 2011. Accessed on May 30, 2012, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41258569/ns/us_news-life/t/million-mock-city-rises-marine-base/#.T87JdO1uHzI
2 "Mapping the Desert" was co-organized by Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), which was co-directed by Dick Hebdige at the time. The related website documents all phases of this project and prior ones for arts-based desert research initiated by Hebdige, http://www.sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/mappingthedesert/.
3 Podcast documentation posted on website for "Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map: An Interdisciplinary Response," Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside. Accessed on May 31, 2012, http://www.sweeney.ucr.edu/exhibitions/mappingthedesert/.
4 Coen, Jeff and Heinzmann, David, "Chicago preparing for NATO summit," Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2012. Accessed on May 31, 2012,"¨ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-nato-training-exercises-in-chicago-underway-20120416,0,1795383.story.
5 Ackerman, Spencer, "Lockheed Gets Big Bucks to Prep Soldiers for Urban War," Wired magazine, Danger Room column, January 18, 2011. Accessed on June 1, 2012,
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/lockheed-gets-big-bucks-to-prep-soldiers-in-urban-war/.
6 Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1975, 30th anniversary edition). http://ernestcallenbach.com/Books.html
Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook and Twitter.Speaking at the White House on Thursday evening, a visibly frustrated and emotional President Obama remarked on the deadly shooting at a community college in Oregon. (AP)
President Obama said Thursday evening that the "routine" nature of mass shootings in America will continue unless the country's politics changes.
"This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America," said the president, who was visibly frustrated as he delivered a statement on Thursday's mass shooting in Roseburg, Ore.
Obama has frequently railed against Congress's refusal to pass additional gun control measures in an effort to curb mass shootings, especially in the wake of the Dec. 14, 2012, massacre of 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. But on Thursday he delivered remarks in which he veered from anger to incredulity as he described his amazement that a slew of horrific attacks had failed to spur a response from Washington's political establishment.
"There’s been another mass shooting in America -- this time, in a community college in Oregon |
loan loss provisions shouldn't have a meaningful impact on bank results.
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But the bigger question is how low energy prices are affecting the Canadian economy, which is already showing signs of heading into a technical recession, defined as two straight quarters of contraction.
Given that banks are highly sensitive to economic activity – people worried about their jobs tend not to look for mortgages – a worse-than-expected economic downturn could drive bank stock valuations even lower.
"We think that forward earnings estimates do not fully capture the credit costs that would start to pile up if Canada's imminent technical recession turns into a real one," said Peter Routledge, an analyst at National Bank Financial, in a note.
"Simply put, we remain cautious on the sector because we think consensus estimates may start to deteriorate and this deterioration may cause further compression in sector price-to-earnings multiples."
In other words, cheap stocks could get cheaper.
Not all forecasts are gloomy, though. Darko Mihelic, an analyst at Royal Bank of Canada, believes that his estimate of 2 per cent growth in earnings, on a per share basis, could prove conservative given several positive trends for earnings.
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Loan growth in Canada is accelerating, according to industry data; the banks raised fees earlier this year, taking effect in the third quarter; growth trends among U.S. banks looked good in their most recent quarter; and banks are controlling their expenses, with Toronto-Dominion Bank and Scotiabank in the midst of restructuring efforts.
"In our view, fundamental trends look positive heading into the third quarter [reporting season] and we believe there could be near-term upside to the stocks if our quarterly estimates prove to be conservative," Mr. Mihelic said in a note.Earlier this year, I was introduced to Jason and Brandon Trost’s joint directorial venture, The FP — a post-apocalyptic, adrenaline-fuelled homage to both 80s cinema and Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, packed top-to-tail with an infectiously immature wit played with admirable sincerity. Shortly after watching, I had the opportunity to interview Jason about the film and his upcoming ventures. Tomorrow sees the US VOD release of his latest film, All Superheroes Must Die — a comparatively dramatic outing which sees a group of four superheroes stripped of their power and forced to complete in a series of challenges in order to save a town of civilians held captive by the villain, Rickshaw (James Remar).
Check out the trailer below and read on to hear about Jason’s journey to release, opinions on VOD distribution, his surprise film of the year and a tease or two about his upcoming projects.
Telstar Media: Am I right in saying that ‘All Superheroes Must Die’ premiered at Toronto in 2011 as ‘Vs’? What’s the journey been like to get the film out to the point of release?
Jason Trost: Yeah. Toronto After Dark in 2011 as Vs (the script says “Versus”) and then we got a distributor, so now the movie is called All Superheroes Must Die. It’s been a hell of journey so far. We shot the movie back in July of 2010 (back when I thought The FP would never sell), the movie premiered in October of 2011 at Toronto After Dark, we sold the movie shortly after, and now it’s taken over a year for the movie to come out. It’s been just sitting there, done for a year. You have no idea how long it takes to negotiate contracts once you sell a movie. Same thing happened to The FP. But now I’m so glad it’s finally coming out. All the hard work has been worth it.
TM: Was the ‘sellability’ of the film something you considered when designing ASMD? Or did it come from a different place entirely?
JT: Yeah. The ‘sellability’ was definitely something I considered. I knew I needed do something with a broader audience to hopefully get something out there. Everyone watches superhero movies, right? It was looking dark for The FP for quite a while. Then both The FP and ASMD sold, so that was a plus.
TM: Did you grow up with superheroes — either through comics, or TV/Film? Are there any that influenced how you approached All Superheroes Must Die?
JT: I definitely grew up with superheroes. I was into comics enough but the wave of animated TV shows in the 90’s such as Batman, Superman, X-Men and Spiderman were definitely my lifeline into the world of superheroes. Batman: The Animated Series was definitely a large influence on me; I wanted this movie to feel like it was just some arbitrary episode in the middle of the series. I always think it’s more interesting to hit the ground running and find out who are characters are as we go as opposed to the hour long origin that usually comes with these movies. Probably the thing that excited me most was the concept of “what are superheroes without their superpowers”? How do they cope? And how can that be taken advantage of. And of course — what I think is/should be the core of all superhero movies — love. How far would we go for love?
TM: Am I right in thinking that ASMD is the first theatrical release which you directed yourself? If so, how did you find the process compared to Co-Directing The FP with Brandon? Were there any difficulties that came with flying solo?
JT: You’re right. This is my first solo directed theatrical release. The process is definitely different but I enjoy it. I think if anything directing solo is easier/quicker… whether it’s better is up for everyone else to decide!
TM: One of the things that striked me upon watching the trailer was how much darker this film feels compared to The FP and the released Wet and Reckless teaser. James Remar seems to be almost channelling Jigsaw/The Joker there! Is that in keeping with the tone we can expect of the film?
JT: It’s definitely way darker and way more serious than The FP which was just a big sarcastic joke. It’s a little different from DC/Marvel, for sure. The heroes are definitely not cartoon characters, they’re more grounded in human reality with human problems. Remar is awesome though. He channels things from classic villains I love. To me he feels like a character from a Paul Verhoeven movie in this.
TM: What do you think of VOD/Digital Distribution as a model for releasing content?
JT: I think VOD/Digital distribution is awesome. It gives people with no money a chance for their movie to be seen by an enormous amount of people, and that’s really the dream when you make these small movies — just for people to see them. I think in the future we’ll all have a small black box with zillions of gigabites that can hold every movie ever made. That’s awesome, but as a collector I’m definitely going to miss holding something tangible in my hands. The artwork, the special features, the dvd case etc… Studios are watching all of this very closely. Sure, their movies make a billions dollars but they cost $999 million to make, advertise and distribute. They’re really not seeing the profit people think. That’s why they love producing the low budget movies — things under $5 million can potentially see way more profit than the half-billion dollar releases.
TM: Do you see yourself revisiting superheroes in some capacity in the future? Or have you said all you feel you have to say about them for now? Any plans for JTRO to develop superpowers down the line, besides his sweet DDR skills?
JT: I see myself revisiting superheroes in the future. I’ve got a lot more to say. Some of which requires money. But, maybe sooner rather than later. I just finished the first draft of ASMD2 and we’ve got interest. It could be my next movie, but you really never know. As for JTRO, he develops all kinds of shit in the next movies, whether or not we get to see any of that depends on when Brandon and I need a tax write-off.
TM: Given the traction and something of a cult following The FP has been getting lately, would you consider going down the crowd-sourced funding option for those films? Or are your ideas for the sequels looking to be on a larger scale than that?
JT: I think we have to consider crowd-sourced funding for The FP. It’s either that or Brandon and I somehow get rich and fund it ourselves. One thing is clear, no investor in their right mind will ever fund the sequels so it’s up to us! And boy, do the sequels get insane. Part 2 will definitely be the T2:Judgement Day of the series, making part 1 in fact look like a “Pussy Bitch”.
TM: Last time we spoke you were knee-deep in editing Wet & Reckless, is there any update as to how that is coming along?
JT: I just finished the score for Wet & Reckless which is now going to be called #WetAndReckless. The final cut is done, just waiting on a couple of original songs from a buddy of mine and to finish the graphics. It’ll be ready to rock in January and then we’ll figure out what’s next.
TM: On the site, we’ve just run our Top 10 Films of 2012 — what were the highlights for yourself this year? Anything surprise you?
JT: This year had some good movies. One of the biggest surprises for me was definitely Dredd. That movie was just so exactly what I want out of movies… and it bombed. So that bummed me out. Hopefully it does well with it’s home release. Otherwise I have to rethink what type of movies I want to make. Maybe I just need to do Chipmunk movies, who knows!
All Superheroes Must Die is released in the US on VOD January 1st, in theatres from January 4th and for home release on DVD & BluRay from January 29th.Dear Deborah,
Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state funds are now being spent to build so-called data warehouses to track students from their earliest years through postsecondary education. Standardized test scores are a key feature of the tracking systems, especially when they are attributed to individual teachers. In time, enthusiasts of the data-is-great school of thought believe we will have the information we need to identify "effective" teachers and make sure that there is an effective teacher in every classroom. With the data comes a tight focus on targets: higher test scores and higher graduation rates.
As the pressure to reach the targets get tougher, many districts are devising ways to raise their graduation rates that have nothing to do with thinking and learning. A prime suspect is credit recovery. I became suspicious when I first learned about credit recovery several years ago. That is when I discovered that some high schools were allowing students who had failed a course to obtain full credit by submitting an essay or a project that was written without any oversight or attending a workshop for several days.
It turns out that the academic fraud goes even deeper than I suspected.
I received a series of emails from someone who works for a major national organization and who reviews the validity of course credits. This person was disturbed by what she learned. She sent me screen shots of course content and assessments that online programs now use to award high school credit. I do not know this individual, but our email exchange persuaded me that she is legitimate, and the information is genuine.
The screen shots showed material used by two kinds of corporations: Some material comes from online credit-recovery courses sold to traditional public schools to help them raise their graduation rates. Other material comes from courses offered by a major for-profit organization that owns online charter schools.
Now, there may be some online courses that are genuinely beneficial. I grant that.
But what I saw, and what I understand has now become common practice, is academic fraud. I saw course credit awarded for "courses" that may be completed in as little as three hours. Three hours of test-taking to get credit for a full semester or even a year! I saw assessments that consisted exclusively of simplistic multiple-choice or true-false questions. I saw responses of dubious value that were "graded" by machines. The level of difficulty of these exams is shockingly low.
But this fraud works. It is profitable. It is a win-win: The student gets credit, the corporation makes money, the school raises its graduation rate, the city leaders celebrate, and the media reports the good news. And the graduation rate means nothing, and the students get an empty "education."
What is going on has nothing to do with learning. It has nothing to do with preparing for the responsibilities of citizenship. It has nothing to do with the goals and substance of a good education. The students who get these phony credits will require remedial courses if they decide to go to a two-year (or four-year) college.
Imagine this: A student fails algebra. He takes an online credit-recovery course. On the very first set of questions, he answers 70 percent of the questions correctly because the questions are so low level that even someone who failed algebra can guess the right answer. The student then goes on to take a series of "exams" and to get more and more right answers. If he guesses the wrong answer, he can take the "exam" again and get the right answer! Eventually, maybe in a few days, he scores 100 percent. What a triumph.
In some of the online courses, the student can skip the canned instruction and go right to the assessment and start the guessing process immediately. The student can guess the wrong answer, keep guessing until he gets it right, and eventually get credit for a correct answer. In this case, "try, try again" means "guess, guess again," and you will pass the course with flying colors.
The questions I saw for juniors and seniors were of a pathetically low academic level. A student who failed junior year in English might be able to pass in a matter of hours or days by answering a simple multiple-choice question. Or guessing wrong answers until he got the right answer. One online assessment asked students to "describe a brief encounter that you have experienced in the last month and explain whether it made you feel good or bad." Anything the student answered, even sentence fragments, received full credit. The answers are machine graded, and the scoring machine makes no distinction between good and poor responses.
I have 12 pages of questions and answers, of scoring tables, of screen shots showing that the student answered incorrectly and was allowed to keep answering until he got it right.
This is academic fraud. These students are not getting an education. They are going through an exercise to pretend that they got an education so that they can graduate. The district will boast that its graduation rate is going up and up. Media figures will say that "education reform" is working. Big-name officials will exchange high-fives. And many thousands of young people will get a diploma that signifies nothing. If they are lucky, they will get remediation when they enter college. If they are unlucky, they will join the ranks of the unemployed and the underemployed and wonder why their education did so little to prepare them for the challenges of life.
Does anyone care?
DianeIn his exit interview with GQ, Goggins talks about committing hard to those frosted tips and why the race controversy over Season One was "pandering."
Walton Goggins has long had one of the most recognizable faces in entertainment, but now he's finally building a name for himself to match. The character actor had back-to-back standout turns in beloved dramas The Shield and Justified, and more recently joined a very exclusive club of people who have survived a Quentin Tarantino movie.
EDITOR’S PICK
He's also one half of the crass, awful pair of vice principals in HBO's Vice Principals, in which Lee Russell (Goggins) and Neal Gamby (Danny McBride), are enemies-turned-friends with the sole goal of becoming the principal at a small South Carolina high school. Created by Jody Hill and McBride, who also conceived Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals is an often hilarious, often sad character study of two men locked in a ceaseless battle not so much with each other, but with themselves.
The show comes to an end this Sunday after two seasons, which was the plan from the beginning. For fans, and for Goggins, it's a bittersweet ending to a show—and character—that were often deeper and more profound than their reputation would suggest. Goggins took some time out of his schedule (he's currently filming villainous turns in two highly-anticipated blockbusters, Ant-Man and the Wasp and Tomb Raider) to talk about how the loud, fey villain Lee Russell came to be, and how the hell to relate to a character who burns down houses and compulsively lies to his wife.
The show is very funny, I swear.
Let's start at the beginning. How did you get this role, Lee Russell?
I knew David [Gordon Green] from the independent world; I've known him for the better part of 13 years, 14 years. I actually read for Season Four of Eastbound and Down. I walked into this audition and there were literally five comedians from Saturday Night Live and me! I thought, "Well, this is never going to fucking happen." But I was like, "Ah, fuck it. I don't care. Let's go in and let's play." I ultimately did not get the role. It went to [Jason] Sudeikis. And they were wise to do that.
But! Vice Principals came along and they were going back and forth about how they wanted to approach it. They thought about a traditional comedian for Lee, and then David, I think, threw out "Goggins" in the room and they all went, "He's the fucking guy! That's it. It's gotta be Goggins." So Danny reached out while I was doing The Hateful Eight and sent me the script, and I just got it.
How much of Lee Russell was written or conceived before you came into it? The weird shirts and the accent itself, and the frosted tips?
The frosted tips were there, and the first thing Danny said to me was, "Listen, you don't have to frost your tips." I said, "Oh yeah. Oh, I'm frosting the fucking tips." The tips will be frosted! Hair that you see and hair that you don't see will have tips frosted. [laughs]
I don't know I really knew Russell until we got on the set the first day. I was full of fear. I just literally wrapped Hateful Eight at 9:30 in the morning and went straight to the airport, got on a plane, landed, got to the house and 11:30 at night. Frosted my tips and woke up at 6:00 the next morning just to become Lee Russell.
How did you approach them as lead characters, Russell and Gamby? Protagonists? They're tonally not heroes, or even antiheroes, for that matter.
I don't think they are. I don't think they are protagonists. We're exploring a side of ourselves or our society that we all know exists without giving the audience many things to cheer about. Unless you can cheer at the truths of how deeply insecure they are, and you can cheer or root for a person once you understand why they are who they are.
When I came into this, I said, "Buddy, there are things here about this guy, once you really kind of get in to him, that are very painful." I don't know that they anticipated it resonating or vibrating on that deeper level with me. I don't know that they fully understood my interpretation of the depth of Lee Russell's pain.
Do you consider it part of your job, in a way, to get people to like Lee, maybe despite themselves? Even in the last couple of weeks we've seen him lose his wife under circumstances that he truly deserves and then spend this spring break episode essentially leering after a teen.
He does, in a very harmless way. I also think in that episode he's also saying, "Gamby, just relax, buddy. Kids will be kids. Maybe if they were given some freedom, maybe they won't turn out like us."
I really don't think it is my job to make people like the antagonist that I play. My allegiance is to three things and three things only: First and foremost, making this fictional character three-dimensional and respecting them as an autonomous human being. Second is to the writer, because words are my Bible. What is it that we are trying to say? What is the writer trying to say? The last thing is protecting my director and giving him many different options that are within this tone and that are within the truth of my interpretation of this character. I am very protective of the people that I play. I don't say the same thing the same way twice. Human beings don't do that.
"I don't know that they fully understood my interpretation of the depth of Lee Russell's pain."
I remember one of the criticisms that I saw a couple of times, from the show's very early days, was that it was a show about two guys trying to bring a powerful black woman down. Looking back, do you think that was fair?
I think those two or three critics that talked about that were pandering to their constituents. In my opinion, they thought that they were, in some way, saving the day. They were looking for a pat on the back, standing up to the insensitive nature of this particular narrative when they had no fucking idea what this story was about.
I just think the people that made those criticisms need to ask themselves, "Would you have felt better about this behavior if it was done to a white woman or a white man?" Who is looking at this through the prism of race? It isn't the filmmaker. It isn't. It's you. I understand it simultaneously because of the times that we are living in. But Belinda Brown, who is imbued with such humanity by Kimberly Hebert Gregory, is really the moral center of this entire story.
This was never a show about two white men against a black woman. This show is about two individuals who are deeply flawed, deeply insecure and are looking to fill that void with the acquisition of power. At the end of the day, the only way that you are going to find peace in this life is to examine your own life and live right. That's where real power comes from.
Are there particular Russell moments that you hold close to your heart?
Oh God. There are so many, buddy. We were talking about the spring break episode before—Russell is getting the lap dance and they've been doing cocaine, and Gamby says, "Hey Lee. Do you want to hang out?" So Lee Russell says, "I am fucking hanging out! Why don't you go hang out!" [laughs] It's all of it. I love it so much.
A part from this season that's stuck with me is Russell loudly playing an Avril Lavigne song to get out of an argument.
Yes! Susan [Park], who plays my wife, she's got to sit there with a straight face. She's so wonderful. You talk about favorite moments, the coming-together breakfast with Susan. That was so extraordinary. I laughed so hard. "Look at us working it the fuck out!"
"This was never a show about two white men against a black woman. This show is about two individuals who are deeply flawed, deeply insecure and are looking to fill that void with the acquisition of power."
It it bittersweet, ending things on your terms but also just having to walk away from a character you love?
I'm going to miss it. I think we're all going to miss it. This is one of the highlights. You look for these moments over the course of your career and not just the acquisition of friends, but the seared memories that were forged over the course of this eight months together.
I don't know. Never say never. You never know if Lee Russell and Gamby might come back. It would have to be something completely different. That would be fun.
You and Danny McBride clearly love working together.
Yes. The big scene from the latest episode? Danny directed that episode and he had such a specific idea for the big fight. This one particular sequence happened when I'm running then he hits me in the locker room and throws me through the window, it's almost one take. The stunt guys were doing this one hit, and it didn't look right. I just said, "Buddy, we've got to go over this hill. We can't go around it. Let's go. Let's get in there. Hit me." We did it. Two times. We went and had a big beer afterwards.
I think a lot of people are going to discover this show in a year or two and feel like idiots.
As Lee Russell would say, "I told you so."
Watch now:Just one month until NFL preseason begins. It's time for super, super, really super early predictions. Now, every NFL fan knows that once you pick a team to win it all, you have to stick with that said team.
It's just a rule.
As I scroll through the 32 NFL teams wisely knocking squads off (Browns, Raiders, Jaguars, check), I know I can only pick one to finish on top come February 2016. Then I come across the NFC West teams, and I see a blue and white bird with a green eye. I think to myself, why not again? Why not three trips in a row?
It's then and there I make my decision: the Seattle Seahawks will win Super Bowl 50.
The last team to successfully make it to three consecutive Super Bowl's (and win at least one of them) was Don Shula's Miami Dolphins. Those Dolphins beat the Minnesota Vikings and Washington Redskins, but lost to the Dallas Cowboys in their three Super Bowls. They're also the last squad to finish a season with a perfect record. Dolphins and Seahawks share no common bond whatsoever, and Miami is about 3,000 miles away from Seattle, but this season sets up for a historical year for the Seahawks in which they could tie the Dolphins record.
The Seahawks still have one of, if not, the best defensive units in the NFL. The loss of Byron Maxwell to the Philadelphia Eagles will hurt, but Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor still create the best secondary in the league.
On top of an elite defense, the Seahawks offense has only gotten better. The addition of All-Pro tight end Jimmy Graham from the New Orleans Saints was arguably the biggest move of the offseason. Graham has recorded 51 receiving touchdowns in the 50 games he has started. You get the picture.
Perhaps the most interesting player on the Seahawks roster to look forward to is wide receiver Chris Matthews. The 25-year-old wide out has never caught a single regular season pass in his career, but played outstanding in the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots with four catches, 109 yards and a touchdown. Matthews stands 6-foot-5 giving quarterbacks Russell Wilson a big target to throw to.
Speaking of Wilson, the Seahawks have a multidimensional quarterback in him. Wilson doesn't turn the ball over very often, he's young, and he does have Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch to hand the ball off to. If only Pete Carroll realized that last game on the one yard line.
The Patriots (as of now) don't have Tom Brady for four games, the Dallas Cowboys no longer have DeMarco Murray, the San Francisco 49ers have had about half their roster retire on them this offseason. The Seahawks should easily sweep their way through the NFC, seeing as they hold a huge advantage over the Green Bay Packers as well. Please, don't bring up the Arizona Cardinals, who don't have a reliable quarterback or running back.
With Brady out, and the Denver Broncos having a new head coach, one could make the case that the Indianapolis Colts are the biggest AFC threats to the Seahawks this upcoming season. Luck against Sherman (Stanford teammates) in the big game. Wouldn't that be something?
Oh, and Sherman isn't on the Madden game cover this year. Curse... over?
Follow Damon Salvadore on TwitterI posted how to intall HTPC Manager on Windows yesterday and today it’s Linux’s turn. I mentioned I was waiting for HTPC manager to support Sonarr, SickRage and Headphones before creating guides for it. You can all thank Hellowlol for upgrading HTPC Manager for 2015. HTPC Manager adds that extra feeling of awesomeness to your HTPC and here’s why. You get a slick, modular HTPC interface so you can manage all of your software and services on your HTPC. Services you can manage include Plex, Kodi XBMC, Sonarr, Sabnzbd, NZBGet, uTorrent, Transmission, SickBeard, CouchPotato and more. You will see nice overviews of recently added shows or movies, suggestions for other movies and TV shows. You can even add movies or shows from the HTPC Manager interface.
This is a screenshot of the computer stats from within HTPC Manager
Install HTPC Manager Ubuntu
Install the HTPC Manager Ubuntu dependencies
sudo apt-get install build-essential git python-imaging python-dev python-setuptools python-pip python-cherrypy vnstat -y
Install psutil so you can get computer stats as well
sudo pip install psutil
Git clone the latest HTPC Manager from Hellowlol’s repository
sudo git clone https://github.com/Hellowlol/HTPC-Manager /opt/HTPCManager
Take ownership of the HTPCManager installation directory with your regular user
sudo chown -R user : user /opt/HTPCManager
Try and start HTPC Manager
python /opt/HTPCManager/Htpc.py --daemon
You may see a cherrpy error, everything still works though so don’t worry.
You can access HTPC Manager at http://ip.address:8085
Autostart HTPC Manager at Boot
I outline two methods, the init.d and upstart method. Choose one.
HTPC Manager init.d Script
HTPC Manager includes an init.d script
sudo cp /opt/HTPCManager/initscripts/initd /etc/init.d/htpcmanager
Edit the htpcmanager init.d script to match the path of HTPC Manager
sudo nano /etc/init.d/htpcmanager
Change APP_PATH to match the path we installed HTPC Manager to
############### EDIT ME ################## # path to app APP_PATH=/opt/HTPCManager
Make the init.d script executable
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/htpcmanager
Update the init.d script to start at boot
sudo update-rc.d htpcmanager defaults
HTPC Manager Upstart Script
Install Upstart
sudo apt-get install upstart
Enter Yes, do as I say!
sudo nano /etc/init/htpcmanager.conf
Paste the HTPC Manager upstart script, change user to your username
#author "HTPCGuides.com" #description "Upstart Script to run HTPCManager as a service on Ubuntu/Debian based systems" #Set username for the process. Should probably be what you use for logging in setuid user setgid user start on runlevel [2345] stop on runlevel [016] respawn exec /opt/HTPCManager/Htpc.py --daemon
Ctrl+X, Y and Enter to save the HTPC Manager upstart script
Now reboot
sudo reboot
You are all set to configure HTPCManager, you will need some API keys and enable WebUIs in some of the services you wish to manage.
Access HTPCManager at http://ip.address:8085Welcome back to today's Grand Prix Orlando blog! In today's article, I want to talk about the staff we've put together in order to make Grand Prix Orlando run smoothly!
If you're here to preregister, Click Here!
I'm going to hand over the reigns of this article to level 4 Magic Judge Jared Sylva, who also happens to be the Manager of StarCityGames.com's Organized Play department! Jared?
I'm really excited that we are able to run Grand Prix Orlando! A good staff is the backbone of any well-run event. Here are the pieces of that puzzle that we put together:
We have 125 Judges working at Grand Prix Orlando:
2 Level 5
4 Level 4
29 Level 3
84 Level 2
6 Level 1
The head judges for the main event are Chris Richter and Damian Hiller.
Chris Richter - A veteran of many StarCityGames.com Grand Prix, Level 4 Chris Richter joins us from Madison, WI and will be serving as the primary Head Judge for Grand Prix Orlando. Chris has been at the head of Grand Prix events all over the world from Australia to Russia and has helped to run many of the largest Grand Prix in history, including acting as Appeals Judge for GP Richmond earlier this year and the Head Judge for GP Charlotte in 2013. Chris brings a ton of experience to the table, and we are always impressed with his ability to run fun, fast, and fair events.
Damian Hiller - We are excited to have Level 4 Damian Hiller, the former RC of the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, joining us as a Head Judge for another Florida Grand Prix. Damian was one of the Head Judges for Grand Prix Miami in 2013 and brings a great background from running many of the Latin American Grand Prix.
The Keystone Program
Grand Prix Orlando is also the debut of our Keystone Program! We designed this program to reward level 3+ judges who commit to being on staff for multiple Grand Prix events. We recognize how vital exceptional leadership and event management skills are to the success of Grand Prix events, and the StarCityGames.com Keystone Program was created for judges who exemplify these skills. StarCityGames.com Keystone Sponsorships recognize and reward the judges who form the foundation of event success as the leaders both on and off the floor by providing travel reimbursement to attend StarCityGames.com events.
I'm proud to announce the inaugural Keystone Judges for Grand Prix Orlando!
Kevin Desprez - We are excited to have Level 5 judge and noted tournament operations expert Kevin Desprez joining us all the way from La Madeleine, France. Kevin has Head Judged over twenty Grand Prix in locations all over the world and brings exceptional experience as a Judge, Tournament Organizer, and Scorekeeper to every event he attends.
Kim Warren - The former Regional Coordinator for the United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa, Level 4 Kim Warren was one of the appeals judges at Grand Prix: Richmond and joins us from Chesham, United Kingdom. Due to her work focusing on Regular REL policy, Kim has influence well beyond the events she attends, and we are happy to see her returning to our events.
John Alderfer - If you have attended a Grand Prix in the United States (or anywhere else for that matter) over the past ten years, then you probably recognize John Alderfer. Regarded as one of the hardest-working and most logistically skilled judges in the program, he may be listed as living in Hermitage, PA, but there are many theories that his home is wherever there is a Grand Prix kit.
Matteo Callegari - Coming to us from Parma, Italy is Matteo Callegari. In addition to managing the judge project to create judge conference guidelines, Matteo manages the Italian Magic Judges website (italianmagicjudges.net), both structure and content. His role in building and unifying the Italian judge community has made it one of the most organized and best-connected in the program.
Dan Stephens - Formerly the US Midwest Regional Coordinator, Level 3 Dan Stephens has been a mainstay in the Judge Program for many years. A veteran of the Open Series, Dan has been on the floor for over 30 Open Series events, including five as Head Judge. His exemplary knowledge, mentorship, and event experience are assets to every tournament he attends.
Abe Corson - Widely recognizable from having judged a record-setting 36 StarCityGames.com Open Series weekends, Abe Corson is known as a go-to guy for judges who have questions about how rules or policies work. Abe is based in Alexandria, VA and manages the Missed Trigger Guides project for the judge program.
Jasper Overman - From Enschede, Netherlands, Jasper Overman has been judging for almost fifteen years. Back home, he helps new Dutch tournament organizers learn about running events. He is a familiar face at Grand Prix tournaments all over Europe. This will be his first US Grand Prix, and we're looking forward to him bringing his experience to our events.
Ryan Stapleton - Residing in Chantilly, Virginia, Ryan Stapleton has been a dedicated member of the Judge Program for over a decade and brings valuable experience to every event he attends. For years he has hosted crucial judging-related documents for mobile devices on his site, bluewizard.net.
Joel Krebs - A fixture of large events in Europe and Asia over the last four years, Joel Krebs will be joining us from Bern, Switzerland. His trips to the United States are rare and we are lucky to have had Joel at for several StarCityGames.com events. We are excited to see him in action yet again!
Eric Smith - From New York City, Eric Smith has been judging since 1997 and made Level 3 in 1999. His wealth of tournament experience from across the history of competitive play will be an invaluable asset for our Grand Prix tournaments.
Aaron Hamer - A former Regional Coordinator for the Northwest United States, Aaron Hamer is widely regarded as a leader in the Judge Program in the areas of mentorship and judge development. From his home in Honolulu, Aaron has had a major impact in the United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific region with his frequent attendance at Grand Prix events.
Christopher "CJ" Crooks - Although he is a newer Level 3, CJ has always been regarded as an events specialist, and is a judge that we have been excited to have at StarCityGames.com events since long before his promotion. CJ hails from outside Tampa, FL, so Grand Prix Orlando will be home territory for him and we can't wait to see him shine.
Maria Zuyeva - While she originally hails from Ukraine and is currently listed as a resident of Moscow, Maria has become a fixture at United States events during her studies. Promoted to Level 3 at Grand Prix Atlanta in May, Maria has been impressing players and judges with her energy, logistical skills, and mentoring ability since before becoming a judge at Pro Tour Philadelphia in 2011.
It isn't just the judges that make a tournament hum- it's also the administrative and support staff for the event.
SCG Staff: We're bringing the entire StarCityGames.com Organized Play Department to run Grand Prix Orlando, so you will get to see your favorite faces from the Open Series all weekend long. That is eleven of the most experienced tournament organizers in the world focused on making sure that everything runs smoothly, and they aren't alone! |
Germany. I'm sure they will not be lacking from here until next year."
An inevitable but unpopular decision?
Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo tweeted his support for Ancelotti following the club's final game of the season
Spanish football expert Andy West: "In one sense, Ancelotti's departure was inevitable because all-powerful Real president Florentino Perez appears to have taken the decision a while ago.
"Even in mid-March, Perez would only assert that Ancelotti would be in charge for the next few 'days and weeks', and from that moment it seemed certain the Italian's fate rested on his team's ability to win either the Champions League or La Liga.
"With both those trophies escaping Real's grasp, Monday's news is no surprise. But the stubborn Perez has been forced to withstand an unexpectedly strong degree of public and private pressure because Ancelotti remained highly popular to the end.
"His last pre-game news conference on Friday ended with the media giving him a standing ovation, which was subsequently repeated by fans before Saturday's game against Getafe at the Bernabeu.
"Then several players voiced their support for the coach, most notably Cristiano Ronaldo and James Rodriguez.
"But Perez ignored all of them, and now faces a tough task in placating those within and outside his organisation who wanted to keep Ancelotti by appointing a suitable replacement. And the early signs are that Rafa Benitez would receive little more than a lukewarm reception."WHITECAP DAKOTA FIRST NATION, Sask. — A group of Saskatchewan First Nations is stepping into the international fray over the Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan — with a bid of their own.
The First Nations are collaborating with merchant banks, pension funds and Chinese investors to prepare a multibillion-dollar competing bid for the Potash Corp. — which is currently the target of a $38.6-billion U.S. hostile takeover attempt by BHP Billiton.
A flurry of meetings has taken place in the past week between provincial ministers, First Nations leaders, potential investors and Potash Corp. officials, according to Indigenous Potash Group spokesman Rick Gamble.
"We cannot be left out. We are moving on this," said Gamble, chief of the Beardy's and Okemasis First Nation. "This is exciting stuff. We're ready to go."
Gamble and the province's other chiefs were gathered Wednesday at the Whitecap Dakota First Nation, 40 kilometres south of Saskatoon for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations assembly.
The province's First Nations are demanding the federal government halt the takeover of the world's biggest potash producer by BHP Billiton.
Potash is a mineral salt high in potassium, mined for use in agricultural fertilizers.
A submission is being made by the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians to Investment Canada, the federal body that approves or rejects such takeover bids.
Should Investment Canada approve the BHP takeover, First Nations officials have drafted an immediate application for a court injunction.
Premier Brad Wall has also asked Ottawa to block the takeover bid, saying it is not in the strategic interest of the province or the country to sell the corporation.
Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach — whose government makes up the "New West Partnership" with those of Saskatchewan and British Columbia — said Wednesday he is backing Wall.
"The potash resource belongs to the people of Saskatchewan and it is of very strategic importance not only to Saskatchewan but to the New West Partnership and really to all of Canada," he said.
Wall has been on the offensive against BHP Billiton's bid since last week, when in a speech he came out against the takeover attempt as posing a major potential risk to jobs, provincial revenue and Canadian strategic interests.
First Nations have not been consulted on this potentially massive transaction, Gamble said.
Recent Supreme Court of Canada rulings have dictated that First Nations be consulted and accommodated on resource issues that affect them.
"It's time that we take a stand. This is a crucial time," said federation vice-chief Lyle Whitefish.
Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo addressed the assembly Wednesday, and stressed the importance of the potash debate.
In an interview following his speech, Atleo said it will be a "benchmark for the whole country."
Atleo said the AFN will support Saskatchewan First Nations in their fight to be "at the table" in any potash decisions.
Potash Corp. spokesman Bill Johnson declined to comment, saying the company will not discuss any "potential transaction."TALLAHASSEE — A state panel will decide today whether to allow polluters to increase the level of toxic chemicals they dump into Florida rivers and lakes as part of the first update of the state's water quality standards in 24 years.
The governor-appointed Environmental Regulatory Commission will vote on a rule proposed by state regulators that would increase the number of regulated chemicals allowed in drinking water from 54 to 92 chemicals and raise the allowed limits on more than two dozen known carcinogens — all currently regulated — from levels that are from 20 percent to 1,100 percent higher than current standards. The agency is reducing the allowed limits on 13 currently regulated chemicals, two of which are considered carcinogens.
The dozens of chemicals are among those released by oil and gas drilling companies (including fracking operations), dry cleaning companies, pulp and paper producers, wastewater treatment plants and agriculture. Many of these industries have come out in support of the new rule.
For environmentalists, the proposal is an unacceptable no-brainer.
"Toxic algae blooms in South Florida are making people sick, hurting our economy, closing our beaches, and the Rick Scott administration wants to legalize even more toxic chemicals in our water?" said Linda Young, director of the Florida Clean Water Action Network, which is fighting the rule. "It's so crazy it seems unreal, and they're not even embarrassed by it."
For the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which proposed the rule using its own new model for determining cancer risk, the measure is a long-overdue update required under the federal Clean Water Act. The agency last updated the list of regulated toxic chemicals in 1992 and began working on the new proposal in 2012, after years of review, said Dee Ann Miller, a DEP spokesperson.
The draft rule incorporates new methods for understanding the amount of toxins that pose a human health hazard, Miller said. In addition to revising the standards on dozens of chemicals currently regulated, it will impose new regulations on 39 chemicals that the agency currently does not limit.
"DEP's and EPA's nationally recognized scientists have worked diligently for multiple years to develop the criteria, which incorporate both the EPA guidance and data specific to Florida," Miller said. "The criteria take into account how, and how much, Floridians eat seafood, drink, shower and swim, and set the limits necessary to protect us all from adverse health effects."
Among the chemicals on which DEP would impose new limits are cyanide and beryllium. The criteria also imposes stricter limits on a handful of current chemicals, such as the chlorinated solvent called trichloroethylene, or "trike", a compound known to cause birth defects and cancer. The proposal would drop the allowed level in drinking water, from 2.7 to 1.3 parts per million.
Environmentalists say that most of the new criteria would weaken current guidelines, allow for toxin levels higher than the federal standard, impose no regulations on dioxins and expose Floridians to higher cancer risk.
For example, benzene, a known carcinogen that environmentalists say is found in the wastewater of oil and gas fracking operations, would go from 1.18 parts per billion in Florida's drinking water to 2 parts per billion under the new criteria. The federal standard is 1.14 parts per billion.
DEP has told lawmakers in the past that it does not have the authority to reject a fracking permit if one was requested. Miller said "there is no active drilling" and the department has not received any current notices that fracking is occurring.
The agency said it developed the new "probabilistic analysis" to be more Florida-specific, shielding people who consume large amounts of fish from the buildup of dangerous toxins. It says the new rule is stricter than the federal standards and was reviewed by "scientists at EPA, Florida Department of Health, four Florida universities and the California Environmental Protection Agency."
But environmentalists warn that no other state uses Florida's "probabilistic analysis" method for detecting cancer risk — for a reason. They argue that the assumptions in the state rule underestimate the amount of seafood Floridians eat and, because toxins that accumulate in fish or shellfish are passed along to humans who consume them, the cancer exposure will increase for people who eat Florida-caught seafood more than once per week.
For example, the environmentalists argue, where EPA standards allow for toxin levels that could cause cancer in 1 in a million people, the toxin levels allowed under the Florida methods increase the number of cancer victims to 1 in 100,000 people, or, in cases of people who eat fish daily, 1 in 10,000.
DEP's new cancer-risk measurement is supported by the pulp and paper industry, which sees it as "more scientifically advanced as it addresses compounded conservatism, links risk targets with environmental concentrations, improves transparency and makes greater use of available data," Jerry Schwartz of the American Forest and Paper Association wrote in a letter to DEP last month.
But a petition signed by more than 2,700 people from across the state disagrees. The petition urged the agency to reject the rule and "to protect public health and the environment, not the wallets of the big polluters."
DEP Secretary Jon Steverson defended the proposals in a statement released late Monday.
"I've been in contact with the federal EPA, which has confirmed every change is in line with its own recommendations,'' he said.
DEP moved up the vote on the proposed rule from September to today without offering a reason. The Environmental Regulation Commission hasn't met since December and two of the seven positions — the representative for the environmental community and another representing local government — have been left vacant by Gov. Rick Scott.
Former Gov. Bob Graham and the Florida Conservation Coalition, which represents more than 50 Florida environmental groups, wrote Scott on June 16 asking him to fill the posts but they never received a response. Democrats in Florida's congressional delegation sent a letter Monday urging the commission to reject the new rules, saying they were an environmental and public health threat.
Last week, several Miami-Dade County elected officials sent a letter to Steverson urging the agency to postpone the vote and seek more public comment. They argue rules "would result in increased concentrations of toxic chemicals in our waterways, threatening our water quality, public health and water-based economies upon which millions of Floridians depend."
Tampa Bay Water warned of the weak structure the agency is using to enforce the rule, saying it was "relying on water utilities (some with very little resources) to identify threats from 'discharged substances.' "
And Bud Nocera of the Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce wrote that the rule did not "protect our island's tourism industry and the livelihood of our members by protecting our waters from toxic chemicals."
Meanwhile, many in the environmental community have concluded that the new rules, and the agency's decision to fast-track a vote today, are evidence that DEP may be laying the groundwork to bring fracking to Florida, Young said.
Several of the chemicals that will be allowed to be increased in Florida waters are related to benzene and are thought to be used in fracking, she said. The Florida Legislature has three times tried and failed to pass legislation to prevent local governments from banning fracking and to shield the fracking chemicals used by the industry from public record. DEP has supported the legislation.
"The benzene thing is strictly for the oil and gas industry — for fracking," Young said. "There is no other explanation."
The department denies the rule is being fast-tracked to pave the way for fracking in Florida.
"This rule update stems from requirements under the Clean Water Act as well as the new EPA guidance," Miller said. "It is not in response to any specific industry or practice and has nothing to do with hydraulic fracturing."
Contact Mary Ellen Klas at [email protected] Follow @MaryEllenKlas.IRELAND AND WALES have had an intense rivalry over the last few years after their various Six Nations clashes, their World Cup meeting and that time Warren Gatland dropped Brian O’Driscoll.
All that sets it up perfectly in two weeks time as Ireland visit Cardiff looking to complete the fourth leg of a Grand Slam. But Wales’ win in Paris yesterday keeps them in the championship hunt and one Welsh journalist expects the home side to deny Ireland at the Millennium Stadium.
Not only that but Andy Howell of Wales Online – who annoyed many Irish supporters by saying Gatland’s Lions team should have had more Welsh players in it – also thinks not many Irishmen would make it into a composite Ireland/Wales selection.
Ireland hang on for win to set up huge, huge clash with Wales. Massive battle in prospect but Wales to triumph to set up title chance — Andy Howell (@andyhowellsport) March 1, 2015 Source: Andy Howell /Twitter
I'd probably pick 5 or 6 Irish in a combined Welsh Irish team. — Andy Howell (@andyhowellsport) March 1, 2015 Source: Andy Howell /Twitter
Wales to beat Ireland but England to win title on points difference — Andy Howell (@andyhowellsport) March 1, 2015 Source: Andy Howell /Twitter
@simonrug they're beatable with him. He's a good player but he's not Superman. I hope he plays so they won't have any excuses #Waleswin — Andy Howell (@andyhowellsport) March 1, 2015 Source: Andy Howell /Twitter
There are so many hot takes in there that I burnt my fingers just compiling them.
What do you all make of Howell’s comments?Here’s one I got a while ago at Uwajimaya in Seattle. It’s big, Japanese and tonkotsu flavor – sounds much better than the last one I had!
Here’s the side panel stuff – click to enlarge.
The noodle block. Looks really nice, I think.
Only one seasoning packet, but it’s really big.
I put most of the packet in this little sake cup – it would not all fit.
Finished (click image to enlarge). Added some veggies, some chicken lunch meat, kizami shoga (pickled ginger), a hard-boiled egg marinated in Kikkoman soy sauce, some Ajishima Kimchi furikake, some Sushinori (seaweed) and finally a couple shakes of Tabasco Buffalo Style hot sauce. The noodles: not bad – a nice texture and quality to them. The broth however is way too salty for me – so much so I couldn’t handle it. I was really shocked at that but oh well. Bummed. 1.0 out of 5.0 – the noodles were good, at least. UPC bar code 074410396718 – get it here.
I bet this stuff is really really good!
Mr. Noodles and a meat tenderizer. This is bizarre.The views taken in the preceding article as to the combination of efforts being the chief source of our wealth explain why more anarchists see in communism the only equitable solution as to the adequate remuneration of individual efforts. There was a time when a family engaged in agriculture, and supported by a few domestic trades, could consider the corn they raised and the plain woollen cloth they wove as production of their own and nobody else’s labour. Even then such a view was not quite correct: there were forests cleared and roads built by common efforts; and even then the family had continually to apply for communal help, as it is still the case in so many village communities. But now, under the extremely interwoven state of industry, of which each branch supports all others, such as the individualistic view can be held no more. If the iron trade and the cotton industry of this country have reached so high a degree of development, they have done so owing to the parallel growth of the railway system; to an increase of knowledge among both the skilled engineers and the mass of the workmen; to a certain training in organization slowly developed among British producers; and, above all, to the world-trade which has itself grown up, thanks to works executed thousands of miles away. The Italians who died from cholera in digging the Suez Canal, or from ‘tunnel-disease’ in the St. Gothard Tunnel, have contributed as much towards the enrichment of this country as the British girl who is prematurely growing old in serving a machine at Manchester; and this girl is much as the engineer who made a labour-saving improvement in our machinery. How can we pretend to estimate the exact part of each of them in the riches accumulated around us?
We may admire the inventive genius or the organising capacities of an iron lord; but we must recognise that all his genius and energy would not realise one-tenth of what they realise here if they were spent dealing with Mongolian shepherds or Siberian peasants instead of British workmen, British engineers, and trustworthy managers. An English millionaire who succeeded in giving a powerful impulse to a branch of home industry was asked the other day what were, in his opinion, the real causes of his success? His answer was: — ‘I always sought out the right man for a given branch of concern, and I left him full independence — maintaining, of course, for myself the general supervision.’ ‘Did you never fail to find such men?’ was the next question. ‘Never.’ ‘But in the new branches which you introduced you wanted a number of new inventions.’ ‘No doubt; we spend thousands in buying patents.’ This little colloquy sums up, in my opinion, the real case of those industrial undertakings which are quoted by the advocates of ‘an adequate remuneration of individual efforts’ in the shape of millions bestowed on the managers of prosperous industries. It shows how far the efforts are really ‘individual.’ Leaving aside the thousand conditions which sometimes permit a man to show, and sometimes prevent him from showing, his capacities to their full extent, it might be asked in how far the same capacities could bring out the same results, if the very same employer could find no inventions were not stimulated by the mechanical turn of mind of so many inhabitants of this country. British industry is the work of the British nation — nay, of Europe and India take together — not of spate individuals.
While holding this synthetic view on production, the anarchists cannot consider, like the collectivists, that a remuneration which would be proportionate to the hours of labour spent by each person in the production of riches may be an ideal, or even an approach to an ideal, society. Without entering here into a discussion as to how far the exchange value of each merchandise is really measured now by the amount of labour necessary for its production — a separate study must be devoted to the subject — we must say that the collectivist ideal seems to us merely unrealisable in a society which would be brought to consider the necessaries for production as a common property. Such a society would be compelled to abandon the wage-system altogether. It appears impossible that the mitigated individualism of the collectivist school could co-exist which the partial communism implied by holding land and machinery in common — unless imposed by a powerful government, much more powerful than all those of our own times. The present wage-system has grown up from the appropriation of the necessities for production by the few; it was a necessary condition for the growth of the present capitalist production; and it cannot outlive it, even if an attempt be made to pay to the worker the full value of his produce, and money be substituted by hours of labour cheques. Common possession of the necessaries for production implies that common enjoyment of the fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable organisation of society can only arise when every wage-system is abandoned, and when every-body, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy also from the common stock of society to the fullest possible of his needs.
We maintain, moreover, not only that communism is a desirable state of society, but that the growing tendency of modern society is precisely towards communism — free communism — notwithstanding the seemingly contradictory growth of individualism. In the growth of individualism (especially during the last three centuries) we merely see the endeavours of the individual towards emancipating himself from the steadily growing powers of Capital and the State. But side by side with this growth we see also, throughout history up to our own times, the latent struggle of the producers of wealth for maintaining the partial communism of old, as well as for reintroducing communist principles in a new shape, as soon as favourable conditions permit it. As soon as the communes of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries were enabled to start their own independent life, they gave a wide extension to work in common, to trade in common, and to a partial consumption in common. All this has disappeared; but the rural commune fights a hard struggle to maintain its old features, and it succeeds in maintaining them in many places of Eastern Europe, Switzerland, and even France and Germany; while new organizations, based on the same principles, never fail to grow up as soon as it is possible. Notwithstanding the egotistic turn given to public mind by the merchant-production of our century, the communist tendency is continually reasserting itself and trying to make its way into the public life. The penny bridge disappears before the public bridge; so also the road which formerly had to be paid for its use. Museums, free libraries, and free public schools; parks and pleasure grounds; paved and lighted streets, free for everybody’s use; water supplied to private dwellings, with a growing tendency towards disregarding the exact amount of it used by the individual; tramways and railways which have already begun to introduce the season ticket or the uniform tax, and will surely go much further on this line when they are no longer private property : all these are tokens showing in which direction further progress is to be expected.
It is putting the wants of the individual above the valuation of the services he has rendered, or might render, to society; it is in considering society as a whole, so intimately connected together that a service rendered to any individual is a service rendered to the whole society. The librarian of the British Museum does not ask the reader what have been his previous services to society, he simply gives him the book he requires; and for a uniform fee, a scientific Society leaves its gardens and museums at the free disposal of each member. The crew of a lifeboat do not ask whether the men of a distressed ship are entitled to be rescued at a risk of life; and the Prisoners’ Aid Society do not inquire what the released prisoner is worth. Here are men in need of service; they are fellow men, and no further rights are required. And if this very city, so egotistic to-day, be visited by a public calamity — let it be besieged, for example, like Paris in 1871, and experience during the siege a want of food — this very same city would be unanimous in proclaiming that the first needs to be satisfied are those of the children and old, no matter what services they may render or have rendered to society. And it would take care of the active defenders of the city, whatever the degrees of gallantry displayed by each of them. But, this tendency already existing, nobody will deny, I suppose, that, in proportion as humanity is relieved from its hard struggle for life, the same tendency will grow stronger. If our productive powers be fully applied for increasing the stock of the staple necessities for life; if a modification of the present conditions of property increased the number of producers by all those who are not producers of wealth now; and if manual labour reconquered its place of honour in society — all this decuplating our production and rendering labour easier and more attractive — the communist tendencies already existing would immediately enlarge their sphere of application.
Taking all that into account, and still more the practical aspects of the question as to how private property might become common property, most of the anarchists maintain that the very next step to be made by society, as soon as the present regime of property undergoes a modification, will be in a communist sense. We are communists. But our communism is not that of either the Phalanstere or the authoritarian school : it is anarchist communism, communism without government, free communism. It is a synthesis of the two chief aims prosecuted by humanity since the dawn of its history — economical freedom and political freedom.
I have already said that anarchy means no-government. We know well that the word ‘anarchy’ is also used in the current language as synonymous with disorder. But that meaning of ‘anarchy’ being a derived one, implies at least two suppositions. It implies, first, that whenever there is no government there is disorder; and it implies, moreover, that order, due to a strong government and a strong police, is always beneficial. Both implications, however, are anything but proved. There is plenty of order — we should say, of harmony — in many bunches of human activity where the government, happily, does not interfere. As to the beneficial effects of order, the kind of order that reigned at Naples under the Bourbons surely was not preferable to some disorder started by Garibaldi; while the Protestants of the this country will probably say that the good deal of disorder made by Luther was preferable, at any rate, to the order which reigned under the Pope. As to the proverbial ‘order’ which was once ‘restored at Warsaw,’ there are, I suppose, no two opinions about it. While all agree that harmony is always desirable, there is no such unanimity about order, and still less about the ‘order’ which is supposed to reign on our modern societies; so that we have no objection whatever to the use of the word ‘anarchy’ as a negation of what has been often described as order.
By taking for our watchword anarchy, in its sense of no-government, we intend to express a pronounced tendency of human society. In history we see that precisely those epochs when small parts of humanity broke down the power of their rulers and reassumed their freedom were epochs of the greatest progress, economical and intellectual. Be it the growth of the free cities, whose unrivalled monuments — free work of free associations of workers — still testify of the revival of mind and of the well-being of the citizen; be it the great movement which gave birth to the Reformation — those epochs witnessed the greatest progress when the individual recovered some part of his freedom. And if we carefully watch the present development of civilised nations, we cannot fail to discover in it a marked and ever-growing movement towards limiting more and more the sphere of action of government, so as to leave more and more liberty to the initiative of the individual. After having tried all kinds of government, and endeavoring to solve the insoluble problem of having a government ‘which might compel the individual to obedience, without escaping itself from obedience to collectively,’ humanity is trying now to free itself from the bonds of any government whatever, and to respond to its needs of organisation by the free understanding between individuals prosecuting the same common aims. Home Rule, even for the smallest territorial unity or group, becomes a growing need; free agreement is becoming a substitute for the law; and free co-operation a substitute for the governmental guardianship. One after the other those functions which were considered as the functions of government during the last two centuries are disputed; society moves better the less it is governed. And the more we study the advance made in this direction, as well as the inadequacy of governments to fulfill the expectations laid in them, the more we are bound to conclude that Humanity, by steadily limiting the functions of government, is marching towards reducing them finally to nil; and we already foresee a state of society where the liberty of the individual will be limited by no laws, no bonds — by nothing else by his own social habits and the necessity, which everyone feels, of finding co-operation, support, and sympathy among his neighbours.
Of course, the no-government ethics will meet with at least as many objectives as the no-capital economics. Our minds have been so nurtured is prejudices as to the providential functions of government that anarchist ideas must be received with distrust. Our whole education, since childhood up to the grave, nurtures the belief in the necessity of a government and its beneficial effects. Systems of philosophy have been elaborated to support this view; history has been written from this standpoint; theories of law have been circulated and taught for the same purpose. All politics are based on the same principles, each politician saying to the people he wants to support him : ‘Give me the governmental power; I will, I can, relieve you from the hardships of your present life.’ All our education is permeated with the same teachings. We may open any book of sociology, history, law, or ethics : everywhere we find government, its organisation, its deeds, playing so prominent a part that we grow accustomed to suppose that the State and the political men are everything; that there is nothing behind the big statesmen. The same teachings are daily repeated in the Press. Whole columns are filled up with minutest records of parliamentary debates, of movements of political persons; and, while reading these columns, we too often forget that there is an immense body of men — man-kind, in fact — growing and dying, living in happiness or sorrow, labouring and consuming, thinking and creating, besides those few men whose importance has been so swollen up as to overshadow humanity.
And yet, if we revert from the printed matter to our real life, and cast a broad glance on society as it is, we struck with the infinitesimal part played by government in our life. Millions of human beings live and die without having had anything to do with government. Every day millions of transactions are made without the slightest interference of government; and those who enter into agreements have not the slightest intention of breaking bargains. Nay, those agreements which are not protected by government (those of the Exchange, or card debts) are perhaps better kept than any others. The simply habit of keeping his word, the desire of not losing confidence, are quite sufficient in the immense overwhelming majority of cases to enforce the keeping of agreements. Of course, it may be said that there is still the government which might enforce them if necessary. But not to speak of the numberless cases which even could not be brought before a court, everybody who has the slightest acquaintance with trade will undoubtedly confirm the assertion that, if there were not so strong a feeling of honour to keep agreements, trade itself would become utterly impossible. Even those merchants and manufacturers who feel not the slightest remorse when poisoning their customers with all kinds of abominable drugs, duly labelled, even they also keep their commercial agreements. But, if such a relative morality as commercial honesty exists now, under the present conditions, when enrichment is the chief motive, the same feeling will further develop very fast as soon as robbing somebody of the fruits of his labour is no longer the economical basis of our life.
Nineteenth Century, February 1887. The present article has been delayed in consequence of the illness of the author.With Israel trying to prove itself open to the renewal of peace talks with the Palestinians, the State Department today warned that it would be a “provocation” to send the Israeli military into the West Bank Palestinian town of Susya and bulldoze it to the ground, despite an Israeli High Court ruling approving that action.
Susya, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank, has already been demolished 4 times in the past 35 years, and is adjacent to the site of an Israeli settlement. With the settlers regularly attacking the Palestinian residents, the Israeli military has often been called in to tear down the Arab homes and expel them all.
Which they do, but the Palestinians come back. They don’t really have a choice from a legal perspective: the Palestinians are refused Israeli permits to use their own land, but if they don’t use the land, the Israelis can declare it “abandoned” and seize the property outright. Instead, they just keep demolishing the village and chasing everyone away for building without the permits they aren’t able to obtain.
The Susya problem is well known in the Arab world, particularly among Palestinian leaders, and has become in many peoples’ eyes the prototypical case of the unfairness and brutality of the Israeli occupation. The Palestinians were chased out of their village, so they lived in tents and collected rainwater in cisterns, so the tents were demolished and the military blew up the cisterns. They are denied the use of land that even Israel recognizes is theirs for no real reason, and are regularly attacked by the settlers and the military.
In 2013, the Israeli High Cort once again affirmed that the Palestinians legally owned the land in Susya, including land seized into Mitzpe Yair, an Israeli settlement that even the Israelis view as illegal. Despite this, the court urged them to simply relinquish that ownership, saying there was no way they would be allowed legal use of the land they legally own. In May, the High Court again declared Susya an “illegal” Palestinian village, despite being built on land legally owned by the Palestinians, and authorized the military to destroy it yet again, and to expel the 450 residents.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzJonathan Kaplan, the founder of Pure Digital, which made the Flip Video camera, and later sold to Cisco, is shifting from technology to grilled cheese. But still keeping with the consumer space, his newest venture, The Melt, just opened on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco, California. It's an idea he's had since college, when he conducted a survey at the Mall of America, asking people what was it about grilled cheese that made people smile?
"We found that the reason was the nostalgic part of the grilled cheese, the fact that people conjured up memories of being with their family and of the first sandwich they might have made," explains Kaplan as he glances behind him while one of his new employees places a hot grilled cheese sandwich on the counter behind him, awaiting customer pick-up.
But although he was passionate about the idea of making grilled cheese for the masses, that idea took a backseat as he dabbled in the tech realm, having sold his children's entertainment company Family Wonder to Sega taking in 2000. Then he sold Flip Video camera maker Pure Digital to Cisco two years ago. When Cisco dumped it's consumer business, that's when Kaplan decided it was the perfect time to launch his grilled cheese restaurant. Now, he's using what he learned in tech and the start-up world, and applying it to the casual fast food industry, hoping it will help him grow The Melt into a multi-billion dollar business like McDonald’s, Starbucks and Chipotle. How is he doing it? He explains in the video below:
In the video above, Kaplan talks about the biggest backers of his new venture who are on his Board of Directors, which includes representation from Disney, Apple and Sequoia. The venture capital firm backing The Melt from Sandhill Road was the most surprising investor in this casual fast food venture, which is already applying for two more sites in San Francisco and plans to expand across the country in the next few years. Michael Moritz, whose successful investments include Google, Yahoo, Paypal and LinkedIn, explains in the video below why Sequoia invested in Kaplan’s new food business.
As to why Kaplan is starting The Melt now: he left Cisco in early 2011 after Cisco decided it was getting out of the consumer business and saw a niche not being filled in the casual fast food industry. He joined networking equipment maker, Cisco, two years ago when the company bought Pure Digital. Kaplan was put in charge of Cisco’s consumer division, which failed.
Forbes: What went wrong?
Jonathan Kaplan: Well, I think you have to ask Cisco what exactly went wrong. But I'd say that the real issue was that Cisco had a lot of challenges in their core space, and they spent a lot of energy and time in that core space, rightly so. And I think as any good business, and any good executive team will do, they look at the areas that are contributing to the business the most significantly and those that aren't. And the reality is the consumer business was about $1 billion of the $45 billion in revenue that Cisco was producing on a yearly basis. And it was an area that took a lot of energy and time to do well because consumer takes a lot of energy and time to do And so they decided to shrink that business.
Forbes: What would you have done differently if you had to do it all over again?
Well, I don't think I really would have done that much differently. I think the only thing that I might have thought more about was the desire to go public. I think that I had a very strong desire to go public, and I was a big fan of John Chambers and of Cisco. And I think that the idea of getting a chance to work with John and getting a chance to be part of Cisco was probably, you know, really an exciting thing for me and for the team. And I think that, you know, if it was two years ago or three years ago, I might have thought more about how we could take Flip public. Because I do believe that the Flip Video Camcorder had a more to offer society, and that, even though we sold seven million units, we probably could have sold 70 million units. And this idea of the smart phone...
Even with the introduction of smart phones?
Oh yes, even with the smart phone, I think that there was a lot of opportunity for Flip to continue to be a successful business, successful brand. I mean Flip ended up having 75 percent brand awareness in America. I mean that's a brand that, you know, very few brands achieve 75 percent awareness in any way. And so the fact that we had that…
And so did the Walkman.
Yes, that's true. But Sony's still around, right?
Sony's around, right, with a different product.
Yes. I think that Sony was really the brand there, and the Walkman was just one of the products that Sony had created. And I think that Flip had an opportunity to create many, many products, and not just the Ultra and not just the Minnow. And, you know, we were introducing wireless technologies into the Flip that I think would have made a huge difference in the way consumers broadcast their ideas and their memories, as opposed to just capture and share their ideas and their memories. And this idea of broadcast, I think, is very powerful and has a lot, a lot of legs. And, you know, I think that there was opportunity to do a lot of things. The products that the consumer never saw that came from the Flip team, it's a shame, because they were pretty amazing. And I wish I could tell you all about what they were, but I can't. All I can tell you is I was very confident that they were going to make the technology that was used in the smart phone seem not at all relevant, kind of the way the Flip made the video camcorder seem not so relevant, also.
So what happens to those ideas?
They're part of Cisco's IP. And they're using them for other parts of the business.
Right, the enterprise.
Yes, exactly, in the enterprise space. Be interesting to see what happens |
and not breathing.
Augusta lawyer Walter McKee, who has defended juveniles charged with manslaughter, said such cases can follow two paths. The case can stay in juvenile court or be transferred to Superior Court, where the juvenile would be tried as an adult.
McKee represented Patrick Armstrong, who in 2005, at the age of 14, struck neighbor Marlee Johnston, 14, in the back of the head several times with an aluminum baseball bat in Fayette. Armstrong pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2006 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison with all but 16 years suspended.
But McKee said he couldn’t fathom how a 10-year-old could be tried as an adult.
“Regardless of what court it goes to, there would be significant issues of whether the child had the brainpower to have the state of mind to commit the crime,” said McKee. “This is a hotly discussed topic now.”
McKee said the brain of a prepubescent child, such a 10-year-old, is far less developed than that of an adult.
“It’s not [an] apples and oranges [comparison],” he said. “It’s apples to carburetors — the furthest away from a fruit you can get.”
McKee said there have been cases in which a juvenile is placed in a juvenile detention facility, such as Mountain View Youth Development Center in Charleston, until the age of 21 and then is transferred to an adult prison.No pop-up animations Including Black Hearts damage
Edit: I returned the bed "sleep" (zzz...) animation. For some reason beds don't heal without it.
This mod removes the following pop-up-animations (giantbook) from the game:
* Pick-ups:
- Black Hearts damage
- White Hearts health-up
- All Tarot Cards (such as Devil)
- All Runes
* Items:
- BETRAYAL
- Dry Baby activation
- Whore Of Babylon activation
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Hourglass
- Mom's Bra/Pads
- Flush
- Spider's Butt
- Missing Pages
- All Books
- All Dice
- MAMA-MEGA!
- Clicker
* Others:
- Rainbow Poop
And probably some more that I forgot.
Add the now-empty gianbook file into the resources directory and wonder why did those animations exist in the first place. Please let me know if there are any problems in the game, like crashes.
EDIT:
The last patch broke all mods. I'm working on a way to update that, but I can't rely on any method since they can change everything the next day.
Currently I've found a work-around for all old mods:
1. Back up your mods in the "resource" folder or copy them somewhere else temporarily.
2. Use the "Resource Extractor" in the "tools" folder. This will extract all ".a" files into the "resource" folder.
2. Rename the "packed" folder into something else, like "old_packed". Now the game will not find the "packed" folder and will launch the game using the extracted files.
3. Place your mods back into the "resource" folder.
This is only a temporary solution, but it works for all old mods.
* Steam Workshop edition: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=844932689
622 downloads downloads x 80
Version 1.1 - December 7, 2015Couple duped by Craigslist ad into renting vacant North Bay home
A Marin County Sheriff’s deputy takes Francisco Reyes, 34, into custody on a probation violation after he and a pregnant woman were found moving into bank-owned home in Bel Marin Keys. Officials said Reyes answered a scam Craigslist ad and was duped into renting the house. less A Marin County Sheriff’s deputy takes Francisco Reyes, 34, into custody on a probation violation after he and a pregnant woman were found moving into bank-owned home in Bel Marin Keys. Officials said Reyes... more Photo: Marin County Sheriff’s Office / / Photo: Marin County Sheriff’s Office / / Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Couple duped by Craigslist ad into renting vacant North Bay home 1 / 20 Back to Gallery
A man who rented a Marin County home through a scam Craigslist ad not only learned he was fleeced, but that he was wanted on a probation violation when sheriff’s deputies knocked on the door to investigate why he and a pregnant woman were living there, officials said.
Francisco Reyes, 34, and the woman were moving into a bank-owned home in Bel Marin Keys that is up for sale, Lt. Scott Harrington of the Marin County Sheriff’s Department said Friday.
Deputies were called to the house on Wednesday after a worker servicing the pool noticed the couple moving in with their dog. The worker thought the house was supposed to be vacant, so he called the property management company who in turn contacted the sheriff’s department.
When deputies arrived, Reyes answered the door and told them he had rented the house through a Craigslist ad. He said he paid a man $6,300 and signed what he believed to be a legitimate lease agreement, Harrington said.
While running a criminal background check, deputies learned Reyes had a warrant out of Sacramento for violating his probation for domestic violence. While police were talking to him, he suddenly bolted for the front door and down the street.
Deputies lost sight of Reyes when he ran into a neighbor’s backyard. They looked for him for about 15 minutes before a plainclothes officer spotted him running down Bel Marin Keys Boulevard.
Reyes ran behind another house and a neighbor came out and directed deputies to a nearby yard.
As the deputies closed in, Reyes scaled a fence, jumped into a nearby lagoon and began to swim away. After a few yards, he gave up and swam back to the deputies, Harrington said.
Reyes is facing charges of probation violation and resisting arrest. Neither him nor the woman are facing charges for entering the vacant house.
“They look like they were renting it out of good faith,” Harrington said. “We’re going to be looking at the Craigslist ad. From our perspective, they’ll be victims of a fraud on that incident.”
Police have not yet determined how the couple entered the house, but the property management company has since changed the locks.
Alison Graham is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: agraham@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @alisonkgrahamThis lack of speed makes it relatively easy to predict hunger. And, accordingly, the Ethiopian emergency was well forecast. As a climate reporter, I’ve heard fretting about the situation in the Horn of Africa since at least October. That was when I began to wonder: How do you know when a famine is coming?
* * *
For almost a year, U.S. officials have warned that food could become scarce in regions of the Horn of Africa. These warnings came in the form of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a USAID program usually shortened to FEWSNET. With rationalist clarity, FEWSNET classifies the food security situation in 36 of the world’s countries:
FEWSNET
FEWSNET categorizes each country, and some provinces and regions, according to a five-scale food-security scale. Most areas have “none to minimal” food-security problems. The scale elevates after that: Some areas will experience a “stressed” food-security situation, which becomes a food-security “crisis,” then a food-security “emergency” and, eventually, a “famine.” (I’m putting quotes around certain terms only because they are technical terms within the scale.)
FEWSNET also regularly puts out forecasts for regions, detailing why it’s forecasting certain food situations for certain regions and why. While FEWSNET has been going on for more than 30 years, it can seem hyper-rational to the point of being algorithmic. Put a lot of numbers about a faraway place into a super computer, pop down to the corner Starbucks, and come back in time to watch it spit out a prediction.
The reality is both much more involved and much less mathematical.
“It is not a computer program, it is not a quantitative modeling process,” says Chris Hillbruner, a senior advisor at FEWSNET. “There really isn’t a mathematical formula that lets you calculate where food security is going. There’s not even a mathematical formula to calculate what current food security is.”
Nor, says Hillbrunner, is there any easy way to check on hunger levels in a region. “There is no gold standard food-security indicator,” he told me.
So even though FEWSNET looks algorithmic, it’s not. To arrive at their classifications, the program’s experts meet in one place and consult a lot of information. This information encompasses data from local markets, weather and climactic reports; and data on local livelihoods, nutritional reports, and what kind of humanitarian assistance is already being provided. It includes information as specific as intra-provincial requests for local water-truck usage and documentation of recent crop diseases.
Most of this data isn’t scraped from the Internet. Employees in the field collect the bulk of FEWSNET’s data in person. More than 300 FEWSNET employees work full-time in the 36 presence countries that it follows, collecting information on the ground and advising its central office.Vaccinating too few children in Syria against polio because the six-year-old war there makes it difficult to reach them risks causing more cases in the future, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, posing a dilemma after a recent outbreak.
Two children have been paralyzed in the last few months in Islamic State-held Deir al-Zor in the first polio cases in Syria since 2014 and in the same eastern province bordering Iraq where a different strain caused 36 cases in 2013-2014.
Vaccinating even 50 percent of the estimated 90,000 children aged under 5 in the Mayadin area of Deir al-Zor would probably not be enough to stop the outbreak and might actually sow the seeds for the next outbreak, WHO’s Oliver Rosenbauer said.
Immunisation rates need to be closer to 80 percent to have maximum effect and protect a population, he told a briefing.
“Are we concerned that we’re in fact going to be seeding further future polio vaccine-derived outbreaks? … Absolutely, that is a concern. And that is why this vaccine must be used judiciously and to try to ensure the highest level of coverage,” Rosenbauer said.
“This is kind of what has become known as the OPV, the oral polio vaccine paradox,” he said.
The new cases are a vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, a rare type which can emerge in under-immunised communities after mutating from strains contained in the oral polio vaccine.
“Such vaccine-derived strains tend to be less dangerous than wild polio virus strains, they tend to cause less cases, they tend not to travel so easily geographically. That’s all kind of the silver lining and should play in our favor operationally,” he said.
All polio strains can paralyze within hours.
Syria is one of the last remaining pockets of the virus worldwide. The virus remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan.Among the top questions for the Cardinals heading into training camp (clockwise from top left): How much of a load running back Andre Ellington can handle, the performance of new cornerback Antonio Cromartie, the pass rush of linebacker John Abraham, and the impact of rookies like safety Deone Bucannon.
The Cardinals will begin the games that count Sept. 8, when they host the Chargers on a Monday night. From next week – when the players stream in for the beginning of training camp – until then, the roster will be formed through practice, roster moves, potential injuries and the like. With the pads on, there are still details to be worked out for the newest version of Bruce Arians’ team. The first five most important questions facing the Cards were posted here already. Here are five more:
1. Is Andre Ellington ready to carry the load?Preface:
Kevin Burke is the Sr. Global Brand Manager for Glaceau vitaminwater, smartwater and Aquarius at The Coca-Cola Company. He recently completed the Startup engineering & corporate innovation track at Flashpoint at Georgia Tech. Kevin and his team participated as part of Flashpoint at Georgia Techs 5th batch of Startups and recently completed the program in June 2015. We caught up with Kevin after a recent afternoon of focus groups around his new beverage product ideas that were generated through the Flashpoint program
Can you give us some background on how you, your team and Coca-Cola came to get involved in Flashpoint?
About two years ago, Carie Davis, who was leading Global innovation and entrepreneurship at Coke, started hosting classes and events around entrepreneurial thinking and new ways of working. I was fortunate to be one of Carie’s early adopters for these courses. Startup Weekend at Coke was my first taste of bringing an idea to product quickly and I personally caught the entrepreneurial “bug” from there.
We then started implementing these new ways of working back into our brand team. My manager pointed out a whitespace opportunity around new beverage innovation for our Glaceau brands and tasked me to seek a new way to innovate to solve that problem.
We wanted a new way to look at innovation, we wanted to learn new skills that could be applied back to our day to day jobs at Coke and we wanted to solve the problem by creating something new or building on an existing opportunity.
We looked at multiple agencies, programs and partnerships and ultimately the team at Flashpoint offered a great opportunity to partner on our problem, so we became part of Batch 5.
What was it like being a corporate team amongst other teams while at Flashpoint?
It was challenging getting to know and work around new people and processes. Our team was fortunate in that our Managers trusted us, believed in the program and gave us permission to have the first 8 weeks away from our jobs to get immersed in learning about Startup engineering.
I think once the other teams recognized that the Coke team was going all-in everyone started to work well together. We learned a ton of techniques, tricks and new ways to look at problems from the Startups in Batch 5. I also believe we were able to give the other teams advice,tools and introductions to people in our “corporate” networks that helped them with their Startups. Ultimately everyone worked well together.
I think being having corporate teams blended with Startup teams is a great model as long as everyone is open to share, learn and teach each other. It certainly was great for us to be with other teams, I think the other teams in Batch 5 would agree with that statement
What about the Flashpoint program was most valuable for you?
Merrick Furst and the Flashpoint team are onto something different and exciting that I haven’t seen other accelerators try. Flashpoint is part education, part discovery and part accelerator. That is unique compared to other programs around the country.
For me two phases of the program really stood out.
First, learning to find authentic demand for your product was a process and set of tools that were really valuable to learn. Flashpoint required us to act like a detective investigate and listen to our customers.
We were taught a set of tools and then required to have primary interactions with people who are critical to our products success. After 250 of these “d.p.i’s” (documented primary interactions) you begin to see if potential customers actually have a need for your product. You also clearly learn how to define who your customer is and what your value is to them. As a corporate team this was a new way to get at what our customers really want versus doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of research. We had to get out of the office and do the work ourselves and that was really valuable learning.
The second phase that was valuable, was the Immunity to Change courses Flashpoint provides. It would take another article to explain it fully but that tool taught me how to recognize the confirmation bias and behavioral factors in myself and those stakeholders who are important to making a new business or idea successful. Once you can recognize those behavioral factors you can build your product and talk about your product in a way that will overcome those immunities to change. This was a breakthrough for me personally.
How did Flashpoint change you and the way you work at Coke today?
The successful brands, products, startups, apps, and businesses, whatever you want to call them, did not become successful by accident. Successful startup companies understand who their customer is and what their customer needs. Then they build a product to fulfill that need.
That is much more clear for me now and I try and take that learning to work every day. If I can be more aware of who are customer is and what their needs are, we can build products that meet those needs and we have a much better chance to be successful with our innovations.
Of the other companies in Flashpoint, who should we look out for?
The guys from Florence Health Care are really onto something, you should check them out. Gayle and her team at the Gallium group have a real business working and a bunch of customers already. I also like what James Harris and his team at VISIT are going after, they are tapping into the mega trend around the maker movement have a chance to win in that massive market.
The other entrepreneurs in the program are also up to some cool stuff. Get Lawyer has a for profit for good play going on that is interesting. The Vault stem cell guys are tapping a unique market around athletes and stem cell storage…All in all I think this group has a chance to make some things happen.
I was happy to get to know them all and I’m still supporting some of them with branding, marketing and storytelling as they raise funds and grow their customer bases.
What advice would you give other Corporate employees who are seeking are interested in Startups and innovating at their companies?
I would tell them to “DO” something about it. Don’t just sit in your desk and dream about it or wait for it to come to you. Get out into the entrepreneurial community in Atlanta, go to the events, meet people, and participate.
You will be surprised how many opportunities there are for corporate folks to lend a hand, give some advice and make connections with Startups. Give something to the community and you are guaranteed to get something back. Make some time for coffee with folks. Do something about it. Don’t talk about it.
I try and meet at least 3 people from my Flashpoint Batch each week. 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there. I can give advice but I also learn something new from these entrepreneurs every time I meet with them.
I also recommend participating in area Startup Weekend or hackathons in the area. Participate, Coach, Sponsor these events, they need support. You can go as far as Hosting a Startup Weekend or entrepreneurial event inside your company, I’d be happy to help someone who is interested in doing something internal at their company get that get started.
Do something about it, get involved. It all starts with “doing”
Ok, I have to ask, what is the latest with the new drinks you created during Flashpoint? When can we taste them?
I cant say much about them specifically, but I can tell you that 5 of the 9 new beverage ideas we devised during our time at Flashpoint are officially moving into the development process.
We spent some time testing the ideas further and got some positive results…which helped validate the consumer insights we discovered during Flashpoint. If all goes right we could have one or more of these products on the shelf somewhere in the world in 2016. My fingers are crossed and we are still working hard to get it right. Flashpoint for us hasn’t ended, we are just continuing the work back inside the big red machine
Applications for Flashpoint at Georgia Techs Batch 6 are now open. http://flashpoint.gatech.edu/apply/
You can follow Kevin Burke on twitter @Kevn_Burke
[Photo Credit]There’s nothing quite so thankless as being the nominal leader of a leaderless party, especially if that party is bereft of power and doesn’t have much to offer by way of an agenda, except for maybe keeping the other party from destroying the country.
When the majority party fails, your supporters say it’s only because the president is an evil buffoon and everyone has figured it out. When the majority succeeds, they say it’s your fault, because obviously you failed to make clear to people what an evil buffoon the president really is.
So it goes for Nancy Pelosi, who’s come under withering criticism (again) since Democrats got clobbered in two more special elections for Congress last week. Facing calls for her resignation, the longtime House leader acknowledged that she’s something of an easy target for Republican ad makers who want to portray the party as a bunch of coastal elites.
And yet, she wryly told reporters at the Capitol, “I think I’m worth the trouble.”
To be clear, Pelosi had almost nothing to do with the Democrats’ recent losses, all of which came in conservative districts the party had no business winning, anyway. But that quote said a lot about the way she and her aging contemporaries think about themselves.
Pelosi should leave the stage not because she’s controversial, but because what Democrats desperately need, more than any new branding strategy or slogan, is a turnover in talent. Which is why the rest of the party’s oldster luminaries should follow her to the exit, too.
Here’s a question for all you trivia buffs to ponder. Who do you think was the last nonincumbent Democrat over 55 to win the White House? I’m not talking about Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson, both of whom inherited the job, but someone running against a sitting president or at the end of an eight-year term.
Here’s a hint: You weren’t alive, and neither were your parents.
The answer is Woodrow Wilson, who ran so long ago that you could still be both a progressive and a white supremacist and not have everyone find that completely bizarre.
Why is that? It’s not because there weren’t any older candidates to vote for, or because America was somehow ageist. From Wilson’s time to today, the country elected no fewer than five new Republican presidents who were at least that old. In fact, before George W. Bush, the last nonincumbent Republican under 55 to win the White House was Herbert Hoover.
No, it’s because Democrats win when they embody modernization. Liberalism triumphs only when it represents a reforming of government, rather than the mere preservation of it. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — all of them, in one way or another, offered a stark departure from the orthodoxies of the past.
Americans don’t need Democrats to stand up for nostalgia and restoration. They already have Republicans for that.
Of course, all the Democratic presidents I mentioned had assists from older, long-serving leaders in Congress. Having a 77-year-old House leader doesn’t necessarily doom a party to irrelevance.
Except that never in its history has the Democratic Party been so thoroughly dominated by the loud voices of its oldest generation. If Republican candidates weren’t so gleefully featuring Pelosi in their ads, they’d be going after Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, none of whom seems remotely interested in yielding the floor.
(Really the only younger Democrat you could fairly call a national spokesperson for the party is its 55-year-old chairman, Tom Perez, whose big idea this week was to form a human chain around the Capitol. Or maybe I’m just remembering an episode of “The Simpsons.” I can’t be sure.)
Anyway, it’s not just that all these iconic Democrats are older; it’s that their vision for the party — with the possible exception of Biden, who’s pro-trade and pro-growth — is relentlessly backward-looking. They’re for government-run health care, expanding Social Security benefits (even for the wealthy) and free college for everyone. They’d pay for all of it with tax increases that magically cover the cost.Abstract Objective: To determine whether lipoic acid (LA), an endogenously produced antioxidant, slowed the whole-brain atrophy rate and was safe in secondary progressive MS (SPMS). Methods: Patients with SPMS aged 40–70 years enrolled in a single center, 2-year, double-blind, randomized trial of daily oral 1,200 mg LA vs placebo. Primary outcome was change in annualized percent change brain volume (PCBV). Secondary outcomes were changes in rates of atrophy of segmented brain, spinal cord, and retinal substructures, disability, quality of life, and safety. Intention-to-treat analysis used linear mixed models. Results: Participation occurred between May 2, 2011, and August 14, 2015. Study arms of LA (n = 27) and placebo (n = 24) were matched with mean age of 58.5 (SD 5.9) years, 61% women, mean disease duration of 29.6 (SD 9.5) years, and median Expanded Disability Status Score of 6.0 (interquartile range 1.75). After 2 years, the annualized PCBV was significantly less in the LA arm compared with placebo (−0.21 [standard error of the coefficient estimate (SEE) 0.14] vs −0.65 [SEE 0.10], 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.157–0.727, p = 0.002). Improved Timed 25-Foot Walk was almost but not significantly better in the LA than in the control group (−0.535 [SEE 0.358] vs 0.137 [SEE 0.247], 95% CI −1.37 to 0.03, p = 0.06). Significantly more gastrointestinal upset and fewer falls occurred in LA patients. Unexpected renal failure (n = 1) and glomerulonephritis (n = 1) occurred in the LA cohort. Compliance, measured by pill counts, was 87%. Conclusions: LA demonstrated a 68% reduction in annualized PCBV and suggested a clinical benefit in SPMS while maintaining favorable safety, tolerability, and compliance over 2 years. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01188811. Classification of evidence: This study provides Class I evidence that for patients with SPMS, LA reduces the rate of brain atrophy.
GLOSSARY AE = adverse event ; CI = confidence interval ; EAE = experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis ; EDSS = Expanded Disability Status Scale ; GI = gastrointestinal ; ITT = intention to treat ; LA = lipoic acid ; MP-RAGE = magnetization-prepared rapid acquisition gradient echo ; OCT = optical coherence tomography ; PCBV = percent change brain volume ; PI = principal investigator ; RRMS = relapsing-remitting MS ; SAE = serious AE ; SEE = standard errors of the coefficient estimate ; SPMS = secondary progressive MS
By 2 decades, the majority with relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) have secondary progressive MS (SPMS). SPMS pathophysiology likely involves mitochondrial dysfunction, microglial activation, vascular endothelial disruption, and effects of meningeal lymphoid-like tissues.1 The resulting neurodegeneration and accelerated brain atrophy correlate with functional disability; thus whole-brain atrophy is the current gold-standard MRI surrogate outcome measure for SPMS trials.2 Targeting specific pathophysiologic processes is a rational strategy for treating SPMS.
Lipoic acid (LA) is an endogenously produced antioxidant with multiple biological functions including free-radical scavenging, metallic ion chelation, regeneration of intracellular glutathione, and oxidative damage repair of macromolecules.3 In mitochondria, the LA/dihydrolipoic acid redox couple is a key cofactor for the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex of oxidative respiration and aids nucleic acid synthesis.4 LA modulates the PKB/Akt signaling pathway important for vascular endothelial integrity, affects transcription factor Nrf2, and acts as an insulin mimetic.5,6
Our center and others have shown that LA reduced disability in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), diminished inflammatory cell migration into spinal cords and optic nerves, and inhibited macrophage/microglial activation.7,8 Oral ingestion of LA by patients with MS produced blood levels comparable with those in EAE.9 In clinical trials, LA is well tolerated; common adverse reactions were gastrointestinal (GI) intolerance, headache, malodorous urine, and rash.10,11 Herein, we report results of a 2-year, randomized controlled trial to determine whether LA reduced rates of whole-brain atrophy, slowed clinical deterioration, and was safe in SPMS.
METHODS Study design. This was a prospective, single-site, 2-year, phase II, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of 1,200 mg daily oral racemic LA to answer the following primary research question with Class I level of evidence: would LA reduce the rate of whole-brain atrophy in SPMS? Secondary research questions were to determine whether LA would reduce rates of atrophy of segmented brain, spinal cord, and retinal substructures, reduce deterioration of disability and quality of life, and be safe in SPMS. Recruitment occurred between May 2011 and October 2013, with last visit being in August 2015. The study was conducted at the Veterans Affairs Portland Health Care System (VAPORHCS), Portland, OR, with some procedures at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Portland, OR. Participants. Inclusion criteria were ages 40–70 years, prior RRMS (2005 McDonald criteria), and current SPMS defined by MS disability progression in the absence of clinical relapse during the prior 5 years as determined by the principal investigator (PI) based on history and chart review.12 Progression was defined as sufficient to change a Functional System on the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) or effect a meaningful functional change (e.g., stopped working due to cognitive decline).13 Participants were permitted to start, stop, or continue glatiramer acetate or β-interferon during the study. Exclusion criteria were use of natalizumab, immunosuppressants, chemotherapies, or scheduled IV corticosteroid treatments within 1 year of enrollment, corticosteroid treatment for relapse within 60 days of enrollment, LA within 30 days of enrollment, MRI constraints, self-reported ocular disease that could confound optical coherence tomography (OCT) interpretation, pregnant or breastfeeding, significant active concurrent illness, uncontrolled or insulin-dependent diabetes, and lack of English fluency. Because of slow recruitment during the first 8 months, the EDSS limit of 6.0 was eliminated. Standard protocol approvals, registrations, and patient consents. The study was approved by VAPORHCS and OHSU Institutional Review Boards. Written consent was obtained from all the participants. The study was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT01188811) and conducted following 2010 CONSORT guidelines.14 Study personnel roles. The PI conducted screening visits and initial EDSS examinations for randomization, evaluated adverse events (AEs), and served as the study monitor. Blinded neurologists and a neurology advanced practitioner served as EDSS examiners. Blinded study coordinators collected mobility data, questionnaires, and maintained databases. Investigational drug. An Investigational New Drug indication was obtained by the PI (no. 110132). Pure Encapsulations (Sudbury, MA) provided gelatin capsules containing 600 mg racemic LA or placebo. Placebo capsules contained Avicel (microcellulose crystal) and 4.3 mg of quercetin (a bioflavonoid) that rendered the placebo a yellow color, similar to LA. Expiration of the study drug was extended once during the study by Pure Encapsulations after retesting of sample capsules determined continued stability. Study timeline. Screen and baseline visits were ≤30 days apart. Subsequent visits at months 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 occurred ±2 weeks. A month was defined as 4 weeks for scheduling purposes. MRI and OCT occurred at baseline, months 12 and 24. Clinical outcome measures were collected at baseline and every 6 months. Safety laboratory measures were performed at each visit. Telephone calls occurred between visits and after study completion to capture AEs. Outcomes. Primary outcome was difference in annual percent change brain volume (PCBV) on MRI by Structural Image Evaluation, using Normalisation, of Atrophy (SIENA). Secondary outcomes included atrophy rates of segmented brain, spinal cord, and retinal substructures, changes in disability, quality of life, and safety. MRI acquisition protocol. MRI acquisition and analyses details are shown in appendix e-1 at Neurology.org/nn. The following sequences were acquired using a Philips Achieva 3.0T X-series with Quasar Dual gradient systems: (1) 3D high-resolution magnetization-prepared rapid acquisition gradient echo (3D MP-RAGE) with 1 mm3 voxels for high-resolution structural (T1-weighted) information. The upper cervical spinal cord was intentionally included in the series through positioning; (2) 3D fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (3D FLAIR) series with 1 mm3 voxels; (3) conventional 3 mm (0.3 gap) axial 2D proton density/T2-weighted sequences with in-plane resolution 1 mm2; and (4) 3-mm sagittal 2D proton density/T2-weighted spinal cord sequences. No intravascular contrast was used. MRI analyses. MRIs were reviewed by a neuroradiologist for unexpected findings. A single trained MRI analyst performed lesion counts, volumetrics, and cortical thickness analyses. The PI conducted spinal cord cross-sectional thickness and lesion occupancy analyses. Both were directed by the study neuroradiologist. Cerebral T2-hyperintense lesion volumes and maps were obtained using Lesion TOpology-preserving Anatomical Segmentation (Lesion-TOADS).15 FSL tools were used to create lesion-filled MP-RAGE images. SIENAX was used to determine cross-sectional whole-brain, white, and grey matter volumes.16 Whole-brain atrophy was determined using SIENA from the FSL package.16 Subcortical deep grey matter volumes were measured using FIRST.16 Cortical thickness, cortical volumetric segmentation, and analyses of these were performed with FreeSurfer (surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/) and its longitudinal processing stream.17 Spinal cord cross-sectional area was recorded at C1. An in-house estimation of the relative percent of the spinal cord from the foramen magnum to the lower edge of C7 occupied by MS lesions was devised for descriptive purposes. MRIs were graded for quality (good, fair, poor, and unusable). Poor and unusable scans were excluded from the analyses. OCT. Participants underwent spectral domain OCT (Cirrus HD-OCT; Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc., Dublin, CA) in each eye after pharmacologic dilation (1% tropicamide and 0.5% proparacaine hydrochloride). Peripapillary and macular scans were obtained with Optic Disc Cube 200 × 200 and Macular Cube 512 × 128 protocols, respectively. OCTs were reviewed by an experienced neuro-ophthalmologist. Excluded scans had confounding findings, artifact, misalignment, or signal strength less than 7. Clinical measures. Disability was captured by the EDSS. The same EDSS examiner was used for a given participant throughout the study to the extent possible. Mobility measures for ambulatory participants were Timed 25-Foot Walk (T25FW), Multiple Sclerosis Walking Scale (MSWS-12) Questionnaire, and Activities-specific Balance Confidence (ABC) Questionnaire.18,–,20 Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) tested cognition.21 RAND 36-Item Short Form Health Survey assessed quality of life.22 Safety monitoring. AEs were categorized using the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events version 4.0 (CTCAE v4.0). Unscheduled visits occurred for relapses, AEs, and early study termination visits. Safety monitoring laboratory tests (complete blood count and kidney and liver panels) were checked at each visit. The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) was administered at every visit. A 3-member data safety and monitoring board met every year. Sample size, randomization, and blinding. The study was powered for comparison of the primary outcome, PCBV, as estimated by Altmann et al.23 using an SD of 1.51 for SIENA atrophy, 2-year study length with yearly MRIs, and 60% effect size. A sample size of 23 per arm was needed to obtain 80% power and a significance of p < 0.05. Projected enrollment was increased to allow for dropouts. Participants were assigned to LA or placebo in a 1:1 manner by the unblinded research pharmacist following a permutated block randomization based on EDSS ≤4.5 or >4.5.13 All other study personnel were blinded to the treatment assignment. MRIs were labeled with additional randomly generated numbers during analyses to further reduce the risk of bias. Statistical analysis was performed by a blinded statistician for primary, secondary, and safety outcome measures. Statistical methods. Intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis used linear mixed models to evaluate the effect of LA on annualized PCBV. Mixed models were used to adjust for within-participant serial correlation, to account for the repeated measurements of the longitudinal design, and to include all study participants. Models were corrected for participant age, sex, and MS duration with standard model diagnostics to identify overly influential leverage points. Multiple comparisons were accounted for using the Holm-Sidak correction within the study outcome domains. Outlier data points were identified through standard diagnostic techniques using combinations of data point leverage, individual residuals, and Cook distance to identify overly influential observations and exclude them from baseline and 2-year change analyses. Data from participants taking a reduced dose of LA (n = 2) were not handled differently in outcome analyses as their limited number made subgroup assessment intractable. Mixed-model results are reported as rates of change with variance represented by the standard errors of the coefficient estimates (SEEs). Post hoc analysis of the primary outcome measure was conducted adding the baseline whole-brain volume and baseline T2-lesion volume as covariates to the model. All analyses were performed using R 3.3.1 with additional utility from the lme4 package.24,25
RESULTS Of the 54 consented and randomized, 51 participants (27 LA and 24 placebo) took at least 1 dose of study drug and were included in the ITT analyses (figure 1). Forty-six participants completed the study (22 LA and 24 placebo). The 5 dropouts in the LA cohort were for reasons of claustrophobia during MRI, prolonged nausea and vomiting which resolved on cessation of LA, and significant |
of view of who gets killed and how they get killed, but also from the standpoint of achieving practical ends that you can live with in the peacetime. If one declares that the only options are pacifism or “anything goes,” one slides down a pretty nasty slope awfully quickly. One gets what Conant is trying to indicate — that war itself is the problem, not the means — but saying that the means are just details of immorality seems to be just a bit too dismissive for me. Nations that decide that the methods of war are just practical details become the stuff of nightmares.
Notes
Tags: 1910s, Books, chemical warfare, James B. Conant, World War IYou are here: Home >Grey Water Central > Create an Oasis with Greywater
The New
Create an Oasis with Greywater
Integrated Design for Water Conservation: Reuse, Rainwater Harvesting & Sustainable Landscaping
Revised and Expanded 6th Edition by Art Ludwig
“Greywater for dummies and greywater encyclopedia in one information goldmine.”
—Dan Chiras, author, The New Ecological Home; The Solar House
$22.95 The New Create an Oasis only 978-0-9643433-3-7
New Greywater Book and Video Set: The New Create an Oasis, Builder's Greywater Guide, Principles of Ecological Design, Laundry to Landscape instructional DVD $51.80 ($13 savings)
(bigger image-270k)
Create an Oasis shows you how to:
Save freshwater by irrigating with washwater
Relieve strain on your septic tank
Purify wastewater without energy or chemicals
Increase your water security
Make your home more resilient to drought, flood, and climate change
Other topics include: why to use or not use grey water, health guidelines, grey water sources, irrigation requirements, 17 system examples and selection chart, biocompatible cleaners, grey water plumbing principles and components, maintenance and troubleshooting, freezing, rain, preserving soil quality, storing rainwater, compendium of common grey water errors and preferred practices, suppliers, and references.
This 6th edition of the world’s best-selling greywater book includes extensive revisions to every page, a dozen pages of new text, and dozens of new photos and figures, as well as complete information on the Laundry to Landscape system (from the originator of this design). Do-it-yourself Laundry to Landscape is the simplest, least expensive, lowest-effort way to get the most greywater onto the home landscape.
This book is of interest to homeowners, do-it-yourselfers, back-to-the-landers, conservationists, gardeners, developers, builders, plumbers, regulators, policy makers, development workers, and researchers.
If your project is going to involve permitting, inspection, codes, building a system for someone else, writing or applying codes, or greywater research, you will also want our Builder's Grey Water Guide (book). These two are available as a set—see
Books & articles.
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“You’ll be in deep greywater without this book!”
—Jeff Oldham, Real Goods Head Technician
“The best, must-have resource on greywater. This thorough book presents almost every design variation on greywater systems, from the simplest to the most complex, and gives the pros, cons, and cost of each, both in dollars and environmental terms.”
—David Dobbs, Editor, Harrowsmith Country Life
What This Book Is About
Humans enjoying their role as responsible stewards of the water cycle.
Create an Oasis with Greywater describes how to choose, build, and use 17 types of residential greywater reuse systems in just about any context: urban, rural, or village. It explains how you can put together a simple greywater system in an afternoon for under $50. It also includes information for taking your greywater reuse to the next level: integrating it with water efficiency, rainwater use, and food production. This book includes:
How to clarify your goals, and how various greywater system options can serve you
The sameGreywater Site Assessment/System Checklist (PDF) and procedures I use for my design consulting
and procedures I use for my design consulting Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Greywater plumbing principles and procedures in detail
Information on soils and plants, tools and parts
Several of our own original design innovations to improve greywater systems' longevity, simplify maintenance, and reduce environmental impacts
Real-life examples of greywater designs for a wide range of contexts
This book offers underlying design principles as well as design specifics. If you run
into a situation not specifically covered, you'll likely be able to use these general principles to figure it out yourself.
Most of the world’s aquifers are being pumped faster than replenished, and all reservoirs are slowly diminishing in capacity as they fill with sediment. At the same time, natural surface waters and groundwaters are being degraded by the wastewater continually dumped into them. Greywater reuse enables you personally to do more with the same amount of water and to increase your water security. At the same time, your greywater reuse reduces the problems of supply and pollution for everyone.
Any greywater system will realize some benefits. Obtaining all the potential benefits is trickier than it seems. Many pitfalls await the unwary. In the average installation, this book will pay for itself many times over in savings on construction, maintenance, and errors avoided.
Most of the information otherwise available on greywater comes from vendors. Oasis Design doesn’t sell greywater systems, so you don’t have to worry that we’re steering you toward stuff you don’t need. Rather, we make our living by providing information to help people have a higher quality of life with lower environmental impact.
Wishing you the best of luck with your projects,
Art Ludwig
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“Ludwig is a water visionary... The most practical and complete presentation of the subject I have seen.”
—Michael MacCaskey, Editor-in-Chief, National Gardening
Chapter 1: Greywater Basics
First, let’s get your feet wet (so to speak)—what is greywater, what can you do with it, why, how, and some greywater lingo.
What Is Greywater?
Any wastewater generated in the home, except water from toilets, is called greywater. Dish, shower, sink, and laundry greywater comprise 50–80% of residential “wastewater.” Greywater may be reused for other purposes, especially landscape irrigation.
Toilet-flush water is called blackwater. A few systems that can safely recycle toilet water are included in this book.
Contaminated or difficult-to-handle greywater, such as solids-laden kitchen sink water or water used to launder diapers, I call “dark greywater”; most regulators consider these blackwater. However, the level of pathogens in even the darkest greywater is a small fraction of that in blackwater.1
Wastewater without added solids, such as warm-up water from the hot water faucet, reverse-osmosis purifier drain water, or refrigerator compressor drip, is called clearwater.
Reclaimed water is highly treated mixed municipal greywater and blackwater, usually piped to large-volume users such as golf courses via a separate distribution system. It is outside the scope of this book.
What Can You Do with Greywater?
Conventional plumbing systems dispose of greywater via septic tanks or sewers. The many drawbacks of this practice include overloading treatment systems, contaminating natural waters with poorly treated effluent, and high ecological/economic cost.
Greywater reuse follows the same principles that make wild rivers clean…even though they drain many square miles of dirt, worms, and feces. Beneficial bacteria break down nasties into water-soluble plant food, and the plants eat it, leaving pure water. The author is shown here deeply absorbed in his tireless study of this process.
Instead, you can reuse this water. The most common reuse of greywater is for irrigation—the focus of this book. It can also be cascaded to toilet flushing or laundry. Even a greywater-only dispersal system has less negative impact than septic/sewer dispersal, because the beneficial bacteria and roots in the topsoil are better than anything else at treating water.
Why Use Greywater?
It is said that there is no such thing as “waste,” just misplaced resources. Greywater systems turn “wastewater” and its nutrients into useful resources. Why irrigate with drinking water when most plants thrive on used water containing small bits of compost?
Unlike many ecological stopgap measures, greywater use is part of the fundamental solution to many ecological problems. It will probably remain an essentially unchanged feature of ecological houses in the distant future. The benefits of greywater recycling include:
Reduced use of freshwater —Greywater can replace freshwater for some uses. This saves money and increases the effective water supply, especially in regions where irrigation is needed. Residential water use, on average, is almost evenly split between indoors and outdoors. Most water used indoors can be reused outdoors for irrigation, achieving the same result with less water diverted from nature.
—Greywater can replace freshwater for some uses. This saves money and increases the effective water supply, especially in regions where irrigation is needed. Residential water use, on average, is almost evenly split between indoors and outdoors. Most water used indoors can be reused outdoors for irrigation, achieving the same result with less water diverted from nature. Less strain on septic tanks or treatment plants —Greywater, which comprises the majority of the wastewater stream, contains vastly fewer pathogens than blackwater and 90% less nitrogen (a nutrient that is a problematic water pollutant). Reducing a septic system's flow by getting greywater out greatly extends its service life and capacity. For municipal treatment systems, decreased flow means higher treatment effectiveness and lower costs.
—Greywater, which comprises the majority of the wastewater stream, contains vastly fewer pathogens than blackwater and 90% less nitrogen (a nutrient that is a problematic water pollutant). Reducing a septic system's flow by getting greywater out greatly extends its service life and capacity. For municipal treatment systems, decreased flow means higher treatment effectiveness and lower costs. More effective purification —Greywater is purified to a spectacularly high degree in the upper, most biologically active region of the soil. This protects the quality of natural surface and groundwaters. Topsoil is a purification engine many times more powerful than engineered treatment plants, or even in septic systems, which discharge wastewater deeper into the subsoil.3
—Greywater is purified to a spectacularly high degree in the upper, most biologically active region of the soil. This protects the quality of natural surface and groundwaters. Topsoil is a purification engine many times more powerful than engineered treatment plants, or even in septic systems, which discharge wastewater deeper into the subsoil.3 Feasibility for sites unsuitable for a septic tank —For sites with slow soil percolation or other problems, a greywater system can partially or completely substitute for a costly, over-engineered septic system. (In extreme cases this can enable otherwise undevelopable lots to be built on—a double-edged sword environmentally.)
—For sites with slow soil percolation or other problems, a greywater system can partially or completely substitute for a costly, over-engineered septic system. (In extreme cases this can enable otherwise undevelopable lots to be built on—a double-edged sword environmentally.) Reduced use of energy and chemicals —Due to the reduced amount of freshwater and wastewater that needs pumping and treatment. If you provide your own water or electricity, you’ll benefit directly from lessening this burden. Also, processing wastewater in the soil under your fruit trees definitely encourages you to dump fewer toxins down the drain.
—Due to the reduced amount of freshwater and wastewater that needs pumping and treatment. If you provide your own water or electricity, you’ll benefit directly from lessening this burden. Also, processing wastewater in the soil under your fruit trees definitely encourages you to dump fewer toxins down the drain. Groundwater recharge —Greywater application in excess of plant needs recharges the natural store of water in the ground. Abundant groundwater keeps springs flowing and trees growing in intervals between rains.
—Greywater application in excess of plant needs recharges the natural store of water in the ground. Abundant groundwater keeps springs flowing and trees growing in intervals between rains. Plant growth —Greywater can support a flourishing landscape where irrigation water might otherwise not be available.
—Greywater can support a flourishing landscape where irrigation water might otherwise not be available. Reclamation of nutrients —Loss of nutrients through wastewater disposal in rivers or oceans is a subtle but highly significant form of erosion. Reclaiming otherwise wasted nutrients in greywater helps to maintain the land’s fertility.2,3
—Loss of nutrients through wastewater disposal in rivers or oceans is a subtle but highly significant form of erosion. Reclaiming otherwise wasted nutrients in greywater helps to maintain the land’s fertility.2,3 Increased awareness of, and sensitivity, to natural cycles —The greywater user, by having a reason to pay more attention to the annual progression of the seasons, the circulation of water between the Earth and the sky, and the needs of plants, benefits intangibly but greatly by participating directly in the wise husbandry of vital global nutrient and water cycles.
—The greywater user, by having a reason to pay more attention to the annual progression of the seasons, the circulation of water between the Earth and the sky, and the needs of plants, benefits intangibly but greatly by participating directly in the wise husbandry of vital global nutrient and water cycles. Just because—Greywater is fairly harmless and great fun to experiment with. Moreover, life with alternative waste treatment is less expensive and more interesting...
Does Greywater Matter?
Viewed from any single, narrow perspective, greywater systems don’t look that important. A low-flow showerhead can save water with less effort. A septic system can treat greywater almost as well.
But when you look at the whole picture—how everything connects—the keystone importance of greywater is revealed.
Ecological systems design is about context, and integration between systems. The entirety of integrated, ecological design can be reduced to one sentence: do what's appropriate for the context.
Ecological systems—rainwater harvesting, runoff management, passive solar, composting toilets, edible landscaping—all of these are more context sensitive than their counterparts in conventional practice; that's most of what makes them more ecological.
And greywater systems are more context sensitive than any other man-made ecological system, and more connected to more other systems.
Get the greywater just right, and you’ve got most of the whole package right, and that’s what matters.
“It is amazing that human civilization has learned how to reach the moon and how to explode a nuclear bomb, but not how to use water properly. But now we have no excuse to remain ignorant. Art Ludwig’s books inform and inspire us to get in touch with the basic, precious, and sacred element of water. They are survival guides in the age of global warming.”
—Satish Kumar, Editor, Resurgence magazine
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Excerpt ~ Drain to Mulch Basin/Drain Out Back
Excerpt ~ Standard Mulch Basin For New Planting
Cutaway view of a double ell, a flow-splitting fitting that is largely self-cleaning with no filtration. This one is part of the first known Branched Drain network. I tested it for half a year: valiantly tried to clog it with pure kitchen sink water—took the sink strainer out and pushed bowls of soggy granola and pot scrapings down the pipe. The
P-trap clogged every other day, but the Branched Drain network never did.
Excerpt ~ Branched Drain
For sites with continuous downhill slope from greywater source to
irrigated areas, Branched Drain systems provide inexpensive, reliable,
automated distribution with almost no maintenance. Branched Drains have
no filter, pump, surge tank, or openings smaller than 1" (2.5 cm).
All variations of this system meet legal requirements in Arizona and other
states that regulate greywater rationally. A friendly inspector can issue a permit for this system under the CPC/UPC. Chapters 9 and 10 explore every aspect of Branched Drain systems in detail.
Excerpt ~ Laundry to Landscape
The Laundry to Landscape (L2L) system is the simplest, least expensive, lowest-effort way to get the most greywater onto the home landscape. It is the greywater system most suited for professional installation by landscapers, yet it is also DIY and renter-friendly. Odds are it makes sense
for you…and even if not, like the Branched Drain chapters, this section intersects some important
greywater design principles from a new angle and is worth reading. (The L2L is an Art Ludwig
original design, developed to address the need for a more prime-time-ready laundry greywater
system when California agreed to our request to make laundry-only systems permit-exempt.)
Laundry to Landscape (web-updated)
Laundry to Landscape (PDF 1mb) as it appears in the 2009 printing
^ Top ^ | Reviews | What This Book Is About | Greywater Basics | The Gravity Drum | Health Considerations | More Excerpts | Table of Contents
“The Oasis greywater book is a powerful tool for the professional and homeowner alike. As water becomes the commodity this century that oil was in the past, this book will be required reading for those who want to control their own destinies and responsibly steward an increasingly dwindling resource: clean water.”
—Jonathan Todd, President, John Todd Ecological Design
Excerpt ~ Health Considerations
In practice, the health risk of greywater use has proven minimal to nonexistent. It is, after all, the water you just bathed in, or the residue from clothes you wore not long ago. Despite all sorts of grievous misuse (brought on in part by lack of useful regulatory guidance), there has not been a single documented case of greywater-transmitted illness in the US. Nonetheless, greywater may contain infectious organisms. It's poor form to construct pathways for infecting people, and totally unnecessary. Keep this in mind when designing and using a system.
All greywater safety guidelines stem from these two principles:
Greywater must pass slowly through healthy topsoil for natural purification to occur. Design your greywater system so no greywater-to-human contact occurs before purification.
Here are examples of possible health-related greywater problems and their solutions:
Direct contact or consumption — Solutions: Carefully avoid cross connections (accidental connections between freshwater and greywater plumbing). Label greywater plumbing, including greywater garden hoses. Use gloves when cleaning greywater filters. Wash your hands after contact with greywater.
— Carefully avoid cross connections (accidental connections between freshwater and greywater plumbing). Label greywater plumbing, including greywater garden hoses. Use gloves when cleaning greywater filters. Wash your hands after contact with greywater. Microorganisms on plants —Direct application to foliage can leave untreated microorganisms on surfaces. Solution: Don’t apply greywater to lawns, or to fruits and vegetables that are eaten raw (e.g., strawberries, lettuce, or carrots). Greywatering fruit trees is acceptable if the greywater is applied under mulch.
—Direct application to foliage can leave untreated microorganisms on surfaces. Don’t apply greywater to lawns, or to fruits and vegetables that are eaten raw (e.g., strawberries, lettuce, or carrots). Greywatering fruit trees is acceptable if the greywater is applied under mulch. Pathogen overload —Greywater systems are safest when reusing water that is fairly clean initially. Solutions: Greywater should not contain water used to launder soiled diapers or generated by anyone with an infectious disease. In both cases, greywater should be diverted to the septic tank or sewer. Also, don't store greywater; use it within 24 hours, before bacteria multiply.
—Greywater systems are safest when reusing water that is fairly clean initially. Greywater should not contain water used to launder soiled diapers or generated by anyone with an infectious disease. In both cases, greywater should be diverted to the septic tank or sewer. Also, don't store greywater; use it within 24 hours, before bacteria multiply. System overload —If you are having a party and 50 people are going to use a system designed for two, consider diverting greywater to the sewer for the night.
—If you are having a party and 50 people are going to use a system designed for two, consider diverting greywater to the sewer for the night. Breathing of microorganisms —Droplets from sprinklers can evaporate to leave harmful microorganisms suspended in the air, where people may breathe them. Solution: Don’t broadcast greywater with sprinklers.
—Droplets from sprinklers can evaporate to leave harmful microorganisms suspended in the air, where people may breathe them. Don’t broadcast greywater with sprinklers. Chemical contamination —Biological purification does not usually remove industrial toxins. Toxins will either be absorbed by plants or pollute groundwater. Many household cleaners are unsuitable for introduction into a biological system. Solutions: Divert greywater that contains chemicals so they poison the sewer or septic instead. Better yet, don't buy products that you wouldn't want in your greywater system.
—Biological purification does not usually remove industrial toxins. Toxins will either be absorbed by plants or pollute groundwater. Many household cleaners are unsuitable for introduction into a biological system. Divert greywater that contains chemicals so they poison the sewer or septic instead. Better yet, don't buy products that you wouldn't want in your greywater system. Contamination of surface water —Greywater needs to percolate through the soil, or else it might flow untreated into creeks or other waterways. Solutions: Discharge greywater underground or into a mulch-filled basin to contain it and slow its movement toward surface waters or groundwater. Don’t apply greywater to saturated soils. Apply greywater intermittently so that it soaks in and the soil can aerate between waterings. In general, greywater that is confined subsurface or within mulch basins at least 50' (15m) from a creek or lake is not a problem.
—Greywater needs to percolate through the soil, or else it might flow untreated into creeks or other waterways. Discharge greywater underground or into a mulch-filled basin to contain it and slow its movement toward surface waters or groundwater. Don’t apply greywater to saturated soils. Apply greywater intermittently so that it soaks in and the soil can aerate between waterings. In general, greywater that is confined subsurface or within mulch basins at least 50' (15m) from a creek or lake is not a problem. Contamination of groundwater or well—It is all but impossible to contaminate groundwater with a greywater system, as the treatment capacity of the topsoil is so enormous. Over 90% of plant roots and beneficial microorganisms are in the top few feet of soil, above most septic leachfields. However, if you have a poorly sealed well, greywater running over the surface could potentially pour into it. Solution: The CPC/UPC greywater codes, which are just crude adaptations of septic tank codes, call for 50' of separation between location of greywater application and a well, same as a septic. Probably half of this is sufficient.
^ Top ^ | Reviews | What This Book Is About | Greywater Basics | The Gravity Drum | Health Considerations | More Excerpts | Table of Contents
“In my youth we pumped every cup of water we used by hand, from a well 80 feet deep. Our water from washing clothes and dishes my grandmother threw over her dahlias with a fine, scything action. I recommend this book, which describes many equally beneficial and cheap systems as well as more automated ones.”
—Bill Mollison, The Permaculture Institute
Excerpt ~ Graphs for Home Water Budget, Water and Climate Commons Effects
Home water budget before/ after water makeover, impacts on water and climate commons.
More excerpts
Common grey water mistakes
System selection chart (PDF)
Greywater Site Assessment/System Checklist (PDF)
Greywater links
Book index (HTML or PDF)
Table of Contents
What This Book Is About
Introduction
Chapter 1: Greywater Basics
What Is Greywater? • What Can You Do with Greywater? • Why Use Greywater? • When Not to Use Greywater • Elements of a Greywater System
Chapter 2: Goals and Context
Get Clear on Your Goals
Assess Your Context
Greywater Systems Are Very Context Dependent • Site Assessment Example • Does Greywater Matter? • Side Trips and Shortcuts That May Apply to You
Assess Your Site
Assess Your Water Resources • Evaluate Conservation Options • Assess Existing Wastewater Treatment Facilities • Assess Your Greywater Sources • Check the Slopes and Elevations •Units: gpd, gpw, gpy, or gpdc? • Help! Too Many
Numbers! • Check the Soil Perk • How to Measure Perk v Assess Your Treatment/Dispersal Area • Assess Your Irrigation
Need • Assess the Climate and Forces of Nature • Assess the Regulatory and Social Climate • Appraise the People Part of
the System • Cost-Benefit Analysis • A Note on Lawns • Lawn Statistics
Revisit Your Goals
Chapter 3: Design for Your Context
Integrate Greywater with Other Systems
Health Considerations • Six Factors for Good Natural Purification of Water or Wastewater • Coordinate with Others • General Landscape Design Points • General Landscape Design Points
Connect Greywater Sources with Irrigation or Dispersal Area
Lump or Separate the Greywater Flow? • Multiple Greywater Zones • Provide for Maintenance and Troubleshooting
Practice Optimal, Integrated Design
Relate Well with the Natural Water Cycle
Chapter 4: Greywater Collection Plumbing
General Greywater Plumbing Principles
When to Get Professional Help • Squander No Fall • Collection Plumbing and Inspections • Build for Future Flexibility • Divert Greywater Downstream from Traps and Vents • Note on Surge Tank Collection Plumbing • Provide Cleanouts and Inspection Access • Design for Easy Maintenance and Troubleshooting
Collecting Laundry (Pressurized) Greywater
Collecting Gravity-Flow Greywater
Surge Capacity
Pre-Filter Surge Capacity in Collection Plumbing • Surge Tanks • Surge Capacity in Irrigation Piping• Surge Capacity in the Receiving Landscape • Dosing Siphon
Choosing and Finding Parts
Minimize Plastic Impact • Proper Fittings and Optimal-Size Pipe • Valves
Tools for Collection Plumbing
Radical Plumbing: A Fraction of the Resource Use
Chapter 5: Greywater in the Landscape
How Much Area Do You Need for Treatment/Dispersal? • Coordinate with Freshwater Irrigation, Actualize Water Savings • Irrigation Efficiency • Get Your Freshwater Irrigation Under Control • Choose the Proportion of Irrigation to Meet with Greywater • How Much Area Should You Irrigate? • Effect of Soil Type on Irrigation Design • Effect of Rainwater Harvesting and Runoff Management • What to Do with Greywater When Plants Don’t Need It
Preserving Soil Quality
Garden-Friendly Cleaners • Urine and Salt Balance • The Key Role of Rainwater • Monitoring and Repairing Soil • Toxic Waste Disposal
Plants
Plants for Greywater Reuse • Plants for Greywater Treatment/Dispersal
Mulch Basin Design
Mulch • Basins • Infiltration Capacity of Greywater Mulch Basins • Swales • Post Holes and Auger Holes
Chapter 6: System Selection Chart
Chapter 7: Simple, Easy Greywater Systems
C: Collection Plumbing; I: Irrigation Plumbing; R: Receiving Landscape
Landscape Direct (CIR) • Drain to Mulch Basin/Drain Out Back (CIR) • Movable Drain (IR) • Branched Drain (IR) • Laundry Drum (CIR) • Laundry to Landscape (CIR) • Ecological Laundry • Tools for Transition to Outdoors • Getting Even Distribution • Experimental Adaptations for High-Efficiency Washers • Garden Hose through the Bathroom (CIR) • Dishpan Dump/Bucketing (CIR) • Mulch Basins (R) • Greywater Furrow Irrigation (CIR)
Chapter 8: More Complex Greywater Systems
Drum with Effluent Pump (I) • Subsoil Infiltration Chambers (R) • Solar Greywater Greenhouse (R) • Doug and Sara Balcomb’s Solar Greenhouse in Santa Fe, NM • Green Septic: Tank, Flow Splitters, and Infiltrators (CIR) • Blackwater Reuse Health Warning • Constructed Wetlands (IR) • Automated Sand Filtration to Subsurface Emitters (IR) • Advanced Treatment System to Subsurface Drip (CIR)
Chapter 9: Branched Drain Design
Lessons Learned from the Drain Out Back
Branched Drains to the Rescue
Split the Flow • Contain and Cover the Flow
Advantages and Disadvantages of Branched Drain Systems
Limitations of the Branched Drain System
Branched Drain System Design
Ways to Split the Flow • Parts for Splitting the Flow • Branching Geometry Options • Reductions • Cleanouts, Inspection Access, and Rainwater Inlets • Branched Drain Outlet Design • Mulch Basin Surge Capacity • Branched Drain Mental System Check-Out
Chapter 10: Branched Drain Installation
Double-Check Your Design • Check for Buried Utilities • Dipper Installation • Connect Pipes and Fittings on the Surface without Glue • Dig Trenches • Laying Pipe with Plenty of Slope • Laying Pipe with Marginal Slope • Form Mulch Basins, Install Outlet Chambers, and Plant Trees • System Test • Map the System • Cover Up
Branched Drain Maintenance
Branched Drain Troubleshooting
Branched Drain Variations, Improvements, and Unknowns
Chapter 11: Common Greywater Errors
Error: Assuming It’s Simple • Error: Out of Context Design • Error: Overly Complex, Delicate, and/or Expensive System with Negative Net Benefit • Context Specific Design • Error: Mansion with a Greywater System • Error: Pump Zeal • Error: Storage of Greywater • Error: Paranoia about Negligible Health Concerns and/or Cavalier Disregard for Legitimate Public Health Concerns • Error: Treatment Before Irrigation • How Dangerous Is Greywater? • Error: Discharge of Greywater Directly to Natural Waters or Hardscapes • Error: Greywatering Lawns • Error: Irrigating Vegetables • Error: Irrigating Plants That Can’t Take It or Don't Need It • Error: Garden Hose Directly from the Washer • Error: Perforated Pipe or Other System Where You Can’t Tell or Control Where the Water Is Going • Error: Combined Wastewater Designs Used for Greywater • Error: Freshwater Designs and Hardware Used for Greywater • Error: Inexpensive Greywater-to-Drip Irrigation • Error: Low-Volume Automated Greywater Toilet-Flushing Systems • Error: Use of Government Agencies, Engineering Firms, or Salespeople for Greywater Design • Error: Guidance from Work-in-Progress Codes
Chapter 12: Real World Examples
Example #1: Town—City of Santa Barbara (Branched Drain) • Example #2: Suburbia—Southern California (Branched Drain) • Example #3: No Water—Highland Central Mexico (Various) • Example #4: Too Wet—Oregon (Mulch-Covered Bog) • Example #5: Big Family in New House (Automated Subsurface Emitters)
Where to Go for More Information
The Future of Greywater Use
Appendix A: Site Assessment Form
Appendix B: Measuring Elevation and Slope
Appendix C: Cold Climate Adaptations
Appendix D: Greywater in the Nonindustrialized World
Greywater Furrow Irrigation
Appendix E: Pumps, Filters, and Disinfection
Appendix F: Related Aspects of Sustainable Water Use
Natural Purification • The Household Water Cascade • Natural Purification by Soil Bacteria and Plant Roots • Rainwater Harvesting • Composting Toilets
Appendix G: Greywater Regulation Revolution
Arizona Greywater Law
Appendix H: Measurements and Conversions
Resources
Further Reading and Resources • Suppliers
Index
About the Author
House Features After Water Makeover
^ Top ^ | Reviews | What This Book Is About | Greywater Basics | The Gravity Drum | Health Considerations | More Excerpts | Table of Contents
See also:
^ Top of page ^ Browse | CatalogJK Rowling is to make a surprise return to the fantastical world of witches and wizards for her screenwriting debut – but there will be no sign of Harry Potter.
Fans of the bestselling series about the teenage wizard will nevertheless be thrilled that his fictional world is to be expanded with a series of new films, starting with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Revealing the news on her Facebook page, the British author said she was going to return to the world of wizardry only “if I had an idea that I was really excited about; and this is it”.
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Warner Bros Entertainment approached Rowling with the idea of turning Fantastic Beasts, the textbook Harry and co study in Hogwarts, into a film.
She said it was a “fun idea” but would find it difficult for another author to take on the book’s protagonist, Newt Scamander. “As I considered Warner’s proposal, an idea took shape that I couldn’t dislodge. That is how I ended up pitching my own idea for a film,” Rowling said. “Having lived for so long in my fictional universe, I feel very protective of it and I already knew a lot about Newt.”
The story will start in New York, 70 years before the start of Harry Potter’s adventures in The Philosopher’s Stone, but the “laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films”.
Rowling said: “Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards, where I was so happy for 17 years, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world.”
Kevin Tsujihara, the chief executive of Warner Bros Entertainment, said the company was “honoured” that Rowling had agreed to the partnership. “She is an extraordinary writer, who ignited a reading revolution around the world, which then became an unprecedented film phenomenon.”
In a bid to exploit fully the potential of the new work, the company has plans to launch a Fantastic Beasts video game and a host of consumer products.
The studio will be delighted to have extended one of its most lucrative franchises, which has an inbuilt audience that will be more supportive with Rowling’s name attached. The series, which comprised eight films, grossed more than $7.7bn (£4.9bn) around the world, according to Box Office Mojo.
Last year Rowling dropped out of the Forbes World’s Billionaires list, which the magazine put down to her charitable giving and the British tax rates.
Since then, however, Pottermore, the online Harry Potter resource, has launched, she has published the bestselling The Casual Vacancy, and has now signed this deal with Warner Bros, which might bring her back on to Forbes’s list before too long. The book is to be turned into a television miniseries by the BBC, which will then be distributed around the world by Warner Bros.
Earlier this year, Rowling was also revealed to be the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, a detective book published under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. After she was unmasked the well-reviewed but modest-selling book became an instant bestseller.
Wizard creatures: From the book of fantastic beasts
Basilisk
This giant serpent can kill with a single glance; the Ministry of Magic grants it an XXXXX classification for being a known wizard-killer. But Harry Potter fights and despatches the basilisk in Hogwarts’ Chamber of Secrets.
Ukrainian Ironbelly
The largest breed of dragon in the Potter world. It guards the vault belonging to evil Bellatrix Lestrange in Gringotts bank.
Hippogriff
One of the series’ best-loved creatures, Buckbeak the hippogriff is an eagle-horse hybrid. His finest moment is his attack on Draco Malfoy after the slimy student shows him disrespect.
Phoenix
Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawkes, saves Harry’s life and helps his master fight Lord Voldemort.
Merpeople
Live underwater and speak Mermish. Hogwarts’ own colony torments Harry during a Triwizard Tournament task in The Goblet of Fire.GROWING Chinese investments in Pakistan have the potential to lift the economy’s potential output, but the repayment obligations that come with this investment will be serious, warns the IMF in its latest and final review of the just concluded programme.
“During the investment phase, as the ‘early harvest’ projects proceed, Pakistan will experience a surge in FDI and other external funding inflows,” says the Fund in a short evaluation of the impact of CPEC related investments on Pakistan. However, the import requirements of these projects “will likely offset a significant share of these inflows, such that the current account deficit would widen” within manageable levels during these years.
The report estimates that CPEC related imports could reach 11 per cent of total projected imports by 2020, equal to just over $5.7 billion, while inflows under the corridor will touch 2.2pc of projected GDP in that year. Gross external financing needs of the country will jump almost 60pc by then, from a projected $11bn for the current fiscal year, to $17.5bn in 2020.
Pakistan will see $27.8bn in “early harvest” projects under CPEC in the next few years, with the remaining $16bn coming over a longer timeline stretching out to 2030.
“Pakistan will need to manage increasing CPEC-related outflows,” warns the Fund, once the Chinese investors begin repatriating profits, adding that the amounts involved “could add up to a significant level given the magnitude of the FDI”.
Outflows will also come in the form of repayment obligations |
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Suicide bombers blew up two booby-trapped cars near the General Organization of Radio and TV in Damascus, state TV reported.
RT correspondent Paula Slier said that two security guards were confirmed dead in the blasts while two suicide bombers died in their cars.
“Within the last 20 minutes there were two massive explosions in downtown Damascus. It seems that one was right in front of the Syrian TV and we are seeing some footage being circulated on line by the rebels saying that their target is the Syrian TV,” said Slier.
But Syrian state news agency SANA said that there were no casualties while blaming the blasts on "terrorists".
Syrian TV showed footage of what appeared to be two burning vehicles, a fire engine and a building which had had its windows burnt out.
Slier added that the rebels have published a video on internet saying they will target the Syrian TV building. She also said that rebels had warned civilians to stay away from all military checkpoints in the city, prior to the blasts, which were just two minutes apart.
BREAKING - We are about 5-7 kilometres from the one blast - the smoke and smell is engulfing us #Damascus#Syria — PaulaSlier_RT (@PaulaSlier_RT) October 13, 2013
One more blast targeted the Four Seasons Hotel, where the foreign chemical weapons experts are staying, said Slier on her Twitter account.
Manuel Oschesereiter, Syrian crisis analyst has told RT that the attacks against UN inspectors were deliberate to undermine international diplomatic efforts.
“The attack against the UN inspectors is a thing where the rebel sides benefit because it is not in their interest that the UN team can work in a proper way,” Oschesereiter said.
“This would mean at the end that all of those agreements could not be kept. It would mean that all the achievements which gave the Syrian government as well as the whole world, which was almost expecting a regional war or even a World War in that area, would completely renew the situation.”
While in April 23 people were killed in two explosions. In one of them, the Syrian Prime Minister, Wael Halqi, narrowly escaped with his life.
Nineteen inspectors from the United Nations and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently working in Syria, investing the use of chemical weapons during the country’s ongoing civil war.
They will have to check about twenty sites as another group of twelve international experts is preparing to leave for Syria to speed up the process.
The government began destroying the first chemical weapons last week while in accordance to the US-Russian deal made during Geneva talks last month the elimination program has to be completed by June 30, 2014.
Bombings are a fairly regular occurrence in Damascus, although by no means as regular as in Iraq. One of the latest blast hit the Russian embassy compound last month, injuring three people.Between now and Feb. 29, sportsnet.ca will be taking an in-depth look at teams and the decisions facing them leading up to the NHL Trade Deadline. Today: Vancouver Canucks.
General manager: Jim Benning
Pending UFAs: Radim Vrbata, Dan Hamhuis, Brandon Prust, Matt Bartkowski, Yannick Weber
2016 draft picks: 1st (VAN), 2nd (VAN), 3rd (VAN) 4th (VAN), 6th (VAN), 7th (VAN), 7th (CAR)
No-move clauses: Henrik Sedin, Daniel Sedin, Ryan Miller, Alex Edler, Radim Vrbata (modified), Brandon Sutter, Jannik Hansen (modified), Chris Higgins (modified), Alexandre Burrows
Cap space on deadline day: $2,199,846
Team mode: The Vancouver Canucks will enter the 2016 NHL trade deadline as reluctant sellers.
Cap, no-move and draft pick data via generalfanager.com
That stance isn’t surprising. Vancouver’s management team doesn’t believe in tanking, and the organization as a whole hasn’t made a future-oriented deadline move since the turn of the century.
Earlier this week, even, the Canucks dealt Hunter Shinkaruk, a pure future asset, for a player in Markus Granlund that can help them now. Though Granlund is only 18 months older than Shinkaruk, the deal appears to be one that benefits the club on the ice in the immediate term.
That perplexing trade combined with the club’s public insistence that they’re still looking to be competitive every night and haven’t given up on earning a playoff berth, lends the impression that this struggling team isn’t ready to be sellers at the deadline yet.
Don’t get caught up parsing public statements though, the Canucks are very much a club that knows that it needs to restock for the future.
“We’re not going to sacrifice pieces of our future to augment the team at this point,” Linden told Sportsnet earlier this month. “If we can get younger and get faster then that’s what we want to be.”
Vancouver hasn’t made much of an attempt to extend expiring unrestricted free agents Radim Vrbata or Dan Hamhuis, both of whom hold no-trade clauses, and it’s widely expected that the club will try to recoup value for both players. Whether or not the market, Vrbata’s recent injury, or Hamhuis’ full no-trade clause complicates matters though is an open question – one that will leave Canucks fans in suspense in the lead up to NHL trade deadline day.
Determining specifically what the Canucks may actually be able to accomplish is tricky, but figuring out what they’d like to do is much simpler. We know that in an ideal world they’d find a taker for Brandon Prust, Chris Higgins and perhaps Yannick Weber, and we can assume with some degree of confidence that they’d like to deal Hamhuis and Vrbata too.
If the Canucks manage to be motivated sellers on deadline day, don’t expect the club to look to accumulate a bounty of draft picks. That generally hasn’t been the organization’s style during the Benning era.
It’s not that the Canucks aren’t interested in adding picks, but if Hamhuis agrees to waive and if Vrbata still has value despite his challenging season, draft picks are unlikely to be the club’s primary target.
“We’re just doing hockey trades,” Benning told reprorters on Monday. “If something makes sense to help our team now and in the future, if it’s a player that we value going forward, then those are the types of trades we’ll make.
“If we move a player out and we can acquire additional draft picks,” Benning added when asked a follow-up question, “we’ll look at doing that.”
What the Canucks are really looking for on deadline day is likely to add a quality young defenceman who is close to earning a spot on their NHL roster. The blue-line version of Sven Baertschi, basically.
“If there was a young defenceman that fit, that had some development time, that could be able to step into our lineup sooner than later that could be an option as well,” Linden told Sportsnet in mid-February.
Not only do we know that the Canucks would love to add a young, nearly NHL-ready defenceman, but we know they’ve already identified young pro-level defenceman around the league whom they think can contribute.
“We tried (to get a defender for Shinkaruk),” Benning said during a media conference call on Monday. “We identified throughout the league some good young defencemen who we would trade him for. I made the calls. The general managers there didn’t want to part with these defencemen so we decided that this was the next best road for us to go.”
Vancouver’s hybrid-type rebuilding effort has frustrated fans at times over the past 18 months, but the overall trend is unmistakable: get younger and get faster, and do it by gambling on professional players in their early 20s.
As a crucial trade deadline for the organization approaches, expect the Canucks to be sellers. They’ll sell in their own unique way though, by hewing closely to those big picture objectives while specifically targeting young defencemen.The Obama administration has responded to revelations on the NSA’s successes in defeating online security and privacy published on Thursday by the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica.
In a statement issued on Friday, the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the US’s intelligence agencies, suggested the stories, simultaneously published on the front pages of the New York Times and Guardian, were “not news”, but nonetheless provided a “road map … to our adversaries”.
At the core of the story, based on reporting from dozens of top-secret documents relating to encryption passed to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, were efforts by the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ to place “backdoors” in online security, and to undermine internationals standards.
These efforts included:
• A 10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made “vast amounts” of data collected through internet cable taps newly “exploitable”.
• The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to “covertly influence” their product designs.
• The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: “Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods.”
• The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the “price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace”.
• A GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the “big four” service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
However, the ODNI said it was not surprising that intelligence agencies would work to defeat encryption, and that disclosing any specifics would cause damage.
“It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract our adversaries’ use of encryption,” the statement begins. “Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities. Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.
“While the specifics of how our intelligence agencies carry out this cryptanalytic mission have been kept secret, the fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news. Indeed, NSA’s public website states that its mission includes leading ‘the US government in cryptology … in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies.’
“The stories published yesterday, however, reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity. Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.”
Privacy groups, however, said the NSA’s activities were endangering privacy and putting both US internet users and businesses users at risk.
“Even as the NSA demands more powers to invade our privacy in the name of cybersecurity, it is making the internet less secure and exposing us to criminal hacking, foreign espionage, and unlawful surveillance,” said the ACLU’s principal technologist Christopher Soghoian.
“The NSA’s efforts to secretly defeat encryption are recklessly shortsighted and will further erode not only the United States’ reputation as a global champion of civil liberties and privacy but the economic competitiveness of its largest companies.”
A blogpost by Dan Auerbach and Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation dubbed the activities “frightening” and “an egregious violation of our privacy”.
Meanwhile, the New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan praised the collaboration, calling the organisations’ reporting “an important story, published courageously”. In the same post, she quoted the Times’ executive editor Jill Abramson as noting “The Guardian at the beginning was highly concerned about working in a way that kept the material secure – we went to lengths to safeguard the material.”
Abramson said she had met with US officials who had asked her not to publish the story, but said the decision to publish alongside the Guardian was “not a particularly anguished one”.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013Sonos PLAY:1 leaks in full
Sonos‘s entry-level Play:1 speaker surprise was spoiled by Target, and now we can see what’s going on inside the box, too. Target isn’t processing any sales until October 13th, but SlashGear reader Steve managed to pick up a Play:1 ahead of time through eBay, and has shared some photos of the $199.99 streaming speaker with us. Check out more pictures – including comparisons with the Play:3 – after the cut.
As expected, the Play:1 is considerably smaller than Sonos’ other models so far, more like the form-factor of a wireless smartphone speaker from JBL or Nokia in fact. On the top is the usual Sonos rocker key for volume up/down, but where the Play:3 and Play:5 have mute buttons, the Play:1 switches that out for a play/pause button instead.
That allows for more local control over playback at the speaker itself, compared to the current situation where everything needs to be handled from the remote or the remote apps. According to the user guide, it should also work to skip tracks, but that’s not apparently working yet; a firmware update, which is notified but won’t download yet, might fix that by the official launch. Connectivity consists of an ethernet port on the back panel, below a mounting screw for floor-stands or wall-mounts, and the power socket underneath.
While extending a Sonos streaming system into smaller rooms is one possibility with the Play:1, the obvious use is as a rear surround speaker pair for the Playbar. That, which we reviewed back in March, can have two Sonos speakers assigned as the rear left and right channel, an expensive proposition when you consider the Play:3 start from $299 apiece.
In contrast, $199.99 – the price Target listed – for the Play:1 seems a lot more acceptable. Unfortunately there’s no battery inside as some had rumored; pull out the power cable and the speaker goes dead and then requires resyncing with the mesh network when you next plug it in.
On the upside, Steve tells us the Play:1 punches above its weight in terms of performance. “Surprisingly great sound, very full and rich” he says. “No separation to speak of but room filling sound.”
We’ll have to wait to test that out ourselves until the Play:1 officially launches later in the month.
Update: It’s official, and we’ve reviewed it!In March, then-candidate Donald Trump shocked nuclear policy experts by suggesting at a town hall meeting that the United States might be able to reduce the defense budget by encouraging its allies, especially Japan and South Korea, to build nuclear weapons. When pressed to clarify his comments by the moderator, CNN's Anderson Cooper, Trump replied, "Wouldn't you rather in a certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?" Earlier that same week, Trump told Bloomberg's Mark Halperin that it was important to remain "unpredictable" when dealing with nuclear weapons.
Since the end of the World War II — the only time that atomic weapons have been used in war — the policy of the United States has been to discourage nuclear proliferation, whether through defense treaties, economic sanctions or controlling international sales of uranium. Similarly, the concept of nuclear deterrence depends on rational, predictable decisions about the use of nuclear weapons. Trump's statements naturally caused a flurry of panic over an untested leader with little familiarity with the basic principles of nuclear security having control of atomic weapons.
It may be time to resurrect a Cold War strategy for limiting nuclear risk: back-channel communications among private scientists.
In 1955, a year after the U.S. test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll blanketed the globe with a thin layer of radioactive fallout, a group of scientists issued a manifesto against the development, testing and use of nuclear weapons. This inspired what became known as the Pugwash Conference. At the height of Pugwash's influence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and a handful of other countries gathered regularly to discuss the nature of the nuclear threat and ways to reduce it.
Commentators have held up Pugwash as a model of nonpartisan scientific activism, a shining example of what scientists could accomplish without the constraints of formal politics. In 1995, the Pugwash Conferences and Joseph Rotblat, one of the founders, received the Nobel Peace Prize. More recently, the Obama administration hailed the personal relationship between Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, as a critical ingredient in the nuclear agreement with Iran. The two men had overlapped at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. While they obviously represented their respective countries at the negotiating table, their shared technical assumptions provided a platform on which to build political consensus.
Both during and after the Cold War, the U.S. government supported initiatives that brought international scientists together outside formal political channels. Beyond the nuclear realm, scientists have informally assisted U.S. officials in negotiating treaties on issues as diverse as climate change and exploration rights in Antarctica.
Scientists are not elected officials, and nothing in their scientific training is designed to prepare them for the subtleties of international political negotiations. The premise of science diplomacy risks putting power in the hands of technical experts whose personal interests may or may not match those of their national governments. And yet: There is no evidence to suggest that the elected head of government — Donald J. Trump — possesses the finesse needed to negotiate a nuclear crisis, either.
For the leaders of Pugwash, the point of an international scientists' movement wasn't so much to displace official negotiations between governments as to keep a line of communication open in the event of a crisis.
During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example, the American members of the Pugwash Committee sent their Soviet counterparts a telegram urging restraint and promising to use whatever limited influence they had over U.S. government officials to defuse the situation. The scientists hoped that a mere reminder of their presence might jolt political leaders into recognizing the effects of a nuclear strike.
Whether or not the president-elect and his advisers realize it, Trump is going to need scientific expertise. In a normal administration, it would be a given that Trump and advisers would confer with security experts who could provide a reality check on technical questions, from the stages of nuclear proliferation to the effects of modernized nuclear weapons on theories of deterrence. But the Trump campaign has defied expectations in a number of ways, and a Trump presidency is in many ways an open question.
Should Trump decide to go forgo technical advice, Americans (and the world) should take comfort in the fact that scientists, security specialists and nuclear weapons experts from many countries will continue to talk to one another. Pugwash's scientists, too, continue to meet, forging personal links and technical knowledge that can transcend international borders. Back-channel communications among international scientists will always offer hope for preventing a nuclear catastrophe, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Audra J. Wolfe is the author of "Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America."Adam B. Ellick, a correspondent for The New York Times, is reporting that Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old shot by the Taliban for "promoting secularism," has awoken from her coma:
Malala was flown to the United Kingdom to be treated on Monday.
As of 12:47 p.m., his Facebook page adds that Malala is responding with her hands and her feet. Ellick added that her father's whereabouts are still unknown.
In 2009, Ellick made a documentary for The Times about Malala's work, and became very close with her family, especially her father. He opened up to NPR recently about the tragedy and his friendship with the family. Here's what he had to say about Malala:
As soon as you listen to her, you're hooked. You can be a journalist and you can pretend to be distant and remote from your sources, but she really has captivated me from the second I first met her.
We'll update you when we know more.Canada's "handyman" robot Dextre is repairing the International Space Station's Canadian robotic arm this week — and in the process, it has taken over another task that once belonged to spacewalking astronauts.
Dextre is a space robot that can ride the Canadarm2 and wield a variety of tools with its two multi-jointed arms. It is currently in the middle of a week-long repair job to replace cameras on the Canadarm2 and its mobile base.
Using the Canadarm2 and Dextre reduces the overall number of spacewalks, definitely. - Mathieu Caron, Canadian Space Agency
Together, Dextre, Canadarm2 and the base make up the space station's robotic Mobile Servicing System, making this the first ever robot self-repair in space, the Canadian Space Agency says.
"We've had to change cameras before, but we had to do it during spacewalks," said Mathieu Caron, mission control supervisor at the Canadian Space Agency, in an interview with CBCNews.ca.
This time, astronauts are barely involved in the work that began last Thursday and is scheduled to wrap up this coming Thursday. The robots are controlled remotely from the Canadian Space Agency headquarters in Longueuil, Que., and NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.
Camera swap
Dextre is taking a camera on the Canadarm2 that has grown kind of hazy and is moving it to the mobile base to replace a completely broken camera. It will then install a new, spare camera on the Canadarm2.
The cameras are among 11 on the Mobile Servicing System that are used to control the robots and perform surveys outside the space station. The swap is taking place because the camera on the base is less critical than the one on the Canadarm2 itself, Caron said.
The astronauts' only involvement in the operation was to push the spare camera into an airlock so Dextre could grab it.
It's the first time a job like this has been done robotically, but it certainly won't be the last – Caron says space agencies are increasingly relying on robots instead of humans to do work outside the space station whenever possible.
"Using the Canadarm2 and Dextre reduces the overall number of spacewalks, definitely," Caron said.
Spacewalks are inspiring demonstrations of technology and human exploration in an environment humans were never designed for – the harsh, freezing cold, oxygen-free vacuum of space. But they are risky for astronauts compared to work inside the space station itself, where life-support systems keep temperatures, pressures and oxygen levels within tightly controlled limits.
Chris Hadfield stands on one Canadian-built robot arm to work with another one during a spacewalk at the International Space Station on April 22, 2001. Preparing for and conducting spacewalks can take up a huge amount of astronauts' and space agencies' time. (NASA)
"Spacewalks are very complex and use a lot of space station resources," Caron said. "They monopolize astronauts not only for the duration of the spacewalk, but in the weeks leading up to it for all their preparation."
That, he added, eats into valuable time that astronauts could otherwise spend running science experiments.
Robots also never need to return to the inside of the space station, making them more flexible.
"We can stop an operation and resume it later on."
Since Dextre was installed on the space station in 2008, it has been used whenever possible for repair tasks and jobs such as unloading supplies sent to the station aboard unmanned space cargo ships.
So, are astronauts' spacewalking days over for good?
Not yet. Dextre still has its limitations – it can largely only handle tools and hardware such as bolts and screws that are "robotically compatible." It has trouble removing coverings such as thermal blankets, for example.
But Caron said the space agency has been testing Dextre with equipment that isn't robotically compatible, such as hardware to refuel satellites.
In the meantime, Dextre's agenda for the summer is already filling. It is scheduled to replace a circuit breaker in June and to repair equipment outside the space station to prepare for some astronaut spacewalks later in the summer, Caron said.
"The next year promises to be very busy from a Canadian robotics standpoint."
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Watch live. If you're on mobile and can't see the video, click here.Premier Brian Gallant says he won’t ask six of his cabinet ministers to resign for their role in the 2009 Atcon loan-guarantee fiasco.
Gallant says the ministers were all re-elected in 2010 and 2014 despite the public knowing about the Atcon affair costing taxpayers more than $70 million.
Victor Boudreau (CBC) "The people of New Brunswick elected these people with no asterisk saying `We elect them to represent us but don’t put them in cabinet,’" Gallant told reporters.
The Progressive Conservative opposition took the rare step on Wednesday of calling for the resignations of six ministers, all of them veterans of the Shawn Graham cabinet that approved $63.4 million in loan guarantees to the Atcon group of companies.
The ministers are Victor Boudreau, Donald Arseneault, Rick Doucet, Ed Doherty, Denis Landry and Brian Kenny.
Denis Landry (CBC) "I demand that Premier Gallant show real leadership and fire every Liberal minister who still has Atcon blood on his hands," PC MLA Brian MacDonald said in the legislature.
MacDonald said Gallant should also fire two other Graham cabinet veterans, Greg Byrne, his chief of staff, and Hedard Albert, the government house leader who is not a minister but who sits at cabinet.
But Gallant told reporters there’s already been consequences for the Liberals from the Atcon disaster.
Donald Arseneault (Jacques Poitras/CBC) "The people of New Brunswick knew what happened with this file," he said. "It was all made very public. The people of New Brunswick were frustrated and probably still are, and I don’t blame them.
"They sent a strong message to the past Liberal government in 2010, a message that was certainly heard, and we saw the results of the 2010 election."
But in brushing off calls for a mass firing of cabinet ministers, Gallant also acknowledged the Atcon decision was a mistake.
Rick Doucet (CBC) New Brunswick Auditor-General Kim MacPherson released a report on the case this week that said the Graham cabinet showed "a troubling disregard" for taxpayer dollars when it approved the loan guarantees.
Atcon went bankrupt in 2010 and because the Graham cabinet gave up its security over the loan guarantee, taxpayers have recouped less than $400,000 of the $70 million that was lost.
"I think what’s important for us today is to learn from mistakes of the past," Gallant said.
"This file is certainly a mistake. No one’s arguing with that."
Brian Kenny (Liberals) Gallant says the CEO of the new Opportunities New Brunswick economic development agency has already met with MacPherson to get her ideas on improving the process of giving companies government subsidies.
MacPherson has also recommended the government clarify one area of disagreement: while she says Victor Boudreau, the minister of Business New Brunswick at the time, broke regulations in releasing the province’s security over the loan guarantees, the government told her he did not.
MacPherson says with legislation to create Opportunities New Brunswick still before the legislature, the government should resolve the difference of opinion in the bill.
Gallant says that’s one thing the government will consider.
Ed Doherty (NB Liberals) But he rejected MacPherson’s suggestion that she could pursue a more in-depth forensic audit of the Atcon case if her office had more resources.
MacPherson wrote that her audit "may not all answer all remaining questions the public may have" about Atcon.
She said she was prepared to investigate further but her office would need extra funding.
Gallant says given MacPherson found "no new information" and she said "we have already spent much money and time on this issue … we will not support a forensic audit."
Dire economic situation
For the second straight day, none of the ministers who served in Graham’s cabinet and approved the Atcon loan guarantees would speak to reporters at the legislature.
But Graham’s former chief of staff, Bernard Thériault, told Radio-Canada that while the decision was clearly a mistake, MacPherson should have acknowledged the dire economic situation in Miramichi at the time.
"They’d lost 1,500 jobs," he said. "The only employer that was still standing, just about, was Atcon."
Thériault said the government was "desperately" looking for ways to create and maintain jobs in the area, and wanted to save Atcon if it could.
He said civil servants also recommended against helping the Twin Rivers mill in Edmundston, but the Graham Liberals came to its aid as well — and in that case, the company survived.
Thériault blamed the Bank of Nova Scotia for forcing the government to give up its security on the loan guarantee.
The lost $70 million "didn’t go to Robbie Tozer or Atcon," he said. "It went to the bank."Quebec cancelled a mass distribution of welfare cheques to asylum seekers at the Montreal convention centre this week after facing concerns the operation stigmatized the migrants and could raise security concerns.
The province had initially planned to use the cavernous Palais des congrès in Montreal to hand out social-assistance cheques to more than 4,000 people, part of the wave of asylum seekers who have come across the Canada-U.S. border in recent months. The government announced on Tuesday it would carry it out elsewhere, attributing the decision to the fact that fewer people than anticipated needed to pick up their cheques by hand. The shift occurred less than 24 hours before the start of the planned three-day operation.
Groups working with the asylum seekers, who are mostly from Haiti, say they have been pressuring the provincial government for days to cancel the event at the convention centre, which they said unfairly put the asylum seekers in the spotlight at a time when some are questioning the cost of caring for them.
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Explainer: What you need to know about the Quebec asylum seekers
"By doing the event at the convention centre, it was stigmatization. We told the government it's unacceptable," said Ninette Piou, spokesperson for Concertation haitienne pour les migrants 2017, an umbrella group of 40 organizations created this month to help the asylum seekers. "They didn't think the decision through. Can you imagine, having 4,000 people come get cheques at the Palais des congrès?"
Ms. Piou also raised fears of disruptions by far-right groups, who have increased their public presence in Quebec in the wake of the arrival of the asylum applicants in the province.
"There was concern that people with right-wing tendencies could disturb it," Ms. Piou said. "We have a lot of antennas out, and we know what's happening. We were aware of it and the government was too."
The provincial government initially said it chose the convention centre because of the volume of recipients in temporary shelters who needed to pick the cheques up in person. On Tuesday afternoon, it said that those numbers have dropped to fewer than 3,000 as claimants leave shelters and obtain permanent addresses.
A spokesperson for the Quebec Ministry of Employment and Social Solidarity declined to comment on security concerns, but said it would ensure the process – which will now take place in five temporary shelters in Montreal – would go smoothly. "We are taking the necessary steps to ensure the good functioning and security of the operation," Antoine Lavoie said.
Political leaders in both Quebec City and Ottawa have struggled to maintain the perception that the surge of asylum seekers into Canada is under control, even while migrants are being housed in army tents at the Canada-U.S. border and at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal.
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About 8,000 asylum seekers have crossed into Quebec from the United States since June, although the number of new migrants has been dropping.
Some of the public worries about the influx are being fed by Quebec politicians. François Legault, whose Coalition Avenir Québec has been closing in on the governing Liberals in public-opinion polling, has questioned whether Quebec can afford to support the migrants. "Honestly, we don't have the financial means to pay for the housing, health, [and] education for all these people for years," Mr. Legault said this month.
Parti Quebecois Leader Jean-François Lisée contrasted the treatment of the migrants with those of patients in long-term care facilities in Quebec.
"The government tells us it can't give two baths in [long-term care] and it costs $30-million. So how much will 8,000, 10,000, 15,000 asylum seekers who stay in Quebec cost over three years?" he asked last week. Mr. Lisée tweeted this month that Quebeckers are opposed to "illegal crossings" at the border and added, "An independent Quebec would have its border respected."
The province gives social support to asylum seekers under an agreement dating to 1996. About 90 per cent of adult welfare recipients in Quebec – there were over 325,000 in June – receive their cheques through direct bank deposit, meaning that they do not have to pick them up in person.
Welfare cheques for the asylum seekers start at $628 a month. The federal government says it is looking at getting the migrants temporary work permits while they wait for their asylum claims to be heard, a process that could stretch into months or years.Foreword: There has been a lot of debate going on about the DirectX 12 capabilities of Nvidia and AMD graphic cards recently, and allegations have been flying high left and right. While most of these are completely unfounded, the subtle nature of the technicality involved is usually misconstrued to a horrible extent; and to better support the popular narrative. In light of this, I thought it was high time that I try to tackle the beast myself and make a one click resource for everything DirectX 12 and GPU related – that is relevant to today’s gamers.
Not an official poster. @Wccftech
A thorough look at AMD and Nvidia DirectX 12 support and the AotS controversy
This editorial, will not only cover all the basics and frequently asked questions about DirectX 12, it will also attempt to shed neutral light on the recent controversy that will, hopefully, steer things away from the redundant debate. This is my attempt to show just how things actually stand. It will also contain a complete list of all AMD and Nvidia DirectX12 capable base models and their respective capabilities, with these capabilities explained before hand. Ofcourse, it will not be possible (not to mention inadvisable) to go into the complete explicit details, however, I will go into more depth than the usual posts designed for gamers go.
Here is what you will find in this article:
A statement of problem, which is the DirectX 12 hype A complete overview of the technicalities that are critical to understanding “DirectX 12 Support” Addressing the ASync Question: Nvidia support and AMD advantage A complete list of AMD graphic cards that support DirectX12 and the extent of support. |
cluster. So why should the size of the cluster matter?” But I calculated the probabilities and drew a graph, and it looked like this:
To be clear, this isn’t the probability of a single node failing – this is the probability of permanently losing all three replicas of some piece of data, so restoring from backup (if you have one) is the only remaining way to recover that data. The bigger your cluster, the more likely you are haemorrhaging data. This is probably not what you intended when you decided to pay for a replication factor of 3.
The y axis on that graph is a bit arbitrary, and depends on a lot of assumptions, but the direction of the line is scary. Under the assumption that a node has a 0.1% chance of dying within some time period, the graph shows that in a 8,000-node cluster, the chance of permanently losing all three replicas of some piece of data (within the same time period) is about 0.2%. Yes, you read that correctly: the risk of losing all three copies of some data is twice as great as the risk of losing a single node! What is the point of all this replication again?
The intuition behind this graph is as follows: in an 8,000-node cluster it’s almost certain that a few nodes are always dead at any given moment. That is normally not a problem: a certain rate of churn and node replacement is expected and a part of routine maintenance. However, if you get unlucky, there is some piece of data whose three replicas just happen to be three of those nodes that have died – and if this is the case, that piece of data is gone forever. The data that is lost is only a small fraction of the total dataset in the cluster, but still that’s not great: when you use a replication factor of 3, you generally mean “I really don’t want to lose this data”, not “I don’t mind occasionally losing a bit of this data, as long as it’s not too much”. Maybe that piece of lost data was a particularly important one.
The probability that all three replicas are dead nodes depends crucially on the algorithm that the system uses to assign data to replicas. The graph above is calculated under the assumption that the data is split into a number of partitions (shards), and that each partition is stored on three randomly chosen nodes (or pseudo-randomly with a hash function). This is the case with consistent hashing, used in Cassandra and Riak, among others (as far as I know). With other systems I’m not sure how the replica assignment works, so I’d appreciate any insights from people who know about the internals of various storage systems.
Calculating the probability of data loss
Let me show you how I calculated that graph above, using a probabilistic model of a replicated database.
Let’s assume that the probability of losing an individual node is \(p=P(\text{node loss})\). I am going to ignore time in this model, and simply look at the probability of failure in some arbitrary time period. For example, we could assume that \(p=0.001\) is the probability of a node failing within a given day, which would make sense if it takes about a day to replace the node and restore the lost data onto new disks. For simplicity I won’t distinguish between node failure and disk failure, and I will consider only permanent failures (ignoring crashes where the node comes back again after a reboot).
Let \(n\) be the number of nodes in the cluster. Then the probability that \(f\) out of \(n\) nodes have failed (assuming that failures are independent) is given by the binomial distribution:
\[ P(f \text{ nodes failed}) = \binom{n}{f} \, p^f \, (1-p)^{n-f} \]
The term \(p^f\) is the probability that \(f\) nodes have failed, the term \((1-p)^{n-f}\) is the probability that the remaining \(n-f\) have not failed, and \(\binom{n}{f}\) is the number of different ways of picking \(f\) out of \(n\) nodes. \(\binom{n}{f}\) is pronounced “n choose f”, and it is defined as:
\[ \binom{n}{f} = \frac{n!}{f! \; (n-f)!} \]
Let \(r\) be the replication factor (typically \(r=3\)). If we assume that \(f\) out of \(n\) nodes have failed, what is the probability that a particular partition has all \(r\) replicas on failed nodes?
Well, in a system that uses consistent hashing, each partition is assigned to nodes independently and randomly (or pseudo-randomly). For a given partition, there are \(\binom{n}{r}\) different ways of assigning the \(r\) replicas to nodes, and these assignments are all equally likely to occur. Moreover, there are \(\binom{f}{r}\) different ways of choosing \(r\) replicas out of \(f\) failed nodes – these are the ways in which all \(r\) replicas can be assigned to failed nodes. We then work out the fraction of the assignments that result in all replicas having failed:
\[ P(\text{partition lost} \mid f \text{ nodes failed}) = \frac{\binom{f}{r}}{\binom{n}{r}} = \frac{f! \; (n-r)!}{(f-r)! \; n!} \]
(The vertical bar after “partition lost” is pronounced “given that”, and it indicates a conditional probability: the probability is given under the assumption that \(f\) nodes have failed.)
So that’s the probability that all replicas of one particular partition has been lost. What about a cluster with \(k\) partitions? If one or more partitions have been lost, we have lost data. Thus, in order to not lose data, we require that all \(k\) partitions are not lost:
\begin{align} P(\text{data loss} \mid f \text{ nodes failed}) &= 1 - P(\text{partition not lost} \mid f \text{ nodes failed})^k \\ &= 1 - \left( 1 - \frac{f! \; (n-r)!}{(f-r)! \; n!} \right)^k \end{align}
Cassandra and Riak call partitions “vnodes” instead, but they are the same thing. In general, the number of partitions \(k\) is independent from the number of nodes \(n\). In the case of Cassandra, there is usually a fixed number of partitions per node; the default is \(k=256\,n\) (configured by the num_tokens parameter), and this is also what I assumed for the graph above. In Riak, the number of partitions is fixed when you create the cluster, but generally more nodes also mean more partitions.
With all of this in place, we can now work out the probability of losing one or more partitions in a cluster of size \(n\) with a replication factor of \(r\). If the number of failures \(f\) is less than the replication factor, we can be sure that no data is lost. Thus, we need to add up the probabilities for all possible numbers of failures \(f\) with \(r \le f \le n\):
\begin{align} P(\text{data loss}) &= \sum_{f=r}^{n} \; P(\text{data loss} \;\cap\; f \text{ nodes failed}) \\ &= \sum_{f=r}^{n} \; P(f \text{ nodes failed}) \; P(\text{data loss} \mid f \text{ nodes failed}) \\ &= \sum_{f=r}^{n} \binom{n}{f} \, p^f \, (1-p)^{n-f} \left[ 1 - \left( 1 - \frac{f! \; (n-r)!}{(f-r)! \; n!} \right)^k \right] \end{align}
That is a bit of a mouthful, but I think it’s accurate. And if you plug in \(r=3\), \(p=0.001\) and \(k=256\,n\), and vary \(n\) between 3 and 10,000, then you get the graph above. I wrote a little Ruby program to do the calculation.
We can get a simpler approximation using the union bound:
\begin{align} P(\text{data loss}) &= P(\ge\text{ 1 partition lost}) \\ &= P\left( \bigcup_{i=1}^k \text{partition } i \text{ lost} \right) \\ &\le k\, P(\text{partition lost}) = k\, p^r \end{align}
Even though one partition failing is not independent from another partition failing, this approximation still applies. And it seems to match the exact result quite closely: in the graph, the data loss probability looks like a straight line, proportional to the number of nodes. The approximation says that the probability is proportional to the number of partitions, which is equivalent since we assumed a fixed 256 partitions per node.
Moreover, if we plug in the numbers for 10,000 nodes into the approximation, we get \(P(\text{data loss}) \le 256 \cdot 10^4 \cdot (10^{-3})^3 = 0.00256\), which matches the result from the Ruby program very closely.
And in practice…?
Is this a problem in practice? I don’t know. Mostly I think it’s an interesting and counter-intuitive phenomenon. I’ve heard rumours that it is causing real data loss at companies with large database clusters, but I’ve not seen the issue documented anywhere. If you’re aware of any discussions on this topic, please point me at them.
The calculation indicates that in order to reduce the probability of data loss, you can reduce the number of partitions or increase the replication factor. Using more replicas costs more, so it’s not ideal for large clusters that are already expensive. However, the number of partitions presents an interesting trade-off. Cassandra originally used one partition per node, but then switched to 256 partitions per node a few years ago in order to achieve better load distribution and more efficient rebalancing. The downside, as we can see from this calculation, is a much higher probability of losing at least one of the partitions.
I think it’s probably possible to devise replica assignment algorithms in which the probability of data loss does not grow with the cluster size, or at least does not grow as fast, but which nevertheless have good load distribution and rebalancing properties. That would be an interesting area to explore further. In that context, my colleague Stephan pointed out that the expected rate of data loss is constant in a cluster of a particular size, independent of the replica assignment algorithm – in other words, you can choose between a high probability of losing a small amount of data, and a low probability of losing a large amount of data! Is the latter better?
You need fairly large clusters before this effect really shows up, but clusters of thousands of nodes are used by various large companies, so I’d be interested to hear from people with operational experience at such scale. If the probability of permanently losing data in a 10,000 node cluster is really 0.25% per day, that would mean a 60% chance of losing data in a year. That’s way higher than the “one in a billion” getting-hit-by-an-asteroid probability that I talked about at the start.
Are the designers of distributed data systems aware of this issue? If I got this right, it’s something that should be taken into account when designing replication schemes. Hopefully this blog post will raise some awareness of the fact that just because you have three replicas you’re not automatically guaranteed to be safe.
Thank you to Mat Clayton for bringing this issue to my attention, and to Alastair Beresford, Stephan Kollmann, Christopher Meiklejohn, and Daniel Thomas for comments on a draft of this post.Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows he has few options to derail the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to cap carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. Even if he somehow got legislation past a Democratic filibuster, he would still face a veto from President Barack Obama. Courts could eventually overturn the new regulations, but he will have no say in their decisions. So McConnell is trying to thwart the rules by operating outside the Senate, where any anti-EPA bill would face a dead-end on Obama’s desk.
Earlier in March, McConnell encouraged states to opt out of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan with an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader. On Thursday, McConnell took it a step further by sending a letter to all 50 governors asking them not to submit state implementation plans for curtailing power-plant pollution. By not submitting plans, McConnell thinks states will buy enough time for the coal companies to overturn the EPA in the courts. “They really can’t defeat this through federal legislation, and McConnell is trying to get the governors to do it for him,” Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate and Clean Air Program Director David Doniger said.
According to The New York Times, McConnell is arguing that the rule is unconstitutional and leaning heavily on Harvard University constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe’s opinion that the EPA overstepped its authority. Tribe has argued against the rules on behalf of Peabody Energy and has become an ally to Republicans in their fight against the EPA. But Harvard legal experts Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus picked apart Tribe’s legal arguments this week. “The President’ s proposed climate plan neither unconstitutionally ignores statutory language nor unconstitutionally takes anyone’s property,” they write. “Nor is State sovereignty unconstitutionally threatened by the proposed rule.”
New York University Institute for Policy Integrity Director Richard L. Revesz sees McConnell's strategy as “an effort to mislead the political process,” because EPA opponents know their constitutional argument is weak. “The strategy therefore makes sense,” he said. “They can’t wait for a court to decide it, because Tribe’s constitutional arguments aren’t going to work. These are just legal arguments designed to mislead the political process.”
MConnell’s plan has many faults, including its most obvious problem: States can’t stop federal regulations by choosing to ignore them. If they do, the federal government steps in with its own plan. Notably, no governor has yet come out against submitting a state plan to the EPA. McConnell's approach entirely hinges on the assumption that the EPA regulations will be thrown out in courts, which he can't promise. Even Tribe said McConnell’s approach won’t work, because states “can’t count on” his being right that it will be overturned in courts.In this Monday, April 21, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at Fort Myer in Arlington Va. during a Presidential Address to the Nation. North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency, Tuesday, described Trump as a leader who frequently tweets "weird articles of his ego-driven thoughts" and "spouts rubbish" in response to tough talk in Washington and Seoul over threats posed by the North's nuclear and missile programs. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Tuesday described President Donald Trump as a leader who frequently tweets “weird articles of his ego-driven thoughts” and “spouts rubbish” to give his assistants a hard time.
The North’s official Korean Central News Agency made the comments in response to tough talk in Washington and Seoul over threats posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
In the same commentary, KCNA also criticized South Korea’s “puppy-like” Defense Minister Song Young-moo, who it said was “running wild” while relying on the “master of the White House.” Song recently ordered the South’s military to be prepared to “immediately and sternly punish” any kind of provocation by North Korea, which has caused hostility with two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month and a threat to lob missiles toward the U.S. territory of Guam.
“Trump spouted rubbish that if a war breaks out, it would be on the Korean Peninsula, and if thousands of people die, they would be only Koreans and Americans may sleep a sound sleep,” KCNA wrote, ridiculing Song for “pinning hope on that mad guy.”
The agency’s comments came hours after North Korea’s military issued its standard fiery threats over ongoing joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korean militaries, vowing “merciless retaliation” for exercises Pyongyang claims are an invasion rehearsal. The allies describe the annual war games as defensive in nature.
North Korea has unleashed personal attacks on past Washington and Seoul leaders, calling former President Barack Obama a monkey and ex-South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. Trump was previously described in North Korean state media as “going senile” and a “war maniac bereft of reason.”
Trump has used Twitter to launch his own insults at North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un. On Aug. 11, Trump tweeted that military solutions were “fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely” amid the standoff between Washington and Pyongyang over the Guam missile threat. But he complimented Kim five days later for making a “very wise and well reasoned decision” after Pyongyang walked away from the threat.
After a July missile test by North Korea, Trump went on Twitter to ask whether Kim has “anything better to do with his life?” ″Hard to believe that South Korea... and Japan will put up with this much longer. Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!” Trump wrote.I ran the inaugural Headwaters Ultra 50K recently and got to meet Gerad Dean, race director for the ultra. You can check out his race profile on Ultra Signup. As a long term runner (since 2003!), recently turned race director, I was really curious about this transition. I wanted to find out what motivated him to organize a race and some of the things he learned by being on the other side of running. I’m sure it’s a very unique perspective, kinda like the difference between being an employee and starting up your own company. As my 2nd 50K ever, this race kicked my butt, but I was super happy with the aid stations, very clear course markings, amazing volunteers and spectacular vistas of Mt. Shasta. Follow Gerad Dean and Headwaters Ultra on Facebook.
Q&A with Gerad Dean
When did you start running?
It wasn’t until after I graduated college that I began running. The first organized run I entered was the SOB 15k at Mt. Ashland back in 2003. It was a blast and I was happily surprised to finish the race around 70 minutes and in the top 10. About this time I had also developed an interest in the marathon distance. My naiveté of those days told me that 26.2 miles was the ultimate distance one could run in a single effort (after all, didn’t Pheidippides die after covering the distance to deliver the victory message to Athens following the Battle of Marathon?). In October 2003, I entered the Portland Marathon. Having only ran a maximum distance of about 10 miles before the marathon, I had no idea what to expect. I ran hard, had a good run, finished entirely exhausted, but completely enjoyed myself.
Following the race I could barely walk home to my apartment in downtown Portland, but I also had a sense that I could accomplish anything! It was an amazing feeling. For the next couple of years a ran three more marathons, including Boston, and several shorter distance road runs. Everything changed after I ran my first ultra on trails…
What does your day job look like (when you are not running 100 milers)?
I work as a crew leader for a forest inventory data collection team with the US Forest Service. What this means is that I roam around Northern California visiting a network of randomly located research plots collecting various forest measurements. We remeasure the same plots on a 10-year cycle to track trends — you can think of it as a census program for forested lands. Like any successful shopkeeper needs to take inventory of her goods and supplies, a land management agency like the US Forest Service needs to know what is on the landscape to make informed forest management decisions. Our data also plays a part in improving forest science. For example, many wildland fire models and carbon sequestration studies rely on these data sets.
What was your first ultra and what motivated you to run that race?
Curiosity inspired me to run the Jim Bridger 50k outside of Bozeman, MT in 2005. I was living in Missoula, MT at the time, working for a different research project with the Forest Service. I mentioned I started running marathons a few years prior in 2003. Working in the forest and living in a little mountain town, I was now curious to experience ultra marathon trail running. The Jim Bridger 50k is a small, but tough race with 4 passes totaling about 11,000′ elevation gain. Similar to the Portland Marathon, I had no idea what to expect. I would run and exercise fairly regularly, but I certainly wasn’t training for anything. I just figured I’d put my name on the list of registrants and see what happens. It was such a beautiful run! The mountains were ablaze with purple, yellow, pink, and white wildflowers, there were creek crossing you had to stomp through to get across, and the climbs and descents went on forever. I think what really hooked me at that race was how supportive everyone involved was — the runners, the volunteers at each aid station, and the RD himself made a point to congratulate and talk to everyone! I was so happy to be there. This was nothing like the marathons I had been doing, with thousands of other runners all jockeying for position, aid stations littered with paper cups on miles of asphalt, and recovering at the finish line where I didn’t really know anyone. This trail run was entirely different, it felt like a family gathering although I didn’t know anyone there. I knew right away trail running was where I preferred to be.
Congrats on placing 4th in the Waldo 100km recently! How did it feel and how did you train for that?
Thank you, it was definitely one of my most successful runs, perhaps the smartest run of my so called running career. Finishing under 10 hours at Waldo is not something that happens often, and I’m very proud to have the accomplishment. This season has been unique because most of the year I’ve been inundated with balancing my day job, organizing the Headwaters Ultra, and being present with my personal relationships. My training has definitely taken the back seat this season. I went into Waldo with no clear expectations for the finish. My primary goal was to take it easy the first half, and see if I could get some negative splits the second. I wanted to finish strong, and avoid a collapse similar to my experience at Silver State 50M in Reno in May. The plan worked out, and I was able to run the second half about 10 minutes faster than the first, including a nice sub 8-minute mile pace over the last 7 miles to the finish. I learned the value of patience at Waldo this year, and hope to carry that into Pine to Palm 100M on September 14.
What inspired you to put together the Headwaters Ultra 50K?
There were a number of things that influenced my decision to create the Headwaters Ultra trail runs. Over a few years living here I became familiar with the local trails and incredible potential for long distance trail running this area has to offer. Nearly every time I went for a trail run I found myself asking the same question, “Why isn’t there an ultra marathon race here?” After a while I realized that some action had to be taken to bring ultra running to this area. I wanted to create something to share this incredible area with others, to showcase it as the magnificent area that it is.
I wanted to create something to encourage people to get out and be active in nature. And on a personal level, I wanted to have this experience of creating a running event and immerse myself deeper in the culture of ultra running.
What do you feel is special about the Siskiyou trails?
Outside of Mount Shasta City, to the west of town where the Headwaters Ultra 50k is run, we are technically in the greater Klamath Mountain province, and more specifically a subrange of the Klamaths called The Eddys. The Siskiyou Mountains are also a subrange of the Klamath Mountains, but they remain north and west of the Klamath River, extending from Southern Oregon just west of Ashland and trending West-Southwest/East-Northeast to Crescent City. The Klamath Mountains in general are a very special and unique place.
They are home to incredibly diverse and endemically rich floristic landscapes, remote and rugged topography, and some of the oldest and most complex geologic regions of the world. I have lived many places in the west, but I find this region the most fascinating and enjoyable place to be. I have never felt a stronger, more primal bond with a place as I do with these mountains.
How long did it take to organize a race like this?
I began serious conversations about organizing an ultra marathon near Mount Shasta in August 2012. The amount of time and effort it takes to get something like Headwaters Ultra started is amazing to me. With the incredible amount of positive feedback the Headwaters Ultra staff and I received I fully intend to keep it going. I just hope much of the heavy lifting is done and out of the way. I think this upcoming second year will be a good measure for what is needed to keep this event alive year to year.
Being a race director for the first time and looking at the runners from a different perspective, did you learn anything new about running?
It was definitely a different experience being on this side of a race. The most rewarding and encouraging piece of directing my first race was seeing the hard fought pleasure and joy on everyone’s face at the finish, hearing their accounts of how tough and brutal, beautiful and empowering the course is. I love seeing people push themselves to the limit and emerge stronger and overjoyed. This encourages me to keep improving Headwaters Ultra. It’s the details that people notice. I want this race to become one where, as a runner, there are no doubts that everything will be dialed in, you will be supported to run your best race, and all you need to do is show up.
What was the hardest thing about putting together a race?
Definitely the balance of work, personal, and race directing responsibilities. I have a long way to go before I get these mastered. I can’t thank my friends, family, and co-workers enough for their flexibility, understanding, and support while I spent time organizing Headwaters Ultra.
What would you do differently (as a race director) in the Headwaters Ultra for next year?
I received so many compliments on how well organized Headwaters Ultra was in it’s first year. I was incredibly pleased, but somewhat surprised by how frequently this came up. From my perspective there were many things that came up at the last minute. The day before and the morning of the race I was still getting things lined out. Most of these were small things, but cumulatively they created a great sense of disorder for me. Some of this could have been avoided with better forethought on my part. I’m glad to know it all came across well for the runners.
I was incredibly pleased and impressed by the rest of the Headwaters Ultra staff. They really brought it together on race day. Once the race started I had very little to do. I’m excited for next year and hope I can get everyone from the staff to help again. This first year has taught me a lot, and I know Headwaters Ultra will continue to improve.It's been cold this winter. We've learned to wrap up, layer and double-scarf. The South even learned to drive in an icy mess (kind of). Unfortunately the cold brought out more than heavy jackets. Climate change deniers got on their soapboxes and made comments that would make Bill Nye cringe.
Climate change is still a politically divisive issue, despite scientists' near unanimous agreement on the issue. A plurality of Americans, 42%, believe global warming is "generally exaggerated." Forty percent believe that changes in global temperatures are due more to natural causes than human activities, according to Gallup polling. There's also a significant difference based on political affiliation.
Image credit: Gallup
But let's put aside pundits and polls and look at the data. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has started to release its latest compilation of scientific data, and based on those findings has stated, "Global warming of the climate is unequivocal... and many of the changes are unprecedented over decades or millennia."
Though there are differences in the models of how rapidly climate change is occurring or what specific factors are contributing to the changes, the scientific community agrees that climate change is happening and it's our fault.
Below are cringe-worthy comments climate deniers have made that contradict the available information on global warming. Their expert logic on global warming is pretty much flawless. Good thing we have Bill Nye to channel our inner (frustrated) scientist.
1. Snow is a real thing.
Yes, we do still have snow, but that's not proof of a hoax.
Scientists started recording climate change data in the 1880s and have documented "spring creep." Spring now arrives 10 days earlier than in the past. Even though an early spring sounds much better than braving the cold, it completely messes up the ecosystem. When the snow melts earlier, the dams fill up too soon and water must be released ahead of schedule. This leads to dry soil later in the season, ultimately contributing to forest fires.
2. The Bible says it's not real.
In an interview about climate change, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma quoted Genesis 8:22 and added, "God's still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we human beings would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
But the devil is in the details. In this case, it's in carbon atoms. An Increase in carbon atoms in the atmosphere produces warmer temperatures, and scientists can tell which ones come from human activities by comparing emissions from natural sources. Your "carbon footprint" is the carbon dioxide released when you burn coal, oil or fossil fuels.
3. Only "corrupt" scientists believe in climate change.
More than 97% of climatologists think that climate change is caused by human activity. That means nearly all climate scientists think that both climate change is real and it's caused by human activity. The other 3% are fighting over what the cause of the warming Earth is. It's pretty bold to assert that an entire academic community is corrupt and promoting a financial agenda.
4. The media made it up.
Climate change deniers usually use the polar vortex to "disprove" global warming, but Rush Limbaugh was creative. He admits the polar vortex is a part of climate change, but that the media hyped it up for headlines. Well, if that's the case, this is the longest media campaign ever.
In 1950 Dr. Dave Fultz described an experiment that replicated the results of the vortex in relation to global warming. I hope Fultz at least got some new Twitter followers out of that arrangement.
5. It's pretty cold today.
This is the perfect example of why many temperature readings are taken over a long period of time.
Baltimore just set a record for the coldest day in March in a long recorded history - 4 degrees. Other places likewise. Global warming con! March 4, 2014
We still have cold weather, but the temperature trend is steadily climbing. In fact, the ten warmest years on record have all been after 1998. What Mr. Trump is describing is at best a short-term trend and at worst an anomaly.
6. It's a control tactic.
Glenn Beck said: "Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization … and you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That’s what Al Gore, the U.N. and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing]."
Glenn Beck's scare tactic not only feels uncomfortable, it's also not an accurate assessment of the issue. Global warming is a scientific problem with public policy implications. Beck seems to forget there is a right and wrong answer in the science part of this problem. If something is true, scientists and citizens come to a consensus about it. That's not some communist brain-washing technique. It's the scientific process.
7. Shenanigans.
Rep. Tom Griffin of Arkansas stated, "I am not convinced that the problem of global warming is what the scientists say it is... There are a lot of shenanigans going on with the data."
When all else fails, all climate change deniers have to do is blame shenanigans and call it a day. It's the questionably grown-up version of covering your ears and proclaiming loudly, "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" But if they ever do uncover their ears, they may want to check out the data from the past century.SYRACUSE, N.Y. - The state today awarded a lucrative gaming license to Thomas Wilmot, a Rochester developer who has spent at least 25 years trying to open a casino.
The award from the New York Gaming Commission marks the official go-ahead for Wilmot's plans to build the Lago Resort & Casino in the Finger Lakes region, at Exit 41 of the New York State Thruway.
The license is also a long-awaited win for Wilmot, who has spent millions of dollars, formed multiple alliances with Native American tribes and at one point learned Spanish in his effort to cash in on gambling.
"On behalf of my family, everyone at Wilmorite and our Lago Resort & Casino partners, employees and supporters, I want to thank the New York State Gaming Commission for the trust they have shown in us," Wilmot said in a prepared statement issued seconds after the commission unanimously approved the license in New York City. "This is a huge day, and not just for those of us connected to Lago but also for the people of Tyre, Seneca County and the entire Finger Lakes region."
Even with today's award, however, Wilmot's epic journey to join the gambling industry will likely continue.
The issuance will likely further inflame opponents of the project - including the Oneida Indian Nation - who have mounted multiple legal fights and public relations campaigns against Wilmot's plans to put a casino 76 miles west of Turning Stone Casino.
Indeed, just minutes after the commission awarded the license, the Oneida nation issued a statement saying Lago opponents were preparing yet another lawsuit to halt the project.
So far, Wilmot has either won or overcome those hurdles. At one point earlier this year, Wilmot halted the construction of Lago in the town of Tyre after opponents were successful in essentially negating local approvals for the $425 million project. Wilmot started over and won new approvals. He resumed construction this fall and plans to open by 2017.
At the same time, the Oneidas and other opponents ran television ads to argue the state made a mistake giving Lago the green light. Wilmot's financial plan includes drawing some gamblers from existing casinos, like Turning Stone, which the Oneidas own. That shifting of economic activity would not help Upstate, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo had promised in convincing New Yorkers to expand gambling in the state, the Oneidas argue.
Wilmot's backers say Lago will be a boon to the Finger Lakes region. The project is supposed to create 1,800 permanent jobs, 1,800 construction jobs and as much as $80 million annually to the state by 2019.
Wilmot is the owner of Wilmorite, a construction and development company that once owned much of the shopping centers in the Syracuse area. Wilmot joined his father's firm in the 1970s. The son began his quest to get a casino in 1990 by working with officials in Puerto Rico. Since then, he's courted multiple Indian tribes and governors to try to win the opportunity to open a casino.
Here's a look at some of his past efforts:
1950 - James Wilmot, Thomas' father, founds Wilmorite. The name is a combo of surnames for the construction company's partners: Wilmot, James Morrissey and Claude Wright. For the next decade, they build hundreds of houses in Rochester and Western New York.
1960s - Wilmorite builds Camillus Plaza, which became Camillus Mall. During the next four decades, the Wilmot family would build or buy nearly every key shopping mall (except Destiny USA) or stand-alone department store in the Syracuse area: Great Northern, Sibley's, ShoppingTown, the Addis Co., Dey Brothers, Fayetteville, Penn Can Mall, and Fairmount.
1971 - Thomas Wilmot graduates from Syracuse University, where he studied engineering. He joins his father's firm, where he had worked summers, as a land surveyor.
1990 - Wilmot makes his first venture into the casino business, this one in Puerto Rico. He learns some Spanish and records ads with the island's governor. The proposal for an oceanfront casino and hotel never wins legislative approval.
1995 - Wilmot meets a Connecticut-based Indian chief at a Washington, D.C., Democratic fundraiser. The chance encounter sparks relationships with tribes from Connecticut to California as the developer tries to get in on the casino business.
2000 - Wilmot forms Caywil New York LLC to work with the Seneca-Cayuga Indians toward the development of a casino. Also this year, Wilmot forms alliance with Rhonda Morningstar Pope, the daughter of a Me-Wuk chief, who successfully challenged her own tribe's efforts to build a casino in California on sacred land. She became a tribe of one, and began working on her own casino plan with Wilmot.
2001 - Wilmot works with the Greenville Rancheria, a 90-member, landless tribe in California with the advantage of federal recognition. Wilmot contracts with the tribe, paying $1.9 million to buy 280 acres for the tribe north of Sacramento. Also this year, Wilmot's lawyers pitch a New York casino to some 600 members of the Seneca-Cayugas in Miami, Okla., who overwhelmingly endorse the project.
2002 - Wilmot purchases 229 acres in Aurelius and Montezuma overlooking Cayuga Lake for the Seneca-Cayugas for $738,544; the idea is to build a $25 million Bingo hall.
2002 - New York signs a compact with the Seneca Nation of Indians to bring casino |
Pluto moves away from the sun and temperatures drop, some gases in the remaining atmosphere may freeze and fall to the ground like snow. (Related: "'Diamond Dust' Snow Falls Nightly on Mars.")
"We think the atmosphere responds very strongly to the solar cycle," Greaves said, referring to the sun's roughly 11-year cycle of activity, which modulates space weather and solar flares.
But even though the previous Pluto data were collected 11 years ago, they didn't show the same atmospheric composition as now, so "it's all a bit of a puzzle at the moment."
Pluto a Breathable Planet?
Although there turned out to be more carbon monoxide than expected, the gas makes up just a small part of Pluto's overall atmosphere, which is mostly nitrogen, like Earth's. (Related: "Saturn Moon Has Oxygen Atmosphere.")
So if future space explorers could somehow survive the long journey—and Pluto's surface temperature of -364 degrees F (-220 degrees C)—would they be in any danger breathing the planet's atmospheric gases?
"Well," Greaves said, "you don't need much carbon monoxide from faulty heating to kill you, so I don't know."Google is to pay £130m to settle a tax dispute with the British Government over how it account for revenues booked in the UK.
More importantly for Treasury coffers Google will now "pay tax based on revenue from UK-based advertisers, which reflects the size and scope of our U.K. business,” a Google spokesman wrote in an email doing the rounds yesterday.
Matt Brittin, head of Google Europe, denied the company was a tax avoider. "We were applying the rules as they were and that was then and now we are going to be applying the new rules, which means we will be paying more tax,” he told the BBC.
The £130m settlement - agreed after an open audit of Google's books - may sound like a lot but it works out at the princely sum of £13m a year for the 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, covered by the settlement. To put this in context, the company paid paid £20.4m in taxes in 2013 on sales of £3.8bn.
Money, that's what I want
US multinationals have come under increasing fire for the elaborate measures they take to avoid paying taxes on revenues generated in the European Union. Three countries - Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - make it very easy and entirely legal for companies to squirrel their profits away from tax authorities.
The UK also plays its part in helping those companies funnel those profits out of the EU and into tax havens across the world, including Bermuda, a favourite of Google.
But the EU worm has turned, single market or no single market. the big multinationals pay a measly proportion of their EU earnings in tax, however they dress this up. The big member states want their slug of profits generated in their states and the multinationals are politically unpopular. They know the game is up.
New EU VAT rules in place since January 2015 mean that online businesses now have to pay VAT in the country of the consumer buying the goods not the business. This is good for large EU countries and bad for Luxembourg, the European domicile of Amazon thanks to its lower VAT rates.
In March 2015, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced the diverted profits tax - quickly dubbed the 'Google tax' - a 25 per cent levy on companies that channelled profits overseas.
In response, in May 2015 Amazon said it would book UK sales through its UK arm and not in Luxembourg. In 2013 Amazon attributed £4.71bn of sales in 2013 to customers in the UK but its Amazon.co.uk Ltd wing filed accounts recording just £449m in revenue for that year. It paid £4.2m in UK corporation tax.
Given that this is Amazon and given that CEO Jeff Bezos has an almost sociopathic aversion to paying tax, it is doubtful that the change will generate much more income for HMRC. No doubt the Treasury bods will console themselves with the new VAT revenue stream generated from Amazon's UK customers.
In December 2015, Apple agreed to pay €318m in back taxes over five years to Italy - equivalent to two days annual global profit.
The company has a much bigger battle on its hands with the EU, which is expected to rule that its tax arrangements with Ireland is illegal state aid. This could cost Apple $8bn in back taxes - and how much thereafter?
Apple is expected to appeal any ruling against it, Bloomberg reports, and of course it will have the backing of the US government in a catfight with the EU. But if enforced would a curiously reluctant Ireland collect or would the Apple windfall get divvied up among the countries where Apple made it sales? ®
How multinationals use Ireland to avoid paying tax
In 2013, Brid-Aine Parnell wrote an instructive account of multinational tax avoidance schemes for The Register. This seems like a good time to republish.
Ireland has come under scrutiny more and more for tax avoidance schemes, particularly one called a "Double Irish". The strategy is a technically legal one, based on Ireland's territorial taxation system, which doesn't tax companies physically based in the country that are "resident" wherever their central management are located.
An international firm will set up two Irish companies to make it work - hence the "double". The first will own the intellectual property rights of the products for sale, but will be resident for tax purposes in a haven like the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands.
The second Irish subsidiary will take a licence for the rights from the first firm, in return for large fees. The second company gets the income from the sales of the products, but its actual "profit" is low because the fees to the first firm are deducted from it. The remaining profit is taxed at the lower Irish rate of 12.5 per cent, rather than the higher rates of the UK or US.
To further complicate matters, multinationals can add a Dutch sandwich. Because Ireland doesn't tax companies' income from certain EU states, like the Netherlands, firms can further reduce their taxes by sticking the income from the sales of products made by Irish companies over there.
The income goes to the shell company in the Netherlands, benefiting from its tax laws, and the money for production costs goes back to Ireland. Remaining profits go to the first Irish company, one being resident in a tax haven. The two Irish companies are the bread, the Dutch firm is the lovely filling and the multinational ends up paying little to no tax because no country sees the full revenues or profits.
Although the terms Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich are becoming synonymous with tax avoidance schemes, these two countries are by no means the only ones used in such elaborate tax planning. Luxembourgeois and Swiss sandwiches are also possible and those are just the strategies that we know of - there are, no doubt, many more.A bill moving through the Florida legislature would allow religious extremists to challenge textbooks that cover evolution and climate change. Senate Bill (S.B.) 1210/House Bill (H.B.) 9891 could leave Florida’s students unprepared for higher education or careers that require a scientific background.
This anti-science bill has sailed through its first hurdles to becoming law. The Florida Senate Committee on Education recommended the bill unanimously with a 9-0 vote, and the Florida House PreK-12 Quality Subcommittee did the same with a 14-0 vote. Both Republicans and Democrats voted for the bill.
Unless there’s a strong public outcry against right-wing extremists’ latest assault on science, many Florida students could soon be learning a curriculum shaped by political and religious dogma rather than academic standards.
Tell Florida legislators and Gov. Scott: Stand up for science in the classroom. Oppose S.B. 1210/H.B. 989.
The bill would allow parents and even residents without children in school to challenge instructional materials they find “non-balanced” or “inflammatory.” A hearing officer, whose qualifications are not explained in the bill, would decide on the merits of the challenge. If the bill passes, anti-science conservatives could wage an onslaught of attacks against school districts – with students and teachers losing out.
The right-wing extremists pushing the bill have submitted affidavits with examples of materials they find offensive. In addition to stopping children from learning about science, the bill would also allow for the censorship of supposedly “pornographic” Toni Morrison novels and social studies lessons that acknowledge Native Americans’ perspectives on Thanksgiving.1 They slam a textbook discussion of evolution by saying it lacks “a balanced discussion of the biblical explanation.”2
Beyond disempowering educators and wasting taxpayer resources, allowing religious extremists to censor children’s educational materials would set a dangerous precedent. At a time when many states are aiming to help students qualify for careers in STEM fields (those based on science, technology, engineering and math), conservative extremists in Florida are working to send students back to the Stone Age instead of preparing them for the future. That’s why the bill has been opposed by Florida Citizens for Science, the National Center for Science Education and Climate Parents.
Tell Florida legislators and Gov. Scott: Stand up for science in the classroom. Oppose S.B. 1210/H.B. 989.
References:This week the Midwinter Update for Gwent, CD Projeckt Red’s card game based off The Witcher 3, finally went live. Gwent, which is still in beta, gets patched pretty regularly, but not like this. Popular cards have seen their abilities simplified and weakened, and text descriptions that added flavor to the game have now been removed. On top of all that, Projeckt Red also overhauled much of the user interface. As a result, the most vocal parts of the Gwent community have revolted.
The giant update was long overdue and included things that were nice to finally see, such as the merging of the deckbuilding and card collection areas. Previously the screen where you built new decks was different from where you could craft cards, leading to a frustrating back-and-forth when constructing something new. Other changes have been more controversial, including a limit to the number of cards that can be placed on a single row and tweaks to the game’s presentation that make it more colorful and action-oriented. In addition to adding over 100 new cards, the Midwinter Update also changed a number of existing ones in substantial ways. The changing of cards is what has drawn the most scrutiny.
For example, Clan Hunter is a bronze Skellige card that was quite popular in recent weeks. Prior to the patch its ability read “Whenever a Unit adjacent to this one is Damaged, Strengthen Self by 1. Deploy: Damage a Unit by 4.” Players could combine Clan Hunter with other Skellige cards that damaged one another to get stat buffs. For instance, Light longship damaged the card to its right and strengthened itself every turn, while Clan An Craite Greatsword reset any damage it had taken every two turns and then strengthened itself by two. In combination, these cards would automatically get more powerful each turn if placed in the right configuration, a strategy that plays into the principles of positioning and placement synergy that help set Gwent apart from other card games.
Now, after the Midwinter update, Clan Hunter’s card reads “Deal 5 damage.” Gwent streamer Mogwai’s reaction to the card on a recent stream sums up many players’ feelings on the change. “This guy’s effect was really cool, why dumb him down like this?” he said. “That card had a lot of flavor.” Previously a unique weapon with very targeted abilities that made it a key part of “self-harm” Skellige decks, Clan Hunter is now a blunt force hammer.
In keeping with this line of thinking, Projekt Red also changed the name of the card, which used to be called Clan Brokvar Hunter. Skellige cards drawn on Nordic culture, and their titles often reference specific clans in The Witcher series more generally, each with their own attributes and back story. Clan Brokvar, for example, are considered cowards by the islands’ other major families, but also great archers. The original version of the card played off this dichotomy. Now it feels generic and toothless.
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For the dedicated Gwent players who have been living with the game over the course of the last year, little things like clan titles go a long way. Callbacks to the larger world of The Witcher games are part of Gwent’s charm. Players were skeptical about this shift even before the latest patch went live, seeing it as an attempt to simplify the game before it officially releases and possibly makes its way to mobile (currently you can only play on PS4, Xbox One, or PC). Accompanied by the laundry list of other nerfs and reworks, however, the loss of proper nouns has become added salt in the wounds of a player base struggling to square where the game is headed with where it was during the rest of 2017.
The overhaul of the game’s UI is a good case in point. On the one hand there are things that make it easier to follow what’s going on during matches. Gwent’s a complex game, in part because of the ways it deviates from normal card games. There’s more to it than just two players facing off, bashing one another with monsters and spells until someone’s life total reaches zero. Unlike in Magic: The Gathering, Gwent revolves around players earning points by placing cards on different rows of a board with opportunities for bluffing and folding. It shares something in common with poker and dominoes in this respect, and can also be harder to follow as a newcomer for these very reasons.
The new UI tries to make the game easier to read by having unique animations for when cards are attacked, healed, or destroyed, as well as by introducing new menu screens for when players mulligan, or replace, cards. There’s more color overall as well, which can make the game more inviting or more distracting depending on how you look at it. One popular thread on the Gwent subreddit that blew up was from a graphic designer who goes by PaleAleDale. “I’ve seen a lot of complaints on here about the design being ‘plain’ or ‘ugly,’” he wrote. “As someone who’s done graphic design work for years, I don’t entirely agree because all of the newest elements are pretty cohesive on their own.”
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What he did think the update did was diminish Gwent’s unique identity. He went on,
“The colors are brighter, the sights and sounds are friendlier, cards hover and flip and gently land on the board. Gone are the bloody consumes, whiplash-inducing trebuchet hits, and the feeling of walloping the board with a card like it was a two-ton slab of metal. There’s no more visual weight to anything, really.”
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From the visual overhaul to the oversimplification of previously beloved cards, many Gwent players have found something to complain about with the latest update. Either the cards are too small, or the overlays are too ugly, or names have gotten too boring. Other players are worried about the rise of certain cards that rely on luck, like Hym, which lets you spawn a random silver card from the enemy’s deck.
In the end, part of why the community is freaking out about all of the latest changes revolves around the elephant in the room: Hearthstone. Ever since Blizzard nailed how to do digital card games with its 2014 release, other card games have struggled to both learn from it and also differentiate themselves. Everything from the streamlined card art to the generic fantasy presentation have helped make Hearthstone look as enticing and intimidating as Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, and other popular smartphone games.
Gwent escaped this in part because of its strange journey from being a niche distraction in a sprawling open-world RPG to a stand-alone card game. A carryover from The Witcher 3, it’s retained most of that game’s gritty character and charm. The Midwinter Update is different, in part because it’s easy to see traces of Blizzard’s popular card game throughout. As someone who’s fallen down the Hearthstone well plenty of times, I can appreciate that concern, not because I dislike the game but because I originally came to Gwent for something different. Something darker and a bit more esoteric. Something more, well, Witcher-y.Editor’s Note: Lennard Zinn’s regular column is devoted to addressing readers’ technical questions about bikes, their care and how we as riders can use them as comfortably and efficiently as possible. Readers can send brief technical questions directly to Zinn.
Dear Lennard,
I have two questions for you and your column:
1. I was very saddened to hear about Bill Pederson’s passing. Ever since I saw his name in my heat-moldable Diadora insoles, I had been going to him for orthotics and cleat set up. He used his custom gauges to set me up with fixed cleats, and then more recently, based on his work with Joe Friel, move my cleats about 2cm closer to my heel (using separate screws). This obviously makes changing cleats and replacing shoes an undertaking that requires professional help. Can you recommend someone else who can do this for me? For reference, I live in New York City.
2. Last weekend, I did the Triple Bypass, and got caught in the thunderstorms. When I removed my cranks (2010 Campy Record 11) to pack my bike, I saw that the grease in the crank bearings had turned a dark grey. Should I try to flush and repack these bearings? And if so, how would I do that? If that requires a bearing puller, which one should I get? Finally, these bearings aren’t sealed – is it worth considering sealed replacements?
— Jon
Dear Jon,
I was also sad at the passing of Bill Peterson. He customized for me some of those Diadora shoes (which I loved, but the Diadora pedals not so much) and made me a bunch more orthotics over the years.
If you were to use Speedplay pedals, you wouldn’t need special shoe drilling. You’d just get the aluminum cleat extender base plate kit. You use them in place of the standard black plastic base plates to provide 1.5cm of additional rearward positioning (not your full 2cm, but close). They only work with Light Action, Zero and X Series pedals.
I, too, ride with my cleats far behind where the normal cleat holes allow with any pedal other than Speedplay. I use Zero pedals with the aluminum cleat extender base plates, and I not only love the ride, but I also can have the same setup on multiple shoes for a modest expense.
Otherwise, try D2 Shoes; Don Lamson will put the cleat mounting holes wherever you want them, as well as custom building the orthotics and the shoes for you.
As for the bearings, yes, it’s a good idea to re-pack those bearings. This is the tool to remove them. Here is how you remove the bearing shields, no matter what type of shield it is. Once the shield is off, you can do no further disassembly and then can do a relatively unsatisfactory job of cleaning the old grease out and packing in new grease; I say unsatisfactory, because the bearing retainer will be in the way of both operations. Here’s how you really clean a cartridge bearing, polish the ball bearings and the bearing surfaces, and repack the bearing with grease. This may seem laborious, but if you have ceramic bearings you’ve paid big bucks for, you may find it well worth your while.
― Lennard
Dear Lennard,
At least to hear Phil Liggett tell it, there have been a few embarrassing moments with electronic drivetrains so far at the Tour de France (one just at peak intensity of the stage-ending sprint).
I’m amazed that those apparent problems haven’t generated articles on the VeloNews website. Are Phil and Paul incorrect? Certainly there was no reticence to report Andy Schleck’s famous chain drop two years ago. Are the electronic shifters being given coddling treatment in the press?
— Jim
Dear Jim,
Since I didn’t watch every minute of the Tour coverage (albeit more hours in July than I care to admit), I don’t know which instances you might be referring to. Regarding the comment about Matt Goss, here’s what Shimano R&D director Wayne Stetina has to say: “It was confirmed there was never any shifting problem because Goss and GreenEdge never mentioned any problems to Hennie Stamsnijder, Shimano Europe’s sports marketing manager who visited all the Shimano teams regularly every week during the Tour.”
― Lennard
Feedback on previous columns:
Regarding brake pads from this column:
Dear Lennard,
Jagwire makes pads and pad holders that are compatible with Campy Skeleton brakes and are much cheaper, Torq hardware and all. The problem with them, however, is that all pads aren’t created equal — some are too loose. A bit of selective fitting may be required, but they save a pile of money.
— Bruce
Dear Lennard,
I’ve been running Jagwire holders with SwissStop pads on my Campagnolo Chorus Skeleton brakes for a little over a year with no problems. I think they look better and needless to say it is much easier to change pads.
— Tom
Dear Lennard,
BBB makes a Campy brake pad holder for skeleton brakes model #BBS-22CT and BBS-22C for older Campy brakes. Available at Wiggle.com.
— Bo
Dear Lennard,
Regarding your statement: “As long as you have the pad holder oriented so the closed end is pointed forward and you don’t push the bike backward while the brakes are engaged, there is no force acting on the pads that will pull them out of the pad holders in normal riding.”
I used to think that until I tried to apply the front brake one day and got nothing. I don’t recall if it was one or both pads that had slipped out of my Ultegra SL 6600 caliper. I’ve never had any problem with the rear but my front retaining screws have been reinstalled.
— Phil
Dear Phil,
I can’t imagine what happened there. I’ve been running without pad retaining screws on all three of my road bikes and both of my cyclocross bikes for years and have never even had a pad slip, much less come out. Sounds like a prudent solution you’ve come to.
― Lennard
Dear Lennard,
I haven’t had the trouble of switching out the pads for Campy brakes since I have been applying a little grease on the pad holder and back of pad, then extracting in fitting the pads with thin, adjustable pliers. It takes about three-to-five minutes, total. I take care not to get grease on the braking surface of pad and store them in the plastic blister pack they come in.
— Rick
Dear Lennard,
I put a drop of White Lightning clean ride lube on my pads and they slide in and out smoothly. I’ve seen no damage to Campy, SwissStop or Zipp pads.
— Gordon
Regarding bike weight from this column:
Dear Lennard,
I live, bicycle commute, and do lengthy weekend rides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In a recent article, you mentioned that decreasing overall bicycle weight from a hefty bicycle to a lightweight for general purposes would equate to roughly six percent of improvement in efficiency if the rider exerts the same power and so forth.
I’m 30 years old, a lean guy, and I have been riding late 1980s and early 1990s steel frames with Columbus tubes made by the Eddy Merckx factory that have more recent components. I am in a cycling club where carbon is king and there is no peer pressure nor ridicule for my penchant for vintage frame sets.
Often, I admit, my pals wonder aloud if I would be leaps and bounds faster for Strava segments and all that jazz if I were on a carbon bike. I think your article can finally give me an answer and I won’t need to rent a carbon number. Thanks!
I also find that changing my gear ratios and wheel sets with better ball bearings does more for me than dropping a kilo of weight or pedaling uphill with only one water bottle instead of two.
Thanks for the direct answer to the fella who wrote to you about bicycle weight. I think it settles something that often gets asked of me. I’ll tell guys that a local climb that takes an hour-forty to summit I could potentially do in 90-something minutes. For the moment, I’m happy with my Corsa Extra and MX Leader by Merckx, and a Columbus SL number by Bottechia.
— Scott
Regarding bike fits:
Dear Lennard,
I want to suggest an alternative for comparing bikes for riders with a good digital camera and some Photoshop experience (or a friend with those):
1. Set up a spot where you can rest your bikes level and straight up, with a dark or contrasting background. For example, I put my bikes on the seats of two outdoor chairs (one seat for front wheel, one for rear) in front of my back fence.
2. Get back as far as you can and photograph the bike and wheels tightly cropped with a telephoto lens (or use a zoom on tele setting). The telephoto and distance help minimize perspective distortion. Try to get the camera lens at the same level as the BB center, dead on, so that the camera is looking straight through the BB (you can actually see this on my Campy BBs).
3. Photograph all your bikes this way, download the images into Photoshop, and use the paintbrush tool to place colored dots (different color for each bike) at critical points on the frame, saddle and bars. Mark the BB center for sure.
4. Combine all the images in one file, each on its own layer. Pick your favorite bike as a benchmark, set it’s transparency to zero, turn off all the other layers except one (the bike you want to compare). Adjust the layer transparency of the comparison bike and move the layer until the BB center marks you made overlap. Do the same for each bike, i.e. align it with your benchmark bike.
5. By selectively turning layers on and off, and adjusting their transparency, you can quickly compare any two or three bikes at the same time. This is the digital equivalent of printing photos of all you bikes on transparency film and layering them together two or three at a time.
I know this sounds like a pain, but once you figure out a set up, you can compare bikes in just a few minutes. I have done this for friends, and they are surprised at how different their bikes are. You can also see things like BB drop and fork rake very easily. I can send you some samples.
Need someone with Photoshop skills? Just ask anyone under 21 that worked on their high school newspaper or yearbook. You’d be shocked how many kids can do this now…
— MichaelNews screencap via Local10.com
Heather Hironimus has been fighting for four years to make sure her son kept his foreskin, but after her arrest on charges of interfering with custody, it appears the battle is finally over—and she's giving in.
Hironimus had been locked in combat with her ex-boyfriend Dennis Nebus over a circumcision procedure she had agreed to permit before changing her mind. The legal machinations of this case endured well past the usual age for circumcisions, but neither parent would relent.
But, according to the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, Hironimus received an ultimatum from Judge Jeffrey Gillen: Sign a form consenting to the procedure, or be stuck in jail for some indeterminate amount of time. She appeared in court on Friday and refused to sign, and was sent back to lockup.
But moments later, she decided to cave, and the court was reconvened. Hironimus cried as her lawyer held the document in place, and she struggled to use a pen while in handcuffs. In the end, the document was signed, and the foreskin's fate was sealed.
Intact America is an activist group that has been very vocal about this case. In an email to VICE, Georganne Chapin of Intact America referred to the situation as "beyond appalling."
According to the Palm Beach Post, Hironimus has yet to be arraigned for interfering with her custody agreement, and a bail hearing for that charge not yet been scheduled.
As we've previously mentioned, multiple judges have ruled that the circumcision should take place, since Hironimus had formally capitulated to the father's wish that their son Chase be circumcised when she signed the initial custody agreement with Nebus.
But according to Nebus's attorney, May Cain, there have been "death threats," against Nebus, prompting him to consider taking the four-year-old out of state to have the procedure performed. According to Local10.com, the judge has authorized Nebus to take Chase out of state and unilaterally make all medical decisions on his behalf.
But Chapin of Intact America told VICE that to do so would be "despicable." She explained that "no physician in the United States can consider Heather Hironimus's signature—obtained while she was in handcuffs, exhausted, and under threat of indefinite detention—to be valid."
The judge told the parents, "You are going to have to learn to deal with each other in a civil and amicable manner," according to the Palm Beach Post.
Protesters were gathered outside of the courthouse before Hironimus signed. In a video, one protester named Tara Shipley told the Palm Beach Post. "We're standing beside Heather. We support Heather, and we hope she knows that she's not alone." She added, "The court has shown that they're really not thinking about the boy's best interest."
Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.(Last Updated On: April 27, 2018)
In a previous article we revealed new research findings that have determined that the bacteria that cause many urinary tract infections are getting stronger and stronger. So strong, in fact, that they have become resistant to most antibiotics.
This of course means that to a greater and greater degree each day, modern medicine is running out of effective treatment tools to combat such infections that are resistant to antibiotics. While all urinary tract infections are not untreatable by antibiotics, the pace at which urinary tract infection bacteria are becoming antibiotic-resistant means that within a few years, modern medicine will have no more drugs to fight urinary tract infections.
What do we do?
Can garlic fight off antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections?
Garlic has been shown to be antibiotic in numerous studies. Again and again, garlic has proved to inhibit the growth of bacteria and fungi infections.
And yes, garlic has been used for thousands of years to fight off various types of infectious diseases. It is a fundamental part of nearly every traditional ancient form of medicine.
The question, however, is whether garlic can also fight bacteria infections that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. After all, if a bacteria strain is strong enough to evade multiple antibiotics, it is a pretty strong bacteria strain, right?
And if it can fight off some of modern medicine’s most powerful drugs, what chance does a common herb – often found growing like a weed – have against such a strong bacteria strain?
This is precisely what a new study has investigated, with surprising results.
Bacteria cultures from 166 UTI patients studied
Researchers from the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences of India conducted a study that tested bacteria cultures drawn from 166 patients with urinary tract infections.
The pathogenic bacteria found included E. coli, Enterobacter species, Klebsiella species, Staphylococcus aureus and P. aeruginosa.
Initial testing on the bacteria found that 93 of these 166 cultures taken from the patients were resistant to four or more antibiotics.
This means that 56 percent of the patients – a majority of the patients – had urinary tract infections that were resistant to multiple antibiotics. Over 95 percent of the cultures were resistant to penicillin and ampicillin, and over half were resistant to ciprofloxacin.
The researchers then produced a garlic extract from fresh garlic bulbs. The extract was made by crushing fresh garlic and then blending with water and filtering out the separated extract. This is called a cold water extract.
The researchers tested the 93 bacteria cultures that were resistant to multiple antibiotics. They found that 82 percent of them – 76 out of the 93 – inhibited the growth of the bacteria significantly. This significant level was measured as being greater than a zone of inhibition of 10 millimeters.
Antibiotics didn’t match garlic’s antibiotic potential
When the 76 cultures were tested against a host of common antibiotics typically prescribed for drug-resistant urinary tract infections – their zones of inhibition ranged from 11 to more than 20 millimeters.
The researchers found that:
“This provides strong evidence for the antibacterial potential of fresh garlic extract in multi-drug resistant infections, where most of the available antibiotics are not effective.”
The researchers found that the garlic extract inhibited growth among these bacteria at a minimum concentration of 35 milligrams per milliliter. This is termed the ‘minimum inhibitory concentration” or MIC.
How does garlic work?
Garlic’s ability to inhibit the growth of infectious bacteria has been the topic of much debate. Studies have shown that it stimulates the increase of the body’s own immune cells through the stimulation of particular cytokines. Others – such as the study above – show that garlic also works directly, inhibiting bacteria.
One of garlic’s more astonishing abilities comes in the form of interrupting the communications between bacteria that allow them to increase their colony strength. A 2005 study from the Technical University of Denmark found that garlic reduced the ability of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria to conduct quorum sensing.
This study was confirmed in 2010 by researchers from India’s Punjab University.
Quorum sensing might be compared to the internet or television broadcasting. Signals are sent between bacteria and throughout the whole group, signalling how and when to expand their colonies. If this is interfered with, their colonies will not grow.
The Punjab University researchers stated:
“In vitro data showed decreased elaboration of virulence factors and reduced production of quorum-sensing signals by P. aeruginosa in the presence of fresh garlic extract.”
Garlic’s antibiotic constituents
Garlic contains over 400 known medicinal constituents, of which some are antibiotic in themselves. In combination they form a tremendous force over bacteria and fungi.
Some of garlic’s constituents found to be antibiotic include ajoene, allicin, allyl-methyl-thio-sulfinate, diallyl-tri-sulfide, and methyl-allyl-thiosulfinate.
Allicin in particular is quite easy to extract from fresh chopped or crushed garlic by soaking in water – although alcohol will more readily extract it. But allicin will also degrade within three hours in water at room temperature, and within 20 minutes when heated.
Correspondingly, as the above and other studies have found, fresh garlic provides the greatest antibiotic potency. A dehydrated garlic powder in a capsule or tablet will likely not contain much of garlic’s antibiotic potency. This is because some of these antibiotic constituents are destroyed or degraded in the presence of heat.
As for odor-less garlic, much of garlic’s odor comes from its sulfur content. And as noticed above with the list of antibiotic constituents, many of these are sulfur-oriented.
Learn how probiotics are also antibiotic.
REFERENCES
Gupta S, Kapur S, Padmavathi DV, Verma A. Garlic: An Effective Functional Food to Combat the Growing Antimicrobial Resistance. Pertanika J. Trop. Agric. Sci. 2015; 38(2): 271-278. http://www.pertanika.upm.edu.my/
Harjai K, Kumar R, Singh S. Garlic blocks quorum sensing and attenuates the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. FEMS Immunol Med Microbiol. 2010 Mar;58(2):161-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1574-695X.2009.00614.x.
Bjarnsholt T, Jensen PØ, Rasmussen TB, Christophersen L, Calum H, Hentzer M, Hougen HP, Rygaard J, Moser C, Eberl L, Høiby N, Givskov M. Garlic blocks quorum sensing and promotes rapid clearing of pulmonary Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections. Microbiology. 2005 Dec;151(Pt 12):3873-80.
Bergner P. TheHealing Power of Garlic: The Enlightened Person’s Guide to Nature’s Most Versatile Medicinal Plant. Motilal UK, 2001.
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MoreMetallica turns double adult – 36 years (which is 2×18). And today I want to share with you 36 rare facts about Metallica: about their songs, shows, the band’s history in general – stuff that goes far beyond Wikipedia. Join us here to stay updated.
Some of these facts went from my personal observations (ya know, I’m nerd), so you probably will not find that shit anywhere else.
If your knowledge of Metallica is a bit deeper than basic, if you know what’s ‘wha-na-na’ and ‘I am the table’ – this video is for you. But even if you’re a newcomer, it’s not going be a problem.
So, let’s get to it: 36 things you might not know about Metallica.
‘The new Metallica’ bassist Roberto Trujillo has already spent with the band almost 15 years. The day when he will outlast Jason is May 15th, 2018. Although Jason left the band on January 17th 2001, he took the decision a few months earlier when James made it clear: no side projects. It was September 27th 2000, exactly 14 years after the loss of Cliff. ‘Bass solo. Take one.’ – this phrase has become legendary. But in fact, Cliff recorded 6 or 7 takes, each being completely different. ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ intro is leading bass, you do know it. But not many know, there are 3 different bass tracks in there: low (following guitars), high (main lead), and extra-high (tapped harmonics, often counted as a guitar overdub). You can download Metallica bass tabs here. Btw, the bell sound was not a bell nor another bass effect. That’s an anvil. You all remember how Robert smashed everybody with his flamenco, that gave birth to ‘All Nightmare Long’. But swapping instruments is a normal thing in Metallica’ songwriting process. For example, James wrote the bass riff from ‘Devil’s Dance’ and insisted to keep it that way. Of course, there’s guitar stuff by Cliff. And also Lars could come up with melodies orally. What Lars did on ‘And Justice for All’ has inspired many. But actually, Flemming Rasm |
. If that prospect bothers the PRC, then it should do more to prevent the DPRK from continuing its present course.
North Korea has become a seemingly insoluble problem for Washington. Nothing the U.S. can do, at least at reasonable cost, is likely to create a democratic, friendly, non-nuclear DPRK.
But as I point out on National Interest: “Washington can share the nightmare, turning South Korea’s defense over to Seoul and nuclear proliferation over to the North’s neighbors, particularly China. Moreover, Washington can diminish North Korean fear and hostility by establishing diplomatic ties, just as America had official relations with the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies during the Cold War.”
The geopolitics still would be messy. But no longer would it be America’s responsibility to clean up.Church and State need separation
Posted on May 6, 2015 by Taber Times
The beautiful thing about living in a modern, forward-thinking country like Canada is that you have the freedom to make a lot of choices. You have the choice to vote for who you want to.
You have the choice to vote for who you want to. You have the choice to live where you want to, work where you want to, love and marry who you want to.
You also have the freedom to practice whatever religion you want. In fact, it’s a right. A right guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You also have the freedom from being persecuted for choosing a specific religion. Let’s not forget that you have the right to not be subjected to indoctrination by a government agency or representative of the state. In other words, it’s reasonable (and legally enforced) that you should expect that a representative of the state does not enforce you to adhere to the practices and rituals of a specific religion.
Let’s also not forget that teachers and school board employees are paid by the state, ie; the government. When parents send their children to school, it is with the expectation that their children will be taught facts and lessons that will prepare them for adult life in the society that we have created.
And the expectation is that those children will be able to learn in a safe environment, free from persecution. Bringing the Lord’s Prayer back into the school, as has happened in Taber, to be read by teachers (representatives of the state) goes against the very fabric that our society has been built upon. We need to have separation of church and state in order to live in a properly functioning democracy. It’s an absolute must.
No one is trying to stop Christians from practising their faith, as many have claimed. We’re simply asking that our children can go to a place of learning where they are free from representatives of the state teaching them about one specific religion. Christians can still be Christian, Muslims can still be Muslim and Agnostics can still be Agnostics at school.
No one (at least not anyone with intelligence), wants to stop people from practising their religion. It just cannot be taught by the school. We have to create and maintain a society where everyone is free to practice whatever religion they want.
“How harmful can a little prayer be?” I’ve heard some ask. On the surface, a little prayer at the start of the day is not a big deal. I do it myself.
But when it comes from and is enforced by the state, it’s a slippery slope that we must avoid at all costs.
JAMES BIGELOW
LETHBRIDGECaptain Joe Nazar deftly guided the 65-foot catamaran Kitty Kat out of its berth in San Francico's Pier 39, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and out to sea, a journey he’s easily made hundreds of times. Joe Rosato Jr. reports. (Published Thursday, Aug. 11, 2016)
'There She Blows!' It's Been a Banner Year For Whales in the Bay
Captain Joe Nazar deftly guided the 65-foot catamaran Kitty Kat out of its berth in San Francico's Pier 39, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and out to sea, a journey he’s easily made hundreds of times.
There was a time back in the 1980s when he’d make this similar trek in the hunt of fish. But these days, he chases something much larger — whales.
“Right out from the minute we leave,” Nazar said, his eyes scanning the ocean, “that’s all we care about is finding that whale.”
Behind Nazar, some 65 passengers who plunked down about $40 apiece to accompany his San Francisco Whale Tours, revealed why he was so intent on finding a whale. But thanks to an abundance of humpback whales this summer just off the Bay Area coastline, the task wasn’t all that challenging.
“If you see a spout, shout it out,” Nazar recited into the ship’s public address system, before offering a free snack to the first person to spot a whale.
“There she blows!” Nazar screamed just past Pacifica as a spout of water floated 50 yards away and quickly dissipated. Seconds later, the bent black body of a humpback skimmed the surface for a moment before retreating from view.
“Unbelievable, this is a big one!” Nazar shouted as passengers craned their necks in unison and let out a collective "Oooooh.”
Whale watchers try to get a good look at a humpback whale on San Francisco Bay.
Photo credit: NBC Bay Area
Scenes like this have become standard for Nazar this year — as an unprecedented number of whales have ventured close to shore, putting on one of nature's most interesting spectacles. This summer, instead of having to make the usual 26-mile journey to the Farallone Islands to see whales, Nazar has been able to cruise less than 7 miles down the coast near Pacifica and Half Moon Bay to dazzle his customers with leviathans.
This year, the whales have even ventured into the bay more frequently and so close to shore that Nazar’s services aren’t even always required.
“Due to the climate change and the El Nino,” Nazar said, “this has been the best whale watching year on record for me ever.”
Scientists believe the large surge of whales venturing close to shore are pursuing their favorite dish of anchovies to supplement their usual diet of krill.
“They’re going where the food is,” said naturalist Ryan Jones. “So if the food is right inside the bay, they’re going to be in the bay; if the food is offshore they’re going to be more offshore.”
While the humpbacks have been Nazar's bread and butter, on weekends he will extend his tours to the Farallone islands to see blue and gray whales. He marveled that tourists in San Francisco could be shopping in Union Square and an hour later come face-to-spout with some of the world’s largest living creatures.
“Because of the locality of the whales this year,” Nazar said, “allows people, especially tourists to get on a boat in two-and-a-half hours to have a tremendous whale experience.”
As a group of five whales frolicked in the distance, Rosie Sanchez of Texas watched silently from the ship’s bow, occasionally whispering “awesome” as the whales ever-so-fleetingly revealed themselves.
“We saw some coming up, and it was amazing,” Sanchez said, “I never see anything like that before.”
The sight was certainly foreign to young Libby Robson of London, England, who watched a humpback flip its tail into the air before diving deep.
“They had fat bodies and long tails,” Robson observed. “It was really good fun, and if I could, I’d come again.”
Whatever excitement the whales generated for the visitors, it was tame compared to the jubilation of the group’s host -- who celebrated every time a whale cut the surface.
“Oh my God,” Nazar said spotting a pair of whales breaking into view. “Finding whales is magical.”The Russian military says it hopes the US-led coalition will not allow Islamic State terrorists holding Mosul to flee the city and go to Syria. It warned the operation is still being monitored.
“Our surveillance spacecraft have been retargeted [at Mosul]. Over a dozen of our surveillance aircraft, including drones, are working in the vicinity,” Army General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s General Staff, said.
The general said that the Russian military are particularly concerned with a scenario, in which militants from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), who are currently holding the Iraqi city, would “try to escape Mosul or be granted safe passage out of it towards Syria.”
“We hope that our partners from the international coalition realize, what would be the consequences of having bands freely roaming around the Middle East. Terrorist should be destroyed on sight, not chased from one country to another,” Gerasimov said.
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The Iraqi government announced an operation to re-take Mosul from IS last Sunday. In addition to the Iraqi regular army, the offensive force includes Kurdish militias and the US-led coalition, which is to provide air support for the ground force. Turkish troops, which were deployed in Iraq against the wishes of Baghdad, will reportedly play a role in the offensive as well.
IS seized Mosul in June of 2014, when it was Iraq’s second-largest city. The terrorist group’s leader then turned it into a major military stronghold, and it is believed that between 4,000 and 8,000 IS militants are entrenched there.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that up to 1 million civilians may flee Mosul amid the offensive, putting a strain on Iraq’s capacity to accommodate internally displaced people.
“Mosul is a city of between 1.2 and 1.5 million people. With the operation being undertaken that’s going to lead to some people being displaced. We don’t know the number of people that will be displaced. So UNICEF is preparing for water and for sanitation for up to 700,000 people in all,” UNICEF's representative in Iraq, Peter Hawkins, told RT.Editor's note: This review is based on our impressions from our first 85 hours in the game as an Imperial Agent who reached level 35. Some endgame elements were not ready to be evaluated at the time of this review, but as always, we will follow-up this review with constant and regular updates of our impressions as the game progresses here at www.pcgamer.com and in the magazine. — LD
30 minutes had passed since my insectoid ally had asked me. It was a simple question—did I intend to resist his claim to this land?—made complicated by the previous eight hours of politics, betrayal, espionage, and war. I didn't know what to do. After consulting five different people (including my wife over the phone), I reluctantly made my choice on the familiar BioWare dialog wheel and betrayed my always-faithful insectoid allies in order to defend the man who'd just slain his own wife to prove his loyalty. I felt used.
I immediately wanted to load a quicksave and reverse my decision, but I couldn't—unlike BioWare's library of other RPGs, The Old Republic is an MMO and everything you do here is permanent, with unavoidable consequences. An abandoned friend suffers his ineluctable fate; a rescued child remains grateful and secure. It's an unexpected tool that BioWare uses to leverage player emotion and create some of the most engaging, moving story moments I've ever played in an RPG—moments that are light-years beyond what we've seen in MMOs so far.
A galaxy far, far away
All 17 of the game's worlds are brought to life with evocative architecture, meticulous set design, and a convincing population. Many quest hubs are the size of small cities with over a hundred soldiers, merchants, doctors, civvies, and the rest going about their business inside. While most of these tertiary characters stay in a single location (we aren't talking Skyrim here), they're almost always acting out a scene—a Jawa trying to protect his droids from Imperial harassers at a starport, soldiers training with a drill sergeant, or a woman receiving saddening news from a friend—and they make destinations feel like places with both a deep past and a future. There is some repetition of environmental models and building layouts, but it's wisely kept to a minimum.
TOR is a BioWare RPG through and through, so you'll be doing the standard BioWare RPG stuff: gathering a crew, meeting interesting people, making moral choices, killing stuff, and upgrading gear. Combat relies on the traditional trinity setup, so you can choose to focus on healing, tanking, or DPS as one of the eight advanced classes available to each faction. A few class designs do break the mold a bit, such as ranged and stealth tanks, but most fall in line with traditional archetypes. The pool of playable species, however, is miniscule—you'll be disappointed if you were dead-set on playing a freaky-looking alien.
I like the game's graphics style—very reminiscent of the Knights of the Old Republic series—though the light-hearted look won't be to everyone's tastes. I think BioWare's bet was a sound one, and there will be plenty of folks more than happy to trade in their bows and arrows for blaster rifles. The sci-fi setting is put to terrific use in the game's consistently dazzling animations and spell effects. The traditional gold sparkles of fantasy game healing spells are replaced by my Agent's floating probes that fall down and rotate around my target, spraying him or her with healing kolto fluid. Blown grenades send enemies sprawling over railings. When I stab an enemy with an electrified dagger, it actually sticks in their chest as their body helplessly convulses and crackles with electricity. And, of course, every blaster blast and saber swing is enhanced with the familiar sound effects and music that the official license grants to TOR.
Something borrowed
Not so fresh are the game's quest mechanics, which are rudimentary and mostly drawn from the oldest tricks in the book: kill X, use Y, or talk to Z. In my 85 hours spent on launch servers, I didn't encounter a single vehicle or transformation mechanic that mixed up the abilities I had at my disposal. A few riddle dialog quests popped up, but nothing revolutionary. That said, the novel Bonus Objective system, which usually makes the “kill X” portions of quests optional, does a fine job of breaking out grinding and making it a separate choice. It lets those that don't care to commit genocide on a regular basis stay focused on the story content, which is told through consistently entertaining cutscenes and enlivened with the memorable, nuanced characters we've come to expect from BioWare. Most everything in TOR is voiced, and the voice-over work is, with rare exception, top-notch. Subtle touches, such as my Agent slipping in and out of accents while undercover or the slightly quavering tone of a psychotic doctor, both entertain and deepen the immersion into the stories.
What's more, you can actually provide permanent help to these people, unlike in most MMOs, thanks to TOR's story areas. These seamless sections of the world are instanced for you and your group on the fly (no load screens or delays), allowing everything inside to react, change, and/or explode in response to the choices you make. We've seen similar technology used in World of Warcraft and a few other MMOs to progressively alter an environment down a linear path that all players share, but BioWare uses it to custom-tailor the world for your character and his or her personal story. That single change is revolutionary: your choices matter, and will affect the world you and your friends play in forever.
Go away, Gavin
My biggest concern going into TOR was that the focus on storytelling would restrict our ability to play with friends and guildmates, but I was overjoyed (and, frankly, quite surprised) to find that it wasn't a problem at all. I played on-and-off with my aide-de-camp, Gavin, during the first 35 levels of our characters, and we never once had a problem finding content to do together or joining each other on our class quests. The mind-blowing ability to holo-call into your groupmates' conversations from anywhere on the planet (you show up as a translucent projection of yourself) is liberating, allowing you to adventure with your friends without having to stumble about like conjoined twins.
But even though I could quest with Gavin, I wasn't sure I'd want to. Making moral choices by committee can be tricky for control freaks like me. When a multiplayer conversation option pops up, everyone in your group selects the choice they want. Then a dice roll determines who gets to respond. The first time Gavin's evil Sith butchered someone begging for mercy, I was outraged. How could he? I felt invested in and protective of my softy Sith Agent and his trajectory, and Gavin ruined my story.
But, on second, calmer thought, I realized I was just playing a different story: the story of an unlikely group working together to defeat a common enemy. It's a very Star Wars theme, and, much like the inability to load quick saves, adds a depth and dimension to roleplaying. There'd be a similar difference between playing Dungeons & Dragons by yourself and with a full group of friends. Sure, another player will inevitably piss you off by randomly grabbing an NPC and hurling them into a fire, but that's part of the spontaneity that makes roleplaying in a group so great. It's an awesome, unscripted RPG experience that you can only have in The Old Republic right now.
Keeping it casual
Spurred on by the unexpected narrative I was experiencing with Gavin, I decided to try grouping with random players. Heroic quests are exactly what commitment-shy gamers like myself need to get grouping: open-world story areas along your questing route with tough enemies that two to four players can knock out in 15 minutes. They're prevalent on every planet, very casual, and non-threatening. They're the MMO equivalent of asking someone to join you and your buddies for drinks after work. Hey bro, wanna come hack a few droid terminals with us? I grouped up while leveling more often in The Old Republic than I have in any other MMO I've ever played—by a very large margin—but it was always by choice.
Groups looking for challenges with more bite have Flashpoints, TOR's four-person instanced dungeons. Their difficulty ramps up as you level, and high-level Flashpoints have complicated fights that are very challenging, even for coordinated groups. Thankfully, the penalty for death throughout TOR is next to nothing: players can self-resurrect wherever they died with no corpse run and a 10-second period of unbreakable stealth to move away from what killed 'em.
The only major hindrance to teamwork is the very noticeable lack of a looking-for-group tool. A very limited attempt can be found in the social menu, but it's so worthless that it's borderline insulting.
Your story
In MMOs, we usually travel around the world playing through the stories of other people. Quests revolve around the problems and desires of the quest-givers because our characters don't have any (other than the insatiable desire for XP and loot). But you have a story in TOR and all of your adventures revolve around it: you go places because you have business to take care of there. It may seem like a modest difference, but being the center of the universe in a personalized, branching narrative weaves a strong sense of meaning and purpose into everything you do in the game.
I created my Imperial Agent to be a champion of the people—someone who signed up for military duty to protect the innocent of the Empire from enemy attacks. And it worked well, for a while. I picked all the obvious light-side options. I used cool tech like spinal-implanted holoprojectors that disguised me as a service droid to infiltrate terrorist cells and save lives. But as the story went on, I began to find out that the world of an Imperial Agent is not so black-and-white. My enemies were constantly changing, and they weren't always the people I assumed them to be.
Without spoiling plot details, I'll just say that I was very impressed by the overarching story TOR empowered me to create: one of a naïve agent trying to do the right thing in an Empire filled with both evil and noble people. Around level 15, I even turned down a perfectly good quest because I thought my character would have refused it (an MMO first for me!). My character had gotten sick of being told to exterminate the native populations every time he arrived on a planet, and he started to wonder if he was the bad guy. The story evolved almost perfectly with my own narrative—it was on that same planet that BioWare tested my resolve by putting me in the situation described at the start of this review: the same native population that I'd championed now demanded the blood of a betrayed man trying to redeem his family.
Constant company
A few people are going to want a say in what you do in that big story of yours. Namely, the members of the crew that you assemble while playing. TOR's companion system lets you have one crew member out fighting with you at any time, and all of them can be customized with new gear and appearance options. This may not be new for BioWare RPGs, but it's one of the most innovative and successful elements of TOR as an MMO, providing you with an ever-present audience that reacts to and reflects your choices, via dialog and affection/romance options.
Each class recruits different companions, each with their own unique quirk and backstory. As a level 35 Imperial Agent, I've gathered a violent anarchist, a groveling robot, a diplomat who's merged with the hive mind of an insectoid species, and a doctor who can transform into a space werewolf at will.
Crew skills are the game's crafting system, and provide the usual activities—gather materials and use them to build weapons, armor, and consumables—with a few added twists. Gathering professions also allow you to send companions on missions, which removes access to that companion for 5-20 minutes and gives them a chance to return with crafting materials, credits, light-side and dark points, new recipes, and skill points. It's a decent system for people that don't want to spend the time gathering and crafting themselves, but it can get fairly annoying to have to continually send companions on new missions every few minutes—there should be an automated option.
The little things
It wasn't until I discovered that you could reverse-engineer items in TOR to discover new recipes that I began to really get drawn into the crafting system. Suddenly, there was a whole complement of unlisted recipes out there for me to work toward. It's a rarely-used concept that's expertly implemented to give crafters another way to really hone in on the specific areas they want to specialize in.
Another wonderful surprise I unearthed while item-tinkering was moddable gear, select weapons and armor whose stats are fully decided by the modification items dropped into them. Once you find moddable gear with a look you like (or a helmet that changes your voice in a cool way), you can conceivably keep it forever, tossing in new modifications to boost the stats as you level up.
It's a great system that helps you establish a unique look in the universe, and its interface is very well designed. The only problem I had was trying to figure out which stats were best for my character. Ambiguously named stats like Surge aren't explained, and I had to go digging through sub-menus in my character pane to even get a hint at what they offered me.
TOR is full of clever new approaches and tweaks to long-standing MMO features. The auction house automatically suggests buyout prices to undercut the lowest seller; datacrons are nestled on every planet, offering small permanent stat boosts; and there's a full codex stuffed with lore, backstories, and interesting info for the knowledge-seeker. The only major disappointment on this front were achievements, which appear as tiny, uninspired codex entries—clearly a hastily-built afterthought.
Shooting up the place
Where The Old Republic makes the flimsiest attempt to break the mold is in its combat design: a very traditional click-to-activate ability system that borrows heavily from the big MMOs of recent years. It's enjoyable enough to play with, and has a few nuances, but will ultimately leave MMO vets with a sense of déjà vu at a time when most are eagerly looking for something different.
The 16 advanced classes do, however, offer a strong breadth of playstyles, ranging from ruthless Sith to tricky Smugglers, and most can fulfill two roles in groups, depending on the skill tree you choose to specialize in. Skill trees are very different from one another, but there's almost zero room for customization within each of the trees, so you won't be able to experiment much after you settle on one.
To the stars
Around level 15, you gain command of your own starship, which matches the style of your class, and are free to cruise around the galaxy. You can march imperiously around your ship like you can in Mass Effect, but alas, your ship is tiny and there are only a few interactive spots.
Your ship can see action in any of the dozen or so space combat missions drizzled around the galaxy map. In each, your ship proceeds along a fixed path as you use your mouse to target enemy fighters and battlements on enemy capital ships and take a few minutes to complete. Ship combat is a pleasant diversion that breaks up your questing routine, but it's definitely not why I'd recommend TOR.
No fair, that's cheating
Likewise, I'm lukewarm about the PvP elements, at least at early levels. I've played the three instanced PvP WarZones 25 times, and most matches had a very broad range of players (anywhere between levels 12 and 50). Almost without exception, the highest level players—who have the most skills and skill points at their disposal—dominated the match. The measures put in place to balance incongruous player power do help at higher levels, but PvP is often full of frustration as a low-level player.
These annoying balance issues will hopefully be alleviated at 50, or when more players are made available to the match-making tool—either by BioWare deciding to implement cross-server sign-ups or simply after people stop questing 24/7—allowing the game to force tighter level brackets. The WarZones house some fun gameplay (especially Huttball, which is a twisted version of soccer with flame pits, acid pools, and death) and it'd be a shame if you had to avoid them until max level to find a fair fight.
The game's designated open-world PvP zones look extremely promising. Particularly the endgame planet Ilum, whose expansive, intricate battlefield filled with battling war machines and giant turrets is entertaining even without other players in it. They're currently ghost towns as players focus on leveling, but I hope that the zones live up to their potential to serve as bloody hangouts for PvP enthusiasts like myself.
Tech specs
BioWare hit a big homerun with server stability. I didn't hear of a single server crash in the entire first week, and the constant addition of new servers kept queue times reasonable. Inside the game, things were a bit creakier. My client never crashed, but the typical MMO bugs showed up to cause problems, like a few broken quests, unusable gathering nodes, and UI glitches. I only saw reports of one game-breaking bug, but it was fixed on launch day.
Into the future
A lot of questions remain for The Old Republic, particularly regarding the endgame. We know that hard-mode Flashpoints, raids, and PvP areas await us at max level, but we don't know if they'll prove diverse and interesting enough to keep our attention for the long-term. If the endgame consists of gear-grinding and standard raid encounters, it'll have a very jarring effect on those who loved playing through stories for the previous 200 hours. I'm also concerned that the need to record new voice-overs for every bit of new dialog will slow down production of content updates and make the team more likely to focus only on raid content post-launch.
But that's all speculation for now. What I know for certain is that it takes close to 200 hours to level a character to 50, and there are eight different class stories that I intend to play through. There's a ridiculous amount of content in The Old Republic. The game's quality is consistently outstanding and, if you enjoy RPGs at all, the price tag is easily justified—even if you never step foot past max-level.
The Old Republic plunges players into the Star Wars universe we've always wanted to live in, and succeeds as both and RPG and an MMO. And perhaps just as thrilling, there's an oversized Bantha's worth of potential in expanding areas like space combat and the companion system, or in adding new features like guild housing. This one's got a long, bright future ahead of it.Rebecca is a weekly Club 75 Blogger as she documents her journey through the CPA Exam. She has been a member of Another71.com's Club 75 since June 2010.
Happy New Year everyone! Last year I made it my goal to pass the entire exam before the ball dropped at midnight on January 1st. However, as we all know that has not been the case.
That being said, the goal continues on into 2012, and I WILL be successful this time. I am not allowing this exam to take over my life for another year, so this is it for me. I know there are a lot of you who are going to be right there with me too!
As much as I love the holidays and all the craziness they bring, I am glad they are over. My study schedule definitely ended up on the back burner with the back to back weekend holidays, so I feel a little behind.
I am not worried, though, where now I have no excuses as to why I cannot put in the appropriate amount of time and my eyes are on the prize. Its a new year for new accomplishments and FAR will be my first one this year!
?The volume of FAR is what scares me the most I have decided. I am not sure how I am going to get through it all and retain it. I know that I cannot allow it to intimidate me or else I really wont make it out alive.
Plus, the more I let it scare me the more often I want to change my test date. I know that isnt the answer so I am just going to keep pushing through all these multiple choice questions and hope for the absolute best. I only need a 75, but this is the one 75 that I need to keep me motivated as I am losing steam.
Which exam do all of you plan on knocking out first in 2012? Are you just as nervous as I am and sick of not passing? Well we are all in this together for better or worse. I love hearing peoples success stories as I envision the feeling of passing the entire exam and those of failure make me realize that I am not alone and make me want to keep fighting this exam.
I wish each and every one of you the best of luck in 2012! This is our year and we will own these exams!
Until next time,
RebeccaFor Ashley Lawrence, the time was right.
With her stellar soccer career at West Virginia University over and with plenty of time before the 2020 Olympics, the world truly was her oyster. Lawrence was in demand in North America and abroad.
Europe won out. But the 21-year-old from Toronto says she sees herself playing in North America down the line.
"It was definitely a difficult decision," Lawrence said from France where she now wears the storied uniform of Paris Saint-Germain. "Especially in my senior year at university. Naturally, I was giving some thought to the next step.
"I thought about NWSL, I thought about Europe and I knew for myself that I wanted to experience both at some point in my career. Having the opportunity to go to Europe and playing with a club like PSG, it's a massive opportunity and there's a lot of challenges that come with it. And I think for me, it's important to continue to challenge myself, challenge my game because in two years time it's the next big event for Canada — the World Cup — and it's important that when we're outside of Canada, that we're continuing to develop our game at the highest level."
Her contract with PSG runs through June 2019.
Lawrence has joined a winner. Midway through the season, Paris Saint-Germain leads the league with a 10-0-0 record and has qualified for the quarter-finals of the UEFA Women's Champions League.
"The teammates, the staff have been very welcoming," said Lawrence, who already has an apartment despite being in Paris a little more than a week. "Of course, I was a little nervous with the language barrier but they've done very well to adjust to help me with the transition.
"And the level (of soccer) is very high. It's been only been four training sessions and every player's very technical. The pace of the game is fast. It's very challenging but for me it's exciting because I know it's going to help me as a player, help me develop my game in the right direction."
Lawrence finds herself part of a global squad that features players from France, Brazil, Costa Rica, Nigeria, Poland and Spain.Watch Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie 1996)
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Watch Movies Online: New Releases Troll The Potter family has just moved to a rented apartment in San Francisco. Harry Potter Sr. and his wife Anne are bringing the packages to the apartment and their son Harry Jr. and their little daughter Wendy Anne stays on the sidewalk.
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Watch Movies Online: Most Popular Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Miles Morales is juggling his life between being a high school student and being a spider-man. When Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk uses a super collider, others from across the Spider-Verse are transported to this dimension.
Green Book Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to |
, Napoleon I took the crown from the pope's hand and placed it on his own head. This had been agreed on between Napoleon and the Pope. At Milan Cathedral on May 26 1805, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy with the Iron Crown of Lombardy.
To restore prosperity, Napoleon modernized finance. He regulated the economy to control prices, encouraged new industry, and built roads and canals. To ensure well-trained officials and military officers, he promoted a system of public schools under firm government control. He also repealed some social reforms of the revolution. He made peace with the Catholic Church in the Concordat of 1801. The Concordat kept the Church under state control but recognized religious freedom for Catholics.
Napoleon I won support across class lines. He encouraged the émigré population to return, provided they gave an oath of loyalty. Peasants were relieved when he recognized their right to lands they had bought during the revolution. Napoleon's chief opposition came from royalists and republicans.
Napoleonic Code [ change | change source ]
Among Napoleon's most lasting reforms was a new law code, popularly called the Napoleonic Code. It embodied Enlightenment principles such as equality of all citizens before the law, religious toleration, and advancement based on virtue. But the Napoleonic Code undid some reforms of the French Revolution. Women, for example, lost most of their newly gained rights under the new code. the law considered women minors who could not exercise the rights of citizenship. Male heads of households regained full authority over their wives and children. Again, Napoleon valued order and authority over individual rights.
The Grand Empire [ change | change source ]
Emperor Napoleon abandoned plans to invade England and turned his armies against the Austro-Russian forces, defeating them at the Battle of Austerlitz on December 2, 1805. In 1806 Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstädt and the Russian army at Friedland. He crowned his elder brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Naples and Sicily in 1806 and converted the Dutch Republic into the kingdom of Holland for his brother Louis. Napoleon also established the Confederation of the Rhine (most of the German states) of which he was protector.
To legitimize his rule, he divorced his wife Joséphine and married Marie Louise, duchess of Parma and daughter of the Emperor Francis I of Austria. Soon she delivered a son and heir to the Bonaparte Dynasty. He was named Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte or Napoleon II and crowned King of Rome from his birth.
At Tilsit in July 1807, Napoleon made an ally of Russian tsar Alexander Romanov and greatly reduced the size of Prussia. He also added new states to the empire: the kingdom of Westphalia, under his youngest brother Jerome, the duchy of Warsaw, and others states.
Napoleon's retreat
The Congress of Erfurt sought to preserve the Russo-French alliance and the leaders had a friendly personal relationship after their first meeting at Tilsit in 1807. However, in June 23, 1812, Napoleon went to war with Russia. The French invasion of Russia defeated many Russian cities and villages, but by the time they reached Moscow it was winter. Due to the Russian army's scorched earth tactics, the French found little food for themselves and their horses. Napoleon's army was unable to defeat the Russians. The Russians began to attack. Napoleon and his army had to go back to France. The French suffered greatly in during Napoleon's retreat. Most of his soldiers never returned to France. His army was reduced to 70,000 soldiers and 40,000 stragglers, against more than three times as many Allied troops. Finally at the 1813 Battle of the Nations he was defeated by the Allies: Sweden, Russia, Austria, and Prussia.
Abdication of Emperor Napoleon in Fontainebleau
Exile in Elba [ change | change source ]
Napoleon had no choice but to abdicate in favor of his son. However, the Allies refused to accept this. Napoleon abdicated without conditions on April 11, 1814. Before his official abdication, Napoleon attempted suicide with a pill but it did not work.[9] In the Treaty of Fontainebleau the victors exiled him to Elba, an island of 12,000 inhabitants in the Mediterranean. The Allies allowed Napoleon to keep an imperial title "Emperor of Elba" and an allowance of 2 million francs a year. Napoleon even requested a 21 gun salute as emperor of the island of Elba. Many delegates feared that Elba was too close to Europe to keep such a dangerous force.
The Hundred Days [ change | change source ]
Battle of Waterloo
Separated from his son and wife, who had come under Austrian control, cut off from the allowance guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and aware of rumours he was about to be banished to a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean, Napoleon escaped from Elba on February 26 1815. He made a surprise march on March 1, 1815 to Paris. His former troops joined him and Louis XVIII fled to exile. He again became ruler of France for a length of 100 days. Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the British under Duke of Wellington and Prussians on June 18 1815, which was his last battle. Napoleon was again captured and taken to his second exile on the island of Saint Helena on the Atlantic Ocean.
Second exile and death [ change | change source ]
Napoleon's death at St. Helena
Napoleon was sent to the island of Saint Helena, off the coast of Africa. He died on May 5 1821 of stomach cancer. Napoleon kept himself up to date of the events through The Times and hoped for release in the event that Holland became Prime Minister. There were other plots to rescue Napoleon from captivity including one from Texas, where exiled soldiers from the Grande Armée wanted a resurrection of the Napoleonic Empire in America. There was even a plan to rescue him with a primitive submarine. For Lord Byron, Napoleon was the epitome of the Romantic hero, the persecuted, lonely and flawed genius. The news that Napoleon had taken up gardening at Longwood also appealed to more domestic British sensibilities.
Statue in Cherbourg-Octeville unveiled by Napoleon III in 1858. Napoleon I strengthened the town's defences to prevent British naval incursions.
French people remain proud of Napoleon's glory days. The Napoleonic Code reflects the modern French Constitution. Weapons and other kinds of military technology remained largely static through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, but 18th century operational mobility underwent significant change. Napoleon's biggest influence was in the conduct of warfare. His popularity would later help his nephew Louis-Napoléon to become ruler of France
On the world stage, Napoleon's conquest spread the ideas of the revolution. He failed to make Europe into a French Empire. Instead, he sparked nationalist feeling across Europe.
“The surest way to remain poor is to be honest“
“Ability is of little account without opportunity.”
“I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up.”
“Women are nothing but machines for producing children.”
“If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.”
“In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.”
“He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”
“Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.”
“The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.”
“What is history but a fable agreed upon?”
"Kiss the feet of Popes provided their hands are tied."
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"Today on IRC, Larry Wall showed this piece of Perl 6 code, which he wrote for Rosetta Code:
sub pascal { [ 1 ], -> @p { [ 0, @p Z+ @p, 0 ] }... * } ; say pascal[ ^ 10 ]. perl
That's Pascal's triangle, generated in one line of Perl 6.
The... is the series operator, which generates lists by feeding the previous value(s) (here always one array) to the generating block on its left, until it reaches the goal on the right (in this case "whatever", which means it returns a lazy, infinite list).
So for example if the previous item was the array [1, 2, 1], the code block evaluates 0, 1, 2, 1 Z+ 1, 2, 1, 0.
Z is the zip operator, Z+ is pairwise addition (ie adding the pairs that the zip operator produced). In our example that leads to 0+1, 1+2, 2+1, 1+0 or 1, 3, 3, 1.
It takes a while to get used to the meta operators and the series operator, but once you've understood them, you can do pretty neat things with them.Lincoln High School coach Pat Adelman (KATU/screen grab)
A high school basketball coach in Portland, Oregon came under fire this week after he allegedly objectified two black players by demanding white players touch them so that fear of black skin would not affect game play.
In a complaint obtained by the Willamette Week, four parents of students at Lincoln High School complained that their children were humiliated and objectified by coach Pat Adelman, the son of former Trail Blazers coach Rick Adelman.
According to the complaint, Adelman exploded at his player during a halftime tirade, and told them that they were losing because the white players were “afraid to touch black students.”
The parents said that Adelman singled out two players who were black and demanded that the white players touch them.
“Does that make you like black people now?” Adelman reportedly asked. “Well, do you keep a flashlight handy when you have sleepovers with them?”
Laurie Wimmer, who is one of the parents and a lobbyist for the Oregon Education Association, contacted Portland Public Schools Superintendent Carole Smith directly when she learned of the incident, Willamette Week reported.
“When it is brought to the attention of a student of color that they are considered by the white world to be ‘outsiders,’ as Coach Adelman did in this outrageous act, that is something that cannot be undone,” Wimmer and other parents stated in the complaint. “Forever after [the students] will be, to their teammates and in their own eyes, ‘black’ and ‘other.’ Not ‘Lincoln students.'”
Although the district declined to comment on specifics about the case, PPS spokesman Jon Isaacs told the paper in an email that Adelman was back on the job after six days of paid leave.
Another email obtained by the paper indicated the district planned to hold a “restorative justice meeting” and “something about getting Adelman some sort of training was also vaguely implied.”
The three parents have demanded that Adelman be fired.
Watch the video below from KATU, broadcast Feb. 10, 2016.Last weekend was PDN’s Photo Plus Expo, and like a lot of east coast photographers I was in attendance. It seems like every year photo conferences get bigger and better drawing in massive crowds and yet there are still photographers who don't see any value in them. It makes me wonder if people understand and are taking full advantage of these events.
For about the last decade I've been attending Photo Plus Expo among other conferences. I was lucky that in college as an editor for the school paper attending educational events like these were fully paid for. I’m extremely grateful for those first couple of years because without them I wouldn't have learned just how important they really are within in the Photo Industry and to becoming a Pro. Since I just returned from Photo Plus Expo I’ll be referring to it for examples but most of what I'm going to talk about applies to almost all conferences, workshops, national organizations (ASMP, APA, PPA etc), and even camera clubs.
As Advertised.
We all know about the obvious benefits of attending and the organizers put a ton of effort into making them better for us every year. The expo floors are packed with booths, big and small, with every new toy on the market to demo. Over the last couple years there has been a change on the floor with the big players really going all out bringing in sponsored photographers to show off their technique or do lectures on various topics. Even creating elaborate staged photo opportunities with models.Most the larger conferences, Photo Plus included, have great seminar packages offering lectures and workshops on countless topics for photographers of all levels. Photo Walks and Master classes have become very popular recently adding even more educational value. They also offer portfolio reviews, photo contests, and keynote lectures by some of the biggest names in the industry.
Though these things should be more than enough to convince any photographer from beginner to pro to attend, if you still do not see the value then here is the real reason those photographers in the know attend.
Networking.
It sounds so obvious and simple how could this be the secret? Well it is simple and it is not. No matter what level photographer you are, networking will improve, increase, and build your business and brand. There is no better place than these events to network with your peers, vendors, and all the other various industry people in attendance. Why would I want to network with other photographers? How would I get started? What is the proper way to go about it? Let's break it down.
Why Networking is Important.
Networking is the best most cost efficient marketing tool any business has. Without a doubt. There is no argument. If you’ve ever admired or followed a pro photographer and wondered how they got to where they are, it's networking. In today's world where we are constantly bombarded with amazing images it is more evident than ever that talent may not be enough. Building long lasting beneficial relationships within any industry will only have a positive impact on one's career.
Advice, Encouragement, Feedback.
At its most basic level, knowing people within any industry gives you an outlet for answering any question you have about your work and business. One of the most common questions I see on any camera forum is, “How much should I charge?” Who better to ask than photographers you have a relationship with. Even the most veteran Pro sometimes has questions about career opportunities and seeks out advice from his peers. Maybe you're a wedding photographer and unsure about licensing for a commercial client. Or need recommendations on assistants and venues in a different region. There are any number of scenarios for why you would want to have photographers, editors, or vendors available to reach out to.
Word of Mouth.
This isn't just important for your clients. We are all both consumers and producers. We all want an editor to like and share our work but it's not just them you should be focused on. Photographers share other photographers work all the time. I’m not a wedding photographer but most people I know still come to me asking for advice on finding one. I will always give recommendations for individuals whose work I respect and know to be reliable professionals. You're a portrait photographer, but a client wants something you're not comfortable shooting. The client doesn't have a big enough budget, so you pass the job to someone you think can handle it. You've booked a job, but last minute have to cancel because of an emergency. You don't want to lose the client so reach out to a peer. Word of mouth is about building Authentic personal connections with people who can become your clients and/or refer clients to you.
Partnerships and Creative Personal Growth.
You are your brand, not the final product you create. Your work should speak for itself, but when we build a network of peers within our industry we create people that can talk about you as more than a product. They sell you as a person, a vision, a talent, your passion. They inspire you to push yourself. They become Mentors that can guide and nurture you. Our peers can open our eyes to new paths we may have never thought of. Just recently, a photographer told me a story about how they had been shooting the same thing everywhere they went for years just out of habit. They never put any thought into the images and they sat on a HDD in his archive. Then one day another photographer saw some of these images and commented on how it would make a great personal project. The 1st photographer had never thought about the images as a collection and what together they might represent. Since they had already shot hundreds of images, it quickly became a new book.
How to Get Started.
The Expo Floor.
You can't just show up and expect results. The most important thing to remember is that relationships take time and have to be genuine. When I first started attending conferences I ran around all crazy and overwhelmed. I tried to get as much free Swag as I could, even revisiting the Kodak and Fuji booths for extra free samples of film. I was still a college student after all. I was looking at all the big company signs hanging above me when I should have been looking at the name badges hanging below. You could be standing next to Jay Maisel and not ever know it. A great photographer friend once told me a story about how when he first started he would go to events paying close attention to everyone's name badge. When he recognized a name he would introduce himself. If he new about their work he would talk about it, if not he would ask what they were working on. He wasn't interested in the Swag or even what was happening on the floor. Every event, year after year he would do this wandering the event floor inspecting name tags. Eventually one day he started walking into events and people came up to him. They knew who he was. Some of those people became friends others just recognized him as a peer, but for almost zero investment just attending an event and introducing yourself he created opportunity.
PDN Plus Expo Badges from previous years
You have to pay attention to what info is given on the badges. Are they a photographer, editor, or vendor? Do they work for a company or are they freelance? Steer your conversations towards them and what info you have available. Introduce yourself to the people around them. Introduce them to the people you're with. Walk the floor always looking for people you know, people you want to get to know, and be there to be seen by the people who might know you.
Be prepared and have a plan. Have plenty of business cards ready and some promotional material. Think about what recent or important projects you’re working on incase someone asks what you have been up to. You want to be able to quickly and clearly give your elevator speech about any given project that might be interesting to who you're talking to. Have a plan and set goals for yourself. I want to introduce myself to three photographers whose work I admire. Or I want to start a conversation with 10 new people. Here are a few easy Ice breakers.
How long have you been in the industry?
What type/genre of photography do you shoot?
Do you have any personal projects your working on?
What other events are you attending this year?
Some of my promos from a recent project and business cards
Behind Closed Doors.
At every conference there are meetings, deals being made, and new opportunities being worked out. Companies are looking for new photographers to work with. Several of the big ones even have private demo rooms or hotel suites for meetings. Software companies are looking for brand ambassadors and feedback on new products. Workshops and other conferences are scouting for new and upcoming speakers for their own events. Photographers are catching up in the speaker ready room inspiring new collaborations or offering advice on new projects. In every room, behind every door, people are sitting down together and taking their careers to the next level through networking.
How do I get behind those doors? Well maybe you already have some connections in the industry or acquaintances that can make introductions for you. If you know what you want to accomplish you can reach out in advance and start to set up meetings. Let people know you’ll be attending and look to see who will be there that you want to meet with. Once you've started to build your network you should be able to see how these events become more important. You can start to develop the necessary resources to go beyond the expo floor to where things really start getting interesting.
Canon's CPS room at Photo Plus
The After Parties.
Did you know about the after parties? I didn't. I attended conferences for years before I got invited to my first party. It's not something often mentioned and in most cases they are open to anyone. A lot of times the conference themselves will host a big networking bash which is great, but the real networking happens at all the industry parties that take advantage of so many people in one location. Several of the big sponsors will throw parties like Sony and Adobe did this year. Other companies might hold shows, photo walks, or special events. Photo communities like ASMP and APA will sometimes host a gathering. Even Fstoppers put together a party open to the whole community. There are countless parties to attend but most don't go out of their way to let you know about them you have to seek them out.
A quick snap during the Fstoppers party
Etiquette.
Then there are the semi-private parties. These are the big time of conference events. Often a who's who of industry leaders. I've been to a couple and I've heard rumors of a few others. They might be a thank you party hosted by a workshop for all their speakers. Or a dinner for all the photographers a company sponsors. Usually you really have to know someone to be invited or like me accompany someone with a bit more of a reputation then yourself. This is yet another example of why we network. Each step leads us up a ladder to new and bigger opportunities. Getting to meet someone important or that you admire is great. Having someone that person respects introduce you to them is much better. This of course leads us to...
I’d imagine most people are taught and practice basic manners when interacting with people at events but it's important to remember that this is about building genuine connections. Be careful not to be pushy. You don't want to immediately show people your portfolio or hand out your business card. It's not a contest to see who has fewer cards at the end of the day. Don't just collect cards either get to know people. For a lot of people it can be difficult to go up to strangers and start a conversation. It's ok to walk up to someone and introduce yourself. That's why most of us are there anyway. Confidence and friendliness will go a long way. If you see someone you want to talk to already in discussion, be respectful and wait for the right opportunity. Don't let being new to the industry waste a good opportunity to network.
Try and ask questions about their work or company. Ask smart questions and try to find a subject or topic you are confident about. People often feel more comfortable talking about themselves and it takes the pressure off of you. Also be mindful of social cues. Are there people standing around waiting to speak with them? Do they seem distracted? Realize when to end the interaction. Be appreciative and if it seems appropriate, give them your card. If it didn't go perfect or they were too busy that's ok, try again next time. We are building a network not acquiring one.
Follow Up.
Even with the rise of social networking face to face introductions still play an important role for photographers. By attending conferences and other networking events repeatedly we can reinforce more and bigger relationships. Before an event I always reach out to the people I know will be attending and try to make arrangements to meet up with them. The expo floor is perfect for this because it also creates a way to meet more people. Some of the best contacts with vendors I've made happened because I met up with someone on the floor and a vendor came up to chat with them getting me an introduction in the process. People remember faces better than names and that's why you want to keep introducing yourself every event you can make it to.
Maybe you only have time to attend one event each year and are afraid the people you've met won't remember you. That's ok too. After each event I try to reach out to the people I feel I made progress with. You want to put the time and effort in to grow that connection. There is a bit of personal judgment with how to follow up with each individual but here are some ideas.
Email or connect on social media.
Send a written note along with some promo material.
Invite them out for coffee.
Or offer to meet up next time you're both in each others area.
Call them and set up a lunch or dinner.
Conclusion
Although getting to play with some of the newest gear on the market before buying it can be great, if you're not interested in gear, the Expo floor offers much more then this. Similarly if the lectures and workshops don't appeal to you or for some reason you feel you can't learn anything new from them, you're missing opportunities. Many photographers have made and have amazing careers never setting foot at conferences and maybe you're one of them, but for a lot of photographers especially ones just starting out, networking and becoming a bigger part of the industry community can be a huge stepping stone to being a pro. Beyond have a thriving business and lots of clients if you desire to teach workshops, get sponsorship deals, or be a leader in any of the national organizations. Putting in the face time and getting your name out there is the quickest and most cost efficient method available.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Precursors
One relic they always leave behind is a sense of wonder.
The Elder Race still learn and grow
Their power grows with purpose strong
To claim the home where they belong." Rush, "2112", "2112" "They left our planets long agoThe Elder Race still learn and growTheir power grows with purpose strongTo claim the home where they belong."
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Precursors, a.k.a. "Ancients", "Elders" or "Old Ones", are a standard of Science Fiction (especially Space Opera), fantasy and occasionally Horror: an ancient race whose culture and knowledge rose to its pinnacle in ages long past but which is no longer present.
In Science Fiction, they may have visited Earth and/or other worlds but they would remain a mystery. They are considered the first species to have technology, making them godlike. In fantasy, they will usually be the forerunners created by gods/God, mighty in deeds and magic. At the height of their civilisation, Precursors might have created intelligent species or reworked entire worlds with a snap of a finger. Any strange and persistent mystery in the story's'verse is usually laid at their feet.
Predecessors now leave behind nothing but tantalizing ruins and rare, sometimes incomprehensible artifacts and dangerous weapons. Just why, no one knows. Perhaps they Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence, succumbed to decadence or were wiped out by a disaster or war, or maybe they just relocated en masse to somewhere else where they haven't been found yet.
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Whatever the reason, they set the stage for the modern world, left behind a few MacGuffins and surprises for the heroes and villains to find, and then conveniently got out of the way. And then there are the times where they themselves are the reason everything's gone to hell, and they intend to keep it that way. If the Precursors implemented a plan that, whether they still exist or not, still influences outcomes, then they are also Powers That Be.
Sometimes the Precursors can be rediscovered; this is often regarded as a bad move, especially by the Precursors themselves. This also applies to the audience: the romance of Precursors can be easily shattered by giving too much away.
It may also happen that Earth Humans are Precursors and their incredibly human descendants try to rediscover their heritage, or conversely, if Earth Humans are the only descendants. If Humans are the Precursors, that's Advanced Ancient Humans. If everyone's scared of them, that's Humans Are Cthulhu. If they pick on their descendants, that's Abusive Precursors; if they couldn't care less about anyone else, it's Neglectful Precursors; if they help their descendants, it's Benevolent Precursors. If there's one or more race that played Precursors to the Precursors, then they're Recursive Precursors. Any and all of these are susceptible to Awakening the Sleeping Giant. If they gave their tech or it's being used by another race, it's Low Culture, High Tech. Very often, their most powerful technology will appear deceptively primitive and/or ceremonial. If everyone gets into an argument over their leftover toys, you have an Archaeological Arms Race on your hands.
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Very commonly used to justify Rubber-Forehead Aliens: everyone was made from a common template by the Precursors, so they look pretty similar.
Compare/contrast with Sufficiently Advanced, Space Elves, The Fair Folk, Eldritch Abomination.
Not to be confused with the space flight sim, The Precursors.
And now, young one, behold the legacy of those who were here before you:
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
In the Marvel Universe, the race of giant Celestials have influenced many planets, including Earth. They wear strange suits of armor, giving the impression that they are mechanical, but that's not the case. They also test races and civilisations according to their standards to see who are worthy. In addition, there are also the Elders of the Universe, a loose associations of beings who all are The Last of Their Kind, and who hail from the first intelligent races to develop in the universe. They are less active, though, since they are all obsessed with one narrow hobby which apparently is the only thing that keeps them from dying of sheer boredom. The Grandmaster may be interested in the gaming and gambling habits of various lesser races, for instance, but couldn't care less about any aspects of their culture that has nothing to do with his obsession with games. There is also the race know as the Watchers, who started to do something similar, but got cold feet when early interference with a much more primitive race led to horrible wars. They have sworn to not interfere with their nigh godlike powers, only record what happens. (The Watcher appointed to Earth is a juvenile delinquent who breaks this rule regularly, but surreptitiously, so as to not get in trouble with his kind.)
In the DC Universe, the Malthusians were one of the earliest sentient races in the universe. They went on to become the Guardians of the Universe. And the Controllers, and the Zamarons, and Krona. They run the gamut of precursor subtropes.
There's also the Old Gods, precursors of Jack Kirby's Fourth World beings. They are actually older than the DC Universe, and are said to have caused the destruction of the one before.
The Merk in Nexus are or were a race of extremely psychically gifted and technologically advanced aliens who left the galaxy and, apparently, their bodies, behind. One of them remained behind, however, and empowered the eponymous hero.
The High Ones of ElfQuest surely qualify (even though they have known descendants), because none of the protagonist elves know much about them, and their powers and origins are a great mystery when the series begins. Elves, trolls and preservers come to be thought of this way by the humans of the medieval and futuristic eras.
It is hinted that Dr. Manhattan will go on to do this after the events of Watchmen somewhere else in the universe, or in another one of his own creation
In Gold Digger, finding the various precursor civilizations is Gina's job. Of course, she usually ends up encountering the stuff left behind, and occasionally bringing it home.
Royals has a reveal that the Kree were created by a long-gone bunch called the Progenitors, much like how they created the Inhumans. These Progenitors are also the ones responsible for the mysterious Sky Spears. It eventually turns out they're full on Abusive Precursors. They enhance species, then come back and sample the innovations to make more Progenitors out of their test subjects. They gave up on the Kree thanks to their becoming an evolutionary dead-end, but when a handful of Inhumans stumbled upon one of their farm-moons and blew it up, that got their attention. And so they decide to come to Earth to farm the Inhumans.
Fanworks
Film
Literature
Live-Action TV
Music
In the The Sword song, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzephyrians", the Precursors are humans from roughly the current era. After a presumably nuclear war screws up the planet, the survivors idiotically decide that they need to find and launch more of our missiles.
The Jimi Hendrix song "Up From the Skies" has an alien revisiting Earth after a long hiatus: "I have lived here before/ in days of ice/ and of course this is why I'm so concerned/ and I come back to find/ the stars misplaced/ and the smell of a world/ that's burning." Maybe a precursor, maybe not, but he'd been here a long, long time ago.
Some of Doctor Steel's music and videos, most notably his song "Planet X Marks the Spot", deal with the Ancient Astronaut theories of Zechariah Sitchin.
Pinball
According to Loony Labyrinth, the ancient Minos were masters of time travel, genetic engineering, and other amazing feats.
Podcasts
In the backstory to the Cool Kids Table game Small Magic, the Tenshi and the Oni are this for humanity. When a Tenshi and an Oni had a child together (the first human), it led to a war that wiped out most of them, forcing the Tenshi to put the Oni in a deep sleep and flee the world.
Tabletop Games
Toys
BIONICLE toyed with this idea a lot, but eventually subverted it with the Great Beings: hailed in the story's early years as powerful, mythological figures responsible for creating the Matoran Universe and its creatures, but then moved to other projects, and chaos ensued. Later it was revealed that these Beings were a highly eccentric group of scientist governors, and can only be seen as the precursors to the Matoran Universe's inhabitants — whom they themselves viewed as expandable machines. Otherwise, they were just one of Spherus Magna's (the planet which they once ruled over) several species. They are also still around someplace, but are hiding, as the inhabitants of their world hated their guts.
Video Games
Web Comics
In the Furry Webcomic Jack, the furries that currently live on Earth are the descendants of furries created in a lab by humans, making humans the Precursors. They were wiped out in a war started by the first furry, Jack. The furry version of the United States government knows about furrykind's origins, and is (probably wisely) keeping it a secret.
In Unity, the creatures living in the ship are all distant descendants of Earth life. Humans built the ship, but disappeared long ago.
In Homestuck, universes are created by sessions of Sburb. And the trolls created ours.
In Impure Blood, they are the Ancients. Roan is a Half-Human Hybrid descendent. The Watchers think they are evil.
The Cyantian Chronicles have at least two species, the Rumuah who created the Cyantians as servants and heirs, than died out from a genetic disease. And the "Squids" who came along centuries later and enslaved the Cyantians, until Alpha Akaelae led a successful rebellion and wiped them out.
In Iothera, the ancient Seb attained spaceflight, then apparently vanished. Cassandra: We still don't really know who the Seb were or how they built the Red Towers or why they were on the moons or even what all the stuff they left behind does.
Harbourmaster has the Qohathoth, who were tormented by the loneliness of being the only sapient lifeform in the galaxy. Although their quest to find other species to befriend (the Yogzarthu didn't want friendship) led them to journey into other dimensions before humans could become spacefarers, they terraformed many other planets to be Earth-like in hopes of sparing humanity that same pain. Ironically, they made the terraformed planets too paradisial; nothing was subjected to the kind of pressures that would select for sapience, until a comet strike altered Tethys's climate, allowing the entomorphs to evolve to sapience.
Drive: The Sill were the most advanced race the galaxy has ever known and the only one to ever reach a type 2 Kardashev civilization. They ruled the galaxy for over 20,000 years undisputed, and their technology reached levels that modern societies can barely dream of. All that's left of them now are some impressive ruins and some slowly dying monks.
Awful Hospital has the Old Flesh and, to a certain extent, the Parliament of the Old Flesh. Apparently, at the beginning of all things, all of existence contained the Old Flesh, and nothing else. At some point, the Old Flesh became infected, and as that infection devoured the Old Flesh, it gave rise to all other concepts in the Range. The Parliament are the remains of the Old Flesh itself note One in-universe book that the Eye Slob finds tells this tale using the metaphor of a 'cake' to describe the Flesh, and refers to the Parliament as the 'crumbs' of that cake, and they seek to use their own infection to eliminate all concepts that arose from the Old Flesh (i.e. 'literally everything') and re-create it in the form of the New Flesh.
, and they seek to use their own infection to eliminate all concepts that arose from the Old Flesh (i.e. 'literally everything') and re-create it in the form of the New Flesh. The Ancients of Leaving The Cradle had unimaginably powerful presense in the galaxy some milions to billions years ago, changing planets and star systems so they could be able to support life, leaving behind artifacts that enabled the civilizations that came after to discover FTL and other fancy tech, and apparently they are even responsible for the very possibility of FTL travel itself, with strong implications that they tampered with the fundamental physical forces of the Universe on a whim, and before that you could travel only as fast as Einstein would allow you. Then they just disappear without a trace, sans for some artifacts or occasional astroengineering project.
Schlock Mercenary: There's a scattering of ruins from extinct civilizations, but not as much as one would expect considering Fermi's Paradox. The oldest race around, the Gatekeepers, are only a million years old. Quite old, to be sure, but young compared to the galaxy. As Petey put it, "If it's this easy to be immortal, where are all the adults?" They were all wiped out due to a variety of reasons over the eons, top of the list being the long-gun, a weapon that can fire anywhere in the galaxy from anywhere in |
of great matchups for a two-start week against the Padres and Jays. But will he do well? Slegers has had a respectable 7.22 K/9 and low 1.76 BB/9 in Triple-A this season, en route to a 3.40 ERA and 1.23 WHIP. That doesn’t scream massive upside, but it does hint at a finesse pitcher that could find his way into outs and innings for your squad. His low 90s Fastball could be amplified by his massive 6’10” frame, and you may not get a chance to snag him if you wait-and-see.This article will help you determine if you are ready to take your model railroading hobby to the next level by making a DCC train set. First of all, this article assumes you already have an introduction to Digital Command Control, but how do you know when you are ready to upgrade?
Are you SURE this hobby is right for you?
Make sure your interest is genuine. If you already have committed money, space, and buy-in from your family members (who typically tolerate your enthusiasm at best) then you are in a good position to expand. If you are just getting started, you may look into getting a DCC-Ready system that still operates in analog, but can be easily upgraded later. It will take extra configuring if you want to take upgrade an older analog system, and it may not be successful anyway. I predict analog systems won't be sold in the future, just as Widescreen TVs are the only style of TVs you can get anymore.
Are you READY for additional expense?
DCC adds an additional layer of expense to the traditional layout. There are many systems to choose from, depending on your price range, technical skill and demands for functionality. At minimum, you'll spend a couple hundred to get the basics, a cab (throttle) controller and a loco-installed decoder to get started. You'll be able to expand to a more expensive system later without much difficulty. As I mentioned, if you are just getting started in the hobby, go for a cheaper system. You can even find great equipment second hand from other hobbyists. Try Craigslist, or better yet, connect with your local Model Railroad club to get great sources of quality used components.
Are you WILLING to turn your 'toy train' into an actual Model Railroad?
If you are going to buy a digital set, go the distance and turn it into an operational railroad. The key to this is to make sure you are committed to start what you begin. If there was such a thing as an unfinished model railroad cemetery, it would be packed with the dreams of many once-enthusiasts. It typically boils down to having a clear plan moving forward and keeping your motivation level high. Get the benchwork and underlayment for the smallest section of your layout done first, so you can lay track and enjoy the high of a quick victory, even before completed scenery. When you come back to work on the layout tomorrow, make sure to get in some 'playtime' with your train for several minutes to build up your excitement, before you go back to weathering the bricks of a retaining wall. :) I recommend starting with a small portion of the set and take it quickly all the way to completion and operation. You want to eat this particular elephant just one bite at a time. Your experience and technique will grow quickly.
Are you ABLE to expand your mind as fast as the possibilities DCC offers?
There is a new learning curve that applies to a digital communication system, like any new technology. But it also adds unlimited possibilities for added realism and automation to your layout. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to walk around your layout, control movement, lights, and SOUNDS of as many trains as you can 'dispatch' simultaneously, while switching tracks and activating other accessories? DCC control systems can manage more tasks at once than your mind can! This means your imagination is the limit with Digital Control.
The Wrap-Up
DCC is another example of how rapidly increasing technology is enriching each facet of our daily lives, even our old pastimes. I hope this information has been useful for you and has helped clear up some of the questions you have regarding digital command control and whether you (and your layout) are ready for the 'next level' of railroading.A recent Quinnipiac University poll has Donald Trump caught up with Hilary Clinton in some key industrial states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania. While the pundits have had a field day analyzing why he's doing better than expected there, I feel like we keep missing a key point. It's still the economy, stupid.
We've talked a lot about the "working class" in this election - mostly in terms of demographics such as gender and race. As a friend of mine said recently, though, the key to that phrase is the word "working." He's right. "Working" is the identity a broad base of people are trying to preserve, and which feels under threat.
It feels under threat because it is. For far too much of America - today's diverse America as well as yesterday's more white male version - work is just plain going away. Or, the investment required to get good work - in education, extracurricular involvement, advanced social networks, etc. - is too far out of reach. You're stuck and there's no way up, or out.
According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, America's middle class is getting squeezed. Some people are becoming upper class, and others are getting stuck in the lower income tiers. While general middle class decline is happening everywhere, want to know who's moving disproportionately to the lower tiers? People who live in former working class communities and parts of the country that haven't cornered a piece of the "knowledge economy."
As Pew put it, "The economies...with the greatest losses in income status from 2000 to 2014 shared a greater-than-average reliance on manufacturing." Rocky Mountain, NC lost 10% of its middle income families to the lower income bracket. For Jackson, MI and Springfield, OH it was 14% and 16% respectively. In a place like Massachusetts, however, knowledge hub of the East Coast, people are moving up. In "Boston-Cambridge-Newton," median household income sat at just under $80,000.
There's not a new job waiting in the communities who are losing. And for families working two or three jobs to break even, no amount of compounded savings is going to bring relief, no comfortable retirement is going to bring rest. That's your life today, tomorrow and every day. That's a very, very hard place to be.
Angry "working class" voters - whether they've followed Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders -- rightly see an American economic future that threatens not to include them, either in work, or in economic supports for people who will be left out of the future workforce. They also see a culture that used to celebrate them but no longer does. Gone are the days of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" or composer Aaron Copeland's, "Fanfare for the Common Man." Today, we celebrate Zuckerberg and Gates. Today, it seems like dignity is in being a "tech bro," but not in being a truck driver.
This isn't just a practical issue. It's also a moral one. Work is fundamental to human dignity. We can't just curate growth and profitability in our economy. We also must curate real work for everyone, across race and gender.Lawmakers in Minnesota and New York have introduced legislation to prohibit the use of controversial gay-to-straight conversion therapy on LGBT youth.
In New York, bills were jointly introduced in both houses of the legislature by State Assemblymember Deborah Glick (D-Manhattan) and State Sens. Brad Hoylman (D-Manhattan) and Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), to ban the practice, also referred to as reparative therapy.
“Banning this so-called ‘therapy’ is a bipartisan issue,” said Holyman. “It’s time for New York to protect our kids from this insidious practice, which has been thoroughly discredited by experts and poses a serious threat to the health and well-being of LGBT youth.”
“Trying to change someone’s true identity through so-called therapy is a dangerous practice that can seriously harm our LGBT youth,” said Nathan M. Schaefer, Executive Director of Empire State Pride Agenda, in a statement.
“Anyone who says they can change an LGBT person from being who they are is preying off of fear and confusion to sell a practice that doesn’t work and causes lasting harm,” said Schaefer.
In Minnesota, Rep. Susan Allen (DFL-Minneapolis) has also introduced that would ban the practice on LGBT youth in her state.
Allen said conversion therapy practitioners aren’t as overt as they once were but that the treatment is still widespread.
“If you look at over the period of the last five years, they’ve sort of changed the way they advertise their services,” Allen told Capitol Report. “It’s not as obvious anymore that some of the Christian, sort of, based mental health services that offer this type of therapy. It’s just sort of given that it’s part of their family therapy. So it is prevalent, and it is a nationwide problem.”
Article continues below
Nationally, the fight against reparative therapy has been met with push back from faith activists who say the bill limits freedom of religion and speech.
Both California and New Jersey have banned the treatment but legal challenges followed shortly after the bills were signed into law.
California’s ban was upheld at the federal level, and by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Another federal judge ruled made a similar ruling in November upholding the New Jersey law.
Similar legislation has also been introduced recently in Maryland and Virginia.
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania lawmakers introduced similar bills last year.
This Story Filed UnderSweden’s newspaper industry has been facing financial challenges for more than a decade. Many local newspapers have long since cut down on editorial staff, merged with competitors or simply given up. At the same time, alternative online media channels have flourished. Yet while in many other countries traditional, mainstream newspapers have been forced to adapt to the new environment or go under, in Sweden some have found another way forward: an ever-closer relationship with the state.
This was made possible over 50 years ago, when Swedish politicians decided that the state was to finance political parties’ opinion-forming. At the time, the money was directly transferred to the parties, which distributed it to loyal or self-owned newspapers. This system was changed in the early 1970s so that funding no longer passed through political parties. Still, since 1971, Swedish taxpayers have spent 26 billion krona (£2.2 billion) keeping Sweden’s traditional newspapers going, and over 85 per cent of this funding has gone to newspapers with an official political designation. Newspapers tied to the Social Democrats have received almost half of all subsidies. Those tied to the Centre Party have received four billion krona. In 2005, the Centre Party sold its media companies for 1.7 billion krona (£146million) and became one of the richest political parties in Europe.
Political parties haven’t been the only beneficiaries of state largesse. Crony capitalists have also maximised their subsidies by creating multiple small newspapers perfectly matching the state’s requirements. Elsewhere, the Communist Party’s newspaper has received over 90million krona (£7.7million) since 1975, and liberal Svenska Dagbladet obtains more than 10 per cent of the annual press support. It could be seen as a good thing that the government funds platforms for a diversity of political views. But, in truth, state funding has created an inflexible and uncritical media. Too many newspapers show an unwillingness to bite the hand that feeds; they tone down critical views towards the state, especially state subsidies to all sorts of other industries. This has not gone unnoticed by the public, who routinely mistrust traditional and state-owned media. And with good reason, as a recent incident illustrated. In January, the libertarian-leaning alternative news site Nyheter Idag (NI) revealed how one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers Dagens Nyheter (DN) received information about a spate of sexual assaults in August 2015 similar to that which occurred in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. A source contacted DN, which was interested in the story until the backgrounds of the arrested were discovered — ‘so-called refugee youths primarily from Afghanistan’.
DN denied NI’s accusations. A couple of days later, the news site KIT, owned by the same company as DN, questioned the NI journalist’s integrity, even exposing his financial problems. DN then published an article describing NI as a ‘hate site’, citing the NI journalist’s previous involvement with the right-wing Sweden Democrats as proof. Across the political spectrum, many feel mainstream media fail to cover some of the hottest topics of public debate. For example, the website Inte rasist, men, run by left-leaning activists investigating the Sweden Democrats and anti-migration media coverage, was born of frustration with traditional state-funded media. It felt that Sweden’s mainstream media failed to cover too many topics that people wanted to discuss. And it was right: Inte rasist, men now has 180,000 followers on Facebook, more than the state-owned TV channel SVT, which has an annual budget of over four billion krona.(CNN) The offensive to liberate Mosul from ISIS control has begun, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a televised statement early Monday.
"Our dearest people in Nineveh province, the victory bell has rung, and the operations to liberate Mosul have begun," he said. "I am announcing today the beginning of these heroic operations to liberate you from the brutality and terrorism of ISIS. God willing, we will meet soon on the ground of Mosul where we will all celebrate the liberation and your freedom."
Only forces with the Iraqi army and National Police will enter the city "and no others," the Prime Minister said.
Fighting with them are the Popular Mobilization Units, largely Shiite paramilitary forces that include Sunnis, Christians and other ethnic and religious groups. The units released a statement shortly after Monday's offensive began saying they were targeting ISIS tunnels and trenches south of Mosul with highly destructive thermobaric missiles.
In addition, Peshmerga Forces -- Kurdish fighters -- launched Monday morning a coordinated operation east of Mosul in Khazir. The Peshmerga General Command said the operation, launched in coordination with Iraqi Security Forces from Gwer and Gayyara, included as many as 4,000 fighters in an effort to clear occupied villages surrounding Mosul.
Defeating ISIS in Mosul would represent a major victory for the Abadi government, as it struggles to boost its credibility, prove its military prowess and end the terrorist group's territorial dominance in Iraq's oil-rich north.
Routing the group from a port city close to the border of Syria and Turkey could also help stem the flow of fighters and weapons between the states.
The fight is expected to last weeks, if not months, and if the battles to wrest Falluja and Ramadi from ISIS' grip are indicators, Mosul will be a messy melee.
The assault's buildup has been ongoing for some time. US-led coalition and Iraqi forces have hammered ISIS targets with airstrikes for more than a year.
The Nineveh Liberation Operations Center, which was set up to coordinate the offensive, has brought in dozens of American and British advisers. A US artillery unit has provided cover for operations south of Mosul.
On ISIS' side of the fight, there have been reports of a growing network of tunnels leaving the city. The terrorist outfit has also allowed wounded fighters to leave Mosul and freed prisoners jailed for low-level offenses. The militants were also taking measures to combat the effectiveness of airstrikes.
Kurdish Peshmerga infantry forces watch as tanks and APCs cross into ISIS-held territory as the mission to liberate Mosul gets underway.
Skirmishes flared outside Mosul in the days leading up to the battle, and Sunday brought several signs that the fight for Mosul was near, including an airstrike on one of the city's main bridges.
Not only did Abadi declare, "God willing, the decisive battle will begin soon," but leaflets proclaiming, "It's victory time," also rained over the city Sunday.
US playing supporting role
JUST WATCHED Mosul awaits assault on ISIS Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Mosul awaits assault on ISIS 02:43
The 30,000-strong force tasked with recapturing the largest city under the terrorist group's control comprises many groups, with the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga making up the bulk.
Once Abadi announced the offensive had begun, Brett McGurk, the US State Department's special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, acknowledged in a tweet the operation aimed to end "two years of darkness under (ISIS) terrorists." Iraqi security forces are expected to lead the ground campaign with the backing of coalition airstrikes and advisers, US officials have said.Once Abadi announced the offensive had begun, Brett McGurk, the US State Department's special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, acknowledged in a tweet the operation aimed to end "two years of darkness under (ISIS) terrorists."
"Godspeed to the heroic Iraqi forces, Kurdish #Peshmerga, and #Ninewa volunteers. We are proud to stand with you in this historic operation,' he wrote in a second tweet.
Godspeed to the heroic Iraqi forces, Kurdish #Peshmerga, and #Ninewa volunteers. We are proud to stand with you in this historic operation. — Brett McGurk (@brett_mcgurk) October 16, 2016
The US recently announced the deployment of 600 additional troops to aid in the city's capture. The deployment brings the number of US personnel to more than 5,200, the Pentagon says
"There are no major objectives after that," Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said. "This is it. This is the last big holdout in Iraq for (ISIS)."
Before becoming the top prize in the Iraqi portion of the militant group's self-declared caliphate, Mosul was inhabited by more than 2 million people.
About 1 million residents remain today -- in the clutches of an organization known to use civilians as shields.
Potential humanitarian disaster
Camps are being set up to accommodate the refugees, who will need transport and basic necessities once the Iraqi security forces and Peshmerga screen them as they leave the city.
Abadi told CNN in September that forces "are planning for a fight for many months." Some Peshmerga commanders have predicted it will take at least three months to clear the city as ISIS leaves sleeper cells behind.
Others expect a quicker victory, with ISIS leaders retreating to the desert west of Mosul.
ISIS prepares
Bracing for the offensive, ISIS in recent days allowed wounded fighters in Mosul to move to Raqqa, Syria, the group's de facto capital, a source inside Mosul said.
JUST WATCHED ISIS sets oil wells on fire Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH ISIS sets oil wells on fire 02:42
ISIS also released some low-level prisoners, including those jailed for their beards, cigarettes or clothing, the source added.
A tunnel network large enough to accommodate motorbikes stretches from the outskirts of the city to the nearby village of Hamdania, according to the source.
US military officials estimate there are 3,500 to 5,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul. ISIS supporters put the number at 7,000.
Plumes of black smoke rose from oil-filled trenches on fire outside northeastern Mosul, an attempt by ISIS to obscure its fighters' positions during airstrikes, military sources said.
In northern Iraq, the main road to Mosul is dotted with villages deserted in expectation of the fight.
Holding force
Peshmerga forces begin clearing villages on the outskirts of Mosul on October 16, 2016
At checkpoints, ISIS fighters wore masks to disguise their identities in what is seen as a sign of decreasing confidence, as well as concerns about retaliation from Mosul residents.
There is concern among diplomats and Kurdish officials about plans for stabilizing and governing Mosul once ISIS is evicted, and according to US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a holding force of about 15,000 Sunni elements was being trained and equipped to secure the city once it's liberated.
The push to Mosul is being felt more than 200 miles south, in Baghdad, where ISIS has launched suicide attacks. At least 34 people were killed in a Saturday suicide bombing at a Shiite gathering in the capital, police sources said.
Photos: The clock tower of the Dominican Mission Church in Mosul, built in the 1870s, was a gift from Empress Eugenie of France. The ancient city is almost 3,000 years old and has historically been important for trading. Located in northern Iraq near the borders of Syria and Turkey, it's situated on the Tigris river and set amid rich oil fields. Hide Caption 1 of 26 Photos: This print of Mosul is from the 1930s, when Iraq was a kingdom occupied by the British. Hide Caption 2 of 26 Photos: Among the many activities on the Tigris River in Mosul was wool washing. Hide Caption 3 of 26 Photos: The souks, or markets, of Mosul hummed with activity every day. Hide Caption 4 of 26 Photos: The famous leaning minaret of Mosul's 12th-century Great Mosque of al-Nuri towers in the background of this photo taken in the 1930s. Hide Caption 5 of 26 Photos: Lady Surma was the sister of the patriarch of the Assyrian Christian church in Mosul and became an ambassador for her people. Hide Caption 6 of 26 Photos: The British writer Agatha Christie arrived at this railway station in Mosul. Agatha Christie spent time in Mosul in the early 1950s while her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, excavated the ancient site of Nimrud. Hide Caption 7 of 26 Photos: Two women look out over the Tigris from the 12th-century Bashtabiya Castle, a big part of Mosul's identity. ISIS destroyed the castle last year, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Hide Caption 8 of 26 Photos: President Saddam Hussein waves to supporters from the balcony of the mayor's office in Mosul on a trip to see how farmers were faring under international sanctions. Hide Caption 9 of 26 Photos: A boy begs for money in 1996. By then, Iraq was reeling under punishing international sanctions and widespread corruption. Hide Caption 10 of 26 Photos: The mosque of the prophet Yunus (Arabic for Jonah from the Bible) stood on one of the two most prominent mounds of Nineveh's ruins and served at one time as an Assyrian Church. It contained Jonah's tomb and was destroyed by ISIS in 2014. Hide Caption 11 of 26 Photos: In this 2001 photo, a man stands before the Great Mosque's minaret, which leans like the Tower of Pisa and is nicknamed "al-Habda," or "the hunchback." Hide Caption 12 of 26 Photos: Kurds mingle with the crowds in central Mosul in 2002, just a few months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Hide Caption 13 of 26 Photos: Children at a school in Mosul in 2002. ISIS developed its own curriculum after it took control of the city in 2014. Hide Caption 14 of 26 Photos: Crowds gathered in Mosul in February 2003 to protest US threats of invasion. Hide Caption 15 of 26 Photos: Kurdish children play on a broken ferris wheel in Mosul, a month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Hide Caption 16 of 26 Photos: A teenage boy tends to a herd of sheep on the outskirts of Mosul in 2003. Hide Caption 17 of 26 Photos: The lake in Saddam Hussein's palace was off-limits to Mosul's ordinary citizens until the dictator was toppled in April 2003. Hide Caption 18 of 26 Photos: The University of Mosul is the second-largest in Iraq and boasted a rich tradition of learning. ISIS militants destroyed thousands of books and manuscripts housed at the university and developed a new curriculum. Hide Caption 19 of 26 Photos: Fierce clashes erupted in Mosul in the summer of 2003, and US soldiers found themselves in the midst of urban warfare. Hide Caption 20 of 26 Photos: Iraqi police patrolled the city in 2005. Hide Caption 21 of 26 Photos: This children's clothing factory in Mosul was operating after reconstruction efforts in 2007. Hide Caption 22 of 26 Photos: Moslawis walk past trash strewn about a busy market area in Mosul in 2009. Hide Caption 23 of 26 Photos: ISIS fighters parade down a main road in a commandeered Iraqi security forces vehicle after the militant group took control of Mosul in June 2014. Hide Caption 24 of 26 Photos: ISIS destroyed ancient Christian shrines and churches like this 13th-century church in the Assyrian town of Telskuf, not far from Mosul in the Nineveh plains. Hide Caption 25 of 26 Photos: Iraqis displaced from ISIS-controlled towns and villages take shelter at this camp in Qayyarah, a few miles south of Mosul. Aid workers warn an assault on Mosul could trigger an exodus of catastrophic dimensions. Hide Caption 26 of 26
ISIS' last stand in Iraq
Kurdish fighters exchange fire with ISIS members in a village about 500 meters away on October 16, 2016.
Mosul, a city almost 3,000 years old, would represent ISIS' last stand in Iraq. Though ISIS seeks to create an Islamic caliphate, it has lost considerable territory in the past two years, being driven out of Tikrit, Ramadi and Falluja.
Kurdish forces have dug in to the east, north and west of Mosul, and Iraqi forces have been moving slowly from the south.
Iraqi security forces also recently recaptured the Qayyara oil refinery and seized the Qayyara airbase, Iraq's third-largest. The airbase is expected to be a vital staging ground in the battle for Mosul.
On Friday, Abadi visited oil-rich Kirkuk province, where he met with leaders ahead of the operation to liberate the ISIS-controlled city of Hawija, about 100 miles south of Mosul. It has been under ISIS control since 2014, and Iraqi security forces estimate about 1,200 ISIS fighters occupy the city and nearby villages.
Abadi inspected military units and spoke to security officials. He said he was preparing for a military operation to take back more cities from ISIS.
Having nearly cleared ISIS from Anbar and Salaheddin provinces, the retaking of Hawija would be a coup as it would lessen or eliminate the threat to Iraqi and Peshmerga forces who would have their backs to the city during the battle for Mosul.Each time you take a photo, that image is copyrighted. Assuming that you can prove that you took a specific photo, then misuse of that photo could lead to monetary compensation. But the truth is that most intellectual property lawyers won’t touch your case unless the image has been registered with the US Copyright Office. A copyright protects forms of “authorship” (as opposed to trademarks and patents which protect marks and inventions), and registration confers significant legal benefits to the photographer, namely that you can claim statutory damages of up to $150,000 per image infringed.
A non-registered image isn’t eligible for statutory damages, however, the infringed party can seek actual damages and “disgorged” profits (which in some cases can exceed the statutory limit). The amount of compensation can vary in size, and based on a judge’s interpretation of “willfulness” of the infringer.
For example, if a nefarious publisher uses your unregistered image of a grizzly bear in a magazine, you might be able to claim a few hundred dollars (i.e. not enough to pay the lawyer). But if the image is registered, you could get up to $150,000 in statutory damages.
Nuances of “Infringement”
Statutory infringements are assessed on a per image basis, with a single award available even if there are multiple infringements. If the nefarious publisher uses the grizzly bear image in a brochure and an ad, you’re only eligible for $150k in statutory damages, not $300k.
Additionally, if the nefarious publisher grabbed your images from a single magazine, or single website, there is also only one statutory damage available. The essay of grizzly bears ripped from your website and used in an ad is still only eligible for $150k.
Registration has a huge benefit, so make sure you register your images regularly.
There are numerous resources on how to register images manually, so we’ll focus on electronic copyright registration.
Electronic Registration
In 2008, the US Copyright Office began accepting electronic registration of images through their eCO system (Electronic Copyright Office). Prior to that, a photographer had to burn a CD or DVD of work, fill out a form, and mail in the application with a check. Electronic registration has several key benefits over manual registration:
– Lower filing fee of $35 (per case, which may include multiple images)
– Faster processing times
– Online status tracking
– Online payment
– Online upload of images
Create an Account
Fill out your name and login information.
Fill out your address information. Remember, some of this information will be in the public domain, so if you have privacy concerns, you might want to use a P.O. Box.
Agreeing to the US Copyright Offices terms is done by clicking “Next”.
You are automatically logged in and forwarded to the homepage.
Navigating the System
Navigating eCO isn’t particularly intuitive, nor is the system very bulletproof (i.e. I’ve encountered a lot of errors from which I could not recover). Here are a few hints:
Make sure you hit “Save for Later” whenever you can to avoid unnecessary data loss. Unfortunately, when you click “Save for Later,” you’re always redirected to the homepage.
From the homepage, any incomplete applications are referred to as “Working Cases”
Click on the claim # to continue editing
Here’s where it gets weird. When you click on the case #, you are taken to the summary page for the case. The only way to navigate to the different pages of the case, is by clicking the “back” button in the page (not the browser back button). There is a table on the right of the screen that shows you where you are, but it’s not clickable.
Registration is a multi-part process:
1) Fill out information about your images and upload your images.
2) Add that “case” to your shopping cart (because each “case” has a separate registration fee).
3) Checkout/final submission.
Published or Not?
Before you start the process, you need to separate out images that have been published vs. unpublished. Even though you can submit lots of different content, you cannot mix published and unpublished content, so make sure you have organized your work accordingly.
What is Published?
Books and magazines are obvious forms of publication. The copyright office is a bit more vague as to whether putting an image on a website constitutes publication. Specifically, they indicate:
“However, ‘publication’ may include the public distribution of copies by means of electronic transmission (e.g. over the internet). The applicant, who knows the facts surrounding distribution of copies of a work, must determine whether the work has been published or not”
PART 1:
Filing a Claim
Click the “Register a new claim” link on the right navigation. Note that the US Copyright Office uses “claim” and “case” interchangeably during this process. There are three main parts of electronic registration, and the system will take you through them serially.
Click “Start Registration” to begin.
Select the type of registration. For photos, select “Work of the Visual Arts”.
Your images need to be aggregated – whether logically or arbitrarily. We do this by creating a Title of the work. Click the “New” button to proceed.
In most cases, you will select “Title of work being registered” when you have related images. The title of this work can be anything description. For example:
– President Obama’s Inauguration
– John and Nancy’s Wedding Reception
– Dance Images from July 2008
You could also have more arbitrary groupings:
– My Work 1999 – 2009
– Ziggy Zaggy xlkdj!
Click “Save” when you’ve entered the information.
There’s no limit to the number of images that you can register at one time, and since the registration fee is per submission, it makes sense to add as many unregistered images as possible. You can continue to add Titles as needed.
You should have predetermined whether the works you are registered have been published or not. Select the appropriate option. Non-published works only require a year of completion.
Published works additionally require a date of publication and nation of first publication. Published works have to be grouped per publication per claim (aka “unit of publication”) because there is no way to affix multiple dates of publication to the form — i.e. only images from a single publication on a single date can be included. If your images don’t fall into this category, you have to either 1) submit then electronically under different claims (and therefore incur more fees), or 2) use the paper form VA. You cannot mix unpublished outtakes with your published images.
The Author is most likely you, so click the “Add Me” link, and fill out the form. Even if you have a business name, you still might not want the “organization” to hold the copyright. “Domicile” is your country of residence.
The Claimant is you, unless you have transferred your copyright. So click “Add Me” once again.
Unless you are an “visual artist,” you probably have not based your photos on previous works. So 99% of the time, you’ll skip this section by clicking “Next.” However, if you are creating composite images that use multiple source images (particularly those not shot by you), then this section is of importance.
Rights & Permissions Contact gives you a way to affix public contact information to the images. So if someone finds your image through the Copyright office, they will also be able to see this optional contact information.
The Correspondent information is who the Copyright Office will communicate with if questions arise. In most cases, that’s probably you, so click “Add Me”.
Mail Certificate is where your registration will be mailed. In most cases, that’s probably you, so click “Add Me.”
Unless you’re in litigation or engaging in litigation, leave the “Special Handling” blank and click “Next.” (Also note that there is an additional $685 fee for special handling.)
Fill out the Certification page, and check “Upload electronic file.” The uploading of files is done after you pay for the registration. Any claim that hasn’t been submitted yet has the status of “working.”
PART 2:
Adding the Claim to your Cart and Payment
Review your submission to check for any errors. When you are satisfied with the contents, click the “Add to Cart” link.
After you’ve added the claim to your cart, you can review it once more before proceeding to the payment by clicking “Checkout”
Select your payment of Credit Card/ACH or Deposit Acct.
Payment is transacted on pay.gov, which is run by the US Treasury. A warning screen indicates that you are leaving the eCO site.
If you’re paying via ACH, fill out the top box. If you’re using a credit card, fill out the bottom box. This non-intuitive layout is courtesy of the US Government.
If the transaction is successful, you’ll be redirected back to the eCO site. Click “Next” to upload your images.
PART 3:
Uploading Files
Usually, you’ll be registering multiple images at once. In this case, I suggest creating a zip file of images. The Copyright Office doesn’t give any specifics on the size of an image, but clearly, it has to hold enough detail to be identifiable. I’ve settled on a 300 pixel wide image, which I create using the “Image Processor” function in Photoshop.
Because you might be submitting multiple titles, it makes sense to name the zip files similarly to your titles. File names don’t really matter, although, it makes sense to adopt a logical naming structure in case your images get scrambled somewhere along the way. You definitely should embed meta data into the image (copyright and contact information).
The upload mechanism will time out after 30 minutes, so depending on the speed of your connection, you’ll have to figure out what size ZIP file you can upload without running into problems. Once you’ve completed the upload, you’ll receive a confirmation notice.
Many high volume shooters mail a DVD or CD because they’ve encountered issues with the timeout even when they have small thumbnails. Note that the registration date is not when you submit the form, but when the Copyright Office receives your images.
Click the “Upload Deposit” link on the appropriate Case# line to submit your images. DO NOT click “DONE” until you’ve uploaded your images!
Select a file(s) from your computer by clicking the browse button. The Item Title should correspond to the work’s title that you entered during the initial process. Click “submit files to copyright office”
A progress window will give you a status of the upload.
You will see a success message upon completion. Click “Close Window.”
When we tried it, we didn’t see the attachments appear in the section below. But since we had a confirmation number, we assumed everything was ok. Click “Done” to finish up the claim. You are redirected to the homepage.
The case is listed as “open” once you have submitted it, but while it’s awaiting a response from the Copyright Office.
You will receive two e-mails:
an Acknowledgement of Receipt from the US Copyright Office
a payment confirmation from Pay.Gov
You can always check on the status of the registration by logging back into eCO.
How long does it take?
From start to finish, it took about an hour to complete the process of:
– Creating an account
– Familiarizing myself with the screens
– Creating a case and adding the information
– Resizing and zipping up the images
– Submitting payment
– Uploading the images
For multiple “titles” under a single case, I suspect the bulk of the time will be in organizing, resizing and uploading the images. The main impediment to working faster in the eCO site is really the usability and interface design.
Notification
On July 8, 2009, less than two months after the images were submitted, I received a notification from the Copyright Office of the successful registration.
FAQ
Do images that are delivered to a client constitute “publication”?
Not necessarily. The Copyright Act states that delivery to a “group of persons” can be publication, but most experts think delivery of files to a company would generally fail the litmus test for publication.
Are there consequences for mis-registering an image as published or unpublished?
If in doubt, register the image as published. The Copyright office |
United States,” he said. He also implied many other Afghan officials were paid more money from international institutions and other foreign governments. “This is probably the lowest salary; a lot of people were getting paid in cash,” he said.
Jawad said the contract was the sum total of his salary, but another former senior Afghan official, who asked not to be named, said Afghan bureaucrats were paid a meager salary from the Afghan government (which was itself reliant entirely on international donors, including the United States) while some Afghan expatriates were paid additional salaries by the U.S. and other Western contractors.
Some outside experts see the payment of Western salaries from U.S. contractors to Afghan officials as a form of corruption. “From day one we built a system that was corrupt,” said Christine Fair, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the security studies program and a specialist in South Asia. “We had in place individuals who were drawing two salaries, one from us and one from the World Bank trust fund. Not only did this contribute to building an incredibly corrupt system. If you are Karzai, how could you trust the Americans and how could you trust any of this?”
In 2002, Karzai trusted Jawad. Soon after being hired by Karzai, he was promoted to chief of staff and placed in charge of international relations for the office of the president. In 2003, Jawad was named Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States. He stayed in that post until 2010.
Andrew Natsios, who at the time was the administrator for USAID, said of Jawad: “We recruited him in 2002 at first to be the media spokesperson for Hamid Karzai to increase the frequency of the President's communication with the Afghan people.”
Jawad was by no means the only Afghan technocrat to benefit from such arrangements, according to current and former top USAID officials. Natsios said that in the early days of the Afghanistan war, USAID had a program to recruit hundreds of highly trained Afghans living in the West to become technocrats in Karzai’s government to build government capacity. Part of this program, Natsios said, involved providing salaries competitive with their jobs in the West. “These technocrats were recruited through the USAID contractors and served as officials in line ministries,” he said. “The early way we had to carry out our programs was through these kinds of contracts. We did this quietly because there was tension between the Afghan expatriates returning and the Afghan militias allied with us.”
Larry Sampler, the current USAID Assistant Administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said these types of transactions were a necessity during the initial phases of Afghanistan’s reconstruction. “If the U.S. policy interest was a functioning interim Afghanistan administration, USAID would look for ways to creatively support that. That might include using one of our contract mechanisms to provide temporary salary support to attract qualified employees. To my recollection, in 2002, I’m familiar with about half a dozen people for whom we did that,” he said. “We would do this for high impact players who were essential for the new administration.”
Given that the interim government of Afghanistan was only months old when some of these men were hired, Karzai’s team actually expected and depended on the Western donors to provide a reliable salary until such time as the interim government could do so, Sampler said.
Still, Jawad appears to be a special case because he performed so many different functions in the emerging government and was especially close to Karzai. In the hectic months following the initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Jawad was involved in various aspects of the effort to prop up a new Afghanistan government, essentially from scratch. His biographical entry on the website of APCO International, a lobbying firm that currently employs him, says Jawad “assisted in the building and re-building of national institutions including the Afghan National Army and brought about major reforms in Afghanistan, notably to the Ministry of Defense.”
One of Jawad’s tasks was to set up a public information office (PIO) inside the office of the president, to perform a range of functions including public and media engagement.
Internews, a worldwide independent media organizations that specializes in training journalists in conflict affected areas, was given a $1 million grant by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) to help the new Afghan government build its PIO. USAID asked Internews to hire Jawad and put him on their payroll at the beginning of the project in June 2002, according to Internews President Jeanne Bourgault.
David Hoffman, Internews president at that time, told Jawad at the time he was uncomfortable about hiring Jawad and paying him from Internews accounts. He spelled out those concerns in a June 24, 2002, email to Jawad, reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“I am very happy that we were able facilitate your hiring and be of help to President Karzai. Normally, we would not even consider such a thing, as it would be a conflict of interest with our journalistic independence. But we recognized how exceptional were the circumstances in Afghanistan and we agreed to do this,” Hoffman wrote in the email.
Hoffman told Jawad that Internews did not want to be in the business of paying Afghan government officials and wanted their financial arrangement to be short-lived.
“USAID and OTI will certainly need to make other arrangements at its earliest convenience before one of us gets in trouble for this impropriety,” he wrote. Jawad said he did not remember the email when he was shown a copy of it this week.
Hoffman did not respond to several requests for comment from The Daily Beast. Bourgault confirmed to The Daily Beast that Internews paid Jawad $49,000 as part of a six-month contract for “consulting” on the project to stand up Karzai’s public information operation.
The arrangement with Jawad was unique and unusual, she said, and added that no other Afghan senior government officials were on the Internews payroll. She also said that Internews went to lengths at the time to mitigate the conflict of interest that Hoffman had warned about.
“We were very careful to build a firewall between that work and our work with independent journalists,” Bourgault said. “I regret the language David used in that email.”
Regardless, outside experts said that an independent media organization paying the salary of a high-ranking Afghan government official presented at the very least an appearance of impropriety.
“In this particular case, because it involved Internews, this is going to hurt the credibility of other independent organizations operating in this very dangerous environment,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.Edwards endorsement pays off for Obama Associated Press
Published: Thursday May 15, 2008
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Print This Email This Barack Obama picked up four of John Edwards' 19 delegates as the former rival's endorsement began to pay off. Edwards endorsed Obama on Wednesday night. Hours later, some of Edwards' delegates followed suit, adding to Obama's growing lead in delegates needed to win the nomination. Obama is now just 135 delegates shy of the number needed to clinch. Edwards won 19 delegates in three states before dropping out of the race in January. They are now free to support whomever they want, regardless of Edwards' endorsement. Several, however, said the endorsement is important to their decision. Obama picked up three delegates in South Carolina and one in New Hampshire, both states that held their primaries in January. It would have meant more in February or March, but John Edwards' endorsement of Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination was welcomed nonetheless by a politician eager to turn the page. Edwards' surprise appearance at a rally Wednesday steered some of the attention away from Hillary Rodham Clinton's landslide win over Obama in Tuesday's West Virginia primary. Despite the victory, the former first lady faces long odds in trying to deny Obama the presidential nomination. Edwards had been their chief rival from 2007 through last January. But after finishing second to Obama in Iowa, the former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential nominee placed third in the next three contests, then left the race. Obama and Clinton immediately sought his support, but Edwards stayed mum until Wednesday. The endorsement would have carried more clout had Edwards made it months ago, when the outcome of the Democratic contest was very much in doubt. "We are here tonight because the Democratic voters have made their choice, and so have I," Edwards said to thunderous applause. He said Obama "stands with me" in a fight to cut poverty in half within 10 years, a claim Obama confirmed moments later. Edwards told the rally that "we must come together as Democrats" to defeat Republican John McCain in November. He also praised Clinton. "We are a stronger party" because of her involvement and "we're going to have a stronger nominee in the fall because of her work," he said. Then as Edwards sat on stage and watched, Obama gave one of his most animated addresses in days, much of it devoted to fighting poverty. In America, he said, "you should never be homeless, you should never be hungry." Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said in a statement: "We respect John Edwards, but as the voters of West Virginia showed last night, this thing is far from over." Political strategist and Clinton ally James Carville said Edwards' endorsement was a psychological boost for Obama, but unlikely to sway many voters. "I think it certainly helps in terms of the psychology of the superdelegates," Carville told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday, referring to the elected officials and party leaders who will ultimately determine the Democratic nominee. A person close to Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he wanted to get involved now to begin unifying the party. Edwards and Obama spoke by phone Tuesday night, and Edwards agreed to fly to Grand Rapids the next day. Edwards didn't even tell many of his former top advisers of his decision because he wanted to inform Clinton personally, said the person close to him. His wife, Elizabeth, who has said she thinks Clinton has the superior health care plan, did not accompany him and is not part of the endorsement. VIDEO OF ENDORSEMENT AT THIS LINKLearning how to properly breathe while running is of utmost importance. Not only does it improve your athletic performance and endurance, it also makes your runs more fun. In fact, proper breathing can make the difference between a great run and a disastrous session.
Whether you’re a new runner or have plenty of miles under your belt, if you want to take your breathing while running to the next level, this guide is for you.
Proper Breathing While Running: The How-To
There’s a lot to say about breathing as it relates to running, but the following four points will have the most impact on your training (and overall fitness and health levels) and will help you to run your best.
Enjoy!
Rhythmic Breathing
Research has proven that rhythmic breathing can help you become a faster and better runner.
44 runners of varying backgrounds were asked to run on treadmills using different breathing patterns. Some were allowed to use random breathing patterns while others used a specific breathing pattern. The conclusion? The latter group had a better running economy and airflow dynamics than the “unpatterned” group.
The 3:2 Pattern
In my opinion, the ideal running-to-breathing ratio for beginners is the 3:2 pattern in which the footstrike is coordinated with inhalation and exhalation in an odd-even pattern. Your exhale alternates sides in a balanced manner. This eliminates the risk of always landing on the same foot at the start of the exhalation, and injuring the “overworked” side.
If you’re not alternating your exhalation footstrike, one side of your body is endlessly absorbing the greatest impact, which might set the stage for injury and other functional problems.
But when you alternate sides, the stress effects of running will be distributed evenly across both sides of your body, helping you decrease the risks of overuse and injury.
Experiment With Other Patterns
Your exact breathing pattern is a matter of personal preference. Much depends on the intensity of your session and training goals.
What what I’d recommend is finding what works (and feels) the best for you, then stick with it. To make that happen, you’d need to practice different patterns such as 2:2, 2:3, 3:4, or a 4:4. This is especially the case when you’re doing different workouts such as easy runs, tempo runs, and even sprinting.
Deep Breathing
Need more air on the run? Belly breathing is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Belly breathing—also known as deep, diaphragmatic breathing—will help you deliver more oxygen to your circulatory system and working muscles. This, in turn, boosts your performance and prevents nausea and fatigue.
Instead of relying on your chest to breathe (which is what the majority of runners do), train yourself to breathe deeply from your belly.
The Road to Mastery
Note: Before you start learning advanced running breathing techniques such as rhythmic breathing, you’ll first have to learn how to breathe deeply.
To master this type of breathing, start practicing it in the comfort of your home. Do it while standing, sitting and lying down. You should be belly breathing all the time, whether you’re shopping for groceries, reading a book, watching TV, etc.
Once deep breathing has become close to second nature, transfer your newly acquired skill to your running practice.
Nose Vs. Mouth Breathing
According to my experience, inhaling through the nose and exhaling out of the mouth is much more efficient for running.
Inhaling through the nose allows for deeper breaths and warms the air on its way to the lungs, whereas breathing out from the mouth helps get rid of as much carbon dioxide as possible. It also relaxes the body.
How to put this into practice? Simple. During your run, the mouth should be held slightly open in what’s known as the “dead fish” (the name speaks for itself).
Strengthen Your Core
The diaphragm is the main muscle in charge of breathing, and you can tone it the same way you strengthen your calves and hamstrings. Pilates exercises are one of the best ways to do this, and doing so will boost your endurance and performance.
Two Pilates Exercises For Better Breathing
Here are two Pilates exercises to try:
The Hundred
Lie flat on your back with your legs squeezed together and your knees and hips forming 90-degree
Lift both legs a few inches off the floor, engage your abs and buttocks, and raise your arms over your thighs. Lift your head and gaze at your toes.
While holding this position, start to pump your arms, moving them in a controlled up and down manner. While doing so, breathe in for five pumps, moving your arms in a controlled up and down manner.
Aim for three to five sets and keep pulsing your arms for 10
Corkscrew
Lie flat on your back with your knees pulled to your chest.
Inhale slowly as you lift your legs towards the ceiling as far as you can while tightly squeezing them together.
Reach your legs over to the right, allowing the hips to lift away from the floor, then go back to starting position with your legs straight overhead, your core engaged, and your lower back remains on the floor.
Repeat on the other side, reaching your legs over to the
Continue reversing the circular direction each time. Aim for three sets of eight reps on each side.
Bonus tip – How Do I Become a Better Runner?
The answer to that question lies within my Runners Blueprint System.
Why?
My system was specially designed for beginners who either want to start running or take their training to the next level, but have little clue on how to do it.
And don’t worry, my ebook is written in a conversational, jargon-free, style. All you need to do is download it, follow the simple instructions, then start seeing results ASAP.
Here’s what it includes :
How to quickly and easily get started running (it’s indeed is easier than you’d think!)
How fast (or slow) should you go on your first sessions
The exact 13 questions you need to answer before you a buy a running shoe
The seven most common running injuries….how to deal with them before they progress into major ones!
The quick standing stretching routine that keeps you flexible even if you’re busy as hell
The 10-minute warm-up you must do before any session to get the most of your training
And much, much more.
Click HERE to get started with The Runners Blueprint System today!
Conclusion
I hope this blog post was helpful. Please feel free to leave any comments below, or send me any questions you may have. I’ll be happy to answer ASAP.
Thanks for reading my post.
Image Credit: Ed YourdonWe may not be getting a new Friday the 13th movie this year or anytime soon – if EVER, depending on how those pressing legal issues play out – but I’m suddenly not all that sad about that in the wake of the long-awaited Friday the 13th: The Game finally being unleashed just a few weeks back.
Honestly, it’s more of a treat than a handful of new movies would probably be.
I spent nearly the entirety of last weekend playing with friends on Playstation 4, and now that I’ve logged more hours that I should probably admit, I feel pretty comfortable saying that Friday the 13th: The Game has wildly exceeded even the high expectations I had built up for it over the years. To finally be able to play as Jason Voorhees, stalking camp counselors around the iconic locales from the films, is nothing short of a lifelong fantasy come true, and I’ve found it maybe, even more, fun to play as counselors fighting for survival while the masked maniac hunts me down.
Clearly made by hardcore fans, the attention to even the tiniest details is jaw-dropping (Jason, for example, can only run when you’re playing as a version of him that ran in the movies), and I just can’t possibly say enough good things about how lovingly the franchise was brought into the gaming world for its first video game since that goofy NES abomination from the ’80s. Say what you want about the gameplay issues that plagued the first week or so of release, but those are all being worked out so rapidly that the game is literally getting smoother by the day.
Speaking of which, Friday the 13th: The Game is sure to evolve in the weeks, months and maybe even years to come, getting bigger and better with DLC content that will very likely make what we’ve got now seem like it wasn’t much to be so overjoyed about. But what specifically would we like to see added to the game in the future? I’ve got 5 big requests, most of which I’m willing to bet will eventually come to fruition…
1) STORY MODE
From what we’ve heard, a single-player mode is soon coming to Friday the 13th: The Game, which will be nice because we’ll no longer have to wait on friends and/or strangers when wanting to plop down on the couch to play – even simple bots would go a long way in making private multi-player matches a whole lot more fun, while also cutting down wait times for public games. Going one step further, I’d love for a full-on story mode to be added to the game (which for now has a very simple “survive or kill” set-up), allowing you to recreate key moments from the Friday the 13th films as you play.
How cool would it be, for example, to play a mini-game that sees you chain Jason to the bottom of Crystal Lake as Tommy Jarvis? Or how about one that makes you chase Jason down to the Higgins Haven barn and stick an axe in his head, ala the final act of Part 3? There are countless memorable moments from the films to pull from (as seen above, you can already recreate the epic sleeping bag kill!), and it would be so much fun playing an active part in those moments, with cut-scenes bringing them to life when set tasks are successfully completed.
Story mode, from what I understand, is indeed a future priority.
2) MANHATTAN
Aside from story mode, my #1 request for Friday the 13th: The Game is a Manhattan map… for obvious reasons. One of the downsides of the game right now is that there are only three maps to choose from – Crystal Lake, Packanack Lodge and Higgins Haven – which can get a little bit repetitive. In order to spice things up going forward, a map that lets you roam around Manhattan would be huge – not to mention, it would finally scratch the itch that Jason Takes Manhattan left us with so many years ago.
We may not ever see the Jason Takes Manhattan film we truly wanted back in 1989 but being able to PLAY that movie would be a massive apology that would finally right one of horror’s all-time saddest wrongs. It kinda needs to happen, don’t you think?!
3) UBER JASON
At the time of writing this article, Friday the 13th: The Game allows to play as seven different versions of Jason – Part 2, Part 3, Jason Lives, The New Blood, Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes to Hell and, if you were able to snag it during the pre-order phase, Tom Savini’s brand new “Hell Jason.” We can only assume that the other Jasons will eventually be added as playable characters (NES, perhaps?!), but the one we want most is Uber Jason, of course from the futuristic Jason X.
The addition of Uber Jason has been rumored for quite some time now – Uber-Jason was, it’s worth noting, one of the most-requested skins in a poll held on the game’s website – and I just can’t help but think how much fun it’d be to see that bizarre version of Jason in Earthbound locales like Crystal Lake and Higgins Havens.
Of course, a Jason X map would also be awesome…
4) MORE MOVIE CHARACTERS
Other than Jason, the only character from the Friday the 13th films in the game is Tommy Jarvis, voiced by Thom Mathews and based on the character’s appearance in Jason Lives – you can play as Tommy, though he can’t be chosen from the character selection screen. All of the other characters are generic archetypes ripped from the slasher handbook, but my hope is that other fan-favorite characters from the movies will soon be added to the mix.
Personal requests? Alice from Part 1, Ginny from Part 2, Shelly from Part 3, Demon from A New Beginning, and Tina from The New Blood. Tina could come equipped with special powers that rival Jason’s, which would make playing as her extra fun – the existing characters in the game right now have no special powers, while Jason, true to the films, has special skills that allow him to detect where counselors are on the map and even teleport from location to location with the press of a button… he seemed to do much the same thing in the movies, after all!
5) CREATE-A-CHARACTER
Even if every Jason and all of our favorite movie characters are available in Friday the 13th: The Game, it would still be extra special if we could create our own characters to bring into the mix. Most games of this sort have create-a-character modes, which in the case of this particular game would allow us to live out a dream we probably all share: actually being in a Friday the 13th movie!
Personally speaking, the character of Kenny Riedell (above) already looks enough like me that playing as him feels like I’m playing as, well, myself, but how cool would it be if we could actually custom-make video game versions of ourselves to do battle with Jason? Certainly not a necessity, but a fun addition that would keep the game feeling fresh and exciting for a long time to come.
What would YOU like to see added to Friday the 13th: The Game?Admission
Release Date: March 22, 2013
Director: Paul Weitz
Stars: Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Nat Wolff
Runtime: 117 min
Tagline: Let someone in
Portia (Tina Fey) is an admissions officer at Princeton University, who swears she just isn’t a sadist who drives on saying no. She seems to be afraid of commitment and she’s a very reserved person. This year, after so many years, Princeton is now number two. In the country or worldwide, you might ask? Who knows, the screenwriter never bothers to tell us.
Anyway, she and this other admissions officer named Corinne (Gloria Reuben) go head to head for the Dean of Admissions job, but when she meets John Pressman (Paul Rudd) and a kid named Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), she must question where her priorities stand. Pressman tells Portia that Jeremiah just might be her son she gave up for adoption years ago.
Admission is a little flick all about relationships, self-sacrifice, and finding middle ground and learning it’s not all about you. The plot isn’t that good, first of all. It’s really safe and probably the most generic plot of the year thus far. It’s also rather pointless with little fairly well-formed plot points here and there. Mark (Michael Sheen), Portia’s boyfriend of ten years leaves her for another woman. Then he just keeps showing up at random moments and it really starts to get tedious. He doesn’t seem to offer much to the plot, but at least it gives Portia an excuse to use when she’s acting all moody, when she’s really being affected by finding her son. She fights for him to get into Princeton and she really seems to believe in him because he seems like some sort of prodigy with great SAT scores without taking any SAT prep classes. She also has some kind-of relationship with Paul Rudd’s character, and Rudd’s character has an adopted son who is sick and tired of travelling all over the place. Portia also has unresolved issues with her mother, Susannah (Lily Tomlin). It all seems like a lot could be going on, but at the same time, it feels like nothing is happening.
Some people who have given up a child for adoption could relate to Portia’s situation and understand that she wants to do anything for Jerimah, not being there his whole life. That’s one of the real-life emotions brought in, but that’s about it. Also, this is a bit of a commentary on how competitive schools are these days. One has to be extremely impressive to get in, and there isn’t any secret formula to getting into Princeton. In the scene where the officers are going through the best candidates, it allows for something fairly original. When they are reading the candidate, the candidate shows up in the corner, and if they get accepted, they stay put, but if they get denied, they just fall through a trapdoor. It’s a little funny. Though, this is only a tiny commentary, as the bigger plot points cloud any potential it had to prosper.
I must admit that this film’s biggest crime is that it isn’t that funny. There are chuckles throughout – like Lily Tomlin wielding a rifle – sure, but I must deny that the film has memorable laugh-out-loud moments or even any big charm. This is extremely generic and a very, very forgettable affair. When trying to even remember the funniest moments a few hours later, you might have to scratch your head for a good minute before you come up with anything. It’s fairly romantic, but it might have just worked better as a drama with some solid moments of comedy. The completely unrewarding third act forgets to make the audience laugh for a good ten minutes, as everyone’s too busy being upset and feeling sorry for themselves.
Everyone’s okay in their roles, at least. Paul Rudd is his usual self in yet another generic comedy. Tina Fey, though, has still yet to make a big splash in the movie world. Mean Girls was great, sure, but when you think of that movie, you think of Lindsay Lohan, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been victimized by Regina George,” and “Karen, you just can’t go around asking people why they’re white,” etc.; not the writer and supporting star, Tina Fey. Though, I hope she could eventually capitalize on the big screen. She still is a huge star on the small screen, because whenever someone may say: SNL female veteran, hilarious Golden Globe host, or 30 Rock, Tina Fey is often one of the first names to come to mind. Though, she’s just okay in this, and has a few funny lines.
In a nutshell: Admission tries to have a good amount of heart. Though, it usually ends up being generic, not charming enough, sometimes bland, safe, and kind-of unrewarding in the end. It just goes along and eventually gets to the end, but a lot later than you wish it to. It isn’t easy to recommend, but if you still feel the need to see it, skip it in theaters and, like the list so many Princeton applicants get put on, waitlist it.
56/100
AdvertisementsCongress is in the midst of a heated debate over gun control and how best to tamp down on gun violence. And mass shootings like the one that tore through Sandy Hook Elementary School last December are a huge part of that discussion.
(Sarah Voisin/The Washington Post )
So how much do we actually know about mass shootings and the people who commit them? A new study (pdf) commissioned by Mayors Against Illegal Guns* tries to add some much-needed detail.
The researchers pored through the FBI database and recent media reports for every mass shooting since January 2009 — that is, incidents in which at least four people were murdered by guns. Here are their key takeaways, some of them surprising:
1) Mass shootings have occurred at an average rate of about one per month since 2009. The report concludes that there have been 43 mass shootings in 25 states over the past four years — or nearly one per month.
2) Yet mass shootings are still a tiny portion of overall gun deaths. For all the attention they receive, mass shootings are not the main source of gun violence. In 2010, according to the FBI, around 8,775 people were murdered with firearms in the United States. Less than 1 percent of those victims were killed in mass shootings.
3) Assault weapons are used in a minority of mass shootings — but those incidents were much deadlier. Just 12 of the mass-shooting incidents, or 28 percent, involved assault weapons or high-capacity magazines — the very same guns that some members of Congress are now trying to ban. At the same time, mass shootings were a lot deadlier when assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were used, with an average of 8.3 deaths, compared with 5.4 deaths on average for the rest.
4) Few mental-health red flags came up before most of the shootings. In just four of the 43 shootings was there evidence that someone had raised concerns about the mental health of the killer to authorities beforehand. Likewise, the report notes, there was no evidence that any of the shooters had been prohibited from owning firearms because of mental-health concerns.
5) Domestic violence played a role in 40 percent of mass shootings. From the report: "In at least 17 of the cases (40%), the shooter killed a current or former spouse or intimate partner, and at least 6 of those shooters had a prior domestic violence charge."
6) At least 11 of the shooters were prohibited from owning guns. Under federal law, felons, certain domestic abusers and people deemed mentally ill are barred from owning guns. The report found that at least 11 of the shooters fell into this category — although there was no good data one way or the other for about one-third of the cases.
7) About one-third of the shootings took place in gun-free zones. Some additional stats: "Nineteen of the 43 incidents (44%) took place in private residences. Of the 23 incidents in public spaces, at least 9 took place where concealed guns could be lawfully carried. All told, no more than 14 of the shootings (33%) took place in public spaces that were so-called “gun-free zones.”
* It's worth noting that Mayors Against Illegal Guns, founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is a group that strongly supports stricter gun-control laws. But for those who want to double-check their claims, the group lists every single mass shooting incident — as well as the relevant details — in the report.
Further reading:
— The full report (pdf).
— This week, the Department of Homeland Security released its own study looking at the profile of mass shooters since 1999. One key takeaway? They tended to be young males acting alone using handguns. And very few were ex-military.
— The last assault-weapons ban didn’t work. Will the new one be different?Devon Campbell-Williams, an inmate serving time for assault in the Multnomah County Inverness Jail in Portland, Ore., applied for Medicaid in January with the help of an eligibility worker hired by the county to enroll inmates. When he gets out of jail in May, he said, he will have health insurance for the first time, coverage that will allow him to get treatment for his ankle, which he broke in 2007 and has been bothered by ever since.
“It’s going to mean a lot,” Mr. Campbell-Williams said, adding that in the past, “I just went to the hospital, that was really about it.”
Opponents of the Affordable Care Act say that expanding Medicaid has further burdened an already overburdened program, and that allowing enrollment of inmates only worsens the problem. They also contend that while shifting inmate health care costs to the federal government may help states’ budgets, it will deepen the federal deficit. And they assert that allowing newly released inmates to receive Medicaid could present new public relations problems for the Affordable Care Act.
“There can be little doubt that it would be controversial if it was widely understood that a substantial proportion of the Medicaid expansion that taxpayers are funding would be directed toward convicted criminals,” said Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group.
Language in the health care law also allows private insurance plans purchased through state exchanges to cover health care for people who are in jail awaiting trial, even in states that have not expanded Medicaid. But few prisoners have incomes high enough to afford the plans, even with federal subsidies, and most state and county correction systems are not yet set up to benefit from that coverage.
In the past, states and counties have paid for almost all the health care services provided to jail and prison inmates, who are guaranteed such care under the Eighth Amendment. According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, 44 states spent $6.5 billion on prison health care in 2008. In Ohio, health care for prisoners cost $225 million in 2010 and accounted for 20 percent of the state’s corrections budget. Extended hospital stays — treatment for cancer or heart attacks or lengthy psychiatric hospitalizations, for example — are particularly expensive.
Stuart Hudson, managing director of health care for Ohio’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said his department, which plans to start enrolling inmates in Medicaid when they have been in the hospital for 24 hours, expects to save $18 million a year through the practice, “although it’s hard to know for sure, because there’s other eligibility factors we have to keep in mind.”PORN website visitors will have to prove they are over 18 to access adult content from next year, the Government has announced.
Users will have to provide credit card details to get on the site in a bid to protect children from porn content.
Getty Images 3 Users of porn sites will be required to enter their credit card details from next year
Websites flouting the new rules, set to be part of the Digital Economy Act, could find a regulator has told their internet service providers to block access to them.
The aim is for all online porn to have age verification by April 2018.
It will be overseen by a new regulatory body, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said.
Online porn has been blamed for damaging development and decision-making and has been seen by 65 per cent of 15 to 16-year-olds.
Nearly half of all 11 to 16-year-olds have seen it, the NSPCC says.
Its study also found that 28 per cent of children may have stumbled across pornography while 19 per cent had actively searched for it.
Getty 3 The move is part of a Government crackdown children viewing porn - with nearly half of all 11 to 16-year-olds having seen it
Will Gardner, chief executive of internet safety charity Childnet, said: “Protecting children from exposure to adult content is incredibly important, given the effect it can have on young people.
“Steps like this to help restrict access, alongside free parental controls and education, are key.
“It is essential to help parents and carers, as well as young people, be more aware of this risk and what they can do to prevent exposure and also to make sense of exposure if it happens.”
EPA 3 Digital minister Matt Hancock claimed the UK will have 'the most robust internet child protection measures in the world'
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Digital minister Matt Hancock, who is set to formally kick start the process with a written statement to the House of Commons tomorrow, said: “Now we are taking the next step to put in place the legal requirement for websites with adult content to ensure it is safely behind an age verification control.
“All this means that while we can enjoy the freedom of the web, the UK will have the most robust internet child protection measures of any country in the world.”First came the slaying of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau.
It was a mystery in itself: The 26-year-old Chicagoan last week was found lying face down on the floor of a Northwestern University professor’s bedroom, dead from stab wounds and slashes to the back. The professor, Wyndham Lathem, disappeared with Andrew Warren, an employee at Oxford University in England. Warren had flown into Chicago for his first trip to the United States on July 24, just three days before the attack.
The gruesome crime set off |
Tea Company’s Asian Beauty Oolong. This Taiwanese oolong is from XinZhu (North Central Taiwan) harvested the Summer of 2013.
Dry Leaf
Asian Beauty Oolong’s tea leaves has a soft roasty scent. As with most Asian Beauty oolongs, the dry leaf is gorgeous. Beautiful Taiwan Tea Company’s Asian Beauty Oolong looks like a rainbow of tea with silver tipped, gold accented, reddish brown and dark leaves.
Steeping Instructions
I decided to steep this Asian Beauty Oolong gongfu style in a gaiwan. I used 200F water and a quick rinse.
When I did the rinse, wow super fragrant! This is going to be an awesome oolong session!
Tasting of Beautiful Taiwan Tea Company’s Asian Beauty Oolong
First Infusion: I started with a 30 second infusion. Beautiful Taiwan Tea Company’s Asian Beauty Oolong came out a beautiful golden cup of tea that smells roasty and peachy.
First sip, Asian Beauty Oolong is so soft! There is a thick silky texture with a lovely floral peach taste. First steepings are always light but this one feels like a nice warm up snuggle.
Second, Third, and Fourth Infusion: Asian Beauty Oolong is a soft, thick peach blanket of honey suckle flowers but now has a woodsy cinnamon finish. The spice adds a nice complexity to the tea but my favorite part is the floral after taste that lingers, providing a refreshing feeling. Each infusion getting sweeter and peachy. I’d say the floral level is on a light to moderate level, 3/10 on the Floral Meter. All the notes are delicate as if carried on a fluffy cloud.
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Infusion: The best steepings though I was battling steep times, so all these are each adding 10, 15 and 30 seconds to the previous steep time. The teas notes have melded together creating a nice smoothness. Asian Beauty Oolong is sweet honeysuckle floral with a woodsy earth depth, kind of bready with a long floral after taste. After each sip I’m getting a little dryness in the back of the teeth, 1/10 on the Astringency Meter, that sticks that peachy longer.
Eighth and Ninth Infusion: Asian Beauty Oolong is now very light and sweet. With each infusion is getting dryer topping at a 5/10 drying the tongue and roof of mouth.
After my tea session I checked out the leaves. Nice looking tea leaf with milk chocolate and red tipped colored leaf and dainty.
Most look in perfect shape with little tears or holes.
Comments
With all the Asian/Oriental Beauty Oolongs I’ve tried, it seems like there is a big range of flavors. I’ve had ones that were more woodsy, more peachy, less floral, more dry. Beautiful Taiwan Tea Company’s Asian Beauty Oolong is a lighter, more delicate and sweeter variety. This Asian Beauty Oolong is for someone looking for something more dainty, sweet and floral – indeed a sophisticated feel of a tea to sip on a early Autumn afternoon.
Beautiful Taiwan Tea Company also sells sample sizes so you can test drive their teas. With a low free shipping threshold of $15 (USA shipping), it is easy to sneak in an order an try a bunch of high quality teas. So many oolongs!
(tea provided for review)
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The Houses of Parliament were put on lockdown after an envelope containing white powder and a "racist" message was reportedly sent to a Muslim peer.
The powder was accompanied by a "horrible racist letter" and was sent to Labour peer Lord Ahmed, according to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg.
Parts of Parliament were shut down for about 90 minutes as police examined the delivery, which arrived at about 12.30pm.
Peers were reportedly left stranded on a House of Lords terrace overlooking the Thames as the incident unfolded.
Scotland Yard said they investigated a suspicious package but did not confirm the contents.
A spokesman for the Met said there were no reports of anyone suffering any illnesses or injuries as a result.
Police were stood down at about 2pm.According to Ubisoft, Assassin’s Creed Unity will be a faithful recreation of events that actually occurred, or at least as faithful as you can get in a video game. The latest installment in the series is set during the French Revolution, which took place between 1789-1799. Technically speaking, these events happened fairly recently so they are well documented for the most part. Games™ had an interview with Vincent Pointbriant, senior producer at Ubisoft Montreal and they tried to find out just how historically accurate Assassin’s Creed Unity really is. “History is our playground,” Pointbriant says, “we try to be historically accurate as much as possible so whenever we can find a hole or something that’s not as well documented, we’ll try to exploit it. Otherwise we try to respect history and just suggest things that might have happened to explain it.”
“The French Revolution is a very complex period, there’s no clear winners or losers,” Pointbriant explains. “I mean, and there’s different events during the Revolution that were very complicated to explain, so what we did is that we used the French Revolution as just a background for the main story which is about Arno, a character [who’s role is more passive] than the likes of Forrest Gump. He’s not necessarily involved in beheading the king or any of these things; it just wouldn’t make sense and it wouldn’t feel right. But you’ll see these events that are happening there in the background, and you might be witness to them.”
The producer then goes on to explain just how important player feedback is for the company. In Assassin’s Creed Unity we get to see two of the most highly demanded features: co-op and character customization. Pointbriant also says that Ubisoft is going back to the AC roots with this latest entry and Assassin’s Creed Unity will presumably be a refreshing take on the popular franchise. Furthermore, the game seems to be very refreshing in terms of mechanics as well from the footage we’ve seen. The new style of parkour looks way more agile and interesting than in previous titles. As for historical accuracy, we’ll just have to wait until the game comes out to see if Ubisoft can deliver on their promise.
Assassin’s Creed Unity launches October 28th for the PS4, Xbox One, and the PC. Another AC title presumably called Assassin’s Creed Comet is also currently in the works. This game is being developed for last-gen consoles only and will reportedly have you playing as a Templar that goes by the name of Shay. Ubisoft said more details will come soon and we’ll let you know the moment they do, so make sure you stay tuned.As soon as the presidential election results were in, Megan Moffat Sather of West Seattle got a call from her lawyer: It was time to adopt her 6-month-old daughter, Winslow. "I have to go through something that I think is actually humiliating," Moffat Sather said. "I have to pay my own money for someone to come into my home and to judge whether or not I should be able to be the parent to my own child." Jen Moffat Sather is Winslow’s biological mom. Megan Moffat Sather is not. They've been together 14 years and also have a son together. But in the current political climate, Megan is afraid her rights as a parent might not be recognized if the family travels outside of Washington state. One fear she expresses is that at some point in the future a hospital in some other state, for example, might exclude her from decisions involving her family. "It's wrong, it's absolutely wrong,” she said.
Sponsor
So Megan has embarked on a process called second parent adoption. The first step is to hire a social worker to visit your home. Megan called this "deeply painful," even though she personally really likes the social worker in question. When that's done, Megan has to hire a lawyer and then head to court to, as she put it, “tell them I understand the right and responsibilities of making this child mine permanently, when the child is already mine permanently." (In Washington state, both people in a same-sex marriage or domestic partnership are presumed to be parents of children born during the relationship.) Jill Dziko, the social worker that the Moffat Sathers hired, said she hadn't received a single call from parents in same-sex marriages looking to adopt their own children in about three years. But she's seen a spike in phone calls since the election.
Sponsor
Now, Dziko feels deeply conflicted about her role in these adoptions, calling it “ridiculous, because people have been a family from the get-go, they've been a family prior to conception.” That said, Dziko believes parents ought to move forward with the process, which she's also done with her own kids. It’s not clear yet exactly what the next administration's policies on same-sex parenting or LGBTQ rights will be. Some pundits and activists think president-elect Donald Trump may even be relatively supportive (for a Republican president). But for Dziko and parents like the Moffat Sathers, the uncertainty this year is unnerving. “Not knowing what is going to happen just scares me," Dziko said, adding, "I have never been afraid before in this country."
SponsorMercedes-Benz rolled into CES with its "F 015 Luxury in Motion" concept, a bold, completely bonkers vision of a future in which we become entirely optional behind the wheel.
The car peers way down the road at an autonomous future in which, it seems, cars look like bars of soap on the outside and sleek, vaguely European conference rooms inside. But let's make two things clear right away. First, this concept car is so far from production as to be little more than a flight of fancy. Given the current state of autonomous tech, we'd guess its probably 20 years from reality. Robo-cars are coming, but there are piles of problems to solve, from the technical—actually building cars that drive themselves—to sorting out the myriad safety and regulatory questions. There's also the not insignificant challenge of getting consumers to relinquish control of the wheel. Each of these things will take years to accomplish, in no small part because the feds and the auto industry aren't known for moving quickly.
Second, this car is ugly, which is a surprise, given the generally excellent design Mercedes is known for. It's hard to believe this sliver of soap came from the same company that gave us the 300 SL Gullwing or even the SL 500.
Still, the car is remarkable because it shows Mercedes is thinking ahead and peering far into the future to a time when autonomous cars will fundamentally change how we design our vehicles. Once computers are inarguably better drivers than we are and regulations reflect that, longstanding norms like forward-facing seats, mirrors, and pedals are no longer necessary. It will be a seismic shift, and automakers will be free to pursue exciting, even revolutionary, ideas. Google embraced this with the forward-thinking (though somewhat goofy) autonomous prototype we saw in May, and tuning house Rinspeed explored it last month with its Budii robotic EV concept.
Mercedes understands that, and runs with it. The interior of the F 015, with front seats that rotate to face the rear, creates a communal space. It's something very new, but also very old, in that it recalls the days of horse-drawn carriages, a point Daimler boss Dr. Dieter Zetsche noted in his presentation Monday night. The vehicle is controlled through hand gestures, eye-tracking, and touchscreens. Everything has LEDs. When the car senses a pedestrian ahead, it can project a crosswalk onto the ground. "The car is growing beyond its role as a mere means of transport and will ultimately become a mobile living space," Zetsche says.
So yes, it will be many years before Mercedes makes a car that looks anything like the F 015. But the German automaker is well on its way toward that day, developing a highway pilot system for its trucks and plans for some level of autonomous tech in its sedans by 2020. Those are the kinds of projects that will advance this technology, and let us daydream about spending our retirement being whisked around in a sleek sedan with spinning seats and hardwood floors.The 1970s had a unique vitality and aesthetic imprint unlike any other decade before or since. Jack Garofalo (1923-2004), an accomplished street photographer for Paris Match magazine, spent the summer of 1970 documenting the vibrant life of Harlem, a neighborhood that was undergoing an existential crisis at the time.
Harlem in the 1970s was undergoing an exodus, as anyone who could was moving to other neighborhoods in New York to escape the neighborhood’s poor infrastructure and crime. Some stayed because they couldn’t move out, while others stayed because they wanted to. But despite the difficulties, the neighborhood was an undeniably vibrant place.
Garofalo’s photos are like a time machine, taking you back to a place and time that you’ve never seen and never will (unless you were there, too). Take a look!
More info: Mashable5 Messages Bernie Sanders Is Sending In His First Campaign Ad
YouTube
The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced Sunday that it will begin airing its first campaign ads on television in Iowa and New Hampshire starting Tuesday.
Sanders' campaign is spending $2 million to air the ads, the same amount that the campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, spent on her first campaign ads. Clinton's ads have been airing since early August. In the months since then, her campaign has spent an additional $4 million on ads in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The announcement comes as Clinton's campaign has been picking up momentum, extending her lead over Sanders in polls since Vice President Joe Biden announced he would not enter the race nearly two weeks ago.
In a statement, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said, "This ad marks the next phase of this campaign. We're bringing that message directly to the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire."
The ad lays out the familiar message of fighting income inequality and climate change that voters have often heard from Bernie Sanders.
Here are five other messages the ad is sending:
1. Life story: Sanders is known for his message of income inequality and his ideology as a democratic socialist, but he has not played up his own personal story much. Last week, he notably mentioned his Jewish faith at a rally of college students. The first line of this ad reads, "The son of a Polish immigrant who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement." Part of this "new phase" for Sanders' campaign could be creating a more three-dimensional image of the man. As the ad says, "Bernie Sanders. Husband. Father. Grandfather."
2. Civil rights activism: The ad notes that Sanders participated in the 1963 March on Washington, and lingers for a moment on an image of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sanders has struggled to appeal to African-American voters, and has had clashes with activists from the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists have also interrupted Clinton events, including a speech in Atlanta on Friday at a historically black college. But her support among African-Americans appears much more solid.
3. Governing experience: Sanders appears to push back on the idea that his idealism would get in the way of accomplishing policy goals. Hillary Clinton contrasted herself with Sanders in the first Democratic debate by saying, "I'm a progressive who likes to get things done." Well, Sanders is trying to tell voters in this ad what he's gotten done by noting praise he received "as one of America's best mayors" when he was the top official in Burlington, Vt., during much of the 1980s. The ad then lists issues he's pushed in Congress.
4. Passionate support: The ad touts that Sanders' campaign has been "funded by over a million contributions," which highlights the grassroots nature of his candidacy. Hillary Clinton's campaign has recently claimed 500,000 individual donors. But more than what the ad says is what it shows — the huge, raucous crowds that have shown up for Sanders around the country. Clinton hasn't been able to match that level of excitement at her events.
5. Honesty: While the ad is positive and focuses on pumping Sanders up, there is one line that seems targeted against Clinton, where Sanders is referred to as "an honest leader." One of Clinton's biggest weaknesses has been that voters don't view her as trustworthy. With the scandal over her private email server roiling since before she officially declared her candidacy in April, Sanders famously said at the first Democratic debate, "The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails." But in terms of character traits, Sanders has an advantage over Clinton on issues of trust and authenticity. Why not have the narrator of your campaign ad mention it?MLG Executive Vice President Adam Apicella has revealed that the quarter-final matches of the upcoming major will be shown to the public.
The announcement comes as a result of the public backlash MLG faced from the community after it was revealed that only three matches - the semi-finals and the grand final - of the upcoming major would have live audience.
MLG had previously stated that, "due to the number of teams competing in the group stage and in the quarter-finals", the MLG Arena - the venue for the first three days of the event - would be closed to the public.
MLG Arena could be open to the public for the quarter-finals
This left American fans fuming as they faced the prospect of not being able to cheer on teams from their home nation. At the previous major, DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca, Brazilian side Luminosity were the only team competing in North America to make it to the playoffs as Cloud9, Team Liquid and CLG were all sent packing in the group stage.
We hear you loud & clear re: Friday CSGO Major quarters being shown to the public. I will figure this out, but I need a few days. — Adam Apicella (@MrAdamAp) 4 dezembro 2015
Apicella added that the schedule for the final two days of the event will remain untouched. This means that the quarter-finals will still be played at the MLG Arena if an extra day at the 20,000-seater Nationwide Arena, home of the Columbus Blue Jackets, is not booked.
Meanwhile, the MLG chief revealed that VIP tickets for the major, which were priced at $150, sold out in just four hours, exceeding the expectations of the company. General admission tickets, costing $45, can still be purchased on ticketmaster's website.Two years ago this month, the open-source Pandora handheld missed its first ship date. To their credit, the GP2X community had a working dev board, but the handheld's DS Lite -like case was nowhere to be found, and things have generally progressed at a glacial pace ever since. However, in February, a spark of hope arrived in the form of dev units, and this week, it appears the last lingering snags are finally being undone. The above image is a pair of honest-to-goodness mass produced Pandoras with painted, hopefully final cases; and at the official Pandora blog, the team reports that it now has fully functioning drivers for every component, has resumed production on the mainboards, and intends to ship both cases and boards to the UK soon for final assembly. Everything seems to be finally coming together. At this point, it would take a disaster of biblical proportions -- say, a volcanic eruption -- to stop Pandora buyers from lifting lids later this year.[Thanks, AndyToday the Braves adjusted their 40 man roster in preparation for the upcoming rule 5 draft.
Most of you know this but for the new reader I hope to have soon, here’s a quick primer on major league rosters. Every team keeps a roster of players they may call upon during the season. The roster is divided into two parts commonly called the 25-man roster and the 40-man roster. If you know this stuff skip down to “Today’s 40 man roster moves.”
The 40 Man Roster and Rule 5 Draft
The 40-man consists of all the players on the team who are signed to a major-league contract. The distinction is important because in addition to the benefits of a major league contract, being on the 40 man roster protects players from being claimed by other teams during the provides the minor league draft commonly called the rule 5 draft. All of the other players in a team’s minor league system are non-roster players.
The 25 Man Roster is a subset of the 40 man roster. It consists of players who are with the team on a day to day basis. Typically an NL Team carries 12 pitchers – 5 starters and 7 relievers – and 13 position players. This roster changes throughout the season as a team requires to replace an injured player or someone on one of the lists – bereavement list, disqualified list, injured list etc. – that allow temporary replacement. The player used as replacement must be a part of the 40 man roster.
The Rule 5 Draft
Every year in December, at the annual Winter Meeting of general managers the last order of business is the rule 5 draft. It’s called the rule 5 draft because the requirement is ser forth in the fifth rule in Major League Rules. By the same token the June draft is technically the rule 4 draft.
Only non-roster players are eligible for the Rule 5 draft. In addition these players must been:
18 or younger on the June 5 preceding their signing and this is the fifth time the Rule 5 draft has happened since their signing or
were 19 or older on the June 5 preceding their signing and this is fourth Rule 5 draft since their signing.
To keep teams from claiming a group of players, claiming teams must:
Pay the losing team $50,000
Add the new player to their 40 man roster. If the claiming team no space on its 40 man roster it must make space by removing another player.
Add the claimed player to their 25 man roster and keep that player on the 25 man roster all season – he may not be optioned to the minors.
If the player isn’t kept on the 25 man roster he must be offered back to his original club for $25,000
The rule 5 draft was designed to prevent hoarding good players without the chance of progressing. These players are not bad players, their team simply has no room for them. Johan Santana was a rule 5 draftee as was Jose Bautista, Shane Victorino and of course Dan Uggla.
Teams often struggle to decide who to protect and who to let go. The trade of Jared Cosart to the Marlins last year was said to have been done in part to clear roster space so they could protect a player with a higher ceiling. The Marlins said thank you very much.
Today’s 40 Man Roster Moves
According to the Braves’ transactions page on Wednesday they designated Jonny Venters and Ramiro Pena for assignment and added Brandon Cunniff, Yean Carlos Gil, Kyle Kubitza, Williams Perez, Mauricio Cabrera and their number one prospect Jose Peraza to the 40-man roster.
Bye-bye
The designations of triple TJ surgery victim Venters wasn’t a surprise. The recovery successful return on third surgeries is small and keeping him would have been a luxury.
In 201 Pena became a fan favorite slipping into the vacancy created when Martin Prado was traded to Arizona. This season Pena returned to his career numbers and was largely ineffective allowing his spot to be claimed by Philip Gosselin.
Safe!
According to John Sickles latest list Peraza, Kubitza, Cabrera and Perez are among the Braves top 20 prospects for 2015; Cunniff and Gil are not. Here’s how Sickles ranks them. The first number is Sickles rank the second their rank on MLB Prospect watch.
1) 1) Jose Peraza, INF, Grade B+: Age 20, slick defender took step forward offensively with.339/.364/.441 campaign in High-A/Double-A, with 60 steals. There are still questions about his power and his walk rate is quite low, but the complete package is worth buying into given youth, athleticism, and consistent improvement.
6) 12) Kyle Kubitza, 3B, Grade B-: Age 24, hit.295/.405/.470 in Double-A, nice swing from the left side, draws walks, strikes out a lot, high OBP type, not as much home run power as you’d expect given size/strength but not punchless. Has made progress on defense, not a gold glove but will field well enough to play regularly if the bat produces as expected.
11) 8) Mauricio Cabrera, RHP, Grade C+: Age 21, missed most of season with forearm injury and was ineffective in High-A due to command troubles when he did pitch. Throws very hard, up to 98 if not higher, but struggles with mechanics and control of secondary pitches. High-end closer if it all comes together or a number three starter, but big risk too.
13) NR) Williams Perez, RHP, Grade C+: Age 23, doesn’t get as much attention as other Braves prospects but out-pitches most of them with sinker/change-up combination, posted 2.91 ERA with 94/39 K/BB in 133 innings in Double-A. 6-1, 230 body weighs against him with observers but the stuff is decent and he uses it well.
Cunniff was originally drafted by the Marlins in 2010 but released in March of 2011. The Braves signed him away fro River City in the Southern Illinois (independent) league in June of 2013. This year he appeared in 33 games in relief for the M Braves posting a 2.05 ERA and a 1.12 WHIP in 52 2/3 innings striking out 50 (8.54/9) and walking 20 (3.42/9). Easy to see why the Braves didn’t want him to slip away.
Gil was signed as an international free agent in 2010 at 19 years old. The 6’2. 195 lb Venzuelan started 22 of his 27 games for Rome this season finishing with a 3.35 ERA, 1.13 Whip while striking out 93 and walking 26 in 126 1/3 innings. Once again it’s easy to see what the Braves want to hang on to him.
Here’s the 40 man roster as of today.
That’s A Wrap
You’ll note if you bother to count that the roster consists of 24 pitchers, 2 catchers, 8 infielder, and 6 outfielders; 40 in all. Yeo full. You might think that would mean the Braves won’t be looking to pick up anyone; you’d be wrong. The Braves have been very aggressive in stocking up on pitchers since John Hart took over. If he sees someone he want she’ll go get him. Besides the you might have noticed that trades and signings are beginning to happen. More of those will happen and the roster will change again and when it does we’ll tell you about it here on the take.Jeff Hughes | October 21st, 2017
Player: Derwin James, Safety, Florida State
Game: vs. Louisville, 11:00 AM CT
Video
What They’re Saying
CBS’ Chris Trapasso on Oct. 10: “As usual, James was good against Miami, yet I’m not seeing the variety of game-altering plays this season he had in 2015. He was a true difference-maker as a freshman at all levels of the field. This year, not so much. James is a gargantuan safety prospect who runs like a slot cornerback, and when he’s rolling, he’s a tackling machine who also flies to the football in coverage.”
From USA Today: “I think he’s every bit as good as anybody we’ve ever played against,” Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban said of the Seminoles safety, via the Orlando Sentinel. “This guy’s just a very aggressive player.”
Chad Reuter of NFL.com: “James in an enforcer, pure and simple. Everyone expected him to return to form after missing most of last season. James doesn’t appear to have lost any closing speed, and he’s certainly not afraid of contact. His length will help him play in the box on Sundays, likely in the hybrid linebacker/safety role that’s currently in vogue.”
I Think…
…the Bears will win too many games to pick James at their actual draft position. With that kind of athleticism, one has to believe he’ll blow minds in Indianapolis and be gone by the fifth pick.
…I haven’t seen many defensive backs look as comfortable as James rushing from the edge. Then I see his coverage skills and wonder, “Is this kid going to change the safety position in the NFL?”
…I love that he’s owning this disappointing FSU campaign. A Tomahawk Nation blog post featured James explaining he could have done more in their recent loss to North Carolina State. That kind of stand-up behavior in the face of adversity will delight NFL scouts.
…the Bears should avoid drafting anybody who has an injury history.
Why Watch This Week
As Clemson QB Kelly Bryant struggles with injuries and FSU struggles to win enough games to get bowl eligible, there’s a good chance Lamar Jackson and the Cardinals will be the most explosive, multidimensional offense James faces the rest of this season. Against a run/pass threat like Jackson, safeties have to be at their most disciplined and their most aggressive. Over-pursuit can lead to big plays down the field and staying back on your heels can lead to the mobile quarterback sprinting by you down the sideline. With some believing Jackson will play on Sundays (not quite sure if I’m one of them) this is the right quarterback to evaluate James against.CALGARY — Shady Hashem travelled part way around the world to study as a mine engineer in Canada, at times paying triple the local tuition and working at a call centre to put himself through school, only to graduate in one of the worst job markets in recent memory.
"There's no jobs,'' says Hashem, 28.
"I talk to a lot of engineers, and the expected time to get a job is between six months and a year.''
He came to Calgary to look for work after finishing classes at Halifax's Dalhousie University in December, hoping to find something in Alberta's oilsands with his co-op work experience at Syncrude last summer. But postings are slim, and he hasn't heard anything back after applying for 50 or so jobs in recent weeks.
"I'm applying everywhere, but I haven't heard back from anybody yet, not even an email that says: 'Sorry, this position has been filled,''' said Hashem. "That's very frustrating.''
Shady Hashem, a recent university graduate seen in Calgary on April 21, 2016. Hashem travelled part way around the world to study as a mine engineer in Canada, at times paying triple the local tuition and working at a call centre to put himself through school, only to graduate in one of the worst job markets in recent memory. (Photo: Jeff McIntosh/Canadian Press)
Hashem, originally from Egypt but now a permanent resident of Canada, is one of the many recent engineering grads who are struggling to find jobs as the oil-and-gas industry continues to slash jobs in the aftermath of the global oil price plunge.
Those still in school looking for work experience also face a daunting market as summer approaches.
Colleen Bangs, manager of career services at the University of Calgary, says only about a third of the 659 engineering students at the school have found placements for their year-long internships as companies cut back on campus recruitment.
"Something I've noticed, particularly in this last semester, is that there's a bit of an impending feeling of doom,'' said Bangs.
That's in stark contrast to the situation just a couple years ago, when the industry was booming.
"There's a bit of an impending feeling of doom.''
"It was just a very different climate. Employers were racing to make offers,'' said Bangs. "Whereas now it's a bit more sombre to be totally honest. It's a lot slower, much like we're seeing in the general marketplace.''
Several companies are cutting back on student hirings. Suncor says it's reduced hiring compared with recent years without giving specifics, while Cenovus Energy says it isn't hiring any students at all for now, paid or unpaid.
Cenovus spokesman Brett Harris said in an email that the company suspended the program given the challenging economic environment, which has resulted in more than 30 per cent of the company's overall workforce being cut since the end of 2014.
It's not all doom and gloom, however.
Shady Hashem, a recent university graduate seen in Calgary on Thursday, April 21, 2016. (Photo: Jeff McIntosh/Canadian Press)
At the University of Alberta, close to 70 per cent of the 1,300 students looking for four-month co-op placements have found them, said assistant professor Tim Joseph at the university's school of mining and petroleum engineering.
He said employers still have short-term hiring needs — and while the co-op students are paid a healthy salary ranging from around $3,000 to over $6,000 a month at times, companies aren't on the hook for senior-level salaries, benefits or other long-term obligations.
"It's not the same expense as a full hire. You can normally get two to three people for the price of one,'' said Joseph.
Joseph said he's hoping to get over 80 per cent of students in co-ops this summer, compared with a peak of 96 per cent in the boom years. Students who can't find placements risk losing their spot in the co-op program, and graduating without crucial work experience.
But even those graduating with experience are struggling, said Joseph, as they look for those elusive long-term, full-time jobs. He recently asked for a show of hands in the graduating class of about 850 of those who had a job lined up, and said only about 20 per cent raised their hands.
"I'm improving my qualifications, but I'm still waiting.''
Hashem was fortunate enough to find co-op placements throughout his program so has some savings to live off, but he's cut back on expenses where he can.
With few jobs to apply for, he's spending most of his time these days trying to further improve his skills, taking an online course on project manager principles so he can apply for civil engineering jobs.
He says he has up days and down days as he tries to stay focused and optimistic.
"I'm doing my best,'' he said. "I'm improving my qualifications, but I'm still waiting.''
Also On HuffPost:The first smartphone running the long-awaited Windows Phone "Mango" operating system was unveiled this morning in Japan. The manufacturer: Fujitsu-Toshiba, who plans to bring the device to Japanese stores and carriers in September. It's not expected to come to the U.S.
The phone, known as the IS12T will be the first device to run the major revamp of the Windows Phone operating system to version 7.5, an update codenamed "Mango." Coming about a year after the original launch of Windows Phone, Mango brings with it several new features (Microsoft claims 500), including multitasking and a Groups feature that has deep integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It also has powerful voice-to-text features. (For the full run-down of Mango, check out PCMag's preview here, or click on the slideshow below.)
The IS12T has other features that go beyond the new OS. The phone is said to be water- and dust-proof, and boasts both 32GB of storage as well as a camera with a whopping 13.2 megapixels. Its processor will be a 1GHz Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm. Users will also be able to use the phone to work on Microsoft Office documents as well as share data through Microsoft's cloud service, SkyDrive.
Microsoft officially unveiled Mango in May. The market share of Windows Phone is relatively small compared to other major OSes like Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and RIM's BlackBerry, pegged at only 2 percent of all smartphones in use, according to data from Millenial Media. However, IDC predicts that Windows Phone will capture 20 percent of the market by 2015.
Other partners making Mango Windows Phones include HTC, Samsung, Acer, ZTE, LG, and of course Nokia, which announced a major strategy shift to Windows Phone in January. Nokia is expected to unveil its first Mango phone, possibly called the "Sea Ray," in October.
As for the IS12T, it'll be on Japanese carriers KDDI and Okinawa Cellular. No prices were announced. The unveiling comes a day after Microsoft said it had sent the final Mango code to manufacturers. You can watch a video report on the Tokyo launch event from Network World below.
For more from Peter, follow him on Twitter @petepachal.
For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.BOSTON (CBS) – July 1 begins a new day for many workers in Massachusetts.
Many workers classified as part-time can start accruing paid sick time leave thanks to the new law.
Boston labor lawyer Nancy Puleo with Posternak Blankstein and Lund says one hour of sick time will be accrued for every 30 hours worked, up to a maximum of 40 hours per year.
This new law applies for small businesses with more than 11 employees. The law is wide reaching:
“Part-time, seasonal and temporary employees are now going to be entitled to paid sick time,” she said.
Many questions arise when considering seasonal employees, including plenty of businesses on Cape Cod that fall into this category.
Attorney General Maura Healey made it a little clearer when it comes to carrying over accrued sick time.
“So basically following a break of service between 4 and 12 months the employee’s still going to have the right to use their earned sick time,” Healey said.
Most of those companies are in scramble mode trying to comply with new law, which is putting burdens on payroll departments.
“Significant tracking and recording requirements. posting notice requirements….and there’s also the potential for abuse. That’s the other employer concern here,” Puleo said.
There could be penalties for such abuse.
“Employers can actually discipline employees that show a clear pattern of using earned sick time before and after holidays and weekends,” Puleo added.
There will be an adjustment period for many businesses. Some employers and clients |
usually don’t vote Republican,” Kinder told Missourinet.
Kinder said it’s more important to him that a Republican become governor than that he become governor, but he thinks his record of winning statewide elections makes him the most likely Republican to win.
“It’s time for Republicans to go with and line up behind a proven winner,” said Kinder.
Former House Speaker and U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway has been in the race the longest, and thinks her time out of office sets her apart from Kinder.
“Living in the real world, raising our kids, working for a living, not being a career politician is a vastly different experience, but it’s not as though I’m without experience in government,” said Hanaway.
Springfield state senator Bob Dixon has been in the race for just more than a month, but said he declined requests that he run for more than a year. He doesn’t think that delay has cost him backers.
“Support has been quietly there over the year and I didn’t realize how much they were very supportive and their on board and really pushing very hard in support of our effort,” said Dixon.
2012 Senate candidate and businessman John Brunner told Missourinet his formal announcement will come within a month.
“People are all hung up on these stages here, but we’re full in, all the way, doing everything we can,” said Brunner, who noted that no one is officially a candidate until filing begins in the spring.
Brunner thinks voters want someone whose background isn’t political.
“Whether it’s doctor Ben Carson on the national level or Donald Trump on the national level, people are fed up, and they want people who have done things to get in there and get the job done,” said Brunner.
Former state representative and deputy director of agriculture Randy Asbury is confident he is building name recognition, “Getting out and speaking wherever we can, and we take every opportunity to do that. People are seeing that we’re legitimate, that we’re serious, and that we’re a contender.”
Three of the GOP gubernatorial hopefuls commented on the allegations that Planned Parenthood has broken laws against selling fetal tissue. Hanaway thinks Governor Jay Nixon (D) should call a special session to increase the penalty for such a crime.
“It’s only a misdemeanor in Missouri and we need to at least get it up to a felony. It’s a serious crime,” said Hanaway. “That way if somebody is caught doing it, if it proves to be true that is happening in Planned Parenthood, we can seriously penalize the people doing it.”
Asbury hopes the videos raising those allegations have an impact even on people who are pro-choice.
“I think if Planned Parenthood disappeared there are plenty of services out there through local opportunities that women can partake of without problems, so as far as I’m concerned Planned Parenthood can disappear,” said Asbury. “Because what they do is not a benefit to our state and certainly not a benefit to our children.”
On the day after the first of those videos was released Kinder called for legislative hearings into Planned Parenthood’s operations in Missouri – hearings that continue this week.
The candidates also participated in a forum at the Missouri Farm Bureau building about the federal clean water rule, better known as the Waters of the U.S.
Dixon said such regulations are threatening Missourians, particularly in the agriculture industry.
“That is a clear example of the federal government run amok. It doesn’t make any sense, and in Missouri we are common sense people,” said Dixon.
Brunner would make 5 GOP candidates, and a likely 6th would be former Navy SEAL and author Eric Greitens.
They’re vying for the chance to challenge Democrat Chris Koster for the governor’s office in 2016.Historically Black colleges and universities were born out of “necessity” rather than the pursuit of school choice, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Elizabeth (Betsy) Dee DeVosWest Virginia teachers just struck against a windfall for public schools Students call on DeVos to offer free tampons, pads in schools to address 'period poverty' DeVos recovering from broken pelvis, hip socket after bicycle accident MORE said Tuesday.
In a series of tweets, DeVos acknowledged that the schools were initially established because African-American students were often not accepted to predominantly white colleges and universities.
#HBCUs are such an important piece of the fabric of American history—one that encompasses some of our nation's greatest citizens. — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 28, 2017
Providing an alternative option to students denied the right to attend a quality school is the legacy of #HBCUs. — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 28, 2017
But your history was born not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism, and in the aftermath of the Civil War. — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 28, 2017
#HBCUs remain at the forefront of opening doors that had previously been closed to so many. — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 28, 2017
We need more good schools. We need more good teachers. And no child should be denied the opportunity to enter a great school. Not one. — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 28, 2017
The Education secretary took heat earlier Tuesday for calling HBCUs “real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” an education policy that DeVos has fervently advocated for.
“They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and great quality,” DeVos said in a statement. “Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.”
But that comment immediately spurred criticism.
Leaders from the country’s HBCUs are currently in Washington meeting with President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE and administration officials and congressional Republicans. Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting HBCUs Tuesday afternoon.Hundreds of British expats in Portugal may lose their homes due to 19th-century 'land grab' law where government can seize land if built on state property
Law means state can take any home it thinks was built on public land
Portuguese government say environmental policy designed to protect coast
But expats, who face months of uncertainty, accuse them of land grab
British expats in Portugal fear they could lose their holiday villas under a draconian new law which could force them to prove their property was built on private land.
A 'water resources law' in the country spread concerns the government could take back any land which was originally owned by the state.
Hundreds of retired couples and families with second homes in the country now face an anxious wait to see if their property will be affected.
Hundreds of Brits have holiday homes and villas in Medeira (pictured) and other areas of Portugal
The Times reported the new legislation will affect houses close to the sea - meaning thousands of holiday homes built around the country's beaches could be affected.
Jersey-born Paul Abiati, 50, who owns a £123,000 seafront house in Madeira, has hit out at the new law, which the Portuguese parliament is now considering amending following a huge outcry.
He told the newspaper: 'This is a breach of international and European laws. A citizen, when they buy a private property, has a right to a certainty over it, and peace and enjoyment under fundamental human rights principles.'
Another expat, Roger Hardy, said he will struggle to sell his property in the Algarve until the issue is made clearer.
Expats in Portugal are facing months of uncertainty over new environmental laws which could affect their holiday homes
Portugal's parliament has recently put forward an amendment, relaxing the laws and potentially saving British homeowners from having to prove the history of their property.
But no date has been set for finalising the changes, meaning those living in the country face potentially months of uncertainty.
A spokesman for the Portuguese government told the Times the policy was important for the country's environment and not a 'land grab' as has been claimed.
He said: 'The law was designed to preserve coastal, river and reservoir areas from over-development. It is within EU law.'
Portugal introduced a special, lower tax rate for foreigners two years ago to encourage them in to boost the economy.
But many expats are now fleeing southern European countries and selling off their homes as property prices tumble and the region struggles with recession.JPMorgan Chase told a California couple to quit making mortgage payments in order to qualify for a loan modification but then foreclosed on their Sacramento home, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court.
Faiz and Khadija Jahani called Chase in December 2008 because they were having trouble making their mortgage payments. According to the suit, they were told that they wouldn't qualify for a modification without being delinquent and that they should stop making payments for three months.
At the beginning of June, the Jahanis claim that they were told they qualified for a modification that reduced their monthly payments. Three weeks later, they received a letter telling them the bank intended to foreclose. This confusing back-and-forth continued for months, with Chase repeatedly asking them to resend paperwork, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California/Sacramento Division, which was first reported by Courthouse News.
The couple is demanding damages of $150,000 for breach of contract, fraud, predatory lending and violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
In October, a real-estate investor knocked on the Jahanis' door and asked them about buying the house, telling the couple that it was a bank-owned property. When the Jahanis called Chase to find out what was going on, they claim they were reassured that the bank had not foreclosed on the house.
"They kept getting conflicting information," said lawyer Piotr Reysner. He added that, as far as he can tell from public records, the bank did in fact foreclose on the property. "Unfortunately, they face a situation right now where they could easily get a three-day notice to quit the house."
Chase did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reysner, a bankruptcy attorney, said he did not know whether the Jahanis had been pursuing their modification via the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program, which started in spring 2009 and gives banks incentives to modify mortgages for hard-luck homeowners. Banks are not allowed to foreclose on borrowers eligible for the program, but they are allowed to move forward with the foreclosure process during a trial modification, a source of much confusion for borrowers everywhere.
"The fact that a servicer is telling a homeowner that they're taking care of the matter and, while they're negotiating, the house moves into foreclosure is a completely common scenario in today's foreclosure world," said Ira Rheingold, director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
In March, HuffPost reported on Indiana law student Melissa Stuart, who had been making monthly payments under HAMP, only to be told when the trial period ended that she was delinquent. Stuart ultimately won a permanent modification.
HuffPost readers: Weird bank problem? Tell us about it -- email arthur@huffingtonpost.com.
UPDATE 6:05 PM: Several readers and commenters have written to say they're having the same kind of problem. And Melissa Huelsman, a Seattle attorney whose practice focuses on predatory lending and wrongful foreclosure, wrote HuffPost to say clients of hers went through the same process as the Jahanis and were ultimately evicted. She wrote:‘Breathtaking, belly-shaking good times’
Heather Greenwood Davis
Writes at Globetrottingmama.com. She and her family were named travellers of the year by National Geographic magazine for their year long round the world trip. @greenwooddavis
Best thing about your visit? The surprises. I’ve met incredible people with personalities that will stick with me for a long, long time. Every cab ride has had me laughing.
Biggest surprise? The small museums in Limerick. We visited Foynes Flying Boat Museum and the Hunt Museum.
Best pub? It’s a tie. Loved chatting with the old-timers at Flannery’s Bar, in Limerick, but the Literary Pub Crawl through Dublin – especially O’Neills – was unforgettable.
Tourist attraction? I write a lot about family travel, and so for me I’d say King John’s Castle, in Limerick, was the best. It paired interactive exhibits with history and provided plenty of great spots for learning and photo-taking. I hope to bring the kids back to see it.
Most memorable cultural experience? Learning to pour the perfect pint at the Guinness Storehouse. Learning to pour the cream just so on my Irish coffee.
Ever feel ripped off? Not once.
Most scenic spot? I know I should say the Cliffs of Moher but I loved the ragtag mix of Temple Bar.
Oddest moment? Hearing a story about a wedding dress made out of chilli peppers by a local fashion designer, in Cow’s Lane, and watching my husband get his head massaged in a vintage chair at Waldorf Barbershop.
Most interesting new fact? That Foynes was the site of first passenger transatlantic flight.
What do you hope never changes about Ireland? The humour. Deadpan and common. No high-brow pretence.
Ireland in five words? Breathtaking, belly-shaking good times.
Will you be back? Absolutely. (Hope you don’t mind if I bring a few friends.)
‘Bring a raincoat and your roving eyes’
Zenaida des Aubris
Writes at travelswith.zen-aida.com. A well-travelled 63-year-old German, or in her words: “A lady in her prime travelling solo.”
@zenaidasworld
Best thing about your visit? The weather. Even the drizzle and the rain because it brings lush greenery, great clean air. It’s a high point these days, especially for people who live in megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Sao Paulo and New York, where the air quality is truly miserable.
Biggest disappointment? Durty Nelly’s Pub across from Bunratty Castle. Very much a tourist trap, though the staff were friendly.
Most surprising? The personal involvement of every staff member at every institution I visited, be it the curator at the Hunt Museum, to the guide at the Foyne’s Airship Museum, to Jackie at Bunratty Castle.
Best meal? Brasserie One at No 1 Pery Square Hotel, in Limerick.
Did you ever feel ripped off? The prices are higher than they are in Berlin, but I didn’t feel ripped off.
Thoughts on public transport? Luas is modern, efficient, clean and well lit: a great system.
Most scenic spot? Cliffs of Moher. The grounds of Adare Manor.
Most interesting new fact? Hurling and its unique rules. There’s no pay for its players, and they must come from the county they play for.
Best thing you overheard? Two elderly gentlemen sitting on a bench actually speaking Gaelic with each other. They are fluent in it and can only speak it with each other, not their families.
Best example of customer service? My Airbnb host Austin going out of his way to pick me up at almost midnight from the airport.
What do you hope never changes about Ireland? The people and their passion.
Advice for people coming to Ireland? Bring a raincoat and your roving eyes. There is bound to be something wonderful just lurking around the corner. Old buildings are full of interesting details... Don’t just keep to the main roads; explore the alleys and farther afield.
‘A truly authentic, beautiful place’
Johnny Jet
Writes at johnnyjet.com, where he is
Editor-in-chief. @johnnyjet
What was the best thing about your visit? The Irish people
What was the biggest disappointment? Didn’t meet any Leprechauns
Best meal? Dinner at Ballyfin Hotel, Co Laois
Best tourist attraction? Guinness Storehouse
Did you ever feel ripped off? Never.
Thoughts on public transport? I took multiple trains and was impressed by how efficient they were and that they offered free wifi.
Oddest thing you overheard? A drunk tourist tell her boyfriend to “smell my finger” while on the tram in Dublin.
Best customer service? The first line in the priest’s homily for Sunday Mass was, “Welcome to any visitors who might be passing through.”
Ireland in five words? A truly authentic, beautiful place.
Any other observations? I knew Ireland was going to be special the moment the passenger sitting behind my wife and I on the plane tapped our friendly seatmate on the shoulder to tell him the restaurant he’d just suggested to us was crap. When we arrived we ran into the opinionated bloke who had been sitting behind us. He warned us not to take one of the airport taxis since they’re a rip-off. Instead, he offered to call us a cab, which he said would be a lot cheaper. He then offered to drop us off at our hotel since he was going that way and wouldn’t take any money for the ride.
‘It seems any measure of caffeine costs a tenner’
Vanessa Chiasson
Writes at turnipseedtravel.com. A freelance writer based in Ottawa, Canada. @turnipseeds
What was the best thing about your visit? We had an incredible tour guide, Tony Kirby, to take us through Limerick and the surrounding areas. He was so passionate, welcoming, and knowledgeable. From native trees to popular poetry, it seemed like there wasn’t an area of Irish life he wasn’t well versed in.
Biggest disappointment? The horrible instant coffee in all the hotel rooms. It seems strange that hotels will provide North American compatible plugs in each room, while the real power surge comes from good, real coffee.
What surprised you most? The weather isn’t all that bad. I live through Canadian winters, so a spot of rain in an otherwise lovely autumn is easily tolerated.
Best pub? The Hairy Lemon in Dublin. The service was warm, friendly and helpful.
Did you ever feel ripped off? Anytime I wanted to buy a coffee and a muffin. it seems like a tenner is required for any measure of caffeine.
What did you think of our public transport? I love the wifi on Dublin Bus, but I cannot figure out the website or the pricing.
Oddest moment? Wifi at the Cliffs of Moher.
Best customer service? The animators at Bunratty Castle: warm, sincere, humble, homestyle welcomes at their very best. Runner-up could be the attitude-free customs staff at the airport.
Worst customer service? The Airlink bus driver who seemed incredulous that I didn’t have the correct change.
What would you change? Not a thing. The biggest change I’ve noticed is the smoke-free public spaces... now I’m experiencing Irish pubs for the first time.
What do you hope never changes? The weather. I’ve lived in the sub-Sahara; give me a season-changing country any day.
Ireland in five words? Imaginative, intoxicating, independent, intriguing, inexhaustible.
Advice for visitors? Have your wits about you when it comes to navigating rural roads. Avoid Dublin on the weekends to get the best hotel prices and know that a one-night weekend stay is nearly impossible.
‘I tried to take a bus in Dublin, but I couldn’t’
Leif Pettersen
Writes at killingbatteries.com. Freelance writer, humorist, world traveller and blogger from Minneapolis. @leifpettersen
What surprised you most? The Irish language has no similarities whatsoever to any other European language. I’m developing a theory that it was invented the morning after they accidently discovered beer.
Best meal? Harvey’s Point, in Lough Eske, Co Donegal.
Best pub? Due to the nature of my tour and the conference so far, I haven’t yet stepped foot into a proper pub. I know. I’m outraged too.
Most memorable cultural experience? The Doagh Famine Village in Donegal.
Thoughts on public transport? I tried to take a bus to meet my tour group in Dublin, but I couldn’t make the route-planning website work. Then three generous people working at the hostel tried to help me manually plan the trip, but it seemed awfully complicated. I ended up walking.
Most scenic spot? The drive to Glenevin Waterfall in Clonmany, Co Donegal. Like being on Mars, but with moss and sheep.
Oddest moment? When it didn’t rain for four consecutive days in September. I understand this hasn’t happened since 1585.
Interesting new fact? Surfing is popular.
Worst customer service? The dolphins that swam next to our boat at the Sliabh Liag cliffs did not hold still enough for photos. It was like they didn’t care about satisfying tourist needs.
Biggest criticism? One day I had a hard time finding a trash bin. That’s all I can think of.
What do you hope never changes about this country? The tireless, astonishing friendliness.
In five words how would you describe Ireland? Green, welcoming, festival of culture.
Will you be back? Definitely. Probably with my parents in tow. Ireland is on their travel wish list.Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, Vikas Swarup said. (File Photo)
India has asked China to stop all work in parts of Jammu and Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, the external affairs ministry said on Friday."Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India," external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said at his weekly media briefing here."Chinese activities in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir have been taken up with the Chinese side, including at the highest level," he said.Mr Swarup was responding to a question on India's stand on Chinese activities in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a large part of which falls within Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.China is believed to have made huge investments and is sponsoring development projects in Pakistan-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, including in the volatile Shia-dominated Gilgit-Baltistan area."We have asked them (the Chinese side) to cease all activities in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir," Mr Swarup said.Video
The Green Party candidate in the Richmond Park by-election last year had already stood down, before an offer of £250,000 was made if the party did not contest Zac Goldsmith's former seat, said Caroline Lucas.
The Green Party co-leader said there was no substance to the report from three of its members - one of whom has since joined Labour - and the offer had not met the party's ethical standards.
She told Andrew Neil: "Any kind of implication that we were standing down in order for money is absolutely wrong, categorically wrong. It happened after the decision was taken, and the money was not accepted."
More: Follow @daily_politics on Twitter and like us on Facebook and watch a recent clip and watch full programmes on iPlayer12 min ago Topics comments
With this year’s 40-man shortlist for the annual award having been announced, Joe Brewin and Greg Lea look at where its previous winners wound up
2003: Rafael van der Vaart (Ajax)
“ In 2008 he was snapped up by Real Madrid for €13m, spent two trophyless seasons in the Spanish capital and then moved to Tottenham, where he was a popular figure for two campaigns before re-joining Hamburg..
Van der Vaart was earmarked for greatness from very early on in his career. Having honed his skills on the streets of Amsterdam close to the trailer park he grew up in, he was scooped up by Ajax aged 10 and moulded into the technically excellent player who would leave them 12 years later for Hamburg.
The Dutchman was a first-team regular by the age of 17 and won the Eredivisie twice, in 2002 and 2004, establishing himself as a goalscoring midfielder with 14 league strikes in 2001/02 and another 18 the following campaign (from an injury-curtailed total of just 41 appearances altogether).
Van der Vaart gets a shot off before being closed down by Scotland's Barry Ferguson in 2003
Those injuries took their toll. Van der Vaart’s stock fell before his surprising 2005 switch to Hamburg – much to Johan Cruyff’s disgust, among others – but his move to northern Germany was a wise one. In 2008 he was snapped up by Real Madrid for €13m, spent two trophyless seasons in the Spanish capital and then moved to Tottenham, where he was a popular figure for two campaigns before re-joining Hamburg.
That was the beginning of the end: Van der Vaart’s stock was falling in line with his club’s, and they followed up a seventh-place finish in 2013 by twice almost getting relegated. A move to Real Betis was even worse – he barely featured and left the La Liga strugglers after a year. He’s now in Denmark with FC Midtjylland after being linked with Reading during the summer.
2004: Wayne Rooney (Man United)
“ Major tournament success with England has always been elusive, though, despite Rooney breaking the all-time scoring record in 2015 and becoming his country’s most-capped outfielder in September 2016..
Oh, for these days again Wazza.
Having followed up two seasons in Everton’s first team with an excellent Euro 2004 for England, it was only a matter of time before the country’s golden boy moved on to bigger things. Newcastle wanted him; Manchester United got him for a shade over £25m – at the time a record for a player under 20.
Under Fergie’s wing he achieved a Premier League-best haul of 11 goals in his debut campaign, then duly followed that with 10 more seasons of double figures (including two above the 25-mark), firing United to five title wins and a Champions League trinket in the process.
Major tournament success with England has always been elusive, though, despite Rooney breaking the all-time scoring record in 2015 and becoming his country’s most-capped outfielder in September 2016.
Both of those latter achievements have only masked a worryingly slide, however: Rooney hasn’t been quite right since the late Fergie years but has surely hit his nadir now, aged 30. Having played so poorly for so long and been recently dropped by Jose Mourinho, this time the decline looks terminal.
2005: Lionel Messi (Barcelona)
“ Messi at this point wasn’t the free-scoring freak of today, but his dribbling skills dropped jaws and he was already considered among the world’s best when he was barely out of his teens..
“I’d never seen anything like it from a teenager,” cooed Fabio Capello after watching world football’s new boy wonder dismantle his experienced Juventus side in a summer 2005 pre-season friendly in Barcelona. “At the end of the game, I went up to Frank Rijkaard and asked to loan him for the season, because they already had three non-EU players [Messi was due to receive his Spanish passport the following month]. He just laughed and said: ‘No chance’.”
He’d finally arrived properly. Barça already knew what they had in the pint-sized prodigy, of course, but now everyone else was seeing it too. Messi at this point wasn’t the free-scoring freak of today, but his dribbling skills dropped jaws and he was already considered among the world’s best when he was barely out of his teens.
Messi shows off the Golden Ball alongside Ronaldinho and Samuel Eto'o, who finished first and third in the World Player of the Year
“Best in the world? I’m not even the best at Barça,” chuckled Brazilian great Ronaldinho to FFT in late 2005 – but he really wasn’t joking. The buck-toothed trickster’s brilliance was mesmeric but frustratingly fleeting, unlike Messi who's lasted the course and somehow got better with age.
Eight La Liga titles with Barcelona and another four in the Champions League only tell a portion of the story of a player who's scored 461 goals in 539 games for his only club. At 29 he’s still just as frightening.
2006: Cesc Fabregas (Arsenal)
Chucked into Arsenal ’s first team at 16 three years earlier, Fabregas became a regular in Arsene Wenger’s side from the following season onwards, playing alongside the seasoned likes of Gilberto Silva and Patrick Vieira.
The Spaniard arguably goes down as Wenger’s greatest student to date; a player who was forced to take on a great weight of responsibility after Vieira’s departure to Juventus in 2005 and duly responded with consistently impressive performances. By the time of his Golden Boy win in 2006, aged 19, he was already over three-quarters of the way to 100 appearances in the Premier League.
But the trophies never came. Fabregas had lifted the FA Cup in 2005 but didn’t get to taste success with Arsenal again, so duly returned home to Barcelona in 2011 to win La Liga (but not the Champions League) in 2013. His homecoming hardly went to plan, though, and a 2014 switch to Chelsea was right for all parties. Things haven’t really been the same since the first half of his debut season at Stamford Bridge.
Next: Better than Kleberson? (OK, fine)A French primary school teacher was stabbed to death in front of her pupils on the last day of term by one of their mothers, in an attack described by President Francois Hollande as an “abominable drama”.
The woman entered the school in the sleepy southwestern town of Albi with a kitchen knife and stabbed 34-year-old Fabienne Terral-Calmès in her classroom as pupils arrived at the start of the school day, officials said.
Paramedics tried to save the teacher, who is herself the mother of two small girls, but she died at the scene from a single stab wound to her side, around two hours after the assault that was witnessed by up to 14 pupils.
Her attacker fled but was arrested a short time later as she wandered along a nearby street muttering incoherently, local prosecutor Claude Derens said.
The 47-year-old woman was assessed by psychiatrists after her arrest and was found to be suffering from “severe mental problems in the form of delirious notions of persecution”, he told a press conference.
He said she had been released from a psychiatric hospital in March, where she was placed after authorities found she had neglected her six-year-old daughter.
It was not immediately clear if the daughter was among the pupils who witnessed the murder at the Edouard Herriot school.
The horrific attack came just over two years after a French Islamist gunman killed three Jewish children and a rabbi in front of a school in the nearby city of Toulouse.
“This July 4, the moment when we should be happy for all children that school is over, that vacations are beginning, that teachers successfully completed the school year, has been turned into a day of mourning... by this abominable crime,” said the education minister, Benoit Hamon, who rushed to the scene after learning of the attack.
According to local media reports, the woman said during the assault that her act was justified because “the teacher wasn’t nice to my daughter”, and had also shouted “I am not a thief”.
The head of the local parents’ association, Sandrine Soliman, said she had spoken to the school and been told “there was no particular problem between the teacher and this woman”.
The victim taught in a class in the kindergarten section of the school, which has around 300 pupils aged from three to 11.
The French president said he had learned “with dismay” of what he described as the “abominable drama” and had ordered Mr Hamon to travel immediately to Albi.
It is still extremely rare for teachers in France to be killed in connection with their work, with only four known cases in the last 30 years.
But the incident in Albi, a popular tourist destination, follows growing concerns in France over assaults by parents on teachers.
A survey published this week said that while violence against teachers in France was rare, one in 10 school workers said they had been subject to threats and insults – twice as many as in any other profession.
The study by the INSEE national statistics agency, which covered the period between 2007 and 2013, said that teachers and other school workers in primary schools were often subjected to threats from adults, notably pupils’ parents.
The teachers most affected by abuse were those in their thirties, with women just as likely to be targeted as men.
In secondary schools the threats were more likely to come from pupils themselves, the study said.NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York prosecutors on Tuesday dismissed charges in the final two cases stemming from the mass arrest of more than 700 people during an Occupy Wall Street march two years ago.
The two defendants, Jonathan Stribling-Uss and Michael McCann, appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court expecting the judge to set a date for their disorderly conduct trial, according to attorney Martin Stolar.
Instead, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office filed a motion to dismiss and said prosecutors did not think they could prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
The move closed out the last remaining legal proceedings against more than 700 people arrested October 1, 2011, on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Stribling-Uss and McCann maintained they were not taking part in the bridge march but were acting as a legal aide and medic, respectively.
Both rejected offers to dismiss the charges if they avoided arrest for six months, their attorney said.
Occupy Wall Street demonstrators first set up camp in downtown Manhattan in September 2011 to protest high profits made by financial institutions and economic inequality.
The movement spread to cities around the world, addressing issues from disaster relief to human rights.
The Occupy Wall Street camp in New York was cleared out by police after two months.
There were more than 2,600 arrests in New York in connection with the demonstrators, including those made during the Brooklyn Bridge march.
About half of those arrested accepted offers from the District Attorney’s office to dismiss the charges if they avoided arrest for six months.
Of 68 cases that went to trial, there were 53 convictions and as of August, fewer than 20 cases remained, according to data collected by the District Attorney’s office.Only 59 super PACs have raised more than $1 million. | REUTERS The un-super PACs
Disgusted by conservative political groups flush with billionaires’ riches, real estate professional Mark Satterlee formed his Our Country Our Voice super PAC hoping to fund television and Web ads promoting liberal candidates.
Filing the federal paperwork took about 20 minutes and a postage stamp.
Story Continued Below
But when Satterlee sought to open up a bank account for his super PAC this summer, four financial institutions turned him down. His fundraising total through October? Zero dollars.
( Also on POLITICO: Dem super PACs get jump on 2014, 2016)
“It took a lot more of my time than I thought it would, and we never really got it off the ground,” Satterlee said. “Doing this was harder than I expected.”
Satterlee’s saga is hardly unique: More than 60 percent of the 1,091 super PACs ever created have never raised a dime.
In fact, more than 100 super PACs have closed shop in 2012, 59 this month alone, the Sunlight Foundation reports.
They’re the “un-super PACs,” often born from political idealism and good intentions but doomed to virtual anonymity or irrelevancy for one reason or another. Even kitschy or eye-catching names — such as Dogs Against Romney, Joe Six PAC, Eradicate National Debt and the Slam Dunks, Fireworks and Eagles Super PAC — haven’t helped much.
( Also on POLITICO: Merriam-Webster adding 'Super-PAC')
Life is good on the other side of the spectrum, where groups such as Restore Our Future, which raised $132 million to help Mitt Romney, or the pro-Barack Obama Priorities USA Action ($63 million), took advantage of a 2010 federal court decision that essentially created super PACs and gave the power to raise and spend unlimited sums.
But those are the anomalies: Fewer than one in 10 super PACs have raised at least $100,000, according to the latest federal records. Only 59 have raised more than $1 million.
That said, super PACs have collectively generated more than $750 million as of their last federal reports — a number that will certainly increase by year’s end.
Robert Rosenfeld of Ohio, for his part, wasn’t exactly being serious when he formed the Fat Old Man PAC.
Using one of his daughters’ nicknames for him, Rosenfeld says he created the super PAC mainly to “get my three kids a little more interested in the election.”
He didn’t raise a dime but said he had some fun and learned, if nothing else, that filing paperwork to form a super PAC is a heck of a lot easier than filing tax returns for charitable organizations, which is part of his day job.
Remy Maisel raised $25 from one donor during the more than six months she’s run Penn Staters for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, a super PAC inspired by comedian Stephen Colbert, who sold a do-it-yourself kit for forming super PACs as part of a yearlong gag lambasting the influence of money in politics. Maisel added $50 from her own pocketbook, as well.
Colbert’s satirical super PAC — Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow — raised about $1.25 million, only to have Colbert to shut it down this month and donate the remaining $774,000 to a secretive nonprofit organization he set up.About
This project started one night while I was reading the news online. After various clicks, I got to some disturbing news involving race, religion and sexual orientation. I always wanted to help people and make a difference in someone else's life. That night I decided to try and spread LOVE, but how? Well, I got together with some friends and told them my idea. We all decided that it would be great to start a t-shirt brand. We got creative and started creating designs. We were very excited until we came across the "spending" part of the project. We realized we needed a lot of stuff to just get started.
Our goal is to promote love and equality. We know that we can make a difference with your help. We will buy our screening machine, we want to rent a studio, and of course we will get the best tshirt quality. We also want to open our e-shop and eventually open our boutique.Artbound's editorial team has reviewed and rated the most compelling weekly articles. After putting two articles up for a vote, the audience chose this article to be made into a short-format documentary.
It had just been a handful of months |
23, 2013.[21]
Payton, Strong, Cipes, and Walch reprised their respective character roles as Cyborg, Raven, Beast Boy, Starfire and Blackfire in DC Super Hero Girls.
Payton reprised his role as Cyborg in Lego DC Comics: Batman Be-Leaguered, Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League vs. Bizarro League, Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League – Attack of the Legion of Doom, Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League – Cosmic Clash, Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League – Gotham City Breakout along with Cipes, Walch, and Menville (although he played the Damian Wayne Robin), and Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: The Flash. He has also reprised his role as Cyborg on Justice League Action.
Several character details from Teen Titans, like Raven's standard incantation Azarath Metrion Zinthos and Beast Boy's super-werewolf form from the episode "The Beast Within", were incorporated into the animated movie Justice League vs. Teen Titans.
Impact on DC continuity [ edit ]
Teen Titans has never been established to be a part of the larger DC animated universe or The Batman animated series. Series producer Bruce Timm stated the series would not cross over with Justice League Unlimited. The character Speedy, who first appeared in the episode "Winner Take All", later appeared in Justice League Unlimited with the same costume design and voice actor (Mike Erwin) as the Teen Titans incarnation (though he is older in appearance). Kid Flash was voiced by Michael Rosenbaum in his appearances in the show, who was the same actor who voiced the Flash in Justice League Unlimited. The follow-up series, Teen Titans Go!, has featured several appearances by Batman, but they have all been non-speaking appearances. Both Batman and Alfred Pennyworth appear in DC Nation's New Teen Titans "Red X Unmasked". In the season 2 episode of Teen Titans Go!, "Let's Get Serious", Aqualad (voiced by Khary Payton), Superboy, and Miss Martian of the Young Justice team appear.
Much like X-Men: Evolution and Batman: The Animated Series, the series has affected the comics that initially inspired it, including: Beast Boy adopting the series' purple and black outfit during DC's "52" storyline and later appearing with the pointed ears and fanged teeth originated by the series,[22] future Cyborg having the same armor pattern of his animated counterpart in the Titans Tomorrow storyline,[23] Raven adapting her animated counterpart's costume design in the "One Year Later" storyline, the characters Más Y Menos making appearances in 52 and the Final Crisis limited series,[24] the character Joto was renamed "Hotspot" during 52 to match his cartoon counterpart,[25] and the villain Cinderblock appearing in a fight with the comic incarnation of the Titans.[26]
In other media [ edit ]
Comics [ edit ]
DC Comics published a comic book series based on Teen Titans named Teen Titans Go!. The series was written by J. Torres and Todd Nauck, Larry Stucker was the regular illustrator. The series focuses on Robin, Raven, Starfire, Beast Boy, and Cyborg who are the main cast members of the television series. While the comic's stories stand independently, its issues were done so as not to contradict events established in the animated series' episodes. Often, Teen Titans Go! also referenced episodes of the show, as well as expanding on parts of the series.
Toys [ edit ]
Bandai released a line of action figures based on the Teen Titans animated series. The line included 1.5 inch "Comic Book Hero" mini figures, 3.5 inch action figures (including "Teen Titans Launch Tower Playset", "Teen Titans Command Center", "Battling Machines", "T-Vehicles", "T-Sub Deluxe Vehicles"), 5 inch action figures, 6.5 inch plush Super-D Toys, and 10 inch figures. Amongst the characters included in the line were the main members of the Teen Titans, Titans East, and various allies and villains.[27][28]
Reception [ edit ]
Critical reception [ edit ]
The series had mostly positive critical reception. Early into the series' run, Executive Producer and Cartoon Network Vice President Sam Register responded to criticism regarding the style of the show with a statement slightly contradicting Murakami's statement about wanting Robin to "be cool" with his metal-tipped boots:
Justice League is awesome and Samurai Jack is awesome and we buy a lot of anime shows that are great, but those shows really are directed more towards the nine to fourteen age group, and the six and seven and eight-year-olds were not gelling with the Justice League and some of the more of the fanboy shows...The main mission was making a good superhero show for kids. Now if the fanboys happen to like the Teen Titans also, that's great, but that was not our mission. — Sam Register, CBR News interview, May 8, 2004
However, while the series' creators initially stated that younger children were the intended audience for the series, Teen Titans Go! writer J. Torres notes that the progression and deeper themes of the show widened the appeal to a much broader audience:
... [The show] started out skewed a lot younger... but along the way, I think the producers discovered it was reaching a wider audience.... [the show] got into some darker story lines, and they introduced a lot more characters, so they expanded on it, and they let the show evolve with the audience. J. Torres, Titans Companion 2 by Glen Cadigan.[29]
In 2009, Teen Titans was named the 83rd best animated series by IGN.[30]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]
2005 Annie Awards
Outstanding Storyboarding in an Animated Television Production (Nominated)
2004 Annie Awards
Outstanding Music in an Animated Television Production (Nominated)
Outstanding Storyboarding in an Animated Television Production (Nominated)
2004 Motion Picture Sound Editors Awards
Best Sound Editing in Television Animation (Nominated)
See also [ edit ]Rates of New Dementia Cases May Be Falling School of public health study raises possibility of preventing or delaying some cases
Despite concerns about an explosion of dementia cases in an aging population over the next few decades, a new study, based on data from Boston University-administered Framingham Heart Study (FHS), suggests that the rate of new cases of dementia actually may be decreasing over time.
The study in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by researchers from BU’s schools of Medicine (MED) and Public Health (SPH), offers hope that some cases of dementia might be prevented or delayed and encourages funding agencies and the scientific community to further explore demographic, lifestyle, and environmental factors underlying the positive trend. Co-authors include Alexa Beiser, professor of biostatistics at SPH and of neurology at MED.
Experts believe that the number of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias will grow each year, as the size and proportion of the US population aged 65 and older continues to increase. By 2025, the number of people 65 and older with Alzheimer’s disease is projected to reach 7.1 million—a 40 percent increase from the 5.1 million people affected in 2015. By 2050, the number of people in this age group with Alzheimer’s disease may nearly triple, to a projected 13.8 million, barring the development of medical breakthroughs to prevent or cure the disease.
Worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 47.5 million people have dementia, and that the total number of people with dementia could reach 75.6 million in 2030.
FHS participants have been continuously monitored for the occurrence of cognitive decline and dementia since 1975. Sources of information on their cognitive health include FHS exams, outside clinical records, interviews with family members, and the examination of participants suspected of having neurological problems by neurologists and neuropsychologists.
For the new study, researchers looked at the rate of dementia at various ages and attempted to explain the reason for a decreasing risk of dementia over a period of almost 40 years. They considered risk factors such as education and smoking, and medical conditions including diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
Looking at four distinct periods in the late 1970s, late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the researchers found that there was a progressive decline in the incidence of dementia at a given age, with an average reduction of 20 percent per decade since the 1970s. The decline was more pronounced with a subtype of dementia caused by vascular diseases, such as stroke.
Interestingly, the decline in dementia incidence was observed only in people with a high school education and above.
The five-year, age- and sex-adjusted cumulative hazard rates for dementia were 3.6 per 100 persons during the first period (late 1970s and early 1980s), 2.8 per 100 persons during the second period (late 1980s and early 1990s), 2.2 per 100 persons during the third period (late 1990s and early 2000s), and 2.0 per 100 persons during the fourth period (late 2000s and early 2010s).
The authors say that while the prevalence of most vascular risk factors (except obesity and diabetes) and the risk of dementia associated with stroke, atrial fibrillation, or heart failure have decreased over time, none of those trends completely explains the decrease in the incidence of dementia.
“Currently, there are no effective treatments to prevent or cure dementia. However, our study offers hope that some of the dementia cases might be preventable—or at least delayed—through primary (keep the disease process from starting) or secondary (keep it from progressing to clinically obvious dementia) prevention,” explains corresponding author Sudha Seshadri, professor of neurology at MED and FHS senior investigator.
“Effective prevention could diminish in some measure the projected explosion in the number of persons affected with the disease in the next few decades.”
The FHS consistently has been considered a reliable source of data. However, the study authors concede that the sample population is overwhelmingly of European ancestry, and that further studies are needed to extend the findings to other populations. In addition, the authors did not look at the effects of key variables, such as changes in diet and exercise.
Despite the limitations, the authors say that better management of cardiovascular diseases and strokes and their risk factors could offer new opportunities to slow the projected burden of dementia.
Researchers from Inserm in France and the University of Bordeaux contributed to the study. Funding came from FHS and from grants from the National Institute on Aging and National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke.Maryland's legislature has given final approval to a bill that would eliminate criminal charges for possessing small amounts of marijuana, and the governor says he plans to sign it.
The Senate voted Monday to accept several compromises the House added over the weekend.
The bill would keep marijuana use illegal but make it akin to a traffic violation. The House opted to require all teen offenders to be evaluated for treatment. It also voted to raise the penalties to $250 for a second offense and $500 for a third, up from a maximum fine of $100.
Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, said Monday he has changed his views on decriminalization. He says it reflects the public's will and could lead to greater focus on more serious threats to public safety.
Copyright Associated PressBOSTON -- How unsettled was the Boston Red Sox outfield last season? Manager John Farrell used nine left fielders, five center fielders and 10 right fielders.
The outfield Farrell envisioned he'd have to open the season -- Grady Sizemore in center, flanked by a platoon of Daniel Nava and Jonny Gomes in left and Shane Victorino in right -- played exactly one game together, and that didn't come until late May.
Victorino blew out a hamstring in the last exhibition game of spring, ultimately had back surgery and played in just 30 games. Nava was sent down to Pawtucket after opening the season in a severe slump. Sizemore was overmatched by center field, his bat was slow to come around and ultimately was released.
Gomes was dealt at the trading deadline.
Jackie Bradley Jr., whose subpar performance in spring training had him ticketed to return to Pawtucket, instead was rushed to the big leagues and kept there, long after his bat proved incapable of hitting major league pitching even as he played peerless defense. The Sox traded for two outfielders, Yoenis Cespedes and Allen Craig, spent $72.5 million on a Cuban import, Rusney Castillo, and gave long looks in the outfield to two converted infielders, Brock Holt and Mookie Betts.
Will Shane Victorino reclaim right field in 2015? Brad Rempel/USA TODAY Sports
All those machinations mean that the Sox are certain to have a different look in the outfield by next spring, and the uncertainty invites all kinds of speculation about which direction the Sox will proceed. An early guess, based on the way the season ended, would be Castillo in center, with Cespedes in left and Betts in right, with Nava and Craig on the bench and Bradley back in Pawtucket working on his swing, but that alignment raises as many questions as it answers:
• What do the Sox do with Victorino if he comes back healthy, as he vows to do, with $13 million and one year left on his contract? Even if the Sox had plans to trade him, they won't be able to do so before he shows he's healthy in spring.
• What if Cespedes, eligible to become a free agent after 2015, signals his intention to leave after the season?
• What if the Sox have to surrender Betts as the price of acquiring a top-of-the-rotation starting pitcher?
• What if the Sox make a run at Miami's Giancarlo Stanton, even though the Marlins insist he's going nowhere, or Atlanta's Jason Heyward, who is a year away from free agency but would offer the Sox left-handed balance and play outstanding corner defense?
• What if Bradley, arguably the best defensive center fielder the Sox have had in 40 years, has a great spring? Does he force himself back into the picture?
This much is clear: GM Ben Cherington will not go into the 2015 season with an outfield that combined to hit 26 home runs, the fewest in the majors, and languished near the bottom of most of the other key offensive categories as well. But how he gets there should be fascinating to watch.
Red Sox outfielders' performance this season (major league rankings):
Batting average:.249, 27th
On-base percentage:.313, 23rd
Slugging percentage:.356, 28th
Home runs: 26, 30th
Extra-base hits: LF 44, 20th; CF 37, 24th; RF 49, 17th
Offensive WAR: LF 1.4, 17th; CF 0.8, 26th; RF 1.7, 16th
Errors: LF 6, 18th; CF 1, 1st (tied); RF 4, 9th
Total Zone Fielding Runs Above Average: LF -7, 23rd; CF -3, 20th; RF 10, 6th
Left fielders used: 9
Offensive stats: Jonny Gomes 54 G,.224/.311/.321/.632 3 HR, 24 RBIs; Yoenis Cespedes 43,.266/.297/.439/.737 5, 30; Daniel Nava 35,.316/.397/.351/.748 0, 5; Grady Sizemore 22,.277/.330/.422/.751 1, 13; Mike Carp 10,.207/.258/.241/.499 0, 3; Brock Holt 7,.333/.375/.400/.775 0,0; Bryce Brentz 5,.300/.300/.350/.650 0, 2; Allen Craig 1,.250/.250/.500/.750 0, 0; Kelly Johnson 1,.000/.000/.000/.000 0, 0.
Center fielders used: 5
Offensive stats: Jackie Bradley Jr. 107 G,.198/.270/.267/.537 1 HR, 26 RBIs; Mookie Betts 28,.272/.353/.447/.800 4, 11; Grady Sizemore 16,.191/.309/.298/.607 1, 1; Rusney Castillo 10,.333/.400/.528/.928 2, 6; Brock Holt 9,.143/.200/.179/379 0, 0.
Right fielders used: 10
Offensive stats: Daniel Nava 65 G,.267/.329/.390/.719 4 HR, 27 RBIs; Brock Holt 32,.311/.356/.475/.831 2, 9; Shane Victorino 30,.268/.303/.382/.685 2, 12; Grady Sizemore 14,.148/.207/.204/.411 0, 1; Allen Craig 10,.160/.323/.200/.523 0, 0; Mookie Betts 9,.355/.412/.484/.896 0, 1; Jackie Bradley Jr. 8,.217/.217/.261/.478 0, 4; Jonny Gomes.241/.333/.345/.678 1, 3; Alex Hassan 2,.143/.250/.143/.393 0, 0; Bryce Brentz 1,.250/.250/.250/.500 0, 0.
Best performance: All the preseason attention was focused on two other rookies, Bradley and Xander Bogaerts, but the 21-year-old Betts may have stamped himself as the team's leadoff hitter of the future with his coming-out party. He handled the transition to the outfield, which he had barely played before arriving here, with aplomb, brought speed and athleticism to the lineup, and showed that he can drive the ball as well.
Biggest disappointment: Bradley was historically bad at the plate, his.198 average the lowest ever of any Sox rookie who had 300 or more plate appearances. The depths to which he fell were puzzling, given his history of being able to hit going back to his college stardom at South Carolina and throughout the minor leagues. Bradley expresses confidence he will hit, and former big leaguers like Mike Cameron recalled fighting similar slumps early in their career, but it's an open question whether Bradley gets another chance here.
Biggest surprise: A strong case could be made for either of the converted infielders, Betts or Holt, thriving in the outfield, but did anyone really foresee Gomes going from such a key role player in 2013 to non-factor so quickly?
Outlook for 2015: We've touched on it above, but the outfield situation is so fluid the Sox could go in any number of directions.
Potential free-agent signings: The Sox won't be targeting an outfielder in free agency.
Potential trade targets: If they make a trade, it will only be in a megadeal (Stanton or Heyward).
Will Rusney Castillo live up to his $72.5 million contract? Elsa/Getty Images
Prospects in the system: He's only 20 and hasn't played above Class A Salem, but Manuel Margot is already ranked the third-best prospect in the Sox system by SoxProspects.com, which cites his plus-plus speed, his plus-defensive skills and potential impact bat as the tools of a potential future All-Star.
Scout's take: Castillo has way more upside in center field than Bradley. He has tremendous actions in center field, he's faster than Bradley though the arm isn't as strong, and he looks like he will hit. That's saying a lot, since Bradley's defense was Gold Glove stellar. I think Bradley will mature, but his bat has a long way to go, and you can't start in a major league outfield if you can't hit. I think he has trade value, for a team that takes a chance that his bat will come along, knowing that he may end up no more than an extra outfielder. The problem for the Red Sox is his bat has already been exposed on the major league level. Unlike Castillo or Betts, there was never any spark or surge. The people I talk to about Betts love his athleticism and versatility.
I expect Cespedes to test free agency. I've seen a little regression in his game since he first came over from Cuba, and I don't think he's a good corner outfielder. A lot of his highlight plays came out of misplays. His whole effort level, to me, was greater when he first came here. He'll produce offense in real good spurts, but I'm not buying the total package. I guarantee you there will be no hometown discounts. For me, a lot of yellow flags.
I've never been a Craig guy, and now his injury history comes into play. The Sox have a real jigsaw puzzle to solve in their outfield.After a great night one, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla came back with another fantastic show for night two of All Star Weekend 13. While I don’t think night two was as good match for match as night one, it featured a great main event and a match that I feel is among the top three to ever take place in the promotion.
Jonah Rock over Adam Brooks [10’43]
This was really good. They played up the big man versus little man angle with Brooks using his speed to counter Rock’s power (though not to the extent of Cage and Webster on night one). I’m not sure how much they’ve worked together in Australia, but they had good chemistry in this. Rock won with a powerbomb from the ropes followed by a brainbuster.
Rating: *** 1/2
The Young Bucks (Matt & Nick Jackson) over Flash Morgan Webster & Mark Haskins by submission [17’44]
This was excellent but I felt they went a little over board on the comedy. The first part of the match saw Haskins and Webster doing the “too sweet” and “suck it” to taunt the Bucks, then trying to force the Bucks to do a “too sweet.” At one point Webster even came in the ring with a helmet on to avoid the superkicks. They did the spot where the crowd calls out for more and more boots and Marty Scurll came out when they got to four boots. They then called for six and Rick Knox was pulled into the action. All four guys looked great in this. The Bucks won with a Meltzer Driver on Haskins followed by double sharpshooters.
Rating: ****
Marty Scurll over Joey Janela by submission [14’12]
This started out with Scurll calling Joey Janela a backyarder and claiming he was beneath him. Janela took control and yelled out a list of wrestlers who started as backyarders. Later when Scrull had a submission on Janela he said that “they don’t teach counters in the backyard.” Once this got going it pretty good. They had set up four chairs with their backs together like an A and Janela took a bump on that followed by Scurll putting on the chickenwing to get the win.
Rating: *** 1/2
WALTER over Zack Sabre Jr by submission [20’04]
WALTER was absolutely destroying Sabre with chops throughout this match. Every time he hit a chop the sound was so loud and half the crowd is just cringing. Ricochet’s selling the night before really helped build up the devastation of these chops as well. Sabre was using a ton of stiff offense of his own. WALTER was under the bottom rope and Sabre was just stomping his face off. Sabre would try to get submissions on WALTER but WALTER was able to just keep over powering out of them. It was paced great and was just brutal throughout. In a reverse of WALTER’s night one match where Ricochet turned a choke into a bridging pin, WALTER turned Sabre’s bridging pin into a choke and got him to tap. This was the best match I’ve seen live this year, and if the year ended today would be my pick for the Southern California match of the year. I’d place it in my three favorite PWG matches ever with Steen and Generico from Steen Wolf and Worlds Cutest Tag Team versus the Young Bucks, though on a technical level it was better than both.
Rating: *****
Trent? over Matt Sydal and Rey Horus [16’59]
With Travis Banks off the shows Trent? was added to this to make it a three-way. It was going to be hard to top the three-way from the night before that this was inevitably going to be compared to. This was good, but there were a few sloppy moments that brought it down some. Trent? hit the Dudebuster on Sydal to get the win.
Rating: *** 1/2
Ricochet over Chuck Taylor to win the PWG World Championship [31’00]
There was a lot of talk going around about Ricochet going to WWE and even talk about this being his last PWG show which had a lot of people (myself included) thinking Chuck Was going to retain here. Ricochet worked more of heel style the night before and even hit low blows on WALTER. About 17 minutes into the match referee Rick Knox took a ref bump, Ricochet hit a low blow and a belt shot on Taylor and Justin Borden came out and counted the pin and Ricochet was declared the winner and new champion. Rick Knox got up and reversed it and restarted the match. I think especially after this everyone was convinced Taylor would now take the win. Usually when these type of things happen in a match the face pretty quickly gets the pin after. Not here. They went another 14 minutes. Playing off the match where he won the the title when Sabre Jr. removed the bottom rope to stop Taylor from rope breaking his submissions, Taylor removed the tope rope to try and stop Ricochet’s aerial attacks.
It didn’t work. Instead Ricochet was hitting moves off the second rope, including a 450 and a Shooting Star Press for near falls. At one point they teased a hammer being used (they couldn’t find the belt with all the ropes in the ring) and Ricochet hit another low blow. Eventually Ricochet hit the King’s Landing and got the pin. After the match Ricochet said getting the belt proves “daddy isn’t going anywhere.”
This was great. I know a few people felt that it was over booked, but PWG really never does matches like this so it came across fresh and they really managed to surprise people with the outcome. It also did a great job of playing off previous matches making it feel more like the climax of a story rather than a self contained match.
Rating: **** 1/2
All Star Weekend 13 ended up being two really great shows and a great end to a fantastic year by PWG. With the string of great shows PWG has had this year, 2017 will have to go down as one of, if not the best years in the promotion’s history. I really appreciated how the two shows felt like two parts to one show with matches playing off each other instead of it feeling like two separate shows. Both nights of All Star Weekend 13 are worth checking out on video.
The DVD and Blu Ray is available for preorder now from PWG and Highspots.Schaffhausen. Trough the IWC watches workshop windows slowly flowing waters of the Rhine – the great river is getting ready to a few kilometers downstream reveal all its power and overthrow the roar and clatter from the rocky ledges the world-famous Rhine Falls. It was here more than 140 years ago, began the history of IWC, which continues to this day.
At the age of 27 years, an American engineer and watchmaker Florentine Ariosto Jones was appointed to the post of deputy director and head of production in the company E. Howard Watch and Clock Co. in Boston, the leading American company for the production of watches on that times. While many people were looking for happiness in the West, Jones went in the opposite direction. He decided to move to the other side of the Atlantic – in Switzerland, where wages are still relatively low. Jones had planned to combine excellence of Swiss watchmakers, advanced engineering technology of the New World and its innovative spirit in order to set up production of high quality watches for the American market. However, the master of the surrounding area of Geneva and remote valleys of western Switzerland reacted to his plans skeptical. Since the XVII century, they have traditionally worked at home or in tiny workshops. Jones, on the contrary, dreamed of building a modern factory with centralized production.
At that time Jones met industrialist from Schaffhausen named Heinrich Moser. Schaffhausen has long been famous for its tradition of watchmaking. The first watches mentioned in the chronicles were created in 1409 in the monastery of Rheinau, located 10 km downstream of the Rhine. They were made for the church of St. John in Schaffhausen. There is also documentary evidence that from 1583, in the city there was a guild of watchmakers and there also lived the famous dynasty Habrehtov timepieces (Habrecht), created for the Strasbourg Cathedral, one of the most unusual astronomical clock in the world. However, it is the idea of Jones series production within the walls of a factory of a large number of high-quality watches that meet all the standards of Swiss watchmaking, ultimately, this idea made watches from Schaffhausen known and famous to the whole world. Let’s go through some meaningful history moments.
1868
Florentine Ariosto Jones (1841-1916), a watchmaker from Boston (MA), had founded the International Watch Company (IWC) in Schaffhausen. Its task was: the production of high-quality pocket watches for the American market.
1875
Construction of new buildings and building modern headquarters on the banks of the Rhine IWC. The company’s staff – 196 employees.
1880
Johannes Rauschenbach-Vogel, engine manufacturer from Schaffhausen (1815-1881), buys IWC company.
1899
In Schaffhausen was produced one of the first models in the world of wristwatches. Firm had used in their manufacture caliber 64 miniature women pocket watches set in an elegant case with lugs for fixing the bracelet. In the production of other watches IWC company used caliber 63 women pocket watches.
1905
After the death of his son Johannes Rauschenbach, Ernst Jakob Homberger takes over the management of the company IWC on behalf of Rauschenbach heirs of the family.
1915
IWC is new gauges: 75 (without the second hand) and 76 (with a small second hand). It was the first mechanism, created specifically for wristwatches.
1936
The first timepiece Special IWC Pilot Watch was launched. Their rotating bezel with swept pointer can be used to record the time of departure. In addition, this watch is equipped with anti-magnetic escapement.
1939
The birth of IWC Portuguese model: two from Portugal importer bought large batch of watches made by very precise caliber pocket watch.
2014
Release of the new generation of Aquatimer watch with outer and inner rotating bezel.He was served at the recent CPAC gathering. Salon:
Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers. The media devoured the Breitbart’s version of story so voraciously that the NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue.
Sherrod argues in the lawsuit that the clip “damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work.” Breitbart, meanwhile, denounced the suit, saying he “categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech.”The U.S. Army and Marine Corps will jointly test a so-called "active protection" system. These tanks and other armored vehicles will be fitted with an Israeli-developed system that shoots down and jams enemy anti-tank weapons. According to U.S. Naval Institute News, this will be the first test of Trophy on American equipment.
The Army is leasing four Trophy units, enough for a platoon, and will test them on M1A2 tanks and Stryker interim armored vehicles. The services will then test Trophy on older Marine Corps M1A1 tanks. The Marines will be particularly interested in the Stryker test, as the vehicle bears a similarity to the Corps' new Amphibious Combat Vehicle 1.1. If the experiments are successful, Trophy could become an important upgrade to protect U.S. armored vehicles from anti-tank missiles and rockets.
Trophy is considered an active protection system because it actively destroys the threat to the tank, as opposed to a passive protection system such as tank armor. Armor is heavy and makes armored vehicles less mobile. Active protection systems such as Trophy, on the other hand, consist of lightweight radars and the hard-kill countermeasure system.
Made by Israeli defense contractor Rafael, Trophy consists of three parts: a detection radar, tracking radar, and both "hard" and "soft" anti-missile countermeasures. The system establishes a 360-degree bubble-shaped detection zone around the vehicle, with a detection radar constantly searching for inbound threats. Here's a promotional video, produced by Rafael, that describes the Trophy system:
Once a threat is detected moving toward the tank, the tracking radar takes over and fires a shotgun-like blast of pellets to destroy the incoming missile or rocket. Intercepts occur as close at 10 meters from the tank. The "soft" kill component of Trophy consists of jammers designed to jam radio signals providing steering commands to anti-tank missiles.Repeat after me – Britain isn’t broke. Welfare for the third child in middle-income families is not an unaffordable luxury, nor are tax credits for striving families. Last night’s abstention by the parliamentary Labour party during the Welfare Bill was a moment of public self-harming. It only takes a cursory look at the budget to see there is money in the public coffers – money to cut the tax bill for big business, to cut inheritance tax for the very wealthy and to increase tax free allowances. So why, when the Chancellor is willing to dole out public money to his favoured causes, can Labour not defend the Blair-Brown consensus on tax credits that cut child poverty and gave aspirational families a boost to their incomes? The SNP’s jibe that Labour should give up its role as official opposition hurts because it is true. What’s the point of the Labour party if it isn’t prepared to help the poorest in our society?
I can see why Harriet Harman felt the need to take a tough stance on this. The public feel Labour was too accommodating of the feckless and workshy. I personally back the benefit cap at £26,000. I don’t see why it is controversial that no family should earn more in benefits than the average earner in work. Yet, the Tories sense blood. They want to go even further – reducing the benefit cap (and this won’t be the last cut) to £20,000 outside London, abolishing the child poverty target and capping child benefits to just two children. All of this is to deliver on their manifesto commitment to save £12 billion from the welfare bill. Before the last night’s vote Labour should have been asking themselves – is this strictly necessary?
The answer is no. As I have pointed out before the election, Labour could have governed without making a single penny’s worth of cuts:
It doesn’t take an expert in economics to fathom that [Osborne’s] final year of increased spending could, in fact, be spread across the next parliament to reduce the level of cuts required. Once you add in the commitment of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats to balance the books – excluding debt interest (eg a small deficit) – by 2019 – 20 (rather than including debt interest) suddenly cuts of £59 billion become cuts of £11 billion.
Cuts of £11 billion – or tax rises of £11 billion. George Osborne gave Labour’s treasury team a handy clue on how this level of tax increase could be achieved by raising taxes by £13 billion by 2020-21. The budget included a tax bombshell on Britain’s entrepreneur class with huge hikes in dividend taxes (leaving Britain’s family businesses with a higher tax bill than under Labour) and, more fairly, a tax rise on buy-to-let property owners. With the tax hike on insurance premiums and other tax increases on vehicles and non-doms, Osborne raised taxes by £6 billion next year rising to £12.96 billion by the end of this term of parliament.
Simply adopting the Chancellor’s tax increases and freezing department spending in this term of parliament would have closed the budget deficit without the sight of Labour backing ideological benefit cuts. Tough though a real terms freeze would be, with inflation set to remain below one percent this year (and the near-future) it would be deliverable. The certainty of fixed budgets for 4 years will help support prudent management of the public finances. As I noted before:
Moving budgets within departments – for instance rebalancing the local government budget to support Liverpool and Hackney (with cuts of £320 per person) by taking the money from leafy Epson (with cuts of only £15 per head) – would help rebalance the cuts and not require additional spending.
Perhaps even a freeze is too much to stomach. Again Osborne shows Labour how cash increases in public spending could be achieved – through his entirely political tax cuts. For Labour to match the additional £8 billion granted by Osborne to the NHS by 2020-21, Labour only need to repeal George Osborne’s tax cuts and back a one-off two pence increase on beer, petrol and diesel duties. While tax threshold increases for top-earners, sweeping tax cuts for big businesses (while family businesses got hit hard) and the inheritance tax cut may be popular, they shouldn’t be political priorities for the Labour party.
Labour has to be more robust on its political messaging: the benefit caps saves only £360 million a year by 2017/2018. Two-thirds of those affected are single mums. The saving is only half the cost of cutting inheritance tax for Britain’s richest families. Ending the automatic entitlement for housing benefit for unemployed (and homeless) 18-21 year olds saves a |
foreign ministry last year that compromised email communications and lasted for many months before it was detected, according to people familiar with the matter.
An Italian government official confirmed that the attack took place last spring and lasted for more than four months but did not infiltrate an encrypted system used for classified communications.
Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian prime minister who was serving as foreign minister at the time, was not affected by the hack, according to the official, who said Gentiloni avoided using email while he was foreign minister.
Nato must defend western democracy against Russian hacking, say Fallon Read more
The foreign ministry’s “field offices”, including embassies and staff members who report back to Rome about meetings with foreign officials, were affected by the malware attack. But the government official said sensitive information had not been compromised because it would also have been encrypted.
The official did not confirm that Moscow was behind the attack. But two other people with knowledge of the attack said the Russian state was believed to have been behind it. The hacking is now the subject of an inquiry by the chief prosecutor in Rome.
“There were no attacks on the encrypted level. So the information – delicate, sensitive information – that is usually shared in this net, which is restricted by code, has never been attacked or part of this attack,” the government official said.
The person said that after the attack was discovered, the foreign ministry modified its online “architecture” and introduced new instruments to enhance internal security. The official declined to comment on how the intrusion was detected.
The revelation comes amid heightened concerns that Russia has targeted Nato members, including the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Bulgaria, as part of a cyber campaign that seeks to weaken the governments of those countries and disrupt critical infrastructure.
In the US, intelligence agencies have blamed Russian government-sponsored hacking groups for breaching the Democratic National Committee and officials in Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 presidential elections, in part to try to help Donald Trump win the White House.
White House says Vladimir Putin had direct role in hacking US election Read more
People who discussed the matter with the Guardian on condition of anonymity said they believed the attack against the foreign ministry was an attempt to gain insight into decision-making within the Italian government.
If Russia did attack Italy, it was targeting a country generally considered less hostile to it than other EU countries such as Germany or the UK. While Italy has supported sanctions against Russia that were imposed following the annexation of Crimea, the government under former prime minister Matteo Renzi strongly opposed a proposal to levy new sanctions against Moscow for its role in the Syrian conflict.
News of the hacking could stoke concerns that Russia may seek to influence the next Italian election, which could be called as early as June. In an interview with the Guardian late last year, a foreign diplomat in Rome questioned whether the current centre-left government, which will face a tough re-election challenge, had prepared itself for possible interference by Russia.
The government’s main opposition, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, has adopted pro-Russian positions on topics ranging from Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Syria, to his invasion of Ukraine, to a call for Italy to lift sanctions against Russia and reassess its commitment to Nato.
A representative of the Russian government was quoted by Ansa, the Italian news agency, as saying the allegations were unproven.”There are no facts that prove this statement,” Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, said in a WhatsApp message in response to a question about the veracity of the hacking allegation.
Raffaele Marchetti, a political scientist and cybersecurity expert at LUISS University in Rome, said Italy had stepped up its attention to security recently and that he had been encouraged by the appointment of Marco Minniti as interior minister because of Minniti’s expertise on the cyber issue.
Russian hacking group's 'last member at liberty' comes out of the shadows Read more
“But of course much more needs to be done and implemented,” Marchetti said.
Italy’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks was exposed earlier this year following the arrest of a brother-sister hacking duo who were accused of trying to illegally gain access to the email accounts of Renzi when he was prime minister, as well as several other prominent Italian politicians and business executives.
Giulio Occhionero and his sister Francesca Maria, who was born in the US and is an American citizen, maintained servers in the US that were seized by the FBI as part of the investigation.
The servers are due to be sent to Italy and officials have said the extent of the pair’s alleged crimes will only be known once the servers are examined. While they are not believed to have gained access to Renzi’s email account, there is deep suspicion within the security community in Italy that the two were likely working with or on behalf of other foreign or domestic interests.
The two are still being held in jail. Their lawyers have denied the siblings committed any wrongdoing.They say our dreams are never cheap, yet one of the most inexpensive fantasies involves imagining ourselves lying in our bare skin, exulting in the luxury of a wild beach or a remote cove. The nudist beaches that dot Spain’s 8,000-km coastline have an innate ability to appeal to our physical senses as well as our inner dreams. The time has come to go out looking for them, as the waters of the Mediterranean will be warm enough for swimming by mid-June.
1. A sandy spit
The beach of El Puntal, in the bay of Santander.
El Puntal (Ribamontán al Mar, Cantabria)
Nobody is immune to the charms of this beach, which is located smack in the middle of Santander, but is only accessible from the city by boat, or after a 40-minute trek from Somo. The pier is just across the construction site for the new Botín Center. Once there, the beach bar El Puntal is living testimony of how this sandy spit has grown in popularity: 45 years ago it occupied the end of the beach, and now only 300 meters separate it from Punta Rabiosa. Beachgoers still fill thechiringuito at lunchtime because of its popular rabas (squid strips) and albóndigas de bonito (albacore fish shaped into balls). The Robinson Crusoes of this beach take up an area located 150 meters from the beach bar, near the white dunes, while the side facing the bay is reserved for kids, and everyone else gets the spot with views of Magdalena peninsula.
2. Generous dunes
The beach of Els Muntanyans, in Torredembarra (Tarragona, Cataluña).
Els Muntanyans (Torredembarra, Tarragona)
This superb chain of dunes stretching for nearly two kilometers has an area of 200 meters reserved for the Adam and Eve types, who can lie here with the sound of the crashing waves in the background. This may well be the most relaxing spot in the entire Costa Dorada. To get there, park the car near the Cal Bofill Environmental Activity Center and take the boardwalk located behind the magnificent dunes —The Mountains, as they call them around here — until you reach the nudist area, which entails around a 10-minute walk. The water puddles that form at the back, and which will dry up in August, attract birds who have learned to live with the sound of the nearby passing trains. For a taste of the local cuisine, try El Vaixell restaurant.
3. Decompressing in the sea
Playa de los Alemanes (Foz, Lugo)
Translated as Beach of the Germans, this is just one of many strips of sand named after the European pioneers of bathing in the nude. This particular strand evokes the Germans who used to work at the nearby kaolin mine, which is still in operation. It is the most dazzling of the nudist beaches in all of Lugo province, and is also referred to as Area Brava. Bathers form a large family within the 135 meters of fine sand backed by a shield of cliffs where pine and eucalyptus trees are reflected in the water. Los Alemanes, which lives up to ISO 14001 and EMS environmental standards, is better enjoyed when the tide is going down. To get there, drive by Cangas de Foz, take the exit to Burela and park in Areoura. The path leading down to the beach is tucked in between a cluster of homes at various stages of construction. For lunch or dinner, most everyone likes to head back to the car and drive three kilometers to the restaurant Lugar do Sixto.
4. Tasty coquinas from Doñana
Chiringuito Bananas (Matalascañas, Almonte, Huelva)
Sitting atop a tall fossilized dune with no other buildings in sight, the Bananas beach bar flies its rainbow flag to announce the friendly and alternative lifestyle that rules along a 25-km stretch of untouched coastline between Matalascañas and Mazagón. Chiringuito Bananas is Andalusia’s gay beach bar “par excellence,” and a living tribute to the original owner and soul of this place, Salvador Jordán, who has since passed away. The nudist area is located around 150 meters from here. The bar serves coquinas (small wedge clams), grilledchoco (small cuttlefish) and for dessert, shots of rum, whipped cream and cinnamon. Patrons can sit back and enjoy the sunset to the sound of chill-out and bossa nova.
5. This place really rocks
A couple sunbathing in the nude. /BARNABY HALL
Roques Planes (Calonge, Girona)
On the Costa Brava, seekers of nudist havens must take the side roads. In Sant Antoni de Calonge, leave the car at the free parking lot near Martina tower, then walk south for 15 minutes to see for yourself that it is still possible to find a virgin stretch of coastline dotted with nothing but pine trees. There isn’t a lot of sand to go around, but there are lots of flat rocks and other spots to lay down a towel and enjoy views of the bay of Palamós. Erosion has created the Roca Foradada (Hole-drilled Rock) and the Espalda de Ballena (Whale’s Back). Until mid-July, the local restaurant Guillermo offers something called Menú de la Gamba, a prix-fixemenu that comes with anchovy on toast, a plate of local shrimp,fideuá (a type of paella made with pasta), drink and dessert for €36.
6. Under the giant Faneque
Guayedra (Agaete, Gran Canaria)
Now here is one of those pieces of Canary Island heaven that have yet to be truly discovered. A dirt path veers off the GC-200 road linking Agaete and La Aldea, shortly after Kilometer 5. This 900-meter stretch takes you down a ravine that was once a major settlement for the aborigine people of the island. We are inside the Natural Park of Tamadaba, where the contrast between the green hue of the palm trees and the harshness of the rocks creates a unique charm. From here, it is necessary to continue on foot a further 15 minutes before reaching the most enchanting nudist beach in all of northern Gran Canaria, a place of pebbles and volcanic sand under the imposing presence of the Faneque, with its 1,000 meters of free-fall. Swimming here is dangerous.
7. ‘Flysch’ world
Siete Playas (Mutriku, Gipuzkoa)
The well-defined beach of Saturrarán is an excellent place for a stroll over to the crags of Atxeku and the country house of the Count of Motrico. A footpath bypasses the estate on its sea-facing side and leads down a flight of stairs to the wild area of Siete Playas, known for its black flysch sedimentary formations. Old Neptune is always a menacing presence around here, so experts recommend coming on days when the sea is calm, and two hours before low tide if possible. After that, consider another stroll down the newly refurbished seaside promenade to Ondarroa, to sample the creative tapas at Bar Cantábrico. Those looking for offbeat accommodation should check out the watchtower-house Haitzalde.
8. From seashells to amulets
Ponzos (Ferrol, A Coruña)
In El Ferrol, large but dangerous beaches are the predominant physical forms along the seafront. A concrete ramp leads down to this wild setting, where spots for sunset-watching are at a premium. There is nothing in Ponzos quite like walking along the water at low tide and gazing down at the ojos vidales, seashells used to make amulets. There used to be a gold mine here, and a cylinder-shaped tower that is still standing marks the beginning of the nudist sector. Swimming here is dangerous, and experts recommend doing nothing more than “poking the wave,” or touching it and quickly jumping out again. The nearby campsite, Cámping As Cabazas (www.ascabazascamping.com), has a school offering courses in surfing, skating and longskate (punkodeslizamiento.blogspot.com.es)
9. Happy feet
The hotel area at Son Bou beach, in Menorca. / GONZALO AZUMENDI (AGE FOTOSTOCK)
Son Bou (Alaior, Menorca)
The longest beach in Menorca is slightly over two kilometers long, and boasts fine sand that feels very satisfying under your feet. To reach the nudist area, leave the car back at the hotel and walk around 300 meters. This area is also accessible from Santo Tomás. The dune’s vegetation slopes down in a great display of beauty, as it blends in with the bright green of the prat, the second most important wetland on the island and a watering hole for numerous bird species. Bathers should heed the flags alerting to the swimming conditions.
10. A miracle in the Levante
The beach of L’Ahuir, in Gandia. / NATXO FRANCES
L’Ahuir (Gandía, Valencia)
Now here is a true prodigy, a piece of surviving nature — dunes included — in southern Gandía, where untrammeled development is not exactly what one would associate with conservationist values. Yet the success of this two-kilometer strip of untouched coast has led to a conservation effort that includes long wooden boardwalks to protect the dunes. There is a nudist sector and another one for pets, with complimentary doggy bags.
11. A closed cove, reopened
The beach of Las Gaviotas, in Tenerife.
Las Gaviotas (Santa Cruz de Tenerife)
This is the nudist sister to the beach of Las Teresitas. Situated three kilometers from the neighborhood of San Andrés, Las Gaviotas was closed to the public in order to enlarge and repave the sinuous access road and to preserve it from collapse. It is a mixed-use beach where nudists and non-nudists share space with bodyboard fanatics. The strip of sand is narrow and bathers will find themselves losing their footing very soon after walking into the sea, which is normal for a cove at the foot of a cliff. Two recommendations: get there early to find a parking spot and bring water with you.
12. The tourist vortex
Bascuas (Sanxenxo, Pontevedra)
This is a terrific half-moon beach set against virescent cliffs, where nudist bathers represent 100 percent of attendance. But the tourist hordes that descend on Sanxenxo during the summer make it a good idea to come before school is out. The entire beach is protected from the cold northern winds that can blow even in the summer, while the islands of Ons provide a natural screen against the southern storms. An added bonus: the ground slopes gently down as one walks into the sea. The restaurant Cany Playa has been offering its specialties, calamari sandwiches and fish, for the last four decades.
13. Safe from the easterly winds
The beach of Roche, in Conil de la Frontera (Cádiz). / SCHMIDT REINHARD
Faro de Roche (Conil de la Frontera, Cádiz)
There are up to nine coves along the coast of Roche, safe from the gusty easterly winds that blow here. Thirty-meter cliffs rise above the sea while the waves eat away at its base and the sunset showcases their impressive earthy tones. Around 150 meters from the watchtower-turned-lighthouse, there is a lookout point over the cove of Faro, which is hard to reach (no footpath is provided) and thus ideal for nudist sunbathing. Go only when the tide is low.
14. Stairway to heaven
Las Escaleras beach (La Oliva, Fuerteventura)
We are now on the east coast of Fuerteventura, a mostly unknown place. Four kilometers south of El Cotillo, we come to a short slope at the end of a dirt road and, soon after that, a right turn that leads straight to the cliffs. Only 132 steps separate us from a real gem: the beach of Las Escaleras (literally, the stairs) also known as playa del águila (Eagle beach). Its openness to the Atlantic makes it an ideal spot for surfers. Come at low tide.
A nudist beachgoer. / CAROLINE VON TUEMPLING
15. Highly protected environment
Barronal (Níjar, Almería)
Although the entire Cabo de Gata natural park is comfortable with nudism during off-season, there is one particular beach that is radically off-limits to textiles: Barronal, which extends over several coves. The parking area is the next one down from Los Genoveses (around three kilometers away). From there, it is a 700-meter walk down a rural path dotted with agave, rosemary and esparto grass. The beach has 800 meters of grey sand produced by the erosion of basalt. Remember to bring lots of water with you.
16. An indiscreet glance
La Vinyeta (Calella, Barcelona)
Where the Montnegre massif slopes down into the sea, we find one of the biggest attractions on the entire coast of Barcelona. Leave the car in the esplanade under the lighthouse and take the underground passage. La Vinyeta features thick yellowish sand where people use bathing suits until a spot 100 meters from the Rocapins beach bar (which serves paella for lunch and has a rock-climbing wall to boot). After that, the proverbial laid-back spirit of the nudist sector takes over. But there is a surprise in store: passengers on the commuter trains headed for Calella have a one-second window of opportunity to cast an indiscreet glance on La Vinyeta.
17. Far from everything
The beach of Es Caragol, in Mallorca. /TOLO RAMÓN
Es Caragol (Santanyí, Mallorca)
There are few beaches with such a power of attraction for Mallorca’s nudist crowd as the remote Es Caragol. Getting there entails walking for 15 minutes from the lighthouse of Ses Salines. The sand has been colonized by lilies and marine thistles, and the waters are clean and see-through, forming a soft curve that ends with the rocky outcrop of Punta Negra.
18. Even in Benidorm
Almadraba and Tío Ximo (Benidorm, Alicante)
They say that Benidorm has no official nudist beaches, yet nudism is practiced inside the Natural Park of Serra Gelada, in hidden coves that are easily accessible. The name of La Almadraba harks back to a time when the locals caught fish here the traditional way, but this pebbly cove is very exposed to prying eyes. Better try the cove of Tío Ximo, where bathing suits are on display in its tiny bathing area but nude bodies abound on the sides.
19. Off on an adventure
Salvados cove (Alajeró, La Gomera)
Getting to this hard-to-reach cove makes for quite an adventure: the final step requires taking a leap down, since the rope that someone once left there is long gone. Leave the car at Medio beach, which accomodates both nudists and non-nudists, and walk over to Chinguarime, whose caves are inhabited by folks who have opted for an alternative lifestyle. Behind the next crag, there is a spot where the waves are small and fishermen once took refuge from the storms. The sand comes and goes depending on the weather. Anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable with the descent should take their clothes off in Chinguarime.
20. Thanks, Cuchillón
Ballota beach, in Llanes (Asturias). /QUINTANILLA
Ballota (Llanes, Asturias)
Ballota, together with Andrín, is one of the best-known and most photographed beaches on the entire Asturian coast, thanks to the lookout point of La Boriza. Yet its nudist corner is little known, and separated from the rest by El Cuchillón, a jutting rock that acts like a natural and gigantic folding screen. The beauty of Ballota is closely linked to its islet and cliffs. Remember to come when the tide is low to avoid having to put your towel down on the pebbles.
Source: http://elpais.com/elpais/2015/05/29/inenglish/1432915988_524409.html
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commentsAhmad Suradji (12 December 1952 – 10 July 2008) was an Indonesian serial killer who admitted to killing 42 girls and women between 1986 and 1997. His victims ranged in age from 11 to 30, and were strangled after being buried up to their waists in the ground as part of a ritual.[1] He buried his victims in a sugarcane plantation near his home, with their heads facing his house, which he believed would give him extra power.[2] Suradji, a cattle-breeder, was also known as Nasib Kelewang, or by his alias Datuk.
Arrest [ edit ]
Suradji was arrested on 30 April 1997, after bodies were discovered near his home on the outskirts of Medan, the capital of North Sumatra.
His three wives, who were sisters, were also arrested for assisting in the murders and helping him hide the bodies. One of his wives, Tumini, was tried as his accomplice and was sentenced to death before it was reduced to life imprisonment.[3][1] He was sentenced to death by firing squad and executed on 10 July 2008.[3]
Murders [ edit ]
On 24 April 1997, 21-year-old Sri Kemala Dewi asked a 15-year-old rickshaw puller named Andreas to take her to "Datuk". She informed him to keep it a secret and never requested to be picked up.[1] Three days later, Dewi's naked and decomposing body was found in a sugarcane field by a man and was later dug up by a group of people who then called the police.[1] Andreas reported to the police and Dewi's family that he had dropped her off at Suradji's house three days earlier, and so police visited Suradji for confrontation.[1] Although he denied any links with Dewi's killing, police found Dewi's handbag, dress and bracelet in his home. He was later arrested on 30 April 1997.[1] During interrogation, Suradji slowly confessed to Dewi's murder but also revealed that he had killed up to 42 girls in the same fashion and an excavation process had to be carried out in the sugarcane field where Dewi's body was located.[1] Throughout the process, 42 bodies had been found with some being so decomposed to the point where they were unidentifiable.[1]
He told police that he had a dream in 1986 in which his father's ghost directed him to drink the saliva of 70 dead young women so that he could become a mystic healer.[2][1] Suradji thought that it would take him too long to encounter 70 dead women singly and so he took up the initiative to kill.[1] As a sorcerer, or dukun, women came to him for spiritual advice for such things like making themselves more beautiful or richer or so Suradji could cast a spell on their spouses so they'll never have an affair.[3][1] He would take them into a sugarcane field and bury them up to their waist, claiming it was part of the ritual.[2] He would then strangle them until they were dead and proceed to drink their saliva. After, he would strip the clothes from their bodies to accelerate decomposition and bury them back into the ground with their heads pointing toward his house.[1] Suradji stated the following to the police:
My father did not specifically advise me to kill people. So I was thinking, it would take ages if I have to wait to get seventy women. I was trying to get to it as fast as possible, I took my own initiative to kill.[1]By Chris Kardish
Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina is joining a growing number of states exploring new fees for hybrid and electric car owners to help make up for revenue those drivers aren’t paying in gas taxes on their fuel-efficient vehicles.
The proposal strikes many owners of alternative-fuel vehicles and some advocacy groups as a wrong-headed approach to balancing priorities of promoting U.S. energy independence with sustainable infrastructure funding. But policymakers and some experts argue taxing hybrid and electric vehicle owners is a matter of making sure all drivers help maintain the roads they use and construct new ones.
Gas taxes are the most vital source of transportation funding, making up nearly 40 percent of all state highway revenues and more than 90 percent at the federal level, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But those revenues haven’t kept up with rising construction costs, falling 41 percent in real value at the federal level since they were last increased 18 years ago, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The same non-partisan research group estimates that state and local gas-tax revenue fell 7 percent to $38 billion between 2004 and 2010.
Natural gas: Truck company shows off natural gas-fueled big rigs
Many transportation organizations and other groups say an overhaul that moves the system to a tax based on miles traveled is needed, but those reforms come with their own hurdles and for now states are looking for other fixes. At least 10 states are considering or have passed legislation to collect fees from owners of electric or hybrid cars.
“I think so far what we’re seeing is the trend seems to be either an additional annual fee or some type of registration fee seems to be much more popular than the miles-driven tax, because that is a newer technology and raises some privacy concerns,” said Kristy Hartman, a transportation and environment analyst at the NCSL.
New Jersey scrapped a plan to charge vehicles by miles traveled amid pushback from media and legislators, opting instead for a flat fee on electric cars.
North Carolina senators included an additional $100 annual registration fee for electric-car owners and a $50 fee for hybrid drivers. They estimate the new fees will raise $1.5 million annually. The Senate’s provision would have to survive budget negotiations with the House, which is expected to release its full spending plan in the coming days.
Sen. Neal Hunt, R-Wake and a chief budget-writer, argues the policy ensures all drivers are contributing their fair share toward maintaining the roads and services they all use.
“I just seems logical to me that they should pay a small fee for the use of the highways and the wear and tear they put on the highways,” he said.
But that policy, along with the end of a pilot program offering four interstate plug-in stops, is troubling to many drivers of fuel-efficient cars.
Heavy traffic: $225 million would go to oil-impacted county roads
Ryan Turner, an IT professional in Chapel Hill, said he and many other drivers of alternative-fuel vehicles chose their cars because they’re concerned about the environment and the country’s dependence on oil. The Chevrolet Volt driver helped advocate for a statewide plug-in vehicle readiness plan.
“On its face, it’s reasonable for electric owners to contribute toward road tax in some way,” he said. “I think what’s suspect is that, given all the issues we have in this state, given the state’s woeful effort so far to promote electric vehicles as part of some statewide agenda, it is suspect that this vehicle tax is a priority given the small amount of the revenue it will bring in.”
The policy looks especially arbitrary when more and more conventional cars are achieving fuel efficiency that’s comparable to some hybrid cars, Turner added.
Jay Friedland, legislative director for the advocacy group Plug In America, has asked legislators in other states to phase in special fees after the number of alternative-fuel vehicles reaches 100,000, arguing administrative costs make such policies counter-productive before states reach a critical mass.
“We generally say this is a period of time when you should be incentivizing these vehicles, but after a while, yes, everyone should be paying their fair share,” he said.
Truck fleet: Halliburton expanding natural gas use
North Carolina has an estimated 30,000 hybrid and electric cars registered in the state.
Plug In America supports a vehicle-miles tax, and Friedland said his organization swayed Washington lawmakers to include a study of that policy in the state’s own bill targeting alternative-fuel vehicles.
“Fundamentally, the mechanism exists (for charging a miles-traveled tax), but I don’t know of any states that are currently doing that yet,” he said. “We’re really on the edge of this, because we’re for once actually watching fuel consumption going down, and that’s why we’re watching these taxes come up.”
Berry Jenkins of the Carolinas Association of General Contractors said bigger reforms are ultimately needed to address infrastructure in the long term. He’s part of a coalition of businesses and regional transit groups that endorses miles-traveled taxes. The problem, he said, are concerns that they system would require intrusive new technologies and that fuels apprehension among political leaders.
“It’s never going to be a convenient time to ask people to pay more for infrastructure,” he said.
Also on FuelFix:
Truck company shows off natural gas-fueled big rigs956 SHARES Facebook Twitter
Could you imagine being threatened by law enforcement authorities over vaccine records as you are waiting with your children for the school bus? This is something that literally just happened to one young mother down in California. One morning she walked her kids to the bus stop and she was approached by an official from the Claremont school district and a police officer. In very intimidating fashion, they began questioning her about whether or not her children had been vaccinated. When she refused to answer and started recording the interaction they walked away, but that wasn’t the end of it. Later she called the police department and explained what was going on, and she was told that she could be arrested for refusing to vaccinate her children.
You can see the video for yourself on Facebook right here. It has already been watched more than 159,000 times, and we need to get this out to as many people as we possibly can. The following is the description that Porsha Rasheed posted along with the video…
Please watch this Video and share I am. I am being set up by the Claremont school district to be arrested and they are trying to force me to give my child immunization shots! I woke up this morning and walked my kids to the bus stop like I always do. Guess who was waiting the Claremont police department along with another man asking me about my child’s shots! I called the police department to make a complaint for harassment and was told by the sergeant, that me not giving my kids shots is a criminal act and that I will be arrested. This is why they were at the bus stop to try to incriminate me by me attempting to them that my son does not have any shots. This is crazy!! I want the world to know if I am arrested this is why! I will follow up with the facts!!!!
This is the kind of thing that health freedom advocates were warning would happen in California.
In 2016, a new law went into effect that mandates that all children be fully vaccinated unless they have been granted a medical exemption…
The law requires all children entering day care, kindergarten or 7th grade to be vaccinated unless they have a medical exemption. It also gives physicians broader discretion to grant medical exemptions based on a child’s condition or family history. The law eliminated personal belief exemptions, which experts say created hotspots of unvaccinated kids and contributed to the spread of contagious diseases. Medical exemptions were rare before the law took effect last summer. Between 2000 and 2015, just.2 percent or less of California kindergartners had one each year. After the law took effect in 2016, the number of kindergartners statewide with a medical exemption increased threefold.
Fortunately, some doctors are fighting back against this draconian new law by granting medical exemptions to parents that do not want to submit to forced vaccination.
The vaccine industry considers California’s new law to be a model for the nation, and they are going to push hard to get laws like this in all 50 states.
So what can we do?
Well, first of all you need to know your rights as a parent. Most states still allow religious vaccine exemptions, and you can see a sample letter on Health Freedom Idaho’s website right here.
Secondly, we need to fight relentlessly for health freedom on the local, state and federal levels. Here in Idaho, Health Freedom Idaho is doing an amazing job standing up for parents, and we need similar organizations in all 50 states.
And we also need health freedom candidates to run for office all over the nation. If I win my race for Congress, I am going to fight relentlessly for health freedom, and we need to strongly support all other candidates that will help protect us from this sort of tyranny.
If we lose this battle, what just happened to that young mother in California will soon start happening all over the nation. It is hard to believe that we have already gone so far down the road toward becoming a police state, and we must fight back with everything that we have got.
Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.Get the biggest football 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
Tottenham boss Andre Villas-Boas is hoping to solve his goal-scoring crisis with a January loan deal for Real Madrid starlet Alvaro Morata.
Villas-Boas was hoping to sign the 21-year-old striker in the summer as part of Gareth Bale's £85million move from the White Hart Lane club to Real.
The Bernabeu giants' new boss Carlo Ancelotti blocked the move then, but has now has had a change of heart as he believes it will help the Spain Under-21 international's career.
Tottenham have been back in for him and held talks with Morata, with Villas-Boas making personal contact to try to convince him to come to the Premier League.
They have also persuaded Morata's representatives that a move would be good as they are convinced he will get regular games.
Tottenham have managed just nine goals in the Premier League this season - three of them penalties - and new £26m striker Roberto Soldado has endured mixed fortunes.
Spurs chairman Daniel Levy may also be ready to offload England striker Jermain Defoe in January, with MLS side Toronto keen.
Defoe could also be a target for West Ham, Sunderland or Hull, with the lure of more regular football in a World Cup year.
But Spurs would not let him go without reinforcements arriving in January and Morata is clearly a top priority.
Check out what Morata has in his locker:Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016 at 4:25 pm by Jim
Filed under Monarch Tagging | Comments Off on Tagging results and the monarch decline
Is the monarch decline due to an
increase in mortality during the fall migration?
Chip Taylor, Jim Lovett and Ann Ryan
Monarch Watch, Kansas Biological Survey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Introduction
The authors of three recent papers dealing with the decline in monarch numbers at the overwintering sites in Mexico have proposed that the decline is due to increased mortality during the migration or the establishment of the overwintering population (Badgett and Davis, 2015, Inamine, et al., 2016, Ries, et al., 2015). While Ries, et al. (2015) suggest that increased mortality during the migration could account for the decline, they acknowledge that other factors could be involved. Badgett and Davis (2015) are more certain of this interpretation, to quote – “we interpret the disconnect between the size of the migratory cohort at Peninsula Point and the overwintering population to be the result of mortality incurred during the migratory journey”. Similarly, from Inamine, et al. (2016) “our results are consistent with failed migration or re-establishment at the overwintering grounds impacting the population decline in Mexico.” These statements are nothing more than speculation, and no data are offered in these papers in support of this supposition. Reviewers of these manuscripts and editors of the respective journals should have challenged these unsupported statements, particularly since this speculation is used in the papers by Badgett and Davis (2015) and Inamine et al. (2016) to challenge the view, well supported by data, that the loss of milkweed and breeding habitat is the cause of the monarch decline.
Unfortunately, unsupported claims have a way of becoming facts (especially in press releases and news reports). Decisions with regard to monarch conservation should be based on data and not on unsupported speculation. This brings us to the question: Are there data that support or refute the supposition that mortality during the migration has increased over the last decade? Our tagging data are relevant to this question.
Because this text is written as a blog article, we will start with a brief summary of the results followed by a discussion. The sections that follow include background information on the tagging program along with a discussion of the dynamics of tag recovery and a section dealing with the analysis. For those interested in a quick read, we suggest reading the summary together with a scan of |
some people have been worried about that. We’re hoping to release those songs at a later date though! That being said, we’re very proud and excited about this EP. The remaining songs, “Go Berzerk” with our good friends Quiet Disorder, Talk About It with the talented Desirée Dawson on vocals. “Speed Of Light” also featuring Desirée came together during the past year through physical studio sessions and online sessions. “Go Berzerk” is meant to be a fun, hard hitting party track and it’s been going down really well on the shows this past tour. We just went into the studio and had fun with it, most of that track was written in one night. On the last tour we’ve usually ended our set with “Speed Of Light”, a stark contrast to our high energy set, but we feel it’s a nice contrast and it really brings out the emotions in people. It’s been beautiful seeing everybody’s reactions to these songs and we can’t wait for it to come out!
TBB: You guys have already teamed with the likes of Snails, JAUZ, NGHTMRE and more for some powerful collaborations in the past. Are there any collaborations you currently have on your wish-list?
Pegboard Nerds: Collaborations can be really fun when you vibe with the people you work with! The outcome can become more than the sum of its parts, which is the best. There are definitely more fun collabs upcoming, as well as our own originals.
TBB: Your association with Monstercat has been nothing short of phenomenal. Can you talk to us a bit about your relationship with the label?
Pegboard Nerds: We didn’t even know Monstercat existed back in 2012 but we took a chance, seized the opportunity and released our first Pegboard Nerds track with them. 4 years and countless experiences later, it’s been an amazing journey growing and evolving together!
The team behind Monstercat and their powerful community makes it such a great thing to be a part of.
TBB: What has been the most memorable moment in your career so far?
Pegboard Nerds: That’s a very tough question right there! It’s not so much of a moment, but the process of deciding that these rough sketches on our hard drives back in 2012 should be turned into songs that got released and that leading to us supporting the likes of Knife Party and going on our own tours has just proven that dreams do come true and you should pursue yours with perseverance.
TBB: You guys are true visionaries when it comes to playing around with genres. How do you guys go about crafting such diverse productions in the studio?
Pegboard Nerds: Thank you! It probably just stems from us being around for a while and knowing and listening to a lot of different genres.. So naturally we’ll draw inspiration from a wide palette of sounds and genres. We always try to think what it takes to ‘harness’ the sound and feel of a certain genre, and pursue that. Sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss, but it’s usually always a fun process in the end!
TBB: This is going to be your debut performance in India. Can the audience at Sunburn Festival expect anything special from you two?
Pegboard Nerds: We’re very excited to be in India at Sunburn Festival on their 10th year celebration! It will definitely be a high energy set, with new music from us and other people we know! Maybe we’ll create something special for this event 🙂
TBB: With your new EP already due in January 2017, what can we expect from Pegboard Nerds in the upcoming months?
Pegboard Nerds: A lot more music, we’re already planning the follow-up EP and beyond; We’re always creating new music you know! Also we have a new U.S. tour planned, starting end of March, and more shows as the year progresses.
TBB: Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to the most from your brief stay in India?
Pegboard Nerds:
-The culture; wildly different from ours.
-The food
-And last but not least, playing there and seeing the people’s reaction!
TBB: Top 3 Bangin’ Tracks at the moment?
Pegboard Nerds:
Dion Timmer – Panic
Kayzo – Stranger Things Remix
MOTi & Maurice West – Disco Weapon
Catch Pegboard Nerds live in action on Day 4 at Sunburn Hills, Pune. Grab your tickets here.I’m taking 1 cup of 'Don’t Hurt Yourself' by Beyoncé, adding 1/2 cup of 'B***h Betta Have My Money' by Rihanna, with some 'When They Go Low, We Go High' Michelle Obama mixed to taste
With Donald Trump as our President, I find I have lost my appetite for mindless play. Even if a large percentage of the voting population missed the memo, tricks are still for kids. I’ve got no energy nor should any of us the generosity to offer up our precious lives to being governed like a television episode of The Apprentice.
This moment in history, to which we find ourselves connected, is – as my great-grandfather use to say – “grown folk’s business.” Unlike last January, this time the call for ladies to get in formation is real – as evidenced by the thousands of women who attended the Women’s March on Washington.
To whom and what will you give your energy?
For many of us, there has never been a more important time in the span of our lives than now to pause and consider who is it that we choose to be—show up as in the world? What will our contributions be? Mindful to boot that the disordered giving away of our light before first taking care of ourselves serves no one well in the end. You cannot get in formation with anybody else if you are not first in alignment with yourself.
Radical. Self. Care. I’m not talking just about the typical self-care rituals we all engage with renewed passion every New Year’s eve. I’m talking about the radical changes we employ like a Marine on the battlefield after we’ve been burned, heart-broken, screwed over or insulted one too many times. I’m talking about 1 cup of “Don’t Hurt Yourself” by Beyoncé, added to 1/2 cup of “B***h Betta Have My Money” by Rihanna, mixed to taste with “When They Go Low, We Go High’ Michelle Obama radical.
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Every woman who’s ever endeavored to master radical self-care, and consequently earned her badass wings, has learned somewhere along the way the importance of artfully expressing, (hand to the face, head-roll to the back) “who the f! do you think I is?” On Lemonade, Beyoncé distilled generations of Black women’s pain and indignation into one simple line that served as a question as much as it did a statement. A notification. A reminder that regardless of how off-center we sometimes get, that once we come back to our right minds, there are some things that will not be tolerated on our watches.
I think of Harriet, Sojourner, Rosa, my late grandmother Cora and declarations like “No,” “Not now,” “Not this time,” “Stop,” I suppose it is indeed true that the practice of radical self-care is a rigorous undertaking, requiring us at every turn to draw our lines in the sand and declare where the bucks will stop. It is a practice for the rebel-hearted.
Even though we sometimes have to fall deep into a dark and reckless abandoning of our self- care in order to wake up, the sloppy decent is very often jolting. For rock bottoms, when absorbed, serve as powerful reboots that rev us up and tune us into a full-throttle- remembering of our innate worthiness, and DNA-certified “badassness”.
In times like these, when we are faced with situations that call for us to take a stand—I stand on the side of no. No. No Trump, you can not just grab me by anything. I am a woman, and you will “put some respect on it” as will I by honoring my right and responsibility to care for myself first.
I encourage you to do the same. Take care of yourself, in order that our standing in formation with others be of the revolutionary quality that makes life better for everyone.
Self-care, by us, for us.
Follow Neycha on Facebook, Twitter @Neycha or Instagram and visit her progressive healing modality known as The Crossfade™.In the game players earn points for acts of sexual violence, including following girls on commuter trains, raping virgins and their mothers, and then forcing them to have abortions. US online retailers Amazon and eBay in February last year took RapeLay off their websites, but the game's Yokohama-based maker Illusion brushed off the protests, saying the game was made for the domestic market and abided by laws in Japan. But attempts by women's rights groups such as Equality Now to ban the game have only created a black market for it online, with dozens of websites offering it as a free download. There is also a number of similar games available in Japan, many depicting young girls, under the "hentai" genre. Sexual assault victims' rights advocate Nina Funnell is against online censorship but said: "These games are quite vile and for victims out there it's quite distressing to come across these games or even just be aware that they exist and there's a culture of rape tolerance and acceptance."
Willis said she "absolutely" believes the forthcoming internet filtering regime is necessary and should block sites that offer access to the game. "While I don't think that playing games causes people to go out and do things, what it can do for those who may already have that preclusion is further break down social barriers to them taking that action," she said. Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said on the surface a game like RapeLay might seem like a good argument for internet censorship but in reality trying to filter it would not work. "Those who want to will be able to get around the filter, and the content will be quickly copied from site to site," he said. "Games like this will only ever represent a tiny minority, and the proper response is largely parental, to make sure kids aren't getting their hands on them."
Similarly, Greens communications spokesman Scott Ludlam said: "If people want to pass it on, as soon as you block a URL it's going to pop up in three other places." Willis conceded that people who are tech-savvy and determined to get access to the game will be able to regardless of internet filters, but that didn't mean the filters would not help. "My father use to have this saying that a lock only stops an honest person... [but] if we have a filter that will stop a large majority of people from getting access to the game," she said. In June last year, Japanese industry group Ethics Organisation of Computer Software instituted a ban on all "sexual torture software" because it "deviates extremely from social norms". But the ban is a form of self regulation and not enforceable in courts. Japan, which has in the past come under fire for being a major producer of child porn, banned the production and distribution of sexual materials involving those aged under 18 in 1999. However, the law didn't criminalise possession of such content and did not cover animated content, such as computer games.
A Japan Committee for UNICEF spokeswoman told the AFP last year that the Japanese loophole hindered international efforts to crack down on child porn. "In this globalised world, connected via the internet, even one loophole could jeopardise all the regulations," she said. "The world trend is to try to ban even the accessing and looking at websites of virtual images." CNN reported this week that a national Japanese law that would make possession of real and virtual images of child porn illegal was under discussion, but no serious legislation has moved forward in Japan's parliament. The broadcaster repeatedly attempted to obtain comment about the RapeLay game from the Japanese government over several weeks, but had no luck in getting anyone to comment on camera or provide a written statement.US workers who launched high-profile campaign now touring the world teaching peers how to take direct action against bosses
The US fast-food workers who protested in New York and 100 other US cities over the “poverty wages” paid by multinational burger chains are preparing their British counterparts to launch a similar direct action campaign in the UK.
Two months after the wave of US strikes and demonstrations that saw hundreds of arrests, Flavia Cabral, a McDonald’s worker from New York City who earns $8 (£5.10) an hour, said she had come to the UK to “teach workers here how to rise up and fight”.
Cabral is part of a band of US fast-food workers travelling to the UK, France, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Denmark and the Philippines as part of plans to form a global alliance of fast-food workers and organise a day of coordinated international protest in April to demand that workers get paid a living wage.
Nick Allen, of US trade union federation Change to Win, said the globally-coordinated version of the US fast-food protests – which included occupying restaurant outlets and blocking roads – would be the biggest ever protest against low pay. “It will be a massive strike, much bigger than last time,” he said. “And this time it will be global, not just the US.”
The US workers and their union representatives, who launched the high-profile Fight for 15 campaign for fast-food workers to be paid $15 (£9.50) an hour, are touring the world teaching workers in other countries how to take direct action against their employers.
They have spoken to workers, politicians and union officials in London and Glasgow, and advised on the formation of a new British campaign, Fast Food Rights, which wants £10 an hour set as a minimum for UK fast-food workers.
“To take on global companies, the protest needs to be global. We need to take to the streets, unite together and stand up. If you ask for a raise, the management are going to say we haven’t got any money,” Cabral said at the rally. “We have to unite. We have to make it global, then it is not just you asking [for a pay rise], it is everyone around the world – and they will have to listen.”
She pointed out that McDonald’s workers in Denmark aged over 18 earn a minimum of 115 kronor an hour ($19.35, £12.35). “If McDonald’s can afford to pay that in Denmark they should be able to pay more everywhere. It is the same work, but a huge difference in pay.”
The UK campaign, which uses the slogan “hungry for justice”, is supported by the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU). As in the US, few UK fast-food workers are represented by unions.
Ian Hodson, president of the BFAWU, said: “Achieving £10 an hour would take 5 million people out of poverty. £10 is the minimum wage we demand in this country. We applaud what the Fight for 15 campaign has achieved in the US and we want to learn from them how we could make the same impact over here.”
He said the US workers had given lessons on how to occupy stores and stop traffic safely. “If we can stop traffic in London we can certainly shut down some McDonald’s, if they don’t engage,” he told a rally at the headquarters of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in London. “This is about changing society and changing our country. This is not about left and right, it’s about right and wrong, and we’re right and they’re wrong. They [UK fast-food workers] shouldn’t have to hope for justice, they should be able to afford justice.”
Hodson said the Fast Food Rights campaign was planning a couple of warm-up protests and sit-ins in December before joining the international day of action planned for April. The UK campaigners will also adopt successful US slogans, including: “They say supersize, we say unionsize.”
The campaign is supported by Labour MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, who will lead a protest outside parliament on Friday.
McDonnell, the MP for Hayes and Harlington, said he would take part in protests and sit-ins on behalf of fast-food workers who might be afraid to protest against their employers. “They fear they will lose their jobs or have hours reduced if they protest, so we will bring in other people to demonstrate on their behalf,” he said.
McDonnell said he approached the BFAWU, which represents many Greggs workers, to ask it to stand up for fast-food workers after management at McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC refused to meet him to discuss workers’ pay.
The BFAWU has launched a special membership rate for fast-food workers on zero-hours contracts at £1.09 a week.
The protest plans come as McDonald’s marks 40 years since opening its first UK store in Powis Street, Woolwich, on 13 November 1974. There are now 1,249 McDonald’s outlets in the UK.
The company recently announced it would hire an extra 8,000 people, mostly on zero-hours contracts – taking the UK workforce to more than 100,000 for the first time. The firm admitted last year that 90% of workers are on zero-hours contracts.
McDonald’s pays under-18s a minimum starting rate of £4.35 an hour, rising to £5.15 for those aged 18-20 and £6.51 an hour for those aged 21 and over. The UK’s hourly national minimum wage rates are respectively £3.79, £5.13 and £6.50.
A McDonald’s UK spokesman said: “We fully support the national minimum wage. All our hourly paid employees start on more than the national minimum wage. In addition, our hourly paid employees receive an annual performance and salary review where they can earn an increase of up to 4.5%. These rates also apply to all those who choose to participate in our apprenticeship scheme.”
A spokesman for the global business added: “McDonald’s respects our employees’ right to voice their opinions and to protest lawfully and peacefully. If employees participate in these activities, they are welcomed back and scheduled to work their regular shifts. We value our employees’ wellbeing and the contributions they make to our restaurants, and thank them for what they do each and every day.”By 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918, the war had ended. The Allies and Germany signed the armistice in France to stop the fighting on the Western Front. Incidentally, that was the day John F. Herbst registered for battle.
The young Kansas City resident was inducted as an American soldier on the very last day of World War I. He and a group of other brand new draftees waited in Union Station for orders to ship out. That’s when they got news of the armistice.
“The inductees were discharged on the spot and sent home,” Herbst’s son, John Herbst Jr., told the National World War I Museum and Memorial, to which he donated his father’s papers. The registration and discharge letters are dated the same day: the armistice.At first ruddy blush, pink-ball Test cricket belongs with the bionic ear, the Hills Hoist, the winged keel, Wi-Fi and plastic bank notes on the list of great Australian inventions. The robust contest was the cake, the grandstand finish and Australia's win the icing. The biggest non-Ashes aggregate attendance at the Adelaide Oval was vindication. It was a fillip for Test cricket, and timely at that. Expect the limited editions poster on the morrow.
More forensic judgments will be made in, well, the cold light of day, absent floodlights, absent the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd. As an antidote to 500-versus-500 Test matches, it was unarguable. But you imagine that in time, three-day, 200-versus-200 would begin to feel incomplete. This was on a ground where there had never previously been a Test without a 250-plus score, and where there has been at least one century in every match since 1993. The highest score in this match was 66.
The dramatic change to par was due to conditions carefully tailored to preserve the pink ball. The question for authorities now is whether they refine conditions and gamble on a ball that may coarsen and prove harder to see in them. New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum discreetly noted that lights and the pink ball were meant to facilitate the staging of Test cricket at night, not fundamentally alter it. But for now, no one is complaining. In any revolution, in any sphere, generally there is over-correction before a happy medium is found.
Certainly, day-night Test cricket has opened up not just a new vista for the game, but new prospects within games, calling for different ways of thinking. One is dusk, and the problems it poses for batsmen, making it pivotal. Like cloud at Headingley or dew at Mohali, it changes the physics of the game. Unlike cloud and dew, you can set your watch by it. It is much more than an incidental.Since last year, NASA researchers have suspected that at the south pole of Saturn moon Encledus was an ocean of liquid water. Now, new analysis of data captured by the Cassini space probe has them thinking the entire moon is covered in water sealed in by the crust.
By looking at seven years of images taken by Cassini, the researchers discovered a distinct wobble that the moon exhibits as it orbits Saturn.
To determine the source of the wobble, also called a "libration," they considered different models, each assuming a different internal structure of the moon. The only one that made sense is the one that has Enceladus surrounded by an icy crust, beneath which lies a liquid ocean that completely covers a rocky core. It's kind of a like a giant chocolate cherry where the cherry's the core, the liquid surrounding it is the ocean and the crust is the chocolate (for those candy-challenged among us).
"If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be," Matthew Tiscareno said in a statement. Tiscareno is a Cassini participating scientist at California's SETI Institute and a co-author of a paper published this week in the journal Icarus that describes the research. "This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core," he said.
According to Space.com, temperatures on the tiny moon, which might hold the best chance of harboring extraterrestrial life in our solar system, reach lows of minus 201 degrees Celsius (minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit). At those temperatures it would seem unlikely that anything at all could remain liquid.
Earlier this year, NASA scientists postulated that geothermal activity from the moon's core was heating up the water at its south pole and causing plumes of vapor to shoot off into space. While that could explain how the pocket of water down there stayed liquid, the exact forces that would make the entire moon's ocean from freezing is a mystery. One theory put forth by lead author Peter Thomas and his team is that tidal forces exerted on the moon from Saturn could be generating enough heat to keep things sloshing around.
"This is a major step beyond what we understood about this moon before, and it demonstrates the kind of deep-dive discoveries we can make with long-lived orbiter missions to other planets," said co-author Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute. "Cassini has been exemplary in this regard."
Cassini has been exploring Saturn and its environs since arriving there in 2004. It is schedule to make its closest-ever pass through Enceladus' active plumes on October 28, when it will be just 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's surface.File this story in the overstuffed folder labeled Republican Hypocrisy That Borders on Satire. Georgia state Rep. Kip Smith, who is co-sponsor of a bill requiring that public assistance recipients be tested for drug abuse, has been arrested and charged with DUI.
Smith, who has been pushing for mandatory drug testing of Georgia's poorest citizens, was pulled over and arrested while driving his – wait for it – gold four-door Jaguar XJ8.
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, not only was he well over the legal limit, he was also not particularly forthcoming or cooperative:
“I observed the odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from Mr. Smith’s breath,” [Officer] Kramer said in his report. “He advised me he was a state representative and gave the name ‘Kip Smith.'” Smith, whose given name is John Andrew Smith, first told the officer he had not consumed any alcoholic beverages. “I asked him again, and he stated he had consumed a single beer at Hal’s. I noticed also that Mr. Smith’s eyes were watery, and I asked him to exit the vehicle, which he did,” Kramer said in the report. Smith told the officer he’d had the beer 45 minutes earlier, and the officer asked him to blow into a hand-held “intoximeter”. The officer said the lawmaker refused, stating he would prefer to go to a clinic or the hospital to get tested. The officer told Smith that was done only after an arrest, and that Smith had not been placed under arrest, but Smith “seemed to be having a difficult time understanding what I was trying to explain to him,” the officer said in the report. The officer said Smith finally agreed to blow into the device. The report stated that Smith blew a.091, which is above the legal limit of.08. [He blew a.100 once at city jail.] The officer said Smith then told him he’d had a beer 15 minutes earlier, instead of the 45 minutes he had said previously. Smith then allegedly failed a “walk-and-turn” test and a “one-leg-stand” test.
This story is another anecdotal example of the hypocrisy rampant among those in the GOP who attempt to codify their prejudices (masked as ethics or proper conservatism).
However, it's more than that. It's another example of the fact that those who we may need to test for drug abuse are not those struggling to survive, but those responsible for creating economic policies that make such struggles persistent.
Those with the power to mold our social and economic policies, those who sit in our country's most-elevated seats of power, those who do well to protect their own interests while abusing or ignoring the interests of 99 percent of us – those are the ones we should test.
On so many levels.
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Follow me on Twitter @David_EHG
----------------------------------A visit to Cuba by French President Francois Hollande, pictured March 2, 2015 at the Elysee palace, is expected to be the first by a Western leader to the Caribbean island since the United States and Cuba announced a historic rapprochement (AFP Photo/Eric Feferberg)
Paris (AFP) - President Francois Holland will make the first ever visit by a French head of state to Cuba in May in the latest sign of a thaw between the isolated communist nation and Europe and the United States.
The visit, announced Tuesday, was expected to be the first by a Western leader to the Caribbean island since the United States and Cuba announced a historic rapprochement on December 17.
Hollande's "visit to Cuba on May 11 will constitute the first visit by a French head of state to this country," the presidency said in a statement in Paris.
Meanwhile, the European Union and the communist regime will resume negotiations Wednesday and Thursday in Havana aimed at normalising ties.
Diplomatic relations between the European Union and Cuba were suspended in 2003 due to a row over Havana's human rights record. However, members of 28-nation bloc unanimously approved in 2014 the opening of discussions aimed at achieving an "agreement on political dialogue and cooperation."
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius made a brief stopover to Cuba in 2014, which was the first visit by France's top diplomat to the island in three decades.
"This is the first time in 31 years that the head of French diplomacy is on an official trip to Cuba," Fabius told reporters as he spoke of revitalising ties with the Americas' only remaining fully communist nation.
"France wants to strengthen its ties with all of South America and, in this context, we wanted relations to be strengthened in particular with Cuba," he added.
Trade between France and Cuba is modest, worth around $388 million (347 million euros) a year, with the balance solidly in France's favour.
As Cuba and the United States continue to progress in restarting their ties, they hope to agree in the coming months on reopening embassies in each others' capitals and appointing full-fledged ambassadors.
Currently they operate through their so-called interests sections in Havana and Washington.
US President Barack Obama has also called on the US Congress to lift the decades-old biting economic embargo of Cuba.
But some US lawmakers -- as well as parts of the Cuban exile community based in Florida -- remain wary of the diplomatic thaw, arguing Obama has failed to secure guarantees on better respect for human rights.
As part of Hollande's trip he is also to make stops on the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
During the visit to Martinique the French leader will preside over a regional summit on climate change.For months, First Amendment scholar Clay Calvert awaited the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether a threat issued on Facebook in the form of rap lyrics was indeed a threat.
On Monday, Calvert got an answer, but it wasn’t nearly what he or many others in the free speech community had hoped.
“It’s anti-climatic,” Calvert, a professor at the University of Florida tells TIME.
The Court ruled 8-1 on Monday to overturn the conviction of Anthony Elonis, whose violent and derogatory Facebook posts about his ex-wife and the FBI were interpreted as threats. But Elonis argued he was just letting off steam. The court, he said, needed to consider his intent. The Supreme Court on Monday agreed in part, saying prosecutors needed to show that the defendant meant for the messages to be considered as threats and sent the case back to a lower court. The Court on Monday opted not to consider the First Amendment argument Elonis presented, instead focusing on a federal threats law instead.
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For Elonis, Calvert says, the decision was a small win since he still faces the possibility of conviction in the lower court. But many wannabe rappers across the country who’ve raised the issue of whether the use of their lyrics in criminal proceedings is a violation of their constitutional right to free speech say this was a missed opportunity.
“Six months [after the oral argument] you get a decision that misses the entire First Amendment question and hones in on this one statute,” says Calvert, who wrote an amicus brief on the issue. “It’s really highly disappointing. It didn’t clarify much in the long run.”
Take the case of Jamal Knox, a Pittsburgh man who was convicted of issuing terroristic threats against police officers in the form of a rap song posted on YouTube. Months after police found heroin on him during a traffic stop, Knox recorded a rap song under the name Mayhem Mal that named his arresting officers and included the lyric “Let’s kill these cops.” He later claimed he didn’t mean the threat, saying he was using his life to inform his art, no different than the poet Langston Hughes or the rapper Tupac Shakur. He even told the court he didn’t mean for the song to be released to the public.
Defense attorneys and the Pittsburgh-based legal organization Legal Means who are working on an appeal for Knox are reluctant to give an all-out praise of the ruling, but one of the attorneys working with Knox says the ruling can been seen as positive.
“It doesn’t take legal expert or a rocket scientist to see that the fact patterns kind of match up and there’s room to be optimistic,” says Daniel Muessig, who is working alongside attorneys Patrick Nightingale and Mikhail Pappas on Knox’s case.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday also made strange bedfellows out of those in the free speech community and the dissenting judges, both of whom found fault with the Court’s failure to address the First Amendment issues of the case.
Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissent that the failure to address the threats standard head-on “throws everyone from appellate judges to everyday Facebook users into a state of uncertainty.”
Justice Samuel Alito, who concurred in part and dissented in part, in no way agrees that threats should be taken lightly or that Elonis’ notes about smothering his estranged wife with a pillow and dumping her body in a lake should be considered works of art. “A fig leaf of artistic expression cannot convert such hurtful, valueless threats into protected speech,” he writes. But by not explaining what type of intent is necessary to prove his words were a threat leaves far too much room for interpretation.
“This will have regrettable consequences,” he writes.
Muessig says, too, that had the Supreme Court ruled on the First Amendment grounds it would have been better for their cases and others like it.
“The point [Justice Thomas] brought up in his dissent where he said that they didn’t address the issue fully, I think that would have made a lot more sense,” Muessig says. “But, I’m not going to look a rare victory for the underdog in the mouth here.”
The unaddressed issue of speech, though, means rappers and aspiring rappers who’ve increasingly found their lyrics used against them at trial were denied a concrete answer to the question of when recorded rhymes become considered a criminal act or a legally recognized admission of guilt.
Though prosecutors have been using hip-hop lyrics to bolster their cases since the early 1990s, the practice is becoming increasingly popular in courtrooms across the country. In the past three years alone, prosecutors have used rap lyrics to help secure convictions in dozens of cases. Sometimes prosecutors say the lyrics describe the suspect’s alleged crime, as in the case of Ronald Herron, a.k.a. Ra Diggs, who was sentenced in April to life in prison after attorneys tied his rap persona to actual crimes. In other cases prosecutors use lyrics recorded long before a crime to convince grand juries and judges of a suspect’s mindset.
“The Supreme Court case involving threats isn’t likely to affect the larger tradition of using rap as evidence in an underlying crime,” says Erik Nielson, who often serves as a legal expert alongside University of California Professor Charis Kubrin on cases involving the use of rap. “The cases in which rappers’ or aspiring rappers’ lyrics are perceived as threats still comprise a minority of cases.”
Calvert agrees. “They totally missed the rap issue,” he says. “It’s kind of much ado about nothing.”
Contact us at editors@time.com.The MLS season opens in less than three months. A lot will change over the next few months, but there’s already plenty to get excited about.
Major League Soccer in 2017 will welcome in two new expansion clubs, a new stadium, and new challengers for the Supporter’s Shield, U.S. Open Cup, and MLS Cup. As we have learned over the years, anything can happen in MLS.
Here is a look at the top six exciting matches / moments ahead in Week 1.
6. Expansion Team Kicks Off The New Season (Minnesota United FC @ Portland Timbers)
It’s always exciting when a new club joins the league, and in the kickoff to the MLS 2017 season we will get our first look at Minnesota United FC. The club will face a massive test in their MLS debut, as they go on the road against the 2015 MLS Cup Champion Portland Timbers.
Minnesota recently announced the signing of two local stars, Miguel Ibarra and Christian Ramirez, who have made an excellent attacking duo in NASL. Outside of these signings, little is known about how Minnesota United FC‘s lineup will look as the 2017 season rapidly approaches.
Starting the season off with a win against a very credible Portland club on the road would be a massive boost for the Western Conference‘s newest addition.Tunisia is renowned for being at the vanguard of women’s rights in the Arab world. When I traveled there in May, I was curious about how, in the aftermath of the Ben Ali regime, feminist scholars and activists might be reconsidering the legacy and impact of “state feminism,” and how they might be dealing with the deep divide between secular feminists and self-proclaimed “Islamic feminists.”
“Ben Ali’s feminism was of an unbearable violence,” Raja Ben Slama, a professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Manouba and a prominent feminist intellectual, told me. I met Ben Slama in her office in Tunisia’s National Library; she was appointed its director in 2015.
Ben Ali’s attitude, says Ben Slama, was that “He’s the one who liberates women, whereas we know that he mistreats Islamist women and women of the left.”
Several of the feminist scholars I met noted that the former regime created two categories of women: those who supported it and enjoyed rights, and those who opposed it.
“Tunisia may have been the ‘best’ country in the Arab world in terms of women’s rights,” Ibtihel Abdellatif, who is a commissioner in Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity commission, and whose portfolio there focuses on human-rights violations against women, told me. “But not all women could avail themselves of these rights.” As testimony gathered by the commission has shown, women who were not viewed as politically loyal to the regime faced terrible repression.
Tunisia’s reputation as a pioneer for women’s rights dates back to its first president, Habib Bourguiba, who passed a new personal-status code in 1956, just three months after independence. It abolished polygamy and replaced repudiation (an informal quick divorce in which a husband only has to say “I divorce you”) with civil divorce that either a man or a woman could initiate. In the 1960s, the state protected women’s right to work, travel and own their own business, and it actively encouraged family planning. Bourguiba dismissed the veil as a “wretched rag” and was filmed removing women’s veils on national television.
For Bourguiba, promoting women’s rights was part of a modernist project of development and anti-colonialism. As I’ve written elsewhere, Bourguiba’s legacy remains an extremely divisive issue in Tunisia to this day. The president’s reform of the personal-status law “turned society upside down,” said Ben Slama. While many Islamists still despise him, “he is venerated by women of my mother’s generation,” she told me.
Today, many feminists note the real advances women made under Bourguiba, yet argue that |
gaard, the customer in question, contacted Amazon to find out what had happened. She received the following reply: We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled. But the account holder claims to know nothing about any other account, and so she wrote back asking for more details: As previously advised, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed, as it has come to our attention that this account is related to a previously blocked account. While we are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts, please know that we have reviewed your account on the basis of the information provided and regret to inform you that it will not be reopened.
Please understand that the closure of an account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well. Thank you for your understanding with our decision. Unhelpfully, then, Amazon simply re-iterated that the newly-closed account was "related" to another, previously blocked account, wouldn't say why, and emphasized that this was an irrevocable ban, even to the extent of refusing to allow the person accused of this unspecified transgression to open any other account at any point in the future.
Again, Jordet Nygaard not unreasonably sought to find out what the problem was so that she could try to address it. This time, she received an email that is not only willfully unhelpful, but positively insulting thanks to a cheesy veneer of bogus sympathy that has been added for good measure: We regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters.
We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters. Of course, this is a totally Kafkaesque situation: found guilty of a crime you are not allowed to know, with no way to appeal. Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has an interesting theory about what might be the issue here: I'd further speculate that the policy violation that Linn stands accused of is using a friend's UK address to buy Amazon UK English Kindle books from Norway. This is a symptom of Amazon's -- and every single other ebook retailer's -- hopelessness at managing "open territory" for ebooks. That sounds very plausible, and means that Jordet Nygaard is essentially being punished for the publishing industry's incompetence when it comes to operating in a global online market, where national boundaries make no sense. Bad as that is, it's only a side issue here. What's most troubling is that Amazon not only closed down Jordet Nygaard's account, forbade her from ever opening up one again, and refused to discuss any aspect of its actions with her, but that it apparently has the capability to lock her out from all Kindle ebooks on any device -- and did so.
If you didn't take the hint when Amazon erased a couple of Orwell's books back in 2009, maybe this latest case involving the alleged remote lockout from all ebooks will finally get across the key message here: those Kindle ebooks you thought you had purchased, are actually only rented to you, and can be denied to you without explanation, and without recompense, any time Amazon wants to. The only ebooks you will ever truly own are those stored in open formats without DRM, which therefore allow backups to be made, and used anywhere.
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Filed Under: customer service, ebooks, kindle, license, own
Companies: amazonGareth Barry scored the winner on his 100th appearance for Everton as the Toffees came from behind at the Hawthorns.
Gareth McAuley put the hosts in charge after 9 minutes, rising highest with a back post header.
But Everton grew into the game and equalised in first half stoppage time. Kevin Mirallas started a neat move on the edge of the box and duly finished it with a low shot under Ben Foster.
And in the second half Barry headed home what was to be the winner at the far post after an hour. Everton should have made safe the points with a third and fourth; Ross Barkley and Romelu Lukaku each spurning gilt edged chances.
Holgate “showing his qualities”
Before Wayne Rooney’s testimonial Koeman told Holgate to “go and show your qualities” at Old Trafford. Since that assured shackling of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the 19 year-old has made two Premier League appearances since then. You’d be forgiven for thinking he’d made 200.
The former Barnsley man is certainly taking on his manager’s advice. Not fazed by the exeprienced older heads around him (Gareth Barry made his 597th Premier League appearance at West Brom), Holgate looked perfectly at home in a back three and equally assured when moved to right back.
Making two successful interceptions, two tackles and two blocks, Holgate stood up to the challenge of the experienced James McClean in the second half. As comfortable on the ball as he is winning it, Everton were able to keep possession and build attacks from his actions.
After a jittery first half hour on his Premier League debut against Spurs, Holgate appears to have have kept the words of his manager firmly in mind: “It doesn’t matter if you are 19 years old or are 36 years old, go and show your qualities. And he did.” He really did.
Defensive frailties not yet banished
The two goals conceded by the Toffees so far this season have come from crosses, a theme from last season Everton seem so far unable to shake off.
As in West Brom’s smash and grab at Goodison Park earlier in the year, the goal owed to a flat-footed and ball-watching rearguard. There’s a reasonable claim that Maarten Stekelenburg was fouled but McAuley was able to jump highest at the far post without much in the way of a challenge.
Everton under Koeman certainly look less frail than Roberto Martinez’s pushovers, but question marks are still being raised when dealing with crosses and set-pieces. Koeman is well aware of this,and the recruitment of Ashley Williams will no doubt go a long way to making Everton less susceptible from corners and free-kicks.
Koeman’s tactical bravery
Everton lined up with the same personnel and in the same 3-5-2 formation as they did in their season opener, but with the anthropromorphised Easter Island statues of Jonas Olsson and McAuley blocking their path, Everton’s lightweight forwards found it tough going.
So it was pleasing that Koeman, unhappy with Gerard Deulofeu’s ineffectiveness decided after 38 minutes that enough was enough. Lukaku entered the fray for James McCarthy and suddenly Everton had a focal point to their play, in a more conventional 4-4-2. While the Belgian occupied Olsson, space began to appear for the buzzing Barkley, Deulofeu and Mirallas, the latter hitting the equaliser just before half time.
And as the Toffees headed into the final 10 minutes with a precious lead to protect, Williams’ introduction saw Koeman revert back to 3-5-2. That the players are responding so well to such changes is testament to the work done on the training pitch, as much as to the Dutchman’s decisive action.
Blues will have tougher tests
Getting your first 3 points of the season on the board as early as possible is vital for confidence, and coming from behind to do so makes the win even more special.
But while winning most certainly is everything, Koeman will know that there will be sterner tests to come. Teams with more talent in their coaching staff than West Brom have in their matchday squad will come to Goodison over the season, and a wasteful and at times frail Everton will have to improve.
Rom showed fight, but quality must return
If the British press are to be believed (and we know that most of the time they are not) Everton look set to keep their goal-scoring Belgian. His introduction helped turn the game in Everton’s favour and last season’s top scorer put his body on the line for the Blue cause.
But his was a display mostly lacking in match sharpness and quality. Despite glimpses of promise with new boy Yannick Bolasie, Lukaku’s link up play was generally sloppy, and firing straight at Foster might have cost Everton had West Brom been more clinical.
But Blues should be confident that the Belgian will come good. A fully-focused and match fit Lukaku is a handful for any defence. As long as he’s still playing in L4 once the window shuts, fans can look forward to another season of goals.Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged the Canadian government to arrest George W. Bush when he visits next week. This has hurt the feelings of Elliot Abrams:
What does one make of organizations that wish to see George W. Bush behind bars—but have never expressed similar sentiments about Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, or Hassan Nasrallah? …Amnesty and HRW are outspoken only with respect to certain officials. Bashar al-Assad visited Paris in 2008 and 2009: silence. Putin hit Brussels this year: silence. When in good health Fidel was a world traveler: silence. No calls for prosecution for the many killings such people have ordered. When it comes to enemies of the United States (recall Yasser Arafat as well) there may be an appeal to release a certain prisoner or a demand for more political rights, but there is no call to bar travel or to advance criminal charges. I am aware that heads of state have sovereign immunity, but why do these organizations not call for indictments by the International Criminal Court or at least demand that they be refused entry into decent countries altogether?
Remarkably, Abrams embarks on this impulsive tirade without realizing that he is engaging in exactly what he accuses Amnesty and HRW for engaging in. He is upset because he thinks they only criticize people like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Hosni Mubarak, King Hamad Khalifa, and others of his ideological ilk. Yet nowhere in his moaning complaint does he exercise the objectivity he urges of Amnesty and HRW. He doesn’t even address – or deny! – the horrible, deadly, torturous crimes the Bush administration implemented. He merely suggests they criticize others for crimes, instead of Bush. He is pathetically blind to the fact that he is engaging in precisely the logical fallacy he blames them for.
Even if it were true, which it is not, that Amnesty and HRW were withholding criticism of those Abrams mentions, it wouldn’t erase the fact that their criticisms of Bush for his massive crimes are entirely valid. Apparently, Abrams is at least smart enough to recognize that, which is why he doesn’t even dare claim that they’re invalid. He cleverly chooses to ignore the criticisms of Bush’s crimes, because he knows he cannot deny them. These are the argumentation tactics of a seven year old.A couple weeks ago it occurred to me that I know next to nothing about church history. So, in an effort to remedy that situation, I ordered The Story of Christianity, Volumes 1 and 2, by Justo Gonzalez from Amazon, and brought them with me to the beach—you know, for a little light reading. Here are a few random observations from my first week of reading:
1. Christians have never been in full agreement when it comes to theology. (And our little theological blog spats have NOTHING on the Arian controversy or the Inquisition, let me tell you!) But often, these disagreements and controversies lead to important developments in Christian thought, theology, and practice. The Nicene Creed, for example, was formulated largely as a response to Arianism. (The Apostle’s Creed is older.) I find this oddly comforting. There’s less pressure to figure everything out. We’re always in process, always debating and discussing, always getting a little bit right and a lot wrong.
2. Constantine was not baptized until just before his death. And his conversion to Christianity is as big a deal as we make it out to be. It changed Christianity forever and marked the beginning of an ongoing, uncomfortable, and at times destructive relationship between Christianity and power.
3. Calls for social justice aren’t new or trendy, but have been a part of church teachings for many centuries. See the writings of John Chrysostom, Basil, Ambrose, St. Francis, and many others. “If one who takes the clothing off another is called a thief, why give any other name to one who can clothe the naked and refuses to do so?” wrote Basil. “The bread that you withhold belongs to the poor; the cape that you hide in your chest belongs to the naked; the shoes rotting in your house belong to those who must go unshod.”
4. Also not as new as I once thought: bishops, and church hierarchy in general.
5. I always thought that the Council of Nicea marked the final acceptance of orthodoxy when it came to the divinity of Christ. But Arianism—the belief that Jesus was created by God as a subordinate and separate entity, not the incarnation of God—made a pretty serious comeback, and with the support of the empire, it nearly won the day! Jerome wrote that “the world woke up as from a slumber, and discovered itself to be Arian.” Athanasius and other supporters of Nicene theology were exiled and persecuted for defending orthodoxy, but in the end, their tenacity, patience, and thoughtfulness prevailed. Also, Athanasius was nicknamed “the black dwarf.”
6. Pretty much every time I conclude that a Church Father seems like a pretty cool guy, I learn that he hated Jews and/or women.
7. I think it’s safe to say Saint Anthony was an introvert.
8. In the fourth and fifth centuries there was a Christian sect called Donatism. Some Donatists peasants were convinced that there was no death more glorious than that of the martyrs, but since the persecution of Christians had ended, they committed to violently resisting those they perceived to be heretics. Gonzalez writes that “in some cases, this quest for martyrdom rose to such a pitch that people committed mass suicide by jumping off cliffs"! Point: There's always this tendency to take a good thing to its extreme, whether it's respect for martyrdom, veneration of the saints, asceticism and solitude, or engagement with the culture.
9. Monastics have always struggled to hold in tension the desire for solitude with the importance of community and service.
10. Gonzalez thanks his word processor in the Preface. That seems worth noting.
I’ll post 10 more things when I’ve finished reading!
I’ve found that most Christians know very little about the history of the church. And we Protestants have the unfortunate habit of skipping from the epistles of Paul to Martin Luther and the 95-theses, leaving centuries of church history in the dust.
How can we do better?
And what have you learned about church history lately? Any fun facts?"Y2K" redirects here. For other uses, see Y2K (disambiguation)
An electronic sign at École centrale de Nantes displaying the year incorrectly as 1900 on 3 January 2000
The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or Y2K, is a class of computer bugs related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates beginning in the year 2000. Problems were anticipated, and arose, because many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits — making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. The assumption of a twentieth-century date in such programs could cause various errors, such as the incorrect display of dates and the inaccurate ordering of automated dated records or real-time events.
In 1997, the British Standards Institute (BSI) developed standard DISC PD2000-1[1] defining "Year 2000 Conformity requirements" as four rules: (1) No valid date will cause any interruption in operations; (2) Calculation of durations between, or the sequence of, pairs of dates will be correct whether any dates are in different centuries; (3) In all interfaces and in all storage, the century must be unambiguous, either specified, or calculable by algorithm; (4) Year 2000 must be recognised as a leap year.
It identifies two problems that may exist in many computer programs. First, the practice of representing the year with two digits became problematic with logical error(s) arising upon "rollover" from xx99 to xx00. This had caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after 1 January 2000, and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "... 97, 98, 99, 00..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid.
Secondly, some programmers had misunderstood the Gregorian calendar rule that determines whether years that are exactly divisible by 100 are not leap years, and assumed that the year 2000 would not be a leap year. In reality, there is a rule in the Gregorian calendar system that states years divisible by 400 are leap years – thus making 2000 a leap year.
Companies and organisations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems to address the anticipated problem.[2] As a result, very few computer failures were reported when the clocks rolled over into 2000.[3]
Background [ edit ]
Y2K is a numeronym and was the common abbreviation for the year 2000 software problem. The abbreviation combines the letter Y for "year", and k for the SI unit prefix kilo meaning 1000; hence, 2K signifies 2000. It was also named the "Millennium Bug" because it was associated with the popular (rather than literal) roll-over of the millennium, even though most of the problems could have occurred at the end of any ordinary century.
The Year 2000 problem was the subject of the early book, Computers in Crisis by Jerome and Marilyn Murray (Petrocelli, 1984; reissued by McGraw-Hill under the title The Year 2000 Computing Crisis in 1996). The first recorded mention of the Year 2000 Problem on a Usenet newsgroup occurred on Friday, 18 January 1985, by Usenet poster Spencer Bolles.[4]
The acronym Y2K has been attributed to David Eddy, a Massachusetts programmer,[5] in an e-mail sent on 12 June 1995. He later said, "People were calling it CDC (Century Date Change), FADL (Faulty Date Logic). There were other contenders. Y2K just came off my fingertips."[6]
The problem started because on both mainframe computers and later personal computers, storage was expensive, from as low as $10 per kilobyte, to in many cases as much as or even more than US$100 per kilobyte.[7] It was therefore very important for programmers to reduce usage. Since programs could simply prefix "19" to the year of a date, most programs internally used, or stored on disc or tape, data files where the date format was six digits, in the form MMDDYY, MM as two digits for the month, DD as two digits for the day, and YY as two digits for the year. As space on disc and tape was also expensive, this also saved money by reducing the size of stored data files and data bases.[8]
Many computer programs stored years with only two decimal digits; for example, 1980 was stored as 80. Some such programs could not distinguish between the year 2000 and the year 1900. Other programs tried to represent the year 2000 as 19100. This could cause a complete failure and cause date comparisons to produce incorrect results. Some embedded systems, making use of similar date logic, were expected to fail and cause utilities and other crucial infrastructure to fail.
Some warnings of what would happen if nothing was done were particularly dire:
The Y2K problem is the electronic equivalent of the El Niño and there will be nasty surprises around the globe. — John Hamre, United States Deputy Secretary of Defense[9]
Special committees were set up by governments to monitor remedial work and contingency planning, particularly by crucial infrastructures such as telecommunications, utilities and the like, to ensure that the most critical services had fixed their own problems and were prepared for problems with others. While some commentators and experts argued that the coverage of the problem largely amounted to scaremongering,[10] it was only the safe passing of the main "event horizon" itself, 1 January 2000, that fully quelled public fears. Some experts who argued that scaremongering was occurring, such as Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, have since claimed that despite sending out hundreds of press releases about research results suggesting that the problem was not likely to be as big a problem as some had suggested, they were largely ignored by the media.[10]
Programming problem [ edit ]
The practice of using two-digit dates for convenience predates computers, but was never a problem until stored dates were used in calculations.
The need for bit conservation [ edit ]
"I'm one of the culprits who created this problem. I used to write those programs back in the 1960s and 1970s, and was proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space out of my program by not having to put a 19 before the year. Back then, it was very important. We used to spend a lot of time running through various mathematical exercises before we started to write our programs so that they could be very clearly delimited with respect to space and the use of capacity. It never entered our minds that those programs would have lasted for more than a few years. As a consequence, they are very poorly documented. If I were to go back and look at some of the programs I wrote 30 years ago, I would have one terribly difficult time working my way through step-by-step." —Alan Greenspan, 1998[11]
In the first half of the 20th century, well before the computer era, business data processing was done using unit record equipment and punched cards, most commonly the 80-column variety employed by IBM, which dominated the industry. Many tricks were used to squeeze needed data into fixed-field 80-character records. Saving two digits for every date field was significant in this effort.
In the 1960s, computer memory and mass storage were scarce and expensive. Early core memory cost one dollar per bit. Popular commercial computers, such as the IBM 1401, shipped with as little as 2 kilobytes of memory. Programs often mimicked card processing techniques. Commercial programming languages of the time, such as COBOL and RPG, processed numbers in their character representations. Over time the punched cards were converted to magnetic tape and then disc files, but the structure of the data usually changed very little. Data was still input using punched cards until the mid-1970s. Machine architectures, programming languages and application designs were evolving rapidly. Neither managers nor programmers of that time expected their programs to remain in use for many decades. The realisation that databases were a new type of program with different characteristics had not yet come.
There were exceptions, of course. The first person known to publicly address this issue was Bob Bemer, who had noticed it in 1958 as a result of work on genealogical software. He spent the next twenty years trying to make programmers, IBM, the government of the United States and the ISO aware of the problem, with little result. This included the recommendation that the COBOL PICTURE clause should be used to specify four digit years for dates.[12] Despite magazine articles on the subject from 1970 onward, the majority of programmers and managers only started recognising Y2K as a looming problem in the mid-1990s, but even then, inertia and complacency caused it to be mostly unresolved until the last few years of the decade. In 1989, Erik Naggum was instrumental in ensuring that internet mail used four digit representations of years by including a strong recommendation to this effect in the internet host requirements document RFC 1123.[13]
Saving space on stored dates persisted into the Unix era, with most systems representing dates to a single 32-bit word, typically representing dates as elapsed seconds from some fixed date, which causes the similar Y2K38 problem.
Webpage screenshots showing the JavaScript.getYear() method problem, which depicts the Year 2000 problem
Storage of a combined date and time within a fixed binary field is often considered a solution, but the possibility for software to misinterpret dates remains because such date and time representations must be relative to some known origin. Rollover of such systems is still a problem but can happen at varying dates and can fail in various ways. For example:
The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program had a very elementary Y2K problem: Excel (in both Windows and Mac versions, when they are set to start at 1900) incorrectly set the year 1900 as a leap year for compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. [14] In addition, the years 2100, 2200, and so on, were regarded as leap years. This bug was fixed in later versions, but since the epoch of the Excel timestamp was set to the meaningless date of 0 January 1900 in previous versions, the year 1900 is still regarded as a leap year to maintain backward compatibility.
In addition, the years 2100, 2200, and so on, were regarded as leap years. This bug was fixed in later versions, but since the epoch of the Excel timestamp was set to the meaningless date of 0 January 1900 in previous versions, the year 1900 is still regarded as a leap year to maintain backward compatibility. In the C programming language, the standard library function to extract the year from a timestamp returns the year minus 1900. Many programs using functions from C, such as Perl and Java, two programming languages widely used in web development, incorrectly treated this value as the last two digits of the year. On the web this was usually a harmless presentation bug, but it did cause many dynamically generated web pages to display 1 January 2000 as "1/1/19100", "1/1/100", or other variants, depending on the display format. [ citation needed ]
JavaScript was changed due to concerns over the Y2K bug, and the return value for years changed and thus differed between versions from sometimes being a four digit representation and sometimes a two-digit representation forcing programmers to rewrite already working code to make sure web pages worked for all versions. [15] [16]
Older applications written for the commonly used UNIX Source Code Control System failed to handle years that began with the digit "2".
In the Windows 3.x file manager, dates displayed as 1/1/19:0 for 1/1/2000 (because the colon is the character after "9" in the ASCII character set). An update was available.
Some software, such as Math Blaster Episode I: In Search of Spot[17] which only treats years as two-digit values instead of four, will give a given year as "1900", "1901", and so on, depending on the last two digits of the present year.
4 January 1975 [ edit ]
This date overflowed the 12-bit field that had been used in the Decsystem 10 operating systems. There were numerous problems and crashes related to this bug while an alternative format was developed.[18]
9 September 1999 [ edit ]
Even before 1 January 2000 arrived, there were also some worries about 9 September 1999 (albeit less than those generated by Y2K). Because this date could also be written in the numeric format 9/9/99, it could have conflicted with the date value 9999, frequently used to specify an unknown date. It was thus possible that database programs might act on the records containing unknown dates on that day. Data entry operators commonly entered 9999 into required fields for an unknown future date, (e.g., a termination date for cable television or telephone service), in order to process computer forms using CICS software.[19] Somewhat similar to this is the end-of-file code 9999, used in older programming languages. While fears arose that some programs might unexpectedly terminate on that date, the bug was more likely to confuse computer operators than machines.
Leap years [ edit ]
Normally, a year is a leap year if it is evenly divisible by four. A year divisible by 100, however, is not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar unless it is also divisible by 400. For example, 1600 was a leap year, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Some programs may have relied on the oversimplified rule that a year divisible by four is a leap year. This method works fine for the year 2000 (because it is a leap year), and will not become a problem until 2100, when older legacy programs will likely have long since been replaced. Other programs contained incorrect leap year logic, assuming for instance that no year divisible by 100 could be a leap year. An assessment of this leap year problem including a number of real life code fragments appeared in 1998.[20] For information on why century years are treated differently, see Gregorian calendar.
Year 2010 problem [ edit ]
Some systems had problems once the year rolled over to 2010. This was dubbed by some in the media as the "Y2K+10" or "Y2.01K" problem.[21]
The main source of problems was confusion between hexadecimal number encoding and binary-coded decimal encodings of numbers. Both hexadecimal and BCD encode the numbers 0–9 as 0x0–0x9. But BCD encodes the number 10 as 0x10, whereas hexadecimal encodes the number 10 as 0x0A; 0x10 interpreted as a hexadecimal encoding represents the number 16.
For example, because the SMS protocol uses BCD for dates, some mobile phone software incorrectly reported dates of SMSes as 2016 instead of 2010. Windows Mobile is the first software reported to have been affected by this glitch; in some cases WM6 changes the date of any incoming SMS message sent after 1 January 2010 from the year "2010" to "2016".[22][23]
Other systems affected include EFTPOS terminals,[24] and the PlayStation 3 (except the Slim model).[25]
The most important occurrences of such a glitch were in Germany, where upwards of 20 million bank cards became unusable, and with Citibank Belgium, whose digipass customer identification chips failed.[26]
Year 2038 problem [ edit ]
The original Unix time datatype ( time_t ) stores a date and time as a signed long integer (on 32-bit systems a 32-bit integer) representing the number of seconds since 1 January 1970. During and after 2038, this number will exceed 231 − 1, the largest number representable by a signed long integer on 32-bit systems, causing the Year 2038 problem (also known as the Unix Millennium bug or Y2K38). As a long integer in 64-bit systems uses 64 bits, the problem does not realistically exist on 64-bit systems that use the LP64 model.
Programming solutions [ edit ]
Several very different approaches were used to solve the Year 2000 problem in legacy systems. Four of them follow:
Date expansion Two-digit years were expanded to include the century (becoming four-digit years) in programs, files, and databases. This was considered the "purest" solution, resulting in unambiguous dates that are permanent and easy to maintain. However, this method was costly, requiring massive testing and conversion efforts, and usually affecting entire systems. Because the cost of expanding a BCD encoded value which requires only the 0x00 through 0x99 values of a byte to include all years up to 0x9999 is the addition of another octet, it is therefore more sensible to simply represent as a binary 14-bit number, though because of word alignment at that point it is easier just to use an unsigned short for years. Such a scheme is capable of representing 65536 different years; the exact scheme varies by the selection of epoch. Date re-partitioning In legacy databases whose size could not be economically changed, six-digit year/month/day codes were converted to three-digit years (with 1999 represented as 099 and 2001 represented as 101, etc.) and three-digit days (ordinal date in year). Only input and output instructions for the date fields had to be modified, but most other date operations and whole record operations required no change. This delays the eventual roll-over problem to the end of the year 2899. Windowing Two-digit years were retained, and programs determined the century value only when needed for particular functions, such as date comparisons and calculations. (The century "window" refers to the 100-year period to which a date belongs). This technique, which required installing small patches of code into programs, was simpler to test and implement than date expansion, thus much less costly. While not a permanent solution, windowing fixes were usually designed to work for several decades. This was thought acceptable, as older legacy systems tend to eventually get replaced by newer technology.[27] Software Solutions In 1996, Rudy Rupak created the Millennium Bug Kit. This freeware solution was one of the first downloadable solutions on the internet at the time and was found in one in four computers[28] and marketed through Planet City Software as Millennium Bug Compliance Kit.
Documented errors [ edit ]
Before 2000 [ edit ]
On 28 December 1999, 10,000 card swipe machines issued by HSBC and manufactured by Racal stopped processing credit and debit card transactions.[10] The stores relied on paper transactions until the machines started working again on 1 January.[29]
On 1 January 2000 [ edit ]
When 1 January 2000 arrived, there were problems generally regarded as minor.[30] Consequences did not always result exactly at midnight. Some programs were not active at that moment and problems would only show up when they were invoked. Not all problems recorded were directly linked to Y2K programming in a causality; minor technological glitches occur on a regular basis. Some caused erroneous results, some caused machines to stop working, some caused date errors, and two caused malfunctions.
Reported problems include:
In Sheffield, United Kingdom, incorrect risk assessments for Down syndrome were sent to 154 pregnant women and two abortions were carried out as a direct result of a Y2K bug (miscalculation of the mother's age). Four babies with Down syndrome were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group. [31]
In Ishikawa, Japan, radiation-monitoring equipment failed at midnight; however, officials stated there was no risk to the public. [32]
In Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight. [32]
In Japan, at two minutes past midnight, Osaka Media Port, a telecommunications carrier, found errors in the date management part of the company's network. The problem was fixed by 02:43 and no services were disrupted. [33]
In Japan, NTT Mobile Communications Network (NTT DoCoMo), Japan's largest cellular operator, reported on 1 January 2000, that some models of mobile telephones were deleting new messages received, rather than the older messages, as the memory filled up. [33]
In Australia, bus ticket validation machines in two states failed to operate. [30]
In the United States, 150 Delaware Lottery racino slot machines stopped working. [30]
In the United States, the US Naval Observatory, which runs the master clock that keeps the country's official time, gave the date on its website as 1 Jan 19100. [34]
In France, the national weather forecasting service, Météo-France, said a Y2K bug made the date on a webpage show a map with Saturday's weather forecast as "01/01/19100".[30] This also occurred on other websites, including att.net, at the time a general-purpose portal site primarily for AT&T Worldnet customers in the United States.
On 1 March 2000 [ edit ]
Problems were reported but these were mostly minor.[35]
In Japan, around five percent of post office cash dispensers failed to work.
In Japan, data from weather bureau computers was corrupted.
In the UK, railway self-service ticket machines ("Quickfare") printed tickets bearing the date "00 JNR 00" for 3 months until mid March 2000. These were incompatible with newly installed Automatic Ticket Gates (ATGs) at Reading railway station. [ citation needed ]
In the United States, the Coast Guard's message processing system was affected.
At Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha, Nebraska, records of aircraft maintenance parts could not be accessed.
At Reagan National Airport, check-in lines lengthened after baggage handling programs were affected.
In Bulgaria, police documents were issued with expiration dates of 29 February 2005 and 29 February 2010 (which are not leap years) and the system defaulted to 1900.[36]
On 31 December 2000 or 1 January 2001 [ edit ]
Some software did not correctly recognise 2000 as a leap year, and so worked on the basis of the year having 365 days. On the last day of 2000 (day 366) these systems exhibited various errors. These were generally minor, apart from reports of some Norwegian trains that were delayed until their clocks were put back by a month.[37]
Government responses [ edit ]
Bulgaria [ edit ]
Although only two digits are allocated for the birth year in the Bulgarian national identification number, the year 1900 problem and subsequently the Y2K problem were addressed by the use of unused values above 12 in the month range. For all persons born before 1900, the month is stored as the calendar month plus 20, and for all persons born after 1999, the month is stored as the calendar month plus 40.[38]
Netherlands [ edit ]
The Dutch Government promoted Y2K Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to share readiness between industries, without threat of antitrust violations or liability based on information shared.
Norway and Finland [ edit ]
Norway and Finland changed their national identification number, to indicate the century in which a person was born. In both countries, the birth year was historically indicated by two digits only. This numbering system had already given rise to a similar problem, the "Year 1900 problem", which arose due to problems distinguishing between people born in the 20th and 19th centuries. Y2K |
charged with rebellion or invasion without a court-issued warrant.
The President also said he was mulling the imposition of curfew in selected areas in Mindanao, such as Lanao del Sur, Lanao del Norte, Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat, Cotabato and Zamboanga Peninsula.
Duterte rushed home from Russia Wednesday afternoon after declaring martial law in the entire Mindanao in response to violence in Marawi City, where a gunfight between government troops and the Maute Group had erupted a day earlier.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines said 6 government troops have died from the clashes.
Gunfights erupted Tuesday as government troops were about to arrest Isnilon Hapilon, an Abu Sayyaf leader who has been named the Philippine head of the Islamic State. The US government is offering a $5-million bounty for his capture.
The terrorists burned several structures in the city, including a Catholic church. A parish priest and several parishioners were also held hostage.
The President is mandated by the Constitution to submit to Congress his justification for declaring martial law within 48 hours of his declaration. The legislature will then conduct a review and decide by a majority vote whether to uphold or revoke the declaration.NZ guarantees bank deposits
Posted
The New Zealand Government has followed Australia in guaranteeing all bank deposits for the next two years.
Prime Minister Helen Clark says she wants to assure New Zealanders their bank deposits are safe.
All mainstream banks, credit unions, building societies and finance companies which accept deposits are covered by the scheme.
It is free for financial institutions with deposits up to $5 billion.
Justin Kerr from New Zealand's Financial Services Federation says it is good news.
"I think the move, together with Australia, is a good thing as far as our two countries are concerned to be seen to be acting together in the same way at the same time," he said.
With less than four weeks until the election, Ms Clark has outlined a detailed spending plan designed to stimulate the economy.
It includes building projects and spending on infrastructure.
Topics: international-financial-crisis, business-economics-and-finance, industry, banking, new-zealandLeica M10 summary
The Leica M10 is the update to the 24Mp Leica M Typ 240, which continues in the Leica range. It’s a 24Mp full-frame rangefinder camera that relies on manual focusing with Leica M lenses. Leica has managed to shave a few millimetres off the M10’s depth in comparison with the Typ 240 and it makes a significant difference to the look and feel of the camera. The user interface has also been streamlined to make using the camera more straightforward.
As before, the traditional build and exposure controls are supplemented by a screen that’s capable of showing a live view image along with a magnified image and focus peaking if you want them to aid focusing.
While the top sensitivity settings are best avoided, the Leica M10 is capable of producing superb quality images with details that look natural even at 100% on screen.
In a nod to recent developments, Leica has given the M10 Wi-Fi connectivity so images can be shared quickly after capture via a smart phone or tablet.
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Camera type: Digital Rangefinder
Date announced: 18th January 2017
Price at launch: £5600/$TBC
Sensor size: Full-frame (24 x 36mm)
Effective pixel count: 24Mp
Lens mount: Leica M
Leica M10 Features and Specification
Processor: Maestro II
Viewfinder: Optical rangefinder
Sensitivity(ISO) range: ISO 100-50,000
Focusing: Manual
Max shooting rate: 5fps for 30 raw files or 100 jpegs
Storage: SD/SDHC/SDXC
Leica’s M series of rangefinder cameras are legendary, dating back to 1954 with the M3. The first digital version was the M8 announced in 2006, followed by the M9 in 2011. In 2012 Leica introduced the Leica M Typ 240, the logical successor to the M9 but with a new naming structure.
Now Leica seems to have reverted back to familiar naming territory with the launch of the Leica M10 Type 3656, however, the M Typ 240 is set to continue as a companion model.
Inside the Leica M10 is a new full frame CMOS sensor with 24million effective pixels. This sensor is specifically designed for use with Leica M lenses – that’s important in a camera with such a short flange depth.
Its construction and micro-lens structure is designed to maximise the light gathering potential of the photodiodes and improve performance over that of the Typ 240.
In addition, Leica has omitted the optical low pass filter to enable the M10 to capture more detail. Meanwhile the an infrared filter over the sensor helps avoid unwanted light refraction.
The sensor is coupled with a new second generation Maestro (Maestro II) processing engine. This, combined with a 2GB buffer, enables a maximum shooting rate of 5fps (frames per second) for up to 30 DNG raw files or 100 jpegs. In addition, the sensitivity range has been increased from the ISO 200-6400 of the Typ 240 to ISO 100-50,000.
As usual with Leica M cameras, focusing is manual and relies on a rangefinder arrangement. However, a focus peaking display is available in live view mode and the areas of highest contrast can be highlighted in red, blue, green or white.
Furthermore, a magnified view can be set to appear as soon as you begin to focus to make life easier. This enlarged view can also be moved around the scene using the camera’s navigation pad.
The Gorilla Glass covered screen on the back of the M10 measures 3-inches across the diagonal, has a resolution of 1,036,800 dots and is capable of showing 16 million colours.
Leica has also made the hot-shoe of the M10 compatible with the 2.4Mp Leica Visoflex (around £340/$546) electronic viewfinder (EVF). This handy device can be tilted through 90 degrees for easier image composition at awkward angles. It displays the M10’s live view image along with the magnified view and focus peaking if those options are selected.
For first time in a Leica M camera there’s a Wi-Fi module and the M10 is compatible with Leica’s free M- App to enable remote control and image transfer to a smartphone.
As Apple supports DNG files it’s even possible to transfer raw files and edit them on an iPad or iPhone. However, to keep data costs and transfer times down, it’s possible to set smaller sized images to share and there are 1, 6, 12 or 24Mp options available.
Leica M10 Build and Handling
Screen: Fixed 3-inch LCD with 1,036,800 dots
Dimensions: 139 x 38.5 x 80mm
Weight: 660g with battery
We were loaned a sample of the camera for our Leica M10 review and have been shooting with it extensively for a few days.
While the M10 looks every bit the Leica M camera, there are a few very clear differences from the Typ 240 and M9.
The first of these differences is that the M10 is 4mm thinner than the M Typ 240. Now that might not sound like much of a difference, but proportionally it’s pretty significant. At 33.7mm deep the new camera is the same thickness as Leica’s film M cameras. As well as making the camera more attractive, it’s a little more comfortable to hold.
Leica has achieved this size reduction by eliminating much of the space within the camera body and condensing the electrical layers down to just one by a combination of miniaturisation and spreading out the main board.
The company has also given the M10 a new battery which is slightly flatter than the Typ 240’s. This also reduces battery life but it’s still very respectable at over 600 shots.
Another major change brought by the M10 is that there’s a new dial on the far left end of the top-plate to control sensitivity. This has settings of 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, M and A. The value accessed via M may be set via the menu and the options go all the way up to the ISO 50,000 maximum.
The maximum value selected via the A for automatic setting can also be specified in the menu along with a maxim exposure time (to avoid camera shake).
This sensitivity dial needs to be pulled up from the camera before it can be rotated. It’s a little awkward to lift ready for action but at least it’s not likely to happen accidentally.
If you want to take manual control over sensitivity and expect to need to change the value fairly frequently, the dial can be left up and it rotates easily with a slight click between each stop.
Another significant change since the Typ 240 sees the number of buttons on the back of the camera reduced to just three (marked LV, Play and Menu) along with the four-way navigation control. This, the traditional exposure controls and the relatively concise menu makes the Leica M10 extremely easy to get to grips with.
On the subject of the menu, pressing the Menu button reveals a customisable screen of favourite features. It’s possible to assign up to 40 features to the Favourites menu, but that’s 2/3 of the entire menu so it’s a bit excessive.
Pressing the menu button a second time reveals the main menu, which is spread over four screens. Each press of the menu button advances you through a screen or you can use the navigation control. Easy.
On the top of the M10, to the left of the power switch and shutter release (with threaded remote socket) with the shutter speed dial. This has whole stop markings in the range 8-1/4000 sec plus Bulb and A for automatic settings. While the markings are in whole stops the dial can be turned in half stops.
The top and bottom plate of the M10 are machined from brass while the front, back and sides are made from die-cast magnesium alloy. This gives the camera the familiar robust, ‘built to last a lifetime’ feel of a Leica M camera.
The narrower build also makes the camera easier to grasp, but the supplied shoulder/neck strap is a wise precaution. Leica also offers a metal thumb support (around £160) that can be slipped into the hot-shoe to give a more better grip and increases the security of the hold considerably.
There’s also a loop-like finger-grip that gives even more security, but I find a little restrictive to use.
Leica M10 Viewfinder
The Leica M10’s viewfinder has a 30% larger field of view and 50% longer eye-relief than the M Typ 240’s, the latter is to make it more convenient to use when wearing spectacles. In addition, the magnification is up from 0.68x up to.73x.
It’s also calibrated to -0.5 diopter, but corrective lenses are available from -3 to +3 diopter. An adapter is available to allow earlier diopter lenses to be used on the new camera.
Bright lines indicate the framing for 35mm and 135mm, 28 and 90mm or 50mm and 75mm. The appropriate lines show automatically when a lens is mounted, but you can also see the framing by flicking the switch on the front of the camera.
With the Leica Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 ASPH. lens mounted and looking straight ahead through the viewfinder, I can just see the outer limits of the frame. If I put spectacles on I have to move my head around a little to see the bright lines.
When the 28mm bright lines are activated I have to move my head to see them even when I’m not wearing glasses. However, I’m a left eye user.
Switch to my right eye and the shape of the camera means the viewfinder sits at a better angle to my eye and I’m able to see the 28mm bright lines when I’m not wearing spectacles.
One consequence of the M10’s rangefinder design is that the lens extends into the viewfinder frame, so you need to be alert to anything unwanted that could be in the bottom right corner of the image.
Leica M10 Focusing
As I mentioned earlier, the Leica M10 uses rangefinder focusing. This means that at the centre of the viewfinder there’s a rectangle with two ghost images. When the focusing ring of the lens is rotated the distance between these two images changes. Once the images are in perfect register (ie overly each other), the subject is in focus.
As the viewfinder magnification is 0.73x and the mechanical measurement of the rangefinder (the distance between the rangefinder window and the viewfinder) is 69.31mm, the effective basis is 50.6mm. This is long enough to make focusing relatively easy.
When you’re shooting spontaneously, it’s often a good idea to be guided by the lens distance scale and set an aperture such as f/8 or f/11 (or smaller) to give sufficient depth of field to conceal focusing errors. Over time using the two methods of focusing helps you to build up a greater appreciation of subject distance and gradually you get faster at focusing the lens.
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Leica M10 Screen and Live View
As mentioned earlier, the M10 has a 3-inch 1,036,800 dot screen. This is fixed and is not touch-sensitive. It provides a nice clear view even in quite bright light and doesn’t suffer excessively from reflections. However, it would be much more useful if it were on a tilting hinge to allow it to be seen more easily from above or below head height. If I’m honest though, I think it’s very unlikely that Leica would do this.
Focusing in live view mode is relatively easy using the magnified view and focus peaking as a guide.
Leica M10 Performance
With 24 million effective pixels on its full frame sensor, the Leica M10 produces 5976 x 3984 pixel images. That’s a nice pixel count that enables you to produce prints measuring just over 50cm or 19.8-inches wide at 300ppi while keeping noise within relatively safe limits.
At low to mid sensitivity settings the M10 produces attractive images and jpegs that look natural, even at 100% on screen. The detail is sharp without being oversharpened and there’s no smudging of out of focus areas – they just look out of focus.
Noise is controlled well up to around ISO 25,000. At this setting images have a fine grained texture that’s evenly distributed and not unpleasant. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it if the lighting demanded it and I’d consider using it to inject a little texture in other circumstances.
Step up above ISO 25,000 and chroma noise (coloured speckling) becomes more evident in areas of uniform tone. There’s even a suggestion of a grid pattern in some areas of images shot at ISO 50,000.
I checked this carefully in my shots taken during a very rainy night in London and while there are vertical streaks that can be attributed to raindrops, the only explanation for the horizontal pattern is the sensor or processing.
In its default settings the M10 usually produces natural colours in natural light and images are a good match for the scene. Activating the Monochrome option for jpegs tends to result in quite flat images unless the contrast is boosted, but most Leica M Photographers are likely to use this a guide and will convert raw files to black and white post capture.
The Multi-field metering doesn’t appear to be the most sophisticated in the world and is quite easily distracted by bright areas in the scene.
After shooting for a little while you find yourself using the Multi-field metering like a centre-weighted system, taking a reading from an area and recomposing. At that point most people are likely to switch to the centre-wighted or spot metering option.
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Leica M10 Sample Images
Leica M10
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Leica M10 Verdict
Leica had a tricky job on its hands when attempting to update the Typ 240. It’s aim was to bring a camera that’s valued for its traditional build and focus on the essentials of photography a little more up to date. I think it’s done a very good job. The handling has been streamlined and the addition of a sensitivity dial means that you can check and adjust all the exposure settings without powering up the camera.
As the Leica SL and Leica T offer modern features such as touchscreen control and an electronic viewfinder, it’s possible that Leica’s engineers feel liberated to really centre on traditional photographic controls with the M10. To that end, the M10 doesn’t have video recording capability, but the Typ 240 which does, is set to continue in the range.
The Leica M10 isn’t intended to be an everyman camera, it’s not designed for fast shooting and thinking later. It’s for photographers who really want to focus on the most important aspects of photography, exposure and composition.
With thought and planning it is possible to get images of action and events with the M10, and it’s discrete looks and high quality results will make it appealing to well-heeled street and documentary photographers.
With practise the rangefinder focus becomes second nature, but if you prefer something a little more of this century, the optional EVF makes a good addition.
If I could add one thing to the Leica M10’s feature set it would be a tilting screen. That would make using live view and low or high level shooting just a little bit easier, but I think it’s unlikely to happen.
All things considered, the Leica M10 is an excellent upgrade to the Leica Typ 240. In the right hands it’s capable of producing very attractive images with lots of natural detail. It’s also built to last.
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Like this: Like Loading...The fact that this week's $13 billion JPMorgan settlement was a record between a U.S. company and the government is not the most notable part of this deal…
What's more shocking about this record-high settlement is that more than half of it could be tax-deductible.
Under terms of the $13 billion deal, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) will pay $4 billion toward consumer relief. The remaining $9 billion goes to settle federal and state civil claims stemming from entities involved in the mortgage securities. The state of New York will receive $613.8 million, California $298.9 million, Illinois $100 million, Delaware $19.7 million, and Massachusetts $34.4 million, according to the Department of Justice.
Included in the $9 million is a $2 billion non-tax-deductible fine to the Department of Justice.
But the rest – $7 billion – is tax-deductible thanks to part of the tax code that states costs associated with corporate legal cases can be treated similarly to a company's wages or equipment expenses.Scientists at SLAC have found a new method to create coherent beams of twisted light — light that spirals around a central axis as it travels.
The method has the potential to generate twisted light in shorter pulses, higher intensities, and a much wider range of wavelengths (including X-rays) than is currently possible.
First described two decades ago, twisted light is attracting attention from researchers in fields as diverse as telecommunications, quantum computing, condensed matter research and astronomy because of one unique property:
Researchers have demonstrated that it can transmit more information through fiber optic cables than the current industry standard.
Creating twisted light with an electron beam
Until now, researchers created twisted light by shooting laser beams through masks or holographic gratings. But a team of accelerator physicists from SLAC and UCLA has shown they can create it with a beam of electrons, in much the same way SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser uses electrons to generate pulses of X-ray laser light.
There are several advantages to generating corkscrew light beams this way, said SLAC postdoctoral researcher Erik Hemsing, who is lead author of a paper in the September issue of Nature Physics. Free-electron lasers can generate light in a vast range of wavelengths and in extremely short, bright pulses, opening up the possibility of generating orbital angular momentum (OAM) light at the X-ray wavelengths of, for example, LCLS.
In the case of corkscrewing light, researchers send two pulses — one containing electrons, the other laser light — through an undulator simultaneously.
The combination of laser pulse and undulator imprints an energy pattern on the electrons. As they pass through another grouping of magnets called a chicane, the electrons reposition themselves like race cars on a curve, and hit the next straightaway arranged in the shape of a corkscrew. This “helically microbunched” arrangement of electrons then enters a second undulator that causes them to wiggle and emit spiraling light.
Intense beams of spiraling X-ray light could also open the door to new condensed matter research, said Hemsing.Something is definitely rotten down on the farm. The General Accounting Office, Congress fact-finding agency, released in mid-June a study of the U.S. Department of Agricultures management of the farm-subsidy program, a multibillion-dollar system of direct payments to farmers. The findings should horrify lawmakers but probably wont.
The GAO revealed that government employees are ill-trained and federal laws too vague to properly monitor the hundreds of thousands of farm-subsidy payments granted each year. The GAO found many of the approved recipients were ineligible for subsidies. (The USDA fact-checks only about 1,000 applications each year.) A GAO sample of USDA-reviewed and approved subsidies revealed that 30 percent of even these scrutinized farm subsidies were going to people who shouldnt be receiving them.
The lack of USDA oversight is outrageous, given how much America spends on subsidies. From 1995 to 2002 the U.S. taxpayer doled out more than $114 billion to farmers, and in 2002 President Bush upped subsidies to $190 billion over the next 10 years. For perspective, consider that in the year 2000 alone, U.S. spending on farm subsidies exceeded the gross domestic product of more than 70 nations, based on federal government figures.
With so much money being freely handed out, the GAO report should lead to some tough questions for USDA officials on Capitol Hill. Yet, for all its detail, the 75-page report artfully avoids the bigger question that no lawmaker wants to hear: Why do we even have farm subsidies?
One popular misconception that contributes to support for farm subsidies is that because they result in lower food prices, they are a boon to consumers. This ignores the fact that taxes pay for these subsidies. Any reduction in supermarket prices is paid for by your taxes, or someone elses, whether you buy that ear of corn or not.
Farm subsidies are not intended to reduce the cost of food significantly. If prices fell too much, farmers would lose money. To prevent this, Congress also has environmental conservation subsidies that pay farmers not to cultivate their land, resulting in higher prices for crops that are thus made scarcer. Consequently, from 1995 through 2002 we paid $14 billion for farmland conservation subsidies that increased the price of our food.
Another myth is that farm subsidies can help U.S. exports, and therefore the U.S. economy, because they make our food cheaper for foreigners to buy. This claim ignores at least two realities. First, just as farm subsidies are a wealth transfer from some taxpayers to some domestic consumers, so they are a wealth transfer to foreign consumers. Second, farm subsidies are starting to cost U.S. exporters. Last April, the World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. cotton subsidies violated global trade rules, which could lead to billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs or fines. The ruling will encourage developing countries to bring lawsuits against other subsidized U.S. exports.
If the United States were to stop subsidizing agriculture, it could encourage others to do the same. Franz Fischler, the European Unions agriculture commissioner, announced at the Doha Round of international trade negotiations in May that, Provided we get a balanced deal, we are ready to put all of [Europes] export subsidies on the table. Given that European agricultural subsidies are almost six times greater per land unit than U.S. subsidies, American exporters would gain tremendously from an end to subsidies. Farmers in the developing world, who struggle in the face of unfair competition from crops subsidized by governments of the developed world, would also gain.
The most enduring political illusion is that farm subsidies are necessary to maintain the small family farmer. In fact, 77 percent of Americans support giving subsidies to small family farms, according to a 2004 poll by the PIPA/Knowledge Network. Small family farmers are not the primary dollar recipients of federal subsidies, however. According to the subsidy watchdog, Environmental Working Group, 71 percent of farm subsidies go to the top 10 percent of subsidy beneficiaries, almost all of which are large farms. In 2002, 78 farms, none small or struggling, each received more than a million dollars in subsidies. The bottom 80 percent of recipients average only $846 per year.
The result of subsidizing the rich, more landed farmers is that they can reduce the prices of their goods, making it much harder for small farmers to compete. Rather than being the small family farmers savior, subsidies work against them.
Rich farmers are a powerful lobby in American politics. In the last election, crop producers gave $11.5 million in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and they are likely to give much more by this November.
So dont be surprised that the GAOs report wont be taken too seriously on Capitol Hill. Farm subsidies are more than just payoffs for loaded, large landowners. Theyre subsidies for elected officials, too.Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus Max Sieben BaucusOvernight Defense: McCain honored in Capitol ceremony | Mattis extends border deployment | Trump to embark on four-country trip after midterms Congress gives McCain the highest honor Judge boots Green Party from Montana ballot in boost to Tester MORE (D-Mont.) unveiled plans to pare back oil industry tax breaks Thursday as part of a wider proposed overhaul of the corporate tax code.
The plan does not attack as many industry tax breaks as some liberal Democrats and the White House have proposed. But it nonetheless drew a quick criticism from the oil industry.
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The plan would end the immediate write-off of drilling costs, an incentive that’s fully available to independent oil producers and partially available to the majors like Exxon and BP.A separate provision in the Baucus plan places new limits on percentage depletion, a deduction on income oil-and-gas production available to independent producers.The Independent Petroleum Association of America slammed the proposal, claiming that it “jeopardizes America’s energy renaissance.”“Current tax rules and laws ensure that industry pays its fair share in taxes, which is now one of the most heavily taxed industries in the country. The current tax code also encourages investment resulting in massive new U.S. energy supplies and millions of jobs,” said Barry Russell, the group’s president and CEO.But the plan does not target some other incentives, including the oil-and-gas industry’s ability to claim a lucrative deduction on domestic manufacturing income, called the Section 199 deduction.Removing that incentive has been a staple of many other Democratic plans to remove oil industry tax breaks and White House budget proposals.However, the Baucus plan would end the ability of businesses – including oil companies – to use the “last in, first out” (LIFO) accounting method, which drew criticism from the American Petroleum Institute (API).“Changes to cost recovery and repeal of legitimate accounting methods like LIFO could unintentionally hit the brakes on America’s energy and manufacturing renaissance,” API spokesman Brian Straessle said.The Hill’s On The Money blog has more on the Baucus plan hereYou can join the week-long fray and battle alongside The Escapist in Dust 514, or you can let us do the heavy lifting and watch us live on Twitch.tv.
Beginning on Monday, March 4th, and running through Friday, March 8th, The Escapist will be hosting a week-long event in the Dust 514 beta, where The Escapist staff will be battling clone armies alongside the community, as well as streaming to Twitch.tv to allow those without a PS3 to join the fun. As an extra bonus, every community member that joins The Escapist's in-game corporation will receive a commemorative Dust 514 badge on site. You can even join early by going in game and submitting your application to the "Escapist Magazine" corporation, being sure to include your Escapist username in your application. The PS3-exclusive Dust 514 is currently in open beta, and instructions on how to get into the game can be found in the How to Play section here.
Dust 514 is a free-to-play FPS with a twist; it ties directly into CCP's EVE Online. Whether you're being hired as a mercenary for a ruthless player-owned corporation, or you're calling in a favor with an Orbital Bombardment, the battles that take place in Dust 514 can have real effects on the in-game universe of EVE Online. This sort of interaction is definitely a novelty to players, and we are excited to see just how much impact the battles of Dust will actually have on the EVE universe.
Dust 514 features two currencies, ISK and Aurum, the former being the same as the in-game currency for EVE Online, and the latter being the real-money currency exclusive to Dust 514's micro-transactions. You'll be able to purchase cosmetic upgrades, as well as some actual equipment with Aurum, however, most practical items you can buy with Aurum are slated to be available via ISK as well, which can be earned through contracts in the game.
The Escapist will be in game and streaming live on Twitch.tv for four hours each day from Monday to Friday, as per the schedule below. In case you're busy at work during the day, we'll be bookending the event on Monday and Friday with MikeWehner, who you may know from the Neverwinter beta live stream, putting some extra hours into Dust 514 in the evening starting at 5:30pm Eastern. If you've got a PS3, you may want to download Dust now, so you'll be ready to get in on the action when Monday rolls around. Would you like to know more?
Update: The Dust 514 event launch has been delayed until Noon Eastern time. Check back then for more info!Additional reporting by Sam Stein and Rachel Weiner
WASHINGTON -- Tom Daschle withdrew Tuesday as President Barack Obama's nominee to be health and human services secretary, dealing potential blows to both speedy health care reform and Obama's hopes for a smooth start in the White House.
"Now we must move forward," Obama said in a written statement accepting "with sadness and regret" Daschle's request to be removed from consideration. A day earlier, Obama had said he "absolutely" stood by Daschle in the face of problems over back taxes and potential conflicts of interest.
Moments after the news was announced, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said she had just spoken to Daschle, who told her, "I read the New York Times this morning and I realized that I can't pass health care if I am too much of a distraction... I called the president this morning." Mitchell described the call as emotional, and said Daschle was near tears.
The stunning Daschle development came less than three hours after another Obama nominee also withdrew from consideration, and also over tax problems. Nancy Killefer, nominated by Obama to be the government's first chief performance officer, said she didn't want her bungling of payroll taxes on her household help to be a distraction.
"They both recognized that you can't set an example of responsibility but accept a different standard of who serves," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, a strong and early backer of Obama's presidential bid and a close Obama friend, said he would have been unable to operate "with the full faith of Congress and the American people."
"I am not that leader, and will not be a distraction" to Obama's agenda, he said.
Obama had given Daschle two jobs _ to be White House health czar on top of the post leading the Health and Human Services Department _ and Daschle is relinquishing both. The developments called into question whether Obama will be able to move as quickly as he has promised on sweeping health care reform _ one of the pillars of his first 100 days agenda and expected to be among the hardest to accomplish.
"It really sets us back a step," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "Because he was such a talent. I mean he understood Congress, serving in the House and Senate; he certainly had the confidence of the president."
Said White House spokesman Gibbs: "We're looking for a new nominee, but the problem has existed for quite some time and the work toward a solution to make health care more affordable won't stop or won't pause while we look for that nominee."
Among those considered for the post before it went to Daschle was Howard Dean, the physician-turned-politician who ran for president in 2004 and recently left as head of the Democratic National Committee.
Asked repeatedly whether the White House sought Daschle's withdrawal, Gibbs said it was Daschle's decision alone. He "did not get a signal" from the White House to step aside, the spokesman said.
Daschle is the third high-profile Obama nominee to bow out. Obama tapped Bill Richardson to be Commerce secretary, but the New Mexico governor withdrew amid a grand jury investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors. Obama named Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire to the position Tuesday.
Last week, the Senate confirmed Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, but only after days of controversy over the fact that he had only belatedly paid $34,000 in income taxes.
Asked whether tax questions are going to arise with any other nominees, Gibbs said only that "the president has confidence in the people he has chosen to serve in government." He also defended the administration's vetting process.
He added: "the president takes responsibility" for the spate of nomination troubles.
The White House dispatched senior adviser David Axelrod to Capitol Hill to soothe Democrats whose nerves were frayed by the loss of Daschle.
Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Daschle's former Democratic colleagues had rallied to Daschle's defense in the wake of questions about his failure to fully pay his taxes from 2005 through 2007. Last month, he paid $128,203 in back taxes and $11,964 in interest.
"Tom made a mistake, which he has openly acknowledged," Obama said Tuesday. "He has not excused it, nor do I. But that mistake and this decision cannot diminish the many contributions Tom has made to this country."
"I was a little stunned. I thought he was going to get confirmed," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the panel that would have voted on Daschle's nomination. "It's regrettable. He's a very good man."
Daschle also was facing questions about potential conflicts of interests related to speaking fees he accepted from health care interests. He also provided advice to health insurers and hospitals through his post-Senate work at a law firm.Bill George is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and a former chairman and chief executive of Medtronic.
Hewlett-Packard’s $8.8 billion write-down of its Autonomy acquisition is just the latest evidence of the steady decline of one of the world’s great companies. Don’t blame Meg Whitman, the chief executive. She is just cleaning up the messes created since 1999 by her three predecessors and H.P.’s strategically challenged board of directors.
For more than thirty years, Hewlett-Packard served as my role model of a company. Having met David Packard in 1969, I deeply admired his, and Bill Hewlett’s, philosophy of “management by wandering around” and “The Hewlett Way.”
Like the founders of my former company Medtronic, Hewlett and Packard started in a garage. They never forgot that the company was an egalitarian organization focused on innovations that met their customers’ needs. Trying to compete with H.P. in its prime was very difficult because of its innovative products, superior customer service and product quality.
The founders also created a financial model that enabled the company to sustain its growth for 40 years: grow revenue at 20 percent, maintain 20 percent operating margins, and reinvest approximately 10 percent of revenue in research and development. Their internally groomed successors, John A. Young and Lewis E. Platt, carried on their philosophy for another twenty years.
In 1999, everything changed. Based on a consultant’s recommendation, the board decided to spin off its core business of test, measurement and medical instruments in order to focus on the rapidly growing computer business.
Wanting to shift its culture, the board passed over several internal candidates to bring in Carly Fiorina from AT&T and its Lucent spinoff. She quickly abandoned The Hewlett Way, moving aggressively to reshape the company as a prominent marketer of computer equipment and enterprise systems. Her fateful move was acquiring Compaq Computer, despite the objections of several board members, in order to become the leader in low-cost personal computers.
Ms. Fiorina tried to focus simultaneously on high-end enterprise systems. The split focus was costly. In its bid to buy the business consulting practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers, H.P. lost out to I.B.M. As time continued, Hewlett’s growth and profitability stagnated.
Ms. Fiorina was succeeded by NCR’s Mark V. Hurd, who focused on near-term sales growth and cost reduction, doubling the company’s earnings and stock price. Mr. Hurd also acquired Electronic Data Systems’ computer services capabilities, an unfortunate deal that led to an $8 billion write-down in 2012. The company’s investment in R&D, meanwhile, fell to 2.3 percent from 4 percent.
When Mr. Hurd resigned after admitting he had violated company standards, the board hastily hired Léo Apotheker, the failed co-chief executive of the enterprise software giant SAP. Mr. Apotheker proposed selling the company’s PC business and dropping its tablets and smartphones to concentrate on systems and software. He acquired the British software maker Autonomy for $10 billion.
His strategies caused such controversy that he was terminated after only 11 months and succeeded by a board |
majority. A company hiring many crucial Bitcoin protocol developers controls some of its own small hash rate now according to its CEO. So the Bitcoin network is at a high risk of being split on Aug 1st, 2017.
BIP148 is very dangerous for exchanges and other business. There is no sign of significant economic support behind BIP148 and when it is alive as a blockchain, the economic support would most likely be based on speculation. The mining activity behind a UASF chain may stop without notice, and investors who buy in the BIP148 propaganda may lose all their investment. Any exchanges that decide to support a UASF token after the forking point need to consider the stagnation risk attached to it.
There is no replay protection on a BIP148 chain. Transactions will be broadcast on both chains and users cannot prevent them from being confirmed on both. Exchanges must stop withdrawals and deposits at the forking point for some time, and deploy their own coin splitting methods. If you want to learn more, please read from the References section of this post: Mitigating Bitcoin Forking Risk during Network Upgrade.
The UASF chain presents a risk of the original chain being wiped out. If there is no contingency plan, all economic activity that occurs on the original chain after the UASF forking point will face the risk of being wiped out. This has disastrous consequences for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. UASF is an attack against users and enterprises who disagree with activating SegWit right now without a block size increase, which is a very important clause in the Hong Kong agreement made by the global Bitcoin community in February, 2016. The chain reorg risk is more significant than imaged, as analyzed by Peter R. in BUIP055,
Rationale for Reorg Protection
The probability (P) that the big-block chain reorgs back to the small-block chain is given by
P = (q/p)^2
where p is the fraction of the hash power mining the big-block chain and q is the fraction of the hash power remaining on the small block chain [2]. With 75% of the hash power supporting larger blocks, the probability of a reorg is 11%.
Protection Plan
This plan is for a User Activated Hard Fork, or UAHF. You can find technical specs here:
https://github.com/bitcoin-UAHF/spec/
The activation time is configurable. We will do the hard fork at 12 hours and 20 mins later than UASF. The epoch time stamp will be 1501590000.
There is “must be big” rule at the fork block. The block size of the fork block must be larger than 1,000,000 Byte. Fork block means the first block which adopt the consensus rule change.
It will accept block of which the size is less than 8MB and we, miners, will soft-limit the block size to less than 2MB.
There will be a soft fork rule added into the protocol to limit the sigops per transaction within 20K.
The block size will not be a part of hard-coded consensus rule for us in the future after the fork block. Miners who generate large blocks will be punished by economic incentives, but not limiting the block size.
There will be replay attack protection that is available for exchanges and wallet developers. You can find the spec here:
https://github.com/Bitcoin-UAHF/spec/blob/master/replay-protected-sighash.md
Bitmain will use some of its own hash rate and work with the developer community to have a contingency plan based on UAHF. We will develop options for miners to voluntarily join us.
Bitmain will mine the chain for a minimum of 72 hours after the BIP148 forking point with a certain percentage of hash rate supplied by our own mining operations.
Bitmain will likely not release immediately the mined blocks to the public network unless circumstances call for it, which means that Bitmain will mine such chain privately first. We intend in the following situations to release the mined blocks to the public (non-exhaustive list):
The BIP148 chain is activated and subsequently gains significant support from the mining industry, i.e. after BIP148 has already successfully split the chain; Market sentiment for a big block hard fork is strong, and economic rationale drives us to mine it, for example, the exchange rate is in favor of big-block Bitcoin; If there is already a significant amount of other miners mining a big-block chain publicly and we decide that it is rational for us to mine on top of that chain. In such a case, we will also consider joining that chain and give up our privately mined chain so that the public UAHF chain will not be under the risk of being reorganized.
Once Bitmain starts to mine a UAHF chain publicly, we will mine it persistently and ignore short-term economic incentives. We believe a roadmap including the option to adjust block size will serve users better so we expect it to attract a higher market price in the long term. The economic network will expand faster, and the winning odds will be higher in a highly competitive cryptocurrency market.
We share the same belief with some very early Bitcoiners, that decentralization means that more than 1 billion people in 200 countries are using Bitcoin as a saving currency and payment network, and that it comprises of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin services, traders, exchanges and software. We do not believe that decentralization means a 1MB block size limit or a responsibility to constrain the block size so that a Raspberry Pi can run a full node while the fee per Bitcoin transaction is higher than the daily income in most developing countries. We believe Bitcoin needs to offer people an alternative to flourish without depending on powerful authorities that charge fees that can be as high as 100$/transaction.
Software Development
Currently, there are at least 3 client development teams working on the code of the spec. All of them want to stay quiet and away from the propaganda and troll army of certain companies. They will announce themselves when they feel ready for it. Users will be able to install the software and decide whether to join the UAHF.
The softwares are expected to be ready before July 1st, and it will be live on testnet by then.
Future Roadmap
If New York agreement activates
We wish that New York agreement will be developed and carried out well. It is the last hope for Bitcoin to scale unitedly in face of the BIP148 threat. We will try our best to deploy and activate it as soon as possible.
If BIP148 activates
Then UAHF will be alive on the same day. The UAHF chain will protect the economic transactions that are under risk of reorganization because of UASF.
Later, we will support the activation of SegWit on the UAHF chain if there is no patent risk associated with SegWit and if the arbitrary discount rate of witness data segment is removed. The weight parameter, which is designed for artificial rates, may need to be deleted and we need to be frank and straightforward in the software code about different limitations on different kind of blocks and other parameters. A SegWit without the artificial discount rate will treat legacy transaction type fairly and it will not give SegWit transactions an unfair advantage. It will also help the capacity increasing effect of SegWit more significantly than with the discounted rate. We will also push for and encourage changes in code, in main block or in extension block, that will make Lightning Network run more safely and reliably than Core’s present version of SegWit does.
Extension blocks will be developed as a framework to encourage multiple protocol development teams to bring innovations and capacities into the Bitcoin protocol. Some important but aggressive innovations can be introduced without affecting all Bitcoin users or companies around the world. This will accelerate the innovation of Bitcoin protocol. Sidechains will also be encouraged after the associated security issues have been reviewed by the technical community. Miners are genuinely driven by the hope that Bitcoin will be a success.
We will encourage and help various multi-layer solutions come into production. As a very early investor of RootStock, we identified the potential of another important competing cryptocurrency. We are already working closely with authors of other multilayer solutions.
A new SPV security service by full nodes should be promoted, and further research and libraries that are compatible with the SPV model should also be promoted among wallet developers.
If Bitcoin can combine Bitcoin NG by Emin and Lumino by Sergio together, then a throughput increase of the current Bitcoin network to up to 100x can be easier to achieve with a block size of around 100KB but of a higher block generation frequency. The original Bitcoin NG is a hard fork proposal, but we can soft fork it into the protocol with the extension block framework. At the same time, RootStock, co-founded by the inventor of Lumino, is also trying to implement Lumino on RootStock. Lumino will work perfectly with Lightning Network. It will be interesting to see which implementation will bring Lumino into production first, and in what ways.
Schnorr Signature is also under last stage review.
The diversification of client development shall be promoted. Defensive Consensus concept is under development and will help in the mining industry. Defensive Consensus will help the Bitcoin network work safely while multiple implementations work together.
There are and will be other good innovations in the Bitcoin community that have not been well promoted because of various reasons. We seek to actively work with those innovations.
BUIP056 will be developed to manage the block size issue before a fully automatic and mathematical block size governance model is widely accepted. As evidenced in the past years of debate, miners have proved to be very conservative and willing to work with the wider economic community. The rough roadmap of the block size increase for the next few years is below.
Time Block size, Byte Now 1,000,000 2017 Aug 2,000,000 2017 Sept 4,194,304 2018 April 5,931,641 2018 Aug 8,388,608 2019 April 11,863,283 2019 Aug 16,777,216 After 2019 Aug Depends on further research
Weak blocks will have to be developed and deployed, before the block size increase reaches 8MB.
References
For other parties in the ecosystem, we recommend detailed research on effects of the UASF. All Bitcoin businesses must be prepared on that day to mitigate or eliminate the risks that UASF carries.
Mitigating Bitcoin Forking Risk during Network Upgrade, https://github.com/digitsu/splitting-bitcoin
If you want to learn more about minority forks, please see Meni Rosenfeld’s presentation:
How I learned to stop worrying and love the fork https://fieryspinningsword.com/2015/08/25/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-fork/
A Fork in the Road: Must we Choose a Path? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJHOpuvQo0&feature=youtu.be
Here is a letter to help you understand the history and full picture of the great debate on Bitcoin scaling, even you are not miners:
An Open Letter to Miners
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6befxw/an_open_letter_to_bitcoin_miners_jonald_fyookball/
Here is another blog help you to understand what will happen on the BIP148 fork:
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/uasf-bip148-scenarios-and-game-theory-9530336d953e
(We have also published the translated versions of this blog post in Deutsche, עִברִית, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, русский and Español )
---------------------Liked this article? Share it with others:Follow Us for Latest News & Articles:“There is no god,” the blind man tells his prisoner near the end of Don’t Breathe. “What god would allow this to happen? There is nothing a man cannot do once he accepts that there is no god.”
Those lines form the core of Don’t Breathe‘s philosophy. It’s a tale about a world without god or justice, where might is the only right. There is purpose behind the fact that the only parental figures we see in the film are abusive and negligent. It’s no coincidence that it’s set in the ruined and largely abandoned suburbs of Detroit. It is no accident that none of the characters are truly “good.”
Don’t Breathe opens with three hooligans, Money (Daniel Zovatto), Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Rocky (Jane Levy), breaking into a house and stealing clothes, trinkets, and technology. Alex is the brains of the operation. He supplies the keys and alarm codes from his father’s home security company and warns the others not to steal more the ten thousand dollars worth of valuables (keeping them under the limit for felony grand larceny if they’re caught).
But Rocky and Alex aren’t happy with the chump change they get from robbing Alex’s way. They want to escape the hell-hole of a town they’re trapped in, and Money proposes a scheme to steal a wrongful death settlement from a blind shut-in. But the blind man proves to be more resourceful than they expected, and infinitely more dangerous.
Don’t Breathe‘s greatest power is its consistency in building tension. It mines its premise for all it is worth, accentuating every sound, making every breath the characters take seem like another step in a field full of land-mines. Don’t Breathe isn’t so much a descriptive title, as it is the thing you want to yell at the characters. There are a few important twists and turns (most of which were spoiled by the trailers) but the movie wisely doesn’t lean on them for its drama. Instead it turns up the heat one notch at a time, leaving you perched on the edge of your seat for the better part of an hour.
Stephen Lang turns out an incredible performance as the unnamed blind man, a character with a beautiful balance of menace and brokenness. He is relentless and determined, but never crosses the line into seeming inhuman or unstoppable. He is nothing more than a man who has rejected the idea of a higher power, a man who has decided that the only way to respond to an unjust word is to make his own justice.
Our protagonists aren’t “good” people by any stretch of the imagination (after all, they’re in this mess because they decide to steal grievance money from an old blind veteran), but they do represent an alternative viewpoint in this bleak world seemingly abandoned by god and government alike. Because they each in some way sacrifice themselves for the good of others. When the robbery goes sideways, Money tells the blind man he broke in alone trying to buy time for Rocky to escape. Alex goes back into the house to help his friends when he could have made a run for it. And Rocky’s prime motivation for stealing the money is so she can help her sister escape from the abusive household she grew up in.
Don’t Breathe paints a picture of a cruel and unfair world, where evil goes unpunished, and justice goes undelivered. But it reminds us that we don’t have to let it stay that way. It’s a warning that when we try to make justice for ourselves we become twisted and ugly. But if we make justice for others who are wronged, if we give our strength for those who are weak, we can make a difference in a dark world.
_____
If you liked the rundown, click the thumbnail below to check out the latest episode of the Human Echoes Podcast, where we discuss movies and more every week.AB 1500 is coming up for a vote TOMORROW, May 21, 2014.
The effort to gets this bill stopped needs to be a joint effort between business owners and their customers. The sponsor of this bill got it passed through the last committee by promising to address the more problematic parts of this bill but then did nothing.
If passed, this bill will result in: The "Adult Signature Required" service will add $5-$6 to the cost of an online order – this is a HIDDEN tax.
Foreign entities and less-reputable entities selling without adhering to the new legal requirements. California will likely be flooded with sub-par products from suppliers with unscrupulous business practices.
Vapor consumers over 18 years of age (but under 21) will be unable to receive their products. These adult smokers needs options more than any other group – this is the age span where a lifelong addiction habit is cemented into their lives.
Adults over 21 will have to stay home from work in order to be home and sign for their delivery.
This will inhibit current consumers from patronizing their online retailers. As an industry we: Do not oppose age-verification at time of online sale to assure buyer is 18+
Wonder why the sponsor would purposely deny smokers between the ages of 18 and 21 access to an alternative to combustible cigarettes
Do not agree with the sponsors tactic of manipulating committee members by promising to adjust the problematic issues noted above We encourage you to contact the committee members listed below in regards to these issues.
You can also direct your California consumers to CASAA for more consumer information.


Thank you for your time and consideration.

Cynthia Cabrera

Executive DirectorJustice Anthony M. Kennedy
Ed. note : Please note the UPDATES I have added, and will continue to add, at the end of this story.
Look, I love legal gossip as much as — actually, way more than — the next guy. I entered the world of legal media through the Look, I love legal gossip as much as — actually, way more than — the next guy. I entered the world of legal media through the back door of judicial gossip, writing a blog called Underneath Their Robes under the pseudonym of “Article III Groupie” (because gossiping about judges by night while appearing before them by day, as a federal prosecutor, is not a good look).
But to be a good gossip, you can’t just spread random rumors. You need to exercise discretion and discernment in what you disseminate — which brings me to the rampant rumors about Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s supposedly imminent retirement, to be announced possibly as early as tomorrow.
I won’t I won’t bury the lede, so here it is: based on reports I’ve received from former AMK clerks who attended his law clerk reunion dinner last night, it is highly unlikely that Justice Kennedy will announce his retirement tomorrow.
But before getting into those reports, let me explain the origins of the latest speculation. Rumors of AMK retiring have been galloping around inside the Beltway for months now. On June 22, they gained momentum after Chris Hayes But before getting into those reports, let me explain the origins of the latest speculation. Rumors of AMK retiring have been galloping around inside the Beltway for months now. On June 22, they gained momentum after Chris Hayes tweeted
Matt Drudge and the wishful thinking fun: Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report soon joined in thefun:
Now, legal nerds and #appellatetwitter types might scoff at taking SCOTUS predictions from the likes of Hayes and Drudge. But Mark Sherman of the Associated Press and Ariane de Vogue of CNN, both highly respected Supreme Court correspondents, wrote stories yesterday flagging the speculation. From Now, legal nerds and #appellatetwitter types might scoff at taking SCOTUS predictions from the likes of Hayes and Drudge. But Mark Sherman of the Associated Press and Ariane de Vogue of CNN, both highly respected Supreme Court correspondents, wrote stories yesterday flagging the speculation. From Sherman
“ The biggest news of all [from the Supreme Court] would be if Justice Anthony Kennedy were to use the court’s last public session on Monday to announce his retirement. To be sure, Kennedy has given no public sign that he will retire this year and give President Donald Trump his second high court pick in the first months of his administration…. But Kennedy turns 81 next month and has been on the court for nearly 30 years. Several of his former law clerks have said they think he is contemplating stepping down in the next year or so. Kennedy and his clerks were gathering over the weekend for a reunion that was pushed up a year and helped spark talk he might be leaving the court.
“ Will he stay or will he go? The rumors have swirled for months, and the 80-year-old justice has done nothing either personally or though intermediaries to set the record straight on whether he will step down.
Adding fuel to the fire, this morning top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said on ABC’s “This Week” that she Adding fuel to the fire, this morning top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said on ABC’s “This Week” that she could not confirm or deny the AMK retirement talk: “I will never reveal a conversation between a sitting justice and the president or the White House.”
Now, here’s my rebuttal. First, allow me to respectfully dissent from Ariane de Vogue’s comment that “the 80-year-old justice has done nothing either personally or though intermediaries to set the record straight.” Justice Kennedy, through the Court’s Public Information Office, previously has tried to dispel the rumors.
Last November, I offered a Last November, I offered a detailed discussion of the AMK retirement rumors, identifying three factors fueling the rumors: (1) moving his law clerk reunion up a year, a departure from the customary schedule of every five years; (2) not teaching in summer 2016 at McGeorge Law’s Summer Program in Salzburg, suggesting a possible slowdown for Justice and Mrs. Kennedy; and (3) hiring just one law clerk for the upcoming Term, October Term 2017. (Active justices get four clerks, while retired justices get one clerk, and in the past, some justices have tipped their hands by hiring fewer clerks than usual.)
If you’ve ever dealt with the Supreme Court Public Information Office, you know that the PIO likes to stay above the fray. It doesn’t chime in on every hiccup in the federal judiciary — it’s not Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, after all — and often it simply doesn’t comment on things. But the PIO did respond to my inquiry about Justice Kennedy, issuing this statement (presumably based on information received from the justice himself):
“ Justice Kennedy is in the process of hiring clerks for 2017. The Justice didn’t go to Salzburg this past summer because it conflicted with some plans with his family, but he is scheduled to return to teach there in 2017. The reunion is scheduled for the end of this Term because the Justice’s law clerks wanted to hold it during the Justice’s 80th year to mark his birthday.
Now, back when I shared this comment with my readers, I offered some caveats:
“ Is it possible that Justice Kennedy actually is planning to retire next year, but doesn’t want the world to know just yet? Sure. Is it possible that he isn’t currently planning to retire next year, but then changes his mind later? Certainly.
But, on balance, the PIO’s statement weighs in favor of AMK sticking around for a little while.
Second, look at his law clerk hiring. In January 2017, a few weeks after the Public Information Office’s statement, Justice Kennedy Second, look at his law clerk hiring. In January 2017, a few weeks after the Public Information Office’s statement, Justice Kennedy hired his fourth and final clerk for the next Term.
And wait, that’s not all. As I’ll mention in my next Supreme Court clerk hiring round-up, and as I’ve already tweeted via And wait, that’s not all. As I’ll mention in my next Supreme Court clerk hiring round-up, and as I’ve already tweeted via @SCOTUSambitions (which offers real-time SCOTUS clerk hiring news), Justice Kennedy recently hired one clerk for 2018 : Clayton Kozinski (Yale 2017 / Kavanaugh), son of prominent Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski (who clerked for Justice Kennedy back when he was Judge Kennedy of the Ninth Circuit, and who remains personally close to AMK).
Now, hiring clerks for 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 is not dispositive evidence that a justice will remain on the bench. There’s a nice tradition at the Court of justices picking up “orphaned” hires of their colleagues (which is what happened with Justice Antonin Scalia’s displaced clerks), so the clerks aren’t necessarily left in the lurch. But as a matter of collegiality and consideration — and whether or not you like his jurisprudence, Justice Kennedy is collegial and considerate — it’s not nice to impose upon your colleagues by hiring clerks you know will never work for you, putting pressure on these colleagues to sacrifice their own hiring discretion to scoop up your leftovers (because of SCOTUS tradition).
Finally, let’s turn to the dinner at the Kennedy law clerk reunion, which took place last night. As Kevin Daley noted over at the did say, which I’ll now share. Finally, let’s turn to the dinner at the Kennedy law clerk reunion, which took place last night. As Kevin Daley noted over at the Daily Caller, Eliana Johnson of Politico and Lawrence Hurley of Reuters previously tweeted that AMK didn’t make a retirement announcement last night. I have more specifics of what hedidsay, which I’ll now share.
I reached out to several AMK clerks who were in attendance, and those who got back to me all opined that they don’t think he will announce his retirement tomorrow. Here’s why (in addition to their I reached out to several AMK clerks who were in attendance, and those who got back to me all opined that they don’t think he will announce his retirement tomorrow. Here’s why (in addition to their “spidey sense” from his demeanor).
First, Justice Kennedy generally made forward-looking rather than valedictory comments. For example, he talked about the three pairs of parent-child clerks he’s had — e.g., the Kozinskis — and how he hopes to have more in the future. This doesn’t sound like a justice who’s about to be slashing his clerk hiring to one a year (the allotment given to a retired justice).
Second, Justice Kennedy made a joke about all the retirement buzz. At the end of his remarks, he said something along these lines: “There has been a lot of speculation about… a certain announcement from me tonight. And that announcement is: the bar will remain open after the end of the formal program!”
Again — like the Supreme Court press office statement, and like the law clerk hiring — Justice Kennedy’s reunion remarks are not conclusive evidence of non-retirement. Indeed, a few of his former clerks have said — not in a mean way, just a matter-of-fact way — that AMK doesn’t care enough about his clerks to make the big announcement at the reunion. (Compare him to my former boss, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the Ninth Circuit, who announced his move to senior status Again — like the Supreme Court press office statement, and like the law clerk hiring — Justice Kennedy’s reunion remarks are not conclusive evidence of non-retirement. Indeed, a few of his former clerks have said — not in a mean way, just a matter-of-fact way — that AMK doesn’t care enough about his clerks to make the big announcement at the reunion. (Compare him to my former boss, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the Ninth Circuit, who announced his move to senior status at his law clerk reunion — right around the same time he told his colleagues on the bench, and in advance of the first news reports.)
Let’s not mince words: as the so-called “swing justice” on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy is one of the most powerful people in the world, and Let’s not mince words: as the so-called “swing justice” on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy is one of the most powerful people in the world, and nobody puts AMK in the corner. As both liberals and conservatives have discovered to their dismay over the years, he swings his gavel every which way. Trying to predict AMK’s actions is almost as challenging as, well, trying to predict the actions of the man who might appoint his successor. As one of my sources said, “I’d be shocked if he retired this Term after last night — but it wouldn’t be the first time he’s surprised me!”
Truth be told, I would not be surprised if even Justice Kennedy himself hasn’t fully made up his mind (as another source of mine suggested to me). I would not be surprised if AMK has already drafted his resignation letter to President Donald Trump, and if and when the spirit moves the justice, he’ll date it, print it, sign it, and have his chambers aide walk it over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Kennedy, OUT!
Liberals should hope and pray that the justice wakes up in a good mood tomorrow morning. Despite progressives’ issues with AMK — cough cough, Citizens United — he’s a heck of a lot better for them than any Trump pick, especially in a Liberals should hope and pray that the justice wakes up in a good mood tomorrow morning. Despite progressives’ issues with AMK — cough cough,— he’s a heck of a lot better for them than any Trump pick, especially in a post-nuclear world
So anything is possible tomorrow when it comes to Justice Kennedy — but in terms of what’s probable, it’s highly unlikely that Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy will announce his departure from the Supreme Court of the United States.
P.S. Despite my caveats, I’m not betting both sides of the line; put me on record as saying AMK won’t retire tomorrow. If forced to assign a probability, I’d say there’s only a 10 percent chance of a retirement announcement. If Justice Kennedy does in fact retire, then yes, I’ll have a veritable three-egg omelet on my face.
P.P.S. In terms of my own self-interest, I’m fervently hoping that Justice Kennedy doesn’t retire tomorrow morning. I’m in meetings or speaking engagements pretty much all day on Monday — P.P.S. In terms of my own self-interest, I’m fervently hoping that Justice Kennedy doesn’t retire tomorrow morning. I’m in meetings or speaking engagements pretty much all day on Monday — come see me tomorrow night if you’re in Minneapolis — so I’ll be majorly annoyed if AMK drops the retirement bomb on a day when I’m mostly offline.
UPDATE (6:40 p.m.) : See also this earlier post by Adam Feldman, : See also this earlier post by Adam Feldman, Why Justice Kennedy May Not Leave The Court Right Now, with which I agree.
Some observers have suggested that AMK might not want to step down next year for fear of making himself an issue for the 2018 midterm elections. But with all due respect to the Supreme Court — and this is coming from me, a huge judicial junkie — there will be many, many other issues for the midterms besides SCOTUS. And, from the Democrats’ point of view, the American people’s indifference to what happened (or didn’t happen) to the Supreme Court nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland shows that the Court is not a major voting issue (or if it is, it motivates conservatives more than it motivates liberals and moderates).
UPDATE (6:43 p.m.) : A partial dissent from one source on the tone of Justice Kennedy’s speech: “there was a valedictory tone [to some of his comments], all the featured speakers were judges, and Justice Gorsuch was seated as : A partial dissent from one source on the tone of Justice Kennedy’s speech: “there was a valedictory tone [to some of his comments], all the featured speakers were judges, and Justice Gorsuch was seated as ‘hand of the king’ [for the photo op]. Legacy-type stuff, in other words.”
UPDATE (7:29 p.m.) : Another attendee had this interesting observation: “note the two judges who did not give speeches: [D.C. Circuit Judge Brett M.] Kavanaugh and [Sixth Circuit Judge Raymond M.] Kethledge. Significance? Maybe nothing, but they are the AMK clerks most likely to get the nod if he retires, and speaking at his final banquet might be awkward.”
So this point weighs in favor of a possible retirement (but not necessarily announced tomorrow, I’d argue, just a retirement during the Trump administration).
UPDATE (7:46 p.m.) : A good question from a reader: “Isn’t AMK’s hiring of one clerk for OT 2018 consistent with him retiring? Retired Justices frequently hire just one clerk, correct?”
Answer: no, because Clayton Kozinski was a super-early hire for Justice Kennedy (but not surprising, given that AMK sometimes hires someone early from Judge Kozinski, to whom he’s very close). The justice typically hires in December or January for the following October Term. So if December 2017 or January 2018 rolls around and Clayton has no co-clerks, that would be a sign of possible retirement.
Earlier :
David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.Buy 2016 Canadian Silver Maple Leaf Coins Online!
Featuring next generation micro engraving with an advanced security feature etched into the front of the coin, the 2016 Silver Maple Leafs represents the cutting edge in bullion coin security.The Silver Maple Leaf is the official silver bullion coin of Canada and one of the purest coins ever to be minted in the entire world. A Canadian Silver Maple Leaf is 1 troy ounce of pure silver minted in.9999 fine silver.The coin has been minted by the Royal Canadian Mint since 1988. Its obverse side is the likeness of Elizabeth II and its reverse is the highly known maple leaf. The coin is very well made and intricately designed. Since 1988 there has been three different heads of Elizabeth II; a young head, an old head and an older head.One of the worlds most popular coins sought after, with annual proof releases and several special issues including the 10th anniversary single-issue 10 oz coin in 1998, and the 25th anniversary issue in 2013.Quantities of 25 ship in the original sealed mint tube and quantities of 500 ship in the original sealed yellow RCM "Monster box".Mint Packaging:Tube: 25Box: 500Still shopping? We offer a wide selection of silver bullion hereThis is one dog who knows his way back home.
Buck, a 3-year-old Labrador, traveled 500 miles to get to Myrtle Beach, S.C., after his owner Mark Wessells left the dog with his father in Winchester, Va.
The journey began in January, when Wessells could no longer have a dog at his South Carolina home and subsequently relocated Buck.
When Wessells learned that Buck was missing, he was devastated.
“I thought he was gone forever,” he told South Carolina’s WPDE News.
As luck would have it, Buck turned up – several months later and some 500 miles away – back in South Carolina, where Good Samaritan Brett Gallagher found him wandering near his house and took him in.
When Gallagher, who planned to keep the dog, took Buck to Myrtle Beach’s Grand Strand Animal Hospital on Aug. 31 for shots, veterinarian Dr. Amanda Thomas discovered a microchip.
A simple click revealed that Wessells, who lives a few miles from the hospital, was the dog’s owner, and Dr. Thomas contacted him right away.
“He couldn’t get off the phone fast enough, crying,” Thomas tells PEOPLE, who said Wessells raced over to retrieve the dog.
“He definitely recognized me instantly,” Wessells told WPDE. “It’s just crazy he made it down here on his own.”
No one knows exactly how Buck made it back, but Thomas credits Buck’s keen sense of smell.
“A dog’s sense of smell is pretty incredible,” she tells PEOPLE. “As we know from search and rescue dogs, they can track people who are in enclosed cars from the grass along highways. [Buck] traveled a pretty far distance to come back here.”
[RELATED_TEXT “Can’t get enough pet news? See more on PEOPLE Pets
Pit Bull Shot By New York Police Recovering, Not Ready for New Home – Yet
Aww! Baby Meerkats Hug Mom” “” ]A new study found that high school seniors paired with college mentors to prepare college applications and financial aid requests resulted in a fifty percent increase in students who actually ended up attending college. They met weekly for a short time, and the high school students also received a $100 bonus. However, they said the money didn’t affect them at all — it was the mentorship that made a difference, and a control group that just received the bonus without the mentorship showed no difference in college attendance.
You can read a good write-up on the research results at Sarah Spark’s Education Week post, Senior Mentors, Not Bonuses, Boost College Enrollment, Study Finds.
This research is obviously interesting to me because of all my work in helping students develop intrinsic motivation.
But I now have an even keener interest in this kind of mentorship research.
Though nothing is definite, it appears that instead of teaching my usual double-block English class of high-needs students next year, I may instead teach two single period twelfth-grade English classes (populated to a certain extent with my ninth-grade students from a few years ago). If that happens, my colleague (and co-author) Katie Hull are planning to do some interesting and regular mentorship activities between my senior classes and her double-block high needs ninth-grade English class.
If it goes through and, as every high school teacher knows, class schedules are constantly in a state of flux, we plan on turning it into a teacher research project tracking attendance, grades, and other data to compare with a control group.
I’m aware of other research detailing the impact some version of mentors can be helpful to older youth, but am definitely on the look-out for more. Please let me know if you know of any….
(Here’s another related post from Annie Murphy Paul)
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One Game For 150 Days & Nights
Let’s paint you a scenario that actually occurs more often than you think. Let’s assume you know a guy who knows a guy, you see where this is going. One of the many major oil corporations own oil rigs in extremely remote locations such as Alaska or Northern Canada. During the winter months, the environment is too extreme and dangerous to have an entire manned |
go beyond the blame game," he said.
BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw says Prime Minister David Cameron signalled a change in the government's approach to tackling Islamist extremism in a speech he gave in Munich in February.
In it he said there needed to be a "lot less" of the "passive tolerance" of recent years.
Extremist groups, Mr Cameron said, must be stopped from reaching people in publicly funded institutions, such as universities.
Last month, the All-Party parliamentary group on homeland security said it had "grave concerns" students were being radicalised in universities.
However, Universities Minister David Willetts has said it is unclear exactly what role university life has played in individual cases where students have become radicalised.
"It's very hard to pin down, when an individual goes off the rails like that, exactly what has triggered it," he said in February.
A Home Office spokesman said: "The government is currently reviewing the Prevent programme, which isn't working as well as it could.
"We need a strategy that is effective and properly focused. The findings will be published shortly."Pro Wrestling News Part 1 w/ Matthew, Landon & Alex - 1:46
Interview w/ Kaitlin Diemond - 54:29
Interview w/ John Skyler - 1:48:53
Pro Wrestling News Part 2 w/ Matthew, Landon & Alex - 2:36:50
Interview w/ RJ City - 3:08:09
Interview w/ Mindi O'Brien - 3:29:28
Interview w/ Chris Hero - 3:37:01
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SKYLER (@TheJohnSkyler) -
Matthew Grant welcomes 'The Southern Savior' John Skyler to the show to talk about plenty including his run as PWX World Heavyweight Champion & the upcoming match with Zack Sabre Jr., being apart of the return of War Games to North Carolina for the first time in 20 years, doing a dark match at TNA's Bound for Glory show, his run in NXT with Corey Hollis thus far & many other topics!
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH KAITLIN DIEMOND (@kaitlindiemond) -
'The Anti Diva' Kaitlin Diemond makes her first appearance on the program to discuss a lot such as her recent time in Japan with the Stardom promotion, working with Smash Wrestling, time in Mexico & experiences with Super Crazy, some WWE extras experience, her time on the Beauty Slammers tour + much more!
HOUSE OF HARDCORE 14 PREVIEW WITH CHRIS HERO, RJ CITY & MINDI O'BRIEN (@thechrishero @RJCity1 @mindiobrienfit @HouseOfHardcore) -
Chris Hero & RJ City return to WWP to preview their upcoming bouts at HOH14 & much more! Hero talks the first time ever match versus Jeff Cobb at PWG, teaming with JT Dunn at Beyond & PWG, addressing ROH/EVOLVE rumors & more! RJ talks capturing the Destiny World Wrestling Championship, his open challenge for the Interstate Championship at the next ESW event & other topics.
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http://www.weeklywrestlingpodcast.comSALES of Kelly Clarkson's latest album "Stronger" nearly doubled in one day following her endorsement of Ron Paul in the Republican presidential primary.
A section of Clarkson's fans used social networking sites Thursday to blast the singer for supporting Paul in light of racially derogatory comments contained in newsletters he published around 20 years ago.
But despite the online backlash, sales of her latest release have soared by 192 percent on Amazon.com in the wake of the criticism.
"Stronger," her fifth studio album, shot from 41 to 14 on the website's "Movers & Shakers in Music" list in 24 hours, according to the Gossip Cop website.
Clarkson, 29, tried to quell Thursday's controversy by tweeting her support for equal rights, but she stood by the Texas congressman "because he believes in less government."
The "American Idol" season one winner ruefully confessed that she should have heeded the advice of her dad, "who said never to share my beliefs on religion & politics."
Despite the surge in online sales, however, some fans told FOXNews.com their days as admirers of the Dallas native were over.
"I used to like Kelly Clarkson. But I can't like anyone who is either ignorant enough or arrogant enough to endorse a candidate like Ron Paul," Spafford Freeman said.
"I have listened to 'Since You've Been Gone' for the last time."A message to future post-apocalyptic historians on the debt ceiling
Dear Chinese overlords alien visitors robot masters zombie hegemons post-apocalyptic historians:
Greetings. My goal in this message is to explain to you why the most powerful country in the world committed financial seppuku in the summer of 2011 AD*.
To set the stage: by now you know that the U.S. Congress was obligated to increase the debt ceiling in order for the United States government to continue to function normally. President Obama, Democrats in Congress, and most of the Republican leadership recognized the gravity of the situation. The GOP leadership, however, wanted to use the debt cekiling vote as leverage to get President Obama to commit to significant deficit reduction. After much haggling over "grand bargains," there was a recognition that no such deal could be passed. As a backup, leaders from both parties reluctantly advocated a bill that hiked the ceiling and put off questions about long-term deficit reduction to the future.
The problem was, a political faction emerged that some called "debt kamikazes." These were politicians and interest group leaders — all Republicans — who genuinely believed that nothing of consequence would happen if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised. There were a few others who did believe it and were nevertheless copacetic with that outcome — I’ll get to that group later.
Sounds absurd to your futuristic ears, you say? Consider my evidence. The Daily Beast‘s John Avlon detailed the position of the 2012 GOP presidential candidates:
Michele Bachmann believes it’s all a hoax. Tim Pawlenty told an Iowa crowd, “I hope and pray and believe they should not raise the debt ceiling.” Ron Paul based his first presidential ad on a call to not raise the debt ceiling, proclaiming “No Deals.” And Rick Santorum has said that raising the debt ceiling should be avoided until a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution is passed…. Even supposedly responsible Republican presidential candidates like Mitt Romney—whose campaign slogan might as well be ‘He’s the Sane One’—are finding it politically beneficial to flirt with debt-ceiling denial, announcing a ‘cut, cap and balance’ proposal without revenue increases as his ‘line in the sand’ for supporting raising the debt limit.
There were also interest group coalitions called "Tea Party" organizations that pressured their members of Congress not to raise the debt ceiling. As CNN’s Shannon Travis chonicled, these organizations believed that the effects of more government spending were far more disastrous than defaulting on the debt:
What they’re saying around the country is, "Do not raise the debt ceiling. It’s that simple. It’s time for Congress to get its fiscal house in order," Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin told CNN. The group is the nation’s largest tea party organization. Martin explained that her group’s supporters want a balanced-budget amendment, significant spending cuts and lower taxes. And they don’t want the debt limit raised. Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for the Washington-based FreedomWorks, explained that he and other activists understand the possible financial implications if the debt limit is not raised (emphasis added)
Similarly, Red State blogger Erick Erickson wrote an open letter to the House GOP that boiled down to "do not believe the doom and gloom."
Now, future historians, you might argue that neither Tea Party activists nor presidential candidates (Bachmann excepted) were in Congress and therefore did not matter. However, what’s important to understand is that these views were prevalent inside the House GOP caucus as well. The Washington Post‘s David A. Fahrenthold provided a detailed description of the members of the House of Representatives who thought a default wouldn’t be such a big deal. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) offered the most extreme example of House GOP thinking:
As the Aug. 2 deadline looms, the debate over how to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis is being complicated by legislators such as Crawford who think the crisis is not as bad as it’s made out to be. On Thursday, several House Republicans said they didn’t believe predictions that economic calamity would result from a missed deadline. That opinion — held despite a stream of warnings from both parties’ leaders — could make it difficult for the House to pass a debt-ceiling deal. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), another freshman, said that a much bigger fear was that raising the debt ceiling would enable Washington to spend itself into paralyzing debt in a few years. “A debt-ceiling problem, as large as it is, is not anywhere near as a big or as bad as” that, Brooks said. If Aug. 2 arrives without a deal, Brooks said, the federal government could continue paying creditors. He said that a show of tough fiscal self-discipline could actually improve creditors’ confidence. “There should be no default on August 2,” Brooks said. “In fact, our credit rating should be improved by not raising the debt ceiling.” (emphasis added)
Lest you think the view that a default was not such a big deal was limited to backbenchers, Outside the Beltway’s Steven Taylor found House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan telling CNBC that a "technical default" of a few days wouldn’t be a big deal:
If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four — what is more important is you are putting the govegnment in a materially better position to better pay its bills going forward.
Now, at this point, I’m sure you, future post-apocalyptic historians, must be scratching your third eye heads, thinking the following:
WHY???!!!
Why, why did these human beings maintain these beliefs in the face of massive evidence to the contrary? Why did these people continue to insist that default wasn’t that big a deal when Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke (a Republican first appointed by Republican president George W. Bush) insisted that there would be a "huge financial calamity" if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised? Why did their belief persist when Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings all explicitly and repeatedly warned of serious and expensive debt downgrades if the ceiling wasn’t raised? Why did they stick to their guns despite news reports detailing the link between the rating of federal government debt and the debt of states and municipalities? Why did they stand firm despite the consensus of the Republican Governors Association and the Democrat Governors Association that a failure to raise the debnt cailing would be "catastrophic"? Why did they refuse to yield despite bipartisan analysis explaining the very, very bad consequences of no agreement, and nonpartisan analysis explaining the horrific foreign policy consequences of American default? Why did they not understand that even a technical default would cost hundreds of billions of dollars**, thereby making their stated goal of debt reduction even harder?
Most mysteriously, why did these people throw their steering wheel out the window despite witnessing the effect of the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse, which revealed the complex interconectedness of financial markets? Treasuries were far more integral to global capital markets than Lehman, but the debt kamikazes refused to recognize the possibility that a technical debt default would have unanticipated, complex, and disastrous consequences. Why?
I would like to be able to offer you a definitive answer, I really would, but I can’t. The implications listed in the previous paraqgraph seemed pretty friggin’ obvious to a lot contemporaneous observers at the time. As near as I can determine, there are four partial explanations for why the debt kamikazes persisted in their belief that nothing serious would happen: One explanation, which I’ve detailed here, is that the debt kamikazes refused to budge because refusing to budge had yielded great political rewards in the past.
Another explanation is that the debt kamikazes convinced themselves that no possible alternative was worse than the federal government accumulating more debt. They looked at countries like Greece and Portugal and decided that the U.S. was only one more Obama administration away from such strictures.
A third explanation was the general erosion of trust in economic experts during this period. To be fair to the debt kamikazes, many of the prominent policymakers who warned about calamities if the debt ceiling wasn’t raised had pooh-poohed the effects of the housing bubble in 2005, or the collapse of that bubble in 2007.
The final explanation goes back to those people who acknowledged that a default might be a big deal, but were nevertheless OK with the outcome. These debt kamikazes had undergone a fundamental identity change. That is to say, despite all their protestations to the contrary, they were no longer loyal Americans. They were loyal to Republicans first and Republicans only. Erick Erickson made this logic pretty clear in his open letter to Congress:
Now is a time for choosing. Now is your time for choosing.As I pointed out to John Boehner yesterday, despite what the pundits in Washington are telling you, it is you and not Obama who hold most of the cards. Obama has a legacy to worry about. Should the United States lose its bond rating, it will be called the “Obama Depression”. Congress does not get pinned with this stuff.
As Outside the Beltway’s Doug Mataconis explained in response:
[I]n this quote above Erickson is clearly saying that he’d be okay with sending the economy into the tank by failing to raise the debt ceiling because he thinks it would benefit the Republican Party…. He’s perfectly fine with economic collapse because he thinks the President of the United States and the Democratic Party will take the blame, and the Republican Party will benefit. The economic pain that will be suffered by his fellow Americans is secondary, it seems, to the political gains he thinks can be made from throwing the nations economy over the brink. How is that different from someone else hoping that, say, the Iraq War had gone horribly wrong immediately before the 2004 elections because it would hurt the Bush Administration and the GOP? The answer, of course, is that it isn’t. Willfully hoping that the country is harmed because it might potentially benefit your political party is perhaps the most cravenly partisan thing that anyone would ever wish. You are saying to your fellow citizens that you don’t care that something bad is about to happen because, in the end, it will mean that more Republicans will be elected. Frankly, I find it disgusting.
That’s the best set of answers I can give you. I’m sure, future post-aopocalytpic historians, that you have devised new and sophisticated methodologies to unearth the mysteries of the past. I hope you can solve this historical puzzle — because me and my contemporaries are thoroughly flummoxed.
I wish you the best of luck, and once again, apologies for the whole collapse-of-Western-civilization-thing that happened in 2011. Our bad.
*To translate into your time scale, 15 B.B. (Before Lord Beiber, Praised Be His Hairness)
** 100 billion U.S. dollars = 15 BieberBucksRule allowing boys to play on girls' teams challenged
In court case, PIAA says it wants the law changed
Attorneys representing the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association — which says it would like to see the law changed to make sure girls do not lose athletic opportunities and for safety reasons — and state Attorney General Kathleen Kane's office met Friday afternoon in Commonwealth Court.
HARRISBURG — — A dispute around a decades-old law that allows boys to play on girls high school sports teams appears to be headed to court.
"It looks like we are headed toward an evidentiary hearing of some sort," said Pittsburgh attorney Mary Grenen, following the status conference between the two sides. Grenen is a potential intervenor in the case on behalf of her daughter, a Fox Chapel field hockey player.
A spokesman for the attorney general's office declined to comment on the case Friday.
The case centers on a 1975 Commonwealth Court ruling that declared a PIAA bylaw forbidding girls from practicing or competing against boys in school athletics unconstitutional. At the time, there were few girls-only sports and the ruling was intended to open up more opportunities for girls in male-dominated athletics.
But, over the years, as more girls teams were created, the order began to be interpreted so that boys could also play on girls teams if the sport was offered only for girls — the opposite effect of the order's original intent.
Boys appear to be most prevalent on girls' field hockey teams. In a survey sent by the PIAA this winter to its 1,470 member schools (742 responded), 38 schools reported boys playing girls field hockey, 14 reported boys playing girls volleyball, eight reported boys playing girls lacrosse, five reported boys playing girls soccer and one each reported boys playing girls swimming and girls tennis. An additional 163 schools reported that boys had played on girls teams but failed to identify the sport. All told, more than 30 percent of responding schools had a boy playing on a girls team, according to the survey results, which were submitted to the court.
Grenen said the PIAA was hoping to reach a compromise with the attorney general's office in light of the tremendous shift in high school sports since the 1970s. The state should allow the athletic association to make a "reasonable bylaw" that would be in line with the federal Title IX law and largely keep boys from girls sports, especially contact sports like field hockey, she said.
Letting boys play on a girls field hockey or other teams creates a safety risk for young girls more prone to concussions or other injury, and also takes opportunities away from other girls who might then not be able to play, Grenen said.
"We don't want to see girls sports start going backwards," she said.
—Distributed by McClatchy-TribuneThe girl with one of the two Muslim carers appointed by Tower Hamlets
A white Christian child was taken from her family and forced to live with a niqab-wearing foster carer in a home where she was allegedly encouraged to learn Arabic.
The five-year-old girl, a native English speaker, has spent the past six months in the care of two Muslim households in London. The foster placements were made, against the wishes of the girl’s family, by the scandal-ridden borough of Tower Hamlets.
The five-year-old girl, whose identity The Times is protecting, with her present foster carer. Her mother is said to be horrified by the alien cultural, religious and linguistic environment in which her daughter has spent the past six months
In confidential local authority reports seen by The Times, a social services supervisor describes the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster carer’s home because “they don’t speak English”.
The reports state that the supervisor heard the girl, who at times was “very distressed”, claiming that the foster carer removed her…Well it is here, and i've been playing it non stop for the last day, so here is my initial review of the new Firefly Banjo Ukulele from the Magic Fluke Company.
Firefly Banjo Ukulele
Firefly logo label inside the rim of the pot
Firefly ukulele head and pot - essentially just a hand drum
Inside the Firefly pot
Firefly tailpiece and braided rim
The classic Fluke headstock - note the zero fret
Denim Firefly gig bag
Firstly some housekeeping - you may have seen that this is my second delivery, as the first one was damaged in transit. Being in the UK, I have spoken highly of two shops for buying ukes, the Southern Ukulele Store in the UK and Musique 83 in France. I needed the banjo for a gig this week (ideally) and at the time of ordering SUS were out of stock. I therefore ordered from France, and want to point out that there service dealing with the broken one was SUPERB. Sadly, they didn't have stock for a replacement, and therefore SUS sorted me out with more SUPERB next day service. So, therefore a big shout of thanks to both stores!Right, on to the instrument itself. The Firefly is a banjo ukulele designed by the Magic Fluke Company in the USA. I am a fan of their Flea and Fluke ukuleles so it was really only a matter of time until I completed the family. It is essentially nothing more than a Flea ukulele neck with the distinctive headstock bolted through a Remo 8 inch hand drum. As such - at over £200 that seems a lot for something so simple. It's more than that though, as I will explain.The uke is essentially soprano scaled, but is actually slightly longer than my 14 fret Flea, as this one squeezes in 16 frets. It actually feels more Concert to me. It comes in a variety of 'flavours' from the Company - with a moulded plastic fingerboard or wooden (this one is wooden), in Walnut or Maple finish (this one is Maple) and with the optional upgrade to Peghed tuners, though I am happy enough with the stock frictions.Looking at the pot first of all, as I say, it's just a hand drum, nothing more, with a synthetic Remo Fiberskyn head. As such, unlike other banjo ukes, there are no J hook tensioners around the rim holding the head in place, just a braided band of fabric. That has raised eyebrows with many as it means, naturally, that the head cannot be tuned or replaced in the event of damage. Fluke advised that the head is pre-tuned, but I suppose as a new instrument nobody really knows what years of playing will do to it. The pot is also unusual as it is not wooden, it's made of a synthetic composite material which actually looks like High Pressure Laminate - essentially a very tough cardboard - they call it an Acousticon Pot. The outer of the rim is finished with a faux wood effect label. Now all of this is sounding a bit ropey as I type it out - but there is a reason that Fluke went this route, and it's also the reason that I was keen to buy it. Weight and comfort. I already own a banjo uke in the Ozark 2035. I like that uke, but I find it really heavy and uncomfortable to hold and play. The hooks dig in my arm and lightweight it is not. The Ozark isn't even a heavy banjolele and if you grab one of the really traditional looking ones, they are heavier still. The Firefly on the other hand - light as a feather, really easy to hold without a strap - no discomfort. What Fluke set out to achieve on that front they have succeeded with very, very well. This is a really easy uke to 'get along with'. To add to that, I am, personally, not a huge fan of the trad banjo uke 'look' (should I duck?) and therefore the Firefly ticks that box for me too - I think the minimal look is just great.Turning the uke over we see how the neck is attached to the pot. The traditional Fluke neck has had an extra piece of wood added to it (the neck is a two piece) which runs through a hole in the top of the pot and is bolted to the inside of the bottom. This is the dowel rod arrangement seen on most banjos and is very nifty. I also adore the engraved Firefly logo on the rod, a bug composed of a neck for a body, notes for the legs, a banjo head for its butt and a Fluke headstock! The way the rod is attached is clever in terms of its ability to be adjusted. The connection on the bottom is stacked with small rubber washers and removing or adding these allows you to adjust the action high or low. As it is, my Firefly arrived with action just as I like it, but it's nice to be able to adjust it.The bolt that holds the dowel rod to the pot runs through the uke into the small but nicely formed tailpiece for holding the strings. To attach the strings, they simply need a knot that you hook into the gaps.On to the walnut neck, and this is where I knew that the Firefly would be a winner. I really like the Fluke and Flea necks - they are superbly accurate and for someone with biggish hands, they are wider than the average uke and chunkier in profile. My Fluke and Flea have plastic fingerboards, and I was keen to try a wooden one this time. The wood used on the fingerboard is not specified (just a hardwood) but is a nice piece and, like any other Fluke instrument, is supremely accurate. The 16 frets are nickel (all dressed and finished very well), and the uke also benefits from a 'zero fret' - that is to say, the nut is not the end point of the vibrating string, it is only there to hold the spacing. At the very top of the neck is a fret that the string sits on - this too helps with accuracy / intonation.The headstock is standard Flea / Fluke shape which I love, and the tuners are Grover 2b frictions which I think work just fine. The buttons on this one are black, but if you order the maple version of the firefly, the buttons are white. I know some people despise friction tuners, and I have blogged about that before. I personally find the tuners that Fluke use are just fine.The whole thing is finished off with a standard uke banjo ebony topped bridge which you simply slide into place to the pencil marks helpfully provided. The strings on this one are made by La Bella, and unusually come with a wound C string. I must say, I am not totally in love with them, as I find that wound string is giving an overly sharp sound to it (a very banjo sound!) and suspect I will be changing to Aquila all nylgut strings in due course.Lastly, the uke arrived in a normal Flea shaped soft gig back, made of denim, and screen printed with the Magic Fluke logo. Nice.So how do I get on with it? Well, as I say above, the lightness and comfort are absolutely superb, and that is a huge plus point for me. This is a uke that is easy and quick to pick up and play, easy to play standing or sitting, and just feels great in the hand. I may offend some banjo uke fans in saying that, because it isn't traditional looking, but that weight and comfort thing is something that has put me off banjo ukes. I also love the design of it, which, being a Fluke, is not surprising - this one will have people asking questions. It's a supremely playable looker!The action is nice and low, with no buzzing - it's a fast and very easy neck to play. I would say that those who only play banjo ukuleles may find the action too low for their liking, but if you are coming to this from a standard ukulele you will find it a dream (all Fluke instruments fall into that category in my opinion). Intonation all over the neck is perfect too, and with the adjustable bridge, that is the only thing you need to worry about for accuracy in tuning.Sound wise, it's not as full toned or as loud as other banjo ukuleles I have played, but I like that fact - it's mellower, and I suspect when I fit Aquilas, will be a little mellower still in getting rid of that wound string. There are a few 'ghost' notes as is common with banjos, and you will see that I have solved that in the pictures above in the normal way - sticking a small cloth in wedged between the rod and the underside of the head. Being open backed, I can control the tone and volume depending on whether I play the uke close to my chest or with the back opened away slightly. But I like the sound a lot, kind of not quite banjo, not quite uke. Whilst I say that other banjos are louder, this is not a quiet uke - certainly louder than a standard wooden ukulele!Turning back to my earlier observation - is a neck bolted on to a drum that costs £20 worth £200? Well, I think so - this uke is more than the sum of it's parts. You know you are buying the quality that Fluke deliver - you KNOW it will be well made, you KNOW it will be accurate, and you KNOW it will be different. Gripes wise, I could moan about the fact the head is not replaceable, but if it was, it would lose the minimalist look. I suppose that synthetic pot accounts for the fact that the sound is not that fully toned, but again, changing that would make the uke heavier so it's about balance.I therefore think it's likely to be a love it or loath it instrument for people - I personally like it a lot - the looks and the playability are the key for me and I would highly recommend you try one out.Looks - 8.5Fit and finish - 10Sound - 7.5Value for money - 6This year’s fastest run was clocked by Rhys Millen in his eO PP03, the drift driver’s 1,368bhp, all-electric prototype clocking a time of 9 minutes 7 seconds at an average speed of 79mph (127km/h).
That’s right, the fastest car at this year’s Pikes Peak was powered by batteries. Welcome to the future, all.
The Latvia-built PP03 uses a 50kWh lithium-ion battery (around double the capacity of that found in, say, the Nissan Leaf) feeding no fewer than six electric motors – three on each axle – with a combined 1,368bhp and no less than 1,593 pound-feet of torque.
Now we have a video of the entirety of Millen’s record-breaking run, and it makes for oddly hypnotic, weirdly muted viewing. There’s a strange sort of purity in watching the four-wheel-drive racer carve up Pikes in near silence, the traditional scream of engine replaced by… well, nothing very much at all, really.
Of course, Millen’s time is still nearly a minute shy of Sébastien Loeb’s outright PP record, the French rallyist recording a deranged 8m13.8s in 2013 in his 875bhp Peugeot 208 T16.
Watch that run here. How long do you reckon it’ll be before an EV beats Seb’s time?
A version of this story originally appeared on TopGear.com.
If you would like to comment on this or anything else you have seen on BBC Autos, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.When forced to comment on an especially touchy issue—NSA surveillance, say—President Obama’s go-to rhetorical gambit has been to call for a “debate,” sometimes a “conversation,” often in service of “striking a balance” between two obviously important things. It’s good tack, particularly when Obama is playing defense. He’s actually found a way to deliver the no-content statements of a politician while portraying himself as a contemplative law professor.
But what makes it such an effective dodge is that the deep ethical dialogues he is pretending to kick-start rarely ever happen, at least not in the federal office buildings of Washington, D.C. To the extent that elected officials indulge in normative language—moral “shoulds” and talk of “values”—it’s either to assert something painfully banal or, more often, to dress up some compromised piece of public policy.
If you’re inclined to lament this fact, don’t. Anyone who expects political tacticians to get into the nitty-gritty of what our values and our rights and our moral beliefs demand has made a serious error. It’s not that such discussions aren’t deeply needed; it’s just that American politics isn’t set up for that kind of thing. What is worth fretting about, however, is that, if we’re honest, most of us don’t even know what such a discussion would look like. This is, of course, understandable; intellectually honest moral arguments rarely make for good copy.
It’s impressive, therefore, that with his new book Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong, journalist and philosopher David Edmonds not only takes us into the weeds of ethical deliberation, but does so in a way that is actually readable—at times compulsively so. The book is a walking tour of moral philosophy organized around one of the most well-known thought experiments of the last half century: the trolley problem.
In it’s simplest form, the trolley problem goes something like this: You find yourself standing beside a train track one afternoon, when you notice a runaway locomotive—sometimes a trolley—barreling your way. Up ahead you see five innocent people tied to the track about to meet certain death. Next to you is a signal switch that will divert the train down a sidetrack or “spur.” Problem is, tied to the spur is yet another individual. If you do nothing, five people will die. On the other hand, throwing the switch will prevent the death of the five up ahead, while causing the death of the man on the alternate track. What should you do?
The example is clearly ridiculous, but that’s the point. Thought experiments are intended to isolate our intuitions by filtering out much of the circumstantial noise that can distort our judgment.
As Edmonds tells us, “[m]ost people seem to believe that not only is it permissible to turn the train down the spur, it is actually required—morally obligatory.” At the very least, it seems acceptable to reroute the trolley. The question is: What’s so special about this situation that makes it all right to cause the death of a person who would have otherwise lived?
Things get even hairier when you consider the different versions of the thought experiment that have made the rounds over the years. As Edmonds tells us, “philosophers have come up with ever more examples, involving runaway trains and bizarre props: trap doors, giant revolving plates, tractors and drawbridges.” The most famous spin-off might be Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “Fat Man” example from which the book takes its title. This time you’re standing on a footbridge above the track instead of next to a switch. The train is once again on a collision course with five innocent people. Next to you on the bridge stands an obese gentlemen. Again, if you do nothing, five will die. If you push the fat man onto the tracks, however, he will stop the train, saving the five, but dying as a result. Would you kill the fat man?
The obvious response for many, including myself, is “no.” But why the change of heart? You’re still faced with the choice of sacrificing one life for the sake of five? Something here needs explaining. And in his attempts to decipher the conflicting intuitions that trolley cases evoke, Edmonds provides a survey of some of the ways philosophers have judged the morality of various actions through the ages.
This includes the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, who believed, Edmonds explains, that an action was good “insofar as it exhibited the behavior of a virtuous person,” as well as Jeremy Bentham’s stone-cold utilitarianism, which judged an action by “how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided.” Edmonds also considers what recent academic trends like behavioural economics and experimental philosophy—an approach that uses the tools of cognitive science to explore philosophical questions—have to say about trolley examples. Along the way, you get a sense of what an Obama-style “conversation” might actually entail.
Thankfully, Would you Kill the Fat Man? isn’t solely concerned with imaginary tales of streetcar disfigurement. In fact, the book succeeds in large part because Edmonds takes every opportunity to relate the enterprise of “trolleyology’—yes, it’s a word—back to some skillfully chosen events, including an ivory-tower soap opera involving one Oxford philosopher with a name out of a Thomas Pynchon novel: Philippa Foot.
Foot (née Bosanquet) created the original trolley problem in a 1967 article in the Oxford Review. She also happened to be the granddaughter of President Grover Cleveland, a founder of the famine-relief charity Oxfam, and part of a complicated friendship with two other influential female philosophers of her era, Elizabeth Anscombe and the novelist Iris Murdoch. It was an incestuous little circle, characterized by “falling-outs and falling-ins, demonstrations of loyalty and acts of betrayal.” Foot eventually married Murdoch’s ex-lover M.R.D. Foot, among other things, a clandestine agent for England during World War II. After their marriage ended, Edmonds informs us, Murdoch and Philippa Foot “connected almost every corner of the love quadrangle and had a brief affair themselves.”
Aside from being juicy bits of faculty-lounge gossip, these narrative detours serve as nifty little vehicles for real-world examples that could benefit from trolley wisdom. For instance, Edmonds considers the moral implications of the 1894 Pullman railway strikes, during which several workers died at the hands of federal troops – an episode he wryly refers to as a “very public trolley problem” for Foot’s grandfather, then President Grover Cleveland. We’re also invited to evaluate Harry Truman’s use of atomic weapons during World War II, an act that appalled Elizabeth Anscombe so intensely, Edmonds recounts, that she staged a fierce and ultimately unsuccessful effort to deny Truman an honorary Oxford degree in 1956. By weaving together abstract principles, biographical sketches, historical examples, and trendy research in this just-so way, Edmonds has figured out how to illustrate the dimensions and consequences of moral decision-making without sacrificing entertainment value.
The fact that it takes such a carefully executed book to bring these debates to life, however, only underscores how slippery the issues really are. Consider Jarvis Thomson’s explanation of what is special about Fat Man. For her, it’s that we’re violating the rights of the corpulent bridge pedestrian, whereas in the original version of the story, no rights are infringed upon—we’re merely reducing “the number of deaths that get caused by something that already threatens people.”
Edmonds himself, meanwhile, points to Thomas Aquinas’ Doctrine of Double Effect, which draws a distinction between foreseeing a consequence of your action and intending that consequence. In the first example, “we foresee, but do not intend a death...” In Fat Man, |
set-up, which also includes living arrangements, political practices, anti-political projects, and so on. All together, from a few crowded metropoles to the archipelago of outward- or inward-looking towns, that array could be called the machine that makes anarchist identity, one of those awful hybrids of anachronism and ultramodernity that clutter our times. But, trivial though the role of Desert may be in the reproduction of the milieu, its small role in that reproduction is especially remarkable given that it directly addresses the limits of that reproduction, and, indirectly, of the milieu itself. Its reception is a kind of diagnostic test, a demonstration of our special obtuseness. If I am right about even some of the preceding, then the increasingly speculative nature of what follows ought to prove interesting to a few, and repulsive to the rest.
* * *
I intend the or in the title to be destabilizing. It does not indicate a choice to be made between two already somewhat fictitious positions. (Quotation marks for each would not have been strong enough. To say this or that position is fictitious may seem to be belied by the advance, here or there, of those who present themselves as the representatives of positions. This is where we need to make our case most forcefully, arguing back that to take on a position as an identity simply eludes the what of position altogether, making it rest on a different, more familiar kind of fiction.) By placing the or between them I mean to mark a slippage, which I consider to be a movement of involuntary thought. Not being properly yoked to action, to what is considered voluntary, it is the kind of thought most have little time for. It has to do with passing imperceptibly from one state to another, and what may be learned in that shift. It is a terrible kind of thought at first, and, for some, will perhaps always be so, all the more so inasmuch as we are not its brave protagonists… Compare these passages:
The tide of Western authority will recede from much, though by no means all, of the planet. A writhing mess of social flotsam and jetsam will be left in its wake. Some will be patches of lived anarchy, some of horrible conflicts, some empires, some freedoms, and, of course, unimaginable weirdness.
And:
The world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all.
The first passage is from Desert, an anonymous pamphlet on the meaning of the irreversibility of climate change for anarchist practice. The second is from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet, a collection of essays that leads from philosophy to horror, or rather leads philosophy to horror. I bring them together here because they seem to me to coincide in a relatively unthought theoretical zone. As Desert invokes the present and coming anarchy and chaos, it admits the weirdness of the future (for our inherited thought patterns and political maps, at least); when Dust of this Planet gestures to the weirdness and unthinkability of the world, it invokes the current and coming biological, geological, and climatological chaos of the planet. They should be read together; the thought that is possible in that stereoscopic reading is what my or intends. (I mean to gesture towards the passage from one perspective to the other, and perhaps back.) If Desert sets out from the knowability of the world—as the object of science, principally—it has the rare merit of spelling out its increasing unknowability as an object for our political projects, our predictions and plans. Dust of this Planet allows us to push this thought father in an eminently troubling direction, revealing a wilderness more wild than the wild nature invoked by the critics of capitalism and civilization: the unthinkable Planet behind the inhabitable Earth. As we slip in this direction (which is also past the point of distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary), all our positions, those little compressed bundles of opinion and analysis, practice and experience, crumble—as positions. No doubt many will find this disconcerting. But something of what we tried to do by thinking up, debating, adopting and abandoning, positions, is left—something lives on, survives—maybe just the primal thrust that begins with a question or profound need and collapses in a profession of faith or identity. That would be the path back to the perspective of Desert (now irreparably transformed). What is left, the afterlife of our first outward movements, might be something for each to witness alone, in a solitude far from the gregarious comfort of recognizable positions, of politics. To say nothing of community.
* * *
All our maneuvering, all our petty excuses for not studying it aside, there is still much to be said about this wonderful, challenging booklet, Desert. To wit, that it is the first written elaboration of sentiments some of us admit to and others feel without confessing to them. And, moreover, that it hints repeatedly at an even broader and more troubling set of perspectives about the limits to what we can do, and maybe of what we are altogether. If the milieu’s demand were accepted and these feelings and ideas were narrowed down to a position, it could indeed be called green nihilism. In this naming of a position the second word indicates one familiar political, or rather anti-political, sense of nihilism—the position that views action, or inaction, from the perspective that nothing can be done to save the world. That no single event, or series of events clumsily apprehended as a single Event, can be posited as the object of political or moral optimism, except by the faithful and the deluded. Moreover, that the injunction to think of the future, to hope in a certain naive way, is itself pernicious, and often a tool of our enemies. As to green—well, those who have read Desert will be familiar with the story it tells. Irreversible global climate change, meshing in an increasingly confusing way with a global geopolitical system that intensifies control in resource-rich areas while loosening or perhaps losing its grips in the hinterlands, the growing desert… It is the story, then, of literal deserts, and also of zones deserted by authority or that those who desert the terrain of authority inhabit. But let’s be clear about this: Desert does not name its own position. It is less a book that proposes a certain strategy or set of practices and more a book about material conditions that are likely to affect any strategy, any practices whatsoever. What is best about Desert is not just the unflinching sobriety with which its author piles up evidence and insights for such a near future, without drifting too far into speculation; it is the way they do not abandon the idea of surviving in such a decomposing world. It is neither optimism nor pessimism in the usual sense; it is another way to grasp anarchy. That is why I write that much remains to be said about it. One way to begin thinking through Desert is to concentrate less on what position it supposedly takes (is there a green nihilism? for or against hope?) and to consider how to push its perspective farther. This means both asking more questions about how it allows us to redefine survival and taking up the possibilities for thought that it mostly hints at. For example, to say the future is unknowable is a pleasant banality, which can just as well be invoked by optimists as pessimists; but to concentrate on what is unknowable in a way that projects it into past and present as well is to think beyond the dull conversation about hope, or utopia and dystopia, for that matter. Here is one example of how such thinking might unfold: Desert seems to offer a novel perspective on chaos. There have probably been two anarchist takes on chaos so far: the traditional one, summed up in the motto, anarchy is not chaos, but order; and Hakim Bey’s discussions of chaos, which may be summed up in his poetic phrase Chaos never died. The former is clear enough: like many leftist analyses, it identifies social chaos with a badly managed society and opposes to it a harmonious anarchic order (which, it was later specified, could exist in harmony with a nature itself conceived as harmonious). This conception of chaos, which is still quite prevalent today, does not even merit its name. It is a way of morally condemning capitalism, the State, society, or what you will; it is basically name-calling. Any worthwhile conception of chaos should begin from a non-moral position, admitting that the formlessness of chaos is not for us to judge. That much Hakim Bey did amit. What, in retrospect especially, is curious about his little missive “Chaos” are the various references to “agents of chaos,” “avatars of chaos”, even a “prophethood of chaos.” It is a lovely letter from its time and perhaps some other times as well; I have no intention to criticize it. It is a marked improvement on any version of anarchy is order, and yet… and yet. It comes too close, or reading it some came too close, to simply opting for chaos, as though order and chaos were sides and it were a matter of choosing sides. The inversion of a moral statement is still a moral statement, after all. What is left to say about chaos, then? The explicit references to chaos in Desert are all references to social disorder. But a thoughtful reader might, upon reading through for the third or fourth time, start to sense that another, more ancient sense of chaos is being invoked: less of an extreme of disorder and more of a primordial nothingness, a “yawning gap”, as the preferred gloss of some philologists has it. The repeated reference to a probable global archipelago of “large islands of chaos” is directly connected to the destabilization of the global climate. And this is the terrible thought that Desert constructs for us and will not save us from: that from now on we survive in a world where the global climate is irreversibly destabilized, and that such a survival is something other than life or politics as we have so far dreamt them. The meager discussion we’ve seen so far on Desert revolves around questions such as: is this true? and, since most who bother thinking it through will take it to be true, does the “no hope”/”no future” perspective (the supposed nihilism) which Desert to some extent adopts, and others to some extent impute to it, help or hinder an overall anarchist position? A less obvious discussion revolves around two very different sorts of questions: what myths does exposing this reality shatter? and, if we are brave enough to think ourselves into this demythologized space that has eclipsed the mythical future, is an anarchist position still a coherent or relevant response to survival there? The myth that is shattered here is first and foremost that wonderful old story about the Earth:
Earth, our bright home… Shelley
There are two main versions of this story. In the religious version, a god intends for us to live here and creates the Earth for us, or, to a lesser extent, creates us for the Earth. In either case our apparent fit into the Earth, our presumed kinship with it, usually expressed in the thought of Nature or the natural, has a transcendent guarantee. In the second version, which is usually of a rational or scientific sort, we have evolved to live on the Earth and can expect it to be responsive to our needs. Here the guarantee is immanent and rational. It is true that this second story, in the version of evolutionary theory, also taught us that we could have easily not come to be here, and that we may not always be here. That is why Freud classed Darwin’s theory as the second of three wounds to human narcissism (the first being the Copernican theory, which displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, and the third being Freud’s own theory, which displaced conscious thought from prominence in mental life). But a certain common sense, or what could be called the most obtuse rationalism, seems to have reintroduced the religious content of the first version into the second, and concluded that it is good or right or proper for us to be here. Natural, in short. In any case, the lesson here is that the psychic wound can be open and humanity, whoever that is, may limp on, wounded, thinking whatever it prefers to think about itself. What Desert draws attention to is a congeries of events that could increasingly trouble our collective ability to go on with this story of a natural place for (some) humans. Irreversible climate change is both something that can be understood (in scientific and derivative, common-sense ways) and something that, properly considered, suggests a vast panorama of unknowns. It is true that Desert makes much of its case by citing scientists and scientific statistics. But the real question here is about the status of these invocations of science. This is where a subtler reading shows its superiority. If the entire argumentative thrust of Desert relied on science, the pamphlet would be fairly disposable. Desert invokes science to put before the hopeful and the apathetic images of a terrible and sublime sort. We could say that its explicit argument is based on science, plus a certain kind of anti-political reasoning. But its overall effect is to dislodge us from our background assumption of a knowable and predictable world into a less predictable, less knowable awareness. After all, it would be just as easy to develop a similar narrative in the discourse of a pessimistic political science, emphasizing massive population growth and social chaos: an irruptive and ungovernable human biology beyond sociality. Let’s try it. From a red anarchist perspective, this could mean more opportunities for mutual aid, for setting the example of anarchy as order; chaos would be a kind of forced clean slate, a time to show that we are better and more efficient than the forces of the state. From an insurrectionary perspective, the chaos would be an inhuman element making possible the generalization of conflict. General social chaos would be the macrocosm corresponding to the microcosm of the riot. For them chaos would also be an opportunity, in this case to hasten and amplify anomic irruptions. In sum, one could make the same argument about the biological mass of humanity as about the Earth—that its coming chaos is an opportunity for anarchists because it is a materially forced anarchy. This does not mean that we are inherently aggressive or whatever you want to associate with social chaos, but rather ungovernable in the long run (or at least governed by forces and aims other than the ones accounted for in political reasoning). It does mean, however, that the idea we are ungovernable in the long run, the affirmation of which is more or less synonymous with the confidence with which the anarchists take their position, is now closely linked with another idea, that in the last instance the Earth is not our natural home. It may have been our home for some time, for a time that we call prehistory. Indeed, Fredy Perlman marks the transition from prehistory to His-Story, or Civilization, as the prolongation of an event of ecological imbalance, a prolongation whose overall effect is destructive, even as the short-term or narrowly focused results along the way are to make the Earth more and more of a welcoming and natural place for humans to be. And now our parting of ways with Hakim Bey may be clarified, for, even if he did not simply take the side of chaos, he did write:
remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos identifies with tao, beyond both yin-as-entropy & yang-as-energy, more a principle of continual creation than of any nihil, void in the sense of potentia, not exhaustion. (Chaos as the “sum of all orders.”)
He was making an argument about what is stupid about death-glorifying art which, parenthetically, still seems relevant. But I simply don’t see why chaos (or tao, for that matter) is somehow better understood as creation than as destruction, or why it is preferable to invoke potentia and not exhaustion. In the name of what? “Ontological” anarchism? Life? And the sum of all orders… is this a figure of something at all knowable? And if not, why the preceding taking of sides? The chaos that Desert summons is not ontological. No new theory of being is claimed here. The effect is first of all psychological: stating what more or less everyone knows, but will not admit. If Desert deserves the label nihilist, it is really in this sense, that it knowingly points to the unknowable, to the background of all three narcissistic wounds. (This is my way of admitting that talking or writing about nihilism does not clarify much of anything. If it was worth doing, it is not because I wanted to share a way of believing-in-nothing. I see now that I was going somewhere else. The analysis of nihilism is the object of psychology… it being understood that this psychology is also that of the cosmos, wrote Deleuze.)
* * *
In the Dust of This Planet introduces a tripartite distinction between World, Earth, and Planet. Thacker states that the human world, our sociocultural horizon of understanding, is what is usually meant by world. This is the world as it is invoked in politics, in statements that begin: what the world needs…, and of course any and all appeals to save or change the world. It is the single world of globalism (and of global revolution) but also the many little worlds of multiculturalism, nationalism, and regionalism. But one could argue that our experience (and the gaps in our experience) also unfold in another world, the enveloping site of natural processes, from climate to chemical and physical processes, of course including our own biology. This is the Earth that we are often invited to save in ecological politics or activism. A third version of what is meant by world is what Thacker calls the Planet. If the world as human World is the world-for-us, and the Earth as natural world is a world-for-itself, the Planet is the world-without-us. Visions of the World and the Earth correspond roughly to subjective and objective perspectives; but what these are visions of, the Planet, is not reducible to either, however optimistic our philosophy, theory, or science may be. In terms perhaps more familiar to some green anarchists, the World corresponds to the material and mental processes of civilization, and the Earth to Nature as constructed by civilization. Civilization, so it would seem, produces nature as its knowable byproduct as it encloses the wild, leaving fields, parks, and gardens, along with domesticated and corralled wild animals, including, of course, our species. Does the wildness or wilderness of the green anarchists then correspond to the Planet, as world-without-us? Only if we can grasp that the wild, like, or as, chaos, is ultimately unknowable—not because of some defect in our faculties but because it includes their limits and undoing. When green anarchists and others invoke the wild, we must always be sure to ask if they mean an especially unruly bit of nature, nature that is not yet fully processed by the civilized, or something that civilization will never domesticate or conquer. Planet is an odd category, in that it seems to correspond both to the putative and impossible object of science (a science without an observer) and an inexplicable and strange image emergent from out of the recesses of the unconscious (which itself raises a troubling question as to what an unconscious is at all if it can be said to issue images that exclude us). I think about this third category in terms of Desert as I read this passage from Thacker:
When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world? There are precedents in Western culture for this kind of thinking. In classical Greece the interpretation is primarily mythological—Greek tragedy, for instance, not only deals with the questions of fate and destiny, but in so doing it also evokes a world at once familiar and unfamiliar, a world within our control or a world as a plaything of the gods. By contrast, the response of Medieval and early modern Christianity is primarily theological—the long tradition of apocalyptic literature, as well as the Scholastic commentaries on the nature of evil, cast the non-human world within a moral framework of salvation. In modernity, in the intersection of scientific hegemony, industrial capitalism, and what Nietzsche famously prophesied as the death of God, the non-human world gains a different value. In modernity, the response is primarily existential—a questioning of the role of human individuals and human groups in light of modern science, high technology, industrial and post-industrial capitalism, and world wars.
In the light of the ongoing and growing disaster called irreversible climate change, Desert clearly exposes the theological-existential roots (the modern roots, that is to say) of anarchist politics, not particularly different, as far as this issue goes, from the panorama of Left or radical positions. What matters to me is the opportunity to strike out beyond these positions, elaborating an anti-politics thought through in reference to a point of view Thacker calls cosmological. Could such a cosmological view, he writes, be understood not simply as the view from interstellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view? Desert might be one of the first signs of the paradoxical draw of this view, which, it should be clear by now, is something other than a position to be adopted. But for those who like the convenience names lend to things, consider the version Thacker elaborates (in a discussion of the meaning of black in black metal, of all things). He calls it cosmic pessimism:
The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism. It is the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups. Its limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in the many popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change. Certainly these are the images, or the specters, of Cosmic Pessimism, and different from the scientific, economic, and political realities and underlie them; but they are images deeply embedded in our psyche nonetheless. Beyond these specters there is the impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to think the absence of all human beings, with no thought to think the negation of all thought.
Now the intention of my or will be clear for some (from the psyche to the cosmos…). In Dust Thacker does not draw many connections between his ideas and politics, so it is worthwhile to examine one of the places where he illustrates the paradox his view of the Planet opens up in that space. He cites Carl Schmitt’s suggestion, in Political Theology:
the very possibility of imagining or re-imagining the political is dependent on a view of the world as revealed, as knowable, and as accessible to us as human beings living in a human world. … But the way in which that analogy [from theology to politics] is manifest may change over time …
Thacker notes:
the 17th and 18th centuries were dominated by the theological analogy of the transcendence of God in relation to the world, which correlates to the political idea of the transcendence of the sovereign ruler in relation to the state. By contrast, in the 19th century a shift occurs towards the theological notion of immanence… which likewise correlates to “the democratic thesis of the identity of the ruler and the ruled.” In these and other instances, we see theological concepts being mobilized in political concepts, forming a kind of direct, tabular comparison between cosmology and politics (God and sovereign ruler; the cosmos and the state; transcendence and absolutism; immanence and democracy).
The closed loop of politics:
The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic. Joubert
Thacker’s question follows: what happens to this analogy, which structures both political theory and ordinary thinking about politics to some extent, if one posits a world that is not, and will never be, entirely revealed and knowable? The closed loop is opened, and the analogy breaks down. What happens when we as human beings confront a world that is radically unhuman, impersonal, and even indifferent to the human? What happens to the concept of politics… It seems to me that a question of this sort is lurking in the background of Desert as well.
* * *
The desert may be, or sometimes seem to be, what is left after a catastrophic event, but it has also always been with us, as image and reality.
In what passes for a moon On the galactic periphery, Here is an austere beauty, Barren, uncompromising, Like that which must have been Experienced by men On the ice-caps and deserts As they once existed on earth Before their urbanization Harsh and unambiguous… John Cotton
World-desert: the desert grows…
Earth-deserts: they are growing, too.
Cosmic deserts: on the galactic periphery… In a response to François Laruelle’s Du noir univers, Thacker elaborates on the various senses of the desert motif, suggesting both that it is the inevitable image and experience of the Planet, as a slice of the Cosmos, or what Laruelle calls the black Universe, and that it is a mirage, that there is no real desert to escape to. Hermits keep escaping to the desert, but their solitude is temporary; others gather nearby. The escape from forced community develops spontaneous forms of community. But for being spontaneous, such community does not cease to develop, sooner or later, the traits of the first, escaped, community. The issue for me is double: first, that to the two senses invoked in Desert (the literal ecological sense, and the sense of desertion) we may now add the third corresponding to the Planetary or Cosmic view, the desert as the impossible, as nothingness. Second, the ethical, psychological, or at least practical insight that some keep deserting society, civilization, or what have you in the direction of the desert and, as stated, sooner or later populating it, inhabiting it, somehow living or at least surviving in it. Even if these deserters headed towards the desert in the first sense, they were motivated or animated by the impossible target of the desert in the third sense. Now, this apparently closed-loop operation could be the inevitable repetition of some ancient anthropogenic trauma. Or it could be (we just can’t know here and now) the sane, wild reaction to Civilization: desperate attempt to return to the Earth (our bright home) via the dark indifference of the Planet or Cosmos. Of this return pessimism says: you will need to do it again and again. Is the pessimism about a condition we can escape, or one we can’t? Is it the anti-civilization pessimism of the most radical ecology, or is it despair, no less trivial for being a psychological insight, before the morbid obtuseness of humans? We just can’t know here and now. Masciandaro, Thacker’s fellow commentator on Laruelle, aptly terms this “the positivity and priority of opacity”—the opacity of the Planet and the Cosmos, Laruelle’s black universe.
O the dark, the deep hard dark Of these galactic nights! Even the planets have set Leaving it slab and impenetrable, As dark and directionless As those long nights of the soul The ancient mystics spoke of. Beyond there is nothing, Nothing we have known or experienced. John Cotton
* * *
In Desert we read:
Nature’s incredible power to re-grow and flourish following disasters is evident both from previous mass extinctions and from its ability to heal many lands scarred by civilisation. Its true power is rarely considered within the sealed, anthropocentric thinking of those who would profit from the present or attempt to plan the future. Yet the functioning of the Earth System is destructive as well as bountiful and it is not a conscious god with an interest in preserving us or its present arrangement—something we may find out if the Earth is now moving to a new much hotter state.
For his part, Thacker concludes his book by discussing a mysticism of the unhuman, what he calls a climatological mysticism. It is a way of thinking, and paradoxical knowing, modeled on religious mysticism rather than scientific knowledge. But it is not reducible to the former. He writes,
there is no being-on-the-side-of the world, much less nature or the weather. [...] the world is indifferent to us as human beings. Indeed, the core problematic of the climate change issue is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human. This is where mysticism again becomes relevant.
This attitude of nonknowledge, as Bataille would have put it, informs life even as it decenters it. That the Earth is our place, but the planet does not care about us and the cosmos is not our home, is a thought of the ways in which we might survive here. Some will remember Vaneigem’s repeated contrast between vie and survie, life and survival. For him it was a matter of inverting the accepted, and to a large extent enforced, view in which one must survive first and live second. Some of this view seems to have been taken into the perspective that identifies life and nature, where the latter is understood as what we are or should be—that is, that there is something normative about life or nature that we can refer to. The perspective I am developing here suggests that we have no way of knowing what we are or should be, and that the wild is better conceived as that no-way, as the conditions that push back against our best effort to define ourselves, identify our selves, or know our world. Similarly, what is wild in us can only be conceived (though it is not really conceivable in the long run) as what resists, what pushes back, against any established order. But this might be closer to survival than to life. Survival has a positive value in that it is itself an activity, a set of nontrivial practices that refer back to life insofar as we know it. We survive as we can, not confident that we are living. It is this aspect of Desert that some insurrectionaries seem to have disagreed with, in that it often talks of plans for survival where they would have preferred to see plans for action, or at least calls to action. We can read there of
An Anarchism with plenty of adjectives, but one that also sets and achieves objectives, can have a wonderful present and still have a future; even when fundamentally out of the step with the world around it. There is so much we can do, achieve, defend and be; even here, where unfortunately civilisation probably still has a future.
It is passages like this one, towards the end of the pamphlet, that probably left some with the impression that its author is still attached to hope, and left others with the sense of a form of survival that still somehow resembled activism more than attack. As for the former impression, that would be to confuse the climate pessimism of Desert with a kind of overarching and mandatory mood, as though those who had this view were of necessity personally depressed or despondent. There is no evidence for such a conclusion. As for the latter, it is a little more complicated. Yes, the author of Desert often sounds like someone addressing activists; and, yes, Desert explicitly rejects the cause of Revolution in several places. One could say this adds up to a kind of political retreat. One could also say, however, that some are too used to reading political texts that always end on a loud and vindictive note! No, this is where the question of rethinking survival from an anti-political perspective inflected by something like Thacker’s cosmic pessimism or reinvented mysticism is critical. We make survival primary, not so much inverting Vaneigem’s inversion of the norm in societies like ours, but rather by noticing what in our conception of life has always been a kind of religion or morality of life, easy adjustment to a familiar nature. Whatever its faults, Desert was written to say that such a conception is no longer useful, and that one useful meaning of anarchist is someone who admits as much. Can that meaning fit with the subcultures that most of today’s anarchists compose? Probably not. The subcultures exist as pockets of resistance, of course; but survival in them is indelibly tied to reproducing the anarchist as persona, as identity, as an answer to the question of what life is or is for. To make sense or have meaning this answer presupposes the workings of our homegrown identity-machine, our collective, repeated minimal task of discerning about actions whether they are anarchist or not, and, by extension, whether the person carrying them out is anarchist. It is our way of bringing the community into the desert. Announcement of one’s intentions to overcome the limits of subculture and reach out to others, or inspire them with our actions, is not different than, but rather a crucial part of, this operation. Survival, in the sense Desert suggests it to me, is something completely different, for in it any social group or kin network, as it attempts to live on, cannot draw significant lines of difference (of identification, therefore) between itself and others. It melts into a humanity collectively resisting death. Needless to say this is something entirely different than the revolutionary process as it has been imagined and attempted. There is no future to plan for, only a present to survive in, and that is the implosion of politics as we have known it.
To survive, not to live, or, not living, to maintain oneself, without life, in a state of pure supplement, movement of substitution for life, but rather to arrest dying… Blanchot
… deserting life.
* * *
A desert and not a garden: one remarkable aspect of the contemporary anarchist space is an open contradiction between two perspectives on what struggle is, or is for, that might be summed up in the phrases we have enemies and we did this to ourselves. There are countless versions of this contradiction, which at a deeper level is really not about political struggle at all, but about the essence of resistance. One version is the condemnation of the notion of enemy as a moral notion, and another is its silent return in the emphasis on friendship and affinity; there is also what a book called Enemies of Society may be taken to suggest from its title on. The contradiction surfaces most clearly in discussions influenced by primitivist positions or ones hostile to civilization, likely because of the tremendous temporal compression they require to make their case. In such talk, we zoom out from lifetimes and generations to a scale of tens of thousands of years. The enemy appears within the course of history, but the fact of the appearance of the enemy, the split in humanity, summons the second we, because of the need to presuppose a whole species in some natural state (balance, etc.) that, in the event or events that open up the panorama of civilization and history, cleaves itself into groups or at least roles. The positions we know better tend to revolve around trivialized versions of these perspectives, never really experiencing the tension between them. It is only in the play of the anarchist space as a whole (and precisely because it is not a single place, in which all involved would have to put up with each other for a few hours, let alone live together) that the contradiction unfolds. Some form of we have enemies is the great rallying for a wide array of active agents, from the remains of the Left to advocates of social war. And some form of we did this to ourselves is in the background of all sorts of moralizing approaches to oppression and interpersonal damage, but also the more misanthropic strains of primitivism. I would also argue that a modified form of it informs the deep background of egoism and some forms of individualism (splitting the forced we from the atomic ourselves). My question is, what happens if we zoom out farther? Here the virtue of invoking science as Desert does may be visible. For what is beyond history (the time of the World) and prehistory is geologic time, the time of the Planet, which leads us to cosmic time. There is a difference between invoking science and practicing or praising it. The latter simply produce more science. The former may be a way to encounter what our still humanist politics ignore. From the perspective of cosmic time, the contradiction does not dissolve (at least not for me); but its moral or political character seems to unravel. Something less centered on us emerges. Perhaps both stories—the story about enemies and the story about ourselves—ignore something much more disturbing than mere accidental guilt or immorality, something that disturbs us precisely because it is the disturbing of humanity. (“It is not man who colonizes the planet, but the planet and the cosmos who transgress the lonely threshold of man”—does this odd sentence of Laruelle’s express the thought here, I wonder?) It makes sense for Thacker to invoke mysticism when he considers the cosmos or the Planet, because its otherness has most often been referred to as divine, and related to as a god. Now, that need have nothing to do with religion, especially if we identify religion with revelation; but mysticism is a good enough approximation to the attitude one takes towards a now decentered life. I call that attitude a thoughtful kind of survival. This is closely connected to a conversation one often overhears in the company of anarchists. Someone is discussing something they prefer or are inclined to do, and doing so in increasingly positive terms. Another person points out (functioning of the anarchist identity machine) that there is nothing specifically anti-capitalist or radical about the stated activity or preferred object, reducing it verbally to another form of consumption. Anxious hours are passed this way. About such inclinations I prefer to say that we do not know if they come from above or below; we know our own resistance, and not much more. That resistance manifests in unknowable ways, obeying no conscious plan. It could well be a particularly fancy kind of neurosis; but survival means just this, that we do not know the way out of the situation and we must live here with the idea of anarchy. Another way to put this is that if our rejection of society and state is as complete as we like to say it is, our project is not to create alternative micro-societies (scenes, milieus) that people can |
-regional-government/.
31 Interview with Jabbar Yawar, peshmerga spokesperson, Erbil, April 2015.
32 Gruber, “Revisiting Civil-Military Relations,” 41.
33 ICG, Arming Iraq’s Kurds, 11.
34 Michael Knights, The Long Haul: Rebooting U.S. Security Cooperation in Iraq (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 2015), 29, www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-long-haul-rebooting-u.s.-security-cooperation-in-iraq.
35 Tyler Malcolm, “Emerging Powers and Forgotten Allies in Iraq,” Medium, August 4, 2014, https://medium.com/the-eastern-project/emerging-powers-and-forgotten-allies-in-iraq-4974b4df1ea6.
36 Knights, The Long Haul, 29.
37 Invest in Group, “Overview: Kurdistan Region,” last accessed October 15, 2015, www.investingroup.org/publications/kurdistan/overview/human-capital/.
38 Michiel Leezenberg, “Urbanization, Privatization, and Patronage: The Political Economy of Iraqi Kurdistan,” in Ethnicity and the State: The Case of the Kurds, eds. Faleh Abdul-Jabar and Hosham Dawod (London: Saqi Books, 2006), 14.
39 Chapman, “Security Forces,” 96.
40 KRG officials cited in a U.S. Department of State cable, “Kurds Delay Budget Over Funding for Peshmerga,” February 7, 2007, published by WikiLeaks, www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07BAGHDAD408_a.html; also Peshmerga Affairs Minister Mustafa Sayid Qadir in Gehlen, “Mustafa Sajid Kadir.”
41 Gruber, “Revisiting Civil-Military Relations,” 30.
42 Interview with Bahar Abdulrahman Mohammed, Islamic Union of Kurdistan parliamentarian and member of the Peshmerga and Anfal genocide committee, Erbil, April 2015.
43 As independent journalist Kamal Chomani observed, “The KDP and PUK have also tried to keep the forces disunited because they have realized that without having peshmerga and Asayish, they cannot win elections, as they have always forced peshmerga and Asayish to vote for them.” Interview with Kamal Chomani, independent journalist, April 2015.
44 “The Time of the Kurds,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 29, 2015, www.cfr.org/middle-east-and-north-africa/time-kurds/p36547#!/.The night of 23-24 September 1916, was a dramatic one for Essex, as two German Zeppelin airships crashed in the county. One came down in flames at Great Burstead, and the other landed intact in Little Wigborough.
Having bombed London, the airship L33 was heading for home when it was hit by an anti-aircraft shell. It eventually crash-landed near New Hall Cottages in Little Wigborough, its huge 650ft long body buckling as it straddled a country lane.
The German captain, Alois Bocker, decided to set the Zeppelin on fire. He even tried to warn those living in a cottage nearby, but the terrified occupants refused to open the door. Bocker and his crew then headed up the road towards Peldon but were arrested when they asked a policeman for directions to Colchester. The crew were taken to Mersea Island where they were transferred to the military.
Location: Copt Hall Lane, Little Wigborough, Essex CO5 7RDMore Lanes Added for L.A. Cycling Enthusiasts December 26th, 2014 at 8:30 am Tweet
In 2010, Los Angeles passed a plan to add 1,684 miles of bikeways throughout the city. Over the years, the city has added hundreds of miles and continues to add more each year. Initially, the plan was to add 200 miles a year. The main goals of this project were to encourage more people to use a bicycle as their preferred form of transportation, decrease traffic and make bicycle commuting safer. Connecting a vast network of bike lanes allows people to get all over the city conveniently by bike.
With improvements to the bike lane infrastructure, more people will be motivated to get outside and bike. Bike paths make biking safer and help to reduce the rate of cyclist injuries. In addition, they also increase safety for motorists. Biking instead of driving is great for both your own personal health as well as the environment.
However, this project is not without its controversies. Some in Los Angeles argue that increasing bike lanes could actually make traffic worse, not better. It’s thought that some of the planned lanes will reduce flow on already tightly packed streets. In some areas, traffic is already reduced to one lane due to parking lanes and it’s unclear exactly how the bike lanes will fit into the equation.
Currently, no measurement is being completed to determine who is right in this debate. City planners are working on how to best measure, track and analyze how transportation is affected where the new bikeways have been added. The Transportation Department is making continued improvements to their analysis process and looking for additional budget-friendly tracking options.
To see a diagram of how the city’s expanded bikeways year by year, check out this graphic from the L.A. Times.10 Activities That Will Strengthen Your Relationship
With so many distractions presented to us daily, we can accidentally create distance between ourselves and our significant others. It’s important to maintain the bond. These 10 activities do just that. Have fun, and strengthen your relationship at the same time.
10 Activities that will bring you and your other half closer together:
1. Teach your partner how to do something he/she has never done before. It can range from how to create an art piece like an abstract painting, how to throw a football, write a poem, build a fire, play a video game or how to “veg out” your and his/her way.
Teaching your other half how to do something he/she might normally not do can lead to hilarious and memorable moments. It also brings you guys closer by building trust and empathy for one another.
2. Go on an adventure that’s new to both of you, like exploring a new hobby such as rock climbing or carpentry, visiting an antique store or a quirky museum, playing bingo in the community center (sounds dull, but I think it has a lot of potential to be entertaining in terms of people watching), finding a take-home worthy item from the junk yard and whatever else sounds good!
My fiancé and I went to Miami, FL’s first Pin-up Convention. We had no idea what to expect. We hoped for the best knowing we might be walking into a tacky burlesque show or a grand slam of retro fun. Thankfully, it was the latter. We meandered through shiny antique cars, tables of one of a kind trinkets, pin-up models, live good music and more. It was a successful endeavor.
3. Play a prank on someone together. All the sketchy scheming and funny outcomes manifests in teamwork, collaboration and bonding.
4. Pick a project to work on together, and do it! You can build a night stand or home-made bar. Try writing a song or screenplay together, cook an awesome meal. Challenge and reward yourselves. Additionally, the nice thing about this activity is that it can take a lot of time to complete, ensuring that you guys will spend one on one more regularly.
5. Invent a pair of characters or alter-egos, then go out and be them all day/night. Include accents, outfits, background stories…the works.
6. Play Truth or Dare!
7. Take each other to a place the other has never been. It’s best if the location is out of your comfort zones. Like taking he/she to a poetry reading, a snorkeling trip, a gun range, where you volunteer, a weird place you used to hang out when you were a teenager, where you learned to ride a bike or drive a car. Anything goes. Learn about each other.
8. Look through old photos of each other like baby pics, sports awards, birthdays etc.
9. Watch an old movie that neither one of you have seen.
10. Make a pact to shut off your phones and televisions all day, then follow through. Imagine all the stuff you both will come up with to entertain yourselves. Automatically, you will depend on each other for company and ideas to spend the day.
By cutting out the outside world for a day, you both will naturally rely on each other more and focus on each other’s words, ideas and company.
[jetpack_subscription_form]The 77-year-old, who was diagnosed with brain cancer last year, has written to the governor of Massachusetts asking him to change state law so his senate seat would not be vacant during a vote on health reform.
A vote is expected by the end of the year and a victory would represent a major triumph for Mr Kennedy, the younger brother of John and Bobby Kennedy, who has fought for reform for 40 years.
Under current law, Massachusetts will schedule a by-election within five months of a senator retiring or dying.
This could mean Democrats were a vote short in what promises to be a very tight contest on Mr Obama's controversial plans to expand health insurance.
Mr Kennedy said he wanted state law to be changed so an interim appointment could be made to the Senate.
His letter, which was obtained by the Boston Globe, does not explicitly mention his mortality or the health care vote, but its meaning is clear.
"I am now writing to you about and issue that concerns me deeply, the continuity of representation for Massachusetts, should a vacancy occur," he wrote.
Deval Patrick, the Governor of Massachusetts, said: "It's typical of Ted Kennedy to be thinking ahead and about the people of Massachusetts."
The senator's friends insisted that his death was not imminent and Senator John Kerry said that if the health vote were held tomorrow that Mr Kennedy would be "on a plane and be down in the Senate to vote".
But fears for the Democratic senator, who despite his strong liberalism has a history of reaching compromises on major legislation with Republicans, have grown after he did not attend the funeral of his sister Eunice last week.
He also failed to appear at the White House to receive the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian award in the US, a few days earlier.] Sorry, guys. The production-version MDR-Z7 arrivedbefore I left for vacation. I took it with me, though......so I was able to get some listening time with it.We're in the middle of shooting the CanJam 2014 preview video (late, because I partially lost my voice for the past few days), so I don't have the time right now to say much about it.What I will say is this: To my ears, this is Sony's best headphone in quite some time--for my preferences, perhaps their best so far, period.The imaging is outstanding, and I suspect it's at least in part due to the huge angled drivers. Now if you automatically assume that a 70mm driver is not responsive or detailed, or is going to be boomy, then you haven't heard Sony's MDR-MA900, which I'm a big fan of. If you love the MDR-MA900 (and I do), know that the MDR-Z7 is at a'nother level up. It seems Sony learned a lot about the advantages that can come with a responsive,driver, and squeezed all they learned into the new drivers and overall design in the MDR-Z7.As far as tonal balance goes, it is quite even-handed, with bass that is deep and rich, and what I'd call mild accentuation. Bass control is excellent, to my ears. (If one of your wishes for the MDR-MA900 was more extended, more present bass, say hello to your wish-come-true.) The MDR-Z7's midband is very resolving, with what I hear as general neutrality throughout. Treble resolution and extension sounds exceptional, andsparkly to my ears. I'm very sensitive to sibilance, and the MDR-Z7 doesn't accentuate it at all to my ears (thankfully). If I had to characterize the Sony MDR-Z7 in a few words, I'd say..."Rich and detailed." If you gave me a few more words, I'd say "Holy poo, that imaging!"The production Sony MDR-Z7's build quality feels excellent. The fit and finish is impressive. The detents on the headband sizing mechanism report their positions with nice clicks and are numbered, which is certainly helpful. (I know to size mine at "8" on each side, and the fit is perfect.) Comfort isCompetitors? The Fostex TH900 is one. In terms of isolation from ambient noise, the Sony MDR-Z7 seems about as closed (which is to say not super-closed) as the big Fostex. In term of its signature, the Sony is more even-handed; and whereas I couldn't see the TH900 being used for monitoring in a studio environment, I won't be surprised to see the Sony MDR-Z7 in studios.Sony works hard on all of their premium headphones, but seemed togive this one a particularly large amount of effort, knowing it would be their new flagship. They involved a lot of people in its development (in terms of letting people hear it along the way)--pros and enthusiasts alike--and I think it paid off handsomely.I was thrilled when early on its development, they showed up at Head-Fi HQ with someearly prototypes of it, like this one (I blurred part of the photo, as I wasn't sure how much of this early prototype's insides should be shown):Here's a photo of Sony's Kenji Ide (left) and Naotaka Tsunoda (right) at Head-Fi HQ, which I think was taken during that visit:Earlier this year, they met me in Nashville, Tennessee to let me listen to prototypes of the MDR-Z7, MDR-1A and PHA-3 that were closer to production. Here are photos from that visit:(Left to right) Sony's Shunsuke Shiomi, Kenji Ide, and Naotaka Tsunoda, in Nashville.It was nice to be able to listen and provide feedback at each stage. (Again, there were many, so I was just a single data point.) And what was most exciting to me was hearing how the Sony MDR-Z7 got better and better at each successive stage. They should be very proud of this one (and I'm sure they are).This Sony MDR-Z7 is very special. And with Sony's unfortunate tendency to discontinue the models that foster the most passion from their fans, I can assure you I will eventually own at least a couple MDR-Z7's.(I don't have the Kimber upgrade cables for the MDR-Z7 yet, or the Sony PHA-3. I'll say more about those later.)Video games are pretty fun, but most of us don't expect much more than that from entertainment media. But what if a fun video game also, conveniently, helped you succeed more in school and in life? That’s the idea behind the plethora of “brain training” apps on the market today. But just as quickly as they’ve hit the virtual shelves of iTunes and the like, the validity of their claims has been called into question. A new study out this week in the Journal of Neuroscience found that one popular app, Lumosity, doesn’t do anything for your brain—other than helping you get better at playing the game itself.
While one study on a single app can’t be used to make any sweeping conclusions on the benefits (or lack thereof) of brain training games as a whole, it does highlight an important point: It’s difficult not only to create the right type of brain training exercise for a specific behavior or condition, but also to figure out if that training actually works.
The logic behind these brain training apps is based on the idea that certain brain circuits are involved in a type of cognitive performance called delayed discounting, which is your preference for choosing immediate, smaller rewards versus waiting for a bigger reward, as well as one called risk sensitivity—whether you choose reliable or risky rewards. Scientists have found that choosing immediate and risky rewards is associated with unhealthy behavior like smoking, drinking, eating poorly, and generally being more prone to addiction. Apps like Lumosity work these same brain circuits—supposedly strengthening them—to help people focus more and avoid rash, unhealthy decisions.
But here’s the problem: There’s still a lot we don’t know about neuroscience and brain circuitry. The thing about Lumosity (and other brain training games and apps), says Joaquin Anguera, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of San Francisco School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, is that there are a number of different modules and games to choose from—and all of them work different neural networks in the brain. It could be that one app on the market does help improve one certain type of brain behavior, but we just haven’t pinned those results down yet. Scientists still need to do more research to figure out which circuits are actually associated with different behaviors, and it will take even more research to figure out whether certain exercises can help.
In this specific study, the researchers split up a group of 128 young adults into two sets. One group received 10 weeks of training with Lumosity. The other, the control group, played video games for 10 weeks. Before and after the 10-week period, the researchers gave them a series of cognitive tests to see how well each group would do. Both of them did indeed improve by the end of the study, but their improvements were, on average, exactly the same. Neither improved more than the other. In fact, the researchers also gave a third group—who didn’t receive any training at all—the same cognitive tests, and those participants improved about as much as the game players. The more you play Mario Kart, the better you are going to be at it. But the fact that you can kick Mario's butt doesn’t mean you are going to do better in school or kick your smoking habit.
“There’s vast literature on decision making and neuroimaging to figure out what are the key brain areas involved and how do they all interact. But I’ve never seen a study that says, ‘If you play these games in this cocktail effect you are going to improve decision-making processes,’” Anguera says.The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
I should say at the outset that I’ve never really been a big football fan. I grew up in Detroit and played hockey, so I love the Redwings. Besides, we didn’t really have a professional team in Detroit; we only had the Lions.
Jokes aside, I watched it nearly every week. Not intently, but it was on in the background because it’s easy to do other things with football on. Whether it’s cleaning, writing or whatever, there are long stretches of time during a football game where nothing much happens. And if anything interesting does happen the announcer’s voice and crowd noise give it away and you can look at the TV. If you miss that, they replay it immediately.
It’s the perfect sport to ignore while you get other things done. Now it’s become, for me, a sport to simply ignore – period.
I’m done.
HGTV was my refuge. Watching a marathon of real people get their houses remodeled was much more entertaining than watching pampered millionaires wrestle in taxpayer-funded stadiums while disrespecting the national anthem and the American flag.
Since I wasn’t a rabid fan the NFL won’t really notice that I’m gone. But I’m not alone. Through my radio show, social media, and life I have heard from scores of people who are diehard fans, and they’re done too.
More importantly for the NFL and the players, they’re beyond angry. Lifelong fans feel betrayed. Anger fades with time, but the sting of betrayal lingers.
This was a foreseeable eventuality, akin to being hit by a train because you were playing on the tracks and refused to move.
The damage to the NFL began when Commissioner Roger Goodell chose to side with left-wing activists over the game in the hope of placating them and absolving himself from his failures to properly address domestic violence by some players.
Activist groups were vocal critics of slaps on the wrists for players abusing their wives or girlfriends. But left-wing activist groups don’t stop, ever. Even when something is (eventually) made right and harsher penalties were handed out. Because they can fundraise off of it and, equally as important to them, they hate professional sports.
Activist liberals always have hated sports, even when they use it. They hate competition – championing ending scorekeeping in youth sports – because there are winners and losers, and they hate meritocracy. If professional sports is anything it is a meritocracy. Only the best survive, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and all the other boxes liberals have created to divide people.
Professional sports has no time for any of that; there’s too much money in winning. And professional sports is a business.
At least it used to be.
It has evolved from an organization that fined Jim McMahon for writing messages on his headbands to one that ignored players perpetuating the lie of “hands up, don’t shoot.” From blocking the Dallas Cowboys from honoring five police officers who were murdered by a militant racist inspired by anti-police activists to ignoring Colin Kaepernick wearing socks portraying police as pigs.
It seemed like a league held hostage by Kaepernick’s racism; in fear of being called racist itself. Now it’s an enabler of ignorance.
Putting aside the ignorance of the issue, because it doesn’t really matter what the protests are about. The method is what is destroying the NFL.
There could not have been a worse target for a protest than the national anthem in a sport that has marinated itself in patriotism. Sure, it was paid for – nothing in the NFL is free – but they cashed the checks.
When Kaepernick chose to protest during the national anthem all people saw was a protest of the national anthem. That Goodell and his highly paid PR team didn’t recognize this fact and squash it like they did DeAngelo Williams’ desire to pay tribute to his late mother by wearing pink to raise breast cancer awareness is a testament to the fear and desire for self-preservation that has marked his tenure. You can’t claim to support the First Amendment rights of your players when you deny them the ability to honor their mothers or excessively celebrate touchdowns.
Yet that’s what the NFL tried to do. And it failed, miserably. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones tried to stop the hemorrhaging by kneeling before the anthem with his team, then they all stood for it. Would’ve been smart to think of that before, now, for many, it’s just too late.
I won’t miss it because I was never really emotionally invested in it. But the NFL has millions of fans who’ve happily handed over their hard-earned money for years who are now feeling like they’ve been conned the whole time. Maybe they were.In “Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid,” Stephen Burd, Kevin Carey, Jason Delisle, Rachel Fishman, Alex Holt, Amy Laitinen, and Clare McCann of the New America Foundation propose a number of broad reforms, including, among other things, the following:
(1) restructuring the Pell Grant program to encourage college completion and to discourage extended and prolonged enrollments, to give higher education institutions that graduate substantial numbers of students from low-income households a bonus to be used to reduce the net price for low-income students;
(2) restructuring the federal student loan program to discourage over-borrowing by students and parents, which in turn will limit the ability of higher education institutions to raise tuition without limit;
(3) and redirecting $180 billion in tuition tax breaks, tax-advantaged savings plans, and the student loan interest deduction to the Pell Grant program.
Elaine Maag of the Tax Policy Center has more on tax-based aid at TaxVox:
In 2012, the $34.2 billion in tax-based aid represented nearly half of all non-loan federal assistance and rivaled the $35.6 billion in Pell grants. But unlike Pell grants that assist low-income students, tax subsidies often benefit students who are already likely to attend college. The Tax Policy Center estimates that in 2013, a quarter of the aid from the AOTC and half of the aid from the tuition and fees deduction will go to students in families with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 (figure 2). According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 barely half of students from low-income families enrolled in two- or four-year colleges immediately after completing high school. In contrast, two-thirds of kids from middle-income families and 82 percent of kids from households making $100,000 or more went straight to college.
Maag’s discussion of tax-based aid reminded me of Andrew Gillen’s essay on what he called “the Bennett Hypothesis 2.0.” Gillen describes the canonical Bennett Hypothesis as follows:
1. Individually, each college is trying to improve (the pursuit of excellence). 2. More revenue is very useful in the quest for improvement. 3. An increase in the generosity of financial aid gives colleges the option of acquiring more revenue by raising tuition to capture some of the aid. 4. Most colleges will succumb to the temptation to raise tuition. a. Some colleges will exploit (3) immediately to help them accomplish (1). b. To keep from falling behind the colleges in (4a), even colleges that did not exploit (3) initially are pressured to do so in the future. 5. Thus, an increase in financial aid leads to higher tuition (the Bennett Hypothesis).
As Gillen observes, the scholarly evidence for the Bennett Hypothesis is mixed at best — yet he proposes three refinements, which I’ve noted alongside his lessons for policymakers:
1. All Aid is Not Created Equal For policy makers, the key point is that financial aid that is restricted to low income students is much less likely to be captured by colleges, and will therefore be more likely to succeed in making college more affordable and therefore accessible (for low income students). In contrast, universally available programs are more likely to simply fuel tuition increases and therefore more likely to fail to make college more affordable. 2. Selectivity, Tuition Caps, and Price Discrimination are Important For policymakers, the first lesson is that capping tuition at public universities will encourage those universities to become more selective. This may be a good thing in some respects, but it does have drawbacks as well. The second lesson for policymakers concerns private universities. Price discrimination allows these colleges to raise tuition in response to aid at an individual level (this is just the Bennett Hypothesis at an individual level). But in order for colleges to price discriminate, they must know each student’s ability to pay. This means that providing colleges with students’ financial background will lead to more aid being captured. Bizarrely, the government currently provides colleges with this information, thus encouraging and facilitating price discrimination. Ending the counterproductive practice of providing colleges with information on the financial background of students and parents would curtail price discrimination, which would increase the effectiveness of aid in improving college affordability. 3. Don’t Ignore the Dynamic Story [A]s college D spends more money, college E needs to spend more to avoid falling behind. If it wants to attract the best professors, it needs to increase pay, lower teaching loads, and build state of the art labs when college D does. And if it wants to recruit good students, it has to offer the same amenities that college D does. Thus, the same things that lead to higher future costs at college D lead to higher future costs at college E.
Given this landscape, Gillen — in the same spirit as the New America report — offers an alternative approach:
Because the nature of competition in higher education is the driving force behind these dysfunctional results, the clearest way to escape Bennett Hypothesis 2.0 is to change the nature of competition. Colleges compete in a zero-sum game based on prestige because they cannot compete based on value, and they cannot compete based on value because measures of both quality and price (net tuition) are obscured. If information on those two were available, the pursuit of excellence would be replaced by the pursuit of value, Bowen’s Rule would break down, and Bennett Hypothesis 2.0 would no longer be a concern. Progress is being made in making pricing information available (colleges are now required to publish net price calculators), but there is no progress regarding quality. A good start would be to publicize employment outcomes, value-added pass rates on certification exams, etc. Until information on such outputs and outcomes is available, we will be stuck in a world where competition is based on prestige, which in turn means we will continue to suffer from Bowen’s Rule and Bennett Hypothesis 2.0.
Gillen also notes that there is another way out of the Bennett Hypothesis 2.0 trap, i.e., restricting aid only to the very poorest. This is part of the impetus for phasing out tax-based aid.Historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley are sailing the Mississippi River aboard the steamboatDelta Queen from New Orleans to Memphis to research their upcoming book Mississippi: River of History.As they make their way to Memphis, Tennessee, National Geographic News will be posting photos and stories of the history they encounter on "Big Muddy."
The Delta Queen steams past Greenville, Mississippi. Lying in the heart of the Mississippi delta, which some consider the richest agricultural land on earth, Greenville in 1927 was the epicenter of the worst flood in the history of the United States. Rain in biblical proportions fell from the sky through the winter. Then, in the spring, the waters began to rise...
And the rains came. They came in amounts never seen by any white man, before or since. They fell throughout the entire Mississippi River Valley, from the Appalachians to the Rockies. They caused widespread flooding that made 1927 the worst year ever in the Valley. More water, more damage, more fear, more panic, more misery, more death by drowning that any American had seen before, or would again.
On the Mississippi River in 1927, progress was everywhere. Thanks to bridges, trains, cars and trucks, people on foot could cross it without pause and without getting wheels or feet wet.
Nature had been or soon would be conquered, or so it seemed. Before the 19th century nothing man-made had ever moved faster than the speed of a horse. By 1927 it was commonplace. Man had taken control of his own life and was well on his way to controlling nature to suit his own purposes and speed the rate of progress.
But in 1927 in the Mississippi Valley the rain came down in quantities that exceeded by ten to more times the yearly average. John Barry tells the story in his award-winning 1997 book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood and How it Changed America (Simon and Schuster).
The Greatest Flood in History
In the winter of 1926-27 the rains were so heavy that on the tributaries of the Mississippi the water had overflowed the banks, causing floods to the west in Oklahoma and Kansas, to the east in Illinois and Kentucky.
On Good Friday, April 15, 1927, the Memphis Commercial Appeal warned: "The roaring Mississippi River, bank and levee full from St. Louis to New Orleans, is believed to be on its mightiest rampage...All along the Mississippi considerable fear is felt over the prospects for the greatest flood in history."
That Good Friday morning, the rains came, setting all-time records for their breadth and intensity. They came down over several hundred thousand square miles, covering much or all of the states of Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana.
In New Orleans in 18 hours there were 15 inches of rain—the greatest ever known there. The river swelled so high and flowed so fast that in Berry's woods, for the residents along the river, " It was like facing an angry, dark ocean."
One man recalled, decades later, "I saw a whole tree just disappear, sucked under by the current, then saw it shoot up, it must have been a hundred yards [downstream]. Looked like a missile fired by a submarine."
In the spring of 1927, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assured the public that the levees would hold. The Corps had built them, after all. But as had been the case at the mouth of the river, the Corps overestimated its own prowress and underestimated the power of the river.
The Corps built the levee system to confine the river. They represented man's power over nature. If necessary, it was thought, the flow would be reduced with outlets that would divert part of the river into the biggest outlet of all, the Atchafalaya River, into the Gulf, or at Bonnet Carre, just above New Orleans, into Lake Pontchartrain and then to the Gulf.
Neither levees or outlets would work, according to James Buchanan Eads, the man who built the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi, at St. Louis, and the jetties at the river's mouth (in 1932 Deans of the American Colleges of Engineering named him one of the five greatest engineers of all time, ranking him with, among others, Leonardo DaVinci and Thomas Edison.)
At South Pass, at the mouth of the river, Eads had made the river obey his will. To prevent floods he proposed cut-offs to straighten and speed the river. The increased speed could scour the bed, even during lower water. The concentration of the river's force would lower the bed so the river would carry more water, faster. By such correction, Eads declared, "floods can be permanently lowered," which would render levees superfluous.
But no cut-offs were dug. Nor was another idea, to build reservoirs on the tributaries to hold back the water. Nor were any outlets dug. The Corps of Engineers—and then the residents of the Valley—relied on levees only.
At high water the river spread and rose even higher. In turn, the Corps raised the height of the levees, from two feet to 7.5 feet to as much as 38 feet. The Corps was confident that its levees-only system would hold in the river, and it so promised.
The levees failed. Here, there, sometimes it seemed everywhere, the river undercut the levees. Water poured through breaks called crevasses, covering with 30 feet of water land where nearly one million people lived.
Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated. This was about equal to the combined size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont. By July 1, even as the flood began to recede, 1.5 million acres were under water. The river was 70 miles wide.Still the rains came. The river rose higher. Most threatened was the Mississippi Delta, between Memphis and Vicksburg, possibly the richest, most fertile land in the country, perhaps in the world.
"Concentration Camps"
To save the land, frantic efforts to raise the levee by stacking sand bags on the top were begun. Charles Williams was an employee of former Mississippi Senator Le Roy Percy's on one of the largest cotton plantations in the Delta. He set up "concentration camps" on the levee protecting Greenville, complete with field kitchens and tents, for thousands of plantation workers—all African AmericansHistorians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley are sailing the Mississippi River aboard the steamboatDelta Queen from New Orleans to Memphis to research their upcoming book Mississippi: River of History.As they make their way to Memphis, Tennessee, National Geographic News will be posting photos and stories of the history they encounter on "Big Muddy."
The river, not the men, won the battles. On April 21 it broke through the levees. Major John C. H. Lee, the Army district engineer at Vicksburg (and in World War II in command of the Services of Supply in the European Theater of Operations—there the chief quartermaster and called by the enlisted men, who halted hated him, "Jesus Christ Himself Lee" wired the chief of the Corps of Engineers, General Edwin Jadwin, "Levee broke...crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta."
The crevasse, just upriver from Greenville was huge, a 100-foot channel half a mile in width. Water poured through, more than double the amount of Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper river ever. In 10 days it covered one million acres with water 10 feet deep—and the crevasse continued to pour water for months.
Panic. Hundreds of workers on the levee climbed into a barge below the break to escape. A tugboat tried to push the vessel downstream, but the flow through the crevasse pulled it upstream. One white man called out "Let's put all the niggers on the barge and cut it loose." Another man, Charlie Gibson, interceeded. "We ain't goin' to cut the barge loose. I'll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together."
Senator Percy's son Will, a World War I hero and a noted poet, took charge of the Red Cross relief efforts for the blacks stuck on the levee. His first impulse was to evacuate them on steamers.
The planters protested. They persuaded Le Roy Percy to instruct his son to leave those blacks on the levee. Cotton was the principal, indeed almost the only crop grown in the Delta. Cotton was labor intensive—it was planted, cultivated, and picked by hand. The planters grew rich because of it. The workers got $1 a day for their sunrise to sunset labor.
The planters knew that if the blacks got out of the Delta, they would never return. They had nothing to come back to and anyplace was better than the Delta. Keep them here, the planters declared. Le Roy Percy backed them. Will Percy, after some feeble protests about putting their own economic welfare ahead of people's lives, gave in.
In 1942, those same planters, or their sons, paid the local police to patrol the Illionois Central railroad depots to prevent the blacks from getting on the train to go to Chicago, where they could get work at, for them, big wages, in the war industries. In 1944 the first cotton picking machine came to the Delta. By 1945, the planters were buying one-way tickets to Chicago for the blacks.
On the levee the blacks filled and stacked sandbags, for which Percy set a pay scale of 75 cents per day. Those who were put to unloading and distributing Red Cross food parcels, which were starting to come to Greenville by barge to feed 180,000 people and thousands of animals.
Percy ordered all |
crammed every other moral issue under the sun into these episodes that are really only about about vampires having sex. So, I wouldn't put it past him. God Hates Tevas! Or Fangs! Or the Bible I don't know, just hold me.]
Pro: Vampire Punch! Now this is the sassy Sookie I like. Not the indignant brat who barges in on very important vampire sex sessions in Vampire Cool King's manor.
Con: Eric explains what happened to his brain as best as he can, "It was her but it wasn't her, she was in a circle chanting, everything I was, was taken from me." Sookie finds this reasoning (from the vampire that just tried to eat her twice) just fine. No problem. I'll help you deal with this. That's sound logic right there lady. Good idea everyone.
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Pro: Eric sweetly leans over and whispers to Sookie, "I am grateful for this...I just wanted to be sure of you." Just kidding that last line was what Piglet said to Pooh. But I still see it.
Con: Sookie ruins said moment with her "Whatever" retort. OK it was kind of funny. Maybe not a Con after all.
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Con: Meanwhile, Tara has returned to her usual routine of suck. The smarmy dickishness she worked a whole year on washing out of her with hot bra-wearing lesbian fighter sex has returned. "So thanks for bringing me tonight, it's been awhile since I got attacked by a vampire and guess what, it still sucks. And it still freaks my shit out." The picture above (from Community) accurately displays my true reaction when ever Tara talks.
Pro: Lafayette spews it all right back in her face with his excellent take on this delightful Dolly Parton quote, "Bitch climb down off that cross." Preach, Rev. Lala.
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Con: Lala's words fail to detour Tara, she continues on rambling about how terrible the whole witches and Eric experience was, for her. I'm sorry sweetheart but if you have such a huge problem with the supernatural element in Bon Temps then maybe, just maybe, you should have passed on the local Wiccan gathering.
Con: Marni is pissed because Eric came in (AKA tried to kill her) and ordered them to stop practicing their religion. Congratulations Mr. Ball, you have managed to fit yet another social and ethical issue into this show that is really just about vampires fucking.
Pro: Loud Wiccan #2 throws down an excellent Amber Atkins quote. "What is this Nazi Germany?"
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Con: But no time for magic, we need to check in on Jason who is still tied up to the filthy bed in Hot Pants Kitty town. WHEN WILL THIS FUCKING PLOT END?
Con: The only thing more annoying than this subplot is the fact that Crystal has to explain to Jason what is happening every time they're on screen. "If you're going to kill me, just do it!" What? They've told 1,000 times that they are going to turn you into a panther, you've SEEN them turn into panthers right before they told you they were going to turn you into a panther. How is Jason the only one who doesn't understand that the clan of were-panthers he's been babysitting for a year are now going to turn him into a panther as well?
Con: Ghost Daddy and Ghost Mamma story is terrible. "Nature ain't need to be smart, nature is nature?" You are draining my will to live Hot Pants Kitty Folk. No. Just. No.
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Con: Vampire Viral video needs more cats, or it's not really a viral video is it? Put more cats in the "YouTube" (ugh) video, or take it down.
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Pro: Look at all the fancy art in Bill's fancy cool guy office. HA HA HA HA I'm just kidding most of the statutes are just half naked torsos of ladies. King Vampire Cool Guy strikes again.
Pro: Jessica shows up for some fanger father time. I have no problem with this. These two are cute together.
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Pro: Bill gives the old, I'm giving you advice that I wish I had taken a year ago, then longingly stares off at his wall (presumably at some naked torso art COOL GUY). ACTING!
Con: Bill then says, "Vamp Up."
Con: Eric tip-toeing around around Sookie's rug. No. Stop this behavior immediately. We all appreciate the no shirtlessness that is seemingly going to last the entire season (thank you). But this behavior must end now. Also when did Sookie get so concerned about people rubbing mud all over her Grandmother's house. I'm pretty sure the great mud orgy of 2009 stayed all over the sides of her home for months.
Pro: Pam's Fangtasia greeting.
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Con: Sookie Jesus is washing Eric's feet. Is this a Jesus thing, Ball? It's a Jesus thing, isn't it. Sigh.
Con: Eric is ticklish. I DO NOT LIKE THIS.
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Pro: Sookie calls Pam and Pam vampire vrooms right over to her house. She's greeted with her own vampire vroom from Eric, WHO THE FUCK IS THAT! Scary, OK I'm back in. Also another big pro for Pam being forced to be nice to Sookie. I don't think I've ever even seen her smile (that way) before. You could kill a lumberjack with that smile. Most excellent. Also it did genuinely seem like Pam was worried about Eric.
Con: Technically you fang-raped me. This and Vamp Up had better not become "things".
Con: No time to talk Eric babysitting plans, or how much one would charge to babysit Eric (I assume you could get paid back in sexy sex, but that's just what I would ask for. That or Trident Stripes). Moving on, it's Jessica and Hoyt time, hooray. But according to True Blood TV, Reverend Steve Newlin has been missing for 6 months. Booo.
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Con: WHAT THE FUCK HOYT?????
Who blocked this scene? No way no how would I let a mysterious little, probably evil and a ghost, dirty toy baby anywhere near my body. Dirty Toy Baby goes into the trash, into the fire, into the shredder not in the beautiful arms of Hoyt. What is wrong with you Hoyt?
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Pro: While I DO NOT like it that Jessica is glamoring Hoyt, I do like that it is happening. This is a real thing that a young vampire would 100% use on her boyfriend if she felt guilty or fucked up, all of the time. Hell, I would use it on everyone. NO office manager I did NOT eat your sandwich, you ate it, and you are full. You do not need to send out an accusatory email that clearly indicates my guilt in the sandwich eating. All is well.
This was bound to happen. And as much as it pains me to watch this couple that I was the biggest cheerleader of circle the drain, I do like that someone is taking advantage of the copious vampire powers. That's thinking with your shoes on True Blood staffers (shoe metaphor!!!! Nope? Yeah, OK sorry about that).
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And one last pro in this scene, even though Hoyt was getting glamored (and that is bad, yes) he looked absolutely adorable in the process. I would pay $15 dollars of my money to just squish his face in my hands like that for an uninterrupted 7 minutes.
Pro: Meanwhile back in the sexless haven that is now docile Eric camp, Eric is wearing some of Jason's clothes. And of course a hooded sweatshirt with no sleeves is something Jason would own. And OF COURSE his shoes would be too small for him, AMIRITE EVERYONE??? And another pro goes to Sookie for rapping on the ladder in Eric's direction like a little puppy. "Come on!"
Con: Now Tara isn't going to skip town because Lafayette is in trouble, but a minute ago she was all screw-this-town Tara. PICK A TARA.
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Pro: Andy's on the sauce. Again. I don't like what they are doing with this character, but honestly he's such a great actor he's selling it for me. So this tirade is both Con and Pro. They could make Andy sell Mary Kay, and the moment would be taught in theater classes across the world. That being said, I'd like a more level-headed Andy (even though he's never truly level) this V-Juice nonsense was played out last season, move along. There's nothing to see here.
Con:Also, someone needs to school me on v-juice. Seriously, what does V-juice do anyways? Andy's got the crack itch, and the heroin shake, but he's acting like a coke-fueled lunatic. We've seen Lala dance around on V like it was E with steroids. I need a vampire "this is your brain on V-Juice" PSA please.
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Pro: Oh hey Alcide!
Pro: And BOOM Alcide just got one upped by Debbie Pelt. Haters to the left, I love me some Pelt. This is the woman who invented the vampire burrito!!!! Fingers crossed she falls off the wagon HARD. But seriously are you actually upset that she left, Debbie?
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Con: Alcide didn't think it was prudent to tell Sookie, oh BeeTeeDubs Sooks the woman that tried to kill you is right behind you. HA HA HA HA HA SCARED YOU. But seriously, she has highlights now so CLEARLY it's cool. Ha, men.
Pro: Another reason Pelt is the best: she's serving up Vienna sausage, squashed pickle, crawfish dip. I have no idea what these things are, but they can all get in my belly right now.
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Pro: Tommy Mickens has been going to the Maxine Fortenberry school for kids who can't read good.
Con: What this hell is this Natural Gas storyline? I'm going to list off all the plot lines we have in the air right now. You let me know if it's too much.
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- Tara's a lesbian
- Lafayette is a witch who mind wiped Eric
- One of the witches is crazy powerful and has something to do with cutters
- Eric has no memory
- The meth panthers are trying to make Jason a Daddy Ghost or some terrible name like that
- Arlene's baby is evil
- Jessica is eating around on Hoyt
- Jessica and Hoyt live in a house that is possessed by a trash baby
- Vampire Bill is the King of Louisiana, sucks at his job
- Tommy Mickens can read, still a dick, lives with Maxine
- Sam joined a shifter supper club (clothing optional) and met a girl
- Alcide is back with Debbie
- Fairies and stuff
- Steve Newlin is missing
- Andy is addicted to V-Juice
- Nan is running a pro-vampire campaign
- Sookie was gone for a year but has to say she was on Vampire Business
That's just off the top of my head. But yeah there's totally more room for a very interesting natural gas scandal. No Problem.
Pro: While Crystal is rubbing magical dirt in Jason's were-panther wounds (yes that is a real thing that I just typed out) the background gets all mystical. I'm kind of proud that they didn't play The Deliverance soundtrack.
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Pro: Crystal gives Jason MEXICAN VIAGRA, HA HA HA HA, because they're poor and can't afford REAL Viagra. LOL great attention to detail everyone. Take 5.
Con: UGH Sam and Tara back together and terrible.
Con: Tara tells Sam to stop flirting with her (this from the girl who IMMEDIATELY started drinking straight tequila with her bed buddy and proceeds to eye fuck the shit out of him for the next 4 minutes). But no, no, Sam you stop flirting with ME. "You're bad Sam." "Yes I am bad." Brrrlaaap hack, *cough cough* bleach. These two are just gross. Bring back the lovely Skin Walker lady — she was fantastic.
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Pro: Bill Compton leaves Eric a voice message. YES! Let's keep this one going, shall we? Who else would Bill call....
"Hello, yes. Comcast? Yes this is Kiiiing Bill Compton of Louisianaaa. I'm calling in regaaaards to a television operation malfunction. For reasons unbeknownst to myself, mah season of "Hot In Cleveland" has disappeared off mah television set. I require immediate assistance... No, no I can assure this wasn't an operator error. I'm over a hundred years old, I'm well versed in television clicker control... I AM THE AUTHORITY in these parts. Now please send one of your cable rephair folks to mah manor. I presume I will not have to pay for this month's service... I beg your pardon. No will nwat restart mah cable box, I have tried this multiple times to no avail. I refuse! You will send someone over here immediately to retrieve mah stories before i have to take this up with a higher office and make you suffer the true death... Yes. Yes thank you...Eric is evil."
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Pro: Bill can't love anymore because he has an old heart. OK. Everyone that's a wrap.
Con: Jessica gives an infant the evil trash baby. And Terry and Arlene allow their child to gum this dirt covered creature. What is wrong with these people, Terry you are better than this! Jessica you are better than this! Arlene, yeah sounds about right.
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Con: Tommy Mickens comes up with a brilliant plan to steal Maxine's natural gas, Sam is all "No that's wrong." THE END. GOOD STORY.
Pro: Pam is back and PISSED! "I will personally eat, fuck, and kill all three of you." In that order? Nice. Watch the clip here.
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Pro: Ginger! Hey Girl, missed you!
Con: Jason wakes up mid Hot Shorts rape. Oy. I feel like more people get sexually violated on this show than on Law & Order SVU. Bon Temps is a BAD PLACE. This whole story is just gross, and it's about to get a lot worse...
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Con: Mid-rape the camera pans over to a flock of ladies in their best dirty dresses, presumably waiting for their turn with Jason. This is when I get mad at True Blood. You've now made ME think on my own that all these poor little meth panthers are going to gang rape Jason. You didn't say it, all you did was show it, and that's where my mind went. Screw you guys.
Con: Sookie is reading a Charlaine Harris book. See earlier ARRRHHHUUUUGH picture.
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Pro: Not that I don't love Charlaine Harris, you are the best lady! Thank you for all the vampire sex! I just didn't need that meta moment.
Con: Claudine is back.
Pro: Claudine is dead, so this means no more fairies plot, right? I can go up and scratch out the fairy plot on the list, right? Please. Ah who are we kidding.
Pro: Sookie's final line. Oh the ridiculousness of it all. You just have to embrace it. Plus Eric's "oops I just murdered your buddy" face in the end was priceless.
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A few of these stills were taken from the Shadow Of The Reflection screencap site (an excellent place for TB stills).CLOSE A large tornado was captured on video touching down near Marks, Mississippi. THE CLARION-LEDGER
A storm-damaged home outside of Atkins, Ark., on Dec. 23, 2015. High winds and heavy rain caused a large tree to become uprooted and fall on the house resulting in the death of an 18-year-old woman and trapping her 1-year-old child inside, authorities said. (Photo11: AP)
A ferocious storm system slammed parts of the South and Midwest on Wednesday, leaving at least fourteen people dead amid torrential downpours, damaging winds and several tornadoes.
An 18-year-old woman was killed in Pope County, Ark., after a tree fell on her home during high winds, KTHV-TV reported. More than 3,500 power outages were reported throughout the state.
In Mississippi, Marshall County Coroner James Anderson said there was one confirmed fatality in Holly Springs, a seven-year-old boy, and Benton County Sheriff A.A. McMullen confirmed two deaths there.
In the Detroit suburb of Canton, three commercial or industrial buildings suffered damage, the Detroit Free Press was reporting.
@NWSMemphis@NWSJacksonMS Just saw a tornado on ground outside of Clarksdale pic.twitter.com/vBkBsubeWd — Josh McIntyre (@joshmac31) December 23, 2015
As of late afternoon, there had been 12 reports of tornadoes, according to the Storm Prediction Center, in Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Tornado watches remained in effect from southern Mississippi to central Indiana. The greatest threat for tornadoes, damaging wind — some of which could be hurricane force — and occasional hail was for areas from eastern Arkansas and northern Mississippi to extreme southern Illinois, the prediction center said.
The risk for a "few intense, long-tracked tornadoes" will continue into Wednesday night, the center said. In all, 101 million Americans were at risk for severe weather.
CONFIRMED: Pope County officials say one person has been killed after high winds blew a tree down onto a home @THV11@THV11Weather#arwx — Phil Buck (@Phil_Buck) December 23, 2015
The center issued a "moderate" risk area — the second-highest level on a 5-tier scale — for severe storms in the mid-Mississippi River Valley, including the Memphis area. From least to worst, the five levels are marginal, slight, enhanced, moderate and high.
Moderate risk areas are extremely rare in December, typically occurring just once every other year, according to Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist for the prediction center.
VIEWER PHOTO: Cortez says this was taken at Hwy 49 in Coahoma Co. #mswxpic.twitter.com/ob7aAfrj7n — WLBT 3 On Your Side (@WLBT) December 23, 2015
Tornado video sent via Tres Brassell near Batesville, MS. #mswxpic.twitter.com/kWcUJelV4R — Joel Young (@WTVAJoel) December 23, 2015
Yeah, that's a big tornado. Near Clarksdale, MS earlier this afternoon. From @Basehunterspic.twitter.com/uNwWqDgtIx — SevereStudios (@severestudios) December 23, 2015
Damage to vehicles under over pass. Just now near Holly Springs, MS. #mswxpic.twitter.com/s9necP38yb — MOAR Meso (@MOARMeso) December 23, 2015
In addition to severe weather, the risk for flooding will be prevalent farther east, AccuWeather said.
Locations from the central Gulf Coast to the western Carolinas were at risk for the heaviest rain that could trigger flash flooding. "Into Christmas Eve, parts of the Gulf Coast could get 4 to 5 inches of rain with locally higher amounts," AccuWeather meteorologist Dan Pydynowski said.
In the West, a series of winter storms will continue to affect the Pacific Northwest through Thursday, the National Weather Service said.
"Periods of coastal rain and heavy mountain snow can be expected, with the greatest amounts likely over the Cascades and northern and central Rockies, where amounts in excess of one foot are likely at the highest elevations," the weather service said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1YFmG3WAttention, Kevin Feige: Make this superhero movie next. Please.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has largely been a success story since launching with “Iron Man” in 2008, but one of the biggest criticisms lobbied against it has been the lack of any female-fronted superhero films. The MCU hasn’t lacked great female characters — just take one look at Zoe Saldana’s Gamora, Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlett Witch, and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow — but it also hasn’t given any of them the title role in the 17 movies it has already released, including the upcoming “Thor” sequel. “Captain Marvel” will be the first female-fronted Marvel movie when it opens in March 2019, and if the women of the MCU have their say, it certainly won’t be the last.
Read More:Kevin Feige Reveals How Women Could Contribute to the Marvel Universe After Phase Three
Tessa Thompson, who is a total badass as Valkyrie in “Thor: Ragnarok,” revealed in an interview with Comic Book Resources that she has already pitched an “Avengers”-style movie to Marvel featuring all the prominent female characters in the MCU, including Gamora, Scarlett Witch, Black Widow, Mantis, Captain Marvel and Nebula. The best part of all: Thompson made the pitch to Marvel with most of the actresses by her side.
According to Thompson: “I think in that group was Brie Larson, myself, Zoe Saldana — although she ran off to the bathroom, I think, so she came midway through the pitch but she had been in the rev-up to it — Scarlett Johansson. Pom [Klementieff] and Karen [Gillan], who are both in the Guardians movies. Yeah, I think it was that group. We were just sort of all in a semicircle talking, and it just came up, because none of us really worked together – well, I suppose Zoe, and Karen, and Pom – and wouldn’t it be nice if we could all work together?”
“We were sort of speculating on the ways in which it might happen in ‘Infinity War,’ or might not happen,” she continued. “And we thought, ‘No, we should just have a whole movie where we know every day we’re going to arrive and get to work together.’ So we just ran right up to Kevin Feige and started talking about it.”
The female superheroes in the MCU do get to team up in the “Avengers” films, but having a women-only superhero movie would be a dream come true. IndieWire asked Feige last month about the future of female-frontered Marvel superhero films, to which he told us that more were being eyed but that focusing on “Captain Marvel” was the main goal right now.
“There are a lot of discussions, they all focus on the post-Phase Three, ‘Avengers’ 4 film, so nothing that we’ll get into publicly,” Feige said. “We’re really focusing on ‘Captain Marvel’ and the work that Anna and Ryan are doing. It’s going to be a big part of heading towards this epic conclusion and epic finale of 22 movies over the course of 10 years. That is focus for the next six movies we have to finish and get out.”
“Thor: Ragnarok” opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, November 3.GUNNISON COUNTY — Billionaires by definition have money. But as Bill Koch is showing locals on the Western Slope, billionaires can also have hobbies on a grand scale.
And the echoes of Koch’s wonderful Western world now under construction on his Bear Ranch are being heard in Delta, Gunnison and Pitkin counties.
Koch’s activities in the region are centered on his latest obsession, building an “authentic” Western town in a former pasture at the base of the incredibly scenic Ragged Mountains, about 12 miles up Highway 133 from Paonia and just east of Paonia Reservoir.
His luxury Western town includes a train station, a livery station, a saloon, a bunkhouse, a firehouse and two large Victorian-style homes.
It’s part Dodge City, part Neverland.
For some, such as carpenters and other building professionals eager for work, the Bear Ranch project means a good paycheck working on a big project. But for others, it means watching the exercise of political will at the expense of access to public lands.
“I don’t have a problem with billionaires,” said Dave Shinn, a local fishing guide on the nearby Gunnison River. “But you just never know what they’re going to do.”
That’s especially true with Koch’s private town, which will not be open to the public.
Employees have to sign confidentiality agreements. There is 24/7 surveillance on the worksite.
But the sprawling Bear Ranch still isn’t quite big — or private — enough for Koch, who began buying his land near the Raggeds Wilderness in 2007. He wants Gunnison County to give up a public road running through BLM land that separates his two big parcels. And he wants to trade the BLM property for land he owns elsewhere in Colorado and Utah.
To make it happen, Koch recently put together a revised a federal land swap proposal, which the Gunnison County Commissioners unanimously endorsed on Tuesday. It was a critical step, as members of Congress rarely vote for land swaps not endorsed by local officials.
Koch’s first proposed land swap was introduced in 2010 in the House by former Rep. John Salazar, D-Manassa, who quickly had it hung around his neck by opponents as being a favor for a billionaire campaign donor.
Forbes put Kochs’ net worth this year at $3.5 billion.
His twin brother David and his older brother Charles became well-known in the last election cycle for raising big money to support conservative causes and union-busting politicians.
But Bill Koch’s politics seem more pragmatic than polemical.
Campaign contributionsMost of his personal contributions, and those from his private company, Oxbow, are directed at Republicans — most recently House Speaker John Boehner.
But through the years, he’s also given donations to John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.
Perhaps relevant to Bear Ranch, he’s also recently given contributions to all three incumbent Delta County commissioners, Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, and Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennett.
One thing that Bill, David and Charles Koch (pronounced “coke”) do have in common is a taste for luxury homes in Aspen. In 1992, Charles and David each paid about $2.5 million for nearby houses in Aspen’s lovely West End — just steps from the Music Tent.
Then in 2007, Bill one-upped his brothers and spent $51 million on four properties in the upper Castle Creek valley south of Aspen, including the 17,000-square-foot Elk Mountain Lodge building near the ghost town of Ashcroft.
It was here that Bill Koch’s cowboy obsession first slipped into view, as he sued his interior decorator for not making the decor in the renovated lodge quite Western enough. They later settled.
During a June auction in Denver, Koch tipped his Western-obsessed hand again, paying $2.3 million at auction for the only known, authenticated photograph of outlaw Billy the Kid.
“The fact that it got that high really floored a lot of us,” said Steve Friesen, curator for the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave on Lookout Mountain, who observed the bidding.
“He’s an avid fan of the Old West,” Friesen said. “He’s not buying this stuff as an investment. I believe he’s buying it for the sheer love of it.”
Koch’s collection now fills a warehouse in Paonia. His Western town is designed to be both a showcase for valuable memorabilia — one building is designated as a museum — and a self-contained enclave with a state-approved private water treatment plant with two 60,000 gallon underground tanks.
Gunnison County has issued permits for 50 buildings on Bear Ranch, two of them in excess of 11,000 square feet.
The locals have noticed.
Tony Prendergast watched on a balmy afternoon this summer as a deconstructed home on a flatbed truck cruised by his place in nearby Crawford.
“Every once in awhile, I see a building all wrapped up, heading to the property,” Prendergast said.
Some of the old wooden structures hail from the defunct Buckskin Joe attraction outside Canon City that hosted mock shootouts and hangings. Koch bought the former movie-set buildings and Royal Gorge Scenic Railroad in September 2010 for $3.1 million. One ranch laborer opined that Koch wants the public road abandoned so he can install the railway on a relatively level alignment.
Whatever Koch’s ultimate vision is for his new town, many are just happy he has one, and is willing to spend his money to make it reality.
As construction activity in the Roaring Fork Valley slowed over the last three years, many tradesmen packed up their tools and joined the burgeoning staff of carpenters and electricians building Koch’s western town.
Indirect benefits from Koch’s world extend to North Fork Valley Airport manager Mike Clawson, who has been able to make improvements thanks to increased business from the Koch and his Bear Ranch visitors.
“He contributes a lot to the local economy,” said Clawson, who leases a hanger to Koch for his private helicopter, used for the 25-minute flight from Aspen. The billionaire boon has allowed Clawson to buy a courtesy car and add a new picnic structure for airport users.
Koch’s greatest economic influence in the region, however, is via the Elk Creek Mine in nearby Somerset. The mine is part of Koch’s Oxbow group. Local radio and newspaper ads trumpet that Oxbow is here “for the long haul,” and tout the mine’s financial contributions to the valley, which they say total around $90 million.
Through a spokesman, Koch declined several requests to talk about his plans and his Western Colorado holdings. Spokesman Brad Goldstein noted that “Mr. Koch is a private citizen.”
That may be, but he needs an act of Congress before he can ride off into his own Western sunset.
The first bill he spurred into Congress was called the Central Rockies Land Exchange and National Park System Enhancement Act of 2010. The bill didn’t make it out of committee before Salazar lost to Republican Scott Tipton.
Bear Ranch land swap”When Salazar didn’t get re-elected, that was sort of the natural shelving of the thing,” said Hap Channell, one of three Gunnison County commissioners who endorsed the land swap this week. “And it caused Bear Ranch to go back and try to sweeten the deal a little bit.”
Koch initially proposed trading about 990 acres of land he owns on the Sapinero Mesa, near Blue Mesa reservoir in Gunnison County, and Dinosaur National Monument, near Vernal, Utah, for the 1,800 acres of BLM land surrounding his Bear Ranch parcels, including land provides access to the wilderness along Deep Creek.
In response to critics that the acreage was 2-for-1 in favor of Koch and of little benefit to North Fork Valley residents, Koch is committed to buying the $3.2 million Buck Creek Ranch up the valley from Bear Ranch, and has proposed assisting in the planning and construction of several trail projects. But Deep Creek isn’t just any trail, say detractors who also worry about what they see could be a precedent-setting decision.
“The public lands are the heart of democracy in the interior West,” said Ed Marston, the retired publisher of High Country News. “And if Koch succeeds in turning the Ragged Mountain basin into an access-blocked extension of his estate, that will be a very bad sign.”
Annie Rickenbaugh, a member of Pitkin County’s Open Space and Trails Board, was initially wary of the land swap — primarily for the lack of a public process and a two-for-one exchange favoring the private citizen. She’s more amenable to the new proposal, which includes additional acreage for public use, yet remains bothered by a trend of billionaires “who buy their privacy at the expense of public access.”
On the open space board, she argued against another potential public land swap near Carbondale involving billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner. That deal fell apart when Pitkin County refused to endorse it. Now, Wexner is working directly with officials at BLM in an effort to remove the public land that splits his ranch.
Meanwhile, just north of Bear Ranch, retired homebuilder Joe Zanin enjoys the big views of the Raggeds. He supports Koch’s land swap, and feels that neither Koch nor Wexner were given a fair shake by elected officials and the public.
A Rotarian and church volunteer, Zanin doesn’t get upset about a lot these days but will speak up against what he feels is undue criticism of his neighbor.
“I’ve built four houses for billionaires,” Zanin said. “Do you know why they do it? Because they can.” Zanin said.
Madeline Osberger is a reporter for Aspen Journalism, an independent nonprofit news organization working in the public interest.
Political contributions
Bill Koch’s political contributions don’t follow a straight party line and instead appear to target candidates on a case-by-case basis.
According to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign donations, most of Koch’s campaign donations from himself or through groups tied to Oxbow, are sent to Republicans.
But he’s also contributed to many prominent Democrats. Here’s a list of some of his contributions, both as an individual and through his political action committee, Oxbow Carbon Mineral Holdings, Inc., and party affiliations:
Tom Daschle (D), $2,000 in 2004
Jay Rockefeller (D), $1,000 in 2002
Tom Harkin (D), $1,000 in 2002
Hillary Clinton (D), $1,000 in 1999
Ted Kennedy (D), $1,000 in 1999
Al Gore (D), $1,000 in 1999
John Hickenlooper (D), $1,525 (plus $525 through Oxbow)
Bill Ritter (D), $500
Oxbow also contributed $525 to Hickenlooper’s campaign.
Rep. Scott Tipton (R), $3,500
John Salazar (D), $13,600 (plus $10,000 from Oxbow in 2009)
Mark Udall (D), $4,600 in 2008
Ken Salazar (D), $2,300 in 2008 (but Salazar appears to have returned that money)
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D), $2,500 in 2010
In addition, all three Delta County commissioners, Republicans Douglas Atchley, Olen Lund and Bruce Hovde, have received contributions ranging from $500 to $1,500 from either the Oxbow PAC or Oxbow Mining LLC.
And Walker Stapleton, the state’s treasurer representing the Republican Party, received $1,050 from the Oxbow PAC in 2009.
— Madeleine OsbergerIn response to warming, animals classically move to cooler ground, relocating either higher up in altitude or farther toward the poles. But in the tropics, animals have to move hundreds of miles north or south to find a different niche. Mountain species face even starker limitations: As they climb upward they find themselves competing for less and less space on the conical peaks, where they run into uninhabitable rocks or a lack of their usual foods — or have nowhere farther to go.
“It’s a really simple story that at some point you can’t go further north or higher up, so there’s no doubt that species will go extinct,” said Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, whose research last year predicted that a third of the 1,000 mountain birds he studied, or 300 species, would be threatened because warming temperatures would decimate their habitats.
Birds are good barometers of biodiversity because amateur birdwatchers keep such extensive records of their sightings. But other animals are similarly affected.
Two years ago, scientists blamed a warming climate for the disappearance of the white lemuroid possum, a niche mountain dweller in Australia that prefers cool weather, and that was cute enough to be the object of nature tours. Many scientists, suspecting that the furry animal had died off during a period of unusually extreme heat, labeled the disappearance the first climate-related animal extinction.
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Since then, biologists have found a few surviving animals, but the species remains “intensely vulnerable,” said William F. Laurance, distinguished research professor at James Cook University in Australia, who said that in the future heat waves would probably be the “death knell” for a number of cold-adapted species.
For countries and communities, the issue means more than just the loss of pleasing variety. Mr. Kiiru regrets the vastly diminished populations of the mythic birds of Kikuyu tribal culture, like buzzards, owls and hawks. But also, the loss of bird species means that some plants have no way to pollinate and die off, too. And that means it is hard for Mr. Kiiru to tend bees, his major source of income.
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Current methods for identifying and protecting threatened species — like the so-called red list criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a conservation gold standard — do not yet adequately factor in the impact of probable climate shifts, and the science is still evolving, many scientists say.
Some species that scientists say are at most risk in a warming climate are already considered threatened or endangered, like the Sharpe’s longclaw and the Aberdare cisticola in Kenya. The cisticola, which lives only at altitudes above 7,500 feet, is considered endangered by the international union, and research predicts that climate change will reduce its already depleted habitat by a further 80 percent by 2100.
Other Kenyan birds that are at risk from climate warming, like the tufted, brightly colored Hartlaub’s turaco, are not yet on watch lists, even though their numbers are severely reduced here. A rapid change of climate can quickly eliminate species that inhabit a narrow niche.
Photo
On a recent afternoon, Dominic Kimani, a research ornithologist at the National Museums of Kenya, combed a pasture on the Kinangop Plateau for 20 minutes before finding a single longclaw. “These used to be everywhere when I was growing up,” he said.
He added: “But it’s hard to get anyone to pay attention; they are just little brown birds. I know they’re important for grazing animals because they keep the grasses short. But it’s not dramatic, like you’re losing an elephant.”
As the climate shifts, mountain animals on all continents will face similar problems. Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley recently documented that in Yosemite National Park, where there |
bottom of the league. That's certainly going to be a situation where they're going to need an elite centerman.
"I do think he can play," Bylsma said. "But sometimes, for the development of the player, is it the best thing to go right in and play? It's a tough question. There are bumps in playing in the National Hockey League. It's going to be difficult."
Bylsma concurred that teenage hockey prodigies often meet the same fate as highly touted NFL quarterbacks: drafted by weak teams that can't offer adequate protection. Centers prosper when they're allowed to mature, much like the Patriots' Tom Brady or the Green Bay Packers' Aaron Rodgers.
"Look at [Montreal Canadiens forward] Alex Galchenyuk, who is an excellent center, but hasn't played center yet," Bylsma said. "It's the hardest position to play. I'd like to see Jack as a third-line center for a team -- not a first-line center -- when he starts."
The ideal situation for Eichel, Bylsma said, would be a team already strong at center, such as the Carolina Hurricanes, with the Staal brothers, Eric and Jordan.
Before Friday's exhibition, Bylsma admitted he hadn't seen enough of Eichel to judge whether he was NHL-ready. But after the first period, after Eichel scored his short-handed tally and almost had a second with a strong net drive, Bylsma updated his assessment.
"He's good," Bylsma said with a smile, pointing at Eichel. "That No. 9? He's good."— Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he has serious concerns over a bill that would legalize medical marijuana in New York just hours before the midnight deadline.
The Democrat stymied the efforts of supporters of the so-called Compassionate Care Act Monday, saying that the measure should ban smoking the drug, cut down the number of illnesses it can be prescribed for and require that the program be evaluated in five years.
“If we can address the concerns, there will be a bill,” Cuomo told public radio’s “Capitol Pressroom” while defending his suggestions. “But I’m not going to be part of a system that is just going to wreak havoc.”
Deadline Approaches For NY Medical Marijuana Deal
State Sen. Diane Savino, the Staten Island Democrat who sponsored the measure, said the bill already addresses many of Cuomo’s concerns.
Negotiations between Cuomo’s office, the Assembly and the Senate began late Thursday and are due before midnight so the Legislature can vote on the bill before the session concludes Thursday.
Savino told WCBS 880’s Peter Haskell she’s confident the bill will pass.
“We have certainly way more support than we need in the Senate to pass the bill,” she said.
Under the Compassionate Care act, smoking would be banned for anyone under the age of 21, although the drug could still be consumed through a vaporizer, edible or oil. The bill would also allow patients with one of 20 diseases to be administered marijuana under the supervision of a health care professional. Cuomo wants the legislation changed so only doctors could prescribe the drug.
Savino called Cuomo’s position on smoking marijuana a “nonstarter” and disingenuous, citing his executive order to allow 20 hospitals statewide to administer the drug.
“It’s a little distressing that they came in at the 11th hour with a list of concerns and demands,” Savino said. “Many of them are already in the bill.”
Gabriel Sayegh, of the state Drug Policy Alliance, also lashed out at the governor’s requested changes, first reported in the New York Daily News.
“It’s disappointing to have the news of these concerns come out at the very last minute in a leaked Daily News article,” Sayegh told The Associated Press. “It’s hard to imagine the governor’s serious about getting this done.”
While advocates doubt Cuomo’s commitment to the Compassionate Care Act, the Democrat said he would waive the required three-day period a bill has to be on a lawmaker’s desk before it can be voted on.
“Medical marijuana, if done well, is a good thing,” Cuomo said. “If it is not done correctly, it is a public health and public safety disaster.”
Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, who controls the upper chamber with a faction of Democrats, was noncommittal.
“I’m not ruling it out, not ruling it in,” the Long Island senator told reporters. “But I’ve learned never say ‘never.'”
A Siena College of 835 registered voters released Monday found that 62 percent of New Yorkers support legalizing medical marijuana as opposed to 33 percent who oppose the measure.
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(TM and © Copyright 2014 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2014 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)Martin guilty of child sex crimes
Updated
A jury in Hobart has found former Upper House MP Terry Martin guilty of child sex crimes.
Martin was found guilty of unlawful sexual intercourse with a young person under 17 and producing child exploitation material, but the verdicts were not unanimous.
The jury could not reach a verdict on a third charge of indecent assault.
The 54-year-old had denied all charges because he thought the girl was 18.
Martin responded to an advertisement for adult sexual services in September 2009 placed by the girl's mother and pimp Gary Devine.
He paid a 12-year-old girl $600 to perform sex acts and he photographed them.
Martin has been remanded in custody for sentencing submissions today.
It is understood his lawyer Peter Barker has told the court he will seek a non-custodial sentence.
He told the court the former MP poses no risk of reoffending because the medication he takes for Parkinsons disease, which causes hyper sexuality, has been changed.
Topics: sexual-offences, courts-and-trials, law-crime-and-justice, tas, hobart-7000
First postedLONDON — Libyan fighters declared victory over the Islamic State at its coastal stronghold of Surt on Tuesday, ending the extremist group’s ambitions for a caliphate on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.
“The battle is finally over,” said Reda Eissa, a spokesman for the coalition of militias from nearby Misurata that led the assault. “Our fighters are ecstatic. We still have to comb through the city and make sure we got them all, but we are so, so happy.”
The Libyan fighters’ apparent success was another defeat for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as its plans for a militant empire buckle on multiple fronts across the Middle East. In Surt, the Misuratan militias finally ousted the remaining Islamic State fighters from a cluster of houses after a grueling six-month assault that pitted suicide bombers and snipers against Libyan forces backed by American warplanes.
After moving into Surt in 2014, the Islamic State seized a 150-mile stretch of coastline and instituted a brutal reign that included public killings and the imprisonment of migrants as sex slaves. The city became a transit hub for fighters traveling to Tunisia, as well as a supply stop and medical treatment center for Islamists fighting in eastern Libya.Recently, G-LO was working the interwebz and received an offer from a PR firm in New York City that he couldn’t refuse. To be perfectly honest, any offer involving free beer or whisky is one that we will not refuse. We may not find that we like every product, but we will gladly accept it. Anyway, G-LO was offered a sample of Guinness’ Foreign Extra Stout and he then passed along a bottle for me to try. Having just returned from Ireland and sampling all the Guinness that I could, I felt that I was in the proper state of mind to try the Foreign Extra Stout.
Here is what Guinness has to say about the Foreign Extra:
Foreign Extra Stout is brewed with generous hops and roasted barley for a bittersweet balance & full-flavored, natural bite. Developed over 200 years ago for global export from Ireland, the addition of extra hops ensured this Stout would arrive to its destination in perfect condition. Today, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout is enjoyed by millions of people around the world.
And here are my impressions of the Foreign Extra…
Appearance: Black with ruby tinged edges, a lot of tan foam, and good lacing.
Black with ruby tinged edges, a lot of tan foam, and good lacing. Aroma: The smell of heavily roasted malt and a hint of coffee.
The smell of heavily roasted malt and a hint of coffee. Taste: Not as thick as I would have expected, creamy with a little sweet malt and dark chocolate followed by the burnt, roasted flavor of coffee and a slightly lingering, bitter finish.
Not as thick as I would have expected, creamy with a little sweet malt and dark chocolate followed by the burnt, roasted flavor of coffee and a slightly lingering, bitter finish. ABV: 7.5%
Truth be told, I am a huge fan of a good pour of Guinness, so I am not really as unbiased here as I would like to be. That said, the Foreign Extra was more like a Founders Breakfast Stout or a Snake River Brewing Zonker Stout than it was the more traditional Guinness. This was Guinness all dressed up and ready to go out, with more depth and complexity than the original. I thought it was very nice. If only I could find it on tap as readily as the standard issue Stout!
But wait! There’s more…
When I told G-LO that I would be working on this review, he said that he would drink his bottle ASAP and then send me his tasting notes to include in the review.
Late Sunday evening, G-LO sent the following photos:
Along with the photos, he sent me the following message:
As you can see, I was doing my usual beertography nonsense (aka “douching it up!”) before settling down to drink a beer. With the photo silliness finally out of the way, I was all ready to drink it, but as I was putting some stuff away in the kitchen, I turned, knocked the glass over, and spilled 85% of it on the counter. Many expletives were muttered under my breath (#2 Son was in the room with me when it happened)! Good thing I had this beer at the last Guinness event and remember it very well. I am 100% in agreement with your assessment. The Guinness Foreign Extra is the standard issue Stout on steroids! Rich roasted malt. A bit of booziness. Dark chocolate and espresso. To all those Craft Beer lovers out there that keep bashing the standard issue Guinness Stout on the multitude of message boards out there, you should definitely give this beer a try. It may just change your mind about Guinness.
So there you have it. Two positive reviews of a very delicious beer.
Have you had the Guinness Foreign Extra? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
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Thank you to Alice Hennessy of Taylor Strategy for sending us this very generous sample.Welcome to internet fame, ‘Damn, Daniel’ and friends! One day you’re riding high, feeling the love from social media, and pulling all the fly honeys in second-period English with your swag, and the next a SWAT team’s surrounding your house demanding you come out unarmed and with your white Vans on.
TMZ reports that the creator of the ‘Damn, Daniel’ meme has learned the hard way that the internet giveth and that it taketh away. Last night, it tooketh away (yes, that’s a word, autocorrect) when the home of the meme’s creator was surrounded by cops after receiving a report that the teen shot his mom in the head with an AK-47. Of course, the call was a prank and police arrived to find no one hurt or even aware that anything had happened at the Riverside, California, residence. But since the incident occurred at approximately 1 a.m., it’s probably safe to say that everyone inside was a little shaken up.
Is this the work of mastermind hackers or just kids at school fed up with the fame and fortune of Daniel and Co.? Maybe some other Daniels that just hate the meme so much they want to end it immediately? According to TMZ, police have no suspects and it’s unlikely any arrests will be made. Kind of hope that at least one cop at the scene — recognizing where he was — just slurred out a “daaaaaaaaamn” for good measure while the house was being searched, but considering that policing is serious business, they probably waited to do that until later.
(Via TMZ)Have you ever looked through someone's Instagram account and noticed that all of their images seemed to have a consistent color palette or style about them? If you've ever wondered how that is possible, give this video a watch. Sean Tucker dives into the details of how and why some creatives choose to present a consistent style, and then he goes on to process a small set of photos to show how it can be done.
I love that Tucker uses the example of cinema to show how color palettes are used across a wide range of images, for the entirety of a particular film. Styles like this are preconceived and planned for when filming, and fully processed in post for maximum effect to complement the feeling or mood of the film.
Tucker uses the Darkroom app, and you might recognize him from another video we shared recently, which was about creating dramatic black and white images for Instagram.
When editing your photos, an important thing to consider is defining your own style and look. When you see a photo or series that you like, that doesn't mean you should simply try to emulate what someone else has done. Developing your own methods for creating a look that you find desirable, and then continuing to refine and add to your portfolio with that consistent style, is going to go a long way in setting you apart from others. There are some good comments on the YouTube page that go into this, with more insight into why this kind of consistent approach is or isn't a good idea.BRIDGEWATER — A large crowd is anticipated for tonight's township planning board public hearing on the application to convert the old Redwood Inn off of narrow and winding Mountain Top Road into a mosque called the al-Falah Center.
The hearing will be held at 7 p.m tonight,. Monday, February 28, inside the performing arts auditorium at the Somerset County Vocational & Technical Schools, 14 Vogt Drive in Bridgewater.
Chughtai Foundation based in Pluckemin applied to the planning board for a permit to transform the 7.6-acre Redwood Inn property into a place of worship for followers of Islam. The land lies within a residential area where a house of worship is a conditionally permitted use.
The original application also includes plans for a daycare center and a school at the site. However, at least one media report indicates that the Chughtai Foundation has removed the plans for the school from its application.
Related stories:
Bridgewater ordinance could block proposed mosqueMapping Interactive Narrative
A few months ago I started working on the Narrative Design for a game called Eons Lost, currently in development by 3 Halves Games. Though Narrative Design was not initially an area of writing I gave much consideration, it ended up taking over my brain, and I want to share with you my methodology in approaching it.
Interactive Narrative is a consistent pattern of Objective and Reward.
The following diagrams are the first element in the methodology I am using to design the narrative of Eons Lost. I started with the basics: How do you organize Interactive Narrative?
Terms and Uses:
Objective:
Your Goal, what you or your character wants to do. Typically, the end objective is completing the story or winning the game, which often includes gaining skills or power, often by leveling.
Action:
Whatever the player has to do to complete the Objective. If the objective is “Collecting 10 Wolf Pelts” then the action would be getting those 10 wolf pelts.
Zone:
Zones do not necessarily denote geographical area, rather they are an abstract area within which non-interrupted action is reasonably possible. Any time you have to stop what you are doing to travel, wait for a loading screen, or for whatever reason stop completing quests, you have left the zone.
Conditional Modifications:
Anything that changes another objective or story element by virtue of completing an objective.
Objective structures:
Objective and Action that are found within a zone and not connected to each other. When you walk into a city in WoW and see a bunch of potential quests, this is a distributed grouping of objectives.
When there is an Objective that is not preceded by another, that objective has an implied action of having to actually find your initial objective.
You can find Linear Trees anywhere you are given a decision in a game. It is the embodiment of choice in interactive narrative.
Linear trees can be universal or exclusionary. Universal trees allow every option to be accessed regardless of which objective is completed first. Exclusionary trees only allow one line of choices to be accessed.
The most common objective pattern by a wide margin. Call of Duty, Bioshock, Last of Us, Arkham City, Portal; Any game that doesn’t allow you to make a choice in the narrative.
True Linear, though, is by no means a lesser form of interactive storytelling, but it is one that relies on a number of fixed points in your narrative. It is a good way of telling the story you want to tell, but often at the cost of replay-ability.
A form of objective pattern that requires the result of disparate objectives to access a new set of objectives.
Most objectives are conditional in one way or another, often by Level, location, affiliation, or other common flags.
If you want anything to be repeatable, it has to be cyclic.
The conditional modification in the cycle serves to change the conditions of the cycle itself, either by making the initial objective available again, or by changing some aspect of the cycle to make it more interesting to the player. Repetition is the enemy.
A narrative pattern where an initially large selection of objectives all eventually lead to a smaller selection of results
Mass Effect is a great example of this. Though it is an open world, you get guided along the narrative simply by virtue of following the action. When done right, it gives the player the sense of making their own decisions. When done wrong it comes across as railroading.
When an Objective’s source, the action leading up to it, crosses a regional boundary.
Any time an NPC tells you to “Go check in with _____ over at ____” that is typically an extra-regional objective. It is a great tool to get your player to start in on the next set of Objectives.
Lord Of The Rings Online has examples of both really good and bad extra-regional quests. On the better end, LOTRO will use them to guide the player to the next area, creating a more intuitive objective pattern. On the other hand, LOTRO has extra-regional fetch-quests, which require you to travel all the way across the absolutely massive map just to talk to an NPC.
When one line of objectives influences another
Often used when the actions of one objective line disqualify you from being able to complete another line of objectives
Often underutilized in creating a story that can influence itself. It helps provide a bit of realism when, if you save a group of soldiers, those soldiers help make another quest easier.
The End result:
This is an early draft of the first section of the Eons Lost demo, and its what my workflow looks like.
As an added note: You can play with the ‘resolution’ of your mapping. If you can define your narrative in 6 objectives, its a much easier matter to break those individual objectives out into a full narrative. Put simply: You can map your objectives on a Macro or Micro scale.
Addendum:
All of these objective patterns don’t exist in isolation of each other. Most stories are a combination of the available narrative forms. A story is more interesting to play if it defies repetition and rewards creativity.
And while this system works in describing Explicit Narrative, the story we want to tell the player, it doesn’t do so well in trying to map out Emergent Narrative, the story that a player creates for themselves over the course of the interactions.
The mistake that is often made in defining a Game’s narrative is that Emergent and Explicit Narrative exist independently of each other. Over the next few months I am going to be working with a very talented team of developers to not only
But the fact is, you can fill in Explicit gaps with opportunities for Emergent Play. The Arkham Series does this wonderfully. Though the Objective Progression is completely linear, it offers many varied ways to complete each instance. If you have to clear a room full of goons, there are many different ways you can do it, go all out and not care if they see you, or take down every last one of them without being seen.
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For those requiring additional reasons to show up at the running path or at the gym in the dreary heart of winter, science has come up with a compelling new motivation. Exercise can, it appears, keep your bone marrow from becoming too flabby.
This idea is the focus of a series of intriguing recent experiments by Janet Rubin, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina and other researchers. For the work, scientists removed bone marrow cells from mice and cultured them. The cells in question, mesenchymal stem cells, are found in bone marrow in both animals and people, waiting for certain molecular signals to tell them to transform into either bone cells, fat cells or, less commonly, something else.
After a stem cell differentiates, of course, it can no longer be anything else: once a fat cell, always a fat cell; once a bone cell, etc. So the fate of marrow stem cells determines the strength and quality of the bone. If a stem cell becomes a fat cell, then the portion of the skeleton to which it might have migrated as a bone cell will be that littlest bit punier. In a study published late last year by researchers at the University of Southern California, the femurs of healthy adults, some in their 20s, others past age 55, were scanned with magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers found that, in both young and old, the amount of fat in the leg’s bone marrow was inversely related to the amount of bone. The more fat in the marrow, the less bone in the thigh.
But what drives a particular stem cell to become a fat cell instead of a bone cell, and does exercise play a role? Earlier experiments by Clinton Rubin, Janet Rubin’s brother and the director of the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University, had shown that mice placed on platforms that were gently vibrating — in an approximation of the forces generated by the muscular contractions of a gentle stroll — developed more bone density than mice who just sat around. Closer examination of the marrow in these experimental mice found that specific genes and gene transcription factors had been stimulated by the vibrations and had, in turn, directed the stem cells to transform into bone.
Something similar happened when Janet Rubin worked directly with the stem cells themselves, even though she was setting them up to become fat cells. To that end, she and her colleagues bathed them in what she calls “a sweet soup,” a medium infused with extra insulin and other elements that normally would encourage the stem cells to differentiate into fat. “They love to become fat cells,” Dr. Rubin said. “It’s discouragingly easy to nudge them in that direction.”
But when the mesenchymal stem cells were stimulated with mechanical vibrations, when they were, in effect, exercised, they did not all become fat cells. “There was a really striking difference in outcomes,” Dr. Rubin said. Her earlier studies with high-magnitude mechanical signals closely approximated a brisk cellular jog. Now she applied lower-magnitude vibrations twice a day, with a rest period of several hours in between. Once again, the stem cells did not all differentiate into fat, even though their cell medium was highly fat-inducing. Dr. Rubin suspects that complicated issues of biochemical signaling underlay the stem cells’ response to the dual-dose regimen. She is currently completing experiments she says she hopes will clarify the mechanisms involved.
Already, though, the findings would appear to have compelling, real-world implications. If you don’t want fatty bone marrow and unhealthy bones, Dr. Rubin said, consider breaking up moderate-intensity workouts into several sessions interspersed throughout the day. Dr. Rubin herself often now works out twice a day for 30 minutes, rather than, as she once did, for a single hourlong bout. “This is the first time in my career that something I’ve done in the lab has changed how I exercise,” she said.
Many questions remain, of course. It’s not clear, for one, whether fat cells generated in bone marrow remain in the marrow or move around to pad, say, the thighs. It’s also not known how exercise affects stem cells located outside the bone marrow. Can it prevent the birth of fat cells all over the body? In Clinton Rubin’s experiments with mice, the vibrated animals wound up with less overall body fat than the control mice, but the reasons are unknown.
Still, one lesson is indisputable. Don’t sit still more than you need to, Dr. Rubin said, and don’t let your children loll about either. “One of the concerns raised” by these experiments, she said, “is that if you make fat cells when you’re young, then you’ve lost any opportunity to have that particular cell be bone,” and the fat cell will remain just that, for life.He has the most-watched YouTube video of all-time, an international phenomenon of a mega-hit in “Gangnam Style,” has made appearances on nearly every American morning talk show under the sun from Today to Ellen, and is scheduled to appear at a D.C. charity concert later this month with President Obama in attendance. It’s safe to say that Korean pop star PSY is now the “most-liked” entertainer on the planet.
It has recently been unearthed in the states, however, that eight years ago, long before achieving this massive stardom, the mega-star rapped about “slowly and painfully” killing American military members and their families.
Some context: since becoming a democracy in the late 80s, South Korea has developed a rich, sometimes over-the-top, tradition of protest. Swarms of Koreans hit the streets to protest everything from free trade agreements to North Korea to Muslim extremism to American troops stationed on their peninsula.
During a 2002 protest concert against the presence of 37,000 American troops in Korea, PSY took the stage in gold face-paint and, with the crowd egging him on, lifted a miniature “American tank” and smashed it on the ground to massive applause. UPDATE: The performance was inspired by the recent death of two Korean school girls who were run over by an American tank in South Korea. The soldiers driving the tank were acquitted by a US military court.
And then in 2004, a Korean missionary was captured in Iraq by Islamists who demanded that South Korea not send troops to aid America in the war in Iraq. Seoul refused to negotiate and the missionary was beheaded. The result: massive protests throughout Korea against both Muslim extremism and the U.S. military for indirectly bringing this fate upon a Korean missionary.
As part of the protests, PSY and several other popular Korean musicians put on a live performance of a Korean rock band’s song “Dear American.” When PSY’s turn came, he rapped:
Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully
As this particularly incendiary verse made its way to American news outlets, the outrage has grown. Conservative Twitter aggregator Twitchy sums up some of the anti-PSY anger, pondering why his anti-American military past was not discussed during his appearance on Ellen.
Think of all the musicians who’ve said unseemly things in their art: Ice-T rapped the perspective of killing a police officer years ago in “Cop Killer,” but he is now a star actor who portrays a police officer on NBC’s Law and Order: SVU. At the time, Ice-T said he was simply rapping from the perspective of another man — telling a story — and not calling for the actual murder of police officers.
On the other hand, Chris Brown and Eminem have rapped about violence against women… and have followed through on it in real life.
But as others have noted, PSY’s handling of his newfound global fame has been remarkably gracious. He hasn’t thrown up the middle finger and rejected his American popularity because of the Iraq War he rightfully found so deplorable (albeit with highly vitriolic rhetoric).
The question becomes: Would he have said the same thing today now that he has precious international stardom to preserve?
UPDATE: PSY’s publicist has sent an apology from the musician. View here.
UPDATE 2: Partial video has surfaced of one of the aforementioned anti-American military performances. Watch here.
[h/t HAPS]
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Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comNEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Bank of America's (BAC) Merrill Lynch last month reinstated its coverage of Tesla Motors (TSLA) with a "neutral" rating and a target price of $33. Earlier this week, Morgan Stanley (MS) raised its rating from "underweight" to "overweight" and increased its target price from $45 to $50.
Both reports included a fundamental financial modeling error that overestimates Tesla's year-end cash position by roughly 200%.
The error was simple. Both firms accounted for expected sales and expected new reservation payments during the second half of the year. Neither firm properly accounted for the fact that reservation payments and cash will decline by $40,000 for each Model S Signature Edition and $5,000 for each additional Model S Tesla deliveries this year.
Merrill Lynch forecast 2012 Model S deliveries of 5,000 units. Reservation deposits for the first 2,000 Model S Signature editions were $40,000 each for a total of $80 million. Reservation deposits for the next 3,000 standard Model S versions were $5,000 each for a total of $15 million more. Overall, the total Merrill Lynch error was $95 million. Morgan Stanley was more conservative at 2,230 Model S deliveries. So its error was $81 million.
As of June 30, Tesla reported $211 million in cash, $133 million in reservation payments, $31 million in working capital and $62 million in stockholders' equity.
In its report, Merrill Lynch forecast a second-half loss of $129 million and year-end balance sheet values of $149 million in cash, $242 million in reservation payments, a working capital deficit of $86 million and a stockholders' equity deficit of $54 million.
Similarly, Morgan Stanley forecast a second-half loss of $158 million and year-end balance sheet values of $132 million in cash, $169 million in reservation payments, a working capital deficit of $127 million and a stockholders' equity deficit of $74 million.
Since June 30, I've been cautioning readers that Tesla's working capital would be eradicated by the end of July, its stockholders equity would be obliterated by the end of August, and its planned cash low point left little or no room for errors, delays or other uncertainties.
I was surprised when two of the most highly regarded investment-banking firms in the country didn't share my reservations. Now I understand why and so do you. Their financial modeling was catastrophically wrong and Tesla's year-end cash balance is on track to come in at about a third of the estimates disseminated to their clients.Despite celebrating the club’s most successful season in their MLS history, Vancouver Whitecaps FC looked woeful on Sunday night en route to their 2-0 defeat in their first home playoff game, against rivals Portland Timbers FC.
The outlook of the game didn’t look entirely bleak for the ‘Caps at first, however, as Captain Pedro Morales was back in the starting eleven for the first time since October 9th after a hamstring injury, and right from kick-off Vancouver seemed to control the game.
20-year-old Gambian Kekuta Manneh looked to be the best player on the field taking numerous attempts on Portland’s goal, with his best attempt hitting the post and bouncing off Timbers’ goalkeeper Adam Kwarasey’s head and out for a corner. Unfortunately, Manneh’s incredible speed came back to haunt him, as he twisted his ankle sprinting towards Kwarasey’s goal. He seemed to be okay coming back on for a minute, but was finally substituted off in the 26th minute after being unable to continue. Veteran Mauro Rosales came on in his place.
After Manneh’s injury, the ‘Caps looked to become an entirely different team, seemingly losing all motivation. Five minutes later, after an incredibly poor defensive effort by right-back Steven Beitashour and Rosales on a free throw, the Timbers capitalised, with Fanendo Adi blasting a shot behind David Ousted.
With a one goal deficit and the away goals rule in place, the ‘Caps knew they needed two goals to defeat the Timbers after a 0-0 draw the week prior at Providence Park. Any motivation Vancouver had left after Manneh’s injury disappeared and the thousands upon thousands of Whitecaps supporters in BC Place were silenced with only the chants of the Timbers Army audible. Chants of “Can you hear the Whitecaps sing?” were loud and clear on the broadcast.
Going into halftime, things looked very bleak for Carl Robinson’s men.
While the ‘Caps seemed to play with more passion at the beginning of the second half, within minutes Portland had control of possession, and once again, the Whitecaps’ offence disappeared. Designated Player Octavio Rivero seemed invisible and ineffective all game. Not even two offensive substitutions, Darren Mattocks for Gershon Koffie in the 63rd minute and Robert Earnshaw for Beitashour in the 82nd, could help the ‘Caps, with Vancouver finishing the game with only two shots on target.
With Vancouver’s hopes of carrying on in the playoffs diminishing by the minute, Diego Chara sealed the win for the Timbers in stoppage time as Portland passed the ball through the Whitecaps’ lifeless defence, before Chara easily slotted the ball behind the helpless Ousted. Vancouver Whitecaps FC’s historic season was over, as the boys in white went out with barely a whimper.
What went wrong for the ‘Caps on Sunday? Quite a bit. Whether it was Manneh’s injury, Beitashour’s poor mistake that led to Portland’s first goal, Rivero’s lack of offence, the lack of passion from the Whitecaps’ supporters, or a combination of all of them, Vancouver saved one of their worst games of the season for when it mattered the most.
Stats:
Goals:
31’ Fanendo Adi
94’ Diego Chara
Shots: Vancouver 12 – Portland 14
Shots on Target: Vancouver 2 – Portland 5
Corners: Vancouver 5 – Portland 4
Offsides: Vancouver 0 – Portland 1
Fouls: Vancouver 18 – Portland 21
Passing Accuracy: Vancouver 73% – Portland 80%
Possession: Vancouver 46.6% – Portland 53.4%
Yellow Cards:
55’ Octavio Rivero
60’ Rodney Wallace
62’ Diego Valeri
72’ Steven Beitashour
89’ Robert Earnshaw
Line-ups:
Vancouver Whitecaps FC:
Substitutes:
Rosales for Manneh (26’), Mattocks for Koffie (63’), Earnshaw for Beitashour (82’)
Unused Substitutes:
Tornaghi, Smith, Dean, Teibert
Portland Timbers FC:
Substitutes:
Paparatto for Villafana (67’), Melano for Wallace (80’), Jewbury for Valeri (84’)
Unused Substitutes:
Gleeson, Johnson, Peay, Urruti
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Jacob Noseworthy Jacob is a second-year political science major at the University of Victoria, but he is also setting his sights towards a minor in journalism. He joined Northern Starting Eleven to combine his passions of soccer and journalism and to help promote and grow the sport in Canada. NSXI gives him the opportunity to refine and grow his writing skills, while also growing his love of the beautiful game. When he’s not studying, Jacob can usually be found watching soccer, whether he is supporting Vancouver Whitecaps FC from across the Georgia Strait or at Centennial Stadium cheering on the UVic Vikes.
Like this: Like Loading...A former male model-turned-elementary-schoolteacher sent out sexually explicit e-mails to potential hookups on Craigslist — but idiotically used a school e-mail account to do so, investigators found.
Upper East Side special-education teacher Matthew Maleski attached pictures of himself clad only in boxers to his e-mail responses to Craigslist’s notorious personal ads, according to officials.
The buff 32-year-old teacher, who was terminated from PS 183 on Tuesday, had formerly posed half-nude in ads for a gay social networking App called “Hornet.”
Maleski’s missives were uncovered because he used an account that he shared with a fellow teacher, who got disturbed enough by the content of the messages to confront him.
On Nov. 5, she told him she found at least five “e-mails that one could perceive to be inappropriate” on their shared account, which was intended solely for correspondence with families.
She told him she was bumping him off the account, and had already changed the password.
“[She] expressed that she was upset because, as she created the account, her name was associated with... Maleski’s inappropriate e-mails,” says a report by the DOE’s Office of Special Investigations.
Maleski, an untenured teacher who was hired by the Department of Education in November 2011, admitted to investigators that he had sent the salacious e-mails.
He also acknowledged that the attached photos were of him.
But he said he had sent the e-mails during non-work hours using his cellphone, which had automatically linked up a number of his e-mail accounts — including the one from PS 183.
The messages were sent on Sundays and early Friday mornings, investigators found.
“Those accounts must of [sic] interchanged accidentally,” he told his co-teacher in an e-mailed apology, according to the probe.
Investigators concluded on Jan. 14 that Maleski had “committed employee misconduct by sending inappropriate e-mail communications from an e-mail address that represents a DOE site.”
DOE officials did not immediately respond to a question about why it took them until this week — nearly two months later — to cut him loose.
They had redacted the titles of the Craigslist postings to |
code, 1.5 kilobytes minified, that sends information to the console. It could be attached to every function and prints out:
The function's execution place and time
Stack trace
Formatted and grouped output
Let's see what our example looks like, when we use Deb.js:
We again see the exact passed arguments and the stack trace. However, notice the change in the console. We work on our code, find out where the problem may be and add.deb() after the function's definition. Notice that the type of the err is placed nicely inside the function. So, we don't have to search for it. The output is also grouped and painted. Every function that we want to debug will be printed with a different color. Let's now fix our bug and place another deb() to see how it looks.
Now we have two functions. We could easily distinguish between them because they are in different colors. We see their input, output and execution time. If there are any console.log statements, we will see them inside the functions where they occur. There is even an option to leave a description for better function recognition.
Notice that we used debc and not deb. It's the same function, but the output collapses. If you start using Deb.js, you will very soon find out that you don't always want to see everything.
How Deb.js Was Made
The initial idea came from Remy Sharp's blog post about finding where the console.log occurs. He suggested that we can create a new error and get the stack trace from there:
The original post can be found on Remy's blog. This is especially helpful if we develop in a Node.js environment.
So, with the stack trace in hand, I somehow needed to inject code into the beginning and at the end of the function. This is when the pattern used in Ember's computed properties popped into my head. It's a nice way to patch the original Function.prototype. For example:
The this keyword in our patch, points to the original function. We may run it later which is exactly what we needed, because we could track the time before and after the execution. At the same time, we are returning our own function that acts as a proxy. We used.apply(this, args) in order to keep the context and the passed arguments. And thankfully to Remy's tip, we may get a stack trace too.
The rest of the Deb.js implementation is just decoration. Some browsers support console.group and console.groupEnd which helps a lot for the visual look of the logging. Chrome even gives us the ability to paint the printed information in different colors.
Summary
I believe in using great instruments and tools. The browsers are smart instruments developed by smart people, but sometimes we need something more. Deb.js came as a tiny utility and successfully helped to boost my debugging workflow. It's, of course, open source. Feel free to report issues or make pull requests.
Thanks for reading.Written by : SMTV24x7
Hambantota, July 11: Zimbabwe have won the Series against the Sri Lanka, here on Monday and clinched the Series with a thrilling knock.
The Team grabbed a win in the fifth and final ODI of the 5-match series by 3-wickets to clinch the series 3-2 in Hambantota after Sikandar Raza scored a six to conclude the contest. The result puts a massive block in their hopes of automatically qualifying for the 2019 World Cup
From this win, The Team Zimbabwe has given Shock to the Sri Lanka.This is the first time that Zimbabwe wins the series against the Sri Lanka, And creates the History.
Zimbabwe wins by three wickets, with the impressive bowling attack from Zimbabwe, the Sri Lankan team has been collapsed with a low score 203/8.
In response, they chased 204 runs in 38.1 overs losing 7 wickets. The win helps Zimbabwe to their first series win against Sri Lanka and first away series win in eight yearsThe cost of a controversial security fence being installed outside Canberra's Parliament House has to be kept secret because the price tag could aid a terrorist attack, according to the federal government.
Speaker Tony Smith and Senate President Stephen Parry have refused to release information about the 2.6 metre steel fence since last year, when plans for security upgrades and fortification across the sloping lawns were rushed through Parliament.
At Senate estimates hearings on Monday, officials from the Department of Parliamentary Services confirmed for the first time the location of the fence would be about one third of the distance up the famous lawn from street level.
When asked how much of the $60 million in security upgrades would be spent on the fence, Senator Parry said the information was sensitive and could only be explained in secret hearings.This photo provided by Galerie Westlicht in Vienna shows a Hasselblad 500 camera which was part of the equipment carried by the 1971 Apollo 15 mission and the only camera ever bought back from the moon
It was put on auction as the only camera that made it to the moon and back. And it had its price - nearly $760,000.The Hasselblad 500 sold over the weekend is described by Vienna auctioneers Galerie Westlicht as part of the equipment carried by the 1971 Apollo 15 mission - and the only camera ever bought back from the moon. It says the others were left behind to make room for mineral samples. Galerie Westlicht identifies the new owner as Japanese businessman Terukazu Fujisawa. It says the owner of an electronics chain placed his winning bid of 550,000 euros by phone. Bidding started Saturday at 80,000 euros - just over $110,000.For the first time in 17 years, I don't own a V8, or anything with a carburetor that doesn't have handlebars, spinning blades, or a pull cord. Of the five horribly impractical pieces of machinery clogging my driveway and garage at the moment, only one of them hails from the last century, and I've already yanked out its Precambrian guts with the intention of replacing them with post-Y2k innards.
This doesn't feel like me. I've spent more than half my life staring down a spread bore.
I sold the last of the old guard a week before my daughter was born. I'd owned my 1978 International Scout Terra for almost a decade after trading the owner a couple of days worth of labor and plucking it from a field. A long line of people had given up on that truck before I came along, but I was too stupid, or bored, or optimistic to do the same. Maybe all three.
I found myself driving home in a hammered Cummins that needed nearly everything a truck could need.
The Scout followed me from job to job, state to state. I asked my wife to marry me on the tailgate. When it came time to renovate our first house, I built a rack for the bed and used it to haul the old bones away and bring the new pieces home. It was doggedly reliable, but compromised in that way that all old machines are. The old IH 304 V8 in the nose drank fuel with a purpose, but produced less power than a Camry. It was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and as drafty as a hay barn all year around.
2003 Dodge Ram 2500 Zach Bowman
It was also woefully dangerous. After years of poking, prodding, and improving, it was as close to mechanically perfect as it could be, but it also had the crash structure of an apple crate. I'll gladly throw a leg over a motorcycle with one brake and a stuck throttle. The Scout was just as much of a gamble, but the thought of putting my pregnant wife in the passenger seat wore at the back of my mind. I flat out refused to put my daughter in the Scout. I wasn't worried about the truck. I was worried about the army of smart-phone addicted drones on the road around us.
So I sold it.
The plan was to replace it with something anonymous. Worthless. Something I didn't have to worry about leaving to rot outside in the rain. Something with ready parts availability. A Chevrolet. One with a stubborn gas motor and a back seat. I was willing to pay out the nose for a truck that didn't look like it had been flung into a quarry at some point. If it was reasonably sorted, all the better.
2003 Dodge Ram 2500 Zach Bowman
This meant accepting certain sacrifices. The Scout was a four-speed manual. Throwing that long lever from gear to gear felt like engaging some piece of ancient, and unknowable machinery. It clicked into place with a musical precision that was both addictive and satisfying. And it had all of the civility of a deep-sea trawler. The heavy, cast-iron V8 in the nose was beautifully industrial. International threw them in everything from dump trucks to construction cranes, generators to well pumps. The fact that it saw duty in a road-going passenger vehicle was both hilarious and fantastic. It was also why the truck had survived 37 years of abuse and neglect.
The Scout followed me from job to job, state to state. I asked my wife to marry me on the tailgate.
Opting for a modern truck seemingly meant accepting an automatic transmission and a consumer-grade engine. It meant wading into a pool of cheap plastic and power windows. It felt like the Wal-Mart age had finally caught me, and there wasn't shit I could do about it.
After driving a handful 6.0-liter V8s with blown head gaskets, missing exhaust manifold studs, and price tags on the far side of sane, I took a flier on something completely different: a 2003 Dodge with 281,000 miles on the clock. I didn't want a Dodge, a diesel, or a truck that needed anything beyond a quick hose-down and a trip to the fuel station. Instead, I found myself driving home in a hammered Cummins that needed nearly everything a truck could need: tires, wheel bearings, ball joints, u-joints, shocks, brakes, a windshield, and HVAC work. About the only thing that didn't need immediate attention was the drivetrain.
2003 Dodge Ram 2500 Zach Bowman
But oh, that drivetrain. The 5.9-liter, turbo-diesel inline six is a mule – a clamoring pile of pistons and torque. It's loud and uncivil. It feels like it got lost on the way to the tractor plant and wound up in a pickup instead. I love it. I want to put one in my vacuum cleaner. The fact that it puts out 555 lb-ft of torque in factory tune doesn't hurt; neither does the fact that it's bolted to a six-speed manual transmission. There's a floor-shift transfer case, too, and it puts power to two massive stick axles.
With its fully-boxed frame, this is as close to a modern take on the Scout as I can come. Not in dimensions or philosophy, but the feel of the thing. It's an honest truck built with no regard for concepts like "commuting," "connectivity," or "turning radius." It's a tool, not an accessory, and that makes me grin like a fool every time I hear it clatter to life in defiance of its odometer.
2003 Dodge Ram 2500 Zach Bowman
I miss my carburetors and dim-witted big blocks, but not enough to go back. The Dodge is a clear reminder that there's still space for good mules in a world full of show ponies and mortgage-rivaling MSRPs. You may just have to split a few knuckles to keep them kicking.ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Islamic State (ISIS) appointed a new governor of Mosul, to replace the former governor, who was injured in a US airstrike and last week died of poisoning while hospitalized.
“ISIS appointed Muhammad Hassan Shammari as the new governor,” said Ismat Rajab, head of a Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) for the Mosul region. He replaces Abu Talut, who was wounded in an US airstrike and later died of poisoning.
Members of the Mosul Brigades, a self-proclaimed resistance group, claimed last week that they had poisoned Abu Talut in hospital.
Meanwhile, the militants executed four locals because their fathers had fled ISIS-controlled territories. According to Sheikh Wajih Abdullah al-Jubouri, a tribal official in Nineveh province, the executions took place in the town of Qayyarah, and two of the victims were brothers, he said.Interview With Developers of SaberMod & Hyper Toolchains
To compile any Android project like a kernel or ROM, developers need to use a toolchain. As per elinux.org, a toolchain is a set of distinct software development tools that are linked (or chained) together by specific stages such as GCC, binutils and glibc (a portion of the GNU Toolchain). Toolchains may contain a debugger or a compiler for a specific programming language as C++ or other. Quite often, the toolchain used for embedded development is a cross toolchain, or more commonly known as a cross compiler. All the programs (like GCC) run on a host system of a specific architecture (such as x86) but produce binary code (executables) to run on a different architecture (e.g. ARM).
The most commonly used toolchain is GCC, initially released almost 20 years ago. A lightly modified GCC is used by Google during the AOSP build process. While Google’s GCC is considered to be the most stable toolchain around, it has some pretty decent competitors like Linaro and SaberMod. These projects are known to boost the overall system performance significantly on many devices. Let’s take a quick look to see the background of these projects.
The Linaro organization was founded in mid 2010 and almost instantly its developers started to work on many projects, including GCC-based toolchains for ARM. Android builds compiled with Linaro started to pop up a few months later. Ever since the Linaro group was founded, users praised it for decent performance improvements and overall snapiness. Linaro uses its own solutions and is constantly updated. You can download the newest version of the toolchain directly from the web page.
A few years later, in 2013, a developer named Paul Beeler created the SaberMod project. Initially the project was used on SaberMod ROM for the Nexus 7 WiFi model (2013). This continued onto the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 through help of user donations. The toolchains are based on GNU GCC 4.8, 4.9, and 5.0 with AOSP patches forward ported into GNU GCC. SaberMod also provides extra optimization features unlike Google’s toolchain, which gives options for a few amendments in the ROM itself to add more performance gains, such as graphite loop transformation optimizations. SaberMod tracks other utilities from GNU in the toolchain source components that are generally more up to date than AOSP or Linaro toolchains, and almost always tracks the development branches of GNU GCC for the latest patches and bug fixes. The toolchain ecosystem of SaberMod is very different from AOSP, using complex scripts to provide quick, up to date toolchains. Other toolchain sources like the AOSP based toolchain build repository have been heavily modified to work in favor of the way SaberMod toolchains are produced. I have approached some toolchain developers to ask a few questions.
If you could describe SaberMod in one word, what would that be and why?
Joe ( ): Optimization. I say this because it is our (the SaberMod team’s) main goal, not necessarily speed. While optimization can provide a great deal of performance and speed boosts, it can also do things such as shrink code or add specific tweaks that allow for better use of a device’s hardware.
A toolchain is not particularly easy to develop. Could you tell me what languages and tools are required to compile a project like SaberMod?
Joe: A lot of programs are required before one even builds a toolchain, just like Android. Things like bison, libpython-dev, the programs you only see in a guide on setting up a build machine to compile a ROM and then forget about. Also like Android, many repos and projects are needed, the main GCC code, BinUtils, GDB, MPFR, and MPC are the bare minimum, but for extra features and performance we add other projects and libraries like GMP, CLooG, ISL, OSL, and Python. This probably all sounds like nonsense, but think of these like the external folder in Android build source, the things in the background that make it work.
Adin ( ): As for languages, development does not require complete fluency of any coding language (though it surely does help a lot). Just knowledge of code structure and basic syntax can help someone produce great work!
Could you tell us why you chose toolchains? And what has been the most difficult situation you have encountered so far?
Paul: Initially I was interested in Linaro toolchain, but found there were quite a few bugs that were not present in AOSP’s toolchains. So the decision was made to create a new toolchain based strictly on GNU GCC, and AOSP toolchain sources, with Linaro ROM patches for optimizations for jellybean. Thus, SaberMod was born. More modifications in the toolchains and android system source came in the following years. The most difficult thing was making the toolchains compile similar to how AOSP does, and figuring out what versions of GNU utilities (binutils, gdb etc.) were needed to make the toolchains compile correctly.
SaberMod is not the only project you are working on. Can you tell us something about Hyper Toolchains?
Joe: Hyper Toolchains was originally just a page that I created on GitHub to help organize my own toolchains, so they aren’t just cluttered and thrown in with the rest of my repos, but after I started messing with toolchains more and more, I ended up making things that were quite a bit different from your standard SaberMod, Linaro, or AOSP GCC toolchains. Mixing aspects of Linaro and SaberMod broadened the range of things developers could do solely with toolchains. That’s when I decided to make a thread on XDA, so that devs could have more control over the speed and smoothness of their projects, not just have the speed and responsiveness of SaberMod or the smoothness of Linaro.
SaberMod and Hyper Toolchains are developed by a team of developers. Can you all tell us a little about yourselves?
Paul: My interest in android started with the G1 nearly 4 years ago. I had no experience in coding. I was interested in open source but had no idea where to start on making a ROM or kernel or anything for that matter. I started with experimenting with android bash scripting for native apps2sdext based on a developers work from firerat. This allowed more storage for apps which was very limited at the time (500mb for system and apps). Afterwards I continued this for the Evo shift 4g up until the Nexus 7 when the mod was no longer needed from storage restrictions. I also started some kernel development with the Evo Shift 4G by including other disk schedulers like BFS which no one else had done for the device at the time. I continued kernel development to the Nexus 7. But my kernel development is still considered low other than modifying things here and there to make the kernels compile with SaberMod toolchains, and optimizations. I currently own a Nexus 5.
Joe: Well, I started working on development stuff a little over 2 years ago with zero experience in coding, Linux, or Android. As a teen who had just upgraded from an old jailbroken iPod to a fancy new first generation Nexus 7, I decided to mess around with Android as much as I could, eventually compiling my own nightly builds with apps, scripts, and mods added. After a while I stopped when my Nexus 7 tragically shattered (RIP in pieces). Once I saved up enough to get a used GS3, I downloaded the latest source, actually got into working with ROM source, and started building a lot of the software on my PC too. I recently got a OnePlus One, which made developing a lot easier and gave me more motivation.
Adin: My first android project was created during the time I had a concussion and was out of school back in April 2014. When I finally got the OK to be on electronics, I decided to try out an android project and ended up making a custom kernel for the Moto G. I also had no knowledge of coding and Linux at the time. Some people say it’s crazy for a 15 year old to be able to do these things, but I see that as motivation to strive for better. With that, Joe and I have created a series of TGM-Hybrid Kernels. I can also solve a 3×3 Rubik’s Cube in 15 seconds on average. My current daily driver is the OnePlus One.
Thank you for your time and good luck with your projects!
SaberMod and Hyper Toolchains can be found on XDA and GitLab. Be sure to take a peek at them if you are planning to release your own custom ROM. What is your favorite toolchain and why? Share your thoughts in the comments below.(Photo: Jeff Donaldson / Flickr)
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On Tuesday night, 180,000 people tuned in to watch Wendy Davis’ filibuster on Senate Bill 5 in Texas. The bill proposed closing all but five abortion clinics in Texas, including all of those in the poorest, most rural regions, and would have banned abortions after 20 weeks.
It was an issue that affected thousands in Texas, and more, across the nation, as women’s reproductive rights continue to be debated. So it wasn’t surprising that 180,000 people wanted to witness the outcome of Davis’ filibuster which began at 11:18 AM and lasted more than 11 hours.
But where did these people watch the proceedings? Not on CNN, or MSNBC or even FOX News. None of those – or any mainstream media channel – was talking about it. Instead, these people flocked to a YouTube livestream hosted by the Texas Senate.
Without a news station commentary, viewers took to popular social media sites like Twitter to create their own dialogue using the hashtag #standwithwendy. The final minute before the crucial midnight deadline resulted in 4,900 tweets a minute, which was 4,900 more tweets than from any mainstream media source.
The political jargon used on the floor could be confusing to many. Without a journalist explaining what some of the rules, regulations and terms were, many viewers became confused. In fact, confusion was so rampant that even Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D-Laredo) asked for clarification.
Fortunately, both people outside the Texas Senate building and those watching from their homes used social media to disseminate information about what was happening to help other viewers understand everything from what Robert’s Rules were to why so many parliamentary inquiries were occurring. It was truly an example of citizen journalism at its finest.
The mainstream media and their investigative journalists failed again when chaos erupted in the final minutes of the filibuster. A vote was called for and questions arose regarding when, exactly, it was taken. Some claimed it happened before the midnight deadline while others said it took place after 12 AM. It was then when Americans and those watching internationally most needed someone to step in and find the answers. But the media stayed quiet on the subject, with large media outlets such as the Associated Press preferring to report on Channing Tatum and his new baby and CNN hosting a segment on the caloric dangers of muffins.
The confusion continued when the Texas Senate web site posted the vote as having taken place on July 26 (establishing the timing at after midnight). The web site was later edited to reflect a voting date of July 25, but not before some citizen journalists had captured the original entry.
And still the story went untold by mainstream media. There wasn’t even a reassuring message announcing that its editors, reporters and anchors understood there was confusion and were seeking the answers for their viewers, listeners and readers.
It wasn’t until more than two hours after the midnight deadline hit that the media finally started to pick up on the story. By then, the confusion was mostly resolved, with president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, announcing that the bill was declared dead – the vote had occurred after midnight. But even as news outlets started to retweet news about the ruling, the only live footage to be broadcast came from citizen journalist Christopher Dido‘s cellphone camera. He dutifully filmed everything and uploaded it to a streaming web site where people could view the chaos at the Texas Senate building. He’s received over 200,000 views as he stayed in the thick of things to act as the eyes for those waiting anxiously for news of the vote and whether it would count or not.
The people were awake and watching, so where was the media? They missed out on this historic moment and the public deserves answers, if not actual reporting.Justice Clarence Thomas joined in a majority opinion today sending the Supreme Court's affirmative action case back to a lower court.
But in a concurring opinion on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Thomas added his own take, arguing against affirmative action policies and comparing the school's justifications to those of Jim Crow-era segregationists.
Thomas says that the “University echoes the hollow justifications advanced by the segregationists" and that there "is no principled distinction" between the two.
It's a position he has staked out before; particularly in a 2003 case on the University of Michigan's affirmative action policies.
Here's a sampling of what Thomas said in today's opinion:
* “Finally, while the University admits that racial discrimination in admissions is not ideal, it asserts that it is a temporary necessity because of the enduring race consciousness of our society. Yet again, the University echoes the hollow justifications advanced by the segregationists.”
* “The University’s arguments today are no more persuasive than they were 60 years ago. … There is no principled distinction between the University’s assertion that diversity yields educational benefits and the segregationists’ assertion that segregation yielded those same benefits.”
* “The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.”
* “Unfortunately for the University, the educational benefits flowing from student body diversity—assuming they exist—hardly qualify as a compelling state interest. Indeed, the argument that educational benefits justify racial discrimination was advanced in support of racial segregation in the 1950’s, but emphatically rejected by this Court. And just as the alleged educational benefits of segregation were insufficient to justify racial discrimination then... the alleged educational benefits of diversity cannot justify racial discrimination today.”
* “It is also noteworthy that, in our desegregation cases, we rejected arguments that are virtually identical to those advanced by the University today. The University asserts, for instance, that the diversity obtained through its discriminatory admissions program prepares its students to become leaders in a diverse society. … The segregationists likewise defended segregation on the ground that it provided more leadership opportunities for blacks. … Indeed, no court today would accept the suggestion that segregation is permissible because historically black colleges produced Booker T. Washington, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prominent leaders. Likewise, the University’s racial discrimination cannot be justified on the ground that it will produce better leaders.”
* “The University also asserts that student body diversity improves interracial relations. … In this argument, too, the University repeats arguments once marshaled in support of segregation. … We flatly rejected this line of arguments in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Ed., 339 U. S. 637 (1950), where we held that segregation would be unconstitutional even if white students never tolerated blacks. … It is, thus, entirely irrelevant whether the University’s racial discrimination increases or decreases tolerance.”Triangulation is the first beer from The Curious series to get unique name and larger production
Fans of Creature Comforts The Curious series of beers will have a new beer to enjoy soon with the release of Triangulation. An adaptation and refinement of The Curious No. 3, Triangulation is a mixed fermentation ale fermented in third use bourbon barrels with blackberries. The beer also underwent a secondary fermentation with blackberries to complement the flavor
“Triangulation is a beer that only exists because of what we learned crafting The Curious No.3, and is the first of our second wave of barrel beers that are starting to come to maturity,” said Blake Tyers, the Wood Cellar and Specialty Brand Manager at Creature Comforts. “The Curious Series beers are experiments for us and just as scientists would use experiments to learn, we’ve adapted and experimented again.”
Creature Comforts says, “The beer is soft, balanced and clean and has a bright acidity in addition to flavors of almond, biscotti, tart cherry and blackberry. The various bright flavors lay on top of a nutty, oak base that brings structure to the flavor while also balancing out the beer’s acidity.”
Local artist and Creature Comforts tour staff member Melissa Merrill created the artwork for the label. Merrill derived the watercolor medium for the original artwork from blackberries.
The beer’s name was inspired by a portion of the Creature Comforts manifesto that states “craving curiosity leads you to discovering your passion”. Triangulation also incorporates the number three, an allusion to its roots in The Curious Series. It marries both themes – discovery and the number three – as triangulation is the historical method used to trace the distance between known points by using the points as vertices of a triangle or set of triangles. In addition, this beer has three primary aspects that lend to its flavor and aroma: the beer, barrels and blackberries.
Photos courtesy Creature Comforts Brewing Co.
Creature Comforts Triangulation
Style: Mixed fermentation Ale with blackberries
ABV: 8.6%
Format: 500 ml bottles
Release: April 21st at Creature Comforts brewery
Availability: Brewery only
Additional info:People will be speaking for quite a while about the the new Pew report on American Jews, and its depressing outlook for the future of any continuation of Jewish affiliation outside of Orthodoxy. One item, appearing at the end of Chapter Four, took everyone by surprise. Fifteen percent of ultra-Orthodox Jews reported that they attended non-Jewish religious services a few times a year. Huh? Can this really be true. The same figure was reported for Modern Orthodox Jews.
Given the sad factionalizing of the Orthodox community, we think we understand what is going on. Occasionally, someone from the yeshivish community will drop by a Young Israel. And a Modern Orthodox traveller in need of a late shacharis might, from time to time, try out a chassidishe shteibel.
This is as “non-Jewish” (r”l) as it gets. Riddle solved.
Not so funny are the real flaws in the report, some of which resulted in the serious under-reporting of Orthodox strength:
1) The clustering of Orthodox population in specific areas
2) The perhaps tens of thousands (or more) especially outside those areas who are strongly affiliated with Chabad. Those people will not call themselves Orthodox, put belong there for the purpose of the poll.
3) The not-so-new touchstone of Orthodoxy is Shabbos observance. Had that been built in to the poll, it would have shown far less defection from Orthodoxy in the past (where lots of people joined Orthodox shuls, but were not shomrei Shabbos, and were subsequently drained off by the growth spurt of Conservatism in the ’50’s-’70’s) Most of those who reported on Orthodox strength noted that defections from Orthodoxy among young people today had declined from the adult dropout rate of the past. Even the original Pew report underscored the difference. Someone at the Tablet got it really, badly wrong – or simply has it in for Orthodoxy.
4) No one ever comes up with perfectly articulated questions for polls, but something has to be wrong when only 76% of ultra- Orthodox respondents avoid handling money on Shabbos. What was unclear in this poll? The definition of “money,” “Shabbos” (maybe they meant before Rabbenu Tam on motza’ei Shabbos?), “handle” or “ultra-Orthodox?” Maybe we should have learned from previous polls that relying on self-identification is not the best way to go?The Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor issues a moratorium on demolitions around the country until January 2017
Published 6:35 PM, December 07, 2016
MANILA, Philippines – The Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PCUP) has suspended all demolition activities nationwide until January next year.
"We are issuing a moratorium on the conduct of all PCUP pre-demolition conferences around the country until January 2017," said PCUP Chairperson Terry Ridon in a statement on Wednesday, December 7.
Pre-demolition conferences are mandatory before any eviction can take place. Representatives of national government agencies, local officials, landowners, and affected families are required to hold talks.
The PCUP also called on other agencies and courts with pending demolition proceedings to delay them until the new year comes.
Ridon said the Christmas season should be a time for parties involved to amicably settle their differences.
"It is our hope that no family should suffer the indignity of forcible demolition proceedings as we enter the Christmas season," he said.
Ridon, a former lawmaker, also said the PCUP will not issue clearances for demolition if there are no existing relocation sites for affected families, or if there is no financial aid worth 60 days of a family's minimum wage.
President Rodrigo Duterte earlier promised informal settlers there would be no demolitions until relocation sites are provided for them.
Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco Jr is now in charge of the relocation projects for informal settlers as the new chairperson of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), following Vice President Leni Robredo's resignation last December 5. – Rappler.comFlorida joined the rest of the country this week in opting into a cost-free plan that aims to reform the way first responders communicate with each other while in the line of duty.
Gov. Rick Scott gave his signature of approval for the FirstNet Radio Access Network (RAN) buildout plan on Thursday, the final day of the statutory 90-day decision period. The plan calls for the development of a “highly secure” wireless broadband communications network for Florida's public safety community at no cost to the state.
“...Florida has decided to participate in the deployment of the nationwide, interoperable broadband network as proposed in the FirstNet State Plan, as amended,” Scott said in a letter Thursday. “I believe this is in the best interest for Florida taxpayers.”
The FirstNet buildout plan involves AT&T, in partnership with the First Responder Network Authority, an independent authority within the U.S. Department of Commerce, to create an “entire system of modernized devices, apps and tools for first responders.” AT&T will be responsible for deploying, maintaining and operating Florida's system for the next 25 years.
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The plan has been touted as an opportunity to create jobs, modernize public safety communications and drive network infrastructure investments, especially in rural areas that are currently underserved.
Established via the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, the First Responder Network Authority says it has worked closely with officials and public safety personnel in each state and territory for the past five years to address unique communication needs. A customized, digital plan was sent out to each governor for approval.
“Governor Scott's decision to join FirstNet equips Florida's first responders with the ability to communicate with priority and preemption at all times to help keep the public safe and secure,” said Mike Poth, CEO of First Responder Network Authority. “FirstNet gives law enforcement, fire and EMS personnel the technologies and tools they need to communicate with each other and across the diverse terrains when responding to emergencies.”
As of Friday, all 50 states, Washington D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have elected to participate in this nationwide communication initiative. The remaining three U.S. territories – Guam, American Samoa and Northern Mariana Islands – have until March 12, 2018 to decide whether they want to opt-in to the plan.
Beginning in 2018, the First Responder Network Authority will start issuing work orders to deploy RANs across the country, therefore giving AT&T the go-ahead to expand its wireless network. The additional bandwidth will go towards providing more “mission-critical connections” to those on the FirstNet network.
First responder subscribers will have access to “ruthless preemption services,” a fast-lane feature that is said to give emergency personnel higher network priority. When communication lines at large events become crowded, non-emergency connections are transferred to another line, “freeing up space for first responders to easily get through,” according to FirstNet.
However, FirstNet has said emergency calls or texts to 911 will never be shifted from the network.
“First responders have been very clear about their immediate need for preemption,” said AT&T Senior Vice President Chris Sambar. “During the collaborative conversations that shaped our FirstNet plan, preemption continually topped the list of mission-critical tools first responders wanted to see first on the network.”
Furthermore, FirstNet will attempt to drive public safety innovation in 2018 by allowing public input. A mobile application developer program designed for the creation of public safety-focused apps was launched earlier this year.
The program is expected to bridge the gap between the developer community and first responders by providing a space were innovation and collaboration can flourish.
“The FirstNet app ecosystem is an important building block as we work to modernize public safety's communications tools and capabilities,” Sambar said.
The program will allow developers to build, test, deploy and maintain first responder applications. Once created, developers will have the ability to submit their apps to be included in the FirstNet application store.
AT&T will be responsible for evaluating the performance and effectiveness of each application before making them available to public safety personnel.
FirstNet has said application developers can focus on areas such as, situational awareness, in-building mapping, records management, wearable devices and forensic intelligence. For more information on how to get involved in the FirstNet Applications Developer Program, click here.
“I applaud these governors for their decision and congratulate public safety for its advocacy and partnership throughout the process,” Poth said. “With more than 50 states and territories participating in FirstNet, public safety is assured of an enduring, self-sufficient network to serve them for years to come.”The paws of grizzlies fall in the same place over and over again, |
, without the rigid routine of a live-in facility, he eventually started attacking his brother. “I have holes in the bedroom doors from Phoenix trying to get to Mac,” Sally says.
The second two programs were tailored to children with autism, and there Phoenix found the help he so badly needed. He was 12 when he started the third program and began taking a new antipsychotic most often prescribed for bipolar disorder, called olanzapine (Zyprexa). And it was during the fourth residential program, when he was 13, that his doctors hit on what seemed to be a winning combination: olanzapine, valproic acid, guanfacine and atomoxetine. He was spending his weekends at home, but during the week he lived at a nearby residential facility where he could get the behavioral and community support he needed. “It was the first time he came home that, for a little bit of time, we really enjoyed his company; we’d get glimpses of the real Phoenix in there,” Sally says.
But a common side effect of Zyprexa is weight gain; the drug made Phoenix ravenous. “On weekends when he was home, he could empty out my freezer at 3 in the morning,” she says. Over the course of a year, the previously skinny child gained nearly 100 pounds. “He looked like he’d pop if you stuck a pin in him,” says his mother. “He’d just be sitting there and his breathing would be labored. We had to get him off the Zyprexa.” His doctor weaned him off Zyprexa and on to one antipsychotic that didn’t work, and then another, quetiapine (Seroquel), that did.
Credit: Keith Negley for Spectrum
Today Phoenix, 15, is on a four-drug cocktail and has remained stable for more than a year. His mood has remained stable, too. “The aggression is gone,” Sally says. His sense of humor has emerged, and he can sit still and watch a television program with his family or discuss something he sees on the news. He has also developed a sense of empathy. Now, when a child at his school acts up in a way that he might have done in the past, he tells his brother, “‘I owe you and Mom an apology,’” Sally says. “He’s seen it through other people’s eyes, and it’s been a real eye-opener for him.” For the most part, she says, he’s happy. “Out of the clear-blue sky, he’ll be in the kitchen and say, ‘You know, Mom, I love you.’ He’d never said that in his life.”
When new symptoms pop up, the temptation to switch medications can be hard to resist, especially because a complex prescription history can condition families to look to drugs first. But sometimes the solution is far simpler.
This past fall, Phoenix began falling asleep in class in the middle of the day. One of his earlier medications had had a similar effect — making him so drowsy he once fell asleep in the middle of lunch at a busy restaurant — so Sally was concerned. Was he falling asleep because he was crashing as a stimulant wore off? Or because a medication was suddenly causing a new side effect? The last thing she wanted to do was to tweak his finely tuned regimen.
Before taking him in for an assessment, she did a bit of sleuthing. “I bought a Disney Circle,” she says. “Best $100 I ever spent in my life.” The device monitors, and sets limits on, their home Wi-Fi network. It revealed that Phoenix had been getting up in the middle of the night and playing with electronics for hours. She set it to restrict overnight internet access — and suddenly Phoenix was staying awake through school again.
“It’s not uncommon for kids to be on more than one medication. The question is: Is it people fumbling around to try a little of this and a little of that and see if it works — or is it rational?” asks Lawrence Scahill, director of clinical trials at the Marcus Autism Center of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. When medication decisions are made judiciously and each one has a clear target, drug combinations can have a clear benefit. Under those circumstances, Scahill says, “I would say that there is such a thing as rational polypharmacy.”
Phoenix’s path, as winding as it has been, has brought him to a good place. He is an example of how polypharmacy, when attempted with attention, care and persistence, can provide people with autism the opportunity to thrive.
But finding and maintaining the right treatment regimen is still up to each physician, each family, each individual. “This is an experiment that’s going on, but it’s a completely uncontrolled experiment,” Scahill says. Ben, Phoenix, Connor: Each of them confronted different challenges and had to figure his own way through, because prescribing is still very much an art, not a science. Clear rules will be a long time coming, if they arrive at all.
Further Reading
This story was originally published on Spectrum.Talking Small
For the May language of the month, I got to play with a language that I've been looking forward to sinking my teeth into for a long time: Smalltalk. I've had a fascination with Smalltalk since I learned of it in college, but I didn't “get” it at the time due to lack of learning materials. Like Lisp, Smalltalk has multiple implementations to choose from; while Lisp implementations tend to be more like dialects (split across the Common Lisp and Scheme languages), Smalltalk implementations are more like separate languages that share grammar but differ in vocabulary. Many of the offerings are commercial; a few, such as Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, and Pharo, are free as in speech and as in beer. Pharo 5.0 recently came out, so let's give that a spin!
Learning To Talk the (Small)talk
Once you've downloaded and started Pharo, learning the language and the environment is pretty simple. You need only open a playground (a sort of scratch buffer for any kind of text, including code), type in ProfStef go, right click and click 'Do it'. This starts up an interactive tutorial that introduces you to the basics of the language and libraries. For a more in-depth Smalltalk education, I consulted Pharo By Example. It's a free book that covers the language, the Pharo libraries, and the tooling more in depth. Unfortunately, the version on that site is a little out of date; I recommend checking out the PDFs distributed in this GitHub repo for a more up-to-date experience. The preface to Pharo by Example contains this quote, which I think is very important to internalize as one is familiarizing oneself with Smalltalk. As someone who really likes to dig deep and learn how things work on why, I find this especially pertinent: Try not to care. Beginning Smalltalk programmers often
have trouble because they think they need to understand
all the details of how a thing works before they can use it.
This means it takes quite a while before they can master
Transcript show: 'Hello World'. One of the great leaps in OO is
to be able to answer the question “How does this work?”
- Alan Knight
Smalltalk is Small (ish)
Smalltalk as a language is very minimalistic; some boast that its syntax is simple enough to fit on an index card. This means that to deliver on power, it relies heavily on its standard library. The Smalltalk environment, which I'll cover briefly, is also extremely important - it's the part that Smalltalk is so famous for. The de-emphasis on syntax is why you won't see a lot of code in this post. One thing that interests me about the small size of the Smalltalk language is this: why don't more Smalltalkers write their own implementation as an exercise, the way that Lispers do? I'm guessing it has to do with the size of the standard library you'd have to reproduce to have something workable, or the tooling is too difficult to reproduce for a single person. It might also come down to culture - considering that quote from above, it seems that Smalltalkers have pride in leaving some work for others and focusing on what matters to them.
And Now For Something Completely Different
One of the reasons that people recommend learning Smalltalk is that everything is so different. You don't really have files to work with; your code is contained in native, living structures that you can poke and prod with tooling or snippets of code. All of your code lives in what's called an image; you can think of these sort of like Docker images, if you're familiar with those, but Docker images focus more on transience and immutable infrastructure. You can acheive that with Smalltalk images, but it also allows you to develop incrementally in a way that feels really natural. Even the tools you're given are citizens of this community of objects - you can inspect and modify them as you wish.
Tooling
Speaking of tools, Smalltalk has some of the best. Here are just a few examples of some of the incredible tools that Pharo ships with.
Method Finder
When you start working with Smalltalk, seeing all of the classes and their methods splayed before you can be a bit intimidating. “How do I convert a string to lowercase?”, you might wonder. You can use the browser to scan through the various string methods, or you can try the spotter to search for methods containing words like 'lower' or 'down'. You know what you want to do; you want to transform the string 'Foo' into 'foo'. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just ask Smalltalk which method(s) you can use to do that? Well, you can! If you open the Method Finder and click the box to search by example, you can enter the following, and the method finder will reply with 'Foo' asLowercase : 'Foo'. 'foo' I wanted to find a method to clamp a number to a particular range; here's an example of how I used the method finder to do that for me: method-finder.webm This makes me think of Haskell's Hoogle, only in a dynamically typed language, and driven by examples rather than types.
Coding in the debugger
I'm an admitted printf-debugger. I don't use debuggers themselves too often; I'll use gdb to examine the occasional core dump or segfault, but I tend to rely on printf. That being said, using Pharo's debugger was a fun experience. A lot of Smalltalkers talk about “coding in the debugger”, which means they write code that they know will fail, focusing on the higher-level details of the problem they're solving. A typical example is invoking a method you haven't written yet; when you're finished thinking at the high level and run the code, the debugger complains “hey, I don't understand this method!”, and politely offers to create the method for you. You don't need to do anything special for this - the debugger is always waiting to help you out. I feel like this is a strong embodiment of the Alan Knight quote from above. After you create and implement the method, you can tell the debugger to proceed, which will invoke the method you just wrote and your application will carry on its merry way. Here's a trivalized example of that in action: coding-in-the-debugger.webm
Ch-ch-changes
Let's say you're working on your Smalltalk program, and you do something silly like write an infinitely recursive function. That's one drawback to Pharo - it's single threaded (as far as the OS is concerned), and it implements its own scheduler, so if you bog down that scheduler, your entire environment will freeze. This actually happened to me while I was working on a program in Pharo, and my only recourse was to kill the VM. Imagine if while working in a more traditional language and testing your program, that your program locked up, and the only way to proceed would be to kill your REPL along with your editor. Fortunately, Pharo ships with a tool to pull you out of the fire here. Whenever you make a change to Pharo code, whether it's deleting a method, adding a class, or changing a method, that change gets logged in what's called a changes file. There's a tool to work with this file, which allows you to recover from a catastrophe. It also allows you to review the entire history of your image and all of your code within - to bring back my editor analogy from above, it's as if your editor had an undo history that persisted across invocations, forever.
Drawbacks
While working with Smalltalk is fun and a learning experience, there were a few things I didn't like so much. Long if/else chains are unwieldy. You end up with something like condition ifTrue: [ … ] ifFalse: [ condition2 ifTrue: [ … ] ifFalse: [ … ]], and it doesn't feel great. There's probably an idiomatic way of doing this that I'm missing, though. Classes are organized into packages to enhance searchability, but that's more like a convention - the namespace is flat. I wonder how often name collisions are a problem in the Smalltalk world! In Smalltalk, multi-argument methods use a keyword-like “split name” scheme, so instead of this: email.sendWithSubject(subject,'me@example.com') …you end up with this: email sendWithSubject: subject to:'me@example.com'. To me, this makes a lot of sense and enhances the readability of the language, but it's not perfect. There are no keywords in method calls - the method's name is'sendWithSubject:to:' - so if you want something like keywords, you need create a method for each combination of “keywords” you support. Because of this, some Smalltalkers tend to use setter methods and chain them together, like so: email := Email new. email subject: subject. email to:'me@example.com'. email send. "I'm a comment! There's a shorter way to write this since the invocant remains the same:" email := Email new. email subject: subject ; to:'me@example.com' ; send. I really enjoyed digging into Smalltalk, and I can't wait to share the program I wrote with you. Stay tuned for a writeup on that in the near future!
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.THANK YOU EVERYONE! <3 With all your support, we are now fully funded! We are ridiculously excited to get to work on continuing this story.
What is The Arcana?
The Arcana is a fantasy/romance visual novel for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac. You, the player, are an apprentice magician with a gift for fortune-telling. Left in possession of an unusually enchanted Tarot deck, you must navigate intrigue, murder, magic… and perhaps a few saucy encounters.
The name and gender of the protagonist is entirely up to the player’s imagination, and with a variety of characters to meet (and romance), The Arcana promises a more inclusive experience than your average visual novel.
Our goal is to start releasing the game serially via biweekly chapter updates.
Interested? You can play through the entire prologue for free:
✦ App Store (iOS)
✦ Google Play (Android)
What will the game feature?
✦ 3 different character routes, with more to possibly be added in the future
✦ Different endings to each route depending on the choices you make
✦ Romance for everyone—choose your protagonist's pronouns, and romance male or female characters
✦ Gorgeous illustrations at key points in the story
Who's behind the curtain?
Nix Hydra is a female-founded mobile game company making magical, colorful, bold products for young women and anyone else traditionally ignored by the gaming industry. Our office is located in Los Angeles, world capital of dream manufacturing and export.
Nix Hydra’s debut game, the virtual pet Egg Baby, has over 15 million downloads, and the sequel Egg! gained 2 million downloads a single month after its launch!
We’re overflowing with new ideas. Earlier this year, Nix Hydra reorganized into several smaller teams—Nix Hydra Labs—to develop more experimental projects. The Arcana has been developed almost entirely by a team of just two of us. If you want to see more, we can make the magic happen with your support!
What's in it for me?
By backing this project you will, of course, help bring The Arcana into existence! All reward tiers will receive access to the desktop (PC/Mac) version of the game, and we’re also planning some finely crafted extras that may entice you:
Be sure to check the FAQ section below if you have any questions!Solving problems
Every rock climber is un-knowingly an algorithm designer
Marc Rollin Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 23, 2015
Living in Paris, Tokyo and now Berlin, I’ve seen numerous climbing gyms sprouting up in the city. Bouldering, unlike sport or traditional climbing, is performed without ropes on a wall usually less than 6 meters tall. Initially considered a form of training for larger ascents, it later evolved into a separate discipline which gained significant traction with city dwellers over the past couple of years.
Although bouldering is typically seen as a physical activity, after a few sessions of climbing your way up the ladder of grades, you might realise that relying solely on your physical capacities can only take you so far. It is because, not only trying to overcome a physical difficulty, you are also asked to solve a problem designed by the route setter.
As a passionate climber and a logical-thinker, this is my take at explaining why I love bouldering and why it’s always been a motivation to overcome myself physically and mentally.(Photo: Mr. Johnson - The Ruiner/Flickr)
I mean this as the highest possible praise: Gold Fame Citrus, the debut novel by Claire Vaye Watkins, is a dreadful book.
I mean, of course, the knuckle-whitening, stomach-upsetting kind of dread. It suffuses almost every single page of this gripping story, which is set in a future America cataclysmically altered by drought and climate change. This is the kind of dread that makes you want to keep reading and stop reading in roughly equal measure, the kind that has you reminding yourself every 40 pages or so that other dystopian visions of the future—Blade Runner, Brave New World, 1984—never came to pass. So this one probably won’t either, right? you ask yourself, uncomfortably.
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The discomfort stems from the way that Watkins, who was raised in the American West (though she now teaches fiction at the University of Michigan), bases her particular apocalyptic scenario on a phenomenon that doesn’t seem at all fantastical or far-fetched. The primary threat in Gold Fame Citrus (the title refers to the trio of commodities that have long drawn dreamers to California) doesn’t come from an alien invader or a freedom-stripping, autocratic regime. Instead, and somehow more menacingly, it emanates from us: specifically, from our collective inattention to the dangers posed by carbon pollution and profligate water policy.
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Watkins was born, she told me recently, “just up the road from Owens Lake.” Los Angeles tapped this once-giant body of water in California’s Central Valley about a century ago to slake the thirst of the rapidly expanding city via the 233-mile-long Los Angeles Aqueduct. The indelible image of the now completely dry lakebed, which the author first witnessed as a child, must have informed her later depictions of a rainless, desiccated Southwest, completely enveloped by an ocean-size and ever-morphing sand dune. The Amargosa, as this sea of sand is called in the novel, is basically the Mojave Desert metastasized: Fed by the hospitably arid conditions of an unceasing drought, the Amargosa is able to grow and drift perpetually, indifferently laying waste to highways, towns, cities, even mountain ranges.
Growing up where she did, Watkins says she was surrounded by people who didn’t take water for granted—people who were inclined by history and hardship to regard the book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner’s classic non-fiction account of the Southwest’s water woes, as a bedtime story. “They talked about Owens Lake like it had been drained yesterday. And they talked about Lake Mead like it was going to be drained tomorrow. We were all aware that our life out there was fragile, that it depended entirely on these bodies of water that could be suddenly slurped up.”
In the story, a pair of young lovers, Luz and Ray, are forced to flee what’s left of a crumbling and largely vacated Los Angeles after they beneficently kidnap a toddler whom they (justifiably) consider to be in danger. With the child, they head east, their supplies of both gasoline and drinking water perilously low. When they reach the rim of the Amargosa, however, they are almost immediately bested by the dune, which has so fundamentally transformed the landscape that navigation by automobile is impossible. Ray leaves Luz and the baby, ostensibly to find help. Luz, for her part, tries not to dwell too much on the death and desiccation that surround her: papery yucca trees, “completely hollow, save for some dry, twiny marrow inside,” and the bloated carcass of a bighorn sheep, “float[ing], swaying slightly in the brine” of an appropriately hellish sulfur pool.
But perhaps even more dangerous than the life-sucking dryness of the Amargosa are those people who voluntarily call it home.
Gold Fame Citrus is the latest offering to come out of a budding genre that some call “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. Along with writers like Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson, Watkins is capitalizing on the advantage well-wrought fiction often has over non-fiction when it comes to winning hearts and minds. “Fiction is really good at activating the parts of us that are empathetic,” she says. “It helps us feel what someone is feeling. And I think empathy is essential to addressing the problem.”
The problem of resource management, especially as it relates to the real-life drought affecting her native Southwest, “is not a crisis of ingenuity. It’s a political crisis. There’s a lot that we could be doing that we’re not doing.” By attaching stories to our political and public policy decisions over water, climate, and energy, Watkins believes, we bring imagination into the problem-solving equation. Asking readers or viewers to consider the long-term effects of protracted drought on an ecosystem by showing them an extrapolative bar graph is one thing; asking them to consider these same effects by putting them in the shoes of a terrified young woman who’s desperately fighting for her life—and that of a baby—is quite another.
“I still remember the first time I ever saw the bathtub ring around Lake Mead,” Watkins recalls. “I was young, and it was easy at that age to imagine a big drain at the bottom, sucking out all the water. Later, of course, I found out that was exactly what had happened.”
Art imitates life; truth is stranger than fiction. The reason these clichés are called truisms is that they’re true. But as long as we’re tapping truisms for whatever droplets of wisdom they might yield, here’s another one: Hope springs eternal.
This story originally appeared on Earthwire as “Apocalypse Soon” and is re-published here under a Creative Commons license.The James G. Blaine Society is an unofficial organization dedicated to protecting the U.S. state of Oregon from overpopulation. It was founded in the early 1960s by writer Stewart Holbrook. The goal of the society is to discourage people from immigrating to Oregon. The society is named after James G. Blaine, a United States senator from Maine, because he never visited Oregon. The society has no organization, leaders, membership roster, meetings, or dues. However, the society was often mentioned in media articles about population growth in Oregon during the 1970s and 1980s.
Founding [ edit ]
The James G. Blaine Society was founded in the early 1960s by Stewart Holbrook, an author and journalist who wrote a regular column for The Oregonian. Holbrook wrote in a humorous blue-collar style that was very popular with readers. As a result, his career as a feature writer for The Oregonian lasted thirty-six years. Holbrook was also a well-known conservationist and advocate of sustained yield forestry. He was particularly concerned about Oregon's rapid population growth in the 1960s and the impact of unplanned development on the state's environment.[1][2][3][4]
Blaine is the society's figurehead, because he never visited Oregon
To highlight his concerns about Oregon's population growth and related issues, Holbrook created the fictional James G. Blaine Society. He highlighted its purpose in a humorous article in the 27 March 1962 edition of Look magazine, originally calling the organization the James G. Blaine Association.[5][6][7]
The organization was named after James G. Blaine, a U.S. representative and senator from Maine and perennial presidential candidate, because the senator never visited Oregon. In fact, during his 1884 presidential campaign, Blaine visited every state in the union except Oregon. The society was named in Blaine's honor to encourage others to follow his example of avoiding Oregon.[1][2][6]
Sharing Holbrook's concern that Oregon's rapidly growing population would have a negative impact on the state's environment, a significant number of Oregonians came to identify themselves as members of the James G. Blaine Society.[8][9] Over time, the society took on a life of its own despite the fact that it had no formal organization, no leaders, no membership roster, held no meetings, and collected no dues. The society's members were self-identified and generally good natured about their isolationist views. However, the success of this tongue-in-cheek group underscored real concerns within the state for issues arising from rapid and uncontrolled population growth.[7][8][10][11]
Come visit, but don't stay [ edit ]
After Holbrook's death in 1964, Oregon author Ralph Friedman became the champion of the James G. Blaine Society for a short period. While his book Oregon for the Curious captured the state's unique character, it was also a book some considered an advertisement for Oregon immigration. Friedman prepared a form letter to counter that impression.[12] The letter read in part:
“ Oregon is a lovely place to visit, but it is a mess to live in. After the tourists have left, it rains like crazy here. Mosquitoes are big as Sherman tanks. The people are unfriendly… and most of us are starving… Our freeways are jammed tighter than scorched rice pudding. Our smog is awful… some days you can't see from Molalla to Silverton. Fuel bills are so high most people just build igloos in the back yard and spend the winter there… There are no fish in the streams… and nobody has seen a rose around here for years. Actually what happens in the summer when tourists come is that we paint our hills green, put up false silhouettes for mountains, borrow a few lakes from Washington and California, and hire some actors to look cheerful. So… spread the word. Oregon is a great place to visit, but no place to call home.[12] ”
James G. Blaine Society ungreeting sign
In 1971, the James G. Blaine Society got a big boost when Governor Tom McCall invited tourists to visit Oregon, but then added "but for heaven's sake don't stay."[2][4][13] This public remark got national press coverage, and was even aired on the CBS Evening News.[14] The governor's remarks also created a demand for Oregon ungreeting cards, which were popular for many years. The most famous ungreeting card read: "Governor Tom Lawson McCall, on behalf of the citizens of the Great State of Oregon, cordially invites you to visit...Washington, California, Idaho, Nevada, or Afghanistan…"[10][15] The sale of bumper stickers with phrases like "Don't Californicate Oregon" also became popular across the state in the 1970s. The governor's "come visit, but don't stay" remark as well as the ungreeting cards and bumper stickers articulated the values of the James G. Blaine Society.[15][16]
In the early 1970s, a freelance writer from Portland named Ron Abell made an attempt to officially organize the James G. Blaine Society. Abell incorporated the society and issued membership cards.[2][4] However, only a small number of people actually paid to join. As the society's unofficial president and self-appointed spokesman, Abell received regular media coverage throughout the state.[17][18] In his speeches, Abell often highlighted the rain in western Oregon and the dry desert heat of eastern Oregon with comments like: "We had a good summer last year. It came on a Sunday so lots of people got to enjoy it."[4] As the subject of numerous articles in local and national publications, Abell eventually got more publicity than he wanted and he tried to disconnect himself from media coverage of the society.[18]
Heritage [ edit ]
In 1970, an article in Smithsonian magazine estimated that most Oregon residents claimed membership in the James G. Blaine Society. The article also speculated that the "James G. Blaine Society may end up as the most popular organization ever to come on the Oregon scene."[8] By the end of the 1980s, media interested in the James G. Blaine Society began to wane. Today, few outside the state are even aware of the society; however, many Oregonians are still familiar with the James G. Blaine Society and media articles occasionally mention the society. While it has generally disappeared from public view, the James G. Blaine Society remains an interesting part of Oregon history and culture.[1][3][14][19]
The Oregon Historical Society research library maintains a collection of society documents contributed by Ron Abell. The collection includes society related correspondence, membership lists, and newspaper reports.[19]
Society slogans [ edit ]
Come visit Oregon, but don't stay [13]
Don't Californicate Oregon [16]
See Oregon and then go home [2]
Keep Oregon green, clean, and lean [20]
Oregon for Oregonians [20]
When it's summer in Oregon the rain gets warmer [17]
You don't tan in Oregon, you rust [17]
rust The enemy flag comes in the colors of an out-of-state license plate [11]
Oregon—small, crowded, polluted…economy failing…cost of living soaring[11]
See also [ edit ]
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izing the sr-modeline-use-utf8-marks variable.
Here is the complete list of indicator icons (in ASCII and Unicode) and their respective meanings:
(ascii) (unicode) 1. Pane modes: * ☼ Normal mode.! ⚡ Editable Pane mode. @ ☯ Virtual Directory mode. T ⚘ Tree View mode (with tree extension). 2. Navigation modes: & ⚓ Synchronized Navigation. $ ♻ Sticky Search. 3. Transient states: # ♥ Contents snapshot available.
To get a copy of the Sunrise Mode Line extension (including installation and usage notes) go to:
The Tabs Extension
This extension brings tab‐based navigation to the Sunrise Commander. It adds to the list of optional mechanisms already available in Sunrise for moving around the file system (like regular bookmarks, checkpoints, history rings, materialized virtual buffers, navigable paths and file‐following) another way to maintain a list of selected locations one wants to return later on, or to compose “breadcrumb trails” for complex repetitive operations.
The main difference between tabs and other mechanisms is that once a buffer has been assigned to a tab, it will not be killed automatically by Sunrise, so it’s possible to keep it around as long as necessary with all its marks and state untouched. Tabs can be persisted across sessions using the DeskTop feature.
To get a copy of the Sunrise Tabs extension go to:
The Tree Extension
This extension adds to Sunrise a tree view of directories that can be used for extremely fast navigation, as well as for several basic operations on files and directories. It uses the excellent “tree-widget.el” library written by David Ponce, does work in the console as well as in graphical environments and offers three different sets of key bindings (mouse centric, arrow keys and alphanumeric keys) to easily adapt to a wide variety of usage patterns.
Navigation inside compressed archives (via AVFS) is supported in tree views (press # to toggle).
Here are two screenshots of exactly the same thing: one in graphical and the other in console mode (click to enlarge):
You can get a copy of this extension from:
The Checkpoint Extension: checkpoints for Emacs 23+
Beginning with version 4 of the Sunrise Commander, checkpoints were redefined to be a special form of bookmarks. Unfortunately, the differences between the bookmarks frameworks in Emacs 22 and Emacs 23 are so big that including this code directly in the sunrise-commander script would make it incompatible with Emacs 22. For this reason both versions of checkpoints are now provided as dynamically loaded extensions, so that you can decide which of them to use. To be sure, this is the version I intend to further develop, as it has a richer set of functions and integrates more nicely to the rest of Emacs. The other one is deprecated and will eventually disappear once Emacs 23+ becomes the “stable” release.
You can get a copy of this extension at:
The Old Checkpoints Extension: checkpoints for Emacs 22
Beginning with version 4 of the Sunrise Commander, checkpoints were redefined to be a special form of bookmarks. Unfortunately, creating bookmarks with custom handlers isn’t supported in the version of bookmarks.el distributed with emacs 22, so if you use Sunrise checkpoints and you don’t want to update your bookmarks.el, just add this extension to your.emacs.el to get back the original functionality.
To get a copy of this extension go to:
The Windows Add-ons Extension
Not long ago, a user of the Sunrise Commander FM on MS Windows asked me if there are any facilities in SC that would give him easy access to the different drives and special folders in this OS. Since there weren’t any I wrote the Windows Add-ons Extension.
This extension implements a listing of all Windows drives and special folders inside the Sunrise Commander, as well as support for symbolic links (shortcuts) for all file system operations inside Sunrise.
One caveat, though: this is only for Emacs ports that run directly on the Windows file system (like e.g. EmacsW32) if yours works on top of some simulation layer that maps the file system (such as Cygwin), you don’t need this code.
You can get a copy of the Sunrise Commander Windows Addons extension (including installation and usage notes) from:
Reduce Intrusion
If you use the mouse occasionally, the defaults might be confusing. Here’s how to disable “click to visit file” and “cursor follows mouse”.
(setq sr-cursor-follows-mouse nil) (define-key sr-mode-map [mouse-1] nil) (define-key sr-mode-map [mouse-movement] nil)
Perhaps Shift TAB gives you an error about ‘backtab’ being undefined? With only two windows, you can have <S-tab> or <backtab> behave like TAB :
(define-key sr-mode-map [backtab]'sr-change-window)
Comments and Suggestions
For the loop extension, is it possible to delete a directory asynchronously?
Is there some mailing list, project page or other way to report bugs?
There is a repository on github – if you have a github account you can report any bugs you find there. You can also write to the gnu.emacs.help newsgroup or directly to me: mailto:escherdragon@gmail.com
It would be great if sunrise commander was in ELPA.
Yes! now SC is available through ELPA (you will need a recent version of Emacs with support for multiple ELPA repositories). Just add http://joseito.republika.pl/sunrise-commander/ to your list of ELPA repositories: (setq package-archives '(( "ELPA". "http://tromey.com/elpa/" ) ( "gnu". "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/" ) ( "SC". "http://joseito.republika.pl/sunrise-commander/" ))) j.a.
I don’t know how much time you spent on this, but SR is just amazing. Thanks a million. With your permission, here are a couple of things which trouble my sleep: 1) How to make dired command to call SR instead, such that it would be available to other programs (ido for instance)? (The problem is that dired’s second optional argument SWITCHES does not appear in sunrise’s arguments list and also on my system is remapped by ido-dired which makes things even more complicated. I am a lay elisper, sorry.) 2) Is there a way to hide specific columns in SR buffer? Especially owner,user columns. They bring no useful information, and take a lot of space, keeping the names of the files outside of the visible area. Next are two things from my wish list (not vital in any way). 3) I love fuzzy matching. It’s strikingly similar to “anything” way of doing things. In “anything” buffer one can type the regexp and at the same time navigate with C-n C-p. To change regexp one needs to just start typing again. To dismiss the minibufer one presses C-g. In SR it’s slightly different, after C-c / I cannot change the string completely because by deleting the last character with Backspace will revert the buffer and once again C-c / is necessary to reenter the fuzzy mode. C-p C-n will introduce ^P ^C characters. C-g will accept the changes, which is slightly unusual😊. Would be nice to have a mini keymap for fuzzy filtering. 4a) Would it be possible to use find-grep C-c C-g and find-name C-c C-n on files and directories narrowed by previously called C-c /, C-c C-g, C-c C-n, C-c C-l? Actually it would be even better (more consistent) to be able to perform those operations on marked files & directories. 4b) How about igrep-find instead of just grep in C-c C-f? igrep-find offers the option to limit FILES searched by specifying the pattern. Grep would search for occurences even in binary files which slows down considerably the whole process and gives long lists. Thanks again for your work. Great job. RedBlue
Hi RedBlue, How much time have I spent on this? A bit, I guess – time passes way too fast when you’re in the flow ;) 1) I have slightly modified the sr-dired function in version 4R315 – you may want to try that instead (have a look at this tip). 2) Yes, try customizing variables sr-listing-switches and sr-virtual-listing-switches and read this tip. 3) That function is actually called “fuzzy narrowing”. How do you exactly imagine navigating through a listing while narrowing its contents? 4) I didn’t know igrep before - will have to have a good look at it 😊 Thanks for the tip. Update 2010-11-05: find can be now performed in marked directories too, the implementation uses the traditional find-dired, so no need to include any other external libraries. j.a.
Not RedBlue here, but here is my take on (3): - after C-c /, keep the currently selected file highlighted in the Sunrise active panel buffer - As user enters the pattern, if the currently selected file does not match the current pattern, select the first matching file. Perhaps center the Sunrise buffer on it. - On C-p/C-n, select and move highlighting to the next matching file - On RET, visit the currently highlighted file - On C-g, close the minibuffer, display all files (matching or nonmatching), keep the selection on the currently selected (matching) file. As another alternative, an option would be to do the same as above, except instead of showing only matching files (as is now the case) highlight them in a different color. C-p and C-n would still move back or forward through the matching files. In this case I guess one could keep the last match highlighted, and display the match string if C-c / is pressed again in the same buffer (reset if changed directory of course). And BTW, I just started looking at SC today, and it already looks like the file manager to use in linux… As an altap salamander user on windows, I also found rather convenient to define were C-f3/f4/f5/f6 for name/ext/time/size sorting, luckily it was easy to do. Another thing that would be nice is to have INS toggle select/deselect, rather than just select… --laxxy PS. Having worked a bit more with it, I am feeling it would have been really nice to have two modes of operation: (1) “navigation mode” where hitting a letter button would start filename pattern search (as in the previous alternative), and move the current selection to the first matching file or directory if it is not matching. Highlighting matches would be nice here I guess. Commands that start with alphanumeric keys would have to be either prefixed or just ignored in this mode of course, and (2) “command mode” which could be the current default. A user could then bind some easy key like “/” to switch between the two. The main reason is that one nice feature of this type of file managers is easy navigation through the directories/files by jumping to the first match. For example, if I have directories ~/xxx/yyy/zzz1, and ~/xxx/yyy/zzz2, and want to switch from ~ to ~/xxx/yyy/zzz2, in a typical two panel file manager (like the classic dos/windows file managers, mc, or krusader) I would do smth like “x RET y RET z C-n RET”. This is very much like completion, except the command is effectively executed in the panel as you type, which makes it more user-friendly. Having to press “C-c / x RET C-c / y RET C-c / z C-g C-n RET” is a bit too much, even if one re-binds “C-c /” to “/”… Perhaps there is a better way, but I have not found it yet 😟 If this sounds like too much work, having the active window automatically following the path typed in the minibuffer on “j” (the way the displayed file list changes on “C-c /”) would be somewhat similar… One thing about it is that since this is smth pretty common functionality in other file managers, I suspect many people might be doing this reflexively, and then scratching their heads trying to remember what were the commands they executed (I know I do)… e.g. in mc this functionality is case-sensitive (bad idea, but that is how it is), so if some former MC user has a directory named say ~/Data, and wants to switch to it in SC in this manner, some rather unexpected things might happen 😊
Hello laxxy, Thanks for your valuable comments ‐‐ your suggestions will definitely influence some version of Sunrise in the near future, so stay tuned. I still don’t think that extending the current fuzzy narrow function (C‐c /) is what you really want here, since it makes no sense navigating across a buffer which contents are being refined to contain only those entries matching your pattern ‐‐ all entries in the buffer do match, so moving to the next matching entry means simply moving one entry downwards. What I think you really want (but please correct me if I’m wrong) is rather “fuzzy search” ‐‐ something like the standard emacs search (C‐s, or C‐r for backwards, etc.) that would work for the same kind of patterns as fuzzy narrow, plus some way to keep that search mode active after pressing return for moving into the currently selected directory (if any). I’m assuming you already know about C‐s and friends in emacs and that that kind of search in Sunrise is not good enough for you. Actually I have written something a bit similar in the Tree Extension. Why don’t you give it a try (after customizing the sr‐tree‐isearch‐always‐sticky variable to make searches always “sticky”) and let me know how that works for you? j.a.
Hi, Good point about C-s, I feel stupid now. I certainly know about it 😊 I guess my brain goes into a “commander mode” rather than in “emacs mode” when I look at SC… It’s definitely more appropriate than C-c /. Now, if it were possible to keep the search mode on through navigation as you noted, that would be just about perfect I guess. I’m looking at the tree extension, it looks nice, but really not quite exactly what I had in mind, honestly I am not such a big fan of tree style navigation… One other thing: would be nice to have a way to open a file in an external application – e.g. if there is a pdf file, I might want to open it in an external viewer. mc and many other commanders have a file extensions association list which is probably the way to go, but for now the following works for me. Perhaps there is already such a function, but I didnt find it and basically copied C-t x: ( defun lx-sunrise-display-external () "Open file at point in an external application." (interactive) ( let ((file (dired-get-filename))) (call-process shell-file-name nil nil nil shell-command-switch (format "%s \" %s \" " lx-sunrise-external-viewer file)))) (setq lx-sunrise-external-viewer "xdg-open" ) (define-key sr-mode-map '[ \C -return] 'lx-sunrise-display-external) --laxxy PS. Currently, when Sunrise exits on “q”, it restores the window positions to where they were prior to Sunrise popping up; but if I visit a file (RET), it opens full screen. It would be much more convenient if it opened in the window that was current at the time of invoking Sunrise, keeping other window positions as they were. in that case Sunrise could be used as a much improved file open dialog window. …Looks like it was actually pretty easy to do by redefining sr-find-regular-file (below). Not sure if I have introduced any undesirable side effects… ( defun sr-find-regular-file (filename &optional wildcards) "Deactivate Sunrise and visit FILENAME as a regular file with WILDCARDS (see find-file for more details on wildcard expansion)." ( condition-case description ( progn (sr-save-panes-width) (set-window-configuration sr-prior-window-configuration) (find-file filename wildcards) (setq sr-prior-window-configuration (current-window-configuration)) (sr-quit)) ( error (message "%s" (second description)))))
Hi again, laxxy, Actually it was not the “tree-style” navigation (whatever can be so called) in the Tree extension what I wanted to draw your attention to when I suggested to have a look at the extension. It was rather a capability implemented in it called “sticky search”. You see, if you install the extension and customize a variable called sr-tree-isearch-always-sticky to be t (instead of nil, which is the default), then whenever you hit C-s you remain in interactive search mode even after you’ve pressed Return. Then you can do “x RET y RET z RET” to arrive to directory ax1/b2y/3cz – you have to press C-g to return to command (tree) mode, or Return one more time, to get the regular (browse) mode back. I think I’ll try doing something like that directly in browse mode (update 2010-10-02: this is already done). To open files in external applications look here for the recommended way of doing it. Regarding the modification in function sr-find-regular-file you propose, I don’t think anything can go wrong by restoring the previous window configuration. Is there anyone against it out there? If there isn’t I’ll make this the default behavior in the next release. j.a.
Hi, thanks a lot for your help and all the good work. I’ll take another look at the tree extension. BTW part of the behavior of C-c / feels a bit unnatural: say I have a number of files with an extension.sas and a bunch of files with extension.sas7bdat. Then on C-c / I can only enter a pattern up to.sa – after that it complains that there is nothing left to narrow, and it seems impossible to refine the filter further…
That’s because all the entries that matched.sa do also match.sas – try with further characters, e.g..sa7,.sab,.sat – j.a.
Ok, this is absolutely delightful. For more than 15 years I’ve been pulling up dired windows side by side in order to fake it. This. Just. Works. My workmates are jealous. Really good work, thanks a bunch. After a few more days of familiarity I’ll start adding in extensions 😊 Thanks very much. --MichaelWilson
That's because all the entries that matched.sa do also match.sas – I understand 😊 I just think that if it is not essential for some reason for the matching string to be as short as possible, it might be a good idea to allow the user to enter it, even though it would not actually change the display… Also I was stuck with this for a while: so this happened and I had the view narrowed, but it was not clear how to cancel this to see all files again (C-c / would just show an empty line) – apparently C-o C-o worked, but I would not say this was the most intuitive thing…
If it is not essential for the matching string to be as short as possible – it’s not strictly essential, but helps a lot to keep the implementation simple and robust. Never mind the message, just keep typing until you see in the pane what you’re looking for, then press Return. Besides, the current behavior has the advantage that for frequent narrowing operations you end remembering the shortest combination of keys that leads to the desired result (e.g. to narrow my ~/emacs directory to sunrise-commander.el and all its extensions, I usually type C-/ su- [RET]). To cancel the fuzzy narrow mode and see all files again simply press g (revert-buffer), possibly preceded by Return (or C-n, or C-p) to terminate the pattern input. It may not be intuitive for you right now, but after you’ve used Emacs a bit this will make perfect sense. One of the best things about Emacs the platform is that all – or at least most of – its applications have similar keybindings for similar operations (though at times the similarity may be hard to discern). j.a.
Perhaps, after all I just started working with SC. BTW, how do I match *.sas but not *.sas7bdat? thanks for the advice about “g”! honestly it does not sound that intuitive to me either 😊 maybe a line somewhere in documentation about C-c / would help. Personally I am not so sure about the consistency of emacs’ interface – I have actually been working in emacs pretty much daily for over 10 years now, and still there are some modes like the vanilla dired or gnus that I have pretty much given up on after multiple attempts 😊
how do I match *.sas but not *.sas7bdat? – hmm, that’s a tricky one. Try this (but do not start with C-/): %m sas$ [RET] tk or this: *. sas [RET] tk this is not Sunrise, but plain Dired saying hello 😊 maybe a line somewhere in documentation... – Darn right, thanks for spotting this omission. I’ve added appropriate comments in the latest revision. j.a.
Hi J.A. Thanks for all the tips above. Worked great! Also the sticky search is a marvelous idea! Can not wait to have it in browser mode. Now I see more clearly what I meant by navigation during fuzzy narrowing. I just wanted to avoid hitting RET after the narrowing such that C-n or C-p would accept the changes and start the movement of the cursor in the buffer. I’ve changed the code slightly in sr-fuzzy-narrow:... ( cond ((memq next-char '(?
? \r 14 16))... Worked for me 😊 I am not so sure about the consistency of C-g after C-c/ which accepts the narrowing. C-g cancels the action almost everywhere else in emacs. Would it be possible to customize C-g to revert the buffer? I could not figure it out. Thanks. – RedBlue
Hi again RedBlue, Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I’ve implemented both of them in the latest revision. – j.a.
Thanks for the update – very nice!! One small thing: the behavior after the new C-c / is a bit unusual in the sense that the highlighted (“green”) file is separated from the regular cursor, and hence C-n/C-p don’t move the “green” cursor (not sure what the right term is) in the manner one might expect. Also, would be nice to have a variable controlling whether to automatically turn off fuzzy-narrow on directory change. Also if you do get around to implementing the “sticky search” at some point, it would be nice to have an option to make it work starting from the beginning of line (ie. if I change to a directory with three files:a.sas, b.sas, and s.sas, and press “s” I want to selection to jump to the third file, which is what other file managers do). It might also be a good idea to put some kind of a visible indicator to show that the directory view is narrowed, maybe change the color of the “total used…” line or directory path, or something, perhaps show the filter pattern too? for example, one might cd to a directory in which nothing matches, then it looks normal, and when you switch back you might forget that there was a fuzzy-narrow filter set… PS. I think I just made my life easier by (define-key sr-mode-map “\C-s” ‘dired-isearch-filenames)! Now, I think what would be necessary for complete happiness is to have it turn on when Sunrise starts, when current directory changes, and when active panel changes (is there any good place for me to try putting a “(dired-isearch-filenames)” at?). We’d be pretty close to having the “dual mode” setup this way, perhaps in some ways even more intuitive than a typical standalone two-panel manager, the navigation mode being entered on C-s and exited on C-g, with C-s/C-r for forward/backward navigation among matches which is I think actually better than what I was originally describing a few posts back. --laxxy
I have just implemented sticky search in the latest revision Check it out, I’ve bound it to C-c s. @laxxy: to make it work from the beginning of line, just prefix the search with a space ;-) The green line is realized by hl-line-mode and is actually more an ornament than anything else, but I’ll have a look at that if I have a chance, just to see if anything can be done. What do you mean by “turning off fuzzy-narrow on directory change”? Yes, some visible indicator to show that the directory view is narrowed is indeed a good idea, but I think I’ll rather implement that in the mode line. Usually I try not to mess directly with the contents of the panes in order to minimize the chance of breaking anything in regular dired. (Update 2010-10-15: This is already done, see ModelineExt – when a buffer is narrowed, its “Contents snapshot available” flag is set to active). Personally, I prefer dired-isearch-forward over dired-isearch-filenames, because sometimes I also search for the name of a month, or some other piece of data displayed in the pane, and not only for names of files. is there any good place for me to try putting a (dired-isearch-filenames) at? – Maybe you could experiment with sr-start-hook (and/or sr-refresh-hook, but it may be overkill. YMMV) j.a.
Hi. I am new to Sunrise Commander. Looks very powerful! My problem: my screen is not so wide and my file names may be long. Therefore: is there a way to list file name, time, and file size, but NOT the mode bits and number of hard links? I am aware of variable sr-listing-switches, but I can’t find the necessary parameters of the ls command. Long listing (-l) shows more information than I want, without -l I can’t get size and time. Also, but not as essential, it would be cool to have columns file name, size, and date listed in that order (like I have in midnight commander). – Sven
Update 28-03-2012: Since version 5r414, the procedure for hiding selected attributes columns has been dramatically simplified. Check out the How do I hide (or modify) selected columns in the list of attributes? section in the Tips & Tricks page for more details. Another possibility is simply to use the vertical layout by default: press C-c C-s once and see if you like it. If you do you can do: M-x customize-variable sr-window-split-style [RET] choose the vertical layout and press the “Save for future sessions” button. j.a.
j.a., thank you very much for your fast answer and great help! I would prefer a different column order though. I am everything but a lisp expert, but if I understand your code, this could be achieved inside the while loop. I might try later when I find more time to really dive into sunrise commander. Again, thank you very much! Great work! – Sven
Hello again, Sven. Thanks a lot for noticing the error (the eval-after-load was an afterthought, but fortunately you got the idea anyway). I’m not sure whether “changing” the order or the columns (again, we cannot change them underneath, but I believe overwriting them should be possible) wouldn’t end being too complex to be worth the effort. I’ll give the idea a spin tonight when I’m back home and let you know what comes out of it. Of course, if you succeed in doing it by yourself I’ll be more than happy to know ;) j.a.
For interactively hiding/showing the attributes, I had some success with dired-details.el and Sunrise Commander. I had to modify ( defun dired-details-hide () "Make an invisible, evaporable overlay for each file-line's details in this dired buffer." (interactive) ( unless (memq major-mode '(dired-mode vc-dired-mode)) ( error "dired-details-hide can only be called in dired mode" )) to add sr-mode to the list of permitted modes, to stop it complaining ( defun dired-details-hide () "Make an invisible, evaporable overlay for each file-line's details in this dired buffer." (interactive) ( unless (memq major-mode '(dired-mode vc-dired-mode sr-mode)) ( error "dired-details-hide can only be called in dired mode" )) It doesn’t seem to have interacted badly with anything, though I’ve only just started using it. Tom
Hello Tom. Sunrise allows out of the box to hide the details: all you have to do is press C-Backspace (or C-c Backspace, if you are running inside a text-only console.) Sven’s question was a bit different, though – what he was asking for was a way to reorder the columns that compose those details. I haven’t had much time to think about it (sorry, Sven), but I’m afraid that task wouldn’t be an easy one, as it would require a layer of indirection between SC and Dired, and the gain doesn’t look to me like being worth such a big effort. j.a.
Hi Jose, I am the lucky SC user from the very SCrise, but only recently started to adjust it to the ultimate “the only one” file navigator. Must admit the only real hinder all this time was the inability to open with external applications. The solution with openwith does not work for me. Sometimes I open.pdf files externally and other times in emacs. The same for html files and images. The best thing for me would be to have a dedicated key (say “b”) for browsing files in external app. Here is a short rewrite of sr-browse-file with org-open-file: ( defun sr-browse-file ( &optional file) "Display the selected file with ` org-open-file '." (interactive) ( unless ( featurep'org ) ( error "ERROR: Feature org not available!" )) (setq file (or file (dired-get-filename))) ( save-selected-window (sr-select-viewer-window) ( let ((buff (current-buffer))) (org-open-file file '(16)) ( unless (eq buff (current-buffer)) (sr-scrollable-viewer (current-buffer)))))) Org is part of emacs and handles all sorts of situations properly, particularly it opens urls in the default web browser. See also org-open-at-point and org-file-apps for more orgish details. My second problem is that many times one of sunrise panes is covered, and I cannot get to the other-window (’C-x o’), Any ideas how to solve this? Also is there a way to restore sunrise window layout if one of the panes has been covered? [EDIT: I switched to two-panes style as suggested by Tom Short in the tips page. For laptops it’s great, and it’s more efficient in terms of navigation. Would be great to have an build in style for two-pane navigation. As an outsider, it seems to me that the 120 lines in popviewer and two-pane style could be integrated into sunrise, leaving only ‘sr-viewer-style’ for the user to customize the preferred style of navigation. My problem still persists - “\” doesn’t restore the panes. It’s bound to sr-lock-panes. ] Many thanks, RedBlue.
This has been addressed in the latest version of the PopViewer extension. See my latest update in the Alternative Usage Patterns section of the Tips & Tricks page for more details. j.a.
Hi, It’s me again. In TotalCommander there is a way to compute the sizes of the directories and display then alongside each directory (alt-shift-enter as far as i can remember). In SC one can compute the total size of the marked dirs, but apparently there is no way to display this info along side each directory. On a related note, there would be nice to have sorting of directories according to their size, not only files. Any ideas? Thanks, RedBlue
This is kind of hard, I’m afraid, as it would require fiddling with the way Dired displays its directory data. Give me some time to think about it, I’ll check what can be done. j.a.
Hi, thanks a million for SC! I have a question though. When rescanning a virtual buffer, the details of the files don’t get refreshed (e.g. size, modification time etc.) Is this by design, or am I missing something? Thanks. hajovonta
Hi hajovonta, This is by design, because the only way to refresh the buffer would be to re-insert all the entries in it, but a virtual buffer may contain entries that don’t exist anymore (e.g. you could have saved the buffer as a file months or years ago) but you may want to keep the entries anyway - refreshing the buffer would sweep them away. j.a.
CategoryDirectories CategoryEmulationWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans attacked President Barack Obama on Sunday for his comments on a controversial plan to build a Muslim cultural center in New York, saying he was “disconnected” from the nation in an election year.
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) speaks to the media about the election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts after a special election on Capitol Hill in Washington January 20, 2010. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Obama waded into the debate on Friday when he appeared to offer his backing for the center called Cordoba House to be built two blocks from the “Ground Zero” site of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City.
On Saturday, seeking to clarify his position, Obama said he supported the right of Muslims to build the center but would not comment on the “wisdom” of deciding its location in Lower Manhattan.
Prominent Republicans have opposed the proposed site of the center, saying it was insensitive and reopened the wounds of the attacks. On Sunday, several criticized Obama for what they said was his support of the center’s construction and subsequent waffling on the issue.
“This is not about freedom of religion because we all respect the right of anyone to worship according to the dictates of their conscience... but I do think it’s unwise to build a mosque at the site where 3,000 Americans lost their lives as the result of a terrorist attack,” Texas Republican John Cornyn said on the “Fox News Sunday” program.
“To me it demonstrates that Washington, the White House, the administration, the President himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America,” Cornyn said.
Peter King, a Republican congressman from New York who opposes the location of the center, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program that Obama clearly gave the impression he supported its construction but then backed off the next day.
“If the President was going to get into this, he should have been much more clear, much more precise and he can’t be changing his decision from day to day on an issue which does go to our Constitution...”
Obama’s remarks put him in the middle of a heated political debate months before November elections, which are expected to result in big losses for Obama’s Democrats and a potential power shift in Congress in favor of Republicans.
Earlier this month a New York City agency cleared the way for the construction of Cordoba House, a 13-story building that would include meeting rooms, a prayer space, an auditorium and a pool.
Some of the families of those killed in the attacks have mounted an emotional campaign to block it, calling the center provocative and a betrayal of the memory of the victims.
“It does put salt on the wound,” King said. He urged Muslim leaders behind the project to reconsider the location.
Supporters of the right to build the center, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, argue that religious tolerance is the best answer to religious extremism.
“The fallacy is that Al Qaeda attacked us. Islam did not attack us,” Jerrold Nadler, a Democratic congressman whose district includes the “Ground Zero” site, said on “State of the Union.”
“We were not attacked by all Muslims. And there were Muslims who were killed there.”
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll showed a majority of Americans across the political spectrum opposed the project being built near the site of the attacks.
The survey, released on Wednesday, showed nearly 70 percent of Americans opposed it, including 54 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of independents.
Republicans said the November elections will be about jobs, and that the president should be addressing high unemployment in the United States instead of speaking about religious freedom.
“Intellectually the President may be right. But this is an emotional issue and people who lost kids, brothers, sisters, fathers, do not want that mosque in New York and it’s going to be a big, big issue for Democrats across this country,” Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, told CBS’ “Face The Nation” program.Feb 10, 2017 | By Benedict
A team of researchers in Korea has used a 3D bioprinter to make a myocardial therapeutic patch for treating ischemic heart disease. When attached to the heart, the 3D printed patch can generate new blood vessels and tissues.
Professor Park Hoon-joon of the Seoul St. Mary's Hospital and professor Jo Dong-woo of the Pohang University of Science & Technology, two of the lead researchers on the exciting bioprinting study, announced the results of their research on February 9, claiming that their 3D printed myocardial patch could radically change the way doctors approach the treatment of ischemia, a condition that results in low blood supply to the heart muscles or other organs.
To create the 3D printed heart patch, the researchers used cardiac extracellular matrices as a 3D printable bioink, with cardiac stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells configured in a double-cell arrangement. A vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a signal protein that stimulates vasculogenesis and angiogenesis, was also introduced. The researchers say that this complex arrangement could hold the key to recovery from ischemic heart disease—at present, the five-year survival rate for patients is less than 50 percent.
The Korean researchers tested out their 3D printed heart patch by transplanting it into the heart-diseased epicardium (the part of the heart liable to cause heart attacks) of a number of lab animals. Once fully implanted, the 3D bioprinted patch was able to reduce the hardness of certain fibrotic areas affected by a lack of blood supply. The patch also increased the number of capillary blood vessels, with some of the new stem cells differentiating into myocardial cells.
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he regarded himself as "a double prisoner" which referred to both this blindness and the general isolation that he felt during his life.[11]
He started his career as a poet at an early age, at about 11 or 12 years old. He was educated at first in Maʿarra and Aleppo, later also in Antioch and other Syrian cities. Among his teachers in Aleppo were companions from the circle of Ibn Khalawayh.[10][11] This grammarian and Islamic scholar had died in 980 CE, when al-Maʿarri was still a child.[12] Al-Maʿarri nevertheless laments the loss of Ibn Khalawayh in strong terms in a poem of his Risālat al-ghufrān.[13] Al-Qifti reports that when on his way to Tripoli, al-Maʿarri visited a Christian monastery near Latakia where he listened to debates about Hellenistic philosophy, which planted in him the seeds of his later scepticism and irreligiosity; but other historians such as Ibn al-Adim deny that he had been exposed to any theology other than Islamic doctrine.[13]
In 1004–05 al-Maʿarri learned that his father had died and, in reaction, wrote an elegy where he praised his father.[13] Years later he would travel to Baghdad where he became well received in the literary salons of the time, though he was a controversial figure.[13] After the eighteen months in Baghdad, al-Maʿarri returned home for unknown reasons. He may have returned because his mother was ill, or he may have run out of money in Baghdad, as he refused to sell his works.[1] He returned to his native town of Maʿarra in about 1010 and learned that his mother had died before his arrival.[7]
He remained in Maʿarra for the rest of his life, where he opted for an ascetic lifestyle, refusing to sell his poems, living in seclusion and observing a strict vegetarian diet.[14] His personal confinement to his house was only broken one time when violence had struck his town.[13] In that incident, al-Maʿarri went to Aleppo to intercede with its Mirdasid emir, Salih ibn Mirdas, to release his brother Abuʿl-Majd and several other Muslim notables from Maʿarra who were held responsible for destroying a winehouse whose Christian owner was accused of a molesting a Muslim woman.[13] Though he was confined, he lived out his later years continuing his work and collaborating with others.[15] He enjoyed great respect and attracted many students locally, as well as actively holding correspondence with scholars abroad.[1] Despite his intentions of living a secluded lifestyle, in his seventies, he became rich and was the most revered person in his area.[7] Al-Maʿarri never married and died in May 1057 in his home town.[1][11]
Philosophy [ edit ]
Opposition to religion [ edit ]
Al-Maʿarri was a sceptic in his beliefs[16] who denounced superstition and dogmatism in religion. This, along with his general negative view on life, has made him described as a pessimistic freethinker. One of the recurring themes of his philosophy was the right of reason against the claims of custom, tradition, and authority.[11][17] Al-Maʿarri taught that religion was a "fable invented by the ancients", worthless except for those who exploit the credulous masses.[18]
Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The sacred books are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce.[19]
Al-Maʿarri criticized many of the dogmas of Islam, such as the Hajj, which he called "a pagan's journey".[20] He rejected claims of any divine revelation and his creed was that of a philosopher and ascetic, for whom reason provides a moral guide, and virtue is its own reward.[21][22]
His religious scepticism and positively antireligious views extended beyond Islam and included both Judaism and Christianity, as well. Al-Maʿarri remarked that monks in their cloisters or devotees in their mosques were blindly following the beliefs of their locality: if they were born among Magians or Sabians they would have become Magians or Sabians.[23] Encapsulating his view on organized religion, he once stated: "The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains."[24]
Asceticism and veganism [ edit ]
Al-Maʿarri was an ascetic, renouncing worldly desires and living secluded from others while producing his works. He opposed all forms of violence.[7] In Baghdad, while being well received, he decided not to sell his texts, which made it difficult for him to live.[1] This ascetic lifestyle has been compared to similar thought in India during his time.[15]
In al-Maʿarri's later years, he became a vegan, neither consuming meat nor any other animal products. He wrote:
Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up,
And do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,
Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught
for their young, not noble ladies.
And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;
for injustice is the worst of crimes.
And spare the honey which the bees get industriously
from the flowers of fragrant plants;
For they did not store it that it might belong to others,
Nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts.
I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I
Perceived my way before my hair went gray![17]
Antinatalism [ edit ]
Al-Maʿarri's fundamental pessimism is expressed in his antinatalist recommendation that no children should be begotten, so as to spare them the pains of life.[6] In an elegy composed by him over the loss of a relative, he combines his grief with observations on the ephemerality of this life:
Soften your tread. Methinks the earth's surface is but bodies of the dead,
Walk slowly in the air, so you do not trample on the remains of God's servants.[1]
Even on al-Maʿarri's epitaph, he wanted it written that his life was a wrong done by his father and not one that was done by himself.[7]
Modern views [ edit ]
Al-Maʿarri is controversial even today as he was skeptical of Islam, the dominant religion of the Arab world.[15] In 2013, almost a thousand years after his death, the al-Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaeda, beheaded a statue of al-Maʿarri during the Syrian civil war.[25] The statue had been crafted by the sculptor Fathi Muhammad.[10] The motive behind the beheading is disputed; theories range from the fact that he was a heretic to the fact that he is believed by some to be related to the Assad family.[25]
Still, al-Maʿarri is sometimes referred to as one of the greatest classical Arab poets. Some have drawn connections between him and the Roman poet Lucretius, calling them progressive for their time.[10]
Works [ edit ]
Poem from Luzūmīyāt, read in Arabic [26] The restrictive rhyme and meter can be heard in the start of poem 197 Problems playing this file? See media help.
An early collection of his poems appeared as The Tinder Spark (Saqṭ al-zand; سقط الزند). The collection of poems included praise of notable people of Aleppo and the Hamdanid ruler Sa'd al-Dawla. It gained great popularity and established his reputation as a poet. A few poems in the collection were about armour.[1]
A second, more original collection appeared under the title Unnecessary Necessity (Luzūm mā lam yalzam لزوم ما لا يلزم أو اللزوميات), also simply Luzūmīyāt or Necessities. The title refers to how al-Maʿarri saw the business of living and alludes to the unnecessary complexity of the rhyme scheme used.[1]
His third famous work is a work of prose known as The Epistle of Forgiveness (Resalat Al-Ghufran رسالة الغفران). The work was written as a direct response to the Arabic poet Ibn al-Qarih, whom al-Maʿarri mocks for his religious views.[12][27] In this work, the poet visits paradise and meets the Arab poets of the pagan period, contrary to Muslim doctrine which holds that only those who believe in God can find salvation. Because of the aspect of conversing with the deceased in paradise, the Resalat Al-Ghufran has been compared to the Divine Comedy of Dante[28] which came hundreds of years after. The work has also been noted to be similar to Ibn Shuhayd's Risala al-tawabi' wa al-zawabi, though there is no evidence that al-Maʿarri was inspired by Ibn Shahayd nor is there any evidence that Dante was inspired by al-Maʿarri.[29] Algeria reportedly banned The Epistle of Forgiveness from the International Book Fair held in Algiers in 2007.[7][25]
Paragraphs and Periods (Al-Fuṣūl wa al-ghāyāt) is a collection of homilies. The work has also been called a parody of the Quran.[1]
Saqt al-Zand
Risalat al-Gufran
Editions [ edit ]
Risalat ul Ghufran, a Divine Comedy. Translated by G. Brackenbury 1943.
Translated by G. Brackenbury 1943. The Epistle of Forgiveness: Volume One: A Vision of Heaven and Hell. Translated by Geert Jan Van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler. Library of Arabic Literature, New York University Press 2013.
Translated by Geert Jan Van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler. Library of Arabic Literature, New York University Press 2013. The Epistle of Forgiveness: Volume Two: Hypocrites, Heretics, and Other Sinners. Translated by Geert Jan Van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler. Library of Arabic Literature, New York University Press 2014.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]Kanye West's cousin Ricky Anderson has tragically lost his one-year-old son.
Anderson announced the heartbreaking news via Instagram, sharing a sweet photo of Avery.
'Today was the worst day of my life!! I lost my lil man and gained an angel! Rest in Paradise!!!! I love you man,' he wrote.
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Avery died in his sleep and there were no previous sign of illness or distress, according toTMZ.
Family tragedy: Kanye's cousin Ricky Anderson (pictured) has tragically lost his one-year-old son
Rest in Peace: One-year-old Avery died in his sleep and there were no previous sign of illness or distress
Anderson is from West's late mother Donda's side of the family and works as a consultant at Kanye's label, G.O.O.D. Music, in L.A.
He also shared several sweet videos of his late son, captioning one 'Missing him so much!!' and tagging the child's mother, Erica Paige.
The little guy was a prominent fixture on both his father and mother's Instagram posts, who appeared to shower him with love.
Avery had just celebrated his first birthday with a Disney-themed party.
Doting father: The grieving father posted this photo in easier times with the caption,'In love with this kid!'
Resize
Kanye has yet to comment on what is another tragedy following several difficult months for him and his wife Kim Kardashian.
Kim was robbed at gunpoint in October while attending Paris Fashion Week and in November - around the anniversary of his mother's death - Kanye cancelled his Saint Pablo Tour after an onstage breakdown.
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The breakdown, which saw a 15-minute rant attacking his friend Beyonce and begging Jay Z to call him, led to a stay in the hospital for 'temporary psychosis.'
Heartbreaking: Avery had just celebrated his first birthday with a Disney-themed party“They have to accept the court’s decision,” he said about Mr. Martin’s parents. “But they are praying that his freedom is only temporary because the pain Zimmerman caused them is going to last forever. They are never getting Trayvon back.”
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Mr. Martin, a high school student, was shot and killed on Feb. 26 while walking through the gated community where he was staying and where Mr. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer. The case incited a national uproar, including protests across the country, after the police did not arrest Mr. Zimmerman, raising questions about Florida ’s expansive self-defense law and racial profiling.
A special prosecutor, Angela B. Corey, was assigned to the case by Gov. Rick Scott amid criticism of the way it was being handled by local authorities, and she brought second-degree murder charges against Mr. Zimmerman last week.
Mark M. O’Mara, Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyer, said he had asked that Mr. Zimmerman be allowed to apologize privately to the parents, but the request was rebuffed. He said Mr. Zimmerman wanted to answer the three questions that he had heard Mr. Martin’s mother raise during a television interview.
“He answered very specifically the three questions posed by the mother: Why haven’t you apologized? Did you know he was a teenager? And did you know he was unarmed?” Mr. O’Mara said.
At the end of the hearing, which ran more than two hours, the judge, Kenneth R. Lester Jr., set bail and imposed multiple restrictions on Mr. Zimmerman’s release, including no contact with Mr. Martin’s family or with witnesses to the shooting. Judge Lester also banned access to alcohol or firearms, and ordered that his movements be monitored by an electronic bracelet. He set a curfew that would require Mr. Zimmerman to remain at home from 7 p.m. until 6 a.m. and ordered him to check in with the authorities every three days.
Mr. Zimmerman will not be released from jail for several days, Mr. O’Mara said, because it will take time to arrange financing for the bond and find a secure location for Mr. Zimmerman, who has received death threats.
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Testifying by telephone during the proceeding because of concern for their safety, Mr. Zimmerman’s family members, including his wife, Shellie Zimmerman, assured the judge that they would closely monitor his whereabouts and notify the authorities if they lost contact with him for any reason before his pending trial.
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As part of his effort to win Mr. Zimmerman’s release on bond, Mr. O’Mara challenged the prosecution’s case, going through the state’s probable cause affidavit line by line, turning the bail hearing into what appeared to be a foretaste of the trial.
He aggressively questioned a state investigator, Dale Gilbreath, about the accusation that Mr. Zimmerman had racially profiled Mr. Martin, and he demanded to know what evidence the state had for the statement that “Zimmerman confronted Martin and a struggle ensued.”
“Do you know who started the fight?” Mr. O’Mara asked Mr. Gilbreath.
“Do I know?” Mr. Gilbreath said. “No.”
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. O’Mara then asked Mr. Gilbreath if the state had any evidence to contradict Mr. Zimmerman’s statement to the police that he had been making his way back to his car when he was punched by Mr. Martin. Mr. Zimmerman told investigators he shot Mr. Martin in self-defense after Mr. Martin banged his head on concrete, covered his nose and mouth and reached for his gun.
Mr. Gilbreath responded, “No.”
While on the stand, Mr. Zimmerman was sharply questioned by Bernardo de la Rionda, an assistant state attorney.
“Do you agree that you changed your story?” Mr. de la Rionda asked, referring to the five separate statements that Mr. Zimmerman gave the police about the shooting.
“Absolutely not, “ Mr. Zimmerman replied in a firm voice.SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- A TV and radio personality and three others were arrested Tuesday in connection with an alleged child prostitution ring that was busted two years ago in El Salvador.
Maximiliano Gonzalez, better known by the stage name “El Gordo Max,” or “Fat Max,” directs the program “Domingo Para T2.”
His detention was first announced on Twitter by the prosecutor’s office and later confirmed by Violeta Olivares, head of the Unit on Illegal People-Trafficking.
Gonzalez was in custody and unavailable to the media, and no lawyer had yet appeared representing him. He is suspected of the crime of paying for sexual acts with a minor.
A businessman returning from an overseas trip and two others were also arrested.
The case is related to the August 2014 arrests of members of a ring that allegedly prostituted minors to broadcasters and businesspeople.
Prosecutors say youths from 13 to 17 years old were led to believe they were getting work in modeling and advertising, but instead they were sold for sex, anywhere from $50 to as much as $300 if they were virgins.
Prosecutors say Gonzalez had cooperated with the administration of the previous chief prosecutor and received preferential treatment as a cooperating witness. They allege that in exchange, the clients of the ring were not investigated and only those who trafficked the minors were prosecuted.
Chief Prosecutor Douglas Melendez ordered the prosecution of Gonzalez and an internal investigation of the institution’s handling of the case.HELL NO: Births, Deaths and Marriages said no - three times - to the name Lucifer.
Meet our new son. We call him Lucifer. Or we would have if the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages hadn't knocked the name back.
The list of baby names queried or rejected by the official registry in the past two years shows the agency is at least being consistent. There were three attempts to register Lucifer (all rejected), and one would-be Messiah was also declined.
The list runs to 102 and consists mainly of names rejected for being too close to titles – Baron, Bishop, Duke, General, Judge, Justice, King, Knight. One couple wanted to call their child Mr.
Religious-themed names were rejected on the grounds of causing offence and several others were rejected for not being words.
One proposed name was `89', another was *, and one was. (full stop). Another keyboard-inclined parent tried to call their child / (presumably he/she would be known as "Slash"). Single letters – C, D, I and T – were declined, though J and q were queried but later accepted.
The Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act says names can be declined for causing offence, being over-long or "without adequate justification" resembling an official title or rank.
Other names that were queried but later accepted included Fanny, Jnr, Shady and Nevaeh (heaven backwards, which, curiously, was the 31st most popular girl's name in the United States in 2007).
Though Lucifer and Messiah were rejected on taste grounds, the Sunday Star-Times struggled to find anyone offended by the names.
Judy de Leeuwe, an atheist at the Rationalists and Humanists Association, said she was not offended and she did not know why Births, Deaths and Marriages would reject them.
Lyndsay Freer, spokeswoman for the Catholic Church in Auckland, said some Christians could object to the name Lucifer, but since millions of Spanish speakers called their children Jesus, she did not see how the name Messiah could be offensive.
Lucifer comes from a Latin expression meaning "light-bearer" and was the name given to the dawn appearance of the planet Venus, which heralds daylight. There was originally no connection to the devil.Halo 3 is coming to PC. Eight years after Master Chief’s last great multiplayer playground hit the Xbox 360, it’s coming alive, for free, on the PC—but not at the hands of Microsoft. Or Bungie. In one of the strangest things to happen on PC this year, Halo 3’s protracted PC birth is coming from a group of modders transforming the free-to-play, Russia-only beta Halo Online into their favorite Halo game.
For years, Halo was a crucial console-exclusive system-seller for Microsoft. When it finally came to the PC again earlier this spring but was region-locked, fans moved fast. They created Eldorito, a mod that cracked the Russia-only restriction within a week of Halo Online’s reveal. Named as a portmanteau of El Dorado, the name of the Halo Online executable, and Dorito, Microsoft’s favorite corporate sponsor, Eldorito has been programmed over the past few months by a group of between ten and twenty modders. Because Halo Online is built over the top of a more-or-less complete version of Halo 3’s engine, the Eldorito modders have been working to pull what they really want from the shell of Halo Online: Halo 3 on PC. I spent a week chatting with one of the modders to learn more about a project that, for better or worse, is the only version of Halo we’re likely to get on PC any time soon.
The Dorito
The Eldorito version of Halo Online doesn’t have a website. If it did, Microsoft would likely detonate it with a lawyer-bomb—as it proved this spring when it issued a DMCA takedown notice on in-game video recorded with the mod. Instead, Eldorito has a subreddit, which directs you to a shared Google Doc, which links you to an executable posted on the New Zealand-based file sharing site, Mega.
Once you download the file (named, naturally, Halo.zip), and run the Eldorito updater, the game is severed from the servers that run Halo Online as a standing, free-to-play service for Russian players.
I tracked down modder Sam Fish through his work as one of the developers of Dewrito, a mod that connects the cracked Halo Online program to multiplayer servers. I asked him to walk me through what exactly the mod does to get Halo Online running. “The Halo Online build that we are building off of had a timer that would shut down the game after 15 seconds if not connected to their servers,” he said. “We just had it load into an offline mode with the Halo Online UI, and from there we were able to load up Halo 3's UI, which was leftover in the code, which allowed us to access things like Forge, LAN multiplayer, and custom games.”
Image via redditor rexadde
For people like Fish, the allure of a Halo game on PC was huge. These long-time fans were introduced to Halo or Halo 2 on consoles, then moved over to PC and brought their love of Master Chief with them. Hearing that a new Halo worked on PC was enough to light the fire. If Halo works on Russian PCs, it will work on every PC—and there’s no DRM in the world that can stop that from happening.
“Hearing that Halo Online was more or less a modified version of Halo 3's multiplayer had me extremely excited,” Fish said. “Of course, my excitement was quickly killed when I saw some of the ‘features’ that Halo Online was bringing to the Russian market.” When Fish uses scare quotes around “features,” he’s talking about the free-to-play mechanics and microtransactions—but not just that. “[I’m also referring] to the complete lack of a game that Halo Online is on its own. Not only does it have only three maps not from other games, it has no single player component, no Forge, and from what I have seen, no custom game support.”
That disappointment made him get involved with the project. “Just the idea that we could possibly get Halo 3 on PC was exciting enough for me to join the project, and others saw it as a great starting off point to create a new Halo Custom Edition.”
Luckily for the modders, Halo Online turned out to be more than a slimmed-down version of Halo 3. It is Halo 3 with a few quick memory blocks to discontinue features—probably only a temporary measure for the beta test. By editing Halo Online’s files, the Eldorito team is slowly bringing parts of Halo 3 back online. “I am not someone who does reverse engineering, but it is really tedious,” Fish told me. “The developers are doing an awesome job re-enabling tons of features taken out in Halo Online, like Halo 3 equipment and dual wielding, which are both currently being tested.”
Splitscreen in Halo Online. Eat your heart out, Halo 5. (Image via redditor M0niak1.)
Growing pains
It sounds relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s going smoothly so far. Twenty people working to crack a game the size of Halo 3 is bound to cause some problems. Whether it’s a somewhat involved multi-step installation process, the release of Windows 10, or the infinite variation in PC users’ hardware and software specs, a bi-weekly bug report thread on the subreddit is consistently full of hopeful players asking for help.
“Every time I try to connect to a server I get into an endless loading loop,” writes one user. “The game doesn't want to start,” writes another. After a week of correspondence with Fish, I’ve also been unable to get into the game and check it out. For all the drama and whining, though, there are also videos showing players getting online and exploring various maps. Multiplayer matches look frantic, twitchy, and, well, a lot like Halo 3. For every person who can’t seem to get online, there are others already there, making insane headshots and blowing things up with Covenant tanks.
The haphazard nature of the mod installation process is untenable, but the Eldorito modding team know it. Fish and the other modders knew that getting multiplayer working would be a big challenge, and now they recognize that making the game more user-friendly is the next step to growing a community around the cracked game. “Our current challenges involve finding ways to make Eldorito more accessible to people,” Fish said, “by adding things like plugins and working on custom menus to wrap everything we have made … Eldorito has come a long way [as far as] usability, and I think that [the] updater has helped a lot to make it easier to install.”
Eventually, the goal is for Eldorito to become a stable, moddable version of Halo 3 on PC. “I feel strange saying I want an almost ten-year-old game on my PC with nothing new, but there is something about Halo 3's simplicity that I enjoy,” said Fish. “I think that having Eldorito at least getting to Vanilla Halo 3 status would be an insane starting point for modding and going crazy with the game. We have already seen an insane amount of support with the community with people making Forge maps and mods and posting them on our subreddit almost daily. I think that if our community stays this awesome, Eldorito will have an amazing year.”
Correction: This article originally identified Sam Fish as the lead developer of Dewrito. This was a mistake. He is the one of the several developers of Dewrito, and the lead developer of the Dewrito Launcher.
On the next page: where Microsoft stands on the legality of modding Halo Online.Glory Head Coach Kenny Lowe was left more than satisfied with his side's performance in Wednesday's 3-2 friendly defeat at the hands of reigning Hyundai A-League champions, Sydney FC.
A rare goal from Marc Warren gave the visitors an early lead in the game that was played behind closed doors at Leichardt Oval, before Dutch defender Jordy Buijs levelled things up.
Three minutes later, Brazilian striker Bobo made it 2-1 to the hosts and although Adam Taggart drew Glory level with his fourth goal of the pre-season campaign early in the second half, Bobo duly bagged what proved to be the winner 13 minutes from time.
The game marked Xavi Torres' debut for Glory and the Spaniard's display was one of many positives Lowe took from what was an entertaining and hard-fought clash.
"We played really well," he said. "We got about 60 minutes into [Diego] Castro and Xavi and 45 minutes into [Jacob] Poscoliero, which was good.
"It was an excellent, high-level game and a great test. Sydney looked good, but we matched them all over the park and the game was played in a really good spirit and at a really good tempo.
"There were a lot of very promising signs and we created numerous opportunities which was very pleasing."
Warren may still be waiting to bag his first Hyundai A-League goal, but he showed the predatory instincts of a seasoned strker when opening the scoring against his former club.
Chasing down an under-hit backpass, he beat goalkeeper Andrew Redmayne to the ball before calmly finding the bottom corner.
And fellow-defender Scott Neville then also took the opportunity to showcase his attacking prowess, providing a headed assist for Taggart who was left with a simple tap-in to make it 2-2.
Bobo was played in superbly by substitute Anthony Kalik to seal the win for the hosts, but Lowe remains confident that his charges are on track to hit the ground running when they return to the Harbour City to face Wanderers on October 8th.
"We're travelling well," he said. "And we didn't pick up any fresh injuries today either, which was good. We did lose Joseph Mills, but that was because he was taken ill before the game.
"We’ve now got a two-week lead-in to the season, so we’ll try and organise another external game if we can and also have an in-house game to make sure we get two more run-outs before we start the league campaign.
"And if we can’t organise that external game, we’ll just have two in-house."
Match Details
Sydney FC 3 (Buijs 29', Bobô 32', 77') Perth Glory 2 (Warren 11', Taggart 53')
Ground: Leichhardt Oval
Referee: Kurt Ams
Sydney FC: 1. Andrew REDMAYNE (GK), 4. Alex WILKINSON, 5. Jordy BUIJS, 6. Joshua BRILLANTE (22. Seb RYALL 72'), 7. Michael ZULLO (16. Anthony KALIK 63'), 9. BOBÔ, 10. Milos NINKOVIC, 13. Brandon O’NEILL, 17. David CARNEY, 18. Matt SIMON (19. Chris ZUVELA 86'), 26. Luke WILKSHIRE (8. Paulo RETRE 37')
Substitutes Not Used: 30. Tom HEWARD-BELLE (GK), 29. Cristian GONZALEZ
Yellow Cards: None
Red Cards: None
Perth Glory: 33. Liam REDDY (GK), 3. Marc WARREN, 4. Shane LOWRY, 5. Jacob POSCOLIERO (6. Mitch NICHOLS 46'), 7. Joel CHIANESE, 8. Xavi TORRES (31. Callum TIMMINS 72'), 9. Andy KEOGH, 17. Diego CASTRO (19. Joe KNOWLES 66'), 20. Jake BRIMMER, 22. Adam TAGGART, 23. Scott NEVILLE
Substitutes Not Used: 13. Nick FEELY (GK), 16. Joseph MILLS
Yellow Cards: None
Red Cards: None
#CREATEDESTINYFergie Olver is a Canadian former game show host and sportscaster. He is best known for co-hosting the 1980s children's game show Just Like Mom with his wife Catherine Swing, and his work as a broadcaster and dugout reporter for the Toronto Blue Jays. Olver's daughter, Carrie Olver, is known for her work on shopping channels and The Weather Network.
Career
Olver began his sports career as an outfielder in the minor leagues, then with Saskatoon/Medicine Hat in the semi-pro Western Baseball League. He began his broadcasting career in the Moose Jaw/Regina area. In 1969, he moved to CFCF-TV in Montreal and then to CFTO-TV in Toronto. He spent the remainder of his broadcasting career with the Blue Jays (1981–1996), covering games on CTV, TSN, and BBS. In 2004, he was nominated for the Ford C. Frick Award.[2]
He appeared in the 1971 film Face-Off as a member of the press.The first two Heijmans One houses went up on a vacant lot in Amsterdam last month.
Courtesy of Reinout van den Bergh
To battle a tight housing market in Amsterdam that is hard on an ever-increasing number of single renters, Dutch building company Heijmans (which also built this dreamy Starry Night–inspired bike path in the Netherlands) has come up with a clever idea: planting prefab pop-up rental houses on vacant city lots that offer singles design-friendly, affordable, quality temporary housing in urban centers.
These movable dwellings are designed to rent to young, single-person households for a reasonable 700 euros ($788) per month as temporary residences located on vacant lots that are in redevelopment limbo and otherwise eyesores on urban landscapes.
The prefabricated houses can be installed on-site in 24 hours. Courtesy of Heijmans
Each two-story house is roughly 484 square feet and is equipped with a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and loft bedroom. They are designed to be airy and light, with high vaulted ceilings, big windows, recycled wood facades, and outdoor terraces.
“The prevention of a homogeneous ‘Construction Site Trailer’ complex was one of the biggest challenges in this type of movable housing,” architect Tim van der Grinten of MoodWorks Architecture said in a project description. “How can we give the occupant a sense of individuality? The architecture of this compact house is characterised by natural materials, space, openness and identity. It is a clearly recognisable property that you can make your own. It is a space a young single person can be proud of.”
A view of the upper floor bedroom. Courtesy of Reinout van den Bergh
Living room. Courtesy of Heijmans
The kitchen. Courtesy of Heijmans
Arjan Hofmann of Heijmans told me in an email that the project was inspired by young professionals in the Netherlands who make too much to qualify for subsidized housing but can’t afford high city rents and aren’t yet able to buy, as well as a way to spruce up vacant urban areas. He said that Heijmans may expand the project to other renters, such as middle-aged and older people who live alone, those seeking short-term housing during renovations, or expatriates on temporary assignments.
The houses are prefabricated and can be installed on-site in 24 hours and easily moved. Hofmann says that the average length of a lease is expected to be about five years, although that would depend on the landowners and city regulations. The houses have an expected lifespan of 25 to 30 years and are currently connected to existing infrastructure for water, sewage, and electricity, although Hofmann says they are experimenting with solar roof panels with an ultimate goal of making the houses self-supporting.
A rendering showing the architecture and dimensions of the house, which is 45 square meters (484 square feet). Courtesy of Heijmans
The first two Heijmans One houses were installed last month in a not very neighborhood-y vacant lot in an underdeveloped part of Amsterdam (as seen above). The rendering below offers a more optimistic take on what a cluster of pop-up houses might do for an otherwise bleak landscape:
A rendering of what a pop-up neighborhood of houses might look like. Courtesy of Heijmans
One is a test residence for prospective tenants, and the other is currently housing 28-year-old Carmen Felix, a website writer and editor who is the project’s ambassador and is living in the house for three months rent-free. Felix told me in an email that although there are people living nearby, she misses basics like a supermarket close by, but she is otherwise enjoying the house. “All my friends love it, especially [because] it feels like a little hotel and I finally have my own, real place,” she says. Would she stay on after the experiment is over? “I could definitely see myself living in a Heijmans One. I would love to.”
Hofmann says that the company is planning to launch 30 Heijmans One houses, most likely in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Den Bosch, at the end of the summer. “We’re also working out how to answer the international interest,” he says, adding that they have had inquiries from New York, San Francisco, Ohio, Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Australia, Mexico, Denmark, and around the world. “Our ambition isn’t limited to the Netherlands.”The new Broadway musical Anastasia and the Bette Midler-led revival of Hello, Dolly!, topped the list of 2017 Outer Critics Circle Award nominees, announced Tuesday, April 25 at the Algonquin Hotel.
Anastasia received 13 nominations, including nods for stars Christy Altomare, John Bolton, Caroline O'Connor, and Mary Beth Peil, while Hello, Dolly! received 10 nods, which included leading players Midler, David Hyde Pierce, Kate Baldwin, and Gavin Creel. Also topping the list were Come From Away and The Band's Visit, which tied with seven nominations, and Paula Vogel's drama Indecent and Daniel Sullvan's revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, both which received six nominations each.
The full list of nominees is below. Hyperlinked shows are still running at time of publication. For tickets, click on the title of a show.
Outstanding New Broadway Play
A Doll's House, Part 2
Indecent
Oslo
Sweat
Outstanding New Broadway Musical
Anast |
) August 18, 2017
"Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville," the letter reads. "The Administration's refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred. Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed."
"Speaking truth to power is never easy, Mr. President," it reads. "But it is our role as commissioners on the PCAH to do so."
The letter ends with a call for Trump to resign from the presidency.
"Supremacy, discrimination, vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values," it reads. "If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too."
The move comes after a number of prominent businessmen resigned from the American Manufacturing Council, which also advises the president.Frank Gifford, a gleaming hero of sports and television in an era when such things were possible, who moved seamlessly from stardom in the Giants’ offense to celebrity in the broadcast booth of “Monday Night Football,” died on Sunday at his home in Greenwich, Conn. He was 84.
His family confirmed the death in a statement.
A shifty running back and later a cagey and clutch receiver who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977, Gifford began his career at a time when the professional game was overshadowed by college football and by Major League Baseball — hardly the American obsession it has become. But as much as anyone, he helped push it in that direction.
By the time he retired as a player (for the second time) in 1964, the Giants and the National Football League had gained the national sports spotlight, and the versatile and handsome Gifford had become a celebrity. A few years later, in the early 1970s, he became one of the best-known figures in television sports (and maybe television in general).
As the play-by-play man of ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” Gifford, with his low-key persona, provided the perfect backdrop to bring his boothmates — the contentious Howard Cosell (who died in 1995) and the country-boy-irreverent Don Meredith (who died in 2010) — into high relief. It was a formula that made the weekly autumn broadcasts must-see programming for much of America.For the second time in as many weeks, a men’s road marathoner turned heads in a trail ultra.
“The seasons are changing a bit. More road marathoners are transitioning to trails and ultras. There was actually quite a bit of depth, four 2:20 or better marathoners,” says Tim Tollefson, after winning the USA Track & Field 50K trail championship in Bend, Oregon, last weekend.
Tollefson’s observation isn’t profound; it happens often now, and many say that ultra distances are more compelling because of it.
Tollefson, age 29, insists that his first national championship wasn’t through luck or natural talent alone. A 2:18 road marathoner, he trained specifically for the race by taking his peak weekly mileage to 124, completing the marathon distance twice on trails in a six-week period, and by switching his longer tempo run for a shorter one that included repeated climbs.
The result was a 3:24 first-place finish, despite it being his trail and ultra debut. He cut 3 minutes from Max King’s 2011 course record, but his win wasn’t assured until he crossed the line. “I was a bit humbled by the distance, had to go into survival mode,” he says.
After preaching his marathon mantra of “emotional control” early on, he gained the lead near mile 7 and cruised through the central Oregon high country trails, a mix of old-growth forest and above-treeline singletrack, without issue for nearly 20 miles. Misjudging his calories, he surrendered minutes back to Ryan Bak in the final miles, finally giving in to a look over the shoulder near mile 26. What was then estimated to be a 2-minute lead shrunk to 20 seconds at the finish, but Tollefson remained in front of second-place Bak. Tollefson earned $500 and his first national championship.
A day after that effort, his biggest ailment was his toenails. A physical therapist at Mammoth Hospital and Mammoth S.P.O.R.T. Center and Performance Lab, he generally knows how to take care of his body, and may redirect his fitness for one final 2014 goal race. He’s non-committal as to where though, perhaps the California International Marathon in Sacramento, where he ran 2:18 in 2011 and 2013, or The North Face 50 championship in San Francisco where he could vie for a $10,000 first-place prize. Both races are held on the same weekend in December.
In contrast to the close finish of the men’s race, Megan (Deakins) Roche, a 24-year-old Stanford University School of Medicine student, dominated the women’s race with a 4:00 winning time. She led from the start and finished 10 minutes ahead of 2008 Olympic marathoner-turned-ultramarathoner Magdalena Lewy Boulet (Oakland, California).
“I haven’t really run anything over 15 miles recently, but I figured that if I just kept taking enough gels, I could survive,” Roche says of the distance, the longest she’d ever run.
She was only two weeks removed from a 21st-place finish at the world mountain running championships, an 8.4K uphill race in Italy, and only committed to Flagline days beforehand. After tapering for the world championships, Roche says she “used the week after (the championships) to catch up on school work and rest…a wonderful, impromptu taper.”
Apart from a fourth-place finish at the U.S. mountain running championships in July and the aforementioned worlds result, Roche has been nearly unbeatable on trails this year. The level of competition at those two peak events didn’t surprise her though. Instead, she almost sounded thankful for it.
“I was actually excited to see how competitive both of those races turned out to be. Worlds is a whole different scene,” Roche says.
Following her immediate long-distance success, she expects to race the Moab Trail Marathon on November 8, the USATF championship for the trail distance. A win there would be her third national title in a three-month stretch, adding to the 50K crown and a victory at the 10K trail championships in August in North Carolina.
Somehow, the superwoman balances her training and travel schedule with a heavy academic load, insisting that the two work well together.
“Med school keeps me from burning out [from running],” she says. “I run because I love the quiet time by myself or with [husband] David and the escape from long hours studying.”Montgomery County Relaunches Bag Tax Campaign As Fees Collections Remain High
Stats show the number of plastic bags used by retailers has remained relatively constant despite 5-cent tax
By Aaron Kraut
Council member Craig Rice speaks as County Executive Ike Leggett looks on during an event Saturday to relaunch the county's efforts at discouraging the use of plastic and paper bags while shopping Montgomery County
Montgomery County leaders on Saturday gathered to remind people to use reusable bags while shopping as fees collected from its more than four-year-old bag tax have remained relatively constant.
The 5-cent bag tax, which went into effect January 2012, was supposed to encourage shoppers to use reusable bags instead of plastic bags provided by retailers that tend to end up in creeks and waterways, polluting those places and hurting the environment. The tax also applies to paper bags provided by retailers.
But since the law went into effect, the amount of money the county has collected from transactions in which a customer does use a plastic or paper bag hasn’t shown a significant decrease.
The county collected $189,025 in bag tax fees in April 2016, about $7,000 more than in April 2015 and about $9,000 more than in April 2014, both months in which a comparable amount of registered retailers were participating in the program. According to the law, the county collects 4 cents of the fee while the retailer retains 1 cent of the fee.
Since the law went into effect in January 2012 through April, the county has collected a total of $10,439,854 in bag tax fees, representing a grand total of 260,972,410 plastic or paper bags provided by retailers.
Proceeds from the fees must go toward programs to combat litter and control water pollution in the county.
On Saturday, County Executive Ike Leggett, County Council member Craig Rice and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Director Lisa Feldt held a press conference in Silver Spring that included a clean-up of a nearby stream and reusable bag giveaway at a nearby grocery store.
“This is a straightforward concept: If residents are using reusable bags, the disposable bags are not going to go into our parks, playgrounds and streams,” Leggett said. “This renewed effort will give additional support to our businesses who are implementing the bag law and ensure that every resident who wants or needs a free bag will be able to get one.”
The revamped public outreach campaign will include a new-look webpage, poster campaign, advertisements on county buses and bus shelters and more free reusable bag distributions. Free reusable bags will also be available at all county library locations and the Manna Food Center in Gaithersburg.
In 2013, council member Roger Berliner introduced a bill that would have reduced the scope of the bag tax only to food stores such as grocery stores, and not other types of major retailers including department and hardware stores. Leggett was opposed to the bill and Berliner eventually tabled it.
Statistics provided Monday morning by DEP show the amount of retailers registered to participate in the bag tax program has steadily increased from 548 in January 2012 to 1,296 in April, the last month for which bag tax data was available.
The statistics show the most money in bag tax fees is typically collected in December during the height of the holiday shopping season. In December 2015, the county collected $267,275 in bag tax fees from 1,274 registered retailers. In December 2014, the county collected $264,976 in fees from 1,224 registered retailers.
Volunteers help clean trash from the Stewart/April Lane Tributary on Saturday, via Montgomery CountyYou probably thought that Sega's official abandonment of the Dreamcast back in 2001 meant we wouldn't see any new, Sega-produced Ecco the Dolphin games for that system. If so, you thought wrong. That's because a newly unearthed prototype of the Dreamcast's cancelled Ecco II: Sentinels of the Universe has hit the Internet, more than 15 years after it was made.
The prototype build, uploaded by the game preservationists at Hidden Palace, is dated February 19, 2001, less than a month after Sega announced it would stop supporting the Dreamcast and step away from the hardware business for good. It comes to the Internet via a large lot of Ecco Dreamcast assets acquired by Hidden Palace, and the site promises "more exciting (and long overdue) [Ecco] stuff in the weeks to follow."
In addition to the ripped GD-ROM version, which is fully playable on PC Dreamcast emulators, Hidden Palace also released a self-boot CDI image that can be burned to disc and played on actual Dreamcast hardware (and hopefully on a real CRT television, for that authentic 2001 console gaming experience). We can thank the Dreamcast's extremely broken copy protection technology for that little wrinkle and for the widespread piracy that helped doom and/or popularize the system back in its day.
The prototype's early 2001 build date likely makes this one of the final development versions of the game and probably one of the last Sega-produced Dreamcast discs ever made. Before this playable prototype was dumped, the only concrete details we had of the game came from a 2007 video of a very similar prototype being played on a Dreamcast Katana development kit.
Unlike other canceled Dreamcast projects, (like Toejam and Earl 3), Sega didn't transition Sentinels of the Universe development to living consoles like the PS2 and Xbox. That means this prototype is our only hint of how the series would have developed after 2000's Ecco: Defender of the Future, which still remains the last Ecco title ever released (note to Sega: it's past time for a reboot for this franchise; also: Space Channel 5 and Chu Chu Rocket).
While the Sentinels of the Universe prototype is fully playable and handles very similarly to its predecessor, it's lacking basic features like sound effects, music, or much in the way of story and explicit goals (save a few above-water hoops to jump through and NPC dolphin placeholders to talk to). You'll run into a lot of glitches and unpolished art, too, which isn't too surprising, since Hidden Palace says that "development on the game had only just begun before it was canceled." The prototype is also stuck in debug mode, which clutters the screen with messages regarding things like frame rate and runtime errors.
Despite all those issues, it's still pretty exciting to swim around new, "official" undersea worlds in a franchise (and on hardware) we thought was abandoned long ago. Now if someone can dig up a playable version of the Dreamcast demo for Streets of Rage 4, our Sega nostalgia zone will be well and truly sated.Here are some key numbers from the City of Saskatoon’s “game plan” for future recreation facilities in the city. Estimated costs of proposed facilities do not yet have a funding source. The game plan will be presented to city council’s governance and priorities committee on Wednesday. 8,200: Number of seats in a proposed downtown outdoor stadium. The stadium is being floated by backers of a Canadian Premier League professional soccer team in Saskatoon. The league has confirmed teams in Hamilton and Winnipeg, but no set start date. $92.2 million: Estimated cost of meeting the city’s recreations needs through new facilities and maintaining and upgrading existing ones over the next 10 years. Three: Number of indoor lacrosse fields to be included in a proposed new facility. $25 million: Estimated cost of a new indoor pool in the city’s northeast by 2028. $15 million: Estimated cost of an additional ice surface by 2022. $3.54 million: Estimated cost of two additional sports fields in the Silverwood Industrial Area by 2022. $4.23 million: Estimated cost of three-diamond complex in Hudson Bay Industrial by 2024. $1.88 million: Estimated cost of two-diamond complex in Silverwood Industrial Area by 2021. 283: Current number of existing City of Saskatoon sports fields, including 24 baseball diamonds, 150 softball diamonds, 107 football/soccer fields and two cricket fields. 194: Number of city play structures. 215: Number of city parks, including 28 with basketball courts and two with lawn bowling clubs. 44: Number of city tennis courts, including three indoor. 30: Number of city paddling pools. 17: Number of city spray parks. Four: Number of city indoor swimming pools. Four: Number of city outdoor swimming pools. Eight: Number of city skateboard sites. Three: Number of city golf courses. Two: Number of city disc golf courses. Six: Number of indoor city ice surfaces. 50: Number of city-supported outdoor rinks. Six: Number of indoor city recreation centres. Nine: Off-leash city dog parks. One: Number of city zoos, speed-skating ovals, football stadiums, bike polo courts, children’s amusement parks.
Saskatoon city council will consider a lofty list of future recreation facilities Wednesday, but nobody should expect any cheques to be cut, a councillor says.
A special meeting of council’s governance and priorities meeting Wednesday will ponder partnerships on recreation projects that will help city hall meet some of its goals to accommodate growing recreation needs.
These projects include an 8,200-seat downtown outdoor stadium to accommodate a professional soccer team, indoor lacrosse fields, a river water park and an expansion of the Gordie Howe Sports Complex.
Coun. Troy Davies, whose council portfolio is recreation, culture and leisure, cautioned anyone from thinking the city is ready for an immediate partnership on any new projects.
“I think it’s all needed and I support all of them,” Davies said in an interview Thursday. “I don’t think Saskatoon’s ready for any new major projects. You’ve got to be realistic and look at our budget.”
Davies pointed out the city is completing several high-profile major projects, including the Remai Modern art gallery, two new bridges and two new interchanges. All are slated to be finished within the next two years with the total construction costs topping $400 million.
A City of Saskatoon report says six groups have been invited to appear before Wednesday’s committee meeting to outline their plans.
“I think this is step one of many steps to come,” Davies said.
Those groups include the embryonic Canadian Premier League, a professional soccer league that is considering a franchise in Saskatchewan. The report mentions an 8,200-seat downtown stadium that would also be available for other events.
The league has only two confirmed teams, in Hamilton, Ont., and Winnipeg, and no established start date.
The Friends of the Bowl Foundation has also been invited to outline possible enhancements to the Gordie Howe Sports Complex in the city’s southwest. Improvements there could include an outdoor track and field facility and upgrades to the speed skating oval.
Other plans includes a water park on the South Saskatchewan River that has been mentioned in connection to a hydro power project at the weir. A group planning a lacrosse facility with three indoor soccer fields has also been invited.
Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, which operates during the summer months, is expected to outline plans for a permanent amphitheatre and venue that would be available for year-round use. Children’s Discovery Museum officials are also expected to update council on its “renewed vision.”
The committee will also consider a report known as the “game plan” that outlines priorities for recreation facilities and some of the related costs.
The top indoor priority remains ice surfaces, unchanged since a previous ranking in 2015, although indoor rinks are now tied for top spot with indoor running tracks. Indoor child playgrounds remain in third spot.
For outdoor amenities, the top priority remains shared-use trail networks, followed by track and field facilities. The track and field surface at the University of Saskatchewan’s Griffiths Stadium is slated to be removed.
Meeting all the goals of the recreation game plan, which includes maintenance of existing facilities, is expected to cost $92.2 million over the next 10 years.
The big-ticket items identified in the 10-year funding plan are a new indoor ice surface, which the plan indicates is needed by 2022 at a cost of $15 million, and a new indoor pool for the city’s northeast, needed by 2028 for $25 million.
Among the upgrades cited as necessary are gender neutral change rooms and greater accessibility at the city’s indoor pools.
Davies pointed to the city’s partnership with the University of Saskatchewan on the Merlis Belsher Place hockey arena as a possible model for future recreation facilities.
The much-needed $42.9-million twin-pad rink received $4 million from the city in order to secure ice time for minor hockey. Council approved $1 million last year, but the additional $3 million approved earlier this year was narrowly endorsed by city council and sparked changes in how the city contributes to third-party projects.
ptank@postmedia.com
twitter.com/thinktankSKOfficial Discord: https://discord.gg/QESTKv4
**While i will leave this up for people to participate by choice, the First Prize mMMO Game Jam has been delayed by a month. I am excited to inform you that i heard back from a couple potential sponsors who are interested in assisting with hosting the mMMO Game Jam, as well as providing even more prizes! This is very exciting news, and will allow for even better rewards, and Structuring of the Game Jam! I know this might be a bummer for those of you who have signed up so far, But rest assured the mMMO game Jam will be happening, and will be even more awesome then i had originally planned and hoped for. The good news is, you can start working on your entries for the First Prize Jam now! Just make sure not to finish them before the jam starts!!! As of right now the Tentative date for the start of the first Prize Jam is September 15th, 2017. **Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, confirms scientists are testing 10th generation centrifuges. No other country even possesses 9th gen tech, putting Rosatom years ahead of the competition.
“We’re on to 10 Gen,” announced Aleksandr Belousov, general director of Urals Integrated Electrochemical Plant (UIEP), a Rosatom subsidiary in Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk Region, in the Urals.
“Scientists and engineers are solving technical issues, which is quite difficult. Any kind of new research and technological development is a venture undertaking, you can either succeed or fail... Any new machinery must be economically efficient. [10Gen] is being developed out of economic expediency, not for mere modernization. The more energy-intensive the machinery is, the more technical problems emerge,” Belousov said.
A gas centrifuge uses principles of centrifugal force to perform radioisotope separation of gases, by accelerating molecules to such an extent that particles of different masses are physically separated within a rotating container.
The centrifugal separation of isotopes is used for various purposes. First of all for production of low-enriched (up to 3-4 percent) uranium to be used as fuel at nuclear power plants. It also is used to produce weapons-grade, highly-enriched uranium (90 percent of U-235). Centrifuges are also needed to produce radioisotopes for medicine and various technical issues.
Centrifuges are operated in cascades of hundreds and thousands units. Manufacturer supplies centrifuges in assemblies of 20 units in two rows, and at the factory they are placed on the columns in tiers, one above the other.
Last week the second cascade unit of 9 Gen gas centrifuges has become operable at the UIEP, with the first 9 Gen unit introduced in late December 2013. Having two 9 Gen centrifuge cascades means that UIEP is the leader in the industry, making up to 48 percent of Russian radioisotope market and 20 percent of the global market, RIA Novosti reports.
The 9 Gen centrifuges are four times more productive than 8 Gen centrifuges, which means a similar productivity pace should be applied to 10 Gen units, Belousov said.
Development of nuclear enrichment centrifuges in the Soviet Union began in 1952. Over the time general dimensions of the machinery changed a little yet the productivity has augmented by 14 times, whereas operating costs have diminished by at least 10 times, aide to the UIEP head, Gennady Solovyov, said.
The modern Russian centrifuge is a state-of-the-art component made of composite materials and special aluminum alloy. Its rotor spins with unbelievable speed of 1,000 rotations per second and can do it without a single stop for 30 years. Mechanical malfunctions are extremely rare, no more than 0.1 percent (one failure per 1,000 units) per year.
Russia’s TVEL Fuel Company (TENEX for operations abroad) is the largest operator of nuclear enrichment centrifuges and absolute leader of world’s radioisotope market, possessing about 30,000 separative work units (SWU), which is almost half of the world’s total 65,000 SWUs. Russian centrifuges are also the most advanced and have higher output capacity than SWUs from rival companies in France, US or Japan.
Starting from 2009 Russia is supplying 7 and 8 Gen centrifuges to China.
The second-largest operator of uranium enrichment centrifuges after Rosatom is URENCO, a joint German, Dutch and UK enterprise operating 14,200 SWUs.
Rosatom is heavily investing in nuclear enrichment at the UIEP. In 2014, the corporation allocated 7.5 billion rubles (nearly $150 million), whereas for 2015-2019 Rosatom plans to spend on the UIEP no less than 34 billion rubles (about $667 million).Off Panel #117: A Period of Disruption with Heidi MacDonald
On this week’s episode of Off Panel, The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald returns to the show to talk the state of comics and comics journalism. MacDonald discusses where comics are creatively, the sheer volume of comics these days, how new opportunities have changed things for creators, what she’s really enjoying in comics, the health of the comics industry, Marvel’s arrogance, DC’s bold moves, where comics journalism is these days, the Craig Yoe controversy, the niche-y nature of journalism, monetization models, how the journalism struggle goes beyond comics, and more.
You can find MacDonald on Twitter and her work at The Beat.
You can download the show directly here on Libsyn.
Off Panel now has a Patreon! Support the show and earn some rewards by backing the podcast on there.
Big thanks to my patrons, including – but not limited to – Bobby Angus, Darren Neely, John Hendrick, Steve Anderson, Cliff Chiang, Brian Klein-Qiu, Michael Perlman, Phil Knall, Ian Maxfield, Benjamin Schipper, Maxwell Schmidt, Dan Lee, Scott McGovern, Nathan Fairbairn, Chris Samnee, Colin McMahon, Cat McKenzie, Lou Iovino, Christopher Carter, Nicholas Keslake, Brian Dickerson, Greg Rucka, Ryan Mayle, Adam Highfill, Nicholas Gardner, Andrew Corrigan, Fiona Staples, Chris Morris, Johan Barrander, Chris O’Hollaran, Mark Abnett, Matt Battaglia, Mike Murphy, Michael Shirley, Tom Barnett, Jim Demonakos, Norbert, Nick Lowe, James Kaplan, and Mission: Comics and Art in San Francisco. You’re all the best.
Subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the show on its LibSyn page. The show is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music and IHeartRadio’s app.
Have a question for Off Panel? You can reach David by email and Twitter.
Header image is the logo to The Beat. Intro and outro music is Vulfpeck’s Outro from their album Vollmilch. Thanks to the band for letting me use the track.I'm mad about the grocery having relocated from just around the corner to three miles away in what used to be a cornfield out in the country. And why? Because the grocer needs 15 acres of parking lot to accommodate cars that have to be driven three miles every time you want a bag of grapefruit and a gallon of milk.
I'm mad about physical-fitness cranks always saying, "If you can't even walk six miles to and from the grocery carrying a bag of grapefruit and a gallon of milk, you ought to join a health club and get in shape."
I'm mad about being told to join a health club and get in shape because, for one thing, health clubs are more expensive than gasoline, and, for another, because people who are in shape are always looking down their noses at people who aren't but are often superior in every other way to people who are in shape. Did Albert Einstein look like a man who was in shape?
I'm mad about not having a bus or streetcar system left like the one that once enabled people to travel those six miles for a little pocket change.
I'm mad about spending my life looking for a parking space in the city, mad about paying breathtaking sums of money to parking garages, mad about my fellow Americans who dent my car on free-parking lots and drive away without leaving their insurance agent's name.
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I'm mad about having to spend more for auto insurance per year than I spend for gasoline.
And how do I feel about knowing that every time I take the car out onto the highway I may be shot because a sniper wants to enjoy a bit of sport with his new gun, or because a testy, armed fellow motorist resents my being in his lane or despises me because my car radio is playing music not to his taste?
How do I feel about that? Mad. That's how I feel.
I'm even madder about being unable, unless you live in one of a few big cities, to travel anywhere anymore without having to drive from 30 to 3,000 miles, all the time burning that increasingly expensive gasoline and inviting snipers and cruising gunmen to shoot you, thus exposing you to hospital or mortuary bills compared with which the price of gasoline is nothing.
I'm mad, too, about people who can't drive being rendered immobile by the national drive-or-else policy.
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I'm mad about having to do all the wretched, dull, dreary, miserable driving myself when one of these hopelessly immobilized Americans is the only person accompanying me on a journey of 1,000 miles.
I'm mad about feeling hatred for these immobilized passengers, who are, after all, my fellow human beings and sometimes beloved relatives and should not be detested simply because American culture enables such persons to slumber peaceably in passengers' seats while saps loyal to the auto ethic do all the driving.
I'm mad about the neighbors and their children laughing at me because my car cannot go from 0 to 80 miles an hour in five seconds, and I'm mad about caring enough to be mad about it because it suggests I have fallen in with the loathsome American habit of judging people's character by the car they drive.
I hate being responsible for remembering to change the oil every 3,000 miles, and for checking the belts to make sure they aren't rotting, and for making sure there is enough antifreeze in the radiator, and for knowing how to replace the transmission fluid and how to change a tire when it goes flat at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, and I'm mad about being part of a society that insists on such stuff.
Bill, Bob! Wake up! Why stop at being mad about the price of gas?Man in Bethel with handgun arrested
Veigo Veigo Photo: / Contributed Photo: / Contributed Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Man in Bethel with handgun arrested 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
BETHEL - A convicted felon with a handgun was taken into custody on Sunday after falling asleep in his car.
Police said they received reports of a suspicious vehicle on Hunting Ridge Lane when they found Antonio Veiga, 45, of Danbury, sleeping behind the wheel of a running car. Responding officers saw a glass pipe routinely used for smoking crack cocaine.
A search of the car revealed additional crack cocaine and a handgun that had been placed in a bag underneath the driver seat, authorities said.
Veiga has a number of convictions stemming from 2011 including two counts of third-degree burglary as well as larceny and weapons charges, according to court documents. He was also wanted on a warrant for his arrest stemming from a failure to appear for a court date on purported probation violation.
Veiga, who police said was also operating with a suspended drivers license, was taken into custody on a number of charges including possession of narcotics and criminal possession of a handgun.
Veiga was released on a $10,000 bond and is expected to appear in Danbury Superior Court for his arraignment on July 24.
dperrefort@newstimes.comIn what is seen as an attempt to form a larger social coalition of Brahmins and other backwards, demands are being made by other backward classes (OBC) leaders to extend quota benefits to the Brahmin community.
This comes in the backdrop of the Congress-NCP led state government extending reservation benefits to Marathas (16%) and Muslims (5%). OBCs, who compete with Marathas socially and politically, have resented the move.
"Brahmins must also get reservations," demanded Rashtriya Samaj Paksha (RSP) chief and dhangar (shepherd) community leader Mahadeo Jankar.
"They must get reservations on economic grounds. There are many Brahmins who are not economically well-off. We will launch a fierce agitation for this demand," said Jankar, who has clashed with the hardline Maratha outfit Sambhaji Brigade in the past.
Brahmins are at the apex of the Hindu caste pyramid. Maharashtra was the cradle of the social reform movement with Mahatma Jotiba Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Vitthal Ramji Shinde, Chatrapati Rajarshi Shahu Maharaj and Prabhodhankar Keshav Sitaram Thackeray forming the backbone of the non-Brahmin movement.
Brahmin leaders claim that their community accounts for an estimated 8-10% of Maharashtra's population across linguistic divisions and sects.
"Maharashtra has a legacy of Brahmins vs non-Brahmin tussles. However, considering the stranglehold of Marathas on politics, a social realignment on Maratha vs non-Maratha grounds is inevitable," reasoned a veteran OBC activist.
OBCs are seen as loyal footsoldiers of Hindutva. Though the Shiv Sena opposes caste-based reservations and instead moots a system based on economic criteria, the bulk of the party's following consists of OBCs.
"Why do Marathas need reservations? They resent the rise of OBCs and are seeking to counter it," pointed out writer- activist Sanjay Sonawani, adding that a social coalition between OBCs and Brahmins was inevitable.
"Reservations are not a garibi hatao program. Still, if Marathas can be granted quotas on economic grounds, then why should Brahmins be deprived?" he questioned, adding that however, perceptions of caste superiority and hubris had to be discarded by upper castes.
"Since 2008, we have been seeking reservations on economic grounds and not on the basis of caste. Those who are not well-off financially must get quotas in education and jobs,"said Anil Gachke of the Akhil Bharatiya Brahmin Mahasangh.
Jankar, a Shiv Sena and BJP ally, who lost to NCP chief Sharad Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule from Baramati in the Lok Sabha polls, is also demanding that his Dhangar community be added in the scheduled tribes (ST) category, which is opposed by tribal politicians across party lines. Dhangars, who fall in the NT-C category with 3.5% quotas, form about 18% of Maharashtra's population, next only to Maratha- Kunbis (16%).
Jankar said they are being denied ST benefits due to a spelling mistake that calls their community as 'Dhangads' instead of 'Dhangars.' Moreover, states like Jharkhand, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have classified the Dhangars as STs, he added.UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has banned paan masala and gutka in government offices
Highlights Mr Adityanath was reportedly furious to see stains in office building Immediately issued order to ban chewing tobacco in all government offices Paan, tobacco products to also be banned in schools, colleges, hospitals
Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, has banned paan chewing and gutka or tobacco in all government offices in the state. It reportedly took seconds for the 44-year-old priest-politician to announce the ban during an inspection of the old Chief Minister's office in Lucknow this morning.Later, a statement said that paan and tobacco products will also be banned in schools, colleges and hospitals.The Annexe building has long stopped being the office of the UP Chief Minister, who now sits at the new Lok Bhawan. Several top officials are still based there.When Chief Minister Adityanath visited the building, he was reportedly furious at spotting rust-coloured stains of paan or betel leaf on a staircase - unfortunately a common sight in government buildings, not just in Uttar Pradesh. The staff got a piece of his mind.Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, who was with Yogi Adityanath, said the Chief Minister had "advised" against consuming paan masala and tobacco in government buildings and offices."The Chief Minister inspected the Annexe and directed officials to maintain cleanliness of both the Annexe and the state so that change is visible," Mr Maurya said. The staff has also been asked to avoid using plastic, he said.On Monday, Chief Minister Adityanath had administered a cleanliness pledge to top officials from across the state and distributed copies of the BJP manifesto for mandatory reading and implementation.Officials repeated with the Chief Minister: "I will not litter, nor allow anybody to do it. I will devote 100 hours every year, to make the pledge of cleanliness come true and I will propagate the message ofSwachch Bharat Mission in every corner of the country." Yogi Adityanath, who is the head priest of Gorakhnath Temple in Gorakhpur, is known for daily cleanliness checks.Microsoft has announced a lawsuit against Motorola, alleging that several of the mobile company's Android devices infringe on nine of its patents. The software giant is suing in US District Court in Washington, and is also bringing a complaint before the International Trade Commission (ITC). The patents are all related to key smartphone experiences that include syncing e-mails, calendars, and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications about changes in signal strength and battery power. Microsoft specifically names two Motorola devices, the Droid 2 and the Charm, but says these are just examples and not a comprehensive list.
The suit comes just as Microsoft readies the release of its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, the successor to Windows Mobile. Motorola was once a big backer of Windows Mobile, but in recent years it has shifted to Google's Android. Although manufacturers can use Android for free, Microsoft argues that phone makers should consider the potential patent infringement issues and the related costs of the mobile OS.
The nine patents in question in the ITC complaint include:
5,579,517: Common name space for long and short filenames
5,758,352: Common name space for long and short filenames |
República Dominicana Spanish pronunciation: [reˈpuβliˌka ðoˌminiˈkana]) is a country located in the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with the nation of Haiti,[16][17] making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands, along with Saint Martin, that are shared by two sovereign states. The Dominican Republic is the second-largest Caribbean nation by area (after Cuba) at 48,671 square kilometers (18,792 sq mi), and third by population with approximately 10 million people, of which approximately three million live in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo, the capital city.[18][19]
Christopher Columbus landed on the island on December 5, 1492, which the native Taíno people had inhabited since the 7th century. The colony of Santo Domingo became the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, the oldest continuously inhabited city, and the first seat of the Spanish colonial rule in the New World. After more than three hundred years of Spanish rule the Dominican people declared independence in November 1821. The leader of the independence movement José Núñez de Cáceres, intended the Dominican nation to unite with the country of Gran Colombia, but no longer under Spain's custody the newly independent Dominicans were forcefully annexed by Haiti in February 1822. Independence came 22 years later after victory in the Dominican War of Independence in 1844. Over the next 72 years the Dominican Republic experienced mostly internal conflicts and a brief return to colonial status before permanently ousting Spanish rule during the Dominican War of Restoration of 1863–1865.[20][21][22] A United States occupation lasted eight years between 1916 and 1924, and a subsequent calm and prosperous six-year period under Horacio Vásquez was followed by the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo until 1961. A civil war in 1965, the country's last, was ended by U.S. military occupation and was followed by the authoritarian rule of Joaquín Balaguer (1966–1978 & 1986–1996), the rules of Antonio Guzmán (1972–1978) & Salvador Jorge Blanco (1982–1986). Since 1996, the Dominican Republic has moved toward representative democracy[1] and has been led by Leonel Fernández for most of the time since 1996. Danilo Medina, the Dominican Republic's current president, succeeded Fernandez in 2012, winning 51% of the electoral vote over his opponent ex-president Hipólito Mejía.[23]
The Dominican Republic has the ninth-largest economy in Latin America and is the largest economy in the Caribbean and Central American region.[24][25] Over the last two decades, the Dominican Republic has had one of the fastest-growing economies in the Americas – with an average real GDP growth rate of 5.4% between 1992 and 2014.[26] GDP growth in 2014 and 2015 reached 7.3 and 7.0%, respectively, the highest in the Western Hemisphere.[26] In the first half of 2016 the Dominican economy grew 7.4% continuing its trend of rapid economic growth.[27] Recent growth has been driven by construction, manufacturing, tourism, and mining. The country is the site of the second largest gold mine in the world, the Pueblo Viejo mine.[28][29] Private consumption has been strong, as a result of low inflation (under 1% on average in 2015), job creation, as well as a high level of remittances.
The Dominican Republic is the most visited destination in the Caribbean. The year-round golf courses are major attractions.[30] A geographically diverse nation, the Dominican Republic is home to both the Caribbean's tallest mountain peak, Pico Duarte, and the Caribbean's largest lake and point of lowest elevation, Lake Enriquillo.[31] The island has an average temperature of 26 °C (78.8 °F) and great climatic and biological diversity.[30] The country is also the site of the first cathedral, castle, monastery, and fortress built in the Americas, located in Santo Domingo's Colonial Zone, a World Heritage Site.[32][33] Music and sport are of great importance in the Dominican culture, with Merengue and Bachata as the national dance and music, and baseball as the favorite sport.[3]
Names and etymology
The "Dominican" word comes from the Latin Dominicus, meaning Sunday. However, the island has this name by Santo Domingo de Guzmán, founder of the Order of the Dominicans.
The Dominicans established a house of high studies in the island of Santo Domingo that today is known as the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and dedicated themselves to the protection of the native taínos of the island, who were subjected to slavery, and to the education of the inhabitants of the island.[34]
For most of its history, up until independence, the country was known as Santo Domingo[35]—the name of its present capital and patron saint, Saint Dominic—and continued to be commonly known as such in English until the early 20th century.[36] The residents were called "Dominicans" (Dominicanos), which is the adjective form of "Domingo", and the revolutionaries named their newly independent country "Dominican Republic" (República Dominicana).
In the national anthem of the Dominican Republic (himno nacional de la República Dominicana), the term "Dominicans" does not appear. The author of its lyrics, Emilio Prud'Homme, consistently uses the poetic term "Quisqueyans" (Quisqueyanos). The word "Quisqueya" derives from a native tongue of the Taino Indians and means "Mother of the lands" (Madre de las tierras). It is often used in songs as another name for the country. The name of the country is often shortened to "the D.R." (la R.D.)[37]
History
Pre-European history
The five caciquedoms of Hispaniola
The Pomier Caves are a series of 55 caves located north of San Cristóbal in the Dominican Republic. They contain the largest collection of 2,000-year-old rock art in the Caribbean.
The Arawakan-speaking Taíno moved into Hispaniola from the north east region of what is now known as South America, displacing earlier inhabitants,[38] c. AD 650. They engaged in farming and fishing[39] and hunting and gathering.[38] The fierce Caribs drove the Taíno to the northeastern Caribbean during much of the 15th century.[40] The estimates of Hispaniola's population in 1492 vary widely, including one hundred thousand,[41] three hundred thousand,[38] and four hundred thousand to two million.[42] Determining precisely how many people lived on the island in pre-Columbian times is next to impossible, as no accurate records exist.[43] By 1492 the island was divided into five Taíno chiefdoms.[44][45] The Taíno name for the entire island was either Ayiti or Quisqueya.[46]
The Spaniards arrived in 1492. After initially friendly relationships, the Taínos resisted the conquest, led by the female Chief Anacaona of Xaragua and her ex-husband Chief Caonabo of Maguana, as well as Chiefs Guacanagaríx, Guamá, Hatuey, and Enriquillo. The latter's successes gained his people an autonomous enclave for a time on the island. Within a few years after 1492 the population of Taínos had declined drastically, due to smallpox,[47] measles, and other diseases that arrived with the Europeans,[48] and from other causes discussed below.
The first recorded smallpox outbreak in the Americas occurred on Hispaniola in 1507.[48] The last record of pure Taínos in the country was from 1864. Still, Taíno biological heritage survived to an important extent, due to intermixing. Census records from 1514 reveal that 40% of Spanish men in Santo Domingo were married to Taino women,[49] and some present-day Dominicans have Taíno ancestry.[50][51] Remnants of the Taino culture include their cave paintings,[52] as well as pottery designs which are still used in the small artisan village of Higüerito, Moca.[53]
European colonization
National pantheon in Santo Domingo
Christopher Columbus arrived on the island in December 5, 1492, during the first of his four voyages to the Americas. He claimed the land for Spain and named it La Española due to its diverse climate and terrain which reminded him of the Spanish landscape.[54] Traveling further east Columbus came across the Yaque del Norte River in the Cibao region, which he named Rio de Oro after discovering gold deposits nearby.[55] On Columbus's return during his second voyage he established the settlement of La Isabela in what is now Puerto Plata on Jan. 1494, while he sent Alonso de Ojeda to search for gold in the region.
In 1496 Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher's brother, built the city of Santo Domingo, Western Europe's first permanent settlement in the "New World." The colony thus became the springboard for the further Spanish conquest of the Americas and for decades the headquarters of Spanish colonial power in the hemisphere. Soon after the largest discovery of gold in the island was made in the cordillera central region, which led to a mining boom. By 1501, Columbus's cousin Giovanni Columbus, had also discovered gold near Buenaventura, the deposits were later known as Minas Nuevas. Two major mining areas resulted, one along San Cristóbal-Buenaventura, and another in Cibao within the La Vega-Cotuy-Bonao triangle, while Santiago de los Caballeros, Concepcion, and Bonao became mining towns. The gold rush of 1500–1508 ensued.[56] Ferdinand II of Aragon "ordered gold from the richest mines reserved for the Crown." Thus, Ovando expropriated the gold mines of Miguel Diaz and Francisco de Garay in 1504, as pit mines became royal mines, though placers were open to private prospectors. Furthermore, Ferdinand wanted the "best Indians" working his royal mines, and kept 967 in the San Cristóbal mining area supervised by salaried miners.[56]:68,71,78,125–127
Under Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres' governorship, the Indians were made to work in the gold mines, "where they were grossly overworked, mistreated, and underfed," according to Pons. By 1503, the Spanish Crown legalized the distribution of Indians to work the mines as part of the encomienda system. According to Pons, "Once the Indians entered the mines, hunger and disease literally wiped them out." By 1508 the Indian population of about 400,000 was reduced to 60,000, and by 1514, only 26,334 remained. About half were located in the mining towns of Concepción, Santiago, Santo Domingo, and Buenaventura. The repartimiento of 1514 accelerated emigration of the Spanish colonists, coupled with the exhaustion of the mines. In 1516, a smallpox epidemic killed an additional 8,000, of the remaining 11,000 Indians, in one month. By 1519, according to Pons, "Both the gold economy and the Indian population became extinct at the same time."[57][56]:191–192
The southern city of Santo Domingo served as a springboard for military expeditions pushing across to the mainland of the Americas. In 1501, the colony began to import African slaves. After its conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, Spain neglected its Caribbean holdings. The slaves remained and became the basis for the Dominican population.[58] Following royal orders, in 1605 Governor Antonio Osorio ignored cabildo protests and had the settlements at Puerto Plata, Montecristi, La Yaguana, and Bayaja burned to stop smuggling. Some rebelled and were defeated while others fled to Cuba. Only 2,000 livestock out of 110,000 survived in the new pasture. One third of the people from La Yaguana and Bayaja who were settled at Bayaguana died of hunger and disease by 1609.
The French were envious of Spain's possessions in the Americas, and thus sent colonists to settle the northwestern coast of Hispaniola. In order to domesticate the buccaneers, the French supplied them with women who had been taken from prisons, accused of prostitution and thieving. After decades of armed struggles with the French, Spain ceded the western coast of the island to France with the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, whilst the Central Plateau remained under Spanish domain. France created a wealthy colony there, while the Spanish colony suffered an economic decline.[59]
On April 17, 1655, the English landed on nearby Hispaniola and marched 30 miles overland to Santo Domingo, the main Spanish stronghold on the island. The sweltering heat soon felled many of the northern European invaders. The Spanish defenders, having had time to prepare an ambush for the aimlessly thrashing, mosquito-swatting newcomers, sprang on them with mounted lancers, sending them careening back toward the beach in utter confusion. Their commander, Venables, hid behind a tree where, in the words of one disgusted observer, he was “so much possessed with terror that he could hardly speak.” The elite defenders of Santo Domingo were amply rewarded with titles from the Spanish Crown.
The French attacked Santiago in 1667, and this was followed by a devastating hurricane the next year and a smallpox epidemic that killed about 1,500 in 1669. In 1687 the Spaniards captured the fort at Petit-Goave, but the French fought back and hanged their leaders. Two years later Louis XIV was at war and ordered the French to invade the Spaniards, and Tarin de Cussy sacked Santiago. In 1691 the Spaniards attacked the north and sacked Cap-François. Island tensions subsided once peace was restored and Spain's last Habsburg monarch—the deformed invalid Charles II—died on 30 November 1700, being succeeded by the sixteen-year-old French Bourbon princeling Philip of Anjou.
18th century
The House of Bourbon replaced the House of Habsburg in Spain in 1700 and introduced economic reforms that gradually began to revive trade in Santo Domingo. The crown progressively relaxed the rigid controls and restrictions on commerce between Spain and the colonies and among the colonies. The last flotas sailed in 1737; the monopoly port system was abolished shortly thereafter. By the middle of the century, the population was bolstered by emigration from the Canary Islands, resettling the northern part of the colony and planting tobacco in the Cibao Valley, and importation of slaves was renewed. The colony of Santo Domingo saw a population increase during the 17th century, as it rose to about 91,272 in 1750. Of this number approximately 38,272 were white landowners, 38,000 were free mixed people of color, and some 15,000 were slaves. This contrasted sharply with the population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present day Haiti) – the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean and whose population of one-half a million was 90% enslaved and overall seven times as numerous as the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo.[59].[60] The 'Spanish' settlers, whose blood by now was mixed with that of Tainos, Africans and Canary Guanches, proclaimed: 'It does not matter if the French are richer than us, we are still the true inheritors of this island. In our veins runs the blood of the heroic conquistadores who won this island of ours with sword and blood.'[61]
When the War of Jenkins' Ear between Spain and Britain broke out in 1739, Spanish privateers, particularly from Santo Domingo, began to troll the Caribbean Sea, a development that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. During this period, Spanish privateers from Santo Domingo sailed into enemy ports looking for ships to plunder, thus harming commerce with Britain and New York. As a result, the Spanish obtained stolen merchandise—foodstuffs, ships, enslaved persons—that were sold in Hispaniola's ports, with profits accruing to individual sea raiders. The revenue acquired in these acts of piracy was invested in the economic expansion of the colony and led to repopulation from Europe.[62] As restrictions on colonial trade were relaxed, the colonial elites of St. Domingue offered the principal market for Santo Domingo's exports of beef, hides, mahogany, and tobacco. With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, the rich urban families linked to the colonial bureaucracy fled the island, while most of the rural hateros (cattle ranchers) remained, even though they lost their principal market. Although the population of Spanish Santo Domingo was perhaps one-fourth that of French Saint-Domingue, this did not prevent the Spanish king from launching an invasion of the French side of the island in 1793, attempting to take advantage of the chaos sparked by the French Revolution.[63] French forces checked Spanish progress toward Port-au-Prince in the south, but the Spanish pushed rapidly through the north, most of which they occupied by 1794.
Although the Spanish military effort went well on Hispaniola, it did not so in Europe (see War of the Pyrenees). As a consequence, Spain was forced to cede Santo Domingo to the French under the terms of the Treaty of Basel (July 22, 1795) in order to get the French to withdraw from Spain.
French rule
In 1801, Toussaint Louverture, who at least in theory represented imperial France, marched into Santo Domingo from Saint-Domingue to enforce the terms of the treaty. Toussaint's army committed numerous atrocities; as a consequence, the Spanish population fled from Santo Domingo in exodus proportions. French control of the former Spanish colony passed from Toussaint Louverture to Gen. Charles Leclerc when he seized the city of Santo Domingo in early 1802. Following the defeat of the French under Gen. Donatien de Rochembeau at Le Cap in November 1803 by the Haitians, their new leader, Dessalines, attempted to drive the French out of Santo Domingo. He invaded the Spanish side of the island, defeated the French-led Spanish colonials at River Yaque del Sur, and besieged the capital on March 5, 1805. At the same time the Haitian General Christophe marched north through Cibao, capturing Santiago where he massacred prominent individuals who had sought refuge in a church. The arrival of small French squadrons off the Haitian coast at Goncaives and at Santo Domingo forced the Haitians to withdraw. As Christophe retreated across the island, he slaughtered and burned.[64] In October 1808 the landowner Juan Sánchez Ramírez began a rebellion against the French colonial government in Santo Domingo and the insurgents were aided by Puerto Rico and British Jamaica.[65] The British ejected the French and returned Santo Domingo to the Spaniards in 1809. The Spaniards not only tried to re-establish slavery in Santo Domingo, but many of them also mounted raiding expeditions into Haiti to capture blacks and enslave them as well.[64]
Independence from Spain (1821)
After a dozen years of discontent and failed independence plots by various opposing groups, Santo Domingo's former Lieutenant-Governor (top administrator), José Núñez de Cáceres, declared the colony's independence from the Spanish crown as Spanish Haiti, on November 30, 1821. This period is also known as the Ephemeral independence.[66]
Unification of Hispaniola (1822–44)
The newly independent republic ended two months later under the Haitian government led by Jean-Pierre Boyer.[67]
As Toussaint Louverture had done two decades earlier, the Haitians abolished slavery. In order to raise funds for the huge indemnity of 150 million francs that Haiti agreed to pay the former French colonists, and which was subsequently lowered to 60 million francs, the Haitian government imposed heavy taxes on the Dominicans. Since Haiti was unable to adequately provision its army, the occupying forces largely survived by commandeering or confiscating food and supplies at gunpoint. Attempts to redistribute land conflicted with the system of communal land tenure (terrenos comuneros), which had arisen with the ranching economy, and some people resented being forced to grow cash crops under Boyer and Joseph Balthazar Inginac's Code Rural.[68] In the rural and rugged mountainous areas, the Haitian administration was usually too inefficient to enforce its own laws. It was in the city of Santo Domingo that the effects of the occupation were most acutely felt, and it was there that the movement for independence originated.
Haiti's constitution forbade white elites from owning land, and Dominican major landowning families were forcibly deprived of their properties. Many emigrated to Cuba, Puerto Rico (these two being Spanish possessions at the time), or Gran Colombia, usually with the encouragement of Haitian officials who acquired their lands. The Haitians associated the Roman Catholic Church with the French slave-masters who had exploited them before independence and confiscated all church property, deported all foreign clergy, and severed the ties of the remaining clergy to the Vatican.
All levels of education collapsed; the university was shut down, as it was starved both of resources and students, with young Dominican men from 16 to 25 years old being drafted into the Haitian army. Boyer's occupation troops, who were largely Dominicans, were unpaid and had to "forage and sack" from Dominican civilians. Haiti imposed a "heavy tribute" on the Dominican people.[69]:page number needed
Many whites fled Santo Domingo for Puerto Rico and Cuba (both still under Spanish rule), Venezuela, and elsewhere. In the end the economy faltered and taxation became more onerous. Rebellions occurred even by Dominican freedmen, while Dominicans and Haitians worked together to oust Boyer from power. Anti-Haitian movements of several kinds – pro-independence, pro-Spanish, pro-French, pro-British, pro-United States – gathered force following the overthrow of Boyer in 1843.[69]:page number needed
Independence from Haiti (1844)
In 1838 Juan Pablo Duarte founded a secret society called La Trinitaria, which sought the complete independence of Santo Domingo without any foreign intervention.[70]:p147–149 Also Francisco del Rosario Sánchez and Ramon Matias Mella, despite not being among the founding members of La Trinitaria, were decisive in the fight for independence. Duarte, Mella, and Sánchez are considered the three Founding Fathers of the Dominican Republic.[71]
The Trinitarios took advantage of a Haitian rebellion against the dictator Jean-Pierre Boyer. They rose up on January 27, 1843, ostensibly in support of the Haitian Charles Hérard who was challenging Boyer for the control of Haiti. However, the movement soon discarded its pretext of support for Hérard and now championed Dominican independence. After overthrowing Boyer, Hérard executed some Dominicans, and threw many others into prison; Duarte escaped.[63] After subduing the Dominicans, Hérard, a mulatto, faced a rebellion by blacks in Port-au-Prince. Haiti had formed two regiments composed of Dominicans from the city of Santo Domingo; these were used by Hérard to suppress the uprising.[63]
First flag of the Dominican Republic
First shield of the Dominican Republic
On February 27, 1844, the surviving members of La Trinitaria declared the independence from Haiti. They were backed by Pedro Santana, a wealthy cattle rancher from El Seibo, who became general of the army of the nascent republic. The Dominican Republic's first Constitution was adopted on November 6, 1844, and was modeled after the United States Constitution.[39] The decades that followed were filled with tyranny, factionalism, economic difficulties, rapid changes of government, and exile for political opponents. Archrivals Santana and Buenaventura Báez held power most of the time, both ruling arbitrarily. They promoted competing plans to annex the new nation to another power: Santana favored Spain, and Báez the United States.
Threatening the nation's independence were renewed Haitian invasions. On 19 March 1844, the Haitian Army, under the personal command of President Hérard, invaded the eastern province from the north and progressed as far as Santiago, but was soon forced to withdraw after suffering disproportionate losses. According to José María Imbert's (the General defending Santiago) report of April 5, 1844 to Santo Domingo, “in Santiago, the enemy did not leave behind in the battlefield less than six hundred dead and…the number of wounded was very superior…[while on] our part we suffered not one casualty.”[72]
The Dominicans repelled the Haitian forces, on both land and sea, by December 1845. The Haitians invaded again in 1849 after France recognized the Dominican Republic as an independent nation. In an overwhelming onslaught, the Haitians seized one frontier town after another.[73] Santana being called upon to assume command of the troops, met the enemy at Ocoa, April 21, 1849, with only 400 men, and succeeded in utterly defeating the Haitian army.[74] In November 1849 Báez launched a naval offensive against Haiti to forestall the threat of another invasion.[63] His seamen under the French adventurer, Fagalde, raided the Haitian coasts, plundered seaside villages, as far as Cape Dame Marie, and butchered crews of captured enemy ships.[75] In 1855, Haiti invaded again, but its forces were repulsed at the bloodiest clashes in the history of the Dominican–Haitian wars, the Battle of Santomé in December 1855 and the Battle of Sabana Larga in January 1856.
The Dominican Republic's first constitution was adopted on November 6, 1844. The state was commonly known as Santo Domingo in English until the early 20th century.[76] It featured a presidential form of government with many liberal tendencies, but it was marred by Article 210, imposed by Pedro Santana on the constitutional assembly by force, giving him the privileges of a dictatorship until the war of independence was over. These privileges not only served him to win the war, but also allowed him to persecute, execute and drive into exile his political opponents, among which Duarte was the most important. In Haiti after the fall of Boyer, black leaders had ascended to the power once enjoyed exclusively by the mulatto elite.[77]
Without adequate roads, the regions of the Dominican Republic developed in isolation from one another. In the south, also known at the time as Ozama, the economy was dominated by cattle-ranching (particularly in the southeastern savannah) and cutting mahogany and other hard woods for export. This region retained a semi-feudal character, with little commercial agriculture, the hacienda as the dominant social unit, and the majority of the population living at a subsistence level. In the north (better-known as Cibao), the nation's richest farmland, peasants supplemented their subsistence crops by growing tobacco for export, mainly to Germany. Tobacco required less land than cattle ranching and was mainly grown by smallholders, who relied on itinerant traders to transport their crops to Puerto Plata and Monte Cristi. Santana antagonized the Cibao farmers, enriching himself and his supporters at their expense by resorting to multiple peso printings that allowed him to buy their crops for a fraction of their value. In 1848, he was forced to resign, and was succeeded by his vice-president, Manuel Jimenes.
After defeating a new Haitian invasion in 1849, Santana marched on Santo Domingo and deposed Jimenes in a coup d'état. At his behest, Congress elected Buenaventura Báez as President, but Báez was unwilling to serve as Santana's puppet, challenging his role as the country's acknowledged military leader. In 1853 Santana was elected president for his second term, forcing Báez into exile. Three years later, after repulsing another Haitian invasion, he negotiated a treaty leasing a portion of Samaná Peninsula to a U.S. company; popular opposition forced him to abdicate, enabling Báez to return and seize power. With the treasury depleted, Báez printed eighteen million uninsured pesos, purchasing the 1857 tobacco crop with this currency and exporting it for hard cash at immense profit to himself and his followers. Cibao tobacco planters, who were ruined when hyperinflation ensued, revolted and formed a new government headed by José Desiderio Valverde and headquartered in Santiago de los Caballeros. In July 1857 General Juan Luis Franco Bidó besieged Santo Domingo. The Cibao-based government declared an amnesty to exiles and Santana returned and managed to replace Franco Bidó in September 1857. After a year of civil war, Santana captured Santo Domingo in June 1858, overthrew both Báez and Valverde and installed himself as president.[78]
Restoration republic
Gregorio Luperon fought against the pretensions of Pedro Santana to recover the Dominican sovereignty.
In 1861, after imprisoning, silencing, exiling, and executing many of his opponents and due to political and economic reasons, Santana signed a pact with the Spanish Crown and reverted the Dominican nation to colonial status. This action was supported by the cattlemen of the south while the northern elites opposed it.[79] Spanish rule finally came to an end with the War of Restoration in 1865, after four years of conflict between Dominican nationalists and Spanish sympathizers.[80]
Political strife again prevailed in the following years; warlords ruled, military revolts were extremely common, and the nation amassed debt. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered U.S. Marines to the island for the first time.[58] Pirates operating from Haiti had been raiding U.S. commercial shipping in the Caribbean, and Grant directed the Marines to stop them at their source.[58] Following the virtual takeover of the island, Báez offered to sell the country to the United States.[58] Grant desired a naval base at Samaná and also a place for resettling newly freed Blacks.[81] The treaty, which included U.S. payment of $1.5 million for Dominican debt repayment, was defeated in the United States Senate in 1870[67] on a vote of 28–28, two-thirds being required.[82][83][84]
Báez was toppled in 1874, returned, and was toppled for good in 1878. A new generation was thence in charge, with the passing of Santana (he died in 1864) and Báez from the scene. Relative peace came to the country in the 1880s, which saw the coming to power of General Ulises Heureaux.[85]
"Lilís," as the new president was nicknamed, enjoyed a period of popularity. He was, however, "a consummate dissembler," who put the nation deep into debt while using much of the proceeds for his personal use and to maintain his police state. Heureaux became rampantly despotic and unpopular.[85][86] In 1899 he was assassinated. However, the relative calm over which he presided allowed improvement in the Dominican economy. The sugar industry was modernized,[87]:p10 and the country attracted foreign workers and immigrants.
20th century (1900–30)
From 1902 on, short-lived governments were again the norm, with their power usurped by caudillos in parts of the country. Furthermore, the national government was bankrupt and, unable to pay Heureaux's debts, faced the threat of military intervention by France and other European creditor powers.[88]
United States President Theodore Roosevelt sought to prevent European intervention, largely to protect the routes to the future Panama Canal, as the canal was already under construction. He made a small military intervention to ward off European powers, to proclaim his famous Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and also to obtain his 1905 Dominican agreement for U.S. administration of Dominican customs, which was the chief source of income for the Dominican government. A 1906 agreement provided for the arrangement to last 50 years. The United States agreed to use part of the customs proceeds to reduce the immense foreign debt of the Dominican Republic and assumed responsibility for said debt.[39][88]
After six years in power, President Ramón Cáceres (who had himself assassinated Heureaux)[85] was assassinated in 1911. The result was several years of great political instability and civil war. U.S. mediation by the William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson administrations achieved only a short respite each time. A political deadlock in 1914 was broken after an ultimatum by Wilson telling the Dominicans to choose a president or see the U.S. impose one. A provisional president was chosen, and later the same year relatively free elections put former president (1899–1902) Juan Isidro Jimenes Pereyra back in power. To achieve a more broadly supported government, Jimenes named opposition individuals to his cabinet. But this brought no peace and, with his former Secretary of War Desiderio Arias maneuvering to depose him and despite a U.S. offer of military aid against Arias, Jimenes resigned on May 7, 1916.[89]
Wilson thus ordered the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic. U.S. Marines landed on May 16, 1916, and had control of the country two months later. The military government established by the U.S., led by Vice Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp, was widely repudiated by the Dominicans, with many factions within the country leading guerrilla campaigns against U.S. forces.[89] The occupation regime kept most Dominican laws and institutions and largely pacified the general population. The occupying government also revived the Dominican economy, reduced the nation's debt, built a road network that at last interconnected all regions of the country, and created a professional National Guard to replace the warring partisan units.[89]
Vigorous opposition to the occupation continued, nevertheless, and after World War I it increased in the U.S. as well. There, President Warren G. Harding (1921–23), Wilson's successor, worked to put an end to the occupation, as he had promised to do during his campaign. The U.S. government's rule ended in October 1922, and elections were held in March 1924.[89]
The victor was former president (1902–03) Horacio Vásquez, who had cooperated with the U.S. He was inaugurated on July 13, and the last U.S. forces left in September. In six years, the Marines were involved in at least 467 engagements, with 950 insurgents killed or wounded in action.[90] Vásquez gave the country six years of stable governance, in which political and civil rights were respected and the economy grew strongly, in a relatively peaceful atmosphere.[89][91]
During the government of Horacio Vásquez, Rafael Trujillo held the rank of lieutenant colonel and was chief of police. This position helped him launch his plans to overthrow the government of Vásquez. Trujillo had the support of Carlos Rosario Peña, who formed the Civic Movement, which had as its main objective to overthrow the government of Vásquez.
In February 1930, when Vásquez attempted to win another term, his opponents rebelled in secret alliance with the commander of the National Army (the former National Guard), General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Trujillo secretly cut a deal with rebel leader Rafael Estrella Ureña; in return for letting Ureña take power, Trujillo would be allowed to run for president in new elections. As the rebels marched toward Santo Domingo, Vásquez ordered Trujillo to suppress them. However, feigning "neutrality," Trujillo kept his men in barracks, allowing Ureña's rebels to take the capital virtually uncontested. On March 3, Ureña was proclaimed acting president with Trujillo confirmed as head of the police and the army.
As per their agreement, Trujillo became the presidential nominee of the newly formed Patriotic Coalition of Citizens (Spanish: Coalición patriotica de los ciudadanos), with Ureña as his running mate. During the election campaign, Trujillo used the army to unleash his repression, forcing his opponents to withdraw from the race. Trujillo stood to elect himself, and in May he was elected president virtually unopposed after a violent campaign against his opponents, ascending to power on August 16, 1930.
Trujillo Age (1930–61)
Rafael Trujillo imposed a dictatorship of 31 years in the country (1930-1961)
There was considerable economic growth during Rafael Trujillo's long and iron-fisted regime, although a great deal of the wealth was taken by the dictator and other regime elements. There was progress in healthcare, education, and transportation, with the building of hospitals and clinics, schools, and roads and harbors. Trujillo also carried out an important housing construction program and instituted a pension plan. He finally negotiated an undisputed border with Haiti in 1935 and achieved the end of the 50-year customs agreement in 1941, instead of 1956. He made the country debt-free in 1947.[39][92]
This was accompanied by absolute repression and the copious use of murder, torture, and terrorist methods against the opposition. Trujillo renamed Santo Domingo to "Ciudad Trujillo" (Trujillo City),[39] the nation's – and the Caribbean's – highest mountain La Pelona Grande (Spanish for: The Great Bald) to "Pico Trujillo" (Spanish for: Trujillo Peak), and many towns and a province. Some other places he renamed after members of his family. By the end of his first term in 1934 he was the country's wealthiest person,[70]:p360 and one of the wealthiest in the world by the early 195 |
and you can get some great sunlight shots as the cars head down the straight here.
Not many opportunities for the rest of the track.After he abandoned goods he had stolen in the car park of Tesco, a Lurgan man made off - but was identified because his name was on the back of the Manchester United jersey he was wearing.
Paul Robert Benson (24), Glenavon Crescent, Lurgan, appeared last Wednesday at Craigavon Magistrates Court.
At a previous court he had pleaded guilty to the theft of goods valued at £104.54 from Tesco on September 3 last year.
The case was adjourned so that a pre-sentence report could be prepared.
The court heard that, at approximately 3pm, police received a report of a male shoplifter in Tescos.
Staff observed that he was wearing a red Manchester United shirt with ‘Benson 22’ on the back.
The goods were recovered in the car park where the defendant had abandoned them after seeing staff. Benson was also identified on CCTV.
When interviewed by police he made a full and frank admission.
A barrister representing the defendant said he had a previous theft offence in 2012 when he stole a bottle of alcohol, but this was at the lower end of the scale and dealt with by way of a fine.
She added there were no offences in the pipeline.
District Judge, Mr Mervyn Bates, said the defendant may as well have had a neon sign identifying himself.
The barrister said Benson had now got a full time job and worked different shift patterns which would rule out community service, but he would welcome probation.
Judge Bates said the report made clear that the defendant had taken on responsibilities and found a job.
He imposed a 12 month probation order.Elaine Thompson, AP Photo Declan Hartman, 4, clambers on a climbing toy as he wears a gender-neutral T-shirt designed by his mother, and his favorite pink shoes, in Seattle in this July 7, 2016 photo.
Elaine Thompson, AP Photo Courtney Hartman plays with her children Lois, 2, and Declan, 4, in the family's backyard as they wear gender-neutral clothing of Hartman's in Seattle in this July 7, 2016 photo.
Elaine Thompson, AP Photo Courtney Hartman shows off her basement silkscreen printer operation where she creates gender-neutral clothing, in Seattle in this July 7, 2016 photo.
Elaine Thompson, AP Photo Some of the gender-neutral clothing made by Courtney Hartman is displayed at her home in Seattle.
Elaine Thompson, AP Photo Martine Zoer poses for a photo with her sons Tyler, 8, left, and Tristan, 5, as they wear and display some of the gender-neutral clothing she creates, in Mill Creek, Wash. Zoer founded Quirkie Kids two years ago that marketed unisex pink shirts online, starting the business after her sons wanted to wear pink but she couldn't find anything in the boys' section.
Elaine Thompson, AP Photo Tyler Zoer, 8, left, and his brother Tristan, 5, pose for a photo as they wear some of the gender-neutral clothing created by their mother, Martine Zoer, in Mill Creek, Wash.
Don Ryan, AP Photo Charlie Guerin, 3, left, shows off her colorful outfit with her brother, Danny, 1, in Portland, Ore. For parents looking to dress their kids in clothing that defy gender norms, options for the back-to-school shopping season are still limited, but they're growing.
Don Ryan, AP Photo In this Friday, July 8, 2016, photo, Chris Guerin poses for a photo with his children Charlie, 3, right, and Danny in Portland, Ore. For parents looking to dress their kids in clothing that defy gender norms, options for the back-to-school shopping season are still limited, but they're growing. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)
Elaine Thompson, AP Photo In this Tuesday, July 19, 2016, photo, Eva St. Clair, left, and Rebecca Melsky pose for a portrait at Melsky's home in Washington. Melsky and St. Clair design dresses for Princess Awesome, a girls' clothing line that uses traditional boys' motifs such as trains, dinosaurs, ninjas, and planes. (AP Photo/Zach Gibson)
Zach Gibson, AP Photo This Tuesday, July 19, 2016, photo shows detail on a Princess Awesome dress at co-owner Rebecca Melsky's home in Washington. Melsky, and co-owner Eva St. Clair design dresses for Princess Awesome, a girls' clothing line that uses traditional boys' motifs such as trains, dinosaurs, ninjas, and planes.
NEW YORK — Pink for girls. Truck motifs for boys. A growing number of parents want to get outside those parameters when it comes to dressing their kids.
Kristin Higgins was adamant about not pushing “girly” stereotypes on her daughter, and painted her room in shades of green. Higgins later dressed her up in superhero costumes. But as her daughter got older, it took more work to locate items that broke the mold. For “Star Wars”-themed pajamas, she had to go to the boys’ section.
“It’s hard to find gender-neutral clothing,” said Higgins, 35, of Little Rock, whose daughter is now 6. “I want her to just get up and put on the clothing without thinking of putting on a costume, an identity.”
Shopping for her 7-month-old son, Higgins finds clothes mainly have pictures like fire engines or sharks. What about cats, cupcakes or hearts, she wonders.
For parents looking for clothes that defy gender norms, the options for back-to-school shopping are still limited — but they’re growing. Some big retailers like Lands’ End and Zara are making small changes to their offerings, while some frustrated parents have launched their own companies to make the items they wanted to find.
“There is really a sharp divide between what is considered girls’ stuff and what’s considered boys’ stuff,” said Courtney Hartman. She started Seattle-based Jessy & Jack, a collection of unisex T-shirts for kids that have robots and dinosaurs, and Free to Be Kids, where a shirt with the slogan, “I’m a Cat Guy” comes in blue, gray and yellow.
Companies like Jessy & Jack and a collection called Princess Awesome, where dresses have trains and planes, are among nearly 20 online brands that formed a campaign called Clothes Without Limits last year that they’re reprising for the back-to-school season. Still, many of the items are not cheap — T-shirts at $20 can be pricey for growing kids.
Bigger companies are offering some options, after similar shifts in the toy and bedding aisles to more neutral signs and products. Lands’ End launched a line of science T-shirts two years ago after a customer complained on social media that there was only one version for boys. As part of its new Cat & Jack brand of children’s clothing that kids helped design, Target offers unisex-fit T-shirts online with slogans like, “Smart & Strong” and “Future Astronaut.”
And fast-fashion chain Zara launched a collection in March for teens and older called “Ungendered” under its TRF line, which focuses on basics like T-shirts, sweatshirts and jeans. Experts and parents also notice that some images like dinosaurs are popping up on girls’ clothing under the Boden brand and others.
More has changed for girls’ clothes than for boys, but the vast majority of children’s clothing is still gender-specific, says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at market research group NPD Group Inc.
Martine Zoer, who founded Seattle-based Quirkie Kids because her sons wanted to wear pink, said that in response to her selling unisex shirts in that hue, she says she got emails saying “boys should not wear pink as it would turn them gay.”
A good portion of children’s clothing buyers are grandparents who tend to embrace more traditional ideas, says Cohen, who doesn’t expect large-scale change until the next generation starts having children.
“Once we get past the cultural discussion, that’s when you’ll see the (major) brands step out,” Cohen said. “No one wants to risk the chance of rocking the boat.”
Chris Guerin of Portland, Oregon, says teaching his mother-in-law to buy clothes that don’t reinforce gender stereotypes is a work in progress.
“When she goes shopping with Nana, she comes back with princess (outfits) and tiaras,” Guerin says of his 3-year-old daughter. “We don’t care for that. But it’s hard to bring up the issue.”
The differences crystallized in the late 1980s, according to Jo B. Paoletti, a professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland and author of “Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America.” Paoletti noticed it when buying clothing for her daughter, who was born in 1982, and her son, four years later. By the mid-1990s, “pink-washing was widespread,” she said. Even disposable diapers came in blue and pink.
In part, manufacturers and marketers wanted to boost sales to American couples having fewer kids, Paoletti said. She also reasoned that parents were rebelling against the more unisex fashions like corduroy pants they grew up with. But Paoletti said the change is harmful.
“It encourages very young children — as young as 2 — to judge and interact with others in highly stereotyped ways,” she said. “We know, based on nearly 50 years of social science research, that stereotyped thinking hurts all of us, whether we are dealing with racial, gender, or any other form of stereotype.”
Macy’s says kids’ clothes are generally separated into boys’ and girls’ sections, but with an array of colors and styles in each. “A lot of kids’ apparel today is active — sweatpants and sweatshirts, graphic Ts, etc. — and are inherently unisex,” spokeswoman Holly Thomas said in an email.
Stores like J.C. Penney and Nordstrom say they listen to shoppers, but aren’t getting customer requests to blur the gender lines.
Those behind the new brands say they’re seeing the demand. Hartman said annual sales are pushing six-digit figures.
Higgins recalled that when her daughter was in day care, she came home crying because some boys made fun of her navy blue sneakers, calling them “boy shoes.” She often puts together kid outfits from thrift shops, and as she thumbs through the racks reminds her daughter: “There are no boy colors. There are no girl colors.”
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By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, AP Retail Writer
Follow Anne D’Innocenzio on Twitter at http://www.Twitter.com/adinnocenzioAs the hearing ran into its third hour, almost all heads went down. The glamour of serving on the Brexit select committee had long since begun to pall. Now it was just a long, hard slog. Mostly about stuff that went completely over their heads.
No one had warned them it was going to be this complicated. Nor how long everything was going to take. Theresa May was about to trigger article 50 and they hadn’t got any further than talking about the sort of things they might need to talk about.
Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU up until his resignation in January, was in his element, however. When he’d suggested to the prime minister that the Brexit negotiations might take 10 years he had intended to be encouraging. Inside the EU bureaucracy, a decade is a mere blinking of an eye. His two-and-a-half-hour appearance before the committee was nothing more than careless whispers.
“Perhaps you could start by telling us what you think the likely order and timescale of the negotiations is likely to be?” said the committee chair, Hilary Benn. Rogers sucked his teeth. It was difficult to say as no one had done it before. But it would go something like this: first there would have to be lengthy negotiations about the terms of the negotiations. The 27 EU countries would want the divorce settlement agreed before the future framework was agreed; we would want to do the two in parallel.
Thinking aloud, let’s say we get an interim agreement on this by the middle of next year, then the 27 countries would want to have a long hard think about what they all individually wanted from a trade deal with Britain and there would be many competing interests. Then everything would grind to a halt for elections and some gory EU budget meetings.
Then everyone would have changed their mind and want to start again. By which time Britain’s two-year exit period would be up and there would have to be lengthy negotiations about what sort of negotiations on transitional arrangements would be acceptable. If and when all this was resolved, then the European parliament would have to be involved. And the same process would start all over again.
The first head hit the table at this point. But Rogers was just getting started. “Brussels beltway … Articles of faith and theology … That boat has sailed … Neuralgic points … No sectoral deals,” he chuntered. They speak another language in Brussels.
Rogers smiled at the blank faces that stared back at him. Good. He hadn’t lost it. Failing to make yourself understood was the hallmark of a top bureaucrat. For a while there was a stand-off, before Rogers took pity. Bless. They were only simple MPs. All they really needed to know was that it was all hideously complicated and was going to end badly.
The Eurosceptic MP John Whittingdale tried to argue that it couldn’t be that hard to get a deal because we would be starting from roughly the same place. Rogers shook his head. If anything it was even harder, because divergence was a lot more contentious than convergence.
“It’s not about what happens on Brexit Day plus one,” he said. “It’s about what happens further down the line. Because if we were intending to leave everything exactly the same there would have been no point in leaving.” And even if we did realise we had made a hideous mistake and promised to leave everything the same, the rest of the EU wouldn’t believe us.
Sensing Rogers was a great deal brighter than all of them and that they were out of their depth, Michael Gove wisely chose not to probe too deeply. Would he like to say if he thought government ministers were still as muddled as they had been at Christmas? He wouldn’t. So did that mean there was no longer a muddle? Rogers smiled. Hadn’t Gove listened to any of the muddle he had spent the last two hours describing?
“There’s actually quite a lot of sunshine out there,” said Rogers as the last head thudded into the table.
“I miss the sunshine in this committee,” muttered Dominic Raab.Modular Homes - A Smart & Affordable Way to Build! With the advances of modern technologies, modular homes are revolutionizing the way homes are built today. Starting by overcoming the misconception that homes built in a factory are poorly constructed and don’t measure up to stick-built traditional homes, people are learning about the advantages in price, efficiency, durability, quality and environmental advantages that a modular home offers. And today's modern modular homes can be built and customized to any design you can dream. Gone are the days of the past box-like look. At Modular Homes Network you will learn the difference between modular homes, manufactured homes and prefab homes. The advantages and disadvantages with each construction method and which factories in North American offer the best constructed homes at affordable prices. Be sure to check out our FREE E-Books about modular and manufactured homes.
They are a great resource to help you get the best deal on the largest purchase of your life. Get our FREE Modular Home Buyers Guide Advantages of Modular Homes The modular housing industry represents both cutting-edge technology and quicker build-times. Homes are assembled in a controlled environment - out of the weather, which increases efficiency and minimizes chances of other issues like damage and mold. Factories purchase their materials and supplies at huge discounts and pass these savings onto their customers. The modular housing industry represents both cutting-edge technology and quicker build-times. Homes are assembled in a controlled environment - out of the weather, which increases efficiency and minimizes chances of other issues like damage and mold. Factories purchase their materials and supplies at huge discounts and pass these savings onto their customers.
Find out why Modular Homes are the lowest cost of construction when building or remodeling. Modular home advantages:
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Unbiased modular home ratings and reviews on over 80 different manufacturers in North America. If you're just starting your search for a modular home our " Modular Home Ratings Guide " is a must read! With over nine years of research and countless interviews, you will learn how modular home companies compare to each other in the areas of: Quality Construction, Design/Style, Appraised Value and Price. Our staff rates each modular home plant, based on: data collected from interviews with each company, various builders and associations within the industry. You can spend months or years researching different builders or you can read our best-selling resource and know who's who in the industry in a matter of hours. Don't waste your time driving from one builder to the next only to hear, "This factory builds the best homes". Get the facts with fair and balanced ratings from a consumer group with no ties or connections to the modular housing industry. Manufactured Home Ratings & Reviews Imagine having unbiased ratings for over 65 different manufactured home factories in North America at your finger tips. With concise reviews, comprehensive rating charts and money saving tips, it’s no wonder our publication is considered the best consumer resource for manufactured home buyers. Our best-selling book has helped tens of thousands of buyers just like you find quality manufactured home companies that meet your expectations without breaking your budget. Our guide is up-to-date with accurate information based on solid research. While it is impossible to know the financial stability of every manufactured home factory, we have done our best to put forth our findings based on data collected from a variety of sources. Why choose Modular construction over traditional building methods?
Modular homes or sometimes referred to as system-built homes are built in a controlled environment, utilizing cutting edge technology. Modular homes can be built from existing floor plans or from custom floorplans. System-built homes have no design limitations - they can be any shape or size and will meet or exceed your local and state building codes. There are fewer restrictions on placing a modular home and interest rates for new construction loans are the same as compared to building a conventional home.
Are Prefab or Panelized homes the same as Modular homes? Panelized homes or sometimes referred to as a prefab homes can represent a number of construction methods. The most common method involves the building of individual walls, or wall sections in a factory. Panelized home builders are the biggest and most diverse segment of the factory-built housing industry. Panelized homes are different compared to modular and manufactured homes. There are some similarities, but prefab homes utilize “Components” or “wall units” that are pre-built in a controlled, factory environment. Once the re-built walls are delivered to a job site, a general contract or the home owner acting as the owner builder will erect the walls. Only the walls are assembled at the factory and the majority of work still remains on-site. The main advantage of panelized homes over stick-built homes is - shorter build time because walls are pre-built and lower labor costs. Learn more about the benefits of panelized homes. How much do Modular homes cost? According to industry statistics, modular construction projects have more than doubled in the last ten years. This is because the modular building process provides time and cost savings. Since they are built inside a factory, the weather does not cause delays, which greatly reduces labor costs. All the fabrication being done at one location allows the factories to buy bulk quantities of supplies at greatly reduced rates, these savings are then passed on to the consumer.
The costs will vary depending on where you live, but a general guide is that Genuine modular homes will cost $50 to $80 per sq. ft. (not including property). To build a stick-built home the average cost is around $80 to $150 per sq. ft. (not including property). Over the years I have spoken to many modular home builders regarding cost and savings. Some say that by using modular construction you can save 30% or more. Others I have spoken to take a different approach and say there is no real cost savings, except quicker build times. And still others say one can typically save 10% to 20%. I tend to lean towards the later point of view and estimate the savings to be around 15% with quicker build times of three months or less compared to stick-built construction. With quicker build times and a possible savings of 10% to 15% it’s clear why more and more people are turning to modular housing. What are the differences between a Modular & Manufactured home? There seems to be some confusion about the differences between a modular and manufactured homes. Modular homes are not manufactured homes or mobile homes. Manufactured homes are built according to the federal building Code, (HUD). This requires all manufactured homes to have a non-removable steel chassis, which severely limits their design options.
Manufactured homes generally come in single units or two-section units. In certain parts of the country you can also find three and four-section units. A manufactured home can be placed on a basement. In general, manufactured homes are single-story homes that are placed on a blocking system that supports the steel I-beams under each section. Today’s homes come with many of the same features typically found in a standard stick-built home: living and dining rooms with vaulted ceilings, skylights, fireplaces, modern kitchens and premium appliances, large bedrooms with walk-in closets, bathrooms with whirlpool tubs, ceramic tile, hardwood floors and more! The options are almost limitless! The industry boasts they are the most affordable option when it comes to housing, with costs normally ranging from $35 to $65 per square foot, (home only). Additional costs include land purchase and site improvements.
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Savvy homebuyers already know that modular homes offer more for their hard earned money than standard built homes. Designed in a factory, built in sections, and assembled on site. This controlled process allows for reduced costs, better craftsmanship and the ability for the homeowner to purchase a larger home. They are not mobile homes. Mobile homes or house trailers are built on wheels and are meant to be moved. A modular home is secured on the property just like a standard built home.
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When you fill out the contact form on our site, you will receive our guides about building a modular home. These free guides will help empower you, as the consumer, so that the home building process will be smooth sailing. When you educate yourself you will be able to purchase, and build, your home worry free. The information you will find in our guides is a compellation of many months worth of research and verification. You will receive these useful guides when you fill out a request for information from a builder in your state.
There is an old cliché that states “knowledge is power”. This could not be any truer than when you are building your own home. Equipping yourself with the right information, that is well researched and complete, will allow you to make all the right choices when building. Home ownership is said to be one of the greatest gifts that one can give them selves. Make sure that you do not need to re-gift your purchase by taking advantage of the free guides offered here. About the Author Our best-selling books and free guides has been helping home buyers considering modular housing since 1999. We have been providing unbiased reviews and comprehensive ratings on over 80 different modular home factories in North America. “Modular Home Ratings Guide” was first published in 2000 and since then has been updated ten times. This comprehensive resource guide is for prospective modular home buyers. The book is packed with everything you need to know from selecting a manufacturer to negotiating with your builder, financing options and everything in between. We dispel the misconceptions about the limitations of modular construction and shows potential buyers that a factory-built home can be as good as, if not better than, houses built with traditional stick-frame construction. In our book you will learn how to choose the best builder for your project, how to select the right loan and how to negotiate with your builder.
Modular Homes Network Discover the Benefits of Building Modular Modular Homes: Top 10 Reasons to Build Modular Modular Homes News
XML error: System error: -2147012889.In the summer months, do you consider getting outside more, but then find it difficult actually following through? If you’re over-worked and stressed out, you need to uncover your inner peace again. But how do you find tranquility in a mad world?
Take a break and head outdoors to your favorite park, nearby hiking trail, bird estuary, or forest. You will quickly regain your sense of peace once you spend some time in the wild.
Try these tips:
1. Get comfy. Dress comfortably and also bring enough of refreshments and snacks. This will be easy if you are taking your vehicle to your chosen nature spot. Remember to wear comfortable walking shoes.
2. Eliminate potential distractions. If you are taking your cellphone, switch it to silent mode to prevent becoming alarmed by its ring tone. For the time being, you want to exchange your usual world for that of the park or forest.
3. Hike on well-marked tracks. Make sure you can find the way back.
4. Ignore the noise that’s going on in your head. Allow the stressful thoughts to drift away. Simply release all your challenges. You are in one of your beloved locations now. Absolutely no problems exist here!
5. Immerse yourself in the sounds that surround you. Perhaps the trees are rustling with the wind, the birds are singing, or maybe you listen to an animal calling.
6. Make use of visual cues to unwind. Leave your stressful world behind. Look at and experience all the green trees. Become aware of the dirt track, the tiny critters crawling on a log, and the spider webs.
7. Take in the smells of your environment. What’s that fragrance? A touch of honeysuckle? The woodsy perfume of pine trees? Inhale in and exhale consciously.
8. Now for the tactile sensations… Is the foliage lightly brushing your arms? Do you find yourself challenged to maintain your footing along the bumpy path? Physically touching nature is an important part of the experience, along with the sights, sounds and smells.
9. Discover the creatures that live in the woods. Perhaps you’ll find a raccoon or a squirrel. Watching other animals is amazing and you will learn something each time you watch a wild animal.
10. Become aware of the birdcalls. Maybe two or more birds are conversing with one another.
11. Pay attention to what the air feels like. You can probably notice that summertime is here. It is a pure, fresh, crisp feeling which includes a touch of heat in many areas. Perhaps the sun is shining or maybe you happen to be deep in a thicket of trees where it is dank and mossy.
12. Go to a pine forest. If you are fortunate enough to reside within driving distance of a pine forest, give some thought to visiting this amazing example of mother nature’s Zen experiences. Sit a while on a bed of pine needles and simply be.
13. Give some thought to gratitude. What are you thankful for in your day to day life? Concentrate on the simple things. “I love my couch in the lounge with my books stacked high beside it.” “I am grateful for the sunset I see each and every evening from our kitchen window.” “I am grateful for having eyes to see as well as hands which work for me.”
14. Consider your achievements. Towards the conclusion your nature visit, give yourself a pat on the back for a challenging situation you have made it through recently.
15. Celebrate the peace. Know that right now, you experience a sense of quiet, peace, and serenity that you can return to whenever you want, just by visiting this glorious corner of nature.
Steep yourself in the experience of nature. Let yourself become keenly aware of the sights, sounds, smells, and atmosphere all around you. Wherever your beloved outdoor locations are, visit them frequently to return to the thing that’s most important: You!Episode 2: “Invasion”
This week gets right to the point: It’s been 4 years since last week’s episode, and things be changin’. It’s winter, and Princess Bitchy Resting Face is about the village. She calls to a young blond boy – yup, Ragnar’s other son. His name is Ubbe. As if that wasn’t upsetting enough (I’m clearly #TeamLagertha), there’s a third son, Hvitserk, AND she’s pregnant. Our fearless leader has been busy makin’ heirs.
Back in the dining hall, Athelstan finally gets screen time, and our priest has grown up to be a pretty babely Viking dude. Floki comes thundering in out of the snow, much to the glee of everyone. He’s been building boats, for like, ever, and he’s cold so get out of the way. He makes a dig at Athelstan, who responds in Norse, telling him he’s not a priest anymore. Floki’s impressed.
Here’s Ragnar! And little Ubbe! And…aw, hell, the kid’s cute. Floki reminds Ragnar he’s been building boats this whole time and he’d like to sail West already. Ragnar gains the attention of the hall to make the official announcement: We’re going West! Finally! Everyone is super stoked, except, of course, Siggy, who gets a decent staredown when Ragnar reminds everyone that they need to stick together. Siggy. And not convince anyone to attempt to overthrow him. Siggy.
Siggy goes outside and looks for Rollo…who has become the village drunk and is passed out under some snow. I guess it’s not the first time this has happened since she throws some water on him and gives him a total “God dammit not again.” look.
One of my favourite plot lines comes up next…Ragnar causally flirts with one of the new serving girls…AND GUESS WHO GETS JEALOUS? (Hint: She’s got Bitchy Resting Face.)
Does anyone else realize why that’s totally hilarious?
Ragnar’s all, “Aw, wife, it’s not like that, you’re just pregnant!” Aslaug has no time for shit, and reveals that she is in fact a “Volva” aka a Nordic seeress. Since she’s jealous and pissed off in the most hypocritical way ever, she tells Ragnar that her unborn son will have the eyes of a serpent. Which means something important. I’m not sure what just yet.
This is apparently bothersome to Ragnar, since he drills the local Seer about the future of his sons. They’ll be more famous than him, and he doesn’t seem to like it. Bjorn is referenced. BRING BACK BJORN! #TeamLagertha
After sobering up, Rollo is moping…and Siggy, being the supportive lady she is, calls him a disgrace and tells him to get his shit together and stop passing out in the snow like a loser, but it’s because she loves him. Oh, and hands him a red hot knife and says if he doesn’t make nice with Ragnar, he may as well stab himself and go to hell. Rollo, in a pretty bad ass move, grasps the blade, and stares down Siggy as it burns him. HARD. CORE.
They made their way over to Ragnar’s place. Rollo tells his brother how he’s a big drunk idiot and feels really bad about the whole trying to kill him thing. Ragnar says he’ll think about forgiving him.
Onto my favourite part of the episode – Athelstan learning how to fight! He’s got a pretty good handle on it, and his old haircut as grown out – he’s fitting in very well. Ragnar reminds him never to hesitate in battle – it could literally be the difference between life and death.
BABY GOAT SIGHTING.
Later, King Horik and Jarl Borg have met up at Ragnar’s to discuss the raid – it’s really awkward. Then it becomes about ten times more awkward when Rollo shows up and asks Ragnar about his decision. He forgives his brother – only he can’t come raiding with them in the summer. So basically, the worst thing ever. He’s NOT impressed.
During dinner, Horik drops a drama bomb: He doesn’t want Jarl Borg to raid with them, despite agreeing to it previously and uses Ragnar’s discrepancy against Rollo to justify it. He’s not going to say anything to Jarl Borg though, he wants Ragnar to do it. This is obviously going to go over well. Over dinner, nothing is said, but someone is making sex eyes over the table at Horik. Unsurprisingly, it’s Siggy.
Horik’s fleet arrives at the docks; Floki clearly talks some shit. Jarl Borg asks Ragnar when they’re all leaving…oh…heh. Oh. That. Ragnar breaks the news…Borg is, understandably, ticked the heck off. Horik is in a room with Siggy, who is promising him all of Ragnar’s secrets. This woman is all over the place, geez.
Borg goes off to pout, and runs into Rollo, who is also pouting. He tries to convince Rollo (again) to try to overthrow his brother, clearly blaming Ragnar for the broken agreement. Rollo responds by punching Borg in the face. Take that. Thankfully he finally understands where his loyalties should, and can, lie.
Suddenly, naked lady back…wait, is that…oh for fuck’s sake. Siggy + Horik, post-gross traitor sex. NO NO NO.
Ragnar says goodbye the family, and everyone heads off, Floki once again perched at the front edge of the boat, where he belongs. Rollo literally has a quivering lip as he angrily watches them leave him behind. He throws a rock into the water in protest. That’ll show ’em.
Hours later, the fleet has yet to reach land. This is troublesome. Being lost is really, really bad. They send up a raven to assist navigation…suddenly, CRAZY GIANT THUNDERSTORM OUT OF NOWHERE! The sails are tearing, everyone’s panicking (except Ragnar and Floki, because they’re hilarious and amazing), and everyone is pretty convinced things can’t get any worse…until they see giant rocks up ahead. OH N- haha, next scene.
Aslaug has called Siggy into her room for Horrible Girls Club Chat. She’s onto Siggy’s game – but she knows how it’s played. She sweetly tells her bitter new “friend” that she reeeaaaally wants them to get along, even though Siggy is totally jealous and wishes she was a Jarl’s wife again, totes bffs, gurl, for serious. Siggy is clearly hesitant, but accepts her offer of friendship. This should be scandalous as HELL. Yesssss.
Phew, the storm is over and they somehow survived. Well – some of them. Most of the boats are nowhere to be seen – and they still have no idea where they are. But they have found land, so it’s a start. They approach the shore and head into the forest – but someone is watching, and quickly leaves on horseback to report the intruders.
The group stops for a while to rest and eat, when SHOTS FIRED! One of Jarl Borg’s sons is shot with an arrow, and everyone instantly flies into battle formations against the ambush. After the initial assault, the attackers approach, and are met with ferocity. In true Vikings fashion, the blood and combat is extreme – and as a bonus, we get Shieldmaidens! THREE OF THEM! Kicking all kinds of foreigner ass! You go, girls.
The battle is over quickly, and the vikings, surrounded by the bodies of the defeated enemy, cheer in unison. Athelstan gets a present from Ragnar – a gold bracelet! Squeeee! Just like the one Bjorn got last season! He’s officially a Viking MAN now. D’awww. …now kiss. They question the last two survivors and discover they’re in Wessex. This means they are in the ruling of King Ecbert…which going on Athelstan’s reaction, isn’t very good.
However, all is not well…the messenger has arrived at his destination. A…bath house? No…a ROYAL bath house. King Ecbert is informed of the Vikings’ landing, and defeating of his men…and he isn’t very pleased.
Until next week, lovelies. Shit’s gonna go down.
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navigate a user with discreet taps. For this reason, apps that take advantage of the Apple Watch’s unique navigation potential will likely be a major category in this device’s burgeoning app market.
Social media
For a device that is constantly in close contact with a user, it is not surprising that several social media companies have already partnered with Apple to develop apps for the Apple Watch. At its media event in September, Apple revealed that Facebook and Twitter will have apps ready for the Apple Watch when it makes its debut next year. As demonstrated by Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch, the Facebook app will allow users to scroll through news feeds and receive updates. However, it remains unclear if users will be able to post status updates from the Apple Watch. The Twitter app allows users to views tweets and access the “favorite,” “retweet,” and “dismiss” buttons, as well as send tweets directly from the wrist-worn device.
Many of the Apple Watch’s most unusual features appear to be ideal for social media apps. Besides using the device’s tap feature to notify users when they have a social media update, it’s easy to imagine how savvy social media app developers could incorporate some of the Apple Watch’s other unique capabilities. For example, a social media app could allow users to post a quick doodle to their social media account using the device’s sketch feature. A social media app could even allow users to post a loop of their heartbeat or a sound bite of their voice by incorporating the device’s built-in heart rate sensor or walkie-talkie features.
Check-in
Apple revealed the potential for check-in apps for the Apple Watch when it briefly discussed two apps made by American Airlines and Starwood Hotels. The American Airlines app will display a digital boarding pass that will expedite check in and baggage pick up. The Starwood Hotels app will not only allow users to check in via their Apple Watches, it will also allow the device to function as an electronic key for their hotel room.
Since the Apple Watch is a wrist-worn gadget that is literally within arm’s reach, it is ideally suited for helping to remove some of the friction associated with travel and hospitality services. Travelers are less likely to lose a boarding pass or a hotel key if it is always strapped to their wrist. This also frees up travelers’ hands to do more useful things, such as carry their luggage. Although Apple didn’t mention Apple Pay integration with these apps, it should be noted that the Apple Watch will also include the company’s NFC-based contactless mobile payments service. Imagine walking into a hotel, checking in and paying with a few taps on your Apple Watch, and then walking up to your hotel room where you can unlock the door by simply waving your arm. Needless to say, there is a lot of growth potential for Apple Watch apps that include check-in features.
Real-time event updates
Another important category of apps suggested by Apple may be related to live entertainment and sports events. As announced by Apple, Major League Baseball (MLB) has created an app that will show real-time game scores. Not only could this app be adopted for other sports games, it could also be used for other live events as a way to increase engagement with customers. According to a Nielsen survey conducted earlier this year, 84% of smartphone and tablet owners already use their mobile devices as second screens while they are watching television.
Apps developed for the Apple Watch could expand on this second-screen trend by providing users with timely information related to a live event that they are watching. Live television shows such as American Idol could tap users to remind them to vote for their favorite performer. A developer could even create an app that taps viewers when the halftime break of a football game is over so they won’t miss the game.
Besides providing real-time event updates for remote viewers or listeners, the Apple Watch could also function as a navigation and check-in device for people attending an event. As reported by TechCrunch, MLB has already adopted Apple’s iBeacon technology at many of its ballparks around the country where it is used for check-in, navigation, and as a way to deliver special offers and interactive features to fans. Future apps for the Apple Watch could build on this system and take advantage of the device’s subtler approach to giving directions and notifications, as well as allow attendees to pay for their tickets via Apple Pay.
Health and fitness monitoring
Although the Apple Watch has fewer health and fitness tracking sensors that what was originally rumored, apps that are focused on this area will still play a major role in the device’s ecosystem. Apple has even created an Apple Watch Sport collection that is geared toward fitness users, as well as two native fitness apps. According to Apple, the Apple Watch “uses the accelerometer, a built-in heart rate sensor, GPS and Wi-Fi from your iPhone to provide a comprehensive picture of your daily activity.” A built in Activity app promises to track how many calories a user has burned, as well as how much “brisk activity” and standing a user has done each day. Another built in app, Workout, will keep track of more detailed measurements for exercises like running, walking, and cycling.
At its media event in September, Apple also revealed that Nike has already developed an app that will allow users to challenge their friends to a running contest. Apple also recently unveiled its HealthKit health data storage platform and it’s likely that many other activity-tracking apps will be developed for the Apple Watch that will work closely with this platform. It’s also likely that developers will create many health-related apps that use data from the Apple Watch’s built-in heart rate sensor.
Smart home
Last, but not least, it appears that apps related to smart home or connected home products will also be a major part of the Apple Watch’s ecosystem. Apple has already unveiled two smart home apps made by Honeywell and Lutron at its media event in September. The Honeywell app allows Apple Watch users to remotely control the thermostat in their homes, while the Lutron app allows users to control a home’s lighting.
Apple’s “most personal device ever” is ideally suited as a readily accessible device for controlling products in the home. Earlier this year, Apple unveiled HomeKit, a suite of tools that allows developers to easily create iOS apps for home automation products such as light dimmers, thermostats, and door locks. With so many home products being integrated into the “Internet of Things,” it’s likely that smart home-related apps will be an important category of apps for the Apple Watch and one that will make it a must-have product for Apple’s loyal users.
While these six app categories provide a good idea of the types of apps that consumers can expect to see developed for the Apple Watch, it is quite likely that there will be many other innovative apps that fall outside of these categories. It is also likely that there will be many apps that crossover multiple categories and utilize the Apple Watch’s capabilities in unexpected and unusual ways. After all, who could have predicted all the types of apps that are currently available for the iPhone and the iPad? Tim Cook probably expressed the sentiments of many Apple customers when he noted at the October iPad event that “Apple Watch will be shipping early next year and every day I look forward to that day.”
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More from Tech Cheat Sheet:Scientists have discovered an ancient animal that carried its young in capsules tethered to the parent’s body like tiny, swirling kites. They’re naming it after “The Kite Runner,” the 2003 bestselling novel.The miniscule creature, Aquilonifer spinosus, was an arthropod that lived about 430 million years ago. It grew to less than half an inch long, and there is only one known fossil of the animal, found in Herefordshire, England. Its name comes from “aquila,” which means eagle or kite, and the suffix “fer,” which means carry.Researchers from Yale, Oxford, the University of Leicester, and Imperial College London described the new species in a paper published online the week of April 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.“Modern crustaceans employ a variety of strategies to protect their eggs and embryos from predators — attaching them to the limbs, holding them under the carapace, or enclosing them within a special pouch until they are old enough to be released — but this example is unique,” said lead author Derek Briggs, Yale’s G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. “Nothing is known today that attaches the young by threads to its upper surface.”The Kite Runner fossil shows 10 juveniles, at different stages of development, connected to the adult. The researchers interpret this to mean that the adult postponed molting until the juveniles were old enough to hatch; otherwise, the juveniles would have been cast aside with the shed exoskeleton.The adult specimen’s head is eyeless and covered by a shield-like structure, according to the researchers. It lived on the sea floor during the Silurian period with a variety of other animals including sponges, brachiopods, worms, snails and other mollusks, a sea spider, a horseshoe crab, various shrimp-like creatures, and a sea star. The juvenile pouches, attached to the adult by slender, flexible threads, look like flattened lemons.Briggs said he and his colleagues considered the possibility that the juveniles were parasites feeding off a host, but decided it was unlikely because the attachment position would not be favorable for accessing nutrients.“We have named it after the novel by Khalid Hosseini due to the fancied resemblance of the juveniles to kites,” Briggs said. “As the parent moved around, the juveniles would have looked like decorations or kites attached to it. It shows that arthropods evolved a variety of brooding strategies beyond those around today — perhaps this strategy was less successful and became extinct.”The researchers were able to describe Aquilonifer spinosus in detail thanks to a virtual reconstruction. They reconstructed the animal and the attached juveniles by stacking digital images of fossil surfaces revealed by grinding away the fossil in tiny increments.Co-authors of the paper were Derek Siveter of the University of Oxford and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, David Siveter of the University of Leicester, Mark Sutton of Imperial College London, and David Legg of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Natural Environmental Research Council, the John Fell Oxford University Press Fund, and the Leverhulme Trust supported the research.Williamson County school board member Susan Curlee says test questions on religion may conflict with a student's religious belief. (Photo: Submitted)
Citing religious concerns, Williamson County school board member Susan Curlee has started a petition to cut state social studies exams for middle school students.
The petition asks state education commissioner Candice McQueen to remove state social studies tests for grades 6-7, the same grades where students learn about major world religions, including Islam. There's been recent statewide concern about how Islam is taught in schools, including claims of Islamic indoctrination and biased textbooks and materials used in class.
"This is about protecting religious liberties of children and families, a right guaranteed in the constitution," Curlee wrote in an email.
Curlee's petition says test questions on religion may conflict with a student's beliefs. The petition also says a "major portion" of the seventh grade state social studies test centers on religion, and that the exam is a big part of a student's final grade.
"If last year's test was any indication, the state exam will contain questions likely to conflict with a child's religious beliefs," the petition says. "If a child fails to answer even one question they personally find offensive or contradictory to their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, it will have an immediate negative impact on both the test score and final course grade."
State Department of Education spokeswoman Ashley Ball said that portion of the petition "is inaccurate."
"Please note that because early indicators of student scores will likely be delayed this year, districts do not have to include state-required test scores in a student’s grade this year," Ball said by email.
Students took a no-stakes field test of the state social studies exam last year. In 2016 students will take TNReady, an improved, and this time operational, version of the state social studies exam.
State law requires school districts to include student performance on state-required tests in final grades. But since next year's test is new, districts will likely have the option to not link test performance to student grades.
"Because this is the first year of a new assessment, we anticipate that early indicators of student performance will be delayed; this will allow districts the option to choose if they want to include student performance on state-required assessments in final grades," Ball said.
Ball wrote the state can not release the exam questions because many of them will be reused in next year's test.
Curlee wrote that she started the petition based on her experiences as a parent.
Curlee's daughter was in seventh grade last year. Curlee wrote in an email that she raised concerns about assignments from her daughter's social studies classes. The assignments had a heavier emphasis on religion than expected, Curlee wrote.
"We were informed other assignments we voiced concerns over would also be on the test. Multiple times, the teacher stressed she had to cover what was going to be on the test," Curlee wrote.
Curlee also wrote she's concerned about the lack of parental review of supplemental materials used in class.
Tennessee students learn about major world religions in the context of world history in sixth and seventh grades. Students learn about the rise, spread and impact of the Islamic civilization in seventh grade.
"World religions are an intricate part of the fabric of world history. All social standards related to religions should be taught in a historical context," Ball wrote in an email. "Therefore, any test questions involving world religion should measure a student’s knowledge of world religions in the context of world history."
Next year's state social studies test will be based on social studies standards implemented during the 2014-15 school year. The state's social studies exams test students in grades 3-8.
Curlee isn't the only school board member concerned with Islam in schools.
Williamson County school board member Beth Burgos introduced a resolution last month in response to Islam concerns. Her resolution wanted to bolster public review of tests and other class materials for religious bias. Burgos' resolution also said students should not be tested on religious knowledge on state assessments.
Burgos' later pulled her resolution.
Though not related to religious concerns, Williamson County board member P.J. Mezera recently introduced a resolution to exempt Williamson County students in grades K-8 from taking state social studies tests. Mezera said he wanted to provide relief from high-stakes testing. The board tabled the resolution in favor of organizing a town hall for all test stakeholders.
The state board of education will review social studies standards in January.
Reach Melanie Balakit at 615-926-1638 and on Twitter @MelanieBalakit.
This story has been updated to clarify what portions of the petition the state Department of Education found inaccurate. Curlee’s petition states that if a “child fails to answer even one question they personally find offensive or contradictory to their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, it will have an immediate negative impact on both the test score and final course grade.” According to Department of Education spokeswoman Ashley Ball, the state considers that statement inaccurate. Ball said that “because early indicators of student scores will likely be delayed this year, districts do not have to include state-required test scores in a student’s grade this year.”
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his is a camera review. There are a number of updates that should appeal in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, but the one question most upgraders are going to be asking is how good is the camera?
The camera system in the iPhone is becoming the central focus of its technological advancements. And it’s not just about pictures anymore. With augmented reality and computer vision emerging as contenders for the next major wave in platform development, the camera system is an input mechanism, a communications system and a statement of intent.
If the camera is a platform, the time to begin reviewing the iPhone as a camera is long overdue.
Two years ago, in my review of the iPhone 6s, I noted that the pace of iPhone performance improvements had quickened. The in-between years of the ’s’ models of iPhone were becoming the times when big silicon releases were being injected into the devices. Huge leaps in processing power and efficiency in versions that were being discounted as iterations on the previous year’s models.
The iPhone 8 proves to be an odd sort of proof for this hypothesis. Apple is launching it one year after the iPhone 7 while nearly simultaneously performing a table flip and announcing the iPhone X just minutes later. Gone is the ’s’ appendix, but continuing is the tradition of “ticking” the silicon improvements forward with crazy speed.
I’ll get this part out of the way right at the top. My recommendation remains unchanged from last year: With nicely enhanced cameras, more power and a fresh look, these are easy phones to recommend if you’re open to an upgrade.
But let’s dig a bit deeper.
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Back that glass up
The return of the glass back is going to be a love-it-or-hate-it feature of the iPhone 8. But for me, it’s a love it. Since I gave up my iPhone 4s, I’ve been missing that feel you get from having both sides of the phone coated in glass.
There’s something about the texture of glass. It’s smoother than the aluminum, but typically less slippery and easier to grip. Glass also warms up to the temperature of your hand faster and stays at that temperature rather than getting hot. And when your phone is really chugging along, it distributes the heat from the processor better, making hot spots less pronounced.
But the main reason for the glass coating isn’t any of that, it’s that it needs to be radio transparent to enable wireless charging. I don’t know the exact internal layout of the phone yet, we’ll have to wait for a teardown, but it’s likely to be a wire loop of some sort that acts as a power antenna. With an aluminum back, Apple would have had to resort to some sort of external antenna, and that was never likely to happen. As it is, you get a nice return to form in the service of function.
So many iPhone screens get broken every year that making both sides glass seems inadvisable at best, but Apple has done a bit to help here.
First, the company works directly with Corning to develop stronger glass. It then gets exclusive access to this glass for some time before any competitor can use it. This is where the ion exchange process Apple has been using in its glass came from. That layer of strengthening is now 50 percent deeper than before. Think of it as a layer of toughened skin like a callous on your finger.
There’s also a bit more help in the shape of a substructure of copper and steel molecularly bonded together with a proprietary laser process and laid down in a lattice-style layer with gaps to allow things like wireless charging to take place through the back. Steel is strong and copper is a great heat sink. Together, hopefully, they make for a less breakable iPhone.
The aluminum of the body has also been strengthened again, just as it was in the second revision of this frame in the iPhone 6s. So, theoretically, you’re looking at the toughest possible phone made out of glass you can find. For what that’s worth.
The glass also allows for a beautifully translucent effect on the back of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Light traveling through the glass, off of the under coating and back gives it a layered look. It makes the back of the aluminum 7 models look positively pedestrian by comparison.
For those interested, the Gold finish has a ton of pink in it. The backside is almost spot on ‘Millennial Pink’, that suddenly ubiquitous shade. I think it’s safe to say Apple thinks Rose Gold is on the outs (the fashion world agrees) and pink is in.
In short it’s like this. From the front: real similar; from the side: real similar; from the back: new hotness.
The best reason to buy a new iPhone
The camera is the best reason to buy a new iPhone this year just as it has been several years running. The iPhone is the world’s most popular camera, by far, and Apple continues to take seriously the business of improving it.
As I’ve mentioned before in these reviews, I have a lengthy history in photography. I’ve been a working pro photographer, and I’ve sold cameras, performed maintenance and run a print lab. This has helped me to recognize the difference between how seriously Apple takes photography and the way that other companies approach “making the camera better.”
There are other smartphones that take excellent pictures, Samsung’s Galaxy S8+, the most direct competitor in terms of hardware that Apple has, among them. However, once you move beyond the basics of increasing resolution, basic optimization and adding catch-up computational features like faux blur, you begin to realize that there’s not a smartphone company on earth that takes it as far as Apple does. It’s just not comparable once you get into the nitty gritty. Here are a few examples you’ll find in the iPhone 8.
Sensor improvements. Same resolution, 12MP, but bigger sensor overall. This is a great recipe for improved image quality. I’m a big fan of concentrating on the size of the individual image sensors that translate into larger individual pixels and making the walls between them deeper, both of which Apple has done here. Those deeper pixel wells give better isolation between capture elements so that you don’t get that speckle that results in color confusion between two pixels.
There’s also a new color filter. Given that digital camera color filters haven’t changed much in years, I was curious about the details here, but couldn’t learn much more than that it should result in improved dynamic range and color.
High dynamic range (HDR) shooting has also been massively improved, to the point where there is no longer even a toggle for it. You just shoot, and if the camera thinks your picture will benefit by an expansion of tones into dark and light it will use it. And there’s such a tiny lag in between the images used to composite together an HDR shot that you’ll find very little of that ghosting that happened under the previous system. You’ll notice that you no longer get two shots — one HDR and one not. That’s how confident Apple is. It’s really well done — seamless even.
The wide and telephoto sensors in the 8 Plus have both been updated, and the system has 83 percent more throughput, which allows for more data to be passed through in a more power-efficient manner. This will help with rapid fire images, but more importantly it allows for the enormous amount of information that needs to be pushed through the pipeline to support 4K video at 60 frames per second and super slo-mo 1080p at 240 FPS.
Apple’s adoption of the HEVC video format, which is enormously effective at reducing file sizes, assists with this, but that’s still crazy impressive. Especially given that Apple is not playing tricks with video quality, and that this still leaves plenty of overhead for the computer vision smarts it uses on video to determine subject matter.
The results are better color with a wider range of tones across all kinds of shooting environments. Apple is particularly fond of their work capturing skies with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, because skies are chock full of light of all spectrums. That holds up in my testing — less banding, more gradations of tone that reproduce more accurately.
Textures in shooting cloth or any other fine detail up close are also improved, with less chance for muddy or moire images when the patterns are super regular. This is reflected in the 4K video modes as well, which have better color rendition across dark and light scenes and less artifacting.
Though you don’t get it at a full 240 FPS yet, it may be interesting to some slow-motion videographers that you get continuous autofocus at 1080p 120 FPS now. This should help track subjects during a slo-mo shot as they move toward or away from you.
Similarly, skin tones have been improved, with less heavy-handed smoothing as seen in the iPhone 7. This is a result of sensor improvements, but also of Apple applying deep learning and intelligence to the process of determining subjects and optimizing exposure. More on that later.
As phone cameras have gotten better at low-light photography, the flash has been reduced to documenting that weird growth you text your friends and hopefully a medical professional.
Hardware accelerated noise reduction. I know this is going to be a bit in the weeds for some folks, but I’m really excited about this one. Noise reduction (NR) is the process that every digital camera system uses to remove the multi-colored speckle that’s a typical byproduct of a (relatively) tiny sensor, heat and the analog-to-digital conversion process. Most people just call this “grain.”
In previous iPhones this was done purely by software. Now it’s being done directly by the hardware. I’d always found Apple’s NR to be too “painterly” in its effect. The aggressive way that they chose to reduce noise created an overall “softening,” especially noticeable in photos with fine detail when cropped or zoomed.
Here’s the bit where I whined about the way Apple handled reducing noise in the iPhone 7:
I’m still not completely happy with how much noise reduction Apple’s image signal processor (ISP) applies to pictures, but I make this statement fully aware that this is not something most folks will notice. It makes some sense that the NR would be more aggressive because most people want less ‘grain’ or pixel noise in their images. But it still results, I feel, in a little loss of sharpness in low-light situations. To be clear, this remains basically unchanged from the way that I feel about the way the ISP was tuned in the iPhone 6. Apple has made some insane improvements in the camera this time around, but I hope it does pay some attention to how they reduce noise and tweak that in the future.
Well, tweak it they have. Noise reduction is no longer a software-only feature. It’s hardware-accelerated, multi-band noise reduction done by the image signal processor (ISP) that Apple continues to improve. The result is reduced noise, but with a sharper, crisper feel that doesn’t feature the blotchy byproduct of the previous process. It’s a solid improvement everyone will benefit from, whether they realize it or not.
‘Zero’ shutter lag
For a while now, iPhones have been keeping a few images in memory before you even press the shutter button. These are recorded but thrown away nearly instantly. In optimal conditions, when you press the shutter, the last picture it recorded just before you pressed the shutter is the one you actually take.
This helps compensate for your normal human lag in pressing the button when you see something you want to take a shot of, and the lag of the system itself. It makes the picture-taking process feel instantaneous.
That buffer has gotten a bump in size in the iPhone 8, and Apple is now applying deep learning to optimize the process for the right time to shoot, the subject matter and other bits of intelligence.
The results are difficult to determine without a huge set of examples, because there are a lot of variables on any given shot. But, anecdotally, it does feel like the pictures fire off faster. Verdict: I believe them, but I need more time to feel this one out.
Flash
One of the main reasons you hate flash pictures is that they tend to pop the subject with tons of light and reduce the background to a blackish-gray nothing. It kills ambiance and mood and as phone cameras have gotten better at low-light photography, the flash has been reduced to documenting that weird growth you text your friends and hopefully a medical professional.
But pro photographers use flash all the time. Mainly because they have control over the shutter speed as well as the flash. This allows them to choose to leave the shutter open after the flash fires, filling in the background with more light and balancing the exposure.
Now, Apple does this automatically for you. If you take a flash picture of a person or thing and there’s enough light available to “fill” behind the subject, the iPhone will drag the shutter or leave it open automatically. It does this using intelligence around the subject matter, distance, ambient exposure and more in the time it takes to pop the shutter off.
The beauty of all of the examples I mentioned above? Every single bit of it is as accessible to the harried parent that wants the best shot of their kid on the first day of kindergarten as it is to a pro photographer. Yes, Apple has a silicon team that’s beyond ridiculous. Yes, it’s at the cutting edge of mobile computational photography and application of deep learning to photos. But you literally don’t have to give a flying animated poop emoji about it to get the benefit.
That is the key Apple innovation: It doesn’t matter whether you read, liked or understood what I just wrote above — you’re still going to benefit with incredible pictures.
iPhone 7 flash
iPhone 8 flash
Is the camera worth the upgrade?
Nearly every iPhone upgrade for the past several years has been driven by the camera. There have been impressive updates in hardware and feature additions, but anecdotally I cannot count the number of times people have cited the camera as the primary reason that they’re interested in updating their phone.
So, how does the camera in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus stack up?
Killer.
When people talk about Apple’s silicon team, they often concentrate on the A-series processors, which is fine. But that team also contributes heavily to the image pipeline in the iPhone’s camera systems.
This is the first year that I’m not saying ‘if you like bigger screens get the bigger one, otherwise get the smaller one’ about iPhones. I flat out recommend the iPhone 8 Plus if you’re in the market for an upgrade and can possibly stand using the larger phone. Why?
Portrait Lighting
Most people aren’t aware of this, but Apple almost never starts a development process for a piece of hardware or a feature with a goal of adding hardware or adding a feature. They start with a question. Sometimes the answer to a question like “Why do people still buy SLR cameras?” is “Because they like the look of a blurry background that separates the subject” and you end up with Portrait Mode.
Now that Portrait Mode is out of beta and looking pretty good in most cases, we’re getting a big update.
The marquee feature of the iPhone 8 Plus is Portrait Lighting. Using deep learning and computer vision, this mode finds faces in an image, detects the planes and angles that need to be lit and applies a variety of different lighting styles that a user can choose from either before or after the picture is taken.
It works better than it has any right to.
Subjects are almost without fail painted appropriately with the different styles of light. A top-down studio style light, a contoured dramatic light that enhances cheekbones and two “stage” lighting modes that drop out the background transform a regular lame snapshot into something you’re proud to throw on the ‘gram or even print out.
The studio and contour options are going to be flooding social networks and phones internet-wide as soon as people get their hands on their iPhone 8 Pluses. The stage lighting takes a bit more effort, but when you nail it and the software is able to do its job by accurately detecting hair and head shapes, it really stuns. It can produce images that feel professional and would take dozens of lights and pieces of equipment to pull off.
Original
Deep learning and computer vision are the keys to Portrait Lighting.
Studio
Studio-style lighting
Contour
The drama of contour lighting enhances cheekbones.
Stage effort
The stage lighting takes a bit more effort.
Professional stage
But when the software accurately detects hair and head shapes, it can produce images that feel professional.
That’s not a huge shock because that’s what Apple did to get this right. They took hundreds of thousands of shots using professional lighting rigs set up by master photographers and cinematographers. Then they distilled those down to a set of master characteristics and figured out how to reproduce them computationally.
The feature is still in beta. But this is a look into the future of photography. All photography, not just on smartphones — though that’s quickly becoming the primary way that most people shoot pictures.
And it’s also something else: augmented reality.
While you might not jump instantly to assigning the term AR to this kind of feature, this is how Apple thinks of it. And it’s how the people that I talk to who are really excited about AR are thinking about it.
It’s altering the fabric of reality to enhance, remove or augment it. And it’s going to spread to every aspect of computer vision, photography and imaging. AR isn’t just putting a virtual bird on it or dropping an Ikea couch into your living room. It’s going to be everywhere, and Apple is preparing itself to push hard in this area. All of that is enabled, of course, by custom hardware.
Because the feature is still in beta, there are obviously things it will have trouble with for now, like curly or fine hair. But it’s useful on skin tones from dark to light — it was clearly tested on a wide variety of people. It’s not perfect but it’s still very impressive.
What the hell does Bionic mean anyway?
Nothing. At least, not specifically. The A11 Bionic chip carries that name simply to differentiate it without having to start appending a bunch of digits to it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t different than what came before.
Bionic is just marketing, but there are real machine learning advantages. It can run instructions at 16-bit instead of 32-bit for instance, for calculations that don’t need the extra overhead. This can massively speed up ML library calculations. It also does have enhanced GPU support to allow ML applications to better leverage the Apple-designed GPU. Obviously GPUs have many advantages for ML training and modeling. And yes, it does have specific enhancements that Apple uses for its own ML stuff like portrait lighting, Face ID and more.
Apple is angling hard through these waters toward a future where the kinds of neural network processing that have to be done remotely can be done on device. This, of course, is a boon to privacy and security. It allows Apple to promise you that your sensitive data will never leave your hands while still being able to provide the advanced intelligence that modern features require.
Apple’s A11 chip has performance that’s on par with an i5 MacBook Pro — and that’s when it’s limited by having to sit on a battery-powered device. A custom designed performance controller — a CPU traffic cop — sits between six cores tuned to higher or lower performance tasks.
This is all opaque to you, the user, of course. But what it means is that you get more power but the same amount of battery life. It’s an even more impressive feat when you realize that the battery is actually physically smaller than last year’s models.
There is not a single team of engineers at Apple more responsible for the success of the iPhone than its group of chip makers.
Contact high
Wireless, or contact, charging works but you have to buy a third-party pad yourself. That’s about all there is to say about it besides it does work with a case and charges about as fast as with the standard adapter.
I’ve had wireless charging on Android phones for a while, and it’s definitely handy. It’s nice to see it come to iPhones and the grab-and-go experience is lovely. We’ll see how good Apple thinks it can really make the experience when its own contact charging AirPad arrives.
Living in the shadow of X
All of this, of course, sits in the shadow of the iPhone X. Had Apple not announced the X when it did, the iPhone 8 would be an easy choice for upgraders and about the same amount of take-it-or-leave-it talk by early adopters that we saw at the launch of the iPhone 7. A bunch of internal upgrades and a nice new glass back along with the new photography stuff means that Apple will sell plenty of iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Pluses.
I don’t think Apple knows whether people will lean one way or the other for sure. Their guidance for this quarter certainly indicates that the matter is up in the air. But I do believe that they’re not overly concerned if people buy an iPhone 8 or an iPhone X. You’re still buying an iPhone.
As far as a consumer goes, however, the iPhone 8 is the easy traditional choice this year. It’s got nearly every technical enhancement that the iPhone X has outside of the TrueDepth camera and OLED screen. I think the mental calculus on this one is probably closer than it’s ever been, but the framework is roughly the same: If you’re the kind of person who buys the high end iPhone every year then wait for the iPhone X. With the one caveat that if the notch for the depth camera on the front of the X offends you, well you have most of the major tech right in the iPhone 8.
I’ve been thinking about this one, and I think the best way to categorize the iPhone X is as a superset of the iPhone 8 series. I’ll talk about that more when it comes time to discuss the X, but for now the iPhone 8 is still going to get you most of the way to “the best” — especially when it comes to the camera.
The iPhone has been the world’s most popular camera for a while now, and it has become a huge reason, perhaps the primary reason, that iPhone users upgrade. Each year, improvements in silicon or design have also contributed to improvements in the iPhone as a camera. This year, Apple has done something really incredible with the Portrait Lighting mode, which is why if you’re in the market for a new iPhone, I recommend the 8 Plus.The fact that Nikki Haley occupies the position she does is a real head-scratcher, but then again, maybe not.
Haley is one of the most abject grovelers to the American Israel lobby. Check out this extraordinary video of her bowing and scraping at a recent Israel lobby event - it is not to be believed:
So maybe her ambassadorship was some kind of political promise in return for Jewish votes on something - who knows, the swamp is the swamp...
Her latest embarrassment to the country was to just make up a story about Russia out of thin air. Trump acts like she doesn't exist, which confirms the theory that she was just a bargaining chip.
He probably thinks she is just some dumb THOT he never has to talk to.
Transcript:
Anchor:2 West Haven residents accused of kidnapping, assault
Jason Kaufman, 31, is accused of kidnapping a woman and forcing her into the trunk of a vehicle. Jason Kaufman, 31, is accused of kidnapping a woman and forcing her into the trunk of a vehicle. Photo: Courtesy Of West Haven Police Photo: Courtesy Of West Haven Police |
split". Ms Allington-Jones and fellow conservator Chelsea McKibbin humidified the skin to make it more pliable. While removing the stuffing, Ms Allington-Jones said they "were delighted to also discover a broken chair and a scrap of The Sydney Morning Herald inside".
The fish has now been repaired and suspended on a new metal frame to enable safe storage and movement around the museum. Sydney in 1883 front page, "Anniversary Day", 1883. Credit:Janie Barrett There was a lot going on in early 1883. Back then, January 26 was called "Anniversary Day" and The Sydney Morning Herald had just 10 pages.
Much of the news seems prosaically familiar: the extension of a light rail line to the eastern suburbs; compulsory acquisition of property for controversial city infrastructure; a Test match to start that day; and debates about funding of religious schools. But none of this found its way onto the front page. The lead item on page 1 was births, followed by marriages, deaths and shipping. The personal column is intriguing. Who knows what was behind this message to "H" from "M": "You looked very comfortable in your buggy; where was she? Say 'Bouquet'." And what about this? "Will the Lady that called at Mrs Bardwell's, grocer, Mary Street, please call again." Whatever it was, it was on the front page in 1883.
The single letter to the editor concerned city crowding and poor urban planning around "The Circular Quay". "Would not the best policy the government could adopt to be to help the citizens to obtain more elbow room? And could not this best be done by working in a westerly direction?" And by this, our anonymous Woolloomooloo letter writer means towards Darling Harbour, which is where our sunfish was found. An Ashes Test match That Sydney summer day was also the first day of the Ashes Test at the SCG, then the Association Ground. It was only the third Test match played there. Arguably, it was the first Ashes Test played at the ground. It was the first in Sydney to follow the 1882 match at The Oval that Australia had won. That match in London had prompted the now famous obituary for English cricket published in The Sporting Times.
"Every preparation has been made on the Association Cricket Ground for the great cricket contest between the Australian Eleven and the Hon. Ivo Bligh's team, which will begin this day, at noon," the Herald's correspondent reported. Also reported was an innovation: "Two patent scoring-boards, which will show the score of each batsman as he compiles his score, and the total as each run is made. "The turf, though a trifle dead owing to the recent rains, will improve and become firmer every hour... The side losing the toss will be placed at great disadvantage, for the ground, in its present condition, is certain to cut up very much, even after one day's play," the report ran. "The match is exciting the greatest of interest in the public mind and it is confidently expected that it will be the best attended match that has ever been played in New South Wales... "Trains will run direct to the ground during the day every few minutes." England won the toss, elected to bat and won by 88 runs. The series was drawn, two a piece. Australia retained the Ashes.
News of the day In other news, the NSW Parliament was sitting in January, with a session of the Legislative Council on the evening of January 25 debating the Criminal Law Amendment bill. Earlier in the day in the Legislative Assembly "leave was given to bring in the Rabbit Nuisance Bill". (Working in January? Take note, pollies in today's Bear Pit.) A single item on page 5 dealt with "News of the Day". It is a section of this we can see from a photo supplied by the Natural History Museum. Fragment of Credit:Natural History Museum, London Back in the day, this was a string of unrelated paragraphs starting with news of an appointment of British officials in Egypt, with protests from the Turkish government.
Such news from the Empire segues into former Empress Eugenie's visit to Paris successfully reuniting the Bonapartist party, followed by news of artist Gustave Dore, "reported to have died from chill". NSW Anniversary Day After dealing with arrangements for the General Post Office on what was a public holiday, we have this: "Of all our holidays the anniversary of the colony is, perhaps, the favourite to Sydney people and the whole community appears to lay itself out on that day more religiously than on any other to do nothing but enjoy itself." After more mention of the Test match, the Herald reports: "The Sydney Turf Club is to hold its first anniversary meeting at Randwick and the crowds attracted by that event and the hose how have made up their minds to take advantage of the extension of the tramway to the ocean at Coogee will probably hopelessly overtax the resources of of the tram department." There were reported negotiations on the borders between the colonies of NSW and South Australia, complaints regarding the "hardship to female teachers in public schools of being compelled to stand during school hours".
Crime, misadventure and country news The "News of the Day" column also deals with a number of criminal matters, including news of "a groom, whose name is unknown, found yesterday afternoon by police lying on the road at the corner of Oxford Street and Darlinghurst Road in an unconscious state". And casually towards the end of the column are reported "several deaths by drowning" throughout the colony. In good news from the colony of New Zealand "publicans will probably discontinue the practice of sending out beer in jars that have contained sulphuric acid". Loading
Sadly, in "country news", a string of deaths. From Mudgee: "A little boy named Willie Martin, 7 years of age, was accidentally shot dead... by a boy named Rope, aged 14, uncle of the deceased." It breathlessly continues to report "some light rain fell this afternoon... and... Threshing is in full swing in the district." And from Tamworth a report of a "very large meeting" to consider the "introduction of the eight-hours system into the mechanical workshops". The Herald reports that "in the event of their request being refused the men have unanimously agreed to strike".Another explosive episode of Game of Thrones Season 6 has hit our screens, and with it comes explosive (but spoiler free) data.
We tracked mentions of the show and characters throughout the first showing of episode 3 and here’s what we found.
Oathbreaker
Yet again it was the end of the episode that got the most mentions, with 9:55pm accumulating 3k mentions overall.
This is a common theme so far in the series, with episodes one and two having similar spikes right at the end. The writers clearly like to save the biggest surprises until the later minutes.
However, this was certainly the lowest performing episode in terms of Twitter mentions so far. The show garnered around 70k mentions during the hour it first aired, compared to last week’s 144k and the premiere’s 166k.We do not share your email address without your permission. We will send you updates on this and other important campaigns by email. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so.
Internet-Wide Day Of Action: Support Privacy Amendments To Cyber-Security Bill
We're taking part in an Internet-wide day of action: Last week's vote was delayed, so now the Senate version of CISPA looks like it'll be voted on later THIS WEEK. Pro-privacy changes have been made to the bill, but they don't go far enough to protect us from undue surveillance by the government and corporations.
Specifically, Al Franken and Rand Paul are pushing an amendment to make sure companies can't spy on their users' private communications: Please add your name at right to support it.
Surveillance proponents are going to try to kill amendments like this one and eat into the pro-privacy changes that have already been made.
Congressional staffers say we can win these fights, but we need to up the volume of constituent contacts -- please help us bombard Congress with emails and calls this week.
Please add your name at right to help us protect privacy rights as this bill moves forward, and then use these links to share this campaign and the image at right:
If you're already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends. If you're already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: Tweet
Just add your name at right to email the Senate. The vote is later THIS WEEK.
Here's the EFF's blog post on the Franken-Paul amendment. Here's the ACLU on the positive changes which have been made so far.Foo Fighters dedicates free release to Paris Attacks victims
NEW YORK - Agence France-Presse
AFP photo
Foo Fighters on Nov. 23 released a free mini-album dedicated to the victims of the Paris attacks, voicing hope that music can offer a bit of joy amid tragedy.The guitar rock giants made available for downloading without charge an EP called "Saint Cecilia," the title presumably an allusion to the patron saint of music.Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl said the EP was originally designed as "a celebration of life and music" to mark the end of the group's global tour."Now, there is a new, hopeful intention that, even in the smallest way, perhaps these songs can bring a little light into this sometimes dark world," Grohl wrote in a letter to announce the EP."To remind us that music is life, and that hope and healing go hand in hand with song. That much can never be taken away," he wrote.Grohl, also known as the drummer for grunge legends Nirvana, encouraged fans to make donations for survivors and families of the Paris victims, offering a link on the band's website.Foo Fighters had originally planned to play Paris last week on one of the last dates of a global tour.But the band ended its tour early after the assault claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group that included a massacre of 89 people at a concert of Eagles of Death Metal, a California rock band that has collaborated with Grohl."To all who were affected by the atrocities in Paris, loved ones and friends, our hearts go out to you and your families. We will return and celebrate life and love with you once again someday with our music. As it should be done," Grohl wrote in his latest message.The music follows Foo Fighters' style of hard-charging rock alternating with cleaner-cut tracks driven by acoustic guitar.One track, "Savior Breath," harks back at times to the Nirvana era with Grohl screaming over a high-tempo guitar line.While the EP itself was a surprise, Foo Fighters had been hinting at it for weeks, earlier putting a clock on its website with a countdown to early Nov. 23 without further explanation.Foo Fighters had an eventful year that included Grohl -- often described as one of the gentler spirits in rock -- breaking his leg in Sweden but returning to finish the show.Foo Fighters last year released the album "Sonic Highways" that was billed as an exploration of US musical history, accompanied by a documentary series in which Grohl interviews leading acts in major cities.Crown Casino: Fourth worker says he was told to tamper with pokies to limit punters winning
Updated
Poker machines at Crown Casino were deliberately manipulated and tampered with by technicians in a bid to boost profits, another whistleblower says.
The whistleblower who worked at Crown in Melbourne for many years added weight to testimony made by three men against the casino that was tabled in Federal Parliament by independent Andrew Wilkie in October.
The claims by those three former employees — that machines were manipulated, federal anti-money laundering rules were avoided, and a blind eye turned to domestic violence and illicit drug use — triggered an investigation from Victoria's Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation (VCGLR).
Crown Casino emphatically rejected all the allegations and took out newspaper ads rejecting the claims.
In ads published in October, Crown Resorts executive chairman John Alexander said that if Mr Wilkie "believes he has evidence of wrongdoing, he should stop the political games, step out of the Parliament and make his claims without privilege".
But in a one-line statement in response to the fourth whistleblower's claims, a Crown spokesperson said "any allegations of this nature should be to be referred to the VCGLR".
In an interview with the ABC, the new whistleblower said last year he and other technicians were instructed to remove betting options on the Players Choice Super machine because punters were winning too much.
"There was an instance where this particular game was paying out too much on the gamble function so technicians were instructed to remove the gamble button completely," he said.
"It was physically removed."
In another case he said technicians removed multiple "spin" options on the IGT Blue Chip machines so that only the maximum bet and minimum bet options were left.
The claims are consistent with the October trio's testimony that many gambling options were removed.
The original three whistleblowers accused the VCGLR of not following up issues of button manipulation when it was detected.
He said the technicians were instructed to make the changes.
"The reason behind that was to limit the play options for the players, to encourage them to play maximum lines and of course win maximum amounts of money," he said.
The fourth whistleblower has not spoken to police because he is worried about being identified to powerful people at Crown Casino, and has fears for his safety.
"I knew that it was unethical when I heard about the conversation with the analyst saying it was to encourage players to spend more money and limit their play options," he said.
"Obviously from anyone's perspective who hears that, it is not the right thing to be done."
He believes there should be a paper trail of evidence about the manipulation and said the order came from managers.
The whistleblower also confirmed the practice of moving poker machines into the highest traffic areas of the Casino on weekends and resetting the "return to player" ratio to maximise profits.
Under Victorian law, pokies must return a minimum of 85 per cent of money wagered to punters.
Most machines operate at a higher rate, but under a strategy used by Crown, the whistleblower claims, machines were regularly reset to the 85 per cent ratio on weekends to boost revenue.
"Not only moving machines into highly populated areas but there were instances where machines were wiped of their memory and the percentages returned to player percentages modified over a weekend period and lowered," he said.
There had been attempts for the fourth whistleblower's claims to be tabled in Parliament but this was blocked — Mr Wilkie's office has since handed that evidence to Victoria Police.
Mr Wilkie said the latest allegations were very serious, but acknowledged he did not know if they were "true or false."
"The next layer that's required is a [federal] parliamentary inquiry because that will provide a framework for these and other whistleblowers perhaps to come forward and, with the protection of Parliament, to tell us what they know," he told ABC News Breakfast.
Earlier this year, more than a dozen technicians were laid off by Crown but an Electrical Trades Union campaign against the Casino has resulted in the company offering the staff their jobs back.
The retrenched staff are being offered $10,000 as compensation or $20,000 if they do not return. The offer was only made after the three whistleblowers made their claims.
The whistleblower is angry that Crown has been so dismissive of the claims.
"It's very frustrating and disappointing that someone can so blatantly come out and say that it is a lie when I know it's the truth," he said.
Greens call for police investigation
The VCGLR said it was not appropriate to comment due to their ongoing investigation into the matter.
"An investigation is currently underway on matters relating to the claims made by Mr Wilkie in Federal Parliament," a spokesperson for the commission said.
Victoria's Gaming Minister Marlene Kairouz said she had confidence in the regulator to investigate the claims.
"The regulator is taking these allegations quite seriously, so am I," she said.
"They're investigating these allegations quite thoroughly. I've asked them to leave no stone unturned."
But Greens MP Colleen Hartland said Crown's poker machines should be suspended from trade and the police brought in to investigate.
"The minister shouldn't be just relying on the regulator, which clearly isn't doing its job," she said.
Topics: government-and-politics, corruption, gambling, southbank-3006, melbourne-3000, vic
First postedIBM and Sony have developed a new magnetic tape system capable of storing 201 gigabits of data per square inch, for a max theoretical capacity of 330 terabytes in a single palm-sized cartridge.
For comparison, the world's largest hard drives—which are about twice the physical size of a Sony tape cartridge—are the 60TB Seagate SSD or 12TB HGST helium-filled HDD. The largest commercially available tapes only store 15TB. So, 330TB is quite a lot.
To achieve such a dramatic increase in areal density, Sony and IBM tackled different parts of the problem: Sony developed a new type of tape that has a higher density of magnetic recording sites, and IBM Research worked on new heads and signal processing tech to actually read and extract data from those nanometre-long patches of magnetism.
Sony's new tape is underpinned by two novel technologies: an improved built-in lubricant layer, which keeps it running smoothly through the machine, and a new type of magnetic layer. Usually, a tape's magnetic layer is applied in liquid form, kind of like paint—which is one of the reasons that magnetic tape is so cheap and easy to produce in huge quantities. In this case, Sony has instead used sputter deposition, a mature technique that has been used by the semiconductor and hard drive industries for decades to lay down thin films.
The main upshot of sputtering—a cool process that you should probably read about—is that it produces magnetic tape with magnetic grains that are just a few nanometres across, rather than tens or hundreds of nanometres in the case of commercially available tape.
The new lubrication layer, which we don't know much about, makes sure that the tape streams out of the cartridge and through the machine extremely smoothly. Some of the biggest difficulties of tape recording and playback are managing friction and air resistance, which cause wear and tear and chaotic movements. When you're trying to read a magnetic site that is just 7nm across, with the tape whizzing by at almost 10 metres per second, even the smallest of movements can be massively problematic.
We know a little more about IBM's new read head, which appears to be a 48nm-wide tunnelling magneto-resistive head that would usually be found in a hard disk drive—which makes sense, given the tape's sputtered medium is very similar to the surface of a hard drive platter. This new head, combined with new servo tech that precisely controls the flow of tape through the system, allows for a positional accuracy of under 7nm. A new signal processing algorithm helps the system make sense of the tiny magnetic fields that are being read by the head.
The new cartridges, when they're eventually commercialised, will be significantly more expensive because of the tape's complex manufacturing process. Likewise, a new tape drive (costing several thousand pounds) would be required. Still, given the massive increase in per-cartridge capacity, the companies that still use tape storage for backups and cold storage will be quite excited.
Some more details of IBM's side of the work are available in a paper published in a recent issue of IEEE Transactions on Magnetics. DOI: 10.1109/TMAG.2017.2727822.
Now read about IBM's world-first 5nm chip, or Seagate's world's largest 60TB hard drive...Feb 11, 2015; Toronto, Ontario, CAN; Toronto Raptors guard Lou Williams (23) drives to the basket past Washington Wizards point guard John Wall (2) at Air Canada Centre. The Raptors beat the Wizards 95-93. Mandatory Credit: Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports
NBA Playoffs 2015: Why The Toronto Raptors’ Lack Of An ‘It’ Factor Will Be Key For Washington Wizards
NBA Playoffs 2015: Why The Toronto Raptors’ Lack Of An ‘It’ Factor Will Be Key For Washington Wizards by Ben Mehic
It seems like every team in the NBA has a player that’s labeled a ‘Wizards Killer’. But there’s probably none more feared than Toronto Raptors guard, Louis Williams, who’s been called a ‘Wizards Killer’ for quite some time now.
Defending the likes of Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan will certainly be a tough task for the Washington Wizards, but Lou Williams is probably equally as tough to defend.
While he’s not as talented as the aforementioned players, for some reason, Williams morphs into the second coming of Michael Jordan when he’s playing the Washington Wizards.
Lou Williams has become a legitimate candidate for the Sixth Man of the Year award, averaging nearly 16 points off the bench for Toronto.
However, the 6’1″ guard averaged 19.7 points on 48 percent shooting from the field in three meetings against Washington this season. He put those numbers up in less than 27 minutes of action.
Similar to D.J. Augustin during last year’s series against the Chicago Bulls, Lou Williams seems capable of winning a playoff game all by himself. Unless he’s on your team, Williams is one of the most irritating players to watch in the NBA.
There isn’t a shot that Lou Williams isn’t comfortable taking.
When the play breaks down, Williams is one of those players that makes defenses sick by knocking down shots from virtually anywhere on the court. Most teams seem to have a scoring spark off the bench and Lou Williams has become the ultimate spark for Toronto.
Garrett Temple served as the team’s defensive specialist off the bench, but it’s not likely that he’ll get much action (if any) against the Toronto Raptors. A hamstring injury to Temple might seem insignificant, but the Wizards really don’t have another player off the bench that’s capable of stopping Lou Williams.
The Raptors have been playing lousy basketball as of late, but they do have the talent to explode for big scoring nights. Lou Williams is a key catalyst to their offense, making him a defensive priority for the Washington Wizards.
At this point, I’ve probably made it seem like Lou Williams is impossible to stop.
Given his success against Washington, you could assume that Williams is going to put up monstrous stats against the Wizards during their playoff series.
Williams is inevitably going to hit tough shots. Washington can’t allow him to get into a rhythm early, otherwise they’ll be in trouble.
Williams shot just slightly over 40 percent from the field this season, so he isn’t unstoppable.
Limiting the amount of open three point looks for Williams will be key.
Williams shot nearly 40 percent in catch-and-shoot three point opportunities this season. Bradley Beal and Ramon Sessions will probably be asked to cover Williams, and forcing him to shoot off the dribble is going to be important. He made over 50 percent of his “wide-open” jump shots this season.
The Raptors will present match up issues for Washington, especially since their big men are capable of stretching the floor, but they’re still a perimeter oriented team. Toronto will go as far as their guards can take them, including Lou Williams.
Most coaches shorten their rotations during the playoffs, so you could expect Lou Williams’ minutes to increase. The guards will ultimately end up determining the winner of the series.
John Wall, Bradley Beal, Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan will be the featured match ups, but Lou Williams could end up swinging the series. If the Wizards want to advance to the semi-finals, containing Williams will be one of their top priorities. Will they be able to contain him? Well, that remains to be seen.(CNN) - It’s hard to believe, but one in seven Americans – 15% of the country – now need government-provided food stamps simply to survive.
The new numbers just came out from the United States Department of Agriculture, which administers what’s officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Nearly 46 million Americans receive food stamps out of a population of some 311 million people. That’s the highest number on record.
The continued high unemployment and the weak U.S. economy have contributed to the explosive growth of the food stamp program – with no end in sight to the monthly increases.
Here’s some context:
– In October 2007, some 27 million Americans were on food stamps.
– A year later, October 2008, the number had reached nearly 31 million.
– By October 2009, the number was approaching more than 37 million.
– Last October saw the program increase to 43 million.
– By the end of May, 45,753,078 Americans were dependent on food stamps.
So how much money in food stamps do they get?
– An eligible individual gets $200 a month in food stamps – in the form of a debit card that can be used at supermarkets and stores to buy authorized food.
– A two-person household gets $367 a month.
– A three-person household gets $526 a month.
– And a four-person household gets $668 a month.
That’s certainly not a lot of money to purchase food for adults and children, but that’s what so many American families have to live on. Many of them simply don’t have any other money.
By the way, the just-approved first round of nearly $1 trillion in debt ceiling spending cuts over the next 10 years exempted any cuts in the food stamps program.
RELATED STORY: Food stamp use rises to record 45.8 millionKyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics celebrates during the fourth quarter against the Golden State Warriors on Nov. 16, 2017. Getty Images
As his Golden State Warriors built a first-half lead over the Boston Celtics, Steve Kerr told TNT sideline reporter Rosalyn Gold-Onwude that the Celtics were “the best team in the league.” It seemed like dubious praise at the time, the words of a coach of an unbeatable team puffing up the opposition. By the time the Celtics had overcome a 17-point deficit to beat Golden State 92-88—Boston’s 14th win in a row, giving them a league-leading record of 14-2—that praise was starting to sound a lot more genuine.
Kerr had been lavishing the Celtics with compliments even before Thursday’s game. “It sure looks like Boston is the team of the future in the East,” he told ESPN’s Chris Haynes on Wednesday. “That looks like a team that is going to be at the top of the East for a long time to come.” But despite what Kerr says, the Celtics are not an exciting and spritely “team of the future.” They are a squad of Benjamin Buttons: fun young players who are all secretly seasoned vets.
Take rookie Jayson Tatum. He may be 19, but the No. 3 pick in the 2017 draft already performs with the maturity and intelligence of a ring-chasing 34-year-old role player. He even looks the part, and his dated mustache-goatee combo screams “paying the bills at the dining room table after the kids go to bed.” (The Boston media are of course handling him with the measured restraint for which they are known.)
Seven of the 10 players who took the floor for Boston on Thursday night—starters Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Kyrie Irving, plus reserves Marcus Smart, Semi Ojeleye, Terry Rozier, and Daniel Theis—are 25 years old or younger. They should be too callow to be winning like this. Yet here we are, mourning lost youth.
In Thursday’s win, the Celtics held Steph Curry to 9 points on 3-14 shooting, which is essentially like throwing handcuffs on a forest fire. And while Kevin Durant scored 24, he had to work through a squadron of Boston defenders to get every look, including on his baseline attempt in the closing seconds that would have sent the game to overtime. On the perimeter, the Celtics combine toughness (Smart is a pest, in a good way) with length and athleticism (second-year forward Brown, who had a terrific night under adverse circumstances) to funnel teams where they want them. It’s why the Warriors, who average 117.5 points per game, managed to score only 88 in 48 minutes.
Boston’s wrist-slapping, jersey-grabbing victory looked like of all the Celtics’ other wins. In a league in which only four teams allow less than 100 points per game, the Celtics—who lead the league in defensive efficiency—give up just 94.1. (The Cleveland Cavaliers, whose roster consists of LeBron James and the cast of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, give up 112.1.) Boston also grabs a staggering 82 percent of its opponents’ missed shots. Annoying and persistent, the Celtics are like athlete’s foot. Long story short, they make you miss and then get the rebound. They are fungi.
Playing the Celtics is like traveling through a wormhole to an earlier era. The NBA in 2017 is all about playing fast and small. Boston, meanwhile, is ranked 22nd in pace and runs much of its offense through center Al Horford. It’s all rather unfashionable, but the Celtics make it work. They showed up to the first day of school after raiding their dad’s closet and now everyone’s raving about their elastic-waisted cargo pants.
The fact that Boston has managed to put together this win streak after losing star small forward Gordon Hayward to a gruesome injury in the first game of the season is nothing short of confounding. The way that they’re doing it may be even more surprising.
For the past three years or so, Stevens had the Celtics performing above their pay grade thanks to a ball-sharing offense and sturdy team defense. When they traded for Irving over the summer, the worry was that the electric point guard’s defensive shortcomings would become a liability in Stevens’ system. Sixteen games into the 2017 season, those fears look like silly bedwetting. Statistically, the Celtics are better defensively with Irving on the court than with him off it. Either Irving has Freaky Friday’d with mid-1990s Gary Payton, or people like myself who made wild predictions in August were wrong. I tip my cap to the benevolent witch responsible for the body-switch—clearly she wanted to teach Irving and Payton a lesson, and it looks like it’s working. Also, Brad Stevens seems like a very good coach.
If the Celtics really are the cream of the Eastern Conference, they will serve as a wildly different foil to the Warriors than the Cavaliers have the last three seasons. To say that Cleveland revolves around LeBron James is a cosmic understatement. If I may paraphrase Carl Sagan, James is the star stuff of which the Cavs are made. The Celtics lack this kind of charismatic paterfamilias. They are death by a million paper cuts, and the Warriors learned this annoying lesson firsthand on Thursday.
It’s only November, but the Celtics have at least proven that they will be a tougher out for the Cavs in the Eastern Conference playoffs this year than they have been in the past. There’s no point in predicting what will happen come April, May, and June, but we know how the Celtics will play once the postseason arrives. Should they go the distance in the East, their blueprint on how to combat Golden State will be more about negating heroics than relying on them.
The narrative surrounding the previous three NBA Finals has been Hannibal versus Rome, with LeBron leading his Cavs on a series of fateful marches to face the mightiest of opponents. The Celtics don’t have a Hannibal. They aren’t the hordes at the gates. They are administrative rot. Would you rather watch a mighty hero try to take down Rome, or would you rather see a great empire succumb to, say, contaminated aqueducts? I’m already getting excited for June—the promotional copy just writes itself.Darrell Issa asked Hillary Clinton about her personal email use in 2012
A House committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton more than two years ago asking if she used a personal email account for official business, but never received a direct answer to the question.
The correspondence — first reported Tuesday night by The New York Times — shows Rep. Darrell Issa asked Clinton about her personal email use on Dec. 13, 2012, writing in his capacity as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
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“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Issa wrote Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.”
The letter also asked another question that turns out to be a pointed one in light of Clinton’s acknowledgement last month that she left office with tens of thousands of work-related emails in a personal account and did not provide copies to her former agency until last year, after an official there asked four former secretaries to turn over any such records.
“Does the agency require employees to certify on a periodic basis or at the end of their employment with the agency they have turned over any communications involving official business that they have sent or received using nonofficial accounts?” Issa asked in one of a series of eight questions sent to agency chiefs and obtained by POLITICO.
At the end of January 2013, about six weeks after the letter was sent, Clinton stepped down as secretary. The letter was answered in March of that year by State Department legislative affairs official Thomas Gibbons, who didn’t say whether Clinton had used personal email as secretary.
Gibbons said any State employee “should make it clear that his or her personal email is not being used for official business.”
Issa’s letter to Clinton, who formally announced her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on Sunday, was one of a round of more than a dozen such inquiries he sent to agency chiefs across the government after it was disclosed that officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere had conducted official business on private email accounts and government email accounts created under fake names.
Former Issa aide Kurt Bardella said State’s response fuels questions about Clinton’s handling of her email as secretary.
“Why did the State Department wait until after Secretary Clinton left office to respond to the Issa letter? Were Secretary Clinton’s efforts to deliberately conceal her official activities through use of her private email prompted by then-Chairman Issa’s request?” Bardella asked. “As is status quo with the Clintons, there are far more questions than answers and it’s likely that these revelations of her secrecy are just the tip of the iceberg.”
A State Department spokesman defended the agency’s response.
“The Department responds to thousands of Congressional inquiries and requests for information each year,” spokesman Alec Gerlach said in a statement. “In its March 2013 letter, the Department responded to the House Oversight Committee’s inquiry into the Department’s ‘policies and practices regarding the use of personal e-mail and other forms of electronic communications’ with a letter that described those policies in detail. We continue to work closely with Congress on various issues on the Department’s policies and procedures.”
The emails Clinton turned over to the State Department in paper form in December totaled about 55,000 pages. She said at her news conference last month that she deleted another set of emails, which aides said was of comparable size, after her lawyers concluded they were not work-related.
State Department officials have pledged to publicly release a redacted version of the emails Clinton turned over. That process is expected to take several months, but officials have declined to commit to a specific date.
Lauren French contributed to this report.Al Gore has just purchased a big chunk of Apple stock by exercising his Apple stock options.
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Gore exercised options on January 15 to buy 59,000 Apple shares at the price of $7.475 a share.
That means Gore paid around $441,000 for his load of Apple stock. With the shares trading just under $500 this morning, Gore's investment is now worth around $29.5 million.
Of course, Apple stock has been falling recently, although that could turn around next week if the company releases good results for the last quarter. Either way, it's still a giant profit for the nation's former vice president.
Gore has exercised stock options at the same price twice before, according to The Next Web -- once in January of 2008 and again in March that same year. After joining Apple's board of directors in 2003, he was awarded 30,000 stock options, but those carried an exercise price of $14.95.
Gore still has a total of 61,574 Apple shares that he can exercise at bargain-basement prices.In a bid to spur development of an Ebola vaccine, the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, a leading public-private partnership organization, has committed to spend $300 million once the World Health Organization recommends such a product. As a result of the outbreak, there has been debate about the lack of available treatments and the need to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to invest more heavily in developing salves for tropical diseases.
Meanwhile, testing at one site for a early-stage safety trial for a vaccine that is being developed by Merck and NewLink Genetics, was suspended. A Geneva hospital says the move, which affects all 59 patients, was made as a precaution after four complained of joint pain in their hands and feet. The trial is expected to resume next month. A Merck spokeswoman says the events have not been reported at any of the other clinical sites, and it is not known at this time whether these events are related to the vaccine or not.A royal expert has revealed exactly what Her Majesty is listening to on her iPod that was spotted at her Balmoral retreat
THE QUEEN raised eyebrows when an old-style iPod was spotted taking pride of place in her living room at her Balmoral retreat.
And now it has been revealed exactly which tunes she could be blasting through her docking station after her favourite song was revealed.
PA:Press Association People have long wondered what type of music the Queen likes to listen to
Last month, the music-playing gadget was seen perched on a sideboard inside her personal quarters as she met with the Governor-General of Australia in the Scottish Highlands.
At the time, it was thought music she may have downloaded on to the Apple product included songs by marching bands, bagpipes or even her namesake band Queen.
But according to royal expert Ingrid Seward, who has released a new book about the Queen and Prince Philip called My Husband and I, Her Majesty’s favourite song is the Beach Boys classic California Girls.
She told Vogue magazine: “The Queen is a big fan of musicals, traditional hymns, and Scottish ballads, and even the Beach Boys’s songs, especially California Girls.”
Last month it was revealed that the Queen has an iPod, seen here in the background, in her living room at her Balmoral retreat
Michael Ochs Archives - Getty Royal expert Ingrid Seward says one of the Queen’s favourite songs is California Girls by the Beach Boys, pictured
Ingrid also added that the monarch also has a wide range |
in today. But, if I dont sleep then I will definitely crash!! It pulls nicely with 1/4 and 1/2 throttle. The change in noise at around 4k is beautiful.
Sound
The car has a combination of noises. Now I am starting to hear a raspy note above 4.5k and some other juicy noises. I love it. I kept the windows down to listen.
Suspension
The car is very comfy while handling great. Very similar to the E90 and less harsh than a 1M
Any other impressions?
Otherwise I will sleep to wake up early for a drive and some more pics
Impressions - April 25:
I drove today for an additional 250 kilometers.
I love the sound of the car and I just keep the windows down.
It has different noises:
Turbo spool
some rasp
some engine noise
very nice mix
I really want to finish the break in period, its KILLING ME.
Oh,
and I am enjoying the sports gauge on the idrive. Shows you how much peak torque and horespower (F30 people already know this, I didnt have it before :0)
Took some nice twisty roads and kept on switching between sport and sport plus. Still undecided which one I like more. In high speed corners I kept it on Sport plus, but then in roundabouts I went back to sport. Both are nice, with sport plus being a bit heavier.
The traction control is different than the E90. I was driving down the twisties and with cruise control set at 140km. When there was a strong bend, the car slowed down by itself to 130 and then back again. I didnt see the traction control light flashing...
When turning on the car, there is not much drama...just a simple start up with not much noise. The 1M on the one hand was very noisy at startup and then cools down.
I wonder what an Akra would do for startup :-)
Its the driving noises which are amazing.
Impressions - April 25-26:
I almost reached 1000km
1000km more to go before the fun starts, although its fun already.
short shifting at 5.5k rpm is torture especially without full throttle. It still manages to chirp at this rpm with almost half throttle.....talk about torque.
The car seema to get louder and the over run pop and crackle are present now. Accelerating and lifting off now results on a nice pop and crackle that reminded me of my Boss, but not as loud of course. I can somehow compare the noise to that of a GTR with an exhaust. I need to finish my break in.
Now that the tires have gotten some miles on them, I am starting to throw it around in corners. This car has great steering and handles really well for a stock car. I am impressed given that both my 1M and E90 M3 are on KW Clubsports.
I wanna drift it!!!!!
And the seats plus ride are very comfy for long distance trips. The 4 door M3 can be the only car to have. But of course I need other cars :-P
I am sorry for my late updates.
Met with Stratus650 and his beautiful 1M. Took him for a ride and his comment was it sounded real different than the 1M. I think I need his comments in a post also.
Drove the E90 back to back with the F80.
I like the direct throttle of the E90 but the steering feel of the F80 is just great. I think that having camber plates changes how a steering wheel feels, but handling improves.
I am buying a VBOX tomorrow morning and I just finished 1100kms. So, I have to finish the next 900kms fast. I can't wait ro actually try the whole rpm range.
I can't get enough of watching those fenders.
Impressions - April 29
Mileage Update:
So the following mileage tests were all done on the highway. I did at the following speeds, 105km/h, 120km/h, 140km/h.
All tests were done using the cruise control. No variation in terms
105km/h
120km/h
140km/h
This is now a more realistic figure which I did and varied my speed
Still, no full throttle of course or even kick down
The figures are in MPG based on BMW
Impressions - May 1
I haven't driven my 1M since getting the M3. Been very busy with work.
Drove my brother's 1M which has stock suspension but that felt bouncy compared to the M3. The 1M feels and is smaller and the manual transmission is still a joy. I will drive my car tomorrow (our weekend is Friday & Saturday) which has KW clubsports.
I need to concentrate on the turbo lag, because it is still there in the M3, but a tiny bit (unlike a GT2 which feels NA untill boost kicks in at 3500 and then all hell breaks loose.)
After driving the 1M for a while, the E90 M3 always felt more planted and less bouncy. I have KW Club sports on both. On the E90 M3 it became so comfortable while on the 1M it is a bit bouncy and rattly.
I enjoyed how I could through the E90 M3 in corners and drift. What happens when I get in the F80 M3 is I get an even bigger smile. It handles great, is comfortable and is stock. I thought that I would miss the Coilovers coming from the E90 but actually the F80 M3 has so much grip.
I like how it steers. The only difference in steering is you can choose how light or heavy the steering is and I believe that Sport is a great medium.
UPDATE:
OK, after driving the 1M for a while, the E90 M3 always felt more planted and less bouncy. I have KW Club sports on both. On the E90 M3 it became so comfortable while on the 1M it is a bit bouncy and rattly.
I enjoyed how I could through the E90 M3 in corners and drift. What happens when I get in the F80 M3 is I get an even bigger smile. It handles great, is comfortable and is stock. I thought that I would miss the Coilovers coming from the E90 but actually the F80 M3 has so much grip.
I like how it steers. The only difference in steering is you can choose how light or heavy the steering is and I believe that Sport is a great medium.
Impressions - May 3
Sorry for being extremely busy.
The good thing, I have 160kms left on my break in and am going to use my VBOX.
The other thing, I got to drive my 1M all weekend.
The DCT "lag" I am talking about is the one you feel when leaving a stop. DCT boxes always seem like they slip clutches a lot in order to move. It's the same as in the M6 also so no biggie.
But, after driving my 1M with a manual, it does make a great difference when taking off, however the advantage is in the shift speed of the DCT. It's a give and take. I am glad I took a DCT, but that's because all my other cars are manual.
As for engine lag and boost. Both engines seem to be sharp and start building boost steadily after 2k rpm with a nicw kick in the 3500rpm +.
The M3 is smoother but I still don't get all the talk about pre-spooled turbo in Sport Plus and Sport (honestly, I don't feel it.)
What I know and I can compare with the 1M is the fact that if you are in the right gear and right rpm in a turbo car, turbo lag will be at a minimum.
I will try to record a 0-250km if possible (need to find an invisible road, om camera at least.)
I also heard there is a DCT software upgrade already for my car. Dunno if launch control is active or not yet, but will know at 2000kms.
Sorry for not keeping the forum updated
1M steering = F80 M3 on Sport
1M throttle = F80 M3 on efficient
1M on Sport= F80 on Sport
F80 on Sport+= no applicable to 1M
Impressions - May 4
I passed 2,000km and am now officially out of break in!
Launch control does work
DSC off
Then S3
Starts at 3K rpm
Cruise control speed stalk allows you to increase or decrease the launch rpm
I just ran out of "legal" road to reach 280.
Had to slow down a bit.
It is much faster than the 1M and M3. To the M6, this car was no drama, just LAUNCH!
I thought I will hear wheel spin but it just jumped. This will help if anyone wants to test side by side.
I will look at how to give my F80 to a friend in order to race my E90.
My passenger was intoxicated with the sound.
He also has a love for BMWs and said that he loves the sound so much.
It is more of an intake noise.
Also, when lowering the windows and shifting at redline it burps. Brrrrrt
I love it.
E90 M3 I still love you, but torque is something new to the M3.
When i drove the 1M for the first time, it always was faster on a day to day at low rpms
Will update once the VBOX is awake again!!!
Launch Control Video:
Impressions - May 9
Sorry for being absent
I was very busy at work and there was no time to drive the M3.
Glad that the reviews are finally coming out and how they like the steering. I don't know what they mean by numbness cause this car steers well and has lots of feel to me. It's direct and satisfying.
I also got to install a Recaro child seat which went in nicely in the back. I also took some friends for a ride and they were really impressed with the power and sound.
Actually, anyone I take is impressed with the power, sound and handling.
In order for me to get a good time on Vbox, I need to wake up at 4am cause that is when the weather is coolest (20c Celsius!!)
I will post some Vbox data early Sunday morning
As for the driving,
I enjoyed cornering hard and shifting....when the car is loaded in a corner and I shift, the dct shifts fast but very soft without upseting the chasis. I don't know if the E9X did the same when up shifting in a corner hard, but this just makes it so easy now. Feels a bit soft but means I can grab the next gear without the fear of upsetting the chasis. Try doing that upshift in a manual or in an SMG and the car would definitely snap out of line.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sred...-MQ&feat=email
I also added the rubber mats from the regular 3 series.
Impressions / VBOX Results - May 11
Ok, VBOX Data is in, Finally.
Results and discussions at:
Specs:
2014 Alpine White M3
Sakhir Orange Interior
DCT
Carbon roof
All options
Gulf spec - First car in here
Ordered in Dec
Traded my M6 for it
Launch Control Video:
Video: Accleration and fly-by (exterior)
Car was in Sport+ mode and in S3
Video: Different sounds of the driving modes (Efficient, Sport, Sport Plus)
Video: Tunnel acceleration (pre-break-in)
Video: Cold Start, Idling, Acceleration/Driving
Video: Interior and idle sounds
Exhaust Video:
Engine/Interior Video:
Engine Idling Video:
More photos:
Delivered F80 M3
Front gap
Rear gap
F80 M3 fender vs E90 M3 fender
Ok, I just picked up my F80 M3.This car drives awesome. It is so much lighter and the sound is just amazing. It is classic bmw inline 6 with a twist. It feels so nimble and fun, especially after the M6 (F13). I still have my E90 M3 6 speed, but this feels so refined and torquy. I was thinking to get a 6mt, especially after being bored to death in the M6, but right now it feels like the perfect choice.I need to finish working to drive more. It is just too exciting.Sounds way different than my 1M and its loud and not raspy as in the videos.Ok, I really really need a week off just to drive this car. Our nice driving roads are at least an hour's drive. The sound is just amazing compared to the clips online. That really scared me. I thought that it would sound crap but am really impressed. This sounds like No other engine. I LOVE it.The steering is p e r f e c t. Don't feel that it is electric. Very direct and very responsive. My E90 has KW clubsports and this car feels amazing in comparison. I am very happy. It is not diluted. Bmw got this steering feel right.The technology inside is amazing. I will try to post some videos later. As for the plastic inside, I never keep it! I had to pick up the car and leave to work, so the ugly plastic was there.Coming from an M6 (F13), this torque curve is very impressive. It is easy even during break in. Lots of torque and pull at 4000 and below. I went to drive the E90 M3 and that car sounds like angry bees and the throttle is super sharp in comparison. But, the F80 is sharp for a turbo.I need to drive my 1M, but this car is special. Best M3 I had so far. I think that I have a new favourite M engine.As for the interior: the leather dash is amazing. On par with the M6. I just miss the Alcantara roof. It gives it an upscale feel that is not present on my E90, even though I had the extended leather. The seats feel great but sad they are not ventilated.The stance of this car is just amazing. Love how angry and wide it is.There is a strange noise when braking and coming to a complete stop, the car makes a friction noise. Dunno if it is something to do with efficient dynamics, but I don't want to focus on it now. It only happens in the last meters before you stop completely.Also my android phone (Note 3 on 4.2.2) does not play music via bluetooth but makes calls [update: this now works]. The iPhone 5S does calls and music and shows the album art.One thing I liked is the fact that the rear fenders are wide and BMW covered them in a clear film, ala 911!!!If someone wants a roof rack with the carbon roof, there are no screws to hold the roof,just and indentation.The steering is just gggggrrreeeaaaaaatI just love it. The steering is just beautiful. Nicely weighted and not too heavy even in sport+ In the M6 (F13), sport+ was when you had no time to go to the gym and wanted to train your arms. The efficient mode is light but not too light. I kept on switching from sport to sport+ and both were perfect with sport+ being a tad heavier but feels direct.As for throttle response, I switched from sport plus to efficient and the pedal felt not as responsive and the noise of the car came down. It is actually louder in Sports+. My E90 was always on comfort or sport but never sport plus in the throttle response.Also I was excited to see that the car is responsive in Sport+ and does not seem to have lag. Of course the shove will come once you are up in the rpm range, but in the 1M I had to wait a bit. This really feels like a proper M3.The sound of the engine really builds up at 4k rpm and gets louder. When pulling away from stops, it is a but N54 with exhaust but then changes charachter to a deep mechanical BMW inline 6. I can hover at 4k rpm all day.I programmed my M2 at D3 and Sport everything plus DSC offM1 setup at Sport plus and S3 plus of course DSC offI need to drift this car ASAP!!!DCT is smoother than the F13 M6 in Auto mode - very nice and smooth you can leave it in Auto. However, it is more involving and makes you want to use the paddles compared with the big and heavy F13. I think the DCT is the right tranny especially with this much power.The F13 was useless in 1st and second gearsIt was also more heavy to drift and change direction while drifting...too much weight being tossed aroundI want to finish the break in to start some driftingBye bye MichelinsIn comparison to the E90, the doors and trunk feel light.Leather dash is great, but I wish they continued the leather on the bottom part of the doors.It [mechanical feel of drivetrain] feels more refined than the E90 but not a bore-trap like the M6 (F13).When coming to a stop or a corner, you get to feel the car downshift and is always ready.When at night you open the doors, the lights will open on that side only. So, if I open the rear left door, the light on that side will light up. Unlike the E90. The badges light up when you unlock the car.I tend to keep it on the second mode all the time.If I keep it on S3, then it has an artificial shove at the end which reminds me of an SMG transmission.In D mode, it is better though.I like the steering on Sport. Now starting to notice that Sport+ is a bit heavier, but not too heavy like an M6. Did I mention that the steering is fantastic?I am really impressed with them. They are strong, coming from an E90. BTW, the F13 M6 brakes were useless, especially after a few spirited runs between corners....in there you could feel the weight.The door is really really light. It actually feels a bit cheap to be honest. I keep on closing the door and it doesnt close so end up slamming it harder. My ordeal is that I close the door twice (or was I spoilt by soft close doors?)The E90 has a heavier door with a vault like clunk when closing.Full Leather to me is a must. Will never buy a car without it. Hate the textured plastic on the doors and wish I could cover it. The M6 even had leather in the door pockets.Headliner looks cheap in comparison to the E90. But, I think that this is standard German, cause even the S class has the same material. I feel that the same company supplies all, but I do miss my Alcantara roof.Vents on the seats should have been utilized for ventilated seats, but the weight would have been an issue. The seats feel very light but I miss the extendable thigh support (used it on the passenger side to hold my phones and other stuff)Idrive is FAAAAAAST. Of Course, My E90 is a 2008 model while the F13 was a 2013 model. Still, I love this iDrive.The lights are beautiful. High beams are very bright too. Love the LED lamps.This car makes me want to finish the break in today. But, if I dont sleep then I will definitely crash!! It pulls nicely with 1/4 and 1/2 throttle. The change in noise at around 4k is beautiful.The car has a combination of noises. Now I am starting to hear a raspy note above 4.5k and some other juicy noises. I love it. I kept the windows down to listen.The car is very comfy while handling great. Very similar to the E90 and less harsh than a 1MOtherwise I will sleep to wake up early for a drive and some more picsI drove today for an additional 250 kilometers.I love the sound of the car and I just keep the windows down.It has different noises:Turbo spoolsome raspsome engine noisevery nice mixI really want to finish the break in period, its KILLING ME.Oh,and I am enjoying the sports gauge on the idrive. Shows you how much peak torque and horespower (F30 people already know this, I didnt have it before :0)Took some nice twisty roads and kept on switching between sport and sport plus. Still undecided which one I like more. In high speed corners I kept it on Sport plus, but then in roundabouts I went back to sport. Both are nice, with sport plus being a bit heavier.The traction control is different than the E90. I was driving down the twisties and with cruise control set at 140km. When there was a strong bend, the car slowed down by itself to 130 and then back again. I didnt see the traction control light flashing...When turning on the car, there is not much drama...just a simple start up with not much noise. The 1M on the one hand was very noisy at startup and then cools down.I wonder what an Akra would do for startup :-)Its the driving noises which are amazing.I almost reached 1000km1000km more to go before the fun starts, although its fun already.short shifting at 5.5k rpm is torture especially without full throttle. It still manages to chirp at this rpm with almost half throttle.....talk about torque.The car seema to get louder and the over run pop and crackle are present now. Accelerating and lifting off now results on a nice pop and crackle that reminded me of my Boss, but not as loud of course. I can somehow compare the noise to that of a GTR with an exhaust. I need to finish my break in.Now that the tires have gotten some miles on them, I am starting to throw it around in corners. This car has great steering and handles really well for a stock car. I am impressed given that both my 1M and E90 M3 are on KW Clubsports.I wanna drift it!!!!!And the seats plus ride are very comfy for long distance trips. The 4 door M3 can be the only car to have. But of course I need other cars :-PI am sorry for my late updates.Met with Stratus650 and his beautiful 1M. Took him for a ride and his comment was it sounded real different than the 1M. I think I need his comments in a post also.Drove the E90 back to back with the F80.I like the direct throttle of the E90 but the steering feel of the F80 is just great. I think that having camber plates changes how a steering wheel feels, but handling improves.I am buying a VBOX tomorrow morning and I just finished 1100kms. So, I have to finish the next 900kms fast. I can't wait ro actually try the whole rpm range.I can't get enough of watching those fenders.Mileage Update:So the following mileage tests were all done on the highway. I did at the following speeds, 105km/h, 120km/h, 140km/h.All tests were done using the cruise control. No variation in terms105km/h120km/h140km/hThis is now a more realistic figure which I did and varied my speedStill, no full throttle of course or even kick downThe figures are in MPG based on BMWI haven't driven my 1M since getting the M3. Been very busy with work.Drove my brother's 1M which has stock suspension but that felt bouncy compared to the M3. The 1M feels and is smaller and the manual transmission is still a joy. I will drive my car tomorrow (our weekend is Friday & Saturday) which has KW clubsports.I need to concentrate on the turbo lag, because it is still there in the M3, but a tiny bit (unlike a GT2 which feels NA untill boost kicks in at 3500 and then all hell breaks loose.)After driving the 1M for a while, the E90 M3 always felt more planted and less bouncy. I have KW Club sports on both. On the E90 M3 it became so comfortable while on the 1M it is a bit bouncy and rattly.I enjoyed how I could through the E90 M3 in corners and drift. What happens when I get in the F80 M3 is I get an even bigger smile. It handles great, is comfortable and is stock. I thought that I would miss the Coilovers coming from the E90 but actually the F80 M3 has so much grip.I like how it steers. The only difference in steering is you can choose how light or heavy the steering is and I believe that Sport is a great medium.UPDATE:OK, after driving the 1M for a while, the E90 M3 always felt more planted and less bouncy. I have KW Club sports on both. On the E90 M3 it became so comfortable while on the 1M it is a bit bouncy and rattly.I enjoyed how I could through the E90 M3 in corners and drift. What happens when I get in the F80 M3 is I get an even bigger smile. It handles great, is comfortable and is stock. I thought that I would miss the Coilovers coming from the E90 but actually the F80 M3 has so much grip.I like how it steers. The only difference in steering is you can choose how light or heavy the steering is and I believe that Sport is a great medium.Sorry for being extremely busy.The good thing, I have 160kms left on my break in and am going to use my VBOX.The other thing, I got to drive my 1M all weekend.The DCT "lag" I am talking about is the one you feel when leaving a stop. DCT boxes always seem like they slip clutches a lot in order to move. It's the same as in the M6 also so no biggie.But, after driving my 1M with a manual, it does make a great difference when taking off, however the advantage is in the shift speed of the DCT. It's a give and take. I am glad I took a DCT, but that's because all my other cars are manual.As for engine lag and boost. Both engines seem to be sharp and start building boost steadily after 2k rpm with a nicw kick in the 3500rpm +.The M3 is smoother but I still don't get all the talk about pre-spooled turbo in Sport Plus and Sport (honestly, I don't feel it.)What I know and I can compare with the 1M is the fact that if you are in the right gear and right rpm in a turbo car, turbo lag will be at a minimum.I will try to record a 0-250km if possible (need to find an invisible road, om camera at least.)I also heard there is a DCT software upgrade already for my car. Dunno if launch control is active or not yet, but will know at 2000kms.Sorry for not keeping the forum updated1M steering = F80 M3 on Sport1M throttle = F80 M3 on efficient1M on Sport= F80 on SportF80 on Sport+= no applicable to 1MI passed 2,000km and am now officially out of break in!Launch control does workDSC offThen S3Starts at 3K rpmCruise control speed stalk allows you to increase or decrease the launch rpmI just ran out of "legal" road to reach 280.Had to slow down a bit.It is much faster than the 1M and M3. To the M6, this car was no drama, just LAUNCH!I thought I will hear wheel spin but it just jumped. This will help if anyone wants to test side by side.I will look at how to give my F80 to a friend in order to race my E90.My passenger was intoxicated with the sound.He also has a love for BMWs and said that he loves the sound so much.It is more of an intake noise.Also, when lowering the windows and shifting at redline it burps. BrrrrrtI love it.E90 M3 I still love you, but torque is something new to the M3.When i drove the 1M for the first time, it always was faster on a day to day at low rpmsWill update once the VBOX is awake again!!!Launch Control Video:Sorry for being absentI was very busy at work and there was no time to drive the M3.Glad that the reviews are finally coming out and how they like the steering. I don't know what they mean by numbness cause this car steers well and has lots of feel to me. It's direct and satisfying.I also got to install a Recaro child seat which went in nicely in the back. I also took some friends for a ride and they were really impressed with the power and sound.Actually, anyone I take is impressed with the power, sound and handling.In order for me to get a good time on Vbox, I need to wake up at 4am cause that is when the weather is coolest (20c Celsius!!)I will post some Vbox data early Sunday morningAs for the driving,I enjoyed cornering hard and shifting....when the car is loaded in a corner and I shift, the dct shifts fast but very soft without upseting the chasis. I don't know if the E9X did the same when up shifting in a corner hard, but this just makes it so easy now. Feels a bit soft but means I can grab the next gear without the fear of upsetting the chasis. Try doing that upshift in a manual or in an SMG and the car would definitely snap out of line.I also added the rubber mats from the regular 3 series.Ok, VBOX Data is in, Finally.Results and discussions at: http://f80.bimmerpost.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=984354 2014 Alpine White M3Sakhir Orange InteriorDCTCarbon roofAll optionsGulf spec - First car in hereOrdered in DecTraded my M6 for itLaunch Control Video:Video: Accleration and fly-by (exterior)Car was in Sport+ mode and in S3Video: Different sounds of the driving modes (Efficient, Sport, Sport Plus)Video: Tunnel acceleration (pre-break-in)Video: Cold Start, Idling, Acceleration/DrivingVideo: Interior and idle soundsExhaust Video:Engine/Interior Video:Engine Idling Video:More photos:Front gapRear gapF80 M3 fender vs E90 M3 fender Last edited by uae247; 04-23-2014 at 09:58 AM.Sen. James Lankford James Paul LankfordHarris on election security: 'Russia can't hack a piece of paper' GOP advances rules change to speed up confirmation of Trump nominees GOP senator calls Omar's apology 'entirely appropriate' MORE (R-Okla.) on Saturday offered praise for the FBI and intelligence community after federal authorities thwarted a planned Christmas Day terrorist attack in San Francisco.
"The thwarted ISIS-inspired attack on San Francisco's Pier 39 is yet another example of the amazing work that the @FBI & intel community do every day," Lankford tweeted.
"Most Americans will never know these heroes or the many threats they stop. I’m thankful to Christopher Wray & his team."
The thwarted ISIS-inspired attack on San Francisco's Pier 39 is yet another example of the amazing work that the @FBI & intel community do every day. Most Americans will never know these heroes or the many threats they stop. I’m thankful to Christopher Wray & his team. — Sen. James Lankford (@SenatorLankford) December 23, 2017
The FBI investigated the would-be attack by Everitt Aaron Jameson, a 26-year-old tow-truck driver, on San Francisco's Pier 39, a popular tourist destination in the city, and arrested the suspect after he talked to an undercover agent about his plans.
Lankford's praise for the FBI comes as many Republican lawmakers and President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE himself have questioned the agency's work, particularly its handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE's use of a private email server and whether it is biased against the president.
Trump unleashed a series of tweets earlier this month taking aim at the FBI, whose reputation, he said, is in "tatters."
Other Republicans have ramped up questions about bias in the agency, especially after it was revealed that a former FBI agent on special counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russia's election meddling had sent text messages critical of Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Trump has also questioned the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that the Kremlin sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and sway the race in Trump's favor.Only visible from the air, the carefully shaped copse of trees known simply as the “Minnesota Forest” has been shaped by a rogue forester over decades to look like its home state.
Created quietly by forest engineer Bill Lockner, the state-shaped forest was only recently discovered thanks to Google Maps aerial view for the everyman. While clearing dying pine trees in the early ’90s Lockner took it upon himself to have a little fun, Forest Services-style. Using nothing more than a compass and other analog measurement tools, he was able to map out the shape of Minnesota in the trees and cleared out the dying growth only in the shape of the state. Photos from 1991 show a Minnesota-shaped hole in the surrounding forest.
Over the ensuing decades as the trees grew back, almost burying Lockner’s art project as the surrounding forest blended in with it. Another round of clearing occurred in the 2000’s, but this time the foresters cleared only the trees AROUND the Minnesota design, creating a smallish new forest that was shaped like the state as opposed to a clearing.
While Lockner modestly refuses to say much of anything about the Minnesota Forest, the whimsical grove has become a popular site on Google Maps.Rafael Quispe is gearing up for his trip. He packs a small leather bag, puts on his black poncho, an alpaca scarf sporting the rainbow-coloured, chequered Andean indigenous flag and his black hat. "This will be an important gathering, a very important gathering. It is about saving our Mother Earth, about saving nature," he says.
Quispe, an Aymara indigenous leader, is heading for Bolivia's central city of Cochabamba for the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the grassroots alternative to last year's ill-fated UN talks in Copenhagen.
At least 15,000 people from worldwide indigenous movements and civil-society groups, as well as presidents, scientists, activists and observers from 90 governments, are expected to attend what is being called the "Woodstock" of climate change summits.
"According to some analyses, about 80% of the world's pollution comes from developed nations and harms, mostly, developing nations. So we feel we have to do something, we must be heard, we must be compensated," says Quispe, who last December lobbied the case of his community at Copenhagen.
"The COP15 was a total failure, so brother President Evo Morales has decided to call for this climate change conference to do something about it. We the people are the ones that should take the lead on how to tackle the climate crisis," says Quispe.
Even if the Cochabamba meeting will have no bearing on the UN climate talks, the idea is to give a voice to the world's poorest people – those most affected by climate change – and to make governments more aware of their plight.
The main goal is to present draft proposals to the UN climate meeting due to be held in Mexico later this year.
Morales will also use the meeting to announce what could be the world's largest referendum, with up to 2 billion people being asked to vote on ways out of the climate crisis. Bolivia wants to create a UN charter of rights and to draft an action plan to set up an international climate justice tribunal.
"The only way to get climate negotiations back on track, not just for Bolivia or other countries, but for all of life, biodiversity, our Mother Earth, is to put civil society back into the process. The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy," said Bolivia's UN ambassador, Pablo Solon.
"There will be no secret discussions behind closed doors. The debate and the proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals from civil society dedicated to tackling the climate crisis," he added.
Bolivia is playing an increasingly important role in the climate negotiations by leading attempts to force developed countries to slash their emissions further than they have so far pledged.
It was one of seven countries that refused to sign up to the deal that emerged from Copenhagen, incurring the wrath of Britain and the US, which this month withdrew $3.5m (£2.3m) of climate aid from Bolivia.
Last April, the UN general assembly approved Morales' initiative of launching the International Mother Earth Day every 22 April to protect the rights of the Andean divinity, Pachamama (Mother Earth), and of "all living beings".
"What is behind all this discussion is that we have broken the harmony with Mother Earth, with nature, and because we have broken that harmony we are now suffering the consequences of climate change," said Solon.
In an office plastered with images of Che Guevara, Solon says Bolivia is taking the initiative because of its indigenous constituency. "Things are moving in a bad direction. Governments know it, scientists know it, but things are not changing. I would say this is the only scenario to make a balance between the pressure that at this moment the corporations are putting on governments, versus the pressure that can emerge from civil society."Story highlights Tremors were felt in New Jersey and New York
USGS confirms a sonic boom hit |
his article, he explains how both male and female thinning hair and baldness involves the continued growth of the skull bones that lie directly under the scalp where hair loss develops. This bone growth is called skull expansion.
Skull expansion seems to have finally solved certain mysteries that have been baffling hair loss boffins for years. These include why the same shape (or pattern) of hair loss will always develop in men with extreme baldness. Severe hair loss at the front (frontal baldness) and crown of the head will leave just a small horseshoe shaped area of hair growing at the back and sides. Skull expansion explains why this happens - something the current theory for hair loss cannot do.
Another mystery involves the male sex hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Male pattern baldness has been linked to DHT, but this hormone also causes body and facial hair to grow at puberty. Skull expansion explains how DHT is connected to both hair loss and hair growth.
If this theory for androgenetic alopecia by skull expansion is confirmed, it could lead to a total redirection of genetic research, affect future treatment methods and might eventually lead to an alopecia cure.WHAT is believed to be Teesside’s oldest house has been discovered by this year’s excavations at Street House, near Loftus, on the east coast.
Radiocarbon testing on hazelnut shells found within the building reveal that it is more than 5,600 years old, which means that it dates from the early Neolithic period and it could even be the earliest house in Yorkshire.
This is the latest discovery at a site which archaeologists have been investigating for nearly 40 years. The most remarkable find was in 2007 when the remains of a very high-ranking woman were found buried on a wooden bed surrounded by jewellery – this “Saxon princess” burial, which dates from the second half of the 7th Century, is of national, if not international, importance.
Then, in 2012, a sizeable Roman villa, dating from about AD370, was found about 100 metres away.
The latest find came this spring, although the radiocarbon results have only just come through.
The excavation, led by Dr Steve Sherlock and carried out by a small local team of mostly volunteers from Teesside Archaeological Society, found the house following extensive geophysics surveys.
It is in a hollow more than one metre deep. It is a sunken oval building, approximately five metres by three metres, with evidence of a fragmentary wall of stakes. The stakes would have been interwoven and any gaps would probably have been filled with either vegetable matter (straw and thatch) or mud to make daub.
The entrance to the house is thought to have been south facing, and there were more substantial postholes at the rear.
The people who lived in the house were the first to settle down in the area and grow crops. Their early farming enabled them to stay in one place. The house could, therefore, be said to be the home of the very first Teessiders.
Similar structures can be seen at Briar Hill in Northamptonshire and Little Paxton in Cambridgeshire, although these are later in date. Within Yorkshire, there are four other Neolithic houses, but they do not all have the broad range of finds and structural evidence that Street House has.
Four samples of Street House’s hazelnut shells were sent for analysis, which shows they date from between 3,949BC and 3,662BC – so the house could be 5,965 years old.
This means it is contemporary with a Neolithic long cairn about 400 metres away which was excavated by archaeologist Blaise Vyner from 1979, when work on the site started.
This year, more than 200 flints have been found within the house, including cores and knapping debris. These come from the “knapping” process of making flint tools by striking the flint with a harder object, usually a stone. The “core” is a piece of flint which has been manufactured so that it has a flat bottom. The core is placed on its base and then struck so that pieces flake off it. These pieces can then be fashioned into tools – blades, scrapers and a leaf-shaped arrowhead have been found on the site – and the waste is known as “knapping debris”.
Also found at Street House were pottery fragments from at least eight vessels. An initial assessment by Blaise Vyner suggests these are carinated bowls – bowls with round bases joined to inward sloping sides – with quartz and quartzitic inclusions added to the clay as a tempering agent to make it stronger. Again this is similar to the pottery vessels found in the nearby cairn.
Other finds include quartz pebbles from a posthole – perhaps these had been collected as a curio or a charm.
In 2012, a carved boulder was found 10 metres to the west of the house, and several other examples of prehistoric rock art have been found. All are potentially contemporary with the Neolithic house.
The house structure appears to have been sealed by a horizontal layer of clay which contained some burnt material. Radiocarbon dating analysis of this material by Glasgow University suggests that the site was levelled some time between 2,578BC and 2,408BC, indicating that there is further late Neolithic activity still to be uncovered. Evidence for this later activity includes a timber circle and a late Neolithic house known from excavations carried out in 2010-11.
The excavations have been possible due to the support of the landowner, Tony Garbutt of Street House Farm, Loftus.
Further excavations to understand more about this enigmatic site are planned for 2017.
Dr Sherlock says: “There is tantalising evidence of something else going on later in the Neolithic period, but the really big question is if there’s a royal Anglo-Saxon burial, there must be an Anglo-Saxon settlement nearby.
“We are looking for the whole picture, and that settlement is the missing link – it would be a really fascinating story if we could find it.”Getting on the front page of Reddit is a huge deal.
Taking over Reddit for a livestream is a first! And The Chris Gethard Show will be first to attempt a live interactive TV/internet experience this Thursday in a partnership between Turner’s truTV network and Reddit.
This week’s episode of TCGS, with special guest John Oliver, will happen live at 11 p.m. Eastern Thursday (Sept. 14, 2017), with live video streaming and commenting taking place on the show’s new Reddit profile page. Viewers can stream the episode at Reddit.com/u/ TheChrisGethardShow.
The show already tackles bizarre stunts and interacts with phone callers as well as the live studio audience, in a one-ring circus led by Gethard and including such guests already in truTV’s first season of TCGS as Method Man, John Mulaney, Adam Pally, Julie Klausner, Jordan Klepper and truTV’s own Impractical Jokers.
“The Chris Gethard Show is a wild, wonderful community of inclusive eccentrics, which is also a pretty spot-on description of many of the folks on Reddit,” said Puja Vohra, executive vice president of marketing and digital for truTV. “Through this partnership, we’re taking one of the most engaging, immersive live experiences on television to the next level and showcasing it on a massive platform of engaged users to make sure fans know The Chris Gethard Show has a new home on truTV.”
“Reddit is the home for conversation online, and we’re excited to welcome truTV’s The Chris Gethard Show into that conversation in a brand new way,” said Kavin Stewart, Vice President of Growth Product at Reddit. “With a dedicated profile page, live streaming and live commenting all within the Reddit platform, this partnership is a unique example of how entertainment brands can engage authentically with their fans to create robust entertainment experiences – and the live component makes this entire activation even more exciting. We can’t wait to follow along.”Image copyright TalkTalk Image caption An example of one of the ads that confused the public
From October broadband providers must make sure adverts for their products are very clear about costs and contract lengths, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled.
ASA research suggests many people find it difficult to make sense of current adverts.
More than 80% were unable to calculate the total cost of a broadband contract when asked to do so, the ASA found.
TalkTalk has said it will scrap separate line rental charges.
In a study of how people reacted to current adverts, conducted with regulator Ofcom, only 23% of participants could correctly identify the total cost per month after their first viewing. Twenty-two per cent were still not able to identify this figure after a second viewing, said the ASA.
To make sure broadband providers ensure they stay within the new rules, the ASA recommends that future ads should:
Show all-inclusive, upfront and monthly costs, with no separating out of line rental prices
Give greater prominence to the contract length and any post-discount pricing
Give greater prominence to upfront costs
Commenting on the changes, ASA chief executive Guy Parker said: "We recognise the importance of broadband services to people's lives at work and at home. The findings of our research, and other factors we took into account, showed the way prices have been presented in broadband ads is likely to confuse and mislead customers.
"This new tougher approach has been developed to make sure consumers are not misled and get the information they need to make well-informed choices."
Issues with current ads include:
A headline price for first month which goes up for the next 11 months of contract
Hidden costs such as internet security - again may be offered free for one month and then charged at £3 or more a month
Changes in the cost of calls - often free for first month, then charged
Line connection fees
Postage fees for sending router
"This kind of pricing would tax a maths professor, let alone a consumer who just wants to find the right broadband deal for their household," said telecoms expert Dan Howdle, from comparison website Cable.
"The practice - known as compound pricing - was outlawed in the air industry in 2015. It is recognised as a misleading and disingenuous way to sell a product - luring customers in with cheap headline prices they simply won't be paying at the till."
Misleading
TalkTalk said it would "lead the way" and called on other providers to make sure that people were not lulled into "seemingly good deals that all too often mask extra charges".
Tristia Harrison, TalkTalk's consumer managing director, said: "As long as line rental and broadband are priced separately, the temptation to advertise deals in this way will always be there. But it's time for providers to be honest about this - it's a bad habit we have all been guilty of, it doesn't serve customers well and it's time it stopped."
Mr Howdle said: "Now TalkTalk has opened fire, the rest of the industry will have to follow."S
First, the cross-sectional studies:uppose for the sake of argument that high-crime countries are the ones that most frequently adopt the most stringent gun control laws.
Suppose further, for the sake of argument, that gun control indeed lowers crime, but not by enough to reduce rates to the same low levels prevailing in the majority of countries that did not adopt the laws. Looking across countries, it would then falsely appear that stricter gun control resulted in higher crime. Economists refer to this as an “endogeniety” problem. The adoption of the policy is a reaction to other events (that is, “endogenous”), in this case crime. To resolve this, one must examine how the high-crime areas that chose to adopt the controls changed over time —not only relative to their own past levels but also relative to areas that did not institute such controls.Hello Commander, Welcome to Elite Dangerous Newsletter #105.
Whether you recently joined us or have been playing Elite Dangerous since we launched last December, we are so grateful you are with us for the ride. You, our community, are not just what makes Elite Dangerous special but with Community Goals and the way you play, your actions actually shape the game! For that and the many many contributions, events, screenshots and videos, we thank you!
Elite Dangerous: Horizons is out now with the recent arrival in December of the first major instalment, Planetary Landings, and it continues into 2016 with more major releases planned as part of our second full season of content.
You can order Elite Dangerous: Horizons now on the Frontier store here. It’s our final update of 2015 and what better way to celebrate an incredible year than highlighting the most important part of Elite Dangerous, you the community.Whether you recently joined us or have been playing Elite Dangerous since we launched last December, we are so grateful you are with us for the ride. You, our community, are not just what makes Elite Dangerous special but with Community Goals and the way you play, your actions actually shape the game! For that and the many many contributions, events, screenshots and videos, we thank you!Elite Dangerous: Horizons is out now with the recent arrival in December of the first major instalment, Planetary Landings, and it continues into 2016 with more major releases planned as part of our second full season of content.After a 12-season absence, pro football returned to Baltimore, Md. in 1996 in the form of the new Baltimore Ravens. "This is a new beginning and a new era for us," Ravens owner Art Modell told fans at the team naming ceremony.
With fans playing an integral role, the selection of the nickname "Ravens" was inspired by the poetry of former Baltimore resident, Edgar Allan Poe. From a list of more than 100 possible nicknames presented by NFL Properties, club executives narrowed the list to 17. Focus groups of 200 people from the Baltimore area trimmed the list to six. A telephone survey of 1,000 fans shortened the list to Ravens, Marauders and Americans. Fans were then invited to participate in a phone-in poll conducted by the Baltimore Sun. Of 33,288 voters, nearly two-thirds (21,108) picked Ravens.
"Ravens gives us a strong nickname that is not common to teams at any level, and it gives one that means something historically to this community," Modell stressed.
Although the team does indeed bring "a new era" of pro football to Baltimore, many of the on-the-field "growing pains" a new team typically endures may be escaped by the Ravens. A veteran team that had already played as a unit, the Ravens hired head coach Ted Marchibroda. The popular veteran coach was head coach of the Baltimore Colts from 1975 to 1979. In his first year at the Colts' helm, Marchibroda took a club that had posted a 2-12 mark in 1974 and engineered the then greatest seasonal turnaround in NFL history by producing a 10-4 record in 1975. The turnaround was the first time in league annals that a team moved from last to first in one season.
The Ravens wasted no time earning their first victory in franchise history. In their inaugural regular season game, the Ravens defeated the Oakland Raiders, 19-14, on September 1, 1996. A Memorial Stadium record crowd of 64,124 witnessed the historic moment.
Under the direction of Ozzie Newsome, General Manager & Executive Vice President of Player Personnel, the Ravens have become one of the elite franchises in the NFL.
The team hired long-time NFL assistant coach Brian Billick in 1999 to handle the coaching reins. In just his second season, Billick, helped by a defense that allowed the fewest amount of points during a 16-game regular season in NFL history, guided the Ravens to a thrilling 34-7 victory in Super Bowl XXXV.
Today the franchise is under the coaching leadership of John Harbaugh who was hired before the 2008 season. In 2012 Harbaugh, along with quarterback Joe Flacco, notched an impressive first when they became the first coach and quarterback in NFL history to win a playoff game in each of their first five seasons. The duo helped lead the team to a victory in Super Bowl XLVII.They say everything changed on 9/11. No one can dispute that. But we didn't learn anything.
Like other events that forced Americans to reassess their national priorities (the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Sputnik) the attacks on New York and Washington were a traumatic, teachable moment.
The collective attention of the nation was finally focused upon problems that had gone neglected for many years. 9/11 was a chance to get smart—but we blew it.
First and foremost the attacks gave the United States a rare opportunity to reset its international reputation. Even countries known for anti-Americanism offered their support. "We are all Americans," ran the headline of the French newspaper Le Monde.
The century of U.S. foreign policy that led to 9/11—supporting dictators, crushing democratic movements, spreading gangster capitalism at the point of a thousand nukes—should and could have been put on hold and reassessed in the wake of 9/11.
It wasn't time to act. It was time to think.
It was time to lick our wounds, pretend to act confused, and play the victim. It was time to hope the world forgot how we supplied lists of pro-democracy activists to a young Saddam Hussein so he could collect and kill them, and forget the "Made in USA" labels on missiles shot into the Gaza Strip from U.S.-made helicopter gunships sold to Israel.
It was time, for once, to take the high road. The Bush Administration ought to have treated 9/11 as a police investigation, demanding that Pakistan extradite Osama bin Laden and other individuals wanted in connection with the attacks for prosecution by an international court.
Instead of assuming a temperate, thoughtful posture, the Bush Administration exploited 9/11 as an excuse to start two wars, both against defenseless countries that had little or nothing to do with the attacks. Bush and company legalized torture and ramped up support for unpopular dictatorships in South and Central Asia and the Middle East, all announced with bombastic cowboy talk.
Smoke 'em out! Worst of the worst! Dead or alive!
By 2003 the world hated us more than ever. A BBC poll showed that people in Jordan and Indonesia—moderate Muslim countries where Al Qaeda had killed locals with bombs—considered the U.S. a bigger security threat than the terrorist group.
In fairness to Condi Rice, Don Rumsfeld and Bush's other leading war criminals, everyone else went along with them. The media refused to question them. Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, cast votes in favor of Bush's wars. Democrats and leftist activists ought to have pushed for Bush's impeachment; they were silent or supportive.
9/11 was "blowback"—proof that the U.S. can't wage its wars overseas without suffering consequences at home. But we still haven't learned that lesson. Ten years later, a "Democratic" president is fighting Bush's wars as well as new ones against Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Now he's saber-rattling against Syria.
American officials correctly inferred from 9/11 that security, particularly at airports but also in ports where container ships arrive daily from around the world, had been lax. Rather than act proactively to close gaps in transportation security, however, bureaucrats for the new Department of Homeland Security created a gauntlet of police-state harassment so onerous that it has threatened the financial health of the aviation industry.
"Aviation security is a joke, and it's only a matter of time before terrorists destroy another airplane full of innocent passengers," wrote Barbara Hollingsworth of The Washington Examiner after the 2009 "underwear bomber" scare. As Hollingsworth pointed out, the much-vaunted federal air marshals have been removed from flights because the TSA is too cheap to pay their hotel bills. (This is illegal.) What's the point of taking off your shoes, she asked, when planes are still serviced overseas in unsecured facilities? No one has provided an answer.
Ten years after 9/11, there is still no real security check when you board a passenger train or bus. Perhaps the sheer quantity of goods arriving at American ports makes it impossible to screen them all, but we're not even talking about the fact that we've basically given up on port security.
While we're on the subject of post-9/11 security, what about air defenses? On 9/11 the airspace over the Lower 48 states was assigned to a dozen "weekend warrior" air national guard jets. Every last one of them was on the ground when the attacks began, allowing hijacked planes to tool around the skies for hours after they had been identified as dangerous.
Which could easily happen again. According to a 2009 report by the federal General Accounting Office on U.S. air defenses: "The Air Force has not implemented ASA [Air Sovereignty Alert] operations in accordance with DOD, NORAD, and Air Force directives and guidance, which instruct the Air Force to establish ASA as a steady-state (ongoing and indefinite) mission. The Air Force has not implemented the 140 actions it identified to establish ASA as a steady-state mission, which included integrating ASA operations into the Air Force's planning, programming, and funding cycle. The Air Force has instead been focused on other priorities, such as overseas military operations."
Maybe if it stopped spending so much time and money killing foreigners the American government could protect Americans.
On 9/11 hundreds of firefighters and policemen died because they couldn't communicate on antiquated, segregated bandwidth. "Only one month away from the 10th anniversary of 9/11," admits FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, "our first responders still don't have an interoperable mobile broadband network for public safety. Our 911 call centers still can't handle texts or pictures or video being sent by the phones that everyone has."
Because the corporate masters of the Democratic and Republican parties love the low wage/weak labor environment created by illegal immigration, American land borders are intentionally left unguarded.
A lot changed on 9/11, but not everything.
We're still governed by corrupt idiots. And we're still putting up with them.
What does that say about us?
_______
About author Ted Rall is the author of " Ted Rall is the author of " The Anti-American Manifesto." His website is tedrall.comBombay Stock Exchange building. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Indian stock markets are on a sustained rally this year and have gained strong since January right after the plunge of November-December, following demonetisation. Benchmark equity indices Sensex and Nifty have risen 22%-24% so far in this year, widely outperforming other major stock markets in the world. Domestic markets have also seen a few milestones this year, including Nifty crossing the five digit mark of 10,000 and Sensex nearing 32,700 points for the first time.
Despite this stellar show in Indian equities, the stock market might be on the verge of a major correction, which might be as bad as the 2008 financial crisis. In the year 2008, the 30-share barometer Sensex plunged 27% over the month of September to 9,748.08 points from 13,417.91 points. Later in a six-month period from March to September 2009, the Sensex more than doubled to 16,741 points from a level of around 8,325 points. We take a look at five warning signals which tell India’s stock market may be close to a 2008-like crash.
Stagnant earnings trail market surge
Earnings growth have languished in the last three years but the markets and stock prices have continuously risen. Earnings per share at companies in the NSE Nifty 50 Index have stagnated since the run-up to the 2014 elections, which triggered a surge in equity prices, Bloomberg said in a report last week, adding that the index has risen 50% over the same period.
The risk is that projections have been too optimistic. Earnings at NSE Nifty 50 Index constituents have trailed consensus forecasts for most of this decade, the Bloomberg report said. “It is a liquidity-driven rally, and there might be a hard landing, especially if the second quarter earnings disappoint, Yogesh Nagaonkar Fund Manager – PMS, Bonanza Portfolio Ltd told FE Online.
Liquidity-fuelled rally
Fund managers say that the markets are rallying simply because of their being too much liquidity in the system without the underlying fundamental factors to support it. “Equity Mutual Funds are at over 6% cash holding now, which is high. A lot of foreign investors have already exited the market,” Yogesh Nagaonkar said. “It’s a typical bull market and there is huge liquidity with a lot of money flowing into Mutual Funds,” he said, adding, “Now, when the mutual funds start selling, markets will crash, as there will be no one to buy.” One other investor chose not to mince words. “Markets are heating like a tinderbox, complacency is at the highest level you will see,” Sanjiv Bhasin, Executive Vice President at IIFL said in the last week’s Bloomberg report. “This is the time to start smelling the coffee,” he added.
IPO bubble
This year has emerged as a record-breaking one for the IPO (initial public offerings) market. About Rs 50,000 crore has been raised through the public offers so far since January 2017, and several others are slated to come up with their public issues. Nine years ago, 2008 was the year that, many hoped, was going to be the year of mega IPOs. The stock markets were rallying to new highs, and Reliance Power‘s IPO was oversubscribed 73 times. But, the company’s shares slipped on the listing on 11 February 2008, and so did the Sensex by 834 points.
This year is also being touted as the year of IPOs. Some have even entered the exclusive club of the companies mobilising over Rs 1 lakh crore and several issues have been oversubscribed by more than 100 times, even at higher valuations. The reason: High liquidity in the market, perhaps, due to demonetisation. “A lot of IPOs are being sold at crazy valuations, with a lot of exuberance. It’s not sustainable,” Yogesh Nagaonkar said.
Irrational movement
Indian equities have been rallying since January 2017 even as economic growth has slumped to its weakest since the year 2014 and most companies reported lower-than-expected first quarter earnings. Despite the earnings decay, the Nifty’s estimated price-earnings ratio is almost two standard deviations above the 10-year mean, another recent Bloomberg report said. This means the valuation of Nifty measured in terms of price-earnings ratio is exceptionally higher than its 10-year long-term average. The last time the ratio was that high, at the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, the gauge had its worst annual decline on record.
GDP under stress
India’s GDP growth plunged to a three-year low in April-June, slowing down to 5.7% in first quarter of FY 2017-18 and disappointing for the second straight quarter. The 5.7% fiscal first-quarter GDP growth, of an economy desperately trying to recover from the shocking impact of demonetisation, was much lower than the 7.9% seen in the same quarter a year ago. It even slowed down from 6.1% in the preceding quarter.
Brokerages warning!
Brokerages have been expressing caution over Indian market that it is overvalued and is trading at close to 20 times one-year forward earnings, well above its long-term historical valuations of around 15 times. “There is a clear and present risk to the earnings turnaround in FY19 as consumption, which has been the sole driver of growth, will not likely be strong enough due to weak fiscal push and job growth. The capex cycle remains nascent and limited to pockets of infrastructure,” Macquarie said in a report in September 2017.How Coinbase Ships Product
Brian Armstrong Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 30, 2015
Coinbase ships a lot of product for a small team. We have 24 engineers, 3 designers, and 3 product managers (in addition to a number of other very talented teams) who help build our buy/sell service (across web and mobile), exchange, developer platform, and merchant tools which serve 2.8M customers in 32 countries.
In this post I’d like to give a peek behind the curtain at how we ship product. We’ve evolved this process over the past 3 years, and I’m sure have a lot more room to improve it as we continue growing.
Our process emphasizes the following:
speed of execution — the company that ships good software the fastest wins
— the company that ships good software the fastest wins user studies — it’s important to feel the customer’s pain and better understand product market fit
— it’s important to feel the customer’s pain and better understand product market fit prioritization — there is never enough time to build everything, so we try to ensure we’re building only what matters most (defined as estimated impact on key results over time to build)
Our Product Manager Playbook
This is the process that our product managers (roughly) follow.
Every Week
Run a standup meeting on Monday. Give a brief update on how the metrics (key results) are trending. Have everyone on the team say (1) what’s going well (2) what’s not going well (3) what they are doing this week and (4) where they could use help. (Max of 2 items each to keep it short — ideally under 2 minutes per person — we try to minimize time in meetings).
Go through the new user experience (NUX) yourself to ensure things are working correctly — if they aren’t, reprioritize the sprint to fix these immediately. It is key to stay in the mindset of a new user more than an already-onboarded customer.
Take a moment to celebrate small wins and give public recognition.
A typical Coinbase standup meeting on Mondays.
Every Two Weeks
Run a ‘sprint’ — a set of features/bugs that will be completed in that two week period. This helps set a regular cadence to a product team and minimizes sudden changes/requests.
Run a product review toward the end of each sprint, where you demo to the founders (or head of product) what the team is working on. This ideally (1) reinforces speed of execution (2) ensures we’re working on what matters most (3) sets the bar for quality and (4) provides an opportunity to coach/teach team members.
Hold 1:1s with every team member to give two way feedback. Err on the side of being honest rather than being liked (easier said than done).
Obtain a report of top requests from the customer support team. Use this to inform the next sprint. Create a tight loop between customer complaints/requests and time to resolution.
We mostly use JIRA agile for sprints, but each team can choose their own tools.
Create a tight loop with support so top customer issues make it into the next sprint..
Every Month
Spend time talking with at least 3 customers one-on-one. Are we solving a problem they have? What would they change if they were us? PMs must have their finger on the pulse of the market, and the best way to do this is to talk to customers.
Send out an email with the key results spreadsheet to the whole team, and a list of things that shipped in furtherance of those metrics. Reinforce speed of execution and relentless progress toward the key results.
Write a blog post about one or more features that have shipped. It’s important to show the external world how the product is continually improving. (If it is a technical feature, post it to your developer blog to help with recruiting).
The product blog helps customers see continual improvement.
Every Quarter
Perform a more in-depth user study. Record a video of a real customer using the product and share it with the whole team. They need to feel the customer’s pain and have this be a constant reminder that normal people don’t use the product like they do. We’ve tried using usertesting.com, fullstory.com, and in person videos for this.
Use at least one of your two week sprints exclusively for bug fixing, refactoring, or removing old stuff. If bugs, pagerduty, or speed/performance become an issue, have the whole team focus on this for as many sprints as needed to get things back below the threshold.
Hold an off site event and do something fun to help the team bond.
A user study we ran on UserTesting.com.
Every Year
Brainstorm 3–10 key results with your team that will move the needle for your product. These should be quantitative/measurable. They should also be ambitious but potentially achievable. Choose one of them as your north star metric which you prioritize above all else — list this one first. This will break ties when a decision needs to be made or there is lack of clarity about what to work on next.
Choose an owner on the team for each key result if appropriate.
Take some time to think holistically about product market fit. Does the overall direction of the product need to change? Does the product need to be split in two or merged with something else? Repositioned as something else? Usually if your product does 3–4 things, 80% of all usage is in just one category. Can you double down on that one thing and simplifying or eliminate the rest?
Take some time to think big picture about this each year.
Hopefully this gives some insight into how we work. I’m sure we’ll continue to improve it as we go.
If you’re interested in learning more about working at Coinbase, please visit our careers page. You can also email us directly at talent at ourdomain.com.
We’re working toward a future where the world has an open system for money and payments.With Greece's relations with its European counterparts at a low ebb, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will head to Russia on Thursday and meet President Vladimir Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
Tsipras' visit comes at a crisis point for Greece, with reforms-for-rescue talks between the country and its international lenders in deadlock.
He is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday afternoon, the Greek government said in a statement Thursday, and ahead of that meeting will make a keynote speech at the forum.
Tsipras' government has already warned it will not have the money to pay a debt of 1.5 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) without an agreement, prompting increasing concern that Greece will default and eventually leave the euro zone.
However on Thursday, Russian Deputy Finance Minister, Sergei Storchak, said Greece had not asked the Russian Finance Ministry for financial assistance, Dow Jones reported. The ministry would not comment on the remarks when contacted by CNBC.
The head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, said that Greece would be in default at the start of July if it fails to make a repayment on June 30 because there is no grace period or possibility to delay, Reuters reported.
"It will be in default, it will be in arrears vis-a-vis the IMF on July 1, but I hope it is not the case, I really do," Lagarde told reporters following a meeting with the Luxembourg finance minister.1 of 8 View Caption
Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Eric and Sandy Byers welcome their son Jacob, 20, back from his mission to the San Dieg Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Mormon missionaries arrive at Salt Lake International Airport on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015 Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Mormon missionaries arrive at Salt Lake International Airport on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015 Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Friends and family connecting live and via Skype welcome Taylor Ogden, 20, of Sandy aft Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Tammy Ogden of Sandy, Utah is overcome with emotion as she greets her son Taylor, 20, a The missionary drop When the LDS Church reduced the missionary ages in late 2012 (to 18 for men and 19 for women), Utah State Univ Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Tammy Ogden of Sandy, Utah is overcome with emotion as she greets her son Taylor, 20, a Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune Mormon missionaries, including Jacob Byers (left) arrive at Salt Lake International AirALAMOGORDO, N.M.—A documentary film production company has found buried in a New Mexico landfill hundreds of cartridges for Atari’s notorious E.T. game — described by some as the worst video game ever made. Film director Zak Penn showed one E.T. cartridge retrieved from the site and said that hundreds more had been found in the mounds of trash and dirt scooped by a backhoe.
Film director Zak Penn with one of the decades-old Atari E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game cartridges found Saturday in a dumpsite in Alamogordo, N.M. ( Juan Carlos Llorca / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS )
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• Former Toronto socialite accused of bilking senior of millions About 200 residents and game enthusiasts gathered early Saturday in southeastern New Mexico to watch backhoes and bulldozers dig through the concrete-covered landfill in search of up to a million discarded copies of E.T. The Extraterrestrial that the game’s maker had wanted to hide forever. “I feel pretty relieved and psyched that they actually got to see something,” said Penn as members of the production team sifted through the mounds of trash, pulling out boxes, games and other Atari products. Most of the crowd left before the discovery, turned away by strong winds that kicked up clouds of dust and garbage. By the time the games were found, only a few dozen people remained. Some were playing the infamous game in a makeshift gaming den with a TV set and an 1980s game console in the back of a van, while others took selfies beside a life-size E.T. doll inside a DeLorean car like the one that was turned into a time machine in the Back To The Future movies. Among the watchers was Armando Ortega, a city official who back in 1983 got a tip from a landfill employee about the massive dump of games.
“It was pitch dark here that night, but we came with our flashlights,” he said. They braved the darkness, coyotes and snakes of the desert landfill and had to sneak past the security guard. But it paid off: they found dozens of crushed cartridges that they took home and discovered were still playable in their game consoles.
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advocate for. When pressed as to the sentiments informing “In Common,” Keys replies, “[Everyone] deserves to have the right to do what everybody else does and to have the same opportunities to get where everyone else is going.”
Indeed, just this past weekend, Keys unveiled the track list for HERE via Twitter, among which included “Elaine Brown,” named after the pioneering civil rights activist, musician and Black Panther chairwoman. Tapping into a legacy that draws a direct line from Keys to the likes of Nina Simone’s fiery protest ode, “Mississippi Goddamn” and James Brown’s civil rights anthem “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Keys emphasizes the important role that respect plays as theme not only in “In Common,” but also throughout her larger body of work. “How we speak to each other,” she notes, “and how we treat each other should always be done with a certain amount of respect—the same respect that we want to be treated with. We all deserve that and I think our kids deserve it.”
Recently, Keys seems ever more confident in her role as the musical inheritor of a legacy of social activism that connects her with the likes of Simone and Brown. That confidence was evident during her appearance at the 2016 Democratic National Convention where, in addition to performing “Superwoman” and “Girl on Fire,” she headlined Politico’s lecture forum addressing, among other topics, the issue of criminal justice reform.
Ultimately, for Keys, music has the power to change minds and bridge the widening social divides she sees in America today. “There's definitely an imbalance,” she points out, “and I think that we're all feeling that imbalance, to be honest.” Music, for her, is one way to close that gap. “I love how much we all can identify with music,” Keys concludes, “whether we're artists or just working at the post office, music is our life.” One thing is for sure, Key’s ability to marry soulful music with socially minded commentary continues to strike a chord for us all.
HERE is available November 4 from RCA Records.After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, President Obama and other gun-control advocates have urged Congress to develop bipartisan gun-control legislation. In addition, the president signed 23 executive actions to help curb gun violence.
Lawmakers in some states have responded to the push for new regulations with their own statewide proposals. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo led the charge as the first governor since the Sandy Hook shooting to sign gun-control legislation into law. The legislation calls for a statewide gun registry and places restrictions on ammunition magazines.
Other states have moved in the opposite direction, with lawmakers crafting bills that seek to make federal gun-control laws unenforceable within the borders of their state.
The latest on the list? Alaska. On Monday, the state’s Republican-led House voted passed a bill that would exempt Alaskans from following federal gun laws. Federal agents who attempt to enforce them would be subject to felony charges.
If this sounds like nullification to you, that was exactly what the bill’s sponsor, Speaker Mike Chenault had in mind. In a January press conference, Chenault, a Republican, told a local reporter that individuals in his district were “looking at nullification” in response to President Obama’s executive actions.
The Alaska law passed the House in a 31-5 vote. But there’s a good chance it won’t pass constitutional muster, given the fact that nullification became a thing of the past in 1833, when Andrew Jackson was in office.
The Anchorage Daily News reports that legislative attorney Kathleen Strasbaugh alerted Chenault to the fact that his proposed bill was “largely unconstitutional.”
Chenault is by no means out in the cold in looking for a way to repel the federal government on gun control. At least 15 states are on a similar track. Gary Marbut, a Montana gun lobbyist, proposed a “Sheriffs First” bill, which would give county sheriffs the authority to decide which federal laws can be enforced in their county. If a federal agent neglected to consult with the sheriff prior to arresting someone suspected of violating a federal law, that agent would be subject to arrest and charged with kidnapping. The bill was recently cleared by the state’s House Judiciary Committee.
In Wyoming, Republican State Rep. Kendall Kroeker proposed a bill that would make it a felony to enforce federal gun laws in his state. Republican State Rep. put forth something similar in his home state of Texas.
Check out the Hardball Sideshow above for more on Alaska’s flashback to the era of nullification.PROVIDENCE, R.I. — With questions remaining Tuesday as to whether the state is prepared to regulate a new industry, the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee voted 14-2 to legalize hemp.
Lawmakers acknowledged concerns raised by law enforcement over how to control a cannabis-based industry. But most ultimately voiced support saying there would be more controls over the hemp industry than there are over its medical marijuana program.
"This is much more stringent for a much less dangerous product," Chairman Joseph McNamara said.
The bill sponsored by Rep. Cale Keable, D-Burrillville, allows anyone who passes a national criminal background check to grow hemp or "CDB-rich hemp" — a form of cannabis. Industrial hemp can be used for cloth and paper products, and some believe that strains that are high in CDB, or cannabidiol, have medicinal purposes.
Changes to the legislation were still being drafted minutes before the committee met. Among them: applicants for hemp growing licenses will be responsible for paying for the required background check. If licensed, the entity will be responsible for the costs associated with testing the product.
The bill defines hemp as having less than 1 percent of the psychoactive ingredient THC — a point law enforcement has said will pose problems as the state does not have the capacity to test. Rep. Samuel Azzinaro, D-Westerly, questioned if the Department of Health will be prepared to handle regulation. While the bill would charge steep application fees, it does not create a restricted receipts account for the funding.
Christina Batastini, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said the agency has no position on the original bill and had not viewed the amended version as of Tuesday night.
The amended bill also slaps growers with a $25,000 application fee to the state Division of Agriculture. If approved, growers would have to renew their licenses every three years, each time at a cost of $25,000. Despite law enforcement's concerns that the bill will create a limitless number of growers who could easily mix marijuana with their hemp crops, the amended version included no limit to the number of licenses in the state.
"You're not going to get Joe Schmoe from out in the woods somewhere coming in saying 'Oh, I'm going to start growing hemp' and then have marijuana growing with it because you're not going to be able to do this until you've had a national criminal background check, and you've paid that $25,000 fee up front," McNamara said.
Phyto Pharmaceuticals LLC, the company whose proposal to set up shop in Rhode Island has been driving the legislation, was also a point of discussion. Founders Anthony Alfonso and Alex Lavin told they committee they will make an initial $5 million to $7 million investment in the state if the hemp is legalized, focusing on the supplement industry.
Rep. Robert Lancia, R-Cranston, who voted against the bill, said he remains uncomfortable with the measure, in part because it's targeted at a specific entity. He reiterated earlier statements that Phyto's presentation seemed to "slick."
Rep. Arthur Corvese, D-North Providence, agreed saying, "Whenever someone's a little slick, you have to think twice." But he ultimately defended the bill, noting that Phyto is not seeking any state financing and the state should be "business-friendly."
Rep. Kathleen Fogarty, D-South Kingstown, said she was primarily concerned about Phyto's statements that it wants to make CDB-rich hemp that could be used to treat children with epilepsy, noting the regulation and development time of such products.
"That could be a liability for the state …. I just don't want to see the state have a problem down the road," Fogarty said.
In response, McNamara pointed to a section of the bill stating that the Department of Health will develop regulations for sales, storage, manufacturing and testing of hemp products.
"There is no reference to medical products. So that's been removed. They're going to be the rules and procedures that are overseen by the Department of Health," McNamara said.
The amended version of the bill, however, appears to make no change to the types of products that can be made from hemp. Both versions define hemp and CDB-rich hemp products as "all products made from the plants, including but not limited to concentrated oil, cloth, cordage, fiber, food, fuel, paint, paper, construction materials, plastics, seed, seed meal, seed oil and certified seed for cultivation."
—jbogdan@providencejournal.com
(401) 277-7493
On Twitter: @JenniferBogdanAwww, back at the White House throwing a hissy as we speak…
Via Fox News:
In a dramatic defeat for the White House, President Obama’s trade agenda ran aground in the House on Friday as Democrats banded together in opposition despite a personal plea from the president.
In a 302-126 vote, the House killed a worker aid bill that was tied to the president’s main agenda item — legislation that would give Obama “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade deals. Without it, the trade push — a key plank of the president’s second-term agenda — withers for now. The vote marked a stunning blow for the president at the hands of his own party, with Nancy Pelosi and labor unions helping drive the stake into the legislation in the end.
Minutes before the vote, Pelosi took to the floor to appeal for a “better deal” for American workers.
The key vote was on so-called Trade Adjustment Assistance bill, a program that retrains workers displaced by trade. The bill was originally put on the table as a sweetener to help entice recalcitrant Democrats to back the “fast-track” bill. But Democrats are so opposed to that legislation, they voted down the sweetener.
Keep reading…As a humiliated Al Franken returned to Washington, D.C. this week clinging to his political life, The Daily Caller News Foundation went to Capitol Hill to ask him if he considers himself part of the “war on women.”
Multiple times. His response? Run away and say, “We’re not taking hallway questions.”
Franken is facing a long series of bombshell sexual harassment and serial-groper allegations by multiple women. In total, four women from different eras of Franken’s career have come forward to describe everything from unwanted groping to kissing them while they were sleeping.
In the past, the Minnesota Democrat has been billed as a “champion of women” and strong on “women’s issues.” He also has regularly accused the GOP of a “War on Women” and spoken out against sexual assault in the past.
Franken’s campaign videos for his re-election in 2014 heavily focused on women’s issues. One video, titled “Common Decency,” brags about how Franken has fought for the rights of sexual assault victims.
"Common Decency" SHARE our new ad, which highlights how Al successfully included a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that ended a shameful practice of many survivors of sexual assault having to pay for their own rape kits up front. Posted by Al Franken on Thursday, October 2, 2014
Another featured Planned Parenthood director Cecile Richards campaigning with Franken and calling him “an extraordinary champion for women.”
Why Cecile Richards is Standing with Al Cecile Richards says it best — Al has been an extraordinary champion for women ever since he got to the Senate, and we have to fight for him. Join our team: http://afs.mn/vol Posted by Al Franken on Monday, October 20, 2014
The Minnesota Democrat has now faced pressure from within his own party to resign. Franken has instead issued a series of confounding apologies where he consistently says he does not remember sexually assaulting his victims.Although the lives of celebrities are certainly in the public eye, there are a few personal things about famous actors that are virtually unknown to the general public—including who they've shared a womb with.
1. Scarlett Johansson
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Scarlett Johansson has a twin brother named Hunter Johansson, who was a campaign advisor for Barack Obama in 2008. While Hunter didn’t pursue a career in acting like his sister, the twins appeared together in the film Manny & Lo in 1996.
2. Vin Diesel
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While Vin Diesel (whose real name is Mark Sinclair Vincent) is enjoying a career in front of the camera with starring roles in action films such as Fast & Furious and Riddick, his fraternal twin brother Paul Vincent likes his place behind the camera as a film editor.
3. Ashton Kutcher
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Ashton Kutcher was born Christopher Ashton Kutcher, and has a fraternal twin brother named Michael. When he was a child, Michael developed cerebral palsy and cardiomyopathy and required a heart transplant during his teenage years. Before starring in That '70s Show, Ashton attended the University of Iowa and studied biochemical engineering, inspired to find a cure for Michael’s heart disease. Michael is currently a spokesman for Reaching for the Stars, an organization advocating for children with cerebral palsy.
4. Kiefer Sutherland
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Kiefer Sutherland was born the older brother of his twin sister Rachel. While Kiefer Sutherland is mostly known for starring as Jack Bauer on Fox’s thriller 24, Rachel works behind the scenes as a post-production supervisor on films and television in Toronto.
5. Giovanni Ribisi
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Giovanni Ribisi's twin sister Marissa had a budding career as an actress in Hollywood with roles in The Brady Bunch Movie, Pleasantville, and Dazed and Confused. She took a hiatus in the early 2000s, and married singer/songwriter Beck in 2004. Marissa Ribisi and Beck have two children, Cosimo Henri and Tuesday. Marissa also launched a fashion line called Whitley Kros in 2007.
6. Linda Hamilton
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Leslie Hamilton Gearren is the identical twin sister of actress Linda Hamilton. Although Leslie is a professional nurse, she was also her sister Linda’s on-screen double in three scenes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
7. Parker Posey
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Parker Posey was dubbed “Queen of the Indies” in the '90s for her appearances in movies such as Dazed and Confused, Party Girl, and Waiting For Guffman. Her twin brother Christopher took an alternative career route as a lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia.
8. Joseph Fiennes
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Joseph Fiennes has five biological siblings who took all up careers in the arts. His older brother Ralph Fiennes is an Academy Award-nominated actor, while his other brother Magnus is a composer, and his sisters Martha and Sophie are filmmakers. Joseph also has a twin brother named Jacob, who opted not to go into the entertainment industry, but instead started a career as a conservationist.
9. Eva Green
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French model and actress Eva Green’s breakout role was in the James Bond film Casino Royale. She has since appeared in Dark Shadows, 300: Rise of an Empire, and the upcoming Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Green’s fraternal twin sister Joy took up a career rearing horses in the Normandy countryside with her husband.
10. Jon Heder
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While Jon Heder is mostly known for playing the titular role in the cult classic Napoleon Dynamite, his identical twin brother Dan Heder works behind the scenes in animation and visual effects, notably for the movie 47 Ronin. The brothers both worked on the Oscar-nominated animated film Monster House in 2006—Jon provided the voice for the character Reginald "Skull" Skulinski, while Dan was one of the film’s animators.When our son was a boy he was tormented by headaches. Tests showed he was allergic to the seven-story cypress tree growing outside his bedroom window. "Cut that tree down," said the pediatrician.
My husband and I were taken aback. No way were we going to cut down that cypress tree. It was magnificent - roots growing deep into the soil behind our house and thick, graceful branches reaching around our deck.
That tree was a presence, a being. It had been there when we bought the house, it would be there when we left. We had no right to end its life. We'd find another way to address the headaches.
Cattle feed lot, California. Photo by Barbara Newhall
Like our cypress tree, a head of butter lettuce has a life, a fact driven home to me whenever I buy one of those fancy organic versions sold alive, roots still attached. I take the lettuce from its box, ponder the tender leaves and the roots still caked with soil, and think, "This plant isn't dead yet. I'm about to rip off its roots and eat it alive."
You can see where I'm going with this.
I don't see a clear difference between slaughtering a pig and cutting down a seven-story tree. Between netting the wild salmon I eat for dinner and harvesting my breakfast oats.
Faced with a choice between killing a pig and killing the tree in our backyard - I'd kill the pig. (Full disclosure: I'd have the pig slaughtered, just as I'd hire someone else to cut down the tree.)
Many people differentiate between plant and animal. A Buddhist might say one is sentient and the other lacks - what? The wind poppies growing in our front yard open their petals to the sun and radiate what feels like - a will to live, an intention to live.
Wind poppies. Photo by Barbara Newhall
Some perceive a hierarchy in living things. The more sentient the being (i.e. the more like us humans) the more valuable its life; a mammal is more valuable than a bird.
But not everyone thinks that way. During a trip to Sikkim my husband and I engaged a Buddhist guide who told us, yes, many of the local people were vegetarians. But others occasionally ate meat.
"When they do," he said, "they might slaughter a single ox instead of many chickens. One ox will feed as many people as a flock of chickens - but only one creature dies."
We are all destined to die - the cypress tree, the pig, my breakfast oats, the chickens. But meanwhile we live, and in order to live, we eat. Humans and pigs eat other living things. And that has to be okay.
The ethical high road might be to go, not vegetarian, not vegan, but fruitarian - living on fruits alone, consuming only the seed-bearing part of the plant not essential to its survival.
I for one am not willing to live the constricted life of a fruitarian. And I don't think my body is set up to subsist on fruits alone, which is maybe too bad for all the turkeys and carrots and spinach I'll be consuming until my own time comes to feed the worms. But that's the way it is, and it has to be okay, it has to be ethical.
I care deeply about how farm animals are treated. I care about the toll our meat-eating habits take on the planet and our bodies. I don't need slabs of meat on my plate, but I do like a little chicken broth in my lentil soup. And I try to stay aware of the creatures - the butter lettuce, the pig, the artichoke - whose lives have come to an end so that I can keep mine. For now.PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee on Tuesday dismissed Curt Schilling's accusations that his remarks about the former Red Sox pitcher's video game company hurt its financial position.
Chafee's administration also disputed Schilling's assertion that the state reneged on film tax credits promised to 38 Studios. Chafee said he has worked since he was elected to assist the company and protect the state's investment in it.
"Obviously I want to see it succeed," Chafee told reporters Tuesday. "But I have to be honest in my dealings with the taxpayers and tell them what's going on."
In his first public remarks on the company's problems, Schilling told The Providence Journal for Tuesday's editions that Chafee's recent comments that the state was trying to keep his company solvent were "devastating." He said that shortly after those remarks, a video-game publisher pulled out of a $35 million deal to finance a new game.
"The governor is not operating in the best interest of the company by any stretch, or the taxpayers, or the state," Schilling told the newspaper. "We're trying to save this company and we're working 24/7. The public commentary has been as big a piece of what's happening to us as anything out there."
Chafee said any potential investors weren't likely to be scared away by his comments. "Any time there's a chance to make money the investors will be around," he said.
Schilling also said the state promised and did not deliver film tax credits for 38 Studios and refused to allow the company to defer a $1.1 million payment to the Economic Development Corp., forcing it to miss payroll on May 15.
Rhode Island Tax Administrator David Sullivan said 38 Studios' request is still under review and that the company was never promised tax credits.
A message left for Schilling, who is also an ESPN analyst, was not immediately returned Tuesday.
38 Studios, which was lured to Rhode Island from Massachusetts in 2010 with a $75 million loan guarantee from the state's Economic Development Corp., laid off its entire workforce last week, including about 300 employees in Providence and more in Maryland. The state would likely be responsible for some of 38 Studios' debts should it collapse.
Chafee said Tuesday that EDC Board member Lynn Singleton has resigned from the board, becoming the second board member to step down since questions about 38 Studios' health arose. Board Vice Chairwoman Helena Foulkes and EDC Executive Director Keith Stokes -- a vigorous backer of the guarantee -- have already resigned.
The firm's financial troubles came to light this month when it defaulted on a $1.1 million payment to the EDC that was due May 1. The company later paid -- but only after first delivering a check that it acknowledged soon after would not clear.
Now the company is again violating its loan agreement with the state, Chafee said. Under federal law, employers who have at least 100 employees and plan to shed at least 50 jobs are required to give a 60-day notice to workers and state unemployment officials.
Bill Thomas, the 38 Studios president, told The Journal that the state was notified of the layoffs on May 25 because the company "wanted our employees to hear it from us first."
The 45-year-old Schilling said he stands to lose all the money he saved while playing baseball, and rejected criticism that he is seeking a public handout.
"I have done whatever I can do to create jobs and create a successful business, with my own income," he said. "Fifty million dollars, everything I've ever saved, has been put back into the economy. The $49 million from Rhode Island has been put back in the economy. I've never taken a penny and I've done nothing but create jobs and create economy. And so how does that translate into welfare baby? I've tried to do right by people."
Chafee, an independent, has said he wants to help the company succeed, but opposes allowing 38 Studios to receive film tax credits after receiving so much in state bond proceeds.
Jonathan Savage, a business lawyer who is representing Chafee, said the state is willing to give up its first position to 38 Studios' assets if that will help attract a private investor.
Schilling said that might help, and he's hoping the company is not finished.
"I pray that it's not," he said. "We're doing everything we can do to make that not be the case."Moody's Investors Service says its stable outlook for Taiwan's banking system reflects its expectation that rated banks in Taiwan will maintain their steady credit profiles, despite an economic slowdown, and that they will continue to benefit from strong government support.
"Although weak external conditions are leading to slower growth in industrial production and exports, the impact on Taiwanese banks' asset quality should be buffered by low interest rates and healthy corporate balance sheets," says Sonny Hsu, a Moody's Vice President and Senior Analyst.
"We expect Taiwanese banks to report stable profitability over our outlook horizon, as higher margins from overseas lending will be partially offset by higher credit charges due to tightening regulatory provisioning requirements and slower economic growth," adds Hsu.
Moody's analysis is contained in its just-published report "Banking System Outlook: Taiwan," which provides an overview of credit trends affecting the banking system in the next 12-18 months.
Moody's baseline scenario assumes a material slowdown in Taiwan's real GDP growth to 1.5% in 2015 and 2.0% in 2016, from 3.8% in 2014, with weak exports being a key driver.
This slowdown, coupled with low expected inflationary pressure, will argue for the central bank's monetary policy to stay accommodative for an extended period, even when the US Federal Reserve begins hiking interest rates.
"While the more challenging operating environment will pressure banks' asset quality metrics, we expect the resultant impact to be mitigated by sound corporate financials, continued low interest rates, and a resilient labor market," says Hsu.
Moody's report highlights that Taiwan's economic and financial linkages with China (Aa3 stable) are growing, with banks' total Mainland China exposures rising to 62% of total shareholder equity as of end-June 2015, from 50% as of end-September 2013.
The banks' rising Mainland China lending will expose them to risks associated with the Chinese economy, including the current economic slowdown and the country's ongoing economic rebalancing. Nevertheless, regulatory caps on banks' Mainland China exposures to 100% of banks' common shareholders' equity limit the extent of such exposures.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese banks will likely strengthen their capitalization as they raise fresh equity and maintain modest overall asset growth, although capitalization remains weak relative to regional peers. Some banks will face increasing capital pressure if their expansion, mostly overseas, continues to outpace that of their local peers.
Moody's also expects the government's willingness and capacity to provide support in a stress situation to remain strong. The government has made no effort to introduce a statutory bank resolution regime that entails imposition of losses on creditors on a going-concern basis if a bank becomes non-viability.
The stable outlook on Taiwan's banking system is consistent with the stable outlooks for seven out of 10 Moody's-rated banks in Taiwan. The system's asset-weighted average long-term bank deposit rating is A1, while the asset-weighted average standalone baseline credit assessment is baa2. The stable outlook is also consistent with Moody's outlook on Taiwan's Aa3 government bond rating.When we announced Project Quantum last October, we talked about how users would benefit from our focus on “performance gains…that will be so noticeable that your entire web experience will feel different.”
We shipped the first significant part of this in Firefox 53, and continue to work on the engineering side. Now let’s dive into the performance side and the work we’re doing to ensure that our users will enjoy a faster Web experience.
What makes work on performance so challenging and why is it so important to include the user from the very beginning?
Performance — a contested subject, to say the least!
Awareness of performance as a UX issue often begins with a negative experience – when things get slow or don’t work as expected. In fact, good performance is already a table stake, something that everyone expects from an online product or service. Outstanding performance will very soon become the new baseline point of reference.
The other issue is that there are different perspectives on performance. For users, performance is about their experience and is very often unspecific. For them, perception of good performance can range from “this is amazingly fast” to “SLOW!”, from “WOW!” to “NO!”. For engineers, performance is about numbers and processes. The probes that collect data in the code often measure one specific task in the pipeline. Measuring and tracking capabilities like Garbage Collection (GC) enables engineers to react to regressions in the data quickly, and work on fixing the root causes.
This is why there can be a disconnect between user experience and engineering efforts at mitigation. We measure garbage collection, but it’s often measured without context, such as whether it runs during page load, while the user interacts with a website, or during event queue idle time. Often, GC is within budget, which means that users will hardly perceive it. More generally, specific aspects of what we measure with our probes can be hard to map to the unspecific experience of performance that users have.
Defining technical and perceived performance
To describe an approach for optimizing performance for users, let us start by defining what performance means. For us, there are two sides to performance: technical performance and perceived performance.
Under technical performance, we include the things that we can measure in the browser: how long page elements take to render, how fast we can parse JavaScript or — and that is often more important to understand — how slow certain things are. Technical performance can be measured and the resulting data can be used to investigate performance issues. Technical performance represents the engineer’s viewpoint.
On the other hand, there is the topic of how users experience performance. When users talk about their browser’s performance, they talk about perceived performance or “Quality of Experience” (QoE). Users express QoE in terms of any perceivable, recognized, and nameable characteristic of the product. In the QoE theory, these are called QoE features. We may assume that these characteristics are related to factors in the product that impact technical performance, the QoE factors, but this is not necessarily given.
A promising approach to user-perceived optimization of performance is to identify those factors that have the biggest impact on QoE features and focus on optimizing their technical performance.
Understanding perception
The first step towards optimizing Quantum for perceived performance is to understand how human perception works. We won’t go into details here, but it’s important to know that there are perception thresholds of duration that we can leverage. The most prominent ones for Web interactions were defined by Jacob Nielsen back in the 1990s, and even today, they are informing user-centric performance models like RAIL. Following Nielsen’s thresholds gives a first good estimate about the budget available for certain tasks to be performed by the browser engine.
With our user research team, we are validating and investigating these perceptual thresholds for modern web content. We are running experiments with users, both in the lab and remotely. Of course, this will only happen with users’ consent and everybody will be able to opt in and opt out of these studies at any time. With tools like Shield, we run a set of experiments that allow us to learn about performance and how to improve it for users.
However, knowing the perceptual thresholds and the respective budget is just an important first step. Following, we will go a bit more into detail about how we use a data-informed approach for benchmarking and optimizing performance during the development of our new browser engine.
Three pillars of perceived Web performance
The challenge with optimizing perceived performance of a browser engine is that there are many components involved in bringing data from the network to our screens. All these components may have an impact on the perceived performance and on the underlying perceptual thresholds. However, users don’t know about this structure and the engine. From their point of view, we can define three main pillars for how users perceive performance on the Web: page load, smoothness and responsiveness.
Page load : This is what people notice each time when loading a new page. Users care about fast page loads, and we have seen in user research that this is often the way users determine good or bad performance in their browser. Key events defining the perceptual budget during page load are: an immediate response to the user request for a new page, also known as “First Render” or “First non-blank Paint“, and the moment when all important elements are displayed, currently discussed as Hero Element Timing.
: This is what people notice each time when loading a new page. Users care about fast page loads, and we have seen in user research that this is often the way users determine good or bad performance in their browser. Key events defining the perceptual budget during page load are: an immediate response to the user request for a new page, also known as “First Render” or “First non-blank Paint“, and the moment when all important elements are displayed, currently discussed as Hero Element Timing. Smoothness : Scrolling and panning have become challenging activities on modern websites, with infinite scrolling, parallax effects, and dynamic sticky elements. Animations create a better user experience when interacting with the page. Our users want to enjoy a smooth experience for scrolling the web and web animations, be it on social media pages or when shopping for the latest gadget. Often, people nowadays also refer to smoothness as “always 60 fps”.
: Scrolling and panning have become challenging activities on modern websites, with infinite scrolling, parallax effects, and dynamic sticky elements. Animations create a better user experience when interacting with the page. Our users want to enjoy a smooth experience for scrolling the web and web animations, be it on social media pages or when shopping for the latest gadget. Often, people nowadays also refer to smoothness as “always 60 fps”. Responsiveness: Beyond scrolling and panning, the other big group of user interactions on websites are mouse, touch, and keyboard inputs. As modern web services create a native-like experience, user expectations for web services are more demanding, based on what they have come to expect for native apps on their laptops and desktop computers. Users have become sensitive to input latency, so we are currently looking at an ideal maximum delay of 100ms.
Targeted optimization for the whole Web
But how do we optimize these three pillars for the whole of the Web? It’s a bigger job than optimizing the performance of a single web service. In building Firefox, we face the challenge of optimizing our browser engine without knowing which pages our users visit or what they do on the Web, due to our commitment to user privacy. This also limits us in collecting data for specific websites or specific user tasks. However, we want to create the best Quality of Experience for as many users and sites as possible.
To start, we decided to focus on the types of content that are currently most popular with Web users. These categories are:
Search (e.g.Yahoo Search, Google, Bing)
Productivity (e.g. Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Outlook, GSuite)
Social (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit)
Media (e.g. YouTube, Netflix, SoundCloud, Amazon Video)
E-commerce (e.g. eBay or Amazon)
News & Reference (e.g. NYTimes, BBC, Wikipedia)
Our goal is to learn from this initial set of categories and the most used sites within them and extend our work on improvements to other categories over time. But how do we now match technical to perceived performance and fix technical performance issues to improve the perceived ones?
A data-informed approach to optimizing a browser engine
The goal of our approach here is to take what matters to users and apply that knowledge to achieve technical impact in the engine. With the basics defined above, our iterative approach for optimizing the engine is as follows:
Identification: Based on the set of categories in focus, we specify scenarios for page load, smoothness, and responsiveness that exceed the performance budget and negatively impact perceived performance. Benchmarks: We define test cases for the identified scenarios so that they become reproducible and quantifiable in our benchmarking testbeds. Performance profiles: We record and analyze performance profiles to create a detailed view into what’s happening in the browser engine and guide engineers to identify and fix technical root causes.
Identification of scenarios exceeding performance budget
Input for identifying those scenarios come through different sources. They are either informed by results from user research or can be reported through bugs or user feedback. Here are two examples of such a scenario:
Scenario: browser startup
Category : a special case for page load
: a special case for page load Performance budget : 1000ms for First Paint and 1500ms for Hero Element
: 1000ms for First Paint and 1500ms for Hero Element Description : Open the browser by clicking the icon > wait for the browser to be fully loaded as maximized window
: Open the browser by clicking the icon > wait for the browser to be fully loaded as maximized window What to measure: First Paint: browser window appears on Desktop, Hero Element: “Search” placeholder in the search box of the content window
Scenario: Open chat window on Facebook
Category : Responsiveness
: Responsiveness Performance budget : 150ms
: 150ms Description : Log in to Facebook > Wait for the homepage to be fully loaded > click on a name in the chat panel to open chat window
: Log in to Facebook > Wait for the homepage to be fully loaded > click on a name in the chat panel to open chat window What to measure: time from mouse-click input event to showing the chat window on screen
Benchmarks
We have built different testbeds that allow us to obtain valid and reproducible results, in order to create a baseline for each of the scenarios, and also to be able to track improvements over time. Talos is a python-driven performance testing framework that, among many other tests, has a defined set of tests for browser startup and page load. It’s been recently updated to match the new requirements and measure events closer to user perception like First Paint.
Hasal, on the other hand, focuses on benchmarks around responsiveness and smoothness. It runs a defined set of scripts that perform the defined scenarios (like the “open chat window” scenario above) and extracts the required timing data through analyzing videos captured during the interaction.
Additionally, there is still a lot of non-automated, manual testing involved, especially for first rounds of baselining new scenarios before scripting them for automated testing. Therefore, we use a HDMI capture card and analyze the recorded videos frame-by-frame manually.
All these testbeds give us data about how critical the identified scenarios are in terms of exceeding their respective perceptual budgets. Running benchmarks regularly (once a week or even more often) for critical scenarios like browser startup also tracks improvements over time and provides good direction when improvements have moved the scenario into the perceptual budget.
Performance profiles
Now that we have defined our scenarios and understand how much improvement is required to create good Quality of Experience, the last step is to enable engineers to achieve these improvements. The way that engineers look at performance problems in the browser engine is through performance profiles. Performance profiles are a snapshot of what happens in the browser engine during a specific user task such as |
-assed videos," she says. "They just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because you're a garbage human. These dudes just making endless videos that go after every feminist over and over again is a part of the issue of why we have to have these conversations."
The crowd gives her a positive response, with some whoops and cheers.
On the front rows, Benjamin and his retinue rock back and forth, as if they are watching a comedy show. He yells back that he be allowed to debate with her.
But she won't debate him. She understands that he's not in the least bit interested in what she has to say.
Dark Motives
After his humiliation, Benjamin posted a video complaining about Sarkeesian's comments and pointing out that they contravene VidCon policy. He also repeated his lamentation that she is avoiding debating him and said that Sarkeesian was guilty of "smearing male gamers." Still, there is a silver lining for him. At the time of writing, the video has been viewed more than 400,000 times.
Benjamin often points out that he asks his followers not to harass the subjects of his videos. But that doesn't stop them assaulting Sarkeesian with vile insults. In the last few days, the usual litany of misspelled, crude and violent insults have spiked.
She's had to live with this stuff for years, ever since she launched Feminist Frequency, which produced a series of YouTube documentaries investigating video gaming's history of propagating misogynistic tropes and advancing a broadly patriarchal view of society. Her work has brought serious feminist ideas to a broad audience of gamers, including people working in the game industry, many of whom were previously ignorant of such notions.
The series was initially crowdfunded through Kickstarter with a target of $8,000. It raised more than $150,000, increasing the scope of the project, which ran for two seasons.
Since she began her work, video games have seen a rise in the number of positive women and minority protagonists and a decrease in the tropes she discusses, such as weak, sexually attractive "damsels in distress." Feminist Frequency has demonstrably made a difference.
Her scholarly take on video games enrages large numbers of men, many of them young. She has received death threats. Her social media streams have received countless slurs, rape threats and insults. Benjamin and his supporters claim they just want to engage with her, but in a video released by a fellow right-wing YouTuber, it becomes clear that there are other motives at play.
Some victim bullshit
Dave Cullen lounges on what appears to be a bed in a hotel room, pointing a camera at himself. He looks tired and slightly pleased with himself. He is an ally of Benjamin's, a fellow YouTuber who makes a full-time living feeding the internet’s appetite for masculine fear and hurt. His Patreon makes around $3,000 a month. His YouTube page has more than 240,000 subscribers.
He was there, he says, at the VidCon Sarkeesian session. As he speaks, he claims that the first three rows were taken up by allies. (These allies have co-opted an internet term of derision to describe themselves: shitlords. They are generally identified by their hostility to progressives and to "social justice warriors.")
“This is harassment, pure and simple.”
He goes on to talk about how these allies coordinated among themselves at the event. "We carefully organized this so that on one side of the audience we would all make up the top three rows,” he says. “We would all be sitting there filming it," he adds, before naming several allies. "Anita spoke. And they were asking about why is it important to still have women talking about sexism or some victim bullshit in video games." He recounts Sarkeesian's comments.
He repeatedly claims the group is there to "engage" with Sarkeesian, but later, he says something very different.
"We had a blast with this. It was such an adrenaline high to be there in the situation, to shit-post, in this trolling kind of way." He goes on to claim there was "no malice" in their actions and that it was “playful.”
Polygon sent his comment to Sarkeesian, asking for a response. She responded via email:
"Hearing the honesty in that comment is weirdly almost kind of validating, because of course we know it’s true, we’ve always known it’s true, that for them this is a kind of game, but they constantly deny it.
"They’re playing for fun. For them it’s a thrill to use the power they have under patriarchy to try to keep women in their place, to try to intimidate or silence women who dare to speak out and assert their humanity and their right to exist as full human beings in these spaces.
“It’s not fun. It’s scary. It’s traumatic.”
"They don’t give a damn about the actual impact they’re having on people’s lives. It’s a sport, an adrenaline rush. But for me and for other women who are targeted by cyber-mobs, who endure ongoing campaigns of harassment, it’s not fun. It’s scary. It’s traumatic.
"You have to be so far removed from the reality of what you’re doing to engage in this behavior and call it ‘playful trolling.’ This is harassment, pure and simple, with the goal of trying to scare and silence women who speak out against sexism in our culture."
Cullen’s video includes footage of a group of supporters in an animated mood after the event, celebrating while at the same time expressing outrage that Benjamin had been called out. One of them jokes that he watches LGBT videos online. He likes the lesbian ones best. He laughs at his own joke.
A pile of shitlords
VidCon has a code of conduct listed on its website which requests that speakers are treated with respect. It asks that attendees refrain from activity that “causes excessive discomfort to our attendees or guests.” It adds: “Pranks often make for some great videos, but it makes us really sad when they are emotionally or physically hurtful, so don’t do that. If we hear about anyone pranking in ways that are disruptive to the well-being of our guests or attendees, there’s a pretty strong chance it will get the prankster kicked out.”
So far as we know, none of those who trolled Sarkeesian were kicked out. Polygon contacted VidCon seeking further clarification. We received an auto-reply that the team is currently on vacation. Later, a statement was released, which included the following.
“There was nothing I could do about it.”
“It is difficult to imagine that this group of people (who are aware that their channels have been base-camps for years of harassment of some of our panelists) did not realize that their arriving early to fill up the three front rows of a panel was going to be intimidating. In any case, it looked like intentional intimidation to most people in attendance, and the panelists were understandably on edge throughout the discussion.”
The statement went on to acknowledge that although Sarkeesian’s insult did contravene policy, there was a wider issue at play. It added that a VidCon official apologized to Sarkeesian for “not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.”
Sarkeesian says that VidCon's security was increased for panels she attended later in the event. They offered her the chance to step down from those sessions, but she declined, arguing that she did not want the trolls to feel like they had scored some kind of victory.
“Why aren’t these men punished for creating that environment?”
"I had to go out on another panel knowing that my harassers were in the audience, filming me for nefarious reasons, and there was nothing I could do about it," she said.
She hopes that VidCon and other events will become more aware of organized trolling. "When push comes to shove, conventions like VidCon should stand up and support women and other marginalized folks who are harassed. Why should I have to go out there in this toxic environment? Why aren’t these men punished for creating that environment? After all, this is a conference about online video culture attended primarily by YouTubers, and it’s no secret that YouTube has an incredibly toxic culture.
"It’s critical that events like VidCon recognize that and implement policies that prevent that toxicity from bleeding over into the event. No YouTube creator who makes videos that serve to target and harass individuals should be allowed to attend, and anyone who uses material filmed at a convention to harass individuals should be blacklisted from future events.”
Bad Faith
Polygon asked Sarkeesian for her response to Benjamin's oft-repeated claim — echoed by many controversial YouTubers — that he is anti-harassment. She replied with a well-known GIF showing cartoon characterizations of Batman, Robin and Green Arrow sharing a mirthful moment.
At the end of the conference, a question and answer session prompted some audience members to line up. In a blog entry posted after the event, Sarkeesian wrote that she is generally wary of such sessions, because they tend to attract bad faith questions. Unfortunately, VidCon was no exception.
One man stood up and asked Sarkeesian if she "truly believes" in the work she does. The question was declined. Sarkeesian is often portrayed by reactionary critics as a cynical manipulator of public opinion for financial gain.
“Their followers will eat it up no matter what I say.”
Another man stood up to ask: "Why do you guys act like only women face harassment online?" The claim that women are the only victims of harassment, so far as we can tell, has never been made by Sarkeesian. When he was booed by the audience and asked to sit down, the man claimed that he was being harassed.
In later sessions, VidCon decided to moderate all questions in Sarkesian's panels. On the question of debating her critics, Sarkeesian offers this explanation.
"My position is rooted in an understanding of what bell hooks has succinctly referred to as imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It sometimes requires a lot of unpacking to come to a basic understanding of this.
"You may need to take classes or read books that illuminate how systems of power have functioned throughout the history of our culture before you come to understand and accept that these systems actually do exist and impact people’s daily lives, but they do.
“I certainly have no regrets.”
"Institutionalized sexism and racism are real, and their effect on our lives is tremendous. Meanwhile, their position that these things don’t really exist is the dominant position in this culture. It doesn’t require all this scaffolding to establish.
"They can skip right to bashing my ideas, and their followers will eat it up no matter what I say. It’s a losing game. I’m not going to change anyone’s minds debating with any of them. More importantly, I shouldn’t have to debate the fact that I am a human being who deserves basic respect, and in fact that is in itself a core issue with all of this: how degrading and exhausting it is just to have to keep arguing for and fighting for and begging for our own humanity."
Polygon attempted to contact Benjamin via his Twitter page and an email address, but have yet to receive a reply.
One of the Kinder Things
In the aftermath of the VidCon confrontation, GamerGate-centric corners of the internet swelled with outrage at Sarkeesian's comments.
In his video, Cullen complained: "What has he [Benjamin] done to deserve this? He's just sitting there. She's the one talking. She started attacking him in this context. Fucking unbelievable. This abuse is acceptable? So these guest speakers are able to insult a paid audience member?"
Sarkeesian says it's clear that Benjamin and his entourage were there to intimidate her. "He had come with several others and together they took up roughly the first two rows. Of course he wanted to be seen, and I knew, because he was filming the panel, that he would use it to harass me and potentially drive harassment to my co-panelists, so I used the first question as an opportunity to let them and the audience know what was happening.
“These men just go on spewing their bullshit without consequences.”
"I certainly have no regrets. And I definitely did not 'flip out' as some folks are trying to falsely describe it. This is a man who has spent years driving harassment toward me and other women online. Under the circumstances, considering his pattern of behavior and everything he’s put me and others through, I’d say 'garbage human' was one of the kinder things I could have called him.
"In the midst of the predictable flood of hate that has come my way from Carl’s supporters, there have been a number of really wonderful messages of gratitude and support.
"So many of us have spent so long internalizing this expectation that we don’t confront this kind of abuse directly, we don’t openly acknowledge it, we suffer it in silence, and these men just go on spewing their bullshit without any consequences.
"As women, we're always told not to engage, not to'stoke the fire,' and that forces us into silence, it forces us to be quiet in the face of harassment. That silence helps perpetuate a culture in which harassment is permissible or even accepted as 'normal.' And so I think that for some women who understand what I’ve been through or who have been through it themselves, it was cathartic to see me not stay silent, to see me call him out directly like that, to acknowledge in front of all those people what he’s done."
Sarkeesian's brief and public ownership of Benjamin is unlikely to alter the toxic dynamic of gaming's reactionary fringe. Too many people are enraptured in their own blind rage. They carry with them a curiously self-defeating notion that fairness and common decency spell their own disenfranchisement and marginalization. Their rage is considered by some to be self-validating. Others see it as entertainment. To a small cadre of YouTube blowhards, it is also extremely lucrative.
When confronted with the consequences of appalling behavior, those organizations that host abusive activities — including VidCon, YouTube, Twitch and Twitter — offer little more than pleasantries and useless palliatives. They are ignoring their own urgent duty to show some courage, to fully confront these awful displays of bullying.
If individuals like Anita Sarkeesian can stand up to such aggression, why can’t these huge and powerful organizations?After 18 months and 12 games in Chelsea colors, 42-year-old Mark Schwarzer is apparently set to move on.
With the return of Thibaut Courtois, Schwarzer had fallen to No.3 in the pecking order. While he was given a new one-year contract over the summer, that was most likely just an insurance policy in case the Courtois - Cech situation couldn't be resolved amicably. Since that arrangement looks good for the rest of the season, Schwarzer is free to look for some actual playing time elsewhere.
Mark Schwarzer is set to complete a surprise move to Leicester City, bringing his Chelsea career to an end after 18 months. Schwarzer is understood to have said his goodbyes to Chelsea players and staff on Friday and has been in talks with Leicester over a deal which runs to the end of the 2015-16 season. -source: Telegraph
Leicester City are currently bottom of the table, and could probably use someone of Schwarzer's experience and veteran leadership in an effort to survive in the second half of the season.
As far as Chelsea are concerned, this should all but confirm now that Petr Cech is staying until the end of the season (just like all the talk coming from the player, his agent, and Jose have suggested). Hurray! And good luck, Mark!In his increasingly draconian anti-drug crackdown, the new Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, actually sent National Police troops to arrest a local mayor—resulting in a shoot-out that left six of the mayor’s bodyguards dead.
On Aug. 1, Duterte ordered Mayor Rolando Espinosa of Albuera town on Leyte to island to surrender within 24 hours—and added: “Otherwise, an order of ‘shoot on sight’ will be given if they resist and endanger the lives of arresting police officers.” Espinosa surrendered to police the next day—but his son, wanted as a suspected drug-dealer, remained at large. The day after that, the gun-fight broke out between the body-guards and police who were on patrol near Espinosa’s house. Police of course said the body-guards fired first. The affair began July 28, when five other of Espinosa’s bodyguards and staff were busted in a sting operation for a street sale of shabu (methamphetamine).
The six slain at Albuera are among hundreds left dead by the extensive crackdown in just the month and change that Duterte has been in office. And it looks like things are set to get worse. In a speech July 29, Duterte said that the movements of “drug abusers” would have to be restricted, and called for military camps to be opened as “rehabilitation centers” where they will be interned.Fans of the ‘Purple Rain’ star made pilgrimage to his Paisley Park studios in the Chanhassen suburb of Minnesota, where for 30 years Prince wrote and recorded some of his most famous hits — and nearly 30 of his albums.
News of Prince’s death at the age of 57 ricocheted through social media last week as millions mourned the loss of one of the 21st century’s most prolific and eccentric musicians.
But while it was built for function, its interiors are every bit as eccentric and lavish as the Grammy-winning star himself. Precious few photographs are in circulation owing to its infamous ‘no photography’ policy. But stories of its dizzying murals and cavernous recording spaces — as well as a few images — have trickled out over the years.
The nine-acre property — completed in 1988 — contains four recording studios, a video editing suite and a 12,500 sq ft soundstage. It cost $10 million to construct and put Minneapolis firmly on the music map as artists as diverse as Barry Manilow and Kool and the Gang travelled to the Midwest to record there.
‘I designed the entire building — including all the studios — based on Prince’s request to have a creative complex where he could do all his projects,’ says Thoeny, principal of Californian practice BOTO Design Architects.
The 55,000 sq ft complex, designed by architect Bret Thoeny, is among the most famous landmarks of the city, resembling (from the outside at least) an IKEA retail park or a research laboratory rather than a recording studio.
The ‘love’ glyph that represented Prince’s name from 1993 to 2000 is emblazoned everywhere, from the floor of Paisley Park’s entrance hall to its speakers, ceilings and neon lights. Postmodern touches, including rounded balconies and polyhedral glass skylights, feature inside. A pyramid above Prince’s office lit up purple when he was in the building.
Above: Paisley Park entrance lobby and below: one of the purple-tinted relaxation rooms
‘The pyramid was a request from Prince,’ Thoeny says. ‘The white metal panels were my concept — it makes it easy to illuminate any purple colour.’
Carpets, walls and upholstery are also fitted in shades of violet. Even lighting in some of the rooms has a lavender hue. Elsewhere, walls are painted with fluffy white clouds and the boardroom ceiling is a silken purple galaxy. Portraits of Prince himself are also plentiful, including a mural of his eyes.
Notoriously private, Prince took refuge in Paisley Park, which also became the site of his archive. In 1990, TIME reported that the musician kept his awards — including the four gold and eight platinum albums he’d amassed at the time — locked in a basement room, next to tapes of an estimated 100 unreleased songs, plus two complete albums. One wonders just how much that archive has grown, more than a quarter of a century later.
Paisley Park was ‘much more than a studio’, as Prince himself told GQ reporter Chris Heath. In 1996, it closed commercially but Prince and some of his friends continued recording and performing until last week.
And the Purple One also liked to throw open its doors to locals on occasion. In the summers of 2000 and 2001, fans were invited to tour the facility as part of Prince: a celebration and he threw regular parties and concerts in the building’s hangar-like live event spaces, which took on a mythology of their own.
Though news of Prince Roger Nelson’s passing came as a shock on Thursday afternoon, it seems poignant he died in the sanctuary that allowed him to create for three decades.
The building could play a central role in years to come t00. ‘We will turn Paisley Park into a museum in Prince’s memory,’ Maurice Phillips, Prince’s brother-in-law, told The Sun. ‘It would be for the fans. He was all about the fans — this would remember his music, which is his legacy.’
Words Betty Wood
Like this story? Recommend it to a friend and follow us on Medium. You can also read more at The Spaces.com and follow us on Facebook and TwitterWhen we rounded up a list of our favorite comic book cliches, we mentioned that there are a whole lot of female versions of male characters out there in the world of comics. Whether they were started out as a means to secure a copyright (like Supergirl and She-Hulk ), attempts at taking a legacy character in a new direction ( Dr. Midnight, Dr. Light and Wildcat II ), or just attempts at shutting Frederic Wertham up ( Silver Age Batwoman, we're looking at you), there are a ton of gender-swapped versions of male characters out there, and some of them are just strange.
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That's why we've gotten ComicsAlliance contributor Chris Sims to take a look through the archives and round up the best and outright weirdest female versions of male comic book characters!
Lady Punisher Unlike the time that the Punisher was an angel, or that time the Punisher was black, or that time the Punisher was a Frankenstein's Monster, this one actually isn't one of Frank Castle's stranger transformations. Instead, Lady Pun here is actually Lynn Michaels, a cop who decided to moonlight as a vigilante to catch a serial rapist and was then caught up in the fast-paced world of black leather pants and skull-patterned bustiers. She was actually one of many ersatz Punishers running around towards the end of his '90s run (including Outlaw, the motorcycle-riding British Punisher who seriously needs a comeback), but just in case you forgot that she's the girl, she's the one that found Frank's diary (well, "War Journal," but let's be honest) and was very upset to see that she wasn't mentioned.
Galacta
Created by Adam Warren and Elsevilla for this year's Assistant Editor Spectacular, Galacta appears to be a young woman in a "Sexy Galactus" costume, much to the delight of hat fetishists everywhere. In reality though -- or at least as close to reality as the Marvel Universe gets -- she's Big G's daughter, who has given up on eating planets and instead subsists on "alien microfauna," mostly in the form of space-diseases that are out of place in Earth's ecosystem.
What's more, Galacta -- who even has her own sadly idle Twitter account -- won a reader vote to get a follow-up story, beating out "Nextwave's" Elsa Bloodstone, who is herself a female version of a male character, the Bronze Age monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone!× Roy Moore is accused of sexual misconduct in the late 70’s; here’s what he looked like at the time
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Roy Moore has been accused by more than 10 women of seeking out sexual contact with girls younger than 18 when he was in his early thirties, working for the district attorney’s office in Etowah County. The youngest accuser says she had a sexual encounter with Moore in 1979 when she was 14; another woman says he violently sexually assaulted her in 1977 when she was 16.
Until now, visualizations of Moore often picture him in his 60’s or 70’s. We’ve been searching for a picture that would accurately represent the man described in these allegations.
What we found is a law school picture from his time at the University of Alabama Law School. Records show Moore passed the bar in September 1977.
A spokesperson for the law school tells us the pictures displayed of graduates are taken the same year as graduation, however, that may not have been the case when Roy Moore was in school. The spokesperson says the picture was likely taken in either 1976 or 1977.If you've been on the Internet lately, Cal fans might have been getting a whiff of these babies from various football commits. Nothing has been confirmed, but it's sounding like that white helmets might be a part of our future at some point, at least based on the way players have chatted about it.
Unofficial to Cal this weekend was great! Thanks to the coaches! @CalFootball pic.twitter.com/EoaZVjaQZj — jackson kaufusi (@jkaufusi23) May 18, 2015
Let's take a look at the wild and wonderful world of white helmets at Cal.
Cal debuted white helmets all the way back in 2011. They proceeded to lose to Oregon 43-15.
They tried the white helmets later that year. They went to UCLA and lost one of the most godawful football games I've ever watched.
They then used the white helmets for their 2012 home debut against Nevada. They blew the game and kickstarted the end of the Tedford era. The helmets were buried by Top. Men.
But they're circulating around! So it's clearly a possibility and Cal recruits and players seem very intrigued by them. Sonny Dykes has said that he isn't that interested in messing around with tradition, but if the players get hyped about a chance to play in white helmets, then there will be enough public sentiment to proceed forward.
What are your thoughts on these theoretical white helmets? Like them? Love them? Hate them? I KNOW you have an opinion of them.Welcome to Locked on Cavaliers, the official Cleveland Cavaliers podcast of the Locked on Podcast network.
On today’s episode, host Chris Manning (@cwmwrites) is joined by Adam Mares of Locked on Nuggets and Denver Stiffs to talk about Kyrie Irving possibly being traded to Denver, what would be a fair return and more.
For those who were wondering, every episode of ‘Locked on Cavaliers’ is now available on iTunes and on Stitcher. And as always, you can listen or download any episode on the podcast’s AudioBoom page. If you like the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes, as it helps other listeners find the podcast. And five-star reviews are much appreciated. You can also like the show on Facebook.
Additionally, please submit questions for the next mailbag show. You can do that by tweeting the show @LockedOnCavs and/or e-mailing the show at lockedoncavs@gmail.com. There will also be a place to submit questions over at r/clevelandcavs.Google isn't standing still with its wearable platform now that Apple has given the press a chance to use the Apple Watch. A source knowledgeable with Android Wear's product road map tells The Verge that the next software release will turn on Wi-Fi support, meaning that features like notifications and Google Now will work when a Bluetooth connection is unavailable. Most Android Wear watches already have Wi-Fi built in, so a simple software update should activate the feature for them.
Along with the Wi-Fi update, there will be at least two additional, smaller updates. The first is gesture control. Users will be able to flick their wrist to scroll through notifications and Google Now cards, rather than needing to use their other hand to swipe on the screen. The UI will also get some tweaks, with easier access to both Android Wear applications and contacts. Finding applications in Android Wear right now requires either spoken commands or digging through an extra layer of menus.
Most Android Wear watches already have Wi-Fi built-in
Just yesterday, Apple revealed the last pieces of information about the Apple Watch that we were waiting for. Apple detailed support for what looks to be a surprisingly robust ecosystem of apps and services that will work with its Watch, which will likely cut into any head start Android Wear managed to get. Google has recently become more vocal about Android Wear on its blogs, detailing developer APIs for Wear and a growing ecosystem of apps.
Of course, direct comparisons between the two watch platforms can only go so far. Neither smartwatch works with the competitor's smartphone: Android users can't use the Apple Watch, and iPhone users can't use Android Wear. But because of that lock-in, it's important for both companies to work to maintain something like feature parity, so as to prevent users from wanting to switch platforms because they'd like to use a different smartwatch. That sort of concern may seem small while the smartwatch market is so nascent, but if Apple and Google have their way, it won't remain a small market for very long.
Verge Videos: Hands on with the most watch-like Android Wear device yet.— The Aga Khan is a smiling man, genial, with twinkling eyes and never less than a faint trace of benign good will turning up the corners of his mouth. He smiled all the way through a speech last month at the opening of the new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, especially while alluding to the innate happiness embodied in the branch of Shiite Islam of which he is the spiritual leader, Ismailism: “We are a community that welcomes the smile,” he said.
The museum, designed by the renowned and venerable Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, is a physical extension of that smile. Sitting on a nearly 17-acre site a few miles northeast of downtown Toronto, it is part of a larger campus devoted not just to worship, but to cultural outreach, concerts, lectures and other events — or “enrichment, dialogue and warm human rapport,” in the words of its benefactor. The museum will display prized selections from a collection of some 1,000 objects, many of them exceptionally fine, and the curators are clearly ambitious to make it both a popular and academic center for the study of Islamic art. Presenting a positive understanding of Islamic civilization — a problematic term that encompasses a huge range of cultural diversity and centuries of history — is an explicit goal. “We hope this Museum will contribute to a better understanding of the peoples of Islam in all of their religious, ethnic, linguistic, and social diversity,” the Aga Khan said in a statement before the Sept. 18 opening.
Museums exist to do many things, and increasingly it seems the presumed traditional function of the museum — to preserve, study and disseminate culture —is merely one among many in the world of museum multitasking. Museums exist as cultural centers, ideological think tanks, economic development engines, nationalist rallying grounds and nodal points for ethnic, religious and other subcultural forms of solidarity. Of course, museums always were ideological, especially the great art and science museums that arose in the 19th century to preach citizenship, enlightenment and good manners to hoi polloi; now a multiplicity of public relations agendas are openly embraced and explicitly built into the museum’s mission.
The Aga Khan’s purpose isn’t just to showcase the diversity of Islamic cultural production. It is to express an Islamic identity that is non-threatening and capable of assimilation without dissolution into secular, democratic society with an emphasis on youth, prosperity, education and success in both spiritual and worldly matters. When the Ismaili campus was being planned, in 1996, the younger generation of Canadian Ismailis was asked for input; and at the opening festivities last month, their successors a chic young cohort born not long before the planning began, were conspicuously and charismatically present as volunteers. The museum also includes classroom space and plans for a robust educational agenda.
During the opening festivities of the museum and its neighbor, the Ismaili Centre (an assembly and worship space designed by the noted Indian architect Charles Correa), the unspeakable remained unspoken: Thousands of miles away, radical Sunni groups were decapitating hostages and filming the barbarity for distribution on the Internet. But between what the Aga Khan advocates and what the Islamic State does is a nearly infinite spectrum of human potential and degradation.
The Aga Khan, of course, is an extremely wealthy man, with a personal fortune estimated two years ago by Forbes magazine to be $800 million. Although he governs no actual physical territory, he is among the richest royals in the world. The Ismaili religion also involves a complex system of tithes that help fund Ismaili centers and the needs of the Ismaili community. His position as a spiritual leader, however, has led him to develop a global commitment to philanthropy, with historic preservation and architecture among his central interests. Anyone who has traveled in Central Asia, the Middle East or Africa will recognize the name and admirable works of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which also developed the new museum.
As a supporter of architecture, the Aga Khan has sponsored a prestigious design award that honors efforts to thread a complicated aesthetic and architectural needle: how to integrate regional and vernacular styles from Islamic societies with a modernist, more internationally aware agenda? In practice, this comes down to a problem that haunts architects today no matter where they are working: how to balance traditional and contemporary thinking without ending in parody, pastiche or generic functionalism with a little decoration on top?
The new museum building, by the 86-year-old Maki, strives for the monumental solidity of ancient forms, with a nod to the precise lines and counterintuitive bravado of contemporary ones. Clad in white Brazilian granite, the walls are canted slightly inward at the base and outward at the top, as if the bottom is a giant plinth on which a gently overhanging cap has been set. This creates a dialogue between the superhuman massivity one might find in pre-Columbian architecture and the engineering and sculptural virtuosity one finds anywhere there is more money than sense, including the super-wealthy boom towns of the Persian Gulf.
The larger form is horizontal, a museum set close to the ground, connected to its gardens and making no effort to compete vertically with the entirely undistinguished office-park buildings nearby. Light is brought into the interior through a relatively small courtyard and six hexagonal “lenses” cut into the roof line. An overscaled canopy, made of metal and seemingly sharp as a knife blade, marks the entrance, and a large cut through the top of the building allows for a geometric form to rise above the space occupied by the steeply raked auditorium. The interior is not particularly generous to gallery space: Of the building’s more than 110,000 square feet, less than 20,000 is reserved for exhibiting objects. These spaces are divided into a lower-level gallery, where a shifting display of objects from the permanent collection will be shown, and upper-level galleries, where special exhibitions can be mounted. The rest of the museum is given over to a restaurant, gift shop, classrooms, theater, storage and office space.
And so, like the collection itself, the entire presentation is meant to be jewel-like: a carefully curated sampling of impressive objects, with no effort to be synoptic or comprehensive (indeed, art from Persia and the Mughal Empire dominates that of other regions). The building itself feels like a space-age container for these gems, a sleek, flattering presentation box, without much emphasis on transparency. The canopy above the entrance looks as if it is designed to close up like a giant metal shutter, recessing into the interior when enemies or foul weather approach, which underscores a slightly blank, hermetic and cool message to the outside world.
It is difficult to know what benchmark you should use for assessing the museum: Is this a small and somewhat disappointing effort to be a great international museum of Islamic art? Or is this a rather impressive entry into the world of great private collections — the Islamic Frick, or the Mughal Morgan Library? If you manage your expectations toward the latter, you will enjoy the experience without reservation.
Visitors to the main-floor galleries encounter two video introductions to the visual culture they are about to experience: The first is a kind of fantasia on patterning, helping the eye break down and build up some of the basic patterns and geometries so fundamental to many Islamic artistic traditions; the second shows the multiplicity of Islamic cultures over time — the Fatimids, Umayyads, Safavids, Mughals, the Aceh Sultanate, the Mamluks, etc. — that must be considered in any larger historic account of history.
The galleries are white, the floors wooden, and every object has a lot of room to breathe — perhaps too much. You feel a bit as if you are island-hopping through a giant sea of Islamic culture rather than touring any one place or region methodically. But the objects themselves are often breathtaking: pottery from the Ottoman courta stunning rug that would dwarf most modern rooms, pages from some of the finest Shah-Nameh collections ever assembled (or, alas, disassembled, as is too often the case), an ivory horn carved in southern Italy with an early 17thcentury silver mount added in England — one of several powerful exemplars of the cultural porosity between Europe and Islam over the ages.
The diffusion of the permanent lower galleries was only emphasized by a wonderfully concise and exciting temporary exhibition of prints and drawings on the second floor, “In Search of the Artist,” featuring artists known to history from Iran, India and other Central Asian countries. It was small, rich, dense and focused. And that likely points to the best path forward for the larger museum: to forget about the project everyone knows is impossible, to forget about representing Islamic culture with any kind of general overview, and todevote the entire museum to a more focused study of particulars. But that will mean having confidence to let go of the impulse to put a generalized smile on Islamic culture and substitute, instead, the scholar’s furrowed brow.
Aga Khan Museum. 77 Wynford Dr., Toronto. (+41 22) 909 7200 or agakhanmuseum.org.This week, Mother Jones and a few other places ran a tape of some curious remarks made by the always eccentric Rep. Allen West (R-FL). Speaking to the conservative group Women Impacting the Nation, he said:
We need you to come in and lock shields, and strengthen up |
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